Tagged: Mark Twain

Dennis O’Neil Don’t Need A Weatherman…

So what’ll we call today? Well, look outside. Ever see such a gorgeous summer day?

Since I (kind of) recall that yesterday the weather map guys were predicting Tuesday storms. Maybe this is national Meteorologist Mistakes Day. You might argue that such a festivity shouldn’t exist because somewhere – lots of somewheres – the weather is conforming to weathercasters’ prognostications and so there, wherever “there” is, the weather folk are dead on.

Somewhere – perhaps in your home town – the gutters are overflowing and lightning splits the sky and thunder rumbles and you are racing down the sidewalk, your windbreaker already soaked, your hair flat against your scalp and boy, was that guy on the 11 o’clock news ever right about the kind of Tuesday was darkening the clouds.

He didn’t use the word “rotten” but he should have. Damn spacey-brained weathermen!

But you’ve reached your destination. In through the revolving door, pause to let some of the weather drip onto the floor, and then your journey continues. Past the long wooden tables – that guy on the end is snoring – and on back to the stacks, thousands of books, some of which must be a hundred years old – could Mark Twain have stopped here during his rambling days to finger one of these cracked bindings when it was still new? (How old would he have to have been?)

Now, deeper into the building, past something that would have been impossible to find here when Dad stopped to return a map – family vacation coming up! – and allowed you to wander around for a while. Comic books! That’s what wouldn’t have been allowed on the premises when you first began to cultivate your library habit. More. But regardless of how they were packaged, these comic books were trash and anyone who’d never read one would have been happy to tell you so, back then.

And finally, the books shelved against the rear wall, where the fluorescent lights were somehow dimmer and a pleasantly musty odor scented the air. It was and is the library smell and it encouraged browsing, seeking treasures you hadn’t known existed until you held them in your hands.

These days, you still browsed, but it was a different kind of browsing. You looked at pictures on computer screens and if you saw something interesting, no problem. One click and it was on its way, this thing pictured on the screen. You could browse another kind of screen, a television screen, and if something caught your attention, click! And sink into the couch to be entertained. But the hard metal and glass of your home electronics devices didn’t smell like anything in particular and so something, some tiny inconsequential something, was missing from the experience and that was not a happy thing.

Ask… who? The weatherman? Okay, yeah, sure, the weatherman. Just don’t expect good information. And happy holiday.

Dennis O’Neil: The Perils of Captain Mighty

Okay, let’s get this out of the way at the beginning: Yesterday I published a novel. The title is The Perils of Captain Mighty and the Redemption of Danny the Kid. I’ll add one more fact: The original title was The Perils of Captain Power and the Redemption of Danny the Kid, but there were a couple of still active copyrights for “Captain Power” and although these copyrights weren’t likely to cause any problems, they could, and so Power becomes Mighty and we proceed to the next paragraph.

Are you expecting a little chest-beating here? Not happening. Not that I have anything against some self-congratulation and some of the writers I most admire were not above it. To cite three, a trio of my favorite Nineteenth Century scribblers: Charles Dickens (who, according to one source “thrived in the spotlight”); Mark Twain (who, according to another, had a “flair self-promotion”); and Walt Whitman, who sought praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson and got it (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” the sage of Concord wrote in a five-page letter Whitman later used to promote his Leaves of Grass.) In my own time, I might cite Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer as writers unburdened by crippling modesty. (Anyone with absolutely nothing better to do might list a few more, but let’s hope you’re not that desperate for amusement.)

Indeed, the “book tour” has become a regular part of publishing in which a writer stumbles into a camera’s lens finder or audiences of bibliophiles and, perhaps, if luck is near, scintillates, and then goes to airports.

Ah, but what if the writer is modest? What if that person were taught, perhaps with the emphasis of a branding iron, that gentlefolk do not speak of themselves and never, ever indulge in self-praise. I guess he or she emulates another nineteenth-century New Englander and echoes Emily Dickenson: “I’m nobody.” Or the person does as an adopted New Englander named J.D. Salinger did, buys isolated lodging and hides for a few decades.

A question: Why are the people I’ve mentioned, and others, reclusive? What, exactly, is modesty/humility, anyway? Do such things even exist? I suspect that in my case they’re other words for fear though I doubt that I’ll ever be able to confirm that. We may not always call what happens to us intimidation, we shy ones, and we may not be aware that it’s there. And nobody in particular is doing the intimidating.

Meanwhile, I’ve published a book and I’d feel better if I knew that, if you read it, you won’t hate me for writing it. But it’s not your fault that you’re intimidating me.

Dennis O’Neil: Crisis On Infinite Superheroes

Simpsons Huck Finn

Cozy down on your couch and wait for it: A Supergirl series coming soon – well, in the fall – to a television set near you. And a new superhero on The Flash and what looks like some supering up of already existing character or characters on Arrow and and and…

I’ll bet the corridors of the media giants in Hollywood and New York (and Chicago? London?) are absolutely buzz with plans and proposals for more stories about that congregation who wear peculiar costumes and bash. I think they call it extending the franchise, and it is nothing new. My current favorite example from antiquity is the King Arthur saga which was kind of inspired by rales of a fifth or sixth century British ruler who fought Saxon invaders. (Did he really exist? Was he compounded of several rulers? Let us shrug and get on with it.)

Anyway, it wasn’t until the twelfth century that Arthur’s tales began to be written down and circulated, though some stuff may have been forever lost in the long gap between inspiration and dissemination. There have been adaptations and additions and redaction ever since. Almost certainly, somewhere on this green planet, someone is even now working on an Arthur piece.

That’s my current favorite example of franchise fattening in Days of Yore, but there are others, including the Tom Sawyer books – Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective – that your English teacher neglected to mention. Heck, even what is by many considered to be the best American novel ever, Huckleberry Finn, could be considered to be an early extension of the Sawyer franchise.

And here we jump over the rest of the Nineteenth Century and a big chunk of the Twentieth and look at comic books, which were in the franchise extending dodge from their earliest days. Like Tom and Huck, Superman and Batman were quite different, but in some ways similar. Superman is a big success and about a year later, voila – along comes Batman. Then the deluge. Dozens – hundreds? – of different-but-similars dotting the newsstands. And witch hunts followed by an implosion. Then, a revival, and here we are, watching superhero franchises being extended – not on cheap paper, but on highly sophisticated electronic delivery systems.

It’s about money, of course. I don’t know if the early King Arthur chroniclers were in it for the coins, but Mark Twain, hassled by money worries for much of his life, certainly had some financial motivation, and so has every professional storyteller since. There are downsides to this propagation of the superhero meme; attraction of creators who have no genuine liking for the material and hence to it badly and hence give others a bad rep; audience difficulty in telling one hero from the other; a dilution of what makes a character unique and interesting; and old-fashioned weariness with the genre.

But I’m of a mind to believe that none of the above guarantees inferior story quality. It’s the recipe, not the ingredients, that’s crucial.

After all, Huckleberry Finn is a pretty good read.

 

Categories

Archives

Everything you need to make great comics!

comicmix-pro-300x69-2

Nucleus X

Bookshop Zaks