MY REBOOT RANT

Reboots seem to be the thing these days.  Whether in comics, movies, or TV shows, the reboots keep coming—even though the public seems to have made it clear that they don’t really want reboots!  Do it right the first time, and KEEP doing it right!  DC Comics can’t help but keep rebooting their entire line every few years, while Marvel Comics has always striven to strengthen its world’s continuity.

Reboots in the movies have Christopher Nolan to thank.  His incredibly successful reboot of the BATMAN film franchise led to everyone else thinking they could do reboots too—even when unnecessary.  Did the SPIDER-MAN film franchise really need to be relaunched?  Not really.  Most of what was good in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN could have fit in nicely with the Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN trilogy, and the things that disagreed with that previous trilogy (a new origin, a new death for Uncle Ben, a sort of bratty attitude for Peter Parker, etc.) didn’t need to be filmed at all.  I enjoyed THE INCREDIBLE HULK which, instead of just wiping away the events of the first HULK movie, just kept GOING!  Maybe it’s a reboot, maybe it’s just a sequel.  Same thing with most of the JAMES BOND movies—are the Pierce Brosnan and Roger Moore movies sequels to the Sean Connery run or are they a reboot?  I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters.  One can argue for or against the necessity of the Daniel Craig BOND reboot, but at least they waited 20 movies.  Why in the world redo something that just ended 3 years ago?

SUPERMAN RETURNS disappointed a lot of people, and it seemed to change the Superman character too much.  He left Earth for five years?  He has a son?  It was obviously intended to be the next chapter in the life of the Salkinds/Christopher Reeve Superman, which might be fine—but we weren’t done with the original Superman premise yet!  And, so, a reboot was eagerly anticipated!  However, the Superman in MAN OF STEEL is dumb, careless, sort of causes the destruction of most of Smallville and Metropolis, and puts the whole world in danger.  Thanks a lot, Supes!  Meanwhile, I just found and finished reading the SUPERMAN: MIRACLE MONDAY novel by Elliot S. Maggin from 1982.  Maggin gets it!  (He always “got” Superman!  Green Arrow too!)  The novel starts with Jonathan Kent’s worst nightmare—his son being careless and destructive!  Can we just have good comic book writers write all the super-hero movies?!?  Now, a FANTASTIC FOUR reboot is in preparation and Ben Affleck has been cast as the new BATMAN.

Though Christopher Nolan’s DARK KNIGHT Batman trilogy was well-loved and made billions of dollars, people are looking forward to a reboot.

Rebooting is not inherently bad—if you have a plan.  Christopher Nolan had a plan with BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT.  He may have rebooted from the Tim Burton and (ugh) Joel Shumacher movies, but he actually went back to the comic book basics!  (Much of BEGINS was taken scene by scene from key BATMAN comics!)  So, with the first two movies, Nolan gave us the Batman we always knew existed and had just been waiting to see realized.  The third Nolan movie, however, is an “Elseworlds” kind of future Batman story that ends Batman’s story.  And it’s also not exactly the Batman we all knew and loved.  Nolan’s Batman had two adventures and then retired for almost a decade (and yet was as injured and broken down as if he HAD been fighting criminals all that time?!?), and so I’m fine (so far) with Ben Affleck stepping into Bruce Wayne’s shoes.  Continuing with the John Blake character would not have been BATMAN, it would have been a SEQUEL to BATMAN, and we didn’t really need that yet—maybe after 20 movies.  So, like SUPERMAN RETURNS, THE DARK KNIGHT RISES was the END of a story we didn’t really want ended yet.

TV too has its fair share of reboots.  TV failed with its reboot of THE FUGITIVE a number of years ago, but it has succeeded with the more recent HAWAII FIVE-O.  It failed with an African-American version of KOJAK a while back, but it will try again soon with an African-American IRONSIDE.  Some things, like new versions of CHARLIE’S ANGELS or STAR TREK, are not technically reboots, they are really SEQUELS, which I have no problem with.  Whether bad or good, I have to give them credit for trying to keep an old friend alive.  (DR. WHO wins this prize, of course!)

Recently, I made an erroneous conclusion, but the idea still feels valid.  I thought (until I looked it up) that the word “reboot” originally meant to reset a computer to its original settings (instead of just “restart”).  I don’t know the technical term, but let’s call that kind of reset a “true” or “complete” reboot.

In a complete “reboot,” you reset the computer (or whatever) to its original settings, wiping away whatever junk had piled up on it since the beginning.

That’s what I wish DC had done two years ago with its “New 52” company-wide reboot (IF it HAD to start over, that is).  But it didn’t.  It just gave us new histories for the characters.  Histories that were not really better than the “real” histories.  And, as with the previous big reboot 30 years ago—CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS—we see that saddling your characters (and writers) with histories that didn’t really happen is like telling a complicated lie that can’t help but unravel before too long.

Marvel also attempted a “reboot” of its own a number of years ago.  It started the “Ultimate” line and brought Spider-Man back to his high school age and roots.  It was a valiant attempt, but they also failed by making the Hulk gray and Reed Richards a teenager.  (EVERYBODY knows the Hulk is green!!!)  Instead of Ultimate versions of their flagship characters and titles, it soon became clear that these were just alternate versions.  I have no doubt that if the Ultimate line had been wildly successful, the main Marvel line-up would have been closed down at some point.  Unfortunately (or, really, fortunately) the world that Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and all the writers and artists that have followed them over the last 50 years created was too good to do away with.  The foundation was too strong.

Starting with Stan, it was clear—the Marvel Universe was a tightly knit continuity and all the stories were canon.  Even the least of them, they meant something.

DC, on the other hand, seems to think its readers are stupid and that they need to be spoon-fed an “easy” line-up.  CRISIS happened because a handful of readers didn’t understand why there was an Earth-Two Superman with gray hair and an Earth-One Superman who was younger.  It’s called “Julius Schwartz was brilliant and you CAN have your cake and eat it too!”  And then, ironically, their “Post-Crisis” world got ridiculously complicated and they undid it about 5 years ago with FINAL CRISIS and then AGAIN 2 years ago with FLASHPOINT and the NEW 52!  The New 52 DC world looks to be overly complicated and micromanaged and has all the indications that it will fall under its own weight at some point in the future.  And if the stories won’t matter THEN, why should I think that they matter NOW?

In Ed Brubaker’s recent 8-year run on CAPTAIN AMERICA, he referenced minor story elements that I first read when I was 9, decades ago!  That’s awesome!  Over at DC, I have no idea how Batman could have a 10-year-old son with Talia if he met her halfway through his Batman career, a career that is now said to be five years old.

And here we come to my point.  Here is my open letter to Christopher Nolan and Zach Snyder, DC and the New 52, the guy that’s going to reboot the FANTASTIC FOUR movie franchise, and Jim Shooter or anybody else trying to reboot MAGNUS, TUROK, THE SPIRIT, DOLL MAN, or whoever: Don’t stray too far from the foundation.  The farther you stray, the less relevant YOUR version becomes!

Frank Miller did a great version of Batman in his DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, BATMAN YEAR ONE, and even his and Jim Lee’s BATMAN AND ROBIN had something—but Selina Kyle was not a hooker and Dick Grayson’s parents didn’t get shot in the head!  It’s all actually very well done, but that’s MILLER’s VERSION!  Not the real Batman.

Christopher Nolan did a great trilogy of movies—but Batman didn’t retire for a decade after only two adventures and meet Catwoman when he’s middle-aged and only fight the Joker once.  It’s a great version, but it’s only NOLAN’s VERSION!  The moment he’s done with Batman, Batman springs back to the Batman we all know.  Even little kids that grew up on Nolan’s Batman somehow know that Batman has had hundreds of adventures and fought the Joker dozens of times.

And even though Batman hasn’t worn his blue shorts for two years in DC’s New 52, people across the country and the world know that he still has them--or even if you want to give him a new costume (I will admit he looks good all in black!), don't tell me he NEVER had the blue shorts!  Not when the best Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers stories clearly show me that he does!  And Superman still has his red shorts—in Legos and other toys, children’s books, and the Halloween costumes available for adults and children alike.

And though Superman has worn a stupid mandarin collar and “armor” for the last two years in the comics, nobody in the world knows or cares.  Seriously, even Jim Lee who designed the thing can’t draw it and make it look good!  Perhaps it’s a good thing that these comics sell less than 100,000 (or 50,000! or 30,000!) copies these days, while Curt Swan’s issues reached an average of half a million readers for two decades.

When the New 52 is over, these characters will snap back to their “default” settings.  Somewhere there is a 16 year-old kid who can’t wait to, maybe ten years from now, work for DC and get rid of that stupid collar and reboot it so that Superman never had a collar or armor!  And he was also never dumb and destroyed Smallville and Metropolis in a careless battle with Zod.

And that’s also why Adam West’s campy, jokey BATMAN TV show from a couple of seasons in the 60’s still resonates with so many people—because it actually held true to the FOUNDATION of Batman!  There was the classic costume, there was Robin, there was Batgirl, there were the villains played by fantastic distinctive actors, etc.

I have three DC collections right now.  I have the pre-CRISIS classic stuff from the 60’s and 70’s (that I am buying more and more of at comic cons); I have the new stuff (I’m a sucker for keeping updated, and books like WONDER WOMAN and THE FLASH are well done and worth reading on their own merits), and then I have a whole cabinet full of post-CRISIS/pre-FLASHPOINT comics—which might as well be packed up and put in the basement.  Sure, I might want to read things like John Byrne’s revival (or reboot!) of THE DOOM PATROL and maybe a few other things here and there where I liked the talent on a particular storyline, but the rest I almost want to throw in the fire.  I would try to sell them, but I don’t think anybody wants them.  It’s not old (classic), it’s not new (fresh).  It’s just throwaway.  I feel bad for any writer or artist who did any work for DC during that whole period.  It was just a waste of time.  And when the fresh has worn off of the NEW 52, I’ll feel the same way about those too.

Is the Susan Lucci version of A CHRISTMAS CAROL your favorite?  Probably not.  And while a lot of people loved Bill Murray’s SCROOGED, that was just a fun diversion.  If you’re a movie director and somebody gives you $200 million to remake the story, you’re probably going to go back to the original book and look at the Alastair Sim or George C. Scott version.  Nobody’s going to remake the Bill Murray or any other alternate version.

Superman never had a mandarin collar, Robin’s parents were never shot in the head, Wonder Woman’s boots aren’t blue, and the Creeper was never some demon that possessed Jack Ryder’s dead body.  I know this.  Every kid in the country that watched the Bruce Timm cartoons knows this.  Why doesn’t DC?

If your version is TOO different than the foundational, classic version, then what’s the point? You might pull a paycheck right now, but your work gets thrown on the bonfire five years from now.

15 COMIC BOOKS THAT WOULD MAKE GREAT TV SHOWS

This week, the TV show MARVEL’S AGENTS OF SHIELD debuted on ABC.  A couple of years ago, that wouldn’t even be a pitch that would make it to pilot, but, after the incredible success of THE AVENGERS at the movies, it’s more than possible—it was eagerly awaited by millions of people.  Well, to be fair, they did try a NICK FURY TV movie (i.e. “hopeful pilot”) with David Hasselhoff in the title role.  Better than you’d expect, it didn’t exactly set the world on fire.  That the new show does NOT star the well-known Fury but rather a bunch of characters made up for the show (led by the Phil Coulson character who was made up for the movies) makes it even more unexpected.  It can definitely be argued that the original NICK FURY/SHIELD comic series was inspired by the MAN FROM UNCLE TV show and JAMES BOND movies of the 60’s, it’s interesting that that the concept has come full circle.

But there are some comic books that would make even more likely (and possibly better) TV shows!  Let's take a look at some of the top candidates:

THE BATMAN—This one is the biggest no-brainers of all time!  The only reason it’s not on TV right now is that Christopher Nolan didn’t want any attention diverted from his DARK KNIGHT movies.  TV shows like ARROW and SMALLVILLE show how well a comic book show can be these days.  And law and order “procedurals” are all over TV now and these would make a great template for a one-hour drama version of BATMAN.  Special effects would not be that necessary if you stuck to Batman’s costumed criminals (no shape-changing Clayface please!), and like the campy Adam West version of the 60’s, it would be great fun to see all the modern character actors portray the villains in recurring roles!  BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES showed how great a BATMAN TV show could actually be and I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing Bruce Timm and Paul Dini in charge of a live action version too!  They could even adapt the animated show’s episodes!

ROBIN—If Batman is still off limits in favor of the movies, then I would really love to see a ROBIN TV show!  It can be the Batman story from the point of view of his trainee.  Batman or Bruce Wayne wouldn’t even have to show up that often or in full view.  TV shows about teenagers and their troubles are already a great basis for almost countless TV shows, add action/adventure and it would be great!  Training and learning also make for a lot of story opportunities.  And you could still have all the great villains show up, played by the day’s most interesting actors.  And Batgirl would always be welcome too!

LOIS LANE—Along the same lines, a Lois Lane TV show would be great!  We pretty much had that with Teri Hatcher in LOIS AND CLARK, a show that never bothered with too many super-villains and only tanked when Lois and Clark got together.  In the comics, Lois starred in her own comic for 20 years and consistently outsold BATMAN, WONDER WOMAN, and almost everything else on the stands for much of that run.  A fun mix of I LOVE LUCY (hi-jinx), THREE’S COMPANY (misunderstandings), and BRENDA STARR (reporter action), LOIS LANE appealed on many levels, and a TV show could do the same.  Right after the end of SMALLVILLE, they could have easily taken the delightful Erica Durance straight into her own show.  “The Super-Hero’s Girlfriend” is a great concept and if Warner Bros. doesn’t do it with LOIS LANE, somebody else will probably do a thinly veiled copy before too long. 

POWERMAN & IRON FIST—The whole “Heroes For Hire” concept is practically made for TV!  Think ROCKFORD FILES with super-powers!  Sure, the iconic versions of their costumes might be too 70’s…but these are two characters whose costumes are not their defining aspects.  These are two super-heroes who could go “plain clothes” and not have it affect them whatsoever.  As in the comic book, you could start with Luke Cage setting up shop almost as a super-powered private investigator or bodyguard type with really down-to-earth sensibilities and then bring in Danny Rand/Iron Fist to add the fantastic and mystical to his life.  Again, the only reason this is not a TV show already is, I’m sure, because of the hopes for movie deals.

THE CREEPER—It’s funny, books often have writers as protagonists, there have been a lot of movies about movie-making, comic-books often insert comic-book creators in their stories, and one of the things that TV does best is make TV shows about TV shows!  And these are some of the best shows television has produced—THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW, THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW, 30 ROCK, and a lot of other shows about news shows or comedy shows!  Even a lot of “reality” shows seem to be the “behind-the-scenes” “documentaries” about the making of TV shows…shows they just don’t bother to make.  Jack Ryder as a newsman would make a great foundation for the “regular people” half of the show (that every super-hero story always has) and then the conceit of Ryder switching to his Creeper guise by a simple click on the wrist is right up there with Wonder Woman twirling and not the boring “I’ve got to find a broom closest to tediously remove my suit to reveal the super-hero costume I always wear underneath” sequence.  And the Creeper is just super enough to make things interesting, but not so super that the viewers would be hardpressed to suspend their disbelief every episode.  If drawn incorrectly, the bright red and yellow Creeper might look silly, but, every time I’ve seen someone dress as him at a comic con, it looks really cool!  I think the Creeper design is one that translates really well to reality.  I honestly don’t know if I would be that scared if someone dressed like Spider-Man or Batman approached me in real life, but, if the Creeper leaped out at me in a dark alley, I would run like blazes!

DOLL MAN—Yes, I said “Doll Man”!  Yahoo is starting a web series right now called TINY COMMANDO, Marvel is going ahead with their ANT MAN movie, movies like HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS and THE BORROWERS always amaze, there was even a straight-to-video movie a number of years ago called DOLL MAN with Tim Thomerson as a diminutive alien with a big gun and a big chip on his shoulder, and, of course, Richard Matheson’s THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN is a great book made into a classic movie.  The concept is fun and visual, good for comics and/or movies, but perhaps best suited for TV.  (Remember VALLEY OF THE GIANTS?)  Sure, DC could go ahead and try to adapt THE ATOM, but I think DOLL MAN is the purest example of the premise and a catchier name.  It has a touch of vulnerability to it which best conveys the dangers a tiny man might face—getting tied to an overflowing sink, stalked by a hungry housecat, being washed down a storm-swept street into the gutter, locked in a glove compartment—what have you.  I might save THE ATOM for the movies as his shrinking to sub-atomic size would call for incredible special effects and storylines like FANTASTIC VOYAGE are (no pun intended) bigger and should be rarer.

CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN—This is also a concept that could be a movie or revived as a comic book, but it just might be better suited to the TV format.  The latest revamp in the comics played with the idea that this monster and mystery-hunting team was actually a TV reality show was a good idea needlessly twisted and cluttered.  There have been a number of paranormal investigation shows on SyFy the last few years where they never actually find the monster or the ghost—how about a show that takes that concept and asks what happens when the team actually DOES come across Big Foot or Aliens, etc.?  Again, the costumes are disposable and regular clothes would work just fine, but you’re GOT to keep the core team of Ace, Prof, Red, and Rocky and their distinct personalities.

DR. STRANGE or CONSTANTINE—Yes, I know they’re prepping a DR. STRANGE movie and there already was a CONSTANTINE movie that flopped, but a mystical investigator is a concept that practically screams television!  Movies like THE EXORCIST and now PARANORMAL ACTIVITY have always been a big draw, mix them with the X-FILES format, and you’ve got yourself five years worth of stories.  If you went with DR. STRANGE, you could pitch it as a “supernatural House (or Marcus Welby or ER or any of countless other medical shows)”!  The "Blink" episode of DR. WHO is a great example of what's possible here.

THE SPECTRE—Everything I just said could apply to police Lt. Jim Corrigan and his ghostly alter-ego—except mix it with the trappings of a police procedural instead.  I would SO watch this! 

GHOST RIDER—Okay, the movie franchise has GOT to be dead by this point, right?  It’s the perfect time to reboot the concept as a TV show!  Again, plain clothes are fine and CGI can be as limited as the budget allows.  Even more suited to television than the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno HULK, the story of a cursed man traveling from town to town opens the door to countless story possibilities.  Add to that the coolness of motorcycles and the beauty of the open road through the American Southwest and you’ve got yourself a potentially GREAT series!  This time though, hire a 22-year-old blond kid to be Johnny Blaze—I’m pretty sure there might be a few of them in Hollywood.

ARCHIE—Why was this never a TV show?  SAVED BY THE BELL, 90210, GLEE, and just about every show on the Disney Channel—these all clearly express the great need and desire for a lighthearted TV show about teenagers in school and at home!  And the Archie/Betty/Veronica triangle is one of the best and most iconic set-ups in Americana!  Well, wait.  I suppose it WAS a TV show!  Red-headed teenager, his romantic ups and downs, the town malt shop, some goofy friends, wholesome 1950’s small town setting—what could be a better ARCHIE TV show than HAPPY DAYS?  But they misspelled “Archie” as “Richie.”

DEADMAN—Ah well, the same could be said about this and QUANTUM LEAP, except they added the sci fi element and different time periods.

THE X-MEN—Sure, the movie franchise is too successful to allow for a TV version, but, like BATMAN, I would rather see 100 or 200 one-hour drama episodes of this than a few hit and miss movies.  And it lends itself so well to the episodic weekly format.  A new mutant pops up in some small American town, send the core team to investigate, things explode—that’s a great premise!  As we’ve seen by MUTANT X, HEROES, and ALPHAS, the premise is quite workable on TV.  Of course, all those thinly veiled knock-offs (or homages—whatever) failed, but I would guess the original version would do much better.  Hmm…if SHIELD can be on the air at the same time AVENGERS are in the movies, why COULDN’T there be X-MEN movies AND a TV show on at the same time?

Finally, how about a STEVE DITKO show?  Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ray Bradbury have all had their own anthology shows, how about a show adapting all those twisty sci fi and spooky stories Ditko did in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s for various comic publishers?  Go ahead, TV people, I freely give you this idea!

STEVE DITKO

I’ll admit right off the bat: I’m not the biggest Steve Ditko fan.  I don’t worship the ground he walks on and I don’t agree a whole lot with his Objectivistic world view.  Some of his books I could live without.  When I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s and he did a fill-in issue of some mainstream title like DAREDEVIL or LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, I was a little disappointed that it wasn’t the regular team.

On the other hand, I love Steve Ditko!

I’m in the middle of his AMAZING SPIDER-MAN run right now (as of this writing)—again!—and I’m just marveling (no pun intended) at the intricate details of the fingers and hands he draws, the fully detailed faces of characters like the Vulture, the designs of villains like Kraven the Hunter, the way he makes Peter Parker’s face completely sympathetic with just a few lines, and above all the fluidity of Spider-Man’s movements.  AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #1 proves all this magnificently and is almost a textbook on how to make a great comic.

The simplicity of Ditko’s images belies the fact that they are perfectly laid out and tell the stories brilliantly.  This is how a comic book series should start out.

I believe in God and His plan for the world, and I think His plan extends to little things people would never normally connect.  Stan Lee and Steve Ditko bringing us SPIDER-MAN in the early 1960’s makes me think that God had His hand in the whole thing.  Like Spider-Man HAD to exist, and this was the way He made it happen.  I suppose you could say I see God’s hand in Ditko’s work.  John Romita Sr., Ross Andru, John Byrne, and John Romita Jr. could come later, but it had to start with Ditko!

But it wasn’t just SPIDER-MAN—Ditko has produced thousands of comic book pages to stagger the imagination.  (Literally!)  Ditko’s DR. STRANGE was amazing to behold!  He created new worlds of imagination.  (Again—literally!)  I think it was when I saw him reimagine Kirby’s MACHINE MAN in ‘79/’80 that I really first started to appreciate him.  When I was a kid, I saw quite a few Ditko reprints of SPIDER-MAN, DR. STRANGE, and even the old monster comics, usually with a quirky ending.  While Kirby cranked out a multitude of monsters, Ditko’s stories were usually spooky or had an alien tearing off his human-like face mask in the last panel.  (Ditko’s super-hero and Twilight Zone-y types of storytelling collided in the first Tinkerer story!)  Stories like this have recently been getting reprinted in good, hardcover oversized editions lately and they remind us what some people crank out as paycheck work is appreciated by another generation as true art.

I always liked Ditko’s hero designs.  The Creeper was always a personal favorite!  He’s so unlike any other creation.  Only Ditko would give a tough action hero—what do I call it?—a fur boa?  Who puts fur into his super-hero designs?  Ditko gave Kraven the Hunter fur too—and those are the only two major characters I can think of with fur!  Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, the Question—also all classic designs.  As I often do, I have to point out that thinly veiled versions of these characters have attained worldwide acclaim in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ WATCHMEN series and the movie based on it.

A little while back, I bought back issues of most of Ditko’s CREEPER and BLUE BEETLE runs, and I find that his writing (or plotting) was right up there with the best.  And, of course, there’s the recent argument that Kirby and Ditko were more responsible for the storylines in the early Marvel comics than the listed writer Stan Lee.  There might be some truth to that, but I feel I have to point out that the work they did WITH Lee was mostly better than any work they wrote themselves.  The argument can be made that Stan Lee was such a great writer that he could give his artist a page of plot and the end result couldn’t help but be magic.  How about if we give them ALL credit and leave it at that?

So, with all this gushing, why did I say I wasn’t that big a Ditko fan?  Maybe it’s expectations.  I wouldn’t want to see a Ditko issue of DAREDEVIL in the middle of a Frank Miller run—but I also wouldn’t want to see a Frank Miller issue of the THE CREEPER in the middle of a Ditko run!  And also, maybe his later work wasn’t quite as tight as his earlier work, just not as intricate or as electric as the earlier stuff.  Was that simply another example of a comic artist getting older?  Another example of an artist “parodying” his earlier work or phoning it in?  No, I think it was just a matter of format.  Format really matters.  Ditko’s earlier work was done on much larger art board than the later standard of 11x17 inches.  I think the newer, smaller boards just didn’t give Ditko enough room to do his thing.  This is not any kind of slam, it’s just that his work looks better when reduced more.  I remember Marvel did a few pocketbook paperback reprints back in the late 70’s, about half the size of a regular comic, and I seem to recall that the SPIDER-MAN and DR. STRANGE editions looked especially good!  Of course, the recent oversized editions also look good!  So, Ditko is a special kind of artist whose work just has to be presented properly and then it’s magnificent!  I think there are a lot of comic book artists that would look really good reprinted in manga-sized editions, and Ditko is definitely one of them.

I found an old issue of MAN-BAT drawn by Ditko in a discount box at a comic con, and I snapped it up.  That’s when you know you like something—when your first instinct is “Yes, I want that!”  Anyhow, the issue guest-starred Batman and I never thought I’d see a Ditko version of Batman!  And you know what, in every panel, Batman’s face was completely in shadow—and it worked!  Leave it to Ditko to take something that a thousand people have worked on and find a new angle.

Like music albums, I wish there were some comics that were just based on the creator and whatever he wanted to do.  If there were a John Byrne comic, I would buy every issue—or Neal Adams or Jim Starlin or maybe one or two others.  I would definitely buy a STEVE DITKO comic!  He could do whatever he wanted—horror stories, sci fi, fairy tales, any new creation he might come up with, or “covers” of established characters, especially some of the newer or independent characters we never got to see him do.  Ditko versions of Vampirella, the Shadow, the Spirit, Popeye, or Howard the Duck would be AMAZING!

As of this writing, Steve Ditko is still alive—and still avoiding the spotlight.  After four big SPIDER-MAN movies and Comic-Con a bigger event than ever, you KNOW that people are trying to get to him for interviews or appearances, yet he avoids it all.  Like J.D. Salinger and Jack Chick, there’s no photo of him online from the last 40 years.  Like them, he is (publically, at least) an American mystery.  There are stories of him though, from people who worked with him.  They paint an interesting picture.  I just read that he was/is friendlier than I would have expected from his attitude towards the press or the mercilessness of some of his characters like Mr. A.  Also, shunning the spotlight seems to be at odds with Objectivist philosophy.  Oh well, aren’t all people contradictions here and there?

I would love to talk to him about Spider-Man or the Creeper or Stan Lee or Jack Kirby or what it was like in those halcyon days when legends were forged.  At the very least, I’d like to know what he thought of Rorschach.  But he probably never even read WATCHMEN or saw the movie.

But I’ll tell you this: If I had a comic book company (and it was maybe 20 or 30 years ago), Ditko would be one of the first people I’d call.  “Do you have a character like the Question or the Creeper that you want to do?  Great!  Give me 100 stories!”  But I’d present it properly.

MARVEL MAGAZINES…THE MISSED FUTURE OF COMICS

Comic books have had their ups and downs through the years.  Distribution and formats have changed and evolved ever since the very beginning.  And the fortunes of publishers and individual comic book characters have risen and fallen since the beginning as well.  Sales of a million copies of a given issue happened during World War II, when the STAR WARS comic first came out, and when speculators drove relaunches of SPIDER-MAN and THE X-MEN in the short-lived boom of the 90’s.  But now, sales of 5,000 or 10,000 are enough to keep a comic in production and 100,000 is a big hit.

The talent has also changed through the years.  From the 30’s and 40’s when plucky teenagers who couldn’t get a job drawing newspaper comic strips settled for the wide open new world of comic books (which were really magazines), to the 50’s and 60’s when competent journeymen did their jobs and (while sometimes staid or even dull) their people looked like people and cars looked like cars, to the 70’s when Neal Adams made the industry jump a light year with his extraordinary illustrative and dynamic art style.  After Adams, anything could happen, and for a while there, it did.

Stan Lee is sometimes seen as a god among men to some and as something of a huckster to others.  What he was was a talented, quick, and inventive writer who grew up in and alongside the comics industry and by the 60’s surrounded himself with incredibly talented, quick, and inventive artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and injected new life into a fading industry.  And he became the biggest cheerleader and spokesman comics had ever seen.  And he knew what worked and he knew what was coming next.

In the mid 70’s, Marvel under, Stan Lee’s leadership, started producing comic book magazines.  THE FANTASTIC FOUR by Lee and Kirby had long boasted the masthead “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!”  But, really, it was—for good or ill—a comic.  A comic book is its own thing.  It can be called a magazine (albeit a small, thin one), or a booklet, or a pamphlet (not sure if that was ever really accurate), but, really, it’s its own thing.  Its own magical thing.  But Stan Lee thought it could be something else.  Something bigger.

In 1971, Marvel launched SAVAGE TALES, a black & white, magazine-size (about 8 x 11 inches) 64-pager that starred the likes of Ka-Zar and Conan the Barbarian.  It also had its humor magazine CRAZY, trying to take some of MAD’s audience—MAD, a very popular comic book magazine that had begun its life as a comic book in 1952 at EC Comics and switched to magazine format in 1955 and saw its sales eventually increase to 1.5 million or more, and continues to be published to this day.  Marvel increased its magazine output with PLANET OF THE APES, DRACULA, DOC SAVAGE, kung fu titles, and a CONAN magazine in 1974, which continued for more than 20 years.

This was all spawned perhaps by Lee’s desire to present more adult material and be taken seriously in the world of publishing.  (Little did he know that he was destined for icon status for his work in regular comics—the very industry he was once ashamed to mention he was part of at parties.)

When Marvel added color to THE HULK magazine and gave us the incredible full-color MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL, everything changed.  And I saw what the future could be.

Great painted covers by Neal Adams, Joe Jusko, Earl Norem, Bob Larkin, and others only added to the quality of the material and broadened the reach to the general public, adults who might feel dumb buying the latest super-hero brightly colored (and often lesser quality) monthly comics but who might be more emboldened to carry a thick magazine with a beautifully painted cover up to the grocery store or newsstand checkout.

MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL often featured some movie adaptations.  While movie adaptations seem to be the most throwaway comics these days, Marvel put some of their best talent on these and a lot of them are quite good.  But when I saw the full-color STAR-LORD story in MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL #10, maturely written by Doug Moench and beautifully illustrated by the realistic (but not TOO realistic) Gene Colan, and with rich hand-done colors better than a purely painted book, I knew the game had changed.  When Doug Moench and the Neal Adams-esque Bill Sienkiewicz gave us their masterwork MOON KNIGHT in the back of the HULK magazine, I knew what comics could and SHOULD become!  But…

It didn’t happen.

Moench and Sienkiewicz brought their MOON KNIGHT to the pages of a regular comic book (albeit it was, I believe, the first mainstream Marvel comic offered only through the direct sales market of comic shops and bypassed the Comics Code and offered somewhat more adult material than your average super-hero comic at the time).  It was good, but not as good as the magazine version.  The format was limited, the coloring flat and ordinary, and it settled into the ghetto of comic shops instead of reaching for the wide open expanses where magazines spread their wings.

Around the same time, HOWARD THE DUCK, by writer Steve Gerber and artist Gene Colan, and TOMB OF DRACULA, by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan, had both enjoyed long runs as regular comics that pushed the boundaries of regular comics and the decision was made to end both as comics and relaunch as B&W magazines—but too late.  While the great, realistic, and moody Gene Colan art still graced both, their longtime writers had moved on and the magic was gone.

With supremely talented artists like John Buscema on CONAN, Bill Sienkiewicz on MOON KNIGHT, and Gene Colan on HOWARD THE DUCK or DRACULA (or whatever came next), comics could have taken the next great step forward.  Instead they petered out.  (And comics like MASTER OF KUNG FU by Moench and great artists like Paul Gulacy and Mike Zeck might have been much better served by the magazine format as well.)  Even CONAN faltered and ended its run, probably due to the absence of John Buscema art on a lot of the later issues as well as increasingly weird or “comic-booky” covers.

The hand-done coloring and wider/larger format of the HULK magazine (and especially its MOON KNIGHT back-up feature) and MARVEL SUPER SPECIAL were a big part of the draw.  They were more in line with the European graphic novels, where these things are taken more seriously and have a broader audience.  EPIC ILLUSTRATED was also very European and maybe a little classier than its inspiration HEAVY METAL.  Some reprints of Will Eisner’s THE SPIRIT also sported hand coloring and they looked great!

Comics in the 1970’s and earlier had flat colors and were printed on cheap newsprint paper.  An upgrade was inevitable.  But instead of the beautiful hand-done colors of these magazines, American comics went the computer route.  Though vastly superior to the flat colors they replaced, they’re sometimes just a bit too slick, too full of effects, and a little too soulless for my tastes.  Coupled with super-slick paper, a lot of modern comics have a distinct garish look. And people should have learned by now—a comic with bad story and bad artwork is not saved by excessive computer coloring and effects on slick paper; it's still a bad comic…an expensive bad comic.

Marvel and DC still produce magazines these days, but they’re usually kid-oriented, with cartoonish/animation-style art and storylines that have no bearing on the characters’ lives or histories.  They are not “The World’s Best Comic Magazines”—they are throwaway.

But now might be the time to try again.  There are some incredible artists that have really entered the spotlight the last few years (mostly at Marvel).  Greg Land, Frank Cho, Leinil Francis Yu, Patrick Zircher, Esad Ribic, Steve McNiven, and a lot of others are all doing great work on old favorites and older pros like Alan Davis, Alex Ross, Butch Guice, and Bryan Hitch are better than they ever were—all of these artists would be great in the magazine format!  And legends like Neal Adams, John Byrne, George Perez, Jim Starlin, and some others should not still be toiling away on monthlies—they should have “graduated” now to doing true graphic novels.  (Like Will Eisner did.)  The other thing that has changed is the popularity and acceptance of “graphic novels” in book stores everywhere.  I put quotes around that because most of these are not really graphic novels—they are collected reprint editions of old or recent comic books (technically known as “trade paperbacks”).

I guess the format I’m hoping for doesn’t HAVE to be a 64-page, 8x11, hand-colored, stapled magazine with self-contained stories, it COULD be a 64-page, 8x11, hand-colored, perfect-bound GRAPHIC NOVEL with self-contained stories—I’m not picky!  That should cost about $10 or less and not scare off any new readers.  Unfortunately, the big companies prefer their collections of 200 or 300 pages of reprint material with a price tag of $24.99 or $34.99 (or $59.95 for hard covers!), which no one is going to spend unless they’re already familiar with the material.  When I was in France not that many years ago, I saw that their graphic novels were usually 48-64 pages with a price tag that translated to maybe $8—and they were hard cover to boot!

In a different world though (a parallel world perhaps), it was STAR-LORD and MOON KNIGHT that led the way to a new future, instead of the class-less and aggravating “New 52” and a weekly SPIDER-MAN (with hundreds of stories that don’t really matter), and beside the HULK magazine, perhaps THE FANTASTIC FOUR, SPIDER-MAN, THE BATMAN, and a few others could have also “graduated” to the more special format, with fewer stories that meant more and had a wider audience.  I’d like to visit that world one day.

INTRO

Welcome to my (I hate this word!) blog.  This blog will deal with comics in general, and even more specifically with the history of comics, great comic book creators, individual comic books and longer runs or entire series, and some comic book-related matters like movies or TV shows based on or related to comics.

I am a writer and artist on the fringes of the industry.  I’ve had a couple of jobs here and there through the years, but I’m in no way an insider. I’ve been cheated, mistreated, and had my hopes raised and dashed just enough to know that I’m good enough to get into the industry—and experienced just enough to know that the industry is at least a little crooked with new talent and more than a little careless with old pros.  So, do I WANT to be in the industry?  Maybe not—at least right now.  (Why can’t I write and draw 200 stories and stick them in a drawer somewhere?  What’s wrong with that?)  Still, I might relate a few stories from my forays into the field and some celebrity and pros meetings at various comic book conventions.

To be honest though, I have been published quite a bit outside the industry, mostly by a Christian publisher for the mission field.  One of my comics has been published over 300,000 times and is all over the world—Africa, Panama, Papua New Guinea, etc.  And a couple of other of my comics have gone over the 100,000 mark too.  My artwork (and sometimes writing) has also appeared in millions of pamphlets and teaching books as well, but we’re not here to talk about that.

I just want to talk about comics.  Everything here is my opinion, but it’s educated opinion based on reading and loving comics since the 70’s and then going backwards through much of the Silver Age through reprints and back issues.

I’m a great fan of Marvel and DC, especially their Silver and Bronze Ages, but I also grew up loving ARCHIE and RICHIE RICH too, and then moved into the Independents when I discovered THE SPIRIT magazine and Pacific Comics, et al.  I’m not an “Everything old is better!” snob though—I still read new comics, I have a number of subscriptions, and I try to go to the comic shop once a week (but sometimes miss a week…or two).

I’m not a big fan of blogs and never wanted to start my own.  However, I do have a great love affair with comics and I want to express that—I have SO much to say!

So, thank you for checking this out!  I hope you enjoy this and the many blogs to come.