Tagged: Danny Fingeroth

Watch “Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines”

Wonder Woman

Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines traces the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman. From the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, Wonder Women! looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.

Take a look at the documentary now until June 14th below…

Watch Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines on PBS. See more from Independent Lens.

 

via Video: Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines | Watch Independent Lens Online | PBS Video.

Mike Gold: Cold Ennui

Here’s a sucky way to spend one’s birthday: voiceless with a serious summer head cold. Bitch, bitch; moan, moan. Okay, I had a great day-before-my-birthday in Manhattan lunching with Danny Fingeroth and dinnering with fellow ComicMixer Martha Thomases. Nine hours of fantastic conversation in the best thing in life with your clothes on.

Sadly, as the overly-breaded but otherwise tasty General Tzu’s was being presented to me at our Greenwich Village dungeon of culinary delight, I was starting to sound like a frog in a blender. By the time I was on the subway back to Grand Central Terminal, I was grateful somebody bothered to invent texting. The gifted Miss Adriane picked me up and dragged me home. That was birthday-eve.

On birthday day, we first had to ransom my car back from the shop – I can’t complain; 100,000 miles on one battery is pretty damn good and I guess you really do need functioning breaks. After a quick stop at Walgreens to clean them out of toxic chemicals and chocolate Twizzlers, we returned home. As Miss Adriane procured the prerequisite chicken soup, I retired to celebrate the anniversary of my mother’s major inconvenience in a time-honored way: I picked up my stack of comic books (e-comics; I’m nothing if not hip and trendy in my dotage) and commenced to read.

As luck would have it, there wasn’t a winner in the bunch. Only one or two sucked; the rest were poignantly mediocre. This is not to say that I hadn’t read some worthy stuff while on the train to Manhattan – I consumed all the good stuff as a matter of fate and ill-planning. But you’d think that out of a dozen or so hand-picked titles, there’d be at least one that reaffirmed my fannish enthusiasm. Let us remember: I was under the weather, and my cockles needed to be warmed.

There were three New 52 titles in the electronic pile. All 12th issues. None motivated me to pick up the 13th, two months hence. There are a number of New 52ers I really enjoy: Batgirl, Batwoman, All-Star Western, and everything with the words “written by James Robinson” on the credits page. These weren’t them. The most enjoyable of the DC books was, oddly, the only Before Watchman mini I’m reading: Night Owl, and that’s because I’d read prescription warning labels if Joe Kubert drew them. Reading Kubert, for me, is a lot like drinking chicken soup. You might have to be Ashkenazi to fully grok that.

The Marvel titles were okay; slightly better in that none chased me away. But, damn, why is it that each and every good Marvel “event” series has four times as many issues as necessary? Okay, we know the answer to that one. Still, the Avengers Vs. X-Men series was established to put Marvel on a somewhat different course for a while and it’s doing its job. It’s not a reboot, it’s just your standard dramatic shuffling of the Marvel deck. But it should have been over by now.

The so-called indies were all over the map as they are supposed to be, so my luck of the draw was simply a bad hand. No, not bad. Just mediocre. Too many unnecessary middle-issues in overly long story arcs. I regret the day publishers decided to put six solid pages of story in each 24-page issue, and I look forward to our next GrimJack series to once again prove you can actually put 28 pages of story into a 24-page issue… without being Stan Freberg, and, yes, that was just to see if Mark Evanier’s paying attention.

Okay, all that sucked. On the other side of the scale, I got more than 200 emails and Facebook shout-outs from friends old and new. That’s great anytime, but after a speechless day of aches and not-breathing and a dozen mediocre comics, all that made be feel on top of the world. And not in the Cody Jarrett sense, either. To one and all, my deepest thanks.

Daughter Adriane and I finished the day watching Paul, a genuinely funny and essentially heartwarming movie written by and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I’m a sucker for anything with Jane Lynch that doesn’t involve high schoolers spontaneously combusting into song, and Pegg and Frost have never disappointed me.

Moral of the story: when you’re feeling low, reach for something positive and funny. Tomorrow is… another day.

Thursday: Dennis O’Neil… Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?

 

DENNIS O’NEIL: Kiss This, Kate!

Once, longer than a while ago, at this time of year, I would make a list of what were, in my opinion, the year’s ten best and ten worst movies. I was writing a column, on movies, for Marvel’s Epic Magazine, and I saw that as part of the job. Not that anybody told me that it was something I had to do, or even should do. But isn’t that a movie critic’s duty? Make these year-end lists? Then, after a year or two, I realized that I was blowing about ten percent of the annual column inches available to me on the year’s worst list and…accomplishing what?

Not much. Nothing, in fact. Unless you count taking easy shots – one liner-type – at other people’s work. Might have made me appear…oh hell, what? Clever? Sophisticated? Maybe witty? Or was it snottiness masquerading as wit?

You may be familiar with Dorothy Parker’s line about Katharine Hepburn: “She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” Clever, sophisticated, witty – traits Ms. Parker had solid claim to. But what does it really tell you about Ms. Hepburn, her acting, her rendering of any one role? Are we shedding any light here, friends?

Anyone who’s ever presumed to write or act or sing or dance or tell jokes or do tricks with a yo-yo for others’ entertainment knows that sometimes you miss the mark. Usually it’s not for want to effort. Such failures might merit regret, but not ridicule.

I eighty-sixed the ten worst list, and I doubt that anyone ever missed it. Including me. Including Epic’s editor, Archie Goodwin.

Archie, editor, colleague, friend and the nicest man I ever met, is gone now these…is it really 13 years? I still remember him and sometimes mention him when lecturing. At times of festivity – the holidays; right now – the absence of someone like Archie dims the lights a bit, maybe makes the laughter occasionally forced.

We’ve lost other good and valuable men in 2011, we denizens of the funny book world. Eduardo Barreto. Joe Simon. And Jerry Robinson.

I’ve seen a bit of Jerry these past five years and, always, it was a pleasant experience. But I didn’t realize that he was ill. The other night, Danny Fingeroth, who’d also seen a lot of Jerry recently, told me that Jerry was battling illness for much of that time. Jerry expressed concern when I had a brush with mortality, but said very little about his own problems.

He was gallant, and brave, and in the best sense of the word, a gentleman.

Here, we end our dark-day rumination. It’s Christmas Eve as I write this, fully night, and I’ve had enough of gloom. Pretty soon, Marifran and I will get into her noble Honda Civic and go hither in search of a few groceries – and to see what kind of Christmas decorations our fellow Rocklanders are displaying for our edification.

2012 is waiting in the wings and we welcome it. (Well, okay, we don’t have a lot of choice, but we smile a welcoming smile anyway.)

So ends my catechism.

(Editor’s Note: For those who are not in possession of visual reference, the photo above is of our friend Archie Goodwin.)

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

MIKE GOLD: Gifts for Comic Book People

Yep, the gift-giving holidays are upon us once again. Here’s three recent releases that are among the top of my list.

The Stan Lee Universe, by Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas  TwoMorrows Publishing, $39.95 hardcover; also available in softcover and digital

If you’re asking “who’s Stan Lee and why should I care about his universe?” then I’m asking “why are you reading a website called ComicMix?” I’m not going to waste bandwidth establishing Stan’s street cred. The Stan Lee Universe is not the definitive biography of Stan Lee; even at 89 years of age (in three weeks), he’s continuing to create new comics properties and appearing on television shows and in movies and his story remains a work in progress. As a life-long comics fan and practicing professional, I find great comfort in that.

The Stan Lee Universe is a massive gathering of articles, interviews, tributes, and – best of all – items from the Stan Lee Archives from the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center. All this stuff was hoisted up and organized by two of the medium’s best, Danny Fingeroth and Roy Thomas, both having served time at Marvel Comics with Mr. Lee and both having an encyclopedic knowledge of the field. The folks at TwoMorrows (Alter-Ego, Write-Now, The Jack Kirby Collector) did the design and layout, and the result is a black-and-white and color extravaganza that actually taught me a thing or two about both Marvel and Stan… and I’ve been here forever.

Danny and Roy knocked themselves out, and it shows. No matter what you think you may know about all this, you’ll learn a lot from The Stan Lee Universe and I recommend it most highly to anybody the least bit interested in comics or our American heritage.

Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1 by Walt Kelly, edited by Carolyn Kelly and Kim Thompson, consulting editor Mark Evanier, forward by Jimmy Breslin  Fantagraphics Books, $39.99 in hardcover.

Everybody’s been reprinting the great classic newspaper strips with such effort that it almost gives a fanboy like me religion. This Pogo series was announced back when Albert the Alligator lost his egg tooth, leaving Walt Kelly’s many fans panting.

It was worth the wait. We get all the dailies from the long-defunct New York Star from the beginning on October 1948 through January 1949, the series nationally distributed by the Hall Syndicate from May 1949 through December 1950, and the initial year’s run of Sunday strips in color from 1950. Reproduction is first-rate; the paper isn’t quite as good as I’d like, but that’s being really picky.

A lot of the conventions with which we are familiar from Pogo were birthed during this period, and most of the characters with which we are most familiar have already been fully realized during the initial Dell Comics run. Walt Kelly’s wit and charm is unmatched in the history of sequential storytelling, and is in evidence here fully developed.

I’d get this book for Jimmy Breslin’s introduction alone. Go. Read this. You’ll charm the pants off of yourself.

The Art of Joe Kubert, edited by Bill Schelly • Fantagraphics Books, $39.99 in hardcover

I have previously gone on record in this and other venues that Joe Kubert is my all-time favorite comics artist and, once again, I will not establish Joe’s bona fides. I’m running out of room, and that is what Google is for. Fan/historian Bill Schelly who, like Roy Thomas is from the first generation of organized comics fandom, knows his stuff and it shows. This is the definitive biography of Joe Kubert, and I would say it is lavishly illustrated but the word “lavishly” pales in comparison by even a quick flip-through of this 232-page tome.

Pure and simple, this is the tribute that Joe deserves. From his youngest adolescent days working for Will Eisner’s shop (obviously, Will was oblivious to child labor laws) to his golden age work to his innovations at St. John’s Publishing to his latter and most familiar DC work to his current efforts as a graphics novelist, The Art of Joe Kubert truly covers, well, the art of Joe Kubert in all its four-color glory. This is an entertaining read, one that will motivate the young wannabe and illuminate the cultural historian. It even taught me a bit about my own roots as an Ashkenazi-American.

For about a hundred bucks, less if you can talk your comics shop owner into ordering them for you for a discount (c’mon, it’s a guaranteed sale), you cannot go wrong with these three books. A couple decades ago, I would have been thrilled with any one of them during a given year. In 2011, all three were released in recent weeks and that is simply breathtaking. Kudos to all.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

 

“The Stan Lee Universe” is Out

Some months back, I was asked by Danny Fingeroth to partner with him once more, stepping in during the final weeks of production on TwoMorrows’ The Stan Lee Universe. I proofread the book, doublechecked facts, filled in blanks, did some caption writing and told Danny and his co-editor Roy Thomas that it was a pretty solid tribute to a true innovator in the comics field.

The first copies came in from the printer while we were all attending New York Comic-Con and we were delighted with how good it turned out. Now, I received word this morning that the book is finally available for delivery. Since this seems to be my year with Stan, I wanted to bring this your attention. If you get it — or Stan Lee’s How Write Comics — let me know what you think.

Here’s the press release on the matter:

Face front, true believers! THE STAN LEE UNIVERSE is the ultimate repository of interviews with and mementos about Marvel Comics’ fearless leader! (more…)
‘The Art of Watchmen’ museum gallery opening

‘The Art of Watchmen’ museum gallery opening

The opening of "The Art of Watchmen" at MoCCA last night was incredibly packed, with a lot of energy and anticipation in the room– even more than knowing you’d be allowed to see the Watchmen movie before almost everybody else would– there was a sense of backstage magic about, seeing so many of the stages of what was going on, from the earliest concept sketches to the original cover art for all twelve issues to the raw cover color work, to the mock-ups for the movies and the harsh black and white pictures of Clay Enos’s Watchmen: Portraits
book.

Clay’s here at left, including the picture of him in the book. Other attendees we got to photograph included Paul Levitz, Peter Sanderson, Steve Saffel, and Danny Fingeroth.

See more pictures after the jump. And if you can, go see the show.

 

(more…)

‘Write Now!’ Calls it Quits

‘Write Now!’ Calls it Quits

Write Now!, the how-to magazine for aspiring comic book writers, will be canceled after its 20th issue, out in February.  TwoMorrows posted the news on their website this week.

Publisher John Morrow noted,  “I’ve got to say, I’m really sorry to see it go; Danny Fingeroth has been absolutely professional and delightful to work with on it, and always managed to teach me (and his readers, based on the mail we get) something new about the intricacies of writing for comic books and related fields.”

“Producing Write Now! for TwoMorrows has been one of the highlights of my career,” said editor Danny Fingeroth in a press release. “The art and craft of writing comics is something that is often neglected due to the higher visibility of comics art. Write Now gave me the chance to share what I’ve learned about writing over the years with people who are passionate about expanding their writing knowledge and skills. I got to meet and speak with many great creators of all eras during the magazine’s run, getting them to speak about what they do in ways that had seldom been touched on before. And, of course, working with the great John Morrow the rest of the TwoMorrows crew was always a pleasure. I look forward to continuing my relationship with this important publishing entity.”

The final issue will focus on The Spirit and will include interviews with producers Michael Uslan and FJ DeSanto in addition to an extensive interview with Colleen Doran, writer Alex Grecian discussing how to get a pitch green-lighted, plus a bevy of script and art examples from a wide range of projects. The magazine, which includes yours truly as its Managing Editor, has also seen a Best Of volume and collaborated with sister publication Draw! on How To Create Comics, From Script To Print book and DVD combination.

Subscribers will be receiving information shortly regarding the resolution of any prepaid issues beyond #20, with the option of receiving either a refund, or applying their balance toward another TwoMorrows book or magazine.
 

Danny Fingeroth on ‘Disguised As Clark Kent’

Danny Fingeroth on ‘Disguised As Clark Kent’

Former Spider-Man Group Editor Danny Fingeroth has a new book out titled Disguised As Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, in which he examines the "cultural origins of the superhero" with special attention to the way Jewish creators and their experiences influenced the early years of the industry.

Over at CBR, Fingeroth explains how the book came about and provides a few examples of the Jewish influence in comics that forms the basis for the book:

“My favorite involves Marvel’s Mighty Thor, who I’d never seen in a Jewish light before. And why would I, or anyone? He’s a Norse deity! But in his early stories, covering the first several years of the character’s existence, a recurring subplot–that eventually became a main plot–was Thor’s love for his alter ego Dr. Blake’s nurse, Jane Foster. Odin, ruler of the Norse Gods, and Thor’s father, forbade him to marry her because she was a mortal and he was an immortal god.”

Fingeroth noted there are often prohibitions in Jewish and other ethnic communities against marrying outside the group, and that the modern tension of breaking away from this system can be seen in the story of Marvel’s thunder god.  “Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could arguably be interpreted as having been using Thor and Jane to work out their own feelings about the taboos around intermarriage they had grown up with,” Fingeroth said. “I’m not saying they did this consciously–just the opposite. But in retrospect, I found it fascinating and worthwhile to discuss that kind of topic in ‘Disguised as Clark Kent.’”

 

Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

New Year’s morning.  Cold, wet, bleak.

I’m sure that within easy walk of where I’m sitting, there are people who are wishing they’d done something else last night.  The wages of sin are, indeed, death — death is the wages of everything, sooner or later — but sin can have some more immediate wages in the forms of headaches, sick stomachs, dry-mouth. The self-inflicted results of having a good ol’ time.
 
In Times Square, poor devils who work for the New York City sanitation department are busy cleaning up the detritus from the annual big hoo-hah.  Watching it on television was like glimpsing purgatory: crowds and noise and chaos — not my idea of fun anymore, if it ever was.  But the would-be poet in me is responding to the chilly, soaking sanitation men symbolize: get rid of the old to accommodate the new.  Yeah, ‘t’was ever thus, but we resist the notion, which is really an incarnation of the inevitable, particularly in our national politics.
 
Given the kinds of things the candidates spend most of their energies fussing over, it would seem that we’ve learned nothing in the past seven years.  
 

(more…)

O’Neil, Uslan, Foglios, DeFalco Go Public

O’Neil, Uslan, Foglios, DeFalco Go Public

People really are taking this comics stuff seriously. This Saturday, October 13, at 7 p.m. at the Montclair Art Museum as part of their "Reflecting Culture: The Evolution of American Comic Book Superheroes exhibition," there will be a lecture on "Superheroes and Society," moderated by Michael Uslan, executive producer of Batman and Batman Begins; with Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman On the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves; ComicMix columnist Dennis O’Neil, and Tom DeFalco, former editor in chief of Marvel Comics. $12 for memebers, $16 for non-members.

Meanwhile, the Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois is hosting its 13th annual computing conference on October 12–14, with guests Phil and Kaja Foglio speaking on a panel entitled: "I can haz money now? Successfully Reengineering Traditional Comic Publishing For The Web," where they will be discussing, what else, Girl Genius.