Tagged: Green Lantern

Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 15, 2008

And the Screen Writers Guild lurches into a tenth week and if there’s any end in sight, I haven’t heard about it.

Last time, I mentioned the Academy of Comic Book Arts and its failure to do any significant negotiating on behalf of its members. ACBA wasn’t the first attempt, though, to organize those glorious mavericks, the comic book community. In the 60s…

Wait! Better issue a warning before I go further. Do not regard anything that follows as gospel. (In fact, you might consider not regarding the Gospel as gospel, but let us not digress.) I have no reason not to believe what I’m about to tell you except one: About a year before he died, Arnold Drake, who was a busy comic book writer at the time we’ll be discussing, told me that the story I had wasn’t the whole story, or even necessarily accurate. I don’t know why I didn’t press him for further information, but I didn’t.

Okay, the story:

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Cartoonists Of The World Unite, by Dennis O’Neil

Cartoonists Of The World Unite, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 8, 2008
The television and movie Writers Guild strike lurches into its ninth week. If it goes on much longer, we may be doomed to even more staged “reality” and contest shows. Might be a good time to rekindle a book reading habit.
 
I’ve heard grumbling from folk who work that side of the street to the effect that the strike could have been better managed. Although I’m technically a member of the Guild, I don’t have an opinion – about the strike, that is. Two years ago, I was told that since I hadn’t done any United States television work for a decade, I was being put on retired status, which means, I think, that I can still benefit from the Guild’s services, but I don’t have to pay dues or have my mail box filled with notices of seminars and other industry events. 
 
All fine with me.
 
About the Guild, as separate from the strike, I do have an opinion. I think the Guild is a noble organization, one that does exactly what a union should do, and no more. It collectively bargains, it protects members’ rights; it offers education and retirement benefits. And membership costs are more than reasonable. The current disagreement is over whether/how much writers should benefit from ancillary use of their stuff, mostly new media and computer related. I can imagine no sane reason why writers should not get such benefits, but I admit to bias.
 

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Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

Leveling down, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 1, 2008

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.  
 

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Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 25, 2007

Danny and Fred were the last two kids in their grade to still believe in Santa Claus. 

 
Danny had first believed in Daddy, but he stopped when Daddy began to yell a lot, and drink whiskey, and throw things. So Danny could believe he had a father, because he could see a man coming and going, but he stopped believing in Daddy. 
 
But he still believed in Santa Claus. Santa Claus would never yell or throw things or drink whiskey, and besides, he brought presents and all Danny had to do was be good, which he was anyway. Fred, who lived next door, also believed in Santa, though he and Danny never discussed the etiology of it, so Danny didn’t know why Fred believed. He didn’t care, either.
 
Then, when Danny was fourteen, Father, who was once Daddy, came into Danny’s room on Christmas Eve and pulled Danny from bed and hustled him into the front room, where the Christmas tree was. Father sat Danny down on the sofa and got a big cardboard box from a closet.
 

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Hot Who Links and Much More!

Hot Who Links and Much More!

  • News
  • December 23, 2007

OK, so we get a little sappy this time of year. Just bear with us and accept ComicMix Radio’s gift of some cool web links. And in the spirit of giving, a few of these haven’t even made it to the podcast yet!

• In two days, a lot of us should be treated to the first new Doctor Who adventure in months when the BBC airs this year’s Christmas special (and the Internet Fairies drop it somewhere online). In the meantime, did you know there is an online adventure calendar poster here. If this doesn’t put you in the mood for more Who, nothing will. 
 
• As we told you on Saturday, Shadowline is creating a contest geared toward writers to create a super-heroine for the 21st Century. The character will be 100% creator-owned as all Image and Shadowline books are (trademark and copyright to be shared by writer and artist). The winning entry will be featured in their own self-titled three issue mini-series to be drawn by Franchesco!, artist for She-Dragon and Green Lantern Corps Quarterly. Contest will be divided into three parts and for Round One: Contestants e-mail a BRIEF one paragraph story synopsis by January 31, 2008 to: superheroinecontest@gmail.com. Stories/concept must be original with original characters. No pre-existing characters may be used unless owned by contestant. 
 

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Driving The Big Boat, by Dennis O’Neil

Driving The Big Boat, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 18, 2007

Maybe we ought to retire the word “hero” and designate the characters whose needs and actions drive the story, more technically and accurately, as “the protagonist.”

(You’ve guessed that we’re continuing our incredibly prolonged discussion of the evolution of superheroes?  Good.)

As mentioned in an earlier installment of this blather, the word “hero” is derived from the Greek and means, roughly, “to protect and serve.”  (Lest anyone think I’m a scholarly dude who actually knows Greek…I wish!) The problem nowadays is defining exactly how the protection and service is to be accomplished.  In other words, what kind of person do you admire, and why do they do what they do?  Who do you favor mor e– Mother Theresa or the late Colonel David Hackworth, our most decorated combat veteran?

I never met the good nun, but I did spend an hour or so with Colonel Hackworth once and liked him very much.  I don’t think I would have enjoyed Theresa’s company a whole lot.  But maybe she was the more heroic of the two, if we count heroism as doing deeds that take courage and accomplish long-term good.  Going out every day to deal with disease and poverty…it must have taken guts and it can’t have been easy.  Easier than facing enemy guns?  I have no idea what measurement we can use to quantify such things.  Maybe there is none.

Col. Hackworth did what he did repeatedly and must have often known what he was getting into and, presumably, chose to do it anyway.  But I’m wary of heaping too many accolades on folk who, in a military situation, do one brave thing because…

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The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

The Evolution of the Superhero, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 11, 2007

And on we plod, continuing our seemingly interminable discussion of the evolution of superheroes. This week, let’s leave the capes and masks and other such accoutrements, and the “super” prefix, in the trunk and concentrate on the hero part.

First, a little oversimplification.

Heroes come in two models: the authority-sanctioned kind, as embodied by King Arthur’s posse, Beowulf, and James Bond, to cite just three of many possible examples, and the loners – the cowboys, the private eyes and, yes, most superdoers.

Conventional wisdom has it that the first kind were dominant throughout most storytelling history – were, in fact, integral to the “monomyth” described by Joseph Campbell. Again oversimplifying: ultimately, the result of all the hero’s roving and adventuring was benefit to his community. And, bowing once more to conventional wisdom, the second kind, the loners, became prominent after the First (don’t we wish!) World War when belief in the essential goodness and wisdom of humanity’s leaders became…well, challenging.

I dunno…the cowboy archetype was well-established before the war broke out in 1914, and it, in some ways, was the model for the private eyes and other rogue justice-dealers. I guess you could argue that the defining event of America’s nineteenth century, the Civil War, made the citizenry wary of Authority, and that wariness grew for maybe a hundred years as media technology made our immediate ancestors aware that if a person was in the market for some really ripe corruption, the statehouse was the place to look..

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I Pity the Poor Immigrant, by Martha Thomases

I Pity the Poor Immigrant, by Martha Thomases

  • News
  • December 8, 2007

According to my reading of the nightly news (between 4 PM and 7 PM, we watch CNN, BBC, and NBC), illegal immigration is a huge issue as we go into the primary season for the various presidential nominations.  According to various estimates, there are as many as 12 million people living in the United States who are in the country illegally.  Some entered legally, as students or tourists, and didn’t leave when they were supposed to.  Others snuck in without going through the proper channels.

Neither party has a consensus on what its position is, but, to greatly oversimplify, the Democrats want to find a way to more quickly legalize the illegals while the Republicans want to deport them.

My opinions on the subject are greatly influenced by the comics I read now and read growing up as a child.  As a DC fan, I know:

* Superman is an illegal immigrant (since granted citizenship), whose adopted parents committed perjury when they claimed he was their biological child.

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Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 4, 2007

In my dotage, I’m coming to believe that a little adolescent rebellion is usually a good thing, and if the rebellion creeps a year or two into full, card-carrying adulthood, that’s okay. Much after the fact, I learned of some things my kid did in his Greenwich Village youth: I’m not sorry he did them and I’m glad I didn’t know of them until much later.

(As for myself…let me note that the principal of my high school told my mother after graduation that they never, ever wanted to see me again. I must have done something…)

Father does not always know best and either does Mother. Like generals, they’re fighting old wars and kids are caught in new wars, which means the kids have to find their own way, which is a process of experimentation, which means that Junior and Pops can’t and shouldn’t march in lock step,

We will now retire the military metaphors and explain what any of this has to do with our current topic, the evolution of superheroes.

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Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 27, 2007

So where we at?  For the past month or so, we have, in a scattershot and disorganized way, been discussing the various elements involved in the evolution of superheroes.  I don’t think we’ve come to any conclusions worthy of being preserved for the ages, nor should we: things change, darnit. But maybe a little tentative upsumming would not be inappropriate.

Upsumming:

Haberdashery: There is currently a trend away from putting superdoers in costumes, though the big bucks movie heroes are still wearing the suits and, judging from the films I know about that are in development, this will not change in the foreseeable future.  But most entertainment consumers — I’m excepting comics fans here — get their heroism, super and otherwise, from television and maybe because of tv production hassles, costumes aren’t common.

Powers: We’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that for a long time the superbeings of mythology and folklore got their powers from some supernatural agency: they were gods, or demi-gods, or friends of ol’ Olympus,  or something.  Or they were agencies of darkness — black magicians of one kind or another.  Then science became the rationale, most famously with Jerry Siegel’s extraterrestrial origin of Superman.  Last, and decidedly least, there was technology allowing the good guy to do his  stuff. And now…well, it’s anything goes time.  Look at the current television offerings: we have a superhero private eye whose abilities are due to his vampirism, which we can call magic; a technology-enabled superhero(ine); and a whole bunch of peripatetic whose gifts have “scientific” explanations, or so it currently seems.

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