Tagged: The Shadow

Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

News
November 27, 2007

So where we at? For the past month or so, we have, in a scattershot and disorganized way, been discussing the various elements involved in the evolution of superheroes. I don’t think we’ve come to any conclusions worthy of being preserved for the ages, nor should we: things change, darnit. But maybe a little tentative upsumming would not be inappropriate.

Upsumming:

Haberdashery: There is currently a trend away from putting superdoers in costumes, though the big bucks movie heroes are still wearing the suits and, judging from the films I know about that are in development, this will not change in the foreseeable future. But most entertainment consumers — I’m excepting comics fans here — get their heroism, super and otherwise, from television and maybe because of tv production hassles, costumes aren’t common.

Powers: We’ve agreed (haven’t we?) that for a long time the superbeings of mythology and folklore got their powers from some supernatural agency: they were gods, or demi-gods, or friends of ol’ Olympus, or something. Or they were agencies of darkness — black magicians of one kind or another. Then science became the rationale, most famously with Jerry Siegel’s extraterrestrial origin of Superman. Last, and decidedly least, there was technology allowing the good guy to do his stuff. And now…well, it’s anything goes time. Look at the current television offerings: we have a superhero private eye whose abilities are due to his vampirism, which we can call magic; a technology-enabled superhero(ine); and a whole bunch of peripatetic whose gifts have “scientific” explanations, or so it currently seems.

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King Arthur, Iron Man, and Brooks Brothers, by Dennis O’Neil

News
November 20, 2007

To…oh, say, King Arthur, if he ever existed, you would have superpowers. I mean, look at you. You can travel 100 miles an hour (but that red light flashing in your rearview mirror can’t be good) and you can cause a blank pane of glass to light up and show you what’s happening on he other side of the world, or what happened last week, or both, and you can twist your wrist and cause flame to appear atop that table-thing in the kitchen, with no protracted fussing with flint and stone… To Arthur, it would appear that you’re employing magic.

Living when he did, Art never read another Arthur’s observation that any form of technology sufficiently advanced would appear to be magic, at least to lumps like us. (I refer to Arthur C. Clarke, but you knew that…) So Arthur, (the king, not the science fiction writer) might watch you doing your stuff and conclude that you must be magic and because you’re magic you must be special. He wouldn’t know that you bought your powers, at a discount, at that big, ugly mall about a mile west on the freeway.

Remember, he had a special sword, Excalibur, and he had it because he deserved to have it. And so it was with other talismans, amulets, and assorted weapons and mystic hoo-haws that super good guys got hold of during their adventures down through the ages.

Which brings us to Tony Stark.

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Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, by Dennis O’Neil

News
November 6, 2007

Before we get to this week’s official topic, a continuation of our discussion of how superheroes have been evolving, I’d like to remind you all that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. I’m sure all you fans of the late 19th century biologist Ernst Haeckel – and I know you’re legion – remember that this means that the development of an organism exactly mirrors the evolutionary development of the species.

Okay, now that that’s settled…consider any given story genre the organism and storytelling as a whole the species. The first stories, maybe told around campfires, were not long on characterization. According to some anthropologists, they were basically religious, an effort to give an identity to the forces that shaped people’s lives, the forces they were already acknowledging, maybe, with rituals. Not much characterization in these yarns. They were more about what happened – some deity decides to create the world – than the nuances of the protagonists’ personalities. As storytelling evolved, from an element of religion to entertainment, the characters began to have personalities, sort of, until by the time Homer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre the good guys and bad guys were acting for reasons peculiar to who they were. And by the time of Greek drama, which, again, was part of religious festivals, they were pretty individualized.

Shoot forward about 2,500 years…Along came comic book superheroes (as opposed to all the other kinds of superdoers, who are a bit outside our boundaries, though I’m sure they’re very nice) and…well, they weren’t quite as uncharacterized as those campfire deities. But we do find ontogeny-recapitulating phylogeny, sort of. Clark Kent was, after all, “mild mannered” and Lois Lane was ambitious, but the stories were plot driven – the stuff was more about what the heroes did rather than why they did it. (Batman comes close to being an exception; a few issues into his initial run in Detective Comics, writer Bill Finger actually motivated him. But unless there are a lot of stories I haven’t read, the emphasis on what makes Bruce Wayne tick came later.)

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Costumes Revealed, by Dennis O’Neil

News
October 23, 2007

There may be some practical reasons why the grown-for-television superheroes dress in plain clothes rather than the colorful garb of their comic book and movie counterparts.

(For those of you who came in late: we’re continuing last week’s discussion of superhero costumes.)

I remember visiting the set of one of Joel Schumacher’s Batman flicks and watching costumers take a long, long time – 15 minutes? More? – just to fit Batman’s mask on a stunt man, a process that involved putting plastic wrap on the guy’s head and then trimming it after the mask was in place. And that was just the mask. Imagine what efforts went into getting tights, cape, boots and all to fit properly. Dash into a closet – a phone booth? – for a quick change? Maybe not.

Though I have no firsthand knowledge of this, I understand that there is actually a closetful of batsuits for the actor and his various doubles; which one gets worn in a particular scene depends on the scene’s content. Are we fighting? Running? Driving our spiffy car? Standing dramatically silhouetted against the skyline? We must wear the appropriate outfit!

Subtract all this time, effort and expense from the task of garbing your good guy and you have…what? Well, have a look at either of the Batman movie serials made in the 40s for your answer. The Superman and Captain Marvel suits from that era are better, but they don’t approach the panache of the average Curt Swan or Jack Kirby drawing.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: On Writing Comics

News
September 18, 2007

I don’t remember a lot about the first time I ever did a cable TV show. It must have been in the 1980s because I know I was working for Marvel, and it was probably on one of those public access channels which still exist but never seem to have anything on them. The evening’s host might have been Carl Gafford. I do recall, to a certainty, that my co-guest was Jo Duffy and we were debating a topic with, surely, international if not cosmic consequence. To wit: which is the better technique for producing comic book scripts, the so-called Marvel method or the full-script method.

Why the networks, or at least the New York Times, did not report this momentous colloquy I know not. Just another example of the ineptitude of American journalism, I suppose.

Jo had the Marvel side of the dialogue and I championed the full-script side. I have no idea what either of us said or did, but it’s now years later and we’re both still alive, so it couldn’t have been too bloody.

Which brings us, via a prolix pre-digression, to this week’s topic. I put it to you, my friend: which is better, Marvel style or full script?

But before you answer, let’s be sure we’re all talking about the same things and that’ll require some definitions. Here we go.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: The Missouri Mafia

News
September 4, 2007

There we were, in Cape Girardeau, Mo. at a convention chatting with fans and signing autographs – yes, the Missouri Mafia together again.

There is an element in the preceding sentence that’s wrong. It’s the word “again.”

Before I explain, a warning: the subject of this week’s blather is so trivial, so insignificant that it does not merit a footnote in the most comprehensive of comics histories, even if that footnote is in a type font so tiny one could use it to put the whole of next year’s New York Times on the head of a pin, presumably near the dancing angels.

Where was I? Oh yeah, in southeast Missouri with Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich, being very well treated by the convention sponsor, Ken Murphy. The occasion was a reunion of the aforementioned Missouri Mafia – i.e., the three of us. I don’t know who first used the term Missouri Mafia, which Roy, in a recent email called “a dumb phrase,” or why. It was probably because we three, in the late 60s and early 70s, were working as writers at Marvel Comics (and Gary and I also wrote for Charlton) and we were not only from Missouri, we all had a connection to a particular parcel of the state. I was working as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau newspaper; Gary and Roy were childhood friends who lived in Jackson, about eight miles from Cape.

To make a story I’ve told probably hundreds of times as short as possible: Roy was editor of what was unquestionably the best comics fanzine, Alter Ego, and had just accepted a comic book job in New York. I did a story on him for the paper, a month later he sent me Stan Lee’s writer’s test, I did it and then Roy and Stan offered me a job, which I accepted. A year or two later, Roy recruited Gary and…voila! The Missouri Mafia.

The Mafia’s ranks were augmented by the eventual arrival on the scene of Steve Gerber, who, coincidentally, graduated from my alma mater.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: The Senator is Golden

News
August 28, 2007

If a man is to be judged by his enemies, Patrick Leahy is golden. He was, as was widely reported, told to do an anatomically impossible act on himself by our always-classy Vice President, the Honorable Dick Cheney, and badmouthed by James Dobson, leader of Focus on the Family. Great foes to have.

Mr. Leahy, as most of you probably know, is Senator Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, currently trying to get a couple of friends of The Honorable George W. Bush to obey the law by telling the truth and honoring subpoenas.

I like Pat Leahy’s politics and especially his humanitarianism and I liked Pat Leahy before I knew much about either because he invited me to lunch a few years ago, along with my wife and a number of other comic book guys. Senator Leahy, it turns out, is a Batman fan and not shy about saying so in public. Lunch was in the Senate dining room that day, and although my mistrust of what we’re forced to call The Establishment is reasonably sincere, I have to admit that this butcher’s kid from North St. Louis was pretty impressed with himself, sitting at a big table with a living, breathing senator, surrounded by the nation’s movers and shakers. Later, our host wrote an introduction to a collection of comic book stories and later still, had cameos in two of the Batman movies.

According to the Journal News, my local Gannett paper, and reported by ComicMix last week, the senator will have an actual part in the next batmovie, The Dark Knight, and will donate his acting pay to a children’s library in Montpelier. (No word yet on whether Cheney or Dobson will be in the cast, but don’t get your hopes up.)

I mentioned the senator’s humanitarianism, which brings me to our second encounter with him. In 1996, at the instigation of Jenette Kahn, then DC Comics’ publisher, we did some comic books about the landmine problem. Before Jenette dragooned me into a meeting full of impressive people, I hadn’t known there was such a problem. But there was, and is, and it consists of the existence of millions of small explosive devices scattered throughout the planet. In theory, their targets are soldiers, but in practice, they kill and maim many, many civilians, especially children. So the Superman guys did a book, to be translated into the appropriate languages, which showed what landmines are and what to do if you see one, and we Batman guys did a book, in English, designed to raise awareness. And that’s where we reencountered the senator. Every year, he works to help landmine victims. You don’t hear about this much, and he makes no political capital from it; having spoken with him about those victims, I’m convinced that he does what he does sincerely, because it needs doing.

Anyway, to finish the story, the senator and I eventually found ourselves sharing a rostrum as we worked to publicize our comics and the landmine problem they addressed.

I’ve done nothing about the problem since. Not so the senator, and that’s one of the reasons he’s a genuinely good guy.

I’ll bet he’ll be just fine in the movie, too.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

DENNIS O’NEIL: On The Road Again

News
August 21, 2007

Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road is 50 years old.

“And this has exactly what to do with comics?” demands the snotty guy in the corner. Well, actually, not much, but maybe if we stretch, a little something. Patience, please.

If you know people my age, or a bit younger, you may have heard On The Road stories. Mine is pretty banal: I was fairly unhappy at school (I was always fairly unhappy at schools, except when I was actively miserable) and I read and had my mind altered by Kerouac’s book which is, among other things, a paean to travel and the highway. So, one morning, I went down to breakfast, borrowed about forty bucks from my father and, blowing off university exam week, got on a bus for New Orleans.

Once there, I didn’t do much: checked into a Y, hung out, walked around, had a friendly lady on Bourbon Street offer to teach me everything about life for only five dollars. I kind of guessed what she was talking about and, being the Good Catholic Boy that I was, politely declined. Then I boarded another Greyhound and went home. No hitchhiking, not that trip, though there was plenty later. (And, by the way, don’t try this at home. Hitchhiking in the 50s and 60s was not without hazards, but not nearly as dangerous as it is now.)

“Did someone mention comic books? This column, this whole dern website, is supposed to be about comics.” The snotty guy in the corner again. Okay, be at peace, brother, and give me another paragraph or two.

Kerouac was, as I’m sure everyone except the guy in the corner knows, the most famous and visible member of a loose confederation of novelists, poets, and musicians that became known as The Beat Generation. I’ve never heard, or read, any of them even evidencing knowledge that comics existed. But they were contrarians that believed that most conventional wisdom was erroneous, that genuine American values involved peace and understanding and, incidentally, that maybe mainstream literary and critical folk – the Establishment – did not own the last word on artistic matters.

Jump ahead a few years to the mid-60s and here we are, on college campuses, and what are the bright rebels reading? Well, a few – those who still wear ties on Sunday – are still delving into Catcher In The Rye, and a few more are grokking Stranger In A Strange Land, but the real nonconformists, the bright ones, are into comics, particularly Marvel comics.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Spoiler Alert!

News
August 14, 2007

Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Danger Will Robinson! Alarums and excursions! Better watch out, better not cry, better not pout…Beware! Mayday! Here there be dragons! Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…

Okay, enough of that.

What I’m warning you about is the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum, now playing at a multiplex near you, recipient of good reviews, maker of serious bucks and, in the opinion of residents of this house, a pretty good popcorn flick.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: Saturday Noon

News
July 31, 2007

Saturday noon, and it still hadn’t arrived. Voldemort’s work? Or the machinations of something a bit more prosaic – book ninjas, maybe, or gremlins? But no. We fretted in vain. At about three, the doorbell rang, and there he was – Mr. Delivery Man, bearing our own copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

(I don’t think a spoiler warning is really necessary at this point – is there anyone who doesn‘t know Harry’s fate? – but what the hell, consider yourself warned.)

Soon, Marifran was in bed, reading – yes – the end of the novel. I asked her if Harry survives and she said that he does. Whew. The next evening, daughter Meg phoned from Seattle. She’s already finished it, all 759 pages. Do all bank vice-presidents spend their weekends reading?

What kind of people are these? What sort of mutated family did I marry into?

Me, I plan to wait for the movie. But I’m glad the book’s doing well. Better that gobs of money go to J.K. Rowling, who comports herself with some dignity, than to yet another deluded, sad young woman who calls attention to her desperate self by displaying what, in gentler times, would be seen only by her mate or her gynecologist.

Of course, not everyone is profiting by Ms. Rowling’s success. Independent bookshops, in order to compete with chains and on-line venues, are selling the book at such steep discounts that their profit is slim to none. And news reports tell us that just because a lot of kids are reading the Potter series doesn’t mean that they’ll read anything else. Apparently, Harry’s sui generis and after Deathly Hallows, it’s back to the tube for many.

But surely some kids will try other printed entertainment, once Harry teaches them that what’s printed can, in fact, be entertaining. Or so those of us who worry about the future of these United States can hope. Al Gore’s new and excellent book, The Assault on Reason (which I recommended last week) tells us that “…the parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words…the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process…An individual who spends four and a half hours a day watching television is likely to have a very different pattern of brain activity from an individual who spends four and a half hours reading.”

So, my understanding of Mr. Gore is, reading is not virtuous because it’s what grandma and grandpa did for fun, but because it stimulates a part of the brain that may be both underused and useful.

Is Harry Potter our new, albeit fictional, messiah? Well, no. We don’t want to take it that far. But given the current crop of wannabe saviors, we could do worse.

RECOMMENDED READING: Understanding McLuhan, by W. Terrence Gordon, illustrations by Susan Willmarth.

Tagged: The Shadow

Is Iron Man Mike Hammer? by Dennis O’Neil

King Arthur, Iron Man, and Brooks Brothers, by Dennis O’Neil

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny, by Dennis O’Neil

Costumes Revealed, by Dennis O’Neil

DENNIS O’NEIL: On Writing Comics

DENNIS O’NEIL: The Missouri Mafia

DENNIS O’NEIL: The Senator is Golden

DENNIS O’NEIL: On The Road Again

DENNIS O’NEIL: Spoiler Alert!

DENNIS O’NEIL: Saturday Noon

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