You know, once upon a time -- back in the late 1980s -- there had been only one actor who was identified at all with the role of Batman. Namely, Adam West. The 1940s serials starring Lewis Wilson and Robert Lowery as the character were almost entirely forgotten and Olan Soule had only lent his voice to the character in cartoons, only to be replaced by West eventually anyway.

So not surprisingly, there was quite a fair amount of speculation of who would wear the cowl when Tim Burton first announced his Batman movie. West was largely out of the running as he was in his 60s by then. But then it was announced that the role had been given to Michael Keaton, a man who was almost exclusively known for broadly comedic roles such as the title characters from Johnny Dangerously, Beetlejuice and Mr. Mom. There was, as I recall, quite a lot of hoopla about the casting decision.

"Why would you place a clown in the role of a superhero?"

I wasn't especially concerned. I remember hearing Burton note sometime early on that Batman was just a suit; anyone could play Batman. What he wanted was someone crazy enough to play Bruce Wayne. (As an aside, I think Keaton's scene where he grabs the fireplace poker and screams, "You wanna get nuts?!? Let's get nuts!" is precisely where I think Burton was coming from with that statement.)

Anyway, all of this background is to put the following song into context. Wally Wingert wrote and recorded "Adam West" to comment on his casting preferences with the song coming out some months before the movie. The tune itself is borrowed from The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" with a dash of the old Batman theme song thrown in for good measure. I found it quite amusing back in the day and wanted to share...

Hey! You know what would make an awesome birthday present for David Gallaher? Buying his work. He's got this Darkstar and the Winter Guard that came out just this past week with lots of superheroes and a bear, he's got High Moon which is full of cowboys and werewolves and he's got Box 13 which is kind of a more modern action/adventure/mystery.

Happy birthday, Dave!

(And, really, I'm going to get a review of Box 13 up here soon.)

The original splash page from DC Special Series #19 is currently up for auction on Heritage's site. It features a somewhat iconic look at Wonder Woman's origin through the artistic talents of Jose Delbo and Vince Colletta...
It's a gorgeous piece of artwork, but it does raise one question for me. And maybe this stems from my being more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but I thought it was Wonder Woman's jet that was invisible, not her boots...

I'm a guy who likes his art with a lot of contrast. Give me some high contrast/rich blacks Joe Sinnott inks over feathery/light lines Vince Colletta ones any day. So I took one look at the cover to the cover to Underground and thought, "Yeah, that's what I'm talkin' about." And then when I started skimming through, I saw that A) there's a fair amount of that throughout the story as well and B) the story largely takes place in the depths of a largely unexplored cave. "Sweet!"

Here's the beauty of that last bit. What you might call Lieber's "signature" work to date has been Whiteout. (Written by Greg Rucka.) The story is about a U.S. Marshal investigating a murder in Antarctica. You know: Antarctica? Miles and miles of nothing but ice and snow. A small base station in the middle of abso-frickin-lutely nowhere. White snow blowing across white ice in front of white peaked mountains. Light bouncing off everything.

Now contrast that against Underground. (Written by Jeff Parker.) The story is about a pair of park rangers who stumble across some thugs who are vandalizing a cave on state property. The thugs get unexpectedly violent and start hunting the two rangers who are forced deeper and deeper into the caverns. The story becomes something of an underground race with the protagonists fighting against both the armed thugs and Mother Nature. Underground. As in, no natural light at all. Ever more confining and restricted spaces. In the middle of town, yet almost completely inaccessible. Just about as opposite as you can get from Antarctica.

And here's the clever bit. The really insanely clever bit. In Whiteout, Lieber tended to use a lot of smaller panels with distinct panel borders. Quite the opposite one might expect. (You know the old joke about a blank sheet of paper being a drawing of a polar bear with his eyes closed in a snowstorm?) In Underground, Lieber uses fewer and larger panels, even going so far as to provide several full page splashes and one double-page spread! Again, going 180 degrees different than one might expect. But the brilliance here is that Whiteout still possess a sense of a vast open wasteland while Underground feels more tight and confining.

It's like Lieber read Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art and said "No, I'm going do the exact opposite of what this legendary master of the medium has said and practiced over the course of most of the 20th century." Which sounds exceedingly arrogant, of course. Until Lieber actually pulls it off successfully! The more I think about this and reflect on what he's actually done between these books, the more impressed I am.

OK, so what about the story?

I gave the basic plot outline above. Not unlike the Parker stories I've already read (which isn't as many as it should be, really) Underground has some excellent characterizations and solid story structure. It takes a number of turns I didn't fully expect, but not so far out of left field that they feel unnatural. Also, serious points for the main protagonist for being a feminine, but still very strong female and the secondary protagonist being a strong male lead, but not in an overbearing or he's-just-there-to-save-the-heroine-when-she's-really-in-trouble sort of way. (Though, he does do that once, it's almost accidental.) These feel like, in short, very real people.

Parker notes in the afterward that, "No one is a true villain. The conflict snowballs because of the hazardous environment. Embrace the chaos of the way things really happen -- too fast for anyone to get a solid grasp or make an informed decision." That both Parker and Lieber held to those tenets throughout the book gives it a sense of being grounded with reality. Not that faux what-if-real-people-had-superpowers groundedness, mind you, but actual reality, making the protagonists bigger heroes that anyone wearing spandex and a cape.

One more piece I'll note is the color. Ron Chan largely sticks to what would be called "local color." That is, the colors he uses are pretty much what you'd expect to see in real life. No fancy mood lighting or impressionistic goings on here. But since most of the story occurs in the dark, where color is barely perceptible to the human eye, Chan uses a very limited color palette for much of the book. In fact, it becomes more and more just shades of grey as the characters get further away from any natural light source. It's interesting to think that the book could largely have been done in just black and white, and comparatively few pages would look much different. But, going back to that notion of contrast, when we do go back to above-ground scenes, the shift in color alone is quite striking.

By now, it shouldn't surprise you to learn that I really enjoyed the book. I'm quite surprised I didn't hear more accolades for it when the individual pamphlet issues were coming out, but now that it's in trade paperback form, you don't have much of an excuse for not getting it. In fact, I bought my copy through Periscope's Etsy shop which meant that both Parker and Lieber signed and Lieber provided a sketch on the inside back cover.

Michael D. Hamersky just posted this interview with Allen Bellman. And unless you're a rare and historied individual, you're probably saying, "Who's Allen Bellman?" Bellman penciled and inked a number of Marvel (then Timely) comics back in the 1940s and '50s. That includes around three dozen issues of Captain America Comics, over two dozen Marvel Mystery Comics, a dozen or so Young Allies and an assortment of other titles like Blonde Phantom, The Human Torch, Sub-Mariner Comics, Venus, All-Winners Comics, Blackstone the Magician and Miss America Magazine. Bellman, who will turn 86 on Saturday, maintains a complete listing of his work on his own site.

Richard Nash spoke at the tail end of March to a group of book publishers. Among other clever things, he notes...

Books are cultural objects that take fifteen hours to read. Fifteen hours of another person's voice inside your head. And so the commonality between two people who've read the same book is a... profound and deep intervention.

(The full video is below and runs about a half hour. That particular quote above comes about a third of the way in, but the whole thing is worth watching.)

Today, I caught this post from Soror Nishi discussing culture as it relates to digital avatars, such as those seen in Second Life. In that post, she borrows a loose definition from Lalo Telling...

So, what do I mean by culture? Commonality: shared experience; shared symbology and language; shared worldview; shared purpose; shared philosophies of what is "right behavior", and why, and how to coax it from people... in the case of Second Life, I'll even borrow from archaeology and include a shared "tool kit". The operative word, obviously, is shared.

"That's all well and good, Sean, but you promised us you'd get back to comics blogging."

In my book, I wrote at length about how these groups form around different cultural touchstones like Spider-Man and Batman. Even less popular characters like Squirrel Girl and Sun Boy have their fans, and small sub-cultures are formed around them. These fans often then show their support with fanfic, filk, cosplay, etc.

What I neglected to mention, though, is that similar groupings can develop around other shared experiences. Such as going to the same comic book shop every week. Although sometimes somewhat derogatorily referred to as "the Wednesday crowd", a comic book shop that has a regular customer base will almost inevitably lead to some sense of community. If you go to the same shop at about the same time every week, you're likely to see many of the same people. Over time, you'll discover things about each other. "Hey, you're reading that book, too?" That will foster a sense of a shared community. Of culture.

I've posted fairly recently about making comic shops about MORE than buying comics. Isotope just overhauled their website and it now provides a much better look at how they've really made it more of a lounge, described thus...

More than just a comic book store, the Isotope proudly represents the bleeding edge of comic retailing modernism. Recognized throughout the comics industry and beyond as the first of its kind, combining a comic store, an original comic art gallery, an active workshop/meeting place for creative individuals, and a relaxing get-away from the pressures of life. With a swank lounge atmosphere usually reserved for the most expensive of night spots, guests at the Isotope chill out in high style with a graphic novel in hand on custom leather sofas and kick back for a quiet read on ample seating.

You want to find nice people and a gorgeous environment to discover sequential art newness that makes you fall in love with comics all over again. We want that too.

Where I'm going with this is that benefit of making a comic book shop into an experience over just a location is that you end up helping to develop a customer's sense of self. They begin to identify not as just a comic book fan, but as a comic book fan who goes to your shop! Not only do they patronize your store, but they also upsell it to other people! That's what selling t-shirts and buttons with your store logo is, isn't it? They're promoting their values -- a part of the culture they subscribe to -- by saying, "I share the mores that are exemplified by this store."

If you get everyone who comes into your store to hang out for an hour a week -- through friendly conversation or comfy sofas or whatever -- that's an hour a week they share together. And that shared experience is culture. And that culture helps to shape their very identity. And that identity is one of the most potent and powerful marketing tools you can get!

Sorry about the non-blogging the past couple of days. I've actually been out of town since last Wednesday night, and been keeping pretty busy.

So I left from work to go see the S.O. in Chicago on Wednesday. Thursday was spent taking care of some errands with her (including a quick tour of Comix Revolution -- great shop; I highly recommend it), but Friday was a gorgeous day that we spent with my dog walking through the park and having a picnic and all sorts of wonderfulness. Saturday, we met up and spent a good chunk of the day with one of my old college friends (who happens to be running for Illinois' State Representative 56th District State Representative; our friendship aside, she's precisely the type of person I'd want representing me) and her family. Sunday we spent with some of the S.O.'s friends. Great fun all around! Monday was really wet and dreary, so we mostly played it cool indoors, except for a brief sojourn out for lunch. And then I spent most of today fighting with all the idiot traffic patterns that pass for Indiana's highway system.

Now, to place on top of that fairly busy schedule, I got a call from Dad on my trip up to the windy city in the first place. I was somewhere in the middle of Indiana when he called to tell me that Mom had a heart attack earlier that day. Quite the surprise since she's never had any heart trouble that we knew of. Fortunately, they were able to act quickly and the doctors got the blockage cleared out sufficiently. Turns out that it had been mostly been in place for a few years, and what another doctor told her was just heartburn a couple years ago was in fact probably this blockage starting to cause problems. After a few days in the hospital, Mom's back at home and in pretty good shape, if a bit tired.

So, yeah. Busy schedule, plus Mom in a hospital weighing on my mind. I repeatedly offered to cut my trip short and drive to see them (and the S.O. was quick to say she'd drop her plans to be right there with me) but both my parents said there was nothing I could do anyway, so don't bother. Mom even apologized for potentially causing me distress during my weekend!

Trying to get this post vaguely back to something comic-related, Comix Revolution was a great shop in terms of material. Excellent selection of titles, with an impressive array of indie comics and decent manga stock as well. I also noted that they had a good selection of hardcover and paperback books of comics analysis -- probably the largest such collection I've seen in person (with my own collection being a close second). I'm also told that nearby Northwestern University not infrequently sends students there for some of their media and popular culture studies courses. While I was there, I picked up Ode to Kirihito Part Two, Cursed Pirate Girl #1-2 and Secret Avengers #1. I easily could've spent quite a deal more if my checking account allowed it.

Also, the youngest son of my college friend is something of a budding writer and has written/drawn quite a few of his own stories. He's only in second grade, but I was quite impressed with his creativity and writing talents. He had a manga-inspired story about a character of his own creation called Tacoshima -- a modern samurai who could conjure and fire tacos at his opponents.

Your regularly scheduled comics-blogging will resume tomorrow.