Tagged: Marc Alan Fishman

Martha Thomases: Iron Man & Iron Mothers

Guy-Pearce-Aldrich-Killian-Iron-Man-3-PosterLike everyone else in the United States, I saw Iron Man 3  last weekend with my illustrious colleague, Mike Gold. I went for the explosions. I went to see my future husband, Robert Downey Jr. I went because I love Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Shane Black beyond all reason.

And I had a good time. But, as time goes on and I have time to consider what I saw, there is one thing that bugs me. If spoilers are going to bother you, depending on your standards for what constitutes a spoiler, you may want to stop reading now.

And that brings us to this week’s word:

Mothers.

There is a kid in the movie who helps Tony Stark. The kid lives in Tennessee with his mom, his dad having abandoned them long ago. The kid is, of course, a boy, because, for the most part, boys are more interesting to Hollywood than girls are.

If I were still a kid, this would have been my absolute favorite part of the movie, because I would identify with the boy (identifying with boys is something girls are expected to do all the time, although the converse is rarely true) and feel what it’s like to hang out with a super-hero. As an adult, I thought this part went on a bit too long.

So long, in fact, that I started to worry about the kid. His mother had to work, so she wasn’t at home. At night. Leaving her kid by himself, to run around town with Iron Man, even when there were explosions. We don’t know if she ever finds out what he was doing.

Mothers are hardly ever the leading characters in action-adventure stories. In comics, there is Sue Storm in Fantastic Four, Mark Andreyko’s Manhunter, and I can’t think of any others (please correct me in the comments). There are a lot of mom’s (and mom surrogates) who are supporting characters – Martha Kent, Martha Wayne, Aunt May, Maggie Sawyer, Hippolyte – but very few headliners have to find child care.

I think this has to do in large part because of who makes comics, and who they think the audience is. Men, for the most part, don’t identify with mothers. Boys (of all ages) prefer to think of their moms as people devoted to being parents, not lean, mean, world-saving machines.

As for sex, that other inspiration for plots, none of these guys want to think about their moms – or anyone’s mom – having sex. Ever. Unless that woman is maybe the mother of Blue Ivy Carter.

In real life, of course, mothers are heroes every hour of every day. No matter how one defines the term, mothers are brave and self-sacrificing and just plain bad-ass.

And that’s after they have pushed a live human being out of their bodies.

You could take your mom to see Iron Man 3 this weekend, and she’ll probably like it, because, in addition to its other attributes, it has Guy Pearce. Just be sure to tell her that you know she’s tough enough as she is, and doesn’t need any armor to prove it.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Dennis O’Neil: Much Ado About Iron Man

Iron-Man-II-Tony-StarkMaybe you’ve been on a vision quest in the Himalayas, or maybe you’ve just been in a coma, so I’ll try too negotiate the next few hundred words without dropping any spoilers. The subject is the movie that looks like it will be the summer’s monster, Iron Man 3, and by now, most of you have seen it, or are planning to see it, or have at least read reviews. As a lowly scribe who once wrote the Iron Man comic book – yes, kids, it was a comic book first – I might be expected to have an opinion about it and I do. But I did promise no spoilers and to state what I liked about it would probably constitute a spoiler…

What’s a fellow to do?

Go at the problem from another angle? Okay: What I did not like about the movie was all the kabooms. Lots and lots of fireworks. Big explosions. Then more big explosions. Hey, no elitism here: I understand the entertainment value of pyrotechnics and to complain about explosions in a film designed to be a summer blockbuster is kind of like attending the opera and bitching about all the screechy singing. But maybe a little moderation? I wearied of all the noise and shrapnel and flame coming at my 3D glasses. Enough was enough. Less might have been more. Anything stuffed down your throat will eventually make you gag.

There you have my major kvetch: the explosions.

I guess I could complain that the villain’s motivations could have been more thoroughly explained, but you might not agree. And if we got rid of a few explosions, the movie would have been been a tad shorter and that might have benefitted it. But none of this constitutes major inadequacy. You pay for your ticket and you get what you paid for, that special kind of summer respite that only happens in cool theaters on hot days. It has been significant pleasure in my life for some 40 years and it still is. (You think I’m not going to see The Man of Steel and The Wolverine and even The Lone Ranger when they grace the multiplex in a month or two? Ha!)

But superhero movies are maturing, as did westerns and badge operas and science fiction before them. While still delivering the spectacle and fantastic heroics that characterize the genre, they’re being put to other uses, too. They’re telling the kind of stories that help us define ourselves, which is something stories have always done. First, there was The Batman trilogy, which was, beneath all the swashbuckling, a tale of redemption.  Now, we have the Iron Man movies, which, if you squint a little, also constitute a trilogy and use the character of Tony Stark to…

Whoa! I promised no spoilers. So, if you haven’t already seen it, watch for the scene in which Tony mentions a cocoon and the shot of Tony standing on a cliff. They’ll tell you what I think the movie is really about.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases: History Comes And Goes

7726History happens every day. Every day changes the world.

Not every day gets written down in history books. Not every day is part of that pop quiz second period.

Usually, the battles get written down. We measure time in wars. The more death, the more important.

And yet, that’s not all there is to history. There are births and marriages and medical advances that allow women to give birth without dying from infections. There are music and art and dance. There are comic books and television shows and movies.

When I was a young history major in college (back when there was waaaay less history), some of the more interesting discussions we had were about how one defined history at all. It is a study of the past, of course, but what kind of study?

The field is enormous, of course, and allows all kinds of views. The one that most interests me is the question of how people lived their lives in other times and other places.

I like the stories.

This week, on AMC’s award-winning Mad Men, the story centered around an historical event that I actually remember, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was in high school at the time, my freshman year at boarding school in Connecticut, and mostly what I remember is feeling horrified (MLK inspired my early pacifism) and frustrated, because there was no way to find out what was going on up on that mountain.

The Mad Men cast had lots of reactions. Some were upset, some were scared for themselves, friends and family. Some were annoyed that events upstaged their plans. Some were awkward around the (very) few black people they knew. I believe all the reactions were authentic recreations of what people in that particular demographic niche felt at the time, although I’m not sure the proportions are correct. Still, it is history the way I like to see it, happening to people in real time.

There are lots of parallel stories in comics. The most famous is probably our own Denny O’Neil’s run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, written about the real world, using super-heroes to articulate some of the different points of view in the day’s arguments. Another of my personal favorites is this story, in which Superman trusts President Kennedy with his secret identity. I read that comic when I was ten years old, and President Kennedy had just been shot.

It’s hard to imagine a story like this today, when things are so hyper-partisan. Looking at it now, I have an understanding of how different our national discourse was 50 years ago.

Another little bit of history that happened this week is the return of All My Children, now on the Internet (and also One Life to Live, but I don’t watch that). I don’t know how anyone can keep historical records in Pine Valley, when time doesn’t seem to move in a straight line. Apparently, five years have passed since we last saw our cast, but some characters are the same age, while some are a decade older. Just a few episodes in, and it’s thrilling how much I don’t care.

And the great philosopher, Howard Chaykin said, “Continuity is for geeks.”

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Dennis O’Neil: Old Bats Never Die

O'Neil Art 130502ZAP! BAM! POW!

I’ve written a lot about comics these – holy septuagenarian! – past 47 or so years, but I’ve never before used the faux sound effects lead that appears above. So. okay, why now?

I’ve always assumed and will continue to assume until the universe corrects me, that the aforementioned lead, perpetrated by a legion of journalists ever since comics have come to the attention of the multitudes, was inspired by the Batman television show that was aired on ABC from 1966 to 1968. Clever, y’know. Catchy. The video folk, in turn, got the faux onomatopoeia from old comic books; the stunt was, they superimposed these sound effects, lettered in garish display fonts, over fight scenes. The overarching agenda was to spoof Batman comics, particularly the Batman comics of the previous decade, by juggling contexts and emphasizing the goofy.

Batman as self-satirizing comedian? Okay by me.

But this form of comedy was much of a particular time and place, a brief, shimmering few years when the nation was in an experimental and iconoclastic mood. The mood changed – don’t they always, darn ‘em! – and after three seasons, Batman-the-television-star left the airwaves, and Batman-the-comedian joined the ranks of the unresurrected.

I’ll testify that comedian Batman deserves a place in the Batman pantheon and I’m sure that the show has its partisans, maybe fierce partisans. But is the world clamoring for a return of this odd form of humor? As I suggested a paragraph ago, it was unique to time/place Or so I’ve been believing.

People at DC Comics apparently believe I’m wrong. Our friends at the Comic Book Resources website inform us that “DC Comics will expand its digital-first comics line this summer with the debut of Batman 66, a series based on the classic television series.”

A number of ways this could go. Try to recreate the spoofy sensibility of the original. Do the comic as a period piece. Play Batman as a comedian using contemporary humor. Structure the stories as the old tv episodes were structured, with a cliff hanger half way through the story. Or do self-contained stories, the kind that were a staple of the old comics. Or do open-ended serials. Preserve the cast of the original. Recast with Batman’s current supporting characters. Mix and match all the preceding or – astonish and delight me with something I haven’t thought of.

I can’t help wondering how this project originated. From whence came the idea – editorial department or marketing department? Or some department in California? Not that it makes a lot of difference; there’s no mandated origin site for good stuff. But if there’s a reason to be skeptical, it might be that folk who can get projects going remember the joy that got from some entertainment when they were children and believe that the entertainment was supplying the job and not their own curiosity and innocence and, further, that they can recreate what they liked and, further still, that today’s audience will respond to the same kind of entertainment.

Let’s open our minds and see what happens.

Note: Thanks to Darren Vincenzo for alerting me to this column’s subject.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martha Thomases: Robert Morales

Robert Morales 2 I don’t even remember the first time I met Bob Morales.  We might have met when he was an intern at the Village Voice and I was a freelance writer, but I have no memory of that.  When I was publicity manager at DC Comics, he was always around.  As a writer and editor – for Reflex, for Publishers Weekly, for Vibe – he was an invaluable asset for me to exploit.

But he was so much more.

Bob was a world-class gossip.  If you read Bleeding Cool over the last 20 years, you’ve read one of Bob’s stories.  He would, occasionally, let me use him to snipe at someone who was annoying me, on the condition that Bob agreed the person in question deserved it (he always agreed).

Bob was a brilliant writer, of comics and of prose.  Most comics fans know him from his work on Captain America, but he was a brilliant critic, and an hilarious comedian.  He wanted to do an Elseworlds Batman story with Mark Twain as Batman, just so he could refer to “Twain Manor.”

Bob was connected.  He was editor and literary executor for writer Samuel R. Delany, and he helped put together the graphic novel Delany wrote, illustrated by Mia Wolff.  He helped me to get this interview with Harlan Ellison.  He talked about working with Neil Gaiman on packaging a line of public-domain novels.  He knew everyone in science fiction.  He knew everyone in hip-hop.

Bob was vicious.  If you ever crossed him (and didn’t try to correct your mistake), you were on the list.  And if you were on the list, he would do everything he could to destroy you.  Because he was so connected, that meant a lot.  If he found out you were looking for a new job, he’d make sure the stories of your treachery reached human resources at your hoped-for employer.

And yet …

Bob was a pussycat.  If you were his friend, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for you, as Heidi describes in this memory.  He always called you on your birthday.  He called all his friends who were moms on Mothers Day, and all his friends who were dads on Fathers Day.  He called me on every Jewish holiday.  He was thoughtful in ways that were unpredictable and touching.

Bob was my family.  He babysat for my son, and told me stories about my son’s other life, when he was his own person and not just my kid.  He introduced me to the woman who became not only one of my best friends, but also my son’s West Coast mom.  He stayed in my apartment when we went out of town so the cats wouldn’t have to be alone.  Quite often – almost always – some horrible mechanical event would occur in my building, and he would deal with it.

This is from Alan Moore (slightly edited), sent to be read at Bob’s funeral.

“I’m going to miss the savvy New York creak his conversation had as much as I will surely miss his writing; the commitment, insight and rare passion that he brought to every story, ever feature, every line. One of the comic field’s conspicuously rare voices of colour, he was also one of its most gifted and original contemporary writers. As a genuine creator of integrity, inevitably he came into conflict with an industry that much prefers a bland subservience in its employees to the fierce, ungovernable talent of an actual artist who has something deeply felt to say and does not care to compromise a work which he or she believes in…Moving with no apparent effort between his extraordinarily diverse realms of endeavour, Bob was like a human cultural adhesive that connected up a vast cobweb of people who, in every probability, would never have been introduced to one another save through him. One of the last authentic hipsters, he was sharp, astute, and very, very funny. If I’m honest it might be his anecdotes that I’ll miss most of all, the unexpected courtesy and deference extended to him by a crowd of strangers at a party whom, it transpired, had been informed Bob was a Puerto Rican mafia prince… Robert Morales had a fine and blazing life, a side or two of classic vinyl that I’m convinced will replay unendingly, just as I entirely expect to pick the ’phone up for an interview with Vibe, one day back in the hectic1980s, and commence a long, sweet friendship full of warmth and great ideas and lots of memorable laughs.  So long for now, Bob, from me and Melinda, and I’m looking forward to enjoying that mafia anecdote again.

The last time I saw Bob was on Saturday, April 13.  He’d been taking care of my cat while I was in Japan, and while I was gone he came down with a stomach flu.  He swore he was over it, but he insisted on doing the laundry before he left.  While we waited on the machines, we watched Rock of Ages on HBO, agreeing that Mary J. Blige should have been the main story, and that Catherine Zeta-Jones looked like Marie Osmond.

When he left, he said he was glad he could help me get away for a real vacation.  I think –  I hope – I told him I loved him.  On Thursday, I got the call that he had died.

Bob was a talker.  He’d call and say, “Hey, got a minute?” and you’d be on the phone for an hour, minimum.  I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this new free time, but it won’t be nearly as much fun, nor as valuable, as what I did with Bob.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

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Dennis O’Neil: Flying High

61Y3TyHFBiL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX285_SY380_CR,0,0,285,380_SH20_OU01_Larry Tye’s book was on the living room shelf for a month or more before I got around to reading it last week, and I’m not exactly sure why. I‘ve spent time with Larry and never doubted that he’d do good work, and he was kind enough to mention me in his biography, Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero.  But whatever the reason for my tardiness, I’ll mark it “happy” because when I did finally delve into the book, it happened to be during Superman’s 75th birthday week. (Note to casual fans: the Man of Steel’s debut was on April 18th, 1938.)

And here it was, the whole story: the early lives of Superman’s creators, a couple of Jewish kids from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster; their attempts to sell their brainchild as a comic strip before they finally placed it at a comic book publisher that later became, and remains, DC Comics; the instant success, and then the deluge – radio shows, movies, novels, early television, recent television, trading cards, cereal boxes, animation, lunch boxes, Halloween costumes and everything I’m forgetting to mention. Larry Tye covers it all with a skillful combination of contemporary reporting and historicity.

The story isn’t always pretty. It has its share of sleaze. The most familiar scandal concerns the death of television’s first Man of Steel, George Reeves, found shot to death in his Hollywood bedroom with a gun at his feet. Suicide? Maybe. But there are doubts. That was the ugliness that made the papers, was the subject of other books, and was even the basis for a movie starring Ben Affleck.

The rest of the dubious behavior wasn’t as sensational – no slain actors – and mostly happened behind doors and walls.

I was around for some of it – that is, I was working for DC and even wrote the flagship Superman title for a year. Being close to the hub of big-time comics (though not very close) I must have heard rumors, and I did have a rough notion of the tribulations of Superman’s creators, and hey, I’m not immune to gossip, but I guess I wasn’t more than casually interested. I walked past those doors and walls, but I was never invited inside, and might not have cared to be. I mean, wouldn’t they have wanted me to wear a tie?

Good or bad, my ignorance? I don’t know. I can’t see how getting the inside dirt would have enhanced my scripts.

Would it have lessened them – maybe provide a distraction from the tasks at hand? Again, I don’t know. Never will, and don’t have to. But the information itself? That I’m glad to have, and I’m grateful to Larry Tye for providing it.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

 

 

Mike Gold: The Big Booth 1105 Crossover

imagesIt was fated to happen. ComicMix is participating in our very first crossover.

This coming weekend – as in Friday, Saturday and Sunday – ComicMix will once again be appearing at the C2E2 comics and pop culture convention at Chicago’s McCormick Place, on the scenic downtown shore Lake Michigan near the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Natural History Museum, and that formerly beautiful football (and, next March, hockey) stadium Soldier (sic) Field – before that hideous flying saucer landed on top of it.

More prestigious still, we ComicMixers will be teaming up with our good buddies at Unshaven Comics. This means the “good” Marc Alan Fishman will be appearing at the same booth as the “evil” Marc Alan Fishman. And if they inadvertently touch… well, let’s just say people will stop bitching about Mrs. O’Leary’s improperly defamed cow.

Representing ComicMix: Glenn Hauman, Adriane Nash, either the good or the evil Marc Alan Fishman (I can never tell which one is which) and yours fairly truly. We will be making two – count ‘em two ­– major announcements at the show, each of which will be promptly detailed in this slice of the etherverse. I won’t tip our collective hand, but I will say this: the second of these announcements will reveal what “CMPS” stands for. I mean this in the acronymical sense, and not in any ethical sense. Certainly not.

We’ll be at booth 1105 in case you didn’t read the headline, and you should because the editor-in-chief spends a lot of time obsessing over them. We eagerly await the opportunity to meet you. Unless you’re rude or insulting; then, we eagerly await the opportunity to let out our pent-up convention aggression. In my case, well, I’ve been going to comic book conventions for 45 years now. But I also used to be among the crowd that founded and ran the amazingly perfect Chicago Comicon, so I know this won’t be an issue.

Truth be told, I like Chicago conventions that are actually held within the city limits. There’s a bunch of reasons for this: the fans are amazingly friendly, the food is unbelievable, the city is everything great that New York City says it is but isn’t and can never be, and – most important – the Fire Marshal, for some odd reason, actually enforces the fire laws at massive conglomerations of humans and paper goods.

Holy Odin’s Eyehole, I’m gotta get it from insecure New Yorkers, aren’t I? Well, as you read this I’m already in Chicago (meetings, meetings, meetings; all at amazing restaurants) so I can only respond in person on the convention floor. Please re-read the sentence above about rude or insulting people and my 45 years of pent-up convention aggression.

We’re gonna have us a swell time. And to take tongue out of cheek for a rare moment, I hope you-all can share those swell times with us.

I hope to see you this weekend.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

 

Martha Thomases: Transgender Mindbender?

Thomases Art 130419While I was out of the country, there was apparently a media kerfuffle about the introduction of a transgender character in the pages of Gail Simone’s Batgirl. There were stories in the LGBT press, in USA Today, and on comics sites (here) (and here too).

A lot of these stories said that this was the first transgender character to appear in a mainstream comic, and I don’t think that’s true. There was a transgendered character in Mike Barr and Brian Bolland’s Camelot 3000, published by DC. The lead in Milestone’s Deathwish from the 1990s was transgendered, and that book was distributed by DC, which to my mind makes it mainstream. It was also quite a beautiful mini-series, and I really can’t recommend it highly enough. There were also several transgender characters in various Vertigo series.

However, I’ll accept that these were seen by fewer people than a Batbook.

The reaction by the audience for these books has, for the most part, been better than I predicted. Relatively few people are calling it a “publicity stunt,” and those who do seem to not understand what a publicity stunt actually is. For example, I seriously doubt that DC’s publicist went to Gail Simone and asked her to introduce a transgendered character.

When I was DC’s publicist, I would have been fired for trying to influence a storyline. The closest I came was suggesting to Neil Gaiman that he might enjoy the chance to do a public service comic about HIV. And even then, there were lots and lots of corporate hoops through which I had to jump, not because of any political controversy but because of a corporate culture that respected the separation of editorial and marketing.

And then there are the people who get defensive. For example, in the second article to which I linked above, there is this in the comments thread:

• I think all DC characters should become lesbians,gay and transgendered.

• Why?

• Because the majority of DC’s audience is.

• Mainstream America stopped reading DC comic books a long time ago. Respectfully, “The Amazing Stam,” Make Mine Marvel!

There are so many things wrong with this. For one thing, I don’t think Marvel’s audience is significantly larger than DC’s, and, in fact, I suspect there is a tremendous amount of overlap. For another, there are transgender characters on television shows like Glee, which have a larger audience than DC and Marvel combined. And, finally, it is disturbing that in 2013, this moron still thinks it is an insult to suggest that DC’s audience is queer.

Whenever a character is introduced who is not a straight, white Christian male, there is inevitably someone who complains that this is done because the creative team is being “PC.” It is impossible for these critics to imagine that creators could find diversity interesting in and of itself, or want to reflect the world in which they live. Perhaps the creators want to challenge themselves to imagine different ways of being human. I never hear anyone complain that someone who writes stories about straight, white Christian people is pushing a political agenda.

Because I’m still jet-lagged, I haven’t read Batgirl #19 yet, as I write this. I plan to get it this week, when I go to Forbidden Planet for my regular fix.

I hope it’s not sold out.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

Dennis O’Neil Is Not Jules Feiffer?

O'Neil Art 130418So there I was, standing in…no, make that sitting in for Jules Feiffer at MoCCA, a two-day long expo-type event sponsored by the Museum of Comic Art and held at the big armory on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. Talk about your bait-and-switch…folks come expecting to see and hear one of our era’s defining and multifaceted talents, a man who has done exemplary work in cartoons, playwriting, screen writing – an innovator and astute observer of manners and morals, a social commentator…This is the giant they anticipated and instead they got…me. Sitting, not standing, on a platform with Peter Kuper, Gabrielle Bell and Paul Levitz. talking about comics and the counterculture.

It’s a big and pretty complex topic and Jules Feiffer – the real Jules Feiffer – might have done it justice. Me – not so much.

Though the kind of comics I’ve been professionally involved in were a far stretch from the innovative, angry, and occasionally profane “undergrounds” that emerged from the turmoil of the Sixties, I guess the superhero stuff I did qualifies as at least marginally countercultural because, after the witch-hunting Fifties, comics of any ilk were not respectable. (Didn’t the Catholic Digest say they were trash? Weren’t there public comic book burnings? Didn’t that some senator or other hold hearings about them?) But, though we did hiccup out a bit of social satire/commentary here and there, we were never in the business of putting it to the man, making granny blush, calling for revolution.

Okay, maybe Feiffer didn’t work those sides of the street, either. Not exactly. But the kind of humor he practiced in his eponymous feature, first in The Village Voice and later in syndication, helped create the societal climate in which authority could be questioned – even mocked! – and the nooks and crannies of our national psyche theretofore ignored by our purveyors of comedy could be acknowledged and explored.

Now, some 55 years later, we can watch Louis CK push in the same direction.

Feiffer’s been on my radar since the aforementioned Fifties and I don’t know who put him there. Somehow, in St. Louis, attending a Jesuit university, I came into possession of Sick Sick Sick, a paperback collection of Feiffer’s early Voice pieces and…well, it wasn’t the brain-wrencher that Kerouac’s On The Road was to be, or, in a very different way, Salinger’s short stories were. But I thought it was funny and it was differently funny and that difference hinted at something out there, beyond the limits of school and parish and neighborhood, something past the boundary of the Mississippi, something that would be good for me to know.  Something that would nourish me.

Something that eventually put me onstage with Bell, Kuper, and Levitz, filling a seat meant for Jules Feiffer and grateful for the opportunity.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

 

Martha Thomases’ Japan

Our columnist Martha Thomases has spent the past two weeks in Japan with her son, Arthur Tebbel. By all reports, they’ve had a swell time. Here’s some of it, in her own words and pictures:

m1Kyoto is a city I have always wanted to visit.  The traditional Capitol of Japan is known for its beauty and history, its cultural importance. Naturally, the first place I went when we arrived was the Kyoto International Manga museum. The building, a former elementary school, has a collection of more than 300,000 volumes, as well as a great deal of original art.  In addition to the permanent collection, there are special shows as well. This is the current show.  Not really graphic story, but an assortment of panels by international artists.  I am embarrassed to say that the only name I recognized was Mike Mignola.m2

 

Everywhere you look, there are books.  The shelves on the walls are higher than you could possibly reach.

 

m3The permanent exhibition shows the history and techniques of the form.  This, I believe, is the “Biff! Bam! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids!” of Japan.

 

Here is some original art, I think.  Really pretty stuff.m4

 

They consider cosplay to be part of manga.  This is a current exhibit linking these two powerful cultural exports.

m5

 

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

 

 

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