Tagged: Julius Schwartz

Dennis O’Neil: Marvel, DC, and Higgs

Columns
July 30, 2015

Okay now, try to stay with me because we’re going pretty deep…

Those of you who were among the Faithful last week remember that we touched, very, very lightly, on a feature that the great comic book editor Julius Schwartz ran in a science fiction title published in the 50s. The comic book was titled Strange Adventures and Julie called the feature “Science Says You’re Wrong If You Believe That…” The format was: somewhere south of the ellipse was a brief, illustrated bit of information about some science-related topic. (Science Says You’re Wrong If You Believe That…I’m qualified to write about science?)

The point of the preceding paragraph was to establish bona fides. See, science belongs in this column because it’s been here before. Isn’t that logical? And easy?

Now we come to the crux of our elucidation: Have you noticed, any of you at all, that despite the elapse of more than a half century and a pretty steady exchange of creative personnel, and a colossal evolution of subject matter, narrative and visual techniques, printing technology, distribution means, business practices, societal respectability and maybe other stuff that I’m forgetting, that the Big Two comics publishers, Marvel and DC, have maintained distinct identities? There are Marvel comics and DC comics and, I might argue, if you caught me in a contentious mood, that True Fans can tell the difference even if there are no visual cues. (Such a cue might be the words Marvel Comics on the cover. Yeah, that might be all a real sharp tack might need.) Even if you don’t agree, pretend that you do while we forge ahead.

Said forging now suggests that I share with you a scrap of information from the essential Wikipedia,, available with a quick Google. “In theosophy and anthrosophy, the Akashic records…are a compendium of thoughts, events, and emotions believed by Theosophists to be encoded in a non-physical plane of existence known as the astral plane…

Okay, one more bit of info and then the payoff.

The bit: Physicists have confirmed the existence of what they call “the Higgs field,” which is an energy field that is everywhere in the universe. (It’s what gives particles mass, but never mind that.)

Now, as promised, the payoff, in the form of some questions: What if the Akashic records and the Higgs field are identical? And what if things like the establishment of editorial identities make an impression on the records/field that persisted forever? So wouldn’t whatever invokes those identities automatically take on the characteristics of the original, even if said characteristics are completely indetectable? Which certainly explains why Marvel Comics and DC Comics are still distinct from one another, doesn’t it?

Well, I’m glad we got that settled. Science might not agree – might say we’re wrong – but science says you’re wrong if you believe that we’ve got to believe science when we don’t agree with it. Or not.

Dennis O’Neil: Science Says You’re Wrong If You Believe…

Columns
July 23, 2015

Now I know that some of you are huge – huge! – science fans while others… well, you might prefer to get your science from old Julius Schwartz comic books. (Remember those old filler features that Julie ran? “Science Says You’re Wrong If You Believe…”) You guys – you Juliers – can consider your class dismissed until next week. You others?

Let us consider Pluto. No, not the Roman god of the underworld, or Disney’s canine, and certainly not Popeye’s archenemy – that was Bluto-with-a-B. We mean the planet. Pluto-the-planet has been much in the news this past week because we put a spacecraft within about 7000 miles of the planet’s surface which, in astronomical terms, is the back yard, and it sent back a lot of data and will continue downloading information for months. So, at the end of the process, we’ll know a lot about Pluto and maybe have some of the Big Questions answered, stuff like why/how are planets and solar systems formed and what the heck are we doing here, anyway.

Oh, and you fussers out there – I know that poor Pluto is no longer considered a full-blown planet. A few years back the people whose job it is to do things like decide on the classification of astral bodies, folks like Neil deGrasse Tyson, decided Pluto was too small to qualify as a planet and so they renamed it a dwarf planet and dwarf-schmarf, say I. The naming business is all arbitrary anyway. The universe doesn’t classify. We do. As human activities go, this one is pretty harmless and if you want to use the “dwarf” label, be my guest. But I’ll stick to calling that orb at the edge of our solar system a plain old “planet,” thank you very much.

Did I mention that I’m fond of (planet) Pluto? A decade ago I made it a character – well, an object, really – in a novel. I’m not sure why. I guess I thought my plot needed something at the far reaches of the solar system and Pluto, 4.67 billion-with-a-B miles away, certainly qualifies.

I got all the information I needed about it from a book I can recommend Don’t Know Much About The Universe, by Kenneth C. Davis. It’ll also tell you about the other planets and the sun and like that. Readable and informative.

Why bother to do this (very minor) bit of research? Maybe it’s my journalism background or maybe I just need a good laxative, but I think we writers, even we fiction writers, have an obligation to society not to spread misinformation. That’s the politicians’ job. If you’re equipping your hero with a Whoseatronic Ray Blaster, you can make it be or do whatever you like. You’ve just made it up, after all. But if you use something that’s real, be accurate. There’s already enough bad info out there.

And by the way…Science Says You’re Wrong If You Believe That Pluto Is that damn dog.

Dennis O’Neil On Alternate Earths

Columns
September 25, 2014

Good news! The angel Fettucini has just delivered a Message From On High: from this moment on, all politicians must be free of greed and egotism and be motivated solely by the desire for good governance and love of heir fellow man.

The, uh, bad news is that the above is true only on Earth 4072, which, of course, exists only in an alternate universe. These things are relative. To the inhabitants of Earth 4072, the news is not bad.

They can be useful, these alternate universes, especially, if you write fantasy or science fiction.

Consider Julius Schwartz, an editor at DC Comics. In 1959, he was given the task of reviving a character who had been dormant for most of the decade, the Flash. Instead of merely redoing the Flash comics readers (okay, older comics readers) were familiar with, Mr. Schwartz and his creative team gave the Flash a comprehensive makeover: new costume, new secret identity that included a new name, new origin story – the whole bag. But Mr. Schwartz had a potential problem: some of his audience – those pesky older readers – might wonder what happened to the original Flash. Mr. Schwartz provided an answer by borrowing a trope from science fiction: alternate worlds. In the Schwartz version, there were two Earths coexisting in different dimensions. The original, Jay Garrick, was on one Earth and the newer model, Barry Allen, was on the other Earth. It was the publishing equivalent of having your cake and eating it, too.

Take a bow, Mr. Schwartz.

The gimmick must have boosted sales because Mr. Schwartz soon applied it to other DC superheroes with similar success. Then other editors and their teams took the alternate Earth idea and ran with it and eventually, there were dozens of versions of Earth, each with its own pantheon of costumed heroes. This may have created story opportunities, but it also probably created confusion and narrative unwieldiness. For whatever reason, in 1985, the guys in the big offices decreed that all Earth be cosmically mashed into one, in a storyline titled Crisis on Infinite Earths that included all of DC’s superhero comics. Later, DC’s editors repeated the stunt three more times.

So…can we reach a verdict? Alternate Earths: pro or con?

Well…if you can get a good story from this, or any other, concept, yeah, sure. A good story is always its own justification. But you do risk alienating new or merely casual readers who might be confused, and you burden your inner continuity with the need to explain the multiple Earths stuff. Maybe this particular story could be told without multiple Earths elements and if that’s true, maybe it ought to be. Or do you risk compromising the uniqueness of your hero by presenting diverse versions of the character, and do you care?

You might want to mull these matters, especially if you make your living from comic books. Or you might not, but if that’s the case, why don’t you want to mull them?

Dennis O’Neil: Comic Books Even Teachers Can Love

Columns
September 4, 2014

That was the headline above a New York Times story that ran in the paper’s Art section…

Hold on! Before we go any further, let’s think about this. The Times headline implies that at least a substantial number of teachers don’t like comics. Not true, at least not in my experience. Marifran, who taught for 50 years, used comics I brought home as classroom prizes in both a Catholic school in Brooklyn and a public school here in Nyack. She got no negative feedback from either parents or school officials. And the kids seemed to like being rewarded in this way. Comics were a small but welcome addition to her workplaces.

Then why did the august gray lady of American journalism imply that comics and lesson plans might be a bad mix? Maybe because once upon a time, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 years ago, comics did have a bum rep among certain citizens, probably including teachers, especially those who read editorials, heeded clergy and other authority figures, including a New York City psychiatrist. And, while we’re on the subject of authority figures, these citizens thought that if United States congressmen said something was a menace to our youth and even convened hearings to investigate, well, by golly, it was a menace, whatever it was.

As far as I can tell, comic books’ days as scapegoats and quarries of witch hunts were pretty much done by the late 50s and early 60s, when Julius Schwartz refashioned a lot of long dormant superheroes and Stan Lee changed editorial attitudes and gave comics an aura of hipness and, dare we utter it, of sophistication. But sometimes old convictions refuse to die, especially if those holding the convictions have no reason to question them. So, yeah, I’m sure there still exist folk who believe comic books to be venues for wickedness, but there can’t be many of them.

Which brings us back to the Times piece. It concerns a new publishing venture, Toon Graphics, and its founder, Francoise Moulay. Ms Moulay is offering comics to schools as tools to help kids learn. She believes that comics can help teach reading because youngsters, unlike adults, because they are used to extract meaning from information. “That’s how they make sense of the world,” Ms Moulay told the Times reporter. “Comics are good diagrams for how to extract meaning from print.”

That makes comics a natural extension of what psychologists say is something infants do before very early in life, make crude, preverbal narratives – stories – to deal with the continual barrage of information their senses are providing. They begin to assemble cause-and-effect scenarios and soon all that… stuff isn’t so scary because they’ve begun to understand it. Then they grow up and acquire language and… well, it can go a lot of ways from there. Maybe they write King Lear. Or go to work for the New York Times. Or contribute to ComicMix.

Dennis O’Neil: They Say It’s Your Birthday…

Columns
May 8, 2014

Some 75 years ago I stuck out my head, decided I didn’t like what I couldn’t quite see yet, and protested, but it was too late to go back and so I’ve been occupying space and respirating ever since.

Think 75 is a big number? Well, my component atoms popped into existence at about the time as the Big Bang, when it all began, and that was 13,798 billion years ago, give or take (and what’s a billion or two among friends?). Now, that 75 seems pretty tiny, doesn’t it? And, matter of fact, it is.

For 49 or 50 of those years, I’ve been involved in what was once a backwater of American publishing, comic books. My timing was pretty good. Roy Thomas brought me into the business just as it was emerging from a decade of disrepute, during which its continued existence was in doubt. But first the late Julius Schwartz reinvented a few once-popular superheroes and, a little later, Stan Lee concocted a new approach to writing comics. Then Roy, and Steve Skeates, and I came to New York, young guys who had grown up reading and liking the kind of fantasy-melodrama that comics purveyed, and the business evolved around us. I can’t speak for Roy or Steve, but I wasn’t thinking of a career, and that was probably sensible since no career path existed in the world of comics. I was just doing a kind of nutty fiction writing and putting food in the mouths of those who depended on me and that was pretty much that.

We’re still here, Roy and Steve and I, and so is the business.

But it’s not exactly the same business. Even those who were taking comics seriously weren’t predicting what they’ve become. The look of the product is different: the pages slicker and fewer per issue, the art style showing influences that weren’t available a half-century ago. The vocabulary is sophisticated, and the themes either more mature or more adolescent, depending on your sensibility. Comics’s usual form, the complete-in-this-issue story, is odd and rare.

Imagine that, you gentle and kindly millennials…no continued stories! And more than one story per issue! And text stories with nary an illustration in sight! And half-page humor strips!

AND…all in color for a dime!

Then, there are the movies. Oh,yeah, Hollywood had been borrowing material from comics since the early 40s and after the first big budget Superman flick in 1978, it was possible to anticipate more superdoing at a theater near you. But I doubt that anyone predicted superheroes becoming their own genre, a first cousin to science fiction but, nonetheless, their own thing, and that they would dominate summer entertainment. Cinema technology evolved in tandem with the ever-more-mature costumed good guys resulting in a near perfect marriage of form and content. We sure didn’t see that coming.

What next? Well, given everything in preceding paragraphs, you’ll pardon me if I pass on prognosticating.

Dennis O’Neil: Tabula Ra’s al Ghul

Columns
February 20, 2014

Well now, I just don’t know. When I finished last week’s blatherthon I thought we were al done with the al Ghuls. Excuse that and where were we… oh yeah, Talia and her sister Nyssa and their father, Ra’s. Batman’s nemeses. The family might be worth a bit more copy.

As I observed last week, the family name is not “al Ghul” or “Al Ghul” or anything like that. The Al Ghul label is a kind of honorific – ”head of the demon” if you must know – maybe laid on the old man by someone he wronged, kind of like “Vlad the Impaler.” It was provided by the late and great Julius Schwartz and I regret never having asked Julie where he got it.

So what’s the real moniker? (more…)

Dennis O’Neil: The Talia al Ghul I Know… and The Sister I Don’t

Columns
February 13, 2014

I was surprised to learn that Talia has a sister. Understand, Talia and I go back a long way. I first encountered her in a script I was writing for Detective 411. I really didn’t know much about her, though I was probably aware that she had a father who would grab attention at some point. I didn’t come face-to-face with him until I looked at a copy of Batman 322.

His relationship to his daughter was open information from the beginning and when you think about it, his having progeny is a bit odd; his biggest concern is the destruction of the Earth’s ecosphere and that includes the problem of overpopulation. And although Ra’s al Ghul is something like 400 years old, I’m pretty sure that Talia is still a young woman – young by our standards, not just her father’s. So this man who thinks there are already too many people adds to the number? It doesn’t seem to parse.

But we should remember that Ra’s is a megalomaniacal sociopath. Such a man might feel that anything he does, including adding to a crisis by siring a child, is righteous because he does it. If you do it: bad. If he does it: bravo. Of course, he may have had a practical reason for becoming a parent: maybe he was looking for someone to take over the family business after he retired. (I suppose that when you pass 350 or so, you lose a step or two and begin to consider successors.) Or he might have been having trouble finding good help and decided to grow his own. Or maybe he planned to begin an al Ghul dynasty.

Well. maybe not an al Ghul dynasty. That’s not a name, that al Ghul. More like a title. According to the late Julius Schwartz, who contributed it, Ra’s al Ghul means something like “head of the demon.” Surely at some other time, he was called something else, perhaps with the title “doctor” prefacing it. He was a doctor, you know, and a scientist and perhaps a bit of a humanitarian in a country that has absolutely and vanished from history. Not a trace left. Nada. Zilch. (How, then, do I know about it? That would be telling.)

About that sister: her name is Nyssa al Ghul – she obviously doesn’t know that what she’s calling herself isn’t a name, unless she does know and is being a rebel. She showed up in a recent episode of a television presentation titled Arrow and proceeded to do some major ass-kicking. I don’t think she’s much like her sister. (Do they even have the same mother?) My Talia has pacifistic instincts that are unfortunately often obliterated by a slavish devotion to her father. A really expert therapist might do wonders for her. Nyssa, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy combat and to be very good at it. Though, I admit, we have barely met the woman and can’t really judge her motives.

I guess we should stay tuned.

Dennis O’Neil: Cold Weather Fans

Columns
February 6, 2014

Went into the living room this morning, looked out the big window and… what do you know? Snow! That was four or five hours ago and it’s still coming down: small flakes, but a lot of them. I guess we should be thankful that this weather wasn’t happening Sunday, because Sunday, as some of you may have heard, was the day of the Big Game, which was played at New Jersey’s Meadowlands, which is a quick drive to New York City (unless Governor Christie’s minions are conducting a traffic study) and New York City is a quick trip to where I’m sitting and so I’m guessing that the snow’s falling on the Meadowlands as it is falling here and if that had happened yesterday it might have interfered with the game. And wouldn’t that have been the worst, most horrific, most devastating, civilization-crumbling event in recorded history?

Oh sure, I guess the Meadowlands has guys who tend to the playing field and maybe they could have made it playable, but still… And imagine being a fan huddling in the stands. No matter how big your thermos full of hot coffee might be, you’d be cold! And being cold might have interfered with your enjoyment of the game and that might have wreaked psychological trauma upon you, leaving you a quivering shell of your former self.

The Broncos lost. That was the team I was rooting for, though not rooting very hard, because although I’ve visited both Seattle and Denver within the last year, I was in Denver most recently – ergo, the Broncs are my guys!

(By the way… Colorado recently legalized recreational marijuana and what happens? Their team gets clobbered in the Super Bowl. So the right wingers must be… er – right. Go ahead, quarrel with logic!)

But something’s wrong here…

Oh, wait, yes. Comic books. This column – hell, this entire website – is supposed to be about comic books. Not football, not Governor Chris Christie, not the lovely snowfall – comic books! So, could a canny blathermeister somehow mix football and comics? Well. I do believe that everything is related, but putting those two topics together in the same column might be a challenge. Comics have never been much about sports. There were a few sports-themed comics in the 40s – All Sports and Babe Ruth Sports, to name two – but not many. And later? The pickings are sparse. DC published six issues of Strange Sports Stories in 1973-1974 that, under the editorship of Julius Schwartz, conflated sports and science fiction. Let’s give it a “nice try.”

So why the de facto segregation? Maybe the stereotype is valid; maybe humans who enjoy reading aren’t often the same humans who enjoy violent contact games. Enormous generalization, sure, but maybe one with a grain of truth buried within it. Or maybe the creative folk never sussed out how to do sports in panel art narrative. Maybe the timing was never right. Maybe maybe maybe…

…I’ll write about something entirely different next week.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

REVIEW: Batman: The Brave and the Bold Season One

Reviews
December 11, 2013

Batman in media has often been a victim of budgets and a fickle public’s tastes. His success or failure has also impacted the comic book incarnation. For example, after the camp live-action series crashed in 1968, the comic sales plummeted, freeing editor Julie Schwartz to take things back to the beginning and reinvent the gothic look and feel which evolved into the 1980s’ grim and gritty comics. Similarly, after a successive series of dark, moody and brilliantly execute animated series, it was most definitely time for something fresh.

Along came Batman: The Brave and the Bold, a bright, colorful, action-packed series that was a sheer delight to watch. This was a Caped Crusader who worked well with others, didn’t brood a lot but took his job far more seriously than his costumed companions. He operated in a universe where heroes and villains from across the DC Universe operated, letting animators stick in brilliant cameos and actually reinvent some of the characters most in need of a personality. Among the latter was the bearded blowhard Aquaman, ready to tell a fish story, naming the adventure with an ego-centric flourish.

Warner Archive has done us all a favor by collecting the 26-episode fist season and putting it all on two Blu-ray discs for an affordable price. The premise often involved a pre-credit sequence as the Gotham Guardian finished a case with one hero before moving on to another escapade with another. As with eponymous comic it was based on, some characters reoccurred more than others thanks to their popularity such as Green Arrow, whose rivalry with Batman for gear and gadgets made for nice humor. The current incarnation of Blue Beetle was seen as an amateur in need for tutelage and we could see him grow in confidence across the run.

Clearly the writers, directors, animators, and voice cast had a marvelous time and it came through with every episode. The character designs came from across DC Comics’ decades long run so Black Canary look as Carmine Infantino first drew her in the 1940s while Plastic Man was at his loopiest. It was refreshing to see the JSA heroes fighting as veterans (notably the pugilistic cracks from Wildcat) while long-simmering character bits such as those between Batman and his wards rang true.

A standout episode was the musical “Mayhem of the Music Meister!”, with the incredibly talented Neil Patrick Harris voicing the title villain. And like so many other installments, this one featured not just one partner but a small army including Green Arrow, Aquaman, and. Black Canary.

Given the Earth-3 villains now running amuck in Forever Evil, it’s fun to see their animated counterparts in the two-parter that closed out the first season — “Deep Cover for Batman!” and “Game Over for Owlman!”.

By some chance you missed this when it aired on the Cartoon Network, or you want a break from the sturm und drang of the current New 52, this is a treat you want.

Dennis O’Neil: Super-Success

Columns / Reviews
June 20, 2013

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…

Superman, crossing his eyes, thumbing his nose and sticking out his tongue. He’s directing his scorn toward all the nay-sayers who predicted a cool reception for The Man of Steel. The picture officially opened Friday morning and by Friday afternoon one web news site was describing it as “disappointing.” Disappointing, maybe, to Marvel Comics execs, but most of the rest of us thought it was pretty darn okay. The reviews were mixed, but the theater exit polls gave it an A minus and it ended up reaping enough profit to be the biggest June movie opening ever.

I think it deserves its success. The director, Zack Snyder, and the writer, David Goyer, did exactly what they had to do, and what previous film makers failed to do – reinvent an elderly icon for a contemporary audience. Way back in 1959, editor Julius Schwartz, did that for the comics and now Snyder, Goyer, and their posse, along with a few other creative teams, have done it for the multiplex.

I won’t go into particulars here… Okay, one particular: the villain. He was played by Michael Shannon, our best filmic heavy, both in movies and on television, and he didn’t think of himself as an evil doer. On the contrary: he considered himself to be a savior whose actions were done “for the greater good.” Something familiar about that? In what I’ll hesitantly refer to as real life, those who perpetrate war and genocide and wholesale slaughter always do it for a cause, often religious nor nationalistic, they believe to be vital and benevolent. They’re the heroes and their opposition is villainy and the poor simpletons who are crushed along the way are necessary sacrifices or, as the current terminology has it, collateral damage. Fanatics, these “heroes,” who believe that they could not possibly be wrong. Michael Shannon’s General Zod can stand as their avatar.

Time was when characters in superhero stories were occasionally referred to as “supervillains” and I don’t recall them denying the eponym. In fact, some of them belonged to a kind of miscreants club, pretty much limited to folk who dressed in odd costumes, that called itself “The Secret Society of Super Villains.” The comic book of that title was published by DC in the mid-seventies and collected in a hardcover anthology. The stories were written by Gerry Conway, one of the medium’s major talents, and were fine for their era, when comics were in their adolescence, unsure of what, exactly, they should be and still in thrall to the notion that they weren’t…respectable. Or serious. Or art or… something. Many of the baddies seem to exist only to give the goodies somebody to beat. Now, in both comics and their lumbering descendants, the flicks, writers are willing and able to acknowledge and dramatize the world’s real evil, which can be tragic.

Consider The Man of Steel a parable for our times. An entertaining one.