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For the term "dennis-oneil".

Dennis O’Neil and the Gremlins

GremlinBlame it on the gremlins.

Here’s a brief excerpt from last week’s column that will help you understand why we’re in the gremlin-blaming game:

If you think I’m recommending the course, you’re right, and so you should know its title. Happy to oblige Dr. Armstrong had reached the section of her presentation that deals with the twentieth century Arthur and spoke of Marian Zimmer Bradley’s Arthurian novels – you might know The Mists of Avalon – and then she began to talk about Mike Barr’s comics.

Notice anything missing there? Yep. After “happy to oblige” there should be the name of the course I’m recommending. And there isn’t. Tsk.

Well, let us make haste to right the wrong. I’m happy to oblige you with the following information: “King Arthur: History and Legend.”

The course is offered by The Teaching Company as part of it’s Great Courses catalogue and a quick Google should give you the particulars.

Now about those gremlins. You’ve probably heard the name and a lot of you have no doubt seen one or both of the Gremlins movies. The first is catchily titled Gremlins and the second, even catchier, Gremlins: The New Batch. The eponymous critters portrayed in the films and nasty and mean and ugly and I guess those words would do to describe chimera that inspired them. I’m not as sure as I’d like to be because gremlin data seems kind of scarce, though the ever-useful Funk and Wagnall’s Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend gives them a goodly amount of space and tells us that “there is little agreement as to their description.”

It seems that they first appeared during the first world war and had a special affinity for bollixing aircraft. Something isn’t working and there is no earthly reason why? Only one possible answer: gremlins.

This clandestine sabotage persisted on through the second world war and I guess to the present. Now, I’m not a big believer in spookies of any sort, but if gremlins do exist they explain an awful lot about my life. Technology is not my friend. Cars, televisions, video players, global positioning trackers, and especially computers and their spawn…they’ve all had their innings making my existence a frustration. Often.

My deeply skeptical DNA sharer would say “coincidence” and I would riposte “this frigging much coincidence?” DNA sharer is pretty smart, but about this, he’s wrong. No. Unacceptable. It is saner, more logical and reasonable, to posit a malevolent intelligence, omnipresent, sly. resourceful, with infinite access to machinery and gadgets of all sorts. And he, or she, it or they, hate me. Don’t ask why. I have no idea what my offense might have been. Or when I committed it.

Maybe I’m being mistaken for some other Dennis O’Neil.

But that missing reference to the Dorsey Armstrong course? It’s in my draft and it isn’t in the printed column, so kindly draw your own conclusions. Gremlins. Has to be.

I wonder what this column fidelyobscrave trom ostitrove

 

Dennis O’Neil: After Changes Upon Changes…

Denny ONeil Neal AdamsWay back before your daddy was born – yes, it’s you I’m talking to – I wrote some superhero comic books that were based on real-life events and I guess they were successful. They got artist Neal Adams and me noticed and they’ve been reprinted and reissued in various formats and I still find myself autographing them at conventions. So yeah – successful. But I have two regrets about them.

The first is that the most of the problems they dramatized are still with us some 45 years later – the world has changed enormously but we still have racism and poverty and addiction and judicial malfeasance and especially climate disruption. I was worried about this stuff back in the day and I’m more worried now.

My other regret concerns my frame of mind when I was writing the stories. To me, it was obvious that what I was portraying was True and there was no doubt where Right and Wrong lived. None whatsoever. And I still believe everything I believed back then and I think I have better information and a clearer understanding.

But I wish I hadn’t been so righteous and certain. Most of the serious mischief – your wars and pogroms and the like – is and has been perpetrated by zealots. People who knew, absolutely, beyond any possibility of skepticism that their cause was just, that they were right, that, yes, God was on their side.

Sometimes they refuse service to gay couples. Sometimes they sponsor legislation that serves society’s predators. Sometimes they strap explosives to their chests.

So I wish that the person I was in 1970, the writer of those comic books, had allowed himself a few moments of doubt – allowed for the possibility, however distant and unlikely it might be, that he could be mistaken.

But…if that had been the case, would he have written those stories?

When they pass my hands I notice that they’re dog-eared and frayed and we climb to the top of he collection we notice that within their plastic bags evidence of yellowing and curled pages

Somebody’s read ‘em!

These are my people!

Pretty skimpy column. I could entertain you with hokey stories of trains and adventure but a lot of us is too lazy for that. We can hope, can we not?

 

Dennis O’Neil: The Bigger Picture

RushdieI thought maybe I’d write about that humdinger of a cliffhanger the creative folk at the Arrow television show left us with a few weeks ago. I also mulled doing a brief piece on Leslie Thompkins who, in the person of Morena Baccarin, popped up in another show, Gotham. The Batman mythos’s resident and, I’m afraid, token pacifist might be worth a few hundred words and maybe will be somewhere down the line.

But now, this week, Monday. . . Je suis Charlie. It is somehow pleasing to type those words.

Certainly, you know the story by now. No need for a rehash here. And my fellow Mixers have weighed in on it and you can see what they had to say someplace near where you’re reading this. I have neither facts nor speculation to add to what’s already been given wherever you go for news.

I was shocked when, in 1988, Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini because the clergyman and his followers were offended by Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, and spent the next several years under police protection. The ayatollah’s fatwa seemed to threaten not only Rushdie, but all of us tale spinners who are just doing our jobs, which happen to be making up stories and drawing pictures. Those massacred at the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo were mostly cartoonists and we all know people like them – some of us are people like them. They are our tribe and slaughtering them was a deep and personal insult to us.

There’s little point in hating the murderers. They are ignorant and – cruel irony – they are doing what they deem virtuous. And look beneath the surface, beneath the unfamiliar rhetoric and alien ideology, and you can find men and women of our own kind who share the murderers’ attitudes and solutions. Anyone who wants to stipulate what others must believe and who wants to dictate what we can read and see and listen to and how we should dress and worship and love is not so very far from the barbarians and given the opportunity and a few assault rifles, who knows?

So, even as we grieve for our fallen brothers and sisters, we should not hate our attackers. You might remember the advice supplied by the Bible: “I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you. . . ” I think that if you plumb them deeply enough you will find fear and we all know about that.

But we cannot tolerate their actions, either. We have to stop them. Let’s hope it can be done with no further suffering. Let’s hope that we can finally abandon what is obviously not working and find creative and merciful means to bring peace to the barbarians and to ourselves.

 

Dennis O’Neil: Good Guys and Bad Guys

breyfogle_4Just because it’s that time of year – and you know what I’m talking about and don’t pretend you don’t – don’t for one second think that I’ve become some sentimental goo brain and if you do think that come over here and I’ll make you a damp spot on the rug. Or at least give you a stern look. (Or at least consider giving you a stern look at some future date, maybe in an alternate universe.)

But despite my loud and proud misanthropy, there are a few things, as we creep past the solstice, that make me believe that there’s really no reason to be ashamed of my species. Leading the list this week, if there were a list, would be the comic book community’s response to Norm Breyfogle’s misfortune. Norm, who I’ve long considered a storytelling artist, suffered what seems to have been a bad stroke that left his drawing hand disabled. I wondered how his colleagues would respond. Splendidly, is how. Within 24 hours, the comics folk had raised over $20,000 and flooded the emails with offers of help and messages of support. Norm has a long way to go – months of therapy and sundry other problems to be solved – but at least his fellow storytellers have given him a start.

Then there was the movie brouhaha. As most of you surely know, cyberterrorists threatened nine-eleven type action against any exhibitor who showed The Interview, a comedy about an assassination plot directed at North Korea’s national big cheese, Kim Jung Un. At first, all parties caved, including the flick’s producer, Sony. Ah, but now the happy ending. At virtually the last minute, over 200 smallish, independent theaters got exhibition rights and showed the picture over the weekend. And it was made available for streaming on three Internet venues.

This has very little to do with The Interview. Might be a good flick, might not, might be somewhere in between. But what’s important here is that those who championed the movie refused to be bullied. Anyone who’s had extensive dealings with bullies – teachers, let’s have a show of hands – will probably testify that bullies can’t be appeased. You can’t get rid of them by simply meeting their demands. They don’t really what they’re asking for, they want the power that got it for them. Give it to them and they’ll just want more. Under the threats, they’re probably scared and that’s sad and pitiable, but irrelevant. You can feel sorry for a rabid dog, but you still have to stop his attack.

A final note and then I’m gone for the rest of the year: Norm Breyfogle still needs help. There’s a link on the ComicMix home page. Please give him some. Oh, and if any of you even dare to accuse me of being a nice guy…

 

Dennis O’Neil: Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis O’Neil: The Tao of Funny Books

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

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

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

Probably not.

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

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

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

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

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

The Tao of Nobody Home?

Dennis O’Neil: Trick Or What?

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

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

You gonna argue with tradition, grumpy-head?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe we should begin shopping around for another tradition.

 

Dennis O’Neil Goes To Kokomo

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

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

Okay, now what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Martha Thomases: Subversive Family Reading

Over the weekend, while all the cool kids were in Baltimore for the Harvey Awards and the convention, I was at a family wedding. As such occasions are wont to do, I ruminated over my life and times.

On Friday night, at the rehearsal dinner, I was talking with a cousin who remembered that visiting our house as a child was fun because we had comic books, which her mother didn’t allow. At that time (late 1950s to early 1960s), comic books were still accused of causing juvenile delinquency, disrespect for authority and Communism.

Certainly, they did that to me.

My cousin’s life is about as different from mine as I can imagine, given our demographic similarities (over 60, female, college educated, Jewish). I live in an apartment in Manhattan; she lives in a rural part of western New York State. Until recently she worked as a carpenter; I expect it to be front-page news when I successfully change a light bulb. I know more about the Democratic candidate for Congress in her district than she does.

We both have fond memories of sitting on the porch, a pile of comics between us.

Another guest, who was not a relative, had never seen a graphic novel. He didn’t know what the term meant, thinking perhaps it was a more polite way to say pornography. We talked about the kinds of books and movies he liked, and I recommended some titles that I thought would fit with his tastes.

Why does this still happen? It’s been more than forty years since Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams were written up in the New York Times Magazine for bringing a grown-up sensibility to comics with story lines “ripped from the headlines” (and much more nuanced than your average episode of Law & Order). Major bookstores at the mall have graphic novel sections. It’s one of the few growth sectors of the publishing business.

But random people still only know comics from their childhood, if at all.

They know about “comic book movies” as a genre, but think it means Batman, Iron Man, The Avengers and, maybe, Guardians of the Galaxy. They don’t know that it includes films as diverse as Scott Pilgrim and Road to Perdition and A History of Violence and Two Guns.

Why should we fix this?

Self-interest, at the least. We enjoy the medium. Some of us support our families by working in it. Because it increases the amount of interaction between the two hemispheres of our brains.

The world is better when there are lots of different kinds of comics, appealing to lots of different kinds of readers. We shouldn’t have to raise money for the people who made the medium more diverse and appealing. We shouldn’t need a movie to justify our enjoyment of the source material. We shouldn’t need to have to keep explaining that comics aren’t just for kids anymore.

How do we fix this?

I think most of the responsibility falls to us, the people who love comics, who write about comics, who create comics. We need to show that we are as varied as the people who love any other popular entertainments. We are old and young, conservative and progressive, queer, straight male, female and other. Some of us like to wear costumes for occasions other than Halloween, and some of us don’t even like to wear them then.

There is no more a typical comic book reader than there is a typical movie-goer.

(Note: I’m aware that there exist statistics that show younger people are more likely to go to the movies, but first, those statistics vary widely, and second, my point still stands. Nyaah nyaah nyaah.)

It’s a big task, and we won’t accomplish it overnight. However, it’s the kind of challenge that is most successful when a lot of people do simple, easy things, rather than a few people dedicating their every waking moment to the cause. For example, I often refer to a graphic novel I’ve read in conversation, as if reading graphic novels is something that educated people do (because it is). When I give out candy and money for UNICEF at Halloween, I include comic books as one of the treats.

Not difficult. Not earth-shattering. Way more effective if we all do it.

The wedding was lovely, by the way. The party afterwards was big fun, too. I only had to sneak away a few times to see if my pal was winning any Harvey Awards.

 

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.

 

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