Tagged: Wasteland

John Ostrander: A Dark Glittering Intelligence

Ostrander Art 131020My favorite new show of the TV season is not Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as I thought it would be (although I like that show well enough). It’s The Blacklist… which is on opposite Castle. I loves me some Castle so I have to record one and watch the other live; so far, Castle is winning out but sometimes it’s a near thing.

The Blacklist is about Raymond “Red” Reddington, a master criminal who the FBI has been unsuccessfully hunting for some time. One day he surrenders and offers to help them take down other monsters on his blacklist but he’ll only work with FBI profiler Elizabeth Keen, whom he insists on calling “Lizzie”. She doesn’t know him and neither she nor anyone else at the FBI knows why Reddington has offered his help but they must admit he’s very effective – especially with criminals and terrorists they didn’t even know were out there.

The series is derivative and there’s a Silence of the Lambs Hannibal Lecter/Clarice Starling vibe to it, but the main reason to watch it is James Spader as Reddington. He’s charming, charismatic, dangerous, and scary. He’s playing all sorts of games and what he’s really after is impossible to guess. Spader is obviously having a wonderful time with the part and is amazing in the role. Reddington is a killer but not a serial one; I’ve come to the conclusion that Reddington is less Hannibal Lecter than Professor Moriarity.

What Spader’s Reddington demonstrates is a dark, glittering intelligence and that makes him a fascinating character and, in that, he is like Lecter. Over the ages, this type of character, in different variations, has become a recurring character type. Hearth Ledger’s Joker falls into that category as well. So does Shakespeare’s Richard III. Something in our own atavistic reptilian brain stem gets drawn to them. Well, at least my atavistic reptilian brain stem does.

The trick is getting us to root for them although they’re monsters. Reddington admits to it. Why do we do that? There’s an appeal to our own dark sides. The monsters embody our dark urges on which we would never follow through. They’re our dark fantasies – unbound by social conventions. They appall us as they enthrall us.

We root for the anti-hero as well as the hero – if the anti-hero is done right. That’s the challenge for the creator. I’m guilty of it myself; in Wasteland, I once did a story from the serial killer’s point of view. The goal was to see if I could get the reader to identify with him. That would be where the horror part of the story really came in – when (if) the reader founds themselves identifying with him. Look to the recently completed Dexter or Breaking Bad. The popular success of those series – along with The Sopranos or The Shield – attests to the fact that we are willing to go there – to root for the bad guys. They need to know who/what they are, accept it, and don’t whine. That’s what we want and that’s what we love. If we’re honest, we like Loki more than Thor. Characters like that give us a delicious thrill.

Angels are beautiful, but the devil is sexy.

MONDAY MORNING: Mindy Newell

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

 

Marc Alan Fishman: Life Is A Pitch

Marc Alan Fishman: Life Is A Pitch

This past weekend, the Unshaven Comics crew split our duties (heh heh). Kyle traveled to Cincinnati, where he single handedly crushed records, and declared himself Lord of the Sale. Matt and I (along with our pretty, and amazing, and totally-not-looking-over-my-shoulder-as-I-write-this wives) returned to Charm City for the Baltimore Comic Con. Again we took in the sites, the fine food, and the amazing fans. But of all the new memories made on this sojourn across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland… it was the impromptu brainstorming session that will stick out as the best part of the trip.

As our wives listened to their iPods, or slept, Matt and I did what we always do. We talked extensively about the Bears, about toys, about movies we loved… and then we started brainstorming about The Samurnauts. I know, I know. I talk about them a lot. But you know what? I love my creations with Unshaven Comics. One of the honest-to-Rao best moments of my weekend was hearing Mike Gold say to another publisher “I really love what those guys (Unshaven) are doing.” And the best part? I didn’t even have to bribe Mike to say it. I know as we’re all “co-workers” or whatever here on ComicMix, but facts are facts. Mike Gold’s résumé in comics,= and his discerning tastes are that of legend. And to be given a nod of approval from an editor like that? Well, it made my beard tingle. But I digress.

So, somewhere between Ohio and Pennsylvania, Matt and I turned the radio down, and started spit-balling. “You know we should do?” “What?” “Take that joke commission of Lucador Samuranuts and actually, you know, do it.” What proceeded after that, was several hundred miles worth of ideation. From a single jokey-dare to a fully fleshed out idea complete with Aztec gods, nomadic kung-fu monkey masters, and a five-on-five tag team tornado match to save the world. The best part? We weren’t done.

“Well, that’s cool. But you know what we could never do… Disconauts. Like… The Samurnauts of the 70’s.” “Yeah, I know. But like… if we did…. maybe they’d each have their own vehicle.” “Yeah, and those vehicles would be like M.A.S.K., right?” And so on, and so forth. Suffice to say, by the time we reached Baltimore, we’d created two completely new mini-series ready to be outlined, sketched, and built.

I related this all to Mike at our goodbye dinner where Mike and I dominated the conversation of our four top, letting Marc Hempel and my wife smile and eat their crab. No sooner did I finish telling him about our Luchadornauts did a smile creep across his face. And as he’s prone to do, he launched into a story of his own. He related to me the time he and John Ostrander took a walk around a lake close to his house, and came up with the pitch for Wasteland. And it was there, in a beautiful restaurant in the suburbs of Baltimore, with a crab cake the size of my face plated before me… did I find that first true connection with Mike Gold that did not relate specifically to good BBQ or amazing conversation. Here was a guy who with his good friend, found a camaraderie not just in opinions and shared experiences… but in an idea and creativity.

Since we were kids, Matt and I founded our friendship on just that. The spark of creation more than anything else… binds us as brothers-from-other-mothers. And just like icing on a cake, cream filling in an Oreo, or crab cakes bound with bits of smaller crab (bless you, Baltimore), Kyle joined our menagerie and completed our circle. We creators of sequential fiction are a curious sort. And my generation – the one bred by toy commercials and Nintendo – was onslaught by our elders to never have to be creative again. Why create when TV, comics, toys, movies, and then the truly evil Internet, is right there awaiting your procrastination. But there, on the road surrounded by small mountains, rest stops, and snoring wives… I was reminded of who I am, and why I do what I do.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

 

Mike Gold: My Brain Hurts!

Gold Art 130320Yesterday morning I received an e-mail from my pal/ComicMix partner/Secret Santa Glenn Hauman with a link to a three-month old piece in The Atlantic  and the comment “You simply must write this up!”

Must? Glenn never says must. He knows I’ll twist and turn any demand challenge into the pretzel from hell – you know, it’s a living – so he usually makes polite suggestions.

I was thinking about writing in detail about exactly how to fix the comic book industry and how easy it is and how it won’t take any additional money to pull it off, but evidently Glenn thinks this is more important. So be it.

I believe the brilliant political satire The President’s Analyst (James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge, and Wasteland contributor Severn Darden) to be even more relevant today than it was when it was released in 1967. I don’t want to do any spoilers but if you haven’t seen this movie, do so. Yeah, it’s got some hippie stuff. You can deal with that. But the ending of the movie, where the happy Doctor Doom of the piece, Pat Harrington Jr., explains his evil scheme is far more believable today.

For the past 46 years I have been proselytizing this nefarious scheme shall come to pass, and now, according to The Atlantic, it has. That’s because they know what magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback is. I didn’t, and now that I’ve read up on it my brain hurts real bad. The funny thing is, if this magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback thing works you might not have to do the heavy reading.

“Simply” put, magnetic resonance imaging neurofeedback allows you to learn how to do visual stuff by having the information zapped directly into your brain. Boston University in Boston and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan figured it out. I won’t explain the process – I can’t explain the process, at least not until I undergo it and I doubt it’s covered in my über-lame health insurance plan.

I find myself in metaphor hell. I don’t know whether to allude to The Matrix or to The Manchurian Candidate. Both, probably.

Here’s the scary part. This procedure has most effective when applied to subjects who don’t know in advance what they’re supposed to be learning. Think about that for a minute. If somebody wanted you to, say, murder somebody and they chose you because of your access to that person, if you actually knew about this in advance your moral predilections might get in the way. Well, they might.

Of course, all of this is still in the experimental phase.

At least, that’s what they want you to think.

ComicMix Editor-In-Chief Mike Gold also writes a weekly, much more political yet somehow still whimsical column each week at www.michaeldavisworld.com, where Martha Thomases, Marc Alan Fishman and Michael Davis also try to annoy the masses.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

 

John Ostrander’s Crossing Realities

Ostrander Art 130127There’s a plethora of “reality” shows on the tube and some fit into the niche of what I call “redneck reality” – shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” “Redneck Vacation,” “Alligator Wrestlers” and so on. There’s also a niche of “supernatural reality” shows such as Ghost Hunters, Finding Bigfoot, and other “investigative” shows. Of course there is also fictional horror shows that are real big like “The Walking Dead” and “American Asylum.” At least, these are shows that intend to be fictional.

I’m not loathe to hop on a bandwagon and I love combining genres or niches so I’ve come up with an idea for a supernatural redneck reality show I’m calling “Zombie Wranglers”.

Cue theme music and opening credits: Zombie Wranglers with Joe Bob Briggs, Ellie Mae Clampett and Simon Pegg.

Narrator: Zombie encounters depicted in this show are handled by self-proclaimed experts in the field. Do not attempt these at home. If you see a zombie, run like hell.

Opening visuals: The team walking through bayou country with Joe Bob in the lead. And he talks to the camera. Ellie Mae, in a tied off red plaid shirt opened to the third button and cut offs cut way up high, is on one side, Simon, carrying all the equipment, brings up the rear.

JOE BOB: This week me and the Zombie Wranglers team are in Bayou Country of Loosiana. Lots o’ Zombie sighting out this way. A few running wild. Hopefully, we can hook up with a local bokor, or voodoo priest, who can give us the lay o’ the land.

Now, your average bokor, he may raise himself up some zombies but mostly it’s just to work around the hut or run errands and such. Very rarely do you come across a bokor trying to create a zombie army and I myself personally have never come across one trying to create a zombie apocalypse. Stands to reason – if zombies take over the whole world, where’s the bokor gonna live, I ask you.

Sometimes you might get a hybrid, like a zombie loupy garou or werewolf. Those are nasty. I’ve heard some talk ‘bout bigfoot zombies but, personally, I’ve never believed in sasquatches myself. That’s a little too out there for me.

Some ignorant types said they don’t find zombies all that scary because you can just outrun ’em. That’s not always true. An older zombie, one that’s come back to life a while ago and whose grave is old, yeah, okay. Their joints are stiff and they just creak along. A newly raised zombie or one created by a zombie bite? That’s a different story. They can move pretty fast and you may not know which is which just to look at ‘em.

Hey, Simon – we seem to be getting’ nowhere in a hurry. How ‘bout you send up a zombie call?

Visual: cut to Simon, muttering.

SIMON: How ‘bout yew carry yer own weight on this show, yew bloody gobshite.

JOE BOB: What was that?

SIMON: I’m doin it!

Visual: Simon cups his hands around his mouth and calls.

SIMON: Urgh! Aargh!

Visual: All three heads turn as a cry comes back from close by.

VOICE (off) Urgh! Aargh!

Visual: Camera turns to catch a pretty fresh zombie lurching out of the brush.

ZOMBIE: Urgh! Aargh!

Visual: Joe Bob keeps his eyes on the off camera zombie as he gives direction. Middle background – Ellie Mae unbuttons another button on her shirt. Simon starts sneaking off in the background.

JOE BOB: Okay, Ellie Mae, prepare to lure him on. Not too fast now. And undo another button on that shirt; that’s pure ratings gold right there. Simon, start circling ‘round now behind him.

ELLIE MAE: Right you are, Joe Bob.

Visual: Ellie Mae, glancing behind her with wide eyes, faking being scared, prances on in front of the zombie, her breasts heaving, The zombie, distracted, follows her, reaching for her.

ZOMBIE: Hurrr?

ELLIE: EEEEEEEEE!

Visual: Joe Bob talks to the camera in a calm, professional manner.

JOE BOB: It’s a little known fact that zombies are easily distracted by a purty woman running just out of reach and screaming, especially if she has large hooters on display.

Visual: Joe Bob calling to Ellie Mae.

JOE BOB: Ellie Mae? You want to run a little faster than that, girl. This is a speedy critter.

Visual: The zombie grabs Ellie Mae by her hair, yanks her back, and bites her on the side of her throat. Ellie Mae no longer fakes being terrified; her screams are for real.

ZOMBIE: Hurrr! Aargh!

ELLIE MAE: Gaaaaaah!

Visual: Simon, coming up from behind, furiously plants a machete in the top of the zombie’s head. The zombie releases Ellie Mae but her eyes roll up in her head.

SIMON: Let go of her, ya bloody beastie!

Visual: The zombie, the machete still in its head, turns around and bites Simon in the arm. His eyes start to roll up in his head as he grimaces in pain.

ZOMBIE: Urgh! Aargh!

JOE BOB: (off camera) See now, this is a classic mistake in combating zombies. You want to strike crossways across the neck and take off their head. Top wise like Simon did does no damn good a’tall. Tell ya the truth, I’m a little surprised at Simon for bein’ so unprofessional.

Visual: Back to Joe Bob as he keeps a wary eye out off camera.

JOE BOB: Now yew folks are gonna get a little extra treat here. You’ll see how someone bit turns into a zombie like Ellie Mae and Simon are about to do.

Visual: Simon and Ellie Mae, their faces going white and their eyes sinking back in their sockets, stand jerkily and raise their arms in classic zombie fashion.

JOE BOB: (off camera) There now. Skins getting’ all pasty white and stuff. See that? Sure sign of them turnin’ into zombies, you bet.

ELLIE MAE: Braaains. . .

SIMON: Braaaains. . .

Visual: Joe Bob seeing that their coming for him and turning to run.

JOE BOB: Well, that’s about all the time we got for this week. I’ll be back next week with a new Zombie Wrangler crew. In the meantime, don’t let em’ grab you! Bye all!

Visual: long shot of the zombies chasing Joe Bob through the bayou as ending credits and theme run.

The Author Concludes: Discovery Channel, TLC – I’m waiting for your call.

The Editor annoyingly adds: Illustrating Mr. Ostrander’s column today is a Wasteland piece by the gifted artist and energetic entrepreneur Michael Davis, best known for his long-running ComicMix column published every Tuesday afternoon… when we can find him.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

Review: Aces Weekly – Today’s Newest Future

I like anthology comics. For one thing, that’s how the comic book medium started – single-character comics didn’t really start until about six years down the road. For another, the anthology format reinvented comics with 2000AD back in the mid-1970s. Today, the anthology format is all but gone, with the notable – and highly laudable – exception of Dark Horse Presents, Creator-Owned Comics and a handful of others.

I like electronic publishing in general and electronic comics publishing in specific. I am a well-known advocate of the movement, at least in my own mind. Well before e-comics became real, I had a debate with my pal and oft-time co-conspirator Mark Wheatley, one of the most innovative and hardest-working people in the known universe. Mark advocated the potential of e-comics expanding the medium by incorporating effects that would move the medium past the boundaries imposed by print. Whereas I agreed with that position, I maintained that such additions move comic books into… something else. Not bad, not good – that depends on content. But nonetheless… something else.

Since then we’ve had various and sundry incursions into the multimedia comics world, the best known being “motion comics.” Interesting, but short of scintillating. But this is a nascent form in need of development, innovation and coddling.

Then my pal David Lloyd (Kickback, Night Raven, Doctor Who, V For Vendetta, Espers, Hellblazer, Wasteland … jeez, this guy has done a lot and, yeah, I’ve got a lot of pals who make great comics; what of it?) decided to combine the anthology concept of the past with the computer magic of an hour-and-a-half ago.

And by “an hour-and-a-half ago,” I mean that almost literally. His new title, Aces Weekly, debuted yesterday.

You’ve probably read about it in all sorts of places. I was lucky enough to get a head’s-up during last month’s Baltimore Comic-Con; Mark Wheatley showed me the first hundred pages of “Return Of The Human,” the series he’s doing with may pal (yeah, yeah) J.C. Vaughn. And I was left panting.

In addition to David, Mark and J.C., Aces Weekly offers us the talent of (take a deep breath) Kyle Baker, David Hitchcock, Herb Trimpe, David Leach, Billy Tucci, Bill Sienkiewicz, Marc Hempel, James Hudnall, Steve Bissette, Val Mayerick, Henry Flint, Dan Christensen, Dave Hine, Colleen Doran, and a lot of others of similar high caliber. No, not all are in the first issue: it’s a weekly, and as one story ends another begins, and the talent recovers.

Aces Weekly costs $9.99 per seven-issue subscription – the anthology is published in seven issue “volumes,” which is a clever idea. It’s online-only, all the material is original, and once you buy it you can read it wherever and whenever you have web access. It’s all creator-owned and, evidently, creators aren’t overly burdened by control-freak editors like me.

Check it out at www.acesweekly.co.uk. No matter how cynical you may be, have your credit card ready.

Oh, yeah. It says up there in the headline “review,” so here’s my review:

I’m jealous as hell.

 

John Ostrander: Aurora

What do we say? How do we react? A guy named James Holmes slipped into a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in a suburban town in Colorado and opened fire with an AR-15 rifle, a shotgun and two 40-caliber handguns. He set off what may have been tear gas as he started his killing spree. According to CNN, the suspect was dressed head to toe in protective gear including a gas mask. CNN also reported that a federal law enforcement official stated Holmes had colored his hair red and told the police he was “the Joker.”

He killed 12 people and wounded 58. As I write this, eleven are in critical condition.

His apartment has been booby trapped with incendiary and chemical devices and trip wires. Residents in the surrounding five buildings have been evacuated. It may take days to defuse it all.

What do we say? What can we say? Should we say anything at all at this point?

If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be writing this column. I was working on a different one but I’ve let it go for now. Why?

Words are important. It’s how we take something that is inconceivable, incomprehensible, horrific and give it a shape and form. We communicate thoughts, beliefs, fears and give them a human shape. Some will misuse the power of words and cast the events in terms of their own ideology. They will try to shape the narrative to support or further their views. The events will not be described; they will be twisted. You can see some of this already on the Internet. I know I have.

In the past I have said that nothing that is human is alien to me, that I am capable of understanding anyone on a human level, that somewhere within myself I can find something of that person. Is that true in this case? Am I capable of understanding Holmes?

If I was writing the Joker, I’d have to find somewhere inside of me where I felt like the Joker. And that can take me to very dark places, not places to where I am eager to go. When I was writing Wasteland, I wrote a story from the point of view of a serial killer, or at least what I thought was a perspective a serial killer would have. I now think it was a little naïve. The story was interesting but I don’t know if it was successful in what I set out to do. Would I really want to be successful in that sense? Could I?

The Joker in Nolan’s previous Batman film, The Dark Knight, was not a “criminal” as much as an anarchist forcing Batman and the entire city of Gotham into choices that would reveal that, at heart, they were not better than he was. He would expose them as what his own dark twisted concept of humanity said they must be. Is that what James Holmes thought he was doing? If so, what more appropriate venue that the opening night of the next Batman film?

I’m speculating, of course. Guessing. That’s all any of us can do at the moment. It may be all that we can ever do. I think it’s important that we try. I don’t want to dismiss Holmes as an aberration, a freak, a monster – something that is not me. That’s too easy. He is human. Yes, a very screwed up human but human nonetheless. If I deny him his humanity what happens to mine?

I don’t have answers. Maybe I won’t be able to find any. Maybe the only answers will be the ones I impose on the situation. Maybe I’m wrong and there are monsters. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s not possible to find a common humanity with this killer. In the days and weeks to come, we’ll have more information. Maybe that will help; maybe it won’t. The attempt, I think, is necessary.

We also need to look at a basic fear underlying all this, one that hits home.

The Dark Knight Rises’ director, Christopher Nolan, was quoted as saying, “The movie theatre is my home, and the idea that someone would violate that innocent and hopeful place in such an unbearably savage way is devastating to me.” I think that’s true for all of us in this little community. This is our home, too, and this weekend was supposed to be a triumph for us in a summer of triumphs – the best summer of comic book movies ever. Now it’s sullied, bloodied and sullied, and whatever sales records the film sets, whatever awards it may win, that opening night in Aurora will be forever linked to it.

And I think that what we fear, deep down, is the possibility that the killer may have been one of us – a deranged, twisted version but one of us nonetheless. That’s the fear we need to name and only words will ultimately serve.

Let’s talk – and listen.

Monday: Mindy Newell

 

Mike Gold: Old Farts Are The Best Farts

In this space last Saturday, my dear friend and adoptive bastard son Marc Alan Fishman stated “modern comics are writing rings around previous generations. We’re in a renaissance of story structure, characterization, and depth… I’d like to think we the people might defend the quality of today’s comics as being leaps and bounds better than books of yesteryear.”

Simply put, the dear boy and my close pal and our valued ComicMix contributor is full of it.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s a hell of a lot of great writing out there today, and I agree with his opinions about most if not all of the young’un’s he cites. Today’s American comics reach a much wider range of readers. There’s also a hell of a lot more comics being published today – although those comics are being read by a much smaller audience in the aggregate – and I take no comfort in saying there’s more crap being published today as well: Sturgeon’s Law is akin to gravity. Marc’s comparison to the comics of the 1960s and 1970s is an apples-and-oranges argument: the comics of the pre-direct sales era, defining that as the point when most comics publishers virtually abandoned newsstand sales, were geared to a much younger audience. Even so, a lot of sophisticated stories squeaked through under the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” technique of writing on two levels simultaneously.

As I said, there are a lot of great writers practicing their craft today. Are they better than Carl Barks, John Broome, Jack Cole, Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, Archie Goodwin, Walt Kelly, Harvey Kurtzman and Jim Steranko … to name but a very few (and alphabetically at that)? Did Roy Thomas, Louise Simonson and Steve Englehart serve their audience in a manner inferior to the way Jonathan Hickman, Gail Simone and Brian Bendis serve theirs today? Most certainly not.

Then again, some of the writers he cites are hardly young’un’s. Kurt Busiek has been at it since Marc was still in diapers. Grant Morrison? He started before Marc’s parents enjoyed creating his very own secret origin.

Marc goes on to state that John Ostrander and Dennis O’Neil would say that the scripts they write today are leaps and bounds better than their earlier work. I don’t know; I haven’t asked them. But I can offer my opinion. Neither John nor Denny are writing as much as they could or should today because they, like the others of their age, they are perceived as too old to address the desires of today’s audience – which, by the way, is hardly a young audience. I wonder where this attitude comes from?

But let’s look at the works of these two fine authors from those thrilling days of yesteryear. John’s Wasteland, GrimJack, Suicide Squad, and The Kents stand in line behind nothing. As for Denny, well, bandwidth limitations prohibit even a representative listing of his meritorious works, and I’ll only note Batman once. Let’s look at The Question. A great series, and he wrote that while holding down a full-time job and while sharing an office with a complete lunatic. Then there’s Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Iron Man, The Shadow… hokey smokes, I wake up each Thursday morning (in the afternoon) blessing Odin’s Bejeweled Eye-patch that Denny is writing his ComicMix column instead of spending that time doing socially respectable work.

I am proud of this medium and its continued growth – particularly as its growth had been stunted for so long. And I’m proud of my own service to this medium. But, as John of Salisbury said 953 years ago, we are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants.

And, standing on those shoulders, we swat at gnats.

THURSDAY: The Aforementioned Mr. O’Neil!

 


John Ostrander: Great Horny Toads!

Censorship can, sometimes, be a spur to the creative mind. It’s more often a pain in the ass but there are times when a creative mind finds ingenious ways of getting around the bans, whatever they may be.

For example, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, them crazy guys who created South Park (and, even more oddly, the Tony Award winning musical The Book of Mormon) originally wanted to call the South Park movie South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose. That got rejected by the MPAA for having the word “Hell” in the title. Parker and Stone re-named the film “Bigger, Longer, Uncut,” which is more salacious. Evidently, the MPAA were the only ones who didn’t get the penis reference. Creativity trumps censorship.

George Carlin in 1972 famously listed seven words you could never say on television. Not only can I say them here, but I think editor Mike Gold would insist. They are: “shit,” “piss,” “fuck,” “cunt,” “cocksucker,” “motherfucker,” and “tits.’’ These days I think you can get away with “shit,” “piss,” and “tits” on television sometimes) but the other ones are still right out. You definitely can’t say any of them in mainstream comics.

For example, Marvel’s Luke Cage is a streetwise badass motherfucker who swears like your granny. “Sweet Christmas!” is his most common swear word. When I wrote him in Heroes For Hire, I had a villain taunt him about it. Cage, as he beat the shit/poo (take your pick) out of the guy explained it was because his grandma didn’t approve of swearing and “she was tougher than you.”

On Battlestar Galactica, instead of saying “fuck,” the characters said “frak” but we all knew what they meant. The word has gone on to enter the vocabulary of the fans and some other sci/fi works. One of the things I enjoy about it is that the process of raping the earth and poisoning it to get at natural gas is called “frakking.’’ For me, it means they’re fucking us all to get at the natural gas and its profits.

George Carlin also famously noted that when we say “Fuck you” we’re actually wishing something nice on a person. Working from that, in some sci-fi stuff I tried replacing “fuck” with “nuke,” as in “Nuke you and the nuking horse you came in on.” Or calling someone a “mothernuker.’’ “Nuke” has the harsh “uk” sound as “fuck” and hoping that someone gets nuked is not wishing them a good time. However, the substitution seemed a little forced and drew too much attention to itself. It read like the author was trying to be clever, which I guess he was, so I dropped it. Sometimes you just can’t beat the fucking classics.

Worse than that is anything sexual. You can rip a guy’s arm off and beat another guy to death with it, all the while spurting gouts of blood but you show too much skin or a couple getting it on or (Christian Right Forbid!) any sort of same sex naughtiness going on and there will be a hue and cry far greater than any uproar over profanity. See the current Right Wing brouhaha over Alan Scott’s Green Lantern being gay or Northstar over at Marvel marrying his boyfriend.

For a long time, if a movie had a couple in bed together, at least one of them had to have one foot on the floor. On TV, I remember that on The Dick Van Dyke Show, whenever they went to the bedroom of Rob and Laura Petrie, they had separate beds. Who were they fooling? I was young at that time and even I, sheltered Roman Catholic boyo that I was, knew my folks slept in the same bed. I didn’t want to think whatever else they might be doing in that bed (still don’t – shudder!) but I knew sure as hell they didn’t have separate beds.

Still, there is a certain sexuality, a certain sensuality in suggestion rather than in statement. I remember when First Comics was doing Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg! everyone talked about the sex and the nudity and all except … there wasn’t. It was implied. Sexy, yes – and sensual. It was a great, classic series whose rep is dirtier than the book ever was.

Over at DC, on Wasteland, we did all sorts of crap. We tossed a baby out of a window in a story called R.Ab (which stood for retroactive abortion) and we managed to honk off both pro-lifers and pro-choicers (and, if memory serves, our publisher) at the same time. We eviscerated a biology teacher for laughs and tried to get the reader into the mind of a serial killer among other things. Without bad language and without sex. We got accused of bad taste, which we reveled in, but rarely bad language or blatant sex.

I’m not saying that the envelope shouldn’t be pushed or that censorship is a good thing. However, if you try to establish boundaries and tell creative folks not to go there, odds are the creative folks figure out a way around it, if they can. That’s why they’re called creative. They’re never more creative when trying to do something naughty. Or juvenile. Or naughty juvenile.

Whoaaaa! Sounds dirty, that! Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more!

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

Mike Gold: Bad Taste Tastes Good

I am of the opinion that “bad taste” is a good thing. It’s the most ridiculously subjective concept imaginable: what offends me (admittedly, very little) might be absolutely awesome to you, and we each have a right to our opinions.

I was fortunate enough to be the editor and, along with ComicMix co-conspirator John Ostrander, co-conceiver of a DC Comics series called Wasteland. It was the black hole of humor, a monthly love-letter to bad taste. The stories usually had a point with enough wiggle-room in each concept to cause the reader night sweats. John wrote the series, often in tandem with improv legend Del Close, and we had a rotating gaggle of extraordinarily gifted artists as our visual collaborators. We’d have four going at any one time: three doing interior stories and one doing the cover. The one who did the cover in month one would do an interior job in month two, and so on. The artists usually came up with the cover concepts.

I only rejected one Wasteland cover. Drawn by Bill Wray, it happens to be my favorite. Those of you who are familiar with the Wasteland run might wonder just what it would take to cross my line. What it took was my concern for the continued existence of the comic book shop retailer: if not for the fact that we had to sell the thing, I would have published the cover about a hobo fishing off of a bridge into a sea of floating dead babies in a heartbeat.

 (Just for shits and grins, I took it to editor-in-chief Dick Giordano anyway. He took one look at it, laughed, and said “You already rejected this!” I miss Giordano a lot.)

All of this is my way of reviewing a truly wonderful new book, [[[Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See]]] by Françoise Mouly, art editor of The New Yorker and publisher of TOON Books. Under her editorship, The New Yorker’s covers shifted rather rapidly from inoffensive fodder to litter doctors’ waiting rooms into a powerful agent provocateur lurking on the newsstands with the sole purpose of confronting our assumptions and values.

Well, not quite every week. Perhaps their most infamous of these covers rests atop this column; it is among the many that has acted as a pie tossed in the face of the pathetically uptight. Most of these covers are reprinted in Blown Covers…

… and so, as the title suggests, are many that didn’t make it. Most of those reprinted in this tome are certainly print-worthy, and to be fair, many didn’t make it because somebody else beat them to it, including Mad Magazine, which also employed the aforementioned Bill Wray. Some… simply… crossed the line. That inevitable, damned line.

Reading Blown Covers is great fun. Just looking at the pictures is great fun, but reading about the decision-making process should be de rigueur for anybody who thinks editing stuff might be a legitimate way to earn a living. Quotes from the artists abound.

My favorite of these rejects was one that wasn’t even offered for publication: it was done by Art Spiegelman, a frequent cover contributor and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, to his wife, the aforementioned Ms. Mouly. It was a drawing of a cattle car overstuffed with Jews on its way to a Nazi concentration camp. One guy was on his cell phone… and his über-cramped neighbors in the cattle car were annoyed and pissed.

What? Too soon?

Like I said, Blown Covers is great fun. Give it out as Christmas gifts to all your relatives.

I will.

Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant To See • Françoise Mouly • Abrams Books • $24.95 retail, also available in electronic editions.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil and the Secret To Getting Hired In Comics!

 

Ode to Oswald

Ode to Oswald

One would think that of all the major conglomerates in the world, The Walt Disney Company would have the greatest empathy and respect for creators who have made bad deals that resulted in their characters being torn from them. Disney, in fact owes its own success to its founder’s resolution resulting from having his creation hijacked by corporate greed. (more…)

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