Sandman (Netflix)

Arthur Darvill as Richard Madoc

Last week I was running the track at the Rec Center, and a song came on that I knew but I could not place from where. A bombastic anthem of nostalgia and regret with an all-encompassing theme of acceptance.

A quick search reminded me that this song, It’s Not Over (‘Til It’s Over and Done) by Bleu McAuley was the song that played over the closing credits of the Netflix series Sandman, based on the comics series of the same name.

When I was a teenager, I yearned for something which was not yet possible; that a TV show or movie might be successfully adapted from the genre materials that I loved so dear. Not just comics, but also books like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. When such attempts were made they suffered from a lack of technology and funding (see the BBC’s TV series for HHGTTG) or the inability to transfer what was essential about the material to the project (see Howard the Duck).

As I was never a DC fan, I had no strong emotional ties to either Superman or Batman, so while those movies (1978 and 1989, respectively) were important, to me they were only weigh stations to something that mattered. When X-Men (2000) was released I was a giddy 32 year old and mostly satisfied.

Sandman was an epic, 75-issue fantasy series which focused on the personification of dreams, sometimes called the Sandman – but not really, he was more often called Morpheus or often just Dream, and his primary function was managing that place we all go when we fall asleep.

Desire
Sandman #41: Brief Lives part 1 (1992)
Pencils: Jill Thompson
Inker: Vince Locke

I loved this comic because it was literate, transgressive, and Goth – Goth in that it was dark and moody and brooding and romantic. It also owes a lot of its imagery to familiar musical acts; Dream appears like Peter Murphy or Trent Reznor, Lucifer like Bowie. Word has it Delirium was modeled after Tori Amos, and Desire, of course, looks like the cover of Duran Duran’s album Rio (Patrick Nagel, RIP). My ex-wife Diana introduced me to the book, which started publication in 1988, and we read them issue by issue. Later, I bought the bound reprint books.

The other night I asked my wife Toni why Sandman has been so important to her (yes, I married two women who love Sandman, quelle surprise) and she reflected to me how expansive it is, and immersive. When she thinks of it, she doesn’t see the panels, the specific artwork, she sees worlds.

When it was announced in 2019 that Sandman would be a series on Netflix, I was excited about that. In the past, such announcements came with a certain amount of dread, like the feel you get every time they announce a new Fantastic Four movie. I love the IP, they are going to fuck it up. The thing about comics, for example, is that they are episodic, and most superhero movies prior to The Avengers (2012) would spend half the movie on the origin story. Even when there was a reboot, they would tell the origin story again.

Then there is the idea of cramming years of potential narrative into one two hour feature. It loses nuance, even when it looks spectacular. There will be nothing unique or interesting. And then there is casting. There were plans for a potential Sandman film in the early 90s that was to star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But mostly, it is the adaptation of one thing into another thing. Comics are one particular thing, and movies a total other. Comics are cheap and movies are expensive, so comics can do so much more because it is only ink on paper and relatively few are reading them, whereas movies are practical and have to make money.

Martin Freeman (Arthur), Sam Rockwell (Zaphod)
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

This is where Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005) failed. The source material is a science fiction satire, with the emphasis on satire, not science fiction. To wit; it is veddy British. In the original, a bunch of weird things would happen in the service of a dry, witty punchline, and the film kept the set-up but cut the punchline. The film gives us spectacular visuals and gags presented by writers and directors who did not understand or care why it was popular in the first place.

But now it is the 2020s and not only can you make almost anything look real, popular culture is so fragmented that the idea of a comic book with an enormous – and intergenerational – cult following being turned into not a single feature film but an anthology series makes total sense.

The series dropped in 2022, and we were delighted. Then came the allegations.

I will not describe the allegations here, except in how they relate to the subject at hand. Let us state what was and what is. Neil Gaiman was once a model figure for those who feel outside of the mainstream; he not merely wrote the works that made them feel seen – adult fantasy fiction like Sandman, and also children’s books like Coraline – but was a constant presence in public and on social media who defended the right for people to be different. His tweets were a protection against the trolling of J.K. Rowling.

At the same time, in his personal life, he was a serial abuser, a monster and a creep.

The second season of Sandman dropped this past July, with little notice or fanfare. I didn’t even discover that it had for a month after. The first season encompassed (more or less) the first twenty issues of a seventy-five issue series. They could have easily made three or even four seasons from the remaining fifty-five books, but chose to cram them all into this final, second series. Even the most lauded issue of Sandman, the World Fantasy Award winning story about Morpheus commissioning Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night’s Dream is briefly shoehorned into a different episode. It is as though the folks at Netflix said, all right, let’s get this shitshow over with.

I chose to watch, even though I was conflicted about doing so. I mean, so many artists contributed to making this show a reality, that’s the thing about artistic collaboration. So I wanted to see it, I wanted to see them. But I was wondering how it would feel, knowing what we know. As it happened, I had my second bout of Covid in late summer, which was an opportune moment to binge the second season while in my own private delirium.

"It had been her own fault."
Sandman #17: Calliope (1990)
Pencils: Kelley Jones
Inker: Malcolm Jones III 

Knowing what we know, certain storylines pop with dread. To quote a meme, “Mister Police. You could have saved her. I gave you all the clues.” One, Calliope, is about Richard Madoc, a famous author with writer’s block who takes action to harbor the actual muse of epic poetry – essentially, he has trafficked her – to spur his creative output.

Dream arrives to free her from the author, something he does not actually have the power to do. The author must freely release her. But Morpheus can torture Madoc, and does so by flooding his mind with so many original ideas he goes nearly insane. When the writer announces Calliope is free, his torment ends, but he can no longer think of anything new or original.

Not arrested, not pursued by other supernatural entities, Madoc simply remains creatively empty, which we are free to assume is something Gaiman believes to be the worst punishment imaginable. (It isn’t.)

Witnessing the second season, released post-allegation, themes of remorse, regret, and atonement are pushed to the forefront. To be honest, they were always there in the text, but are so much more apparent now. Dream had committed an unforgivable act, and in the process of making it right was compelled to do something which (literally) brought the Furies down upon him.

In the end, all the chaos, pain, and anguish, the sum of a lifetime of poor decisions, are wiped away as the entity that was Dream is eliminated and replaced by someone new. End of story. 

But reality is much more complicated. Morpheus apologized, repented, and took responsibility for his actions. To date, his creator has not.

 

The Negative Zone (comic strip)

From "The Negative Zone"

This is the foreword to "The Negative Zone", a sixteen-page comic created for my Comic Theory/Queer Studies course at Kent State, Spring 2021.

At the tender age of thirteen, I was frequenting coffee houses after dark with friends of friends, smoking cigarettes and consuming far too much caffeine, and listening as these strange cohorts discussed the philosophy of STAR TREK, made catty remarks about the entrances and exits of familiar faces, and whether or not “to pork” was an appropriate synonym for fucking. 

Pengo, age 14

No one described themselves as queer, but they weren’t exactly straight, either. A self-identified witch claimed she could never get pregnant because she could menstruate at will, a twenty-one year-old hipster had no issues getting my fifteen year-old girlfriend to tongue kiss him, sitting right there in front of me. The rules were not familiar, I did not know what was all right and what was not.

What does “all right” mean, anyway?

As found families go, this one was somewhat toxic and my takeaway included some bad wisdom. Around the same time I was introduced to NORTH STARR COMICS, which was first operated out of this guy’s basement, and later in the storefront of a motel. It was the kind of place dudes (pretty much entirely dudes) might hang out all day. It was a place of safety for nerds where we could eat crap and talk shit and read all the comics and crack jokes and watch movies and just be ourselves.

Pengo & Serena

Up to a point. Our sexuality, ourselves, this remained an awkward subject. This “Bronze Age” of comics, where even the mainstream producers like Marvel and DC were exploring issues of race and class through titles like Cloak & Dagger and the New Teen Titans and the explosively popular X-MEN (and its countless spin-offs) they still served a dominantly heteronormative, binary gender paradigm.

Alternative comics were actually worse. Unburdened by the COMICS CODE AUTHORITY these books could freely offer images of sex and sexual violence with impunity, and of course, even in such high-brow and critically acclaimed titles as V for Vendetta and Sandman, women were the subject of degrading abuse in a manner the men characters never were.

And so many of us (I include myself in this number) were homophobic and sexist by upbringing, if not by nature. A comic shop was a much an example of Foucault’s beloved PANOPTICON as anywhere else in the larger society where, by awareness of constant observation by others, we were still self-governing our behaviors and statements, for fear of judgement or punishment by the larger group -- even if the standards of that behavior in a comic shop was alternate to that which was found in school or on the streets.

Pengo, age 52

THE NEGATIVE ZONE is a fictional space, inspired by the comic stores I frequented: Kovacs, North Starr, Cosmic Comics, Mr. Fantasy’s. A place where teenagers mingled with adults who shared a common interest, and in many cases had a greater opportunity to be their true selves, even when they weren’t sure who that was yet, even as they were in the process of becoming. To quote my man Jean Paul SARTRE, “A person who claims that they fundamentally have a certain identity is in bad faith.”

Many genres and subcultures came together under such roofs, the superhero FANGIRLS AND BOYS and the science fiction geeks, the fantasy seekers and their Wiccan counterparts. And yes, there were online systems back then where computer aficionados from different communities could chat with complete anonymity and pretend to be whoever they wanted to be.

If this all sounds perhaps a little risky, the underage and the aged interacting so far from the watchful eyes of parents and guardians, it was that, too. As it is in our schools and churches, and halls of government. But for those who sought the freedom to explore and to discover brave new identities, it was a haven, a sanctuary, a laboratory. We were IN THE ZONE.

"The Negative Zone" is now available as an e-comic for Kindle!

The Frantic Four (comic strip)

Artwork: Tom Packis

When I was a kid, I would get on a city bus, by myself, and take it to Lakewood. This was when I was ten or eleven. I’d get off on Clifton, and walk a half-mile south to get to Kovacs Comics at 16108 Detroit Ave.

I have this strange memory of a man with these bizarre growths, hanging from his face. They were like spheres of flesh, hanging from stretched tethers of skin. I found it horrifying, and only glanced at him and looked away. His face was unreal, grotesque.

Years later, in a novelty shop, I saw a rubber mask featuring the exact same, bizarre deformity, and I wonder, was that man real? Did I conflate some memories? Or was the guy on the bus wearing that mask and I couldn’t tell?

Anyway there I was, a child, on the RTA, on my own. Freedom! I can’t imagine my kids wanting to do that. 

I had a flyer from Mister Fantasy’s (15015 Detroit) and it was just an ad for the store. All the comics shops did that, printed up flyers to put into each bag of comics you bought. 

Artwork: Philip L. Fried

This flyer featured an original comic. “Mr. Fantasy” was direct addressing the reader, talking about how the store was closing, and that this was the last comic. Mr. Fantasy was a big bearded guy, the stereotypical image of a guy who owned a comic book store.

Thing was, though the comic was cheeky and cheery, in the last panel the character had shot himself. It was just a blood-spattered wall.

In 1981 or 1982, I was introduced to North Starr Comics. Originally it was a mail order concern, operated out of this guy’s basement in Fairview Park. But he had fixed up his basement the way you would a store, and my friend Tom brought me there. It was so cool, like a comic book speakeasy. If you knew the password, you could browse and buy and hang out and shoot the shit.

By 1983 he’d rented a storefront on Lorain Avenue. A proper store, open for business. And there was a regular cast of characters who would hang out there and antagonize each other. Some of us would spend hours there, reading books, watching comings and goings. If you have been paying attention, North Starr Comics was the inspiration for The Negative Zone, my recent comic book project.

"Ghoul" reference

Dave, the proprietor, also had fliers. They were usually cheesecake pin-ups drawn by this guy named Phil. And I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we made a superhero parody featuring characters based on all the guys who hung out at the store?

Looking back, this turned out to be my first public foray into script writing. I wasn’t much of an artist then (am I now?) but Tom was, and so we created The Frantic Four which was full of inside jokes and references. 

It’s not for the ages, suffice to say I didn’t know what to write about, things just happened. Mostly it was a goof, inspired by Marvel Comics’ own self-parodies like Not Brand Echh, or the kind of riffing humor you would find in Cracked. 

One lesson I am glad I learned early was about unappreciated mockery. We were all in on the joke, but there was one guy who had been the butt of our jokes for some time, and I made him the villain of the story. In his first appearance he was an overweight, diet pop swilling creep who had a cadre of robot servants dressed like high school cheerleaders. We used his actual first name, and the drawing did look like him.

After that "issue" of the comic was produced and distributed, I received a very terse but measured phone call from him (he was in his mid-20s at the time, I was fourteen) explaining to me exactly what the meaning of the legal term "libel" was and recommending I put more thought into my work.

He wasn't wrong. He wasn't wrong at all. It freaked me out. So I had his character unceremoniously murdered by Dr. Doom and never mentioned him by name again.

It is remarkable to me, however, that for a couple years I was producing scripts, that another artist was turning them into pages, and that people actually received them to read (or throw away) in their monthly bag of comics.

My interest in the project waned at the same time my interest in superhero “floppy” comics did. By the time I was a junior in high school I was so engaged in other things, and that was around the time they ret-conned the Jean Grey/Phoenix Saga (if you know, you know) and I was moving on. North Starr closed shop while I was at college, which is as good a metaphor as anything else.

Creating The Negative Zone comic, taking the class, was  quite restorative. I felt like I had the opportunity to rewrite some history I had closed off in my memory, and to remember how enjoyable that period of my life was. It was so easy to dismiss the writing I did for this project as childish and silly. But that's what it was meant to be. And the really important thing to keep in mind is that we did it. 

Many thanks to "Frantic Four" co-creator Tom Packis for his amazing artwork!

North Starr Comics

Process XXVIII

Printed copies of The Negative Zone arrived in the mail the other day. I believed the most hassle-free and inexpensive way to complete the project would be to order them online, twenty copies, enough for the professor and any member of the class who wanted one.

Alas, there was a voice balloon missing from one of the panels. No need to explain how this happened, it was a technical error, and entirely my fault. Worse yet, the voice balloon in question was on the first page, even worse, it was the set-up to a rather crass joke, even worse yet, a joke that receives several callbacks throughout the comic.

What to do? Dump the entire run, of course, and have it printed for pick-up at the print shop up the street. Editing it, reprinting the one page, adding a sticker or something, these would cost as much, take too much time, and look sloppy.

I am relieved I did not (as I had considered) print one hundred of them, for sale. As it is, I will number these few revised copies, sign them, and that will be that.

I hope it's good enough. The memory of my embarrassing failure as an undergrad fueled my desire to create something truly special. Is it? Who knows. It’s a thing. It’s just another thing.

The audio drama I penned for craft and theory was a trip. I found a template for radio drama for Final Draft on Reddit, of all places, and that was very helpful.

The script, I Think We’re All Weirdos On the Web, is more me than Firesign Theatre, though I did name the protagonist Georgia Mordedor (Spanish for “teether”) after David Ossman’s omnipresent George Tirebiter. But she’s neither a spy nor a girl delighter, just a woman trying to get a chair she found on Craig’s List.

Process XXV

They say that two-thirds of the way through any endeavor, a person becomes distracted, unmotivated, desiring to quit, perhaps. Don’t ask me who “they” are, but I have heard it more than once. 

Forty-five minute class? You start watching the clock at thirty minutes. Six week rehearsal process? You start losing your focus around week four, wondering if the show will ever open. After six months of pregnancy, the father leaves.

Okay, maybe not. But maybe?

It didn’t happen to me last semester, I drove straight through without stopping to question. But after creating six out of nine panels for my queer comic, I just kind of lost it. Page six is inked but incomplete, seven is an unfinished pencil. I’m actually going to start page eight, to keep leaning forward towards completion. In that way, I may be able to bang, bang, bang, finish them all one after the other.

My wife reminds me that I have been goggling at how far ahead I have been, on everything, that I only think I’m behind because I have slowed down a bit. I think she’s right. I’m glad I didn’t leave after the sixth month.

This week I also wrote up the second part of my story about race in the 1980s for the fiction writing class. Next weekend will be quite eventful, Saturday night is the premiere of the All-Ohio Show for the 2021 State Thespian conference (see graphic for details) for which I am an advisor, and on Sunday the NEOMFA short films will debut at a bar downtown.

That’s weird. I wrote a thing. And then I will witness an animated film created from that thing I wrote. And I have zero idea what that is going to look like.

Process XXIV

I have always been bad at composition. I like drawing people, but not things. But things provide a sense of place. My first year as an editorial cartoonist for our weekly high school paper, my editor told me I needed to add background. If only a single line, so that y characters weren’t floating in space.

After I had created three comic strips for the daily paper at school, I self-published a collection (God, that was expensive and what no one was shopping for) and the cover is terrible. Just the main characters from each strip, floating in space.

Looking at that cover, I wouldn’t have bought it. Too much white space, as they say.

Creating a cover for The Negative Zone, I am creating a 1980s inspired superhero comic cover, with a bunch of inside references mostly from the class, and even from the class I took in 1988, if you can catch it.

And we are now fully vaccinated. And we have returned to the deck. The furniture is there. The lights are hung. It is time, once again, to work outdoors.

Meanwhile, on Thursday evening I attended the first in-person rehearsal in thirteen months. Same director, though Chennelle. From The Witches to I Hate This. A solo performance, one actor. But also director, playwright -- and cinematographer-collaborator, and a stage manager. A creative team, still distanced, still masked, but all in one room.

Is there a light? Can you see the light?

Gay Comix #4 (1983)

When I was a teenager, there was a period of time when I hung out at a comic book store. North Starr Comics was located in the storefront of a motel on Lorain Avenue in Fairview Park. There was a cast of regulars, at the age of fifteen I was one of the youngest. We would read comics, watch video of B-movies on the TV, talk shit, pull each others’ chains.

One Saturday in early 1984 the owner had scheduled a live auction, to get inventory he couldn’t move out of the place. It wasn’t a very large store. Most of what he was unloading were by lot, and I wasn’t a huge spender. But there was a lot of cajolery, mocking each other for their stupid purchases.

When he announced, “Next up, one copy of GAY COMIX!” that got a huge laugh, and I hollered, “Two cents!” It was a joke! Because, come on, who would want something called “Gay Comics”? Right? 

“I hear two cents!” said the owner, and I realized I had made a mistake. Because now I was the joke. No one else bid on it, and in spite of my desperate protestations, I won the comic. I refused to pay for it. I was informed it was free, and if it was discovered I had somehow left it behind there would be hell to pay.

So, I slipped it into my bag and hoped no one would mention it ever again. Later, I read it.

Gay Comix (later retitiled “Gay Comics”) was first published in 1980 by Kitchen Sink Press. It was created to be an anthology of short stories by gay artists on gay themes. Originally it leaned heavily on providing true stories of the LGBTQ+ experience. It had a mission to challenge the prevalent cartoonish imagery of gays and lesbians in the media, and in comics.

While it did feature nudity, there was an intentional de-emphasis on the depiction of sex or anything that might be construed as pornography.

Gay Comix #4, the issue that I had won, was published in late 1983. It was not only my first adventure into comics with LGBTQ themes, it was perhaps the first underground comic I had ever owned.

What does that mean? That it was my first experience with non-superhero, non-fantasy, real-life material, set down in black and white, in this case created by a wide variety of artists and writers, including a few artists of color. The subject matter is almost entirely binary, however, and leaned more into stories about gay men than lesbians.

One of the stories, Ready or Not, Here It Comes by editor Howard Cruse, was a view of the AIDS crisis, certainly my first exposure to the pandemic from a gay man’s point of view. Another, The Unicorn Tapestry by Roberta Gregory was the only piece in the issue about someone who is transgender.

I was raised to be homophobic. But I found this material to be fascinating. I was not repelled. There were coming out stories, tales of first love, some purely comic bits. Naturally, I was concerned that if anyone knew I was reading this they would “think I was gay.” I kept it to myself. Reading this book did not end my bigotry. It was the first crack in the wall.

And I still have that comic book.

To be continued.

Source: Wikipedia

The History of Underground Comix

When Ohio University announced its first graduate level course in sequential art, The History of Underground Comix, I was still an undergrad. It was 1988, Fall quarter of my junior year. But if there was going to be a course on independent comics, by God, I was going to be taking it.

I was, at that stage in my life, immersed in comics. I had been reading commercial comics or “floppies” since I was a kid, and the 1980s were a golden time for the superhero genre; reconsidering it, turning it inside out, and creating the template for today’s Industrial Superhero Film Industry. Books like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and the heyday of the "Uncanny X-Men." 

Also, I had been drawing a daily strip for the college paper and though my art was pretty crude, I was not only taking inspiration from mainstream comics. I had begun to discover alternative works, including those of Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), Matt Groening (Life In Hell), Art Spiegelman (Maus) and those artists that appeared in Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Raw anthologies.

So, if there was going to be a course on comics, then I, David Hansen, creator of the controversial strip Breaking Point, would have to be accepted. 

Breaking Point (1988)

This was a mistake. Fall quarter my junior year was a disaster for me for a number of confluent reasons. I was cast in an extremely challenging mainstage show which conflicted with much of my attendance for this evening class. I underwent something of an emotional breakdown as I negotiated my poorly-managed interpersonal relationships. 

And the fact is I had always been a bad student. I skated through my classes. I knew enough to pass, even occasionally to do well. But I was never a deep study, or a good reader, of texts. Pleasure reading, sure. Not work that was assigned.

Cover, "401"
Art: Ken Kastely

The professor was skeptical. An undergrad can’t just take a graduate level course. I had to submit a portfolio, and a letter of intent. Only then was I grudgingly assigned a slot. 

But there were texts to be read and papers to write, and debate in class and a final project which involved the class collaborating on creating an original, physical comic book.

The comic, titled simply “401” after the class's room number in Siegfried Hall, was a missed opportunity for me, one in which I could have pushed myself and broken form. As it was, I drew two pieces involving suicide (I didn’t know at this time how thoughtlessly trite that was) and a third which was just a cheap shot at one of my classmates, a woman with a strong feminist agenda.

This one is a single panel depicting myself reading Kate’s final monologue from The Taming of the Shrew as my “humorless” classmate approached from behind wielding a baseball bat. No, I will not be sharing that image here.

It was my beef with the women in the class that I am most ashamed of. There were, to me, a surprising number of women in the class; self-possessed, confident, intelligent women, who were into comics and had an agenda to explore and expand the form. I was a young, callow, white male of privilege and I was challenged by them, or should I say I felt challenged by them.

Another signifiantpart of our grade was a class presentation, for which I planned a take-down of Dr. Friedrich Wertham’s seminal work, Seduction of the Innocent, which documents a direct connection from comics to juvenile delinquency.

I cannot imagine I actually read the book. Worse yet, I had a performance the night of my presentation. I provided a booklet of photocopied images from the book, images from horror and superhero comics of the kind Dr. Wertham asserted were the cause of sociopathic behavior, and also a cassette recording of a stream-of-consciousness rant in which I quoted Wertham's claims and then just said that he was wrong.

The next class, the final class, I avoided anyone’s gaze and received my materials back from the professor. The cassette itself has been recorded over by members of the class to provide their response. I think I got a couple minutes into it. I never listened to the entire thing The tape began with a lecture from one of the women (a woman of color, if I recall correctly) describing how unprofessional my work was and spelling out in no uncertain terms the errors in my scholarship.

I dropped the cassette into the wastebasket, not out of resentment but shame. I had fucked up, and I knew it.

There’s always that guy in any class, you know the one. Often absent, does substandard work. You don't know who they are or what may be going on with them, but you do wonder, why is this person even here? For that class, that guy was me. I got a D for the course, which I believe was generous. 

Why am I sharing this humiliating piece of personal history? Because this semester I am taking a graduate level course in Comics Studies and Queer Theory. Among other goals, I plan to make up for past failures.

My Friend Dahmer (film)

Local comics legend Derf (see: The City) composed a cartoon memoir of his high school years in the late 1970s and his association with serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.

That book, My Friend Dahmer has gone on to international acclaim, been translated into a several languages, and on Friday a motion-picture adaptation starring Ross Lynch as Dahmer goes into general release.

Derf has been and will be accused of cashing in on a horrific tragedy, but that charge can more reasonably be made of previous made-for-TV films which capitalized on the gruesome and inhuman acts performed by Dahmer during the years of his crimes. This story has as much to do with the psychology of a would-be-but-not-yet killer as with the world which fostered his desires and compulsions, and provided the opportunity to make his fantasies come to fruition.

As one of the more self-pitying members of Generation X, I have loudly and at length whined about the disastrous effect the 1970s had on its children, when media was skewed entirely toward the interests of rising Baby Boomers. Our television programs and films churned out tales of easy sex, transient relationships, and graphic violence, while popular music dwelt on maudlin thoughts and liberal mores, and no one was looking after the kids.

From "My Friend Dahmer" the graphic novel by Derf

Two months ago I surprised the wife for her birthday by taking her to a sold-out, pre-release screening at the Cleveland Cinematheque. I am excited for Derf, and hope My Friend Dahmer, the film, receives the attention I believe it deserves.

The film captures that late 70s mood without fetishizing it, as so many contemporary films do. The suburban torpor of a nation in decline, and the effect that has on its citizens, especially the young people is on full display.

Derf has often suggested that his book is an indictment of the adults who failed in their responsibility, providing no oversight, and in this way allowing a neglected, alienated monster to come to life. Dahmer may have been destined, either through fate or natural design, to become a murderous sociopath. But why did no one see the signs?

The screenwriter and director Marc Meyers made the decision not to employ a narrator. Derf comments on the proceedings in his novel through the use of captions, and in this way he himself leads us through the narrative. We are never alone with Jeffrey Dahmer. Without narration, Dahmer's increasing isolation from humanity (portrayed hauntingly by Lynch) is ours to witness in isolation.

It is this emotional connection -- not sympathy, which is feeling, but empathy, which is understanding -- that makes the final scene of the film so chilling. I won't spoil it for you. It's enough to say that in any other film, it would be moment of triumph, and of celebration. Our main character finally knows who he is.

And he is free.

"My Friend Dahmer" makes its Cleveland premiere at the Capitol Theatre next Friday, November 10, 2017.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (book)

WHAT IF ... The Original Marvel Bullpen Had Been A Socialist Collective ..?

The origins of the most indelible characters in DC Comics were created by artists and writers whose ideas were kept by the corporation, the enrich those who owned the company. These artists were paid for the work - the artwork, the pages - they produced. But the ideas remained the possession of the corporation, in perpetuity.

As long as you were an employee, you were paid a wage. Once you left, your characters - which in other industries we may compare to inventions, patented or copyrighted - remained behind. No residuals, no royalties, even the artwork itself was owned by the corporation for which it had been created. (See: Superman.)

So it was also with Marvel Comics. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Steve Gerber - they did not own The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Howard the Duck.

Only Stan Lee benefited from his initial contributions to the early works of Marvel, because he never left. As the years went by, his self-made legend grew and he was able to capitalize on this and make a fortune. I will not debate whether he was anything more than an editor (to his dying day Kirby insisted Lee never wrote a word) but he certainly made himself the Ronald McDonald of Marvel Comics.

By the 1980s, management at DC and Marvel had learned that by providing incentives (let us not call them royalties) for popular work, they could encourage artists to create comics that would have the broadest appeal. In the case of Marvel, this also translated into cross-title storylines which increased their bottom line exponentially.

That's Capitalism.

For a brief period of time, the lasting effects of the so-called Silver Age of 1970s comics (for which people of my generation were so emotionally connected to) coincided with the glut of multiples titles for one character or team and "event" comics, so that everyone on board at that time lived in security and in a couple of cases, great wealth.

That lasted one or two years. And by that time (some would argue long before) the comics were awful to read and look at, and the emperor was revealed to have no clothes.

Hey, wait a minute! These are comics!

We've been reading comics!

Imagine an alternate Marvel Universe, where the original Marvel Bullpen (if there ever was such a thing) was a profit-sharing collective, where success for one was success for all. Where funding went to training the best artists and writers and editors. Where there was a strong, paid internship program, vacations and great health care for emphysemic illustrators?

Well. We know Steve Ditko would have no part of it. And no doubt a model like that would never produce an artist-entrepreneur like Todd McFarlane, or any of the Marvel-inspired blockbusters of the last ten years. They'd just continue producing low-grade pulp superhero comics strictly for the people who like to read them.

But unlike the What If titles of the late 1970s and early 80s - which always ended in disaster, as if to prove the correctness of the canonical storyline - perhaps this alternate universe would have had a happier ending, at least for the artists instead of the publishers.

'Nuff said.

Source: Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

The Adventures of Tintin

Belgian graphic designer Georges Prosper "Hergé" Remi (22 May 1907 – 3 March 1983) created the young, intrepid reporter Tintin (pronounced tan-tan, thank you) and the series of adventures which bear his name.

You know, there was a period during my childhood when my mother thought it would be a good idea to make family vacations out of my father's occasional international working excursions (he was in foreign exchange for Cleveland Trust) which brought me to England, Paris and Norway in the years 1977, 1978 and 1979. This comfy culture shock exposed me to Tintin, Rupert, Asterix and even the Smurfs years before my American contemporaries.

This explains my cosmopolitan world view, bizarre sense of humor, and my general sense of arrogance.

Did you know Inspector Thompson and Inspector Thomson are not brothers, let alone twins?

Tintin adventures stretched from 1929 to the mid-1960s though for me they always had a pre-war vibe. It makes perfect sense that Spielberg would choose to create a movie based out of this material, because the end-product is like Indiana Jones, only with a lot more reasonably acceptable slapstick. The CGI-effected performances make some of the more extreme physical violence a lot more funny and a lot less "Oh my GOD!"
What was most enjoyable for me was that the film plays like a Tintin novel, beginning with Tintin landing in the middle of a mystery, and progressing with great speed to a ship, to the middle of the ocean, to a desert to a non-specific Middle Eastern emirate ... it just goes and goes, no backstory, no Hollywood time wasted explaining who Tintin is, where he came from, even what paper he even works for. Just go-go-go.

And with the exception of an entire absence of tobacco products of any kind, its pretty damn faithful. Guns, whisky, blood ... and only one female character at all, the venerable Madame Castafiore. Tintin is a "boy's own" story, you want more girl characters, adapt something else.


For Christmas I got some of the new editions of Tintin, which are easier to hold but not to read (they are small) but include introductions to key characters which made leaping into what feels like an extended narrative much easier. Just reading half of Red Rackham's Treasure made my six year-old's idea of attending the movie much less fraught.

However, I will want to pick and choose which volumes to acquire or share with the kids, and not just because of the smoking or winking attitude towards Captain Haddock's obsession with drink. A number of them are pretty damn racist. Hergé famously had a world-view alteration from a Tchang Tchong-jen, a Chinese-born companion, which drove him to recreate most of his early work, especially the hideous Tintin in the Congo.

American Splendor

Sitting on the stoop in front of Tommy's Restaurant,
now the location of Mac's Backs Paperbacks.
Harvey Lawrence Pekar (October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010) was born in Cleveland, to Polish immigrant parents. He graduated from Shaker Heights High in 1957 and after a stint in the U.S. Navy settled in Cleveland Heights eventually gaining regular employment as a file clerk at the V.A. Hospital. His legend, however, is as a writer, of jazz criticism and as the creator of his autobiographic comic book American Splendor.

In 1962 Pekar met Robert Crumb, who at that time was an illustrator for American Greetings. They had a mutual admiration for all things jazz, and Crumb introduced Harvey to "underground" comics. Pekar had abandoned superhero comic books as a teenager, but Crumb opened his mind to all of the different stories could be told through the medium. When he decided to reach out and attempt his own work, Pekar first contacted Crumb to be an illustrator.

He self-published American Splendor #1 in 1976. And the cover is correct, Crumb only did a two-pager.

For those familiar with his later work, which concentrates almost exclusively on his day-to-day life with wife Joyce Brabner and their child Danielle, the premiere issue is a little dizzying. Longer pieces like How I Spent My Summer Vacation: 1972 and Love Story (Summer 1946) tell the story of Harvey surrogates "Marv" and "Herbie" and their entirely unedited sexual exploits. One image might even be punishable as child pornography. Only one story (not including the cover) where Pekar explains how he roped Crumb into assisting him on this adventure depicts Harvey by name as himself.

Depictions of Black people and women (lots of naked tits) would also raise a few eyebrows ... but not if you were already familiar with the work of Crumb and his contemporaries. It was par for the course in the 1970s. Looking at his later work, I would almost guess that Harvey felt he was supposed to "go there" to be part of the underground comics scene, but I would hesitate to give any closer analysis than that, other to say it's a bold first issue, and it must have taken a heap of courage for someone like Pekar to take some many of his personal thoughts and shove them out there as if to say, "This is what I think, this is who I am, take it or leave it."

And that, after all, is what everyone who loves him loves about him.

The most poignant story is Remembering Be-Ins which takes place in the not-too-distant future. Two teenagers approach the balding, 70 year-old "Mr. Shapiro" and ask him what life was like way back in the far-out 1960s.

That's right. It says, Summer, 2010. Crazy.

Source:
American Splendor
cleveland.com

The Adventures of Mental-Man

Action Comics #196 (Sept. 1954)
Circulation at the Daily Planet is down, and gruff but loveable editor Perry White orders Lois Lane to create a comic strip. Now, while asking your star reporter to draft a comic strip makes as much sense as, I don't know, asking your classical music critic to start reviewing plays, the connection here might not seem odd to your average comic book reader. After all, Brenda Starr, Reporter had been a successful daily strip since 1940 -- and was even created by a woman, Dale Messick.

Of course, few knew Dalia "Dale" Messick was a woman at first, she changed her name to conceal that fact. She and Lois may have gotten along just fine. If Lois was a real person. I digress.

So, Lois sits down to write and draw a daily strip. The main character is Mental-Man, a hero with supernatural mental abilities! And he has a girlfriend named Laura Lovely, whom she draws to look exactly like herself! Good Lord! That is really ... embarrassing!


A comic strip about a superhero inside a comic book. Could have called him Meta-Man. Get it? See what I did ... there ...

Anyway.

After not too long, a real Mental-Man appears and asks Lois to marry him.

However, the entire "real" Mental-Man thing was a ruse to trick some actual villains who were planning to do bad things to the world. Working behind the scenes with Superman, Mental-Man was actually Aquaman in disguise ... because it was necessary to ... uhm ... fuck with Lois' head?

The 50s was a really bad time for superhero comic books.


Nice box.

Sources:
Various
Gay For Lois Lane

Breaking the Bank

The famous Cleveland Trust Ameritrust Society Bank Rotunda at East 9th and Euclid.

Read more about it here!
The Avengers have been wreaking havoc on East 9th Street this week. I am not talking about facelift they gave the street to make it look like Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I mean literal (fake) destruction on a massive scale.

First off they deface the historic Cleveland Trust building.

Then HULK SMASH!!!

Witnessing the devastation, this woman from Shaker Heights said,
"I think it's fantastic! It's great for the city."

This afternoon I had a lunch date downtown and did my share of rubbernecking to take the sights of big trucks, large bits of fake concrete and no Scarlett Johansson. I thought the large, explosion-dusted billboards for AussieBum swimwear were a gag. But seriously? There really is an Aussiebum?

Sources:
ComicBookMovie.com
WEWSTV5
FOX8

Brooklyn Thrill Killers

Jack Koslow, 18

Summer brings out the worst.

In the summer of 1954, four Brooklyn teenagers went on a senseless spree of violence and murder, terrorizing defenseless hobos. They beat one man to death, they beat Willard Menter, an African American, burned him with cigarettes and then dragged him for seven blocks before dumping him into the East River to drown. Several more were tortured. None were robbed. They did not know any of these people. They just fucked them up or left them to die.

These boys also admitted to horsewhipping girls in the park, and tying an old man's legs with gasoline-soaked cotton rags and setting him on fire.

None were gang members. Several were camp counsellors. They "liked athletics, played handball, swam at neighborhood pools, liked books and music." (Time, 7/30/1954)

When questioned about where they had arrived at such gruesome plots, they said they were inspired by comic books. This fact was mentioned at the Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency.

One charge was dismissed, another boy turned state's evidence. Two of the youths - Jack Koslow (18) and Melvin Mittman (17) - were sentenced to life in prison for the death of Willard Menter. The others were Robert Trachtenberg (15) and Jerome Lieberman (17).

Bizarre photo of the boys identifying the body of Willard Menter.

Sources: Time Magazine
Various disreputable websites

Wedding Bells #3

From this ...



Spicy Mystery Stories, April 1936

... to this!



Wedding Bells, June 1954

Thank you, Dr. Frederic Wertham.

On Comedians

"I should be drinking a toast to absent friends
Instead of these comedians."
Elvis Costello
My junior year was the year of comedy. Stand-up comedy. One of the main stage productions that fall at the Ohio University School of Theatre was Comedians by British playwright Trevor Griffiths. In brief, the play is about an older man who teaches an after-hours course in stand-up to working class guys in Manchester. The final exam is a five-minute routine at a local pub.

However, when the instructor’s old partner shows up, a very successful British comedian and talent agent, and announces he is scouting for new talent and will be attending that night’s event, well, that raises the stakes considerably, doesn’t it?

These two men of a certain age have differing opinions about comedy, and its uses. Morecambe and Wise vs. Angry Young Men, don’t you know. The guy in downtrodden, 1970s era Manchester, scraping his living, thinks of comedy as a time-honored art form best employed to divine difficult truths. The other gentleman is about entertainment and money -- If you can get everyone in the room to laugh at the fat kid in the front row, you win!

Also in 1988, when Tom Hanks was still willing to risk playing an asshole, he starred in the film Punchline, which might be my favorite role he’s played. A middle-aged housewife (Sally Field) is having a midlife crisis and wants to try out stand-up. Hanks' character is a moderately successful, workaday comedian, kind of a dick troubled character, and takes her under his wing.

"But doctor ... I am Pagliacci."

Comedians, it turns out, are not happy people. They are bitter, angry people. The best ones can be charming, lose themselves in the content of their “character” and who can cleverly cut down everyone around them but remain adored. Caustic, scorched earth comedians offend everyone and most often flame-out. I don't need to name them. The ones with the longest self-life are beloved, unknowable clowns. Who is Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson? Who cares, they’re funny.

That school year was also my year of graphic novels. The daily comic strip I had written during my sophomore year had been cancelled, but as a result of that experience I had begun delving beyond strips and books, and into what Art Spiegelman called “comix.”

Junior year was when I began reading Harevy Pekar, Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw, and Watchmen, an underground comic posing as a superhero book. Watchmen famously features a character called The Comedian, an psychopathic mercenary who plays the American system to the hilt, G. Gordon Liddy with the expertise, style and strength of Batman. He wears the iconic “smiley face” button that is the signature gaphic for Watchmen. It’s also his blood that gets splattered on it.

He's the Comedian. He gets the joke.

The second act of Comedians features all of the younger performers presenting their shtick. To the playwright’s credit (and the ability of the actors) the routines actually do make the audience, the actual theater audience, laugh -- or not, if they are supposed to be lackluster. All the student had been instructed carefully to look into themselves, to find the humor within. When one comedian’s work begins to flag, he starts making racist jokes which are unfortunately hilarious. Win! A team of brothers have a melt-down onstage, however, when one of them tries to pull the same thing in the middle of their act, and the other refuses to.

The final comedian, Gethin Price, is entirely balls-out bizarre. It’s more like performance art, it isn’t "funny", it’s a grotesque lashing out against the upper class. It is COMEDY. I wasn’t in this production, but I was very interested by it, read the script in advance. I had made acquaintance of the guy playing Price -- he was an O.U. Alum, a visiting artist -- and gave him a Watchmen pin I had gotten from the Uptown Mini Maul. He was thrilled, and got permission from the costumer to pin it on costume.

I like comedy. I like funny. I do not like comedians. In general, I find them to be misanthropic, mean-spirited people. And the only thing worse than a comedian is an improv comedian.

To be continued.