What I'm Working On These Days

I haven't done any blatant self-promotion stuff in a while, so I figured I'd throw something up today when no one's really paying attention anyway because you're already thinking about your long holiday weekend.

• First, I'll start by pointing to the premier Fandomize podcast. It's going to be a show all about fans and fandom, and Cynthia Boris asked if she could interview for their first episode. We talk for an hour about fandom type stuff and I make an attempt to sound like I know what I'm talking about.
• Speaking of fandom, the latest installment of my Kleefeld's Fanthropology column went up on MTV Geek today. Every week, I write about fandom type stuff and I make an attempt to look like I know what I'm writing about.
• I'm also doing some more ad hoc type pieces for MTVG these days too. My two most recent are The Top 20 Webcomics BuzzFeed Forgot To Mention and Whatever Happened To 'Fantastic Four's' Cousin Bones? I might be doing some reporting on CAKE next month, too.
• I just submitted my latest Incidental Iconography colum for The Jack Kirby Collector #61, due out in late June. I look at one of Jack's later works -- The Eternals!
• I made a recent behind-the-scenes cameo in Greg Cravens' Hubris. If you read the next installment, you learn that I did indeed trade in the crap for a wagon.
  
• It's far from done yet, but I'm working on an essay for inclusion in a book entitled The Ages of the Avengers: Essays on the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes in Changing Times. My piece specifically will focus on Kurt Busiek's and Carlos Pacheo's Avengers Forever mini-series.
• I recently completed Christina Blanch's Gender Through Comic Books online course. Fantastic material and discussions! I highly encourage everyone to take it if the opportunity comes up again!
  
• I've still got my The Comic Book Adventures of Harry Blackstone, Magician Detective book on hold while I sort out my permanent living arrangements. Unlike a lot of other research projects I work on, almost none of the material here is available online and the hard copies I have are currently in storage. I will get back to this sooner or later, though!
• And, as ever, there's my humble blog churning away in the background with no one but myself interested in it.
  

Journey Into Mystery: A Bad Visual Pun

No idea where this came from, but for some reason the idea of this mashup amused me tonight.

A Bullpen Of Links

• Blake Bell points out some differences in what Steve Ditko drew compared to what was ultimately printed in Black Magic #27. But why pimple cream, of all things, that's what I'd like to know?
• David Herbert looks at the process of trying to analyze the qaulity of one's own webcomics objectively. Obviously, the same idea can apply to any creative endeavor.
• Jim Shelly has some thoughts on the cancellation of Legion of the Super-Heroes.
• Finally, Jeremy (grandson of Jack) Kirby is Kickstartering a new book featuring lots of previously unpublished photos and drawings and such from The King. One of the reward tiers is original Jack Kirby art!

The Used Bookstore Adventure

I stopped by a used book store last night becaue... well, it's a used book store! I'm by no means a collector of antique books or anything, but I almost always find something interesting and/or useful in just browsing the stacks. This particular store was unlike any I'd ever been in though. The place was so filled with books that it was physically difficult to navigate the store. (That's an actual picture of it at the right.) Every spare nook and cranny was packed with books and when they ran out of room, they got stacked up on the floor in the aisles.

The store was, unsurprisingly, very loosely organized. Old post-it notes that had lost their stickiness and had been stapled back to the bookshelves identified broad categories, but beyond that, it was a crap-shoot. Sociology was next to History, and Psychology was the next aisle over next to Russian Literature. (Not an exaggeration.) Finding anything seems to be a bit of an adventure, and I think that's probably the biggest appeal here.

I was surprised to discover he did have a few shelves of comics material, unlabeled and mixed in with the humor. Very little in the way of mainstream type material you might be searching for, but I found a few interesting nuggets. There were a few DC pocketbook paperbacks from 1978 that I never knew existed; at a buck fifty each, I couldn't pass those up. And I stumbled across a 1992 issue of Psychic Chicago -- Chicago's Psychic Magazine. It had an intriguing cover, and a quick flip-through revealed a four-page comic in the middle of it! I also picked up some Kim Deitch, The Making of a Graphic Novel: The Resonator, and a civil liberties anthology that was NOT put out by the CBLDF.

Absolutely none of those books I picked were ones I was looking for in any capacity. In fact, I was completely unaware that any of them actually existed at all. I bought them in part because they were cheap, but also because there was some thrill of discovering something totally unexpected in a dark and mysertious place. It kind of had an Indiana Jones element to it, honestly. I could have left the books there -- or, for that matter, thrown them anywhere in the building; they wouldn't seem out of place regardless where/how they landed -- but I paid for them as a sort of trophy. I dove headlong into a labyrinth of dusty books on ancient shelves, and emerged having conquered the minotaur. As much as I love the ease and accessibility and universality of Amazon and eBay and the like, yesterday afternoon was quite the literary adventure, and I quite like the idea of being an Indiana Jones of sequential art.

Musings On Invulnerability

Last night, I went to dinner at a Mexican place along a pretty busy, urban street. Small place, but good food. We're sitting there eating and the S.O. gets this quizical look on her face. I follow her gaze out the window to see this child of maybe 3 or 4 wearing red shorts and a Superman emblem tank top standing by himself on the sidewalk. In the second or so it took me to realize that this child was completely by himself, he darted out across three or four lanes of traffic to the other side of the street. (Spoiler: he made it to the other side safely.) As he was crossing, there was fortunately a bit of a lull in traffic, but there was one guy who had to slam on his breaks pretty hard. And simultaneous to all this, there comes this loud shriek from inside the restaurant and this woman goes dashing out the front door and into the street.

This lady (presumably the child's mother) actually got closer to being in an accident than the kid. But she grabbed him on the other side of the street and dragged him back to the front door of the restaurant where, by this time, a man (presumably the father) was waiting, holding the hand of another child of maybe 5 or 6 years. There was a brief discussion between the two adults, and Dad stormed off dragging the two kids, while Mom went back inside. She left again shortly after, so I'm guessing she just paid their bill.

The child who ran into the street was alright when I last saw him, although I suspect his butt was considerably more tender by the time he went to bed.

What struck me was the Superman shirt. The child was young enough that he might not have really had a firm grasp on Superman yet. Maybe he recognized and responded to the character from cartoons or games or something, but he certainly was too young to understand what invulnerability means. Death is just too abstract a concept for that age group. They're still learning how their bodies work and respond to external stimuli. They're just getting to an age where they begin to understand that grabbing a hot pan will burn you, and a snarling dog can bite, and all those early life lessons that naievete forces us to learn.

But, in a weird way, that very ignorance made him invulnerable. Yes, if he got hit by an oncoming car, it would have ended tragically, but he didn't know that. He stepped into the street fearing absolutely nothing, because he had no reason to think his life was in any danger. He had no concept that his life could end, no concept that the life he's experiencing is finite. And, naturally, he had no clue that the big S on his chest implied his sense of invulnerability.

That changes as we get older. Although we still often feel invincible well into adolesence, we can at least begin to appreciate what death is, even if we don't really understand it. But the child in the Superman shirt? His complete ignorance of death makes him as invulnerable as Superman.

Quick Apology

Just wanted to drop a quick note to apologize for the lack of blogging this weekend. As you may recall, I recently moved to the Chicago area and the S.O. and I have been house-hunting. We found a place, put in an offer that was accepted and about a week ago, they decided they didn't want to sell to us after all and walked away from the deal. So we're back to square one, with the added bonus of the lease on my short-term place ending on Tuesday and the S.O.'s ending at the end of the month.

Fortunately, a friend of the S.O. is trying to sell her place and offered to let us stay there super-cheap until it sells or we find a place of our own. (The super-cheap part is critical here, since there's no way we could afford it normally.) So this weekend was spent packing and moving my stuff, plus packing some of the S.O.'s stuff and putting it in storage. Next weekend is packing and moving the S.O. We also had a relative's graudation party to attend, and last week I had some unexpected travel come up for work.

Plus, you know, trying to look for a house still. Along with the regular day job, and various other ongoing writing gigs.

In any event, I'll try to keep blogging as much as I'm able, but please pardon me if I miss a day or two. Plenty going on right now, and there's only so much time to get it all done in! (It's not that there aren't enough hours in the day, as many claim; it's that I just need to spend too many of them asleep!)

Reappropriating Symbols

I took an arcitecture course in college, and had to do a report on a local building. I opted for a local church, primarily because it was literally across the street from the apartment I was in at the time. The pastor there was friendly, and provided a tour. I quickly noticed, though, a number of swastikas embedded in the tile floor near the alter. Probably seeing my gaze, he proactively responded that, historically, the swastika was an icon with very positive connotations and can be found in religious texts and artifacts dating back thousands of years. "Being with higher self" is sometimes given as the literal translation of the word "swastika." It was perfectly normal and appropriate to use swastikas in churches built before the 1900s.

Adolf Hitler developed a specific version of the swastika for use with the Nazi party. It's black and on a 45° angle, set in a white circle which is then set on a red field. Despite the specific usage, though, swastikas of any sort have come to symbolize Nazism and white supremacy. In part, this is due to the attrocities committed under the Nazi regime, but it's also partly because Hitler was an expert propagandist and used his swastika EVERYWHERE. Not only were the banners and flags all about at the rallies, but it was clearly on the bicep of evey, single Nazi soldier. Sure, many countries incorporate their flag as part of their uniform, but Hitler's swastika was exceptionally easy to read and very distinctive. It didn't take long for Nazi ideals to seep over into other forms of the swastika as well.

This is the notion of symbol reappropriation. That an individual or group is able to take an existing symbol and bring enough identity to it, that the symbol's original meaning is subsumed. It's of course not limited to visual icons like the swastika; it can happen with textual icons (i.e. words*) and broader icons like Superman and Batman. The question becomes: when does it make sense to do that with regards to characters?

Batman's a good example. The character, as he was known in the 1950s and early '60s was very banal. A generic superhero who was pretty interchangeable with any other DC superhero. The only real difference was the costume; they all saved the planet from kooky aliens and used strained logic to solve crimes. And they did so for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. Batman essentially represented everything bad that happened to the comic industry in the wake of Seduction of the Innocent. Despite the "New Look" Batman introduced in 1964, the 1966 television's popularity took hold of the character's image. It was then in 1969 when Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams deliberately tried to re-image the character into more of a dark detective.

Not that sales shot up (they didn't) but what I'm talking about isn't necessarily related to sales. What I'm saying is simply that they weren't happy with what the icon of Batman represented, and deliberately went about trying to change that. The problem O'Neil/Adams ran into relative to that was that Detective Comics got the barest fraction of an audience that the TV show did, so their work wasn't seen by everyone who "needed" to see it. Which is why we got "Bif! Pow! Wham!" headlines in newspaper articles about comics for YEARS afterwards.

Of course, that's OFFICIAL reappropriation. It's entirely possible to do the same thing more surreptiously for older characters that are more in the realm of public domain. How many times has Dracula been reappropriated over the years? Or, for a more complex version, how has Mr. Sulu's image changed since George Takai took up a more flamboyant public image for himself?

Just because an symbol -- whether it's a chracter like Batman, an icon like the skull and crossbones, or a word like "otaku" -- means something to you right now, that doesn't mean that it has to continue to mean that same thing.

* The notion of "Big Brother" is one of the more innocuous ideas to come out of George Orwell's 1984. Read the book, if you haven't -- he spends a good amount of time talking about how words get deliberately redefined to mean the opposite of what they used to me. See also: Fox News and Republicans.