You know, I get that some companies think it's a neat idea to make comics to promote themselves. And I get that creators hired to do those comics have a lot of constraints placed on them, not the least of which is trying to make a reasonably coherent and vaguely entertaining story out of absolute drek. But this is right down there with the worst.

Not that you're interested, but that big white box on the bottom of the cover was where a small box of crayons was glued. (You can see some of the residue stained the inside of the cover as well.) The yellow box above/behind the dog on the cover could be used for an individual grocer to put their own name/logo.

So what do you do with your free time? Read comics probably. Maybe just reading in general. Video games. Television. Movies. Stuff like that right, right? There's a lot of great (and a lot more not-so-great!) material out there to enjoy. Regardless of your preferences. It's great to unwind with your favorite book or show, and escape into their world for a bit.

But is that all you do with your free time?

I spent a good chunk of this weekend beta-testing a new Star Wars game (due out in December, I think). When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded really cool and something that I might be interested in, so I signed up for their email newsletter and to be put in the queue for beta-testers if they needed them. In playing this weekend, it looked like a fantastic game, but it also convinced me not to get it when it comes out. In the first place, my system could barely handle it, so if I really wanted to play, I'd need to shell out a decent amount of money not just for the game itself, but also some system upgrades. New video card, additional RAM, latest OS... Doable, but not exactly cheap.

More significantly, though, it was a very immersive world and I don't have the time to play more than occasionally. Some of my time, of course, goes to work and those types of adult responsibilities, but I also ensure that most of what remains of my free time goes into creating things. Writing, designing, drumming... Some of it is indeed freelance work on top of my day job, but some of it I do just for the sake of creation.

I was talking with a co-worker last week, and she was expressing a lot of dismay over how many people she knew did NOT create anything. They did their jobs by rote, and went home to repetitive and uninspired tasks, some necessary (like laundry) but others not (like watching TV). And some that could be executed with creativity (like cooking) but were often subject to drudgery (warming up frozen dinners). Her theory was that those people who live like that at home don't do a very good job at work either; there's little interest in trying new things or pushing the boundaries at all, and so their work is mundane and trivial. She noted that the people who seem to be doing the best and bringing the most to the company are the ones who create outside of work.

I'm hardly suggesting that everyone should stop consuming material and ONLY create it. I don't know that's even possible in the first place, and in the second place, you'd never get to see anyone else's ideas and you'd be stuck recycling your own material all the time. But what I am suggesting that you make a point to carve out some time in your schedule dedicated to creation. Doesn't matter what you create, or even what venue you choose. It doesn't matter if anyone is ever even aware of it. If you can't write, draw. If you can't draw, cook. If you can't cook, sing. If you can't sing, dance.

The point is NOT to create something that others can appreciate. The point is NOT to create something that only you think is great. The point is to create something for the sake of creating something. A phenomenally horrid school system here in the States has forced a lot of people's creative muscles to atrophy, but just like physical exercise, practicing being creative results in getting better at it. Without that creativity, you're really not much more than a zombie trudging through the motions of life.

You want to live a better life? Become more active to get your body moving, and then become more creative to get your brain moving.

I'm working on an art project, and I thought I might use some silhouetted figures as part of the design. So I go trolling around the interwebs looking for royalty-free silhouettes to use, preferably in vector format. And I quickly find the website All-Silhouettes.com which not only has many vector drawings of silhouetted people and objects, but also has them conveniently sorted. One of the files I stumble across has about 40 superheroines. Well, they're silhouettes, so 40 women-wearing-tight-clothing-with-a-few-flowy-bits-trailing-behind-them-in-dramatic-poses. Here's a sample...

And I'm scanning through them, and I'm thinking, "Yeah, that kind of looks like Ms. Marvel. That kind of looks like Hellcat. That kind of looks like Supergirl..." I figure they flipped through some comics for inspiration. Hardly surprising, really. But then I saw these two...

Now, if you don't know your 1980s Marvel comics very well, let me suggest where I think the inspiration for those two figures came from...

Nebula and Dagger. I don't know where these specific images were first used, but I know I saw them repeatedly in the various Handbooks and RPG materials that came out in the mid-1980s. I remembered them specifically because they had pretty unusual poses and, frankly, cast memorable silhouettes. Which leads me to wonder several things. First, are all of the superheroine silhouettes traced from specific artwork? Second, what about the other files from that same host; have they all been traced from existing work? Third, if they have been traced, what's the legal culpability of using them? I don't have answers to any of those questions, but it's something to think about.

The title of this post is one of the last journal entries writer Bill Mantlo made back in 1995, three years AFTER a hit-and-run driver barrled through him, severing his brain stem.

Back in 2007, I read and reviewed Mantlo: A Life in Comics, a biography of the man with detailed and appreciative notes about his work in comics. As I noted at the time, I was surprised by just how very much of Mantlo's work had impacted me, many of his stories making an indelible impression before I thought to look at who worked on them. And those aren't even the stories Mantlo was best known for, or the ones that got him the most praise.

I'm reminded of this today because LifeHealthPro just ran this impressive story about Mantlo. There's a good summary of his career as a writer, of course, and how he was just getting into the lawyering business, but what's most relevant here is the focus on what happened to him after the accident. That's a part of his story that's rarely told; it almost always ends with "Then he was hit by a car while roller blading, and has never really recovered."

Mantlo's own story is a tragic one. Beyond just the life-altering brain injury on the verge of his new career successes, but also the divorce (before the accident) and dealing with two kids trying to handle it. And then, after the accident, trying to deal with getting even adequate health care and the deep rifts that have torn apart the closest relatives and advocates he has apart. Tragic doesn't even really begin to describe it.

Knowing Mantlo's post-accident story is worthwhile for a couple of reasons. First, I think comic fans should recognize and acknowledge not only what Mantlo did for comics while he was in the industry, but also recognize and acknowledge that he's not dead. That his life didn't end back in 1992. Maybe his work didn't speak to you in quite the same way that Jack Kirby's or Chris Claremont's or Neil Gaiman's might have, but it was still pretty powerful stuff.

Second, I think everyone should recognize and be aware of just how messed up our health care system is. I've seen people out there -- average Americans -- who claim our health care system is the best in the world. It's not. Not by a long shot. Never mind that the World Health Organization rates America at #37, lower than Costa Rica and Chile, that Mantlo has had these kind of issues navigating the health care system should be more than enough to say there's something seriously wrong with what we have now.

Admittedly, it sounds like (at least from this article) some of the issues with Mantlo's recovery are his own anger and bitterness getting in the way of therapy. When it takes an insane strength of will to even get up in the morning, trying to recover lost motor skills must seem impossible, so I don't think we can judge Mantlo too harshly for that. Frankly, I'm impressed that he made as much recovery as he did.

But that speaks to a third lesson I think we should take away from this. In 1995, Mantlo typed out "I want to go home." After three years, he was obviously and understandably sick of hospitals and rehab, and wanted to return to life as he knew it before the accident. Who wouldn't? But he can't do that. None of us can do that. Time only flows in one direction; we can only take what we have right here and right now, and move forward with that. If some random event takes away some part of our life -- whether that's a job or one's health or a loved one or anything -- we can't get that back. And I think that's, sadly, part of what kept Mantlo in the state he's been in. You can't hold on to anger over what happened years ago; you can't cycle through past events in your mind forever. You can only move forward from where you are today.

Mantlo's problems are much larger than what he's been able to deal with. It has absolutely been crushing on him mentally, emotionally and physically. Far more than any person should have to deal with. But even though he's not writing comics any more, I think he still has valuable stories to pass on. Please go read the LifeHealthPro article, and then go buy a copy of Mantlo: A Life in Comics.

Over a decade before Stan Lee introduced Pinky Pinkerton to the world, he apparently went around proudly proclaiming to be gay himself...

From Gay Comics #29 circa 1947.

• The Belated Nerd shares scans of "Chip Martin College Reporter" from the pages of 1960s' Boy's Life. It's exactly as riveting as it sounds, but it's been suggested that Neal Adams was the artist on some of the later unsigned strips after the series had been introduced by Tom Scheuer.
  
• Alec Berry seems to think that another "Hey, everybody, comics are really cool! Really!" article is needed. His is posted over at The Daily Athenaeum.
• Caleb Simmons has this very substantive and solid review of Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. Simmons' final paragraph begins: "MANGA is a crucial step in the field of manga studies and should be read by everyone researching the genre."

I try to keep my blog pretty squarely on the topic of comics, but I'm going to veer off a bit tonight if you'll indulge me.

When I was a teenager, I came to the conclusion that all politicians were just lousy bastards and there wasn't a single one worth voting for. Plus it didn't matter anyway, since I never saw any that even remotely reflected my views on anything. Not surprisingly, I didn't even bother registering to vote once I was eligible.Why waste my time?

After I got out of college, I started paying attention to the world around me a little more. I started listening to the news, and understood things that were happening to people well outside my sphere of influence. Politics inevitably came up, and I started seeing politicians a little differently. They were still lousy bastards that weren't worth voting for, and I still didn't see any that even remotely reflected my views, but I did start seeing that some were not only not acting in my best interests, but actively working against everybody's interests except their own. Sometimes they were coy about it, but increasingly, they were pretty openly hostile in their views towards anyone who wasn't them.

So I began voting. Cynically. As much as I would like to vote for a candidate, I sadly myself voting against them at least as often as not. The lesser of two evils, as it were.

I don't expect government to work for me. I don't expect them to act in my best interests. I expect that the only person that's going to stick up for me is me. I think that a lot of people think similarly about businesses, but I apply that same notion to essentially any institution.

I live in a pretty solidly middle-class neighborhood. Kids ride their bikes in the street, people jog on the sidewalks, there always seems to be one guy mowing his lawn. Except for the lack of white picket fences, it wouldn't be terribly out of place in a 1950's sitcom. In the past three years, within a one mile radius of my house, there have been four foreclosures that I'm aware of. I can't speak to the individual issues each household had, but I bring it up because two of those four houses have been vacant for the past 1 1/2 to 2 years. Why? Nothing wrong with them, as far as I know, but the banks have never bothered to put them on the market. They haven't bothered because almost none of the houses that have gone up for sale willingly have sold in the past 2-3 years. I know there's one just four doors down from me that's been on the market for nearly two years.

I could get into the housing crisis and bank mess and all that, but you know the recent history there. Instead, let me embed this 1/2 hour video that goes back a bit further to explain things at a more macro level. (Stick with it. It can get a bit confusing in places, but it makes sense if you sit through the whole thing.) (Also, the last five minutes or so pay a bit of tribute to Frank Miller's 300 if you need a comic connection here.)
I'm fairly certain killing Henry Paulson isn't going to solve everything as the video sarcastically suggests at the end, but overall it does make fairly evident why we're all screwed these days.

And with the global economy on the verge of disaster (make no mistake, the crisis in Europe is by no means limited to Europe) I'm pretty well scared shitless. Like, building a bomb shelter with enough supplies for several years, type of scared. I'm okay with some things being beyond my control. I've (mostly) come to grips with the notion that I can't afford to hold to my ideals and survive. I understand that I'm not good at playing the corporate game, but I know it well enough that I can get by reasonably well most of the time.

But these days, I have no clue what comes next. Not just who gets elected and what type of policies they pass, but whether or not currency holds any value. I realize it's a somewhat irrational fear in the same way that I was scared that the Soviet Union might drop a nuclear bomb on us in the 1980s. Which is slightly comforting in that we obviously survived that decade without a nuclear attack but, at the same time, look what happened to the Soviet Union. I've actually tried (unsuccessfully) to look up how average Russian citizens coped on a day to day level with their country -- and economy! -- collapsing. Clearly, the precise nature of how/why the U.S.S.R. fell apart isn't really at all applicable to the U.S., but the impact of a country's economic and political system falling into complete disarray might be worth studying regardless of the root cause(s).

I've noted before how I think we all need to act at least partially like freelancers in order to keep income flowing regardless of our current job situation. I read another post recently that suggested that's how you get through retirement as well. (Again, not expecting the government to come through with anything like Social Security by the time I retire.) She opted for renting part of her house instead of writing a book, but the core concept was similar. (I won't link to that piece because I think the author was off-base on some other significant points.)

I'm still working towards that end because the only model I have to work with is what we've got right now. And since I don't know what things will look like in a year, much less a decade, I figure it's better to work with at least what's current than with not doing anything at all. Current might translate into whatever is next; not doing anything most definitely won't.

I've got the local election results scrolling by in the next window as I'm writing this. The results generally reflect which campaign spent more money on advertising, seemingly regardless of whether or not the bill is in the best interests of the 99%. I am by no means complaining about where I'm at; I don't have anywhere close to the hardships that a lot of people are facing these days. But I still see a lot of what I do as survival because, clearly, the people who are already wealthy are the ones running the show for their benefit. Not mine. And yet people still seem to be voting against their best interests. (I fully acknowledge my bias here, and that my best interests don't necessarily overlap everyone else's, but some of these issues don't serve anyone's interests except the 1%.)

I don't have a good way to wrap this post up. I'm scared, in part, because I'm trapped; I can't afford to switch jobs or attempt to move in this economy. I'm scared, in part, because I disagree with most people in my region at some really fundamental levels -- I can almost always predict how my district will vote on any given issue or candidate by choosing the opposite of how I vote. I'm scared, in part, because I don't have any answers. I don't even know the questions. I'm scared because I can't expect my government (local, state or federal) or any business I have to deal with to do anything but screw me over in every way they can. I do what I can, and that's largely just working to keep my head above water and, maybe, find a piece of driftwood to cling onto.

And, you know, that really kind of sucks that someone like me, doing even moderately well, has to think like that.