Gawdy laws! What is all the commotion?! Somebody find out about the attack on voting rights? The bloodshed in Egypt? In Syria? The shrinking food stamps program?
Oh. An actor was hired to do an acting job. And a lot of moviegoers are unhappy about it. Well…
The angst might be a little premature. A special effects film doesn’t find its final form until shortly before it graces your closest multiplex and so we can’t know how casting Ben Affleck as Batman will parse out. We have no idea how the character will be used, where he will fit into the screenplay, whether or not he may have some quality that the filmmakers will find useful.
When the world learned that Michael Keaton had been chosen to drive the Batmobile in director Tim Burton’s 1988 Batman it seemed like a highly questionable pairing of performer and role. But what we didn’t know, all of us inclined to say nay, was that Mr. Burton had his own vision of what the character might be and proceeded accordingly. Not my vision, but a vision that was valid on its own terms. Burton made a pretty good movie and then he made another. Not great flicks, but I’ll generally settle for pretty good.
Unless you’ve been on a digital media fast for the past several days (and if you have, good for you!) you’re aware that the next movie adapted from DC’s comics will team the company’s two signature heroes, Superman and the aforementioned Batman and if I were looking for something to fret about, that teaming would be it. Since both cape wearers are immensely popular, it makes marketing sense for the movie guys to costar them, just as it made marketing sense for the comics publishers to put them under the same covers, way, way back in the 1940s. We all know that more = better. (Don’t we?) But I’m not a marketing guy, I’m an editorial guy, and I will claim that, really, Superman and Batman don’t belong in the same story. There’s a problem of proportion. Superman, at his mightiest, could haul planets around. Batman… gee, he’s real smart and strong and –
– and he doesn’t partner well with Superman. The problems and antagonists appropriate for one are not appropriate for the other. In putting them both at the center of a story simultaneously the storyteller can either ignore the implicit contradictions (or be blissfully unaware of them) or devise separate story arcs for each, different but interrelated, which is how we usually dealt with company-mandated crossovers that had to involve Batman and Superman and whoever else had to be in the mix.
Or – best case scenario – the writer can be so clever and sly and ingenious that he solves the problem in a way that has never even occurred too me.
Casting is a big part of film making – there are highly paid professionals whose sole task is to help directors with the chore – but its not the only part; let us not forget writing and editing and production values and cinematography and locations…
I’ve liked Ben Affleck’s recent work behind the camera – Gone, Baby, Gone is surely one of the best private eye pictures – and so I’m willing to forego prejudging his forthcoming incarnation as Batman and, what the hell, wish him luck.
My regular readers have figured out by now that when I sit down to write this column every week, my tongue is usually so deeply planted in my cheek that my face scares homophobes.
Which is why I come to you today with a heavy heart. And an uncharacteristically downbeat-sounding bunch of words. I have nothing to joke about – at least, not “above the cut.”
Oh, I continue to monitor, and very discriminatingly partake, of the various expressions of Geek culture chronicled, dissected, and celebrated here and elsewhere. But I can’t seem to get as excited about any of it as do all the other too-numerous and overstimulated chatterers.
Something is missing.
Yeah, I know it’s supposed to be a big deal that John Romita, Jr. is maybe gonna draw Superman. And no one can figure out why Kick-Ass 2 was a box office disappointment. And people can’t wait to know what the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is gonna look like, or how Peter Capaldi’s Doctor Who is gonna be different from Matt Smith’s. And on and on and on. But, for some reason that’s really starting to bug me, because I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, I can’t motivate myself to give a rat’s patoot about any of it.
From most of the comics and movies and video I sample, something is missing. For a long time I thought it was just that I was somehow managing to miss “the good stuff,” but now I’m not so sure.
It can’t possibly be Just Me. Not with the fistful of antidepressants I take every day. No, of course not. That can’t be it.
I suspect that what I’m really experiencing is a massive case of Be Careful What You Wish For, You Might Get It. And what veterans of the comics biz like myself have always wished for was that comics – the genre, if you can call them that; the type of content, not the physical printed product – would became a mainstream entertainment phenomenon. And they have.
Thanks more to CGI and Hollywood than to their modest printed spawning-ground, comics and related pop culture are, of course Big Business now, and have been for so long that most readers of sites like this one can’t remember a time when they weren’t. Which means they can’t remember, either, a time when all this stuff wasn’t quite as mindlessly escapist, or – at the opposite end of a spectrum that seems not to have a mid-range – leadenly, pretentiously Serious Minded.
That condition obtains, perhaps, because mindlessness sells big-time, while Seriousness of Purpose wins Eisner Awards and fanboy cred (and the occasional crowdfunding bonanza), which freshly-minted capital is then expended by the mintee on being mindless for a much bigger payday.
But something, nevertheless, seems to me to be missing.
What first got me seriously wanting to write comics instead of just reading them were things like Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’s original Green Lantern / Green Arrow series and Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck. Titles that were a vibrant and perceptively critical commentary on the culture they arose from, but whose Creative always enveloped its core concerns with a sugar-coating of good, solid, old-fashioned fun. Fun as in slam-bang heroic-fantasy action or verbal jokes and sight gags – the stuff that allowed the less demanding readers to remain oblivious, if that was their wont, to the Big Ideas the writers of such comics were trying to explore. In so doing, these comics were hits among fans (as opposed to being successful by the casual-reader-at-newsstands-only distribution “metrics” of their day. But the industry learned, for a brief time in the ‘80s, that such content was solidly marketable in the direct-only environment.
The art of producing that kind of comic book entertainment seems to me almost lost. At least, I haven’t been able to find it – not for a few years now.
If that’s the something that’s missing, I want and need – need – to find it again. Or somehow become a force in reviving it, if not just making it more visible than it is now, if it’s even still out there. And that’s what seems to be preoccupying me this week, and will, I hope, be grist for this mill in weeks to come.
All this is why something else is missing this week: a column that tries to be itself entertaining, while “sugar-coating” with humor an observation or caution that I hope might prove thought-provoking or inspiring of debate.
Oh, well. Maybe next week.
At least I didn’t do what too many in the blogosphere are tempted to do, and write a column about how I couldn’t figure out what to write about.
Here we are again, in a bardo state. (Note: “Bardo,” as all you Tibetan Buddhists know – and among our readers, you are legion – refers to an intermediate state, as between one life and the next. I’ll use it to mean any state between a current important thing and the important thing one is anticipating. I don’t know what the Dalai Lama thinks about this, but I hope he approves.)
Where was I? Oh yeah, between the end of summer and the beginning of fall. For me, this year, it seems to be a time of nostalgia. Today, for example, is the anniversary of the day, 25 years ago, that I met a woman who had been, 30 years earlier, a girl to whom I’d given, as a birthday present, a subscription to Mad Magazine. Unknown to me, she had maintained that subscription all those years and so, learning that I’d become a comic book writer might not have been deeply surprising to her, (Maybe slightly surprising? I mean, does anyone really become a comic book writer?) I’d forgotten the gift subscription and what I find interesting about it is that back then, in my late teens, I still had some tenuous connection to comics. Before the girl-turned-woman gave me a reminder, I thought I’d abandoned comics much earlier, before I shut a figurative door with the cold breath of an individual I shall call Sister Henrietta still chilling the nape of my neck.
Then, off to school plays and speech contests and the misery men know as military high school and girls…one girl in particular. There was an annual bardo, that occurred just about now, when the frolicsome summer days were expiring and school loomed and you couldn’t help but wonder what lay between you and Christmas. (Note: the days weren’t always that frolicsome because, there was work to be done, my family being one of modest means sustained by a neighborhood grocery store and I’d better get out of this parenthesis before I begin ranting about how the kids of today don’t know how good they got it…and, work or no, we did manage some fun, and even a bit of goofiness.)
Okay, now imagine a montage of uniformed service and slum living and empty highways and empty rooms and empty bottles and Manhattan office buildings and hospital wards and protests and anything else you’d care to imagine and end your montage with me meeting the girl-turned woman in the vestibule of a church, both of us a ripe middle age, accompanied by our grown children, walking between the pews to the altar to speak vows I’d typed on file cards – not great vows, but they did the job. That was August 19, 1988.
Let me tell you, August 18 was for me one hell of a bardo.
I had the weirdest dream last night. Like all – or most dreams – it was a jumbled mix. And some of the details are getting lost as the day goes on. But I do remember that I was in the midst of writing three books for DC, one of which was specifically for Karen Berger, although I couldn’t really classify the stories as strictly Vertigo. They were more along the lines of Elseworlds, or Marvel’s Ultimate titles.
All the books were graphic novels and very adult, but the only one I remember clearly now is the one about Supergirl, the original Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, and it was getting the full DC PR treatment – in fact, I think it was Martha Thomases, my friend and fellow columnist here at ComixMix, who was handling the publicity. Karen was very excited about it, and I knew I was writing at the tope of my game. Alex Ross was doing the art, painting it ala Marvels or Kingdom Come. Or if it wasn’t Alex, it was someone equally talented.
But my Kara wasn’t the sweet, prepubescent young lady who was Superman’s secret weapon. This Kara was one tough broad, and street-smart. In my dream she had escaped Krypton’s destruction by running away from home, hitching a ride on a space-trucker’s semi, who subsequently tried to rape her in his cab. This happened while the semi was passing by Earth’s solar system, so it turns out that, because of the influence of Earth’s yellow sun, Kara is the wrong babe for the space-trucker to mess with.
The (super) struggle causes the semi to crash on Earth. Kara is the “last man standing” after the crash, which is investigated, not by Superman, but by Wonder Woman and two other superwomen. (But even while I’m dreaming I’m feeling pissed off because I can’t identify the two other women clearly, though both could fly and were very powerful and I think one of them was a lot like Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Captain Marvel – or maybe it was Carol Danvers, I don’t remember.)
Anyway, Wonder Woman wants to take Kara to Themiscrya, but Kara refuses to go, telling Wonder Woman “I ain’t no dyke, and I ain’t going to an island full of dykes.” (Don’t ask me how she speaks English and knows nasty, sexist slang – dreams don’t work like that.) The “sorta” Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers pulls a full nelson on Kara, but Kara breaks her grip and the two fight. While they are fighting Wonder Woman uses her “lariat of truth” to rope Kara to try and calm her and make her tell the truth, i.e., who she is, how she got there, but Kara uses heat vision (inadvertently, the girl is still discovering her powers) and burns the rope, breaking free and flying off.
So this is the first chapter of the graphic novel, and like I said, Karen is very excited and happy with my work; me, too, plus I’m making so much money that I can quit nursing and become a full-time writer. Which is good because working full-time as a nurse would certainly interfere with my ability to make deadlines if I’m writing three graphic novels at the same time. And Joseph Campbell said to “follow your bliss” if you truly want to be happy, and nursing isn’t my bliss (though I’m good at it) and writing comics on a full-time basis is and I’m very happy, very satisfied, with my life.
But then I read in the New York Times and The Comic Buyer’s Guide that there has been a huge upheaval at DC, and it has been sold off to some conglomerate that is even bigger than Time-Warner – or maybe it’s that Time-Warner decides to dump DC because the company’s movies, even with Man Of Steel making gazillions, pretty much suck – or it had something to do with the CBS vs. Time-Warner Cable war…
I’m dreaming, remember?
So all my books are on hold, including the Supergirl graphic novel. It’s not going to see print.
I’m suddenly not enjoying this dream, and I want to wake up.
But I can’t.
Then I get a call from “somebody” that there is a big meeting regarding the reorganizing at DC after the sale and I’m invited. Only it’s the same day as a wedding I have to go to – or not. I remember that in the dream I dress up to go this meeting, waaaaay over-dress in an incredibly beautiful art deco-y type of gown – think Jean Harlow in Dinner At Eight – in a satiny deep, deep purple, and this stunning cloche with a peacock feather curling down and around my chin, and in the dream I guess I’m trying to justify why I’m dressed so formally because I’m thinking that I will catch a cab and get to the wedding/affair after the meeting.
But you know dreams. Even though I’m sleeping I know that something isn’t right.
So I get to the meeting and there are people there whom I know but can’t recognize. But everyone is very glad to see me. We are in this very corporate, and yet very classy, glass-enclosed boardroom. The ceiling lights are recessed and there are candles burning on glass coffee tables and we are lounging in big, slate-blue love seats. Everyone looks absolutely terrific, though I am the only one in a gown, everyone else is wearing very expensive, designer suits by the likes of Hugo Boss and Chanel and Stella McCartney and Dolce and Gabanna.
The new owners of DC (a few men and women) hand out prospectuses and folios that contain the new organization chart for the company. According to the chart I am going to be an executive editor. The “new Karen.”
But I don’t want to be the “new Karen.”
I want to be a writer.
I ask about my Supergirl graphic novel. I say that the first chapter is done and I’m working on the next. I want to know if I can finish it. I want to know if it’s going to be published.
Nobody hears me, or chooses not to answer.
Now the new owners pass out envelopes. We all open them. Inside are contracts, or “letters of agreement.” My letter tells me who will be in my “stable,” including editors, assistant editors, writers, and artists. I want to know if I have to use these people if I don’t want to; again, nobody hears me.
Boy, do I want to wake up now.
I turn to the woman sitting next to me. She kind of looks like Shelly Bond, but I’ve only met Shelly once or twice, so I can’t be sure, and, anyway, it’s not her.
She says, “Wow, Mindy, they’re paying you $70,000 a year. That’s great!”
“No, it’s not,” I say. “Not for the responsibilities they want me to have. And anyway, I make more than that as a nurse.”
“But that’s a lot of money.”
“No, it’s not. They just want you to think it’s a lot of money.”
Then I hear my name mentioned, and the new owners are telling me that they are pulling my Supergirl book. It’s dead in the water.
Everyone else is busy signing his or her contracts.
They are signing their lives away.
They’re all just happy to have jobs in the comics industry.
If you follow this column regularly (in which case I apologize for the feelings of loneliness and alienation), you might remember me mentioning that I now reside in Los Angeles, which is the perfect city to move to if you’re really desperate to live in a comic book. It’s so colorful and exciting and full of funny-looking noises. Like when the valet at Jerry’s Deli on Ventura slides that new car you haven’t even started making the payments on yet into a parking space narrower than its wheel base – at 120 mph – because he thinks he’s Batman.
So I am thrilled to report I’m serene, I tell you, serene as I continue to sit around, keyboarding like this. Only now I do it for fun because the keyboard I’m using is the digital one on my smartphone, and it’s now in my lap as I write this, with the vibration intensity on the haptic feedback set to “Maximum.”
Sorry.
I am, however, finding it somewhat more lonely here than I’d anticipated.
Many of my old friends – the kind who keep insisting I refer to them on social media as “not-old-that-way” – don’t get out much. They glide about their palatial homes in motorized tricycles which have to be loaded into their very tiny cars when a group of us goes out to lunch. Whereupon the one who still has enough use of his legs to actually drive a car keeps asking the voice on the GPS to speak louder, so he can hear her replies to his inappropriate comments about how hot she sounds and what time she gets off work.
Meanwhile, the other three beg me to push their motorized tricycles out into freeway traffic while they are still in them, because their fingers are too arthritic to use a trackpad and none of them has mastered SEO well enough to Google for the guy who inherited Jack Kevorkian’s equipment.
Thus I find myself in the rather odd position of actually looking forward to inviting to lunch Stan The Man, who, as you know, lives in Beverly Hills. And is not too busy to see me because there are no animation studios or comic book companies left out here with whom he can jointly announce a project that will be completed after you and I are dead.
(“Just came back from The Mansion and I’m way stoked, ‘cause Hef an’ I are This Close to launchin’ that whole Spider-Bunny thing.”)
I’ll have to find a way to break it gently to Mr. Man that Mr. Hefner no longer sits around all day in his pajamas and bathrobe because he needs to be ready at a moment’s notice to fuck a smokin’-hot babe, but because sitting around all day in your pajamas and bathrobe is just what you do when you’re 187 years old.
But, of course, as Bill Maher knows how to say with much better fake sincerity than I, I kid Mr. Man. I have every confidence that he really will be with us many years hence. That’s because, as he has helpfully informed us, he has a pacemaker but no need whatsoever for a motorized tricycle. I am, however, inviting Mr. Man to lunch in my home, where absolutely no effort will be made to point out that he’s standing too close to the microwave.
And, in what passes here in Hollywood for truth, Mr. Man has announced a strategic relationship with Archie Comics, for whom he will be writing Just Imagine Stan The Man Asking You To Believe He Actually Wrote This Comic Book Himself About What It Would’ve Been Like If He’d Created That Really Swell, Groovy Homo Kid We Came Up With That’s Putting Us Out Of Business Because It’s Pissing Off All Those Loudmouthed Jesus People Who For Some Reason Are Still Under The Impression That They Can Buy “Age-appropriate” Comic Books At Wal*Mart.
I, for one, am looking forward to chatting Mr. Man up about that book. I may be totally off-base on this, because I haven’t actually seen Mr. Man in the 20 years since the announcement, but I think Archie is a perfectly natural “fit” for him because, at least at that time, the back of Mr. Man’s head was orange, too.
Now, as we come to the conclusion of what I know all you reverential fanboys, with your keenly developed senses of humor, will have understood was meant as Just Jokes rather than the gratuitous and mean-spirited rant you, you hero-worshiping little cretins, you, mistook it for … I leave you with just these humble thoughts:
Apparently, here in The City On The Edge of Forgetaboutit, the way you fight ageism is by making fun of people who are even older than you are. If you can find any.
And so it is that I whistle past Forest Lawn and rage, rage against the dying of the light from my smartphone.
OK, so I’m a little cranky, too.
Some asshole just totaled my motorized tricycle, trying to park it at 120 mph because he thinks he’s Batman.
Enough poesy. What we’re dissertating on today is not verse, which I’m pretty sure I don’t quite understand, but goals.
But first, a brief look at what are widely considered the seven basic plots. I’ll be courteous enough to add, under each one, an example of what it is. This I will do in italics.
Here we go:
Overcoming the Monster – Gilgamesh
Rags to Riches – Cinderella
The Quest – Lord of the Rings
Voyage and Return – Wizard of Oz
Comedy – Modern Times
Tragedy – Oedipus Rex
Rebirth – Christmas Carol
Most of what I’ve just tossed at you are narrative germs that involve somebody trying to get or accomplish something – somebody with goals to achieve. (Tragedy and Rebirth are hereby excused. And Comedy can take a nap, if it wants.)
That’s mostly the stuff we see at the monsterplex and it is a sturdy beast that’s been transfixing audiences for…I don’t know – fifteen centuries?
But, I shall now claim, to be as effective as they can be, goalish-stories must have clarity: the goal itself must be clear and the obstacles between the hero and his goal must also be clear. In order to pull us to the edge of our seats, the storyteller has to let us see and know exactly what the hero has to overcome and in so doing, generate and the suspense and thrills and chills that we’ve paid for.
And here comes the kvetch: Some of our storytellers are failing, just a bit, by giving us too much. You’ve probably seen it: Good guy has to rescue good girl and to accomplish this he must get past the head villain’s henchman. Okay, fine. But – we don’t know who these henchmen are, how many there are, what they’re capable of. So good guy stalks through someplace that’s badly lit and has a lot of corners, and maybe a lot of door and-what the hey? let’s throw in a balcony or two, and a skylight would be nice. Now, the big action: out pops a bad guy and bangbangbang. Out pops a bad guy and bangbangbang. Out pops a bad guy and bangbangbang. Out pops a bad guy and bangbangbang. Out pops a bad guy and bangbangbang. And bang bang bang…We don’t know how many of these faceless nasties the hero has to vanquish so we can’t tell exactly what he’s overcoming, nor what progress he may be making. And he does pretty much the same couple of things to achieve his victories: a trio of shots from his Glock, with the occasional lethal martial arts move for lagniappe. Finally, he confronts the chief stinker and do we doubt that, after the hero’s dispatched legions, he’ll be stymied by this loser?
Are you bored yet?
Two words, Mr. Filmmaker: rising action. It’s part of your medium’s basic vocabulary and it is still as potent an audience-transfixer as when, way back, Laurel and Hardy used it to get laughs.
The same act of mayhem repeated and repeated does not constitute rising action.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve watched the first season of Hannibal and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The show is fascinating and horrifying and engaging and cinematically very well done and, dammit, the food makes me hungry sometimes (which is so, so wrong, but omigawwwd, that grape gelatin dessert. I want it! Just…without the human bits, m’kay?).
The show is also not above regular and sometimes slightly terrible puns, which is why I don’t feel the least bit guilty about the title of this column (wait for it), or about saying that although I would have loved to make it to the Hannibal panel or chat with the whole cast and crew while I was at SDCC, I was happy to get at least a taste of production insight by talking briefly with Hannibal’s original musiccomposer Brian Reitzell before BMI’s ‘The Character of Music’ panel discussion (aaaand now the title’s pun lands. Yes, I’m terrible).
We literally had just a few minutes to chat, but in that time, I managed to squeeze in several questions and learn some really neat stuff. So here’s my little amuse-bouche of a conversation with Brian!
How did you end up on the show? Were you a fan of the franchise?
Who’s not a fan? David Slade, who directed the pilot, and kind of really set the stage for everything – I had done a horror movie with him called 30 Days of Night. And that’s very much part of David’s style. I mean, music and sound design as well, you know; so he brought me in. It was his fault!
And did you know all of the Hannibal collection, or just Silence of the Lambs, or what?
I’ve only seen Silence of the Lambs. I haven’t seen the other ones. But I want to see them now; especially the Michael Mann one.
When you’re composing the music, where do you go for your inspiration? And what do you have to go on from the show?
I get the whole show. I don’t read the scripts. I like to sit down and watch the whole show, and instantly start working on it. I like to be like the audience; I don’t want to know what’s around the corner. I actually want to go there myself. So it’s very reactionary. I find that horror music is really good that way.
When you’ve got the food scenes versus the different character scenes, what is your inspiration for these different areas?
It depends on what’s going on. I love the food scenes. I used to be a chef, so I can appreciate all of the detail that goes into it.
I have to say, it makes me feel guilty, because sometimes the food scenes make me hungry.
I know! But saying that, I just keep seeing the shot of him cutting up the pig’s lungs. Those were actual pig’s lungs.
Can you tell me a quirky bit of trivia about your work on the show?
I can tell you that with the last episode, where the Will Graham character is losing his mind; David Slade had said, ‘You know, it’s like…it’s spinning out of control.’ So I thought, ‘Okay.’ And I got this thing called a bullroarer, which is – basically it’s a piece of wood on a string, that you spin around – or a bone. They’ve found one on every continent on the planet, dating back to like, 1700 B.C. And it creates this kind of whirring sound, like a Doppler. I have a few bullroarers, and I have this microphone that has four capsules on it, so it records a perfect surround sound. So what I did is, I set the microphone on the floor, and I took a bullroarer, and I spun it around my head; and it’s literally, in the show, it’s spinning, and it’s like you’re in this vortex; it sounded crazy. And we just kept upping that, so if you’ve seen it, you know, he’s in a dream, he’s in a nightmare, and then he wakes up, and he’s got blood on him, so he’s still there. The realities have completely merged.
For some reason I keep getting these jobs where people are going crazy. I’m not really a TV guy – this is my second TV thing, and the other show I did was called Boss – but in that show, the guy was losing his mind. He had this neurological disorder! And I’m always doing these psycho jobs; but that’s – I’m very proud of that.
Will there be a Hannibal soundtrack, and will it come with snacks?
Actually, there’s been demand for it, which is weird! But I’ve done soundtracks for pretty much everything. Even Boss – we did a double vinyl. And I just did The Bling Ring, so I just did a soundtrack with Def Jam, which is also weird! But yeah, there will be a soundtrack.
And what would be your preferred snack to go with that?
My preferred snack…do you know about the miracle berry? If you eat it, and then you drink lemon juice or eat a lemon, it actually tastes sweet. It takes everything sour and temporarily makes it sweet. It’s a trip. So I’d like to have a miracle berry, which is quite small, and either a lemon or something…or maybe to go even more extreme, you could do something like maybe some fish eggs. It’s Hannibal – it’s gotta be weird!
• • • • •
I totally agree; and I look forward to eventually listening to the soundtrack, and eating my miracle berry and drinking my shot of lemon juice as I listen to the bullroarer whirl and attempt to hold onto my sanity.
Thanks to Brian Reitzell for this interview, and to BMI for setting it up!
And until next time, Servo Lectio!
FRIDAY MORNING: Martha Thomases
SATURDAY MORNING: Marc Alan Fishman… Well, actually, the woman NEXT to him…
Has it really been more than 35 years since the debut of Omaha, the Cat Dancer? That’s why it says in the introduction to Volume 8, the last of the collected series, just published by Amerotica, an imprint of NBM.
Way, way back in those pre-Internet days we found our comics by happenstance. I was lucky enough to live in New York City, and had six or seven different comic book stores within a couple of miles of my apartment. If one store didn’t have a particular title, it was likely another store would. More to the point, it was possible for someone like me, an engaged but not maniacal fan, to find a book that was totally new to me. I hadn’t read any pre-publication hype. I might not have heard of the creative team. But I could stumble upon something, and it could bring me joy.
Such was the case with Omaha, the Cat Dancer. I can no longer remember when I read it first, but I know I was on-board from the beginning. The artwork was so graceful, the characters so credible, that I barely noticed that they were anthropomorphic animals.
Omaha was infamous in its day for its frank sexuality. The characters had sex, often, and not only as a variety of gender combinations, but species combinations as well. Dogs and cats, living together! When a Chicago comic book store, Friendly Frank’s, was busted for selling an issue in 1988, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was formed.
And yet. And yet. It’s hard to imagine a combination of explicit sex and character development that would be less gratuitous. The characters in Omaha have sex because they are complicated, adult characters who do things that complicated adults do. It’s part of their lives, just like sleeping, eating, going to work, taking a walk, or breathing.
There is also a fair amount of political activism in the lives of the characters. As citizens of Mipple City, they get involved in elections and zoning issues. It’s a refreshing flashback to a time when community involvement was something adults took for granted, like sex, meals, walks, etc.
Oh, I had my quibbles. I’ve never entirely bought into the perspective that strippers are agents of revolutionary change. I kept trying to figure out if the species of animal chosen for each character had any kind of racial or ethnic or class distinction. I found it awfully convenient that a lot of characters ended up being related to each other.
But, really, I meant it when I said those were quibbles. Omaha is a wonderful character, and Omaha is a wonderful series.
The new volume is the last, containing the issues that weren’t completed at the time of writer Kate Worley’s death (too soon) from cancer. Her husband, James Vance, completed her work along with Reed Waller, the artist on the series from the get-go. The transition, to me, is seamless.
There won’t be any more. That’s a shame. But we have these eight volumes, and you should get them. Now.
Yeah, I know that last week I promised you the third and final part of that earth-shattering rant that, as you know, went hugely viral and made me the new darling of the Internet.
I promised to report on what I’d have learned – evidence that supported or refuted my thesis about Mainstream Comics being unable to escape from the corner they’ve painted themselves into – at the publishers’ booths in the exhibit halls of the 2013 San Diego Comic-Con.
But I made that reckless and foolhardy promise before I’d actually been to the San Diego Comic-Con – or, at least, to what it has metastasized into in recent years. Oh, I’d heard all the stories, of course. But none of them do justice to the actual experience, which taught me that you can’t, in fact, learn anything at the San Diego Comic-Con…because can’t really hear anything over the sound of dozens of Jumbotrons trying to sell you things you don’t want, or see anything for the crush of, uhm, imaginatively-garbed bodies slowly taxiing through the Area 51-like hangar like some flying fortress of presumably human flesh.
Wait. I take that back. There are some things you can learn at Comic-Con. And, because I won’t be able to concentrate well enough to resume the serious business of earth-shattering rants until I can see and hear again – and the anti-depressants kick in three days from now – I’d like instead to share some of them with you.
1. There is a definite limit to the number of times you can tolerate bleeding from the chest because you are being poked by some asshole wearing Wolverine claws.
2. SDCC makes you grateful for word processing apps on smartphones. Mainly because there are so many competing WiFi hotspots in the exhibit halls, you can’t use the phone for anything else. I am, in fact, writing this column on my phone, during my hour-long walk back to my hotel. No prob; I love hour-long walks. Good exercise. Unfortunately, my hotel is only three blocks from the convention center.
3. Best way to deal with being poked in the chest for the third time by some asshole wearing Wolverine claws: Fling a handful of your blood in his face and chant, “Nyah-nyah, I’ve got the Hanta Virus…”
4. Always remember, when tempted to accept an invitation to the Eisner Awards, that they are not merely a new version of the old Inkpot Awards banquet, because they are no longer, in fact, a banquet. And when you are sitting through 30-minute anecdotes from dead artists’ children, reminiscing about how their dad sculpted “Eskimos” from soap bars when they were five, you will really want to be having the dinner you didn’t eat earlier because you thought you were gonna get food.
5. No one presenting or accepting an Eisner Award is as funny as they think they are, and the ones who are supposed to be, aren’t. And Doctor Who cast members who try to be are just FAAABulously embarrassing. However, this rule does not apply to Chip Kidd, who made me believe the Eisners really are the Oscars of the comics industry because now they have their own Bruce Vilanch. But only when Chris Ware wins something.
6. None of the panels or “events” is as entertaining as the looks on the faces of the guys picketing out front with “You’re a crawling piece of shit but Jesus loves you anyway” signs, while people dressed as the entire cast of Supernatural shuffle past them. Especially not the events you can’t get into without coming down with a virus by camping out on the sidewalk all night.
7. The virus you get from camping out on the sidewalk all night is very effective in dealing with getting poked in the chest by assholes wearing Wolverine claws.
8. The Eisner Awards are not, in fact, “the Oscars of the comic book industry.” The Oscars are smart enough to video, in a separate, earlier ceremony – and play back at the main event only in judiciously-edited clips – the awards for Best Translation of A Graphic Novel You Will Never Read About A Subject You Don’t Understand Originally Published In a Language You’ve Never Heard Of Before.
9. In the convention center there is one Starbucks concession for every 10 guests, and by Sunday at noon every Grande Hazelnut Frappuccino® is being spiked by 150-proof Captain Morgan’s, and you are wondering how you can find an asshole wearing Wolverine claws so you can hire him to stab you in the chest.
Please Note: The above are Just Jokes. I actually enjoyed the convention (as a guest) enormously, and the staff is terrific. Still the best show in the business, serious about comics amid all the Hideous Hollywood Hype, and everyone – guests and paid members alike – are treated well. My thanks to all the folk at SDCC for a memorably fun weekend!
Where’s there? Oh, come on…The San Diego Comic-Con! Where else? And, as I type this on Monday evening, are you perhaps just getting home. Are you frazzled? Exhausted? And are you happy? Was the adventure all you’d hoped it might be? Do you have, encased in plastic and two slabs of thick cardboard and tucked into your carry-on, that one special issue, the one you’ve sought for years. the one whose absence has left as yawning crater in the middle of your collection – finally, triumphantly yours? Have you met the person of your dreams, wearing, perhaps, an X-Men costume? Or had your picture taken with the celebrity who occupies a god niche in your psyche? (Okay, it cost you what you pay for a week’s groceries, but some treasures are beyond price.)
Hooray. That’s all well and good. But now the important question: Did you see me there?
If you did, I must have had some Dr. Strangey astral projection mojo working, because I haven’t been anywhere near Southern California this year. (Denver is as close as I got.) So – either I astrally projected (while napping?) or you saw some other septuagenarian chrome dome. I didn’t do any disembodied jaunting last week but…I did do something similar.
The late Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic to primitive people. (Let’s assume that “primitive” is relative.) Well, abra my cadabra, because while sitting upstairs in the dining room I spoke to a group of people in Lima, Peru – gave a talk and then answered questions. Mr. O the bilocated – at once in New York and Peru! Be in awe, you primitives!
The magic was, of course, technology, and not cutting edge technology, either. (Though, come to think of it, maybe this story would be better if it were.) What we were using, the attendees of the Lima Book Fair and I, was Skype, which is surely old news to many of you. Too me – not so old. I’d used it once before, to record something for use on YouTube, but I had the advantage of a tech savvy offspring at my elbow on that occasion. This time, Marifran and I were pretty much on our own, though we did have help from Eduardo, an affable cyberwizard from – where else? – Peru. I won’t say that all proceeded glitchlessly. (Does Dr. Strange ever suffer interference from, say, a snotty kid riding a Hogwarts broomstick?) But the glitches were minor and the event, I’ve been assured, was a success.
And just recently, a book I wrote about a dozen years ago became available as an e-book. So I guess I’m being dragged into the twenty first century, That, or I’ve taken up residence where eldritch forces are manifest. Either way, as the great prophet Bobby told us, the times they are a’changin’, and, there being nothing to do about it, let’s enjoy the ride.
Gawdy laws! What is all the commotion?! Somebody find out about the attack on voting rights? The bloodshed in Egypt? In Syria? The shrinking food stamps program?
