Category: Columns

Mindy Newell: Migraines and Mel

This may turn out to be a short one, guys.

A lot of us here at ComicMix have written about the agonies of writer’s block, but I don’t think anyone has ever talked about the torture of trying to write when your head is trying to separate itself from the rest of your body.

That’s ‘cause I have the worst tension migraine right now. I’ve been having them all week, on and off. It’s probably because I’m starting to go nuts from being – mostly – stuck in the house. My vision is okay, but there’s a little man with a pick-ax standing on the right side of the crown of my head, and he’s swinging away and my right ear is ringing in response – I feel like Wile E. Coyote after a run-in with the Roadrunner. I’ve taken my Advil, but the only thing that really helps is standing in the shower and letting the hot water run over me – and I can’t stand in the shower all day.

Anyway, I finished the story for the ComicMix project – see my column from two weeks ago, Patience, Perfection, and Procrastination – and what I called “connecting the towers” worked. It’s now in the hands of artist Andrea Shockling. Check out her work at andreashockling.com, and you’ll understand why I’m thankful to ComicMixer Joe Corallo for telling me about Andrea. She and I spoke on the phone last week, and we discovered that we are kindred spirits; bottom line, I am super excited and happy to be working with her.

Still plugging away at my graphic novel proposal. Did I ever mention that I am the worst, absolutely the worst, proposal writer in the world? I have the hook, I have the concept, I have the story – my big problem is I start writing the outline, and all of a sudden I am deep into it; but when I stop to take a bathroom break or make a “cuppa tea” I come back and realize that it’s already eight or nine pages long. Which means I have to go back, and cut and paste and cut and paste and edit and keep editing, all in order to get to the place where the heart of it resides, while at the same time whittling it down to three or four pages, double-spaced. Oy.

As to what happened yesterday (Saturday, August 12) in Charlottesville, Virginia…

Il Tweetci The Mad can make inane remarks and have the White House staff rush in to “stem the fallout” – as the New York Times reported today – all he wants. He ain’t fooling anybody.

Here’s a conspiracy theory for you from a migrained mind: what happened was encouraged, nay, organized, by the “deconstructionists (read: destroyers) of the world order” and Nazis currently sitting at the right hand of Il Tweetci: Steve Bannon, Steve Minchin, and Sebastian Gorka. (Okay, I’m not sure if Minchin is a “deconstructionist of the world order” or a Nazi, but he, im-not-so-ho, sure is a self-hating Jew.) Not that anyone could prove it.

Today, this morning, I went on YouTube and watched Spike Jones’ “Der Fuehrer’s Face” and “Springtime for Hitler,” from Mel Brooks’ The Producers.

Then I read an interview that Mr. Brooks did with the late Mike Wallace on CBS’s 60 Minutes in 2001. The subject was Mr. Brooks’ obsession with his ethnicity and with Hitler:

“Hitler was part of this incredible idea that you could put Jews in concentration camps and kill them…How do you get even with the man? How do you get even with him?”

“You have to bring him down with ridicule because if you stand on a soapbox and you match him with rhetoric, you’re just as bad as he is, but if you can make people laugh at him, then you’re one up on him…It’s been one of my lifelong jobs – to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.”

And I thought, what if people had just stood and laughed at them?

Would that have worked?

I don’t know.

But what happened is enough to give anyone a permanent migraine.

 

Ed Catto: Baby Got Back

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but in comics we do. That’s what sells it. Oftentimes, comics retailers need to make pre-ordering decisions based largely on just a comic’s cover.

Comics, like people, should be enjoyed for what’s on the inside. Corny but true. But like the B-side of a vinyl record, sometimes there’s glory on the flipside, like with comic book back covers.

Emil Novak, Sr. runs a great store in Buffalo called Queen City Bookstore. It’s overflowing with comics and lost treasures, most reflecting Emil’s ravenous appetite for great comics. During my last visit there, I stumbled across The Spirit: The First 93 Dailies reprint comic from 1977. The front cover sported a heroic Eisner Spirit image, but the back cover, showing an exhausted Spirit collapsed in the snow was the cool part. And the courageous use of negative space really stood out. I really liked that back cover, and that sparked today’s topic.

We need not only reach back into the past for examples. There are so many clever back covers on comics today. Two, in particular, come to mind:

  • Cliff Chiang’s creating some gorgeous wrap-around covers for his Image Paper Girls series, written by Brian Wood. Essentially the back cover is part of the front cover, but with Cliff’s strong sense of design and deliberate use of color, the back covers have a life of their own,
  • Greg Rucka and Michael Lark swing the pendulum far in the opposite direction for their brilliant Lazarus This is a series set in the near future that provides a stark look at the impact of wealth concentrated amongst the few. The creators provide faux back cover advertisements each issue. The back cover adds to the story as if one of the storyline’s companies or ‘governments’ has created an ad. World-building via the back cover, if you will.

Back Cover Advertising

Advertisements can also create memorable back covers. I have fond memories of Silver Age back covers selling Aurora superhero model kits. The best ones leverage Curt Swan or Murphy Anderson art for on-the-nose authenticity.

And while Land of the Giants, Rat Patrol or The Invaders weren’t TV shows I was watching back then, I sure was fascinated by their back-cover model kit ads. The Aurora monster model kits back cover ads probably deserve an entire column devoted to the creepy thrill and chills they inspired a generation of readers.

Toys ads could be hit or miss. I never warmed up to – or even understood – Skittle Bowl, despite ads illustrated by Murphy Anderson or featuring Don (Get Smart) Adams, I really loved the back-cover ads for Mattel’s Hot Birds and rrRUmblers. They must have worked. All the kids on my block collected these toys for about half a minute.

Professional Backstory

Over the years, my fascination with back covers has spilled over to my professional career. I’ve helped develop a few back covers of which I’m proud. A few examples:

  • Pagemaster was the movie that had everything going for it – a great message, hot movie stars, and a top pop music performer. It was a “can’t miss.” I was excited to lead Nabisco’s promotional program with the picture. But then, the hot movie star got weird (Macaulay Culkin) and the pop music performer (Michael Jackson) got weirder. The picture fizzled, but not before we created a great comic ad for the program. We used one of the young actors from the TV ad and we ran on the back covers of Marvel Comics for a couple of months in 1994.
  • At Bonfire Agency, our geek-focused marketing firm, and GeekRiot Media, we ran quite a few ads on the back covers of comics from lots of different publishers: IDW, Boom! Studios, Archie, Dynamite, Aspen and more. It was invigorating, and personally fulfilling, to get big brands partnering with publishers beyond the “big two”.

Coming Next Issue

I think there’s something special about advertising the “next issue” on the back cover. I could go on and on about how we live in an anticipatory culture, always looking ahead to what’s next. Have we lost the ability to live in the moment? I don’t know. That’s a whole ‘nuther topic.

No matter: I still like using the back covers for next issues, or other comics by the same publisher. Recently, publishers like Titan and Black Mask started embracing this tactic.

Some of the best “coming next issue” back issues were on the flip side of Pacific Comic’s Somerset Holmes. It was a gorgeous comic with a gorgeous female lead, based on a gorgeous real-life female creator. (There’s an epic tale behind it all that I’d like to get into one day.) Somerset Holmes’ back covers were creative and memorable – some of my favorites.

Advertising experts used to say that the back cover of any magazine is valuable real estate, as there’s a 50% change that a magazine will be put on a table with the back side up, I’m not sure if anyone ever truly believed that, but there’s no denying the charm of the oft-neglected comic book back cover.

•     •     •     •     •

Oh, and in the spirit of “coming next time”: my next column builds off my recent Back Issue article on the 80s comic Thriller! I’ve finally caught up with author Robert Loren Fleming and we’ve got some long-lost secrets to reveal!

 

John Ostrander: The Bourne Formula

Spoiler note: Various plot elements of the Bourne movies may be revealed below. The movies have been out for a while so I’m assuming those who want to see them have seen them. Nevertheless, the spoiler flag is flying just in case.

There are a number of movies that, when I come across them on the tube, I’ll stop and watch them. I tell myself that it will be just until a certain scene or bit of dialogue but the fact is I usually wind up watching them through to the final credits. When this happens late at night, I can wind up staying awake for far too long and suffer for it the next day.

The Bourne series of movies fall into this category. They include The Bourne Identity/Supremacy/Ultimatum and Jason Bourne but not The Bourne Legacy which, despite its name, has no Jason Bourne in it and appears to be ignored by the series filmmakers so I do, too.)

The reason I’m doing this retro review is to look at how something that starts fresh can drift into formula.

The films center on an assassin working for a clandestine special ops CIA agency. Born David Webb, he has become Jason Bourne – among other identities. Trained to be a living weapon, Bourne (wounded on one failed assignment) has become amnesiac. Over the course of the films, he starts to recover that memory.

The series starts with 2002s The Bourne Identity, loosely (some say too loosely) based on Robert Ludlum’s novel of the same name. It was a refreshing take on the spy/action genre, which previously had been defined by the James Bond films. The action was more realistic as were the characters and the situation. There was a car chase but it involved what I think was a Mini. The villain in the movie was not a huge over-the-top megalomaniac but the very agency that employed Bourne. The female lead was not a striking Bond girl but a Bohemian woman named Marie. The film ends with Bourne and Marie putting a new life together for themselves and the agency that hunted them has been closed down.

The film was a big success and re-defined the genre; the Bond films were re-cast in the Bourne mode – tougher, grittier, more realistic. They had needed to change and Bourne showed the way.

The Bourne Supremacy (2004) continued the trend. There’s a successor to the black ops agency in the first film but there’s a traitor inside who frames Bourne for a failed mission. In attempting to take him out, Bourne’s love Marie is killed. This is startling; Marie was a major character in the first film and her death has a major effect on Bourne, giving him a motivation that continues through the series. Still, the Big Bad is again the Agency or, at least, elements of it. We’re seeing a pattern developing.

The third film in the series, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy, once again has Bourne and the Agency at odds. This time, the film winds up bringing Bourne back home to the U.S., specifically New York City. He learns the truth about his origin and there are touches throughout that bring us back to the first film suggesting this is the final installment in a trilogy.

And it was, for 12 years.

In 2012, the studio tried to capitalize on its franchise with the Bourne-less The Bourne Legacy. It also tried to make Bourne more of a superhero. That didn’t work all the way around.

Last year saw Jason Bourne (with returning star Matt Damon) hit the theaters. Once again, a woman who is close to Jason is killed and once again the central villain is the Agency (or someone at the Agency). And the formula is starting to become obvious.

Every film has a car chase, each becoming more spectacular than the last. The first one was relatively modest and interesting. After that, any time Jason takes the wheel insurance rates are going up and there will be considerable collateral damage. In all the cars being upended or hit, I just imagine people being hurt and dying. I’m no longer impressed.

There will be a big hand to hand fight between Jason and… somebody. Somebody trained enough to give Jason a good fight but the outcome is never in doubt, It will be very violent and no music plays during it.

In every film, Jason says some variation on “This ends here.” Except it never does. If the studio has its way, it never will. So why even say it?

The antagonist is always the Agency or someone at the Agency. Always. Jason might as well be fighting Spectre and Blofeld.

In two out of the four films, a woman close to Bourne is killed. The first time it was effective if startling and had real impact and consequences. It’s starting to look like a trope.

Don’t get me wrong; I’ve enjoyed each Bourne movie I’ve seen and I wouldn’t mind seeing another. But what started out as fresh and different is becoming old and formulaic. That’s hard to avoid when you’re working on a series. How do you keep from repeating yourself especially when part of the attraction for the fans is that repetition of fave motifs and lines?

It can be done. The next Bourne should avoid the Agency or maybe have Bourne work with the Agency, Different settings, different stakes. As it stands now, they’re not doing sequels; they’re doing remakes.

The Bourne Repetition.

Marc Alan Fishman: The Light At the End of the Tunnel

For those of you who follow my li’l studio Unshaven Comics on Facebook, you’ll note a recent ramping up of delightful sharing. As pages get completed in The Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts #4, I’ve been too excited not to immediately share them with our fans. As such, I’m finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on a book that has taken more than a year beyond what I’d intended to see it be ready for release.

We’re not there yet, but the end is truly nigh.

For those sticklers who like details: three of us presently are mashing on the necessary color work – with about 20 more pages that need final effects. Everything is lettered. The book file is built. Literally, 20 pages need some over-the-top TLC, and they will be pushed into their final form. To ensure we round third base and dive for home, I’m even taking this coming week off my normal day job to only work on the book. By the time you read my article next week, I should be sending the book off to the printer – and likely attempting to gain back a weeks’ worth of lost sleep.

Not that I’m counting our chickens before they are hatched. Within these last pages is the crux of the issue – if not the entire four book series. Fight scenes dissolve into bigger fight scenes and culminate in a space fight that will push me to my limit with meticulously placed texture maps and Photoshop glow effects. Every single page matters. Every panel needs polish. If this is to be the culmination of five years’ worth of nights, weekends, holidays, and everything in between, there will be no half-measures.

If I am to speculate that my work is successful, I will look forward to those final steps to see the book become a physical, sellable object. The book is pressed into a high-res PDF and is carefully transferred to our printer. A proof is produced, and we spot check every page to ensure the trim doesn’t cut into any major details or words. Then, issues will be printed, cut, bound, and boxed. We’ll pick up issue #4 along with a hefty helping of issues 1, 2, 3, and the not so secret origin and make the 12-hour drive to Dragon Con in Atlanta. And there lies the grail of emotion I truly seek at the end of this process.

For five years, we have minted a minor (very, very, very minor) fortune by uttering a pitch that takes less than 20 seconds to complete. I’d say, “you already know it by now,” but if you know me then you know I’m not missing my window to boldly brand:

The Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts is a team-action adventure about samurai-astronauts, led by an immortal Kung Fu monkey… saving humanity from zombie-cyborg space pirates!

And for the last five years, one burning question had remained deftly unanswered by our growing amassment of wonderful fans…

“Is this everything?”

Now, we can now look them dead in the eye, and place the entire series in their lovely mitts. A complete thought (plus a wonderful upsell if they want that origin tale) that took over a thousand hours to piece together across the birth of four kids, the marriage and subsequent moving of one Unshaven lad to Wisconsin and over 102 individual mortgage payments posted. Now for a single Andrew Jackson, the fruit of all of that labor is handed over with glee.

The light at the end of the tunnel represents more than just the culmination of a comic book. It’s the lighting of the torch that announces the next phase to Unshaven Comics. The only place to go from here is up. And now… it’s starting to feel like it’s actually true.

Tweeks: SDCC 2017 Voltron Interview

This week, I talk to Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, the producers of Voltron: Legendary Defender, as well as, Bex Taylor-Klaus and Tyler Labine, the voices of Pidge and Hunk, about the recently released Season 3 of the hit Netflix Original. And if you are a fan of voice acting, Bex & Tyler have some great things to say about that too!

Without spoilers, let me say that Season 3 was so amazing! The characters were really explored more in this season, in regards to what makes them tick and the motives behind what they do. We also had some light shined on the lives of the original Paladins and their relationships, notably King Alfor, Haggar, and Zarkon. The season was only 7 episodes (ughhhh) but it’s worth it because Season 4 releases in October!

Let me know how you feel about Season 3 in the comments!

– Maddy

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #417

HE’S NOT RUNNING A LOKI CAMPAIGN

It wasn’t funny the first time, okay?

The recent mini-series Vote Loki had the Asgardian god running for President. The series was a political satire with Loki running on the platform that he would lie to America’s face and they would love it. Here’s what followed.

Nisa Contreras, a reporter for the Daily Bugle, attempted to uncover information to discredit Loki. However, every time that she did – Loki’s followers were brainwashed cult members or Loki orchestrated political unrest in Latveria– her efforts backfired. Information which would have torpedoed any other candidate’s chances didn’t discrediting Loki, it made him more popular. The same joke was in issue 2 and repeated in issue 3.

Fortunately for Vote Loki, political satire doesn’t have to be funny. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is political satire and it’s about as funny as a Pauly Shore movie. Every Pauly Shore movie. Combined.

If you’ve been paying attention, you probably gathered that I didn’t find Vote Loki very funny; mostly because the joke Vote Loki kept repeating wasn’t funny the first time; the first time being when I actually lived said joke last year. But, I’m not here to offer my critique of humor. After all, my column isn’t called “The Laugh Is a Ass.” So you’re probably wondering where’s the law in all of this.

It’s here. In Vote Loki #1, J. Jonah Jameson asked Loki how he could run for President. After all, Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution says, “No person except a natural born citizen… shall be eligible to the office of President.” Loki explained that as a mythical figure he was a “manifestation of stories… I have lived and died hundreds of times, retelling some version of the story of what is Loki.” Loki further explained that the current version of his back story was that he was born to an American couple in Accident, Maryland and that Odin then “quickly took me from them to ‘put the baby in its rightful place in Asgard.’ ” So he was a natural-born citizen and eligible to run for President.

Even if we believe this preposterous claim that basically allows Loki to alter his back story to suit his needs – a talent as useful for comic-book editors infatuated with retcons as it is for politicians who have something to hide; which is just about all of them – Loki’s new back story doesn’t help him as much as he thinks.

First there’s the question of whether Loki is still an American Citizen? Remember, he’s served as the ruler of Asgard on a few occasions. Usually by usurping the throne while Odin was in the Odinsleep or some other convenient plot device, but Loki has ruled Asgard.

Article 8, Section 1481 of The United States Code spells out several ways in which a citizen of the United States can lose his citizenship. Subsection (a)(4) of the code says a citizen shall “lose his nationality by voluntarily… accepting, serving in, or performing the duties of any office, post, or employment under the government of a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof, after attaining the age of eighteen years if he has or acquires the nationality of such foreign state.” So Loki’s stints as ruler of Asgard may be enough, under the United States Code, to say Loki lost his citizenship. And if he’s not a citizen of the United States, he can’t run for President.

There is a complication to this argument, the case of Afroyim v. Rusk  which we’ve talked about before. In that case, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled the Constitution does not grant Congress the authority to strip a person of his citizenship through a legislative act. Congress has the right to confer citizenship not take it away. The only way a citizen can lose citizenship is if the citizen voluntarily renounces it.

Some might argue that by voluntarily accepting the rulership of a foreign realm, an act Loki knew would result in him being expatriated, he also implicitly renounced his American citizenship. Doing something you know will cost you your citizenship is the same as saying you don’t want it. Others, including the Afroyim case, seem to disagree. The issue isn’t completely settled.

If the United States Code’s dictates cannot strip citizenship unless the citizen both accepts the foreign post and says he or she is renouncing his or her citizenship, Loki’s still a citizen. Loki didn’t even know he was an American Citizen until recently so he wouldn’t have known that he had any citizenship to renounce. Loki could still run for President.

Except that he couldn’t.

Even if Loki is still a natural-born citizen of the United States, he is not eligible to run for President. Jonah Jameson’s question concentrated on the first half of the paragraph in Article II Section 1 of the Constitution which sets out the necessary qualifications to be President. J.J.J. didn’t read far enough. After the paragraph gets done talking about natural-born citizens, it adds, “neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained the age of thirty five years [at several millennia, I think Loki’s more than meets that requirement] and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.” [Emphasis added] (By the way, that Y in Years was capitalized in the original. What can I say, English usage was different back in the days when they made the letter S look like the letter F.)

We’ll skip over the attained the age part. Loki’s millennia old, he just lies about his age. He’s more than old enough to be President. But fourteen years a resident? Now we’ve got him!

Remember in Loki’s new continuity he may have been born in the USA but he didn’t stay long. Odin “quickly came” and took the baby Loki up to Asgard. Since then Loki’s spent time in Asgard, he’s been banished to Hades, he’s been imprisoned in an Asgardian tree. He has, in fact, been banished to lots of places, and imprisoned in lots of other places.

Loki has spent some time on Earth and in America, frequently fighting Thor. But there were other stays in America; like when he was a member of the Young Avengers. That trip to America only lasted 15 issues; less than a month and one-half real-world time and probably only a fraction of that time in Marvel Universe time.

So, yes, Loki has spent some time on Earth, but is it enough time? Is it fourteen years? The entire modern Marvel universe beginning with Fantastic Four #1– Marvel may be forbidden from publishing the book but we can still talk about it – has only been ten years. Maybe a few more. Let’s say it’s been as much as fourteen years. But Loki – whichever version of the myth has come out to play this month – has not spent most of that time on Earth, let alone in the United States. So he hasn’t lived in the United States for 14 years and isn’t eligible to be President.

I wish someone from Earth 616 had come to me and talked out their Loki problem. I could have told them that if they just read a little farther in the Constitution they could have found the clause dictating that Loki couldn’t run for President. I couldn’t do anything to prevent the circus that was last year’s presidential election process here on our Earth. But it’s nice to think that, had they but asked, I could have helped the Marvel Universe avoid their own version of the Cirque du Soiled.

Martha Thomases: Obesity and Honesty

Roxane Gay’s new book, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a knock-out of a book. It kept me glued to my couch for a long weekend. I finished reading it about ten days ago, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

Does it have anything to do with comics? Well, Gay wrote a mini-series for Marvel. Beyond that, if you want to know more, you’ll have to keep reading.

In addition to being an accomplished author and journalist, Roxane Gay is, in her own words, a morbidly obese woman of color. Hunger is about what happened to her, how she got this way, and what it’s like to live the way she lives. It’s incredibly honest, so much so that I couldn’t look away, even as I squirmed in recognition.

I am not morbidly obese. Sure, I could drop twenty or thirty pounds to look more like the mannequins in the department stores, but I can pass. I am not a woman of color. As a Jew, my people have a history of persecution, but I can pass. Unlike Gay, I was not gang-raped when I was twelve years old. Because I have these privileges, I could sneer at her with my societally-approved advantages, but I can’t. I feel my own version of what she feels, and I went through my own version of what she went through.

Gay started to overeat because she wanted to make herself unattractive to men so she wouldn’t get attacked again. She knew that a woman who is overweight is considered to be ugly – and an ugly woman is invisible. By building a wall around herself, she would be safe.

Her descriptions of her experiences are harrowing. Strangers in the supermarket take away food from her shopping cart. People complain to airlines about having to sit next to her, even if she pays for two seats. Instead of taking her ideas seriously, critics comment on her looks. Everything about her life, good or bad, is dismissed by those who only see her size.

And then there are the people who think they are helping her. The people who tell her that maybe she doesn’t really want dessert. The people who suggest exercise. I can assure you that every woman in Western society who is larger than a Size 0 knows about diet and exercise.

Still, reading about her pain, the Jewish mother in me did want to lean in and offer Gay some advice. She talks about regularly starting (and giving up on) a diet-and-exercise plan, and my first suggestion is to uncouple those two things. Various eating systems have made me feel variously better and worse, but if I didn’t exercise, I would go mad. I don’t do work because I expect it to make me a fashion model or an Olympic athlete but because it keeps me sane. Working up a sweat on a regular basis burns up a lot of my hostility. My resting pulse is 48. I can’t claim I’m never angry or never hating, but it doesn’t burn me up inside.

Except I know that she is a different person than I am, and what works for me as a coping system might not work for her. I’ll try to shut up about that now.

Women obsess about our appearances because society consistently tells us that it is our most important duty. My mother used to beg me to lose weight, starting when I was twelve (5’ 3” and 113 pounds), telling me that “boys don’t like fat girls.” Even now, at 64 years of age, when I know that my life is about more than boys liking me, those thoughts won’t go away.

My mom (and Roxane’s) were only trying to teach their daughters how to get ahead. To succeed, we were told, a woman must be thin and fit and beautiful. That was difficult enough. Today, when society pays at least lip service to the idea of diversity, we are supposed to be not only thin and fit and beautiful but also, if we are not, to pretend that it doesn’t matter (even though it does).

It gets even more difficult at menopause. Not only can we no longer bear children, the only true purpose for the female life, and the reason we must be attractive to men, but biology conspires to make us more fat.

We can’t win.

I would like to be like Faith, the Valiant superhero who is large. She wears a skin-tight white costume that does nothing to conceal her size. She is strong and she can fly and she has an interesting life and, in her current incarnation, spends no time at all thinking about her looks or what she eats or how many calories she burns off.

Sure, she also catches bad guys and saves the world, but that’s not why she’s my hero.

Dennis O’Neil: Deadlines and Ducks

My old friend Danny Fingeroth has nothing to do with the subject of this column, at least I don’t think he has, but we are at the beginning and, you never know maybe some absolutely brilliant idea will occur any second now, an idea with Danny’s name graven on it in fiery letters as big as the cosmos, in which case, I guess, that’s what’d I’d write about.

Hey idea, I’m waiting.

Okay, to hell with you, idea.

And onward. I wanted to get in touch with Mr. Fingeroth because he often knows things I don’t and I wanted to fact-check myself on an assignment that I blew (I think) but I don’t care to scramble names/dates and such. We are, by thunder, in the truth telling business here, citizens (and therefore are not qualified for a job in politics. We’ll live with it.) The immediate problem here is, I want to telephone Danny and people don’t always instantly answer emails and so communication by computer is iffy, leaving the alternative of the phone. But I’ve misplaced Danny’s Rolodex card. Just like me!

Do we have a topic yet, or are we just blathering?

Okay, if the cupboard is bare open the pantry.

What I was hoping to get confirmed by the encyclopedic Mr. F was an article being prepared by another magazine, the ancient kind made of paper and ink (though I do think it has a web presence and don’t I wish that Dan was here to confirm that?!) The editor of this publication was seeking anecdotal information about deadlines and, having been dueling with deadlines on and off since I was a wet-behind-the-ears journalist back in southeast Missouri I thought, sure, I can knock out volumes of copy – both pro and con – about deadlines, so clear the way to the computer!

But I didn’t. One reason might be that, as a general policy, we don’t sling mud in this venue and the ripest of my deadline tales would entail doing just that. Sure, I could and would omit proper nouns or use pseudonyms but my readers are extremely astute and would effortlessly see through such a paltry stratagem and probably think less of me for trying to perpetrate it. And the most egregious deadline flaunters, well…I’m sure others have stories, too, and don’t need mine.

Not that I myself am completely innocent in this matter. I once thought I was and mentioned this in a conversation with the late and beloved Archie Goodwin who was my editor at the time. Archie gently rectified me. I was, indeed, a chronic deadline misser. I always got assignments done in time to keep their dates with the presses, but I was not as prompt as, living in a fool’s paradise, I believed I was. I was, in short, a dumb cluck.

And here we are almost 500 words into whatever this is and still no topic. Feh! And cluck cluck cluck!

 

 

 

Mike Gold: My Timey-Wimey Toddlin’ Town

Well, last Sunday my pal John Ostrander did a lovely and quite informative column around his inability to come up with a topic. And tomorrow, my pal Denny O’Neil has an equally interesting column addressing the same basic issue. So, damn, I’d look pretty lame if I pulled the same stunt today, wouldn’t I?

Yeah, I know. I should be used to that.

So, instead of impressing you with my astonishing ability to wax on for 591 words about how there’s an echo chamber between my ears – it’s August; there’s supposed to be an echo chamber between my ears… or, at least, the Attica! chant – I’m going to write up a couple of paragraphs about a comic book show I’ll be doing in 15 days. Stream of consciousness, to paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, means you have nothing left to lose.

Danny Fingeroth, who’s name will magically reappear in Denny’s column tomorrow, finally found the one way to get me out to Chicago’s Wizard World show August 24 – 27. No, it’s not the availability of that wondrous delight, the Italian beef sammich. I get back to Chicago three or four times a year, so that’s not quite a deal maker.

No, Danny suggested we do a panel about America’s first mammoth Doctor Who convention, held as part of the Chicago Comicon (since sold to Wizard World) way back in 1982. Larry Charet, who, along with Bob Weinberg and me, were sponsors of the Comicon back then and Doctor Who had pretty much just taken a serious hold among American geekdom. We massively underestimated the number of folks who would be interested in attending… by… well… a lot. We made the Chicago Fire Department nervous, which, historically, is a dick move. We made the American Nazi Party nervous as well, but you’ll have to attend our panel in order to find out why.

I believe this was one of the first, if not the first, Doctor Who show that attracted the attention of a 15-year old named John Barrowman, who had been living in nearby Joliet Illinois at the time. John also will be a guest at Wizard World, so hopefully, I’ll be able to find out. Not that we’re taking credit for inspiring the man who became Captain Jack Harkness on Doctor Who and on Torchwood… but, with him no longer part of Arrow (at least for the time being), maybe the good folks at BBC-Wales can get him back to the timey-wimey stuff.

Of course, going home for Wizard World puts me back in the neighborhood of a hell of a lot of friends, as well as a gaggle of good folks that I haven’t pissed off for a while. Writers, artists, retailers, media folks, actors, broadcasters – it’s a fun place to be. And I’ve always had a great time at Wizard World Chicago, even though it’s actually in Rosemont Illinois, a town sandwiched in between the City of Chicago and the Airport of O’Hare. If you go there, check out Rosemont’s water tower and, if there are children around, try not to laugh out loud.

A month later, I’ll be at the Baltimore Comic-Con, one of my favorites. A damn good show run by damn good people.

That’s the reason we started these big comic book shows. Friendship, seeing people from all over the planet and making rude and obnoxious comments about the high price of stabbed comic books.

At least, we think those are comic books in there. Outside of the cover… who knows?

Box Office Democracy: The Dark Tower

I wonder if it bothers Stephen King that his 54 novels and 200 short stories have produced exactly one great movie.  (Two if you count The Shining, and you probably shouldn’t, considering the very public feud between author and director.)  We have the greatest pulp author of a generation, perhaps of all time, and he just keeps sending his ideas off to Hollywood to die.  I don’t mean to turn the man in to too much of a martyr; he keeps cashing the checks, so he knows what this is.  But to see The Dark Tower, the sprawling thirty year epic he wrote threading through so much of his work, turn in to a pale reflection on the silver screen must sting worse than most.  The Dark Tower is probably the best attempt we’ll ever see to turn a 4,000 page story in to a 90 minute movie, but also maybe no one should ever try that again.  There just isn’t room for any nuance.

I’ve never read any of the Dark Tower novels and I’ve never felt particularly tempted.  I understand that this movie is a sequel of sorts to the books and also that it tries to tell a fair bit of the overarching plot of the novels in this 95 minute movie.  I don’t understand how both of those things can be true but there’s no possible way this is a reasonable adaptation of eight Stephen King novels, that man writes a dense book.  I appreciate that this isn’t anything like the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies and they didn’t turn this in to an endless stream of movies with endless amounts of exposition until I feel like I’ve been ground to dirt.  The Dark Tower, for all of its other faults, has a sense of tempo that is lost with books by directors that make movies like an overly defensive book report needing to prove they did the reading.  I always felt The Dark Tower wanted to get to the next scene and wanted to be entertaining.  It didn’t always succeed but it was trying.

Of course, I can’t tell you anything about what this movie was about.  There’s the eponymous tower and it’s good that it’s there but some bad guys who are basically all Vincent D’Onofrio from Men In Black are trying to use psychic children to destroy the tower.  The first half of the movie has a fairly compelling plot about family and trust but that just completely falls away.  It ends up just being a boy (Tom Taylor) hanging out with The Gunslinger (Idris Elba) in a barren dessert world that looks an awful lot like a studio backlot but according to the credits was South Africa.  Occasionally an evil sorcerer (Matthew McConaughey) will turn up and make everything interesting but they try to keep him as far away from the action as they can.  Probably because it’s all building to a confrontation that takes less than three minutes.

Matthew McConaughey seems like he was basically born to play a slick Stephen King villain.  He has the honeyed way of American speaking that I always tried to do in my head when someone was trying to talk someone in to giving up their soul for a trinket or whatever.  He’s playing a rather generic villain here, I presume because the intricacies of licensing made The Man in Black a little smaller than his literary equivalent (I don’t know how I know so much about this character despite never reading the books but here we are).  He shows up to be menacing and he backs up his bluster by being very mean to his subordinates and characters who are no longer useful.  He’s like a Saturday morning cartoon villain that can actually kill people.

Idris Elba is a talented actor given no chance to act.  The Gunslinger is every gruff hero you’ve ever seen in anything ever.  He doesn’t want to form emotional attachments and he doesn’t want to talk about why that is.  He’s very good at shooting things and there’s solid work given to showcasing that talent but it’s a waste of Idris Elba.  All they needed from Elba was a look and while he looks amazing (he’s a handsome man) there’s no there there.

I’ve seen something like 250 movies since I started reviewing them in 2012 and I’ve learned a little bit about good movies and a lot about bad movies.  The Dark Tower is a bad movie but it’s a great bad movie.  It isn’t excruciating to watch, it has the sense to be short, and there’s always something to pay attention to even if the story is bland nonsense.  They put a giant amusement park sign that said “Pennywise” and I was on edge for a whole scene that had literally no other content.  The Dark Tower is the kind of bad movie that you can walk out of feeling refreshed, remarking to yourself that it “wasn’t really as bad as people said” and while it might not be true it feels better than the movies where you can’t wait for the lights to come up.

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