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MIKE GOLD: The kids ARE alright

MIKE GOLD: The kids ARE alright

There’s an ad campaign on radio right now demanding that all movies that show people smoking cigarettes be handed an R rating. This is based upon the perception that despite parents’ best and most consistent efforts, kids who see somebody smoking a cigarette in a motion picture will turn into hopeless addicts.

This is amusing, as the baby boomers that are making these noises represent the first generation to turn their backs on smoking. Of course, we baby boomers were raised on cigarette commercials, our teevee heroes smoked like chimneys, our movie stars didn’t need fogged up lenses to hide the wrinkle lines, and, oh yeah, our parents and our grandparents were complete tobacco fiends.

Virtually all of our finest movies would have to be reclassified as R-rated. Casablanca, Citizen Kane, the Marx Brothers movies … I think about 95% of the movies the American Film Institutes’ Top 100 list wouldn’t make the cut. I’m not sure about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – why do you think they called him Dopey?

So instead of actually raising our young with standards and values, it’s easier to simply have somebody else erase history for us. Forget about learning from our mistakes, let’s just stick our head in the sand and pass a law demanding everybody else does the same.

Here’s a fact. Parents want somebody else to raise their children for them. Offended? If I had said “Too many parents want somebody else to raise their children for them” would you still be offended? In the 1950s we looked at comic books said “somebody should stop kids from reading that.”  Then we heard rock music and said “somebody should stop kids from listening to that.” Then the villains became long hair, video games, rap music… it will never end.

The problem is, we have millions and millions of baby boomers who read comics and/or listened to rock who have grown up to be productive, or at least normal, citizens. Kinda fat, though. Maybe our parents should have spent their time bitching about Dr. Pepper and Froot Loops.

Parents, raise your children yourselves. Leave our history and our culture to fend for themselves; they do a great job without interference from lazy busybodies.

As for our children, well, they’ll make some mistakes. That’s their job. Be there to help them learn from those mistakes and remember, 99.5% of them will survive just like you did.

The Who said it best, and they said it 42 years ago: The Kids Are Alright.

Mike Gold is editor-in-chief of ComicMix.com. He watches a lot of old movies and he does not smoke. So there.

August denies Gyllenhall gab

August denies Gyllenhall gab

John August sets the record straight on his blog:  Jake Gyllenhall is not considering the lead role in the Captain Marvel project which August has been tapped to write.  He continues, "I can pretty much assure you he’s never heard of the project. And we’ve never discussed him. We’ve never seriously discussed anyone.

"After several months of meetings, casting has come up exactly zero times. There’s no casting list. If there were a list, Gyllenhaal’s name would probably be on it, but trust me: there is no list. There’s no start date, no release date, no movie whatsoever. There’s just a script to be written. Which I should probably get back to."  Aww no, baseless internet speculation is tons more fun than doing actual work!  On to the next trumped-up rumor, then: Emma Watson — in or out?

ComicMix week five

ComicMix week five

Time again for your one-stop shopping roundup of this week’s regular columns and podcasts!  Here are the columns:

And here are mellifluous Mike Raub‘s podcasts:

See below for the first regular Above and Beyond column from Glenn Hauman.  And don’t forget to check with us on weekends (and occasionally even during the week) for our special Opinion pieces and feature reports!

Advice from the pros

Advice from the pros

Not only are "the internets" a great place to find news (for instance, both CBR and Blog@Newsarama have the WizWorld LA scoops more than covered from the fan view, and Marv Wolfman from the pro view), but they’re invaluable as information tools if you know where to look.  One of the best places to read about life as a comic book professional is from the folks living it, who often have valuable words of wisdom to pass along to aspiring writers and artists.

Becky Cloonan talks about the world of Original English Language (OEL) graphic novels from manga companies, and compares how they’re put together here as opposed to the Japanese method.  A must-read for any artist planning on drawing that kind of a workload.

Stephanie McMillan examines how her own work is shifting from strictly editorial cartooning to a more strip-based focus, and how she tries to inject a more activist stance through the ideas she conveys with her writing and art.

And Colleen Doran conveys a couple of great cautionary tales about money — how little most professional writers really make, and the tendency so many creative people have toward throwing their money into get-rich-quick schemes.

GLENN HAUMAN: Literature of ethics, revisited

I’ve been kicking around these ideas around for a while but never codified them until Jim Henley wrote his famous blogposts and essay on the Literature of Ideas. Henley’s thesis boils down to “If science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story is the literature of ethics. Or say, rather, it should be.”

Now for the backstory. This isn’t verbatim, but as I know and at least briefly worked with all the people here, I suspect it’s pretty close.

In the early 1970’s, the late great Julius Schwartz took over editorial duties on the Superman comics line from Mort Weisinger. Julie hired Dennis O’Neil to write the series, and O’Neil knocked Superman’s power levels down to about the level of his earliest appearances — no heat vision, no x-ray vision, no super-breath, no flying through space unaided, and so on. O’Neil was quoted saying that the reason for the change was that he found it difficult and/or uninteresting “to write about a character who could destroy distant galaxies by listening hard.”

O’Neil’s tenure on Superman lasted for about a year, and then the reins were handed over to Elliot S. Maggin. Elliot bumped Superman’s power levels back up to where they were, and approached writing Superman this way: if you have a character who can do anything, the only story avenues left to you are ethical ones. But in this area, there’s a lot of ground: “What was Superman’s relationship to his charges, the people of the Earth? To the authoritative functionaries of the rest of the Universe like the Guardians and, by extension, those who might be considered deities? What were the limits of Superman’s responsibilities? Were there differences between the real limits of his responsibilities and his perception of those responsibilities? What role did his heritage, both on Earth and among the stars, play in the determination of his actions? What long-term effects were coming about as a result of his intercession?”

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Erin Go Bragh!

Erin Go Bragh!

We were casting about today hoping for an appropriate St. Patrick’s Day comic-related post, and the Redhead Fangirl didn’t disappoint, calling our attention to a company called Cló Mhaigh Eo in Claremorris, County Mayo in the West of Ireland.

They’ve been around a dozen years, and publish "books in Irish for children and young people as well as a series of acclaimed Irish graphic novels… Many Irish language learners throughout the world make extensive use of books from Cló Mhaigh Eo, particularly our children’s picture books."

Here’s their graphic novel list, and you can even click on several pages for translations from Gaelic into English.  Tip o’ the tweed cap for this one, redlib!

Tom DeFalco speaks!

Tom DeFalco speaks!

Marvel writer and former editor-in-chief sits for an exclusive ComicMix Podcast interview and talks about "the last true Marvel comic book" and long-time comics fan Gene Simmons becomes a comics publisher. Buffy #1 gets re-Buffed as lots of first printings sell-out.

All this plus TImeline, more news, and we dip into the ComicMix mailbag. It ain’t easy being green, except on St. Patricks Day – you’ll find out how on this weekend’s ComicMix Podcast, available by pressing this button right here:

Booty call, fandom style

Booty call, fandom style

Via Cheryl Lynn, yet another online meet-and-greet club has burst onto the scene with ambitions toward dispelling stereotypes about fans being weak in the social skills department.  This one’s called OtakuBooty, and specializes in bringing together "intelligent, funny, sexy" aficionados of Japanese animation, manga and gaming.

They claim, "Not all Internet communities are overrun by 13 year-olds arguing about DragonBall. Most OtakuBooty members are in their 20s and 80% of our members over the age of 18."  Which of course means a fifth are still legal minors. They continue, " OtakuBooty has a tight-knit community that has banded together for countless activities: a Full Monty-style fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina victims, raising money for a member who lost his apartment in a fire, and even clothing themselves in custom-made OtakuBooty hockey jerseys… And then there are the infamous parties."

Seems to me if you have that many underage members, you might want to be more careful about advertising Full Monty-style charity events and calling your parties infamous.

Comic Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art

Comic Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art

The good news is that a big name, first tier, grown-up institution, the Museum of Modern Art, is doing a show on comic art.

 

The bad news is that we’re still being nibbled to death by ducks; the show is a rather narrow view of the medium, a look at how 13 artists are using the visual conventions associated with comic art. Sometimes it’s one convention to a practitioner; sometimes they can handle as many as a half a dozen.

 

The Modern (www.moma.org) is spiffy enough to have an online exhibition, which can at least let you in on the main ideas. I don’t have to tell you the value of staring at a wall-sized painting vis a vis a reproduction on a screen, but in this case especially you can understand the ideas at work here. If you don’t buy the idea, then you can probably skip a trip to the show. It fits in one of their smaller temporary exhibition spaces, fewer than two-dozen pieces altogether in about four rooms, artfully arranged, like spaces in the primate habitat at the zoo to seem like a few more.

 

It took me a half hour to look at it closely, most people were in and out in less time than that.

 

The Museum feels the need to expand their scope to “slapstick, comic strips and films, caricature, cartoons, and animation.” This says, to me, that, they still need to add things to comic art to make a show. It also says they are still bedeviled by the use of “comic” to refer to both the medium and a point of view. They are in sight of the transcendent critical vision here: that comic art is a medium, not a genre.

 

But that’s their contribution to critical literature; the show makes a lot more sense looking at it than reading about it.

 

As usual, the artists are ahead of the museums. They know the comic artists have great powers, most of them have been reading comics all their lives, just like the rest of us, at least in the Sunday paper. They know a speedline from a thought balloon, clean line from brushwork. They have such respect for comic art technique that most of them don’t go near it, as such, exploring instead the equally wide seas of painting.

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Lawsuit happy

Lawsuit happy

It’s beginning to look like ComicMix needs a Lawsuit Watch correspondent.  Reuters has the details (hat tip to IESB).

On Thursday, two NY-based artists filed suit against NBC Universal and the creators of Heroes claiming the popular TV show stole one of their plotlines from them, basing it "on a short story, a painting series and a short film the couple exhibited in 2004 and 2005." The 2005 exhibit at Hunter College was attended by two people identifying themselves as writers from Crossing Jordan (also developed by Heroes creator/executive producer Tim Kring) and who were believed to have taken copies of the artists’ work, thus lessening the likelihood that coincidence is not causality.  As Heroes has tried to depict, nothing’s coincidence anyway.

Also on Thursday, Carol Burnett filed a copyright infringement suit against the makers of Family Guy over an episode shown last April featuring an 18-second sequence depicting a "slightly altered version" of her signature cleaning-woman character in a segment last April, basically saying they used the charwoman-clone without her permission. A 20th Century Fox spokesdroid responded that the references amounted to parody, which shouldn’t even need to be said.