Author: Dennis O'Neil

Dennis O’Neil: Of History And Time Travel

Okay, pay attention now because this won’t be easy to understand.

First, a couple of news items:

A time capsule buried near the State House in Boston in 1795 by Paul Revere and Samuel Adams was unearthed last week during some repair work.

And scientists have actually seen some dark matter. They’ve been speculating about it for quite a while, but last week a team of stargazers at the Keck observatory in Hawaii actually glimpsed it a long, long way off.

Some of you are probably giving a so what shrug. What has this to do with the midseason finale of the Arrow television show and why am I not writing about that? Because, yeah, that was a hell of a final scene. Well, maybe we’ll get to it next week, if we’re not distracted by holiday matters. Because, you know, the season to be jolly can be a drag and some of us have never figured out how to handle it with elegance and grace.

Anyway, what must have happened back in 1795 was that someone came into Paul Revere’s shop and maybe introduced himself as a friend of Ben Franklin’s – easy to believe because Ben got around – and in the course of some colonial chit chat suggested that Paul might get together with Sam and the two of them might want to bury a time capsule. I mean, why not? Then Ben’s ”friend” might have said that he just happened to have a time capsule in his carriage, parked right outside, and Paul was welcome to it.

Of course, by now you realize that the “friend” was really an alien and what he was offering Mr. Revere was, in fact, a time capsule, but not the kind Paul was thinking of. No, this alien artifact was a cunningly disguised time collector. What a time collector does, as you must surely know, is collect the bits and pieces of time that nobody is using – a nanosecond here, a fortnight there – and just kind of store them until they’re needed, a bit like a Christmas lay away plan. And that’s what the container that Paul and Sam buried has been doing for the past 219 years: collecting.

Now, for who-knows-what reason, the alien has returned. To do that – this is a matter of celestial mechanics – he’s had to reveal a bit of his dark matter home, (He was probably hoping that the folks at Keck were looking the other way.) Why come back now? My best guess is that one of his pals who lives here on Earth communicated across the void and told the pseudo Ben friend that the capsule is to be opened this week. Then? The collected time whooshes out, a mighty tidal wave of chronology, and carries us through the rest of the century, a span full of dangers, some of which could obliterate us. Finis. Kaput. The End. But the time wave will deposit us safely in 2100 and all will be well.

And think of all the Christmases we won’t have to celebrate.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

Well, I guess I was wrong and I guess I’ll take whatever heat there is, unless I can think of somebody else to blame. We refer to last week’s column in which I predicted that the CW televised enterprises, Flash and Arrow, were about to commit Crossover: that is, begin a story in one show and end it in the other. I jumped to a conclusion. What the programs in question really committed was Guest Star; each hero appeared in the other’s venue but the problems to be solved and the adventures to be had and the bad guys to be vanquished were unrelated.

And while we’re on the subject of bad guys… unless I suffered a fairly significant mental glitch somewhere between eight and nine last Tuesday, the Flash and company perpetrated a melodramatist’s sin by catching the villain off-stage and thus depriving we eager onlookers of what would naturally be the story’s (exciting) climax. We hear that the evil dude is at large and then there’s a brief scene in which he’s behind bars and then on to other concerns. I’ve been guilty of giving the antagonist short shrift in a story or two, mainly because I was more interested in other elements of the narrative so, being guilty of the same sin myself, I am throwing no stones. But this sort of thing is questionable technique and maybe we should all avoid it in the future.

Okay, that’s a quibble and on the bright side, the Flash-Arrow guest stunt put Emily Bett Rickards, who plays Arrow’s the charming and comely Felicity Smoak, on my screen twice in one week and that buys forgiveness (and yes, dammit, I know she’s young enough to be my great-grandchild.)

(Regarding Felicity: If she were canonized, would she be holy Smoak? Something for the show’s writers to consider and then immediately forget about.)

Word is that last night’s “winter finale” Arrow episode will feature a Batman baddie and if true this won’t be the first time Arrow’s people have rummaged in the DC Comics line. Are they trying to build a video franchise, as the company’s long-time arch rival, Marvel, is doing successfully in the world of movies? Motivate us watchers to tune into a DC show and not just another adventure of a super guy? That would be a tricky accomplishment, I think, and they’re probably not attempting it. No, they’re probably doing what the rest of us are doing, using what’s available to them and hoping that it works. Making it up as they go along. Okay by me. That’s what we and our various ancestors have been doing for about five million years and counting and, what the hey, it’s gotten us this far.

Dennis O’Neil: Crossovers – And That Ostrander Bozo!

Before we get into this week’s topic, if we ever do… Who does this Ostrander bozo think he is? In a recent Facebook post, he told the world that he was about to start preparing a holiday meal. He was preparing to do this only about a month after undergoing bypass surgery.

Well. It so happens that some 12 years ago I had some bypass action and a month later, was I cooking up a feast? You kidding me? A month later I was mostly lying around catching up on my sloth. Wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t taking out the recyclables, wasn’t down here in the office tapping at the keyboard. Nope. Just sprawled on the couch, being torpid.

But Ostrander is being a chef and doing a weekly column and for all I know, writing comic books and for all I know, swimming the Hellespont. I have to admit, I’m a little hurt. I guess I expected better from a fellow midwesterner.

Spoiler alert: completely different subject.

Which is this week’s crossover event. Not in your newest comic book. Crossovers in comics have become so common that they hardly qualify as worthy of notice, however much marketing departments might wish it were otherwise. But crossovers between television programs remain still relatively rare.

Before we soldier on, a bit of clarification: a crossover is not a mere appearance of the lead character from one venue in another lead character’s venue – Batman popping up in an issue of Superman, for example. That’s a guest appearance. A crossover happens when a story is begun in one place and ended in another. Lex Luthor blows up Gotham City in Detective Comics and Superman pastes it back together in Action Comics. As noted, pretty ordinary in panel art but not elsewhere. But not unheard of. A few weeks ago, some evil stuff was done in an episode of the venerable Law and Order SVU and the story wrapped in Chicago PD and if memory serves – and won’t that be the day! – an oldie, Homicide: Life on the Street, once did a similar stunt with the Law and Order franchise.

Now, the crossover trope has, in a way, come full circle. Characters who started life in comics are doing comics-type crossovers on television. On Tuesday, if my TV listing is accurate, Arrow and some compadres will visit the Flash and on Wednesday the Flash will operate on Arrow’s turf.

I leave it to the brainier among you to mine this programming for significance. I will allow myself only this with which to close: I think that our television brethren know, really know, how to do superhero material in their medium. It’s been a bit of a learning curve as they encountered and solved the narrative problems we comics guys have been bumping into for decades. The comics-begotten shows are all honorable entertainments and one of them, Gotham, is, I think, more than that.

The only question left to ask is, does John Ostrander agree? Or is he too busy building a garage?

Dennis O’Neil: The Tao of Funny Books

Could we have heard that name correctly? Sounded like the guy on the television said that a nasty killer was named “Szasz.” Well sir, I knew of only two Szaszes. One was an upstate New York psychiatrist with some controversial ideas, and the other was a comic book character. Since the television program I was watching when I heard the name (I did hear it, didn’t I?) was based on comic books, it seemed logical that the teevee folk were paying some sort of homage to our fictitious hero. But our Szasz wasn’t a killer; our “Szasz” was the birth name of the guy who later called himself “Vic Sage” and later still adopted the identity of a masked vigilante, The Question.

Vic SageWhy call him Szasz? Um… I liked the name. I’d seen it somewhere, probably in the New York Times, and when my man Vic needed (another) moniker, there it was.

Does any of this give anyone an insight into the creative process? Are you now able to establish a connection between character’s names and their essence? Is symbolism lurking there somewhere?

Probably not.

But speaking of names; we take a short hop past them and what do we find? Titles. (Names, titles…almost the same things, no?) So here’s a title: The Tao of Funny Books.

You might be familiar with the practice incorporating “tao” into book titles. The first, as far as I know, was The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, by Fritjof Capra. The subtitle tells you what the book is about.

I don’t know what the next ”tao” title was, but the next one I read (and reread) was The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff. This takes A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and friends and uses them to illustrate and dramatize elements of a much older work, The Tao Te Ching, written some time in the sixth century BCE by one Laozi who, by the way, might not have existed. What he (or it, or they) offer is wisdom and advice and, I think it’s fair to say, a world view in some 5000 words and I wish every politician in the world would read those words.

After Hoff’s addition to the Pooh mystique came the deluge: The Tao of Philosophy, The Tao of Dating, the Tao of Healing, The Tao of Law…even The Tao of Badass and, O Lordy, The Tao of Kim Kardashian. What those have to do with Laozi’s work, I don’t know.

Nor do I know what kind of book I’d append to The Tao of Funny Books. I don’t want to dishonor Laozi (or Benjamin Hoff) by slapping just anything between covers and I do believe that everything is interrelated so it seems that comics and Laozi’s taoism should be able to share a theme or two. But so far…nada.

The Tao of Nobody Home?

Dennis O’Neil: Beautiful Gotham City

BAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW BAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW snifflesob WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW

BAW WAW WAW WAW snurfle WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW WAW

But enough about the election. Let’s go to Gotham City.

Some 25 years ago there was this big hit movie, Batman, directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton, set in the fictitious Gotham City. You knew that, right? What you maybe didn’t know, unless you’re the kind of kid whose mother is forever telling him to go outdoors and get some fresh air, for pity sake, is that we who were charged with producing the comic book versions of Batman very much admired the set design of Anton Furst. Yes – this was Gotham! Ugly and foreboding, its walls high, windows few, designed to keep nature outside, out there, because nature was the enemy, and instead became a maze, a place of gloom, miles of squalor sprawled along the Jersey shoreline, and who knew what kinds of dread lurked in all those shadows?

Maybe we should go to Disneyland instead.

We liked Mr. Furst’s work so much that we asked him to design some Gotham for us, for use in the comics. We couldn’t steal directly from the film, for reasons I’ll probably never understand, but we could put Anton Furst’s sensibility on the page, and so Publisher Jenette Kahn and I asked him to make us some drawings. In time, he did. They still exist. Last time I saw them they were decorating the wall of a DC Comics reception area. Like the movie sets and other renderings of Gotham, the Furst drawings didn’t really show much of the city but they did suggest, or maybe imply, what it would be in its entirety.

In the years that followed, other creators, in both comics and movies, have given us their interpretations of Gotham and it is right and proper that they didn’t remain where we were when we left. What lives, evolves. And I’ve enjoyed my successors’ work; this is not me complaining. But whatever the virtues of these later Gothams, I still preferred Anton Furst’s.

Until the new Gotham came to a television screen near me. This is not the movie city, but our teevee brethren understand that sometimes locations can have the psychological weight of a character – see Holmes’s London, or Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles, and let’s not forget Middle Earth – and, properly executed, such locations lend not only ambience, but also mood and even a weird kind of credibility to the story; they provide a setting where we can believe that the hero does what he does. They help with that old English class favorite “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Almost certainly video’s Gotham is not produced, as was Mr. Furst’s, on a lot about 30 miles outside London. Actually, I don’t know where it’s done, or how. I’m guessing that what we see is an amalgam of sets and street locations and maybe some of that voodoo hoodoo those folks do with computers and green screens. Whatever they do, those folks, it works.

You want bleak. Check your local Fox channel on Monday nights.

We might not know the meaning of life, but a group of scientists working for NASA came up with a definition for it that’s just seven words long: “Self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”

 

Dennis O’Neil: Television Is Sacred

Well, I predicted it.

Mari and I sat in the living room until about nine, and then she turned out a front light and we returned to our sacred duty, watching television.

Before we continue… You’re vexed by that last statement? Teevee watching a sacred duty? Eh? Okay, consider: Almost beyond doubt there is a television in every home in our village. And almost beyond doubt, each of those television sets gets turned on and heeded each and every day except for those belonging to our townsfolk who may occasionally leave screens dark for religious reasons. Now, there is nothing else that is in every – every! – domicile. Mezuzahs, bibles, Boy Scout oaths, crucifixes, copies of the Declaration of Independence, scientology tracts, Buddhist sutras, the collected works of Ayn Rand – sure, you’ll see those here and there, but not everywhere. But we all own televisions and we all watch them once in a while, or oftener, and anything that’s done by everyone must be important and – correct me if I’m wrong – isn’t it a short step from “done by everyone” to “sacred”?

Glad we got that settled.

And no, I don’t know what we watched. Like that matters!

The faithful among you may remember that last week I attributed our lack of Halloween trick-or-treaters to the difficulty of trudging to the top of our hill, especially if you’re afoot and coming from the center of town, and the few dwellings on our particular block, and the utter absence of businesses.

I may have been mistaken.

Tomorrow, as I write this, is the day we good citizens vote. My lefty/hippie politics are no secret and so it’s reasonable to suppose that my Political Enemies (for surely they exist) decided to nullify whatever polling place influence I might have by diverting such costumed visitors who were bound for my front porch.

“Hey kid,” they might have hissed at some fledgling goblin (and don’t these types always hiss!), “those people at the top of the hill have sprayed their lawn with Ebola and are brewing up cyanide lemonade in their kitchen.”

The youngster would flee and Mari and I would be alone on our couch as the hours ticked by which, as a matter of fact, is what happened. Then, my Political Enemies might suppose, I would become so despondent at my being ignored that I would climb into the attic, hunker down between stacks of comic books, put my thumb in my mouth, and moan until well past voting day.

Not going to happen. (At least I don’t think it will happen, though voting day isn’t until tomorrow and who can predict the future? But no – I’ll probably steer clear of the attic.)

And what about you? Did you avoid the attic? Did you do your duty and vote?

I certainly hope so.

Unless you’re a Political Enemy.

Dennis O’Neil: Trick Or What?

65846We haven’t gotten visits from trick-or-treaters for quite a few years now. We live at the top of a pretty steep hill on a block that has only two houses facing the street, no businesses, not much light. Not a lot here to attract apprentice ghosts and goblins. If any do show up, we’ll give them comic books.

None of what a friend of mine calls “sugary treats” – and when she uses the term, she isn’t being complimentary. Time was when we did hit the drugstore and stock up on slimy and gooey stuff, your chocolate bars and your jelly beans and gummy bears and gum drops and all the rest of the Willy Wonka wet dream. Our consciences may have a protesting yip or two, but the yips weren’t loud and we could pretty much ignore them. Oh, okay… we knew that what we were putting into the kids’ bags wasn’t good for them, or anyone else, but, well, surely a little toxin wouldn’t do any harm, or at least not much harm, and if the young’uns parents didn’t mind, why should we be old grumpy-heads and anyhow, passing confections to the young and innocent is a tradition.

You gonna argue with tradition, grumpy-head?

Probably not. We’re pretty big on tradition ‘round these parts, and so is every other civilized society that I know of. We won’t even guess at the reasons here. We’ll only note that we humans seem to take comfort and maybe a sense of security from repeating rituals at prescribed times and places and anything that bestows comfort and security will get a smile from me. Hey,, it’s a tough life!

But… can traditions outlive their usefulness? Have some of them already done so? Can they be replaced with something more appropriate?

About this sugar/candy problem: Let us begin by making the painful admission that all but the most diehard smokers had to make a decade or two back – tobacco is very bad for the human body. (The guy in the corner, the one who’s gasping and wheezing and turning red, is shaking his head and trying to say no! I’ll assume that the rest of you are giving me permission to continue.)

Tobacco is bad for you and so, alas, is sugar. A quick rundown of some of your components that can be hurt by it:

  • Teeth: consumption of processed food containing sugar cost Americans 54 billion dollars in dental bills every year.
  • Heart: sugar raises levels of triglicerides and cholesterol, both of which are enemies of your heart.
  • Liver: sugar stresses this important organ.
  • Obesity: sugar is full of empty calories and encourages users to eat more.
  • Addiction: the stuff creates abusers.

It won’t be hard for you to find other information on this topic. Go get some.

So, Halloween night: Do you really want to give some neighbor kid a substance that is harmful in so many ways and might be the beginning of a life-long and possibly lethal addiction?

Maybe we should begin shopping around for another tradition.

 

Dennis O’Neil Goes To Kokomo

Denny ONeilOut on runway number nine, big 707 set to go / But I’m stuck here on the ground where the cold winds blow • Gordon Lightfoot

You’d think, after all the trips we’ve taken, that we’d know how to get to the airport on time. But this day, we didn’t. So there we were, grounded somewhere in New Jersey, while an aircraft with our names on the passenger list soared west. Obviously, we had a problem. We were expected in Kokomo, Indiana, on the following day and I didn’t want to cancel the appointment, mostly because I’ve already cancelled an appointment or two this year and breaking promises is a lousy habit to get into.

Okay, now what?

We weren’t the ones who made the reservations, so scrubbing them and getting replacements would be unusually hasslesome, even if it were possible. What then? Train? No idea if there were trains running to Kokomo. Bus? Ugh – and Mr. Greyhound might not get there on time anyway, and where the hell do you catch a bus in New Jersey? Drive? Hmm.

Fifty years ago, give or take, a girlfriend and I were sitting around a St. Louis apartment on the day after Christmas. She was a senior at Webster College and I, recently discharged from the United States Navy, was eking out a living doing an occasional substitute teaching job. I don’t know why we decided to hitchhike to San Francisco, in the winter, through unfamiliar terrain, but we did, and we made the trip with maybe 20 bucks between us. Even in 1964, that wasn’t much. But somehow, it was enough, and we survived, and returned to our sundry obligations.

I wouldn’t have recommended anyone follow our example back then and I certainly don’t now. It is dangerous out there, and I think on a freeway outside Los Angeles, we dodged what could have been a malignant encounter. But sometimes the universe is kind to the foolish, and so it was that winter day a half century ago.

Back to Jersey and the departed airplane. Was it time to again be quixotic? Drive to our engagement in Indiana? It had been a while since we’d taken a road trip – a long while – and at our age, every adventure might be the last. So before we could realize how inadvisable our decision might be, we program the GPS and headed out for the heartland.

I’m glad we did. I’ve never met nicer, more helpful people than the Kokomoans. The motel was excellent, our vegetarian meals tasty and nourishing, and the hours I spent with an audience at a local university and with fans at a convention were pleasant.

Is there a lesson too be learned from all this? I don’t know. Maybe not. Probably not. But at our age we should care?

 

Dennis O’Neil: Beginnings, Myths, & The Flash

I guess that now we know because – correct me if I’m wrong – last Tuesday we were all hunkered down in front of our television sets watching the latest addition to broadcast video’s superhero pantheon acquire his powers. ‘T’was lightning mixed with some other stuff that made the Flash the Flash.

Can we all just relax a bit?

We seem to have a need to know from whence we came, we noble mortals. Most of the word’s religions/mythologies have an “in the beginning” chapter and, funny thing, it doesn’t seem to matter much what the particulars of those creation myths are. A bird brings up a speck of mud from deep in a primordial ocean and that morphs into our planet; the earth emerging from the cracking of a cosmic egg; the dismemberment of a primordial being whose body parts become flora and fauna…and on and on and on. These tales and many, many more have all, at one time or another, sufficed to answer the question of our Beginnings. We seem to want to know our heroes’ origins, too, and so “origin stories” have been staples of comic books (which are what we’re concerned with here) from the first pages of the first appearance of the first mega-popular superhero and of course we could mean none other than Superman. That origin, as movie producer Michael Uslan pointed out decades ago, is quite similar to a story found in the Bible, and you can take that anywhere you want it to go.

Where were we? Ah, I remember: flashing.

The creators of the program under discussion chose to use science to explain how Barry Allen can move so darn fast. Nothing new: there have been four comic book iterations of The Scarlet Speedster and all owe their special traits to science… or maybe we should make that “science.” Briefly: Jay Garrick inhaled hard water vapors to acquire his power; Bart Allen got his after a sojourn in a time machine; Barry Allen and Wally West got their superspeed after being near a lightning bolt that struck some lab chemicals in two separate incidents. (And hey, you carpers – the word “coincidence” exists for a reason.) The teevee folk chose a variation of the Allen-West scenario.

There are, of course, other comics heroes who owe their uniqueness to “science” – we’re not forgetting The Hulk’s exposure to gamma rays, The Fantastic Four’s being zapped with cosmic rays, Spider Man’s encounter with a radio active spider and if you’ve a mind to, you can add your own favorites to the list, but I want to get back to the Flash.

If comics had existed before, oh, say, the Renaissance, our heroes powers would probably been explained by magic because, although science – without the quotation marks – existed back then, I doubt that the varlet on the street thought of it when he considered the miraculous. Magic, or contact with the Almighty, were what caused miracles to happen. Label something magic and… case closed. “Science” served the same purpose for comics (and pulp) writers. As suggested above, we mostly don’t care about the particulars of our origin stories, we just want them to exist.

Then: abracadabra. Now: quantum physics.

As for that label we use to explain the marvelous…we have to be careful if we plan to call it bogus. The nifty – and frustrating – thing about scientists is that they’re never absolutely sure of anything. They always allow for the possibility that they’re mistaken, that something will happen tomorrow that will completely invalidate what they “know.” Radioactive spider? Wellll…

 

Dennis O’Neil: Flash Back!

You’ve already seen it, you slathery blagger, but from this side of the time divide it’s an experience yet to be had. I refer, of course, to the debut latest television version of DC Comics’ venerable superhero, the Flash.

(Digression: I never know whether the “the” is the Flash should be capitalized. Seems to me it should because although it’s usually a garden variety article, in this usage it is also part of the guy’s name and so a proper noun and thus meriting capitalization. But a DC editor insisted that its lower case and I guess he should know.)

I said that what will be playing on the CW tomorrow night is “the latest” video Flash and that might puzzle those of you who have entered the universe recently we’ll provide a bit of explanation (and perhaps bore those of you not so new to the universe.)

The Flash first came to your living rooms way back in 1990. It starred John Wesley Shipp and much of it was written by comics’ own Howard Chaykin. And… I confess that I’m about out of information. I wasn’t a big TV watcher back then and – mea culpa – I wasn’t much attracted to comic book characters in other media because, well… comic book characters were my job. But I do recall seeing the show and thinking it was well done.

And I’m happy to note that in what I’ll be watching on the CW, the original television Flash, John Wesley Shipp, plays the current Flash’s father. This is one of those harmless inside jokes that don’t harm your understanding to the story if you don’t get it and provides a momentary smile if you do. (And yes, purists might argue that such jokes do harm the story because some in the audience will be thinking Shipp, Shipp – where have I heard that name? and others will be thinking Hooray – that’s the Flash my daddy told me about! and in both cases the audience member will be distracted and maybe lose an important plot point. But, with your permission, I won’t be that picky.)

What I’m wondering is, how super will the TV guys allow this particular superhero to be? In the very first issue of his comic book, published in 1940, our speedster is shown outracing a revolver bullet, so from the git-go he wasn’t fast like an Olympic runner is fast, he was something beyond human. And he got faster and faster and faster. So he wasn’t a science fiction character because sci-fi requires that the narrative not violate the laws of nature as we know them and someone operating, with no explanation, far beyond human capability certainly does that. Green Arrow is a character rooted in human possibility. Spider-Man is not. Neither is the Flash.

None of which will determine whether or not television’s latest miracle worker can do his real job: giving us a light dose of after dinner entertainment. I guess we’ll find out pretty quickly.

 

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