We’ve been pretty grim, these last couple of weeks, so I thought maybe I should lighten up. What I thought I’d do, last night, was take my place at the computer and spin some wordfluffle suitable for submission to ComixMix and then…what? Continue existing? But before I could get to it, I saw the news window on the screen and learned that some lone gunman – anything familiar in those words? – had killed six Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple before being himself gunned down by police. We don’t yet know why. We probably won’t be too surprised when we do.
The politicians – no surprise here – beat me to the fluffle. The same dreary litanies we hear so often: hearts and prayers going out to and deep sadness and troubled days ahead… Democrat, Republican, independent all saying the same thing and in so doing actually saying nothing.
Look: I get ritual. I don’t much like it and I’m no good at it, but I think I understand it. Somebody dies or gets married or gives birth and you recite some variation of a limited set of sentiments and it’s not the words that have meaning, it’s the act of saying them. We use these formulae to console and rejoice and lament because, really, language isn’t up to these primal needs and so we let the clichés act as signifiers to express what resists expression. And that’s all good.
But when ambitious strangers say the words? When they claim that a tragedy that happened to strangers makes their hearts heavy? Allow us, please, to doubt. Allow us to at least suppose that the ambitious ones are using tragic occasions, at the very least, only because the recitation of the words is expected of them or, even less admirably, to further their own agendas. The word for this is hypocrite.
Let’s agree that hypocrisy stands pretty far down in the catalogue of major transgressions, and I’d have no serious quarrel with it if it were followed by action of some kind. Any kind. We’re not advocating anything draconian here. We’re not even advocating a program of legislation and, to be honest, I doubt that any single law or even set of laws will solve the problems that lay deep in the senseless acts of violence that are happening again and again and again.
But shouldn’t we start? Somewhere? As Jon Stewart pleaded, let’s agree to discuss everything, openly and honestly, with nothing withheld from consideration. Then maybe the hollow words will begin to have meaning.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases and the Fanboy Politicians
Here’s a sucky way to spend one’s birthday: voiceless with a serious summer head cold. Bitch, bitch; moan, moan. Okay, I had a great day-before-my-birthday in Manhattan lunching with Danny Fingeroth and dinnering with fellow ComicMixer Martha Thomases. Nine hours of fantastic conversation in the best thing in life with your clothes on.
Sadly, as the overly-breaded but otherwise tasty General Tzu’s was being presented to me at our Greenwich Village dungeon of culinary delight, I was starting to sound like a frog in a blender. By the time I was on the subway back to Grand Central Terminal, I was grateful somebody bothered to invent texting. The gifted Miss Adriane picked me up and dragged me home. That was birthday-eve.
On birthday day, we first had to ransom my car back from the shop – I can’t complain; 100,000 miles on one battery is pretty damn good and I guess you really do need functioning breaks. After a quick stop at Walgreens to clean them out of toxic chemicals and chocolate Twizzlers, we returned home. As Miss Adriane procured the prerequisite chicken soup, I retired to celebrate the anniversary of my mother’s major inconvenience in a time-honored way: I picked up my stack of comic books (e-comics; I’m nothing if not hip and trendy in my dotage) and commenced to read.
As luck would have it, there wasn’t a winner in the bunch. Only one or two sucked; the rest were poignantly mediocre. This is not to say that I hadn’t read some worthy stuff while on the train to Manhattan – I consumed all the good stuff as a matter of fate and ill-planning. But you’d think that out of a dozen or so hand-picked titles, there’d be at least one that reaffirmed my fannish enthusiasm. Let us remember: I was under the weather, and my cockles needed to be warmed.
There were three New 52 titles in the electronic pile. All 12th issues. None motivated me to pick up the 13th, two months hence. There are a number of New 52ers I really enjoy: Batgirl, Batwoman, All-Star Western, and everything with the words “written by James Robinson” on the credits page. These weren’t them. The most enjoyable of the DC books was, oddly, the only Before Watchman mini I’m reading: Night Owl, and that’s because I’d read prescription warning labels if Joe Kubert drew them. Reading Kubert, for me, is a lot like drinking chicken soup. You might have to be Ashkenazi to fully grok that.
The Marvel titles were okay; slightly better in that none chased me away. But, damn, why is it that each and every good Marvel “event” series has four times as many issues as necessary? Okay, we know the answer to that one. Still, the Avengers Vs. X-Men series was established to put Marvel on a somewhat different course for a while and it’s doing its job. It’s not a reboot, it’s just your standard dramatic shuffling of the Marvel deck. But it should have been over by now.
The so-called indies were all over the map as they are supposed to be, so my luck of the draw was simply a bad hand. No, not bad. Just mediocre. Too many unnecessary middle-issues in overly long story arcs. I regret the day publishers decided to put six solid pages of story in each 24-page issue, and I look forward to our next GrimJack series to once again prove you can actually put 28 pages of story into a 24-page issue… without being Stan Freberg, and, yes, that was just to see if Mark Evanier’s paying attention.
Okay, all that sucked. On the other side of the scale, I got more than 200 emails and Facebook shout-outs from friends old and new. That’s great anytime, but after a speechless day of aches and not-breathing and a dozen mediocre comics, all that made be feel on top of the world. And not in the Cody Jarrett sense, either. To one and all, my deepest thanks.
Daughter Adriane and I finished the day watching Paul, a genuinely funny and essentially heartwarming movie written by and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I’m a sucker for anything with Jane Lynch that doesn’t involve high schoolers spontaneously combusting into song, and Pegg and Frost have never disappointed me.
Moral of the story: when you’re feeling low, reach for something positive and funny. Tomorrow is… another day.
Thursday: Dennis O’Neil… Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?
There was something I wanted to discuss…what the devil was it? Something about a theater in Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming – one of those cowboy states. But have you heard about that movie star from the vampire flicks and how she admitted to cheating on her boyfriend? Boy! Wasn’t that something? Wonder if they’ll get back together. I kind of hope so because it’s always sad when young love goes blooey, though that seems to be mostly what young love does. These days, anyhow. Now when we were young… Oh wait. I did get dumped at tender age 21, didn’t I? Well, good luck to the youngsters, anyway.
Back to that cowboy state – was it a movie theater or some other kind of theater? A music hall, maybe?
And speaking of music… Elton John’s kid is just turning one year old. Bet Elton throws him a heck of a party.
And while we’re on the subject of music…Did you hear that JLo is quitting American Idol? You’ve got to wonder what that’s really about. She says she wants to devote herself to performing, but Idol’s ratings are sinking and has it been the same since Simon Cowell split? Some might say yes, some might say no. Me – I’m just asking.
Seen any of the Olympics? Monday Michael Phelps got his Speedo kicked. Came in fourth in a swim race. Fourth! Michael Phelps! Last Olympics, he medaled eight times and now…a fourth. You know, he was caught in a photo smoking weed, or at least holding the kind of pipe used to smoke weed – I forget the details – and you gotta wonder… I mean, they say that weed doesn’t hurt athletics – “they” being weed smokers – but still…
Did that business in the cowboy state –was it Texas? – have anything to do with smoking in a theater? Or maybe smoking out on the prairie, where the deer and the antelope play? Maybe smoking is allowed in theaters west of, say, Kansas. I can’t remember when I was in a western theater, but I’m sure I must have been in one some time – probably during one of my visits to California. Don’t recall what the smoking situation was.
One more item before we abandon the Olympics… did you see that some of the athletes got in trouble for pictures they posted online, or Tweeted, or something like that? One of those cyber things that seem to consume people my children’s age, or maybe younger. Yes, let’s say younger! I don’t know what the pictures showed, but how bad could they be? A shot of somebody smoking weed? Would that be considered bad? I mean, didn’t the president admit to trying the stuff at a party?
Wait! The president and his chief opponent and that western state… Something about what those guys are saying? Or not saying?
Well, end of the day, who cares? I mean, whatever happened happened last week – ancient history, no? And there are so many other things to think about.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases and her Green Lantern Problem
It is one of the universe’s pointless ironies that the horror in Colorado happened at the showing of a Batman movie. Despite the grimness in the Batman mythos, the character has neither been an advocate of violence, nor an apologist for it.
Not that I think it’s necessary, but let’s put out a few reminders anyway:
The only time Batman used a gun was in a very early story when the character was still in the process of forming.
Similarly: the mature Batman has eschewed lethal force of any kind.
A couple of decades ago, John Reisenbach, the son of a colleague, was shot to death on Jane Street in Greenwich Village – one of those senseless urban crimes that will probably never be solved. At the urging of Jenette Kahn, and under my editorship, John Ostrander wrote a fine Batman story about city streets and guns in reaction to our coworker’s tragedy. The story, titled “Seduction of the Gun,” was later credited with helping to pass anti-gun legislation in Virginia.
A final example: In the movie that was showing in Colorado, Batman has a line forbidding another character to use firearms.
So it wasn’t our fault, and, happily, the only press I’ve seen tying the massacre to comics was in New York’s Daily News, which cited a Frank Miller story in which similar gun violence was committed. But even that piece quoted Brad Meltzer’s observation that Batman has been vocally anti-gun for these many years.
So it wasn’t our fault and it wasn’t the fault of anything the gunman read or saw or played. All extant evidence indicates that normal, psychologically healthy individuals and not prompted to atrocity by anything in the media. And the unhealthy? That’s scary and I’ve experienced occasional momentary uneasiness when I’ve had a hero in something I’m writing use lots of physical force to solve some problem. Was I setting a bad example? I don’t think so. Like it or not, we humans have aggression in our nature – that ol’ devil Evolution again – and if that weren’t true, we probably wouldn’t be entertained by depictions of warriors doing their thing. The earliest stories we have – and a good bit of what’s known as Scripture – are full of bloodletting.
Maybe the tactic for us modern storytellers is not to glorify the violence. Sometimes it’s necessary to use force in defense of self or other, sometimes the skills of the warrior are valuable. And, arguably, warriors are legitimate heroes. But, in our stories, let’s not glory in our characters’ infliction of pain and death. That glorification might be the line between heroism and sadism.
None of this is of any use to the people in Colorado and I’m too cynical to say that some good will come of it all. I don’t believe that much good came from the Columbine massacre or the Gabrielle Giffords shooting or the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan or the murder of John F. Kennedy or the million gun death that have happened in our nation since the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
Maybe the best we can hope for is that we will stop blaming movies and television for these indescribably sad events and have the courage to begin investigating the real causes. It is a forlorn hope, but it may be the best we have.
First, the good news. Scientists are prepared to say that, definitely, god exists.
Now the bad. (He) (she) (it)…oh dang, there are really no appropriate pronouns for a concept that transcends the very idea of gender. Let’s settle for “they” and start again: They – the god thingies – are called “Higgs bosuns,” nicknamed “god particles,” and they permeate the universe. And without them, nothing could exist, could ever have existed. (Unless, that is, there’s a kind of reality we can’t comprehend, and we’re not exactly willing to rule that out, but we’ll never know and anyhow, who cares?) Although physicists have been seeking the Higgs for a half-century because the accepted model of the universe indicated that the things had to be there, it wasn’t until July 4 that they were prepared to say, yep found it. I understand that there was some celebrating in the Land of Labs.
Me, I got my science fix when I went to see The Amazing Spider-Man at the local monsterplex and, later, caught a few minutes of Superman on the tube: the first big-budget Superman, released in 1978 and hyped with the line, “You’ll believe a man can fly.” (For the record, I didn’t.) That flick has flaws, but it’s pretty good, especially for something made when Hollywood was just beginning to learn how to make these kinds of entertainments. The only part I really dislike is the ending: the graphics, though they tell the story, are pretty crude compared to what’s preceded them. And the science…oh woe – the science. (If you want to consider this a spoiler alert, suit yourself.) Lois Lane dies in an earthquake and Superman flies counterclockwise around the Earth and thus – ready for this? – reverses time and goes back to before Lois died and happy endings all around.
Reverses time, does he? By flying counterclockwise. Uh huh.
Nothing in the Spidey flick is quite so nettlesome, but in this reinvention, the film folk chose to explain Spidey’s ability to shoot webs huge distances and make them, apparently, as strong as the occasion warrants the same way Stan Lee and Steve Ditko explained it in the first Spider-Man comic book story, way back in 1962: A teenage Spidey, who gets really good grades in science class, having acquiring amazing powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider, goes home and, you know, tinkers around and comes up with a gadget that a) does the web shooting stuff and b) is compact enough to be worn like an oversize wrist watch.
So: if he commanded such technology, why didn’t he use it for much greater good than he could achieve as a costumed vigilante and, incidentally, plunk his saintly Aunt May down in some swell digs?
For the same reason that Superman didn’t use his godlike time reversal stunt to undo every single bad thing on the whole planet? (I mean saving Lois was nice and all, but…war! Famine! Disease!)
Of course, this kind of story is basically fantasy and, I guess, we all have a private setting for our willing suspension of disbelief. I complain about plot devices that violate the story’s own “reality” and haul us out of the fiction while we try figure out how we’re supposed to accept what we’ve just seen.
Since, in superhero writing, there is a long tradition of writers using whatever’s in the zeitgeist at the moment, I expect we’ll be seeing some costumed dogooder involved with Higgs bosuns pretty soon. I hope I don’t have to mangle my willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy the story, god particle or no god particle.
My thanks to Martha Thomases for her column this week. In it she confessed to having a fondness for the 1980 Flash Gordon film that started the immortal Sam Jones and Max Van Sydow. It’s bad film and she knows it but she has legit reasons for her fondness of it. Martha, just so you know, the 2007 SyFy TV series is much worse, not even having space ships, for crying out loud! Flash Gordon without space ships?! Talk about not getting the concept!
I say thank you because I had no idea what I was going to do for my column this week and now I do. There are bad films and one CD that I know are horrible but I felt a compulsion to go out and buy a copy of them. This isn’t the same as the weird films of which I own a copy and that I like – things such as Incident At Loch Ness, Get Crazy and, soon, Troll Hunter. These are all justifiable. Not the ones I’m about to talk about; uh-uh, these are plain bad and they are not recommended for viewing. Just to be clear about that.
First up – Barb Wire starring Pamela Lee Anderson. I may have talked about this one before but I stumbled on it one late night on TV while scanning the cable for something to occupy my sleepless mind.
The movie is based on a comic put out by Dark Horse at one point, part of their Heroes Greatest World series of superheroes. I wrote one of those comics for a while and I knew all the other titles. As I said, Pamela Lee Anderson starred in the movie and I lingered, waiting to see if she would take off her clothes, which is the main reason for any guy to watch a Pamela Lee Anderson movie.
I came in after the film started and then watched in horror as I became aware that the movie was an update of Casablanca into a future setting and featuring Pammie in the Humphrey Bogart part. ‘Nuff said? Nuff said.
And then there’s The Return Of Captain Invincible from 1983, a superhero spoof from Australia starring Adam Arkin in tights as the titular hero and Christopher Lee as his archenemy, Mister Midnight. Lee sings in this, by the way. Did I mention there are some songs sprinkled throughout? Not enough to make it a musical, just enough to not make sense – which fits right in with the rest of the movie. The lyrics to some of them were done by Richard O’Brien who wrote the original musical play of Rocky Horror Show and as an actor he was also in, among other things, Martha’s guilty pleasure, Flash Gordon.
I could run through the plot of Captain Invincible but – why?
Next on my list of very dubious pleasures – Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter. Yes, you read that right. It’s a kung fu movie that has Jesus returning to Earth and winding up fighting as a king fu warrior against hordes of vampires, including lesbian ones, with the aide of a masked Mexican wrestler, Santo Enmascardo de Plata. Hmm. I may need to re-write that sentence; it makes the film sound too interesting.
Oh, and it also has a song in it. One. Right in the middle of the film. Why? Who knows.
Finally, there’s a CD – Pat Boone’s In A Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy from 1997 in which Pat covers heavy metal and hard rock songs with big band arrangements. Oh, and on the cover he wears black leather pants and matching vest – no shirt. Get that picture out of your mind if you can.
I don’t know if I’ve ever listened to the whole thing.
My friend, Bill Nutt, used to have a weekly radio show and, on occasion, I would be invited in as a guest and allowed to select some of the music. I told My Mary one such time to listen in because I would be dedicating a song to her.
That week I also played one of the cuts from In A Metal Mood and it played before Mary’s song came on. When I got back home, Mary demanded why I made her listen to the Pat Boone cut. In an unwise moment, I admitted neither Bill nor I had actually listened to it; we turned down the studio monitor once it came on.
That did not go down well. She has since forgiven me but I doubt she will ever forget my doing that to her.
What unites all these choices is the fact that I own a copy of each and every one of them. I can’t explain to you why these and not the other very bad CDs and DVDs that are out there. The selection probably says something about me and its probably not good.
And, Martha? Flash Gordon is superior to any of them.
Pop culture can be a funny thing. I don’t mean “Ha ha” funny, although that is also sometimes true. I mean funny as in a head-shaking “Ain’t that a bitch,” kind of way.
For example, yesterday I went to see Ted. I didn’t want to, but it was the Number One box office hit this weekend and my son, the genius, is doing a blog on the subject, and he was in town for the Del Close Marathon. It’s not a very good movie, in my opinion, but I’m not a huge fan of Seth McFarlane. He’s okay, and I will always support him because his work points out the blistering hypocrisy of our shared alma mater . And I like fart jokes more than the average little old Jewish lady.
Still, I found myself tearing up. Did the film have unexpected emotional depth? No. What it had was a million references to Flash Gordon.Flash Gordon is a terrible movie I saw in 1980 when it was released, with co-columnist Denny O’Neil. It was so deliberately and hilariously bad that I dragged my husband to see it immediately. We own it in at least two different formats. I got him a signed photo of Melody Anderson for an anniversary present. Over the years, we found more opportunities to exclaim “Not the bore worms!” than you would think could credibly arise.
We find each other through shared interests. I met my husband because we both admired Paul Krassner. We laughed at a lot of the same things. He wasn’t into comics, but we found common ground in our appreciation of R. Crumb and Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. Our tastes weren’t the same, but I was not surprised when he liked Scott McCloud’s Zot!at least as much as I did.
What really bonded us, however, was seeing Pinocchio together at the Annecy Animation Festival. It was 1979, our first trip to Europe together. Annecy is a lovely little town in the French Alps. We were staying in a room in a charming small hotel that, when we went to take a nap with the window open, filled with cats.
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson were guests of the festival, and we got to hang out with them. I hadn’t seen Pinocchio since I was a child, and couldn’t remember the way it ended at all (too frightening). Watching it with John, seeing what a perfect film it was, made me love him even more.
Love is about a lot of things, but if you can’t share pleasure, there’s not much point to it.
Thank you, Seth McFarlane, for reminding me of those fun times. And also, the Ryan Reynolds cameo. That was great.
The other writer on the platform was Tony Bedard and he was getting most of the questions. We were at the Supercon in Miami and our topic was the Green Lantern.
What was Tony doing there? That’s easy. He was answering questions about the current status of GL and well suited to do it, was he, being the writer of The Green Lantern Corps, one of the GL spinoffs and a part of what has become, I guess, a franchise. Tony’s in the know.
Me? Well, let’s see…I wrote the character about 40 years ago, briefly, and I can retail a factoid or two regarding his early years, in the 1940s, and I saw the movie. But the recent stuff? Nah.
And that’s what our Miami audience was interested in, the current continuity, not the senescent blathering of a fossil about what was, to them, ancient history.
Be blessed, superconners. You were right.
The study of comics’ history is a legitimate discipline, and becoming more legitimate every day – as legitimate as the study of any, ahem, art form. But it has little to do with your enjoyment of the story that you’re looking at. And as Samuel R. Delany once suggested, neither does the discovery of “respectable” historic antecedents lend any valid respectability to the story you just bought. There’s a connection between comics and the German genius Goethe? (There is, isn’t there?) Well, okay. The expressionist painter Lyonel Feininger once did comic strips? Uh huh. Patricia Highsmith and Dashiell Hammet and Stanley Kauffman once did comics? Uh huh and uh huh and uh huh. Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and modern Chinese and Japanese writing bear resemblances to comics? Okay, noted.
But what about the thing in front of you?
There are a couple of ways creative types might use the past: as examples of what not to do and as a source of ideas. They might also use it as examples of what to do, but that’s creeping toward dangerous territory. We don’t want to rehash what we loved when we were fans/readers, regardless of how many hours it brightened. Rather, we want to give our audiences the same kind of pleasure we got from our predecessors.
Let us nod in agreement with the great haiku writer Basho: Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the masters. Rather, seek what they sought.
So our friends in Florida were behaving properly when they focused on Tony Bedard and kind of ignored me and, you know, it was pretty darn hot outside that hotel – just how mythic is that global warming? – and it was not excellent weather for crying, but, heck, we take our tears where we find them…
RECOMMENDED READING:Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.
I’m tired of being an outsider! No more rebel for me! From now on, I run with the pack.
But where to begin? Why, by emulating our leaders, those wonderful ladies and gents who prowl the halls of power in our nation’s capitol. Yessir, I’m talking about Washington D.C. and I’m talking about our own Congress and we’re not playing favorites, the House or the Senate, either one will do. So, to imitate our solons…I guess I should get pissed off about something. I guess I have to! Isn’t that what the current crop of lawmakers do?
But what? The economy? Nah – everybody’s riding that hobby horse. The wars? Old news, and besides, everyone seems to be taking them for granted. Wait…I’ve got it.
The Journal News. My local newspaper.
A little context. I’m just back from the St. Louis area where I spent some coin on a couple of editions of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which Joseph Pulitzer owned before he went to east and, at the New York World, commissioned the first color comics. Now, I never worked for the PD – I reported for a much smaller sheet upstate – but it was an early part of my daily life from toddlerhood on. I guess my parents must have been subscribers.
Almost certainly, it was in the PD’s “funny pages” that I got my first exposure to panel art. Not only were there comics in the PD, at a certain time in, I guess, the 40s, those comics were in color. Not just Sundays – heck, every paper’s Sunday comics were in color – but every blessed day. I think I was on the floor of my grandmother’s living room when I opened the paper and…wow! Color comics! On a weekday! Some occasions, a kid doesn’t forget. And somewhere, Joseph Pulitzer was exalting.
So, flash forward: Last Monday, I picked up the PD, turned to the funny pages looking for my favorites and, yes, there it was, the strip that I think is tied with Doonesbury for being the best and wisest feature in all of syndication: Non Sequitur, by Wiley Post. But it was a strip! And in the Journal News, it’s a box! The editor in me wanted to know if the feature was sent in two formats or certain papers reformatted it themselves, and what effect that might have on Wiley Post’s working habits and if he has to reformat himself, why that doesn’t drive him crazy.
But, while all that gives one pause, it’s not bad. What is bad is what I saw the day before, in the PD’s Sunday funny pages: Non Sequitur. In color. On Sunday! On Sunday, dammit. Because the Journal News, though it has a Sunday comics section, which I read every week, doesn’t carry the Sunday Non Sequitur. I didn’t even know that there was a Sunday Non Sequitur before this week
Well, Journal News? I’ve been a loyal reader for 14 years and I live in Upper Nyack and I can’t help wondering what you have against doing us the service of publishing Non Sequitur seven days a week. Not six – seven. Do I hear an excuse?
“All you can do is open up the throttle all the way and keep your nose up in the air.”
First Lieutenant Meyer C. Newell
P-51 Mustang Fighter Jock
Separated from his squadron, shot up and leaking hydraulic fluid somewhere in the skies over Burma
What is the measure of success? What is the measure of failure?
In the previous three columns, I’ve told you a little bit – well, quite a bit, actually, about early failures in my life. And for a very long time I let my, uh, lack of success, hold me back, drag me down. That old albatross had a permanent nest on my shoulder. The Fantastic Four may have visited the Negative Zone, but, guys, I lived there.
In my mid-thirties I was divorced and living with my parents. Alix was two or three. She was sleeping in a portable crib, I was sleeping on a cot in the den. And then one day – sometime in my late thirties, I think – I was driving with my father in the car. I don’t remember where we were going; I think he was driving me to an appointment with one of the numerous psychiatrists and therapists I had seen in an attempt to “figure out what was wrong with me.” Oh, that was fun, let me tell you. One doctor put me through a round of physical tests and blood work to see if there was a physiological reason for my “blues.” (Tests came back. I was perfect.) Another doctor gave me his trench coat, telling me to cover up my legs because he was getting sexually excited. I went to a therapy group for newly divorced women; all I remember of that is the woman whose husband regularly beat the crap out of her. “Jesus, honey,” we would all say, “get the hell out of there.” She would just start to cry and go on and on about how much she loved him until the hour was up. We never got to talk about anything else. There was one doctor who talked to me for five minutes and gave me a prescription for Valium, the drug of choice in those days for women on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I took one Valium, fell asleep for 18 hours and dumped out the bottle. A week later I got a bill for $500.00 for “services rendered.” I called him and told him I was sending him $50.00, and just try to take me to court. Never heard from him again.
The best, though, was the shrink who was an Orthodox Jew. He told me that the only thing wrong with me was that I wasn’t married, so “I should stop dating the goyim, marry a nice Yiddisher man, and have lots of babies.”
Anyway, back to that day in the car with my dad. We weren’t talking much, just bits here and there. Suddenly my dad started talking about a mission he had been on during WW II. It had been a bombing and strafing mission somewhere in Burma, the objective being to destroy the latest installment of the railroad the Japanese were building – see The Bridge On The River Kwai for reference. They had met a lot of resistance, and on one strafing run my father’s P-51 got hit up badly. One of the hydraulic lines was hit, and he couldn’t keep up with the rest of the squadron on their flight back to the base. They had to leave him.
“Wow, Daddy, what did you do?” I asked. (The answer is above.) And then he said, “Know what I’m saying?”
And the light bulb suddenly clicked on over my head, just like in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. “Thufferin’ Thuccosthasth!” I said. “I do!” (No, not really. I mean, yeah, the light bulb went on, but I didn’t suddenly start sputtering and slovering like Sylvester the Cat.)
I’m not saying that all of a sudden my life was a bed of roses and that everything was hunky-dory. No. Quite the opposite. It took finding the right therapist. It took swallowing my pride and starting on an anti-depressant. But mostly it took a lot of hard work, a lot of tears, a lot of self-recrimination. Most of all, self-forgiveness.
These days I wonder. All my failures – but were they really failures? Weren’t they just part of the pattern that’s made me who I am today? And any failures, any successes that I continue to experience will just add to that person who I will be tomorrow, next week, next month, next year or in a decade.
These days most people would say that my life is a success. Well, I don’t know about that, but if it is, it didn’t happen without failures, some my own, some caused by outside factors. For instance, two years ago I got laid off. (Yes, Virginia, registered nurses do get laid off these days.) It sucked. I cried. I ranted. I worked at a couple of hospitals I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to. (Well, maybe I would.) But I also went back to school and finished my BSN, opening up new doors for me.
As for my other career, the one in comics? A lot of people in the comics industry have commented and complimented me on my “ear for dialogue,” my ability to get into the heads of the characters I have written. Maybe that wouldn’t be true if I hadn’t lived the life I have lived. I probably would never have submitted a story to DC’s New Talent program. I wouldn’t have written When It Rains, God Is Crying, or Chalk Drawings with a certain mensch who goes by the name of George Pérez. I wouldn’t know Mike Gold or Martha Thomases or Len Wein or Karen Berger or Neil Gaiman. And I wouldn’t be here writing this column.
Black and White.
Stop and Go.
Yin and Yang.
Success and Failure.
The ups and downs of life.
TUESDAY MORNING: Can Michael Davis Possibly Still Be Black?
TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Can Emily S. Whitten Possibly Be Talking About Deadpool?
We’ve been pretty grim, these last couple of weeks, so I thought maybe I should lighten up. What I thought I’d do, last night, was take my place at the computer and spin some wordfluffle suitable for submission to ComixMix and then…what? Continue existing? But before I could get to it, I saw the news window on the screen and learned that some lone gunman – anything familiar in those words? – had killed six Sikhs in a Wisconsin temple before being himself gunned down by police. We don’t yet know why. We probably won’t be too surprised when we do.
