John Ostrander: Scattershot – Past / Present
Perhaps it’s a sign of aging when you’re more attuned to what came before than what’s going on now, especially in entertainment. Oh, I’m up on what’s going on with movies and TV (less so in music) and I certainly have my faves in those areas. Recently, however, I’ve been re-discovering some music I’d had before, some TV I had seen when I was a boy, and have found that some of my favorite movies were created before I was born. This column is a grab-bag (hence "scattershot" — it’ll be our code for columns that have a variety of topics) of some of those. Given the age of the material, these are probably less reviews than post-mortems.
• We Five came out of San Francisco about 1965 when I was still in high school. If you know this folk-rock group at all, it will be for their one big hit, "You Were On My Mind". I not only loved their big single, I bought their two albums, the first named for the hit single and the second was "Make Someone Happy". They broke up after the second album and later reformed with new members. I’ve discovered that the reformed We Five still plays venues today.
So do the Guardians of the Universe equip Green Lanterns with bumper stickers that read: My Space Sector, right or wrong?
There was a great deal of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth when word leaked out of Hollywood that Joss Whedon had left the Wonder Woman film project and David Goyer would no longer write and direct a Flash film. Similarly, people reacted in horror at the notion of Joel Schumacher having anything to do with a Sandman movie.
Back in a previous life I was a very struggling actor in Chicago. One summer I was working with a small troupe that, among other things, did children’s plays outdoors and in various venues. This particular show we were doing was called Wiley and the Hairy Man, based upon a children’s book. I played the Hairy Man – a swamp-man/boogeyman – and, while I kept getting chased offstage by the Wiley in the title, my character kept sneaking back in. It was not a part of particular subtlety but it did require some finesse. I was the monster in a children’s play which meant I couldn’t be too scary; just enough to produce the tinglies and a lot of laughs.
I’m not the man I used to be. But comics aren’t what they once were, either.
Books about comic books and comic book characters have grown in volume over the past few years. While some, such as Bob Handelman’s biography of Will Eisner, have received mainstream notice, many others fly under the radar.
Welcome to ComicMix — well, phase one of ComicMix.
C.J. Henderson (Batman: Joker’s Apprentice) has come out with an exceptionally twisted book called Baby’s First Mythos. With its cardboard cover and binding, it feels like my old Super Grover kids book (oh, like you didn’t have one) but it reads like a children’s primer to H.P. Lovecraft. Think Edward Gorey meets Cthulhu.
