So So Silver Age

Hey look! New content!

2006-08-04T22:50:00.000-04:00

So... haven't been reading new stuff lately (as I mentioned in the last post). But Franny and I each have an article in this month's edition of that nifty online zine, The Comic Foundry.

True to form, Franny writes something intellectual, citing actual theories and forming coherent sentences.

I, on the other hand, write something that is equal parts ZOMGFLAIL and fanboy snark.

So go, check that out. Let us know what you think, and maybe we'll do that again.

...If you're here because you Googled one of us after reading our stuff in CF, welcome! Please take a look at the "Best Of" links to the right, and enjoy your stay.

Creative titles are overrated

2006-05-25T23:13:00.000-04:00

So. I haven't written in a very long time. And there's a very important reason why.

First off, I didn't want to come in here after Franny has written some very well-composed, articulate pieces about very good indie comics and sound like "that guy" on comics forums, the asshole who rants about the most inane shit:

But that feeling quickly passed. I'm passionate about comics. When I'm passionate about something, I tend to swear like a sailor. And I still think dumb shit like the O RLY? owl is really, really funny. So fuck trying to be "academic" and "safe for work."

So the real reason I've been silent for so long? I got tired. I got really, really fucking tired of new comics. I'm tired of One Year Later, I'm tired of Infinite Crisis, and saddest of all, I'm really tired of 52 and I haven't even read a damn page of the thing.

That's what made me realize it. After I graduated from MSU earlier this month, I moved away from my beloved comics shop back to my parents' place in Saginaw. So I haven't read any new comics for over three weeks.

And, amazingly, I don't miss them at all. I've missed the first three issues of 52 and I couldn't care less.

I had way more fun reading old issues of Action Comics Weekly than I did reading most of what's come out in the past four months. And that's sad.

Seriously, people. In ten years 52 will be in exactly the same position Action Comics Weekly is now. Some of it is pretty good, some of it is eye-gougingly bad... and all of it will be in the quarter bin. So why freak out about it? I have so many other things I'd rather spend my energy on. Like playing World of Warcraft and doodling little pictures of Art Spiegelman getting sexually harassed by furries.

So! Here's to the old ones, the bad ones, the cracktastic ones. Here's to the issues in your longbox you'll love long after the latest crossover has been retconned out of existence.

For the first time in my life, I'm without my precious, mile-long pull list.

And it feels pretty good.

Palomar

2006-04-29T19:48:00.000-04:00

Starting to read independent and experimental comics is like entering any fandom, although I think many creators in the genre would bristle at that term. Success at finding something you like is much more likely if you have a friend to guide you and make recommendations. The good stuff comes largely through word of mouth--if you go only by books that get big shiny recognition, you end up with Jimmy Corrigan, which may be revolutionary but is absolutely no fun to read.

I am a very suspicious reader. But I can say with certainty that my latest read, Gilbert Hernandez's half of Love and Rockets, is absolutely deserving of the heaps of praise it has gotten in the several decades since it debuted. I picked up the trade hardcover edition Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories because I intended to look in it for traces of a codex legacy--I'm working on a paper for a class on American Indian rhetorics that's trying to imagine a decolonial history for the comic book. While I didn't exactly find what I was originally looking for, the work had obvious connections to other literary and comic book texts.

All of Gilbert Hernandez's stories in this collection take place in the fictional town of Palomar, which he glosses as meaning "pigeon coop". This world-building impulse can be traced back to two sources--Gabriel García Marquez's town of Macondo, featured in One Hundred Years of Solitude as well as DC Comics' own fictionopolises like Metropolis and Gotham. He actually references the ironic connection to Macondo in the text, but the Metropolis link is extra-textual. His author bio mentions a childhood love of Superman, and to me as a reader, the impulse to create a fictional town with a vague geographical location is as much a legacy of DC in his work as it is a legacy of that other super-famous South American writer.

That's a fun detail that makes my literary brain happy, but it's also an engaging read. The portrayal of small-town life is really...authentic. That's always a problematic word to use, but the characters truly felt like real people to me. I'm not from a poor Mexican rural town, so I can't really judge it on accuracy there, but as far as human nature goes, G. Hernandez understands souls passing through this world.

I was surprised as to how much disability there is in the work. This relates to the feeling of authenticity--in the real world, disabled folks are everywhere, they just end up invisible in many forms of media. If you know what to look for they are everywhere in superhero comics, but I had discounted indie comics from my search (more because I know a lot more about superheroes than I do anything else). I was short-sighted--the town of Palomar embodies what James Trent describes as the oldest form of reaction to people with disabilities (mental in his case, as his book was Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States). They are integrated into the community because there is no other possibility. One man is referred to sometimes as "Martín el Loco" but ultimately he is just another part of the town. I'm not sure anyone has ever done a disability-related analysis of the work but it merits further thought.

I'm still a little skeptical of all the praise Love and Rockets has received for good portrayals of women, as it is written by men, but it's very similar to the situation with Y: The Last Man. Dudes get gold medals for not being violently sexist. But I digress: the women are really cool characters, not judged by the author's gaze for being as sexually active as the men in the series.

Anyway, I loved what I have read so far, and since there is WAY more to read where that came from, my next stop will either be the Jaime Hernandez half of stuff or G. Hernandez's later works following his central character, Luba, and others after they leave Palomar.

My first comic

2006-04-21T17:30:00.000-04:00

It's no longer "first comics week" but I have no concept of time other than it is flying, so I'm going to tell you about my first comic anyway.

As a young child, I was something of a female chauvinist. I didn't have any feminist analysis of oppression or hate men for any patriarchal sense, I just thought boys were gross, as well as everything that was even nominally male. Toy dinosaurs and trucks weren't actually male, so they were okay, but any anthropomorphic or humanoid toy had to be female for me to play with it. I had a rocking horse on springs that was technically named "Thunder" but I renamed it Jill so she could be a girl. Needless to say, I hardly had any Ken dolls. Actually, I never had a real Ken; I had Mr. Heart, the dad of a family of dolls, an Aladdin doll, and Prince Phillip doll from Sleeping Beauty. However, I had (still have) dozens of girl dolls. They took over my bedroom and were finally relegated to one half of the basement.

Suffice to say, when Marvel released a Barbie comic book, I was all over it. My first comic books were Barbie Comics #1 and Barbie Fashion #1 (they came bundled together). I have no idea what was in it or what the story was like, but it was pink and there were paper dolls and lots of pictures of clothes.

I do remember that it had a letters column. One letter has stuck in my mind to this day--a guy wrote in a few issues in after he had read his little sister's Barbie comics. He said that he was tired of ultra-violent comics like The Punisher and it made him happy to see that there was at least one Marvel comic book out there that told cute, funny stories without any gore.

There were Marvel company ads for other titles they sold, and I especially recall their ads for X-Men because I assumed all the characters they showed were boys, including Storm. I was ridiculously surprised and pleased when Fox Kids first aired the X-Men cartoon and I found out that she was a girl. If there were even a few girl X-Men I could make a concession and like them, even though there were boys too. (In the end I liked Rogue much better. Maybe I would have gone the other way if they used her costume from Claremont's leather years, but as it was Rogue had awesome hair and a cool belt.)

My one frustration was that there were never any superhero Barbies to play with. I really, really, really wanted X-Men Barbies. The closest they ever came while I was a kid was Flying Hero Barbie, who was pink and glittery--not like any X-Men I knew. The release of Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and (ugly) Batgirl barbies along with Elektra, the Invisible Woman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy dolls made my heart happy for the current generation of weird little girls who want their dolls to kick butt as well as have hair long enough to brush and lots of interesting outfits to wear. And, of course, I bought some for myself. Supergirl and Wonder Woman are wearing each other's costumes right now and sitting on top of my toybox. Seriously.

Waiting for Scott McCloud

2006-04-06T11:03:00.000-04:00

Two men sit in a room. Neither knows why they are there. A table, or perhaps a picture of a table repeated over and over on the page, lies between them. There is a door, exquisitely crosshatched, and a window.

“Do you think there is a world outside that door?” asks the man in the mouse mask.

“I assume so,” replies the man with fat lips and blank glasses. “The world does not cease to exist when it is not observed by humans. A tree has life outside of human consciousness, if you know what I mean.”

“I don’t. Know what you mean, that is. Do you know why we are here?” He takes off his mouse mask, throwing it on the floor, to reveal another mouse mask. You no longer see the first mask, but despite this, you assume it continues to exist.

“You asked me that. No.”

They stare blankly at each other for a moment.

“Do you have a name?” asks the man with fat lips.

“Art Spiegelman.”

“Let’s go.”

“We can’t”, says Art, “We’re waiting for Scott McCloud.”

“So what do we do while we wait?”

“We could hang ourselves.”

“We don’t have any rope.”

Art grimaces. “We could draw ourselves hanging ourselves. We are cartoonists, aren’t we?”

“Oh. I guess we are.”

They draw.

The man with fat lips asks: “Do you have a mouth?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you did, because all my sensory evidence implies that you are talking to me. I assumed you had a mouth, but when I thought about it, I realized that I could not see it. Isn’t that strange?”

“Scott McCloud would call that closure, the process of seeing the parts but observing the whole."

“I don’t understand how that relates to whether or not you have a mouth, Mr. Spiegelman.”

Now that they have both said this, you become uneasy about the continued existence of the mouse mask on the floor. You no longer see it, and are apprehensive about whether or not it continues to exist, as you previously assumed. Perhaps this mouse mask only existed in your mind in the first place.

“I have a stylized face, do I not, mister…”

“Sacco. I’m Joe Sacco. Look, can you take off your mask? It’s really bothering me. I’d like to see your face in better detail.”

“Ah, but how then could you relate to me? The less detail there is in my face, the more people my face can describe. Besides,” Spiegelman continues, “Isn’t your face just a mask anyway? Facing outward from the day you were born?”

Sacco stands up and begins to pace.

“That’s ludicrous. My face is my face. Besides, I’m a cartoonist. I know about faces and drawing. I’ve made comic books about genocide, for Christ’s sake. But I draw in great detail—stylized and distorted imagery at times, to be sure, but with great detail. And I don’t think this makes it harder for people to relate to my comics than if they starred an army of stick figures.”

“What is real, Mr. Sacco?” Spiegelman takes off his mouse mask to reveal a human mask. He places the second mouse mask on the table, where you can see it. It continues to exist.

“Oh stop it. I draw in detail because I believe that detail, as well as my strategies for drawing interviews, give my work realism.”

“Remember, I am a cartoonist as well, Mr. Sacco. I did Maus. Both parts.”

“Congratulations. Frankly, I found your characters hard to tell apart from one another. If the only distinguishing feature of your individual characters are their attributes, their clothes, hat, accessories, then you are not working hard enough.”

“But my work is about the arbitrariness of the Holocaust—how it conflated individuals into one group identity to be extinguished. From the point of view of the Nazis, all Jews were the same. I reappropriated this sameness as well as the image of Jews as vermin, as mice, therefore transgressing the original meaning and purpose of the image. Anyone reading my book knows Jews do not all look the same in the real world, but in a cartoon world, characters do. Cartoon worlds, like that of Disney—“
Spiegelman pauses to spit on the ground.

“—have cultural connotations of niceness and happiness. I’m subverting those happy memories to tell a story about memory. The story is not about exactly how many Jews died in the Holocaust—my father couldn’t even remember exactly all the details of his own experience. My use of cartoons places my story in the realm of concepts.”

Sacco puzzles over this, while Spiegelman removes his human mask. You look away, and when you look at the next image, you see it has disappeared. You do not know where it went. His face is that of a mouse.

Spiegelman continues: “You are a reporter, are you not?”

Sacco nods.

“Your comics report on facts. It is only proper, according to McCloud, that you use great detail. Your works are in the realm of the physical world, and communicate the materiality of violence and warfare. Facts and dates, while never absolute, are nonetheless more important in your work than mine.”

“Does the level of detail I use on the grass in the background of my panels really affect how I present my facts? Most of those facts are stated in caption boxes or dialogue balloons."

“Ah, but the detail communicates materiality,” Spiegelman says with italic emphasis. “It gives the facts weight and physical presence, which lends to their credibility in the audience’s eye.”

“Okay, fine. Be vague and lacking in detail if you must. But why are we doing this in the first place? What’s the big deal about cartoons? I’m a big deal in comic books, and I don’t even know why,” says Sacco.

“Cartoons have a kind of acidic potency for clarifying a situation because they're reductive."

“Reductive, eh? This room is pretty acidic and reductive. I think I’m going to leave.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you. You assume there’s something out there, but there’s only something there because you believe it to be so. Neither of us has any sensory evidence that there is anything outside. Nothing can be seen through that window. Your perception of reality is an ‘act of faith, based on mere fragments’."

“I’ve had it with you! “Closure” is the only way the world makes sense! If you stop believing that things exist outside of your sight, then you’d go mad! I’m leaving.”

Neither man moves.

***

Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman sit at a kitchen table, reading an essay by Franny Howes titled “Waiting for Scott McCloud”.

“This is terrible,” Spiegelman says. “She makes me out to be some kind of McCloud worshipping murine Zen master. And the assignment was to write a fictitious conversation between the two of us about Understanding Comics. She never even mentions the book.”

“But we were obviously talking about it, I mean, closure and all.” Sacco sips his coffee. Scent lines, a visual metaphor, rise from it, as if from a cartoon pile of feces. However, there are no flies, and there is no evidence to indicate that it smells bad. Thus, you assume the coffee is hot and fragrant.

“But what was her point? That we’re all postmodern weirdos?”

“Be nice. I think she was saying that while it is not the be-all, end-all of theories (signified by my character’s vocal protests), McCloud’s theory of abstract cartoons really does help to explain the difference between our styles. We are both realists, but your realism is a fuzzy realism of memory, and mine is a hard-edged realism of fact.”

“But you address memory in your work as well.”

“Yes, but I don’t problematize it. Part of reporting is sorting out the unreliable sources before you construct your article/comic book/whatever, and only using reliable sources, thus eliminating this question. In contrast, Maus, especially part II, has a strong concern with how to represent memory, especially when you show yourself pondering how to draw Françoise, or being besieged by the media, as well as every part that involves discourse with your father."

“What about all that mask stuff? And whether or not the world exists?”

“Duh, Art. It was an abstract attempt to grapple with McCloud’s notion of closure. She’s merely illustrating through text the phenomenon’s importance, and pointing out its action in the mind of the reader. By pointing it out and problematizing it, she draws attention to it, in the same way that McCloud illustrates it by having the world behind the little boy disappear without him watching it, or stating that he has no legs."

Spiegelman looks resigned. His face wrinkles with frustration. “Fine, Sacco, you win this round. For all I know, I’m a fictional character merely conceding to make a rhetorical point, but you still win.”

With that, Sacco and Spiegelman disappear and are replaced by something infinitely stranger. Who’s to say this has not happened before, and will not happen again?

GODDAMMIT GEOFF JOHNS, GET OUT OF MY TEETH

2006-03-30T13:59:00.000-05:00

Reading Green Lantern Rebirth #5, I said to myself: Oh for Gods sake, he better not waste too much time next issue with Batman. Just hit the bastard and get to the real fight. The next month?

KRAKK.

I've always wished for Arisia or Katma Tui to come back to life... and I'd really love Arisia to come back as this sexy butch broad who doesn't take shit from anybody...

In Green Lantern Corps: Recharge, I got a butch version of Katma Tui. Close enough.

I've always wanted to see Hal break the Cyborg Superman in half for what he did to Coast City. (I cannot overstress my visceral hatred of that character.) Reading the previews for May's comics, who do I see on the cover of Green Lantern 12?

Oh, fuck yes.

Walking home yesterday with my comics under my arm, I planned in my head an entry about Steve Englehart's run on Green Lantern Corps... specifically, the issues where Kilowog heads off to the USSR, and the Earth GLs have to deal with the conflict of being heroes for the whole planet vs. their status as Americans. I've told Franny that I'd really love for someone to update that story... After all, you had 7 people with weapons of mass destruction living in a compound in southern California. It's not a stretch to imagine an administration that would declare them a terrorist cell and a threat to homeland security. Or, at the very least, they'd make a lot of other countries very, very nervous.

About ten minutes after formulating that thought, I opened this week's Green Lantern.

Arguing the political complexities of Green Lanterns. While fighting ROCKET REDS, for God's sake!

Literally everything I've ever randomly hoped for in Green Lantern over the past couple of years has been delivered to me by Geoff Johns.

...I swear to God, if I had any fillings I'd be checking them for radio transceivers right now.

Franny, who is always the voice of reason when I lose my shit over things like this, said it's most likely because Geoff and I have a lot in common: Michigan native. MSU alum. Unreasonable obsession with Hal Jordan and test pilots.

But still. It's spooky as hell.

And as long as there might be a chance I've got a psychic connection to Mr. Johns, the Lord and Master of DC Continuity, here are a couple of requests:

*Hal and Guy watching the MSU vs. U of M football game. Hal wearing an MSU T-shirt just to piss Guy off.

*Boodika beating the ever living piss out of Hal in revenge for the loss of her ring and hand.

*More gloriously slashy Hal/Kyle moments.

*Hot hot pilot makeouts between Hal and Cowgirl in the back of an F-15. (Yes, I know it's not even remotely comfortable/possible from a positioning standpoint. It's my fantasy. Shut up.)

*The untimely death of Carol's husband Gil during the course of 52

And if any of this actually happens... well, don't say I didn't call it first.

Sorry for the radio silence...

2006-03-28T22:01:00.000-05:00

Amy and I are both sick, I more than her, so we've been temporarily unavailable to snark. As soon as I acquire some beneficial pharmaceuticals things should get rolling again.

I'm not actually calling Brian K. Vaughan sexist, read to the end

2006-03-05T03:49:00.000-05:00

I am almost caught up to the present issue of Y: The Last Man. Kalinara just wrote about how people assume she would like the series and she is not interested in it. I have been pondering my attitudes toward Y for some time; they are decidedly mixed, and braided with my feminist outlook on comics and media in general. Bear with me while I wax intellectual.

This is not a simple issue of good versus bad portrayals of women. It is possible to argue that a work like Y is problematically sexist despite having widely recognized "good" portrayals, whatever that means. Nobody can agree on how they want their group to be represented. It's a fact of the politics of representation: there's no consensus on the images that "should" be presented, nor is there agreement on who should get to make the representations in the first place. It is agreed, however, that peoples' privileges are inescapable and influence their work. Brian K. Vaughan is a man, and despite ideological and artistic intentions, his male privilege (the unspoken benefits of being male, invisible to people who grow up as men in our society but highly visible to those who do not have them) makes it inherently biased.

My intention is not to roundly condemn Vaughan as sexist; that would be counterproductive and he does not deserve the label, at least in the conventional sense. However the issue of representation and privilege really bothers me in the case Y and the "unmanned" scenario. The idea of a society without men has long been a staple of feminist philosophy as well as speculative fiction. I'm going to bet you can't name any work that deals with this. Yet most readers of this blog know about Y; it has gotten huge attention within the comics community and from the media at large. Vaughan is always posting in his blog about the latest plug for his ongoing series (Ex Machina and Runaways too...but that's another essay entirely) in magazines like Jane or Entertainment Weekly. He is an excellent writer. It is a well put together series. The apparatus works. I read it. But it still makes me furious. A man gets media attention and fame for writing about a world without men. I know Pia Guerra is the co-creator and artist. But she does not get nearly as much attention for her work on the series as Vaughan does; maybe if she drew tits a little bigger she could get some work on Witchblade, but I'm not holding my damn breath.

Vaughan uses an old trick to diffuse this situation within the series itself; Yorick Brown, the man, actually talks to another character about how ironic it is that a man is still the center of attention even after the world is now entirely run by women. By acknowledging that a narrative situation is weird or improbable, it feels less so to the reader or viewer. It's something I've heard many times as a screenwriting student, and it doesn't work on me.

And yet, as furious as the series and the hype surrounding it makes me, I have more than once cried with emotion from reading it. It tells a really engaging story about characters that resonate with me, Yorick most of all. Catholicism is actually a very prominent theme in Y, and as a nice Catholic girl with social justice sensibilities, I can relate to the story of a nice Catholic boy with social justice sensibilities who just happens to be the last man on earth. The subject is treated seriously and with respect; what do you do as a Catholic when there are no priests left? Does your God cease to exist? Has the tie been severed? I feel like Vaughan and I would have a lot to say to each other about the idea of someone keeping their faith close to them even when it seems ludicrous to do so.

Yorick Brown is obnoxious and wonderful. He makes obsessive pop culture references and dreams that he is a science fiction hero, yet he is deeply troubled by committing violence. In an inversion of the fantasy-journey narrative of strapping hero, frail wizard, and naive princess, he is definitely the princess, while female companions are strapping and arcane, respectively. He is a male survivor of sexual assault and he believes in true love. He used to write Knight Rider fan fiction and described himself as having a punctuation fetish. He has been dismissed by some as a typical "lovable loser" character; but what does it mean to be a loser? What is the difference between a "loser" and a "real man"? This is Yorick's dilemma.

Ultimately, Vaughan is using the unmanned scenario to explore manhood and masculinity through a character who is decidedly not the American ideal superdude, who is a composite of anxious shortcomings thrust from being a guy to not just being a man but the man. And ultimately, it serves feminist purposes to reevaluate and reflect on the meaning of masculinity. It has been a tenet of transfeminism and gender activism in the last decade that gender roles are not only oppressive to women. And Y will certainly get read more widely and taken closer to heart than many gender treatises I can think of.

I retain my righteous anger that women should be the ones to write about what women would do if left to their own purposes in an unmanned world. There's definitely a part of that anger epoxied to my own frustrations as an unpublished woman writer. Call me jealous; I am. Some part of me hopes that a series like this will open the doors for women to write brilliant transgressive gender fantasies, be published by a DC or Marvel imprint, and get loads of wonderful shiny press. Another part hopes that this will be written by me.

I'll spare you any more details or confessions. It's time to go to bed.

"Enfreakment" is a real word

2006-03-02T14:01:00.000-05:00

So I finally finished my paper on superheroes and disability. FINALLY. I took an incomplete in the class because I couldn't get it done. I didn't realize how hard it would be to write academically about something I talk about all day, every day, that is a part of my material existence. Both comics and disability are, and combining them...wow. I realized I had way too much to say to fit in 30 pages and still include enough evidence. I ended up citing way more secondary sources that I originally planned to, because when you want to make a general statement about a character or summarize their origin story, it's much easier to just hit the DC Encyclopedia, even though it not always accurate.

On a fun note, there are certain words that you get to use in disability studies that just make me grin. Like "enfreakment" and "freakery". That would be the process of creating a "freak" (as in side show freak) and the spectacle of viewing and exhibiting a freak, respectively. Also, supercrip, which I talked about a way long time ago when I first started this beast of a project. Then you get the usual academic words that are hip right now: interrogation, subjectivity, embodiment, materiality, discourse.

Lastly there's my favorite thing: transgressive reappropriation. I love transgressive reappropriation. In my opinion, it is the solution to every problem of representation in comics. Except for gay stuff. That might be an overstatement, but it's still cool. What it basically means is reclaiming stereotypical/negatively portrayed disabled characters and finding value in them, taking them back and making them cool. Temporarily able-bodied people have appropriated the images of disabled people in their work, and this is the phenomenon of disabled people taking those images back. (I got this from Mitchell and Snyder's Narrative Prosthesis for any academic types interested. But they didn't make it up. I think they got it froM Garland Thompson. I'm a DS newb so I haven't read all of her stuff yet.) This is especially important for images of disability; there are so many out there, specifically in comics, that creating new disabled characters in order to have "good" portrayals of disability would be excessive. It would be more efficient, and probably more pleasing to fans, to take old disabled characters and use them progressively. (It doesn't really work for gay characters because there aren't any to reappropriate.)

I ended up not talking for an excessively long time about this in my paper either...eventually I got to the point where I had to wrap things up, and an extensive discussion of transgressive reappropriation as well as the iconicity of ability ended up not getting written. Someday they will.

So...the question is, should I post the paper in its entirety here? Some of you might laugh at it in the sense that I have to define "mutant" and explain what the JSA is. I also am not actually sure if I'm right about what I said about Doctor Mid-Nite and I don't want to get shot down. The alternative is re-writing the sections in blogger discourse as opposed to academic discourse for your reading pleasure. Maybe I'll do both. Leave a comment if you have a preference.

Because how do you remember Elvis? You KNOW how you remember Elvis.

2006-02-15T22:22:00.000-05:00

You know that bit from Denis Leary's No Cure For Cancer where he talks about how someone should have shot Elvis in the head back in 1957 -- before he got fat, pretentious and bloated -- so we could remember him in a nice way?

I've just been thinking about that bit a lot lately, is all.

Love comes in four colors. (And yes, I'm still bitter over Sue Dibny.)

2006-02-14T12:49:00.000-05:00

Another day of work is nearly over
You must have seen the whole thing on TV
Seventeen more city blocks and I can almost smell you
Waiting at the windowsill for me

It's our forty-first anniversary

But we don't look a day over twenty-three
Not in this life
Not in this universe
We were still in high school when I met you
If you believe the continuity

I rescued you from robots
And untied you from the tracks

And you pretended not to know that it was me
We didn't even kiss
Until issue #26
This world still feels like 1963

I love this life
I love this universe

And you'll keep my identity a secret
And you will know the touch beneath my glove

I may go out every night and risk my life for strangers
But you're the only girl I'll ever love

Gwen Stacy isn't dead, she's only sleeping
And Elektra isn't evil or insane

Those bastards at the Pentagon can't really kill Sue Dibny
No more than they could kill off Lois Lane

And I swear to God there'll be hell to pay
If anybody tries to take you away

Forget this life
Forget this universe
You're everything I need

You are my life
You are my universe

They'll have to go through me

Lyrics from "Four Color Love Story," by The Metasciences.

Happy Valentine's Day, folks.

"Good" graphic novels and tears of ink

2006-02-05T00:00:00.000-05:00

This past week, I read Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde, a graphic novel that's really graphic reportage/graphic journalism/something that implies it really happened and distinguishes it from, say, Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew. Because it's not an obvious difference. Previously, I posted on City of Glass, and prior to that, I read Maus volumes I and II. These are all class assignments. We are also doing Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, Phoebe Glockner's Diary of a Teenage Girl, and another book to be decided.

I am pushing to read a volume of Gaiman's Sandman in that slot, preferable Endless Nights, the 11th postscript volume of standalone stories, or volume four, Season of Mists. (I am really abusing the italics tag in this entry.) However, I have realized that this will not happen, because neither meets the requirements of Comics As Literature. To be a member of the C.A.L. canon, a work has to fit two of three descriptions, other than being a work of sequential art:
1. boring and/or incomprehensible
2. autobiographical, semi-autobiographical, or featuring a character with the same name as the author
3. about genocide or mass murder

Comics As Literature, pioneered by professional indie blowhard Scott McCloud, is a concept that really bothers me. Not because comic books are not literature, but because I believe they are all literature. When the majority of comics are excluded and denigrated so that a few prestigious authors can get read in college classes and be discussed by the Modern Language Association, a great disservice is done to the medium, this medium, this medium that is my blood. My heart speaks in the language of comics. I think comics and piss comics--when I cry, they are tears of ink, and when I fall on the ground, there is a great THUD outlined in bold black jagged lines.

McCloud is adamant about comics being a valid medium, and getting comics accepted into the literary canon, and yet his dismissal in Understanding Comics both of superhero/adventure comics and the very act of collaboration undermines this effort. The prioritization of abstract/cartoonish work produced by comix-auteurs and published by independent presses over collaborative work reaching a more popular audience thoroughly pisses me off. It makes me really fucking angry.

He explicitly states, as if it were some obvious fact, that collaboration between a writer and artists (penciller, inker, letterer, colorist) gets in the way of artistic expression. Only someone isolated in an isolated, Drawn and Fantagraphics Quarterly world could ever get away with this statement. Collaboration is the bread and butter of the low, mean, my-god-joe-the-teeth, Kryptonite, radioactive platinum, silver Spear of Longinus, Seduction of the Golden Innocent comics that I love and what the universe ultimately knows as the comic book. If collaboration is a barrier to art, then I am the Queen of Spain.

This is terrible and bitter. But when my professor describes Superman as a "guilty pleasure" compared to the illustrious Art Spiegelman, who I am dead sick of, I have to fight to keep ink from leaking down my cheeks. My words come from the heart in four colors and all this bullshit makes me sick inside.

City of Glass; PMS; robots.

2006-01-25T14:28:00.000-05:00

Carpal tunnel is a bitch. I might say that along with Andrew Jackson, homophobia, PMS, trolls, and lactose, it is part of my Gallery of Rogues. I'm not sure who or what is in Amy's rogues gallery, but I can guess that Ron Marz probably has a strong presence. He and his army of androbots.

I took the day off today because I'm being mind controlled by the PMSculator and I don't want to accidentally decapitate any of my classmates. So what do I do? I blog.

The two of us are both taking Comics and Animation in America this semester (AMS 270). This is the first time I have ever had a class with Amy, and she has managed to make me giggle uncontrollably while covering the Holocaust (via Maus, of course) by taking notes in cartoon form and drawing herself punching Scott McCloud (right cross: KRAK! My God, Joe, the teeth!). What the unassuming internet does not know is that she is actually quite a good cartoonist. She stopped doing a lot of art after she quit her online drawing forum, even though she has *two* tablets, but I think I have finally convinced her to be my collaborator on a comics project. Here's to hoping.

I should go to the library and watch some Korean television drama for my Asian Film class, but I'd rather sit here and start work on a script to give her. I haven't done any creative projects of substance other than some poems since I finished One Dozen Black Roses, my last screenplay.

Anyway, the actually comics-related portion of this post is that I just finished reading City of Glass, which is a comics adaptation by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (the latter did Batman: Year One) of a novel by Paul Auster. It was assigned for our comics class, and it is terrific. It is a detective story, but the detective is fake, and it reminds me more of Jorge Luis Borges's "Death and the Compass" (aka Muerte y la Brujula) than any crime story I've ever read. It is about the power of lies and words to shape reality, and if you don't like postmodern stuff where the author shows up in the story, stay away. However, if you are somewhat depressed by the state of your superhero pull list (like me) and looking for a great high-concept graphic novel, I highly recommend it. I am sure Amy will not be drawing cartoons of herself punching the author of this work.

What's wrong with this picture?

2006-01-06T23:43:00.000-05:00

Geoff Johns shuffles into Dan DiDio's office, clearly upset.

"Hey, Dan, I've got a problem."

"What's the matter, sweetie? Come on over here and tell me all about it."

DiDio winks flirtatiously. Johns pulls a chair up to his boss's desk.

"Gosh, this is really hard to talk about. I've been having--"

DiDio cuts him off. "Is it that time of the month again?"

Johns stares across the desk in horror. "No, that's not it at all. You see, I'm really uncomfortable with the climate around this office."

"Was Jim Lee being mean to you again? I can talk to him if you want, but you've got to toughen up. It's time to be a big boy, Geoff. There's no crying in baseball, if you know what I mean."

Johns's frustration increases. He knew this was going to happen. But he tries again.

"I don't mean to sound whiny, Dan, but I think this office has a problem with..."

"Come on, spit it out."

"Sexism. There, I said it. This place is sexist. I can't walk through this building without a dozen people wolf whistling or calling me 'baby'."

DiDio rolls his eyes. "What did I say about toughening up? Boys will be boys, after all."

"It's not just that. Hardly anyone here will look me in the eye when they talk to me--they're always staring at my chest."

"Well, you are showing it off all the time, leaving the collar unbuttoned on those hot little oxford shirts. If you don't want men checking out your merchandise, cover yourself up for once."

"But Dan, George Perez can't keep his hands off me! I was trying to talk to him about the art for IC #3, but I can't get anything done with his hand inching up my thigh. I ran out of the room. What else could I do? Then afterwards, he told all the other guys in the office that I'm a cocktease."

DiDio sighs. "How do I know that that even happened?"

"What?"

"How do I know that you don't just want attention? You show off that cute little butt in those tight khaki pants all day, and then when that doesn't get you noticed, you go around making baseless accusations. I bet you're just jealous."

Johns stands up from his chair. "Dan, I thought you would understand."

And that was the day that Geoff Johns quit comics forever. But there was another cute writer to take his place, one who didn't complain about being ogled by his peers, constantly disrespected, and assaulted by his editor. So no one even noticed that Geoff was gone.

In totally uncontroversial news...

2006-01-05T18:56:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you realize something that should have been obvious much sooner. I submit for your approval or scorn a comparison: on the left, Rahne Sinclair, my beloved New Mutant Wolfsbane, as drawn by Ryan Sook. On the right, my beloved girlfriend, Amy, in an undated webcam photo taken earlier during our college career.

I think this is very funny. However, to my knowledge, Amy is not a were-lesbian.

A Very Special Green Lantern Special

2006-01-04T16:15:00.000-05:00

As promised, I now present to you Green Lantern Special #1. I figure, why dwell on violence against women in comics when there's such a...unique example of racial violence in my collection as well. I love "very special episode" comics. I have two different copies of the mini where Death and John Constantine talk about fighting AIDS. But this one...is just bizarre. The worst thing is that while a large part of the issue is about how bad apartheid is, it concludes that the freedom fighters are as bad as the government because they also engage in violence.

The setup: Hal Jordan is always broke. John Stewart, trying to get him to stop sleeping on his couch, tells him to go steal diamonds from South Nambia while nobody's looking. They couldn't possibly miss them, right? But they catch him. This is very bad.

But it gets worse. Since John Stewart has a public identity as the Green Lantern, when South Nambians see Hal stealing from their mine, they assume it was John. John gets extradited to stand trial. In a racist country. With apartheid.

The South Nambian authorities try to coerce John into signing a fake confession. And then they beat him up some more.

Hal visits John in jail and convinces him to use his ring to break out. He does so and initiates a large scale prison break. Then he joins up with another guy who broke out to fight apartheid and destory rich white people's property. But there's more. As it turns out, in busting up the prison, John also freed a MURDERER!

The boy can't do anything right...at least with Christopher Priest writing him. In the end, John almost helps in a terrorist attack against the South Nambian government, but Hal shows up to stop him (after some coersion by everbody's favorite bastion of law, Superman).

Yay for Hal getting punched in the face...sorry, Amy.

Hal and John's relationship in this era is described very accurately as schlemiel and schlamazel. A schlemiel is a bumbling idiot, and a schlamazel is a chronically unlucky person. To put it one way, the schlemiel is the guy who always spills his drink, and the schlamazel is the one he is spilling his drink on. Hal does a lot of things that cause him no problems but make John's life pretty miserable--a sad cycle of mistakes and consequences.

Some things are worth ignoring canon for.

2006-01-02T18:33:00.000-05:00

So I finally got the Showcase Green Lantern trade for Christmas. I've really enjoyed reading it, both for the history (the origins of major characters, the first time Hal uses a boxing glove construct, etc.) as well as comparing this version of "rookie Hal" to the versions presented in Emerald Dawn and DC: the New Frontier.

But one panel stopped me cold.

I absolutely refuse to believe Hal Jordan went to college. You'll never, ever be able to convince me otherwise. I don't care if it's canon, I don't care if the image of Hal as Idiot Frat Guy works on a certain level. Some things are more important.

I know, deep down, this conviction is all wrapped up in my ideosyncracies that equate Hal Jordan with both Chuck Yeager and my dad, neither of whom graduated from college. But there's more to it.

It is extremely important that not all of the Green Lanterns of Earth have a college degree. They should be as socioeconomically different as possible. To present them any other way is ignoring one of the most profound elements of the whole Green Lantern mythos.

That is: in order to be a Green Lantern, you need to be two things:

completely honest
totally without fear

That's it. Honesty and fearlessness. It doesn't matter what race you are, or what class you're from, how much money you make or how much education you have.

As long as you're trustworthy and brave, as long as you work hard and believe in justice, you can gain the power to overcome any obstacle -- to do anything you can imagine, as long as you have the willpower to see it through.

The Green Lantern Corps has no officers, save for the symbolic (and now defunct) three-member Honor Guard. Rookie GLs defer to their seniors because of experience, not hierarchy. All Corps members are treated equally, whether they're an Air Force test pilot, an architect from the inner city of Detroit, a gym teacher with a disability, an out-of-work graphic artist... or an over-idealistic lesbian from Middle-of-Nowhere, Michigan.

They each have an equal shot at proving themselves worthy of the ring.

They're not perfect people, of course. They bicker over women and harbor petty grudges. They say dumb things sometimes and get hit on the head a lot. But for all their faults, all their flaws and all their failures, they represent a single, beautiful, absolute truth:

Strive to be the best human being you can be, and someday your rocket ship will come.

I can believe in that.

Captain Jackson's feet of clay

2005-12-22T12:12:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I dressed up like a superhero and patrolled my city. Amy and I tried it on Halloween but we were nothing compared to the two dozen Ninja Turtles on the streets, not to mention the pair of Transformers. (There's nothing like a college town on Halloween.) People thought she was Robin Hood and I was...some kind of hooker maybe? I got some weird stares, which got weirder when I explained in great detail who I was supposed to be.

The point is, unbeknownst to either of us, Jackson, Michigan has had its own superhero since 1999: Captain Jackson. I'm really sad that I never knew of this guy until, following his alter ego's arrest for impaired driving, he was unmasked in his local paper.

I first heard about this through a better and more sympathetic piece in the Detroit Free Press today entitled "Unmasked, Hero Is Human". The reporter even compares the rise and fall of Captain Jackson to a DC Comics storyline. However, I think it's really more like a Marvel storyline, as I am pretty sure the exact same thing has happened to Daredevil at least twice.

The Free Press article says that the Captain has been unreachable since his unmasking and has ceased to go on patrol. But I sincerely hope that this civic defender can bounce back from this plot twist. I don't mean to condone drinking and driving, but I feel he deserves another chance. Maybe he needs a new creative team. Or maybe his teen sidekick, Crimefighter Girl will take over the flowing purple mantle, ushering in a new era for the city of Jackson.

Here's to hoping. Good luck, Captain Jackson, wherever you are.

A preview for what I will be scanning over Christmas...

2005-12-17T04:28:00.000-05:00

Greetings, all. It is I, the quieter, shorter, insomniac half of this blogging team. What follows is a little preview for the comic I am taking home to scan this Christmas. I do not own a scanner, but I have a digital camera...

I present for your consideration: The Green Lantern Special #1, 1988, by James Owsley, Tod Smith, and Denis Rodier. The title is, "WITH THIS RING...!" And it addresses the timely problem of apartheid in a country called South Nambia. I think it's supposed to be near Qu'rac.

Fairly early in this issue, John Stewart gets stripped naked and whipped by South Nambian cops. AAHHH! THEY TOOK AWAY HIS PENIS!!!

I know you all just can't wait until I get this properly scanned. Remember, kids, racism is bad, but extraterrestrialism is worse. Hug an alien today.

OMGOMGOMGOMG

2005-12-16T15:07:00.000-05:00

There is a God.

Behold:

My prayers have been answered.

There is a God in Heaven, and he's got a fucking awesome sense of humor.

Where have all the letters gone?

2005-12-06T14:44:00.000-05:00

It seems like every few weeks, I start off a post with an apology for the lack of posts, and then post a mega-long entry. This is no different. (Scipio, I don't know how the hell you can keep posting short entries several times a week -- maybe I don't know when the hell to shut up.)

Anyway, hopefully once the semester is over on the 16th I can get back into some heavy posting over break.

I was sorting through my comics last night, trying to put together a Microsoft Access database so I can search quickly and easily for a certain author, penciller, or event.

And as I usually do when I flip through the comics of my youth, I started to wax nostalgic.

I miss letter columns.

They used to go on for pages, plus maybe a letter from the editor in chief. It's where more than a few comics creators got their first publication in a book. Like most bygone things in comics, it's one of those things I never really got the chance to participate in and regret.

My all-time favorite letter column was in Gerard Jones' Guy Gardner -- fans would write in and Guy himself would answer, his response usually laced with not-quite-curse-words he must have picked up from Lobo ("fraggin'," "bastich," etc.).

But letter columns have been largely replaced by comics blogs. Comics fans are still cheering and bitching about their favorite topics (costume changes, deaths, who is Earth's Green Lantern), but the mood is different. Now some hide behind avatars and pseudonyms -- letter columns used to publish your whole address, for God's sake. There's a certain honesty that comes from people knowing your real name instead of GLFan2814 or some such nonsense. People took more care in writing their arguments. Once you sent off a physical letter, that was it -- if someone misinterpreted your argument, you couldn't immediately respond and go, "No, you idiot. You weren't even listening to what I said." Or if you wanted to, you'd have to wait another month or two to respond.

Letter columns haven't died completely, of course. I can't speak for the independent labels, for starters. Mark Waid's Legion of Superheroes respond to their own letters in a way that is even more postmodern and meta-fictional than Guy Gardner's ever was.

But my personal favorite is what's currently running in Young Avengers. Even if you've sworn off Marvel comics (I'm looking at you, Scipio), you should really pick up this book. Given the fact that it sprung out of Avengers Disassembled, it's surprisingly accessible to people with only a vague awareness of who any of these people are. But I've already extolled the virtues of YA in the past -- let me get to the point.

In the letters column of this book for the past half-year, there has run an ongoing debate about homosexuality in comics. It's hilarious, because the argument started long before Asgardian/Wicca and Hulkling were revealed to be dating.

Most of the furor centered around a letter by some guy named James Meeley, published in YA #3:

"A super hero comic is not the platform for exploring 'sexual identities,' especially for characters who are teenagers. [...] I would hope that you and Marvel would not be so gung-ho to pander to every taste within society that would would forget that comics were never meant to be an outlet for changing society's view or forcing sensitive issues to be discussed among the readership. They are meant, first and foremost, to entertain in an all-ages type of manner."

I cut for length, but you get the gist. The point about comics not being a venue for discussion is ironic: the entire next letters column was filled with various responses to Meeley's letter. He himself was responding to another letter-writer, Philip Gasper, who expressed hope about positive gay characters in comics.

And for the record, as long as I'm discussing the argument: These representations are important. It's not a matter of them not being "real people." To someone out there, they're representations of themselves. They're someone they can relate to.

What an awful place comics would be if they were only populated by white, heterosexual, traditionally masculine men and their one-dimensional sidekicks. (And here I roll my eyes at Hal Jordan and his mechanic, Thomas "Pie-face" Kalmaku.)

And comics have long been a place for social commentary and discussion of mature issues, even when they involve teenagers. Roy Harper's addiction to heroin. Oliver Queen's new ward Mia's contraction of HIV. Stephanie Brown's pregnancy. And that's just off the top of my head.

But I digress.

And really, props to Marvel for posting Meeley's letter, misguided as it may be, and keeping the debate alive. It was really refreshing to see an honest discussion about what comics could and should be that didn't degenerate into "LOL STFU FAG" like I see on too many forums.

To quote Young Avengers writer Alan Heinberg:

"To me, one of the most remarkable aspects of this discussion is that it began with the topic of sexuality and quickly evolved into a thoughtful consideration of the nature and purpose of comics as art.

"You guys make me proud to be a fanboy."

I wish Marvel and DC would run more letters columns, whether they're silly and snarky in the line of Guy Gardner and Legion of Superheroes or more serious and intellectual as seen in Young Avengers.

Blogs are an interesting and entertaining replacement, but there's something about seeing your name in print in your favorite comic book that is so freaking cool. The closest adrenaline rush a blog can create in that respect is to have a creator comment on an entry (Hi, Gail, if you're still reading).

Or, perhaps, letters columns of years past really were as immature and superficial as modern forums, and I'm just sugar-coating through my nostalgia.

Thoughts?

Observing our site's statistics...

2005-11-29T21:48:00.000-05:00

By far, the most common referral to this site is from a Google Image Search for the word "Homoerotica."

I find this totally hilarious.

Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern.

2005-11-25T11:25:00.000-05:00

So Kyle Rayner is getting his own series as Ion, scripted by Ron Marz.

And I am one of those Green Lantern fans. So I'm sure you can imagine, I am none too pleased.

Changing a Green Lantern into something different-yet-related-to-the-mythos is nothing new. Parallax. Sentinel. Warrior. The man-Guardian savior of the Mosaic.

But you know what? They all failed. All of them.

When will comics companies learn that these gimmicks don't work?

And then, of course, there's Ron Marz.

I've tried to keep my comments where I call creators out by name to a minimum, especially since many of them -- like Marz himself -- surf the Internet.

Some people think it's uncouth for a fan to spit vitriol at creators, particularly when the creators can read it. But I really don't care if Marz knows I have zero respect for him. He hasn't done anything to earn it.

Because now that Marz is gaining a toehold in the Green Lantern universe again, Jade might as well have a giant target painted on her forehead.

”There's a sacrifice in [Rann-Thanagar War] that impacts Kyle in a major way,” revealed Marz. “As it has a number of other times in Kyle's life, tragedy serves as a catalyst."

Run, Jade, run! This man isn't capable of creating drama without slaughtering a female character!

Or worse yet: Alexandra DeWitt gets reborn from all this Crisis hoo-hah, just so she can get killed again!

You might think I'm making too much of the Women in Refrigerators thing. But I offer as my evidence: I have never met a female fan of Ron Marz. Ever. Not in person, not in all the vast reaches of the Internet. I don't think they exist.

There are some (like in the Newsarama forum thread for the topic) that think this issue will manage a year, year and a half tops before it caves in. I disagree. There's enough misguided Green Lantern fans out there that still think Ron Marz is a good writer. So this series could last for three years, five years or more.

But better writers than Marz have tried and failed to alter the Green Lanterns.

I can wait.

They won't nuke Metropolis, but Themyscira is fair game...

2005-11-13T14:55:00.000-05:00

I just cracked a cold one to mourn the passing of Wonder Woman. Her book is getting cancelled in February and I'm sure she's going to get a craptastic reboot after Infinite Crisis. Nobody will reboot Action Comics or Detective Comics because of the "legacy" but they'll walk all over Diana and make Steve Trevor never exist and write her out of history...up yours, Dan DiDio. Suck my left one.

I am working on the disability research, really...I'm just terrible at keeping a blog. Really. My livejournal is no better, it just has more quizzes. So once I have something to post here that isn't hand scribbled notes or critical theory goblety gook it will go up.

A ring, an oath, and a fan

2005-11-01T08:57:00.000-05:00

Well, November starts NaNoWriMo month, and both Franny and I are involved.

My project is also part of fanfic100, a marathon project of --

Yes. I'm going to be writing 50,000 words of fanfiction. Stop laughing.

But it got Franny and me going about whether or not fanfic qualifies as art.

Before I start that discussion, I think it'd be best if you had a better awareness of where I'm coming from as a fan. So, here's one that readers of my livejournal may have read before I shifted my comics thoughts over here:

Once a Green Lantern, Always a Green Lantern: My lifelong love affair with comics and why I somehow involve Hal Jordan in every conversation I have about the DC Universe

"I want to start writing those essays about comics in my LJ," I told Franny. "But I don't know where to begin."

"Start with Hal," she said. "You know you have to start with Hal."

But really, my love of DC Comics does not start with Hal Jordan.

It starts with the Justice League.

I couldn't tell you which was the first comic I ever read -- I've read comic books for as far back as I can remember. It was probably something from Archie, or Disney. (The first comic I ever bought, for the record, was the Super Mario Bros. 3 book put out by Valiant comics.) But I do recall my first superhero story: the Justice League, Giffen/DeMatteis's era, fighting Starro the Conqueror. The comic belonged to my cousin Justin, and he let me read a stack of his comics so I would stay out of his and my brother Guy's hair for an afternoon.

Starro the fuckin' Conqueror. Now there was a villain. Giant starfish, latched onto your face, took over your body. Not the stealthiest guy in the world, though. Mind-control-based sneakiness is considerably more difficult when, you know, you've got a fuckin' starfish on your face. But I digress.

I was in love. I recall being absolutely entranced by Fire, a foul-mouthed pyrokinetic Brazilian who looked essentially naked when she went "flame on." (Sexy? Yes. But I was maybe seven when I read this story. I had no concept of sexy.)

So Guy and I started reading DC Comics. Sometimes I wonder what kind of comic fan I would be had I grown up reading Marvel. But Marvel's continuity at this point was so convoluted, it seemed impossible to jump in. You couldn't know what the hell was going on unless you could refer back to 30 years worth of back issues. (These were the days before Marvel created the Ultimate universe, a simplified and streamlined version of the original continuity.) Marvel made no fucking sense. So, we became DC fans by default.

We drew our own comics. Since there were two Justice Leagues during this time (one in America and one in Europe), it seemed conceivable that anyone could have their own Justice League. So Guy and I created Justice League Carrollton. (Teeny little township near Saginaw, MI, for those of you keeping score at home.) Given my obsession with all things Green Lantern, it may interest you to note that it was Guy who got a power ring in our Justice League. But it made sense -- the current Green Lantern was named Guy, so Guy had a personal interest in him. I was Rocket, a pyrokinetic (although I didn't go full-"flame on" like Fire did). I also had phasing abilities -- stolen from Phase from DC's L.E.G.I.O.N., not Kitty Pryde.

The members of the League were our friends from school, including Stopwatch (a mutant-like character (he was a Marvel fan) with the ability to halt time for a few moments), Blue Lantern (a Green Lantern who had been struck by lightning, making his power ring blue and removing the weakness to the color yellow), and Nightstar (based on my friend Katie, she could control and produce light). We made a single one-subject notebook full of full-color stories -- unfortunately, that notebook has been lost forever.

We would later make another generation of comics under the "Z Comics" publishing label, starring updated versions of our characters with some new allies. Those comics, I still have. All of them. And once I get a scanner I'll show you a few. But that's a subject for another essay.

Being fans of Star Trek and space exploration in general, it seemed only natural that Guy and I would be fans of Green Lantern. Intergalactic space cops with a ring that could do anything you wanted it to. How cool is that? We started buying the Green Lantern monthly.

It was the summer of 1992. That's when I met Hal.

Green Lantern #25. Hal literally comes out of nowhere, coming to claim the right to be Green Lantern of Earth. Guy and Hal settle the argument with an old-fashioned fistfight -- a knock-down, drag-out brawl that pits the grey-templed Hal against the youthful, angry Guy.

And Hal kicks his ass.

I immediately sided with Hal because Guy was on Guy's side -- sibling rivalry. Like the decision to read DC over Marvel, it started out by pure chance. But Hal was cool. Here was a guy my dad's age that still had the guts to be a superhero. Who had the stamina to push through the pain of sore muscles and aching bones to win a fight when it really mattered.

And it was a fun monthly, too. Gerard Jones is a witty guy, and M.D. Bright's pencils put the perfect smirk on Hal's face. Green Lantern was clever, it was exciting, it was different. Here was a guy with real, human problems. Knees that ache in the morning. A long-time girlfriend that is looking to get married -- not out of pure love, but out of a lack of other options. Balancing the needs of a city with the needs of his sector with the needs of himself. It was all so incredibly compelling.

And I had no idea it would be all over in two years.

It seems so strange -- that I would develop such a deep, intensely personal bond with Hal as a character in such a relatively short period of time. But then again, two years is about the span of time between the release of Nevermind and Kurt Cobain's suicide, isn't it?

The beginning of the end was the death of Superman. Sure, it was a marketing ploy, but the stories that came out of the aftermath, World Without a Superman and Rise of the Supermen, were actually pretty interesting. But it was during Rise of the Supermen that it would all begin to fall apart. The Cyborg Superman, one of the four Supermen in the story line (the other three being Steel, Superboy, and The Eradicator) was revealed to be a villain working with the alien marauder Mongul. The two set up a base of operations on Earth in the form of a city-sized war machine -- but first they needed to clear a city-sized piece of land.

So they blew up Coast City, Hal Jordan's hometown.

To make the long and painful story of Emerald Twilight short, the loss drove Hal insane. He killed or maimed most of his fellow Green Lantern Corps members, destroyed the Central Power Battery on Oa, and became the villain Parallax. The last Guardian of the Universe, Ganthet, tapped young Kyle Rayner to take up the last remaining Green Lantern ring.

In all fairness, I should have liked Kyle Rayner. After all, it's every Green Lantern fan's dream to have a Guardian randomly walk up to them and say, "Here it is, kid. It's your turn, now." Here's a guy who was living the dream -- this punk kid in a flannel and a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. Kyle was a comic fan, for Christ's sake. He was one of us. I should have loved him. But I couldn't. Not at the expense of Hal. Not at the expense of the Corps.

And yet, Guy and I stuck with the title for a little over a year -- through Kyle's girlfriend Alex being killed within a week of him getting the ring... through Zero Hour, which pitted the entire DC Universe against Hal -- up to Green Lantern #64.

Well, Guy may have read issues after that, but I didn't care. That one was it for me.

It was the second part of a two-issue fight between Hal and Kyle. Hal beats down on Kyle and the Justice League without much effort. It looks like Parallax's evil will triumph -- but Kyle shames Hal into leaving Earth: "I can't give up. That's not what I hero would do. That's not what a Green Lantern would do." Hal bows his head in defeat. "I... I can't go back to the way things were. I realize that now. I also realize this ring doesn't belong to me. I'm not Green Lantern anymore. You are."

The issue ends with guest pencils by M.D. Bright. It's a flashback to the Coast City days -- Hal finds a boy's lost dog, Skipper. "You're my hero. You make Coast City the best place to live in the whole world." The flashback fades to Hal, sitting alone on an empty, alien landscape. Tears in his eyes. His knees pulled up to his chest. His face, an expression of pure agony.

That was it. I was done.

I wouldn't step foot in a comic shop again for over seven years.

Guy and I stopped making comics. They just weren't fun anymore.

I looked for something else to fill the void. Something full of angst. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles fit the mold quite nicely. Reading Anne Rice led me to White Wolf's roleplaying game Vampire: the Masquerade. V:tM sites led me to several interesting goth sites on the Web. I began to notice something: on several of these sites, there were shrines set up to a white-skinned girl in black clothes and eye of Horus makeup.

Her name: Death.

Death led me to Sandman, Neil Gaiman's stunning series. It didn't register as a "comic" where my vow against the medium was concerned -- it was largely devoid of superheroes, and you could buy the collected trades at bookstores. I began hunting down the volumes, buying as many as I could afford wherever I could find them. Once, I bought six at the Virgin Megastore in New York City. I had all six read by the time the twelve-hour bus ride back to Saginaw was over.

Three years and two hundred dollars later, I had all ten volumes.

Neil Gaiman had rekindled my love of comic books. I started clinging to my old Green Lantern back issues. I would rant loudly and at great length about Emerald Twilight and Zero Hour to anyone who would listen. I started reading all the great stories I had missed out on. The Watchmen. The Dark Knight Returns. Batman: Year One. Crisis on Infinite Earths.

When I came to MSU, I checked out 21st Century Comics. I noticed a new comic for the week -- The Spectre. I had heard somewhere on the Internet that Hal Jordan was the Spectre now. I decided to check it out.

The story centered around Hal and his niece, Helen. He had taken her into his care after Hal's brother and sister-in-law were murdered. Deciding that Helen couldn't possibly have a proper childhood around a godlike superhero, he tries to send her away to live with distant relatives. Helen's angry reaction on the front porch of her new parents' home shook me to the core.

"It's like I've always loved you! I've always believed you were gonna be a part of my life! ... Fine! Fine! Be that way! But I don't ever want to see you again, Uncle Hal! NEVER!"

My. God. It was exactly what I thought when I had read the Emerald Twilight story so many years ago. I've always believed you were gonna be a part of my life. I don't ever want to see you again. Good God, Helen even looked like how I did when I was that age. And the look, the look on Hal's face when she closes the door -- it still brings tears to my eyes.

I had to put the book down. My hands were shaking. I couldn't deny the power that the Green Lantern mythos had -- that Hal had -- over me any longer. I started picking up back issues with a passion and a fury that has taken a mighty toll on my wallet these past few years. But it didn't matter. It was like phoning up an old flame and discovering she still loves you after all these years.

So imagine my unbridled joy when I learned that Hal Jordan was coming back from the dead. That he was going to wear the Green Lantern ring again.

On February 16, Hal took up the ring for the first time in eleven years. And hell yes, it choked me up. The DCU may be a screwed-up place to be, but as long as there is the Corps, all is not lost yet.

So now I've come full circle. Back to reading Green Lantern comics. Back, perhaps, to drawing my own comics.

Back to comics being fun again.