Crazy

(via PZ Myers)

For the man who has everything but

What do the above images have in common? Colorist Tom Ziuko.

I used to act as Macintosh troubleshooter/repairman/tutor for Tom about ten years ago, when he lived in a tiny closet-sized apartment near the U.N. building in midtown Manhattan. When I say this place was closet-sized, I mean it literally -- I know for a fact some people who read this blog have closets larger than that whole apartment. Tom shared the apartment with a three-legged cat; there wasn't enough room in that place for a fourth leg. Tom was one of the nicest people I ever worked for, and absolutely one of the sweetest and most generous people I encountered in the comics field.

When I was looking over Tom's published credits, I was surprised by just how many landmark comics series and cult favorites he was directly involved with. Among many others and in no particular order, Tom was colorist on such titles as Mazing Man, Amethyst, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Legends, Thriller, Phil Foglio's Angel and the Ape, and John Byrne's Superman reboot. My own favorite comics work of his is the 1985 Superman Annual by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons preceding their collaboration on Watchmen. Check out that link at the start of this paragraph for more of his credits.

In spite of all his ability and all this terrific work to his name, a health crisis has left Tom in financial peril. I've donated what I can, and the only other thing I have to offer is trying to raise awareness. The comic book business has been pretty hard on a lot of people who worked on comics I loved, and pretty hard on friends of mine who were employed by it. Tom is both of those, and you'll understand I get kinda tired of watching it happen. Read this post at Daniel Best's blog and see what you think.

Also, comics scripter and letterer Todd Klein offers a post about Tom that really captures the guy.

Thundersnow

Apparently this is a thing that happens.

I'd never even heard of it before, but it's happening as I write this. In all the fearsome Pennsylvania winters of my childhood, I never heard thunder or saw lightning during a blizzard…but we just had both a few minutes ago. Awesome. And such a heavy metal name, too. This is better than Hanukkah and Christmas and the Going Forth of Wadjet rolled into one.

Heimdall

The following is posted here so as to spare myself the trouble of retyping it in lots of other places and I can just direct people here. Especially non-comics people who are trying to make sense of the contradictory and sometimes very foolish things being said on this topic. I'm far from an expert, so if you spot any mistakes please give a shout in the comments.

A few random points about this:

Yes, a character whose nickname is "the White God" is being played by someone whose skin color is not what Westerners colloquially refer to as "white." Why, that's almost as unthinkable as a Hellene referring to the Furies as "the kind hearted ones" or someone calling a very large man "Shorty."

Brown-skinned people were not unknown to the Vikings; they raided Iberia and encountered Moors. And funnily enough, Norse mythology itself features two races of gods -- the Aesir and the Vanir -- fighting and then joining forces. (Something like the Avengers/Defenders War.) There's a line in one poem that seems to say Heimdall was originally a member of the Vanir who crossed over to join the Aesir. So the notion of Heimdall being a different race is not completely unheard of.

In Marvel folklore, discrepancies between the depiction of gods in the pages of Thor and in standard Norse myth -- Marvel's Thor not having red hair, for instance -- were long ago rationalized by the explanation that the comics characters are not the Aesir and Vanir et al but their successors, reborn after the fall of Asgard at Ragnarok. Subsequent writers have probably fiddled with that explanation. (However, that thing some people are saying about "they're actually shapeshifting space aliens who took the form of Norse gods" is something else altogether and not considered to apply here.) The point is, historical considerations about what the Norse would have had in mind for Heimdall as noted above aren't strictly relevant.

Thor comic co-creator Jack Kirby also created the first African superhero, the Black Panther. After that, he tried to make sure all his comic series were racially integrated. He even wrote and drew an African-American romance comic that was never published. When he was working on Thor, I bet if you had asked him "Hey Jack, why aren't there any Black gods in Asgard?" he'd have told you "Sure there are!" and introduced one in the next issue.

And most importantly, Jack Kirby nearly died fighting the Nazis…and if you ever told him that something in a movie made out of his Thor comics was going to cause irritation and annoyance to a bunch of ignorant bigoted white supremacist assholes, he would have been delighted. He would have said "Tell me what pissed them off and I'll do it twice as much!"

Its origin and purpose still a total mystery

It's full of stars!

I can't believe this is actually real, but apparently it is. I want one but I'm afraid of what might happen if my action figures evolve to become sentient tool-using creatures. And then one day the Monolith tells me "All these toys are yours, except the ones on the top shelf of the left bookcase. Attempt no landing there." No, the danger is just too great.

(via John Gruber)

Days of miracle and wonder

Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson looks out the Cupola window bay of the International Space Station at Earth, about 350 kilometers below, sometime in September 2010. More information here and here.

Don't forget that we live in a time when this is a real thing that actually happens.

(Link courtesy Mark Bourne, whose blog Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL is always a source of great edification and information.)

Something to think about

"I see the Christian Science church already has its Christmas tree up."

"Yeah…and you notice, it's always a Christmas tree. Never a Science tree."

Costumed character

From Brooklyn to Beijing, and Into a Caldron:

Mr. Cabo favors the kind of dress inspired by turn-of-the century Chinese aristocrats: a long, black silk tunic with a mandarin collar that opens to the side and a black trilby over a black do-rag bearing Chinese characters for "dragon" and "trust." On his feet he wears black Dr. Martens boots.

One early Sunday morning, while commuting to work by subway, he explained his look. His attire communicates his respect for Chinese culture, he said, but it also has a more practical function. Because angry Chinese parents do not knock before barging into his office, when they see him behind his desk in the fashions of yesteryear they are momentarily flabbergasted.

"It gives me time to think," Mr. Cabo said as he walked through the crowd. At 6-foot-3, he appeared nearly a head taller than almost everyone around him. "Plus, they’re going to stare at me anyway," he said.

Recently, a 4-year-old started crying in fright at the sight of him. "I’m a little afraid to talk to you, because you’re black," a parent said to Mr. Cabo, who speaks fluent Mandarin.

From the New York Times, November 3, 2010.

He comes from a distant place. He's not like anyone else around him, and though he tries to fit in to a certain degree he is always apart. He's assumed to have special powers and abilities because of his alien heritage. He wears a distinctive outfit for psychological advantage, to evoke a specific response in the people he deals with. I don't say that Paul Cabo is heroic…but he may have more to tell us about what it would feel like to be a costumed hero in real life than you'll find in Watchmen or the works of Ellis or Millar.

(And if only he were an ex-hitman instead of a former Starbucks manager, the whole story would be like a sequel to Ghost Dog.)

Birthday honors

As ever, birthday greetings on this unusually fine day to Adam at The Blue Meanies Are Coming! and Becca at No Smoking in the Skull Cave. May the birthday elves leave every gift you want underneath the birthday tree...while birthday revelers dressed in their traditional costumes as Katy Perry, James Carville, and Helen Reddy knock on your door to offer you birthday candy and treats…and in the evening, birthday fireworks light up the skies and make your neighbors gasp in surprise and cheer the anniversary of your birth. Or however you do the whole birthday thing where you are.

How interesting that two of my favorite bloggers just happen to have birthdays on the same day. I mean, what are the odds?

For me, it's the day I apologize yet again to my mother for having caused her inconvenience one day many years ago. But as she points out, she didn't have anything better to do that day.

Lost weekend

photo by Rich Johnston

I feel a bit funny here without my initials -- they've been with me so long -- but it was time to let them go. They served their purpose, and I was getting uncomfortable with people actually calling me "Rab" (or sometimes, strangely, "Rob") in real life. It's time people know me not merely as an acronym but as the fellow who edited that book, and then that other book, and then wrote a book, and that comic that never came out and another one that did a long time ago.

Anyway, so yeah…NYCC 2010 went by in a blur of about ninety million people. That's the figure they announced, right? I'm prepared to believe it. For the first time, I feel like I missed a convention while actually attending it, mainly because the crowds kept you from walking the show floor freely. Most of my time wound up spent behind the Sequart table, plus an excursion to the world premiere screening of Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods on Saturday evening and helping out at the Q&A session for the film at the con the following day. If you were there at the convention panel, did you notice how the lights went off when they showed clips from the film and back on when they were done? That was me. Pushing the light switch.

I still maintain a table can be the best way to see a convention -- just stand there and let everyone come to you -- but this time it didn't work as well. I hate to say this, it really goes against the grain philosophically to sound elitist…but NYCC may have to consider adding a fourth day, and making that extra day for industry and trade people, including librarians and teachers and press. For people who are working during the con, those early hours on Friday before the doors open to the public might end up being the only chance they have to see the rest of the con (as it was for me). And really, the definition of "professional industry person" is becoming so diffuse, it's not so elitist as it might once have been. It still rankles to make the suggestion. I come out sounding like the guy who's just got in, trying to pull the ladder up behind him. But it may have to happen.

Overall, Sequart had a really good con, including the aforementioned film debut. The company launched two books at the con, my own Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen and a pre-release convention beta edition of the Gotham City 14 Miles anthology. Both sold out during the con. The Watchmen book sold out before the first day was over. The copies that Sequart expected to last the entire three days of the con went in less than a day. Finally we had to reserve two copies as display copies marked "sold out, please order online" so that prospective customers would have something to pick up and flip through at the table. And we did have people saying they'd come looking for the Sequart table specifically because they'd heard of this book and wanted to buy it. Amazing.

One factor that may have fed demand was a curious gap or omission I noticed at the con. Last year NYCC took place just before the Watchmen film opened, so the merchandise was everywhere. Toys, costumes, the works. This time, virtually no new Watchmen merchandise to be found. One costume merchant was selling Rorschach-style fedoras, with accompanying mask; you could find action figures at a steep discount. Not much else. Surely people didn't stop liking Watchmen just because the movie came and went? Having liked it for 25 years already? But that's how media marketing works. This time, because no one had any motive to generate false demand for it, Sequart had the market cornered for people who genuinely still wanted to know about Watchmen.

(If you're also one of those folks, Minutes to Midnight is not yet listed on Amazon but is now available on Lulu. I'll be sure to mention it when the Amazon link arrives.)

At the con, we also worked out what my next two projects for Sequart are going to be, so I've got a nicely packed schedule over the next several months. More as this story develops…

No cause for alarm

Monty Python - Airplane Pilots - watch more funny videos

Despite the title, the above video is not actually Monty Python, but comes from a television special called How To Irritate People starring three future Pythons and produced by David Frost. Though I didn't know it until recently, I was watching when it aired in the States back in January 1969. Funny thing: this very sketch was a huge joke in my family for many years after this brief exposure…but for all this time none of us could remember where we had seen it. Every once in a while, something like this gets stuck in our memory and become a huge part of our personal mythology. Who can say why, or what significance it may come to have later on?

So, yes, six months. No cause for alarm. I'm not quite ready to start blogging again, but there's some news I've been sitting on for way too long and I've been dying to share it with everybody. You may already have read about it here or here or here, but the official word is here.

The book is Minutes To Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen. 184 pages, $19.95 cover price, a dozen genuinely terrific essays about Watchmen in print and on screen inside, and my name slapped on the cover purely for being in the right place at the right time. Available this October from fine vendors of printed graphic storytelling everywhere, as well as through Amazon and Lulu.

A couple of the contributors may be folks you know by different names; a couple of them are just on the verge of becoming prominent; and a couple of them are such big names you'll be asking yourself "What kind of dirt does Richard have on these people that they'd be willing to write for him?" I can't figure it out myself. But they all did an outstanding job. Unbelievably, all of them found something worth saying about Watchmen 25 years after it was published. You'd have thought there was nothing new left to say. I did too. We were wrong.

Minutes To Midnight will be launching at NYCC this year -- as will the documentary film Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods directed by one of our contributors -- so it promises to be a wild ride in October. If anyone reading this is going to be at NYCC, let me know in comments or via e-mail so I can pencil you into my timetable...!

I'm also more than happy to answer any questions you may have about the book. Or anything else, really!

Verbatim

My mother, yesterday afternoon: "Do you hear someone drumming?"

I listen for a moment and say, "Yeah, I hear it too. There's someone playing drums in the park across the street."

"Oh good," my mother replies. "For a moment, I was afraid I was turning into the Master."

*

Woman talking on cellphone at 1st Street and Second Avenue:

"And she said girl, your face is red, your eyes are glassy, and you're swaggering. And I said whoa! what do you want from me?"

*

A sighted woman and a blind man are walking down Lafayette Street towards the Astor Place Tower.

The woman says "I wish you could see this building."

The man says "I don't need to see it. I can hear it. It sounds terrible."

A very short story

When I was ten or eleven -- sometime during the year before my family moved to New York City -- I have a vivid memory of a substitute teacher coming to my class and, in lieu of a lesson, reading us The Laughing Man by J.D. Salinger.

Which, if you know the story, was a profoundly weird thing to do.

A holiday message from Kamandi

Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, would like to wish everyone in the United States a very traditional, utterly conventional, and totally unremarkable Thanksgiving dinner.



And should this be the case, Kamandi would very much like to spend Thanksgiving with you instead of the mutants next year.

The jungle lord

The following was written at the behest of pillock, who asked to see it, in connection with Andrew Hickey's revisionist Pop-Drama Manifesto. This piece also combines elements from two of my favorite films.

Some of what you've heard is true.

In 1890, the British Colonial Office dispatches a young nobleman and former Army officer named John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, to investigate reports of forced labor conscription of natives by a rival colonial power. Clayton departs for Africa with his bride of three months, the former Alice Rutherford, intending that they present themselves as wealthy idlers whose family owned a rubber plantation there before the colony changed hands in 84.

The couple never reach their destination. Following a mutiny aboard their ship out of Sierra Leone, Lord and Lady Greystoke are put ashore at a remote spot on the coast. Rather than following the coastline, the couple head inland in hopes of reaching a Christian mission, because the pregnant Alice urgently needs medical attention. The mutinous ship is attacked and sunk before its crew can reveal the Claytons were spared rather than killed in the mutiny, so a search never takes place. Husband and wife are never seen again.

In 1902, a lone survivor from the lost ship emerges to describe how John Clayton had saved the life of the black sailor who subsequently led the mutiny. Putting the Claytons ashore was meant to protect them, not further endanger them. (An allegation that the ship's captain may have been employed by the rival power Clayton was sent to investigate can neither be proved nor denied.)

The following year, heir presumptive to the Greystoke estate William Clayton mounts an expedition to learn the fate of his long-lost Uncle John and Aunt Alice. Joining this expedition is Professor A.Q. Porter of Baltimore, with Porter's sixteen year old daughter Jane serving as caretaker and factotum to her naturalist father. Finding no trace of the Claytons on the coast, the party moves inland. Very much further inland, they find a secluded village. Among the villagers they're stunned to see a twelve year old boy, in all respects a normal member of his tribe…except for his distinctly Caucasian skin color. The boy is nearly as surprised: he's never seen any albinos other than himself before, but now several show up all at once!

Through their interpreter, Clayton and Porter hear an outlandish story of hunters from the village discovering a female gorilla trying to nurse a hungry newborn human baby. Bringing the infant back to their village, one of the hunters and his wife raised the boy as their own. Going by the child's apparent age, William Clayton works out what anyone would at this point: Alice apparently gave birth to a child in the jungle. This boy may well be William's cousin, the true heir to the Greystoke estate.

The interpreter explains to the villagers that William is the son of the brother of the boy's father, and wishes to bring the boy to his family home. As soon as the boy hears this, he flees into the jungle. The albinos want to buy him from his family? He won't go! The expedition tries to lure him back, but he stays hidden. Finally, after much effort, they're obliged to give up and leave. As they make the long journey back to the coast, the expedition are aware of the boy tracking them the whole way. They continue trying to coax the boy, but they've misunderstood his motives. He's not watching them leave with ambivalence: he just wants to make sure with his own eyes that they're gone and won't come back.

Sometime around 1906, a scruffy vagrant youth is spotted in fishing towns and shipping ports along the coast. He's sometimes dubbed "the white savage" and sometimes other, less benign names. Over the next couple of years, he picks up bits of spoken German and English and French and Dutch from sailors, though he remains illiterate. The boy watches black workers driven past the point of collapse by white bosses, as their forced labor builds railroad lines connecting the ports to the plantations of the interior. Finally he hops aboard a steamer heading across the Atlantic, working his passage as a deckhand.

On the crossing to America, the boy becomes the responsibility of Julius, an old merchant sailor. Julius outfits the boy with an old Navy coat for the approaching cold weather. It's the first winter coat the boy has ever worn. He's overawed. Seeing the boy parade back and forth in his big coat with the brass buttons, admiring its finery, Julius mutters an affectionate insult in Hebrew -- "tarzan," which means a dandy or a toff. From then on, "Tarzan" becomes the boy's nickname aboard ship.

Apart from his new coat, Tarzan has only one other possession. He keeps it hidden away, but pulls it out to examine when no one else is watching. It's a piece of paper given to him by the ugly albino girl during her well-intended but futile attempt at teaching him to read. Although he still can't read, Tarzan knows -- because the ugly girl told him so -- this slip of paper holds the location of the ugly girl's home. And she can tell him where he came from.

*

John Clayton, the Viscount Greystoke, and his wife Jane arrive in New York City at the start of the Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age. Art Deco. Prohibition. Speakeasies. Bootleggers. Gangsters. Babe Ruth playing for the Yankees. The music of Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bessie Smith. Clayton loves the towering buildings and the lights and the sights and the sounds. It's like he can see the future being assembled before his eyes.

The Claytons are hailed as celebrities. At age 21, John Clayton -- not yet granted his inheritance and needing some quick cash -- sold the story of his African childhood to a writer in Chicago. The tale became a magazine serial and then a series of popular books. The arrival in New York of a titled young English nobleman with money would be exciting enough; the arrival of the real-life Tarzan is an absolute sensation.

When Benjamin Franklin was the American Ambassador to France, he affected shabby clothes, a fur cap, and a folksy demeanor. The French ate it up. Playing to their lowest stereotype of a simple country bumpkin, Franklin conned the pants off the French aristocracy. John Clayton does something similar, playing at being "Tarzan the jungle man" for the crowd while leading a refined upper class lifestyle. He's the urbane and debonair "natural primitive" in fine tailored suits. His looks and charm make Clayton a hit in society.

But inwardly he's seething. The book based on his childhood left out his adoptive family and his entire village in favor of claiming that he was raised by apes, because readers would more readily accept a human raised by apes than a white boy raised by blacks. Raised by apes! The sequels were spun from whole cloth: Clayton is sickened to hear of his fictional alter ego becoming the king of "savage black cannibals" who he calls "my children."

The racism of the sailors and bosses he saw in the port towns as a boy barely prepared John Clayton for what he's seen since then. Lynchings. Race riots. Cross burnings. Men in white hoods. The persecution of immigrants and trade unionists in the Red Scare. Perhaps Julius could have explained it, but Julius was killed by a lynch mob in 1915 while traveling through the South.

Jane Clayton shares her husband's views. The Porter family had been abolitionists and freethinkers, and Jane's mother a suffragist. Jane no longer seems ugly to John. Now that John has finally come into his long-delayed inheritance, the couple move to New York City to advance their hidden social agenda.

(His cousin William Clayton would readily sympathize with his disdain for the Tarzan novels. They made him out to be a cowardly buffoon grasping to keep his wrongful inheritance, then killed him off. In fact, William had urged John to claim his full due, and stayed on to manage the estate after the courts declared John the rightful heir. William was also surprised to find himself cast as Jane Porter's jealous fiancé, when in reality he belonged to the Order of Chaeronea. He chose not to sue the author.)

In August of 1920, John Clayton is among the audience of 25 thousand seeing Marcus Garvey at Madison Square Garden. Some alongside Clayton in the audience know him only as the racist Tarzan of the books, and don't know what to make of his presence at the rally. Neither does John Hoover of the government's Bureau of Investigation, whose agent spots Clayton there while keeping watch on Garvey. Clayton is vexed when Garvey has himself named "the Provisional President of Africa" but nonetheless is deeply moved by the rhetoric, and shares Garvey's rage at the current state of things.

The wealthy white nobleman is a black nationalist, ardent anticolonialist, and clandestine backer of African native uprisings. He's a foe of Gandhi for his support of the British against the Zulus in the Bambatha Rebellion. Spied on by Hoover. Pursued by Garvey. He wouldn't use guns, but he's no stranger to hunting with knife and spear. In his exploits, Tarzan becomes the nemesis of rumrunners and racketeers and slumlords and feds alike.

And then, in 1924, the Klan marches into Tarzan's city to support their candidate for President of the United States…

Without boulders

Recently, Mark Evanier wrote:

"The story was that Woody Allen had been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones and had handed in an unusable script that was essentially a Honeymooners episode set in the stone age. Among the things wrong with it was that it presumed the limited-animation Barney Rubble was capable of an extended pantomime scene a la Art Carney, and that it was all set in one room for the entire half hour. This never happened and Joe Barbera even told me it had never happened...but a lot of people believed it."

Apparently I have better show business connections than Mark, because after some time and effort I was finally able to get hold of Woody Allen's long-lost story for The Flintstones. It's not exactly as it was originally described to Mark, but it's easy to see why Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were ultimately forced to pass on it. Despite its shortcomings, I'm very glad to present this rare document for the first time.

*

There's this old joke: these two elderly dinosaurs are talking, and one says to the other "My brother's crazy, you know. He thinks he's an archaeopteryx." And the other dinosaur says "Really? Why don't you take him to a doctor?" And the first one says "I would, but we need the eggs…even though archaeopteryx eggs are gritty and tasteless."

That's pretty much how I think relationships are like dinosaur eggs: we need them, even when they're hard to swallow.

*

I was born in the Jewish neighborhood of Bedrock, in a house built directly underneath the Pterodactyl ride at Coneyrock Island. Which I think accounts for my personality: to this day I can't shake the feeling something traveling very fast is going to swoop down on me from above. It was here that I first began to contemplate the inhumanity of the modern stone age family.

At the age of nine I fell into a profound existential crisis, the roots of which I tried to explain to a doctor summoned by my nonplussed mother. "Why are there all these dinosaurs around?" I asked him. "What is this, the late Cretaceous era? The early Triassic? How can there be hominids coexisting with dinosaurs? We shouldn't even be in the same epoch!"

"So we're coexisting. Everybody's getting along peaceable. This is a bad thing why, exactly?" The doctor turned to my mother, puzzled.

"It's something he read." My mother turned back to me in exasperation. "How is this your business? Take your chisel and stone tablet and finish your homework!"

*

When I got home last night I found a message from my ex-wife Betty on the answering bird saying I was behind on alimony payments. Maybe my payments would last longer if she didn't take in so many extra mouths to feed; I don't know who told Betty it was her duty to adopt underprivileged cave children from every nation. When we were together, it was just the one boy.

It's funny, I remember how nervous she was about adopting a child for the first time. "I heard the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine gossiping about it last night. They talk to one another when they think no one else is listening," Betty said.

"In fairness, a baby woolly mammoth on wheels and a pelican with a beak full of soapy water probably don't have that much else to talk about," I answered. "I don't understand why we have to have so many gadgets in the first place."

"Well, pardon me I should want just a taste of the good life! After all, the Jetstones have a robot maid to do their chores."

"The Jetstones do not have a robot maid. What the Jetstones have is a velociraptor with a metal pot over its head that they call a robot, just to make everyone think they have all the latest conveniences up in that treehouse of theirs. Besides, what kind of name is Jetstones anyway? What does that even mean? And don't get me started on the way their daughter runs around in that skimpy outfit with the bare midriff -- "

"Their daughter Judy? What about her? Is there some reason you should notice what a teenage girl is wearing?" Betty's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

*

Our son moved to Rock Orleans a few years ago to pursue his career as a celebrity chef. He isn't speaking to me anymore. To be honest he wasn't the most articulate of children, so it was hard to tell. But I knew deep down he had never forgiven me for taking up with his former girlfriend. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants.

Pebbles was the daughter of my next-door neighbor and the childhood sweetheart of my son. I could remember a time when her greatest intellectual pursuit was reaching into a bowl of dinosaur pudding and rubbing it into her hair. Eventually she left home to attend Stoneford University. After graduating summa cum laude, she returned to Bedrock with a degree in Pleistocene philosophy and a figure worthy of a Penthouse Pet Rock of the Year.

We had an argument after Pebbles attended the funeral of her Grammy Slaghoople, a fact which I found deeply arousing. I always associate arguments and funerals with sex, probably because I've been ejected from all three for not having the correct ticket. Anyway, Pebbles was leafing through an issue of New Rockpublic in bed while I smoked a Winstone cigarette and mused. "Bedrock. New Rock City. Rockville. Rock Vegas. Rock Angeles. Haven't you ever wondered what's behind this mania for adding 'rock' to proper names? It's anti-semitism, that's what it is."

"What? How can it be anti-semitism? Anyway, Prinstone doesn't have 'rock' in its name. Neither does Sand Simeon."

"Aha! That just proves my point!"

Pebbles sighed. "Is this going to be another one of your things? You always find something trivial to obsess over as a way to avoid facing your fear of success. Sigrock Freud says that -- "

"Sigrock Freud? Really? I mean, do you even listen to yourself?"

"Don't get so worked up. Remember what daddy said about watching your stress levels."

"Your father should talk. At the rate he pounds back those bronto burgers, he's going to be extinct a few years before the rest of us."

*

As it happened, Pebbles' father was also my best friend. Our friendship survived not only my involvement with his daughter, but also his increasingly strong conviction that he was being followed everywhere by a small, invisible green man from another world whose sole purpose in life was to subject us to constant scorn and verbal abuse that only he could hear. He was completely psychotic, but a good man.

We were heading home after a meeting of our lodge -- or as I liked to think of them, the Ku Klux Klan with fur hats. I'm not saying the Water Buffaloes were intolerant, but if the Grand Poobah of Lodge 26 ever found out I was circumcised, he would invite me down to Slate's gravel quarry late one evening for a friendly chat. Shortly afterwards, small portions of me would be evenly distributed among every driveway in the town of Bedrock.

"Barn, that little girl of mine is her own woman," Fred explained. "It's not my place to get involved in a quarrel between you. Oh, and Gazoo says to tell you you're a microcephalic dum dum whose grasp of interpersonal dynamics is facile at best."

"Whatever you say, Fred." I sighed. "But I still can't help feeling the whole concept of Neolithic tool-making hominids domesticating Mesozoic era dinosaurs is inherently self-contradictory."

"Not that again? Look, I may just be an ordinary working class Apatosaurus operator, but I know the fossil record is incomplete by its very nature. Our picture of mass extinction events is necessarily limited, so we can't rule out the survival of certain dinosaur species. After all, Darwin said -- "

"Darwin?" I shouted. "You don't know what you're talking about! I just happen to have Charles Darwin right here, and he says we can't possibly exist!"

With that I pulled Charles Darwin from his hiding place behind a nearby movie poster. "I heard what you were saying, young man, and you know nothing of my work. Indeed, your very existence contradicts all established scientific fact!"

Boy, if the stone age were only like this.

Content advisory

Well, that was a month. It's going to be a little while yet before I can resume blogging. But I did want to mention that if you're not already completely burned out on articles about the Disney/Marvel deal, this is the one to read. Bob Iger's connection to comic book history will blow your mind if you haven't heard it already.

Also, the top of this post features an overview of the best reporting so far on the topic. A lot of silliness is being spoke on this subject, but these two links will not steer you wrong.

I form a tactfulness merely to carry out to another tactfulness

I don't know. You try to write something that conveys all the ambivalence and conflicted emotions brought on by the death of someone who loomed large in your personal mythology, you wrestle with irreconcilable desires for honesty and discretion, you lay the result before your readers despite its many shortcomings...and then someone else comes along and turns it into a work of genius.

Maybe from now on I should just run all my writing through whatever produced that.

The headless men all doff their hats

When I wrote the previous post I had a feeling I'd be writing this one soon afterward, but it happened a bit sooner than I expected. If I were in the habit of tagging my blog posts, I'd probably have to label both of these "brushes with fame" or something like that.

It's been very strange to see all the media coverage for the death of Frank McCourt, because I spent three years in his class, probably somewhat longer than most students. He was my English teacher in the sophomore year of high school. The following year, I sat in on his class unofficially while skipping an especially boring math class. (Yes, I cut a class only to attend another class. That's the kind of place Stuyvesant High School was.) In senior year -- while making up the missed math class with a different teacher who was not boring -- I took his writing class. If you add in that one time he was a substitute teacher during my freshman year, Frank McCourt was a constant presence throughout the whole of my high school education.

Going back even further, he was part of the reason I wound up attending that particular high school, despite its reputation as an "elite" math and science school with no emphasis on the humanities. This turned out to be complete nonsense -- shielded from excessive meddling by administrative indifference, the History and English departments at Stuyvesant were up there with the finest in NYC; hobbled by micromanagement and constant pressure on the faculty to produce prizes and awards, the Math and Science departments were a mess -- but I had no way of knowing that in advance. What won me over was getting a copy of the school science fiction magazine, for which McCourt served as faculty advisor. If a New York City public high school had its own student science fiction magazine, that had to be the place for me.

(In fact, that particular issue even had a four page comic strip satirizing McCourt himself, written and drawn by a student named James Fry. James and I didn't get to spend much time together when I got to Stuyvesant, two years behind him, but we became close cronies when we both worked at Marvel Comics a few years later. But I don't remember if I ever told him about seeing that satirical strip or what an impact it had on me...)

If you'd asked me at the time, I'd probably have told you I kept going back to McCourt's classroom because I was going to be a writer, and he was a writer. Even if he was unpublished, he could tell you all you needed to know about being a writer. When I got to be a little less pretentious, I'd have said I kept going back because he was so entertaining: full of darkly humorous tales of his grim boyhood in Limerick, always ready to turn the class into a freewheeling discussion of whatever struck our fancy, never bound by whatever he'd told us we were going to be doing the previous day. But if I'm brutally honest, I always knew the real reason I kept going back to his class year after year was that I'd discovered early on you didn't need to do any work to get by in his class. You could always distract him, or get him talking about something else, or make an excuse, and he'd never push back or make a fuss. I was just incredibly lazy, and that's no reflection on him...but I never thought much of him as a teacher, and to be honest I still don't.

Please understand, this isn't some lingering bitterness speaking; I didn't have some grudge against McCourt that I've been nursing for all these years because he savaged my masterpiece, dashed my hopes and dreams, or anything like that. I don't recall we ever had any problems, and he was as encouraging about my writing as he was for any other student alongside me in his class.

Where McCourt excelled -- and I don't mean this as dismissively as it may sound -- was in playing the role of a writer for his students. For students who wanted to be writers, he was the embodiment of that world, a living gateway to the patrons of the Lion's Head and the White Horse and all the other two-fisted literary hangouts (i.e., bars) of New York. That life was tantalizingly within reach so long as he was in front of us, even if at the time it was almost as notional for him as it was for us.

I wonder how many of his former students were as stunned as I when Angela's Ashes was published? That was sixteen years after I graduated high school and I certainly never expected to see his name on the cover of a book. He and his brother Malachy had written a comical two-man play about their childhood in Limerick and I'd seen them perform it, but I expected that would be as far as things ever went. Surely he was destined to be just another of those sad figures at the bar, talking about the great work they were going to write someday, or would have done if life hadn't got in the way. And then suddenly he was at the White House, more than once, and winning a Pulitzer.

It's very odd when someone you knew as a regular person becomes a celebrity, and then becomes a crazy international mind-blowing celebrity consorting with heads of state and royalty. I've probably had more than my share of experience with this. (Is it normal to have known two people who went on to win Pulitzers for literature? Why, Lord, have you blessed me so?)

Because Frank McCourt's subject was himself, everyone who's read his books feels as if they know him. They don't; they know a version of his life that he rehearsed and refined and pared down for dramatic impact and maximum charm. He did know how to get through bad times on little more than charm...and that's certainly one respect in which I've tried to copy him over the years. He could be sarcastic and disdainful and ungenerous in his opinion of others. But you didn't forget the things he said. I certainly haven't.

Mr. McCourt, I know I left class owing you an essay or two. Sorry this one was so late.

Everything you see here was as it happened that day

My dad met Walter Cronkite once.

It was very shortly after the episode of Mary Tyler Moore in which Cronkite made a guest appearance as himself. That episode aired in February 1974, and this would have been no more than a few weeks later. Cronkite was visiting someone at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, where my father was working at the time. My dad saw Cronkite in the elevator and said "Mr. Cronkite, if you're willing to shake Ted Baxter's hand, you should be willing to shake mine." Cronkite laughed, and they shook hands.

Look, I didn't say it was an exciting story. But it's the only story I have about Cronkite, and I won't have any other occasion to tell it.

My family had only just moved to New York City a couple of months earlier...and on the basis of this incident, I probably assumed meeting national celebrities was just something everyone took for granted here. Like it happened so often that it wasn't even worth mentioning. Actually, that last part turned out to be true.

The most apt memorial writing I've read is Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did. The increasingly pompous Brian Williams in particular is the new Ted Baxter. In his self-congratulatory reminiscences you can hear an echo of those booming stentorian tones: "It all began at a small 5000 watt radio station in Fresno, California..."