Tagged: superhero

Generic Respect, by Dennis O’Neil

Generic Respect, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • March 11, 2008

Don’t bother putting on airs, Messrs. Man (Super and Bat); you’re nothing special, not any more. These days, you’re just two more members of a rather large club that includes cowboys, cops, private eyes, combat soldiers and guys who fly space ships to other planets and solar systems and galaxies. Serial killers who slice and dice sexy teenagers are in the club, too. And critters that are normally harmless but mutate into gigantic sociopaths.

While you weren’t looking, you’ve become a genre.
 
Of course, if we want to get sniffy about definitions, you always were, in comic books. Almost from the beginning, here were cowboy comics and detective (or Detective) comics, and monsters and spaceship jockeys were early joiners, too. And you guys, the superheroes. You were the most popular and emblematic, of the comic book good guys, but you had peers.
 
Movies were another matter. Oh, you guys showed up on what was called The Silver Screen pretty early in the form of serials or, if we want to get fancy, chapter plays intended for the Saturday matinees, which were populated by kids who, in my memory, made a hell of a lot of racket. Even there, you were a bit of an aberration, outnumbered by the gumshoes and gunfighters, and not deserving, apparently, of cinematic and dramatic niceties. And, while there were cowboys and sleuths aplenty in the movies made for after-dark showings to the kids’ moms and dads, no superheroes ever made the leap to, ahem, serious entertainments.
 

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Review: Teen Titans Year One

The other day I was talking to James Kochalka, creator of Superf*ckers and the upcoming Johnny Boo children’s books, and he mentioned how difficult it is to find superhero books for his kids. Such offerings are mostly limited to comic book adaptations of cartoon series that were adapted from comics, he said, and “they’ve been pretty bad.”

For DC, the lifeline to younger readers has long been the Teen Titans, most recently through the TV spinoff Teen Titans Go! and Tiny Titans, which is almost too innocent for its own good. Now we also have Teen Titans Year One (issue #3 is out tomorrow), the “origin” story from writer Amy Wolfram.

The book succeeds on a number of levels, primarily in how it manages to be appropriate for kids without dumbing down. There are serious threats and the group faces violence and danger and interpersonal hangups. The art also perfectly fits the tone.

While I’ve enjoyed the series thus far, I doubt it’ll serve as a jumping-on point for any kid looking to get into comics. Another thing Kochalka complained about was how the youth-oriented Marvel and DC comics rely on readers coming into the book to have a firm understanding of the mythos, and that’s certainly the case with [[[Teen Titans Year One]]]. New comics readers will be fairly lost, if not out and out discouraged by the lack of exposition.

The Year One tag also only hampers the series, forcing it into a ridiculously incongruous existence amid decades-old comics. For instance, these Titans use cell phones and instant messaging, devices that weren’t around when the Teen Titans debuted. That’s nit-picking, to be sure, but when an editor’s note tells me this storyline happened right after [[[The Brave and the Bold]]] #54, I can’t help but be yanked out of the plot.

Van Jensen is a former crime reporter turned comic book journalist. Every Wednesday, he braves Atlanta traffic to visit Oxford Comics, where he reads a whole mess of books for his weekly reviews. Van’s blog can be found at graphicfiction.wordpress.com.

Publishers who would like their books to be reviewed at ComicMix should contact ComicMix through the usual channels or email Van Jensen directly at van (dot) jensen (at) gmail (dot) com.

For Kids: Find Your Inner (and Outer) Superhero with ‘Super You’

For Kids: Find Your Inner (and Outer) Superhero with ‘Super You’

  • News
  • February 22, 2008

Here is one of those things you find in your travels around the InterTubes that’s just too cute/funny to keep to yourself.

Super You, in addition to having a theme song of the same class as "It’s a Small World" when it comes to getting stuck in your head (WARNING: Music plays automatically when you visit the site), offers custom-made superhero outfits for kids. You simply choose a size and color for each part of the outfit (unitard, cape, belt, etc.), wait for the costume to arrive, and next thing you know, your favorite little crimefighter has a new costume.

What could be better for a child’s self-confidence and creativity than to be able to create their own superhero costume? By creating Super You, I hope to teach children that being Super is whatever they want it to be—and that being Super comes from within.

My favorite part about the whole arrangement? The costume arrives in a black "Super Briefcase" for kids to open — preferably away from the prying eyes of supervillains and those they’re sworn to protect.

 

Superhero-themed play to land in Manhattan

Superhero-themed play to land in Manhattan

  • News
  • January 16, 2008

In Save the World, a new superhero-themed play set to begin its run in Manhattan later this week, a group of powered-up heroes face trouble from both their enemies and, apparently, themselves. Created by Chris Kipiniak and  Michael Barakiva, the play will open on Jan. 19 for a four-week engagement.

From Playbill.com:

"The superheroes of the Protectorate (Legend, Umbra, Stagger, Prodigy, Quake, Roach, and Future-Knight) fight bravely to protect the earth from a series of seemingly unrelated disasters. But when the unthinkable occurs the team begins to splinter. In their desperate search for the cause of the threat, compromises are made. So are mistakes. With their incredible powers and their human failings, the heroes risk becoming threats themselves to the good they’ve sworn to uphold."

 

Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

Cut Them Off At The Past, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • January 15, 2008

And the Screen Writers Guild lurches into a tenth week and if there’s any end in sight, I haven’t heard about it.

Last time, I mentioned the Academy of Comic Book Arts and its failure to do any significant negotiating on behalf of its members. ACBA wasn’t the first attempt, though, to organize those glorious mavericks, the comic book community. In the 60s…

Wait! Better issue a warning before I go further. Do not regard anything that follows as gospel. (In fact, you might consider not regarding the Gospel as gospel, but let us not digress.) I have no reason not to believe what I’m about to tell you except one: About a year before he died, Arnold Drake, who was a busy comic book writer at the time we’ll be discussing, told me that the story I had wasn’t the whole story, or even necessarily accurate. I don’t know why I didn’t press him for further information, but I didn’t.

Okay, the story:

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Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

Nudity and the Editorial Process, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • December 4, 2007

In my dotage, I’m coming to believe that a little adolescent rebellion is usually a good thing, and if the rebellion creeps a year or two into full, card-carrying adulthood, that’s okay. Much after the fact, I learned of some things my kid did in his Greenwich Village youth: I’m not sorry he did them and I’m glad I didn’t know of them until much later.

(As for myself…let me note that the principal of my high school told my mother after graduation that they never, ever wanted to see me again. I must have done something…)

Father does not always know best and either does Mother. Like generals, they’re fighting old wars and kids are caught in new wars, which means the kids have to find their own way, which is a process of experimentation, which means that Junior and Pops can’t and shouldn’t march in lock step,

We will now retire the military metaphors and explain what any of this has to do with our current topic, the evolution of superheroes.

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Power!, by Dennis O’Neil

Power!, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • November 13, 2007

So you wanna be a superhero. Okay, where are your powers going to come from?

For years – nay, hundreds of years; nay, thousands of years – the brief answer was: From out there. Somewhere. The first superbeings in popular culture (the only kind there was, back then) were either gods, or pals of gods, or imbued with magical abilities, the origins of which weren’t necessarily clear or important. What was important was…wow! – look at what he/she/it can do! And so much the better if it, whatever spectacular thing it is, is being done for reasons I approve of.

That’s still what’s important. But our minds seem to be wired to want reasons for what we see, which is certainly why there’s science and may be why there’s art and civilization. But, oddly, once a reason is supplied, many of seem to be satisfied and require nothing further. The great cosmic snortlefish created the oceans? Swell, now I know why there’s all that water and what’s for dinner?

By the time Jerry Siegel got around to thinking up Superman in the summer of 1934, magic wasn’t terribly fashionable and it had long since become divorced from religion. But science…ah, science was going to deliver us and besides, it was real. And Jerry was a reader of science fiction, which, in those happy days, at least claimed to be rooted in physics and chemistry and astronomy and stuff like that. So it was natural, maybe inevitable, that he would give his übermensch a science rationale. Guy comes from another planet, sure – that’d be why he could be so powerful. Makes sense. Made sense to Jerry in 1934, probably would have made sense to me when I was the age Jerry was when he created Superman, if I’d thought about it.

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Costumes, by Dennis O’Neil

Costumes, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • October 16, 2007

My beloved has just been pushed out of a fourteenth story window and is plummeting toward certain doom. I must rescue her and I will – as soon as I change clothes…

We were discussing, last week, how superheroes are evolving and we agreed – didn’t we? – that, on the whole, with a few notable exceptions, they’re getting grimmer.

They also seem to be changing their taste in wardrobes. None of the current television superdoers wear anything more than normal clothing, albeit sometimes very spiffy normal clothing. Time was, and not so long ago, when…shall we call it unconventional garb was an indispensable part of the superhero thing. Capes, masks, tights, all kinds of bizarre raiment, often in the primary hues that were friendly to the aniline dyes and rather primitive printing presses used to color them.

It began, as did so much superheroish stuff, with Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman. To the best of my knowledge, these pioneers never went on record regarding exactly why they chose this particular visual strategy, but it was a good idea. It gave the their character and immediate and utterly unmistakable image and it separated him from his ordinary brethren as a police uniform or priestly vestments separate the wearers from plain joes and janes, at least when performing unique services. As Peter Coogan wrote, Superman’s outfit “does proclaim his identity.” The costume was obviously a part of Superman’s appeal, and immediate success, and, being no fools, Siegel and Shuster’s army of imitators copied it.

Consider that, for now, the why of superhero costumes. As to the whence…

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Darkness in Four Colors

DENNIS O’NEIL: Darkness in Four Colors

  • News
  • October 9, 2007

If I want to be reminded of a very good reason for being where I am for the next six weeks or so, all I need do is look out the window. The foliage is always glorious. I wish I were a poet, or Henry David Thoreau, or James Lee Burke, so I could properly celebrate the changing of the leaves.

But I’m not. What I am is a guy who’s had a lot of reason to think about superheroes and – here comes a stretch – they’re changing, too, just like the leaves.

Well, maybe not just like. Actually, whether you think these überpowered gallants are getting glorious or dreary as dishwater is emphatically a matter of opinion. If you’ve already made up your mind about this … permission to skip to another column granted. If you haven’t … some remarks.

They’re getting darker, these superheroes. Grim, tormented, almost tragic. No doubt about that. Just read a few comics, or, if time and/or budgetary constraints don’t allow for a trek to your nearest pop art dealer, turn on the television.

Because one of the major changes in the superhero saga is that they’re no longer the exclusive property of comics (or low-budget film and video enterprises.) There are the big budget theatrical movies, of course. And television is rife with superheroes, and I’m not referring to the Saturday morning kiddie television ghetto, either; I’m talking prime-time network stuff. It’s about money, as it usually is.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Plugging No-Face

DENNIS O’NEIL: Plugging No-Face

  • News
  • October 2, 2007

 

Imagine me jumping up and down and pointing to myself and waving a book and yelling, Buy this you gotta buy this it’ll make you happy and rich and solve all your problems and give you Jessica Alba’s phone number it’s the greatest thing since similes…

Now imagine me reverently kissing the hem of George Bush’s garment.

One event is as likely to occur as the other.

I tell you this because soon I will mention a collection of stuff I wrote before some of you were born and I wouldn’t want anyone to think for a nanosecond that I was recommending you buy it.  We Missourians who have attained a certain degree of maturity do not so demean ourselves.  (We sip our tea and doze in the afternoon sun instead.)

With that caveat…

Yesterday a Santa’s helper from Brown dropped an early Christmas (or Halloween) present on the front stoop, a box of graphic novel-format volumes titled Zen and Violence.  Now, somewhere on the space-time continuum between my typing these words and you reading them, they will be inspected by Mike Gold, who is the editor of this department and also edited the aforementioned collection of comic books.  Let us pause to consider that maybe the space-time continuum is, indeed, curved, and then enter a timid demurral regarding that title, Zen and Violence.

Not mine.  Not Mike’s, as far as I know.  My first problem is this: there isn’t much Zen in those pages.  A smidgen, maybe, but when I did the stories I may have thought I knew more about Zen than I did.  I’m not sure how the series came to be identified with Eastern thought, but it did, and if it does for someone else what the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg did for me – point to the Something Else out there – then maybe I should shut up and smile and bow and retire.

My second problem:  Yes, there is plenty of violence in the stories, or action, as some prefer to euphemize it.  These were, after all, published as superhero comics in 1986-1987 and nobody back then was buying superhero comics to study philosophy, nor should they have been;  violence…er – action was part of the package.  Nor do I want to be snooty about it; violence has some valid dramatic uses (and I guess action does, too.) But I don’t want anyone to think I recommend violence as an all-purpose problem solver, and putting the word in a book title might give that impression.

Okay, okay, I’m being paranoid…

RECOMMENDED READING:  You want to know something about Zen?  Brad Warner’s your man.  Warner is a musician, monster movie fan and Zen priest and that, my friends, is a resume a lot of us would be proud to call our own.  His latest book is called Sit Down and Shut Up: Punk Rock Commentaries on Buddha, Good, Truth, Sex, Death & Dogen’s Treasury of the Right Dharma Eye.  The title, for once, says it all.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

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