Via Val D’Orazio, here’s a delightful parody of the Mac vs. PC commercials as action figures of Spider-Man and Superman discuss Marvel vs. DC movies.
Just one more thing to get you psyched for Spidey 3, in case you weren’t already.
So I’m catching up on Previews magazine (more about which in my Wednesday column) and I notice this drop-dead gorgeous art in the Marvel Previews insert that caught my eye and made me stare at the page for like a minute and a half. And I’m one of those "usually more into the words than the art" comics people.
It was either an interior page or Jo Chen’s cover art for Last of the Mohicans #1, adapted from the James Fennimore Cooper novel by veteran scribe Roy Thomas. Okay, probably the cover, but the interior pages in that Marvel Previews issue were equally gorgeous, with rich, lush inks. I wish I knew who did those inks. The pencillers are listed as Steve Kurth and Denis Medri, and their scene-setting and composition is indeed wonderful from what I’ve seen, but geez Marvel, whom do I have to bribe to get inkers’ names into your PR?
In any case, particularly having just come from the Kids’ Comic Con, I find this news of Marvel doing Classics Illustrated-type stuff to be welcome indeed. Last of the Mohicans is the second title in the nascent Marvel Illustrated line If you haven’t yet grabbed Jungle Book by Gil Kane, Jo Duffy and P. Craig Russell, get it now), to be followed by Treasure Island and the Man in the Iron Mask. Hey, can a woman-written classic be far behind? I know Frankenstein‘s been done to death, so to speak, but how about some Virginia Woolf or a Bronte or two?
There is hardly anything more annoying than listening to a bunch of us Baby Boomers talking about the good old days: the music, the sex, the drugs, the sit-ins and be-ins and love-ins, even the comics. We act like we invented rebellion, and we don’t think anyone else will ever care about the world as much as we did, and certainly no one else will make changes as important as the ones we made.
We’re wrong.
A recent article in USA Today describes “Generation Y”, those born since the early 1980s, as one that has endured a lifetime of public tragedies. My generation lived through the Kennedy assassinations and the murder of Martin Luther King, the Kent State shootings, the Viet Nam War and Watergate, and these things were horrible. However, kids today witnessed the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle explosion, the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the attack on the Atlanta Olympics, school attacks on Columbine, the Amish school in Pennsylvania, and the recent Virginia Tech massacre. They’ve seen a tsunami devastate Southeast Asia, and Hurricane Katrina destroy New Orleans. In my day, we watched a half-hour evening news broadcast, while today there is a 24-hour news cycle. They say that Viet Nam was the first war fought on our living room television, but the “Shock and Awe” attacks on Baghdad four years ago had so much advance hype and so many on-the-scene embedded journalists, they practically had official sponsors.
The horrific moments that changed my personal world occurred when my best friend’s brother died in Viet Nam, followed shortly by the Kent State slaughter which was just a few miles from my house. Before that, my feelings, although sincere, were based more on ideas than on events. My son saw the World Trade Center collapse outside his classroom in lower Manhattan, but not before he saw burning bodies falling from the windows.
Just as the Sixties didn’t turn everyone into a protesting hippie peacenik, these events have not shaped a single personality type among today’s twenty-somethings. Most of the mass media would have us believe that the values of this generation establish a new low of shallowness, exalting the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. But their taste and values go far beyond American Idol or the Pussycat Dolls.
The USA Today article quotes social historian William Strauss: “the Millennials’ baby-boomer parents were anxious about political assassinations because that’s what they witnessed growing up. But their children’s fears are different – because they witnessed mass killings of children by peers whose motives nobody can seem to understand.”
He continues, “The fact that this sort of thing can happen calls into question the super-achieving, high-stress life some of them lead.” He says that Generation Y will be less concerned with “having it all” than with having a balance. Unlike many in my generation, who traded in their values for SUVs, private schools and second houses and the long commute to jobs that paid for everything, there is hope that this generation will enjoy every day with their families as well as meaningful work.
For most people, comics are a small part of their lives. By that I mean if your comic book collection and your girlfriend were hanging by a cliff and you could only save one your choice would be simple.
Your choice would be simple, right? If not then you should really seek some professional help.
As much as I love comics I have never thought that comics would affect my life in any significant personal way. By personal I mean that outside of my love for the medium and income from the business, comics would not play a major role in my life. I have always thought that comics were an important but small part of my life.
Boy, was I wrong. Sometimes it’s the small things that lead to the big things.
My birthday is Sunday and I have been thinking about my life and my friends lately. Everybody in the comic book industry who knows me knows that Denys Cowan is my best friend. I don’t have a lot of friends (insert your joke here) but those friends I do have are great people. I know I’m a bit hard to get to know-truth be told people meet me and they either love me or (insert your next joke here) hate me.
Of those friends I consider among my best friends: Mike Stradford, Lovern Kindzierski, Roger Klohr, Jason Clark, Ehrich Van Lowe, Lee Speller, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman, David Quinn and Denys. Of those guys Denys has been around the longest except for Lee, and we go back to Junior High. I would take a bullet for every one of those guys. That said, Denys and I grew up and went to school together – even if we did not know it.
So how do you grow up together and not know it? Here’s how. I grew up in Queens, New York: Jamaica, Queens then Rockaway, Queens then back to Jamaica, Queens. In all the years I lived in Jamaica, Denys literately lived around the corner from me and we NEVER met.
That’s nothing special until you consider that we went to the same specialized high school, The High School Of Art & Design in Manhattan and we still never met.
Consider this: Denys and I lived around the corner from each other, we rode the same bus, from the same bus stop took the same subway train from the same subway station everyday. We then had to walk the same blocks to the same school in Manhattan. We did this for years and never met. What are the odds?
How did we meet? Why did we meet?
Comics.
We literally met at Marvel Comics years after high school because a mutual friend of ours thought that two black guys working (or in my case trying to work) in comics should know each other. We both resisted that meeting but our friend Darlene was smarter than both of us and arranged it. She asked me to have dinner with her one day and told me to meet her at Marvel where she was the receptionist. When I got there she asked me to Xerox something for her. I went to the Xerox machine and standing there was Denys Cowan.
I had it easier than many comics writers. I began in the business as an assistant to Stan Lee in 1965, when Marvel was just completing its metamorphosis from obscure Timely Comics to publishing phenomenon, and Stan’s vision of what a comic book company could be was pretty much complete. Implicit in the writing part of the job was the requirement that I imitate Stan’s style – after all, Stan’s style was Marvel. That made the job simple: imitate Mr. Lee successfully and I was doing it right.
Of course, I bridled a bit at having to imitate anyone. After all, I was in my 20s and had been doing comics for about two days, and therefore, according to my lights, I was deeply wise and fully knowledgeable about…oh, name it, and don’t forget to include comics. As Bob Dylan sang, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Now, in my sexagenarian salad days, I’m grateful for my Marvel initiation because everyone begins by imitating someone, and I didn’t have to seek a model or wait for the churning of the universe to provide one – I learned the trade by having to imitate the comic book scripter who was at that time, arguably, the best.
Here are a few words from a man who is well on his way to becoming my favorite mainstream writer: “Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master… Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.” Those observations are from a Harper’s Magazine piece by Jonathan Lethem titled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which you can read on Harper’s website. They bring us, at last and via the long way around, to the subject of this installment of the arc (or miniseries, or series-within-a-series or whatever the hell it is) that began with what we called “Who Knows What Evil… Part 1.” Those of you who were kind enough to read the earlier installments may remember that I suggested that the creators of Batman may have been…well, call it “intensely aware” of The Shadow and other popular culture creations.
Let’s assume that they were. Did that make them wicked, weaselly thieves? No, no, and again, no. Remember: everyone begins by imitating someone. As Anthony Tollin said in a phone conversation, those early comics guys (who were barely out of adolescence and in the process of inventing a medium) had no one to emulate except authors from other forms and the newspaper strip fraternity. Since they were generally not from society’s loftier precincts, with ready access to elitist amusements, their entertainment was comic strips, movies, the pulps, and maybe radio, and it was natural – inevitable? – that they’d seek inspiration in those media. Where else?
The horrific events this week at Virginia Tech have elicited the usual pompous political rhetoric about the evils of Hollywood entertainment – violent video games, rap music, movies and television are to blame. “Our kids are being trained to be murderers,” thunder the politicians. “They learn to shoot at their enemies instead of reasoning with them. They become calloused by this violence, which dehumanizes others. Let us regulate this evil, lest our children slaughter us in our beds.”
Except that’s not how it works. If the media were that effective, we would all be effective code crackers, physically fit from our active lifestyles, enjoying out fabulously large New York apartments. That’s what the non-violent media teaches.
I’ve been a non-violent activist since high school, where I regularly risked expulsion by distributing an anti-war magazine. I dropped out of college for 18 months to work with the War Resisters League, and I now serve on the Board of Directors for the A. J. Muste Institute (http://www.ajmuste.org). Doing this work, I’ve met a lot of people who are deeply and thoughtfully concerned about popular culture, and think it degrades people. After decades of rational and reasonable conversation, I need to disagree.
In Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, author (and sometimes comic book writer) Gerard Jones examines why children enjoy playing at violence, and why it can be a good thing for them. If I may grossly over-simplify an entire book into a few sentences, he says that children play to work out their feelings, including anger, frustration and helplessness. It’s far better to pretend to kill the monsters with rayguns or laser beams than to hit another kid because he’s got better stuff in his lunchbox than you do.
Kids aren’t the only ones who feel this way. As a human being and a New Yorker, I face frustration dozens of times a day. The traffic lights are slow, the tourists don’t know how to walk down a city sidewalk so other people can pass them, my neighbors don’t clean up after their dogs. I think about killing them all the time. Because I’m an adult, and because I understand that actions have consequences, I don’t do these things. Instead, I watch Kill Bill or read Punisher.
I also understand that other people have feelings. This understanding did as much to shape my politics as anything else – I saw people on television, dying in Viet Nam, realized I didn’t want to die, and the people I saw, even the Communists, probably didn’t want to die, either. From there, I could see that the people making the decisions to go to war weren’t the ones fighting, but they and their friends were getting rich.
If you’re going to appear in a Marvel movie, you might as well try to get into the video games as well.
Marvel Entertainment has expanded its deal with Sega Europe and Sega of America, under which they will develop and distribute games based on Marvel’s upcoming feature films, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, and Thor. This new exclusive, multi-year licensing deal follows Marvel and Sega’s pact to create game titles based on Marvel’s upcoming Iron Man movie, with both game and movie set for release in May 2008.
Pixel Avengers by Ben Cooper. Check out the rest of the roster here.
Marvel Entertainment has announced a new sweepstakes, the winner of which will win a walk-on role in an upcoming Marvel Studios movie. Usually these things are only reserved for folks like Stan Lee and Joe Quesada, so it’s nice to see regular ol’ folks given the chance at unpaid, uncredited extra work.
Sweepstakes entries are here. If you don’t win the Grand Prize, there are also three First Prizes (that never sounded right to me, shouldn’t First Prizes be the top ones rather than Grand Prizes?) where you could win a collected edition of Marvel comics and 15 Second Prizes for a 12 issue sub to one of their books.
The sweepstakes began on Tuesday and runs through August 10, so it’s not like you have to rush. Only one entry per person.
As I write this, the nation is still reeling from the deadliest shooting massacre in its history – if you don’t count wartime battles, and they never seem to. Once again, a disturbed young man decided that the best response to his problems lay in premeditated violence against total strangers. Once again, trusted and trained authorities appeared slow to act in protecting human life. Once again, we found ourselves yearning for a hero to make it all go away.
Comic book heroism is a double-edged sword, probably a fitting metaphor, given superhero comics’ fascination with weaponry. On the one hand you have a reflection of whatever the current national mood of the era happens to be. I was watching a history-of-Superman program on the Biography channel earlier this evening, wherein Mark Waid talked about how the character shifted from a rabble-rousing champion of the people at his inception to the "ultimate blue Boy Scout" symbol of authority after World War II. Superman, like other successful icons, was able to change with the times, allowing succeeding generations to project their desires onto him. And for some time, ever-escalating fictional violence as the appropriate (and often only) answer to frustrations has fueled the entertainment desires of Americans.
Comic books are, of course, incidental to this trend, which has encompassed virtually all forms of mass media, even more so as the news divisions — once sacrosanct and considered acceptable loss leaders to responsible corporations which made their money on other programming — morphed into 24/7 cable infotainment, hungry for the next fix of spectacularly gruesome visuals. Their mouths say "tut tut" to the carnage, but their wallets say "More please, sir!" And yet, critics of ultraviolent entertainment (and boy is that a Sisyphusean undertaking!) are always very quick to point fingers at "the comic book mentality" and wave around the latest issue of Punch ‘Em Up Man. Because, you know, it makes a good visual.
On the other hand, comics at their best can inspire and educate and lift us all up to our highest aspirational fantasies. To me, this attitude of being "part of the solution" rather than "part of the problem" has always been the essence of superhero fantasy — not beating up on badguys, but using one’s hidden reserves of power to triumph over adversity and bring hope to others, showing them by your deeds the way they too can become heroes.
Nowhere was this more keenly illustrated than after 11 September 2001, when the comics industry came out with a slew of amazing and poignant comics stories examining and trying to make sense the tragedy, in order to help raise money for victims’ families.
In a gimmick reminiscent of Time Magazine naming the second person singular "You" as Person of the Year for 2006 using a reflective cover, thus skirting any responsibility for actually choosing a Person of the Year, Marvel has decided to give its usual cover artists a break by putting out a blank cover for its first edition of Fallen Son: The Death of Captain America.
They’re technically calling this a "sketch cover," suggesting that "fans will have the opportunity to get an original sketch on the cover, get it signed by top Marvel creators, or perhaps even draw their own alternate cover! How’s that for one of a kind?"
While the gimmick is sure to be a hit with that portion of readers which attends conventions and patiently waits in queues for sketches, as well as with some aspiring professionals, I’m not sure the artist who might have made a couple hundred bucks illustrating that cover is very appreciative of the lost income.
(Note: When DC Comics published a blank cover on Wasteland, the artist never received payment.)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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