Tagged: comics

MICHAEL DAVIS: The Blame Game

MICHAEL DAVIS: The Blame Game

Monday April 17, 2007 at Virginia Tech University a gunman took 32 lives. I am writing this the following day, Tuesday April 18. To give this piece a little more perspective I tell you this: I lost my sister and grandmother some time ago and when ever I hear of any random act of violence like what happened at Virginia Tech I always pause and think of what the families are going though. I say a silent prayer and hope that somehow the pain that they feel now will ease a bit over time. It never goes away but I hope that they find some comfort from what will seem like an eternity of grief.

My family unit was my mother, sister, grandmother and myself. So half of my family was taken from me. I had to deal with losing my sister and grandmother; my mother had to deal with losing her first-born child and her mother. It hit us both very hard. We were lucky enough to have friends and family around us to comfort us. After a while – a great while we had to deal with the why of what happened. Why them? Why now? Why not me? Why were they there? Etc, etc.

There was always a why.

Those questions are as biting now as they were then. My mother and I still deal with those questions every single day. As I said we had help getting though it.

In the last 24 hours I have heard the Virginia Tech Massacre described in many ways by many people in the media.

A National tragedy

A Nation mourns

America is saddened

United as one

We all feel this

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Counting down on MySpace

DC Comics has just announced it’s partnered with the comic books section of MySpace to preview the first two issues of its much-anticipated Countdown series, which has reverse numbering because we aren’t confused enough.

The first 10 pages of Countdown #51 will be up on MySpace/comicbooks on May 4, followed on May 11 by the last 12 pages of that issue and the the first 12 pages of issue #50. The final ten pages of Countdown #50 will be on the site on May 18.

Why the sudden interest in the site? Well, DC’s also launching its own DC Nation MySpace page on May 2, so that could have something to do with it.

While it’s always good to see major corporations paying attention to the netroots, let’s hope smaller efforts aren’t completely usurped by the bigger fish.

Eisner nominees announced

Eisner nominees announced

The Oscar race of the comics industry is underway, as the 2007 Eisner nominees (for work that came out in 2006) have been announced .

Thank goodness Heidi MacDonald (from Barcelona, yet!) has all the nominees listed, so we don’t have to.

Marc Andreyko speaks to ComicMix Podcast!

Marc Andreyko speaks to ComicMix Podcast!

Today’s pop quiz includes the brain busting questions of who was Dickie Goodman, where has Manhunter been, why is someone ripping off Richard Dawson, wow does The Doctor get to the fast lane, and WHO was "John And Ernest?" We give you good news on a much loved DC book, dig into Doctor Who’s latest romp, we hear from comics writer Marc Andreyko, and much more.

After all that, wouldn’t you feel guilty if you DIDN’T press the button?

JOHN OSTRANDER: Perverse Pleasures

We all know what a “guilty pleasure” is – some movie, book, song, whatever that we are ashamed to say we actually like – nay, sometimes love. While we may be embarrassed by our affection we should, at the very least, be able to claim, “Well, anyway, I like it.” Even if nobody else does. I have my list of those and I suspect you do as well.

This is not the same as the strange, little known things that you love that are, in fact, pretty good. I have my list of those things also and it might be useful to talk about these odd delights at some other time.

Neither of the above are the same as what I call my “perverse pleasures.” I’m not talking about sexual kinks and peccadilloes. I’m talking about music, books, movies and so on that I know, in fact, are awful and that I don’t like but feel a weird compulsion to own them anyway.

On to confession.

The first item is Pat Boone’s 1997 CD In a Metal Mood; No More Mr. Nice Guy wherein the King of White Bread Music decides to do his covers of Heavy Metal songs. We’re talking songs such as Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water, Love Hurts, Enter Sandman and plenty of others. Oh, my ears! He doesn’t do them as Heavy Metal, of course; his arrangements turns them into Big Band tunes. When Mr. Boone sings, he’s usually off the rhythm, flat, or just speaks the lyrics. I have yet to get through a complete cut.

This is completed with a cover shot of the aging Mr. Boone in leather pants, leather vest, and no shirt, fixing the buyer with a steely stare that defies said buyer not to purchase the CD. I, of course, succumbed.

To top it all off, I was doing a guest shot on my friend Bill Nutt’s radio show, The Nutt House, on WNTI. I decided to play a cut of the CD on his show. Hey, they’re not my ratings. My better half, the lovely and talented Mary Mitchell, was listening in. I should explain that Mary is a heavy metal fan. Most people wouldn’t suspect it to look at her but she’s pretty knowledgeable and has her criterion: a good heavy metal band should look and sound like trolls. Pat Boone comes nowhere near that ideal.

Mary asked me what was on my mind to play that track. I explained that none of us at the radio station actually listened to it; we turned off the monitors about thirty seconds into the song so we didn’t have to listen to it. I think that’s where I lost Mary as a regular listener to my radio hijinks. She did listen to the track all the way through.

This is one of my definitions of love – despite having trick-bagged her into listening to something that I couldn’t, she still cares about me.

If Mary hasn’t found the CD, I probably still have it around somewhere.

Wandering over to the DVD section, I find my copy of Barb Wire. I knew the Dark Horse comic on which the movie was based and stumbled on the movie starring Pamela Lee Anderson while channel surfing late one night. I, like millions of Americans, ignored it in its theatrical release but I thought it was worth pausing long enough to see if Pam popped out of whatever she was wearing. It was late night and my standards of viewing are pretty low after midnight.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Part of the solution

ELAYNE RIGGS: Part of the solution

As I write this, the nation is still reeling from the deadliest shooting massacre in its history – if you don’t count wartime battles, and they never seem to. Once again, a disturbed young man decided that the best response to his problems lay in premeditated violence against total strangers. Once again, trusted and trained authorities appeared slow to act in protecting human life. Once again, we found ourselves yearning for a hero to make it all go away.

Comic book heroism is a double-edged sword, probably a fitting metaphor, given superhero comics’ fascination with weaponry. On the one hand you have a reflection of whatever the current national mood of the era happens to be. I was watching a history-of-Superman program on the Biography channel earlier this evening, wherein Mark Waid talked about how the character shifted from a rabble-rousing champion of the people at his inception to the "ultimate blue Boy Scout" symbol of authority after World War II. Superman, like other successful icons, was able to change with the times, allowing succeeding generations to project their desires onto him. And for some time, ever-escalating fictional violence as the appropriate (and often only) answer to frustrations has fueled the entertainment desires of Americans.

Comic books are, of course, incidental to this trend, which has encompassed virtually all forms of mass media, even more so as the news divisions — once sacrosanct and considered acceptable loss leaders to responsible corporations which made their money on other programming — morphed into 24/7 cable infotainment, hungry for the next fix of spectacularly gruesome visuals. Their mouths say "tut tut" to the carnage, but their wallets say "More please, sir!" And yet, critics of ultraviolent entertainment (and boy is that a Sisyphusean undertaking!) are always very quick to point fingers at "the comic book mentality" and wave around the latest issue of Punch ‘Em Up Man. Because, you know, it makes a good visual.

On the other hand, comics at their best can inspire and educate and lift us all up to our highest aspirational fantasies. To me, this attitude of being "part of the solution" rather than "part of the problem" has always been the essence of superhero fantasy — not beating up on badguys, but using one’s hidden reserves of power to triumph over adversity and bring hope to others, showing them by your deeds the way they too can become heroes.

Nowhere was this more keenly illustrated than after 11 September 2001, when the comics industry came out with a slew of amazing and poignant comics stories examining and trying to make sense the tragedy, in order to help raise money for victims’ families.

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Chick chaplain suspended

Chick chaplain suspended

Teresa Darden Clapp, an ordained Christian minister and a chaplain in Rockland County, New York (my ancestral spawning grounds and current home to ComicMix columnist Denny O’Neill), was suspended for distributing Jack Chick’s religious comic books to the prisoners under her care.

The tracts refer to Muslims as idol-and devil-worshippers and portray the prophet Muhammad as a criminal and a "religious dictator."

This is not the first time Chick Publications has run into accusations of religious bigotry, having previously attacked Catholics, Jews, atheists and others in similar fashion in their sundry comics.

Artwork copyright Chick Publications. All Rights Reserved.

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…?  Part 2

DENNIS O’NEIL: Who knows what evil lurks…? Part 2

Suddenly, the air was full of bats!

The “air” here is metaphorical and if you’d allow me to fully ripen the trope, possibly to the point where it emits a faint odor, it might read, The air of popular culture in the 30s and 40s was full of bats.

Let’s see.  There was a Mary Roberts Rheinhart novel and an early talkie adapted from it, both called The Bat, and there was a pulp hero also called The Bat and, a bit later, another pulp do-gooder who labeled himself The Black Bat.  Am I forgetting anyone…?  Oh yeah.  A comic book character that was introduced in Detective Comics #27, dated May 1939, as Batman.  Like an estimated eighty percent of your fellow earthlings, you may have heard of him.

And, again metaphorically, standing behind the Batman and maybe some of the others was one of the greatest pulp heroes, The Shadow.  The writer of the early Batman stories, Bill Finger, made no secret of his admiration for the Shadow novels.  He went so far as to admit that the Shadow’s influence on his batwork was extremely direct when he told historian (and author and artist and publisher) Jim Steranko, “I patterned my style of writing Batman after the Shadow.”  And: “My first script was a take-off on a Shadow story.”

Which brings us to Anthony Tollin.  Remember him?  I introduced the two of you a couple of weeks ago in this very feature. I told you that a company Anthony owns has been issuing reprints of the Shadow books. Recently, he sent me an early copy of one of those books, titled Partners of Peril, and suggested that I might want to compare it to the first Batman adventure, The Case of the Chemical Syndicate. 

Of course there are differences.  After all, the Shadow novel is probably around 50,000 words long and Batman’s debut is six comic book pages.  But there are also similarities.  I won’t even try to describe them all – see Robert Greenberger’s ComicMix article, or Anthony’s text piece in the book itself – but they are manifold.  In a phone conversation a few hours ago, Anthony mentioned the most obvious, among which are:

  • Both are about a – yes! – chemical syndicate.
  • The heroes of both get involved in the proceedings while visiting a law-enforcing friend.
  • Both feature virtually identical death traps, which each hero beats in the same way.
  • Both heroes offer the same whodunit-type explanation at the adventure’s end.
  • Both heroes spend a lot of time on a rooftop after a safe robbery.
  • The denouements of both stories are, again, virtually identical.

Et cetera.

As I wrote in the earlier column, anyone with even the dimmest interest in pop culture or comics history, or who just wants to sample the kind of entertainment that kept pops or granddad reading by flashlight under the covers, or who’s just in the mood for capital-M Melodrama combined with capital-H Heroics, might want to see if the Shadow has anything for them.

For me, the stuff has another aspect, one which is as modern as hip-hop. But that’s for next week.

RECOMMENDED READING: Awww…you know.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

The Secret is out

The Secret is out

I’ve been rooting for Pulp Secret to flourish ever since their executive producer, my old college friend David Levin, first gushed to me about it.  And in the short time they’ve been around the site has branched out from their 5-minute video news segments to a weekly talk and interview show to David making good on his vow to give away items in his prized comic book collection on a regular basis.

But for me, there was still something missing.  And some of it had to do with me not being able to tell the three young white male self-amused hosts apart.  I’m sure they’re nice guys and all, but it was (as the Brits say) much of a muchness.

Now finally, with webcast #18, the video news segments have a female face.

She’s Ana Hurka-Robles, a director and writer from NYC who’s been behind the camera until now.  Says AHR, "I’m part of a small crew that produces the episodes, so I get a chance to direct, shoot, write, research, and edit. I know that film degree would come in handy some day!"  (I think someone else may have "edited" her name up there.)  You can catch her on-screen debut here, at about 3:45 into the webcast, but she narrates capsule reviews in webisodes 10 and 15 as well.

Thanks, David & co., for expanding PS to include the other half of the population!

INTERVIEW: Harlan Ellison, part 1

INTERVIEW: Harlan Ellison, part 1

Harlan Ellison is a force of nature.

For more than 50 years he’s published stories and novels, written for television, movies, and comics, created an award-winning CD-Rom, lectured widely, performed TV voice-overs and spoken word recordings, and been an all-around pain-in-the-ass curmudgeon. This month alone, Deep Shag Records issued his newest CD, On the Road with Harlan Ellison (Volume 3, no less) and a 105-minute theatrical documentary about him, Dreams with Sharp Teeth, will have its premiere at the Writers Guild in Beverly Hills on Thursday, April 19 (for information about all of this, and to get tickets for the Guild Event, go to www.harlanellison.com).

Dark Horse Comics just released Harlan Ellison’s Dream Corridor Volume Two, a book ten years in the making, with contributions from Gene Ha, Curt Swan, Martin Nodell, Gene Colan, Jay Lynch, Eric Shanower, Tony Isabella, Richard Corben, John Ostrander and more.

I first heard Ellison speak more than 25 years ago, at an event to which ComicMix sensei Denny O’Neil brought us. I no longer remember precisely what he said, but do remember being so angry about it that I was awake all night, arguing with him in my head. Ten years later, when the rabbi’s sermon provoked a similar response, I knew I’d found the synagogue for me. Jews are like that.

Reb Ellison is still schooling. Our interview started off awkwardly, as we called to arrange a schedule and Mr. Ellison wanted to go with no notice. After a pause while we ran out to buy batteries for our antique cassette recorder, we began.

HE: I live my life principally by one adage – Louis Pasteur: Chance favors the prepared mind. Thus, if you call me, you should have batteries. Now we know we’re running. Now you can interview me. Go ahead.

CoMx: You have a new graphic novel, you have a new CD, you have this movie coming out. Why now?

HE: Because though I’m incredibly humble and shy, I am, nonetheless, famous … I’m a cultural icon. Everyone gets their 15 minutes, and if they have some talent they get their 15 minutes repeatedly. My 15 minutes have been going on since about 1955.

One finds, at this age, the most annoying thing you have to worry about is cultural amnesia. For most of the little imbeciles today who live on the Internet, for whom nostalgia is what they had for breakfast, all the golden things and evil lessons of the past have no significance, no meaning, no understanding that whatever they do would not be possible had not the world, its artistic heroes, villains, done what they did before their smug, ignorant li’l asses were born. They know nothing, and are arrogant that they know nothing. “Bite me” is their mantra. They don’t even know the name of who won on American Idol last year or who came in second or who won the Academy Award, much less who Sojourner Truth was, or Lanny Ross, or Tris Speaker, or Subotai, or Klimt or Frank Buck, or Eddie Condon, or … or anything earlier than Sanjaya Malakar and Beyonce’s thong.

But they are quick to label geezer and old coot everybody who did anything the day before they were born. I consider myself very lucky still to have a large following and a loyal following in these parlous times, and I think, some interesting enemies, too.

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