Author: Martha Thomases

Martha Thomases: We’re Back In The Sixties Again

Screen Shot 2013-02-19 at 3.57.00 PMAmerican Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-64 by John Wells, TwoMorrows Publishing, $39.95 retail hardcover; $11.95 digital

When Editor-in-Supremo Mike Gold asked me to review American Comic Book Chronicles: 1960-1964, I said, “It sounds like my childhood between two covers.” So he sent it to me.

First, the bad news. This isn’t a bunch of reprints from the early Sixties. I realize that would be a nightmare in terms of getting all the necessary permissions, but that’s what I wanted. The book is lots of cover shots and panels and ads for other comics, with text in the middle.

Text. Lots of text.

I didn’t read it all. I didn’t have time. So this isn’t really a review. I just read the parts about comics I liked, or might have liked if I’d known about them when I was seven.

Seven is, as we all know, the Golden Age of Comics.

I think the book tries to cover too much ground. They consider comics to include newspaper strips and humor magazines like Mad and Help. These are interesting subjects, but I think covering them dilutes the main story.

The main story is really cool, too. In the 1960s there were so many different kinds of comics. There were superheroes, of course. There was Archie and other teen comics. There were war comics and comics pitched to the military, like Sad Sack. There were romance comics and science fiction comics and funny animal comics and doctor comics. There were comics based on television shows, and comics based on movies. There were comics for girls, comics for boys, comics for men and comics for women. That’s because comics were sold at newsstands, then, which offered magazines to all those potential readers.

The book shows you the ways that the times influenced the comics, whether it was the Beatles, the election and then the assassination of President Kennedy, or the civil rights movement, sometimes all at the same time.

It’s also just about the time that the guard changed. Boys (almost always boys) who grew up reading comics were old enough to write, draw and edit them. They started fandom. They wrote long, thoughtful letters to the letter columns.

And their involvement caused the characters to evolve. I remember reading the story of Lex Luthor’s marriage, on the planet Lexor where he was a hero. It made me feel something for him, like he was a person with feelings. That was a new insight for pre-teen me.

The stories started to have higher page counts, sometimes running across more than one issue. Characters had deeper relationships with each other and, therefore, with the readers. And yet, comics were still disposable enough that publishers would take ridiculous chances, so that, for example, they gave the Batman line to an editor whose only experience was in science fiction.

This is my favorite quote, from Julius Schwartz commenting on fan reaction (which was almost entirely positive) to the New Look Batman of 1964. “There’ll always be the diehards who resist any change, and we can always count on the nostalgic type who fancies that nothing in comics published today can match the so-called Golden Era of Comics.”

I hope to read more of the text in the future. And I definitely look forward to the next book (which I assume will cover the next five years of the Sixties), when underground comics emerge, and LSD makes such an impact on the public consciousness that even people who didn’t take it acted all trippy.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Martha Thomases: Udder Catastrophe

Thomases Art 130215There are two totally unrelated things I want to talk about this week. Well, not entirely unrelated. Both have actual connections to comics, something my last column managed to completely miss.

1. In a move that reminds absolutely everyone of Dick Tracy, Apple may be developing the twenty-first century version of the two-way wrist radio. This would be a flexible all-class device that one would wear on the wrist. There is speculation the screen would be 1.5 inches in diameter.

I hate this idea. I can barely type on the keyboard of my phone with two thumbs. There is no way I could tap out anything even vaguely intelligible on my wrist with one hand.  There is only a slightly larger chance that I would be able to read anything on a screen that small, so I guess that would limit the amount to typing I would need to do.

There is apparently an entire department at Apple that is developing wearable computers. The article alludes to the possibility of Apple sunglasses as well.

My first reaction was to get excited, because I would look much cooler in sunglasses, and also, Neuromancer. However, the more I think about it, the more I think it’s either a bad idea, or requires more refinement. I mean, it’s difficult enough to walk a city sidewalk now, when the multitudes are so engrossed with looking at their phones that they walk into traffic. And they have to actually take their phones out of their pockets and hold them in their hands to look at those screens. With glasses, even that little bit of effort is superfluous. As you walk down the sidewalk (or, God forbid, drive your car) you won’t be able to tell who is or isn’t paying attention.

We’re all doomed.

At least, with a watch, there’s the possibility of fighting crime.

2). Those of you who keep track of my every utterance may remember how appalled I was last year when the editorial brain trust at DC Comics decided that super-powered female lizards have breasts

http://www.comicmix.com//columns/2012/03/23/martha-thomases-what-would-women-worldkillers-wear/. For one thing, I kept formulating a joke in my head (“Like tits on a lizard, these are the Days of Our Lives“) that no one would understand anymore.

But, mostly, it upsets me that purportedly adult humans either know nothing about human biology or think the customers who pay their salaries are stupid tools who are easily manipulated. Both of these alternatives fill me with despair.

And this week, as I read my DC Comics, I was let down in exactly this way by a few books I normally enjoy.

The first was the end of the “Rot World” storyline, taking place in the #17 issues of Animal Man and Swamp Thing. Our title heroes and their allies are fighting creatures who have been overtaken by The Rot, so that they are desiccated zombies or monsters. Among the zombies are Superman and Wonder Woman. They are skeletal, except for Superman’s enormous muscles, and Wonder Woman’s muscular arms and giant breasts.

It makes no sense whatsoever for Wonder Woman to have a body that indicates she has no fat, but the gigantic breasts belie that. I suppose it’s possible that her breasts are full of pus, which would be scary, but also disturbing.

And then, in Dial H for Hero #9, the woman with a dial turns into a Minotaura, a female minotaur. She is covered with hair, has horns on her head, again with the exaggerated musculature, and again with ginormous boobies.

Think about it. A minotaur, half man and half bull. The female version would be half woman, half cow. No horns. And, if mammary glands, just as likely to be an udder as breasts.

Consider the possibilities of the super-powered udder. There could be jet-propelled milk, used to knock opponents off balance. A full udder is heavy, and an empty one could be flexible. It would be awesome.

But it wouldn’t give the fanboys boners, so I guess it’s not to be.

I await the Apple computer that gets built into bras.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Martha Thomases Sees Super Bowl Spots

Thomases Art 130208This is going to be old news by the time you’re reading this, but as a card-carrying DFH I am still obsessing over the gender and racial politics of the Super Bowl. And also the nerd politics.

First, a disclaimer: I’ve never been able to figure out football. Even when my son played it in high school, I couldn’t understand the rules. I know there are two teams fighting over a ball. I know there “downs,” and they matter. I know it isn’t soccer, which I do understand. So I’m only watching for the commercials, and because every other television station has surrendered and is running reruns.

(And even then, I switched to the Law & Order marathon on TNT occasionally, especially during the black-out.)

The commercials were depressing.

And they were depressing for a lot of reasons. For one, they weren’t very good. I get that, for the most part, they aren’t aimed at me, an older woman who isn’t into beer and lives in a city where she doesn’t have to own a car.

(I should say, however, that if anyone could manipulate me into buying a car, it’s Jon Hamm and Willem Dafoe.)

So, yeah, there were commercials that tugged our heartstrings, with tear-jerking odes to soldiers and farmers and horses.

There were celebrities making unexpected appearances, like Oprah and Seth Rogan and Kelly Cuoco and Tracy Morgan and Paul Rudd. And, most surprising, dead Paul Harvey.

There were ads for summer movies, which are fun to see when it’s cold out.

There was the gross Go Daddy ad, which I believe is deliberately bad so we’ll talk about it, and therefore I’m going to stop now.

On average, the ads celebrate bros. The people in the ads are men who drink beer and eat chips and drive around. If there are women, they are either unobtainable sex objects (who are obtainable if you use Axe body spray or drink Budweiser) or affectionate scolds. It is as if to be a woman is to be the responsible adult, and that is to be avoided at all costs. A real man has no impulse control, and if he’s successful, women will take care of him.

If this is what men want, that’s really sad. I would be more inclined to believe that it’s what the advertisers want men to want, and so they try to sell this attitude along with their product. Or maybe the lowest common denominator is lower than I thought.

As a palate cleanser, you might enjoy this. I can’t say the men in the ad are particularly my type (big pecs don’t do it for me), but the ad is funny, to the point, and assumes a certain amount of intelligence in the target audience.

The other thing I learned from the Super Bowl this year is that, even though my initial reaction was that making this movie was a stupid idea, I desperately need to see The Lone Ranger.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman and the Comic Book Industry of the Future!

 

 

Martha Thomases Plays With Toys


Thomases Art 130201 “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

– 1 Corinthians 13:11

Uh uh.

Leaving aside the gender issues that run rampant through our so-called holy books, I find myself about to enter my seventh decade with a computer full of rock’n’roll songs, shelves full of toys, and a plastic figure of Howdy Doody watching over my bed as I sleep. I revel in childish things.

So when I saw a story about Mattel’s latest attempt to revive the Max Steel line of action figures, I was curious. And then a little bit horrified. And then fascinated again.

When I was a kid, I loved team-up comics. The Legion, the Justice League, the Teen Titans – they were great because I could imagine myself as different characters depending on my mood. If I had friends who were also into comics, there were enough characters that we could each play our favorite. It was fun. We didn’t need any accouterments except maybe towels tied around our necks as capes.

In the 1980s, when my son was a boy, the ways corporations marketed to kids had changed a lot. My husband and I were real opinionated about it, and we had bunches of rules. We didn’t allow him to watch any cartoons that were created just to sell toys. No He-Man. No G.I. Joe. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were okay, because they were based on a comic book that was a satire of Frank Miller’s Ronin. The rules relaxed as he got older and better able to understand how marketing worked. Also, at four years old, he could tell the difference between a Tex Avery cartoon and a Chuck Jones cartoon.

Here’s what I noticed as a mom. Favorite characters came and went. Ghostbusters. Dick Tracy. Batman. Turtles. Whatever was in vogue, the kids would run around the playground, pretending to shoot (or send rays out of their hands, or wave swords). The names of the characters would change, but the game was always the same.

Back then, kids didn’t have computers. There was only television and, if the family budget allowed it, books and comics. Kids knew the story lines of their characters, but there was still a lot of room for running and fighting evil.

Maybe I’m wrong, but that doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. According to the article I cite, Mattel is creating a rather ornate web site with lots of information about the various characters and what they can do, even before the toys are available or the cartoon goes on television. “The intent of the wide distribution is to create viral marketing on social networks,” said Bob Higgins, the executive vice president for children’s and family programming at Fremantle. “Around the world, kids will start hearing about this,” he said. “Kids want to do what their friends do. If they are watching Max Steel, they want to be a part of that party.”

Before I buy my kid a toy, I want to know that he will actually play with it. Not hold onto it while he sits in front of the computer, but play. I want it to engage his imagination so he makes up his own stories, or thinks of ways the characters could participate in his own life.

Toys are media. They are how children learn about the world and how they fit into it. I don’t want my kids to learn that their place is in front of a screen, absorbing content.

Capes. I want capes.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases’s Extra Heroes

Thomases Art 130125If you were to come by my place for one of my fabulous dinner parties, you would be disappointed. My kitchen table is covered with file folders and copies of every bill I paid in 2012. Yes, it’s tax season! Every person has a different set of issues with the IRS, and mine this year are especially weird. Is an ambulance deductible?

Naturally, in an attempt to avoid this tiresome chore, I’m wondering what super-heroes who find themselves in this situation do.

I mean, I’d assume that the fabulously wealthy, the Bruce Waynes, the Tony Starks, the Oliver Queens, have accountants who can write off their gear as R & D expenses at a corporate level.

And Aquaman, Wonder Woman and Doctor Doom are heads of state of sovereign nations. Whatever they might owe their respective governments, they aren’t writing checks to the IRS.

But what about the average working schmoe? Just because you can bend steel with your bare hands doesn’t mean you can deduct your spandex pants. That’s only possible if being a hero is your business, and you need your costume as a business expense. Hooters waitresses can claim their t-shirts, Grant Morrison’s Superman can’t.

It is, I think, a major problem of our tax code that this is true. Why should Anne Romney’s horse be legally deductible as business expense when Comet is a taxable money-pit.

The reason that Rafalca is a legitimate business expense is that raising her is a business, with profit and loss. Similarly, if the Romney’s chose to donate the horse (or, more likely, a piece of artwork or simply cash) to charity, they would be legally entitled to a deduction for the value of their gift.

This is a good thing. I’m in favor of philanthropy. I’m in favor of tax laws that encourage charitable giving. I might quibble with an individual’s choice of charity, but then, I quibble with my own choices, and that’s what makes a democracy.

This should also apply to heroics. If Peter Parker is saving New York from the Green Goblin, he should be allowed to deduct his web fluid. That matters more to the city’s quality of life than a dozen socialites giving their used wardrobe to the Metropolitan Museum.

And Peter needs the deduction more. He’s a working stiff.

Similarly, there are all kinds of people who do good without any fancy outfits. Working people who use their own metro-cards to help tutor at-risk kids, or work at a soup kitchen, or a thrift store. They don’t have money, so they donate their time. It would be great if we lived in a world where these problems were taken care of at a macro level by the government. Until that happens, it would be nice if our tax laws encouraged its citizens to pick up the slack.

We can use the extra heroes.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman and Something About The New 52

 

Martha Thomases: Breaking The Four-Color Wall — Comics About Cartoonists

Thomases Art 130118-aComics About Cartoonists • Edited by Craig Yoe • 192 pages • $39.99 retail in hardcover • IDW Publishing, on sale January 22nd

The creative life has its own circle of hell. The blank page, the blank canvas, the empty stage, all exist to remind us of our failure. When one is a professional with a deadline, the taunting is even more painful.

For those of us in the audience, it can also be excruciating. I don’t like songs about how difficult it is to be a rock star. I don’t like novels about how misunderstood teaching assistants can’t get laid.

But then it can also be fun. The Stunt Man is a wonderful movie about making movies. My Favorite Year is a laff riot about writing television shows, and it’s one of my favorites. All That Jazz? It’s show time!

Thomases Art 130118-bAnd now, Craig Yoe has put together an anthology of comics about creating comics, Comics About Cartoonists. It collects sketches and finished stories, newspaper strips and comic book covers from some of the most celebrated creators of the last century.

The book has comedy, horror, and romance. It has work by Jack Kirby, Winsor McKay, Steve Ditko, Ernie Bushmiller, Jack Cole, Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Charles Schulz and lots, lots more. It has deep personal insight into the real lives of working stiffs, and also what happens to cartoonists when aliens attack.

To meet this deadline, I read the whole thing in one sitting, and that’s not something I would recommend to you, Constant Reader. There are only a few plots. Cartoonist has no idea, so he fells asleep and his characters have an adventure. Cartoonist isn’t appreciated by his editor. Cartoonist stumbles on plans for an alien invasion. Beautiful girl doesn’t realize that the dumpy guy who looks like the cartoonist is beautiful on the inside. I’m sure I would have enjoyed these stories more if I read them one at a time, instead of in a lump.

And then, it has Basil Wolverton, with a story that not only exhibits his energetic wit and exuberance, but dialogue that is so much fun it should be read out loud. I would pay for Childish Gambino to record it.

My favorite comic stories about comics were the ones Cary Bates and Elliott S. Maggin wrote themselves into with the Justice League. Yoe also doesn’t include Grant Morrison’s appearances in Animal Man. The rights were most likely not available, and all of these are too self-consciously meta for the book’s shaggy-dog aesthetic.

On the other hand, the book’s endpapers are old ads promising to teach you — yes, you! — how to make big money and attract beautiful women as a cartoonist. “Cartoon Your Way to Popularity and Profit” says one ad that goes on to promise you a “Laugh Finder.” That ad alone is darker and more meta than anything on the market today.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: Soap

Thomases Art 130111Oh, Pine Valley! I have missed you so!

But my prayers have been answered, and All My Children will soon be back, if only on the Internet. And while it won’t feel real to me unless they get back Erica Kane or Zach, I think this is a real win for those of us who like our entertainment niche.

Soap operas are not new. They were a staple of radio drama and easily made the transition to television. Usually, the focus would be on one or two families, and the drama that resulted when love, greed, hate and intrigue enmeshed them with each other and their neighbors.

Conventional wisdom maintained that this kind of entertainment was for women, especially housewives. They would watch “their stories” as they did the ironing or dusted. Every day, for 30 to 60 minutes (including commercials), they could vicariously experience the lives of beautiful people, with a cliffhanger at the end, ensuring a date with tomorrow’s show. When (white, middle-class) women went into the workforce in large numbers in the 1970s, it was assumed the genre would die.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, the soap opera mutated. It invaded primetime, where shows like Dallas and Dynasty were monster hits. Soap elements – relationship dramas among the characters that couldn’t be solved with a laugh, a gunfight, or magic – invaded cop shows, doctor shows and more. Do you think you’d have The Sopranos without General Hospital? If so, you think wrong.

(My point is not that David Chase is a soap opera fan – although he may be – but that network executives wouldn’t have gone for the pilot without a profitable precedent.)

What ultimately drove the soaps off network television was the cost, and the continued segmentation of the audience. It’s expensive to have daily shows with big casts, big sets, and lots of writers. The talk shows that replaced the soaps are way cheaper, and product placement is much easier (although I will always remember with fondness the month that AMC had Campbell’s Soup as a sponsor, and therefore soup solved everything). They don’t get the same audience as the soaps, but they don’t need to.

The solution? The Internet. It’s taken a while for the producers to get it together with finances, and unions, but now it looks like they have.

It’s an interesting parallel to comics. Hollywood is making a ton of money from superheroes, but sales of floppies appeal to a much, much smaller audience. And, again, the Internet provides a way not only to grow the readership, but to level the playing field for those creators (and readers) who don’t want to limit themselves to one genre, or one business model.

The folks trying to resuscitate All My Children have already signed up Angie. Get Tad, and I’m there.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: You Say You Want A Resolution…

Thomases Art 130104New Year’s Resolutions aren’t for me. When I was a kid, my parents would sit my sister and me down with paper and have us write some. I suppose it helped their hangovers. Since I had to do it, I hated it.

For most of the last decade, my only resolution has been to drink more water. If that.

Still, there is a new year ahead, and that means twelve months of possibilities. It would be foolish not to have a plan to take advantage of them. So here, for better or worse, is what I want to do. We’ll see if I have the resolve to follow through.

• Try new things. When I go to the comic book store on Wednesday morning (hi, gang!), it’s easy to just pick up my usual. But just as that’s a boring way to go to a restaurant when there are so many other choices, it’s no way to approach the rack. Last year, for one example, I took great joy in Resident Alien. If you didn’t see it, I highly recommend the trade. As for me, I’m going to look for more than a DC bullet in the corner.

• Don’t support what I don’t like. As I said above, I have a tendency to just look for the DC bullet. And while I’ve expanded my repertoire over the decades I’ve read comics, I tend to add titles more than subtract them. Why do I do this? Am I afraid I’ll miss something? The Internet means I can always catch up. In the meantime, I’ll save myself time, money, and indicate my displeasure to publishers.

• Proselytize. When something is good, I’ll say so, especially if that thing isn’t getting enough attention. For example, American Horror Story: Asylum  is the best television show I never hear anybody talking about. It has everything you could want in an entertainment – Nazi doctors, serial killers, demon-possessed nuns, crusading lesbian reporters, aliens from outer space – and it’s from the guys who bring you Glee, so you know everybody looks good.

• Shut up, occasionally. It’s easy for us Baby Boomers to talk incessantly about how much better we had it, back when rent was cheap, there was no HIV, and there were no rating systems. We had great movies, great comics and music that still moves us. But most of us forgot our ideals, and sold out our legacy. Patti Smith is doing Levi ads. We are in no position to tell younger people what to do.

It’s my fondest hope that I can stick to these, at least through Groundhog Day. And to keep my water bottle handy.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: Printing Punk

Like many old people, New Year’s Eve makes me remember earlier times. When I was young. When I knew who the new bands were. When I was cool. Once one has children, one is never cool again.

There was a period of time in the mid-1970s when I dropped out of college and went to work for an antiwar magazine. We had a barter arrangement with lots of underground newspapers and magazines, so I got to read CREEM magazine, and from that and the Village Voice, I knew who all the cool bands were and where to see them in New York.

When I decided to go back to college for my degree, I kept up subscriptions to CREEM and the Voice, and it was from these that I discovered Punk.

Not the music, although also the music. No, I mean Punk, a magazine that combined my two greatest passions, comics and rock’n’roll.  It was hand-lettered. It was rude and crude and hilarious. I so wanted to work there.

After I graduated, I moved to Manhattan and tried to get a job in journalism. I applied at straight places, like Time-Life, Condé Nast and Hearst. And I walked into the PUNK office, then on Tenth Avenue, to see if they would hire me. When I said I had worked for an antiwar magazine, Legs McNeil, the Resident Punk, leaped on top of a desk, pointed at me, and yelled that I was a Commie.

That didn’t stop them from letting me do some typing for them, when they needed labels for a mailing. And it didn’t stop me from becoming friends with Legs and John Holmstrom, the editor.

John is, in my opinion, the most ripped-off man in comics. I mean, lots of early comic book creators were screwed financially by their publishers. And lots of early comic book creators have been imitated by the artists who followed them. John, however, created a style that was part Harvey Kurtzman (a mentor of his), part Bazooka Joe, part Basil Wolverton, but uniquely his own. In no time at all, and with not even an acknowledgement or thanks, he was co-opted by every art director at every publisher and every ad agency in the world.

But John was more than an innovator. He was a great patron of new talent. Not only did Punk do stories on new bands, but they published work by new cartoonists. For example, John was one of the first person to publish Peter Bagge.

It has long been my contention that the comics and rock’n’roll share the characteristics that both are uniquely American art forms, but only gained respect when English people did them. John combined them in astonishingly simple ways, by drawing his interviews, or staging fumetti stories that starred Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, the Ramones and Andy Warhol, among others.

It’s not just nostalgia at Auld Lang Syne that has me thinking about how cool Punk was. Harper Collins has just published a big, beautiful hard cover volume, The Best of Punk Magazine that brings those late 1970s/early 1980s days back to life. It’s on much slicker paper than the original, but it still has the brattiness that made the original so much fun.

It’s a book that will get up on a desk and yell at you, and then bum money for cigarettes and beer.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman’s… Lists

 

Martha Thomases: Don’t You Know, It’s The End Of The World…

If the world doesn’t end today and I really have to write this column, the responsible thing would be to write about the horrific shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.

Here we go again.

The usual subjects are making the usual arguments. People who like guns think the killings could have been prevented if more people had guns. People who don’t like guns think the killings could have been prevented if guns were more difficult to get. People who don’t want to change the gun laws think we should concentrate on mental health services. People who don’t want to pay more in taxes for things like improved mental health services say the problem is that we took prayer out of public schools.

And everyone blames the media.

A good friend of mine, one whose values I respect, said he thought part of the problem is that first-person shooter video games are so realistic that players develop an emotional callus, so that it’s easier to make the transition and shoot a real human.

He may be right. A recent study would suggest otherwise, but I don’t think there is a single answer here. Certain kinds of mental illness may be exacerbated by the kind of stimuli contained in vividly realistic games.

It only takes one.

I don’t like violent video games, but then, I don’t much like video games at all. That said, I’m looking forward to seeing a bunch of violent movies in the near future, including Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty, and I’m not prepared to say my choices in violence are better just because they’re mine.

Here’s the thing. It’s not the media that is the problem, but how we deal with it. As an adult I can separate my fantasies from my realities, and I can enjoy them as such. I know that, as an adult, I can’t shoot people who annoy me, and that knowledge contributes to my enjoyment when I watch Clint Eastwood or Sam Jackson do it.

I wouldn’t let my child watch those films if I thought said child was too young to understand. I didn’t, and we had arguments about it. However, even if I was wrong about specifics, my son knew that I valued his emotional health. He might not have known that if I had just turned him loose in the cinemaplex and let him run rampant.

There’s not a single answer to the problem of shootings like the one in Connecticut. It would help if guns were more difficult to obtain, especially the kind that let the shooter fire dozens of shots at a time. It would help if we had more empathy for those suffering from various kinds of mental illness, including run-of-the-mill teenage despair.

If you want to blame the media, blame the right one: the news media. And then consider why we have so many news-worthy, real-life situations in which we glorify killing.

And consider that even after the national outrage about what happened Friday morning, the violence didn’t take a break.

Are we stuck? Is this the human condition? Is it just dirty rotten hippies like myself who believe we can do better? Isn’t there an evolutionary imperative for the strong to dominate the weak?

No, according to some recent archeological discoveries. The evidence suggests that humans are designed to take care of each other, no matter what our individual shortcomings.

If the world hasn’t ended, and you want to help keep it that way, you still have time to make a difference, either with money or service.

Here’s to more light in the days ahead.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks