TEMPEST IN A JAR JAR

When we left off last week, we were observing African-American History Month with a discussion of the Star Wars character of Jar Jar Binks and whether this character was an intentional slur against people of African descent, and Caribbeans in particular. My own opinion is that he wasn’t--at least not an intentional one. Though many people raised the dehumanizing spectre of the Stepin Fetchit character in old movies to decry the nabob of Naboo and the alien species of Gungans to which he belongs, there is another character to whom Jar Jar is, in my opinion, more closely related--and once again, I call this an ill-considered accident of creation. To understand this, we need to revisit a certain very unpleasant chapter of the historic portrayal of blacks in popular culture, one that some people may take issue with me for even bringing up.
This all became clear to me many years ago after I watched a public TV special on this subject. After Emancipation, the laws of the land forbade the keeping as property of “colored” people. The African-descended man was now free--at least of the chains and whips of slavery. But the links of cultural bondage persist much longer with much greater strength. If blacks under the law were not to be oppressed one way, they could still be oppressed in others. In popular media--books and newspapers at first, and later films--there was a shameful fashion for presenting blacks as buffoons--ugly-looking, sexless, shuffling, inarticulate, stupid fodder for comic relief who degraded one race for the aggrandizement of another. Think about Stepin Fetchit (look him up if you don’t know the character) and all the Hollywood movie “Mammies,” and of course the minstrel shows of the Vaudeville era. That’s where that came from, the swapping out of physical chains and whips for cultural dehumanization. And besides old Stepin, there is one other character synonymous with this artistic beating down of an entire race; a character whose name in some quarters cannot be spoken aloud to this day.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...Little Black Sambo.

Depending on what generation you belong to, you may be as unfamiliar with Sambo as you are with Stepin. But you’re on the Internet right now, and when you leave this Blog, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I want you to Google it. I’ll tell you this much up front: There used to be a Denny’s-like restaurant chain called Sambo’s. All the Sambo’s had to be closed or renamed because of the wrath and acrimony that this name instills in African-Americans. I’m not kidding. And I’m now going to tell you why.

Little Black Sambo is the story of a little Indian (as in Hindu) boy whose parents give him fine new clothes for his birthday. When Sambo is out in the forest with his new duds on, he is mugged by some tigers who make him give them his threads. (Think of all the kids in school who ever got mugged for their high-end sneakers; it’s a bit like that.) To escape the tigers, naked little Sambo climbs a tree, but he needn’t have bothered: for the tigers in his clothing are all so vain that they start fighting amongst themselves over which is the best-looking, and as Sambo watches from above, the tigers chase each other round the tree till they turn to butter! No, really--butter, which Sambo’s mother serves on pancakes for breakfast! Seriously!

Now, the way it was originally published, Little Black Sambo is a perfectly charming children’s story. Parents might still be reading it to their children today--if not for what happened when American publishers got hold of it. When it reached this country, the illustrations in Little Black Sambo were redone, and Sambo became the very ugly, stupid, buffoonish caricature of a black child that was so rife in the portrayal of blacks throughout American popular entertainment of that time. It was never meant to be that way; remember, this story took place in India and was about Indian people! But that’s what American publishers made it. And somehow, Little Black Sambo and in fact the very name “Sambo” became the lightning rod for the anger of African-Americans over the way they were treated, culturally, socially, politically, economically--you name it. The name Sambo became as demonized as the justly hated “N” word. It became a name not to be spoken. (In the first season of Soap, there’s a scene in which Bob the dummy [Jay Johnson] calls Benson [Robert Guillaume] by the hated name! It’s one of the few places in modern popular culture where the name is heard.) And because of what American culture did to what was originally just a charming story for children, Little Black Sambo was driven underground: suppressed, censored, buried.

When my friend Christopher Bing-Manhard and I were in art school, Christopher caught the ambition to do children’s books. One of the books he wanted to do was a new version of Little Black Sambo. Having never been exposed to the loathing that surrounded this story, I never held this ambition against him; I actually helped him a bit with one of the early drafts of it and supported his efforts. In researching the work, we learned the actual history of the book and where it really came from, and realized the appalling thing that had been done to it. Christopher persevered against the vitriol that the story still aroused even so many generations later, and eventually his version of Little Black Sambo did see print. But it remains a somewhat obscure piece of work, which is a shame, because Christopher’s illustrations are a wonder to behold. Even beauteous art can’t erase the legacy that has been heaped on this basically sweet little story.

I’ll give you another little post-script about this. Do you remember the sitcom Bosom Buddies starring Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari? There’s an episode in the second season in which the girls on the show--Donna Dixon, Telma Hopkins, and the late Wendie Jo Sperber--are alone at the advertising agency where they have to shoot a commercial with a tiger. It happens that Ms. Hopkins is a black singer/actress; she was half of Tony Orlando’s Dawn. Anyway, at one point the tiger gets loose in the studio and the girls run up a ladder to get away from him. When the other two start to panic, Hopkins’s character asks, “So what do you want me to do, run him round in circles till he turns to butter?” Having just learned about Little Black Sambo at the time, I thought that allusion was really funny. But some time later, when that episode went into syndication, guess what: that line of dialogue had been cut! I listened for it, didn’t hear it, and realized, Hey, they cut the Little Black Sambo joke! I just shook my head. There are some things that time just doesn’t seem to erase.

Anyway, to get back the original subject: When Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, many people lobbed allegations of racism against George Lucas and his company for the character of Jar Jar Binks and his buffoonery with a Caribbean accent, and the Caribbean patois and exaggerated mannerisms of the Gungan species (in particular their leader, Boss Nass). Last time we talked about the probable--and in my opinion, overwhelmingly likely--reasons why this had done. And I advanced the opinion that it wasn’t done deliberately but unthinkingly, in the process of trying to animate these characters. They did this without realizing or anticipating the way some people might react. They didn’t think ahead to the cultural effects of their special effects. And they weren’t prepared for the backlash they faced from some segments of the public. Well, what I’d like to offer as a further opinion is that what racist book publishers did deliberately and intentionally with Little Black Sambo, Lucasfilms did unwittingly with Jar Jar Binks. Jar Jar Binks is not the Stepin Fetchit of science fiction so much as he is the accidental, unintentional Little Black Sambo of science fiction.

The lesson I would suggest we take from all of the above is just this. Every story, if it is a really good one, has things to tell us about life. There are, however, times when we ought to let a story be just a story. And yet, even so, there are times when we ought to remember that the audience for every story is going to bring its own perceptions to what they’re seeing/hearing/reading. No story exists independently of the context of the culture around it. And context can make all the difference, not just in the world, but in the galaxy. Even a galaxy far, far away.

Next week: African-American History Month continues with a look back at a daytime TV series that should have gone on for...Generations.

A LONG TIME AGO AT A THEATRE NEAR YOU...

February is African-American History Month. That makes it the perfect time to talk about something that is a recurring subject in science fiction, and specifically Star Wars, fandom. For this week’s Quantum Blog and the next, I’d like to offer my take on some questions that will soon have been debated in Star Wars circles for a decade. I sum up the controversy this way:

Is the character of Jar Jar Binks, introduced in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, a racist caricature? If so, was this done deliberately?

My answers may be summed up as follows:

No, he isn’t, but he is an example of questionable creative decision making and poorly thought-out science fiction. And absolutely not, though this doesn’t quite exactly let George Lucas and company off the hook. Not quite.

In this week’s Blog I’ll talk about my answer to the first part. I’ll save the second part for next week.

In filmed science fiction, there are two characters who have been the object of countless fans’ death fantasies; which is to say, countless fans have devoted unhealthy amounts of time and energy to coming up with ways to kill them out of sheer small-mindedness and meanness of spirit. One of them is Wesley Crusher of Star Trek, who was the object of the cruelest and most unfair wishes for his death over the one--count it, one--occasion when he was directly, personally responsible for saving the Enterprise before he was even a Starfleet Cadet. (By the way, I’ve met Wil Wheaton and he’s a perfectly nice young person.) We’ll talk about him some other time. The other is the nabob of planet Naboo, Jar Jar Binks.
Now, scholars of storytelling and popular and classical mythology will tell you that Jar Jar, who belongs to the semi-aquatic species of Gungans, is an example of a particular character type: the immature clown who grows up fast, becomes responsible, and makes good. (His role is greatly reduced in Episodes II and III, but he becomes a Senator of the Republic before the revenge of the Sith brings the tyranny of the Empire.) What a lot of fans will tell you is that Jar Jar is fit only to have a target painted on him and be used for Imperial Stormtrooper target practice. Why? Not just because he starts out as a bumbling buffoon, but because he’s a bumbling buffoon who speaks in a patois reminiscent of that of certain African-descended ethnic groups. There are some who consider Jar Jar a kind of intergalactic Stepin Fetchit, and his species an insulting caricature of Caribbean cultures. But is this really the case?

In the defense of George Lucas and company, what I’ll say first is this. Jar Jar and the Gungans are partly animated characters, and there are certain realities inherent in trying to bring an animated character to life on screen, if it is a character with humorous intent. When you’re working with data and pixels (or ink and color on cels in traditional animation), you have to work even harder to create a lifelike personality than you would with a director and actors. That means you have to exaggerate qualities about the character, and the character has to have qualities that lend themselves to exaggeration. Think about the great characters of Warner Brothers cartoons. There is a reason why they all had peculiarities or impediments of speech: Bugs Bunny’s inner-city New York dialect, Daffy Duck’s slobbery sibilants, Sylvester the Cat’s lisp, Porky Pig’s stammering, Foghorn Leghorn’s “Ah say’s” and repetitions, and so forth. That was to give the animators mannerisms that they could work with in making them...well, animated. The same principle applies to the Gungans. They were made to talk and behave that way to make them seem more lifelike. Unfortunately, the choice of dialect for them, and the particular ways in which they were exaggerated, came across to some people as a racial slur. It really wasn’t; it was just animators doing what animators do. They weren’t trying to be racist; in my opinion they just made a questionable creative decision, one that they failed to think through.

I dismiss out of hand any allegations of racism against George Lucas and his company. A lot of filmmaking racists would not have given us Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian and Samuel Jackson as Mace Windu. No, I just don’t accept that. This wasn’t bigotry, it was ill-considered characterization. I reject both the allegations and the allegators. (An old gag from Flip Wilson that I always loved.)

Creative decisions made without thinking are, in my opinion, an overall problem with The Phantom Menace. When it was first released, there hadn’t been a Star Wars film in 16 years and I welcomed it with open arms. At that point I would have applauded a film of the cast reciting the Tunisian telephone directory. But as I had time to think about it, I realized that there were some problems with the science fiction in this picture, and the Gungans were part of it.

I used to keep newts as pets--or I tried to keep them as pets, anyway. My little salamanders had a habit of launching themselves out of the fishbowl and going off and hiding, and weeks later someone would move a piece of furniture or an appliance, and behind it would be a hard, dry, shriveled up thing that used to be a newt. Now, the Gungans are basically big, two-legged, talking salamanders. Look at them; that’s what they are. They’re sentient amphibians. And there is a significant part of The Phantom Menace that takes place on planet Tatooine--with Jar Jar. I have every belief that after about five minutes on the arid surface of Tatooine, Jar Jar should rightly have come to the same fate as my little newts. (Which would have made some people happy!) But he doesn’t, and it doesn’t make sense. What would have made sense would have been for Qui Gon and Obi Wan to make Jar Jar stay aboard the ship in a specially humidified chamber. Or failing that, it would have made sense for Padme Amidala to have a medic in her entourage (she was a Queen, after all) who could slip Jar Jar some temporary DNA that would adapt Jar Jar for a desert environment, endowing him with a more coarse and water-tight skin like that of a desert-dwelling toad or horned lizard. (Commercially, this would have paid off by giving the studio a chance to license toys of both Aqua Jar Jar and Desert Jar Jar; you see, things can make both sense and money!)

Anyway, the problem with the Gungans is not just one of physiology but anatomy. Look at the design of their bodies, specifically their ears. In what kind of natural history do amphibians have long, floppy ears? Look at real amphibians--bullfrogs, for example. The ears are flat membranes against either side of the head--perfect streamlining to complement an overall streamlined body form for a creature that lives partly in water. The Gungans should have had bullfrog ears, not those long, clumsy, floppy things.

Oh, and speaking of living in the water, there’s a problem with the planet Naboo itself. There is a sequence in which Qui Gon, Obi Wan, and Jar Jar must travel through what is explicitly called the core of the planet in a submarine. An aquatic, water-traveling submarine. Again we look to our own planet to see the problem with this. Naboo is a terrestrial planet; that is, a planet similar in nature and composition to Earth. It is a life-bearing, thoroughly Earthlike world. Humans, or humanoids, live there. The core of Earth is not filled with water. On the contrary, it is filled with molten rock and iron at tremendous temperatures under colossal pressure. (I don’t care how powerful The Force is; no one is going to pilot a submarine through that and live to battle Darth Maul later on!) And lucky for us that it is so, because the rotating molten iron core of Earth creates a powerful magnetic field that screens out harmful radiations from the Sun that would otherwise render terrestrial life impossible. If Naboo is an Eartlhlike planet with Earthlike surface conditions and life comparable to that of Earth, it stands to reason that it has a core like that of Earth, not a core of water! A lot of people are going to sit reading this and roll their eyes at what a nit-picker I am, but how nit-picky is it when the problem can be fixed without hurting the story at all, just with a single line of dialogue? Change the expression “core of the planet” to “underwater caverns” and you get the same story, just truer to nature! Hollywood screenwriters get paid big bucks for writing this stuff; it’s not petty to expect them to think about what they’re writing! Much of the problem with our culture, popular entertainment and otherwise, is that people don’t like to think!

And frankly, people who aren’t going to take the trouble to think about this stuff shouldn’t be writing science fiction anyway.

So...they didn’t think about the creative process that went into Jar Jar. They didn’t even think about the nature of Jar Jar’s (and Padme’s) planet. And a lot of people took the character as an insult, a throwback to less enlightened filmmaking and storytelling. But I maintain, he was not so much a racist creation as a thoughtless one. Exactly how thoughtless will become even more clear next week, when we actually do put the character into a racial context. Jar Jar unintentionally harks back to a character that degraded African-Americans--but it’s not Stepin Fetchit! You’ll see what I mean in the second part of this entry.

THE MEDUSAN EFFECT

There is a group of people who remind me of the Star Trek episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”

Written by Jean Lisette Aroeste, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” is an episode of the third season of the 1960s Star Trek. It has the distinction of being the one episode of that season that I like without reservations or qualifications. From having both watched and studied Star Trek all my life, the further I go into the 1960s series, I find it increasingly difficult to watch. In fact, the back end of the second season is when I think it starts getting painful. The third season I mostly avoid altogether, except for “Is There in Truth...,” which I love. The reasons for this lie in the way network television--specifically NBC--treated Star Trek. It is well known that NBC wanted to cancel Trek almost from the time it first went on the air. Trek has the distinction of being not just one of the first series to be saved by a letter writing campaign from its devoted fans, but the only series I know of to have been saved by its fans twice. It took NBC three attempts to kill it! They got their way the third time by deliberately burying the show at 10 PM on Friday nights when its intelligent audience (in pre-VCR days) was mostly out doing other things. That finally gave them their excuse. But the signs of trouble start to occur halfway through the series, when the production budget is repeatedly, mercilessly slashed (why do you think they did all those episodes about planets resembling periods of Earth history?) and Gene Roddenberry and company face mounting interference from network executives and sponsors. The change of time slot to the last hour of Friday night was the last nail in the coffin. Gene stepped down from the grind of producing the show at that point, and the thing just kept deteriorating. So there is a significant part of the series that I just stay away from, and I’m someone who truly loves Trek. However, the third-season episode that I will watch whenever I find it is “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”

This episode is the story of a woman and her Medusan. The Medusans are among the most exotic species of aliens ever to appear in Star Trek. Perhaps “appear” is not quite the right word, as we don’t actually get to see them. In fact, when Medusans travel aboard Federation vessels like the Enterprise, they are carried in special boxes. These beings are the most skilled subspace navigators in the known galaxy; they are invaluable aides in space travel. But they seem to be composed of energy as much as they are of matter, and their particular wavelength impinges on the nervous system of purely organic lifeforms in such a way that the sight of them renders us incurably, violently, fatally insane. So they travel in boxes for our protection and we can look at them only by wearing special visors that screen out the harmful wavelengths. When Kollos the Medusan visits the Enterprise, he is accompanied by a human telepath named Miranda Jones (Diana Muldaur, also Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek: The Next Generation) whose mental powers afford her an intimacy with the Medusan that other organics can’t achieve.

Of course, the set-up is obvious. Once you understand the situation, you know someone is going to get an unprotected gander at our friend Kollos. The unfortunate looker turns out to be Spock. One thing that NBC was always pestering them to do was to get Spock, whose Vulcan culture is based on emotional repression in favor of logic, to show feelings. So, “This week, in a Very Special Episode of Star Trek, Spock goes insane!” Through twists of plot, Spock mind-melds with Kollos to get the Medusan’s help in bringing back the Enterprise from the edge of the galaxy, then returns to Kollos’s box to reverse the meld...but Spock/Kollos forgets to put on a visor! Spock gets an unprotected look at the Medusan, and there go his Vulcan marbles. This brings us to the Big Twist, the kicker of the episode: Miranda Jones is revealed to be Kollos’s perfect companion not just because she is telepathic--but because she is blind! Yes, she’s perfectly safe from the Medusan because she can’t see him or anything else; she passes for a sighted person by means of sensor webs woven into her gowns. Miranda, who is jealous of Spock/Kollos’s mind-meld, ironically is the only one who can save Spock when the sight of the Medusan drives him bonkers.

I’ve just done something above that in some quarters might get me into trouble. Namely, I’ve just told you the Big Twist of “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” without warning you that I was going to do it. I’ve just laid upon you what is known as a spoiler. In some circumstances I would be chided and chastised and subject to open resentment for such a thing. That is because of a widespread condition that I’ve come to call Spoiler Neurosis.

Odds are that you belong to one or more Listservs, so you know about this condition and you probably suffer from it yourself. Spoiler Neurosis is the inability to bear knowing any little detail in advance about any TV show/film/comic book/novel/story. It is characterized by powerful aversive reactions to any piece of information about anything that you haven’t seen/heard/read yet. Spoiler neurotics howl in mortal pain and dismay at any such exposure. If you’re going to talk about the latest episode of a favorite show or the latest issue of a favorite comic book on a Listserv, you must do so in careful and strategic generalities, or make careful omissions of character names, or issue a warning that you’re going to go into details and then leave anywhere from ten to twenty lines of blank space in your E-mail before you proceed. This is the functional equivalent of the anti-Medusan visor. Persons exposed to advance information about, say, this week’s episode of Lost that they haven’t played back on their recording are apt to react to it in the same way as if they had just gotten an unprotected look at Kollos. “OH DEAR GOD, SO-AND-SO JUST REVEALED THAT JACK SHEPHARD SHAVED OFF HIS BEARD AND DIDN’T LEAVE A SPOILER SPACE! NO! NO! AAAAAAAAHHHH...!”

I am one of the very vanishing few people that I know of who are immune to Spoiler Neurosis. Mind you, I don’t go looking for spoilers and I don’t avoid them, but if I find them they don’t bother me.

Just as an example, as far as Star Trek is concerned, I have gone into Trek movies already knowing the essential plot. I knew the whole plot of the Next Generation sixth-season finale, “Descent,” in advance. I knew the stories for the first episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager before I saw them. I knew the entire story of the conclusion of Voyager well before it went on the air. And it didn’t phase me one bit. In fact, I enjoyed them that much more for knowing what was coming up. Why? Because, already knowing that Data was going to be seduced into the evil of his brother, Lore; or that Kathryn Janeway would team up with her future self to get Voyager past the Borg and their Queen and back to Federation space, and how they were going to do it, didn’t ruin it for me in the slightest. It made me that much more curious to see how the things I had read about were actually done. How did they produce that scene that was described in the article? How did the stars perform that scene that the writer of that piece talked about? How were the special effects done? What did it look like? How was this idea executed? How close will what I see on the screen come to what I imagined when I read about it? Usually, what people call “spoilers” are for me not so much a hindrance as an enhancement to what I’m going to watch or read. But I find myself quite outnumbered on this issue by the Spoiler Neurotics who can’t stand to be briefed about anything.

This is why a lot of the time when I post to a Listserv about the latest week’s comics, for example, I speak only in the most general terms. I may talk about how well it was written or drawn. I may mention that there is a surprise at the end and nothing more, or I may bring up that something of particular interest happened on a particular page and not say what it was. If it’s a really important piece of business or an issue that I thought was especially good and really want to pick apart and analyze, then I will defer to the prevailing neurosis and leave a space before I talk about it in the way that I want to. Really, though, I think the whole business of people thinking that advance knowledge robs you of the pleasure of seeing how it was done, and carrying on as if they’d looked at Kollos if you don’t frame your remarks carefully or hit the Return button twenty times before you go on, gets really neurotic and tiresome. But sometimes it’s just one of those things you have to do in consideration of other people’s feelings.

Of course, there are exceptions. If you’d never seen Citizen Kane, you really wouldn’t want to know beforehand that Rosebud is Kane’s sled from when he was a boy and is the symbol of his lost childhood and innocence. If you’d never seen Murder on the Orient Express, you wouldn’t want to know at the start that they all did it. There are any number of episodes of The Twilight Zone (“The After Hours,” in which she is one of the mannequins; “The Eye of the Beholder,” in which she’s gorgeous and everyone else is a gargoyle; “To Serve Man,” in which it’s a cookbook) where viewers deserve to get to the twist on their own. Viewers new to The Planet of the Apes shouldn’t be clued in beforehand that Charlton Heston is really on Earth. People who were for whatever reason just discovering Dallas shouldn’t be told that Kristin shot JR, and people who were for whatever reason just discovering Soap really ought to be allowed to find out for themselves that Chester, suffering from a brain tumor, killed Peter Campbell. And if you have somehow managed to avoid the Star Wars films, you don’t want to know going in (assuming that you’re starting with Episode 4) that Darth Vader is really Anakin Skywalker, Luke’s father, and that “the other” that Yoda mentions is Leia, who is really Luke’s fraternal-twin sister. (Though I went into Return of the Jedi already knowing about Leia because I skimmed the Marvel Comics adaptation, and I lived.) Sometimes Spoiler Neurosis is not so neurotic after all. But you’ll notice that I saved all of these remarks for the very last paragraph. I probably should have given a warning at the beginning.

THE STATE OF THE ART

Since the last time I posted about comics, my feelings about the medium that I have loved from boyhood have not gotten any better. In fact, in the last year, I have dropped or let go most of my buying of regularly published, monthly comics. I’m now down to two regular titles, Thor (I keep wanting to call it “The Mighty Thor” but for some reason they’ve dropped the “The Mighty” part, which annoys me) and Wonder Woman. This week I’ll be visiting my comic dealer for the first time since before Christmas to pick up one book that I’m sure of, The Amazing Spider-Man, and that’s only because it’s drawn by John Romita Jr. John Jr. returned to Spider-Man late last summer and will be drawing selected five-or-six-issue story arcs on his new tenure. Basically, when John Jr. is aboard, I’ll be there for him.

Meanwhile, I’m not sure how long I’m going to be staying with Thor. The reason is that since the series was revived, it has ceased to be a super-hero adventure book about the Thunder God and his epic battles against titanic evil and menacing super-villains. It’s played more like the Norse version of I, Claudius, filled with schemes and plots and familial disputes and angst. I don’t so much mind the angst; this is a Marvel comic book, after all. But I do like my comic book heroes to be heroic and have adventures and battles. Last year Marvel released the latest in the series of Marvel Masterworks hardcovers of classic Thor issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In the ten or so issues in that collection, Goldilocks took on Loki, faced Mangog in a four-part epic, learned the truth about his origins (Dr. Don Blake was an invention of Odin to teach Thor humility), repelled the attack of Galactus on Ego the Living Planet, and began to explore Galactus’s origins. The biggest battle in the current Thor series was the issue when he opened a can of whip-thy-buttocks on Iron Man for having him cloned as a living weapon of mass destruction in The Civil War. Thor hasn’t been doing it for me and I’m rapidly losing my patience with it. If it doesn’t start to become the book I want to read after the upcoming 600th issue, it’s out of here.That fate has already befallen what has historically been my most important and at the very least my sentimental favorite comic book. For the latest of several times in my fan life, I have dropped The Fantastic Four, and I’m reaching the point of not caring whether I ever buy it again. To tell you the truth, I don’t really feel as if I’ve dropped the actual Fantastic Four. Marvel isn’t really doing that book any more; they’re doing a lot of comics with the Fantastic Four name on them, that don’t have the look or feel or aesthetic of the FF that I loved. I look at an FF issue today and the first thing I see is a cover that doesn’t have the traditional Fantastic Four logo and “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!” banner at the top. FF covers these days look like supermarket tabloid covers with drawings of super-heroes on them. And while the current artist, Bryan Hitch, draws in a beautiful and pleasing style, he suffers from what appears to be the affliction of most comic book artists today: He doesn’t want to draw the FF in the uniform that Jack Kirby designed. The FF no longer sport their classic uniform or any variation of it (including the smart-looking but still recognizable update by Carlos Pacheco, which I loved); even the famous “4” insignia/symbol doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to. You may find this a rather superficial and frivolous complaint, but there are certain designs that don’t need to be made over. A classic is something timeless and immune to style. Superman, Captain America, Spider-Man--they’ve all been made over, and they’ve always come back to their aesthetic roots. The Fantastic Four were taken back to their aesthetic roots, and then taken back out. I’m not going to support that any more. If I’m going to spend money on the FF, I want my FF. The right cover format, the right look of the characters--the FF that was part of what made me love comics. As Edgar Allen Poe might have put it, “Only that and nothing more.”As I said, this is not the first time I’ve stopped buying The FF. There was an earlier period when I dropped it, and in my own opinion I did so after hanging on for far longer than I should have done out of sheer loyalty to this book and these characters. During the tenure of writer Tom DeFalco and penciler Paul Ryan, things started out beautifully and then went into a shocking deterioration. At first I didn’t recognize the deterioration for what it was, because I assumed that they were just having a little fun with it and would quickly fix the things that were going off the mark and get the book back to where they had it. And I was wrong. I don’t want to go all the way into this (though it may come up in some future post), but my little joke with myself is that DeFalco and Ryan took on the assignment to do The Fantastic Four and got a little confused and thought they were doing The X-Men. It certainly seemed as if they were trying to do The X-Men, as the book grew filled with plots that went off in a dozen different directions at once; Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman, started to dress like a mutant slut and behave like an aggressive bitch; and everything seemed as if it were being done for an audience of adolescents with short attention spans. But I kept hanging on for the next issue, and the next, and the next, until even my deep love for these characters wasn’t enough to justify it any more, and I dropped it. I came back a short time later to see how they would fix the apparent murder/suicide of Mr. Fantastic and Dr. Doom that kept my favorite characters out of the book for almost two years (and we really don’t want to go into that right now), but that led to the shut-down and re-start of the series in a marketing gambit called “Heroes Reborn” that sent the FF and the rest of Marvel’s central cast to a parallel world to act out revisionist versions of their classic adventures. I looked at only a little of that.

When they brought the FF home, writer Scott Lobdell and artist Alan Davis restored the team to something like its classic look and style, and I was so happy to see it that I almost cried--but a few issues into that iteration of the series, Lobdell and Davis were replaced with writer Chris Claremont and artist Salvador Larocca (whose artwork I truly loathed back then), and I immediately saw the writing on the wall: “Uh-oh, another round of X-Men stories in the guise of FF stories.” And I dropped it again. I was gone for nearly three years this time. I returned for the issues plotted by artist Carlos Pacheco mainly because I missed my old friends, the Fantastic Four, so badly. I was rewarded with a restoration of the book’s classic style and even a new Baxter Building. I thought they had fixed it for good this time. And again, I was wrong.

The overall reasons for my disenchantment with comics are very complex and in many ways very personal. I could be sitting here composing blogs for the next week going into all of it, and probably giving you more information than you want or need. Odds are it’s a theme we may be returning to in future posts anyway. But in the last week, I’ve been seeing some posts elsewhere online that have touched on things that I’ve thought about the state of the art, and they’ve reminded me of something that I found in an interview with a prominent writer/artist that I went and dug up because it struck a deep personal chord with me. I want to present those things to you now.

The first one comes from artist/writer Bill Willingham from an editorial on the site Big Hollywood, which was quoted on Robot 6 @ Comic Book Resources on January 10:

“Folks, we’re smack dab in the midst of the Age of Superhero Decadence. Old fashioned ideals of courage and patriotism, backed by a deep virtue and unshakable code, seem to be… well, old fashioned. Full disclosure time. I’m at least partially to blame for this steady chipping away of the goodness of our comic book heroes. In my very first comic series Elementals, first published close to thirty years ago, I was eager to update old superhero tropes, making my characters more real, edgier, darker — less heroic and a good deal more vulgar than the (then) current standard. Elementals was one of the first of what was later dubbed the ‘grim and gritty’ movement in comic books. And to complicate my confession, I’m still proud of much of that early work. At least my crass and corrupted Elemental heroes still fought, albeit imperfectly, for the clear good, against the clear evil.”

To begin with, I love that expression “Superhero Decadence”. It feels like exactly the right thing to call a phenomenon that is a large part of what’s turned me off about comic books since the late 1980s and into the 1990s and beyond. I remember reading The Elementals when it was first published, but I recall very little of the storyline now. (The issues I bought are buried in my basement somewhere.) Mostly what I remember is that I thought the artwork was nice for something outside of Marvel and DC. As Willingham knows his work better than I do, I take his word for the Elementals being less “heroic” than they were “super,” but that is one of the things that have alienated me about comic books in the last couple of decades, and I find it refreshing that one of the people who presently occupy the arguable top of the profession identifies himself as part of the problem and is ready to step back and reconsider his own contribution to it.

“Superhero Decadence” gets a further clarification in this passage from Dirk Deppey in Journalista, the Comics Journal Weblog, from January 13:

“I would say that the current kerfuffle is little more than a reflection of a larger problem, which [is] the continuing effort to wedge an adult sensibility into a genre created for children. I’ve taken to calling this phenomenon ‘superhero decadence,’ and it occurs to me that I should define my terms a bit. By ‘decadence’ I don’t mean sexual deviance, but rather ‘jaded but unwilling to move on, with one’s tastes growing more ornate and polluted in the process.’ Readers of modern superhero comics seem to be chasing a cherished moment from childhood without quite understanding that they’re no longer the people capable of enjoying that moment with the same wide-eyed wonder; possessing a more adult outlook, they thus insist on reading modern variants of the superhero comics that they loved as teenagers, but with a point of view more appropriate to The Sopranos than Teen Titans wedged in there as well. The results read like an adult crime drama featuring all the excess sex, violence and a zombie-like attempt at the sophistication of an HBO television series but with a cast composed entirely of professional wrestlers. Would you watch Glengarry Glen Ross if it starred Hulk Hogan and Rowdy Roddy Piper? (Okay, I would too; that would be funny. But you get my point.)”

I’m not entirely sure I agree with the characterization of super-hero comics as being “a genre created for children”. If I recall correctly, one of the pioneers of the form, The Spirit by Will Eisner, started out as a newspaper supplement that certainly reached an audience of more than just kids. And even so, by the 1960s you had Marvel Comics, which started with Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and my beloved Fantastic Four, appealing to an audience not only of children, but their high-school and college-age siblings and in many cases their parents, aunts and uncles, and even grandparents. Granted, there has always been an appeal to children in comic books, but there is just as much of a history of adults writing and drawing to please themselves. In fact, I’m pretty sure Stan Lee has never intentionally written just for kids; Stan always wrote for Stan. So I’m not sure that I can get behind the idea of super-hero comics having created solely with children in mind. The Marvel Comics that I loved best were always for young (and sometimes older) adults who hadn’t lost the sense of wonder that they knew as kids. But what really crystallizes my own thinking on the matter comes from writer-artist John Byrne. For several years in the 1980s, John Byrne, who had risen to stardom on The X-Men, did the best work with The Fantastic Four outside of the original stories of Lee and Kirby themselves. In Comics Interview magazine #71 (1989), there is an issue-long interview with Byrne, at one point of which he says some things that hit dead-on-target with me. (This is what I went and dug up). According to Byrne:

“One of the things that bothers me about a lot of the stuff . . . that’s in comics in general these days is that people have forgotten what super-heroes are. Super-heroes are not psychotics who put on costumes and go out and kill people. Super-heroes are people who are intrinsically better than thee and me. They are more moral, they are more noble, and they’re doing what they doing because it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re crazy.

“ . . . these guys aren’t super-heroes. There’s an old term that we don’t use any more, costumed crimefighter, and most of the guys out there, all bred by Wolverine basically, are costumed crimefighters. They’ve taken Batman, for example, and changed him from a super-hero into a costumed crimefighter. You don’t have to have super-powers to be a super-hero, you just have to wear a funny suit and do good stuff, and they’re all turning into costumed crimefighters instead of being super-heroes. They’re not doing it because it’s the right thing to do any more.

“ . . . these guys do this because deep down they know it’s the right thing to do. They don’t do it because they’re crazy, they don’t do it because they’re like us, they do it because they’re better than us.”

What Byrne said in 1989 is something that I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone else say in the entire industry. I don’t think anyone else ever would say something like that. But it’s true. And it has been a major part of the problem with comics since the 1980s. Byrne, like Willingham, identifies himself as part of the problem, because the popularization of the character of Wolverine began with Byrne’s own work in The X-Men.The evolution in comics that began with the Fantastic Four has over the years gone to some extreme places. Perhaps the most fundamental argument for it is that evolution is not a one-time thing; it doesn’t start and then stop, it keeps going on. But where has it gone? Later this year we’re going to see one of the prime example of where it has gone, adapted for the movies. There is a growing buzz surrounding the upcoming release of the movie The Watchmen based on the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. The Watchmen is the prime example of the trend of “deconstructionist” comics; that is, comics that challenge and even tear down the central operating assumptions of super-hero fiction. Don’t be surprised if in some near-future Quantum Blog we have a heart-to-heart talk about The Watchmen and everything that it represents. I’ll tell you one thing up front: I read the graphic novel, and I enjoyed the craft of storytelling and art that went into it (and appreciated the swipe of the plot of one the earliest episodes of The Outer Limits), but those characters were another matter entirely. Enough of that for now. But what I’ll share with you for the moment is some of what made me love comics in the first place.

In the comics that I loved, which began with The FF, super-heroes were assumed to be real people and the world in which they lived was assumed to be a real place, like our world except for the presence of people with superhuman powers. That being the case, anything that might happen to you might also happen to the super-heroes. Anything that pertained to you would also be true of them. Super-heroes--and the villains they battled--were prone to all the same problems, failings, and conflicts that you would be. They would know love, hatred, sex, greed, fear, vanity, sorrow, joy, humor, illness, mortality, affluence, poverty, compassion, distrust, intimacy, camaraderie, loneliness, confidence, doubt, suspicion, triumph, tragedy, and anything and everything else common to the human experience. Additionally, they would have powers that we didn’t possess, they would wear symbolic attire and call themselves by symbolic and metaphorical names, and they’d have adventures and experiences far surpassing our own. BUT--and this is the big thing--it was understood that good was still good even if it wasn’t perfect, and that evil was still evil even if it had identifiable motivations and might even arouse our sympathy and understanding. And when evil threatened, when danger loomed over the city or the world or the human race itself, super-heroes got the hell over themselves and got the hell on with the business of being heroes! And they did it for exactly the reasons and motives that John Byrne said above!

Look at it this way. Super-heroes have the same basic motivations as police officers and fire fighters. What the New York Fire Department does for the City of New York, the Fantastic Four and the Avengers and Superman do for the planet, sometimes even the universe. And there’s no need to deconstruct that. That’s just who they are. And that is all that I’ve ever needed them to be.

FLIP, MARTIN, AND ME

And...we’re back.

I took some time off from the Blogosphere last year. Since then, during the summer, I took my blogging in another direction by creating the Quantum Male Art Blog, http://qmaleart.blogspot.com. I welcome you to surf on over there and see what I’ve been up to. But as of this week, I’ve decided it’s time to start up The Quantum Blog once again. (Well, that and the fact that it’s been hard to keep my digital mouth shut all this time.) And for my first post of the re-started Quantum Blog, I’d like to tell you an interesting story. It was, I think, my last year in college when my friend Richard wanted to go to the New York State Museum and attend a retrospective on the photography of Flip Schulke (1930-2008), accompanied by a lecture by the photographer himself. If you’ve never heard of Flip Schulke, as I hadn’t, you’ll understand why this is a very timely post indeed. Flip Schulke is a photographer and photojournalist who documented both the Civil Rights Movement and the NASA Moon missions from the inside. Flip knew and traveled with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself and shot photos of Dr. King and his family that no one who wasn’t on an intimate basis with him would ever have gotten. He became an actual friend of the King family. Not only that, he was a known pioneer in the field of underwater photography and went on expeditions with Captain Jacques Cousteau himself. Flip’s work also covered NASA’s endeavors at the very height of the space program in the 1960s, when America reached for the Moon. He photographed the astronauts and the space camp, and documented the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle projects. This is a guy who was “hands on” with history itself. As I write this, I’m just learning of his passing away last year. I had no idea. I met him only that one evening, but he left an impression. For a little while, I was in the company of someone who had done some important things.

For many years, I most closely associated Flip with what I considered the irony of the little bit of time that I spent talking with him. Richard and I were there to see his work and hear him talk of his experiences of knowing Dr. King and his family and being there for so much of what happened in those years, including the assassination. But when it came to his work with the space program, it came out that Flip and I had a common interest. We both enjoyed science fiction movies! At that exhibition of his work, I actually stood there with this man who had been at the right hand of our most revered civil rights leader, discussing the relative merits of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien! It made sense, actually, now that I think of it. Science fiction is not about “unreal” things, as many people seem to believe. It’s simply about taking reality and projecting it forward, or turning it around at a different angle and looking at it a different way. And many of the concerns of Flip’s work--the rights and dignity of all people regardless of their differences, the preservation of our natural environment, the understanding that humanity’s future must ultimately lie off Earth--are identical to or compatible with the concerns of science fiction. There could be nothing more natural than for this man to be a science fiction fan. Now, how many of you know another interesting thing: There is evidence that Martin Luther King Jr. himself was a Trekker!

It’s apparently true. There is a well-known story in Star Trek circles, told by Nichelle Nichols, who played Lt. Uhura in the 1960s series and the first six films. It seems that at one point, Nichelle wanted to leave Star Trek. She didn’t believe she was being well or adequately utilized on the show. She thought of her role as being too limited to sitting on the Bridge of the Enterprise keeping “hailing frequencies” open. (In fact, I’ve heard stories that Gene Roddenberry was able to keep Uhura on the show only by promising NBC that she would never take command of the ship! This may account for all those times when Mr. Sulu [George Takei] was left in the Captain’s seat in lieu of Kirk, Spock, or Scotty, when in fact Uhura was directly behind Scotty in the chain of command. Better a Japanese man than a black woman running a starship on TV in 1967!) What changed Nichelle’s mind about leaving was her encounter with Dr. King. It seems that Dr. King and his family watched Star Trek together (as did my family and I back then). When she told King that she was leaving the show, King told her she mustn’t do it. He argued that even though she may have mostly been an interplanetary switchboard operator, it was important for people to see a black person, man or woman, in a position of responsibility in a show about the future. Star Trek, said King, was sending a message to the world that blacks would be part of a common tomorrow for humanity, just by the mere presence of Uhura. No matter the size of her role, she was important and had to stay. Thus inspired, Nichelle Nichols stayed with Star Trek. And not only did she continue in the role of Uhura, but when the original series ended, she went to work for the actual space program. It was Nichelle Nichols who helped to recruit the first African-American astronauts into NASA. And as it happened, a little black girl who watched Star Trek grew up with Uhura as one of her inspirations to show her that she could do something of meaning and value with her life. That little girl became an award-winning comedienne and actress on stage, film, and television. We know her today as Whoopi Goldberg; she played Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Another little black girl also grew up watching Uhura and was similarly inspired, not in the performing arts, but in the sciences. She became a physicist and the first African-American female astronaut. Her name is Dr. Mae Jemison, and she guest-starred as a Transporter Chief in the Next Generation episode “Second Chances”. You see, Dr. King was right.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said something that I think is the perfect summation of everything that is Star Trek, though I’m sure he wasn’t actually talking about Trek when he said it. Dr. King once said he refused to accept that “the is-ness of man’s presents nature renders him morally incapable of reaching up for the ought-ness that forever confronts him”. What he meant is that the challenge of being human is the challenge of believing that there is something better than our present state of being, our present way of life, and of striving to attain it. It is the challenge of believing that we can change for the better. And I’ll tell you something true: In six TV series (counting the animated show) and ten films (soon to be eleven), this belief, and the actualization of it, is all that Star Trek has ever talked about. That’s what Star Trek is. It’s not really about spaceships and ray guns, and people in uniforms and crazy costumes, and odd-looking people and beings with strange protuberances on their foreheads. It’s about the belief that one day we are going to be better. One day we are not going to be prejudiced. One day we are not going to be greedy. One day we are not going to let poverty and inequality exist. One day we will stop fighting wars (against each other). We will cease to be superstitious, stupid, and ignorant. We will value our human faculties of reason and the human quality of compassion that is its necessary complement. We will use science for what it is meant for: to improve our minds and enhance the quality of our lives. The entire body of written and filmed works that we call Star Trek is about just what Martin Luther King Jr. said: the idea that there will come a time in the future when we will get over being what we are and become what we ought to be.

All this comes to me as I write this now and remember the night that I met a man who walked with history and recorded it, and a man who appreciated the idea that humanity has a future. And it’s an even more apt thing to remember on this of all months, when we’ve just put a man in the White House who embodies everything that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted for America and the world. I never met Flip Schulke again after that night at the New York State Museum, but I’m grateful for that little moment of time that I got to exchange words with a man whose work straddled past, present, and future. I’m only sorry I didn’t know until now that he had died. But knowing it now makes the memory that much more special.

NOT A NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

I stopped making New Year’s resolutions so long ago that I don’t remember the last time I made one. This, I think, is because of something that I think John Lennon once said: “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans”.

When someone doesn’t keep a New Year’s resolution, people usually chalk it up to either a failure of will or a failure of discipline—failures on the part of the person in question. I don’t pretend that there aren’t people lacking in will or discipline, but this explanation omits a very important factor: life itself—or what we humans have made of the experience of life—gets in the way.

Think of what you have to go through just to function in the world and conduct the basic, daily business of living. Think of what most people seem to think life really is. It’s not about living and growing and experiencing and enjoying. Life isn’t really about life at all. We talk a good game about goodness and virtue and righteousness and morality, but what is it that really drives and governs our day-to-day existence? Money—or, to be exact, the grinding, gnawing, soul-sucking need to accumulate as much money as possible; the inextricable intertwining of the need for money with the content and quality of every minute detail of our lives. New Year’s resolutions are supposed to be about making better lives for ourselves, but the way we’ve set up the world is antithetical to living fully. The majority of us don’t really get to enjoy our lives until most of life is behind us—if we’re lucky. We humans have pretty much made our whole world a conspiracy to take time from people’s lives, energy from people’s bodies, and most especially money from people’s pockets. Everyone who goes about wearing a St. Christopher’s Medal or any other form of cross should rightly be wearing a dollar sign. Our true religion is greed. And yet, every year we keep right on making resolutions in the face of a world that is set up to make us break promises to ourselves because of the covenant we’ve already made with money.

However, resolutions are also about a sense of purpose and direction, and other than reason, rationality, humor, and love, I consider a sense of purpose essential for any attempt at a well-lived life. Without purpose, life is aimless, directionless, pointless. Which is why rather than making a resolution every January 1 with the deck stacked against me because of the way the world puts everything in your path but living, I proceed with a general sense of purpose that I check and reevaluate frequently as I go along. It’s about planning your work and working your plan, regardless of the time of year. And it spares me the artificiality and futility of New Year’s resolutions.

Thus, even before I took down my 2007 calendars and put up my 2008’s, I had added a new directive to the latest revision of my general life plan, and I’ll share it with you now. Where the decisions of certain comic book companies and what they choose to do with their characters are concerned, the new directive is to remember that they are not my characters.

For anyone else, I’ll admit, this would be a pretty frivolous item to put on the agenda. However, I am not anyone else. I am J.A. Fludd. If you’re a regular visitor to The Quantum Blog, you already have a good idea of whom you’ve been dealing with. If you’re not…well, I have very copious bon mots on previous posts to get you acquainted. I direct your attention in particular to the posts titled “The Marvel Super Heroes Had Arrived” and “The Homeless Fan”. Anyway, in light of the things I’ve been seeing in comics, and the things I’ve been writing about comics here, I think it is very appropriate to make a mantra to myself that it’s a waste of my energy to fret and spike my blood pressure over comics and characters that I do not own. They’re not my characters. They’re not my property. I have no responsibility for making any decisions about them. I am not a contributor to their stories and their worlds. I have no part of them, and no one in the organizations to which they belong has ever wanted me to have any part of them. They’ll gladly take my money (and they’ve been getting less and less of it by the year, I might add), but they haven’t the slightest use for anything else I might have had to offer. I am out of the loop. And in a way, I’m glad for it, because the things I’ve been seeing, and continue to see, convince me more and more by the month that I don’t want any part of it any more.

Submitted for your approval (as Rod Serling might have said): The character not of my own creation who has historically been second only to the Fantastic Four as my very favorite hero: the ever-amazing Spider-Man. What’s been happening with Spider-Man lately, and going back about a couple of decades, is right now the prime example of what makes me glad to have been shut out of participating in the doings of these comic companies.

Consider where his most recent storylines have found our favorite Webhead. Spider-Man had joined the Avengers—an idea that I considered completely wrong-headed. It went completely against the grain of our entire understanding of Spider-Man. For years, we’ve known that Spider-Man was not cut out to be a member of a team. He gets along with most other super-heroes at least most of the time, but his nature is that of an outsider, even a loner. Stan Lee was always smart enough to flirt with the idea of Spider-Man become an Avenger without actually having him do it. Spidey is not a joiner. But there he was, in the Avengers. What’s more, he came out to them, so to speak, sharing his secret identity with them, and moved himself, Mary Jane, and Aunt May into Avengers Tower. (Don’t get me started on the abandonment of Avengers Mansion and all the other stuff they’ve done with Marvel’s heaviest-hitting team in the last few years; we’ll be here all week and it won’t be pleasant.) This had the effect of giving Spidey a very glamourous, un-Peter-Parker-like life. It also made him the protégé of Tony Stark/Iron Man, one of the scientific leaders of the Marvel cast. Then, when the Marvel Super-Heroes Civil War broke out, Spider-Man—with Iron Man’s encouragement—came out to the public in a nationally televised press conference, revealing that he was Peter Parker, and endorsed the Super-Hero Registration Act that was causing all the strife between the heroes. In the midst of this, Spidey also took to wearing a Stark-designed red-and-gold “Spider Armor” about which you don’t want to hear me ranting either, but I’ll just say that it, and all the other stuff they were doing with Spidey both as an Avenger where he didn’t belong and in his own book, was stupid and leave it at that.)

This, naturally, had the effect of painting great big targets on both Mary Jane and Aunt May, and in the fallout of the Civil War, Aunt May took a bullet from—I believe—a sniper working for the Kingpin. This and all the other Civil War upheavals took a heavy toll on Spidey and had his life circling the drain as Aunt May barely clung to hers, with a prognosis that held out no hope. This all seemed to crystallize the storytelling baggage that Spider-Man had been accumulating in the years since he married Mary Jane. And finally, Marvel realized something had to be done.

What they decided to do, which has caused one of the biggest controversies in comics at the moment, was to have all the baggage just taken away. In a storyline called “One More Day,” Peter and Mary Jane have made an actual deal with the Devil—or Marvel’s version of him, anyway. Mephisto, the supernatural embodiment of evil, has apparently undone decades of Spider-Man continuity going back possibly as far as the 1970’s, all in the name of scoring a personal triumph over the virtue and purity of Peter and Mary Jane’s love for each other. (I’m getting this second hand from the guys on the Gay League Listserv; you may want to look this up on http://www.newsarama.com/ for a truly accurate accounting of it.) Under Mephisto’s magical fiat, Peter and Mary Jane are no longer married and were never husband and wife; Spider-Man never came out to the Avengers or the public; and thus Aunt May was never shot and never in jeopardy (at least from any of this business; they actually have “killed” and resurrected her once).

Now, what you should understand if you’re a reader of this Blog is that Marvel Comics is the company that practically codified the practice of treating comic-book heroes as real people and their stories as real events that have consequences. The consequences of altering perhaps as much as 30 years of Spider-Man’s history—which affects not just Spider-Man, but the entire Marvel canon—are daunting, to say the least. There are now going to be a lot of areas where things that were printed either didn’t happen, or didn’t happen the way we remember them, not only in Spidey’s books but across the Marvel line. The Marvel Universe stands to become a “Twilight Zone” where anything we think we remember may at any time prove to be no longer true.

And my reaction to this? They’re not my characters.

Even as I write this, I am feeling the relief of just not caring. I’ll still read those Marvel titles that I think are beautifully drawn and in which I find the characters appealing. They’re not anywhere near as numerous as they once were, but they’re out there. But as far as Marvel’s decision making goes, I am to an ever-increasing degree just going to let stories be stories. I’ve seen enough stupid things done, and I’ve spent enough years watching from outside as a non-participant whose involvement was never desired, that I can bring myself to care less and less. I haven’t been getting any Spider-Man titles on a regular basis for the past few years, and I won’t read Spidey again until later this year when John Romita Jr. comes back and Spider-Man returns to battling costumed super-criminals of the sort that he is best suited to battle (or so it’s been said). And if they mess it up again…well, at least I’ll still have the art of John Jr. to enjoy. There was a period when I was getting Spidey books just for that.

And in another month or so, when the new writer and artist of The Fantastic Four take over my most important book, I will watch what they do with the same understanding that I’ve had about the FF for the past decade: If they screw it up, I’ll stop buying it. (And believe me, there was a period of about 3 years when I did not buy The FF. I flipped through it every month and put it back on the rack. This went on until the writer and artist to whose work I objected were removed.)

Meanwhile, I’ll be continuing with my own work, my own plans, and my own purposes. I’ll have more than enough to keep me busy. Some of it will probably be on display here at The Quantum Blog in the months ahead. (And you can see some of it at www.comicspace.com/quantumartist.) That should be entertaining. Life may be what happens when we’re making other plans, but it’s important that we do make plans—not artificial resolutions that are doomed to fail because the world is greedy and puts everything in our way but life, but organic, life-affirming plans that keep our direction constant and our eyes on the prize, yet can flex and alter just enough to accommodate changing circumstances.