At Long Last, Sir, Have You No Shame?

As reported on CNN:

Delegates to the Republican National Convention found a new way to take
a jab at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's Vietnam service record:
by sporting adhesive bandages with small purple hearts on them.

Morton Blackwell, a prominent Virginia delegate, has been handing
out the heart-covered bandages to delegates, who've worn them on their chins,
cheeks, the backs of their hands and other places.

...

[Former Sen. Robert] Dole was sharply criticized by Kerry backers when
he questioned whether Kerry's wounds were severe enough to merit a Purple Heart.
He said Monday night that "you can't control delegates."

"I'm certain there's no possible connection" between the Bush
campaign or Republican leaders and the bandages sported Monday night, he said.

"The last thing President Bush or anybody in the campaign wants to
do is stir this up."

Sure, sure--we're all shocked, shocked to find gambling going on.....

Elmer Bernstein, 1922-2004

I've been meaning to post something on this for several days, but real life kept getting in the way.

Elmer Bernstein, one of the great film composers, died last Thursday. He was 82.

I first became interested in film music in my teens, listening to the scores of favorite movies such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (Korngold), The Sea Hawk (Steiner), Captain Blood (Korngold again), Casablanca (Steiner again), and later The Thief of Bagdad (Rozsa). That interest blossomed in the '70s when John Williams' stirring scores for Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Superman became popular hits.

As I got older, my taste in films matured...and though those great old action flicks are still among my favorites...I finally picked as my fave film of all time To Kill a Mockingbird (probably influenced by the fact that the novel is my favorite book of all time). Elmer Bernstein's simple, affecting score for that movie can still conjure specific images and dialogue to me.

Combined with the recent death of Jerry Goldsmith, the film world has lost two titans of its musical heritage.

Do You Have to Buy in Bulk?

Costco Begins Test Marketing Caskets

Further comment seems unnecessary.

Chartered to Fail

Back to the subject of education and the right-wing's continued failure to support public education and, indeed, to hasten its failure.

I wasn't at all surprised by the findings of this report; I've suspected them all along:

The data show fourth-graders attending charter schools performing about
half a year behind students in other public schools in both reading and math.
Put another way, only 25 percent of the fourth-graders attending charters were
proficient in reading and math, against 30 percent who were proficient in
reading, and 32 percent in math, at traditional public schools.

Because charter schools are concentrated in cities, often in poor
neighborhoods, the researchers also compared urban charters to traditional
schools in cities. They looked at low-income children in both settings, and
broke down the results by race and ethnicity as well. In virtually all
instances, the charter students did worse than their counterparts in regular
public schools.

And yet, conservatives continue to tout charter schools as the wave of the future. This is particularly strange coming from a political viewpoint that demands accountability of public schools and rises in righteous indignation whenever anyone suggests that taxpayers ought not have control of their school budgets.

But here they are supporting a system that pulls public--taxpayer--money away from the publicly controlled, professionally administered school system and puts it in the hands of rank amateurs who are not required to meet any of the standards the public schools must meet.

And now it's clear they aren't doing the job.

Conservatives will argue, "It's all about choice!" OK--then my choice is not to give my taxes to failures that I have no control over.

Continuity Doom?

All right, I'll admit it--there was a time when I was a completely continuity-obsessed comics fan.

I devoured the couple of issues of Mark Gruenwald's fanzine Omniverse; I worked for a couple of years on an index to DC's Silver-Age Green Lantern, attempting to work all his guest appearances into a workable timeline. Post-Crisis, I tried to come up with a history for the Justice League that allowed virtually all of their published adventures to remain "in continuity," finding substitutes (or somewhat different plot points) to make up for the absence of Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman (since the official line is that the latter two did not join the group until much later and that WW didn't exist until the appearance of her first post-Crisis issue).

But, within, the past decade, I have become convinced that Marvel and DC's--and their fans'--insistence on that kind of history, so that anything that contradicts a past story or editorial statement about a character is either forbidden or declared a "retcon", is both stifling creativity in the superhero genre and turning away new readers. Combined with the modern "never-ending" story in superhero comics, so that a new reader rarely finds himself at the beginning of a story, but always in the middle, continuity as used and defined today is no longer a tool but an impediment.

Let's make something clear--I'm not suggesting that it is advisable for the basics of a character or concept to be so completely flexible that the reader can never be sure if he is reading, in issue #144, about the same character he encountered in #131. Some things--basic powers, names, relationships with supporting cast--should certainly be consistent from issue to issue. But the operative word there is "consistent".

Consistency merely assures the reader that Clark Kent is Superman, that he is an alien from Krypton with certain "powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men." Continuity insists that a writer in 2004 portray those powers and abilities as they were portrayed 20 years ago, even though only the most hard-core of fans can recall the specifics of a two-decade-old story.

The most recent continuity argument came up when DC and John Byrne decided to revive the Doom Patrol...and treat them as never having existed in the DC Universe before. Fans--at least the vocal ones--were up in arms. "What about Gar Logan--Beast Boy/Changeling?" they cried. That member of the Titans had a history--a continuity, if you will--that involved certain members of the DP. But even the most recent of those stories were, by now, thirty to forty years old, and the most recent appearances of Logan certainly didn't depend upon them.

In fact, save for Logan, the DP had made damned little impact on the DC Universe, even in its halcyon days of the 1960s. They were produced out of the Murray Boltinoff editorial office back then, and Boltinoff pretty much ignored all the other DC titles, except when ordered to do otherwise. The original DP ended in 1969 with the death of all the members (a death later retconned in the 1980s, so that certain members would survive)--and in its less than a decade of publishing history, the encounters of the DP with the likes of Flash, Superman, etc. can be counted without exhausting the fingers of both hands (and virtually all of those encounters occurred in the pages of The Brave and the Bold, a title continuity fans generally ignore, anyway).

So, why shouldn't a new reader get a new Doom Patrol? One that includes the memorable characters of the original--for those of us who'd like to see them again and in their prime--but that doesn't depend on a forty-year history and allows the new reader to be introduced to them as fresh?

Because long-time readers remember it differently? Because it spoils the old stories for them?
I'm reminded of the story of a writer, asked if the movie versions of his books had "ruined" them, who responded, pointing to the bookcases in his office, "They haven't been ruined. See, there they all are."

For those who prefer the historical Doom Patrol, I say, "Those stories have not been spoiled. Go to your collections--see, there they all are."

Straining at Gnats

I was raised as a Roman Catholic and a pretty active one. I "fell away" after college, not attending any church until after I got married and became an Episcopalian (or, as Robin Williams calls it, "Catholic Lite--all the ritual, half the guilt").

When people ask me why I stopped being a Catholic, this is the kind of thing I point to:

The Diocese of Trenton has ruled that the First Communion of a girl with a digestive disorder is invalid because the host she received was not made of wheat.

Her mother is calling on the Vatican to reverse its ban on wheatless Communion wafers, saying the Monmouth County girl's condition prevents her from consuming even a small amount of the grain....

...the diocese has informed the Waldmans that Haley's Communion was not sacramentally valid because church law requires that every wafer contain at least a fraction of wheat gluten.

"Hosts that are completely gluten-free are invalid matter for the celebration of the
Eucharist," Trenton Bishop John Smith said in a statement released yesterday.

Jesus didn't think highly of the kind of people who put strict observance of the Law above normal human decency. Those were the Pharisees he kept railing about. One of those statements is the source of the headline on this piece:

Blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

--Matthew 23:24

The Football Game Will be Played Before and After the Half-time Show

If you had told me, six years ago, that I would now be the webmaster for a high-school marching band (here), or that--for some three months out of every year--all my weekends would be spent cheering that same band at football games and marching band competitions, I'd have called you nuts.

But yet, here I am, about to embark on my seventh season as a "band parent"--and a damned active one, too!

Band camp starts in ten days. I'll spend part of that time taking pictures to post on the website. First football game--or, as we band parents like to call it, "first performance"--is on September 3. Two weeks after that, is the first band competition, as the Ridley Raiders travel the highways and byways of the Delaware Valley region to show their skills and be judged against the marching bands from other high schools. (Think the "Battle of the Bands" shown in Funky Winkerbean and you'll have some idea.) I'll be at every game and every "comp"--taking pictures and cheering.

It started when my older son, Brian, entered high school and joined the drum line. Unsure of marching band when he started (he'd only been in a stage band until then), at the end of his freshman year, he told me, "I'm going to be drum major before I graduate!" And damned if he wasn't--in a season when the band won more awards than in any season in the past 20!

His younger brother, TJ, was never an instrumental musician...but he liked the idea of marching band, having seen his big brother in it, so he also joined the drum line, quickly becoming an experienced percussionist--to the point that the percussion instructor thinks he may eventually be a better drummer than Brian!

So, here I am, a band parent, with two seasons left. What the hell am I going to do with my falls when TJ graduates?

Picking a Big Blue Boy Scout

AP is reporting about the problems in finding someone to play Superman:

Although it would seem to be a natural for any actor, some of the very
things that make "Superman" an ideal role on the surface - massive worldwide
exposure, guaranteed sequels and becoming the face of a pop-culture icon -
can also be counted as potential drawbacks.

And if fans don't like the movie, you become their nemesis.

I dunno about that. Remember all the fan fuss when Michael Keaton was named to play Batman? Fans were certain it would be a joke, a farce, a return to the days of Adam West and Burt Ward. That the director was Tim Burton--then mostly noted for oddball stuff like Edward Scissorhands--didn't help matters.

But the fans were wrong...and many of those who spoke so vehemently against the choice now defend that first Batman film as the sine qua non of comic-book based movies.

I suspect the new Superman will be somebody--like George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, Dean Cain and Tom Welling--that most of us have never heard of. But of the actors I have heard of and heard mentioned for the part (although not in the article referenced above), I think George Eads (of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) comes closest to my view of the Man of Steel.

"...Does Whatever a Spider Can..."

Finally saw Spider-Man 2 yesterday.

An explanation is in order--my younger son, TJ, who is decidedly the more gung-ho about movie going between my two boys--was away at a summer theater school all of July, and we'd promised not to see the Spidey film without him.

The CGI stunts still have problems, to my eyes--too often the swinging scenes are obviously digital and any time Doc Ock picked up another human being (Mary Jane outside the restaurant, the two passengers on the el train) it was clear even to my tired, middle-aged eyes that the human in his clutches was CGI creation, at least as clear as it always was to me that whenever one of Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion monsters picked up a real human that human turned into a puppet as well.

I think the solution to the swinging scenes is more blur; the images are too crisp for the speed Spidey's moving at.

OK--having gotten the technical issues out of the way--I have to admit I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It's a combination of several different motifs from the classic Spider-Man stories--something going haywire with Peter's powers, Peter quitting to have a "normal" life (including a scene that virtually duplicates a famous scene--Peter walking away from the garbage can with his Spidey suit hanging from it [Amazing Spider-Man #49 or #50, right?]), and a climactic sequence that includes echoes of the famous "lifting the huge piece of metal" scene from Amazing Spider-Man #33.

One interesting point from a film-making standpoint--the director and writers choose not to cut directly from Spidey's heroic triumph against Doc Ock to the closing credits. Instead, we get a very comic-book like "epilog" that ties up a number of the sub-plots from the story...and gives us a new one to spur the next film.

All-in-all, I give this three-and-a-half stars out of a possible four.

(BTW, anyone else think Peter's no longer hiding anything from his Aunt May in this storyline? Whether he knows it or not?)

Fay Wray, 1907-2004

Hollywood's original "scream queen", Fay Wray, who made her mark by bellowing terror at King Kong, died yesterday in New York. She was 96. A complete obituary is here.

My momories of King Kong revolve around growing up in New York and TV's Channel 9 there, WOR-TV. Channel 9, in my youth, was known for just two things--carrying the Mets and Million Dollar Movie, an odd tradition of running the same movie afternoon from Monday to Friday. (The show's theme was the Tara music from Gone With the Wind--I was in my teens before I knew that lush string melody as anything else.)

Anyway, King Kong was a frequent film on that schedule, so I got to see it pretty often. Later, by my teens and 20s, the station (by now WWOR) began an equally odd Thanksgiving tradition: In an apparent effort to schedule against the football showing on all of the major stations, Channel 9 turned turkey day into Ape Day. They started with Kong in the early afternoon, then segued into Son of Kong, followed by Mighty Joe Young.

Must admit, for a non football-fan like me, it provided some entertainment before and after dinner.

"Your Representative's Judgement"

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.--Edmund Burke

That is one of my favorite quotations on the nature of representative democracy...and I bring it up now because of a recent development in my home state of Pennsylvania.

As some of you may have read in the recent news, Pennsylvania recently legalized slot-machine gambling. The idea is that the revenue from that source will be dedicated to reducing property taxes in our school districts, the main source of funding for education in this state.

I'll be happy to debate whether property taxes make any sense at all in the modern era another time, but for now let's stick to the issues connected to this new law. In order to get its share of the new money, each school district must do three things:

1. Enact at least a .01 percent earned income tax;
2. Once the gambling revenue is flowing, keep all property tax increases to a figure at or below a state-determined inflationary percentage; and
3. If a proposed tax increase exceeds that state-determined percentage, put the school budget to a referendum.

That last is something that the hard-core conservative element in this state have been crying for for years,and it is at the heart of my opposition to the entire deal.

Can any of you imagine that such a referendum would ever pass? And, more importantly, why are school taxes singled out in this fashion? Why not require referendums on virtually every tax, from the federal income tax down to the local charges for garbage pickup?

My understanding of representative democracy is that we choose our representatives--in this case, school board members--through periodic elections. (In my district, the nine members each serve a four-year term, with four of the members chosen in one year, and the other five chosen two years later.) We presumably choose them to make decisions--including tax decisions--for us, in part because they will have the time to spend on these issues and make the informed decisions that we, in general, cannot.

If we disagree with their decisions, our recourse is to vote them out of office in the next election. That is what we do with state legislators, city councilmen, etc. Why is it that only school board members are being considered as unable to make the informed decisions for us...and that we must have the ability to override their judgments?

I suspect it is because what the hard-core conservative element in this state--or any state with a similar requirement--really wants to do is starve public education out of existence. They would be much happier with a completely private educational system, because then the duty to improve the lives of the least among us would no longer be their concern.

Not that it concerns them overmuch right now.

Who Owns Superman?

Newsarama is reporting that the Siegel family heirs--who have been negotiating with DC Comics for their half of the rights to Superman for the better part of a decade--are now going to add Superboy to the mix, as the end of the pre-1978 56-year copyright term nears. And, in accordance with the changes wrought in copyright law in 1995, Joe Shuster's estate is now claiming the other half. (Previously, the Shuster estate was barred from making a claim because the law permitted it only for surviving spouses and children; Shuster had none. The 1995 law extended that right to the estate.)

So, who owns the rights to Superman? For the time being, we must presume DC Comics still does--as it continues to publish the character's adventures, and there has been no legal challenge to those publications by the Siegels or Shusters.

Newsarama says that may change as the heirs have hired a more "aggressive" lawyer. On the other hand, do the Siegel and Shuster heirs really want to become the publishers of Superman? Wouldn't it be more in their interests to negotiate a deal with DC--either an outright sale, or a licensing agreement (similar to the one the William Moulton Marston estate reportedly has regarding Wonder Woman)?

Part of the comics community always argues for "creator control"--in this case, actually, "creators' heir control"--of a character or concept. But is that really the best outcome in this case? There's no evidence that either the Siegels or the Shusters have any experience at either creating comics or publishing them. Isn't the best-case scenario for everyone--DC, the Siegel/Shuster estates, Superman fans--to leave the character in the hands of the corporation that has done pretty well by him all these years? And simply pay the estates a proper amount for the rights--admittedly a figure probably in the tens of millions of dollars over time?

I happen to think a licensing deal is the best resolution here--it provides the heirs with a steady income and doesn't deplete the DC coffers all at once.

What do you think?

Welcome--I'm new to this!

Hi!

Though I've been writing professionally for 30 years, this is my first attempt at keeping up this kind of a journal.

Comics fans will recognize my name from Comics Buyer's Guide, Comics & Games Retailer, and Wizard, where I was the first editor some ten years ago. I know I'm noted for being opinionated and stubborn in those opinions when it comes to what I think comics should be and where they've gone wrong--both aesthetically and commercially--over the past two decades or so. I've expressed those opinions--in no uncertain terms, I'm afraid--in places like the newsgroups in the rec.arts.comics area and the discussion pages at http://www.comicon.com.

Comicon.com is also where you're most apt to find me pontificating (as my wife calls it) on politics. I'm a life-long Democrat and unashamedly liberal, so don't be surprised if a little Bush-bashing goes on here during this election season.

Well, that's enough to get this thing started. Don't know if I'll post every day, but I'm sure going to try to.