Your Avengers Primer

There's a movie coming out May 4 called "The Avengers," which is the culmination of a very clever bit of world-building that's run through all of Marvel's recent films, including "The Incredible Hulk," "Iron Man" 1 and 2, "Thor," and "Captain America." Those movies took place in the same fictional universe, with the common thread of Samuel L. Jackson's character Nick Fury, head of the super-spy organization SHIELD, woven through them. And all those characters, plot points, hints and portents come together in "The Avengers."



My wife Karen enjoys superhero movies as much as I do, but she didn't spend her youth obsessively scrutinizing pulpy four-colored phantasmagorias like I did (I almost wrote "waste her youth" but caught myself--mine wasn't wasted at all). Consequently, one of the first questions she asks as we leave the theater is, "Was it like the comic?"

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. The Hulk and Captain America movies were about half-faithful to the comics, Thor about one-hundredth. Iron Man set my gold standard for fidelity. The filmmakers updated Tony Stark's heart-stopping (heh!) misadventure from 1963's Southeast Asia to 2008's Middle East, made some superficial changes I liked (in the comics, the chest beacon that protects Robert Downey Jr.'s heart and powers his armor was little more than a seldom-used headlight), and they were good to go. Best of all, Mr. Downey showed more personality and charm in five minutes on screen than Tony Stark had in 45 years in print.

But if there's any comic book movie whose authenticity I'm qualified to judge, it's "The Avengers." I knew them when. Specifically, I knew them in early 1972 at the age of 12, when I bought issue #100 while making a Greyhound bus trip to Klamath Falls, Oregon, and got off at the next stop to buy issue #99 so I could find out what had happened the previous issue. I'd unwittingly stumbled into an amazing introduction to the team: a special anniversary issue featuring every hero who'd ever been an Avenger (at that time numbering about 14) invading Mt. Olympus to fight the ancient Greek gods to save their amnesiac member Hercules. The Hercules. How cool is that?

It was my first exposure to Marvel's unique mash-up of ancient mythology, which I already knew and loved, and angsty superheroics, and it hooked me good. Furthermore, issues #99 and #100 were drawn by the extraordinary artist Barry Windsor Smith, who soon after this storyline pretty much abandoned superhero comics for sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I began buying new Avengers as they came out while collecting the back issues I'd missed, until I eventually had a complete collection of the entire series.

A lovely two-page spread by Barry Windsor Smith from Avengers #100.

So you see, when it comes to the Avengers movie, I feel a bit like a Beatles fan who discovered the lads at the Cavern Club in 1961 and turns up his nose at those 60,000 screaming girls at Shea Stadium. Where were they when the Avengers fought the Man-Ape, the Space Phantom, or Valkyrie and her Lady Liberators? Where were they when the X-Men were a hundred times cooler, and the only Avengers anyone knew were John Steed and Emma Peel (about which the comic-book Avengers occasionally joked)? Oh, I paid some dues, pal. I paid.

Terrific Avengers, just not my Avengers.

Avengers Assemble!
The upcoming Avengers movie takes one inspiration from the comic-book origin: the team was inadvertently united by Thor's evil brother Loki. In Avengers #1 (1963), Loki tricks the Hulk into destroying a train trestle to lure Thor into battle. Thor hears the the radio call for help, as Loki planned, but so do Iron Man, Ant Man and his fiancee the Wasp, who also respond. They fight the Hulk for a bit until they discover and defeat their true enemy, Loki. Ant Man suggests they form a team, and the Wasp proposes the name "Avengers" because it's "colorful and dramatic." Not because they actually intend to, you know, avenge anything.


As that thrilling climax suggests, those early stories by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby have a naive charm that just wouldn't fly today. The Hulk hides from his pursuers by masquerading as a circus clown and juggling elephants, surely an impenetrable disguise. The Avengers capture Loki by dropping him through a convenient trap door into an even-more-convenient lead-lined nuclear-waste disposal tank. Hey, it was the Cold War; those things were everywhere.

Although Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk and Loki are in the Avengers movie, Ant Man and the Wasp have yet to appear in any of the Marvel films.

The Avengers comic hit a game-changing home run with issue #4 (1964), which reintroduced Captain America to modern comics. The character was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941 for Timely Comics, which later became Marvel. Cap fought through World War II before his book was cancelled during the medium's post-war crash in the 1950s. Now, a decade later, Lee and Kirby brought him back with the explanation that he'd been frozen in an Arctic glacier since the end of the war (ignoring the stories published into the Fifties, an oversight other writers cleaned up later) and defrosted by the Avengers. This brilliant device established Captain America as a man out of time haunted by the death of his young partner Bucky, a characterization that defined him for decades. I'll be looking for that in the movie.


The core team of Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man (who gained the power to grow and became Giant Man), the Wasp and Captain America enjoyed a solid year of derring-do through issue #15 (the Hulk got tired of committee meetings and lit out early in issue #2). Then in #16, Lee did something that made for neat storytelling but must have been a risky business decision: the big-name characters with their own books--Thor, Iron Man, Giant Man--quit the team, leaving Captain America to recruit and train three relatively low-powered unknowns.


They were the mutant Scarlet Witch, whose sketchy "hex power" caused bad things to happen to her enemies (it was later defined as an ability to alter probability, so that if a bad guy had a 1% chance of misfiring his gun or tripping over a shoelace, she could make it 99%); her brother, the super-fast mutant Quicksilver; and the world's best archer, Hawkeye.

Hawkeye's in the new movie, having already appeared briefly in "Thor." The other two haven't been seen yet.

All three of the new Avengers exemplified one of Lee's favorite tropes: a misunderstood outsider lured or tricked into crime, only to be redeemed by their inherently noble nature. The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver had fought the X-Men as members of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Hawkeye was a hot-headed ex-carnie manipulated by the Soviet femme fatale Black Widow (a-ha!) into fighting Iron Man. The next several issues focused on Captain America molding these untrusted outcasts into a team, and are regarded by many as a high point of the entire series. The Black Widow similarly reformed, and contributed her martial arts expertise to the Avengers years later.

Two notes: The Black Widow is in the movie (and was already in Iron Man 2, played by Scarlett Johannson) but doesn't seem to be a Soviet/Russian spy anymore. Also, it's hard to imagine that a guy who shoots arrows ever took on Iron Man and lived. But that's part of the appeal of Hawkeye, who often tops readers' "favorite character" polls: he's got no superpower except the cocky gumption to stand toe-to-toe with gods and monsters, and he usually survives (he died once, but got better). I'll be looking for that roguish arrogance in the movie, too, as well as any hints that he and the Black Widow might have some history.

Hawkeye and Black Widow in the movie (above) and a recent animated incarnation.

Writer Roy Thomas succeeded Stan Lee in the mid-Sixties, and worked with artists like Don Heck and the great John Buscema to bring more modern characterizations and plots to the Avengers as members came and went. One of Thomas's most significant creations was the Vision, a red-skinned android who longed to understand human emotions and eventually found love with the Scarlet Witch (until he went crazy and got disassembled and rebuilt but lost his emotions and then they had twins who turned out to be imaginary and then she went crazy and ripped him in half and oh it's all just so depressing . . .). From the late Sixties through the Seventies, the Vision tapped the same wellspring of alienation and repressed passion that Mr. Spock did in "Star Trek," making him the coolest comic book character around, at least to alienated and repressed adolescents.

Avengers #57 (1968), which introduced the Vision (left), and my homage to that cover in Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorow?

Thomas climaxed his Avengers run with a storyline considered a landmark not just for that book but for comics in general, the Skrull-Kree War, which lasted nearly a year through 1971, an unprecedented length at a time when a really long story might span three issues. The war involved two ancient interstellar empires, the Skrulls and the Kree, with Earth caught in the middle and different groups of Avengers fighting on several fronts. Many of the Skrull-Kree issues were beautifully drawn by Neal Adams and inked by Tom Palmer; one of the issues, the double-sized #93 in which the miniaturized Ant Man takes a dangerous "Fantastic Voyage" trip inside the android Vision to repair him, is an absolutely stunning piece of work. (One measure of its quality is that its value in most price guides is several times that of issues immediately before or after it.)


Thomas ended his opus with the most audacious deus ex machina ever, in which an ordinary Earth teen, Avengers hanger-on Rick Jones, saves the universe by tapping into the latent mental powers that lay dormant inside every human and freezing all the combatants in their tracks. That's why everyone is always so interested in primitive Earthlings, you see: our godlike potential both fascinates and frightens them (another recurring theme in "Star Trek" as well).

I mention the Skrull-Kree War mainly because I've read speculation--nothing substantive enough to merit a spoiler alert--that the upcoming Avengers movie could reference it. In any event, Thomas topped that war with the Mt. Olympus story that completely seduced me, and then turned the book over to writer Steve Englehart, who did some excellent, trippy, character-driven stories that brought great new heroes and villains into the fold.

After that . . . well, in my opinion the 1980s and 1990s got pretty grim. Part of my ambivalence may be because I'd gone to college, gotten married, gotten busy, cultivated other interests. I realized I was buying current issues of the Avengers, which were full of characters I'd never heard of and didn't care about, and boxing them up without even reading them.

It's possible I simply outgrew comic books, but I think it's more that the plots, themes, characterizations, styles and tones favored by later creators just didn't appeal to me. Everything became grim and gritty and cynical. I don't do "cynical." Stories became more "adult," but only in the most juvenile, crass, sniggering sense of the term, which is to say less adult than the thoughtful whimsies Lee and Kirby spun. I got the sense that many (not all!) of the people making comic books then didn't have much respect for their medium or their readers.

I prefer to say that I didn't leave comics, comics left me. Ultimately, Marvel's decision to reboot their entire universe and halt the Avengers' continuity at issue #402 (1996) gave me the perfect excuse to stop collecting or caring. Marvel immediately restarted the series--in fact, it has several different lines of Avengers going now--but I haven't missed it a bit. No one I know or like lives there anymore.

Is It Like the Comic?
To save Karen the trouble of asking (not that she's going to read past the first paragraph of this post):

YES: Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, and Captain America (I'll give them a pass on Cap not being in issue #1) form the Avengers to fight Thor's brother Loki. The characterizations of all of them feel right to me--not exactly as they are in the comics, but as close as you could get with human actors playing the roles. Their costumes are different but that's what happens when you translate paper and ink to real people and materials on screen, and I mostly approve.

Captain America is a particular challenge and bellwether: his uniform has the potential to look absolutely ridiculous in real life, and the sincerity and earnestness of the actor playing him (Chris Evans) has a lot to do with whether it works. I'm reminded of how Christopher Reeve sold the Superman suit; when Superman told Lois he'd come to fight for "truth, justice and the American way" and believed it, you believed in him. Same with Captain America. I'll be looking for Cap to be portrayed as a take-charge battlefield strategist. That's his thing: he's weaker than Thor, Iron Man and the Hulk but they respect him enough to follow his lead.

In the comics, billionaire Tony Stark provides the Avengers' airplanes, spaceships, submarines, laboratories, supercomputers, etc., and even loans them a Manhattan mansion to meet and live in. (One of the neat conceits of Marvel comics is that they happen in actual cities rather than Metropolis and Gotham City. Avengers Mansion is on New York's Fifth Avenue across from Central Park, where the Frick Museum is in our universe.) It looks like he plays a similar role in the movie.

NO: The movie introduces Hawkeye and the Black Widow as founding Avengers way too early. More importantly, it shows the team being organized by a skulking Nick Fury, with Hawkeye and the Black Widow as SHIELD operatives. I'm not saying that can't be a good story; it's just not how it happened. (Digression: in the comics, Captain America and Nick Fury were old friends from World War II. In the "Captain America" movie, remember that international team of crack commandos who helped Cap liberate the POW camp and attack the train? In the comics, Fury led that team. When Marvel revived Cap in 1964, that worked. Fury would've been just 20 years older. Today? Sadly impossible.) I'd appreciate some wise-guy attitude from Hawkeye and any personality at all from the Black Widow (not much in evidence yet).

When I first heard that Marvel planned to make an Avengers movie, I couldn't imagine how it could work. Now, having been primed by the films already released, gotten comfortable in the reality they've built, I'm still dubious but much more optimistic. Maybe an Asgardian god, a World War II super-soldier, a gamma-radiated monster and a rocket-powered knight can stand side by side on the same screen without looking laughably absurd. I'd love to love this movie and would hate to be disappointed. I mean, gee, if this movie stinks, the value of my 402-plus "Avengers" comics--not to mention my 40 years of memories of them--could take a hefty hit.

I'd also squeal like a 12-year-old if Captain America shouts out "Avengers Assemble," surely the least inspiring battle cry ever ("Assemble?" Really? Doesn't that sound pretty calm and orderly for charging into combat?) but one that I think could still send a shiver down my spine.
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Rx: Graphic Meds

Thanks to a new publicity push (i.e., e-mailing some people such as the wonderful Johanna at "Comics Worth Reading" and Alan at "The Daily Cartoonist"), I'm getting notes from folks seeking information about the Comics & Medicine Conference I'm helping organize for Toronto next July 22-24.

This event follows conferences in London in 2010 and Chicago in 2011 that were both terrific, exciting, thought-provoking, intelligent spelunkings of that odd seam where comics meet healthcare (Epileptic, Stitches, Psychiatric Tales, Our Cancer Year, Tangles, Mom's Cancer...). Patients, caregivers and medical professionals tell their stories and use comics to communicate experiences and information in ways no other medium can. It's a growing niche in the field of Medical Humanities. Participating in these conferences has been an absolute highlight of my comics career and we hope/expect to recapture the magic in Toronto.

A couple of FAQs:

1. How can I propose a paper/talk/workshop/topic? Check out the "Call for Papers" at our Graphic Medicine blog, which is in general a good place to keep up with the latest. It'll give you a good idea what we're looking for, which boils down to a page explaining who you are and what you want to talk about. Deadline is Feb. 28.

One suggestion: although our conference theme of "Navigating the Margins" focuses on underrepresented or outsider perspectives, don't feel like you need to bend over backwards to make your idea match the theme. We're open-minded and would never reject a good proposal just because it didn't exactly fit that box. Part of the fun of organizing this thing is gathering different presentations into panels that become greater than the sum of their parts. (As I recall, we had one panel slot last year that consisted of "Stuff that Doesn't Fit Anywhere Else." We ultimately came up with a fancier name for it, but that's what it really was. And it was good.)

Important point: these are academic conferences, not comic conventions. Most of the participants are professors, students, physicians, nurses, etc., along with as many creators as we can convince to come. In Chicago, our headliners were David Small, Phoebe Gloeckner, Scott McCloud, and our lucky charm Paul Gravett (who kicked off both London and Chicago with a terrific context-setting talk that we're hoping he'll bring to Toronto). In addition to Paul, we're planning to have Joyce Brabner (Our Cancer Year) and Joyce Farmer (Special Exits) in Toronto.

2. How can I register? You can't, yet. We'll set that up soon, but right now we're still determining funding and expenses. Once that's nailed down, we'll know how much registration has to be to cover the costs (and we're only aiming to cover the costs; no one makes a dime). Our goal is to keep it affordable for starving artists. Watch that Graphic Medicine blog for updates, and I'll be sure to announce it here as well.

Another difference between an academic conference and comics convention: everybody registers and pays, even panelists and presenters (the only exceptions are invited keynote speakers). I'm going to register and pay. These conferences are intimate--80 to 100 people in London and Chicago--and presenters comprise a big proportion of those attending. This is standard practice in the worlds of academic and business conferences but sometimes comes as a surprise to those more used to comics conventions, which hand out free passes like Mardi Gras beads. I only mention it to head off that unhappy conversation later.

More information about past events and graphic medicine in general is available at www.graphicmedicine.org.

Hat Tales

A couple of people reading yesterday's post suggested I should do a comic about my stolen hat's adventure. Unfortunately, my pal cartoonist Patricia Storms says that Jon Klassen beat me to it:



Sigh. That's what makes the job hard: all the really good ideas are taken.

I Got My Hat Back

Loyal friends o' the blog may recall this post from last November describing how my family's venerable '96 Honda with 206,000 miles on it was taken from in front of my wife's office one afternoon. My jaunty opening to that post was a complaint that my favorite hat had been stolen and, oh, by the way, so had the rest of the car it had been in.

We grieved. Not like you do when something (someone) real has been lost, but like you do when the car you raised your kids in and hoped to maybe hand down to them and never had a chance to say goodbye to has been lost. Insurance declared it "totalled" and paid us off--honestly, more generously than we expected. We bought a new car with high-tech 21st Century features we enjoy. And a few days ago the cops called and told us they'd found and impounded our car.

Huh?

Never expected that. Old Hondas are chop-shop favorites, and we figured she'd been dissected before we even noticed she was gone. It turns out she probably spent the last couple of months abandoned in the parking lot of a fitness center less than two miles from home. The police told us she looked to be in pretty good shape, "except there's a lot of garbage inside." We assumed that meant totally trashed.

We called the insurance company, which actually owns the car now (and already took possession of the keys), to ask "Now what?" They said they'd truck it to a distant salvage yard. "Fine," we said, "but could we take a look first? Maybe see if there's the slightest chance any of our personal property is still inside?" "Sure, but do it today because we're transporting it tomorrow." Karen and I dashed down to the tow yard with the paperwork proving we used to own the car. The tow yard guy was sympathetic. We didn't have a key but we still had a remote that unlocks the doors. It worked. Score!

All that garbage inside? It was ours, scattered: maps, paper napkins, owner's manual from the glovebox. It's almost a sitcom gag. ("You've been robbed!" "No, it always looks like this.") Except for some damage done as the thief tore through the interior looking for valuables, the car looked good. Real good. If we'd had the keys we could've driven her home. The iPod and GPS were gone, of course, as were Karen's good sunglasses. But everything else--everything--we'd left in the passenger compartment and trunk was still there. All the registration papers I feared someone could use to find my house. The garage door remote I feared they could use to break into it (if I hadn't immediately reprogrammed the opener). And my dorky straw hat.

I think it's possible in these situations to buy your recovered car back from the insurance company, but we never really considered it. It would have cost more than the car was worth. Frankly, just paying the towing company for towing and storage would have cost more than the car was worth. We have a new car, we've moved on. But we got to collect our stuff, bang her on the hood, and tell her thanks and goodbye. That's worth considerable peace of mind.

Farewell, our true and faithful steed.

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Deep, Elegant or Beautiful

This post won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Each year, the online salon "Edge.org" asks the smartest people it can find a different Big Question. Earlier years' questions have included "What have you changed your mind about," "What are you optimistic about," and "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" This year's question asked them to name their "favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation." The responses are profound, trivial, thoughtful, silly and incomprehensible. Most are worth mulling over.

One person chose the Scientific Method, calling it "an explanation for explanations." I like that. A few chose Einstein’s explanation of gravity as the curvature of spacetime. More biologically inclined respondents picked the DNA double-helix. Other answers included behavioral economics, sexual conflict theory, "Like Attracts Like," Pascal's Wager, plate tectonics, the germ theory of disease, or how the experience of time changes when one stops wearing a wristwatch.

I'm not an especially deep thinker, but I did major in Physics and try to keep up with the popular scientific literature, and in that context I've encountered a few ideas that brought me up short and made me say, "Whoa." (Told you I'm not deep.)

For example, I'm amazed how often trigonometric functions like sine and cosine appear in unexpected places. It's not surprising when they crop up in systems of a cyclic nature; for example, the motion of any spot on a rolling wheel describes a sinusoidal curve. You'd expect to see them when calculating a planet's orbit or electron's path. But they also appear in weird places that have nothing to do with circles or angles, hinting that they are deeply woven into the fabric of the universe.

In any event, why should math--an internally consistent system of analysis and calculation invented by humans--describe reality at all? Yet it does, to as fine a point as we can measure. Moreso, it sometimes seems that no result from mathematics is so wacky or abstract that some scientist can't find an unimaginably small, large, fast, dense, early or late chunk of the universe that it describes perfectly.

I'm amazed by Euler's Identity: e^iπ + 1 = 0. In this equation, "e" is Euler's Number, (1 + 1/n)^n as n approaches infinity, equal to 2.71828... ; π is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its radius equal to 3.14159... ; and both are transcendental numbers that never end. They have nothing in common. Yet if you take "e" and raise it to the power of imaginary π (that's what the "i" indicates) then add 1, you get 0. To my ear, that's like saying "if you stack crushed glass and Pop-Tarts on top of a Stephen King novel, you get fried chicken." It makes no sense but there it is, again hinting at a deeper truth I can't begin to comprehend (not least of which is the notion that imaginary numbers--multiples of the square root of -1, which makes no sense in real life--actually mean something).

I think Newton's insight that Force = Mass x Acceleration (F = ma) is THE pinnacle of human intellectual achievement, real Promethean napalm. It's not intuitive or obvious, and yet the most profound insights and results flow from it. First, it implies that objects only feel a force when they accelerate or decelerate (which includes changing direction, and was stated more colloquially by Newton as "an object in motion tends to stay in motion, an object at rest tends to stay at rest"). To put it another way, it's not jumping off the cliff that kills you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom. F = ma makes the tides rise and the planets spin. It took me a couple of years to really grasp the profundity of F = ma and I can't recapture that learning in a brief blog post. Suffice it to say that F = ma is nearly all you need to know to shoot a rocket into space and land a man on the Moon (although it wouldn't let you build a GPS satellite network, which requires the refinement of relativity). Studying that equation changed the way I regard the world.

Also deep, elegant or beautiful: the idea that a profound insight into the universe can be expressed at all, let alone economically with only four or five symbols. F = ma. E = mc^2. Maxwell's Equations, which in the late 19th Century explained the entire field of electromagnetism (and, incidentally, could be solved to prove E = mc^2 although no one realized it until Einstein achieved it a different way decades later), are four expressions that can be written with 30 or so symbols. One of the great quests in science is for a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that would unite General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, which govern different realms (the very big/fast and very small, respectively) and are currently incompatible. No one quite knows what a GUT will look like, but I remember one researcher saying he'd know it when he saw it because it'd fit on a t-shirt.

That seems right, doesn't it? That when we eventually find the universe's owners' manual, it'll comprise one page with a single line of type (or, per Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the number "42")? There's no reason our aesthetic sense of elegance should coincide with how the universe actually operates--the universe doesn't owe us simple answers--but so far that's how it seems to work. That's deep.

However, none of these are really "explanations" in the sense the question asks. They may be helpful tools or Mysterious Mysteries of the Unknown, but they don't really explain anything. So for my favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation I'm going outside Physics to Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection. The reason it's my favorite is that when I first learned about Evolution it seemed so self-evidently obvious to me that I couldn't believe it hadn't always been common knowledge. No math required.

Lifeforms with characterstics that offer advantages in a particular environment live to reproduce more successfully than those without them. Different environments reward different characteristics. That's it. Repeat for a couple billion years and it explains everything from the oldest fossil strata to the latest flu vaccine (we wouldn't need a new flu shot every year if the bugs didn't keep evolving). That's just common sense! Why didn't everybody know that all along? We needed Darwin to tell us that? But of course we did.

(I had the same reaction after finishing Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which attributed the developmental differences among cultures to their environments, including whether they happened to have handy domesticatable plants and animals (the Old World had many, the New World few) or mountain ranges that ran west-to-east (Old World) or north-to-south (New World). I understand Diamond's work has its critics and I'm not qualified to judge, but for me the broad sweep of his thesis was so obvious I couldn't believe I hadn't known it all along. Yet I hadn't even considered it until I read his book.)

Physicist Richard Feynman once posed the question, "If all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, which statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?" Feynman's answer: "All things are made of atoms." That's a pretty deep, elegant and beautiful answer.
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Review: Teller

Another book review! But one with two caveats up front. Teller: A Novel may be the only murder mystery I've ever read aside from Sherlock Holmes. It's not a genre that normally appeals to me, and I'm a blank slate when it comes to its traditions and tropes.

In addition, the book's author, Frederick Weisel, is a friend and former boss of mine. We get together occasionally to share tall tales of the literary life over lunch. I watched him struggle to write this thing over many, many months. Between that and my ignorance of detective fiction, it's impossible for me to offer an informed, impartial review. Instead, consider this an appreciation of story I was thrilled to read at last.

Charlie Teller is a ghostwriter of best-selling celebrity autobiographies whose excesses destroyed his marriage and career. Now he's moved to the Wine Country of Sonoma County, California, to be near his divorced wife and daughter, accepted a job to write the vanity-project biography of a construction mogul, and made new friends, one of whom quickly turns up dead. Teller is the first on the crime scene. Feeling an obligation to the victim, he starts his own investigation. That's what an autobiographical ghostwriter does, right?--ask questions, probe acquaintances and enemies, and gradually illuminate the mysteries of a life. A tough cop, the victim's femme fatale fiancee, a special forces vet, a paranoid drugged-out rock star, and other characters have their own secrets and agendas. Some want to help Teller; others want him dead.

Teller is a reluctant hero, not particularly strong or capable, but driven by a dogged curiosity. The mystery moves along and builds to a satisfying conclusion, with a fine mix of action and dry wit. Weisel brings a lot of nice texture to Teller's world. He's done his homework on literature, classical music, winemaking. Setting the book in the county Weisel and I both call home gives it a terrific sense of place. I know these restaurants, hotels, backroads and vineyards. Again, he gets the details right (except I've never run into as many rich and famous celebrities as Teller does, but maybe I go to the wrong parties).

Interspersed throughout the book are flashbacks, set in a different typeface, that relate the rise and fall of Charlie Teller's literary career. I'm told that at least one early reader didn't like these chapters at all, arguing that they don't advance the plot or help solve the mystery. I couldn't disagree more. I appreciated learning the arc of Teller's life, from struggling young writer to rising star to the humiliated failure we meet on Page 1. We encounter some terrific characters, learn Teller's strengths and weaknesses as a writer and man, and understand how desperately he needs this job--or something in his life--to work out. For me, the threads elegantly come together. Just as Teller wrote his subjects' life stories, Weisel has written Teller's. I loved the flashbacks, and honestly thought they elevated the entire novel above what could have been a routine murder mystery (noting, as I did above, that I don't really know what's "routine" for this type of story).

Weisel's website has some great background on the book, quotes and excerpts, and links to buy it in the form of either paper or electrons. He also posted a couple of videos, including the one below in which he tells a story about research he did on murder weapons that had my howling when I heard it over lunch:



I can't sum up Teller better than Weisel himself did on his back cover. I found it "a surprising novel about the meaning of memoir and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are." It's a fun, ambitious first novel from an author who I hope will do many more, and next lunch pick up the tab.
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LitGraphics to Munson-Williams-Proctor

I learned a couple days ago that the LitGraphics traveling art exhibition, of which eight of my original pages from "Mom's Cancer" are a small part, is coming to the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, N.Y. March 4 to April 29.

This is the comics art show I write about from time to time that was originally mounted by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. in 2007. I attended that opening, as I did its opening at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art in 2009. Since then it's been to the James A. Michener Museum in Pennsylvania and the Fitchburg Art Museum in Massachusetts, where Friend O' The Blog Jim O'Kane made the Best Video Ever. Now New York.

I can't believe my drawings have been out traveling the country for more than four years. They grow up so fast. But would it kill them to call once in a while?

The Munson-Williams-Proctor people have asked me to record a one-minute audio clip discussing my work, presumably for museum-goers to hear as they browse. It's tempting to read a recipe out of a cookbook, record a cat howling, or just unleash a profanity-laced tirade. Sadly, I'll probably play it straight. That's why I'll never be a great artist.

LitGraphic is a terrific show if you can get to it. Eisner, Crumb, Spiegelman, Kurtzman, Ditko: more than 200 works of great comics art, plus eight of mine. Worth your time.
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Review: My Friend Dahmer

One perk I really enjoy is that from time to time Editor Charlie sends me an Abrams book he’s particularly proud of or thinks I’ll appreciate. A few weeks ago he mailed me a review copy of My Friend Dahmer (Abrams ComicArts, 224 pages), a graphic novel by Derf Backderf, which will be released in the spring. I don’t often review books; however, for reasons I’ll explain, My Friend Dahmer stirred me to reflect and write.

My Friend Dahmer relates cartoonist Backderf’s high school relationship with serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, when he was caught after his intended 18th escaped and ran half-naked into the street. Dahmer was especially depraved, torturing his victims horribly and eating some of their remains. He was killed in prison in 1994. Backderf knew him in high school before the murders started (coincidentally, Dahmer claimed his first victim the same day Backderf moved to college) but long after it was clear there was something desperately wrong with Jeff.

Backderf pulls together clues whose significance was only obvious in retrospect: a preserved fetal pig stolen from the science lab, animals found butchered in the woods, weird laughter at a friend who fell and hurt himself. Backderf wonders why no one—parents, teachers, cops—connected the dots. A haunting subtext of the story is Backderf brooding over why he didn’t, either.

My Friend Dahmer is no apologetic. Backderf never asks or expects us to sympathize with a monster. But he does illuminate how Dahmer got broken, partly through common high school hurts and humiliations that Backderf recalls with aching clarity. Dahmer, Backderf and I are evidently peers—I graduated high school the same year they did—and though I didn’t grow up in Ohio, Backderf’s portrayal of the clothes, cars, classes, and most importantly the feel of the times really resonated with me. I had that haircut, I wore those glasses. I had those friends.

Does My Friend Dahmer work as a comic? Honestly, I had to give the question some thought. Backderf’s drawing style owes something to MAD Magazine’s Don Martin, one of the great big-foot, over-the-top humor cartoonists but maybe not your first choice to illustrate a serial killer bio. I initially found the contrast between form and content jarring. However, upon reflection, I thought it succeeded. Backderf’s storytelling is skillful and clear. Sometimes, his style lets a little lightness into a story that is otherwise unbearably grim. Other times, particularly through Backderf’s thoughtful spotting of black, the art effectively builds suspense and dread.

Ultimately, despite (or due to?) its cartoony grotesqueness, My Friend Dahmer is an impressive work of journalism that may well stand as the most sober and thoroughly researched biography the killer ever receives. In endnotes, Backderf discusses his sources, including FBI interviews obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Backderf tests his first-hand memories of characters and events against later evidence and timelines, points out where they agree and diverge, and clearly annotates nearly every page. It’s a nice piece of genuine scholarship.

Now: why My Friend Dahmer hit me in a way it may not hit you. As I said, I’m the same age as Backderf and Dahmer. I didn’t attend my high school class’s 25th reunion, but its organizers invited everyone to write short bios that were compiled into a booklet and, months later, mailed out to us. I sent in a paragraph. Everyone who contributed anything sent in a paragraph. Everyone except one man, who sent in three single-spaced pages chronicling a lifetime of depression, victimization and misery. He concluded by wondering what he might have done to all of us if only he’d had the example of Columbine to inspire him.

Well. That gets you thinking.

I knew him in school and considered him a friend. He was a bit “off,” not in a scary way but enough to ping the radar of the predators and bullies. No kid I knew—whether punk or stoner or nerd or gay—was lonelier or had a bigger target on his back than this boy whose raw howl of defiant rebellion was wearing a suit and tie to school. Even the teachers just rolled their eyes. I knew his high school years were hell. I’m pretty sure I didn’t do anything to make them worse, but I don’t know if I did enough to make them better.

That’s a regret I imagine Backderf shares. My friend was no Dahmer. But then, when Backderf knew Dahmer, neither was Dahmer.

My Friend Dahmer concludes with a chilling coda set in 1991, when a friend of Backderf’s called to tell him that one of their classmates had been arrested as a serial killer. The friend asked Backderf to guess who it was. Dahmer was his second guess.

That gets you thinking, too.

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My Favorite Photo Ever (Top Three at Least)

I could think of no better way to begin 2012 than embarrassing my children.

I was in my wife Karen's office recently when I saw one of my three favorite family photos of all time stuck on the side of her file cabinet and had to grab, scan and post it. I love everything about this photo, which makes me very happy everytime I see it.

In 1996, my 8-year-old twin daughters were in a Brownie Girl Scout troop led by Karen. The girls in the troop ended their school year and began summer vacation with a party that included an apple-bobbing tub. My daughter Robin took her turn, captured her apple, then stepped aside for her sister Laura, and . . .

What's the point of having a twin sister if she won't help keep your ponytail dry?

Is that a Norman Rockwell painting or what?

Honestly, though I'm ashamed to admit it, I wasn't sure which girl was which in this photo. I asked the girls themselves (while asking their permission to post it) and they replied, "How should we know?" Karen IDed them as above. Personally, I would've deduced that the hair-holder was Laura based on the left-handed apple-eating (Laura is left-handed, Robin right-handed). But Karen says she's 99% certain, and when in doubt you've gotta trust Mom.

These are problems most people don't have when looking through family photo albums.

In any event, my girls still have each other's backs 15 years later, which is one of the things about this picture that makes me happiest. Happy New Year, chiquitas.

And Many Happy Returns

. . . as long as you kept the receipts.

I hope Christmas was great for everyone, and you all survive whatever you have planned for New Year's Eve. I'm thinking bedtime around 11 sounds pretty good.

I've spent the past three days migrating my entire life to a new computer, replacing my former magic box that was six years old and hinting that it couldn't carry on much longer. So far, it's been less frustrating and traumatic than I expected.

Since I tend to keep computers a long time and depend on them for everything, I spent some money and got some upgrades--more memory, a nice video card--that should serve me well for years. In particular, the new box should gracefully handle the art chores for whatever graphic noveling I might do. No more pushing the Photoshop "save" button and then waiting half an hour for my screen to unfreeze (I hope)! I also bought a new monitor with the new computer; right now, I've got both computers running side-by-side, but as soon as I'm convinced I don't need the old one for anything, I'll retire it and set up a dual-monitor station that'll be really cool! Twice the workspace in widescreen Cinemascope, which'll be a big help with both my writing and cartooning.

Below is one of my best Christmas gifts, which should look familiar to anyone who read WHTTWOT:


It's a genuine souvenir from the 1939 New York World's Fair, which not only stylishly reproduces the Fair's iconic Trylon and Perisphere attractions in sleek classic Bakelite, but accurately reports the temperature as well. It's small, less than 4 inches tall. My wife Karen and I saw it in an antiques shop months ago. I always keep my eyes open for New York World's Fair trinkets, which are pretty rare on the West Coast, and I thought this one was super-neat but just couldn't justify buying it for myself. So Karen circled around later and did it for me! How cool is that?

I don't want to bore or disgust anyone with a list of my loot, but have to mention that my girls very thoughtfully brought me back a bag of goodies from their summer trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and our friend Marion surprised me with a kitchen implement I thought was so amazing I once blogged about it. Others were thoughtful and generous as well.

Again, all my best to you, and thanks to all my family, friends and readers. Hello 2012.

They Is Too Many Bums in My Blog

December 24 marks the date to revisit a dram of whimsy that's been a tradition of this blog every Christmas Eve since 2005. I hope everyone gets through the coming days and into 2012 with health and happiness, and maybe that perfect little gift you didn't even know you needed. Many thanks for reading my stuff. Sing along if you know the words, or can read them . . .

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Don't we know archaic barrel,
Lullaby Lilla boy, Louisville Lou?
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Bark us all bow-wows of folly,
Polly wolly cracker n' too-da-loo!
Hunky Dory's pop is lolly
gaggin' on the wagon,
Willy, folly go through!

Donkey Bonny brays a carol,
Antelope Cantaloup, 'lope with you!
Chollie's collie barks at Barrow,
Harum scarum five alarum bung-a-loo!

Dunk us all in bowls of barley,
Hinky dinky dink an' polly voo!
Chilly Filly's name is Chollie,
Chollie Filly's jolly chilly view halloo!

-Walt Kelly

Influences

Comments left on the last post by Namowal and Jim deserved more thought and space to answer than I could deal with there. So I'm dealing with them here.

Both asked about my artistic influences. It's complicated.

I grew up reading mainstream comic books (DC as a gateway to Marvel) and comic strips. I didn't pay much attention to Underground, Japanese, or European work until well into adulthood, when I approached them more as a student than a fan. While I can appreciate Crumb and Tezuka and Herge, I came to them too late to really fall in love. Still, I try to learn what I can.

Beyond that, I divide my influences into those I happened to absorb as a kid growing up reading comics and those I sought out later as someone trying to learn about them. I remember being impressed at a very young age by the mid-century expressionism of Hank Ketcham's "Dennis" and Bud Blake's "Tiger." I still recall entire plotlines of "Dick Tracy" I read at age seven. Curt Swan's "Superman" and Carmine Infantino's and Neal Adams's "Batman" mesmerized me. When I was 11, we moved to a city whose newspaper carried "Prince Valiant," and I fell head-over-heels. Some work I could appreciate as both a young fan and maturing student of the art, starting with "Peanuts" and including Gus Arriola's "Gordo."

At about the same time, I found my new stepfather's secret stash of "Pogo." Dad became a fan in college in the late '50s, and I devoured his collections. Ten Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Years with Pogo may be one of the dozen most influential books I've read. I never saw "Pogo" printed in a newspaper in Walt Kelly's lifetime, but I'd mark my discovery of that strip as the inflection point that turned me from a fan of ephemera into a student of an art form.

In my early teens I migrated to Marvel comics, where I found John Buscema, Jack Kirby and Gene Colan. I also began reading books about comics, how to make comics, and many terrific creators from before my time including McCay, Segar, Sterrett, Raymond, Crosby, Caniff, and too many others to mention. I also found "The New Yorker."

At the same time, I was learning about traditional fine art in school and on my own. I couldn't begin to list the artists whose work I studied and tried to learn from. But I'll always remember being in a university life-drawing class when the instructor dissected a sketch of Michelangelo's, showing how he defined the contour of a hip and leg--firm and fleshy bits moving forward and backward in space, popping off the page--using nothing but a single line. It was a real thunderbolt-from-Heaven "a-ha!" moment. Whenever I sit down to ink, I aim for the "lively line" standard set by Michelangelo (no pressure).

Don't get me started on writing.

Everyone is the sum of their influences. I think the trick is to cast your net as widely as possible and drag in as many influences as you can. My most common complaint about many cartoonists, especially young ones, is they all seem to have the same tiny set of influences. Berke Breathed and Gary Larson have a lot to answer for (not really; it's not their fault that half the cartoonists following in their footsteps aped their styles, including their significant artistic limitations). These days you see a lot of what I'd call a "manga house style" appropriated from Japan, which is a straitjacket of its own.

You've got to lift your eyes. Michelangelo has something to teach a cartoonist. So do Rockwell, Picasso, Rembrandt, Dali, ancient cave paintings and Egyptian canopic jars. Likewise, it's very important to draw from life as much as possible; instead of drawing a hand like Kirby or Schulz or Tezuka draws a hand, look at the one at the end of your arm and draw what you see.

Then you take it all in, figure out how it works as best you can, and draw and draw and draw until it all filters through you and you don't even think about it anymore.

And that's your style. I think.
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Monday Tapas

It's quiet in the blog. Almost too quiet.

I often compare my freelance science-writing day job to farming. I can work months with little to show for it, then suddenly all the crops ripen (or the deadlines converge) and it's harvest season. Here in the California Wine Country they call it "Crush," mostly for what happens to the grapes but also, I think, for how the vintners feel during those few weeks when the grapes have to be picked not too soon RIGHT NOW oh no too late. I'm just coming out the other side of my Crush now, and BAM there's Christmas, its jolly elven face smirking at me. Thanks a lot, Christmas.

On top of that, I'm grabbing every spare moment I can to pencil pages for Mystery Project X. Always achingly slow but it adds up.

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A recent post by film critic Roger Ebert on Things He Knows About Writing: "I really only know one: If you don't start it, you'll never finish it."

Yes yes yes. I've said before that the hardest, gutsiest part of creating a graphic novel (or anything) is sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and making the first mark on Page One knowing you've got hundreds of more pages to go. What a seemingly insurmountable goal! I feel innate respect and kinship for anyone who does it, even if they do it badly. Most people excel at finding excuses not to start. There's always a reason. They don't have the time or the resources or the right equipment or every detail of their story worked out as well as they'd like.

I think that last one is semi-legit; even now, I'm still finding new ideas I want to explore in Mystery Project X. The basic plot's been set for months, but the motives and relationships of my characters--the themes and subtext--continue to change. If I'd drawn it a year ago, it wouldn't have been as good. A story needs time to ripen but not so much that it rots. Did you ever have a peach that's rock hard in the morning and brown mush in the afternoon? I don't know how you tell when that moment of perfect freshness arrives. Maybe you know it when you see it. Then start. Page One. Better too soon than too late, I think, because just the act of doing it will give you new ideas for improving it.

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Today is evidently "Agricultural Metaphor Day" at the Fies Files.

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Following the recent deaths of comics greats Jerry Robinson and Joe Simon (co-creator of Captain America in the '40s), the New York Times seemed determined to profile the oldest living Golden Age cartoonist they could. Luckily, they found a real gem in Irwin Hasen, who did quality comic-book work in the 1940s and '50s (including the original "Flash" and "Justice Society of America") and drew the popular-in-its-day comic strip "Dondi."

I've had the honor of meeting the 93-year-old Mr. Hasen a few times, not that he'd recall them. Punks like me are a dime a dozen to him. But what a smart, charming man. What the NYT piece only hints at is his saltiness: he is a short, sharp, profane, no-BS kinda guy who'll give it to you straight with a twinkle in his eye. He reminded me of my grandfather (who once greeted me by looking me up and down and exclaiming, "Jesus, you got old!"). The last time I saw Mr. Hasen was in Artists Alley at the 2006 San Diego Comic-Con. As I wrote then:

No one was at his table. In fact, I had to elbow my way through a line of fans queued up to meet the Hot Young Artist at the table next door to get to him. I reintroduced myself and we had a nice conversation, when I looked over his table and noticed only prints. No originals. "Oh, I remember you had some Dondi originals in New York," I said, disappointed. "I was really hoping to see them." Mr. Hasen gave me a conspiratorial nod, pulled a portfolio from under the table, and slid out a dozen "Dondi" strips. We continued to talk as I flipped through them, figuring out which one I wanted to buy. At last I chose my prize."You've got a good eye, you S.O.B.," said Mr. Hasen, eyes twinkling. "You picked the best one."

On my wall.

With Irwin Hasen, February 2006

The NYT piece is accompanied by a short video profile of Mr. Hasen. I don't see a way to embed it here, but I think this may be worth 3:29 of your life.

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I considered editing out one of the two references to Mr. Hasen's twinkling eyes in the above grafs but liked them both. If this blog were a paying gig, that's a redundancy I'd fix. But here, today, I'm a writing outlaw. Chicks dig bad boys.

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I am heartened knowing that no matter how I live out the rest of my life, I've done more good in the world and contributed more to the universe than Kim Jong Il ever did.

Dot dot dot.

Graphic Medicine/Jerry Robinson

Two bits today, one nice and the other a little heartbreaking.

"Nice" first: Although I'm hip deep in the small offshoot of science and art called "Graphic Medicine," having participated in one international conference on the topic and helped organize two, I have a hard time explaining what it is. Now I don't have to. Instead, I'll just point everyone to this article at Hektoen International, an online journal of the medical humanities, written by Ian Williams, who explains the whole thing. Ian provides some historical perspective and literary analysis in an excellent overview. And not just because it mentions me.

"The depiction of illness influences the perception of illness, which can change the illness experience for others," writes Ian. "Comics artists exercise considerable personal power through the publication of visual illness narratives."

Ian is a UK physician and cartoonist who invited me to speak at the first Comics & Medicine Conference in London in 2010. He's also on the committee that's organized the second conference in Chicago last June and the third we're planning for Toronto next July. Smart, talented and British is hard to top. Recommended reading.

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"Heartbreaking" second: Comic-book great Jerry Robinson has died. I didn't know him but I met him for ten minutes, introduced by Editor Charlie at the San Diego Comic-Con in 2006. Comic Book Resources has a nice obit.

Mr. Robinson was just about the last of the great Golden Age creators who was there at the beginning of modern comic books in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Born in 1922, he began his career as an assistant to Batman creator Bob Kane and is credited as co-creator of Robin the Boy Wonder and the Joker. His work later extended beyond mainstream superhero comics to encompass editorial cartoons, literary criticism and comics scholarship, most notably his very important book The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art (1974), which was an absolute lifeline to me in my teenage years.

In my brief encounter with him, he displayed qualities I've found common among old-school comics creators: humility, genuine appreciation that his work was remembered, and apparent curiosity about new work by someone he'd never heard of. Like Gene Colan before him and one or two since, Mr. Robinson immediately treated me like a peer. It's hard to describe how great that feels, even when you know you don't deserve it. He was a gentleman.

ADDED Friday: Links to Mr. Robinson's obit at the New York Times, and the one I was waiting for, this obit by writer Mark Evanier.

How Am I Gonna Unload These Pallets of Bookplates? Wait! I Know!

For the past couple of Decembers, inspired by wistful dreams of WHTTWOT resting under Christmas trees beribboned in Jetsons-themed gift wrap, I've offered to send a free signed bookplate to anyone who wants one. A bookplate is just a fancy sticker meant to substitute for signing a book, saving you and me the time and trouble of actually mailing the book back and forth. I designed these and had them printed up when WHTTWOT came out and, well, I've still got some.

Of course it doesn't have to be for a gift and the offer is valid any other time of the year as well (although I'd appreciate it a lot if you did actually own a copy of the book). Just e-mail me your postal address (which I promise to never use for evil), tell me how to inscribe the bookplate, and I'll have it in the mail to you the next day. My e-mail address is in the Profile atop the column to the right.

I don't say it enough, but I'm sincerely grateful when readers like my work enough to pay money for it, and even more when they like it enough to give it to someone else. Thanks.
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