Tagged: Marc Alan Fishman

Martin Pasko: Marvel & DC – The Little Big Two

letterpress2As I was saying last week before I was so rudely cut off by the limitations of your internet-degraded attention span …

Mainstream Comics (read: The Big Two) have begun to remind me of that much-mocked TV commercial with the old woman screaming “Help! I’ve fallen but I can’t get up!”

That business seems to me to be in freefall, and only gaming the numbers so as not to scare the horses maintains the status quo, with ongoing monthlies somehow being considered successes with four-digit sell-through estimates that, as few as 10 years ago, would’ve gotten a title canceled long before things got that desperate. And the “top-selling” titles, you’ll note, are all brand extensions – all variations on, or team-ups with, batmen, wolverines, and other tried-and-trues.

Which presents a thorny dilemma.

Neither of the “Big” Two’s corporate parents wants to be in the business of putting ink on dead trees, which – though ComiXology might claim otherwise – is still the major comics delivery-system. And publishing’s a low-margin biz, and low margins are as crucifixes to Count Disnela and Baron Von Warner. But they’ve been persuaded not to drive a stake through the comics divisions’ hearts by being sold on the dubious proposition that comics are low-cost R&D for blockbuster movie and TV development.

Yet not one of the tentpole franchises from the Big Two’s studio daddies has been based on anything created more recently than 50 years ago (the 40-year old Blade being neither tentpole nor generated by Marvel Entertainment). If you’re going to be a stickler and say, for example, that X-Men’s success owes more to the ‘80s reboot than the Lee-Kirby original, okay – 30 years ago. So far the closest Hollywood has come to building a discrete film around a newer character is the alleged Deadpool movie. Since the New Mutants and X-Force titles that whelped the character are both X-Men spinoffs, however, Deadpool doesn’t really count as something that isn’t a brand extension. If Jeff Robinov’s successors don’t share his aversion to making a Lobo film, maybe then I’ll sit up and take notice.

To make matters worse, the comics themselves are not being used as a development lab, since most, if not all, of the new titles in recent years have themselves been brand extensions. (And, when films like Red and The Losers tank, the incentive to look to newer “original” Big Two titles as source material dies with them.)

If the Big Two can’t be profit centers from publishing alone, the only way Pub Ops can truthfully be a development lab is if the publishers increasingly take back control of the creative development of their comics, which they’ve completely outsourced. This, to control new product development focused less on selling comics and more on creating potential movies and TV shows. But they probably can’t do this – at least, not easily.

For one thing, The Big Two seem to be under pressure to roll back the kinds of deals that used to give Creatives limited profit participation in new characters. And in this Brave New World of self-publishing, it’s hard to find strong, seasoned talent willing to let their new ideas be Wholly Owned by the Big Two.

So how much longer can the Big Floppymeisters justify their existence? Especially when they’re completely reliant on the freelance talent … because they no longer have editors who can control the process credibly, even if their bosses were willing to redefine the role of the editor. Few, if any, of them have the chops to pick up a pencil, graphics tablet or keyboard and make the product themselves (and show the newbies how it’s done) – the way the Infantinos, Orlandos, Lees, Romitas, O’Neils, Weins, and Shooters did when they were running things.

More in the third and final installment of this rant, written from the San Diego Comic-Con, where I’ll be looking for signs of a forced-change in Talent Relations – if any – and reporting back from my maybe not-so-uniquely skewed perspective.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: California, Here I Come – Except…

Thomases Art 130712In a few days, I’ll be in California. Not in San Diego, but in California. I’ll get the good weather without the mobs.

It is the habit of old farts (check out our editor-in-chief’s tirade in this space next Wednesday morning) such as myself to complain about the San Diego Comic Convention. It’s too big. It’s not about comics anymore. Nobody kisses my ass anymore. I don’t have an expense account. (Those last two might be unique to me.)

My major philosophical objection is that a fine, non-profit educational organization has been completely co-opted by Hollywood. True, comic book companies used the occasion of the convention to promote their books, but the convention was at least about comics. Now, it’s a stop on the promotional train for television, movies and video games, complete with red carpets and stylists.

And, apparently, rock bands. Metallica will be performing a live concert for those lucky enough to get tickets (in case you haven’t waited in line for Hall H long enough), to promote their new movie.

Metallica is no doubt a fine group of people (although their music is not my genre), and, since they’ve been together since 1981, they aren’t exactly amateurs at attracting and keeping fans. They should live and be well.

But, as the New York Times story in the link reports, there is going to be a panel about rock music at the Con. And it will include people who score movies, but not the people behind the new Dark Horse graphic novel, The Fifth Beatle, which actually combines rock music and comics. It won’t include John Holmstrom who was combining rock’n’roll and comics even before Metallica was a band.

Look, I enjoy soundtracks as a musical form. Mark Knopfler did some of my favorites. It is an interesting and a demanding musical form with its own unique challenges and structures. There are lots of places that could host interesting panel discussions on the subject with a variety of experts, including composers, directors, and editors. I just don’t think the panel, as described in this article (and maybe it’s not accurate? Could happen) is that kind of conversation.

If you are going to San Diego, I hope you have a fabulous time. I hope you get into The Black Panel because it is so much fun.  I hope no one hits you in the face with a backpack.

And, if you’re really lucky, I hope you find some cool new comics.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Martin Pasko Wants To Know What’s Going On

Pasko Art 13071I was considering doing a piece on how I can’t figure out why I haven’t seen any of my comic collector friends on Hoarders. You know, those people who keep moving to cheaper, bigger houses in worse and worse neighborhoods so they can have a living room big enough for those little, narrow walkways among their 437 eight-foot-high stacks of long boxes? Fear of ending up like that is the main reason I never got into collecting. Or so I thought.

But then I looked around my own claustrophobic living space and realized that people who live in Mylar snuggies shouldn’t throw weighted-based maquettes.

But I’m not a collector. I’m an accumulator. I haven’t paid for a comic book in 20 years, but people keep sending them to me. I can’t get them to stop. So I put them aside, saying I’ll get to them eventually. But I hate clutter. So today I finally forced myself to spend the day opening stacks of boxes of comps from the major publishers. And wasting several hours on one of my favorite pastimes (not): cutting open those shrink-wrapped bundles of “floppies” and searching for a cover on which I could tell what was going on without having to stare at it for half an hour.

I’ll award my own personal version of the No Prize (you don’t wanna know) to anyone who can me tell what’s going on here. Or here.

Y’see, I just blew my mortgage payment on a new pair of glasses with lenses thicker than the mirrors on the Hubble, so I know it’s not my eyes.

So engrossed was I in trying to find points of focus and resolving all those hyperthyroidal ink strokes and manic bursts of color into coherent images that I didn’t notice right away that I’d sliced my finger with the box cutter and was bleeding on the comics. In fact, it took a while to notice the flecks of blood on the pages.

No, not because of the gory, violent content (Since when does Superman need to bleed from the nose? Oops, better not get myself started. That’s another rant for some other week) … but because the interior pages are even more incomprehensibly busy, busy, busy than the covers, and in this particular book, the digital colorist’s efforts to cram 137 shades of red into a grad in the background of a panel that printed at 3” wide made it impossible to see the blood.

It finally struck me that what has now made most mainstream super hero product unreadable to me is the very same thing that made it impossible for me to get into collecting, but until today I’d never fully made the connection.

Clutter.

For those of us schooled in certain design principles, minimalism and the use of “negative space” is more effective at arresting the eye than throwing in everything including the kitchen sink. Minimalism in composition, at least ‑ such as that employed here. And here. (And if you don’t believe me, consult Alex Toth.

Since the beginning of this industry, up until relatively recently, many comic book artists have had to be forced by knowledgeable art directors and editors to understand that less is more.

And therein lies part of the problem.

Are the art directors and editors asleep at the switch? No, they’re just impotent. What, exactly, editors and art directors are expected to do these days isn’t abundantly clear. But what role could they play that they aren’t playing in preventing the indecipherable train wrecks that are most mainstream super hero comics?

And what if the very survival of the medium depended on their ability to change course? Could they do it? (Hint: I’ll argue that it does, and they can’t.)

Be here for Part II when we dissect these weighty issues (no, not the floppies). And if you’re one of those eyestrain fans who actually enjoys this stuff while sitting cross-legged in a 3-foot-square floor space between stacks of long boxes, and any of this got your knickers in a twist, just wait’ll next week.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

Martha Thomases: Comics Creators and Free Labor

Thomases Art 130705Gerry Conway recently posted a provocative story. He starts off discussing the history of creator rights and profit-sharing in the comics industry, and how he (and others) get paid when their creations are used not only in comics, but also on television, in movies and other media.

And then he says this:

“But, like all companies, it’s a business, and its first priority is to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and maximize profits. So tracking which character was created by which writer and artist team thirty or forty years ago isn’t part of their business plan. It’s just too much work, and it requires a dedication and devotion to detail that only one group in the world has in abundant quantities:

“You, the fans.”

I object to this on myriad levels. Here’s a sampling.

• Fans are fantastic, but they do more than enough when they buy the comics, or the movie tickets, or turn on the television. They should not be used as slave (by which I mean unpaid) labor by profit-making companies. That’s because…

• Comics publishers are profit-making companies, not charities. If they want someone to work for them for free, they should get interns, like the rest of corporate America.

• Paying creators a share of the profits generated from their work is not charity. It’s not even a nice gesture (or rather, not primarily a nice gesture). It is the cost of doing business, especially for companies that deal in intellectual properties (or content, as the kids say). Sure, they might save a few bucks by not paying out for a couple of quarters, but over the long haul, they will lose talent to the companies that pay more fairly. Profit-sharing improves the bottom line.

• Most of the work has already been done. It’s really a matter of moments for some aide to an assistant to look up what’s not already covered here.

• Anyone writing a script that uses a really obscure character, either as a springboard for a plot or an Easter egg for fans, already knows the comics well enough to be able to do the research him or herself.

Now, I don’t know anything about Gerry Conway’s personal finances (which are none of my business). He has a terrific résumé, which includes a bunch of high-paying jobs, and I imagine he has a comfortable life, but then, I’m just projecting. However, as he acknowledges, his proposal will benefit scores of other creators, many of whom can really use the money. I’m not faulting him for his idea, just for the execution.

Warners and Disney (and Sony and Universal etc. etc.) are not the only corporations that treat paying out money as some kind of optional, if unpleasant chore. According to this article, some companies are, essentially, making employees pay for the privilege of receiving their salaries.

Said salaries are frequently not enough to support a family, even when the employee works full-time in a supervisory position.

As comics fans, and as Americans on this Independence Day weekend, when we celebrate liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we need to stand up for the people who make our lives enjoyable. And we need to do it by demanding fairness, not working for free.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Martin Pasko: Got Jokes?

Pasko Art 130704By now, those of you who probably greeted with thudding indifference my first regular post here last week may be whining (privately) about my tone.

As of this writing, that piece hasn’t gone up yet, so I haven’t yet read the comments I probably won’t get. No doubt some of you will slander me as a cranky old fart. I would prefer that you read me, if you read me at all, as Grumpy Cat with alopecia and a litter box that looks like a Mylar snuggie.

My purpose here is mainly to provoke thought, but in this overcrowded blogosphere, what that means is, one has to provoke, period. So I also try to entertain by trying to be funny. (I have some experience with this, having been paid to do so on several occasions.) I’m counting on there being ComicMix readers who know that “shock jock” doesn’t have anything to do with Lightning Lad’s penis.

Which brings me to my subject today (Why Patton Oswalt Is So Lonely At Comic Book Conventions). Fanboys have no sense of humor? Well, why the fuck not?

You like to laugh, right? And you love comics, right? Where is it written that loving something means you can’t see its absurdities? (Oh, wait. Married Geeks = a minority. Forgot.)

OK, now that we’ve solved that problem…

Assuming you do like laughing and you like comics…WTF have you got against a one-and-done, and getting both fixes from the same place? Why do so few of you have any interest in comic books that aren’t populated by characters so teeth-grittingly grim that they always look like they’re on the crapper and constipated? Is it too gross to contemplate the idea of a comic book that tries to make you laugh?

Where have all the funny mainstream comics gone? Plastic Man has either gone all deadpan or invisible; Kyle Baker’s given up on the Big Two; Joe Quesada probably doesn’t even know WTF Not Brand Ecch was; and Mike Richardson won’t be blowing any money on another Instant Piano anytime soon. But when did the industry get so risk-adverse? When did their commitment to product diversity become so transparently lip-service?

I know being married to the floppy is a burdensome job, but let’s all learn to lighten the load by leavening it with laughter, aight? In the grand scheme of things, comics aren’t really that important, yo. Your school, if you’re unlucky enough to go to one, will still have textbooks designed to turn you into a Marching Moron. Or it will keep you in debt till long after comics have ceased to exist.

Your job, if you’re lucky enough to have one, will still suck, and the fries that go with it will have been reconstituted, blow-dried, flavor-sprayed, and frozen by a 12-year-old Chinese girl in one of those two-cents-an-hour laborers’ dormitories that gave Mitt Romney a hard-on. And even if you don’t get around to reading this till September, your phone company will still be letting Black Ops guys look at pictures of your junk.

Me, I will recklessly continue trying to bring smiles to your lips, despite your dogged resistance. If I and like-minded writers can’t be funny in comic books, I, at least, will defiantly and unapologetically try to be funny about them – as I did here, and got hugely trolled for it by a lot of Geek jobs who sounded like they were about to cry.

That’s why you’ll also find in my columns that there will be links for some things you don’t immediately understand but also for others that you do.

Well, FYIYCTAJ. And I’ll let you figure out what that stands for on your own time.

You’ve been warned. But imagine a smiley face after that.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: Man of Steel, Man of Skulls

Thomases Art 130628Forgive me, but I have to write about Man of Steel some more. Or, more specifically, the current marketing of Superman.

Last week, I wrote about how disappointed I was in the apparent shame felt by comics fans and Warner Bros. about Superman’s optimism.

But it’s not just that this kind of grim’n’gritty Superman is disturbing. There is also the character’s complete disregard for the welfare of the people of Earth. As a New Yorker who lives within a mile of the World Trade Center, I tend to get upset by such images of destruction. I don’t expect filmmakers to contort themselves to my memories. In fact, I can appreciate the opportunity for catharsis.

However, I would like to see some acknowledgement that there were humans living in a city that is ravaged by superhuman destruction, and these humans were affected by the smashing skyscrapers. Joss Whedon managed to do this very well in The Avengers. I am disappointed that we don’t see at least as much in Man of Steel.

New this week is DC choosing to emphasize the worst aspects of the Man of Steel Superman with this San Diego Comic-Con exclusive, a sculpture of Kal-El standing on top of a pile of skulls.

This image exists in the movie, in a nightmare. That’s the most I can say for it.

If you don’t like hopeful characters, then Superman is not for you. Don’t try to mutate Superman into something he is not, just to fit the fashion.

I’m not the only person who thought so, as you can see here and here. Even movie stars are questioning certain entertainment choices (although, for the record, I really enjoy Kick-Ass in all its iterations, and most of what Mark Millar does. YMMV).

Believe me, I understand. There is a time in the lives of most of us, usually when we are around 12 or so, when we understand that there is more to life than toys and candy, that death and destruction exist, and we strive to be mature adults who embrace reality. For me, this state lasted through college. Then, when I lived on my own and began to experience my personal share of tragedy, I grasped the value of balancing realism with optimism. I loved Jonathan Richman not only for his talent and charm, but for his fierce defense of joy.

So, if I needed to have a ceramic expression of my own aesthetic, I’d buy this instead of a Superman on skulls. There has been enough death in my life . It needs more joy.

Joy is worth fighting for. That’s why I love Superman.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Martin Pasko Hates Comic Book Movies

Pasko Art 130627It might surprise you that a writer who spent so much time writing coverage on Warner Bros. film scripts for DC and won an award for an animated TV series about Batman … Hates. Comic. Book. Movies.

Usually. Not always, but most of the time. There’s a reason for that, though.

By virtue of my peculiar set of writing credits, I am a graduate of the Berlitz course in Geek-to-Hollywood translating. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, just make enough bank off it to pay back the student loan.

Ever since comic book artist lizards first started crawling out of the four-color slime and evolving into knuckle-dragging primates with Panaflexes on their shoulders, the meme that comics are little more than frozen movies – when what they more closely resemble is storyboards with half the frames cut out of every scene – has visited a host of unfortunate consequences on the medium we supposedly celebrate here.

For one thing, the intrusion of the Hollywood mentality on mainstream comics often results in exactly the sort of Big Mistake that Hollywood itself makes. (Mistake in the art crime sense, mind you, not the ka-ching, ka-ching sense.)

“Auteurs” we have up the wazoo, but directors who write their own stuff are seldom well-served by their writers. The two disciplines aren’t necessary mutually-reinforcing. And it’s a far rarer creature than we generally assume who can do both well. Which is why I think most talented comic book artists probably should have their typing fingers broken. Not everybody who graduates from UCLA film school is Orson Welles, and not everyone who buys a diploma from Joe Kubert’s school is Frank Miller.

And, to put a metaphor into the Cuisinart and push for “puree,” this epidemic of the sins of one medium being visited on another is a two-way street. You can’t get good movies out of styling or constructing a film as if it were a comic book, though Chthulhu knows Hollywood now seems to be trying to.

The two media aren’t the same. Each has a grammar of its own which is part of its unique appeal. (After too many instances of watching Robert Downey, Jr. debase himself and repudiate his profound talent by playing flying Spam, I hesitate to use the word “charm.”) And if you conflate the two, IMO you dilute the unique appeal of both.

That, uhm, whack Batman TV series in ‘66 not only proved that, but leveraged those differences to create its signature whackness. By “transliterating” — as opposed to adapting — the tropes and conventions of one medium (the “Meanwhile…” V.O.s, the POW!s and the ZAP!s, the “I’m a duly deputized law enforcement officer” even though I look like I just escaped from Liberace’s closet) into a completely different medium, it commented on the absurdity of superheroes from a non-Geek perspective. Which is why Geeks hated it.

No amount of redesigning the Spandex as Tutti-Frutti Kevlar can hide the self-evident fact that any grown-up celebrity-wannbe who goes outside looking like that will do his 15 minutes of fame in Celebrity Rehab. But I preferred the Batman: Animated stuff because it worked in animation: everything was stylized, appropriate to the surreality of it all. You could accept that Batman existed when he stood next to a Commissioner Gordon who looked like an inverted pyramid with eyes, in a suit jacket whose lapels grazed his earlobes. By contrast, Christian Bale’s teeth-gritting just looks silly.

The live-action stuff used to make me giggle. Now, of course, it just pisses me off as much as mainstream comic book pacing does: you can’t figure out WTF is going on in any of these things unless you’ve seen the previous five entries in the series. And date night at the Octoplex still costs more than five “floppies.”

All that said, I eagerly look forward to being dragged to see Sin City: A Dame For Our Rape Culture, secure in the knowledge that I won’t be too pissed off to fall asleep on it. If Frank and Rodriguez light this one the same way they lighted the first one, I won’t be able to see WTF is going on there, either, and won’t have to care.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases Stands for Hope

Thomases Art 130621Late to the Man of Steel party, but I am compelled to weigh in. Here are my thoughts, which I don’t think are spoilers, but be warned if you’re squeamish about such things.

When I worked at DC in the 1990s, I was known as the person who liked Superman. Which is odd, really, because without Superman, there would be no DC. In any case, the consensus was that Superman wasn’t cool because he wasn’t dark or broody. Over the next decade, Superman became cool, not only in the comics, but also on a top-rated television program. People stood on line at Macy’s anchor store for the chance to meet editor Mike Carlin.

And then Superman Returns bombed, and the conventional wisdom was that Superman, as a character, needed to be dark and brooding after all. He had to be made “modern.”

Anyone who was reading Superman before John Byrne’s 1986 reboot will remember a dark and brooding character. The late, pre-Crisis Superman was always thinking mournfully of his lost planet, his lost birth family, his lost adopted family, and his sense that he could never have a family of his own. Alan Moore captured this brilliantly in his 1985 story, “For the Man Who Has Everything.”

This film is certainly dark. In a recent interview, Bill Nye said, “Space brings out the best in us.” But not, apparently in our production design.

On all of Krypton, it seems, the only colors are blacks, grays and metallic. There do not seem to be any blondes. We don’t see any vegetation above ground, and the Kryptonians we see wear either armor with capes or robes that appear to be ceremonial. It’s beautiful, but it really took my out of the movie, as I wondered how any civilization could be so determinately dreary. I suppose it’s possible that an entire planet could have its own art director to show how Seriously Dark and Mature they are, but to me it just seemed like the everybody went Goth at the same time. When we have the big reveal of Kal-El’s Superman suit, I wondered when Jor-El had discovered blue and red.

Amy Adams is a delightful Lois Lane, maybe the best I’ve ever seen. Her performance is completely believable as a hard-charging, ambitious reporter. She never plays girly or helpless. I only wish she would give lessons to Maureen Dowd.

Laurence Fishburne is a terrific Perry White. If only he had more to do.

The real hero of the movie, to me, is Christopher Meloni, in his most memorable movie role since Wet Hot American Summer.

Which brings me to my biggest regret. The body count in this movie is ridiculously high. The final battle over Metropolis must kill hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people. And it’s not just Zod and his minions who destroy. Superman topples his share of skyscrapers. My Superman would have moved the battle to an ocean. The ending, to my mind, is completely out of character. I know it’s been done in the comics, but there was immediate fall-out and regret, which we don’t see here.

It’s especially disturbing, given that Warner Bros. apparently went out of their way to market this movie as something traditionally religious families would enjoy. The script makes a big deal about Clark being 33 years old (which seems to me to be too old for Clark to be so naive, but I’m not in film marketing), Even if one can ignore the Jewish roots (which, before that, were Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian) of most of the Superman mythos, one would still notice the tug-of-war between Jonathan and Martha Kent over whether Clark should stay in or out of the closet about his differences.

Maybe this is the problem. Maybe trying to make a film that will appeal to those too self-conscious to be hopeful at the same time trying to appeal to evangelicals produces a mush.

Or maybe the creative team needs another film to find their legs. That’s what happened with Batman.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Dennis O’Neil: Super-Success

O'Neil Art 130620Look, 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.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: Falling In Hate

Thomases Art 120614In my entire life, there were two times I didn’t hate it.

The first time, in the early 1970s, I was walking out of Central Park with my then-boyfriend. I was wearing a green halter-dress, as was the fashion of the times. There was a group of construction workers having lunch near the park entrance, and when I rounded the corner, one of them, seeing me, fell to his knees.

About a decade later, my husband and I were going to a Halloween party with a movie theme in the Village. He was some version of the Phantom of the Opera, and I was Marilyn Monroe. I had a white luminous plastic halter dress, white shoes (leftover from my wedding – see, you can use them again!) and a blonde wig. As we crossed Houston Street, a man got out of his car and proposed.

Being hassled on the street is part of being a woman. In these two instances, I thought there was a certain amount of spontaneity, some wit. But I still didn’t like it. I didn’t like feeling judged every time I ventured out of my apartment. It didn’t matter what I wore. I could be in sweats, in running clothes, in a down coat, in a suit for work or wearing my baby in a Snugli, and still men would feel entitled to tell me what they wanted to do to me.

“You’ll miss it when they stop,” people said to me. No, I didn’t.

Men don’t do that because they are overcome by love or lust at the sight of a woman. They do it to put us in our place, to let us know that the sidewalks belong to them, not us, and we are allowed to walk about because it amuses them to permit it.

Which brings me to comics.

It was my pleasure to be at Heroes Con over the weekend. A fabulous show, full of talented young people making comics, sharing comics, and selling comics. At least half the floor space is dedicated to Artists’ Alley, my favorite part of any show, and the presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design means there is a lot of talent on display.

I noticed that a large percentage of the artists (Half? I’m not sure) were women, certainly more than I ever saw when I first started to go to shows in the 1990s. Coincidentally or not, there is way less art devoted to T & A on display.

Utopia, right? We’re here, we have ovaries, get used to it.

And then …

At breakfast on Sunday morning, I was sitting next to a lovely group from Orlando. One of the two women took me about a dinner she had been to the night before. She had to get up and leave in the middle because a colleague had made a series of crude remarks to her.

“I’m married,” she said. “He knows I’m married.”

Of course, even if she wasn’t married, he had no right to continue once she made her displeasure known to him. As humans, we occasionally misread cues and make the unwelcome pass. As humans, we can forgive one time. The fact that this guy continued indicates that he’s either really, really clueless, or, more likely, he was telling her that she was there solely for his amusement.

“I could write about this guy,” I said. “Tell me his name.”

“No, I can’t do that,” she replied. “I see him at all the shows.”

There has been a lot of discussion about gender issues in comics lately, by me and by my esteemed colleague, Mindy Newell. And it’s not just here, but at other sites as well.

And it’s not just comics. Female gaming fans are complaining more, noticing that the sexism they see around them is supported by the very corporations trying to sell them games, as if they can’t be demeaned anytime they want, and for free.

If you aren’t a woman, maybe you think this is a tempest in a teapot. Maybe you think, as a commenter on one of the links above, that the battle for Equal Rights is over, and that women are just looking for things to complain about so we can continue to be victims (because being a victim is so much fun). If you think that, you’d be wrong.

You can re-write this article and substitute “queer” or “African-American” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” for “female.” It’s all the same problem. You can try to change it because it’s the right thing to do, or you can try to change it because more kinds of comics mean better kinds of comics, which we all want.

But, please, for the love of all that is fun in life, let’s change it.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

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