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.

COVID-19 vs. Comic Books: "That's ALL, Folks"?!

What a difference a week makes!

This germ has bigger muscles than Superman..

The hammer had fallen on Monday. On the week before, the people of the United States were warned to be cautious, stay away from large gatherings, wash their hands, wear gloves, to not cough & sneeze on people, consider rinsing yourself off rather than waste/hoarding toilet paper...but the numbers were climbing, people were taking the Corona virus either too lightly or had no real choice and had to continue going about their day...I saw the comic shop that I go to was selling everything at 20% discount, so I rolled the dice and went in on Friday, saw only 3 people there (luckily, 7 people did not enter the premises, so the 4 of us were safely equidistant), made my purchases and skedaddled promptly.

The quick fox returns to the den from the trip deep down the rabbit hole, covered in dirt on the long way back, yet with tail intact, feeling none the worse for wear and enlightened...

Non-essential is the key word here. Beginning Sunday, all the comic shops that weren't closed are ordered to close. This is something comic book people feared...the death of the Direct Market from having no business, lots of unsold products, no sense of when exactly will they be back in business, no idea if recovery is possible. I see a lot of the shops are turning to online sales for now, but I've also heard & read the word "Non-essential" used to describe books as a low priority for the post offices and other delivery services. Some crowd-funding entrepreneurs think they're being clever by disguising their book bundle in boxes that look like they contain food, but that doesn't sound foolproof. 

So..with all the talk of the Direct Market going down comes talk that the publishers will go down  with them. A lot of the books published within the last two decades were clearly marketed to a specific type of consumer - the guys who spend maybe 30 or 40 dollars minimum per week, who aren't shy with using their debit/credit card. They're usually men, regardless of whom the books are aimed at (I don't really want to bring up Comicsgate vs. SJW audiences in this post, but I will say that the retailers have a right to be concerned if the publisher is cranking out product for a target demographic that's not buying them enough to make healthy sales while losing the longtime consumers who stopped buying when they saw they were phased out and there was nothing new for them). Within the last month, I've seen that the old tricks can still turn a trick:

Y'know...when you hear about a comic book being "sold out", that doesn't mean they were sold to customers walking into the store..it means the retailers purchased all the copies printed by the publisher. If the publisher wants to, they'll offer to print out a Second Edition that the retailers can purchase...and if all the retailers order all the copies from that 2nd then maybe the publisher offers a Third Edition...and of course, none of this means your average consumer brought a copy of either - it could mean the retailers have the copies sitting in storage, hoping that turns into a pile of gold...and it could, now, because ALL the comic shops in the country are closed, indefinitely, so all these new books that are supposed to come out within the next 3 months are either not going to be shipped to stores (because the retailers are hoping for a last-minute reimbursement/cancellation) or take the new books but not order anything new indefinitely until they can see light at the end of the tunnel. The consignment system is tricky because success with comic book sales depends on speculation, which is why a number of shops were depending on toy sales over the last few years...toy stores are not considered "essential" either. 

So for now, the shops are screwed, the publishers are screwed. Lots of doom and gloom talk on social media. I expect a mass implosion when business resumes..lines will be slashed by more than 3/4 - you're only going to see the shops remaining in business fall back in the late-1990s groove of severely under-ordering books, even main Batman books - the "Pull List" is a thing of the past...and what remains of the Direct Market is going to recoil back into the cave-like atmosphere that gave comic shops a stigmatization that never went away. 

The Bubble has burst.

I'm going to have to just wait for the trades to read more about Punchline, the Joker's new girlfriend, who kinda acts like Mercy Graves, Lex Luthor's valet...well, there's only so many personalities a female comic book villain can have, but she looks great.

Mary Jane Watson: What Do WE Know?

If you're regarding the recent reveal that actress Zendaya Coleman had been cast as Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man: Homecoming (or Michelle Jane Watson, but still "M.J." regardless) in terms of fidelity to the source material, then it probably is disappointing that Hollywood is still adverse to gingers..but Zendaya is an actress and glamorous model..and the Mary Jane Watson of the comics is an actress and glamorous model...she's as good a choice (perhaps a better casting choice) than the 2 actresses who preceded her (Kirsten Dunst and Shailene Woodley). And there's another thing to consider:

"Face it tiger, you hit the jackpot!"..is kind of a ridiculously corny thing a woman could say. The only actresses who could get away with saying that line just right - in all sincerity, without a trace of sarcasm or saccharine schmaltz - are Karen Gillan and Ellie Kemper, and they're not teenagers. Megan Fox could do it, because we've seen her play the M.J. all of you detractors think you want to see onscreen...in 4 Michael Bay movies (yes, I'm counting the TMNT movies). And I don't know if Bella Thorne could've delivered that line, either.

Past Spider-Man films tended to downplay M.J.'s personality to match the performance of their Spider-Man/Peter Parker. Dunst's M.J. could be noncommittal and fickle. Leaked dialogue for Woodley's deleted scenes appeared to portray Mary Jane as pragmatic and less of a party girl than the M.J. from Stan Lee and John Romita Sr.'s stories. In other words, she might've been characterized as having more in common with Peter, socially.

There's a superficial take on Mary Jane..and a more complex one. The superficial M.J. is...Megan Fox in a Transformers movie. I'm not going to waste words - if you want to see quintessential M.J. Watson, watch Megan Fox in the first 2 Transformers movies. That's Mary Jane in all but name only...yet lacking complexity.

The complex Mary Jane Watson is the one who became Peter's confidant..and eventually, his wife. She's the one who became the love of his life..first by staying by his side to help him with his grief after Gwen died. We haven't seen that M.J. depicted on film at all...maybe we will see Zendaya bring out that aspect of the character. That would be awesome.

#Top5ComicBooks of 2015 #1: "Amazing Spider-Man #1", Vol. 4

When I was a kid, I always thought Spider-Man was a rich guy. Those gadgets must cost serious money..no way could he afford an apartment (albeit a crappy one) in NYC by taking pictures of himself in costume for millionaire cheapskate J. Jonah Jameson; he'd be better-off shaking down tourists for tips after posing for free photos on Times Square with the other shabbily-dressed cosplayers. Plus, the toys always showed he owned a multitude of vehicles at his disposal - cars, motorcycles, jetplanes, helicopters..and he lives in Forest Hills!! Peter Parker, you rich, boy.

Let's be honest...Spider-Man was always a miserable read. Who gives this book to children? A guy who can't win because his life is doomed. Why can't he win? Why is Parker plagued with bad luck? Because he sucks. He was a sap..perhaps he is destined to remain a sap. At least he's a rich sap now. Money buys time, money pays bills, money pays ideas forward...better to have money and be a guy who inadvertently killed his girlfriend and got his marriage annulled by the Devil so that his 90-year-old Aunt could continue preparing meals for him than a guy with dick in the bank who inadvertently killed his girlfriend and got his marriage annulled by the Devil so that his 90-year-old Aunt could continue preparing meals for him...let him play Ted Kord for a while.

And a happy April Fools Day to everyone. :)

#Top5ComicBooks of 2015 - #4: "The Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows" by Dan Slott and Adam Kubert

Spider-Man...married? With child? That's the way Spider-Man comics should've continued, in my humble opinion. No crazy stalker-kidnappers, vampires, Gwen Stacy-Norman Osborn shippers, Iron Spidersuits and deals with Mephisto. Just stories about Marvel's greatest superhero defying his hard-luck existence by becoming a husband and father while continuing to fight the good fight using his unusual powers, intelligence, resourcefulness and wit, because that's what a responsible grown-up man does. THAT'S the real Peter Parker. That's the real Spider-Man.

And if it required a tie-in mini-series set in a parallel universe showcasing a preposterous new villain as part of a patchwork crossover to dust off this status quo and show what readers lost in favor of a bizarre, myopic, "not-on-my-watch" possessivenes on the part of higher-ups, so be it. It's only on the final page that Dan Slott hints that even he's aware that The Regent is an incredibly stupid villain whose m.o. has him miscast as a Spider-Man foe and he may have been working off an outline that was handed to him from editorial, but the dialogue between Peter, Mary Jane and Annie May Parker rings true in a way that many Spider-Man comics orbiting this mini-series haven't in almost two (!) decades. It ain't perfect, but it's the best I've seen or read with the webhead in a long time. My one regret is that this feels like the end - the "Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow? "-esque execution has me suspect that Peter Parker will never be portrayed in this manner anywhere again. His default characterization will be either a teenager ( example: the new Spidey comic book series), or a late-twentysomething "millennial" sap.

Now if only we knew who is that kid in that one panel of issue #2...who is he looking at?

"The 21st Century Superhero: Essays On Gender, Genre and Globalization In Film", Edited by Richard J. Gray II and Betty Kaklamanidou

It is possible to publish a book of essays about superhero movies without discussing the source material. That's what this book was, as well as offering an argument that the films made in the early-2000s had allusions to 9-11, the war in Iraq and American military action, all within a narrow margin...it feels like it had a limited sell-by date, with some discussions dated by their choice of films to examine  ( it's been a long time since anyone talked much about Hancock, Aeon Flux or the Kick-Ass movies ), but there are some good tidbits:

*Bruce Banner's exile in Brazil's favelas, as depicted in The Incredible Hulk, piqued the author's interest more than the remaining 2/3 of the film ( so...somebody liked at least some of that movie ).

*Jean Grey's "..limited cinematic presence" in the original X-Men film trilogy  is a reflection on "the mythos of patriarchy" in the films - in other words, she doesn't have enough screen time to develop into an interesting character..unless it's a character development that serves the mechanics of the script, i.e., everything centers around Professor X, Magneto, and  especially Wolverine.

*In his efforts at "Understanding 'Hotness' in the superhero film genre", Richard J. Gray had quite a lot to say about Ellen Page's sex appeal as Kitty Pryde. Considering how she barely had about 15-20 minutes of screen time and the essay was focused on her debut in X-Men: The Last Stand...I say he was smitten with Page...she was appealing in Super, though nobody has ever written this much about her attractiveness since - far less was written about her coming out a while back. He also has a crush on Jessica Alba, since he seems to give her shrill, vapid Sue Storm in Fantastic Four a favorable review. Even Halle Berry's Catwoman gets a light love tap of criticism, so whether he wrote the essay to talk shop about attractive female superheroes and ponder why they were sexy or critique their sexualized image is moot.

*No surprise that several essays compared Christopher Nolan's work on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight as commentaries on life post-9/11, but what caught my eye was a shout out to Batman Unmasked, a book I reffered to in my previous blog post as a possible inspiration for Grant Morrison's take on Batman, even confirming my suspicion by noting the passage I vaguely remembered..so now I don't have to hunt for that out-of-print book just to check out a hunch!

*I've never read any of Marvel's Kick-Ass or seen the movies, so I wouldn't be able to agree or disagree if the films share a correlation with the Spider-Man movies in their contrasting use of voiceover narration reflecting the masculinity of their respective effete protagonists, but I do know that nobody's rallying for more sequels to Kick-Ass.

*I'm actually bored with reading material that puts Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen on a pedestal, because I don't really think it's the greatest comic ever written and drawn - I just respect the effort that the creators made at telling this story. I do agree with the essay in this book arguing that the film adaptation succeeded in being a pastiche of film noir, but that's what the comic book did, and Snyder was simply following it. It's hampered by the fact that it features an ensemble cast of also-rans, could've-beens and never-weres, so it feels like we're watching a big-budget made-for-cable mini-series on Starz or Reelz instead of a proper superhero adventure film.

So..the book essentially covers what I would argue was the formulative stage of modern superhero movies. If Avengers is being considered the definitive maturation of this genre and Tim Burton's Batman films the embryonic, then the films covered in this book premiering between 2000 and 2011 are formulative development...but that's my hypothesis. If the authors had thought of that, they would've cranked out two sequel books of essays by now..

Catching Up: #FourComics...That I Read In The 2000s

"None of these people have anything interesting to say and none of them can write, not even Mr. Kerouac...it isn't writing at all - it's typing." - Truman Capote, attacking "Beat Generation" writers, circa 1959.

There's some overlap from the late-90s through that first decade beginning with 2000. I recall being willing to give anything a try. I wasn't just looking at what was on the racks now, but going backwards...I was interested in the early-80s Batman villainess, Nocturna...I still can't figure out what her deal was..what did she want?..I checked out the "Clone Saga" in Spider-Man comics, old Marvel Comics' Further Adventures of Indiana Jones...then there's Ebay - before PayPal butted in, that site was the place for stuff - I remember buying a lot of 50 Jughead comics, simply because I was interested in Trula Twyst and the comic shops never really have a good supply of Archie-related back issues...even with the spike from the Afterlife With Archie books.

And "Bendis!" - we can't reminisce about the early-2000s without mentioning Brian Michael Bendis...he wasn't the first writer to use what's now referred to as decompressed scripting, which is really just trimming the purple prose narration and thought balloons in favor of dialogue conveying suspense & tension, then stretching out plotlines over the course of multiple issues what would've once only taken 2 to tell. His approach would make multitasking on scripts a snap, allowing any writer following his lead to write "X" amount of pages for multiple titles...the books were becoming faster reads, but the price point was getting higher..as the trade paperback reprints were being cranked out, faster than ever before, you can't help staring and comparing: I could save money and buy a different comic, then read the trade when it's available to borrow at the public library, or buy the trade if I liked it after reading the library copy, or read the library copy to decide which issues from the storyline it collected I would go back and buy from the shop's back issues and save money that way..new options present themselves..

But is any of this stuff good? - that's why I copied that quote and posted it at the top of this post. The decompressed approach feels more like a change of format than a storytelling style; if you feel like you've read the book while briefly flipping through it, standing in front of the rack at the shop, then it's not something you're reading..it's something that's been cranked out, building to a moment / event...then setting up another moment / event.

So I start getting picky...I become familiar with the concept of walking out empty-handed...that's not fun, but it is what it is.

My favorite issue of Savage Dragon has the titular character mulling over an offer to have a comic book spun-off from his memoir. It gives Erik Larsen a chance to go meta and comment on superhero comics, circa 2003. At the time, Captain Underpants was a very popular children's book series, outselling the superhero comics...and Larsen was toying with the idea of offering a syndicated "Savage Dragon" newspaper comic strip which would have a lighter tone and crossover with the regular series. This experiment lasted 2 or 3 issues (of which this was one of them). The one lasting element was Mr. Glum, the pint-sized villain of the arc - a combination of The Brain from Pinky and The Brain and Stewie Griffin from Family Guy - he's become a recurring foe ever since.

Justice League Adventures was the tie-in to Cartoon Network's Justice League, then in it's first season. The show wasn't popular until it was retooled in it's 3rd season as Justice League Unlimited, but this issue, featuring a menagerie of DC Comics supervillians unwittingly invited to a sting operation organized by the League, is incredibly clever and a lot of fun. This is the comic book script that put Dan Slott on the fast track to writing more material on the 1st tier for Marvel and DC.

I'm one of those fans rooting for Ted Kord to officially be "back" as the Blue Beetle. That current Convergence tie-in is a good read, so Scott Lobdell has my vote for a new ongoing series starring Ted...

..and now I'll write about the book that killed him off. 80 pages of comics for one dollar is a steal, and the mystery of whose corpse Batman was cradling in his arms on that Alex Ross & Jim Lee cover had people guessing for months. Countdown To Infinite Crisis became the definitive Ted Kord tale in showcasing his perseverance in the face of all his friends and allies behaving out of character in order to hype an upcoming crossover that was overshadowed by the events that set it up. We had just seen Sue Dibney get raped by Dr. Light in Identity Crisis, Jason Todd back from the dead in Batman and Ted Kord get shot in the head by Maxwell Lord...we were too shell-shocked to care what Lex Luthor was up to.

And that cover, more than any image I've seen since, encapsulates Batman's eclipsing popularity over Superman in the new decade perfectly.

Spider-Girl had lasted for a decade in spite of it being anachronistic to Marvel Comics then-editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada. Let's not be naive: he co-wrote and illustrated "Spider-Man: One More Day" and wrote "Spider-Man: One Moment In Time"; if a married Spider-Man wasn't his cup of tea, why would he like a book about his daughter? It may have helped prolong the life of the book when it was retooled with a new title, The Amazing Spider-Girl, but it's future in the face of a Brand New Day was unlikely. This issue, #28, has May Parker take stock of her existence amidst storylines wrapping up, like the penultimate episode of an adventure series that's going to leave it's audience wanting more. It was a class act from beginning to end.

And in 2025 my " #FourComics..That I Read In The 2010s" should be all sorted out...