Dennis O'Neil, RIP

We lost a legend over the weekend - Writer/Editor Dennis O'Neil (aka, Denny O'Neil) passed away. A former newspaper reporter, O'Neil began writing comics near the end of the Silver Age in the mid-to-late-60's and became a beloved mainstay thereafter. My introduction to him was a memorable 2-part episode of Batman: The Animated Series he had written titled "The Demon's Quest", which reintroduced to a new generation of Batman fans a villain he had co-created with artist Neal Adams in the 70's: seemingly immortal criminal mastermind Ra's Al Ghul:

 Is it pronounced "Raysh" or "Razz"? That's an old debate...

This adventure was atypical of any Batman cartoon or movie we had seen before. More like Indiana Jones, The Spy Who Loved Me or Casablanca. Batman's world opened up.  If your knowledge of Batman came from the live-action movies by Tim Burton, the TV series with Adam West or the Superfriends, you would think this was an experiment, but this did solidify Ra's as a top-tier Batman villain in a way that the comics never did. This episode, plus subsequent appearances in the series became the definitive portrayal of the character and he appeared in more comic book stories by other writers & artists in the decades that followed, including new stories written by O'Neil, like Birth of The Demon, which revealed the origin of Ra's, and Greg Rucka & Klaus Janson's Batman: Death and The Maidens. He also became one of the main villains in Christopher Nolan's trilogy of Batman films, played by Liam Neeson.

I met Dennis O'Neil at BigAppleCon in New York in 2004. I was actually surprised that there wasn't a long line of people to see him, but in retrospect, I recall that this was at a time when people thought the years when he was in charge were creatively limiting and the Bob Shreck-edited era of Batman comics was better, but tastes have changed since then. We didn't speak much beyond exchanging simple, polite dialogue: "Hi - signing books?" "Sure." "Okay...these are great. Thank you. It was nice meeting you!" I was impressed by how simple it was to get an autograph (and he didn't charge for it either), but then again, I had just 5 comics for him to sign (1 Batman, 1 Brave and The Bold, 1 DC Comics Presents, 1 The Shadow, 1 Further Adventures of Indiana Jones), though some artists are known to act as though they're handed everything & the kitchen sink, then whip out their calculator and start carrying decimals. No..."Denny", if I can call him Denny, was professional to the fingertips.

I have my own theory that prototypes of Ra's, his daughter Talia and the enigmatic demonic bubble bath known as The Lazarus Pit made a preliminary appearance in "The Secret of Waiting Graves!" - the first solo Batman tale he worked on with Neal Adams:

This one, along with "Daughter of The Demon!" are my favorites of the Batman tales he wrote. O'Neil's writing reminds me a lot of Stan Lee in that they're heavily influenced by tropes found in genre fiction, but there's an effort to achieve a sense of realism - characters talk and react to things that are happening to them the way that we know people would act in real life, a lot of the action is from a street-level, even in trips to exotic locations. The villains', supporting cast and even the city the heroes lived and operated in would be fleshed out to be less one-dimensional. Gotham City was the only fictional city/location in DC Comics that was starting to feel like a real place. Whereas Stan Lee's plotting style was inspired by soap opera, O'Neil's storytelling was inspired by a combination of his background in journalism, a casual knowledge of Pulp adventure/mystery/horror comics/magazines, and a genuine interest in theories about social issues, folklore & mythology and philosophy, particularly Zen Buddhism in The Question.

 This was a prose paperback.       novel that was published in 2006. It's a nice encapsulation of the 1980's comic book and works as a novelization of a "Question" movie that never happened but could work as inspiration for one.

 Another prose novel - this one retells the origin of Kyle Raynor becoming a Green Lantern, but without the 1990's excess. Under O'Neil's word processor, Kyle's origin is more contemplative and metaphysical - a "vision quest". 

These iconic images from his run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow with Neal Adams still resonate today:

Although he wasn't shy about writing characters with phenomenal powers, like Superman, The Shadow, Shazam and the Justice League, he was more at home crafting stories about characters who he could understand or relate to on some basic level of humanity: Batman, Green Arrow, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Iron Man, The Question, Azrael...someday, the 100+ issues Denny wrote of Azrael, Agent of The Bat will be re-evaluated, because I am convinced that Jean-Paul Valley was Denny's alter-ego, a reflection of his knowledge and thoughts on himself, of heroes & identities and the state of the world, particularly in the late-1990s.

A lot of really great Batman comics were made during the 15-year period in which he was the editor of Batman books at DC Comics...there was a consistent quality to them that we haven't seen before or after in any superhero comics before or after. When he stepped down and retired from editing, he wrote The DC Comics Guide To Writing Comics, a valuable resource when, even today, there are little or no books available specializing in the craft of writing a professional script...and it's his approach to it, really. It's literally a Magnum opus.

The book is out-of-print, but worth seeking. Within the last decade, DC has been compiling reprints of older Batman stories by various writers and artists in lavish hardcover editions under the title of Tales of The Batman/Legends of The Dark Knight. Denny's work with Neal Adams on Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow has been reprinted several times, his work on Spider-Man was recently collected in 2 volumes under the  Marvel Masterworks line, but he has told many other Batman tales with other artists that would best be seen again in a Tales of The Batman: Dennis O'Neil series. While it's a pity that it wasn't done during his lifetime, I'm sure that's an oversight that will be corrected soon.

Dennis O'Neil, R.I.P.

Coloring Fun - Batman & Batgirl by John Byrne

Black-and-White commissioned sketches are usually more fun to color than the coloring book pages found in official material. If you're following this blog, you may have noticed I stopped coloring pages from the Batman: Hush coloring book. Congratulations to anyone who did. I found that John Byrne drawing in a Google search, printed it, got the crayons out, then proceeded with the coloring.

The colors on the Batgirl costume are a nod to Yvonne Craig. The blue-green Batman costume is a nod to the cover color choices from Bronze Age Batman comics. The red night sky is a nod to later episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. The color of the Batmobile is a nod to how it appeared on the Superfriends cartoons:

Funny how the colors look brighter in that shot, but they're kinda muted in the later picture. I blame the camera. I miss the one I used to have.

The end result looked great to me - I framed it:

I find that the black frame & glass helps it "Pop" more..or in this case, "Biff!" "Bam!" "Ka-Pow!"

Heathcliff Word-Find Puzzles

I'm not sure if Pennypress is still publishing bi-monthly "Word Seek" puzzle magazines devoted to Garfield the cat, but it was refreshing to find a "Word Find" puzzle devoted to that other comic strip cat, Heathcliff, seemingly tucked away at random...yeah, right. 

Wouldn't that be neat? Actually, here's what the magazine in question really looked like:

And the puzzle located therein:

Here's how you can tell the puzzle-maker at Kappa is a huge fan of the Heathcliff comic strip - he/she knows who Crazy Shirley is.

Shirley was a recurring character in the comic strip that appeared in the earliest Heathcliff cartoon series, Heathcliff and Dingbat:

She didn't appear in Heathcliff and The Catillac Cats, which came later:

But she continued to appear in the Heathcliff comic books and books that reprinted the older comic strips:

Actually, I don't know if she's in two of those examples - I have the Batman parody issue, there - she's not in that, either..I just like those pictures I found..I'm on a roll loading pictures right now.

I'd be curious if she appeared in the Nintendo Wii game, since it would need more characters for a racing game:

Back on topic - Crazy Shirley was likely a personal favorite of the strip's creator, cartoonist George Gately Gallagher, who worked under the byline "George Gately".  His nephew, Peter Michael Gallagher, took over the strip, under the byline "Michael Gallagher" which is the same name as another nephew, Michael Gallagher, who had worked as a writer on the Heathcliff comic books. Confused yet? No? How about this..I think Peter Michael's decision to not work under the name "Peter" was to avoid confusion with TV and film actor Peter Gallagher...

Of course, I'm sure people think they're all related to the stand-up comedian Gallagher who smashes watermelons..

Last I'd heard of him, he was feuding with his brother for stealing his schtick, also smashing watermelons...

(I think that's a picture of the same guy...I just found that amusing and wanted to share it)

Back on topic (again) - Peter Michael may or may not be a fan of Shirley, or just felt the jokes about her stalking Heathcliff to plant random kisses got old, since contemporary Heathcliff strips tend to veer more towards guest-star cameos..

Outrageous sight gags:

Observational commentary:

Dry pop culture references:

And all-out anthropomorphic cartoon cat mischief:

While Garfield is usually housebound, Heathcliff can pop up anywhere, with anyone, doing anything he feels like doing, so that zany spontaneity is appealing in its small, daily doses. I tip my hat to whoever it was at Kappa who got the itch to give Garfield's rival a puzzle..how's about a whole magazine next time, okay?

"#Adulting" or "#Kidding"?

I don't feel like quoting Bill Maher, because that's like quoting from the court jester. His remarks on the reaction to the death of Stan Lee and subsequent follow-up to the public reaction to his reaction...It's all done in jest. His shots at Kevin Smith are also entirely in jest, since Smith is a funny cat in his own way. Both these clowns are for sale and not ashamed of it. They live quite well.

I'm more impressed with the eloquence of "Adulting", the essay by Maher that got the ball rolling. It's just three paragraphs. One page of notebook paper. And this essay will likely not be done in three. If Stan Lee's legacy is, according to Bill, that he created characters that appear in movies and put buns in theater seats, then the legacy of this "dumb culture" is that it kept big-budget movies in business. Quite an accomplishment from comic books being a medium born as a money-laundering front by gangsters shipping loads of booze, drugs & cash back-and-forth via a Canadian printing company.

If you've ever been keen to learn the history of the comic book "industry" and understand why it's got the social stigma that it has, then you're aware that the bulk of comic books in existence are trash. Bill Maher is right, but everyone hates it when he seems to be saying that adults should stop reading comic books because...the only people buying comics in the 21st century are adults. Kids and teenagers are more likely saving money to pay their phone bills. Adults are the only ones in the shops spending thirty or forty dollars a week buying comics until their piggy banks have been smashed, then the comic shops hope a new generation steps in to begin spending after the last one quits. This is not casual spending. The worst excesses of the medium that we saw in the 1990's - variant covers, crossovers, redundant characters, watered-down concepts, diluted brands, price increases, relaunches - keep popping up...because they still work. If there's any "good stuff" amongst that, well, that's nice, but the gimmicks keep the business afloat so that some good stuff can be found...you take what you can get, you read what you like, avoid the stuff you don't care about, know when to take a break, or know when to walk away. It's not going to get better if you collect 'em all. It's all junk. But it can be good junk.

The consumers who still hang in there? You'll find they're not buying as much.

In the past, Will Eisner tried passing off comic book illustration in technical terms as "Graphic Storytelling"...which would've taken off if he was actually any good at writing dialogue. I'm convinced Carl Barks was the only Golden Age-era cartoonist who knew how to write, but his work is marginalized because it's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, which shouldn't make a difference in distinguishing it as excellent storytelling in the medium, but that's not an opinion shared by people only looking at the superhero books. If comic books are ever going to get respect as an art form (and it seems awfully late in the game to bother thinking about this...this is all bull $#!+ in it's own way - always has been), then any talk of it needed to be more democratic..and, unfortunately, that ship sailed a long time ago. There's a lot of trash disguised as treasure. It's been that way for over 80 years, so Bill's just repeating what everyone's mother used to say from under his smirking stance.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the quality of comic books, I don't recall anyone who's ever read them say they wasted their time. But it was never an activity that people own up to doing with dignity, as it's stuck with the stigma of being the stuff of misguided adolescence...and adults who've become attached to it by habit. It's not going to be taken seriously. It can't be.


And there's always talk that it's almost over.

It's like the old saying: Even a broken clock can tell the correct time twice a day.

And Last Night, I Had Another Batgirl Dream...

Oh, boy...

***

I was in Paris. Lily called and asked me to meet her at a certain cafe. She said she needed to talk to me...

When we met at the cafe, Batman was there, but I couldn't see his face....

Lily was very pleasant. She had brought Cathy & Christina with her. We all had a coffee...

Lily would pause in-between sips to make bat-shaped shadow puppets with her hands, which reflected onto the surface of the coffee cup's saucer. She concluded her puppetry by doing the Batusi while remaining seated...

And then she said the ancient phrase:

"We are like the dreamer, who dreams and lives inside the dream."

We are like the dreamer, who dreams and lives inside the dream...I told her I understood. And then she said:

"But...who is the dreamer?"

But who is the dreamer? A very powerful, uneasy feeling came over me. Lily looked past me and indicated to me to look back at something that was happening there...

I turned and looked...

I saw myself...I saw myself, from long ago, at a defunct comic book store in Manhattan's East Village...listening to Ben, telling me about a dream he had:

"Joseph, it's 10:10 a.m. on February 16th...I was worried about today because of the dream I told you about...the one where I get everything I ever wished for, but it's f*$ked up. I don't like them apples, Joe. I don't like the look of them apples at all...what am I gonna' do? It's like someone's sayin': 'Applesauce, bitch! Take it or leave it'."

And that was the day Matt appeared...

"Joseph?!"

And didn't appear...

"Matt? Is that you?"

"Ben..meet the long-lost Matt Reeves..you may've heard of him."

And while Matt was apparently there, he raised his arm and pointed at Ben, and asked me:

"Who do ya' think that is there?...Naw, naw..we ain't gonna' talk Bats and Babs, now..we ain't gonna talk 'bout Babs or Bats at all..."

I turned around...Lily had put on a purple Batgirl mask and was snapping her fingers before saying one word:

"Meanwhile..."

***

Damn!..

I hadn't remembered that!..

Now this is something really interesting to think about!...

Popeye Yam

In 2011, artist Tom Neely published the spoof Doppelganger, a mini-comic that aped the basic plot of an old Popeye comic published by Dell in which Popeye confronts a robot lookalike built by his old archfoe, The Sea Hag. Neely's effort was created to attract the attention of comic book archivist/publisher/historian Craig Yoe, who was editing a new series of Popeye comic books for IDW, hopefully getting an assignment to draw some "proper" Popeyes. I don't know if it worked out for him, because I didn't follow the newer material that came out, but Doppelganger is a neat little book - I remember writing about it in one of my "Best of The Year" posts, so yes, it's a keeper.

Cut to 2017. Craig Yoe is still editing Popeye comics for IDW, but it's strictly a monthly series reprinting issues of the old Dell Popeye comics, written and drawn by Bud Sagendorf. IDW has gotten really good at reprinting older comics from other publishers featuring licensed characters that are currently appearing under their label, usually as a spin-off series under the name "...Classics". It started with Transformers Classics, followed by Doctor Who Classics, G.I. Joe Classics...you get the idea. Iwouldn't be surprised if a Ducktales Classics in the horizon..deservedly so, in my humble opinion.

So..to my surprise a few months ago, the then-latest issue of Popeye Classics featured a reprint of the exact issue of Popeye that was Neely's inspiration for Doppelganger! You know what that means...I get to stare and compare!

I like Popeye, but I wouldn't know how Sagendorf's take on the character differs from E.C. Segar's comics, because I haven't read those. The comics are more interesting than the myriad cartoons that were cranked out and aired in TV reruns for many decades, where it was just...waiting for when Popeye eats the spinach and mops the floor with Bluto/Brutus or discipline those nephews that looked like him, but were clearly rip-offs of Huey, Dewey and Louie. And I didn't know Sweet Pea the baby could talk! And I don't mean thought balloon talk-speak, like Garfield or Marvin or Snoopy, but engage in dialogue! If there was more of this in the cartoons and less hackwork then Popeye would've probably not become obscure to the point where a movie studio would get cold feet about doing a CG cartoon movie about him!

One nifty thing about Doppelganger is the size of it allows me to bundle the book inside this issue of Popeye Classics as a bonus insert. They complement each other.

#Top5ComicBooks of 2015: #1 - "The Eltingville Club #2" by Evan Dorkin

This was the best comic of 2015. What took me so long to write about it? Well..it was completed in 2016, followed by the hardcover volume that collected it. It's the second half of a mini-series; judging by how good the 1st issue was, I waited for it. I also posted fake #1 on this blog to coincide with April Fool's Day, but make no mistake: this is the one. You may continue reading or just start searching for it online or in back issue bins at your neighborhood comic store before it's gone. Or buy the hardcover before that also goes away...none of the non-superhero comics tend to stay in circulation long...I'm still holding on to my copies of Hopster's Tracks..you can go look that up.

Still lurking about? Okay. Read on..

Bill, Josh, Pete and Jerry. These four young men comprise The Eltingville Club. They are fanboys. They are frenemies. They are suckers. They were united because they had nobody else to compare notes with on their hobby. Although Jerry had become a more sympathetic character by the end, they're all at eachother's throats most of the time. This issue is the finale to a series of stories written and illustrated by Evan Dorkin during a 20+ year period; I heartily recommend you check it out, then be sure to check out the hardcover collection of all the stories, which was released on February of this year, also by Dark Horse Comics.

See, you look at guys like Kevin Smith, Chris Hardwick and others form cottage industries by branding comic book & pop culture fandom, but they skate lightly over this milieu; they'll use it as a springboard to just take what they can get and run...Evan Dorkin, on the other hand, steps deep in the $#!++y side of things and unveils the rotten core in a way that sometimes has reviewers downplay the canny accuracy by saying, "Oh, things aren't quite like THAT anymore, thank goodness"...when anyone with half a brain would beg to differ. All the bad behavior - across the board, from both sides, fans & retailers  (with a hinted thumbing of the nose at the publishers here and there) - is fair fodder for satire.

The "camaraderie" amongst the Eltingville Club is weak and toxic; this issue depicts what's supposed to be a "reunion", where they run into eachother at San Diego Comic-Con in their mid-30s. Pete and Josh have found careers, Jerry has found love, but Bill hasn't moved on, so the whole thing goes to hell. This must be read to be believed. Go now. Pick up this book. You will not regret it. Read the bits below for a taste if you're still not convinced. It should make you want to read more...then lament the fact that this was the end of it...then seek out the reprint book...and wish that wasn't the end...because that's what only the best comic book of the year can do.