Well, maybe "hate" isn't entirely accurate -- it's probably wholly inaccurate in fact. But I do seem to perpetually fall below his radar even if I just up and down, waving my arms.

Several years ago, I did send him an e-mail about researching comics and comic art. He responded, politely, that there's absolutely no money in, and that there wasn't a lot of room for new "players" financially speaking. Further, it would be unlikely that I would really be able to uncover anything new; the big stuff's been discovered already, and there's already some very talented and well-connected people looking into what hasn't been.

Not one to be discouraged, I kept pursuing my growing interest in comic book research and came up with some intriguing, if obscure and relatively minor, discoveries. I wrote some articles about them and they were eventually published. ("The Buttons of Doom" and "The Legend of the Origin of Galactus" in Jack Kirby Collector numbers 38 and 44 respectively.) Spurred on by some light praise from editor/publish John Morrow, I started doing some more research and came up with the idea for a regular column for JKC. John liked the idea and "Incidental Iconography" debuted in JKC #40.

In the meantime, Mark was plugging away on his various projects and, from time to time, mentioned on his blog the status of his definitive biography of Jack Kirby. At one point, he noted that he needed some volunteers to proofread portions of it, but they had to be extremely well-versed in the histories of comic book characters. I immediately fired off an e-mail, citing my work on FFPlaza, the Marvel Chronology Project and JKC.

No response.

I figured he probably got quite a few volunteers, and it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that he already knew several of them and how much knowledge they already had. I could easily have been an unknown quantity for him, and he didn't want to "risk" anything by showing people he didn't really know. Fair enough.

Then, after having had several "Incidental Iconography" columns published, I started work on one focusing on Mr. Miracle. "Say," I thought, "Mark was working pretty regularly with Jack at the time AND he admits to having come up with a new color scheme for the character. I should try to get some info directly from him." I fired off an e-mail asking him some relatively quick questions about the Mr. Miracle's coloring.

No response.

Mark came up on his blog a day or three later, and made some kind of general apology for not posting to his blog more, and that he had some deadline crunch. Okay, I can totally understand. So I e-mailed him again after he said his deadlines would pass, reiterating that this was for JKC and I really just wanted to get the facts straight.

No response.

I held off from submitting the article to the very last minute, and had to leave in some kind of note that I had tried contacting Mark, but he was unavailable. (Which I'm sure seemed odd to many people since he had a "Jack F.A.Q.s" in the very same issue.)

Well, maybe he's got some heavy spam filtering software on his mail program and he didn't even get the message.

I mentioned yesterday how I was looking for information/confirmation about the death of Ernie Schroeder. I also e-mailed Mark and asked if he could A) post some notice on his blog since he usually notes that stuff anyway, and B) provide some more information about it, hopefully, from closer/better information sources than I have. I even used a different e-mail account to send the message, on the off chance that he had a spam filter catching my previous ones.

No response.

It's well over 24 hours after I sent him the notice. Not only have I not received a response (which I didn't really expect anyway) but his blog has been updated five times with no reference to Ernie at all. FURTHERMORE, he did include a notice about the death of a minor celebrity that very few people outside L.A. would even know.

A couple of slights I can understand; I've missed e-mails before on occassion, and there was sufficient enough reason at first to not respond. But at this point, I have to think he's making an active point of avoiding me and/or my e-mails. I don't know what I may have said or done to cause that, but I think there's too many instances of being snubbed to not take it personally.

I just don't know what I could've done or said that would cause him to not respond like that. I'm sure he doesn't read this blog and probably not FFPlaza.com. I don't think I've ever said anything that significant in JKC, so I'm just left sitting here confused as to why he "hates" me.

I just caught news that Ernie Schroeder passed away recently, but the one piece I saw didn't list what the cause was or even when he died. It only gave a brief biography and mentioned that he passed away sometime in 2006.

I'd only recently "discovered" Schroeder and I'm sorry to hear he passed away. But since I've only seen notice of his death in exactly one place, I wonder if it's mis-informed. I kind of doubt it since he would be about 90 now, but still...

So, does anyone have any solid news on him?

I was reading through some back issues of Jack Kirby Collector and saw they once ran a "What's you favorite Kirby cover" feature on the regular contributors and various comic professionals. This was shortly before I became a regular columnist for the magazine and, consequently, I wasn't asked at the time.

But I started wondering about what my favorite Kirby cover actually is. The only ones that really stand out are things like Fantastic Four #1, Amazing Fantasy #15 and Avengers #4. Not so much for the actual cover designs, but for the contents that are contained inside.

So I thought some more and realized that most of the Kirby imagry floating around in my head are interior pages. Sometimes a figure or a panel, but mostly full pages of story art. It dawned on me that I was reacting to Jack's art in pretty much the same way he created it: he put all of his power and dynamism in the story itself, while the covers were largely afterthoughts. The man was a storyteller, not an artist. It wasn't (in Jack's mind) his job to come up with an iconic image that represented the whole of a story he just wrote. So his covers aren't quite up to the levels of power that were seen in his stories.

That said, I took a more conscious look through many of Jack's covers to see if I could find one that I really thought worked better than others. I eventually decided that Tales of Suspense #80 is pretty cool. I like the way the lightning (or whatever) is eminating from the Cosmic Cube there, and the torrent of activity in the background is well-designed to make for a relatively neutral backdrop that still conveys significant information.

I think it was about four years ago that The Wife and I visited Chicago. While we were there, we saw a performance by the Blue Man Group for the first time and I was quite thrilled to partake in the truely multi-sensory experience. What struck me in particular was the incredible blending of entertainment with social commentary. They were adept, I thought, at providing an enjoyable experience through their performance while simultaneously giving things for the audience to think about. Further, the audience was bombarded with so much information during the performance itself that one couldn't help but reflect on it afterwards -- you didn't have time during the show. What that does is allow people to think about the subject more than if they had simply provided some sort of straightforward message.

For example, if I told you that we, as human beings, have a dizzying array of information at our disposal and that it's too the point where it's impossible to realistically filter in all of, but only, the portions you want, you'd take that idea, think about it briefly, and either start to process my next statement or start formulating a counter-opinion. In the show, however, the BMG are ostensibly giving a performance so your attention is focused on what they're doing. You are able to catch the messages that are in the show, but only just. They fly by so quickly in relation to their performance itself that you don't have time to even process the idea, much less store or counter it. Consequently, you're predisposed to thinking about it later at such time when you can mentally devote yourself to the thought.

Now, I bring this all up here because this is a small group of people who A) have something to say, and B) know how to say it to great impact. Further, they do it in a very iconographic and visual way -- with their uniform, asexual, and simplistic appearance. So I'm wondering if they've considered tackling comic books as a medium for their messages, or if a publisher has ever approached them to publish a Blue Man Group comic?

Now, there certainly would be some challenges with such an endeavor. By its nature, a comic book reader has much more control over the speed of information than a person attending a Blue Man Group performance. The Blue Man Group, while they do work in storytelling into their shows, tend NOT to have a cohesive over-arching storyline in a traditional sense. While not mandatory for comic books, it is certainly the norm and probably what a majority of readers expect.

But I think it should be obvious that they do a visual that would lend itself to comic books, and I don't think it would be difficult to adapt some of their ideas to the form. Hey, if you're a comic book editor reading (though I have no reason to believe any right-minded editor would!) why not give them a buzz and see if there's any interest?

The other night, I was running through a Target to pick up some sundries and happened across the DVD version of Neil Gaiman's and Dave McKean's Mirrormask. Now, The Wife is actually a bit of a fan of Gaiman in the first place and The Jim Henson Creature Workshop, who she's also a fan of, did some work on the production as well. So I picked it up for her.

We just sat down and watched it tonight, and I have to say that I was impressed. But not in the way I thought I'd be impressed.

The story is essentially about a girl who has the typical types of fights with her parents -- her mother mostly -- and then somehow slips into a dream-world that's composed almost entirely of her drawings. Along the way she discovers that an evil twin of sorts has taken her place in the real world, and is ripping up the drawings and destroying the dreamworld and everyone in it. So the girl has to save the dream-world and return to the real world, all the wiser for the journey.

Now, I was expecting to be wowed by Gaiman's story. And, quite frankly, I wasn't. It was structurally and thematically pretty close to The Wizard of Oz. I was kind of expecting to see some cool Henson studio creatures. There were a couple that bore Henson hallmarks, but there were largely periphery characters without much screen-time. What I was NOT expecting -- certainly not expecting to be impressed with -- was Dave McKean's designs.

Oh, I've seen Dave's stuff before and I thought he was talented and all. But I was surprised here because much of his work was translated -- and translated very well, I might add -- to three dimensions. The art team working on the film did an incredible job interpretting what Dave had put down on paper, and bring it to life. All sorts of wonderous designs and sketches -- they were certainly evident in the designs the girl tacked on her wall, but they were also floating throughout the entirety of the dream-world.

Excellent, excellent visual treat. The story's not bad either, but the film's much more worth watching for the eye candy.

I had lunch this afternoon with a friend of mine. He lives in the area where I work, and suggested a small mom-n-pop type shop tucked away in an older strip mall. So we met there and talked about this, that and the other. And we stepped out and he suggested we stop next door to look around for a bit, since I like comics and he likes baseball cards.

I had seen the place as I've been driving home from work, but it looked like a trading card shop, so I was surprised that he mentioned that they had comics. We walked in and, sure enough, the place was littered with old trading cards. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer... It also had a good collection of trading card games, like Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc.

But then I glanced towards the back, and saw the wall was lined -- almost to the point of wallpapered -- with old comics. And, as we meandered towards the back, I saw the usual assortment of statuettes, action figures, long boxes, and new comics. The back half of the store was a bona-fide comic book shop!

Now, we didn't have long before we had to go back to our respective jobs, so I didn't get a proper look at their selection, but I found it incredibly surprising that there were TWO comic book shops within five or ten miles of each other for a relatively suburban area. I would expect that, for an area that really isn't THAT crammed with people, there wouldn't be enough support for two separate comic shops. Especially since I know that there's ANOTHER one -- the shop I used to frequent -- only about 15-20 minutes north of the both of them!

I see this as a positive sign that the comic industry is doing better. More sales of individual comics generally translates to more shops. More shops translates to more differentiation. More differentiation translates to more selection and better service. Overall, it's a win/win for everyone.

Provided that the shops are well managed, of course!

Now, the down side is that I'm going to have to go through this second nearby shop and drop even more cash on back issues they have in stock! But, you know, that's a problem I'm happy to have right now.

Okay, so WAAAAY back in the days of Marvel comics, Dr. Hank Pym discovered something he dubbed "Pym Particles." A person using Pym Particles could change their relative size becoming either very small or very large. Several characters have used Pym Particles over the years to become super-powered. But let's take a moment to look at what's happened to some of them...

Clint Barton -- Became Golaith II in Avengers #63. Killed in Avengers #502.

Bill Foster -- Became Black Goliath in Power Man #24. Killed in Civil War #4.

Scott Lang -- Became Ant-Man II in Marvel Premier #47. Killed in Avengers #500.

Erik Josten -- Became Golaith III in Iron Man Annual #7. Died in Thunderbolts #47.

Rita DeMara -- Became Yellowjacket II in Avengers #264. Killed in Avengers: The Crossing.

The only characters I'm aware of that have used Pym Particles and haven't died have been Hank Pym himself and his ex-wife, Janet van Dyne. Pym, though, has gone schitzo on several occassions, and Janet has gotten smacked around quite a bit over the years -- including by her then-husband (Hank) and her best friend (She-Hulk).

So I'm thinking that this might not be a coincidence. Maybe Pym has gone over the deep end and is actively having these people killed. Maybe the earliest deaths might have been "real", and that got Hank thinking about getting rid of the remainder of his "competition." After all, the three most recent deaths were caused by people who were considered friends/allies of the victims, and who all were well-acquainted with Dr. Pym.

Lots of story potential here, I think...