This image is the cover to ODD #12, a fanzine from 1966 by brothers Dave and Steve Herring. You can see Dave's signature at the bottom of the art there. I'm posting it to show that the notion of using a time machine to go back and pick up old comics when they were new isn't new. Even back in 1966 when Marvel Comics #1 -- considered one of the rarest, most valuable comics at the time -- might command a price of as much as $250! Two hundred fifty dollars. The last one I saw at auction went for $1.6 million.

My point being that people have dreamt about using a time machine to make money selling old comics since they were barely worth the effort!

OK, now let's expand this to a story idea. Let's say a comic book fan gets access to a time machine, and they initially just use it to complete their collection of Superman. (Or whatever old title floats your boat.) They go back in time, find a newsstand, buy a copy for ten cents and zap over to a month later where they do that again. They zap over to a month later and do it yet again. Maybe they get the first dozen or two issues that way and things are going smoothly.

Then they think, "Hey, I could buy TWO copies of each issue and sell one of them at a profit!" So they go back in time again, grab another copy of Superman #1, come back to the present, and sell it for a few million. (After all, it's in virtually mint condition!) There's no authority governing time travel, so there's nothing illegal about this and the guy thinks, "No harm, no foul!" (I'm assuming the character is male because guys are more often assholes like that.)

But what if this time traveller gets greedy? What if he does the same thing for dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of old comics! Again, there's nothing illegal there, but that would seriously much up the economy! Even if you only sold one old issue at a time, you'd be throwing a huge wrench into the market, suddenly shifting tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars into a single peron's account! I honestly can't even process the ripple effects that would have!

OK, so that's going to end badly, right? So what if some other guy with a time machine, and an interest in comics, caught wind of the first person's plot? So this second guy takes it upon himself to try to thwart the other's plans! But because of the nature of time, the second guy can't always intercept the first sufficiently to actually catch him. So the second guy does what he can to sabotage the first's plans.

(In the Doctor Who episode "City of Death", the Doctor writes "This is a fake" in marker on the backs of additional Mona Lisas that da Vinci was being forced to paint. I'm thinking similar tricks could work here.)

So the overall story becomes this game of cat and mouse. Something like a cross between Doctor Who and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. So there's the idea. Open for use by any comic creator looking to play around with something different.

Oh, and hey -- if you're looking for a character design for the hero? A quirky adventurer type who's into comic books? I'll just say that I've done a bit of time travelling in my comic book research (see below!) and would be up for an another adventure! 😊

I haven't seen the comparison made often, but Trump's approach to his base reminds me of Darkseid's. Trump obviously hasn't the closest approximation of Darkseid's sense of strategy or power, but what Trump has done is efffectively harness the anti-life equation that Darkseid long sought. There has been some debate over the years about the exact nature of Jack Kirby's so-called anti-life equation that he introduced in his Fourth World comics. I think most people got the gist of where Kirby was intending with his message, but I think subsequent comic creators have missed the beautiful simplicity of the equation's origins.

Here's a passage that was written in 1957, some years before Jack introduced his anti-life equation...

It was man's mind that all their schemes and systems were intended to despoil and destroy. Now choose to perish or to learn that the anti-mind is the anti-life.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch-or build a cyclotron-without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.

But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call 'human nature,' the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival -- so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'

...

A is A -- and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

Any of that sound familiar? Although the phrase "A is A" (or "A = A") is attributed first to Gottfried Leibniz, who was essentially summarizing the Law of Identity, it has been immortalized in comics through the character of Mr. A, Steve Ditko's famously objectivist character who debuted in 1967 still several years before Kirby's Fourth World. Indeed the character's name is derived from that very equation.

But, in reading that passage above, it's clear that "A = A" is not the anti-life equation. Quite the opposite, in fact. "A = A" is the affirmation of existence, the affirmation of life. Anti-life, as described above, is not having the ability to think for oneself and make choices for oneself. Anti-life is thoughtless existence, where one is not permitted to question others, where one accepts the reality one is told without giving any thought to whether that is right or wrong. Where rationality and common sense are irrelevant. Where up is down, good is bad, and lies are truth.

That aspect of anti-life is expanded upon in George Orwell's 1984. Although more famous for introducing "Big Brother" into the common vernacular, it also presented a government that was entitled to claim whatever they wanted, and the population at large was to accept it without question. The Ministry of Peace conducts perpetual war on whomever it choses, and the Ministry of Truth tells people that the country they're at war at now is the country they've always been at war with, regardless of who they actually used to be fighting. He introduced the term doublethink which is where people are able to hold two mutually exclusive and even contradictory ideas as being equally and simultaneously valid, such as black being the same as white.

Or where A is not the same as A.

A ≠ A

There is no mystical equation that, when recited, will cause people to become living zombies. There is no physical manifestation of anti-life. All the subsequent creators who've tackled Kirby's anti-life equation don't know what the hell they're talking about, and are throwing out overly complex metaphors to make them look more clever than they are. (Morrison especially.)

The equation is simple: A ≠ A.

But it's not just telling someone; that is nothing. The equation itself is meaningless. It's the thought behind the equation that's the key. Being able to get someone to actually believe that A does not equal A... THAT is the real anti-life equation. It's not telling someone A ≠ A, it's being able to convince them of it. Without even having proof. You can't just say A ≠ A, you need to get people to believe in its truth. And when you do that, you've eliminated their own thoughts, and their own ability to reason, and supplanted them with your will. THAT is the anti-life equation.

Oh, and that passage I quoted above? That's from Ayn Rand, the very same philosopher who had such an influence on Steve Ditko; she had a pretty big impact on Jack Kirby, too.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The Girl Who Flew Away Review
https://ift.tt/wiKdLpV

Kleefeld on Comics: Earth Day Comics
https://ift.tt/Pq7QmKV

Kleefeld on Comics: Sales ≠ Success
https://ift.tt/2nMAdZT

Kleefeld on Comics: Gary Larson circa 1986
https://ift.tt/CXdukx6

Kleefeld on Comics: Remember 2015?
https://ift.tt/lAC7ipE

2015. Ten years ago. Let me rattle off a few tidbits, with varying degrees of significance, about what we started 2015 with... 

•  At the beginning of the year, the only TV show related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was Agents of SHIELD 
• The only movie DC had produced in the wake of the MCU's success was Man of Steel
• While Amazon had recently purchased ComiXology, it was still a stand-alone app
• Ask Shagg, Dilbert, and Spider-Man were still ongoing newspaper strips
• The Nib was still part of Medium
• The CXC show in Columbus, OH hadn't been launched yet
• Diamond was the comics distributor in the US, full-stop; there was no other company even toying with the idea of competing 
• DC was still a year away from rebooting its entire line with "DC Rebirth"
• Marvel had just announced it was cancelling the Fantastic Four comic; it would not be restarted until 2018
• The Ringo Awards were not a thing yet
• The Eisner Awards had no Webcomics category; webcomics were lumped in with Digital Comics
• Neither Tom King nor any of his works had won an Eisner Award; same for Marjorie Liu 
• Olivia Jaimes had not yet worked on Nancy; R. K. Milholland had not touched either Popeye or Popeye's Cartoon Club; Dan Schkade had not started on Flash Gordon 
  
• Stan Lee, Joe Sinnott, Denny O'Neil, Gahan Wilson, Marie Severin, Steve Ditko, Ed Piskor, Flo Steinberg, Keith Giffen, Trina Robbins, R.C. Harvey, Carlos Pacheco, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Justin Green, Darwyn Cooke, Richard Thompson, and Tom Spurgeon were still with us
  

How many of those items do you discuss the same way now as you did in 2015? There's been recent discussion about that documentary about Stan Lee's final days. The Ringo Awards are just a regular part of awards season now. When planning which conventions to attend, how many different choices do you consider? With Fantastic Four: First Steps just a couple months from being released, can you imagine their NOT having a comic actively published? If a syndicate suddenly pivots into a wildly different direction for one of their legacy comics, does anyone bat an eye any more?

My point is that, in all likelihood, your thinking about the comics industry has changed pretty radically in the past ten years, whether you realize it or not. What you consider normal now was viewed by many with skepticism or even outright fear just a few years ago. More significantly, however, is that these changes in the overall industry mean that individual businesses need to change as well. You can't continue to operate in an environment that's changed without making changes yourself. Remember the old adage about being the town's best buggy whip manufacturer in an age of automobiles?

What's more, while people typically think of these shifts in terms of business, they not surprisingly apply to individual creators as well. When it comes down to it, most creators are operating as small businesses unto themselves, so that makes sense, right? But it also applies to readers/consumers. How you read comics is impacted by how they're created. How you buy comics is impacted by how they're distributed and sold. How you relate to comics is impacted by how they're marketed.

Ten years. It doesn't seem like it should be an especially long time, but things can alter pretty dramatically. (Even setting aside something like COVID throwing everyone for a loop in 2020.) You don't necessarily have to jump on board and embrace each and every change that comes along -- some will be short-lived failures, of course -- but be aware that things ARE changing, and you need to think about and react to them; you can't just assume that what worked five or ten years ago will continue to work today because the environment is constantly changing around you.

The show Documentary Now did an episode a few years back that was a spoof of the type of documentary where a film maker goes on a quest to find their hero, recording all of it in order to make the film. In this case, the fictional novice film maker was looking for Gary Larson. Larson was no doubt chosen as the subject in part for his relative reclusiveness. I can only find one photo of him more recent than the 1980s, and video interviews with him are even more scarce. The closest there is to a 'public' appearance by Larson in the 21st century seems to be a short cameo in a 2010 episode of The Simpsons where he's drawn pretty much exactly how he looked 20 years earlier... With that said, I thought I'd share the only video interview with Larson I can find. It's a piece done by 20/20 back in 1986. I'm posting here as a sort of time capsule of the period.

I've talked with comic creator Dwight MacPherson on a few occasions, and I recently came across some his thoughts I had saved about the goals of a comic book creator. He said...

I've met many aspiring comic writers who say their ultimate goal is to work for Marvel. When I ask what book, they generally pause and say, "Whatever they'll let me write." Seems like backward thinking to me. Concentrate on creating your own characters and world seems like an aimless goal. Like saying, "My goal is to be someone important." Yeah, well, lots of people are important in different ways... Work-for-hire gigs are fabulous experiences (most of the time). But no writer should set such a fleeting thing as their ultimate goal.

I don't know that I've talked to many comic creators (or future creators) about their goals, but I'll take MacPherson at his word it's a common refrain. It certainly wouldn't surprise me.

He's right, of course, that having your goal to be working as a creator for Marvel shouldn't be an ultimate goal. But you can hardly blame someone for thinking that it's totally valid. After all, we live in a society which is constantly telling us how success is defined in financial terms. Successful comics are the ones the ones that sell the most. Not infrequently, publishers tout the sales of their best-selling comic. The celebrations are not so much for the content being good or not, but just that it sold a lot. And it may well be fantastic, but that's not what people were cheering about.

Look at webcomics for a smaller scale version of the same argument. Webcomics' success is measured by financial measures. Can the creator earn enough money from their webcomic to make a living? It's a lower financial bar in that regard than what mainstream publishers are looking at, but it's a financial measure just the same. Even the visitor count or page impressions or whatever other technical stats you can find about a webcomic are seemingly irrelevant compared to the "bottom line."

But that's the United States in the 21st century. We are told since birth an infinite set of variations on "he who dies with the most toys wins." Life, according to what nearly everybody tells us, is a competition and the yard stick you're being measured against is your bank account. The "success stories" we hear about on the news are those people who fought a variety of hardships, but still went on to make a good amount of money. Granted, they're generally not considered in the same class as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates, but the root of the story is always, "They worked hard and are making good money now." Occasionally, "They worked hard and stuck to their ethics... And are making money despite their ethics!"

Reflecting on that, it's little wonder many comic creators aspire to simply work for Marvel. Look at the sales charts during any given month, and the top-selling books are dominated by Marvel. ICv2 just had a piece about Marvel took 38% of the comic book market in the first quarter of 2025. Let me re-state that. Thirty-eight percent of all comic books sold in U.S. comic shops in January through March were published by Marvel. We're so used to numbers like that it probably isn't as staggering as it should be, but that is a HUGE domination of the market. Marvel sells the most comic books. Period.

So if you want buy into the accepted philosophy of the country -- that you can only be a success in your field by making a lot of money for someone doing whatever it is you do -- then an aspiring comic book writer will have a greater likelihood of "success" by working for the company that has the most success itself. That is, Marvel comic books sell better than any others, so writing for Marvel means you'd be writing one of the most successful comics on the market. Even the best selling non-Marvel/non-DC title last month sold worse than dozens of others. So even the worst-performing Marvel titles continue to outsell the vast majority of non-Marvel/non-DC work. Yeah, that's great that you sold 100 books at that convention last weekend, but even if you did that every weekend for a year, you'd still be selling less than anything Marvel does in a month. So it makes complete sense that, using the "success = sales" mindset, working for Marvel is the ultimate goal in comics.

If that's how you define "success", I'm not going to stand in your way. But, me? I think there are MUCH better measures of success in life. I don't think that they're as quantifiable as sales numbers, and I know I'm not measuring them against however the next guy is doing. I'm just saying that you should just take the time to really evaluate what "success" really means to you, and how you might try to measure it.

As you may know, I sometimes do a scan of the funnies on holidays and such to see how many cartoonists do something to denote the occasion. Religious holidays are a little iffy since, as a newspaper cartoonist, you wouldn't want to alienate the part of your audience that isn't of that faith, though Christmas and Easter are often seen as secular enough to get a pass. Theoretically, uniquely American holidays like US Independence Day would also be a bit off limits depending on the global reach of your audience, although I think most American comics don't get much traction outside the States to begin with. Earth Day, though, is a global, secular holiday and you'd think that would be an easy one to throw on the calendar and give creators a go-to topic for gag every year. Given how few cartoonists seem to reference it, though, that does not appear to be the case. Here's all I could find this morning...