It’s a sad fact of life. Just as every new TV season brings shows that sound good on paper and test well in pilot stage, some series are going to be cancelled sooner or later.
Even DC’s new 52 initiative, with multiple printings, will have series that will go by the wayside. And now that we’ve all had a chance to see the first issues, it’s now fair to ask– which ones aren’t going to make it? And which ones are going to drop first? Or do we heed the tweets of DuckBob Spinowitz, who thinks that DC stands for Disk Crash… “Isn’t that what you call it when a reboot fails?”
So we leave it to you. Who will live and who goes to that great 3/$1 box in the sky? Vote below (you can only vote for a maximum of 13 titles) and defend your decisions in the comments.
DC’s New 52 made the New York Times again. The title of the article is “So Far, Sales For New DC Comics Are Super,” by George Gene Gustines and Adam W. Kepler was published on Saturday, October 1, 2011 issue, and was featured on the front page of the Arts Section. According the article, the first five weeks of DC’s reboot of its universe has increased “the sales of DC Comics by leaps and bounds.” The first issue of the new Justice League – which the authors call DC’s flagship book. Really? I would have thought it was Superman, since the Son of Krypton is the flagship character. But what do I know? – anyway, the first issue sold “more than 200,000 copies, compared with the roughly 40,000 for each of the last few issues of the old book.” Well, I hope it keeps up, but these are the first issues. I think it’s a little early to call it a win – after all, the NY Giants just pulled out a win over the Arizona Cardinals in the last three minutes of the game.
My pal Heidi MacDonald, has done a great job of covering the critical discussion of DC’s depiction of female characters in The New 52. Thanks to her, I read this awesomely thoughtful analysis by Laura Hudson, and this terrific bit of snark.
So there’s not a lot I can add from a political perspective. Instead, let’s talk about the fashion.
By fashion, I don’t mean the clothes you see on the runways or in the magazines. I mean the choices humans (and, in this case, women) make every day before they leave their homes to go to work, run arounds, or hang with friends.
If you’re a woman with super-powers, and you have a public role fighting crime, or saving people from disasters, it stands to reason that you’d want to wear something eye-catching. That allows you to be seen by people who need your help. It also makes sense that you’d want to wear something form-fitting, because you don’t want a lot of extra fabric to get in the way of the work you’re trying to do. There are many who think the superhero costume was inspired by circus acrobats, and that is certainly an occupation that would require costumes that fit these criteria.
But then what?
Let’s consider Starfire, currently appearing in Red Hood and the Outlaws. I almost didn’t pick this up, because I’m not much of a fan of the current version of Jason Todd, but I looked at the first page, liked the art, and decided to be open-minded. By the time I got to page 7, I was okay.
But then there was page 8.
I’m supposed to believe that Starfire, an alien warrior, would go into battle with almost her entire body exposed, with only her calves truly protected. A woman who, for whatever reason, has enormous breasts, and who wears an outfit that offers them no support, just small metal bandaids over her nipples.
Two pages later, we see Kory again, this time in a bikini. She’s swimming, so the fact that she’s wearing a bikini isn’t surprising, but it doesn’t fit her properly. The ties that should go underneath her breasts instead circle them from the middle. Maybe they have to, because the patches of fabric attached to the ties are too small to cover her if the suit fit properly.
(Perhaps this inability to find something appropriate to wear is related to her new characterization. An alien who can’t tell one human male from another probably has trouble understanding American sizing, or fitting rooms. However, since she makes it clear that, like all her people, she’ll have sex with anyone at any time whenever she feels like it, I’d love to see what the appliance stores are like on Tamaran.)
A costume can be revealing and make sense. When Amanda Connor was drawing Power Girl, I completely believed that Kara was comfortable in her outfit. Sure, it showcased her ta-tas, but Amanda emphasized the seaming enough so that I believed she had the necessary support. There is no doubt in my mind that Amanda did this because she has worn a bra.
A lot of the problems with comic book costumes for women occur because they’re designed and drawn by men, most of whom have not worn a bra. They don’t know what it feels like to run in heels. They haven’t tried to do anything when their breasts might bounce around enough to hurt. And they haven’t heard the things that other men feel entitled to say to women who flaunt their assets (or just try to keep cool in the summer heat).
I used to spend a lot of time decrying that kind of male attention. I really hated being interrupted by strangers and their opinions when I was just outside, minding my own business. “You’ll miss it when they stop,” people told me.
They were wrong. I don’t miss it at all.
If the men who used to hassle me are now distracted reading comics like Red Hood, that’s fine. Let them annoy fictional characters, and there will be no harm, no foul. I only wish DC would market the book accordingly, so I don’t think they want my money.
Dominoes Daredoll Martha Thomases thinks Spandex is just great, especially when it’s part of jeans.
CEO Jeff Bewkes told staffers in an email that the company’s preparing to evaluate “our office footprint in the New York metropolitan area and develop a long-range plan to meet our future needs.” The team leading that process — to be run by Chief Financial and Administrative Officer John Martin and Global Real Estate SVP Tom Santiago — probably won’t make a decision until the end of 2012. Then it could take years to implement. The corporate ranks and cable channels including CNN probably will stay in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle; the company owns about 1 million square feet in the building. But Time Warner leases an additional 3 million or so additional square feet of office space in the New York area. The agreement for the publishing unit’s operations at the Time & Life building expires at the end of 2017, while the one for HBO’s home on 6th Ave runs out in 2018. There are plenty of options in Manhattan, including the new World Trade Center. But neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut probably will try to persuade Time Warner to move some of its operations, and jobs.
We talk more with Joel McHale about the new season of COMMUNITY, how he’s taking himself a little more seriously and what’s up with Jeff & Annie. Then we showcase another new NBC comedy – FREE AGENTS with Hank Azaria and Kathryn Hahn, plus FRINGE fans can relax. We found Peter Bishop – and he’s at DC Comics.
Today is a very, very special day in the history of Aquaman–it’s his 70th birthday! And when we say 70th birthday, we don’t mean the birthday DC Comics has seen fit to give him within their continuity–that’s January 29. No, we mean that on this day seventy years ago–September 25, 1941–More Fun Comics #73, Aquaman’s debut appearance, hit newsstands…
So, with Aquaman hitting the big 7-0, and his new series only days away from debuting, the Shrine thought it a tribute fit for a king to reach out and collect birthday greetings from various writers, artists, and performers, all of whom have been involved with the Sea King in some way over these seven decades…
How do you blow out birthday candles underwater? For that matter, how do you light them?
I love stories. I love reading stories, I love hearing stories, I love telling stories.
I’ve been like this as far back as I can remember.
The way my mind works is that I see stories everywhere. Back when I was going to Chicago’s Quigley Prep Seminary in my freshman year of high school, I had to take the elevated train down to school and back at least five days a week. In those days, the first seat in the first car was a single seat right by the front window. When I could get it, I’d watch the tracks as we went. I’d assign one person’s life to one of the rails and another person’s life to the parallel rail and, at junctions, where another set of rails could switch you to another set of tracks, I saw those parallel lives coming together but then another junction would come and those lives would no longer travel on together. I projected a story onto the rails.
Yeah, I was an odd kid.
Sometimes I would come home after dark, especially during the winter, and when I could I’d sit by the train window and watch the apartment buildings as we passed them with rows upon rows of windows. Most would be dark or have the shades drawn but, every so often, the window would be lit and the shade would be up and you’d see someone in the window, just for a few seconds. You’d catch a bit of their life and wonder what the rest of it was like.
Years later, I lived in an apartment that was a half block or less from the train tracks. I lived on the third floor and I knew, from my previous experience, that if the lights were lit and the shades were up, people from the passing trains could look into my life just as I glimpsed into others. That seemed fair.
What I learned from this is that we play many parts in our lives. We are the leads of our own stories (or should be) although, as Charles Dickens, in the opening of David Copperfield, wrote: ”Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” We can be the hero or villain in our own life and sometimes are both. In the story of other peoples’ lives, we assume different plot functions – supporting character, antagonist, cameo, walk-on. We are part of so many different stories.
We are all stories; we are all storytellers. As my former rector, Revered Phillip Wilson, used to say, stories are the atoms of our social interactions. We use story constantly in our own lives, to convey experience, tell a joke, share an experience. Stories are how we understand the world into which we have been born. The stories we tell shape us both as a people and a nation.
The stories often get told and re-told just as DC Comics is now re-telling its stories. Events get altered because it makes a better story. When Del Close was telling portions of his life story in Wasteland, he was never concerned about the facts (although there were often some kernels of fact in the story) – he was concerned with what was true, what was good for the story.
A good story always reflects the storyteller and Del’s stories always did. Del lives in his stories just as Dickens lives in his stories just as Shakespeare does in his. As I do in mine. The stories aren’t real in that the events haven’t happened but they are hopefully true; lies told in service to the truth.
RESPONDING to years of declining readership, DC Comics — the publisher behind Superman, Batman and other superheroes — recently reintroduced itself with 52 new titles, featuring characters and story lines that better reflect today’s diverse sensibilities. But it remains to be seen whether that diversity will include more accurate portrayals of mental illnesses. Although the reintroduction is in full swing, it’s not too late for DC to use its unique and influential position in American pop culture to combat harmful stereotypes.
All hands brace for a confession….Yeah, you got me. I admit that all the noise surrounding DC Comics’ reboot or relaunch or reinvention…whatever you call it, all the dust raised by this activity has caused me the occasional twinge. I worked in the comics trenches for a lot of years and some of it I still miss. Not all, oh no, but – sitting with bright, talented, convivial people in a room and doping out stories to tell…that was one of life’s joys and I’m guessing that the stalwarts at DC have spent a lot of time recently doing just that.
But they aren’t the first to redact the company’s pantheon of superheroes. Way back before you were born – most of you, anyway – Julius Schwartz did pretty much the same thing. The year was 1956 (I told you that you weren’t born yet) and comics, and their primary contribution to pop culture, superheroes – they’d been sickly for about a decade, ever since some politicians, editorial writers and assorted busybodies had convinced a lot of citizens that comics were spawns of evil. (To be fair, changing publishing and retail realities had something to do with comics’ decline, too.) As Julie told me the story: he and his fellow editors were having a meeting and someone decided to revive The Flash, a once-popular character that hadn’t been seen for years. Julie’s words as I remember them: They all looked at me and I said, I guess I’m it.
They did, and he was. He didn’t merely produce a carbon copy of the original Flash, though. With writer Robert Kanigher and artists Carmine Infantino & Joe Kubert, Julie gave the world a new Flash – new costume, new origin, new identity. He left the original concept intact – the world’s fastest human – and altered everything else to make The Flash and his world reflect this, the world we non-fictional beings in habit. Julie and his merry men taught those of us who followed them how to do it: leave whatever made the character popular and unique alone, and modernize the rest.
There was no particular fuss over Julie’s work, back in 1956. For him, it was just another day at the office. The network of fan publications was at best just a’borning, as were conventions, and websites, like this one, weren’t even science fiction because, as far as I know, nobody had even thought of them. Sure, some dedicated readers may have reacted, but the world at large…yawn. And that may have been where Julie had an advantage over his editorial descendants.
Imagine doing this complex task with hordes of the curious looking over your shoulder, waiting to see if you fail, some of them, human nature being what it is, maybe hoping you’ll fail. And of course, regardless of how well you perform, a lot of your audience will find fault because they’ve been establishing an emotional attachment to these characters for years – for decades? – and any significant changes is going to seem…well, dammit, wrong! Pretty daunting, huh?
I haven’t read any of the new stuff yet. Have I just convinced myself that I shouldn’t?
Back in 1937 a King Features Syndicate staffer was given the job of taking over the coloring and engraving their fairly new full-page weekly comic, Prince Valiant. It was a remarkable assignment; one that only a truly talented artist could perform. The job was given to a 19-year old named Jack Adler.
That assignment was his full work load: he had a week to do it, and given the complexity and beauty of Hal Foster’s work, Jack needed every minute of the work day to make his deadline. Given this workload and his youth, we can forgive him for making a politically incorrect faux pas. His boss was taking an executive on a tour; clearly, this executive was a comics fan who really new his stuff. He asked Jack all kinds of questions that were answered perfunctorily without the teenager taking his eyes off of his work. Finally, his boss cleared his throat and Jack swiveled around just in time to meet the executive’s glower.
The executive was the incredibly powerful William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the joint and a man used to deference.
Jack Adler kept his job. That’s quite a tribute to his talent.
Adler went on to a career in comics that lasted for nearly a half-century. Teaming up with his friend Sol Harrison – the engraver on, among other projects, Superman #1 (the first one), the two revolutionized the world of comics color. They recreated the engraving system at the New York Daily News, they helped organize for the engraver’s union and they wound up at DC Comics. Continuing to color – particularly covers – Jack became assistant production manager in 1960 and was promoted to production manager when his boss, friend Harrison, became DC’s president.
Of all his work, Jack is perhaps best known for his wonderful wash covers in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Sea Devils, Green Lantern, Adam Strange, Challengers of the Unknown and others.
A passionate photographer, an audiophile and a watercolor artist, Jack was quite the Renaissance man. I used to joke that he invented papyrus; he thought it over and said no, he would have invented a paper that would absorb color more efficiently.
Jack was saddled with all kinds of allergies and medical conditions and, during his final days at DC, needed help to get through the workday. But he still hung on and was a frequent advisor to a number of so-called independent comics publishers; Adler gave me all sorts of suggestions when we were doing the original First Comics.
Oddly, he might have been better known outside of the comic book donut shop because his cousin, Howard Stern, mentioned him frequently on the air.
Jack Adler passed away Sunday night at the age of 94.
Stern dedicated the opening of Tuesday show to his “super cool Cousin Jack,” calling him a “genius” photographer who supported his passion by becoming a comic book artist.
Look, they can’t all live forever.
