Our pal Denny O’Neil usually occupies this space at this date and time. Sadly, he’s under the weather, which sucks because the weather was 60 degrees and mostly sunny in his neighborhood today.
The good news is, he’s on the mend. The bad news is, he couldn’t make this deadline. That’s fine — better Denny should take care of himself, in case he decides to enter the Iditarod or something.
He’ll be back here next time… dare I say it?… same Bat-time, same Bat-website.
FRIDAY, we’ll have Martha Thomases here in her usual space.
Arm back, arm forward, release the ball and…three it goes, down he lane, heading for the pocket and…Kerflunkl –
Strike!
But uh-oh. Look what happened. Somehow, instead of rolling a bowling ball we rolled our magic crystal ball and sure, we knocked down all the pins, but we also smashed the ball to smithereens. Dozens of shards scattered on the polished wood.
Well, we won’t be using that crystal ball to peer into the – or some – future and let the prophecies issuing therefrom provide fodder for this week’s blather. Nope. And there are things we’d like to know about the forthcoming comics world, like will DC be able to continue the success of its reworking of the superhero pantheon (lookin’ good so far, guys!) and just how damn digital will comics get and if they get any digitaler will the comic shops cope? Will their income really be seriously affected?
(I mean, they’re closing the Blockbuster I’ve been patronizing for the past dozen years or so. Nothing is sacred, or certain, and of course we know that, but it can still kick us in the shins.)
Where was I? Oh yeah. Things we’d like to know. On a personal note…will I finish the book I’ve been futzing with for…is it three years now? And will somebody publish it? (And if our crystal ball had a literary critic app, I’d ask just how smelly a garbage heap the book is, anyway.) And back to comics-related matters: Will the Batmovie really knock everyone’s socks off? (And hey, Warners – must I pay for my own ticket or will one of you folks be kind to the ancient, doddering, mostly-retired, septuagenarian funny book hack and put him on a screening list? And not one for a screening in Los Angeles, please. He’s already scheduled to get on more airplanes than he cares to this year.)
Maybe we could pick up a shard and catch a glimpse in it if what the crystal ball would have revealed if we hadn’t stupidly mistaken it for athletic equipment. But what good would that do? Without a context – without the big picture – what we glimpse in a shard wouldn’t provide much information. Come to think of it…the whole and uncompromised crystal ball, pre-bowling fiasco, wasn’t really all that useful, was it? Not for what counts, not for what we really want to know. (Mostly: will I get what I want? How will it all turn out? And oh yeah…will I get what I want?) That ball was always pretty murky, wasn’t it? The images it presented were fuzzy and soft-edged and weirdly distorted, the colors all wrong, the backgrounds bizarre, and when time had passed and we were existing in the reality of those images, they never meant what we thought they’d mean. There were also smells, which the ball couldn’t show.
Once, when I was interviewing the great Alfred Bester for a magazine piece, he showed me a statuette, a Hugo, the award bequeathed by science fiction fans for outstanding work – the first Hugo ever awarded for best novel of the year. He was using it as a doorstop because, he said, that’s what it’s good for.
Maybe crystal balls make good bowling balls.
RECOMMENDED READING: Alfred Bester received his Hugo for The Demolished Man in 1953. If you’d like to compare your preferences with those of readers of yore, you can probably find a copy of the novel.
Last month, the New York Times ran a story – front page, no less – about ordinary citizens putting on costumes, giving themselves superheroish names, hitting the streets and combating real-life crime. Apparently, they mostly content themselves with non-violent intervention, or calling the cops, though one guy in Seattle was arrested after pepper-spraying a street fight.
They even have an organization called The Black Monday Society.
It’s been creeping into the zeitgeist for a while, this business of plain Janes and Joes putting on odd clothing and assuming alter egos. There’s been at least one movie that uses the idea as a springboard – it’s called “Super” and it’s popped up on cable channels hereabouts – and it was the core of a weekly television show titled “Who Wants To Be A Superhero?” hosted by my one-time boss, Stan Lee. (Stan: If you’re out there and asking that question, I’m not raising my hand.)
I imagine that for most members of the Black Monday Society, the masked-and-caped patrols are a hobby, a slight mutation of the dressing up at comics and science fiction conventions that can make a good time of just sitting in a hotel lobby and watching the fantasies parade on past. And hey, maybe the Black Mondays are actually of some service to heir fellow citizens. What’s not to like about blowing the whistle on some creep breaking a vacationing neighbor’s basement window, or directing a befuddled partygoer to the nearest bus stop? But here’s the catch: these well-meaning people are not superheroes, and neither are you, or I, or Stan, or Ryan Reynolds, or anybody else who ever trod the planet. We are not faster than a speeding bullet, we can’t outpower a locomotive nor leap over tall buildings, and if we were ever bitten by a radioactive spider we’d need medical attention. As a species, we homo sapiens need medical attention pretty often, and we especially need it when we meddle with strangers who are bigger, stronger, meaner, or have better weapons or ornery friends or, as almost happened when congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, a good Samaritan packing a gun mistakes the heroes for the villains.
The psychosexual aspects of role playing in dangerous contexts were touched on in Watchman, still the high water mark in comic book superheroics, and the perils of being a self-appointed vigilante were the subject of last week’s episode of Harry’s Law, which dealt with a young woman’s putting on a Wonder Woman suit and bashing abusive spouses.. I’d been watching the show for about 20 minutes before I remembered that its co-writer, and the show’s creator, the prolific and generally excellent David Kelley, was also honcho on a Wonder Woman series that NBC decided not to air. The episode was unusually glum for a Kelley production, with the faux WW ending up in therapy, but it did give the producers an excuse to put a gorgeous Erica Durance in that costume.
Several decades ago, the mythologist and sage, Joseph Campbell, warned of the dangers of conflating myth with fact. A news story and a fable tell different kinds of truth and it might be unhealthy to confuse the two. So maybe we’d all better save our superheroing for the next convention costume parade and find other ways to help our neighbors.
Ah, there you are. Still with us. Good. You survived the turning of the new year and the doom some are predicting hasn’t happened. Yet. But be of good cheer, you who are longing to manifest the death instinct that Sigmund Freud said is common among homo sapiens. According to something I read somewhere, the Big Erasure isn’t due until the fall. So we might yet be annihilated, thank you very much.
Meanwhile, we can read comic books and/or go to the movies. That’s what I did day before yesterday, went to my local monsterplex and saw the new Sherlock Holmes flick. And pretty much enjoyed it. Director Guy Ritchie and his associates have done what, I maintain, must be done with olden characters if they’re to appeal to contemporary audiences; he reinvented Sherlock and Dr. Watson and even Sherlock’s smarter brother, Mycroft.
Sherlock is still the world’s greatest “consulting detective” and Watson is still loyal, courageous and honorable and Mycroft is still brilliant and still needs to get to the gym, urgently. Nothing here alien to the 60 Holmes stories Arthur Conan Doyle gave us more than a century ago. But although Doyle’s Sherlock was occasionally a man of action – he could give a good account of himself in a donnybrook, by Jove – and he had a streak of the rebel in him, he was primarily a thinker and a scientist, and despite that tiny flavor of rebellion, he espoused the Victorian values: respect for order and tradition and law and, despite the denseness of some of the policemen he dealt with, also a respect for authority.
Those aren’t our values.
The world has churned and we know that science isn’t always benevolent and order is not the highest good and scoundrels can hide in tradition and authority figures…oh, come on! Check the headlines or a reputable newscast or two.
Mr. Ritchie and friends haven’t gobsmacked those quaint values – if you squint hard you might be able to discern them – but they’re largely ignored. What’s emphasized is comedy and action, along with enough science and ratiocination to qualify the hero as Sherlock. If you’re familiar with the Doyle canon, you might react to the movie’s references and rearrangement of plot elements. If you’re not… no harm, no foul. What you need is up there on the screen, though you might have to pay close attention to get it all.
I have one gripe, and for me it’s not a new one; I can level it against a number of entertainments. It’s this: much of the action is rendered in blurs and pans and ultra-swift cuts and so we popcorn eaters don’t know exactly what’s going on. The Asian actioners have demonstrated that there is considerable entertainment value in a clearly seen, cleverly choreographed fight scene. Why deny us that pleasure, particularly in a movie the budget of which is the size of Neptune? I mean, you can hire really good stunt people.
RECOMMENDED READING: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Oh yeah, here we go with another time displacement. I’m writing this at about 5:20 on Saturday evening, New Year’s Eve, and you’re reading it, at the earliest, on Thursday morning.
Unless you’re not reading it at all because the doomsayers were/are right and maybe the world stopped existing at midnight, or stopped ever having existed, which would pretty much cancel you and me, and make who’s reading what moot.
Or maybe…you’re not you and I’m not I. Maybe we exist in parallel universes and because of some unthinkable and pretty dumb cosmic anomaly, what I’m typing into my computer changes places with what my other-universe doppelganger is typing into his computer – the same words, same typos, same everything, only a different and completely identical reality.
Can you say that it isn’t so? Can you be absolutelycertain that it isn’t so? I thought not. (Or we thought not?)
Or maybe…this is all a hallucination. Maybe I’m a brain in a vat being fed an illusory existence by who-knows-what kind of mad – or utterly sane – scientist. Or maybe old Rene Descartes was right and I’m at the mercy of a demon who’s feeding me the illusions. Which, of course, posits that demons exist. But heed me, all you skeptics – can you prove that demons don’t exist? (I won’t even mention unicorns.)
Or – still on the topic of illusions – maybe it’s about 50 years ago and I’m driving home late on a Friday night after being dumped by my girlfriend of four years and, full of woe, I’ve accidentally run a red light and been hit by a Walnut Park bus and in these, my last few moments, I’ve hallucinated a long life which includes eventually marrying the young woman who’s just terminated our romance. Any nanosecond now, lights out.
A final hypothesis appropriate to the venue we’re occupying, you and I and our other selves, if any: maybe we’re all characters in a comic strip created by a staggeringly advanced writer-artist with really excellent equipment – no sable brushes and india ink bottles for him/it. No, he/it has tools we wouldn’t know how to use even if reality glitched and we got our hands on them and his/its existence, if any, certainly explains all the stuff that vexes and disturbs and dismays us and torments our days, the stuff we just can’t dammit understand!
How? Well, think about it. Maybe all that would help us make sense of our lives happens between the panels and since we don’t exist there, between those panels, we can’t possibly know about it. And hey – doesn’t that let us off all kinds of hooks? Well, maybe not. I guess we’d have to know more about him/it to answer that. I mean, does he blame his creations for their shortcomings?
I may be getting close to Deep Philosophy here and before we get caught in that quagmire, I’m going to scurry away, wishing you all lots of light as I go. Assuming that you, or I, or any of us, exist. Or ever have existed.
You might be chipper, content, full of good cheer – that is, you might a person who enjoys crowds and deadlines and the giving of gifts. This is your time and I say, blessings.
Or you might feel like you’re sucking a bare electric wire, stressed and frantic because your always busy life has become a nightmare of scurrying and doubt. (Will Granny like the pajamas? What to get for Aunt Bertha, a Scientologist who’s just declared herself to be a vegan? And nephew Horatio….doesn’t he already have every comic book ever published?)
One size never fits all, in holidaying as in everything else.
Well, which it is? Santa or Scrooge or the Grinch?
Let’s eliminate the Grinch from this discussion. Dr. Seuss was a national treasure, but – let’s face it – the Grinch is fantasy and was never intended to be anything else. And the jolly old elf? Okay, there’s a vaguely historical basis for him, but the guy in the red suit with the beard? Naw. Not for anyone older than eight.
Leaving us with Scrooge. Old Ebenezer is fiction (and was never intended to be anything else) but his is a fiction rooted in some truth. Haven’t we known a Scrooge or two? Haven’t we been a Scrooge? Show of hands, please.
I’ve just put mine down.
Oh, I can, and have, justified my Scrooge attacks with sweet reason. Isn’t Christmas really a pagan holiday, a celebration of the end of winter and the coming of spring, with its brightness and warmth? An occasion for rest and renewal? Perhaps a way to reassure ourselves that, despite the darkness, we will survive? And hasn’t it morphed into something the opposite of what it once was, a festival, not of light, but of greed and showing off for the neighbors? The season of frayed nerves and bereft bank accounts? Of terror at the arrival of the Master Card envelope?
Yeah, afraid so. But we Scrooges – in the hush of our chambers, at three in the morning, we know the real reason for our sourness, don’t we?
When one’s life is flaking apart, for whatever reason, displays of cheer and the sound of song exacerbate the anguish. So the churches and the bars and the AA meetings do brisk business on the holiest of eves, because a lot of lives are flaking. Remember Thoreau: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Amen, and Thoreau’s observation can be most painfully true on Christmas. So we’re not mad at the season, we Scrooges. We’re mad at ourselves for allowing our existence to become one of quiet desperation.
When the holiday is a deserted street and an empty bottle, what’s to celebrate?
We have to blame someone or some thing, and Christmas won’t argue with us.
Some of us Scrooges will awaken in the morning and, I don’t know… send a kid to buy a goose?
According to some recent news, the sun seems to be bouncing stuff off an invisible, planet-sized object near Mercury. Of course, the smarty-ass scientists have an explanation – don’t they always? – something about how the pictures are processed. Other, more sensible, people have speculated that the invisible thing is a spaceship hidden by a cloaking device, maybe spying on us from two planets away. (Really big binoculars?) I’m afraid that misses the mark, too. The obvious answer is…Santa’s sleigh! Think about it – a cloaking device. Of course. That explains why we’ve never seen it. And the size of a small planet (which is still pretty big)? Well, it can’t exactly be tiny, not when it carries all those toys for good girls and boys.
Now, it’s true that as I look about me I don’t see many good girls and boys. None, in fact. So maybe the invisible sleigh is full of lumps of coal to be put in the stockings hung by the chimney with care, assuming anyone hangs stockings anymore. This could be glad tidings. If the coal comes from Mercury – and surely it might – why, we might just have ourselves a source of clean energy.
Isn’t it grand when truth meets science?
***
About 15 years ago, give or take, a movie-involved bearer of my DNA put a video cassette into our VCR and showed us a short cartoon that was going around titled, just a bit sacrilegiously, Jesus vs Santa. The plot was simple: the Jolly Old Elf and Our Lord and Savior duke it out to determine who’s the king of the holiday. I forget who won and that isn’t really important (and herewith I resist the impulse to launch into a diatribe). What is important, or at least interesting, is that the two young guys who perpetrated the cartoon were (and are) named Trey Parker and Matt Stone and what played in our living room was the predecessor of Comedy Central’s champion half-hour, South Park.
The story probably doesn’t have a moral, or even a point, but if you really need one, you could try, You just never know, do you?
***
Jerry Robinson, a man I was proud to know, is gone. Others have celebrated his achievements and accomplishments, his generous spirit, his activism, and his art. I have nothing to add.
But, thinking of Jerry, I remembered a quotation from Raymond Chandler’s Simple Art of Murder: “He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world”
That was Jerry.
RECOMMENDED READING: Jerry Robinson, Ambassador of Comics. By N. Christopher Couch.
The good news is, the Christmas gift list is shorter this year.
The bad news is, the Christmas gift list is shorter this year.
But enough gloom, for ‘tis the season to be jolly, ‘tis it not?
And judging from the number of cars in the mall parking lot, the season ‘tis jollier’n hell. Don’t these shoppers know about the mess the economy’s in?
Did I mention fa la la la la la?
And now a quick trip into the Chamber of Curmudgeons, significantly emptier since Andy Rooney’s gone. But (entering the chamber) I am the guy who once commissioned a magazine cover depicting a skeleton in Santa Claus garb holding an empty sack, so my curmudgeon cred is intact. And I proclaim:
It used to be so much easier, dang it!
Buying gifts for comics geeks, that is. Because there really wasn’t much choice. Back in the Pleistocene, when I was reading my first comics, Batman or a Superman might serve as an also-gift, what’s called a stocking stuffer, but even a not-too-bright gradeschooler knew that a comic cost only a dime and there had to be something else under the tree.
Later, much later, after the first Batman hardcover graphic novels turned out to be good sellers – best sellers in the limited world of comics – an editor or two was yearly tasked with producing a hardcover for the holiday trade. It was sometimes difficult for the editors, but a good deal for people seeking a present for that snotty nephew who always had his head in them funny books. A couple of sawbucks and – problem solved.
Now… big changes. As a stereotype, that kid with the buried head no longer exists. Comics have attained full parity with other forms of story delivery. You’re not expected to be dumb if you read the stuff. You can, with good conscience, buy a graphic novel for almost anyone you know who likes to read. Or use something comicy to introduce a reader to something he/she hasn’t yet discovered, and might enjoy. You doubt? Hey, Maus won a Pulitzer.
But your choices aren’t limited to Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece. Lordy, no. The monster book mart in the aforementioned mall has a wall full of comics stuff: manga, hardcovers, paperbacks, reprints, originals…that’s not counting the novelizations of movies over in the science fiction section and…that’s not counting the growing list of books about comics.
Cost? All the way from four-five bucks to – brace yourself – four hundred American dollars for the deluxe edition of Star Wars comics published by Abrams and also available in a more modest edition. (Okay, I wrote the introduction. But I don’t get royalties. We’re honest curmudgeons here in the Chamber.)
My recommendation? How about, all of the above? Or: if you’re a book person, you probably like to browse. So browse, on online or off. If you’re likely to be the gift recipient, drop hints. You know how to do that. You’re smart. You’re a comic book reader.
So there I was, sitting at my desk, surrounded by the detritus of the editorial life, not being productive, listening to the voices coming from across the hall: a fellow editor and a freelance writer engaged in something about half way between discussion and argument.
Editor: It’s not the kind of thing we publish.
Writer: But it’s what I want to write!
But we don’t do stuff like that.
But it’s what I want to write!
Another volley of buts, both articulated and implicit, and the meeting ended with the writer still needing to find a way to pay his bills.
I was an editor for more than two decades; you know whom I sided with.
But…what was with the writer, anyhow? Was this an instance of an ego bloating up and strangling its host? Or – and here we enter The Region of Psychological Murk – was the writer subconsciously sabotaging himself so he wouldn’t have to face the possibility of failure?
Or did he have something?
I mean, the writers (and artists) are the creative ones, right? Shouldn’t they be allowed to go where their instincts take them, tugging readers, publishers and those rat bastards known as editors along behind them?
In a word: no. But this is a qualified no.
Begin with the implicit contract between publication and consumer. People have a right to the kind of entertainment (or information) they’ve paid for. Fail to provide it and they’ll fail to continue buying your product.
Now, the qualification on the previous but: What was stated in the preceding paragraph is not an insistence on storytellers repeating the old, shabby tropes, month after month, year after year until the sun cools. If they do, they’ll lose their audience as surely as if they weren’t delivering what the audience is paying for. The material has to be either current or somehow timeless and current is a lot easier. If it isn’t, the audience won’t be able to identify with it and they probably won’t be interested for long. Things change – things must change. (Sorry, you anti-Darwinists, it’s that kind of universe.)
I’m not advocating change for its own sake; that might be another form of ego-bloat. No, I’m saying that an altered world – altered technology, altered mores, altered institutions – suggests new kinds of storytelling that can be achieved without violating the premises of character or genre. Or writers might try delving into what already exists – finding elements already in the material that have been ignored and using it for the sort of story fodder that readers will find fresh and entertaining while, again, preserving character and genre. Or a writer might involve his fiction in subject matter that is new to it, but – yes, again – doesn’t wreck what the reader already likes.
Does all this squash self-expression? Not a bit of it. A long time ago, Raymond Chandler said that the trick to writing genre fiction was to give the reader what the reader wants while getting what the writer wants in, too. Chandler himself proved that it can be done.
RECOMMENDED READING:Ego: The Fall of the Twin Towers and the Rise of an Enlightened Humanity, by Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft. This splendid little book delivers exactly what the title advertises.
A few weeks ago I was blathering about the absence of new superheroes in the current television schedules. Shame on me! I forgot about Super Ray.
Before you rush off to consult TV Guide searching for time and channel, be assured that you won’t find Ray there. The show he’s on isn’t about him. Fact is, he’s not exactly on the show. He’s a character created by one of the fictional people who is on the show. This character, also named Ray, is a comic book artist and Super Ray is his brainchild.
Still with me? Good, because it gets even more complicated.
The show is called Bored to Death and it concerns Jonathan Ames, a largely unpublished writer who moonlights as a private eye, his editor/restaurateur mentor George, and his cartoonist pal Ray. It’s a comedy, one which has grown on me; initially, my reaction was take-it-or-leave-it, but that’s morphed into a genuine fondness for an entertainment that’s quirky, unique and… what am I forgetting?… oh yeah, often quite funny.
Bored to Death gleefully and wantonly blurs the line between fiction and real life. The nominal hero, Jonathan Ames, played by Jason Schwartzman, is – no surprise here – based on the real Jonathan Ames but…the actual Ames plays Irwin who is trying to stab Ray because of a problem involving a woman. George Christopher is played by Ted Danson and I’ve never liked him in any role as much as I like him as George.
Which brings us to Ray, played by the ubiquitous Zach Galifianakis, and also inspired by a person with an address and a social security number, Dean Haspiel. Like the quasi-fictitious Ray, Dean is a cartoonist and a friend and colleague of Mr. Ames. All clear, right? Ray is tight with the Schwartzman/Ames and Dean is tight with the Ames/Ames.
Wait – there’s more! Some of Bored to Death’s storylines are borrowed from Dean’s autobiography.
But here the correspondences begin to dissolve. You probably wouldn’t mistake Haspiel for Galifianakis. Zach/Ray is a pretty dour dude whereas Dean is cheery and ebullient. To me, Dean seems to be absolutely delighted to be who and what and where he is.
(Yeah, you got me. I do know Dean – have known him since he was a little kid. He’s one of my son’s oldest friends. Okay with me if it’s okay with him.)
One more thing: Dean Haspiel is the only person I know who possesses an Emmy, an award he received for work on Bored to Death’s animated title sequence. And when Zach/Ray draws a picture on television, Dean actually wields the pencil…and again, the lines blur.
But see for yourself. Bored to Death. HBO. Monday nights at nine, eastern time.
RECOMMENDED READING: Nothing in particular, but Dean Haspiel’s website has information about his published work and a little Googling would probably yield more Dean, as well as a list if Jonathan Ames’s books. (The real Jonathan Ames, that is.)
Our pal Denny O’Neil usually occupies this space at this date and time. Sadly, he’s under the weather, which sucks because the weather was 60 degrees and mostly sunny in his neighborhood today.
