Author: Dennis O'Neil

Dennis O’Neil: Stamp Out Batman!

Think Batman is tough? Well, my friend, you could give him a licking!

Okay, I’ll ask you to forgive that. What I really mean is, you could lick the postage stamps that bear Batpics. The stamps might be already available and if they’re not, you’ll be able to get them soon – “just in time for the New York Comic Con,” promises an article in last Monday’s USA Today.

This isn’t the first time that heroes from DC Comics pantheon have made their way onto postage stamps. One of the stranger gigs I’ve ever participated in had several of us comics guys sitting at a table in The Museum of Comic Art and autographing post cards and sheets of stamps illustrated with the likes of Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Arrow, Aquaman and other superdoers including, yes, Batman. The people in front of us then took the signed items to the next table where employees of the United States Postal System marked the stamps with a cancelation notice, thus proving to any who cared that the stamps/post cards were purchased on the day they were first available.

I guess the what we signed and the postal folk canceled were pretty nifty items for both stamp collectors and comics fans and receiving an imprimatur from a living, breathing government agency was further evidence that comics had struggled from the underbelly of American publishing into the Region of Respectability. The stuff I just mentioned was, as noted, not limited to just Batman, but the Dark Knight stands (and swings) solo on the new issues. (The USA Today piece doesn’t mention Robin.)

Why this particular distinction? The newspaper quotes DC’s co-publisher Jim Lee: “Batman is the most popular superhero of all time…” Is he? Let’s not argue. But is this paragon an appropriate subject for postage stamps? I mean, shouldn’t stamps commemorate exemplars of political achievement – the Washington/Jefferson/Roosevelt crowd – or civilization-altering inventors – your Fultons, your Edisons, your Carvers – or genuine heroes who sacrificed themselves for the national good? Note that “genuine”: it excludes movie stars as well as cartoon characters, with the exception of Jimmy Stewart, who flew 50 bomber missions.

Okay, we’ll take “no” for an answer.

We hereby admit fictional stalwarts into the company of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington Carver and the rest. But can you at least grant that the made-up people should symbolize achievement and maybe nobility? King Arthur types. Maybe even Sherlock Holmes. What does Batman symbolize? Childhood tragedy. Obsession. Urban darkness.

Well…maybe Batman does belong on postage because the grim things he represents are a part of life and maybe there should be room on our signage for the less cheery aspects of our national experience.

Naw. Let’s stick with fantasy. Wasn’t there a Mickey Mouse stamp a while back?

 

Dennis O’Neil On Alternate Earths

Good news! The angel Fettucini has just delivered a Message From On High: from this moment on, all politicians must be free of greed and egotism and be motivated solely by the desire for good governance and love of heir fellow man.

The, uh, bad news is that the above is true only on Earth 4072, which, of course, exists only in an alternate universe. These things are relative. To the inhabitants of Earth 4072, the news is not bad.

They can be useful, these alternate universes, especially, if you write fantasy or science fiction.

Consider Julius Schwartz, an editor at DC Comics. In 1959, he was given the task of reviving a character who had been dormant for most of the decade, the Flash. Instead of merely redoing the Flash comics readers (okay, older comics readers) were familiar with, Mr. Schwartz and his creative team gave the Flash a comprehensive makeover: new costume, new secret identity that included a new name, new origin story – the whole bag. But Mr. Schwartz had a potential problem: some of his audience – those pesky older readers – might wonder what happened to the original Flash. Mr. Schwartz provided an answer by borrowing a trope from science fiction: alternate worlds. In the Schwartz version, there were two Earths coexisting in different dimensions. The original, Jay Garrick, was on one Earth and the newer model, Barry Allen, was on the other Earth. It was the publishing equivalent of having your cake and eating it, too.

Take a bow, Mr. Schwartz.

The gimmick must have boosted sales because Mr. Schwartz soon applied it to other DC superheroes with similar success. Then other editors and their teams took the alternate Earth idea and ran with it and eventually, there were dozens of versions of Earth, each with its own pantheon of costumed heroes. This may have created story opportunities, but it also probably created confusion and narrative unwieldiness. For whatever reason, in 1985, the guys in the big offices decreed that all Earth be cosmically mashed into one, in a storyline titled Crisis on Infinite Earths that included all of DC’s superhero comics. Later, DC’s editors repeated the stunt three more times.

So…can we reach a verdict? Alternate Earths: pro or con?

Well…if you can get a good story from this, or any other, concept, yeah, sure. A good story is always its own justification. But you do risk alienating new or merely casual readers who might be confused, and you burden your inner continuity with the need to explain the multiple Earths stuff. Maybe this particular story could be told without multiple Earths elements and if that’s true, maybe it ought to be. Or do you risk compromising the uniqueness of your hero by presenting diverse versions of the character, and do you care?

You might want to mull these matters, especially if you make your living from comic books. Or you might not, but if that’s the case, why don’t you want to mull them?

 

Dennis O’Neil: It’s About Time

It is driving you absolutely mental, this whole time paradox business. You lie awake nights wondering what would happen if you hopped into a time machine and went into the past and killed your own grandpa when he was a child. Because, as you well know, if you offed gramps he would never beget your father and if you father were never begotten he would never beget you and if you never existed you couldn’t kill your grandpa…

We may have a (kind of) answer for you. It is supplied by the professor who also supplied the grandpa hypothesis above. His name is David Kyle Johnson and he offers a course entitled Exploring Metaphysics, available from the Teaching Company’s Great Courses, which you may not have known, but you do now. Professor Johnson’s solution to the offed grandpa poser, which even he admits is a bit of a cheat, is that maybe your time machine (which probably doesn’t come with a warranty) not only carries you into the past, but also takes you into an alternate universe that is an exact duplicate of this one up until you began your temporal jaunt. So the gramps you might kill is not precisely your grandfather, but an exact copy of your grandfather, only in another universe. This, of course, leaves that universe’s version of you born and, presumably, able to do some grandpa hunting of his own. Will it never end? Well, that’s not our problem.

You’re probably familiar with the notions of both time travel and alternate universes, but you may not realize how far back they go. Time travel, for instance: you may think the first story involving that was H.G. Wells The Time Machine, first published in 1895 because… well, we’ve all seen the movies. (Okay, nitpickers, it was actually several movies.) But not even close. You could argue that the first story about someone moving forward in time appears in Hindu mythology and concerns a guy who went to heaven where he met the god Brahma and finds that when he returns to Earth ages have passed. We could date backward time travel fiction to Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, which appeared in 1733 and relates the doings of a guardian angel who brings state documents from 1998 to 1728.

On to the alternate universes trope. This probably hasn’t been used as story fodder as much as time traveling, but it, too, has a long ancestry, especially if you include stuff that appeared as “alternate history.” Let’s agree, for now, that alternate history fiction began with a story in which Alexander the Great went west instead of east, written in the first century CE by the Roman historian Livy.

Some of you may have fallen asleep a paragraph or two back, but for the rest… we may return to these matters next week. Of course, we’re speculating about the future here and… you just never can tell.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Consuming Mass Quantities

It was late in the evening before we found a place where a pair of oldsters with a nodding acquaintance with heart attacks and strokes might find nourishment. A pizza joint, it was. A pizza joint with few customers but a pretty high decibel level. I ordered penne with roasted vegetables. Yummy? We’ll see. The service was, to be charitable, unhurried, but eventually the stuff arrived. A lot of it. I could have gotten four or five home meals from what the wait-person presented. I finished about half.

The next morning, as is my on-the-road custom, I ordered room service pancakes. No complaint about service this time – the meal arrived before it was promised. But again… this was a single serving? Five pancakes, wide and thick: at home – three or four meals. But I ate the lot of them, maybe because I like pancakes more than I like penne with roasted vegetables and afterward, feeling a bit bloated and bottom-heavy, I experienced a guilt pang. Had I been gluttonous? Not that gluttony is a hanging offense. (Is it even a mortal sin? I bow to my school teachers and Others Who Know.)

And here, we begin to slip into murky regions. How do we define gluttony? How much is too much? When does a pile become a heap? A hill become a mountain? Maybe my pig-out is your satisfying snack.

Maybe you can judge when something is too much by the results it produces. I did not feel awfully chipper after that penne dish and maybe millions of my fellow citizens experience similar discomfort after a meal and here we might be tempted to launch into a diatribe about national health crises and such. But let’s not. Instead, let’s go to the movies.

We should have no trouble finding seats. It’s been kind of lonely in the multiplexes lately. Ticket sales have been dismal. The summer’s receipts are 22.2 percent lower than last year’s. And still, the entertainment we get in those holy darknesses is long and, like the pizzeria, very, very loud. Why defeat one villain when we can vanquish a dozen? Just one explosion? What are we, pikers? One hero? Okay, but doesn’t the budget allow us to hire five? More? Same with bad guys. Let’s have our protagonist(s) mow down a battalion.

And as you leave he theater, do you feel that all that sound and fury left you feeling satisfied, or just bloated? Or did you even go to the theater? There’s the hassle with parking and it’ll cost you a twenty to get you and a mate past the ticket taker and so… you may decide to become a member of that 22.2 percent of moviegoers who became ex-moviegoers. I mean, if you’ve seen a hundred explosions you’ve pretty much seen explosions and they’ll look the same when you see them on your television screen, only smaller.

The day after I had the pancakes, I ordered the same breakfast. I expect we’ll get to the movies sometime soon.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Comic Books Even Teachers Can Love

toon_graphicsThat was the headline above a New York Times story that ran in the paper’s Art section…

Hold on! Before we go any further, let’s think about this. The Times headline implies that at least a substantial number of teachers don’t like comics. Not true, at least not in my experience. Marifran, who taught for 50 years, used comics I brought home as classroom prizes in both a Catholic school in Brooklyn and a public school here in Nyack. She got no negative feedback from either parents or school officials. And the kids seemed to like being rewarded in this way. Comics were a small but welcome addition to her workplaces.

Then why did the august gray lady of American journalism imply that comics and lesson plans might be a bad mix? Maybe because once upon a time, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 years ago, comics did have a bum rep among certain citizens, probably including teachers, especially those who read editorials, heeded clergy and other authority figures, including a New York City psychiatrist. And, while we’re on the subject of authority figures, these citizens thought that if United States congressmen said something was a menace to our youth and even convened hearings to investigate, well, by golly, it was a menace, whatever it was.

As far as I can tell, comic books’ days as scapegoats and quarries of witch hunts were pretty much done by the late 50s and early 60s, when Julius Schwartz refashioned a lot of long dormant superheroes and Stan Lee changed editorial attitudes and gave comics an aura of hipness and, dare we utter it, of sophistication. But sometimes old convictions refuse to die, especially if those holding the convictions have no reason to question them. So, yeah, I’m sure there still exist folk who believe comic books to be venues for wickedness, but there can’t be many of them.

Which brings us back to the Times piece. It concerns a new publishing venture, Toon Graphics, and its founder, Francoise Moulay. Ms Moulay is offering comics to schools as tools to help kids learn. She believes that comics can help teach reading because youngsters, unlike adults, because they are used to extract meaning from information. “That’s how they make sense of the world,” Ms Moulay told the Times reporter. “Comics are good diagrams for how to extract meaning from print.”

That makes comics a natural extension of what psychologists say is something infants do before very early in life, make crude, preverbal narratives – stories – to deal with the continual barrage of information their senses are providing. They begin to assemble cause-and-effect scenarios and soon all that… stuff isn’t so scary because they’ve begun to understand it. Then they grow up and acquire language and… well, it can go a lot of ways from there. Maybe they write King Lear. Or go to work for the New York Times. Or contribute to ComicMix.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Profit!

lumiere1If I ever get around to actually writing The Tao of Funnybooks, which at the moment exists as an ill-defined notion that occasionally sidles into my awareness, it will probably have a chapter (if it has chapters) devoted to money. Or at least partly devoted to the filthy lucre.

Did I just lose my hippie cred?

Let me, briefly, elaborate.

Technology always precedes art, with the possible exception of oral storytelling.

Somebody who lives in your cave discovers that a pointed rock will make marks on the wall and pretty soon you have pictures. Ol’ Johnny Gutenberg invents moveable type and pretty soon somebody is using it to tell stories and then, some five centuries later, somebody else invents a steam driven rotary version of Gutenberg’s brainstorm and we have novels intended for a large readership and, about a century further on, we have superhero comic books.

And meanwhile…

In 1895, a Frenchman named Louis Lumiere invents a portable motion picture camera and – yep – along comes the storytellers who use Lumiere’s gadget to do their jobs.

Motion pictures and mass market printing both evolve pretty quickly, each exerting some influence on the other. Eventually motion picture technology develops techniques to tell, and do justice to, the kind of fiction that had been appearing mostly in comic books because motion pictures were limited by technology and comics were limited only by what an artist could draw. And then – it all changed. Movies had gotten themselves a huge bag of tricks and realized that superhero stories were a great source for the kind of colorful, spectacular narrative they could achieve with their new toys.

Profits ensued. Big, big profits.

And in our world, really rich guys are seldom disrespected. Grumbled about, despised, even hated. But quietly. When something is valued by its profitability – and some of our brethren do engage in such valuation – whatever generates the profits is looked kindly upon. Simple progression: you value the rich guy because he’s rich and by extension, you value what made him rich.

Well now, from here on, it gets kind of complicated and maybe a little muddled, and anyway, do I look like a friggin’ philosopher to you? But can we agree, we noon-philosophizing simpletons, that comics’s welcome into establishment respectability paralleled film’s turning costumed vigilantes into profit centers?  Surely no coincidence.

Alas, to the best of my knowledge, not a lot of the movie money has filtered down into the print realm, though today’s Yahoo news informs us that Action Comics #1, featuring the debut of Superman, has just sold for a cool – no, an icy – three point two mil. Let me give you that in numbers: $2,300,000. Nice return on a ten cent investment. So maybe that figure was influenced by the money making movies and, if that’s true, movie profits have filtered down to print. But only to print that’s 76 years old, and very scarce.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Charlton + Wertham = Olio?

Can I pause? Can I catch my breath? Where am I? About half way through August? That means I’m more than half way through the distance run that is this summer. Last commitment in October, only … I don’t know? three between now and then?

Meanwhile, imagine me yelling, Oh, Leo! Something like what I yelled when I was a grade-school kid: standing in a friend’s back yard and calling his name and if his mother appeared asking if my pal could come out and play. Or maybe I’m shouting another name, a last name: O’Leo. Irish fella, don’t’cha know! Actually, none of the above.

The word we’re going for here is not a proper noun, it’s a plain old common noun, one known to faithful solvers of the New York Times crossword puzzle: olio – that’s our word, and would one of our New York Times stalwarts favor us with a definition? Or do you Times readers think you’re too good for such a mundane task, you elitists who would never even consider watching Fox News? Well, climb back into your ivory towers then while I take it upon myself to consult the dictionary that resides inside my computer and supply the definition in question:

o*li*o: noun, a miscellaneous collection of things

So, know where I was over this past weekend? At the Connecticut ComiCon, is where. On Saturday I did a panel with my old and seldom-seen friends Paul Kupperberg, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Frank McLaughlin, and Bob Layton. Subject was Charlton Comics, which I don’t remember ever discussing in front of an audience before. Why Charlton? Well, apart from the fact that Charlton was headquartered in Connecticut, which made the talkfest site-appropriate, the company provided work for an impressive list of writers and artists who later attained comic book eminence including – no surprise here – those of us on the panel.

Paul and some colleagues are doing a Charlton revival. Might want to check it out wherever you check out things like that.

I learned a lot in those 45 minutes.

I didn’t know that the convention city, Bridgeport, was so close to where I live, I don’t expect this information to change my life.

We made some money for Hero Initiative, there in Bridgeport. Always good to make money for HI. Always worth a journey.

When I extracted the three days worth of mail crammed into the box yesterday, I was happy to see the latest issue of what is identified on the cover as “Roy Thomas’ Not-So-Innocent Comics Fanzine,” Alter-Ego. Blurbed below the logo: “Seducing the Innocent with Dr. Fredric Wertham.” The writer of the article is Carol Tilley, who, a while back, examined Wertham’s condemnation of comics and found that the good doctor had tampered with the research. She deserves our thanks for that and Roy deserves our thanks for giving Ms. Tilley a place to do us a service.

Full disclosure: I read the New York Times.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Too Many Superheroes?

SuperheroesI’m about to use a word that may be offensive to some, so if you’re one of them, I suggest you leave. You can make a ruckus as you go if you like; we judge here, but we do not blame.

Evolution. That’s the word, and now it’s out there. It may or may not recur as we proceed down the page.

The occasion is an item in Yahoo’s news site over weekend reporting that the moviemakers at Marvel and DC have their superhero schedule figured out for the next five years. Not all the t’s are crossed, but apparently The Big Two know how many superhero flicks they plan to make and when they’ll be putting these entertainments on a screen near you. And they don’t intend to skimp on quantity.

And I’ll probably see many, if not most, of them, so these are not the remarks of a disgruntled septuagenarian who wonders why nobody out there in that Hollywood makes Hopalong Cassidy pictures because, dang it, they were entertaining. But I can’t help wondering if there isn’t such a thing as too much, a saturation point, and if superheroes aren’t fast approaching it. (And in the case of guys like Superman and the Flash, that “fast” is fast!)

Then there’s television. I can think of at least three superhero weekly outings destined for a screen near you – the one in your living room – and my information is probably incomplete.

Bottom line: too many superheroes?

But that wasn’t really the bottom line because, while we’re in wondering mode, we’ll wonder if the superhero situation isn’t a small edge of a much, much larger one.

Consider these facts, culled from a New York Times piece by Daniel J. Levitin: we citizens are exposed to the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information on a typical day; over in TV land, the world’s video broadcasters produce 85,000 hours of original programming daily.

If you’re Joe Average, you spent five hours a day watching your living room tv set.

The brain fodder comes at us in the form of cop shows, sitcoms, news, commercials, stuff that’s playing in the background (but is nonetheless seeping into your psyche), and the books you read, and comic books you read and the magazines you page through,, and billboards, and bus ads, and Facebook and what that smart young fella down at work says…

Mr. Levitin tells us that “the processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited.”

Evolution gave us the ability to make narratives – tell stories – so that infants could began to make sense of all that garble by figuring out that effects have causes and grownups could discern patterns that might be useful for survival and construct personal identities and from there stories evolved into myths, drama, songs, campfire tales and commercialscomicbookstelevisionshow…

You can fill in the rest of the blanks.

Mr. Levitin deserves a direct quote: “Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message … is competing for resources in your brain…”

How about every story you read/hear/see? Any competition for resources there?

As is so often the case, I don’t know. But no harm in asking, is there?

You anti-evolutionists can come back in now.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Make Room, Make Room!

The room was large and dim, the food tasty, the entire evening pleasant. We were at this year’s Eisner Awards Banquet, held annually at the San Diego Comic Con International as a venue for presenting the Eisner Awards, named for the man who probably deserves to be called comic books’s greatest practitioner and used to honor people who have made outstanding contributions to Will Eisner’s chosen province. We saw and were glad to see some folk we hadn’t seen in years – decades? – and that was nice.

And I learned something about this quirky enterprise that has kept me fed and clothed for…what? – close to 50 years now?

I won’t keep you in suspense. What I learned was how diverse comic book publishing has become. Oh, back in my younger days I occasionally read what some termed underground comix and way back in 1995 I was honored to be mentioned in the thank-you section of Howard Cruse’s superb graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby. So yeah, I knew you didn’t have to wear a costume, have a double identity and devote your waking hours vanquishing evildoers to get your picture in a comic book.

But I didn’t realize, until the Eisners, how much comics had diversified. I’m guessing that because the direct sales market provided a place for interested parties to go and buy comics creators who saw the form as hospitable to much, much more than tales of fantasy-adventure realized that their work could be seen and even sold and sat down and did that work. And readers did see it and did buy it and all that helped comics to be recognized for what they had always been, a communications medium and – whisper this – an art form.

So there I sat, back to the dining table, looking at a stage flanked by two large screens on which were projected images of comic book covers. The fantasy-melodrama writers and artists were well-represented: no surprise and maybe cause for belief in a just universe – people should get what they deserve – but not the only game in town. All those storytellers with their pencils and inks and computers, not interested in derring-do as subject matter, but attracted to panel art as a narrative form, a means to do what has been done for tens of centuries by those with a need to shout and sing and scrawl and tell their stories,

For comics, it’s been a long climb from trash lit to respectability, from flimsy magazines a kid with a whiff of rebel bout him read behind geography books to the mainstream and – ye gods! – respectability. I’m not sure how I feel about that respectability, but my fellow celebrants at the Eisner Awards seemed to be handling it just fine.

 

Dennis O’Neil: The Elevator Compulsion

  • News
  • July 31, 2014

So there I was, in an elevator, being stared at by these huge faces. What or who were they? Well, okay, they were elements of an advertisement trying to get me to consume something – a cable television show, I believe – and if I watched that show it, in turn, would try to persuade me to consume something else. A car? A soft drink? A set of videos that would reshape my aging corpus into a mesomorphic splendor that would make Mr. America shudder with envy? All of the above?

And what the heck were ads – big ads – doing in a hotel elevator, anyway? But, as Hunter Thompson might have said, cazart! Could these visages be, not adverts, but deities? I mean, they were outsized and their gazes did not waver and doesn’t that remind you of someone/thing – a cosmic entity, perhaps? And if so…why were they staring at me like that?

Aieee…what did I do, oh mighty avatars of whatever you’re avatars of and please forgive me for not knowing? Did I not consume enough? (In your infinitude, please remember that my wife and I paid almost fifty bucks for breakfast this morning, but maybe that wasn’t enough?) Then, woeful wretch that I am…did I have a thought? And if I did so transgress, must I wear sackcloth and ashes, or will a Duck Dynasty t-shirt suffice?

Well, maybe these hallucinatory musings were prompted by our watching Noah on the in-room video gadget. (We’re old! What did you expect us to do after dinner, go clubbing?) Or…maybe they weren’t hallucinatory. There is a certain justification for thinking this because the other thing in the elevator that your average Luddite might question was a small television screen mounted just above those face-bearing doors, where it was hard to miss if you were looking forward and it was never turned off. Granted, it was displaying The Weather Channel, which has been a favorite of mine for decades, a destination whenever I, uh…want to know about the weather. But The Weather Channel does run commercials and that makes it at least partly about consumption and money and that, dear auditors, brings us to the finger-wagging portion of the discourse. (By the way, “finger-wagging” is in the dictionary, so spare me accusations of stealing from Stephen Colbert.)

Research has shown that people primed with thoughts of money, even subliminal thoughts, tend to be more selfish than their peers who aren’t thus primed, and aren’t we lagging in science and technology and such brainy stuff and couldn’t a culture of non-cooperation be partly to blame? I mean, aren’t selfishness and lack of cooperation at least fraternal twins? And that television set: don’t continual distractions such as this deprive us of opportunities to heed whatever small interior voices are trying to generate doubts or stimulate curiosity? I don’t know. But no harm in asking.

Think I’m being grumpy now? Then don’t get me started on the plane trip!

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