World War 3 Illustrated The Food Chain

The Comics Journal's Rob Clough kindly reviewed this latest effort, only days after a wonderful story by the New York Times on World War 3 Illustrated's legacy.
Read, Enjoy, forward and recommend.
The retrospective of the show is up until February 5th.
-SJ

Another Year, Another Comic Book Convention.

Today marks the start of “New York Comic Con.” I’ll be in attendance this evening and all weekend, as I have been for the last five years, not as a fan but as a “professional,” a very kind acknowledgement by the convention’s founder, Lance Fensterman, that I’ve been published for 20 years now. I am not rich, and certainly not well known outside of my medium.

The world of comic books is diverse and bizarre. Today it is part transnational commerce, part entertainment, and partly art, although there was a (recent) time when it was judged uniformly as lacking any creativity or merit of any kind. Some, like the late Dr. Fredric Wertham even tried to blame juvenile delinquency and violence in children on comic books. As of 2010, comics characters of all types from Superman to Garfield have become the most successful brand extensions since the figures portrayed in the bible.

Take that, Dr. Wertham.

This weekend is a gathering of fanatics and readers, collectors and artists at the Javitz center in New York City. It will be crowded, wall to wall with people who love the medium I create in, as well as trekkies/trekkers, Star Wars fans, devotees of Tolkien, and various other outsiders drawn to the fellowship that their common love of particular genres of fiction has created. This is (after all is said, laughed about, and done,) a society. In past years, I had always felt estranged from the crowds, put off by their eagerness, and embarrassed by their enthusiasm, and when I was a kid, there were no girls at these things whatsoever (although it’s been noted that the very first Star Trek conventions were organized by exclusively female fans of Leonard Nimoy and George Takei in the early 1970s.) Only recently did I realize that my discomfort had more to do with the fact that I’d internalized the scoldings of my professors, the ridicule of my peers and replaced my own love, my own “fandom” with a kind of self-conscious reserve. I was never going to dress up as Captain Marvel, or Spider-Man, but why have I always looked down on the kids who did? Is it any sillier than some fat drunk bastard showing up to a Giants game in a Manning jersey? People at Comic book conventions don’t love the characters in their favorite titles any less than NASCAR fans love their favorite drivers: comic book fans tend to show it more, and by and large they’re not interested in appearing detached and “cool” about it.

Imagine if people still got this excited at gallery openings, at the premieres of sculpture, or at poetry readings? –When Mark Hamill (who in addition to portraying Luke Skywalker, also defined the voice of The Joker for an entire generation and now entertains millions as various animated characters on Metalocalypse and Regular Show) walks into a room at a convention, the response is deafening. That’s real love: undiluted, unmitigated and eternal. Why shouldn’t they show it?

I’m going to walk around the convention center this evening and try very hard to stamp out my ingrained shames and groundless misgivings about comic books, and take some pride in all those other fans whose only crime is loving something that I love too.

"Live long and prosper."
-SJ

The Wiz. An Appreciation, 32 Years Later

There were no blogs when I saw this musical as a ten year old. There was only schoolwork, AM and FM radio, three networks and four local channels flying through all that atmosphere that our cell phone calls now occupy for the most part. Newspapers were the daily history of record, and if it didn’t get covered, it often didn’t “have” happened.
It was a different world in 1978. It was not a world in which a Black man was entertained as a candidate for any office higher than mayor, -other than as a cruel, insulting joke.

I bought the DVD release of the Wiz last year, one of the very few musicals I left off of my list of very few musicals that I love. Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark would be another notable omission. I’ve only gotten around to watching The Wiz again this past weekend, and decided that even with its four Oscar nominations; it has rarely gotten its due.
Among the motion pictures of Sidney Lumet, this is surely a standout for its aspirations, as well as its subject matter. For the most part, Lumet’s hopes (in as much as I can identify the longings of any artist) in cinema were previously relegated to the possible and the familiar in New York (E.g. 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon.) The Wiz is as much a work of Science Fiction as it is a musical, and that’s a very fundamental distinction in need of exploration and discussion because while The Wiz’s “inspiration” or object of commentary uses magic as its principal means of applying force or resolving conflict, Lumet’s film is speculative and “possible...”

Flying Monkeys were traded for motorcyclists this time around.

This re-imagining of The Wizard of Oz, is a fable grounded in “the real.” One of the greatest inherent fantasies in American cinema was the decades-long absence of Black people altogether, as well as their non personhood in history as expressed in the movies. From that perspective, hundreds of American pictures (If not all of them up until the mid 1950s) can be described as fantasies because there were no Black people in them, and they therefore referred to a “non-existent” America, for there has never been a point in the history of the United States where African Americans were not active participants. To look at all the films of anybody crucial to the history of Hollywood like let’s say, George Cukor; an unknowledgeable observer would think that African Americans were late-comer, rare, exotic immigrants and not citizens numbering in the tens of millions largely responsible for building the country for all of the centuries of its existence.

What Lumet’s film gives us is a Dorothy who is not a child, she is a (ahem) 24-year-old kindergarten teacher, in some ways she is the opposite of a child in character which is extremely important for this “adaptation of an adaptation” (this is no remake) that is being crow barred into post civil rights relevancy by Joel Schumacher’s script. The Wiz presents us with a scarecrow made of garbage; a Tin Man who is mechanical toy from Coney Island; and lastly a lion, exiled from the jungle and making his living as a statue in front of the New York Public Library.
These symbols and metaphors are as dependent on the subject of their allegory, the legacy of racial injustice in America, as they are on the original film by Victor Fleming (I doubt the silent 1925 version is remembered by many.)
For if the original Wizard of Oz attempted to reach the possible with the impossible; the Wiz attempted to reach the impossible with the unthinkable:

It is Diana Ross’s Dorothy who tells her teammates that they always had what they were always told they were lacking. It is Richard Pryor’s Wiz who makes the previously unspoken confessions of impotence, and explains the price of political bargains that bring the capable, and the mighty down the path of mediocrity and capitulation. These are much more profound insights and existential speculations than were ever implied in past adaptations of Frank Baum’s American fable about a Kansas schoolgirl living in a reassuringly all White pastoral society where even the economic strata’s bottom was populated by White characters only. Visibility is the mission of this picture, visibility and awareness; of the self, of each other, and of the world.

There are bitter sweet moments in this movie that are made all the more stinging and poignant by the decades’ passage of time since its release. Michael Jackson is sadly buried under all the elaborate costuming and creature effects; presaging in tragically prescient fashion, the very way he would later attempt to erase himself with surgery and chemical burnings. Jackson’s dancing, his kinetic almost superhuman grace is weighed down earthward by boxy fabrics and padded shoes that distract from his height and never succeed in telling you more about the Scarecrow’s plight than Jackson himself could have with movement. Curiously, the “Brand New Day” dance number in which the enslaved shed their heavy layers of monstrous subhuman make up to reveal a mass of variated, lithe, beautiful dancers of every description, draws your attention to Jackson all the more. The grotesque weight of Jackson’s makeup and disguise is made achingly tragic by all of those dancers in flight, -confident in their minds, -confident in their bodies and their very souls.

I pulled one simple message away from this movie as a child: “Dignity Is the Road.”

Today I wonder if two of its stars, tragically tortured by the unavoidable pressures that their meteoric talents and success brought, were able to hear what I thought they were telling me. I suppose I just find it hard to accept that I live in a world with no Richard Pryor in it anymore.

The original release of this picture was a “flop” I’ve always heard, an abject failure. That kind of industry news rarely matters to kids. Kids love what they love, and as a grown man I still love this picture. I can remember being blown back in my seat by the sets, stunned speechless by that skyline with five or more Chrysler buildings in it.

I have to ask people who see this picture now after so many years, with Lena Horne as Glinda the Good, how could anyone not love and revere this movie?
-SJ

This Game.

I’m through writing obits and remembrances for the year.
I have relatives in the hospital who are fighting for their lives these past months. Bob Sheppard, Harvey Pekar, George Steinbrenner all died within the last five days and although none of these were young men cut off in their prime, I just want to write and think about something present, something alive, and maybe even forward-looking. So it’s strange to pick a subject that is nearly as old as the country itself.
The National League beat the AL for the first time in 13 years this week.
-I’ve heard more than one person on my morning subway ride remark “who cares.”
Well, I still do.
PBS has wisely rerun Ken Burns’ epic documentary simply entitled “Baseball” every Wednesday night, in single episodic installments (as it originally aired in 1995.) It is a detailed and perceptive history of a deceptively simple game that more and more young people see as boring and obtuse with each passing generation.

I’ve never told anybody this, but I have to confess that when the last players’ strike hit, I really thought I might be done with watching Baseball. I have one childhood friend who has stuck by his disgust to this day, and refuses to watch or follow any series or even a single game. In the mid 1990s Baseball asked for a lot of my time and attention, and once again ungratefully reminded me,( as if I had even partly forgotten,) -that it was principally a business and as such, didn’t care about me and my hopes for it. Baseball, in that half year of 1994 on into 1995 seemed to say to me “I don’t even care if you’re not watching, I still go on.”
The weeks and months passed. “And yes,” I said to the old timers, the mustache Petes, the “old fellers” at the Elk’s Head bar in Williamsburg Brooklyn “This IS worse than the Giants and the Dodgers leaving New York.” -Because at least the Giants and Dodgers packed up and went some place to play. -At the very least those teams continued playing. The Bar’s owner, Joe Genna, a retired boxer and great, great man in my estimation asked me, “Why do you even care?” I told Mr. Genna, I’ve never had a reason, I just do.

Just who does have a reason for loving any thing or any body?

I attended my very first ballgame with a man who wasn’t my uncle, but was much more than that and considerably more than any kind of simple blood relation to me. Santiago Pomonti, was a hardworking, tough talking Venezuelan who worked long hours and liked to argue with people until the veins on his head pushed out at his porkpie hat, threatening to pop it off his head like a cork from a bottle. My first game; the very first baseball game that I can ever remember going to or watching, was at Shea Stadium. I remember that I was cold. Santiago had bought me a plastic Mets novelty batting helmet, and I poured my twenty or so toy soldiers out of their tattered plastic bag and into the helmet for the duration. Santiago allowed me to stand in my seat the whole game.
The Mets lost. It was a Saturday I think although probably not, and the Astros destroyed them 9 to 2. That much is etched clearly in memory.
That’s all I remember about Shea that day: -The loss, -Santiago keeping the lousy box score on a newspaper, -and the unwelcoming steepness of Shea stadium’s upper deck.
It wasn’t much of a magical memory. On the ride home, Santiago drove his forest green 60s era Volvo westward, talking a blue streak about the Mets and their significance, as New York City stretched its sky scraper arms around us as we descended from what must have been the 59th street bridge. The man loved to drive. The front seat of his car was his cigar parlor, and even seat-belted in, I slid around quite a bit as he drove up the FDR highway. Santiago talked about the New York Giants, the Polo grounds and he talked about Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers and Ebbits, and my namesake Sandy Koufax. He went on about things I couldn’t know anything about, things that had gone on before I was born. He told me about the Mets’ team logo, which was taken to honor the Giants, and the royal blue of the cap, in deference to the Dodgers of Brooklyn. I couldn’t understand why there was a National League and an American League, “didn’t both words mean the same thing?” I couldn’t understand why Black people hadn’t been allowed to do the things he was talking about for so long, -and about that, he said little.
Santiago and I were in the middle of a variation of Abbott and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First’ routine due to my inability to understand that the All Star game was not a game between teams per se, but between representative players from the two leagues when I saw it for the first time: Yankee stadium.
From the pale green wrought iron work of the Macombs Dam bridge, it came into view. It looked like a castle, with copper accents. I asked my uncle what were all the flags: “Pennants,” he said. I didn’t ask him what pennants were, I assumed they had something to do with the “ligas” Santiago kept trying to explain to me. I stared in wonder, it looked so creepy and old, and to my greedy child’s eyes, very nice.

“There’s no game today.” Santiago said, as I followed the ballpark with my eyes. I asked him every question I could think of about the Yankees and he grudgingly complied as we passed Jerome avenue and veered down further into the South Bronx.

My old boss at Kern-Rockenfield, John Kern, once said to me that baseball was a tough game to be bad at, meaning -not that it was easy, -but that it hurt deeply to fail at baseball in a way that it could not hurt in other sports. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years since he said it to me. It’s one of those things that has become “truer” with the passage of time.
The cruelest and most negative assessments I’ve ever been subject to as a human being, were for my baseball playing. I have no “natural” talents for this game. This game that requires an obsessive watchfulness, keen timing and a kinetic awareness of one’s physical position in space relative to actual moving and potentially moving elements and people on the field. This is where baseball’s greatest myths of fairness lie. All the exercise, conditioning and training were never going to make the average kid into a Reggie Jackson, not for all the wanting, sweating and praying in the world. But hard work, studious learning and diligence are indeed rewarded by this game, if only on a purely neighborhood level. Conversely, lack of effort off and on the field is punished and ridiculed. One’s failures become uniquely emblematic in baseball. My frustrations with the game’s fundamentals, throwing, catching and hitting, came early and have remained with me for life. Playing with kids who did it well, and who had already learned by closely watching others, and in silent monk-like drilling sessions meant there was no one willing to explain simple concepts like using one’s own mid section as a line of demarcation indicating when to flip a glove’s fingers up, or down to properly field an oncoming ball. Nobody, not one friend, not one kid in my old neighborhood ever took the time to explain even the basic rules of the game and its idiosyncrasies. I had to learn those things from watching the Yankees on WPIX and concentrating on the ramblings of Phil Rizzuto, Frank Messer and Bill White, who were as likely to talk about restaurants and vacation spots as they were about the game in front of them.
My memories of all my childhood friends who excelled at baseball are punctuated with vignettes of them tossing a ball up and down, fielding grounders by throwing a ball against a wall or curb.

I did none of those things.

I only played baseball when I was asked to. I have never, not once in my life organized a game. I gave no physical or instinctual part of myself over to it. I never put the work in. I learned, -much too late, that unlike our prehistoric ancestors, we actually work at skills to play any game, not play a game to work at those skills. It was a heartbreaking insight and one of those many things that go unsaid in application and go unexplained; like the infield fly rule, the ground rule triple, or why if a left-handed pitcher fakes to first base and turns and looks at third, it can be ruled a balk.
My memories of losing games I played in, of being relegated to a non presence deep in the outfield for my own sake, are lessons in humiliation that I will never be thankful for, even as I recognize their possible necessity.

If I ever have a son, my first words on the field to him will be:
“This game is a game of bad feelings and blame. It asks that you succeed on its terms, not your own. This game is a glimpse into all the unfairness, joy and disappointment of the world to come. Try to remember it’s only a game to people who lose.”

...and I'll try to remember to tell him, "I love this game."
-SJ

FDR And The New Deal For Beginners, Sabrina Jones

Like a Rainbow in the Dark

Too many greats are passing in short succession. Last week it was Frank Frazetta, now it’s Ronnie James Dio, -whose name should have probably appeared in bold gothic caps on his birth certificate accompanied by flames. Such was the scale of this physically unprepossessing, diminutive man who sang with a powerful, outsized voice.

Ronald James Padavona, or “Ronnie James Dio” to reformed, or “lapsed” skids like me was born on July 10, 1942. He was a singer-songwriter in a type of Rock n’ Roll that many still insist contains no singing or songwriting in it, and it’s really for those who don’t like Heavy Metal at all that I write this appreciation of one of the last true gentlemen in 20th century popular music.

Along his career, Dio performed with bands with names like “Elf,” “Rainbow,” “Black Sabbath,” “Heaven & Hell,” and of course “Dio.” While all Heavy Metal necessarily sounds the same to those who are “deaf” to it, Dio was known for principally operating within the artistic sub-genre known as “Power Metal.” According to documentary filmmaker Sam Dunn, “Think Swords and sorcery” and you have a superficial but legitimate understanding of its lyrical content at least.

People have asked me, an avid listener of music whose fanatical tastes still range across the boards from folk music (Bob Dylan), to Country (Johnny Cash, The Cramps), to so-called lounge singers (Bill Henderson), to Garage bands, 70s punk, Ska (all eras) 80s Hardcore, Hip Hop and so on; What the hell do I see (hear) in Heavy Metal? While I could use an oft-recited but still inarguable cop-out like “who has a single reason for liking anything?” I choose to answer the question directly to people who hate this kind of music:

-Heavy Metal offers the world that dreams only imply.

...and you can quote me on that, friend.

All of the power and sex, adventure, horror, excitement and violence of our longing is made manifest in Heavy Metal music. This is why it appeals principally to adolescents, young adults and secondarily to people who feel a need to keep in touch with their youth and see an importance in remaining connected to the turmoil of their coming of age.

A few years back, Robert Halford, an aesthetic fellow traveler of Dio’s, came out of the closet, revealing himself to a notoriously homophobic audience and culture that he was and always had been, Gay. While many of us who grew up listening to Judas Priest weren’t surprised (Halford’s stage persona and mode of dress seemed straight out of New York’s leather-clad West Village culture in the 1980s) it was an unprecedented disclosure. While people argued about whether this changed everything or whether it even meant anything at all, I can remember thinking to myself: “Who better than a longtime closeted Gay man to speak to the youth of the world about anger, oppression and rebellion?” And that’s the singular, central thing about Heavy Metal, unlike any other of kind of Rock n’ Roll: It tells the listener to come on in and absorb some power, some courage, and some voltage. Dio and other singer songwriters in the Power Metal sub genre invited, excited and assured you, -whatever you’d been told, “there’s nothing wrong with you that is actually important,” -a necessary assurance amongst all the judgment, exclusion and nonsense of life in modern society.

Ronnie James Dio was not good looking. He was short. He was perpetually balding. None of this mattered to anyone. Ronnie James Dio showed and proved to me and the world that there’s more than meets the eye.
Sometimes you just have to listen.

-SJ

Frank Frazetta Didn’t Paint Heroes

I can’t say exactly when I first saw a Frank Frazetta cover, but I’m pretty sure those were the earliest works I was exposed to, -his covers. For artists of my generation, he was always there, part of the squad of old master-like forbearers in popular illustration like Frank Paul, James Bama, and Alex Raymond except Frazetta’s work was darker and it was otherworldly in just about every calculable respect.

Frazetta’s Conan is still the definitive characterization of the barbarian: Always a brutal, homicidal would be-king at rest. Frazetta didn’t paint heroes; his sensibilities were too sophisticated and “knowing” for that. Frazetta had no innocence about him as an artist; it seemed he was barely holding back all the sex, fury and violence that were not allowed in the actual pulp novels, comic books and movies he was commissioned for. Frazetta painted protagonists; That in and of itself was a radical proposition and a welcome relief from the commercially established smooth-edged imagery that had at its core an insistence on clear, absolute differentiation between good and evil or the hero and the villain. Frazetta’s work was too nuanced and cavernous to entertain naive distinctions like those. His work was called “adult” at a time when maturity was not the number of an age, but the indication of certain knowledge of the world and oneself. Frazetta’s paintings and imagery demanded that one consider the world inside of his pictures. In a very real sense, he was asking viewers to step forth and meet his world and he made no attempt to make it a safe trip for anyone. Frazetta’s work didn’t reach out; -it asked that you make the effort to walk in.

He had an incredible ability to seduce and frighten with his imagery simultaneously. If you dreamed about running your hands along the body of some voluptuous princess in one of his paintings, you had to contend with the idea that you didn’t actually want to be where she was standing. Some of his paintings appeal vigorously to our erotic longings, -but all of them scare.

For illustrators however, Frazetta posed another type of terror: mediocrity.

I grew up in an era of explosive virtuosity among comic book artists. This was in the aftermath of the aesthetic contributions of Neal Adams and in the wake of the various innovations that he brought to comic book illustration. After Adams, the late 1970s and early 80s became an era of extreme accomplishment in pure draftsmanship exemplified by artists like Brian Bolland, George Perez, John Byrne, Milo Manara, Marshall Rogers, Michael Kaluta, Jim Aparo, Arthur Adams, John Buscema, Michael Golden, Walt Simonson and a few others working in mainstream comics. As an adolescent trying to investigate work that would offer useful examples to learn from, the greatness of these artists was strangely demoralizing. Some of these artists were better story tellers than others, some had strong cinematic sensibilities, while others could express a speed and violence that rattled the pages in your hands, -still others gave you an extraordinarily authentic sense of time and place, as did John Byrne whenever he showed us midtown Manhattan. But all of them were incredible masters at their individual style of execution, and on their own terms, they were arguably perfect... Unless you compared them to Frank Frazetta.

Frazetta was not classically trained, -but classically minded. While there were always gifted painters in the fantasy genre in the time of my youth and earlier, (scores of them shuttling between the world of commercial advertising on Madison avenue, like my personal favorite Basil Gogos) only Frazetta maintained a sustained and unique presence, expressing that haunting sensibility that communicated the disquieting notion that sex, fear, love, power, death, hunger, regret are all present, at all times whether we want them all there souring a “fantasy” or not. The living darkness in Frazetta’s imagery and his skill at moving paint were but the invitation, the psychological world within was the destination.

In my teens, as I wondered in frustration at the work of George Perez who could make debris and wreckage look beautiful, and John Byrne who had figured out how to draw liquid metal, and especially at Brian Bolland who drew so decisively and precisely it made me angry... There was always Frazetta. Even my gods, had a god it seemed, and that made me feel better. On Monday, Frank Frazetta died at age 82.

Frank Frazetta, who was still untouchable by greats like Boris Vallejo, Richard Corben or Gaetano Liberatore, always sat in some distant hall of heroes in my mind, working ever harder, year after year, sending us all turbulent dispatches from his imagination, until his mortal body and health began to betray him.

If Lovecraft, Blake, Donatello, and Rembrandt could have sired a child…

And so it goes. Another master of the fantastic leaves us to join his creations, ascending into a place in our imagination.

-SJ

Vladek, Vampire Detective

WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED RELEASE PARTY

Video Promo for Jon Papernick's New Collection of Stories: ~There Is No Other~

Good Night Captain.

Captain Phil Harris, 1953-2010

My Two Cents

Just saw Avatar. After all the rave reviews and people just about proclaiming it the greatest thing since sliced bread, I went in to the theater ready to be impressed. Here's my quick review:
Character development is about as thin as it was on Titanic. It is also just as predictable as that movie. The bad guys might as well wear appropriately colored hats or twirl their mustaches as they plan their evil schemes. The story is almost exactly the same as "Dances with Wolves", right down to the new language which was created for the movie which sounds a lot like a native American dialect. It was really pretty to look at, so it's got that going for it, which is nice. James Cameron used to write a screenplay and then push the envelope with special effects to fit that story. Now it seems as if he works the opposite way. He figures out what special effects are available and then writes a story to fit those effects. It's a great platform to show off the best in technology, but the story suffers greatly. If you liked DWW and are a fan of shallow character development and predictable plot points, then this is the movie for you. The IMAX 3D was very nice though (I guess they had to make it 3D to make up for the one dimensional characters), but it's DWW with bigger explosions and special effects.

Happy Birthday Stan Lee

Stan Lee turns 87 today having outlasted just about every pioneer, except one of the men who hired him back in the earliest days of his career, Joe Simon.

It’s difficult to express with words just how important Stan Lee is to comic book artists, writers and filmmakers of my generation. He’s one of those creative forces in the medium who influenced every facet of comic book creation and storytelling in the 20th century.

The story by now is of course legend: Stanley Martin Lieber, changed his name to Stan Lee and along with several notable artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he created Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Thor, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, and many, many others.
But Stan Lee didn’t just create innovative super heroes and memorably flawed human characters, -he created entire cosmologies, a series of alternate realities that had a concrete continuity (characters referred to past events and interacted with each other often moving around and stepping into each other’s titles and storylines unexpectedly.) This may not seem like much, but anyone familiar with stories from comics’ “Golden Age” knows how limited and unreal early comic books were.

Years ago my dear friend, the cinematographer Joe Zizzo said to me on a movie shoot something that I’ll never forget:

“Everyone invents and is invented by their own version of New York City, whether it’s Jules Dassin, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee or Stan Lee.”

And that’s the thing about Stan Lee; he placed Peter Parker in Jackson Heights Queens, the Avengers’ Mansion was on Long Island, the Baxter building was in midtown Manhattan.

Clark Kent lived in some made up New York called “Metropolis” but Matt Murdock lived in Hell’s Kitchen.

That’s what Stan Lee has given to the world: a posture toward speculative fiction that approaches the rich potential of novels with characters that could be standing next to you on a subway train. Lee’s characters had tough jobs, they paid rent. They had all of the trouble that most comic book characters, up until that time, were incapable of having.

There are two things I’d like to thank Stan Lee for that often go unmentioned:

Stan Lee challenged the Comics Code Authority and ultimately forced it to reform its policies by pushing for stories about serious topics (In the most notorious case it was a cautionary story about drug abuse in an issue of Spider-Man in the early 1970s.) When faced with a series of editorial changes that would have rendered his story about the perils of addiction meaningless, Lee defied the CCA and ran his story without the Comics Code Authority seal of approval on the cover.
-They’ve been on the defensive ever since thanks to Stan Lee.

Lee also introduced the practice of including an entire credit panel on the splash page of each issue. This meant that for the first time the writer, penciller AND the inker and the letterer were credited directly for their work.
-Comic books are far too labor-intensive an enterprise for anyone to go uncredited.

There isn’t enough space on the internet to list and assess this man’s contributions to his medium, so I’ll just say thanks and hope that another dear friend, Ian Fischer didn’t take it the wrong way when I cursed him under my breath for getting to take a picture with Stan Lee at a convention.

Happy birthday Stan.

-SJ

Happy Birthday Elzie

Elzie Crisler Segar 1894 – 1938

Today marks the birth of EC Segar, one of the most influential, if not the most influential comic strip artists of all time.

EC Segar was the mind behind Popeye, -a character that I, and many others believe, can be arguably called the first superhero of the 20th century. Needless to say Superheroes as we understand them today owe a great deal to Superman and the cosmology created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. After all, Superman is the character for whom all subsequent superheroes appear to be named. But it is important to note that Superman had a direct depression-era ancestor in Popeye the Sailor.

If we are to recognize that Popeye was among the first, it is important to look at what superheroes are at their core: Superheroes, regardless of their superhuman powers or abilities and resources are people who always fight back. Superheroes are people who fight back even when they are not physically able to overcome their adversaries. Superheroes are fictional characters who will risk life and limb to fight for others who cannot fight for themselves. Superheroes never quit. The psychological posture of the comic book hero was born of the Great Depression; an era when individuals (long touted as the strength of the nation) were again powerless against grinding poverty, joblessness and the banks. This era gave birth to the fictional defenders Popeye, Superman, and curiously, the equally fascinating -but very real- gangsters and criminals of the time, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde. 1919’s Zorro, and even much older legends like that of Odysseus and Gilgamesh certainly preceded him, but there is something about Popeye that sets him apart from the earlier incarnations of heroes in world culture throughout history. There is a quality of “noble bearing,” –and a humility and human fragility that sets him apart from Hercules, Maciste and other “strong men” of earlier myths. Popeye was born poor, he was uneducated, he was working class, and in the earliest episodes of Thimble Theatre, (the strip in which he made his debut,) he was a drunk. Clearly by the look of his early uniform he was not necessarily a Navy man (this changed during World War II,) but more likely part of the Merchant Marine. He was a working man, with forearms bestowed upon him by a presumably hard, working life.

The Spinach and its accompanying leitmotif in the animated cartoons are incidental to an understanding of Popeye as a paradigm from which many of the later heroes were intentionally or unconsciously patterned.

Popeye’s real power was much simpler. He fought back. Popeye always fought back. That was his strength, his “super power” and ability: an attitude of resistance. Popeye never took it lying down; he never let a transgression go unanswered. At Popeye’s core is the very American idea of a man’s insistence on dignity, not enforced by a gun -but by his own hands. It’s important to recognize just how significant this was to Depression-era audiences and the generations that succeeded them in our nation like my own.

The idea of a man who always settled all accounts and went to bed at night unburdened by the spite of a lingering slight is of course at the end of it all, a simple “power fantasy.” Over the years, many critics of superhero fiction have dismissed superheroes wholesale, pointing to a certain “adolescent” obsession with “winning” and being right. I would point out that those desires embodied by Popeye and other characters are born of real disappointment, tragedy and suffering in the 20th century and that these characters are more than just pabulum manufactured to exploit the longings of children.

For my part, Popeye and Sinbad are the first heroes I can remember reading about as a child. What struck me, sitting in a Bronx apartment in the early 1970s as the entire borough seemed to be burning down around us week to week, was how much these two guys traveled, and how far... How nothing ever kept them down. It’s interesting that they were both sailors.

Happy birthday Mr. Segar, and thank you.
-SJ

Reflections on a Cinematic Pioneer

Oscar Micheaux is regarded by many as the first African-American feature filmmaker, and the most prominent producer of so-called “Race Films” in the early decades of American cinema. Micheaux wrote and directed forty-four feature-length films between 1919 and 1948, a staggering body of work for any director in any time period. In my mind he has always stood apart as one of the very first Independent filmmakers as I understand the term today: (An auteur, generally a writer/director who is telling stories and operating independent of the marketing concerns, branding mandates and political and social establishmentarianist postures of a given studio system in a given era.)

Micheaux was one of eleven children of former slaves. This direct connection to the nightmare of American Slavery marks him as unique among all other filmmakers in history, and makes him no less special and remarkable though this distinction was purely an accident of birth. This observation has been the subject of many unresolved arguments concerning the greatness, historical importance (or lack thereof) ascribed to Oscar Micheaux’s films. This has more to do with the issue of race itself in our society, than with anything else. After all, what made DW Griffith unique was his own perspective, made possible by his own luck at being born who he was; where he was; when he was: if indeed we can call any of this luck at all in his case, or Mr. Micheaux’s. I find it hard not to think both of these men simultaneously, as one readily invokes the other in my imagination. I try to envision their conversations, what they would say, (to themselves and to each other) if they could see today’s world, its people, its culture -and especially its media.

Oscar Micheaux was first and foremost a writer, and somewhat of an anomaly as he was a novelist in an era when the theatre was the most common and logical path to filmmaking. At a time when most African-Americans owned nothing, and certainly had no means to create media or mass-distributed images of themselves to counteract the popular racist myths being put forth as fact about them in America, Oscar Micheaux formed his own movie production company. In 1919 he completed his very first film. He wrote, directed and produced a silent motion picture called The Homesteader starring Evelyn Preer. The Homesteader was based on a largely autobiographical novel of his own that recounted his experiences settling a piece of land in a predominantly White region of South Dakota. His first “talkie,” The Exile, revisited what would become increasingly prominent themes of entrepreneurship and the importance of self reliance in the face of adversity: be it racial oppression or a poorly chosen tract of uncooperative land. In 1924, Micheaux made one of his most important contributions to cinema history by introducing audiences to Paul Robeson, in the motion picture Body and Soul.

Micheaux’s film Within Our Gates, was a direct response to D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. It is often relegated to the realm of novelty by historians and critics who repeatedly point out that as a polemic, it would not exist without the object of its criticism. The implication here is one of “unoriginality.” I can’t argue with an intentionally narrowed judgment such as this: but I disagree with the critical focus on the film’s inspiration as its sole aspect that determines its significance or worth. I instead insist on pointing out that Arthur Penn, Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone and even Woody Allen owe many of the polemical possibilities of their cinema to Oscar Micheaux for using film (specifically in the case of Within Our Gates) as the vehicle for a larger conversation about culture, reality and the truth. Micheaux was the first to make a film in direct response to another film, by another filmmaker.

Haskell Wexler, the cinematographer, often said that in the last years of his career, Micheaux was a desperate figure, often simply changing picture frames and moving props around on a set, rather than dress the scene differently or even change a camera angle lest he lose light: therein he presages Ed Wood, and every other independent filmmaker who ever ran out of money. Therein he presages me as well.

For what it’s worth, if there were a “Cooperstown” for independent filmmakers and American pioneers in cinema, at 44 films, Oscar Micheaux gets in on the first round.

Micheaux’s significance as a pioneer and innovator requires the nuanced consideration often lavished on his contemporaries and peers, but strangely absent from most conversations about his legacy.

-SJ

1930-2009

J.G. Ballard, a giant among storytellers, has left Earth.

For Crash, Concrete Island, The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise and Empire of the Sun, I am eternally grateful.

-SJ

I Have Always Hated Musicals.

I know.
It’s a tired, boorish sentiment from a straight man, but seriously, I hate musicals… with five notable exceptions listed at the end of this post.

I should note that I’ve seen enough of them on film, but only three productions on an actual stage, “The Wiz,” “Sweet Charity,” (with Debbie Allen when she was looking ridiculously fine back in 1986 or thereabouts) and “42nd Street.”
Now these where all impressive productions in their own time, before the contemporary standard of special effects, wire work and puppetry that seems to dominate the premier Broadway shows of today. Interestingly enough, the current day standard of pyrotechnics, lasers, smoke effects and stunts are made to lure people like myself (what I sometimes call the 2nd television generation; raised predominantly on action and violence) to the theaters by Disney and others.
Well it’s not working:

I am not going to see “Phantom of the Opera” no matter how loud Michael Mejias says it is.

I have an extreme dislike for the idea of people breaking into song at what seems like random intervals (more on this later). On some level it really pisses me off. I follow a story, and suddenly it is hung up by a song and dance number that recycles the same bit of emotion, information or conflict over and over again, generally in a repetitive chorus like:
“You’re the one that I want,”
“I need this Job,”
or “Hello Dolly.”

I get it, “She’s the one that you want,” so shut up already.

I, like many people, was astounded to have enjoyed this year’s Oscar’s telecast as much as I did. It had more of the shit I hate in it, (song and dance numbers) than any other Oscar’s program I’d ever seen before in my life.
So what was the difference?
Even a troglodyte such as myself, appreciates song and dance when it’s done well, and with self-deprecating humor to boot… or maybe it was just Hugh Jackman channeling James Cagney, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse… and Wolverine?

Being that Hugh Jackman is the first and only actor to play Wolverine (in three successful big budget movies already with a fourth one devoted to him alone coming soon), a character that single handedly raised Marvel’s fortunes in the 1980s and 90s with then-kids like me, it’s not crazy to assume that he acted as a bridge to get me over my hatred of musical numbers.
It’s not crazy, but it’s not accurate either.

After the Oscars were over, I began to think and wonder why is there such a clear divide between the fandom of action pictures and the audience that is devoted to stage musicals. These audiences are today curiously divided along straight and Gay lines, although that wasn’t always the case. Both action pictures and musicals employ a “show piece,” a segment or a phenomenon if you will, crow barred into a narrative: car chases and exploding corridors in action pictures versus the synchronous dancing crowds in musicals.

So the question I was left pondering after the Oscars was:
Is Hugh Jackman leaping into song in “Oklahoma” any stupider than Hugh Jackman leaping into the air as Wolverine and eviscerating swat teams to a guitar track?
I have to say I don’t have an answer for that question… or more honestly, I don’t like the answer that I readily have which is:

“There’s no difference at all other than that of simple individual tastes.”

I realized that while I like music, I don’t like musicals and the reason is that the songs in musicals are almost uniformly terrible in my opinion, with rare exceptions like the score for “Chicago.” The songs in musicals are often constructed to simultaneously entertain and move the story forward, but don’t seem to do either effectively. Dennis Potter managed to do some pretty crazy stuff with musical numbers and the stage musical medium as a metaphor chiefly because he embraced its unreality as a device for the delusions of his characters within another medium: Television.

So on further reflection, I suppose I should say:
“I don’t hate musicals... I just think they suck most of the time.”

…And what a relief that is. I can now say I love the five musicals I listed below without fear of contradicting myself, although I’m probably coming off pretty Gay.
I hope I’m also coming off as not giving a shit.
A fear of presumed effeminacy is a very stupid reason not to like something, or even someone.



Note that these are all films:

West Side Story
Lower class White kids versus Puerto Ricans. Almost six decades later, this shit is still genius. It’s also a brilliantly directed film by Len Wise.

All That Jazz
This movie is so dark and so messed up, it’s almost Metal.I always hope he’s gonna pull through in the end,
then –ziiiip.

The Rocky Horror Show
A transvestite mad scientist. Do I even need to explain this one? Probably, but I won’t.

The Blues Brothers
Aretha does a dance number.The verdict? Totally bitchin’ my friends.

Planet of the Apes, The Musical
“Come on and rock me Doctor Zaius!”



Okay the fifth one has never been staged or filmed, it’s just a great gag from a “Simpsons” episode, one of the last ones with the late great Phil Hartman.

But you’d come with me to see it wouldn’t you?

Come on, admit it.

-SJ

The 10 Best Animated Shows You’re Probably Not Watching:

This may be the nerdiest post I’ve ever written, so brace yourself or turn back now.

My friend and long time mentor at World War 3 illustrated Seth Tobocman once said that bad writing takes longer to reveal itself in comic books because of the novelty and spectacle of illustration to some degree, -and so it is with animation.
For every movie like the groundbreaking 3D animations “The Incredibles” or “Monsters Inc.”, you also have several more talking animal 3D flicks “written down” to the allegedly (and erroneously) simple mind of a child. On television, what separates a good animated show from an unimaginative one is its writing, regardless of who it’s written for.

“South Park” is one of the worst animated shows I have ever seen… from the standpoint of its actual animation alone. As far as original television series go however, “South Park” is one of the greatest comedies ever produced for broadcast. This is due entirely to the force of the writing on that show. The show is clever, frighteningly original; offering the best commentary on modern world culture available anywhere on TV. If you are someone who has dismissed that show because of its crass humor, I invite you to watch a recent three-part episode called “ImaginationLand.” In these three episodes, Matt Stone and Trey Parker explored the notion that Americans have allowed Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to highjack our imagination, bringing our nation to the point of collective abject hysteria. Those three episodes are the most powerful and prescient example of social political commentary I have seen on television in the last ten years. It effectively deconstructs all of the post 9/11 state and right wing-sponsored fear mongering, as well as the ineffectuality of our advertising sponsored news media as a reliable source of factual information, and the herd mentality of the American voting public in times of war… but those three episodes are loaded with really disgusting jokes, so I doubt that many will recognize its brilliance. South Park is a great show. It has remained a great show by positioning itself as a program for those 14 and over, which speaks to a larger issue of who animation is for.

Animation is not just for kids, and it never has been.
The work of producers like Fred Quimby, Leon Schlesinger, Tex Avery and others from the 30s 40s in the Merry Melodies, Looney Tunes and the multitude of MGM canonical short works is an indication of the savvy, urbane potential of animated stories even when they are populated by furry neotenic animals.

The perennial problems of what determines American animation’s content and tone accelerated in 1954 with a book called “Seduction of the Innocent” by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who maintained that there was a direct link between juvenile delinquency and mass media, (specifically comic books) in children. His efforts and advocacy led to a U.S. Congressional inquiry into the comic book industry and the subsequent creation of the Comics Code. The chill effect that resonated throughout the media industry at the time resulted in waves of internal preemptive censorship at publishers but also Film and TV studios and the formation of “codes” and reformulations of “Standards and Practices” for any entertainment that might reach a child audience.
Much of the problem with the development of the animation created in the 1960s and afterward, especially programming made for Saturday morning television (The Flintstones was a prime time show in its initial run) was not the idea that animation had to be made “safe” for children but that children had to be “written down to.” There was a notion, in actual practice (if not in theory before the fact) that along with explicit violence, sexually suggestive content and certain other specific moral conventions (E.g. no one can be depicted as getting way with or benefiting from criminal activity) sarcasm, complexity, topical references, politics, irony and any kind of innuendo or double entendré had to be eliminated. In short, sophistication had to be excised from animation.

Animation was hopelessly mired in a strange world of kids-only entertainment after the 1950s despite the masterpieces being churned out by Disney. Animation progressively got dumber and dumber, (see the Al Brodax Popeye cartoons produced in the 1960s for an example of how “Standards and Practices” concerns allowed and emboldened hacks to create absolute garbage for kids.)

Just as Prohibition begot the mafia, and the mafia begot the FBI, censorship always inspires the subject of its control. The world of “Adult animation” was born in the late 60s and early 1970s in motion pictures. There were movies like “Fritz the Cat,” “Heavy Traffic,” and later “Heavy Metal,” “The Lord of the Rings” by Ralph Bakshi, as well as his “American Pop” and “Fire and Ice.” On television, Filmation studios’ “Flash Gordon” animated series and rare short run shows like “Thundarr the Barbarian” tried to challenge the idea that shows targeted for children had to be sophomoric and predictable. But even the writers of “Flash Gordon” were eventually forced to write in a pink baby dragon side-kick in later seasons, and Thundarr didn’t survive its second season despite featuring the art work and stories of great masters like Gil Kane, Alex Toth and Jack Kirby.

The 1980s ushered in a strange era of toy marketing wherein TV shows were created in order to promote action figures and play sets on store shelves. “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” was one of the more egregious examples of this strategy. Instead of creating good animated narratives and entertainment, toys were designed and then TV shows developed to promote them on Saturday afternoon and after school programming slots. That said, the 1960s and 1970s also brought us the Spider-man animated series, the Hanna Barbera or Ruby Spears productions of the various “Superfriends,” shows that while interesting adaptations of their comic book inspirations, fell far below the level of the latter’s complexity of writing. I was one of many children who wondered why Batman comic books were so great, and yet the Batman Filmation produced series on CBS was so bad.

The late 1980s and early 90s brought a number of groundbreaking shows and tremendous changes to televised animation. “The Simpsons” and also a now largely forgotten Saturday morning show called “The Pirates of Dark Water” eschewed the insistence that animation, even animation for kids, had to be written with anything less than skill and sophistication. Volumes could be written about the Bruce Timm produced “Batman, “Superman” and “Justice League” shows in that decade.

Today we have “Family Guy,” “King of the Hill,” “American Dad,” “South Park,” “The Boondocks” and surprisingly after all these years, “the Simpsons,” enjoying massive audiences due to the quality of the writing on those shows. Interestingly most if not all carry parental advisories. As in years past, we still see absolute dreck developed and televised for kids. In most cases they’ll just have to get older before they can see reruns of all the great animation they are missing. Thankfully not all the writing in animation for kids today is mediocre.

As someone who loves animation and their narratives of impossibility, I felt the need to champion certain shows that are being ignored by the mainstream. So here are my ten selections of shows, -regardless of whether they are adult targeted or kids fare that exhibit a level of sophistication and excellent writing that I don’t feel are getting their due, either critically or in terms of their Nielsen data.



“The Venture Bros.”
A truly postmodern, almost fanboy-centric show, it chronicles the adventures of two dopey teenage boys, Hank and Dean Venture, their insecure super-scientist father Dr. Venture and the family’s bodyguard, Brock Samson voiced by Patrick Warburton. Beautifully modeled and animated, this show requires a level of political, media and cultural literacy that would stymie readers of The New Yorker. Thankfully it’s going into its fourth season, even though you’re not watching.

“Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends”
A show in which imaginary friends become physical beings the instant a child imagines them; unfortunately for the friends, the children eventually outgrow them. Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends is the place for abandoned imaginary friends seeking a new home.
A beautiful, smart show for kids with a vector-based look that refers to the “splash” layouts of the 1960s in Warner brothers’ cartoons.

“The Marvelous Misadventures of Flap Jack”
I don’t know how to describe this show. It’s for children, but it might be the most subversive thing I’ve seen since “The Pee Wee Herman Show.”
It’s about a kid whose mother is a whale. It has to be seen to be believed.
Seriously.

“Chowder”
Another kid’s show: Chowder is a young child who is the apprentice to a chef named Mung Daal, who owns a catering company serving the fictional city of Marzipan. The show combines traditional 2D animation with stop-motion animation and puppetry. It’s pretty wild looking and legitimately funny for anyone.

“Batman: The Brave and The Bold”
James Tucker, one of the long suffering storyboard board artists/ animators/ modelers/ Directors/ writers/ producers on the Batman animated series, Superman animated series and Justice League series is the producer of this new show which features Batman teaming up with other characters from the DC Universe (as in the comic book showcase of the same name.) The show is much lighter in tone than previous Batman animated shows. Strangely, like the Filmation CBS show, Batman does not appear as his alter ego, billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. But even with the renewed kid-friendly approach, its tone is even-handed and pretty serious although the aesthetics and design of the show harkens back to the Adam West live action show… and did I mention Diedrich Bader is the new voice of Batman?

“SuperJail!”
A show so good, it ought to be illegal. Totally not safe for the kids... and so what?
I feel really bad enjoying this animated show; it’s like laughing at a car crash.
Superjail is built inside a volcano, located inside a larger volcano and run by the “Willy Wonka”-like Warden. Superjail exists in an isolated reality, where time and space are somewhat fluid and can change at the whim of the Warden. At the start of every episode a criminal named Jack Knife is brought to Superjail by the Jailbot. Every episode inevitably leads to a spectacular psychedelic bloodbath prison riot, while Jack Knife escapes in the confusion to be caught again in the opening of the next episode.

“Ben 10” and “Ben 10 Alien Force”
A main character in a kid’s animated show named after the poet Tennyson. Nice. Ben Tennyson finds a mysterious, watch-like device, called the Omnitrix, which attaches itself permanently to his wrist and gives him the ability to transform into a variety of alien life-forms, each with their own unique powers.

“Metalocalypse”
A show chronicling the exploits of a death metal band called Dethklok.
This show is the most important critique of the new facism and the mass cult of celebrity that our media and the military industrial industrial complex thrive on. It is extremely violent. It is frequently funny. It is always profound, even when it’s trying to be sophmoric.

“The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy”
(Originally Part of the “Grim & Evil” show)

One day, The Grim Reaper loses a bet to Billy and Mandy, two children from Endsville, a typical suburb (an homage to the “The Seventh Seal”). The Grim Reaper has to be their best friend "forever and ever": Two little kids with “Death” at their beck and call. It’s the sickest kid’s show I’ve ever seen considering any mention of mortality is generally off limits for Saturday morning TV.

“The Secret Saturdays”
The opening theme music alone is worth the watch.”The Saturdays,” are a family of cryptozoologists who work to protect undiscovered and mythical species from the human race and vice versa. The look of the series is influenced by 1960s-era Hanna-Barbara action series such as the Herculoids, and Jonny Quest and features an interesting use of washed out color plates that remind me of what it was like to watch color animated TV shows on Saturday mornings when I was a kid… which is to say I watched them in black and white, on a tiny Sony TV monitor.



--Honorable mentions that have recently bitten the dust:

“Frisky Dingo” (and the spin off series “The Xtacles” has also been scrapped)
This was a very slick, sophisticated show that followed an extraterrestrial would be conqueror and single parent, “Kill Face” as he threatened to drive the Earth into the sun for ransom. Episodes revolved around his attempts to market and promote the planet’s doom while running afoul of “Awesome X,” the most believable billionaire superhero ever brought to screen. Thankfully, seasons 1 and 2 are available on DVD. Hang your head in shame for not watching this show.

“Fairly Odd Parents”
While this is not a show that was unsuccessful in its intended demographic, I do believe that this show should have had a longer run than it did.


-SJ

Lux Interior, 1946-2009

"Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well there's still alot of rhythm in these rockin' bones.

I wanna leave a happy memory when I go.
I wanna leave some thing to let the whole world know,
that the rock 'n roll daddy has a done passed on,
but my bones Will keep a rockin' long after I'm gone.

Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well I still got all the rhythm in these Rockin' Bones.

Well when I die don't you bury me at all,
just nail my bones up on the wall.
Beneath these bones let these words be seen:
"This is the bloody gears of a boppin' machine."

Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well I still got all the rhythm in these bockin' bones.

I ain't worried about tomorrow just thinkin' about tonight.
My bones are getting restless and I do it up right.
A few more times around this hardwood floor,
before we turn off the lights and... close the door.

Roll on.
Rock on.
Raw bones.
Well there's still alot of rhythm in these Rockin' Bones."

Rest in peace, Lux Interior...
or just roll on, rock on.

Forever.

Thank you for a lifetime of great music.

-SJ