Tagged: The Shadow

Is Hillary Clinton Really The Thing? By Dennis O’Neil

Is Hillary Clinton Really The Thing? By Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • August 12, 2008

I never talked to either Jack Kirby or Stan Lee about politics, so I don’t really have any idea where they stood on the subject. My guess would be that following their political spoor wouldn’t take you very far west and that they didn’t have much sympathy for the hippie-rebels of the 60s (and here allow me to blush and hide my face). After all, they and their parents (and my parents) fought for a place in the American mainstream because, finally, acceptance meant an increased chance of survival and for those outside the tribe, who suffered the Great Depression, not surviving seemed to be a real possibility. Then here came the snotty kids with their tie-dye and their girly haircuts and their wiseass slogans saying that a place in the tribe was not worth struggling for – in fact, the tribe itself was stinking of corruption.

Both generations were, in their own way, right; both had a piece of the truth.

Stan and Jack were – are – of the first of the two generations and so they were – are – probably politically a bit to the right of me and maybe you (and my parent and most of my siblings.) But events of the past week make me guess that their greatest creations were liberals. I refer to the Fantastic Four who, along with Spider-Man co-launched Marvel Comics, as one or two of you might have heard. True FF aficionados know, and perhaps relish, the tendency of the members of this supergroup to squabble among themselves. Two of the four, The Human Torch and The Thing, seem particularly apt to indulge in petty argumentation.

Remind you of any particular political group?

Yeah, right. Liberals. Witness the recent news: Ms. Hillary Clinton’s die-hard supporters are threatening to vote for John McCain, the Republican candidate, unless Ms. Clinton’s presidential aspirations are accorded full acknowledgement at the Democratic convention, which will be soaking up media time in about two weeks. This despite the fact that Ms. Clinton has already lost the nomination to Barack Obama, whose crew must be thinking harsh and uncharitable thoughts about the Clintonites.

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Speaking Up, by Dennis O’Neil

Speaking Up, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • July 29, 2008

The comic book veteran was smiling as he leaned forward to read the lettering on the button fastened to my lapel: Let’s Legalize Pot. His mood changed instantly, to one of anger. He snatched the pin off my jacket, flung it into a wastebasket, and stalked from the room.

That was in 1965 and before I relate another incident from the same era, let me offer a quick clarification. I don’t like marijuana. Never have. The circumstances of my rather bumpy life have, at times, put me close to it and of course, like William Jefferson Clinton and maybe just one or two other pols, I sampled it and found it usually did little for me. Which is not to say I didn’t have addiction problems. No siree. My love of alcohol cost me a marriage and a job and a lot of dignity and some trips to the hospital. But pot? Usually just made me cough. That button? Well, although the evil reefer was not my drug of choice, I thought that if booze and nicotine were legal, evil reefer should be, too.

This was not conventional wisdom in 1965 (and still isn’t) and, although, as we discussed last week, comics guys like the man I outraged were outsiders, they were not rebels. No, they were outsiders by birth and circumstance, not choice, and their values were pretty much those of mainstream America. They wore suits and ties to work, they paid taxes and owned homes, went to church or temple, voted, behaved themselves. Many had served honorably in the war. They were patriots, they were good citizens. They knew, because they had not learned otherwise, that our nation was menaced by godless Communism, that elected officials were as honorable as they themselves were, that what was good for General Motors was, in fact, good for America, that the atomic bomb was an invaluable part of Liberty’s Arsenal and, oh yeah, that the Devil’s Weed would likely corrupt any youth who got a whiff of it. They were my parents, my relatives, and the folks in my old neighborhood.

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Education, by Dennis O’Neil

Education, by Dennis O’Neil

Over the past few years, I’ve come to believe that not everyone gets the same education, even if schools and transcripts are identical. Some folk mentally compartmentalize: church goes here, family here, school stuff here, life in general there. So when they pass tests on what they’ve heard in classrooms, and at the end of a span of time, usually16 years and some august personage hands them a rectangle full of fancy lettering, they’re done with it. No more schooling, and no learning above what’s needed to live comfortably. Schooling in its compartment yonder, not touching this compartment, which is where we live.

That seems particularly true for liberal arts types, and vastly less true for engineers, doctors, dentists – students who go to the universities to acquire skills.

Although it’s been encouraged and enabled by the current “No Child Left Behind” calamity, which seems to be all about passing prefabricated tests and not at all about learning, this just pass the test attitude is not new. My favorite college professor, from whom I took at least six courses, told us that we’d better join the Book of the Month Club; if we didn’t, we’d probably never read another book after graduation. He was admitting that he wasn’t in the business of encouraging curiosity and a love of books and what’s in them. Rather, his task was just to help us grind through the requirements, pick up the sheepskin and…what? Remember to pay taxes. Don’t raise a fuss. Hang the sheepskin in the foyer, where visitors will see it.

The problem, I think, is this: There might be information over in the school compartment that is relevant to the contents of the living compartment. It might supply answers, or at least stimulate thinking.

Left in the ghetto of the school compartment, denied access to other compartments, and it is useless, and it will die. Worse, its lack might cause you to blunder.

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Barefoot In The Dark, by Dennis O’Neil

Barefoot In The Dark, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • June 17, 2008

I don’t know when I first saw an English edition of Barefoot Gen. It was probably sometime in the mid 70s, when I was editing for the modest enterprise that has become the mighty Marvel Entertainment. In those days, a lot of stuff crossed editorial desks and we read most of it, if not all. So: Japanese comics? Sure, I’ll give it a look. It was probably my first experience with manga and I remember feeling a mild taste of cognitive dissonance – a perceived disconnect between subject and form. (I am choosing to ignore, because it’s a bit off-subject, the hybrid of cartooning and illustration that’s most superhero art.)

The subject was grim. Barefoot Gen is the autobiographical tale of a child who witnessed and survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. But it was presented in a visual style I would have described as “cartoony.” Like most American pop-cultch consumers, I associated bright, simple, exaggerated drawings – cartoons – with material that was at least supposed to be humorous, and there was nothing remotely funny about Barefoot Gen. It was, and is, a powerful anti-war document and, because it is that, deeply humane.

It’s creator, who did both art and copy, is named Keiji Nakazawa, and Barefoot Gen is his story. He had this to say about it: “People should be told what happened. If you live through something like the A-bomb, you know that war is too horrible not to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the justifications offered for it.”

The work first appeared in 1972 as a serial in a mass market Japanese publication, Shukan Shonon Jampu (and perhaps some kind reader will translate that for us). Later, it migrated to smaller magazines, and later still, it was published in English as a paperback book series. The most recent English iteration appeared in 2004, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman.

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Getting Reality Right, by Dennis O’Neil

Getting Reality Right, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • June 10, 2008

Vinnie Bartilucci said it better than I did. Commenting on a couple of columns that asked, sort of, if the science in comics should be real, Vinnie wrote, “… once a writer chooses to mention actual, proper science, he should get it right.”

Yes. Exactly. Well put.

But I wonder if we shouldn’t extend the idea to other real life areas. Social problems, for example.  Or such knotty personal problems as addiction. One of the difficulties is, there isn’t the kind of consensus on personal and societal quandaries that there is on the basics of, say, physics. All but the most skeptical – or reactionary – can agree that Newton’s three laws are on the money and Einstein was right about relativity, both general and special, and even Heisenberg’s principle doesn’t seem terribly uncertain these days.

But, to pluck just one example from the ether…addiction? What, exactly, is it? My imperfect understanding is that many, if not most, addictions are caused by environment acting on genetics. In other words, nature and nurture combine to rot out somebody’s life. But, with patience, determination, and rigorous self-honesty, the addict can put his demons in the coal bin, and if he’s able to continue being patient, determined, and honest, they’ll stay there until he dies and they die with him. Addiction is not exactly a disease, in the conventional sense, but it’s more that than character defect.

That was, more or less, the version of addiction I posited in an extended comic book continuity some years ago, and most people who saw the stories seemed to agree with me. But not everyone. A source I trust told me that a person much higher on the corporate food chain than either my editor or me thought that the fictional addict should have just…I don’t know – snap out of it? (In fairness to all concerned, the executive in question never confronted me personally, so I am taking a trusted somebody’s word for what happened.) On another occasion, an excellent artist, a man I respect, refused, politely, to draw a one-page shot of a hero dreaming he was drunk – just dreaming, mind you – because, in the artist’s opinion, heroes don’t behave like louts, even when snoozing.

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Indiana Jones and the Godless Commies, by Dennis O’Neil

Indiana Jones and the Godless Commies, by Dennis O’Neil

Now we know. That Indiana Jones still swings a mean whip.

I liked the new Indy flick better than the critics I read, all of whom said something like, well, okay, it was all right but not up to the earlier entries in the series. Which makes me wonder: what would they have thought if this had been the first Indy flick, instead of the fourth. It’s like those clichés in Hamlet – they weren’t clichés to the greasy-chinned groundlings at the first (or fourteenth, or eighty-third) performance of Shakespeare’s story of a screwed-up kid with severe mama issues. Way back in 1981, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and a platoon of talented collaborators took elements from Saturday afternoon serials, silent comedies and maybe a few other sources and combined them in the right proportions to create entertainment that was not only right for the time, but provided a template for a lot of entertainment that followed.

Was the fourth as good as the first (or second, or third?)? That’s me, scratching my head and muttering, I dunno…And, frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Years and years ago, a brilliant science fiction writer told me that Goethe’s criterion for judging art was found in two questions. To wit: What was the artist trying to do and did he succeed in doing it? I’ve never found a good reason to argue with Herr Goethe and by his criteria; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a success. We entered the multiplex hoping to be amused, hoping to forget Bush’s ongoing follies and the Democrat’s internecine dogfights and – voila! We were amused and we, temporarily, forgot. Value received. Money well spent.

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Science Friction, by Dennis O’Neil

Science Friction, by Dennis O’Neil

The following will be about a column I didn’t write and it’s Vinnie Bartilucci’s fault. But that’s okay. I forgive him.

What Mr. Batilucci did was beat me to recommending Physics of the Impossible, by Michio Kaku. This Mr. B. did in a comment on last week’s column which, some may remember, described how awkward I felt being a published science fiction writer who was abysmally ignorant of science and how one of my earliest attempts at remedy of this ignorance was reading One…Two…Three…Infinity, by George Gamow.

My plan was to save recommending Dr. Kaku’s much more recent book – it’s on current best-seller lists, in fact – for this week.

Said recommendation would have come at the end of a blather that would have mentioned yet another elderly book, The Two Cultures, by a remarkable man who was both a scientist and novelist named C.P. Snow. According to the endlessly useful Wikipedia, “its thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the “two cultures” of modern society – the sciences and the humanities – was a major hindrance to solving the world’s problems.” I encountered Mr. Snow’s slim volume in college, probably when I should have been reading something some teacher had assigned, and it must have impressed me. (I mean, here we are, all these years later, and I still remember it.) The unwritten column would have culminated in the reiteration of something I mentioned some months ago, advice from my first comic book boss, Stan Lee. Stan said, in effect, that it’s a waste of space to “explain” comic book “science” because readers will accept what we tell them.

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The Squires of Science, by Dennis O’Neil

The Squires of Science, by Dennis O’Neil

We were the Squires of Science, my friend Mike and I were. He went to public school and I was a sixth- or seventh grader at St. Louise de Marillac, but that didn’t keep us from palling around together, watching Tom Corbett, Space Cadet on his family’s television set and doing chemistry set experiments in his basement. Actually, I don’t remember doing many experiments – we squires weren’t really much into real science – but Mike, who was good with tools, made us a plaque and, well…we believed in science. Maybe not as much as I believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but still a lot.

I was also reading a lot of science fiction, thanks to the public library, and I guess Mike was, too.

Adolescence disintegrated the Squires of Science. I was off to a Catholic military school – and yes, you may snicker – and Mike went…I don’t know – probably to Beaumont High, which we Catholic kids thought was kind of wicked, in some ill-defined way.

About then, I began to realize, dimly, that science involved mathematics. I had never been really good at arithmetic, which caused me a lot of grief at old St. Louise, and I seemed to be getting worse as I grew older. Then I flunked freshman algebra. Had to go to summer school. It wasn’t exactly a disgrace, but it wasn’t exactly not a disgrace, either.

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The Shadow’s Web, by Dennis O’Neil

The Shadow’s Web, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • April 15, 2008

With the kind permission of Anthony Tollin and Mike Gold, this week’s column is an adaptation and condensation of an introduction I’m writing for a forthcoming edition of Mr. Tollin’s repackaging of the original Shadow novels. No formal recommended reading this time, but the volume in which the much longer version of what’s below will appear – Shadow #19 – will be on sale in the latter half of June.

Let us, for just a little while, indulge our wish that the great mythic and fictional heroes did and do exist. We are told – and remember, we’re in believer mode – that a diligent historian named Maxwell Grant was privy to the life and thoughts of a mystery man who, though he was probably born Kent Allard often assumed the identity of Lamont Cranston, one of those gentlemen of wealth and leisure who seemed to proliferate in the 30s, the years of the Great Depression, and become almost extinct after World War Two. We are assured that many years ago, while traveling in the Orient, that he acquired certain extraordinary skills – they might even be termed “powers” – and that these aided him in the activities of another of his personae, the relentless and dreaded nemesis of crime known only as The Shadow.

Now, let us entertain a hypothesis. It’s possible, perhaps even probable, that our eastern sojourner, during his investigations, came across reference to Indra’s Net, perhaps while thumbing through a yellowing old volume he found in a bookshop located in a winding Calcutta alleyway. (Would the book have been written in Hindi? Likely. Would Mr. Allard have mastered enough of that language to read it? Again, likely.) Being the ever-curious investigator he had to have been in his salad days, Mr. Allard would have made further inquiries regarding this “Indra’s Net.”

Here is what he might have learned:

In Svarga, the realm of the god Indra, there is a network of gems arranged in such a manner that if a person looks at one of them he sees all the others reflected in it.

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On Beowulf and Catechism, by Dennis O’Neil

On Beowulf and Catechism, by Dennis O’Neil

  • News
  • April 8, 2008

In days of yore, when cowboys and dinosaurs roamed the land and I was an undergraduate in a Jesuit-run university, not knowing exactly what one was supposed to do in a university, much less what the heck I, a butcher’s kid from north St. Louis, was doing at a university, I had what Friedrich Nietzsche might have called a “slave morality.” That is, I felt powerless and I resented and mistrusted every authority figure on the horizon, even the ones who were trying to help me.

Watching the movie version of Beowulf reminded me of one episode in my inglorious academic career.

Somewhere along sophomore year, an English prof assigned a paper to be titled “Beowulf As An Allegory of Redemption.” (I don’t know if that repeats her capitalization. If not, I apologize.) Well. I didn’t think so. Oh, I could, and did, write the paper using some kind of tortured rhetoric/logic/whatever, then, for a creative writing class, I did a paper called “Three Blind Mice As An Allegory of Redemption,” using the same rhetorical devices. The point was, of course, that you can use rhetorical sleight-of-hand to prove anything you want. The subtext was, of course, “They’re bullshitters”– the they being anyone older, more credentialed, better-looking than a butcher’s kid, and maybe anyone who wore a tie. These degree-waving poltroons will twist anything into a Catechism lesson: so my declaration might have gone.

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