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To Be Continued #18
Odds and Ends A couple of weeks ago, I asked you guys to send me your choices for comic books I should be reading. Thank you. Now stop it. Minus duplications, I've received over 300 different suggestions, so far. I'm either going to have to cull the list or hit the lottery. I'm working on it. More to come. Colorist supreme Greg Wright e-mailed me shortly after my recent Christopher Priest/Jim Owsley column, he had some observations of his own: "Upon meeting him, I was struck by his hair. He once had a James Brown/Al Sharpton thing going on. And, unlike every other editor at Marvel, Jim wore a suit. A nice suit, not some worn out piece of crap. And Jim seemed to be the only one who was acting like being an editor was a real job. He took it seriously. And then there was his office. No cluttered up junk den for the Owz. No sir. He had his own slick furniture in there. His office reflected a sense of professionalism. And he made his assistant wear a tie. And he was always cool to me. Even when I was a punk glorified secretary/editorial assistant at Epic. Owsley suffered the same fate as anyone who cared too much about doing the job from the heart. He was labeled trouble by those who didn't get it." I recently received an enormous box of foam peanuts from Another Universe. I assume the book I ordered is in there somewhere but I haven't found it yet. I'll let you know… Department of Gratuitous Plugs To celebrate the release of his new graphic novel collection: Blackjack: Blood & Honor (which you should already own several copies of), writer/publisher Alex Simmons is having a super signing event at New York's Jim Hanley's Universe (14 West 33rd St., between 5th Ave. and Broadway) on Wednesday, February 23 from 4-7 PM. Scheduled to appear, ready to sign all the books you're going to buy are: Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, Ray Lago, Chris Cross, Rob Stull, Louis Small, Jr., Steve Ellis, Cesear, Jerry Craft, Don McGregor and of course, Alex himself. If New York area To Be Continued… readers don't mob the place, it'll make me look bad. Department of Graft Rob Schmidt sent me a free copy of his very well-intentioned indy comic, Tribal Force, so I'm mentioning it here. Going back a couple of items, to reiterate and clarify: I didn't receive a box of foam peanuts from another universe (as interesting an occurrence as that might have been). I received a box of foam peanuts from a store called "Another Universe." As it turns out, my Legion Archive was in there, too. Because my brother just got a DVD player and because I'm a couple of hundred words short this week, I thought I'd reprint part of a pertinent article I wrote a while back for a sci-fi column I used to do: WARNING: If you haven't yet seen The Matrix, tread carefully, all right? Don't say I didn't warn you. I used to write comic books for a living and if years of precipitously dropping sales weren't enough to depress me, I had to go sit through The Matrix, only the most recent of a spate of "comic book movies" that're way more enjoyable than your average actual comic book. Just shortly before the Earth finished cooling, when I was but a editorling at Marvel Comics, I was taught comic books' main advantage over movies was that "comics have an infinite special effects budget." For what it's worth, I thought our main advantage was an interplay of prose and pictures unique to the medium. The argument, such as it was, is now moot. See what happened is, the movies finally caught up to us visually. It's pretty clear now that any image you can think up can be done on film. All I could think of, watching folks leap through the air from building to building and running up walls and swinging from ropes in front of explosions is this: This may actually look cooler than when Ditko was drawing Spider-Man. Okay, it ain't as cool as Kirby yet but give them a couple of years. I hereby pronounce big, dumb action as a comic books' raison d'être, dead and buried. It is now the proper province of 100 million dollar-plus movies. Mainstream comics better find something else to do, before everybody's got a DVD player. Meanwhile, some very quick thoughts on The Matrix. Yes, it is very much like Ghost In The Shell but has anybody noticed how much the plot mimics the origin of Marvel Comics' Dr. Strange? I guess the comic-bookness of the affair shouldn't surprise me. I know at least one of the Wichosky brothers (co-creators of The Matrix), wrote some damned good Hellraiser comics for Marvel (Ahem, I wrote some stories in the same crossover. I'll be expecting my 100 million dollar movie to be along presently. I'm waiting…). The most pleasant surprise, though, is that the much ballyhooed "secret of The Matrix" pays off as one of the coolest evil plans to take over the world I've ever seen. Go figure. On the other hand, human beings make really crappy batteries. Everybody repeat after me, the value of a battery is not how much current you can get out, it's how efficiently it stores the energy you put in. Humans store energy only slightly more efficiently than a hot towel. Especially really skinny humans like Keanu Reeves. One last thing, filmmakers, if any conceivable variation of the phrase, "We're not in Kansas anymore" is anywhere in your script? Cut it. Really. It was barely amusing in the Wizard of Oz. Okay, that about killed the rest of my space. Be here next week for the shocking conclusion of To Be Continued… Who will live? Who will die? What the Hell is Dwayne babbling about this time? All will be revealed.
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