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REVIEW: True Story

True StoryThe old Broadway song goes, “Two lost souls on the highway of life“and that certainly describes Christian Longo (James Franco) and Michael Finkel (Jonah Hill) in the thriller True Story. We open with Longo hiding in Mexico, wanted by police for the death of his wife and children, but avoiding arrest because he’s masquerading as Finkel, a reporter for The New York Times. Finkel, though, has issues of his own, having been accused of fabricating a story by writing about one character who was actually a composite of several sources.

When told of Longo’s eventual arrest, Finkel is curious as to why he chose him, of all people, to impersonate and so begins the meat of the fascinating narrative. Available on a Blu-ray combo pack from 20th Century Home Entertainment, the film is an interesting two man character study, leaving you wondering as to each person’s sincerity and even sanity.

The two men begin to meet and talk in Mexico, leading to a symbiotic relationship as Franco agrees to tell his story in exchange for writing lessons from the journalist. Their exchanges are taut, with a wide range of emotions on display, from suspicion to trust to friendship to apprehension.

For Finkel, he’s hoping for redemption while Longo is in for the fight of his life as he is extradited to America and stands trial for the horrendous crimes, leaving the viewer uncertain if he committed the crimes or not. The journalist takes their voluminous correspondence and gets a book deal, his road back to relevance. But everything is not as it seems and rather than spoil things, let me just suggest you rent or buy the video for your own edification.

The lead performances are strong and the two men are comfortable with one another so their exchanges ring especially true. While some of the dialogue by screenwriters David Kajganich and Rupert Goold, who also directed, isn’t the strongest, they make the most of their moments. For his first feature, Goold does a nice job with keeping a talky story visually interesting. Since this is clearly about two men, it was seemingly decided they needed some female presence so enter Finkel’s girlfriend Jill Barker (Felicity Jones), for a few scenes including one dramatic confrontation with Longo. But it all feels unnecessary.

What makes this all the more interesting is that it is based on Finkel’s book of the real world events that inspired the film. That’s right, this all happened.

The AVC encoded 1080p transfer to 1.85:1 is visually just fine along with the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix so watching this is a pleasure.

Since the movie did well at Sundance but not so well in general release, we get just some perfunctory special features. Goold offers up some enthusiastic Audio Commentary for the entire film as well as some interesting explanations accompanying the Deleted Scenes (16:44). Then there are an assortment of promo features: Mike Finkel (3:33), Who is Christian Longo? (3:56), The Truth Behind ‘True Story’ (4:03), and The Making of True Story (5:26).

Mike Gold: Pissing Off My Inner 11 Year-Old

The Thing

The newest Fantastic Four movie disaster answers one question, but raises at least one other.

From the menorah conveniently planted in a background shot, we learn that Ben Grimm was indeed Jewish. But from all of the later scenes featuring The Thing, we find ourselves asking the question “Was Ben Grimm’s mohel a raving lunatic with gardening shears?”

This is because The Thing is naked throughout the movie. He didn’t even call Fin Fang Foom to borrow some undies. He should have. Then he would have had an excuse to walk out on this remarkably tedious motion picture. In this movie, The Thing has no, ahh, man-thing.

That wasn’t the worst part and, to be fair, it wasn’t the best part either. It was just as boring as the rest of this movie. There were worse elements. A story with so many holes you’d think you were driving down Manhattan’s FDR Highway. A lead cast that would have been better deployed in an adaptation of Power Pack. A Doctor Doom so poorly designed you’ll believe Galactus looked better in Rise of the Silver Surfer, the previous Fantastic Four film fiasco.

Worse still, and, actually the worst thing to happen in a superhero movie in over ten years…

Jack Kirby’s name was nowhere to be found!

Stan Lee was noted as an executive producer. This was a contractual honorific, so as far as I’m concerned neither Stan nor Jack were mentioned. They certainly were not credited with creating even the characters.

I have a special connection to the property. Fantastic Four #1 was the first Marvel comic I ever bought. Yes, that’s the first Fantastic Four #1. Didn’t you read last week’s column? Anyway, I had just turned 11 and I had never, ever read a comic book that was half as… fantastic. It strip-mined my sense of wonder. I reread it immediately. And then, I read it again.

O.K. So I’m a fanboy. They didn’t make this current Fantastic 4 movie (that’s how it’s spelled in the credits) for geriatric fanboys. They made this movie for people who have been shooting cocaine for a week and need something to put themselves to sleep. The best part of this movie was the popcorn and, like the movie, it was overpriced.

Here’s the plot: a bunch of kids invent a machine that causes the audience to immediately zone out. The end.

Have I ever seen a less humorous movie? Yes; that would be Triumph of the Will. Is it better than the previous first Fantastic Four movie? No. Is it better than the first first Fantastic Four movie?

That Roger Corman-produced movie from a quarter century ago was Citizen Kane compared to this new waste of CGI. The Corman film is vastly superior in this release in at least one respect.

They never released that first, first Fantastic Four movie.

 (Thanks to my pal Danny Fingeroth for letting me test some of this out on him.)

 

 

Box Office Democracy: “Fantastic Four”

Fantastic Four 4

Fantastic Four is a bad movie. Don’t go see it if you want an enjoyable 100 minutes in a theater and probably don’t see it for an ironic “so bad I want to make fun of it” kind of way either. It’s a lifeless bad, an entropic bad, a movie so bad it makes me question if there’s even a good movie based on this team to be made. Only the depths of history save Fantastic Four from being the worst superhero movie of all time (it might not even be the worst movie named Fantastic Four) but it’s certainly the worst superhero of this generation and is a top contender for worst film of the year.

Perhaps it isn’t possible to make a good Fantastic Four with the constraints that a non-Marvel studio would put on it. They need to make the principal characters young so they’re more relatable to young people, but then you have a team full of cut-rate Peter Parkers with none of the family-based charm that makes the FF work in the comics. You need to do an origin story but you also need to get Doctor Doom in there because he’s literally the only villain that anyone’s ever heard of so you end up shoehorning that character into a story that doesn’t involve him or he becomes some kind of vestigial Fantastic Fifth. There’s also an unwillingness to use the iconic costumes or codenames that aren’t The Thing, which takes a team with so much history and turns them in to a bunch of generic off-brand versions of themselves.

It’s become quite clear over the weekend that there were some serious behind the scenes squabbles over the making of this movie and it’s certainly apparent in the product given to us on the screen. After the four main characters get their super powers they are held as scientific experiments, a predicament from which Reed escapes and the remaining three are left behind. This creates a great deal of mistrust from Ben Grimm who feels abandoned but throws himself headfirst in to working as a secret weapon of the military. One such military operation is taking Reed back in to custody. When they bring Reed back Johnny is quick to embrace him, Sue feels guilty at being part of the operation that brought him back in and Ben still feels anger. Then Doctor Doom shows up and starts killing a lot of people and it feels like this is going to be the impetus for the four of them to put their differences aside and work together to stop this larger evil a few scenes later in the movie but instead this one confrontation is it. They fight Doom and at the end they seem to be the best of friends even though nothing really changed for all of them, they don’t talk, there aren’t even meaningful glances or anything. Reed goes from missing for an entire year to barking orders that everyone follows in what must have been hours. I bet there was a version of this movie that feels more complete but we’ll never see it and with the right NDAs we might never even know but this is the rare movie that’s boring at 100 minutes but might have been appreciably better at 120 minutes.

I don’t know where this property goes from here. There’s already word from Fox that their announced Fantastic Four sequel might get scrapped in favor of a Deadpool sequel. Oddly, not announcing sequels for movies that haven’t been released yet doesn’t seem to be an option at all. Perhaps this time Fox has finally stumbled so badly with the franchise that they’ll be willing to work out a deal that returns the characters to Marvel and we start seeing a slow rollout of Latverian mentions in Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’m not interested in seeing this version of these characters again and I’m sure as hell not excited to sit through another origin story in four years time. I want this to eventually be gotten right but maybe it doesn’t matter, there are enough super hero movies out there without another iteration of the FF taking up all of our time.

Emily S. Whitten: G.I.S.H.W.H.E.S. – A Culture of Positive Fandom

Robert DowneyThis weekend, on the way back from the wedding of one of my longtime best friends, I took a loooong train ride home. Naturally, I was riding in high style, in a Deadpool shirt and my handmade Deadpool symbol earrings. During the trip, I happened to be standing in the Amtrak café car line when a guy waiting with me complimented my geeky attire. This led to a several-minute conversation about Deadpool and the upcoming Deadpool movie; the X-Men movies; and (yarrrgh) the Wolverine: Origins movie. It was a great little comics nerd conversation, which I guarantee could have continued for hours were we hanging out at a convention rather than standing in a line for food on a train.

I realized afterwards that this conversation was particularly refreshing because after the initial “So you’re a Deadpool fan?” question, I didn’t encounter any of the attitude that I often get from men in comics fandom – the attitude that immediately questions or is at least taken aback by My Commitment to Sparkle Motion, i.e. my legitimate knowledge of and appreciation for comics fandom as an entity independent of any dude or some imagined desire to falsely pass myself off as a geek.

This still baffles me. If I was going to try to lie to random strangers about who I am, I think it would be way more fun to pretend to be fabulously wealthy and eccentric. I fail to see the advantage of pretending to be a geek.

It was nice to have a conversation that was not tempered by a feeling of defensiveness about the legitimacy of my geekdom in the eyes of my co-conversant, and it made me realize just how frequently I have encountered an attitude that, instead of accepting how I represent myself, continues to question the validity of my enjoyment of a certain brand of entertainment until I manage, basically, to out-nerd the other person (which, not even kidding, happens pretty much every time. If you challenge my geekdom I will pull out the big guns and quote esoteric nerd facts at you with the best of them). It’s so commonplace an experience that I barely notice it anymore; until I notice the lack of it, as in my pleasant conversation with a stranger on a train. As small an element as it may seem, for that component to be missing felt like someone had suddenly lifted the weight of Establishing My Geek Cred from the ingredients necessary to have a normal conversation about fun geek stuff.

I know that change can be slow, but I like to hope that encounters like my little train chat are a sign that geek fandom is gradually transitioning from some of the isolationist, unwelcoming attitudes I have railed against in previous columns (like the attitudes of geeklitism, or of Gamergaters) into a more understanding, celebratory camaraderie of mutual and group enjoyment of genre entertainment without snap judgments or prejudices.

I also suspect that social media, where one can generally interact on one’s own terms, is playing its part as a driving engine for change; and that some of the positive fan-interactive movements started by prominent celebrities in geek fandom, such as Supernatural star Misha Collins and his G.I.S.H.W.H.E.S. (Greatest International Scavenger Hunt The World Has Ever Seen), and Zachary Levi and his Nerd HQ strongly contribute to the changes I’m seeing in geek culture. I’ve already talked about how great Nerd HQ and the attitude it projects are, and more recently have celebrated the feeling of camaraderie in geekdom conveyed by the new Syfy Geeks Who Drink show and its Twitter interactions. Both of these have a strong positive and geek-celebratory social media component.

G.I.S.H.W.H.E.S., started by Misha Collins in 2011 is another such interactive social movement. The scavenger hunt, which wrapped on August 8 this year, consists of 15-person teams (which you can choose to be randomly assigned to, and which has led participants to meet new friends all over the world and have great experiences) working together over a week to complete a list of over 200 tasks, documented and submitted to the competition via photo or video. The submissions are judged and points awarded, and based on the overall points awarded to the teams, one team wins a Grand Prize all-expenses paid trip to an exotic locale with Misha Collins – which sounds abnosome.

The hunt, which is now a worldwide phenomenon with tens of thousands of participants in over 100 countries, had over 14,000 participants last year and is so successful that it has been categorized by Guinness World Records as the largest scavenger hunt of its kind. It has also broken several other world records through completion of some of the challenges issued to participants. The Gishwhes site describes the hunt as “part silliness, part art, part kindness and 100% fun” and notes that Gishwhes is the single largest contributor to the charity Random Acts.

About the tasks, the site notes, ”We try to create a list that is challenging, thrilling and absurd. We like to have participants break out of their comfort zones, re-awaken their inner artist, and do a bit of good in the world.” According to Collins, the primary reason for developing the competition was that he “loved the idea of thousands of people from all over the world connecting to create incredible things.”

Gishwhes is a great example of a celebrity both following his own personal inspiration for a project and using his status in fandom for good. I also believe its encouragement towards geek teamwork and outreach through fun and passion for the fandom, and the way it began and is maintained via social media and online interactions, is a contributor to a transition in genre entertainment fandom attitudes towards a kinder, more inclusive and positive fandom. Gishwhes encourages fans to branch out, join forces, and put their enthusiasm for their fandom towards creativity, social interaction, and helping others instead of focusing inwards or dwelling on themselves. I applaud celebrities like Misha Collins and Zachary Levi for leveraging their celeb status with fans for good in this way, and hope to see more from-the-heart fan interaction phenomenons like Gishwhes and Nerd HQ.

I also just plain love the cool stuff that’s come out of both; and particularly, some of the fun creations I’ve seen from this year’s Gishwhes. Favorites of mine include this gorgeous salt-and-pepper portrait of Robert Downey Jr. / Tony Stark; this portrait of Princess Leia (and her famous buns) in bread (there were prettier ones, but this won my heart for the punny speech balloons); and this lol-worthy video of “another boring trapeze teleconference. Business attire required.” You can see even more cool and crazy things accomplished during Gishwhes in this video from Misha Collins.

Other than all of the nifty things accomplished due to Gishwhes, I think the biggest thing I take away from it is the warm and positive attitude of the competition and everyone involved. It’s encouraging and inspiring to see all of the people who have chosen to celebrate and express their fandom in a fun and inclusive way; especially because, in the end, it is always our own personal choice as to how we want to move through the world; and how we choose to put ourselves out there can have bigger consequences for change than we can ever imagine. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

From what I have seen, Gishwhes is contributing to changing the attitude of the world (and fandom) in a positive way. Here’s hoping that it continues to do so; and until next time, Servo Lectio!

The Point Radio: UNITY Brings A Message To The Movies

This week you have a chance tho catch a unique cinematic experience when the long awaited documentary debuts in theaters for one day only. Writer/Director Shaun Monson talks about his long struggle to get his work on the screen and his list of nearly 100 celebrity narrators. To see this film in it’s one day event (Wednesday August 12th) go here for a location near you. Plus it’s the biggest twist on reality dating shows. VH1’s DATING NAKED and this season’s bachelor talks about how he is coping.

In a few days, TV’s funniest (and smartest) ladies, Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair from PLAYING HOUSE join us.   Be sure and follow us on Twitter now here.

REVIEW: Justice League: Gods and Monsters

Justice League Gods and MonstersWarner Home Entertainment has seemingly acknowledged that mostly in-the-know fans watch their direct-to-video offerings because if you’re not a fan, the current release, Justice League: Gods and Monsters, won’t make as much sense as he previous videos. Essentially, this 77-minute animated film is an Imaginary Story but it has the benefit of being the product of Bruce Timm’s brilliant imagination.

Timm has absented himself from the DC Universe for a while, recharging his batteries, and he’s back in an energetic and refreshing take on the concept of heroism. The film is chock-full of cameos and references to people scattered throughout the company’s 80 year history with many a creator deservedly getting their names in the end credits.  Timm has reteamed with producer Alan Burnett and the two share story credit with Burnett writing the final script.

JLGAM-Wonder WomanImagine if you will: General Zod sending his son (voiced by Benjamin Bratt) to Earth moments before Krypton exploded. In Gotham City, Kirk Langstrom’s (Michael C. Hall) experiments with bats has turned him into a power man-bat closer to a vampire than a hero. On Apokolips, Bekka (Tamara Taylor), Highfather’s granddaughter leaves her war-torn world to come to Earth. From their tower in Metropolis they have formed the Justice League where they serve and protect but on their terms.

While arrogant and far more violent than their traditional counterparts, they are not idiots so when scientists are killed in a series of accidents, they investigate. When giant robots, mimicking their abilities, are seen committing the crimes, the press blame the JLA and the hunt for the heroes begins in fervid earnest, led by Steve Trevor (Tahmoh Penikett) under orders from President Amanda Waller (Penny Johnson Jerald). And here’s where the story really impresses me, the motivations behind the villain. I won’t spoil it for you, but the story has heart where so many other offerings in the series have been cold, action-packed adventures.

JLGAM-BatmanThis is a world with limited heroes and villains but many who have the potential are the scientists involved including Ray Palmer (Dee Bradley Baker), Ryan Choi (Stephen Shin), Emil Hamilton (Trevor Devall), Pat Dugan (Dan Gilvezan), Dr. Sivana (Daniel Hagen), Michael Holt (Arif S. Kinchen), Victor Fries (Jim Meskimen), Silas Stone (Carl Lumbly), and John Henry Irons (Khary Payton). Then there’s Dr. Will Magnus (C. Thomas Howell), served by his diminutive robot Tin, who seems a mentor to these brilliant minds.

Where’s Lex Luthor you wonder? He’s above it all. Literally. From his orbiting space station, he has been suffering with Lou Gehrig’s disease and is confined to a wheelchair, making him a cross between Stephen Hawking and Metron. It’s a really interesting interpretation of the man and his exchanges with Superman are refreshingly non-monomaniacal.

As Batman leads the investigation, we are treated to well-spaced out flashbacks to the trio’s origins which provides us with other glimpses of this almost familiar universe and timeline. Supporting players from Lois Lane (Paget Brewster) to Jean Loring Palmer (Andrea Romano) make appearances enriching the story.

JLGAM-SupermanThe villain’s reveal and explanations bring the tight pacing to a grinding halt but then we burst into the final act and Sam Liu’s direction may be the culprit. Some things are prolonged, some reveals aren’t as surprising as you are led to be believed, but overall, once the credits roll, you’re left feeling fairly well satisfied. (And if you want more, DC Comics has offered up a ton of tie-in comics.)

This comes in a package containing the Blu-ray, DVD, and digital copy along with a Bekka action figure. As one has come to expect, the 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 video pairs nicely with the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track so it looks and sounds just fine.

The extras this time around are a mixed bag. We start with Alternate Realities: Infinite Possibilities (19:00) led by DC Entertainment Creative Director of Animation Mike Carlin, DC Entertainment Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, Timm, Burnett, writer Heath Corson and DC Entertainment CCO Geoff Johns go on at length about the joy of reading and then producing Imaginary Stories. The history could have been better explained but all the expected favorites get touched out without properly acknowledging the modern day version, Elseworlds, started with Gotham by Gaslight.

We have an extended look at the show’s production with Calculated Risk: The Making of Gods and Monsters (24:00), which acknowledges the risk of too much Inside Baseball seeping into the finished product.

Lifted from an earlier disc, you get some additional background on Bekka and her world via The New Gods (22:00) where Carlin, Paul Levitz, Walter Simonson and ComicMix contributor Alan Kistler review the brilliance of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World and its enduring impact on DC Comics.

As usual, the Blu-ray concludes with a preview of the next offering, Batman: Bad Blood (12:00) which will bring Batwoman to the animated universe.

Rounding out the bonus material are “Phantoms” from Legion of Super-Heroes and “Brave New Metropolis” from Superman: The Animated Series.

Tweeks: Color of Earth #ChallengedChallenge Week 5

For week 5 of the ComicMix Challenged Challenge, we discuss Kim Dong Hwa’s graphic novel, The Color of Earth.  Aside from the over use of flower metaphors, we loved the book. It’s about a Ehwa, a girl living in Korea with her widowed mom. The book deals with Ehwa growing up and so there’s talk of puberty and all that kind of related stuff that apparently makes some adults very uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough for this to be the second-most challenged book.  It’s a coming of age story and so we’re stumped as to why the essential parts of coming of age are so scary for the intended readership (who, you know, have just come of age or are in the process). But we try to break it down in our video.

Mindy Newell: Politically Incorrect

Strange FruitSaturday, I met a very nice young man named Moses in my local comic books shop. We got into a conversation about *duh!* comics and he was very frank in stating that he was not buying many DC comics because – and I’m paraphrasing here, since I didn’t happen to have a tape recorder on me – everybody in the office is white so it’s impossible for them to understand the black experience. I told him that I didn’t agree with any part of that, but that is Moses’ perception, and perception is everything. Isn’t it?

Yesterday, I read Marc Alan Fishman’s latest column here at ComicMix, Affirmatively Actionable Comic Equality, in which he referenced J.A. Micheline’s August 4th piece over at Comics Alliance titled Why I’m Boycotting Marvel Comics, which I linked to and read. In her own words:

“Marvel, you and I are taking a break. It’s not me; it’s you – and you made the decision really easy. In the past two to three weeks, I have watched you disrespect and disregard marginalized voices and I’ve had enough.”

Then I Googled “diversity of comics creators” and found an article by Laura Hudson published over at Wired on July 25th of this year: “It’s Time To Get Real About Racial Diversity In Comics.” She writes:

“July in particular has been an interesting month to ponder that question, thanks to a series of recent events that offered a prismatic lens on the complex friction between race and representation in the field. Not only did the Marvel variants spark discussion, but this month, DC Comics announced that Milestone Media – an imprint created by black creators and focusing on black superheroes – would be returning to the larger DC Comics fold, along with most of the black artists and writers who had created it. Meanwhile, Boom! Studios released Strange Fruit, a comic made by a white creative team that dealt with racism in the American South, prompting discussions about when works by white creators are erasing the voices of the people they’re writing about.”

Jon Stewart asked us to do something on his last show: “If you smell something, say something.”

Okay, Jon, I will.

It’s about fucking time that people stopped creating these stupid fucking artificial lines.

To be brutally forthright – and quite politically incorrect – I don’t give a damn what color, what religion, what ethnicity, what nationality, or what sex a creator is.

The only thing I care about when I’m reading a story, the only reason I’m reading it, the only reason I continue to read it, be it comics or prose, is that I’m enjoying it, that I’m sucked in, that I can’t put the goddamn thing down, whether that means reading it at work while on a break, or at home while eating dinner, or reading it on the toilet wherever that toilet may be.

So Strange Fruit, a series about racism in the South, was written and drawn by Mark Waid and J.G. Jones, two white guys. So what? I think they should be applauded for writing about it. I think the premise, about a super-powered alien who looks like a black man in 1927 Mississippi, is great, and I’m putting it on my list to buy. And by the way, Quantum Leap did an episode in the very first season in which Sam jumped into the body of an elderly black man in the pre-Civil Rights South (“The Color of Truth”). Nobody objected that it was produced by a white man and starred two more white men.  

And if a story about racism was so important to you, African-American creators, why didn’t you go out and create it?

Oh, wait. You did.

Maya Angelou. James Baldwin. Octavia Butler. Amiri Baraka. Toni Morrison. Ralph Ellison. Zora Neale Hurston. Lorraine Hansbury. Langston Hughes. Richard Wright. Alice Walker. Alan Paton.

Oh, you mean comics?

Christopher Priest. Michael Davis. Damion Knight. Matt Baker. Reginald Hudlin. Darryl Banks. Denys Cowan. ChrisCross. Kyle Baker. Jamal Igle, Malcom Jones III, Mark (M.D.) Bright. Billy Graham. Keith Pollard. Brian Stelfreeze. Ron Wilson. Larry Stroman.

Dwayne McDuffie.

Okay, what’s wrong with this list?

No women.

But they do exist.

Charlie “Spike” Trotman. Carol Burrell. Barbara Brandon-Croft. Afua (Lakota Sioux) Richardson. Alitha Martinez. Cheryl Lynn Eaton.

Yes, I admit, these women were a little harder to find. And that’s bullshit, too.

Still, obviously, I managed.

You could, too, if you wanted to.

I could write a whole column about that. But then I might be accused of being a white Jewish woman who has no business writing about the black woman comics creator, because, you know, that’s not politically correct.

But if any of these women would like to have a dialogue with me on these pages, you’re very welcome to get in touch with me. In fact, I’ll ask Editor Mike to be our liaison (mike@comicmix.com).

See, I think making it in a profession that is your passion takes talent, sweat, blood, tears, aggravation, patience, aggressiveness, stick-to-it-iveness, and luck.

A whole lot of luck.

The truth is that luck is the goddamnest wild card.

And that’s a truth that is politically incorrect to say out loud.

 

Ed Catto: Geek Culture – How Far We’ve Come!

Libarary 2

When I was a kid an ad in my local Pennysaver newspaper caught my eye. It was placed by a guy selling old comic books. In those pre-Internet days The Pennysaver was a weekly community newspaper that served as a want-ad compendium. As a young boy this particular ad was especially glorious because (1) I loved comics and (2) living a small town like Auburn, NY, I didn’t have a lot of ways to get old comics. Sure, occasionally we ordered by mail, but this was different.

IMG_1891One problem was that this seller lived on the “other side” of town. Way over on the bizarrely named Frazee Street. And Mom was very suspicious that there were sinister motives involved. The person placing the ad might have been luring young boys, like my pals and me, with the siren call of comics. After much discussion, I wore my mother down and she said she’d supervise a visit to this suspicious seller of old comic books.

The first visit was… fantastic! This collector had amazing stacks of all the old comics my neighborhood cohort and I had previously only dreamed about. We were eager to read Silver Age Marvels. To us, it was like finding buried treasure. And the collector (“a guy named Joe,” in fact) priced his wares fairly. His method was to charge us 60% of the stated value in the Passiac Book Center Guide Catalog. Yes, in those early days, the Overstreet Comic Book Guide was a mere babe in publishing years. Instead, the local gold standard by which to judge a comic’s worth was with the mimeographed and stapled pages of the Passiac Book Center Guide.

Library 3Well, Joe wasn’t an axe murderer and, in fact, over the years he,and his wife and kids became family friends. But it was a slow process for my mom to get over her maternal trepidation.

Now, contrast that story with the recent classes I’ve been teaching. I’ve been asked by local organizations – Bergen Community College and the Ridgewood Library – to teach courses on “How to Create a Graphic Novel.” That’s a fancy way of saying “Teach Kids to Make Comics.” These courses are tailored to high school, middle school and even elementary school kids. We review the basics and quickly shift to the creation stage with several short exercises. And you know what? These classes have been very close to full or SRO every time!

Spurred by a thirst and curiosity for pop culture and comics, kids want to know more and their parents want them to know more. And they are not intimidated. These kids want to fully engage and create their own stuff!

Some kids are talented in drawing and some are natural born storytellers. Some are a little shy, but typically even they are fully engaged by the last 10 minutes of class. In general, there’s not a lot of hesitation. In fact, so many of the students are eager to share their pop culture credentials with me. They want me to know that they know comics and graphic novels and plotlines from superhero TV shows and artists’ styles and Marvel Comics trivia. Way back when, I’d work hard to hide all that from my peers or teachers.

IMG_1896And at the recent classes in the local library, the staff trotted out many of their graphic novels to show to the class. And they sure knew their stuff. The library staff was vigorously promoting comics to the kids – cool stuff like the collected editions of the new Ms. Marvel comic and Scholastic’s Graphix books by Raina Telgemeir.

In fact, I couldn’t help but wonder if librarians are the secret weapons on the front lines of Geek Culture – but that’s probably another thought for another column.

It was great to have parents drop off their kids to learn about comics. It was encouraging to see how passionate kids (of many ages) are about Geek Culture. And I think it would be cool to follow some of these kids and see if the spark that was lit turns into something more.

There you have it: community approved Geek Culture for all supported by all. We’ve come a long way from Frazee Street.

 

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