A STONE FOR THE GRAVE OF MR. ARONSON

© Paul Kupperberg

Silent as a tomb. In the dead of night.

He never really thought about what that meant until now. Walking through a cemetery in the hour just after dusk on a bone chilling autumn evening, colder than the time of year warranted, cold, he thought, as the grave. There wasn’t a sound, not the buzz of insects, not the chatter of birds or the whisper and rustle of wind through the drooping branches of trees, heavy with the dry weight of dying foliage. Quiet. No life except for the one he brought through the graveyard gate and that wasn’t much of a life at all. Too quiet for his tattered nerves. Too quiet for a guy with a kilo of stolen cocaine jammed into the pocket of a lightweight overcoat as tattered as those nerves.

Row after row of cold, hard headstones growing out of withered, brown grass. Otherwise forgotten names long ago chiseled in loving memory, untended tributes to mother, father, grandparent, child. He read off the roster of the dead to himself as he trudged through fallen leaves carpeting the paths between graves.

Steinberg, Abramowitz, Levine, Weinstock, Bromstein, Sherman, Tockman.

The dates, parenthesis enclosing lives barely lived, lives lived long: 1911 - 1919. 1904 - 1979. 1924 - 1944.

Do the math, compute the life-spans, no matter the longevity, never time enough.

Did the math for himself. 1969- 2004.

Koch, 1937 - 1980. Heller, 1901 - 1949. Greenberg, 1940 - 1967.

Anything to keep his mind off the truth, that he had come here to join the dead. Except there would be no carved granite monument bearing his name, no reason to memorialize what he would be leaving behind. He’d seen to that by living as he had.

Get used to it, he thought. This was going to be home for what was left of eternity.

Karp. Cronenberg. Golden. Moser. Deitrich.

Hi, neighbors.

They couldn’t have picked a better place for the meet. The Jewish section of the old cemetery outside of town, its last occupant lowered into the ground more than a dozen years ago, filling the final six foot by three foot by six foot deep piece of real estate. Who came out to an inactive graveyard at this hour, on a miserable night like this? One stop shopping for them: they got back their property and had a place to leave his lifeless sack of flesh when they were through. They told him all they wanted was the merchandise, that he could just hand it over, say he was sorry, and walk away.

But he knew what was going to happen, what had to happen. You didn’t mess with these guys, take what was theirs and not pay for it. Letting themselves get ripped off and doing nothing about it would be bad for business. Examples had to be made, messages had to be sent to the next guy who even thought about taking them off. He would be their billboard warning the whole world to keep hands off. He had hoped that throwing them Rickie, his partner in that sorry town and this even sorrier attempt at instant wealth, would satisfy them, but Rickie had wound up with half his head gone, shoved into the trunk of a wrecked Buick waiting to go through the metal crusher in the salvage yard on the other side of town. Now it was his turn.

The old man was there, standing with bowed head before a weathered headstone. He wouldn’t have seen him in the gloomy silence, would have walked right on by, mistaking him for just another graveyard shadow, if the old man hadn’t spoken, calling out to him, “Hello?”

He stopped, fear squeezing his heart. Were they here already? He had arrived early, why not? There wasn’t anywhere else he could be, no way in hell he could run from them. Besides, a man doesn’t want to be late for his own funeral.

Then he saw the old man, a shrunken figure in black topcoat with sparse white hair framing a withered face with wrinkles that were a roadmap of a long life lived hard. Rheumy eyes glittered at him in the half light. No, this was no harbinger of his own death, merely a mourner of an earlier victim of the reaper. So he forced himself to breath again and resumed walking, head down, back on track to his meeting with the inevitable.

“Excuse me?”

Keep walking, get there and get it over with. He’d been living with the numbing fear of his own coming mortality for more than two days now. Forty-nine hours to be precise, at 4:37 in the afternoon the day before yesterday when he realized there was nowhere to run and Junkyard hissed in his ear that they knew who he was and were looking for him.

“I’d help you, man,” Junkyard simpered, compulsively running his hands up and down the thighs of his greasy coveralls. “You’re my bud, I wanna help, but you gotta understand I can’t, don’t you? They know I did for you, they’ll kill both of us.”

Ray had just stared, a pulse beginning to pound in his forehead. He looked at the neon dial clock over the door of the small service station office. 4:37. The moment his death warrant had been signed.

“And they’ll know. Word’s out, dig? Hands off’a you and don’t no one cross these guys. You see my hands’re tied, don’t you, Ray?”

How had it come to this? How did a life suddenly go from hope to hopeless in the blink of an eye, the tick of a clock on a rainy autumn afternoon at 4:37 P.M.? The scheme couldn’t have been simpler: walk in a door with three bucks to his name, pick up a package, and walk out a minute later richer than he’d ever been, ever hoped to be. It should have been a walk in the park.

So how did that turn into his last mile through a graveyard?

The answer was simple, as obvious as every other piece of ill fortune and bad timing that was the story of his miserable life. Born to the wrong parents, friends with the wrong people, consistently being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong idea. He gave nothing, took whatever he could get his hands on and to hell with who it hurt. Like Rickie, the poor bastard. And for all that, what was he left with? What had he ever done that wasn’t selfish and wrong? Whose life had he ever touched who would give a second thought to him when they heard he was dead? Except they never would hear the news. He’d just disappear, and the few who might, for God knows what reason, have cause to remember him, would just assume that he’d moved on to another place, where he could start stealing and swindling and creating misery among people who didn’t yet know, but would find out soon enough.

Forty-nine hours gone. About twenty minutes left to live. Did he want to spend it talking to some old fart in the cemetery? Would be like getting stuck with his senile old grandpa again. Old man had gone seriously nuts when Ray was in high school and had come to live with him and his mom. That was a trip, his boozer old lady and her old man, him shrinking daily under the weight of Alzheimer, her under the bottle, making each other crazy, spending all day screaming drunken, senile gibberish at each other. Good enough reason for Ray to have quit school in his junior year and get the hell out of there.

He burned any bridges back home but good. His mom was passed out on the couch with Sally on TV and grandpa was in his room, talking to dead people. Ray marched right in and picked up anything he could find of any value, watches, rings, a camera, whatever, planning to leave, without a word and with whatever little wealth they had shoved into the pocket of his jeans. His grandfather sat staring at him with those damned vacant, runny eyes of his, his mouth moving without speaking, not even to the imagined dead, for the longest time. But Ray’s last act of defiance must, somehow, have gotten through the vale of fog spread across the old man’s rotting brain and gramps had finally stirred, coming to life and finding clarity again, for just a moment, maybe the last time in his miserable old life.

“You,” the old man had croaked, wagging a palsied finger at the sullen and surprised boy.

“Me what?” Ray snarled back, stuffing his grandfather’s wedding ring into his hip pocket.

“You was born a piece a shit, you’re gonna die one,” his grandfather wheezed. Then he laughed, a short, harsh bark of amusement at the boy’s fate before settling back into his fog.

Ray had stopped, glaring at the hateful presence. His mother’s embittered and brutal father had nothing to give Ray before his illness had forced him into the orbit of his life. He had endured the cruelty, the belittling for six years, watching the old man sink deeper and deeper into dementia, growing bolder in his own life as grandpa diminished in his. The cold-heart never thawed, never gave in. Even sick and dying ugly inch by ugly inch, unable to remember his own name and how not to crap in his own pants, he could still crap on Ray.

Ray decided that not slapping the old bastard to the floor and stomping him into an early grave would be the last act of kindness he ever allowed himself. And even that, he later thought, was a lie. Killing him would have been a kindness. Leaving him alive, a crumbling mind within a shattered body, was punishment. Ray kept the memory of the old man’s misery to remind himself of why he was who he had become. He kept to his faith and did unto others, never allowing anyone ever again the power to hurt him.

And here he was, twenty years later, still by himself.

Ready to die.

“I’m sorry, but there’s never usually anybody here,” the old man said, shuffling along the path behind Ray. “Do you have people here?”

Ray continued walking. “I got nobody, nowhere,” he said.

“Oh, well, I hope that’s not true,” the old man said, but with such earnestness that it made Ray stop. He didn’t know why he turned around, why he should care. Maybe it was the fear, looking for something else to occupy his mind while he waited to have two bullets pumped into the back of it by some anonymous, stone-faced goon.

“Why you asking?” Ray said.

The old man ducked his head, smiling. “I’m sorry. I was being nosy. I do that, I ask too many questions and make people crazy or uncomfortable.”

Ray shrugged. “I was just asking. What about you? You got people here?”

“Oh, my god, yes,” he said and laughed. “I’ve got people all over this cemetery. All over.” He looked back over his shoulder at where Ray had first seen the old guy. “That’s my wife. My Becky back there. I visit her all the time.”

“Yeah?” Ray, whose own heroin-addicted father had disappeared from his and his mother’s world when he was three, nodded. “That’s nice.”

“We never had children,” the old man said. “Who else is going to come see her?”

Ray looked at his watch. He had fifteen minutes until the meeting.

The old man made a face. “You’re late, aren’t you? Here I am, talking about people you don’t even know and you’ve got someplace to be.”

Ray said, “No, I don’t. I got time.”

“There’s a bench,” the old man said. “Back there by Becky’s grave. I like to sit there and chat with her, so she knows I’ve been.”

“Yeah, sure,” Ray agreed, and they went and settled on the cold, hard concrete bench. The old man bunched his dark overcoat around him and shivered as he pointed at the worn headstone just opposite them.

Rebecca Aronson. Wife, Aunt, Humanitarian. June 19, 1925-February 7, 1974.

“My Becky,” he announced by way of introduction.

“It’s been a long time,” Ray said, reading the stone. “Since she died.”

“Thirty years gone,” agreed Mr. Aronson. “We were married thirty-one years.”

“Jeez.” Ray’s mother and father had never married, never spent more than two months at a stretch together before his father split for good. He couldn’t envision a relationship lasting so long...lasting decades, even, beyond the grave.

“She was something,” Aronson said and chuckled fondly. “We met, it was right after I was discharged in early 1945. All of the second world war, I never got within three thousand miles of a battlefield so I got shot by another supply clerk with a rifle that’s supposed to be empty doing inventory at Fort Dix. Go figure, right? So I limp back home with a medical discharge, still in uniform, and who do I meet the first weekend at a synagogue dance? That girl stole my heart the second I saw her...and then I ran after her for ten months trying to give her mine. But I did it, finally. I won her.

“Turned out we couldn’t have kids, which was a terrible thing for us at the time. We both came from big families and all around us, our brothers and sisters and cousins were having all these children. It hurt,” he said with a sigh. “I won’t lie. We’d watch these kids with their mothers and fathers and I knew that while my heart may have been breaking, Becky’s was crushed.”

Nor could Ray imagine a world in which anyone wanted a child so badly that their hearts could be broken, crushed by the wanting.

“So we did what we could. We became everybody’s favorite aunt and uncle. Instead of kids and grandkids, we have nieces and nephews, cousins, once, twice, three times removed. Dozens of kids.” The old man smiled and Ray knew he was picturing some pleasant memory, a Christmas morning, or maybe someone’s birthday where all those kids were around him once again, climbing all over him.

Aronson blinked and returned from that long-ago celebration. His shoulders rose in a long, exaggerated shrug. “But kids grow up, get their own lives, move on, move away. And, frankly, after Becky died, I wasn’t exactly in a grandfatherly mood. So, thirty years later....”

Ray laughed without humor. “You got nobody.”

Mr. Aronson said, “I have people. They just happen not to be here any longer, but I’ve got my memories of them. So many of them, enough memories to get me through whatever years I have left.”

“Naw, naw,” Ray said quickly, suddenly aware that he might have hurt the old man’s feelings. “I wasn’t laughing at you. I just...y’know, I just thought here’s a guy like you, did everything right all his life, had a family that loved him and he loved back, right? But he still winds up alone, just like me, only I don’t think I ever once did what was right. Just makes you think, that’s all.”

“What are you, some kind of gangster?” Aronson put up his hands as though warding off an imagined attack. “Should I be afraid of you?”

“I’m just...I ain’t always a nice guy, that’s all.”

“You come to the cemetery, you visit the deceased. That’s a nice thing,” Aronson said.

Ray shoved his hands in his overcoat pockets. He felt the brick of dope, wrapped in a paper bag there, the heavy weight dragging him to his death. “I ain’t visiting. I’m here to...meet some people.”

“Who meets in a graveyard? Vampires, maybe.”

Ray shot the old man a heated look. “People like me,” he said. “People you don’t want to know.”

Mr. Aronson waved his hand in dismissal. “Tough guy. I was forty-five years in the trucking business before I retired from that line of work. I seen tough guys. You like to play tough but I don’t think you quite got the real thing.”

Ray yanked the paper bag from his pocket. “I guess I don’t,” he said. “’Cause every time I grab for the brass ring I wind up with a hand full of shit. See this?” He slapped the bag down on the bench between them. “That’s worth about a quarter million bucks on the streets. Pretty good, right? Lotsa money for a schmuck like me, ain’t it?”

The rheumy eyes flicked from Ray to the package and then back again. “What are those? Drugs?”

Ray’s arm shot out, his fingers stretched as though grasping for something just out of his reach. “I heard about this drop, guy talking on his cell phone in a stall in the men’s room, must’ve thought he was alone and didn’t hear me come in, right? Wasn’t no one who knew I knew about it ‘cept for one other guy, dude name of Ricky. He was kind’a my partner. We worked it out, Ricky runnin’ interference while I snatched up the stuff. It was right there, duct taped under the phone in a booth in this bar I used to go to. So Ricky makes a little noise, anybody watching the booth looks away for five seconds, all I need, right? Five seconds, the shit’s in my pocket, no one’s the wiser, me and Ricky get outta this shit-hole of a town and set up shop somewhere that doesn’t suck.”

Aronson shook his head. “I take it things didn’t work as planned.”

“Things did not,” Ray said, “work as planned. Ricky picked a fight with some guy, got into it nice and loud, took it to the street, everybody watching Ricky and this guy yellin’ at each other like idiots. I reach in, bada-bing, I’m the proud papa of a kilo of uncut cocaine. Except the freakin’ place has all this video surveillance stuff, right? Cameras everywhere and there’s me on video-freakin’-tape stealing their coke.” Ray showed the old man his hand. “There’s me grabbing another hand full of shit.”

“Oy,” Mr. Aronson said. “So they want their drugs back, yes?”

“Yeah.” Ray touched the package. “Matter of fact, you should probably go. They’re gonna be here in a few minutes to...y’know, to get this back. They’re not the kind of people like witnesses to their business.”

Mr. Aronson said, “They’re, they’re not going to be satisfied just taking back their drugs, are they?”

Ray shook his head.

“My god,” the old man said in a voice thick with emotion. “What sort of life have you lead, boy?”

“A bad one,” Ray whispered. “One anybody’d remember, if they remember it at all, for the bad stuff I’ve done.”

Mr. Aronson shook his head. “How does a man come to this?”

“When a man never thinks,” Ray said, “that he’s done something big, something he’ll be remembered for.”

The old man gaze longingly at the headstone. “Show me someone who isn’t afraid of that. I know I’ve left behind nobody to remember I was here.”

“Those kids...,” Ray said.

“Thirty years ago and another life. If any of them think about me at all, they probably think I’m dead, too.”

Ray looked at Mr. Aronson and would never know, until he died, where his next words came from. “I’d remember you, if I could.”

The other man laughed and patted Ray on the knee. “Thank you. It’s the thought that counts, especially on something like this. I hope it counts for you, too. I’ll remember you. Every time I come to visit my Becky, I’ll think of you and lay a stone on her grave in your memory.”

Ray frowned. “You’ll what?”

“A stone,” said Aronson. “A rock, a pebble. Whenever a Jew visits someone’s grave, they leave a little rock on the headstone. It’s a way to show that there’ve been visitors looking after the deceased. The stones are supposed to be a symbol, I guess, of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that was three times built and three times destroyed by our enemies.”

“Huh,” Ray said. He looked over at the headstone of the old man’s wife. Rebecca Aronson. Wife, Aunt, Humanitarian. June 19, 1925-February 7, 1974. There, atop the weathered granite adorned with a Jewish star sat several pebbles. The stone to the right of Becky’s grave was similarly topped with rocks. Ray’s eyes went to the matching stone to Becky’s left. He read it, confused.

“Yes?” said the old man.

Ray read the inscription again.

Sidney Aronson. Husband, Uncle, Mensch. October 22, 1921-April 20, 1994.

“But I thought,” Ray started to say and then stopped himself. “You’ve been lying.”

Mr. Aronson smiled sadly. “Not entirely. The story was true, the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind,” sighed the old man. “I like to work in graveyards. What can I tell you? It appeals to my quirky sense of humor, although I do admit it makes disposing of the body that much easier. So I pick a grave to work from of someone of about the right age with my wife’s name.”

“Becky.”

“Rebecca, yes. Not Aronson, though. Those,” he said, pointing with a hand that now held a gun to the matching headstones, “are the Aronsons. Still, my Becky’s buried far away from here, but this way at least I get to visit with her by proxy. I really do find it quite comforting. I lay a stone on some other Rebecca’s grave but my Becky knows it’s for her.”

Ray said, “Your Becky’s lucky, having you to remember her.”

“I promised you I’d remember you too, Ray,” the old man said. “Every time I visit a cemetery, I’ll lay on a stone on your grave by proxy. Like I do for Becky. Like I do for every one of my clients.”

Ray thought of jumping the old man. How hard could it be to take out this guy, must be pushing eighty? But his next thought was that he wouldn’t still be in this line of work if he couldn’t handle himself and he’d probably shoot Ray dead before he got two feet. Besides, he didn’t want to hurt the old guy and Ray was tired of losing and tired of trying to run from the demons he had provoked and those that lived inside him.

Ray got to his feet, leaving the cocaine on the bench. Mr. Aronson, or whatever his name was, said, “I told you I had people all over this cemetery.”

“People like me?” Ray asked.

Mr. Aronson nodded.

Ray knelt and he could tell that made Mr. Aronson nervous so he looked up at the old man, past the barrel of the gun, and said, “It’s alright.” Then he brushed some fallen leaves out of the way and, in the last light of the day, located what he was looking for. He clenched it in his fist and rose again.

“Is it okay?” he asked, pointing his chin at the headstones.

Mr. Aronson said, “Sure.”

And Ray stepped up to Sidney Aronson’s grave and bowed his head, addressing someone, somewhere in as close a thing to a prayer as he could devise. Then he reached out his hand and placed a single rock alongside the others on its weather-pitted top.

“Remember,” he whispered.

“I will,” said Mr. Aronson and he pulled the trigger.

the end

Everything's Archie!

Archie Comics had such success with their "Archie Marries..." storyline in Archie #600 - 606 that they decided to continue the stories in an ongoing series. Michael Uslan (comic book fan/historian/writer and producer of the Batman film franchise, among others), who originated the idea and wrote the miniseries, was unable to stay on as writer due to time considerations, and, with only a handful of short stories for the regular Archie titles under my belt, editor-in-chief Victor Gorelick tapped me to write the new series (after the first stories were written by Uslan).

Now, according to the story on CBR: ":With the storyline generating renewed interest in the Riverdale brand around the world, Archie Comics recently announced a new magazine containing two brand new storylines launching in July: The Married Life: Archie Loves Betty and The Married Life: Archie Loves Veronica." Michael wrote a series bible for the first six issues, and, even as we speak, I've begun working out the story beats for issues #7-12.

CBR posts a few pages of Norm Breyfogle's pencils from the first chapter of the Veronica story; old friends and colleagues Josef Rubinstein (Archie Loves Betty) and Andrew Pepoy (Archie Loves Veronica) ink Norm's beautiful work.

Life With Archie: The Married Life #1 is on sale in comic shops July 28, 2010 (August 10 on newsstands). My "first" issue, #2, appears in late August).

Oh, sugar! Honey, honey...

A Two-fer Week!

These just out...


From DC Comics, Scooby Doo #155, which features two tales by yours truly, "Over the Boardwalk!" and "It's A Mystery!", a Velma solo story, both illustrated by Fabio Laguna.

And from my pals at Moonstone Comics, The Phantom: Generations #10, featuring a prose story illustrated by Joe Bucco. Just to give you a taste, here's the first few hundred words...

THE PHANTOM: GENERATIONS #10

“A King’s Ransom”

© King Features Syndicate, Inc.

“Speak,” commanded Nader Shah, king of the Great Iranian Empire. “What have you brought me?”

“Riches,” said Darius, a dark eyed captain in the Shah’s army and husband to one of his daughters. “Sent in search of treasure to fill the royal coffers, we…”

“I know what I commanded,” the Shah snapped. “I ask again: What have you brought me?”

“This, most respected father,” the young soldier proclaimed with pride, pulling back the clothe to uncover the prize he knew would secure his future in court. He revealed on the litter beside him twin glistening, gold statues, each as big as a young man and encrusted with jewels and gemstones that shimmered brilliantly in the sun-washed royal chamber.

“From the legendary land of Bangalla in Africa,” said the youth, “did we wrest these and other treasures from...”

The Shah’s awe crumbled into despair, his vision of refreshing the Persian treasury depleted by his wars of conquest with this prize gone.

“Are you mad, Darius?” the old Shah thundered. “To invite the wrath of the Ghost? No! Take it away…no treasure is worth the ruin rained upon those who defy Bangalla’s protector.”

“He is but myth, my lord…” Darius said.

“He is not myth. He is doom and death and when he comes, boy,” hissed the Shah, “be certain the Phantom comes for you!”

I am, at last truly a ghost who walks.

The idea rose, unbidden, in his head, a dry, papery whisper of a thought he pretended not to hear. Such thoughts came from the darkest part of the soul, the deepest well of fear that would, if he paid it heed, whimper I surrender and let him die. Die now, rather than trudge on across endless sand and unbearable heat and a thirst so deep he might have wept had he but the tears in him, suffering another day, perhaps two, but no more, before death claimed him anyway. If his end was inevitable, out here, lost and sick beyond hope in the fiery Hell that was the great Persian desert, why persevere and prolong the agony?

Drop.

Now. Fall to the burning sands. Let them consume you with their heat.

Die now, oh, Ghost Who Walks. None can say you did not do your duty, that you did not fulfill your destiny.

Sleep, Ghost, said the whisper. None would deny you your rest.

A breeze like a blast from a smith’s forge swept past him and stirred the long, loose jallabiya he wore over a suit of purple, played with the headdress that covered a face also hidden beneath hood and mask.

None would deny you your rest, said the breeze and the sands made to dance by its passing agreed.

“Farewell, dearest Anneliese,” the Phantom said, though no sound passed from his parched throat and lips as he dropped to his knees.

His eyes lifted with effort to the sky made so hot and bright by the blazing sun that the blue was all but banished from overhead, the air tinged gold. The shimmering curtain of golden light danced and flitted about before him. It swirled into shapes and forms, it became Anneliese and then it was his children and in the next moment, the face of Nuhalla, his friend since ever he could remember.

None would deny you your rest.

Anneliese. Kit. Kirsten.

Nuhalla.

They would deny you this. They would see you fight on, even with hope gone. They would do no less.

Without the Ghost Who Walks, Nuhalla would die.

“Later,” the Phantom whispered to the soothing voice of rest and reason. On legs barely able to hold him, he rose and took the next step.

“Later.”

And, swaying from side to side, collapsed on his face in the hot, welcoming sand.

A cool wave washed across the Phantom, as though the earth had split beneath him to release a river of refreshing waters to wash his soul to Heaven while his body gave itself back to the dust from whence it had sprang. He was not surprised his suffering was done, merely sad for it to end this way, not falling in battle against an insurmountable foe but stumbling to an ignoble end, the victim of bad mapmaking and a crooked camel dealer who sold him a sick animal that perished two days into his desert trek.

And sad for Nuhalla, to whom the Phantom would need explain his failure to return the stolen idols of Power and Fate to the priests of Bangalla when they met, soon, in the hereafter.

“Is he alive?”

Sad for the wife he must leave and the children he must desert, yet knowing little Kit would, one day soon, carry on the line, and lovely Kirsten...Lord knows she had spirit and courage enough to do the same were such a life as this woman’s work.

“He’s breathing, I think.”

Another wave washed over him and the Phantom turned his face to the cooling waters.

A sharp pain in his ribs sent him gasping.

but my suffering is done

A rough hand grabbed him by the chin and fetid breath replaced the wash of the water on his face. Had he misjudged his ultimate destination?

“He’s alive. A European, by the look of him,” growled a voice in Arabic. “Kick him again.”

He had.

“What European wears such garments?”

He was alive.

“What European wanders around the desert without water or a camel, eh?” and they all began to laugh.

“A foolish one,” croaked the Phantom through his still parched throat and opened his eyes.

He was laying in the shadow of a silk lean-to erected in the sand to offer shade to his rescuers while they paused on their journey to consider his situation. There were seven of them, dark men of all shapes and sizes, swaddled in the loose, flowing colorful robes cinched by belts weighed down by swords and knives and headdress of Bedouin tribesmen. Their camels, large, awkward-looking animals saddled in fine leather and embroidered clothe, stood nearby chewing and oblivious to the brutality of their environment.

“He speaks!” roared one, a big man with a black beard and dark, dancing eyes as he laughed in delight.

Read Rll Rbout Rt!

The folks over at ComicMonsters.com thought my upcoming zombie-themed story in Scooby Doo #157 ("Night of the Undead") was worthy of a mention and also conducted a short interview about what did and did not influence the story. You can check it out here.

Dick Giordano

There are a few things I know from my 50 years of comic book reading and 35 years in the business:

In the 1960s, the comic books edited by Dick Giordano at Charlton and DC were some of the hippest and best books on the market. He was also one of the best artists in the business, penciling or inking, or both.

As an employee of DC Comics, I always knew I could count on Dick to be a great creative sounding board and a fair and impartial boss.

As an editor, I knew I could always call on Dick to do a fast and beautiful job.

As a writer, I knew my words were going to receive breathtaking treatment when he was assigned to draw it.

A Kupperberg/Giordano story from June 1980,
under a cover by Jim Aparo

As a fan, I knew Dick was a fount of anecdotes, a man who had witnessed a vast majority of comics history helping make that history and loved to talk about it sitting around conventions or over an ice cold Rob Roy and a good meal.

But most of all, I knew Dick Giordano as a friend, and it's in that role that I'll miss him the most.

Good afternoon, Dick...

Weekly World News XXVI

From the annals of the late, lamented Weekly World News, a Global Warning-like story from February 2007:

THE NEXT GREAT FLOOD! Modern-Day ‘Noah’ Warns Threat Will Be of Biblical Proportions!

© respective copyright holders

Washburn, Colo. – Since he was a child, whenever storm clouds would gather over the Rocky Mountains, Dr. Warren Soakes would take a moment from his work to gaze at the natural wonder. Now, the forty year-old meteorologist stops whatever he’s doing to make a quick, worried scan of the skies – and to listen.

“It’s coming,” Dr. Soakes warned Weekly World News. “Due to the effects of global warming, there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that a flood as bad or even worse than the Biblical flood will wipe out all life on Earth sometime in the next six months! It will be a combination of rain and rising sea levels creating perfect flood conditions.

“But unlike the first flood, this will be an act of man, not God!”

Nor is Warren Soakes a crazed voice crying doom on a street corner. He is one of the country’s leading climatologists, a respected scientist who, until last month, was director of the Pacific Region Climate and Oceanographic Institute.

“Between the melting polar ice caps and the el nino-based shifts in climate that caused this winter’s brutal snow storms across the heart of America, it’s just a matter of time before the deluge comes,” Dr. Soakes said.

While no one can argue that global warning is real, Dr. Soakes and his colleagues remain at odds over exactly how severe the condition is and when its effects will be felt.

“Dr. Soakes has gotten a bit carried away with his estimates,” said the current director of the P.R.C.O.I., Dr. Shiela Lemech. “While a global-wide flood is theoretically possible at some point in the future, it’s certainly nothing to worry about right now. Certainly we have time to reverse the warming trend before we have anything cataclysmic to worry about.”

But Dr. Soakes stands by his predictions, which are based less on advanced computer models than on common sense.

“We’re trying to fit billions of gallons of newly-melted ice in a container that isn’t large enough to handle it,” he said, referring to the ocean. “I’ve tried convincing the rest of the scientific community but they refuse to listen. Something’s got to be done, and I’m going to do it myself!”

Unlike his radical, forward thinking, Dr. Soakes’s plan of action is dramatically ‘old school.’

“There really aren’t a whole lot of models to work from based on the scenario of the world being flooded,” he said, “so I went to the source for my inspiration: the Biblical story of Noah and his ark.”

Dr. Soakes’s ark will be considerably more high-tech than was Noah’s ark.

“Thank goodness I don’t have to build the whole thing from scratch,” he said. “I’m starting with a military surplus destroyer that I picked up last month at a Pentagon auction. I cashed in my IRA to buy it. Who needs savings when there won’t be anywhere to spend it? The Navy was selling it for scrap metal, but with a few patches and a new engine, this baby will be perfect for riding out the flood, no matter how deep the water gets!”

Not unlike the scientific community, Dr. Soakes’s neighbors are more than a little skeptical about his new project.

“The doc’s always been a great neighbor,” said retired sanitation worker Hyram Stenich. “But then he had that boat trucked into his backyard and it’s been nothing but construction noise and foul stenches ever since. It smells like he’s keeping a zoo in his garage.”

In fact, Dr. Soakes and his sons, Sam, Joseph, and Hamilton, have moved the family car from the garage in favor of the host of animals he plans to bring with them on the ark.

“I don’t have room for elephants and hippos,” he said, “but we’ve got the basics -- dogs, cats, cows, chickens, goats, horses, mice, hamsters, and one alpaca. If you hear of anyone with a female alpaca for sale, let me know.

“I’m hoping a new, post-flood world without giraffes isn’t the worst thing,” he added.

The Good Old Days

In 2003, I edited a young adult non-fiction book. Critical Perspectives On The Great Depression for Rosen Publishing. The book was a collection of contemporary writings about that bleak period of American history, with brief introductions to the pieces by the editor. This is the intro I wrote for the book, which, in light of current economic conditions and and just a few short months after the 80th anniversary of “Black Tuesday,” might be worth taking a look at.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE GREAT DEPRESSION

© 2004 Rosen Publishing

Introduction

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, first inaugural address, March 4, 1933

Social Security. The federal income tax. Unemployment insurance. Welfare. The Federal Bank Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Tennessee Valley Authority. The National Labor Relations Board. The Securities and Exchange Commission. The Federal Housing Authority.

These are just some of the federal institutions and agencies that we today either take for granted or resent for their intrusions into our lives and business. Before October 29, 1929, most of these federal institutions (and dozens more just like them) would have been unthinkable to the citizens of the United States, accustomed as they were to a laissez-faire, or hands-off, style of government. Yet after 1929, these programs resurrected the United States from the depths of the greatest economic disaster to ever strike this country, the crash and near-decade long recovery that came to be known as the Great Depression.

It seemed was as though no one wanted to see it coming. Ever since 1919 and the end of the first World War, the United States had been on what appeared to be an ever-cresting tide of economic growth, with no end in sight. Gone were the restraints of the staid, pre-War Edwardian era, shoved roughly aside by returning veterans with a reckless disregard for what lay ahead. Here were the Roaring Twenties, the swinging Jazz Age, a decade of exuberance, of excess, of wild abandon. While the Eighteenth Amendment had outlawed the transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages (1919), anyone wanting a drink knew where to find the nearest speakeasy for a shot of illegal whiskey, accompanied by the hot sounds of the popular new jazz music.

The nation was fairly exploding with prosperity, innovation, and creativity. With only a little money down, and little government regulation or interference, anyone could invest in the booming stock market and find themselves—on paper, at least—instantly wealthy.

Air travel went from being a novelty craze to commercial viability with Charles Lindbergh’s successful 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, even as Americans bought millions of Henry Ford’s new Model A automobiles to create the most mobile society in the history of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway brought literature into the modern age with such works as “The Great Gatsby,” “An American Tragedy,” and “A Farewell to Arms,” while motion pictures learned to talk, starting with “The Jazz Singer.”

There seemed no stopping America. “The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge told the press in 1925 and no one could argue with that assessment. For most of its first century, the U.S. had been a largely agrarian society, but by the end of the first third of the Twentieth Century, the country had turned decidedly urban and industrialized, with a majority of its population living, for the first time, in cities rather than on farms. Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, was still considered a sleepy little Southern town, “A strange city, set up in the first place to be the center of government and, like government itself at that time, a city moving slowly and doing little,” according to reporter David Brinkley in his book, “Washington Goes to War.” Government was kept small, operating with a bureaucracy that can only be called miniscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers that today keeps the monolithic machine of government humming.

Herbert Hoover, who in 1922 spoke of “American individualism” over governmental regulation and interference in the lives of its citizens, was elected president in 1928. President Hoover, former head of the American Relief Administration (which organized shipments of food for an estimated one billion starving people in fifty-seven countries in post-World War I Europe) and Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, was a believer in balancing responsibility for the welfare of the people with a faith in free enterprise. During his 1929 campaign, Hoover proclaimed “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

Between May 1928 and September 1929, the average price of stocks rose forty per cent, with trading exploding from two to three million shares per day to over five million. Those interested in investing in the stock market could do so “on margin,” that is, for a small cash down payment, using the stock itself as collateral for its purchase; full payment came due when the stock was sold...usually, in those heady days, for a significant profit that would more than cover the purchase price. The market, once the playground of the wealthy, was suddenly open to Everyman. The railroad tycoon and the shoeshine boy stood side-by-side, watching the rise and fall (but mostly rise) of the Wall Street stock ticker.

Stock prices spiraled upwards, speculation ran rampant, and investors kept jumping on board the money-making wagon. But that wagon could support only so many before it collapsed under the weight and, on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, that’s exactly what happened, dumping the United States and the rest of the world into the throes of the Great Depression. In a single day, billions of dollars were lost (it is estimated that on the New York Stock Exchange alone, losses exceeded $8,000,000,000; this at a time when the average per capita urban household income was $750 a year and $273 for farming households) as more than 16,000,000 shares were frantically traded in a futile attempt to staunch the financial bloodletting. Small investors who had made their paper-profits on stocks purchased at ten per cent of face value were suddenly forced to pay the balance due on their stocks. But with prices plummeting so low, a majority of these small-timers had no profits to cover them and lost everything.

Jazz Age exuberance and excess turned almost immediately to desperation and deprivation. Banks and businesses failed, the money supply shrank, and, by 1932, the unemployment rate would reach a staggering 23.6 per cent (and continue on up, peaking at 24.9 per cent) as over thirteen million Americans lost their jobs. Relief efforts were organized across the country as families with no source of income were forced to stand in the infamous bread lines and soup kitchens, which were, for many, their only source of food.

Hundreds of thousands took to the road seeking work at any wage; entire families begin a westward migration from the southern and northern Plain states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arkansas), which suffered the added tragedy of one of the worst droughts in history that turned a large section of the nation into a Dust Bowl. President Hoover took a number of steps to stem the tide of desperation, including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, and the banking regulatory Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, but it wasn’t until newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933 that the government’s response was equal to the magnitude of the crisis. As the Democratic nominee for president, Roosevelt had promised “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

Roosevelt was as good as his word. In the first one hundred days of his administration, his “New Deal” instituted a concentrated program of legislative activity, sending recovery bill after recovery bill to a Congress that, unsure how to respond, had not done nearly enough to help their constituents through this unprecedented financial catastrophe. Under the president’s guidance, Congress created, in swift succession, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Farm Credit Administration (FCA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), to name a few. This alphabet soup of federal agencies—along with a rash of banking, securities, and credit acts that followed—were all aimed at getting Americans back to work and the floundering economy back on track.

But for all the efforts of FDR (whose popularity as leader would lead him to being reelected an unprecedented three times) and his dedicated administration, it would be more than a decade before the nation, and the world, would truly recover from the events of that single, terrible day.

Weekly World News XXV, or Happy New Year

It's been several months since since I posted anything from my days with Weekly World News, the World's Most Reliable Newspaper. Here's a piece that ran in the end-of-2006 issue:

TIMES SQUARE CELEBRATES NEW YEAR’S DIVERSITY

© Weekly World News

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Every year as the clock ticks down to midnight on December 31, a giant, glittering Waterford crystal ball of light descends from a flagpole to the roof of One Times Square. At the stroke of midnight the ball touches bottom and the crowd of almost one million people goes wild in celebration of the New Year!

This uniquely New York tradition dates back to 1906 and has come to symbolize New Year’s Eve to most of the world.

But December 31 isn’t New Year’s Eve for everyone. “Many cultures follow different calendars and observe their own New Years on days other than December 31,” New York’s Deputy Mayor for Cultural Affairs, Frank Daley told Weekly World News.

Since New York is a melting pot of all peoples and cultures, the municipal government has made an effort to include these diverse celebrations in its Times Square tradition. “For instance,” Deputy Mayor Daly said, “on the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hoshanah, which falls on the first and second days of the Hebrew calendar in the month of Tishri, or around mid- to late-September, people gather at sundown—the traditional start of the new day—in Times Square to watch the dropping of a giant, illuminated matzoh ball.

“Now, the Chinese follow a lunar calendar and celebrate their New Year in January or February, which we commemorate with the dropping of a giant dim sum, while the Chinese New Year, also in February, gets its very own electric dumpling. It’s all quite festive. And delicious.”

Other New Year ornaments include the Korean Ttok-kuk, or rice cake soup bowl, Banh Trang, the Vietnamese rice paper-wrapped delicacy, which is dropped into a giant dish of dipping sauce, the mid-April celebrations of the Southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala with the vada, or deep fried doughnuts made from a batter of lentils, and appam, a pancake made of fermented rice flour, respectively.

“We also celebrate the New Years of the Muslim faith, of Sinhala, Tibet, Iran, the Telugu, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Thailand ... you name it, New York drops something to celebrate it,” Deputy Mayor Daley proudly proclaimed.

But a thorough examination of the holiday list showed the March observance of the Assyrian New Year, Rish Nissanu, was missing.

“Whoops, I guess we dropped the ball on that one,” the deputy mayor sheepishly admitted. “Or, in this case, didn’t drop it.”

He's the Goddamned Batman!

I was recently asked by my buddy Jim Beard to contribute to Gotham City 14 Miles, a book of essays on Batman he is editing for the Sequart Research & Literacy Organization (to be published in July 2010). My subject was the lasting effects of the 1960s Batman TV show on the character and on pop culture. The first section thereof is below:

“Some Days You Just Can't Get Rid of a Bomb”:
The Legacy of Batman

© respective copyright holders

“Oh, my.”
Leonard Goldenson, ABC Television President, in response
to the pitch for the Batman television show

When that first episode of Batman aired on January 12, 1966, I was ten and one-half years old. I was already a hardcore comic book reader and something of an accumulator, if not quite yet a collector, of as many comics as I could lay my hands on.

I was the audience for that show, eager, no dying to see another of my four-color heroes come to life on the TV screen, like The Adventures of Superman, the 104-episodes of which originally aired between 1952 and 1958 and continued on and on in daytime syndication during my childhood on New York’s WPIX-TV, Channel 11.

Pow! Zap ! Bam!

Yes, I recognized they were making fun of Batman, but so what? Grown-ups always made fun of comic books. My father, himself a reader of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Conan, and G-8 and His Battle Aces in the pages of the ten-cent pulp magazines of the 1930s, who brought home the 1960s Ace Books editions of the Tarzan novels with the gorgeous Frank Frazetta covers for his sons to read, who nurtured the creative instinct in the three of us, all of whom went into some sort of creative field, my father, who must have understood the appeal and certainly never discouraged our interest in comic books, nonetheless called the four-color pamphlets my older brother and I separately hoarded by the hundreds “Popeyes,” as in Popeye the Sailor Man, whose name became the noun for all comic books. “You left a pile of your Popeyes in the car,” he would say. “When you’re finished reading your Popeyes, would you take out the garbage?” Most adults just called them “funny books.”

And even in the ghetto of Pop Culture, comic books were the lowest of the kid stuff. Dangerous, even, if the doomsayers of the 1950s witch-hunts against the evils of comic books and their damaging effect on young minds were to be believed. And even if not dangerous, certainly disposable. To modern collectors in their Mylar bags sealed between slabs of plastic, the notion that a comic book was rolled up and stuck in the back pocket of an eleven year-olds jeans before and after being read (repeatedly, and by many kids) is sacrilegious, but that was exactly what we did. That issue of Spider-Man I romped around with in my back pocket in 1964 is worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars today, but back then, it was the center of my universe and, until I learned better a couple of years later, I ran around with it, or another one like it, rolled up in my pocket, where I could bring it out any time to read again. A copy of a Flash Annual from around the same period will forever carry the grit of New York’s Reis Park beach sand ground into its square-bound spine from that summer when it was the comic book I could not go anywhere without.

Pow! Zap! Bam!

Comics did not get respect before Batman and, aside from the recognition of comics during the run of the show, was no better off after than before. Respect was too much to ask of a funny book. The comics had been effectively neutered by the 1950s and were unlikely to feature anything capable of offending anybody (although there’s always someone to be offended by anything), but Senator Kefauver’s Congressional hearings into the link between comics, juvenile delinquency, and childhood emotional problems were only a decade in the past. These hearings were inconclusive and came up with no result other than the creation of the industry’s self-policing agency, the Comics Code Authority of America. The bad taste had nonetheless been left behind in everybody’s mouth and, in their memory of the hearings, comics had been officially stamped “garbage” by the U.S. government. What other proof did they need?

When it came to picking from this heap, Hollywood had not always approached it with such trepidation. In the 1940s, superheroes were successful on the radio (Superman on a three-times a week program on the Mutual Network) as well as on the big screen as serialized adventures, 10 or 12 15-minute weekly shorts, each with a cliffhanger ending to draw the kids back to the theater to see how the hero gets out of this one! Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Blackhawk, and others from the comics were made into serials, while a series of Superman cartoon shorts produced by the Fleischer Studios (creators of Popeye and Betty Boop before the Man of Steel) for Paramount are still considered classics of animation. The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was, despite, the nostalgic chuckles it elicits today, a very faithful and, for the most part, straight adaptation of the Superman then in the comic books, scaled down from his skyscraper-lifting level of four-color power to a syndicated TV program’s budget. But, of course, the program was produced by DC Comics, its stories overseen by comic book editors-turned-producers Whitney Ellsworth and Mort Weisinger. They were company men playing with company toys and they were very careful not to break anything.

The one thing all of the above have in common is that they were created as and always intended to be for kids. Serials were shown on Saturday mornings, along with cartoons and other kid stuff. The Adventures of Superman radio program ran for 11-years in a late afternoon timeslot. The Adventures of Superman TV show, though its first two seasons, in black and white, are darker and more serious than the later color seasons, was always a kids show, right down to its sponsorship by Kellogg’s cereals.

Comics only started getting into on-screen trouble when someone decided to do a TV show for grown-ups without first getting over their embarrassment at what they were doing.

One always has to start from the premise that the people adapting comics to the screen, big or little, do not have any respect for the material, certainly not then and, comics overall public relations progress to the contrary, not still.

The people who make movies and television shows, who stage Broadway shows and publish literature are embarrassed by the source material, whether they will admit to it or not. They voice a love and admiration for this true American art form, but if what has hit the movie and television screens is the result of love, hate me, please. Even the best of them can not help metaphorically winking uncomfortably in acknowledgment of the source. The subtext may be Shakespearean in scope, but the brilliance is clad in primary colored spandex that overwhelms even the strongest message. (These same dramatists forgetting that Shakespeare himself was little more than a TV writer of his time, the legends and tales of the era serving as the source material for his plays, themselves pandering to the lowest common denominator in the cheap seats.)

But no message, as it turned out, would ever be stronger than this:

Pow! Zap! Bam!

It made the show. It was, the first time it hit the screen that January night in 1966, a self-announcing visual punch in the nose. It made mom and dad laugh. It was kitschy, campy, and in tune with the “pop art” movement popularized by such commercial artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both influenced by comic art, Lichtenstein, indeed, lifting, without credit or remuneration, entire panels from romance and war comics to recreate as such paintings as "Drowning Girl" and, more to the point of Pow! Zap! Bam!, "Whaam!" Marvel Comics, which, under the creative direction of Stan Lee and his co-writing artist cohorts like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and others, had bumped up the level of comic book sophistication with continuing stories and heavy doses of soap opera elements inflicted on superheroes whose secret identities lead less-than-perfect lives, even went so far as to change its corner symbol identifying their titles as “Marvel Pop Art Productions” for four or five months during 1965, riding the wave of a trend their existence helped to set rolling.

“Pow! Zap! Bam!” was brilliant, an inclusive nod to the source material. Sound effects have long been a vital part of the vocabulary of comics. A picture of a fist in the vicinity of a chin is only half the story. The “WHAM!” of the knock-out punch or the “whoosh!” of the fist sailing past its target tells the rest. Hand-lettered onamonapia was straight out of the newspaper comic strips and comic books the chuckling adults had read as children. It was self-referential and precious and it was exactly the right touch of gentle mockery to catapult Batman into a full-blown, two-year long bona fide fad.

The only problem was, even after Batman was gone from the airwaves, it left “Pow! Zap! Bam!” behind.