Over on the Two True Freaks podcast, I babble on endlessly about me and the olden days of comic books, ostensibly to discuss a fill-in issue of Star Trek I wrote in 1984.
I hate the sound of my own voice...
Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts
Monday, November 8, 2010
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Over on the Two True Freaks podcast, I babble on endlessly about me and the olden days of comic books, ostensibly to discuss a fill-in issue of Star Trek I wrote in 1984.
I hate the sound of my own voice...
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Ruh-roh!
The best part about being a freelance writer is that you sometimes never know what you're going to be working on next. (Conversely, the worst part about being a freelance writer is that you sometimes never know what you're going to be working on next.) Wednesday I was working on a Superman children's book (The Kid Who Saved Superman, coming from Stone Arch Books in Fall '09, part of a 48 book series featuring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman; I'm writing at least four other books in the series as well), Thursday on a Bart Simpson comic book script, and today, I'll start on a new script for a Scooby Doo comic book story. Friday I went into New York and bothered everybody at DC Comics; everyone needs a hobby.
While I was there, my editor, Harvey Richards, showed the pencils for the last Scooby script I had turned in, "Sunday In The Park With Scooby." Fabio Laguna, who's from South America and whose work is new to America comics, did the art and did it so nicely, I just had to share a few pages (as ever, just click on a page to view it in a larger size). The story is scheduled to appear in Scooby Doo #143.
While I was there, my editor, Harvey Richards, showed the pencils for the last Scooby script I had turned in, "Sunday In The Park With Scooby." Fabio Laguna, who's from South America and whose work is new to America comics, did the art and did it so nicely, I just had to share a few pages (as ever, just click on a page to view it in a larger size). The story is scheduled to appear in Scooby Doo #143.
"Sunday In The Park With Scooby"
(c) respective copyright holders
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
ONE HUNDRED!
Hey, what'd you know...my 100th post (thanks to pal Rob Kelly over at the Aquaman Shrine for the idea of using the above cover to illustrate it...why would I think of such a thing, just 'cause I wrote the comic--well, co-wrote, with Paul Levitz--and a 3-D diorama of the lovely Joe Staton/Dick Giordano cover sits about two and a half feet from my desk) in the form of Part 2 of the Wonder Woman essay:
What Is So Hard About Wonder Woman?! (Part 2)
© respective copyright holder
Not everyone agreed to go along with the idea. Some mocked it with a vehemence that revealed mid-century man’s deep fear of the equal, or, heaven forbid!, dominant woman. In 1954, MAD (then a comic book; it would later evolve into the magazine format more familiar to today’s audience) offered up the parody “Woman Wonder,” by Harvey Kurtzman and Bill Elder. In it, Woman Wonder is every bit the strong, capable, dominant woman. Her boyfriend Steve Adore is a little weenie of a man, constantly needing rescue by his bigger, stronger Amazon girlfriend. They can’t even make out without his complaining “Ooh, dearest! When you crush me so hard in your strong, sinewy, hairy muscular arms ... I ... I ... I ... I ... break ... something in the side of chest ... something broke, sweetheart!” Diana Banana, this relationship’s obvious top, is oblivious to Steve’s pain as she demands “Give me another kiss!” over and over through his discomfort. Steve fakes his own abduction to drawn Woman Wonder into a trap where he first psychologically berates her for being dumb enough believing her great powers are even possible “both physically and mathematically” (stupid girl!), and then he and his muscle goons beat and torture her for two pages of non-stop hilarity, ending with his stomping on her face “raised so tenderly in tearful supplication” with his hob-nailed boot. “I’ve been planning for years to beat you to a bloody pulp!” he screams as jumps up and down on her, kicking her “back in the kitchen where you belong, sweetheart!” And so we see in the final panel, Steve and Diana in stereotypical comic strip domestic bliss, complete with a houseful of screaming, misbehaving children (including a little girl in a Woman Wonder outfit who is setting fire to her brother), a haggard Diana with baby in one arm, burning dinner with the other, while Steve reclines with a cigar and racing form in the living room. “Diana Banana is now content with the normal female life of working over a hot stove!” the caption reads. “And Steve can even knock her down in boxing!”
Take that, Wonder Bitch!
In all fairness, MAD’s mission statement, as much as one ever existed, was to twist and subvert the conventions and pretensions of their parody subjects. Superman and Batman both received earlier and similar skewerings in MAD, both equally honest in their own ways, but the sheer brutality and misogyny of “Woman Wonder” is, especially in retrospect, disturbing. This is what happens to a dame who thinks she’s better than a man: she gets stomped into submission.
Gloria Steinem worked, coincidentally, for Harvey Kurtzman, writer of “Woman Wonder” in the early-1960s when she was a contributing editor to his humor magazine, Help. There is no indication, anecdotal or otherwise, that Kurtzman, creator of MAD and Playboy’s “Little Annie Fanny” was himself in any way a misogynist; indeed, for it’s overt sexuality, the harassed Annie usually came up the winner in the strip’s battle of the sexists. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of chalking it up to the 1950s zeitgeist, when domestic violence was looked at as understandable and sometimes necessary disciplinary action, or the punch line of every episode of Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners: “Pow, zoom, to the moon, Alice!” Ralph bellowed, his clenched fist in her nonplussed face. Yes, viewers knew – the apologists now contend – Ralph was all bluster, that, in fact, Alice could and would kick his ass if he ever dared strike her, but did the viewers of the 1950s, inured by decades of implied violence against women in the media, know this? How many simply heard the stated message without bothering to dig out its comedic nuance? It was the mass media’s selling of the socially acceptable belief that conflicts in the home could be settled at the end of a fist.
Television was rife with this subliminal message (as were comic books and movies), from the 1950s and continuing through ... well, what year is it? Sometimes, when Ricky lost his temper and loomed menacingly over Lucy, berating her in machinegun Spanish, she would cower, literally in a corner, under his verbal assault. His eyes bulged, veins throbbed in his forehead, he flailed about with clenched fists and the thought is sometimes unavoidable: Oh, my God! Ricky beats Lucy! Why else would she be so fearful of his fiery Cuban temper?
Edith Bunker was another victim, verbally “stifled” by Archie’s bigotry, hatred, and stupidity. Yes, Edith was smarter than Archie ... but Woman Wonder will tell you what happens to girls who don’t hide their superiority from the boys. Even Charlie’s Angels answered to Charlie.
Wonder Woman was a symbol waiting to be discovered, both on TV and as a political icon. Steinem, like most kids during the 1940s, read comic books, but was bothered that the women in them were relegated to the role of getting into trouble so the superhero could then rescue them. “I’m happy to say that I was rescued from this dependent fate at the age of seven or so; rescued (Great Hera!) by a woman,” Steinem recalled in the 1995 introduction to Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was the woman girls who followed the muscular world of comic book heroes wanted to be when they grew up, someone worthy of being, unlike “a Technicolor clotheshorse, getting into jams with villains, and saying things like, ‘Oh, Superman! I’ll always be grateful to you!’”
Steinem found Lynda Carter to be “a little blue of eye and large of breast” for the role, “but she still retained her Amazon powers, her ability to convert instead of kill, and her appeal for many young female viewers.”
“Wonder Woman is this enigma within the world of superhero comics. No one seems to ever ‘get her.’ One moment, she is this completely powerful and independent character that stands just as strong (and often stronger) than her male counterpart. Then, she diverts to this out of touch ditz who doesn't even know how to pump her own gas, then sway into a ball-busting man-hater who thinks us dudes are nothing but disgusting sperm banks. Suddenly, she is the leader of an entire race of warrior woman, (and) finally she becomes Superman with ovaries. So, what gives? Which Wonder Woman is the correct Wonder Woman?”
Aaron Duran, 2007 (“What Is So Hard About Wonder Woman?”)
When I assumed editorship of the Wonder Woman comic book in early 1994, the character was in what could only be described as a slump. The character was fifty-plus years old and showing, not her age, but the inability of the boy’s club that is the comic book industry to fully comprehend the needs of a complex, older woman. Girls stopped reading just about anything other than Archie comics sometime in the 1960s; that left the next few generations of comic book creators an almost exclusively male domain.
Writing any character of subtlety and nuance is difficult to do in the often limited scope of mainstream comic books. For a male writer who grew up on the testosterone soaked comics of the last three decades, it was probably asking a lot of him to convincingly write a character of the opposite sex who is supposed to embody everything that is good and virtuous and above all, peaceful in womanhood ... yet stands for the personification of the invincible warrior class. How is a man who probably doesn’t even understand his girlfriend or wife supposed to decode the exemplar of womanhood? It was by no means an impossibility, nor was it for any lack of effort; George Perez managed to come close in a popular and critically successful run of Wonder Woman starting in 1987. Dennis O’Neil, the writer who kicked off a controversial 1968 story line in which she was “de-powered” and played as an Emma Peel karate expert in a white jumpsuit, partnered with a wise little blind Asian martial arts master, I Ching, readily admits to the weakness, saying in a 2006 online interview, “You have to understand, writers like me, we have the best of intentions. We simply don't always know how to do things well.”
O’Neil, one of the most respected writers in the medium, would seem to have shown us the error of those particular 1968-ways. He recalled in a 2007 online interview, “Gloria Steinem, bless her, without mentioning my name, wrote an article about that and after the fact I saw her point, absolutely. At the time I thought I was serving the cause of feminism by making this woman self-made and then I immediately undercut that by having her have a male martial arts teacher. My heart was pure, but I now see Steinem's point. To take the one really powerful [female] character in the comics pantheon, and take away her powers was really not serving the cause of feminism.”
And yet, almost three decades after that fact, Wonder Woman, under the auspices of a talented editor and inventive writer, was reduced to working in a fast food taco franchise in stories published under covers depicting her in various poses of humiliation and defeat. Several years later, down the line of my editorial tenure, a storyline by writer/artist John Byrne elevated Wonder Woman to the level of a god in the Greek pantheon. A large segment of fans were outraged; how dare anyone suggest Wonder Woman could be the equal, or (that troubling concept again) superior, to Superman? He was the male, naturally superior. Wonder Woman would, in the estimation of some, be allowed second place on the superpowers scale. Others busied themselves compiling lists of all the male heroes who are stronger and why; role playing games have given the hardcore accepted standards for the quantification of magical and super-powers to bolster their arguments, which generated considerable heat on the internet before subsequent editors and writers returned her to the comfortable, familiar status quo.
# # #
What is so hard about Wonder Woman?
Is she, in the end, just a fungible fictional character responding to the personalities of whoever happens to be creating her adventures? Or is she the sum total of the reader’s interpretation as they filter the writer’s experiences through their own? After all, every argument for William Moulton Marston being a proto-feminist can be rebutted with quotes from his writings that blatantly and specifically espouse the psychological benefits of bondage and domination, the proof of which can be found in its almost comically obvious presence in all of his Wonder Woman stories; spankings – boy on girl and girl on girl alike – were routine, covers depicting her astride, or bound to, missiles hurtling through the air were plentiful, and lots of characters spent many, many panels trussed up by ropes and chains in a variety of bondage poses. As a dramatic device, Marston said, “binding and chaining are the one harmless, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menace and making drama of it.” Besides, he said, “women enjoy submission.”
Which carries more creative weight: the original intent of the creator, the judgment of the individual reader, or the interpretations of later creators? Comic book characters, like all serialized characterizations everywhere, are kept fresh through the illusion of change; readers and fans want their favorites to go through six different kinds of hell on a monthly basis ... just as long as they emerge exactly as they’ve always been (since the particular reader have been reading it, that is) but different on the other end.
More people know Wonder Woman from the television show than have or ever will read the comic books, but the influence of the creator’s original intent were hard to ignore, even in the event of cross-medium translation in which the receiving medium usually has little or no trouble ignoring exactly what it was that attracted them to the character in the first place. Network television standards and practices kept it clean – there would be no straddling of phallic symbols on the Peacock Network! – but every review, every reminiscence couldn’t help but reference the true star of the show: Lynda Carter’s breasts.
So: Feminist icon. B&D poster girl. Propaganda tool for enlightening the malleable minds of impressionable little boys. Smartass broad who needs a smacking around. Role model for girls. Goddess. Harmless TV entertainment. Jiggle-TV.
Because, in the end, everyone reads into Wonder Woman the qualities they need to satisfy themselves. She is, in the final, clichéd analysis, a fictionalized earth mother. We come to her as viewers and readers and she, in her nurturing way, shows us exactly what we need. Lynda Carter needed a higher meaning to a role as a comic strip character. Gloria Steinem needed a symbol for women’s equality. Harvey Kurtzman needed a strong woman victimize in order to comment on the decade’s misogyny. Dennis O’Neil needed a reminder of how art intersects politics.
William Moulton Marston needed a spanking.
And the writers find what they need to make Wonder Woman work for them: Robert Kanigher, who took over scripting Wonder Woman after Marston’s death in 1947, took the character off into light, romantic comedy mixed with fantasy and high adventure by way of romance comics. Fantasy novelist and Wonder Woman writer Jodi Picoult told Newsarama.com in a 2006 interview, “My thoughts are to sort of give her some mother-daughter issues – because I think all women have those, and to beef up the relationships that she now has in the world of man, as she's assuming an identity given to her.”
Assuming an identity given to her.
That’s something Wonder Woman should be used to by now.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Make A Hawk A Dove, Stop A War With Love...and Big Hooters
Late last year, I ghost-wrote an essay for a book about action-adventure TV shows for a writer friend who was behind the 8-ball and called for volunteers on the writers list we're on to help him out of his jam. Here's the first half:
“In terms of Wonder Woman, I’ve never really had a woman not identify, or identify in a negative way. At least they haven’t come up to me and said anything. That was always a goal of mine, was sort of that sisterhood thing from Paradise Island.”
On the back cover of the January 29, 1977 issue of TV Guide is an ad for Virginia Slims cigarettes, picturing a good-looking (but not so good-looking as to be threatening to her sisters), fashionably dressed young woman, cigarette between her fingers and the celebratory slogan of solidarity, “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.”
On the front cover, in all her Lichtensteinesque glory, was Wonder Woman, cartoon bullets bouncing off her cartoon bracelets. “From the Comics to TV: Lynda Carter as ‘Wonder Woman’” the copy-line reads. The copy above the logo promises “A Startling Survey: What Criminals Learn From Television.”
The lead article was “When Television is a School For Criminals,” wherein “a surprising nine out of 10 (criminals interviewed at Michigan’s maximum security Marquette Prison) ... actually learned new tricks and improved their criminal expertise by watching crime programs. Four out of 10 said that they have attempted specific crimes they saw on television crime dramas.”
A staggering concept. (Starsky & Hutch as your criminal blueprint? Really?)
Thank Hera the article leading off the back of the book was about someone who could fight television criminals with television justice: “From the Pages of Comic Books ... Comes ‘Wonder Woman’ Lynda (Wham!) Carter, Who Is Scoring A Hit (Zap!) With Children and Their Fathers (Crash!)”
Lynda Carter and Wonder Woman were the media darlings and punch line du jour of 1977. After a couple of uninspired (many say insipid) pilots and TV movies, The New Original Wonder Woman debuted on December 18, 1975 on ABC. The series was set in the days of World War II, copying the look and feel of the comic book original by Charles Moulton (a.k.a. William Moulton Marston) and H.G. Peter. The villains were Nazis, Fifth Columnists, and war profiteers. The tone was campy, though not high-camp, a few notches down from over the top approach that worked so well on Batman, the show that (Wham!), a decade after it had gone off the air (Pow!), remained – as, indeed, it seems to do even today – the public perception of comic book superheroes (Zap!). Wonder Woman was played (unconsciously) cool and (retrospectively) ironic, but the appeal was (unavoidably) sexual.
Readers are made to wait until all the way to the end of the third paragraph of the article to learn that in the line-up of ABC’s comic strip-like TV show stars (Six Million Dollar Man, Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Bionic Woman), none of the competition could hold a candle to Ms. Carter in the bosom department. “Lynda’s is an impressive size 38.” Against the likes of Lee Majors, Henry Winkler, Gabriel Kaplan and Lindsay Wagoner, the inclusion of this tidbit smacked of studio-approved pandering; it would be surprising if all of “Lynda’s” measurements weren’t included in producer-approved press material. The paragraph lead off with the information of the “spectacular 6-foot dimensions” of the “ex-‘Miss World-U.S.A.’” All this was in support of probably the only conclusion one could reach about a mid-1970s television show starring a tall, attractive woman costumed in a star-spangled bathing suit and red knee-high high-heeled boots: “...It is not only 9-year-olds who are watching. The Nielsen evidence is that their fathers are also impelled to steal peeks at this particular comic-strip show.”
No doubt.
TV Guide critic Judith Crist wrote in November, 1975, “Produced with taste and fine period feeling by Douglas S. Cramer, with a screenplay by Stanley Ralph Ross (one of Batman's better writers) and directed with wit by Leonard Horn, this introduction of Wonder Woman and her role in beating the nasty Nazis is indeed an animated comic strip, but done with intelligence and verve.” The cast is “fine,” and Lynda Carter is described as “luscious.” (In all fairness, Lyle Waggoner gets a reference for playing “handsome Maj. Steve Trevor,” but where handsome is value-neutral descriptive, luscious is plainly suggestive, especially when attached to the actress herself rather than to the character she plays.)
The New Original Wonder Woman garnered respectable enough reviews and ratings ... when viewers could locate it on their dials. When TVs still had dials. Instead of giving the Amazon Princess a berth on the weekly schedule, ABC used the first season’s eleven one-hour episodes as specials to counter-program against the competition on CBS and NBC; one would imagine that decision was not arrived at because anyone thought Wonder Woman offered a compelling historic look at the second World War sure to draw big numbers. Clearly, it was the costume and the spectacular 6-foot dimensions of the ex-Miss World-U.S.A. who filled it that drew its particular demographic: kids and males eighteen to dead. Junior came for the comic book goofiness; dad stayed for the size-38s. John Leonard, television critic for the New York Times, reviewed the 1977 premiere of The New Adventures of Wonder Woman on CBS (Warner Brothers, the studio that owned Wonder Woman, having grown tired of ABC’s lack of commitment to the program picked up their size-38s and took them somewhere else): “Obviously none of this is meant to be taken seriously. And I won’t. Using comic strip exaggeration, the producers are offering another of those escapist fantasies in the mode of grim bionic creatures and camp cartoons that once transformed Batman into electronic success.” It was a bit of a cliché, but a fun, harmless one. “As an actress,” he could not help add, “Miss Carter creates the impression of a sweet little girl disconcertingly trapped in the body of a potential Fellini sexuality symbol.”
Yeah, you’ve sure come a long way, baby.
“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”
In 1972, Gloria Steinem recruited Wonder Woman as the symbol of the growing woman’s liberation movement by putting the Amazon Princess on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. Wonder Woman was depicted (drawn by a middle-aged male artist) as a colossus striding Godzilla-like over a small town, brushing aside attacks by the military (meant to represent male aggression, one supposes) and protecting homes while carrying, bound up protectively in her Gold Lasso of truth, all those things that are good and giving (meant to represent female nurturing and strength).
Wonder Woman, created so that little girls could have a “funny-paper heroine to root for” had survived the highs and lows of publishing to be one of only three superheroes to stay in print (Superman and Batman being the others) through a seven or eight year superhero dry spell, comics having been commandeered by readers demands for other genres: westerns, romance, crime, humor, supernatural, funny animals. The popularity of The Adventures of Superman on TV kept DC’s core heroes afloat, but titles such as All-Star Western, Girls’ Love, The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Tomahawk, Mr. District Attorney, House of Mystery, Animal Antics, and Mystery In Space far outnumbered the dozen or so superhero titles.
Wonder Woman came about as the response to a challenge made by William Moulton Marston, psychiatrist, inventor of the lie detector, feminist, and educational consultant to comics publisher All-American Comics (later known as DC Comics). Dr. Marston was disturbed by the overwhelmingly male world of superheroes. Where, he asked, were the role models for the little girls reading comics?
All-American publisher Max C. Gaines (whose middle name, Charles, was combined with the doctor’s to come up with the ‘Charles Moulton’ pseudonym Marston employed on Wonder Woman) turned the challenge back on Marston, offering him the opportunity to create a “wonder woman” to stand with the “super men.” Marston responded with Wonder Woman, the first baby born in ages to the Paradise Island-dwelling race of Amazons and who was blessed by the gods with the gifts of Aphrodite’s beauty, Athena’s wisdom, Hermes speed, and Hercules’ strength. She was, of course, the feminine archetype.
But for whatever inspiration Wonder Woman may have provided to girls, it was believed that the readership for even this “girl’s” comic was likely as high as ninety percent boys. Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s editor at All-American, said in Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History, he felt Marston “was writing a feminist book but not for women. He was dealing with a male audience.” Daniels observed “Marston always felt that males were the ones who needed his message most. If he really did succeed in altering the social climate, it might have been by exposing millions of boys (who would become men by the 1960s) to the ideals of feminism. After all, it’s not much of a surprise that women might want to assert themselves, but it’s quite a different matter when many of the supposed oppressors agree to go along with the idea.”
What Is So Hard About Wonder Woman?!
© respective copyright holder
“In terms of Wonder Woman, I’ve never really had a woman not identify, or identify in a negative way. At least they haven’t come up to me and said anything. That was always a goal of mine, was sort of that sisterhood thing from Paradise Island.”
Linda Carter, 2006 (Wonder Woman, 1975-1979)
On the back cover of the January 29, 1977 issue of TV Guide is an ad for Virginia Slims cigarettes, picturing a good-looking (but not so good-looking as to be threatening to her sisters), fashionably dressed young woman, cigarette between her fingers and the celebratory slogan of solidarity, “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.”
On the front cover, in all her Lichtensteinesque glory, was Wonder Woman, cartoon bullets bouncing off her cartoon bracelets. “From the Comics to TV: Lynda Carter as ‘Wonder Woman’” the copy-line reads. The copy above the logo promises “A Startling Survey: What Criminals Learn From Television.”
The lead article was “When Television is a School For Criminals,” wherein “a surprising nine out of 10 (criminals interviewed at Michigan’s maximum security Marquette Prison) ... actually learned new tricks and improved their criminal expertise by watching crime programs. Four out of 10 said that they have attempted specific crimes they saw on television crime dramas.”
A staggering concept. (Starsky & Hutch as your criminal blueprint? Really?)
Thank Hera the article leading off the back of the book was about someone who could fight television criminals with television justice: “From the Pages of Comic Books ... Comes ‘Wonder Woman’ Lynda (Wham!) Carter, Who Is Scoring A Hit (Zap!) With Children and Their Fathers (Crash!)”
Lynda Carter and Wonder Woman were the media darlings and punch line du jour of 1977. After a couple of uninspired (many say insipid) pilots and TV movies, The New Original Wonder Woman debuted on December 18, 1975 on ABC. The series was set in the days of World War II, copying the look and feel of the comic book original by Charles Moulton (a.k.a. William Moulton Marston) and H.G. Peter. The villains were Nazis, Fifth Columnists, and war profiteers. The tone was campy, though not high-camp, a few notches down from over the top approach that worked so well on Batman, the show that (Wham!), a decade after it had gone off the air (Pow!), remained – as, indeed, it seems to do even today – the public perception of comic book superheroes (Zap!). Wonder Woman was played (unconsciously) cool and (retrospectively) ironic, but the appeal was (unavoidably) sexual.
Readers are made to wait until all the way to the end of the third paragraph of the article to learn that in the line-up of ABC’s comic strip-like TV show stars (Six Million Dollar Man, Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter, The Bionic Woman), none of the competition could hold a candle to Ms. Carter in the bosom department. “Lynda’s is an impressive size 38.” Against the likes of Lee Majors, Henry Winkler, Gabriel Kaplan and Lindsay Wagoner, the inclusion of this tidbit smacked of studio-approved pandering; it would be surprising if all of “Lynda’s” measurements weren’t included in producer-approved press material. The paragraph lead off with the information of the “spectacular 6-foot dimensions” of the “ex-‘Miss World-U.S.A.’” All this was in support of probably the only conclusion one could reach about a mid-1970s television show starring a tall, attractive woman costumed in a star-spangled bathing suit and red knee-high high-heeled boots: “...It is not only 9-year-olds who are watching. The Nielsen evidence is that their fathers are also impelled to steal peeks at this particular comic-strip show.”
No doubt.
TV Guide critic Judith Crist wrote in November, 1975, “Produced with taste and fine period feeling by Douglas S. Cramer, with a screenplay by Stanley Ralph Ross (one of Batman's better writers) and directed with wit by Leonard Horn, this introduction of Wonder Woman and her role in beating the nasty Nazis is indeed an animated comic strip, but done with intelligence and verve.” The cast is “fine,” and Lynda Carter is described as “luscious.” (In all fairness, Lyle Waggoner gets a reference for playing “handsome Maj. Steve Trevor,” but where handsome is value-neutral descriptive, luscious is plainly suggestive, especially when attached to the actress herself rather than to the character she plays.)
The New Original Wonder Woman garnered respectable enough reviews and ratings ... when viewers could locate it on their dials. When TVs still had dials. Instead of giving the Amazon Princess a berth on the weekly schedule, ABC used the first season’s eleven one-hour episodes as specials to counter-program against the competition on CBS and NBC; one would imagine that decision was not arrived at because anyone thought Wonder Woman offered a compelling historic look at the second World War sure to draw big numbers. Clearly, it was the costume and the spectacular 6-foot dimensions of the ex-Miss World-U.S.A. who filled it that drew its particular demographic: kids and males eighteen to dead. Junior came for the comic book goofiness; dad stayed for the size-38s. John Leonard, television critic for the New York Times, reviewed the 1977 premiere of The New Adventures of Wonder Woman on CBS (Warner Brothers, the studio that owned Wonder Woman, having grown tired of ABC’s lack of commitment to the program picked up their size-38s and took them somewhere else): “Obviously none of this is meant to be taken seriously. And I won’t. Using comic strip exaggeration, the producers are offering another of those escapist fantasies in the mode of grim bionic creatures and camp cartoons that once transformed Batman into electronic success.” It was a bit of a cliché, but a fun, harmless one. “As an actress,” he could not help add, “Miss Carter creates the impression of a sweet little girl disconcertingly trapped in the body of a potential Fellini sexuality symbol.”
Yeah, you’ve sure come a long way, baby.
“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don't want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women's strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”
William Moulton Marston, 1943 (creator of Wonder Woman)
In 1972, Gloria Steinem recruited Wonder Woman as the symbol of the growing woman’s liberation movement by putting the Amazon Princess on the cover of the first issue of Ms. Magazine. Wonder Woman was depicted (drawn by a middle-aged male artist) as a colossus striding Godzilla-like over a small town, brushing aside attacks by the military (meant to represent male aggression, one supposes) and protecting homes while carrying, bound up protectively in her Gold Lasso of truth, all those things that are good and giving (meant to represent female nurturing and strength).
Wonder Woman, created so that little girls could have a “funny-paper heroine to root for” had survived the highs and lows of publishing to be one of only three superheroes to stay in print (Superman and Batman being the others) through a seven or eight year superhero dry spell, comics having been commandeered by readers demands for other genres: westerns, romance, crime, humor, supernatural, funny animals. The popularity of The Adventures of Superman on TV kept DC’s core heroes afloat, but titles such as All-Star Western, Girls’ Love, The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Tomahawk, Mr. District Attorney, House of Mystery, Animal Antics, and Mystery In Space far outnumbered the dozen or so superhero titles.
Wonder Woman came about as the response to a challenge made by William Moulton Marston, psychiatrist, inventor of the lie detector, feminist, and educational consultant to comics publisher All-American Comics (later known as DC Comics). Dr. Marston was disturbed by the overwhelmingly male world of superheroes. Where, he asked, were the role models for the little girls reading comics?
All-American publisher Max C. Gaines (whose middle name, Charles, was combined with the doctor’s to come up with the ‘Charles Moulton’ pseudonym Marston employed on Wonder Woman) turned the challenge back on Marston, offering him the opportunity to create a “wonder woman” to stand with the “super men.” Marston responded with Wonder Woman, the first baby born in ages to the Paradise Island-dwelling race of Amazons and who was blessed by the gods with the gifts of Aphrodite’s beauty, Athena’s wisdom, Hermes speed, and Hercules’ strength. She was, of course, the feminine archetype.
But for whatever inspiration Wonder Woman may have provided to girls, it was believed that the readership for even this “girl’s” comic was likely as high as ninety percent boys. Sheldon Mayer, Marston’s editor at All-American, said in Les Daniels’ Wonder Woman: The Complete History, he felt Marston “was writing a feminist book but not for women. He was dealing with a male audience.” Daniels observed “Marston always felt that males were the ones who needed his message most. If he really did succeed in altering the social climate, it might have been by exposing millions of boys (who would become men by the 1960s) to the ideals of feminism. After all, it’s not much of a surprise that women might want to assert themselves, but it’s quite a different matter when many of the supposed oppressors agree to go along with the idea.”
Continued...
Monday, August 25, 2008
Hey Kids--Comics! Part 3
Thursday, August 21, 2008
A Brief Introduction
Every now and then, I'm called upon to use my overabundance of comic book knowledge to write an introduction or foreword to some collection of stories, frequently stories that I am somehow connected to because of my long experience in the field. In this case, it was an archival collection of the Doom Patrol, a classic comic book series from the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, I wrote revivals of the Doom Patrol, mostly, at the time, to lukewarm fan review, although time has soften many of those opinions and there seems to be a certain fondness for the work now.
Here's a slightly abridged version (I took out references to the stories printed in the volume) of the foreword to THE DOOM PATROL ARCHIVE, Volume 4. DC doesn't illustrate these forewords so the photograph did not appear in the book.
THE DOOM PATROL ARCHIVES • Volume 4 FOREWORD
The first time I met Arnold Drake in anything more than passing was in March of 2004. Someone had arranged to bring a bunch of Golden and Silver Age writers and artists up to the DC Comics offices for a tour and a small gathering for the comics creators of the day to express their appreciation for the creators of yesteryear. Among that number were some old friends, including artist Murphy Anderson (and the charming Mrs. Anderson) and several new acquaintances, including Larry Lieber and Arnold Drake.
Murphy, of course, was a long-time staple at DC, one of the company’s top artists and inkers. Larry never wrote a word for DC, but as a prolific Atomic and Silver Age Marvel writer and artist, I had grown up on his work and was thrilled to meet him. Arnold, on the other hand, had written plenty of words for DC: mysteries, science fiction, detective stories, suspense, super-heroes, humor (including THE ADVENTURES OF JERRY LEWIS — I’m just saying); you name it, he’d written it.
Though I was junior to Arnold Drake and the rest of the gentlemen gathered at DC that day in terms of years in the biz (as well as status and reputation), I had logged a few decades hanging around those offices as well, beginning as a fan around 1970 (when a fan could still hang around the offices), so it was unsurprising that our paths would cross, even if only, as I’ve said, in passing.
Starting in 1977, Arnold and I actually had a legitimate connection, but I doubt he knew who I was or that the connection even existed.
Arnold Drake and I had both written THE DOOM PATROL.
Not that the credit put me in the same stadium, let alone on the same playing field, as Arnold. As the forewords to previous volumes of this Archive series have related, he created this remarkable cast of characters (along with co-writer Bob Haney on the first couple of stories). He was the guiding force of this, DC’s most forward-thinking series of the 1960s. Probably more than any other writer at National Periodical Publications in 1963, Arnold saw the writing on the wall that was being scrawled by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko at Marvel, and he replied with THE DOOM PATROL.
How well did he understand what Lee and company were doing?
Arnold’s DOOM PATROL was the perfect DC counterpoint to the Marvel Revolution, as proven by the debut of the similarly-themed (but thoroughly different, wheelchair-bound leaders aside) Lee and Kirby-created X-Men a couple of months later. In 1967, Arnold also gave the world Deadman, and by then the rest of the company had gotten the hint and creators such as Ditko, Mike Friedrich, Steve Skeates, Dennis O’Neal, Neal Adams and others had joined Arnold in pulling the company into the 1960s.
THE DOOM PATROL never seemed to lose its edge. Sure, parts of the stories may seem forced and corny today, but to those of us reading them in the 1960s, when plot gimmicks and “as fate would have it”-levels of coincidence were still the norm in a lot of titles, the group was a revelation. The Chief, Cliff, Larry and Rita (later joined by Gar Logan and Steve Dayton) provided one of the few continuity-driven books in the line. A diehard DC fan could tell, even then, that THE DOOM PATROL, under the editorial stewardship of Murray Boltinoff, had to have been flying under the radar. It was too different. Too good. I wasn’t surprised to learn, years later, that despite the second-class status of many of his titles, quiet, unassuming Murray consistently posted some of the highest sales percentages in the company.
I came to THE DOOM PATROL around 1967 via a back issue of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN that I had picked up for a nickel at one of the few used book stores in my area of Brooklyn that carried old comics. It was CHALLENGERS # 48, from 1966 (reprinted in THE DOOM PATROL ARCHIVES VOL. 3), the first of the two-part crossover with the Doom Patrol (another big deal for the time — crossovers were few and far between!). The Challengers were my second-favorite team at the time (after the Justice League of America, of course; that went without saying), and I was picking up whatever back issues I could find. In that 25 cents’ worth of old comics was my introduction to Arnold’s creation.
By then (the time of the stories reprinted in this volume), the Doom Patrol readership was becoming a bit of a family as well. Editor Boltinoff didn’t just run letters from the fans on his letter pages; he had a “Swap Shop” section in there as well, listing the names and addresses of readers looking to buy, sell or swap back issues of THE DOOM PATROL. Only Julie Schwartz’s letter columns at DC (and Stan Lee’s at Marvel) had that same feeling of intimacy, not only between editor and reader but among the readership in general.
But all good things must come to an end, and THE DOOM PATROL met its fate in the summer of 1968 with a denouement as unexpected as it was unprecedented.
And there it ended. Until 1977, when Paul Levitz, Boy Editor, called me with the news that (a) DC was reviving the original title of SHOWCASE, last seen in 1970; (b) he was editing the first three-issue arc (although we didn’t call them that until the 1990s, when someone swiped the term from the TV show Wiseguys (they used to just be called “stories”); and (c) would I like to write it, because (d) it was going to be the New Doom Patrol.
Paul and I have known each other since seventh grade in Meyer Levin Junior High School. Like me, Paul is one of the biggest fanboy geeks around, and he knew full well that this assignment contained all the elements I liked, wrapped up in one: it had the Doom Patrol, it had SHOWCASE, and it was work!
However.
Let me just say now, with no apologies but by way of explanation, that I was young, only a couple of years into writing comics, and caught up in the trend of changing, fixing and otherwise screwing around with what came before. Suffice to say that both the New Doom Patrol and I would have been better served if I hadn’t revised quite so much. I took Arnold Drake’s Doom Patrol and broke it. It was done with the best of intentions, but it still wound up broken. And I didn’t make things much better when I had a second chance at the characters in 1987.
Thanks to continuity, there’s no such thing as water under the bridge in comics. It all becomes part of the gestalt, and the characters (not to mention the readers and the writer) are stuck with it, regardless of subsequent retcons or reboots.
So, in March of 2004, I finally got the chance to sit down, face to face, with Arnold Drake and spend some time just talking. I told him how much his Doom Patrol meant to me. I talked about his other work, particularly on THE ADVENTURES OF JERRY LEWIS (again, I’m just saying), and then, just before we had our picture taken together, I said, “I really regret that I messed with the Doom Patrol. It was perfect the way you set it up. Changing it was a big mistake.”
Arnold was gracious, shrugging as if to say, ‘What’re you going to do?’
“What I did with the Doom Patrol’s really one of my biggest creative regrets,” I said with a sigh.
He sighed too, nodding his head and patting me fondly on the shoulder. “I know, my boy,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I know.”
Which explains why I wasn’t smiling when the picture was snapped.
Sorry, Arnold.
Here's a slightly abridged version (I took out references to the stories printed in the volume) of the foreword to THE DOOM PATROL ARCHIVE, Volume 4. DC doesn't illustrate these forewords so the photograph did not appear in the book.
© DC Comics
Photograph by Marc Svensson
Photograph by Marc Svensson
The first time I met Arnold Drake in anything more than passing was in March of 2004. Someone had arranged to bring a bunch of Golden and Silver Age writers and artists up to the DC Comics offices for a tour and a small gathering for the comics creators of the day to express their appreciation for the creators of yesteryear. Among that number were some old friends, including artist Murphy Anderson (and the charming Mrs. Anderson) and several new acquaintances, including Larry Lieber and Arnold Drake.
Murphy, of course, was a long-time staple at DC, one of the company’s top artists and inkers. Larry never wrote a word for DC, but as a prolific Atomic and Silver Age Marvel writer and artist, I had grown up on his work and was thrilled to meet him. Arnold, on the other hand, had written plenty of words for DC: mysteries, science fiction, detective stories, suspense, super-heroes, humor (including THE ADVENTURES OF JERRY LEWIS — I’m just saying); you name it, he’d written it.
Though I was junior to Arnold Drake and the rest of the gentlemen gathered at DC that day in terms of years in the biz (as well as status and reputation), I had logged a few decades hanging around those offices as well, beginning as a fan around 1970 (when a fan could still hang around the offices), so it was unsurprising that our paths would cross, even if only, as I’ve said, in passing.
Starting in 1977, Arnold and I actually had a legitimate connection, but I doubt he knew who I was or that the connection even existed.
Arnold Drake and I had both written THE DOOM PATROL.
Not that the credit put me in the same stadium, let alone on the same playing field, as Arnold. As the forewords to previous volumes of this Archive series have related, he created this remarkable cast of characters (along with co-writer Bob Haney on the first couple of stories). He was the guiding force of this, DC’s most forward-thinking series of the 1960s. Probably more than any other writer at National Periodical Publications in 1963, Arnold saw the writing on the wall that was being scrawled by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko at Marvel, and he replied with THE DOOM PATROL.
How well did he understand what Lee and company were doing?
Arnold’s DOOM PATROL was the perfect DC counterpoint to the Marvel Revolution, as proven by the debut of the similarly-themed (but thoroughly different, wheelchair-bound leaders aside) Lee and Kirby-created X-Men a couple of months later. In 1967, Arnold also gave the world Deadman, and by then the rest of the company had gotten the hint and creators such as Ditko, Mike Friedrich, Steve Skeates, Dennis O’Neal, Neal Adams and others had joined Arnold in pulling the company into the 1960s.
THE DOOM PATROL never seemed to lose its edge. Sure, parts of the stories may seem forced and corny today, but to those of us reading them in the 1960s, when plot gimmicks and “as fate would have it”-levels of coincidence were still the norm in a lot of titles, the group was a revelation. The Chief, Cliff, Larry and Rita (later joined by Gar Logan and Steve Dayton) provided one of the few continuity-driven books in the line. A diehard DC fan could tell, even then, that THE DOOM PATROL, under the editorial stewardship of Murray Boltinoff, had to have been flying under the radar. It was too different. Too good. I wasn’t surprised to learn, years later, that despite the second-class status of many of his titles, quiet, unassuming Murray consistently posted some of the highest sales percentages in the company.
I came to THE DOOM PATROL around 1967 via a back issue of CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN that I had picked up for a nickel at one of the few used book stores in my area of Brooklyn that carried old comics. It was CHALLENGERS # 48, from 1966 (reprinted in THE DOOM PATROL ARCHIVES VOL. 3), the first of the two-part crossover with the Doom Patrol (another big deal for the time — crossovers were few and far between!). The Challengers were my second-favorite team at the time (after the Justice League of America, of course; that went without saying), and I was picking up whatever back issues I could find. In that 25 cents’ worth of old comics was my introduction to Arnold’s creation.
* * *
By then (the time of the stories reprinted in this volume), the Doom Patrol readership was becoming a bit of a family as well. Editor Boltinoff didn’t just run letters from the fans on his letter pages; he had a “Swap Shop” section in there as well, listing the names and addresses of readers looking to buy, sell or swap back issues of THE DOOM PATROL. Only Julie Schwartz’s letter columns at DC (and Stan Lee’s at Marvel) had that same feeling of intimacy, not only between editor and reader but among the readership in general.
But all good things must come to an end, and THE DOOM PATROL met its fate in the summer of 1968 with a denouement as unexpected as it was unprecedented.
And there it ended. Until 1977, when Paul Levitz, Boy Editor, called me with the news that (a) DC was reviving the original title of SHOWCASE, last seen in 1970; (b) he was editing the first three-issue arc (although we didn’t call them that until the 1990s, when someone swiped the term from the TV show Wiseguys (they used to just be called “stories”); and (c) would I like to write it, because (d) it was going to be the New Doom Patrol.
Paul and I have known each other since seventh grade in Meyer Levin Junior High School. Like me, Paul is one of the biggest fanboy geeks around, and he knew full well that this assignment contained all the elements I liked, wrapped up in one: it had the Doom Patrol, it had SHOWCASE, and it was work!
However.
Let me just say now, with no apologies but by way of explanation, that I was young, only a couple of years into writing comics, and caught up in the trend of changing, fixing and otherwise screwing around with what came before. Suffice to say that both the New Doom Patrol and I would have been better served if I hadn’t revised quite so much. I took Arnold Drake’s Doom Patrol and broke it. It was done with the best of intentions, but it still wound up broken. And I didn’t make things much better when I had a second chance at the characters in 1987.
Thanks to continuity, there’s no such thing as water under the bridge in comics. It all becomes part of the gestalt, and the characters (not to mention the readers and the writer) are stuck with it, regardless of subsequent retcons or reboots.
So, in March of 2004, I finally got the chance to sit down, face to face, with Arnold Drake and spend some time just talking. I told him how much his Doom Patrol meant to me. I talked about his other work, particularly on THE ADVENTURES OF JERRY LEWIS (again, I’m just saying), and then, just before we had our picture taken together, I said, “I really regret that I messed with the Doom Patrol. It was perfect the way you set it up. Changing it was a big mistake.”
Arnold was gracious, shrugging as if to say, ‘What’re you going to do?’
“What I did with the Doom Patrol’s really one of my biggest creative regrets,” I said with a sigh.
He sighed too, nodding his head and patting me fondly on the shoulder. “I know, my boy,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I know.”
Which explains why I wasn’t smiling when the picture was snapped.
Sorry, Arnold.
— Paul Kupperberg
2007
2007
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
500 Words A Day or Bust!
My hard drive is full of bits and pieces of incomplete stories, novels, characters, bits and ideas. Some of them will never go anywhere, some will wind up cannibalized and used elsewhere, and others are far enough along that I really have no excuse not to do something with them...like, maybe, finish them. One of the latter is The Same Old Story, a mystery set in the early 1950s world of the comic book industry from which I ran an excerpt on August 2 (containing my beloved Pincus the ribbon salesman joke). I had about 21,000 words written on the book, eleven or twelve chapters, and a pretty solid idea where the story was going, but I hadn’t touched the thing in more than a year.
It occurred to me that if I’d written even 500 words a day on it during that year, the book would have been finished months ago...as would a second book, with a third one in progress. Five hundred words a day, even on top of regular schedule of paying work, is no great strain. So on August 16, I sat down to inaugurate a 500-words a day regiment aimed at finishing this novel in the course of the next three to four months; I ended up totaling 1,200 words that first day and between 600-800 words each day since. These are those first 1,200:
It took me all of two stories to get the formula, which wasn’t really much different from every other crime comic on the racks. Introduce your characters, throw a criminal plot in their path, take them through a couple of twists and turns that winds up with them facing the wrong end of a gun or hanging from the face of a building, than provide an incredible last-second save based on their knowing something the bad guy did not or some slip-up on the villain’s part. I jotted some notes as I read; crimes with interesting twists, compelling bad guys, a few death traps, some obscure forensics trivia. From what I had heard and could read for myself, Schwartz was a gimmick-guy. He loved a great bit, a twist, preferably based on some scientific or historic fact, always fairly introduced somewhere in the story. “That so-called jungle orchard in your hothouse produces the chemical surgeons use to paralyze and immobilize their patients on the operating table!” Writers I knew who worked with him said he was a challenge, always twisting the story out from under you, taking the rough lump of your idea and polishing it until it glistened with all the facets of what he thought this type of story needed. It also made me understand Al Roth’s comments about how they wanted him to draw like “everyone else.” Everyone wrote like everyone else, at least on their crime books. Everyone was squeaky clean, even the cartoon gangsters pulling outlandish crimes too incredible to be taken seriously by even those brain dead hotheads talking censorship in Washington.
But, as my grandfather, Chiam the peddler, liked to say, “You sell what people are buying.” It used to be I was selling pulp stories. Right now it was crime comics, but look where that was going. The 25¢ paperback was looking good as the next big thing; all I needed was a solid novel to peddle to one of the publishing houses, not that I had the time to work on something like that. Whenever I sat down at my desk, and I spent an awful lot of time parked there, it was to work on a paying job. I was too busy scrambling to pay the rent and have something resembling a life to concentrate on anything like a novel on spec. Sooner or later, though, I’ll have to do it. Better I should be writing it now, two, three, even five hundred words a day, than start sweating it out with no time to do anything good...
Except that was just my mind trying to divert my attention from what I should be doing, procrastinating at the thought of having to tackle something new like the Big Town stories. The hypothetical novel would have to wait, at least until I was caught up with my story outlines and scripts.
I rolled a sandwich of carbon paper between two sheets of white bond into my trusty old Underwood Noiseless Portable 77 and started typing. I figured I would come up with six or eight springboards, jumping off points for stories that Mr. Schwartz and I could mold and shape together in reasoned dialog. Why spend all the time to construct tight little eight-page mysteries that will unravel at his first change anyway? I was willing to go in, offer him the raw material with which to build a story he was comfortable with then work with him to finish as something we both can live with.
The act of typing was enough to raise my confidence. I always figured I could write anything...I just needed to get to it and put the actual words down on paper. Typing meant I’d gotten to it, on the same typewriter I’d been getting to it on since 1937. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of words I’d logged on that old Underwood. The E, S, and RETURN keys were practically worn out and the bell that rang at the end of each line was starting to sound a bit tinny, but we worked well together. I wasn’t a fast typist, poking away at a reasonable speed, about as fast as I know what the next word is going to be, so the keys never jammed on me and were always just the right amount of springy under my fingers.
I’d paid Mr. Baum at the pawn shop on St. John’s Place $13.50 for the Underwood in 1937. Or maybe it was more accurate to say I rented the sleek black machine from him for 5¢ a week for over three years until I’d paid him his asking price. Mr. Baum had seen me wandering past the store several times a day for almost two weeks, pausing to stare forlornly at that machine before moving on. One day, he happened to be outside sweeping the sidewalk when I came by and he and his broom joined me at the window.
“You like that typewriter machine?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I ain’t got thirteen and a half bucks.”
“You do know ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word.”
“I know, but that’s how everybody else talks so I do too.”
“So, this typewriter. What’s so special about it?”
“I don’t know. I just really like it.”
“What I’m asking is, what do you want it for?”
“Oh. To write. I’m a writer.”
“You are?”
I nodded. “Well, I will be when I get a typewriter. Right now, I write everything on nickel tablets, but that’s just until I can get a real typewriter. All the real writers use them.”
“I’ll tell you what. Since I too would like to see you become a real writer, and because I know your father, I can let you take this magnificent machine home on a special time payment program of one nickel a week, when you got it. When you don’t, you come sweep up the sidewalk or the floor inside, do some errands, you’ll work it off. And if after a few weeks you decide you don’t want to keep it, I’ll give you a…”
“That’s okay, Mr. Baum, that won’t happen. This is a final sale.” I stuck out my hand and shook on the deal with Mr. Baum before he could change his mind. With extra hours on weekends, I owned the Underwood outright in three years and I let Mr. Baum read everything I wrote with it. He called that collecting interest payments on the loan.
It occurred to me that if I’d written even 500 words a day on it during that year, the book would have been finished months ago...as would a second book, with a third one in progress. Five hundred words a day, even on top of regular schedule of paying work, is no great strain. So on August 16, I sat down to inaugurate a 500-words a day regiment aimed at finishing this novel in the course of the next three to four months; I ended up totaling 1,200 words that first day and between 600-800 words each day since. These are those first 1,200:
THE SAME OLD STORY
THE SAME OLD STORY © Paul Kupperberg
BIG TOWN © the respective copyright holders
BIG TOWN © the respective copyright holders
Chapter 8/BIG TOWN
It was after lunch by the time I got back to Brooklyn, so I took the cold brisket on rye mom had left for me and a mug of reheated coffee into my room and ate while I got to work. I’d spent so much time during the week looking for work, I’d hardly gotten anything done on the assignments I already had. First up were the Big Town story pitches for Schwartz at National. Since I’d practically grown up listening to the radio program, I was pretty much up to speed on the relationship of newspaper editor Steve Wilson and his gal pal Ona Munson, but I read through the issues of the comic book I’d been given anyway. I was guessing there was a formula of some sort that the writers followed, just like the program it was based on could be counted on to tell its stories in a certain way.It took me all of two stories to get the formula, which wasn’t really much different from every other crime comic on the racks. Introduce your characters, throw a criminal plot in their path, take them through a couple of twists and turns that winds up with them facing the wrong end of a gun or hanging from the face of a building, than provide an incredible last-second save based on their knowing something the bad guy did not or some slip-up on the villain’s part. I jotted some notes as I read; crimes with interesting twists, compelling bad guys, a few death traps, some obscure forensics trivia. From what I had heard and could read for myself, Schwartz was a gimmick-guy. He loved a great bit, a twist, preferably based on some scientific or historic fact, always fairly introduced somewhere in the story. “That so-called jungle orchard in your hothouse produces the chemical surgeons use to paralyze and immobilize their patients on the operating table!” Writers I knew who worked with him said he was a challenge, always twisting the story out from under you, taking the rough lump of your idea and polishing it until it glistened with all the facets of what he thought this type of story needed. It also made me understand Al Roth’s comments about how they wanted him to draw like “everyone else.” Everyone wrote like everyone else, at least on their crime books. Everyone was squeaky clean, even the cartoon gangsters pulling outlandish crimes too incredible to be taken seriously by even those brain dead hotheads talking censorship in Washington.
But, as my grandfather, Chiam the peddler, liked to say, “You sell what people are buying.” It used to be I was selling pulp stories. Right now it was crime comics, but look where that was going. The 25¢ paperback was looking good as the next big thing; all I needed was a solid novel to peddle to one of the publishing houses, not that I had the time to work on something like that. Whenever I sat down at my desk, and I spent an awful lot of time parked there, it was to work on a paying job. I was too busy scrambling to pay the rent and have something resembling a life to concentrate on anything like a novel on spec. Sooner or later, though, I’ll have to do it. Better I should be writing it now, two, three, even five hundred words a day, than start sweating it out with no time to do anything good...
Except that was just my mind trying to divert my attention from what I should be doing, procrastinating at the thought of having to tackle something new like the Big Town stories. The hypothetical novel would have to wait, at least until I was caught up with my story outlines and scripts.
I rolled a sandwich of carbon paper between two sheets of white bond into my trusty old Underwood Noiseless Portable 77 and started typing. I figured I would come up with six or eight springboards, jumping off points for stories that Mr. Schwartz and I could mold and shape together in reasoned dialog. Why spend all the time to construct tight little eight-page mysteries that will unravel at his first change anyway? I was willing to go in, offer him the raw material with which to build a story he was comfortable with then work with him to finish as something we both can live with.
The act of typing was enough to raise my confidence. I always figured I could write anything...I just needed to get to it and put the actual words down on paper. Typing meant I’d gotten to it, on the same typewriter I’d been getting to it on since 1937. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of words I’d logged on that old Underwood. The E, S, and RETURN keys were practically worn out and the bell that rang at the end of each line was starting to sound a bit tinny, but we worked well together. I wasn’t a fast typist, poking away at a reasonable speed, about as fast as I know what the next word is going to be, so the keys never jammed on me and were always just the right amount of springy under my fingers.
I’d paid Mr. Baum at the pawn shop on St. John’s Place $13.50 for the Underwood in 1937. Or maybe it was more accurate to say I rented the sleek black machine from him for 5¢ a week for over three years until I’d paid him his asking price. Mr. Baum had seen me wandering past the store several times a day for almost two weeks, pausing to stare forlornly at that machine before moving on. One day, he happened to be outside sweeping the sidewalk when I came by and he and his broom joined me at the window.
“You like that typewriter machine?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I ain’t got thirteen and a half bucks.”
“You do know ‘ain’t’ isn’t a real word.”
“I know, but that’s how everybody else talks so I do too.”
“So, this typewriter. What’s so special about it?”
“I don’t know. I just really like it.”
“What I’m asking is, what do you want it for?”
“Oh. To write. I’m a writer.”
“You are?”
I nodded. “Well, I will be when I get a typewriter. Right now, I write everything on nickel tablets, but that’s just until I can get a real typewriter. All the real writers use them.”
“I’ll tell you what. Since I too would like to see you become a real writer, and because I know your father, I can let you take this magnificent machine home on a special time payment program of one nickel a week, when you got it. When you don’t, you come sweep up the sidewalk or the floor inside, do some errands, you’ll work it off. And if after a few weeks you decide you don’t want to keep it, I’ll give you a…”
“That’s okay, Mr. Baum, that won’t happen. This is a final sale.” I stuck out my hand and shook on the deal with Mr. Baum before he could change his mind. With extra hours on weekends, I owned the Underwood outright in three years and I let Mr. Baum read everything I wrote with it. He called that collecting interest payments on the loan.
Monday, August 18, 2008
Hey Kids--Comics! Part 2
Last Monday, I posted the first of three unpublished 5-page back-up comic book stories starring superhero Steel Sterling, written by myself and drawn by Gene Ha for the relaunch of DC's 1990s Impact Comics line. Today, the second part. Just click on a page to view it at a readable size:
STEEL STERLING-Part 2
© the respective copyright holders
Monday, August 11, 2008
Hey Kids--Comics!
Back in the 1990s, DC briefly licensed from Archie Comics their line of superheroes (the Fly, Jaguar, Black Hood, etc.) and published them, unsuccessfully, as the Impact Comics line. At some point, the line was canceled and a new editorial team was suppose to fix 'em and relaunch them. The fixes were made, a miniseries called The Crucible published, and there the line died. We had, however, started work on first issues of the three relaunched titles, which were to include a back-up feature running through them that I was writing. We made it as far as pencil art (by the excellent and soon to be star-artist Gene Ha) and lettering (by my go-to letterer guy and pal, John Costanza) before the pin was pulled on the project. So here is the first 5-page installment of the Steel Sterling feature. Just click on a page to view it at a readable size:
STEEL STERLING
© the respective copyright holders
Saturday, August 2, 2008
It’s Still the Same Old Story…
An excerpt from a work in progress, Same Old Story, a murder mystery set in the early 1950s world of the comic book business. Guy Dooley and the narrator, Max Wiser, are writers who have just learned the several of the publishers they write for are going under and have hit the streets in search of new work. Here, they run into one of their more successful colleagues. I love the Pincus the ribbon salesman joke beyond all rational explanation:
Chapter 3/ REAL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Deciding that being only half-drunk after receiving the news from Murray was worse than being sober, Guy was desperate for coffee. We stopped at the Automat on 44th Street, feeding enough nickels into the slots for a couple of cups of joe and a matching set of doughnuts.
Guy was lighting a cigarette when Robert Konigsberg sauntered up to the table. Tall and handsome in a rugged Robert Taylor sort of way, Bob had been an editor at National before leaving to write freelance. He was, for all intents and purposes, the top writer at the top company, responsible for a large chunk of their super-hero and romance lines. And he knew exactly where he stood in the pecking order, too. In a brushed camel hair coat and always freshly blocked Homburg, a bright and natty ascot as a dashing alternative to a tie, Bob was a fashion-plate, a teller of self-aggrandizing tall tales, a playboy, an often surprisingly good and creative writer, and a certified lunatic. There were too many Bob Konigsberg stories to tell, but the least bizarre of his traits included his habit, while writing during his lunch hours when he was still on staff, of suddenly leaping up on his desk, brandishing an umbrella or cane as a sword and sprouting ersatz Shakespearean dialogue at the top of his lungs, then calmly climbing back down to his seat and resuming his typing. His office mates thought he was eccentric. The head-shrinkers at a psychiatric facility in Valley Stream thought he was a danger to himself or others. Twice. Once for sixty days, then again for five months.
He was, by all reports, not currently crazy, making me wonder how crazy you had to be to qualify for crazy. I thought the guy was a fruitcake, but at least he was nuts in a way that made him interesting.
“Gentlemen,” he sniffed at us in his bored, affected nasal tone. “What’s the good word?”
“Down here on earth,” said Dooley, ”or up there on Olympus where you reside?”
“Jealousy of his betters aside,” Bob said, directing his question to me, “what’s his problem?”
“Pincus,” said Dooley, suddenly and apropos of nothing at all, “was the best ribbon salesman in New York. You ever hear this one, Bob? About Pincus, the ribbon salesman?”
Bob sighed theatrically. Konigsberg had several talents, but humor wasn’t one of them. The man was incapable of understanding funny in any form but the dry, smile provoking bon mot, which only he thought was humorous to begin with. Laughter was unknown to that sad, dark heart of his. So Guy liked to tell him jokes.
“He sold Woolworth’s, Gimbels, B. Altman’s, everywhere. But he could never sell to Macy’s. The ribbon buyer refused to change ribbon suppliers, but Pincus kept badgering him until, finally, one day, the buyer says, ‘Pincus, I'm in a bind. I need a piece of ribbon exactly two and six-sixteenths inches wide, of the exact red of a perfect sunset, with a texture like a baby’s behind, and as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis. I need it tomorrow by noon. Find it for me and from now on, I’ll buy all my ribbon from you.’ Pincus agrees to the terms and off he goes.”
Bob tapped his foot on the Automat’s scarred linoleum floor, waiting with undisguised impatience.
“The next day, at exactly noon, the phone in the buyer’s office rings and it’s Pincus. ‘I got your ribbon,’ he says. ‘Meet me outside.’ So outside the buyer goes and there’s Pincus...with ten big trucks full of ribbon! ‘Pincus,’ the buyer says, ‘the width is dead-on, the color is absolutely perfect, the texture so soft you could cry. But, Pincus, I said I wanted a piece only as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis!’
“’So?’ says Pincus. ‘The tip of my penis is back in Poland!’”
I laughed. Bob didn’t.
“You were saying?” Bob prompted me, as though Guy hadn’t spoken.
“Worldwide Distribution’s gone down the tubes and they’re taking Blue Chip and Feature, that we know of, with them,” I said.
Bob blinked. He stepped back. “When,” he said, “when did this happen?”
“Today. This afternoon,” I said. “You okay, Bob?”
I don’t think he heard me, just nodded out of reflex.
“Don’t set sail for Cloud Cuckoo-land on us now, Bob,” Guy said. “Remember, the guys you work own their own distribution company. They’re the only ones don’t have to worry.”
“Were you doing anything for one of them?” I knew Konigsberg drew a nice salary writing exclusively for National, but I’d also heard the rumors that he wrote secretly, under a variety of pseudonyms, for other publishers.
“Hmm?” Bob shook his head and focused his gaze on me once again. He managed a smile, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Actually, between you, me, and the lamppost,” he said, nodding in Guy’s direction, “I did provide some unsigned material on the side for some of their adventure and romance titles. Adventures Beneath the Earth, My Strangest Journey, Young and in Love, First Dates and so forth.” He waved his hand. “Strictly for income my wife was unaware of, a little extra cash to keep a certain someone in the style to which I’ve made her accustomed.”
Guy drained his coffee and rose to go after a refill. “Oh, Bob, you dog,” he said, deadpan, and left.
Bob shot his cuff and checked his wristwatch, making sure I got a gander at the gold band and jeweled face. “Well,” he said. “Speaking of which, I’d best be off. Don’t want to keep the lady waiting.”
I didn’t ask if he meant his wife or his girlfriend. I just said good-bye and returned to my doughnut.
Knowing that guys like Konigsberg would sail right through the current troubles with little more than an interruption in the quality of their adultery made me feel even worse for guys like me and Dooley. His kids could go hungry, I might have to live off my widowed mother or get a real job...but Bob Konigsberg might not be able to pay the rent on his floozy’s apartment.
At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a reason I could ever feel sorry for either Konigsberg or his floozy.
That would change soon enough.
THE SAME OLD STORY
©2008 Paul Kupperberg
Chapter 3/ REAL CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Deciding that being only half-drunk after receiving the news from Murray was worse than being sober, Guy was desperate for coffee. We stopped at the Automat on 44th Street, feeding enough nickels into the slots for a couple of cups of joe and a matching set of doughnuts.
Guy was lighting a cigarette when Robert Konigsberg sauntered up to the table. Tall and handsome in a rugged Robert Taylor sort of way, Bob had been an editor at National before leaving to write freelance. He was, for all intents and purposes, the top writer at the top company, responsible for a large chunk of their super-hero and romance lines. And he knew exactly where he stood in the pecking order, too. In a brushed camel hair coat and always freshly blocked Homburg, a bright and natty ascot as a dashing alternative to a tie, Bob was a fashion-plate, a teller of self-aggrandizing tall tales, a playboy, an often surprisingly good and creative writer, and a certified lunatic. There were too many Bob Konigsberg stories to tell, but the least bizarre of his traits included his habit, while writing during his lunch hours when he was still on staff, of suddenly leaping up on his desk, brandishing an umbrella or cane as a sword and sprouting ersatz Shakespearean dialogue at the top of his lungs, then calmly climbing back down to his seat and resuming his typing. His office mates thought he was eccentric. The head-shrinkers at a psychiatric facility in Valley Stream thought he was a danger to himself or others. Twice. Once for sixty days, then again for five months.
He was, by all reports, not currently crazy, making me wonder how crazy you had to be to qualify for crazy. I thought the guy was a fruitcake, but at least he was nuts in a way that made him interesting.
“Gentlemen,” he sniffed at us in his bored, affected nasal tone. “What’s the good word?”
“Down here on earth,” said Dooley, ”or up there on Olympus where you reside?”
“Jealousy of his betters aside,” Bob said, directing his question to me, “what’s his problem?”
“Pincus,” said Dooley, suddenly and apropos of nothing at all, “was the best ribbon salesman in New York. You ever hear this one, Bob? About Pincus, the ribbon salesman?”
Bob sighed theatrically. Konigsberg had several talents, but humor wasn’t one of them. The man was incapable of understanding funny in any form but the dry, smile provoking bon mot, which only he thought was humorous to begin with. Laughter was unknown to that sad, dark heart of his. So Guy liked to tell him jokes.
“He sold Woolworth’s, Gimbels, B. Altman’s, everywhere. But he could never sell to Macy’s. The ribbon buyer refused to change ribbon suppliers, but Pincus kept badgering him until, finally, one day, the buyer says, ‘Pincus, I'm in a bind. I need a piece of ribbon exactly two and six-sixteenths inches wide, of the exact red of a perfect sunset, with a texture like a baby’s behind, and as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis. I need it tomorrow by noon. Find it for me and from now on, I’ll buy all my ribbon from you.’ Pincus agrees to the terms and off he goes.”
Bob tapped his foot on the Automat’s scarred linoleum floor, waiting with undisguised impatience.
“The next day, at exactly noon, the phone in the buyer’s office rings and it’s Pincus. ‘I got your ribbon,’ he says. ‘Meet me outside.’ So outside the buyer goes and there’s Pincus...with ten big trucks full of ribbon! ‘Pincus,’ the buyer says, ‘the width is dead-on, the color is absolutely perfect, the texture so soft you could cry. But, Pincus, I said I wanted a piece only as long as from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis!’
“’So?’ says Pincus. ‘The tip of my penis is back in Poland!’”
I laughed. Bob didn’t.
“You were saying?” Bob prompted me, as though Guy hadn’t spoken.
“Worldwide Distribution’s gone down the tubes and they’re taking Blue Chip and Feature, that we know of, with them,” I said.
Bob blinked. He stepped back. “When,” he said, “when did this happen?”
“Today. This afternoon,” I said. “You okay, Bob?”
I don’t think he heard me, just nodded out of reflex.
“Don’t set sail for Cloud Cuckoo-land on us now, Bob,” Guy said. “Remember, the guys you work own their own distribution company. They’re the only ones don’t have to worry.”
“Were you doing anything for one of them?” I knew Konigsberg drew a nice salary writing exclusively for National, but I’d also heard the rumors that he wrote secretly, under a variety of pseudonyms, for other publishers.
“Hmm?” Bob shook his head and focused his gaze on me once again. He managed a smile, but it never quite reached his eyes. “Actually, between you, me, and the lamppost,” he said, nodding in Guy’s direction, “I did provide some unsigned material on the side for some of their adventure and romance titles. Adventures Beneath the Earth, My Strangest Journey, Young and in Love, First Dates and so forth.” He waved his hand. “Strictly for income my wife was unaware of, a little extra cash to keep a certain someone in the style to which I’ve made her accustomed.”
Guy drained his coffee and rose to go after a refill. “Oh, Bob, you dog,” he said, deadpan, and left.
Bob shot his cuff and checked his wristwatch, making sure I got a gander at the gold band and jeweled face. “Well,” he said. “Speaking of which, I’d best be off. Don’t want to keep the lady waiting.”
I didn’t ask if he meant his wife or his girlfriend. I just said good-bye and returned to my doughnut.
Knowing that guys like Konigsberg would sail right through the current troubles with little more than an interruption in the quality of their adultery made me feel even worse for guys like me and Dooley. His kids could go hungry, I might have to live off my widowed mother or get a real job...but Bob Konigsberg might not be able to pay the rent on his floozy’s apartment.
At the moment, I couldn’t imagine a reason I could ever feel sorry for either Konigsberg or his floozy.
That would change soon enough.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
An Artist and a Gentleman
I just read that Golden Age comic book artist Creig Flessel has died at the age of 96. I had the privilege of meeting and spending some time with Creig in 1994 when we were both guests at a comic book convention in Kansas City. My buddy/brother Rick Stasi, one of the convention organizers, asked me to present Creig with a Lifetime Achievement Award at that show, one of those things that conventions hand out to guests of honor on a fairly regular basis. In Creig's case, however, it was well-deserved and entirely heartfelt, as was the short speech I gave along with the award.
The following day, Creig came over and handed me a copy of one of the numerous how-to-draw books he had done with Lee Ames, DRAW 50 PEOPLE (Doubleday, 1993). The Sandman sketch and inscription pictured above were on the title page. I treasure it more now than ever.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: CREIG FLESSEL
© 2008 Paul Kupperberg
Some things are just plain obvious.
For instance, back when I first started reading comics, I would go to this used book and comic shop in Brooklyn to feed my habit on pretty much a weekly basis. This place carried used comics by the ton, comics that could be had for 10¢ and up. But the real treasures, the Golden Age and ECs... the expensive stuff, was kept in a glass showcase at the front of the store. I couldn’t afford these treasures, of course... even though the comics that go for tens of thousands today were available for mere tens of dollars in those days, but to a 12 or 13 year old on a fixed income of allowance and after school jobs, 20 or 30 bucks then might as well have been ten thousand.
But even if I couldn’t afford to own them, I was allowed to look at those treasures, and one of the things I remember are the covers. Especially the good ones... obviously. One of the artists behind a lot of those covers was a man named Creig Flessel.
The Golden Age was the formative years of the comics industry, and like the developemental stages of any person or art form, there were, obviously, growing pains. A lot of this art forms early stuff was pretty crude, often written and drawn by creators with more heart than ability, so even the good ones managed to stand out... and the great ones were like shining beacons, thrilling their readers and alerting the coming generation of creators to the potential of this new medium.
Creig Flessel was one of those beacons. He began his professional career in the mid-30s as an illustrator for the Street and Smith pulp magazines before moving to DC Comics in 1936. His amazing covers graced many early DCs, such as ADVENTURE COMICS, MORE FUN COMICS, and DETECTIVE COMICS, including the very first issue of that historic title. Flessel’s work was alive, his characters warm and breathing on those glossy four color covers... if you don’t believe me, see if you can locate a copy of ADVENTURE COMICS #44, wherein a very surprised Sandman is caught in the act before an open safe when the lights come on. Or ADVENTURE #46, with Sandman leaping over a fence to blast a different thug with his “gas gun.” Or, one of my all time favorites, the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #15, featuring a top hatted jewel thief, the mirror behind his head showing the reflection of the two cops entering the room with guns drawn.
Creig Flessel is an illustrator, a first-rate artist with an eye for detail and a delicate, masterly ability with brush and pen.
Creig Flessel was one of those bright lights of the Golden Age and now, almost 60 years since he first put that brush and pen to paper to create some of the most memorable images of his time, we’re here to honor him, to let him know that we remember him and his contributions to comics.
As I said, some things are just plain obvious. And it’s obvious that there are fewer people more deserving of receiving the Kansas City Comic Convention’s Lifetime Achievement Award than this year’s recipient, Creig Flessel.
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