Comic Books--Past and Future 2

An exchange on Facebook yesterday reminded me of exactly how I went from being a comic-book reader to being a comic-book collector. When I was growing up on Staten Island, there was a place called the Farmer's Market, a big open space under corrugated steel walls and roof, divided into stalls, that were rented out to various merchants. It was only open on weekends--Friday to Sunday. Most of the renters sold food of one kind or another, as the name "Farmer's Market" would imply. But some dealt in what now would be the stuff you find at flea markets...and one of them sold old comic-books. Not really old ones, though the proprietor did deal in those by mail, but issues from the past six months to five years, roughly. I discovered this place when I was 16, in 1968.

The owner was Bill Morse and his helper was Dave Kaler, a name I knew because he was a sometime-comics writer, notably on Captain Atom for Charlton. For about a year, I went there every Saturday (the market was about a 15-minute walk from my home) and picked up a few dollars worth of comics. (Back then, most of his recent back-issues--those about two years old or less--sold for 35 cents each; cover price in '68 was 12 cents.) Business was slow, though, so sometime in '69, Bill closed up shop.

He returned to running the business from his home....and I became one of his helpers. Every Saturday, I spent two or three hours sorting comics and keeping them in order. I got paid in comic books--three dollars worth for every hour I worked, as I recall. In 1971, Bill rented a storefront in another section of the Island, along a stretch that had become known as "antiques row". I worked there as well every weekend. Eventually, he moved the operation to Manhattan, in Greenwich Village. I continued to work for him until I finished college.

Through Bill, I met a number of young professional comic-book writers and artists, among them Marv Wolfman, Len Wein, and Paul Levitz. Those acquaintances became important about ten years later when I started writing about comics for a living.

Comic Books--Past and Future

 I spent half of my adult life as a writer, writing on a variety of topics, from office supplies and equipment to jewelry to comics and film/TV. That last was my real passion.

Oddly enough, some of that passion has waned in the past 20 years, as the nature of those two media has radically shifted--especially comics. When I first got interested in comics, as a teenager, they were truly a part of the "mass media". You could find them sold in the same stores as newspapers and general interest magazines like Life and Time and Newsweek--often on the same racks as those publications. Around the time I began writing about them professionally, that all changed: Comic books became a "specialty" product, sold (for the most part) in "boutique" environments to fans. They had moved from an impulse, casual product to a "destination" product; you no longer picked them up while you were doing other shopping, you went to a specific place to make a specific purchase.

At the same time, comics reached the culmination of a trend that had begun two decades earlier. In the 1960s, comic books were written, drawn, edited and published by people who largely had been doing that for 15 or 20 years. It was a job; for many a job they loved, but they had no real emotional attachment to it...they were journeyman craftsmen. Beginning around 1970, that changed, as people a bit older than I was, who had grown up as comics fans started to find work in the business. By a decade later, they were virtually running the business, as their predecessors retired or found that their work was no longer desired by the changing audience. It had become a medium in which fans were creating for fans.

From the beginning of my time writing professionally about comics, I found that kind of comics lacking....precisely because it was all aimed at the same target. Humorous comic books no longer sold well. Even superheroes with a "light touch" were outsold by their grim and violent counterparts. Comics were becoming "adult," it was said. I disagreed--they were becoming, to my mind, adolescent...the print equivalent of the explosion- and chase-filled movies of the same period.

I kept thinking it couldn't be sustained...that other media told such kinds of stories better. Turns out I was right. More on that another time.

Serial Issues 2

 I realized after posting my first discussion of this topic that I had left out one way of dealing with the characters and world of a continuing series--aging and changing both in real time. One of the best examples of that I can point to is Kathy Reichs's novels about forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (which, BTW, have nothing in common--save the protagonist's name and occupation--with the TV series, Bones, ostensibly based upon them). Tempe Brennan ages from her early 30s to her early 50s in the course of the novels, and the cities she works in--Charlottesville, NC and Montreal--reflect the changes in those locales over the 20 years as well.

With that oversight out of the way, let's turn to the problems of dealing with time in comic books. Traditionally, comic-book heroes remain unchanged from issue to issue, so that a new reader can pick up any issue and understand the hero and his world just from the contents of that one story. That has changed a bit in the past 30 years or so, but still the problem remains--we don't want to deal with a 60-year-old Superman. 

Actually, Superman is one of the characters least affected by all this. His origin is not specifically tied to any one real-world event. It is enough to know that he arrived on Earth as an infant about three decades ago--whether that means pre-World War One, as it did when he first appeared in print, or in about 1990, as it must today. Much of the same is true of Batman--except for one thing: It is well-established that his parents were killed, when he was about ten, on their way home from seeing a movie, most often said today to have been about Zorro. When that was first proposed about 30 years ago, the presumption was that it was a revival-house screening of The Mark of Zorro, starring Tyrone Powell. Today, it would be easy to assume it was 1998's The Mask of Zorro, with Antonio Banderas.

Other characters present more challenging circumstances. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four in 1961, they probably figured the series would last no more than a decade or so--and in that time, the readership would turn over two or three times. Instead, it has lasted six decades--and many of those initial readers are still with it today.

They tied the quartet's origin to the space race...with Reed, Ben, Sue. and Johnny sneaking onto a military base to take off in the ship of Reed's design to be the first humans to orbit the Earth. Now, with the four having barely aged in those 60 years, it's tough to figure out why there mission was so secret.

Even more troublesome is the backstory given Reed and Ben: They both fought in World War Two! In 1961, with the war only about 15 years in the past, that was believable--it meant they were each about 40 years old. But WW2 vets are now in their 90s! Reed and Ben's military service must have been in the Gulf War. Even worse is that they fought alongside Sgt. Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos--whose exploits are definitively set in that war. (The explanation of Fury's longevity and eternal youth is a tale for another time.)

And since virtually every Marvel character can date their origin and age in relation to the Fantastic Four--well, you see the problem.

Basically, Marvel just ignores it all. But I pity anyone trying to build a timeline of the Marvel Universe in the comics.

Serial Issues

 Every writer who begins writing about characters who will appear in a series of stories eventually has to make some decisions. Among them are: Will my characters age in the course of their adventures? Will the world around them change or are they permanently in the period in which they began? Every author--no matter what the genre--answers those questions differently.

Arthur Conan Doyle--although he wrote the tales of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson over a period of some 40 years, from 1887 to 1927, he largely kept their activities in the period before World War One...and, except for the idea of Holmes' retirement in His Last Bow, they remain essentially ageless. 

Another famed detective team, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (created by Rex Stout), are treated somewhat differently. Their adventures span about the same amount of time, from 1934 to 1975, and like Holmes and Watson, they remain the same ages throughout. (There are minor hints that they have aged somewhat, perhaps five years or so, in that span.) But Wolfe and Goodwin's world advances just as the real world did in those four decades. Cars become sportier and faster, New York's skyline changes, television replaces radio, the Mets replaces the Giants as Archie's favorite team.

Erle Stanley Gardner took the same tack with Perry Mason. Mason remains a man in his prime through pretty much the same period as Wolfe and Goodwin, and his world is always contemporary with the period in which the stories were published.

Yet another team, Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin, began their adventures in a comic strip in 1963 and continued there and in a series of novel and short stories from 1965 to 1996 (the comic strip continued until 2000). Peter O'Donnell keeps them essentially the same age throughout and the world around them reflects the period the stories were written.

This creates interesting problems for two of these series--the Wolfe and Blaise stories. Perry Mason's "origins" are not specifically tied to any one era or event (despite what the current TV series says). Thus nothing prevents him from having been born at the turn of the 20th Century (as he must have been in his earliest stories) or around World War 2, as the last of his stories would imply.

But Wolfe is established as having been a "freedom fighter" in his native Montenegro--at first in the period before the first World War, when the Balkans were a hot bed of various failed revolutions. Wolfe is said to be in his late teens and early 20s at that time and, as he is generally assumed to be about 50 during his career in New York, those events must have occurred around 1900. But if he is still about 50 years old in 1970, and he was 20 when he was a "freedom fighter," those events would have happened during World War 2.

And now, we have a paradox--Wolfe and Goodwin were both working for the US government during WW2, Wolfe as a special adviser, Goodwin as a major in the Army. Those events are frequently referenced in stories that take place after the war, even up to the 1970s.

A similar situation faces us when tracing the origins and career of Modesty Blaise. We're told she was a "displaced person" in the Middle East when she was, perhaps 10-12 years old. As she is in her early 20s in 1963, that would put her "origin" at about 1950, and her circumstances a result of either WW2 or the creation of Israel in 1948--possibly a little of both. But she is still in her early 20s in the 1990s...so what caused her to be a "displaced person" about 15 years before that? Well, the Yom Kippur War was in 1973, perhaps that is the catalyst. And any of the number of other conflicts between Arabs and Israelis between 1948 and the present could explain her beginnings now.

In another posting, I'll deal with problems facing characters such as Superman and Batman.

Fan Art 1

Some 30 years ago, I was very active in science fiction fandom, including writing and drawing for fanzines. As I got older and family took up more time, I drifted away from it. Then, a few years ago, I started working on some art pieces just for fun.

Here's one of the first ones I did:

Obviously, I did this before the casting of John Hurt, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whitaker. Since I still have all the individual elements I used to make this one, someday I'll have to rework it to include those three...and whoever else plays the Doctor after they do.

First Day

For those who don't know me...or haven't read my profile...my name is Patrick Daniel O'Neill, Pat to my friends. After working at a variety of jobs over the past 50 years, I decided to retire this month. I had a lot of plans for how to spend my time in retirement, most of which have--at least, for the time being--been put in abeyance by our current crisis.

Among my past careers, I was a writer. I wrote about many things--office supplies and equipment, jewelry, broadcasting equipment, and my favorites: comic books, science fiction, film and TV. So, with so much time on my hands now, I thought a blog might be a good idea. (I tried on a few years ago, but it never seemed to gel.)

What will I be discussing here? Good question. A lot of it will be simply outlining how a newly retired guy uses his time. Some of it will be talk about the things I thought would be taking my time--primarily community theater. I've been involved in it for about a decade and thought retirement would allow me more time for the various aspects of it. But, of course, our virus quasi-quarantine has closed all the theaters for, apparently, at least the next few months.

I'll also discuss films, TV, comics, and--probably--politics. We are, after all, in an election year.

At any rate, I'll find something to write about every day if I can. I hope you'll join me and comment.