The earliest stories of Huntress, one of the Gotham City heroes featured in the upcoming Warner Bros. film Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, are collected in a new title.
The daughter of a hero and villain–the Earth-2 Batman and Catwoman–young Helena Wayne is unique in comics. Trained by her parents, she became a superb athlete, and studied law with the hope of bringing criminals to justice. But when her mother died after being blackmailed into resuming her life of crime, Helena traded her books for a mask and a crossbow and set out to seek revenge as the Huntress!
Now this fan-favorite character’s classic 1977 origin story as well as her first several years of solo adventures are collected in a single volume. Written by Paul Levitz (Justice Society, Legion of Super-Heroes) and illustrated by Joe Staton (Green Lantern), Steve Mitchell (Iron Man), Bob Layton (X-O Manowar), and more, The Huntress: Origins also features an insightful introduction by Levitz.
A Stan Lee Storyhttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/themes/movedo/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3441921179aff1838c01342fc1c9a68ba940f4f1a233065e2f21854c3c715b4a?s=96&d=mm&r=g
My favorite meal with Stan was at Hamburger Hamlet in LA, probably in the early 2000s…his public ‘avatar’ wasn’t on that evening, not even to charm the waitstaff, for whatever reason. He said that Marvel was looking to have him do more editorial work again, and then said “What does an editor do these days?”
“Well, Stan, to all intents, I haven’t been an editor almost as long as you haven’t,” I replied, “But I think the heart of the job is still the same–to get the best work out of the creative people.”
I talked about the different ways different people used to accomplish that goal, and we warmly remembered Archie Goodwin–the best editor I never could manage to learn from, because so much of his technique seemed to be in his personal style of relating to people.
“But Paul, I wasn’t much of an editor. I wrote almost all the stuff myself,” Stan said.
“I worked with all your artists, Stan, and no one ever got as great work out of them as you did. Never mind Jack and Steve, you got the best work of their lives out of Don Heck and Dick Ayers. Good guys, incredibly professional, but you got so much more out of them than I did.”
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He smiled, and the ‘avatar’ started to come on. The Stan Lee we know from the stage said, “Every time I sent Dick a script–he was doing some western, I don’t remember what it was–he’d call and say “What do you want me to do with this one, Chief?'”
“And I’d say, it’s a western, Dick, I want to see the spurs shining and hoofs flashing…” and Stan never got to finish, because I was laughing out loud.
“That’s how you did it, Stan, that’s how you were a great editor. Dick and I got along great, but our conversations were his ticking off pages per day in his little date book, figuring out when he’d be in for the next job. He counted on me to keep him busy, and I did, but you got him excited.”
Stan has a complex legacy, with his own massive creativity clouded by unresolvable debates over the relative value of collaborators’ contributions, actions he might have taken in a more perfect path to help them achieve more economic rewards, and his statements about their collaborative process. But as someone who knew and worked with pretty much all of them, I believe Stan was the irreplaceable catalyst, without whom the magic that was that first decade of Marvel Comics would never have happened, and perhaps neither would have the changes that spread through the comics field from there.
With the recent run of deaths of comic creators from the generation who worked from the ’50s onward, it occurs to me that depth of emotional reactions from those of us who came into comics may use some explanation. Like so many out there, we had grown up on the work of folks like Steve Ditko and Russ Heath, who were consistent presences in our comics spinner racks every week or two. But not to diminish the grief of those of you who only knew these folks through their work (and getting to know Steve, for example, was a hell of a challenge), but these were members of a VERY small community that my generation was admitted to in the late ’60s and early ’70s. My best estimate is that there was only enough work going around in 1972 when I started for about 200 full time jobs or solid freelance existences in American comics, and although there were always a number of folks who weren’t full timers, most comics were done by people for whom this was the primary source of income. Most of the folks (90% perhaps) were in the NY metro area in the days before FedEx (much less digital), and besides working together, shared studio spaces, apartments, poker games, volleyball and softball in Central Park, dinners and movie nights.
Think about how small a community of 200 is…maybe a graduating class in suburban high school? While not everyone hung out together (Marie Severin never sketched me, to my great regret, Russ and I had sort of a nodding acquaintance since he was one of the few who had departed New York by then, and I didn’t do a eulogy posting for Gary Friedrich because we didn’t even meet until years after he left comics), but everyone knew everyone, and had both creative and personal feelings for each other. And most of us were together for much more than the four years of high school. So when one of us goes, it’s not just the loss of their magic from our reading pleasure, it’s the reaper standing by the desk that might have been next to ours in class.
I was extraordinarily lucky as a young man to get to work with some of comics’ first generation, and to become friends with many people who were a decade or more older than I am. But it feels awfully weird to look around that community in my head and count the empty chairs, and I don’t think I’m the only one feeling that way.
If you “only” miss these folks for their work, thanks for your sympathy and for your support whether from buying their work years ago or donating to Hero Initiative. But if members of the community get a bit weepy, maybe this will help you understand why.
Moments from the Bronzehttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/themes/movedo/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3441921179aff1838c01342fc1c9a68ba940f4f1a233065e2f21854c3c715b4a?s=96&d=mm&r=g
One of the most distinctive rituals at DC in the early 1970s was the walk down the aisle to get a cover designed. The newsstand was still virtually the only form of distribution of comics in America, and conventional wisdom held that the cover was by far the most important aspect of a comics’ sales potential other than the main character. By the time I started as an assistant editor, Carmine Infantino had been designing almost all of DC’s covers for several years; a responsibility he took on in his first staff position as art director in the late ’60s and kept with each promotion. Was it was more important in his view than any alternative business task, or simply more comfortable? Probably a combination of the two, and there’s no question he was extraordinarily skilled at the task.
One or another of the editors would walk down the corridor, a complete inked issue or perhaps two under his arm (by my time on staff Dorothy Woolfolk had left, and the next woman to be named a full editor (Karen Berger) wouldn’t get that title until 5 years after Carmine’s departure. Carmine preferred to use the cover design meeting to thumb through the pages, looking for visual drama or potential, and occasionally to use the opportunity to conduct a bit of quality control.
Most often, after a brief look and perhaps a short discussion with the editor, Carmine would pick up a ball-point pen and a sheet of bond typing paper, and start sketching. The aspect ratio of the typing paper was off that of a comic cover, but his compositions were often such dynamic constructions that they survived the adjustments that would be made by the pencil artist who would actually render the cover. Those artists who most often did the covers were used to Carmine’s structural compositions (more like a large thumbnail than a rough sketch), and could bring them to life beautifully; just look at the powerful pieces created by Joe Kubert or Neal Adams this was, or the beauty of Nick Cardy’s covers from the period.
Since a couple of the editors were amazing artists in their own right, once in a while the sketching process became an artistic duel, or a layered collaboration (a SWAMP THING sketch by Carmine much overlaid by Joe Orlando survived and has been reprinted a couple of times as an example of this).
Once in a while, though, it was quality control time. Anthology mystery books occasionally were sent back in their editor’s arms to be remixed, another, perhaps more visual story to be chosen from inventory in place of one of the proposed tales. The inventory of the two principal mystery editors of the day (Joe Orlando and Murray Boltinoff) was deep, so this wasn’t a major setback.
More frustrating (and far rarer) were moments like the classic discussion of SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS #1, during which Carmine looked through the issue in search of the villains’ headquarters, and finding none, sent editor Gerry Conway back to have the already finished issue redone to include one. (The earlier version has been reprinted a couple of times, and you can make your own decision about whether it was improved by the guidance.) Or when Carmine read my original dialogue for an Aquaman lead for ADVENTURE COMICS, and decided I wasn’t ready for the task. David Michelinie was given the polishing job, and it became a rare Jim Aparo job that didn’t carry his lettering, with Ben Oda’s balloons pasted in over the originals. Looking back at my work of the period (I haven’t ever had the courage to look at the script that was redone and compare), I’m sympathetic to Carmine’s judgment. I was probably still a member of the ‘Not Ready For Prime Time Players.’
There were also are moments when an editor would simply march down the hall carrying a cover, fully illustrated and submitted on spec by an artist with no connection to any specific issue. Only a handful of artists did this: Neal Adams, Bernie Wrightson and Mike Kaluta come to mind. Sometimes a story would be crafted around the image, or the cover might run without a specific story connected to it (most often on a mystery title).
Covers actually had the most time-consuming production and printing process of any part of a comic at this time, so designing the cover last potentially put pressure on. But most of the line was on a production schedule that allowed this painlessly, and to my recollection, no comic ever shipped late as a result.
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In Brooklyn, a serial killer is on the loose–and when strange clues lead down a paranormal path, a detective confronts his inner demons to solve the case.
After returning from a tour in Afghanistan, detective Billy O’Connor returns home to a Brooklyn he doesn’t recognize. As he tries to return to his normal routines, his PTSD is easily triggered and he suffers severe hallucinations. Once he begins to work a gruesome homicide case, however, O’Connor has difficulty sorting out what’s real–and after he uncovers some strange clues, he’ll have to face the unthinkable to bring the killer to justice.
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From New York Times Bestselling authors Paul Levitz (75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Myth-Making) and Tim Hamilton (Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation), this volume collects all sixteen chapters originally serialized in Dark Horse Presents Volume 3 #17-#22 and #24-#33!
“I like to feel that I played a part in making comics a better field for creative people,” says the writer, editor and executive.
Paul Levitz is having quite the year. The veteran comic book creator and executive served as DC Comics president between 2002 and 2009, capping off a 35-year stint with the company. He has has been nominated for a place on the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, but he’s hardly resting on his laurels; this week also sees the release of Brooklyn Blood, a collected edition of his horror crime serial from anthology series Dark Horse Presents.Heat Vision talked to Levitz about the origin of the new project, and also where he sees the comic book industry from his particular vantage point.
I want to start with Brooklyn Blood. You’re a writer who’s worked in multiple genres through your career, and one who’s demonstrated a consistent desire to push yourself — your Doctor Fate run just a few years ago is evidence of that, in terms of cultural influence as much as anything. But even with all of that, Brooklyn Blood feels like a departure. Where did you come up with, “Oh, Lovecraftian horror noir, that’s a good idea”?
Brooklyn Blood really started as a more straightforward police procedural, a genre I’ve loved forever. But stories take you where they will… Doctor Fate started with thinking about the original character’s connection to Egypt, and before I knew it, Anubis was ready to drown the world in a second great flood. Once I focused on Brooklyn as a setting — taking advantage of my old hometown now being cool — the geographic coincidence of three very different mass deaths in a single-mile stretch led me to look for the common cause, and it turned out to be Lovecraftian.
How did you hook up with Tim Hamilton? His work brings so much to the story.
My pal Christine Norrie, an Eisner-nominated artist herself, recommended Tim, and his work on [the graphic novel adaptation of] Fahrenheit 451 clinched it. Brooklyn Blood required someone comfortable with smooth shifts from gritty reality to horror that’s either in detective O’Connor’s imagination or reality, and Tim did that straddle magnificently. He’s also a Brooklyn resident, so getting the ambiance and the settings worked out especially well.
How was the experience of writing short chapters for an anthology? Books like Dark Horse Presentsremain an oddity in the American industry, sadly, but you were writing shorts for classic anthologies Ghosts and House of Mystery way back when. How did you find returning to this kind of writing after years of thinking of story in terms of 20- to 22-page chunks?
Anthologies can be great, and I loved reading things like Dune when it was originally a serial in Analog. There’s a certain power to building stories within constraints, self-imposed or otherwise, and having to structure this one in eight-page chapters kept it moving at a pretty rapid pace. That said, I think mysteries are more fun to read in a single volume, and I think Brooklyn Blood comes together better that way.
Since stepping down as president and publisher of DC in 2009, you’ve done an impressive variety of work, both for DC and elsewhere, with non-fiction books for Taschen and Abrams. You’ve made a point of staying active in the field, not settling down or settling at all. Was this pent-up energy from being an executive for so long and wanting to explore different creative avenues?
There’s so many ways to have fun as a creative person with how comics are exploding as a cultural form, and I’m enjoying as many as I can. I do a lot of teaching, board work on not-for-profits and Boom! Studios [Levitz signed on to the publisher’s board of directors in 2014], consulting projects, and when I sit down to the keyboard, I like to either revisit my old friends or stretch myself. We worked hard to expand the possibilities for comics; why not take advantage of it?
Along those lines: The comic industry is a very different place today from when you started out — thanks to changes that you were involved with at DC — and there are many more possibilities for different types of creators and stories to be found by readers these days. As a scholar, fan and creator, where is your head at when it comes to the state of comics right now?
I think the creative medium of comics is in a second golden age, with more types of stories being created than we’ve ever had in America. The comics industry I came into was a small niche in American publishing — maybe 3 percent? — compared to the sales comics forms have elsewhere, often 14–35 percent of overall trade publishing, and I think we close this gap by diversifying the genres we publish. Children’s comics and memoirs are experiencing great growth; who knows what’s next? Comics can tell any kind of story.
You’re nominated for the Hall of Fame this year. Is that a moment that makes you pause and look back at your career to date? And if so, what do you see?
I’m incredibly honored to be nominated — on the same list as Thomas Nast — and proud of what I’ve accomplished in each stage of my career: As a comic fan doing [early fanzine] The Comic Reader, as an editor, writer and executive. I like to feel that I played a part in making comics a better field for creative people, and that’s why we’ve been able to start the graphic novel explosion and see comics’ stories move into other media so successfully. Besides, as a college dropout who’s getting to teach at schools like Columbia University, I’m getting a bit of the last laugh. Does it get better than that?
Somewhere between a cop thriller and an occult monster story lives the hall-of-famer’s latest, his first set outside DC Comics in four decades, firmly set in his native borough.
Brooklyn was a place residents worked to escape in Paul Levitz’s day, which was decades before an influx of wealthy whites transformed it into something barely recognizable to its natives.
But its hold on its children can be felt in the bitterness, the contempt and the truth behind the opening lines of Levitz’s newest comic book: “I got Brooklyn in my blood. But it sure as hell isn’t this Brooklyn.”
The lines belong to Billy O’Connor, a pissed-off Marine veteran of Afghanistan turned asshole cop whose struggle with PTSD fuels the engine of Brooklyn Blood, Levitz’s first original comic in 40 years published outside DC Comics.
Levitz, an East Flatbush native raised in the shadow of Tilden High School, spent decades shaping DC Comics as a writer, editor and eventually publisher. But on Wednesday, the smaller-press Dark Horse Comics will publish a collected edition of Brooklyn Blood, Levitz’s hybrid detective thriller/horror story, a collaboration with artist Tim Hamilton.
It’s a creative stretch for Levitz, one of the first comics fans to turn professional, who’s most widely known as the driving force behind DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes, a 30th century intergalactic task force helmed by teen heroes Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, and Lightning Lad. Brooklyn Blood riffs off Ed McBain’s detective fiction, he says—“great procedurals and often structured to work around not developing too much detail about an adversary”—and felt it was important to ground such a work in a familiar place.
“O’Connor is channeling my amazement at the borough changing. Not disgust, part joy, part amazement… and some worry that the working class transformative power of Brooklyn may get lost in the shift,” Levitz tells The Daily Beast.
Brooklyn Blood, first serialized in the anthology series Dark Horse Presents, is a nervous tale driven by trauma. O’Connor’s flashbacks to his armored personnel carrier running over an insurgent roadside bomb both complicate and help him unravel the case of a serial killer stalking Park Slope. With help from a psychic, O’Connor and his Muslim partner, Nadira Hasan, get sucked ever deeper into a seemingly random spate of slayings that connect to something ancient and occult lurking within the fabric of the borough. There’s even a guest appearance by the borough of Queens.
And you thought the scariest thing in Brooklyn was at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal.
As the head of DC Comics, Paul Levitz worked with the biggest names in the comics business — Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.
But after retiring and deciding to write an original story of his own, the East Flatbush native chose to leave capes and costumes behind and write about something far more astounding: the real, bloody history of his home borough.
“I noticed three of the city’s five greatest loss-of-life disasters all took place within a mile of each other in Brooklyn. That’s kind of weird. It’s a big city. Why? That became a story hook,” said Levitz, who served as president and publisher at DC from 2002 to 2009.
“What would happen if a serial killer was committing murders in the spots where those mass deaths happened? Where would that lead?”
Where it led was the book “Brooklyn Blood,” a supernatural thriller about a grizzled 78th Precinct gumshoe trying to work out why corpses and ghosts are showing up at the site of those disasters — the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, the 1918 Malbone Street train wreck and the 1960 Park Slope plane crash
It’s part police procedural, part Lovecraftian horror story — and a history lesson on the surprising body count racked up in and around Park Slope before the neighborhood was more synonymous with the phrase “food co-op.”
The setting isn’t far from where the comics-industry legend, 61, grew up, reading books from seminal crime writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ed McBain.As a teenager, Levitz took over running a defunct comics fanzine called The Comic Reader, and his work soon caught the attention of DC — home to the Caped Crusader and the Man of Steel — where he was offered work as a writer and began climbing the ranks.
But even though the first original comic book ever made rolled off the Brooklyn Eagle’s presses in 1935, Levitz notes, the entire comics industry was in Manhattan.
By age 19, he’d happily said “fuhgeddaboudit” to Brooklyn for good and moved across the East River.
“Brooklyn was not cool in those days,” Levitz, 61, said.
Of course, the borough’s cachet has seen a rebirth in recent years to rival that of Superman’s 1993 rise from the dead, as Levitz saw when he returned to visit after his daughter moved to Boerum Hill after college.
‘I noticed three of the city’s five greatest loss-of-life disasters all took place within a mile of each other in Brooklyn. That’s kind of weird. It’s a big city. Why? That became a story hook.’
“We worked so hard to get out of Brooklyn!” he joked.
And when a pal who runs indie publisher Dark Horse Comics asked Levitz to write something, he decided to return to his roots by setting the story in Brooklyn and finally penning the kind of crime story he’s loved since childhood, although with a paranormal twist.
“I had an opportunity to play in that genre after decades doing superheroes-slash-science fiction,” Levitz said.
He was able to funnel some of his head-scratching, homecoming experiences into the main character of “Brooklyn Blood” — an Afghanistan war veteran who returns to the streets where he grew up to work as a cop, only to find them filled with hipsters drinking pumpkin-spice beers.
Suffering PTSD, Detective Bill O’Connor is haunted by the ghosts of his past — which are soon joined by the ghosts of Brooklyn’s past when a murder victim is found in Prospect Park.
That’s the approximate site of the Battle of Brooklyn — the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, where about 300 members of the Continental Army were slaughtered by the British.
The connection isn’t obvious in the story until O’Connor walks past the Fort Greene Prison Martyrs Monument — where the remains of American prisoners from the war are buried — and spooky skeletal poltergeists start coming out of the ground.
The 1960 Park Slope plane crash. (NY Post photo)
He starts seeing ghost planes crash over Park Slope — where a United Airlines jet plummeted in 1960 after colliding in midair with a TWA propeller craft (which smashed into Staten Island), killing 134 people. Then there’s a ghost train rocketing along the subway tracks beneath Malbone Street where 93 people died when a Brighton Beach Line train crashed near the Prospect Park station in 1918. O’Connor soon realizes these aren’t just his regular war flashbacks.
Levitz teamed up with Fort Greene-based illustrator Tim Hamilton to bring the story to life — so to speak.
The pair pored over history books and old articles and walked the streets to get the Brownstone Brooklyn scenery right before filling their tale with monsters and explosions and casting a noir-ish shadow over everything.
“I really do enjoy history, so I was able to go around and take pictures of most of the things I put into the novel,” said Hamilton, who has previously adapted Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”″ into a graphic novel and has done art for The New Yorker and Mad magazine.
The pair also used their own homegrown knowledge — it was Hamilton’s idea to include the Prison Martyr’s Memorial from his neighborhood, while Levitz knew what the fatal train tunnel in the Malbone Street disaster actually looked like from riding the rails as a kid.
“In my youth, I used to ride in the front of the train looking deep into the tunnel, so I’ve got a pretty good visual sense of what goes on. In the old days, you could easily see out the front of the cars, so you learned a lot more than you do now,” he said.
Which is just as well, because Hamilton, like many New Yorkers, hadn’t even heard of the wreck.
“They don’t make a big deal about it at the Transit Museum,” Levitz quipped.
The 1918 Malbone St. train wreck. (NYCTA File Photo)
“And [the city] renamed Malbone Street to Empire Boulevard pretty quickly after the disaster. Real-estate values — the guiding history of much of New York City.”
The comic culminates in an epic showdown between O’Connor and his mystic foe at the Hell Gate Bridge — which isn’t in Brooklyn, but is where the Brooklyn-made General Slocum steamboat sank when it caught fire in 1904, killing 1,021 people.
“Once it became a supernatural story, the fact that the city’s great disaster prior to 9/11 happened at a place called Hell Gate was a natural payoff,” Levitz said.
Also, the scene just looks cool — and has the right infrastructure for a ghost train, a ghost plane and a ghost sea monster all at once.
“When you’re talking about deaths that happened a hundred years ago and in many ways hadn’t been memorialized, you didn’t have a distinctive visual to play with,’’ Levitz said.
“So being able to work with something as vivid as a railroad bridge, it’s pretty cool architecture.”
With comics currently enjoying unprecedented popularity thanks to the explosion of superhero stories on the big and small screens, plus Brooklyn’s new popularity, Levitz is looking to tap into the zeitgeist of both.
“I hope ‘Brooklyn Blood’ can be a little bit of a trend-setter,” he said.
“I’m hoping people in Brooklyn hear about the story and are curious enough to take a look. I promise no ghosts come with it.”
Levitz and Hamilton are doing a signing at Crown Heights’ Anyone Comics on July 27.
That, too, is the site of an important Brooklyn event.
“I was bar mitzvahed a couple of blocks from there!” Levitz said.
The joys of awards – part twohttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Just_Books.jpg1200375Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3441921179aff1838c01342fc1c9a68ba940f4f1a233065e2f21854c3c715b4a?s=96&d=mm&r=g
A few weeks ago I received perhaps the most unlikely award of my career: an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Pace University while speaking at graduation. Never having finished my undergraduate education, this was a delight, checking an unexpected box on my life list. But the icing on the cake has been a couple of emails that followed. One was from a former grad student (I teach in the M.S. in Publishing program as well as undergraduate courses), saying that my speech about the power of stories had finally helped her family understand her career choice, and another came from the parent of a graduate, telling me about the importance of my writing to her recently deceased brother through a very difficult lifetime.
Most of the awards offer strength to me in proportion to how they were achieved: the ones that were voted on by my peers or by groups that I worked with closely are great sources of pride. But there’s a true warmth in the one on one feedback that my work has permitted: the people who have come up to me at comic conventions talking about the pleasure my stores gave them, or responses like these. There’s a real joy in being part of a community, whether it’s comics or a school.
To all involved in these, thank you…and to all of you who allowed me to do the work that qualified, thank you as well.
An infuence examinedhttps://paullevitz.com/wp-content/themes/movedo/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg150150Paul LevitzPaul Levitzhttps://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3441921179aff1838c01342fc1c9a68ba940f4f1a233065e2f21854c3c715b4a?s=96&d=mm&r=g
Deep into a chronological binge re-reading of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, a project long on my to-do list. I was introduced to the series decades ago by Mark Hanerfeld, my predecessor on The Comic Reader, and read something like the last half of them as they came out and the earlier ones as I could find them.
McBain is a textbook for a number of qualities: the structure of a police procedural, serial character development across separate novels, and simple, effective pulp writing. Going in sequence (the series began as I was born, in 1956) offers an amazing ‘core sample’ of how the world has changed. From the astounding shift in technology in the home (an early book has one of the cops reminiscing about the radio dramas of his youth and the shift to television) and work environment (McBain offers CSI-level detail of the police laboratory processes of the time, which feel frighteningly primitive now), to the tremendous shifts in perceptions of race, gender, and sexual diversity, it’s quite the time machine.
As I read, I realized how significant the series was on my recent work on Brooklyn Blood. I use a quote from another mystery author, P.D. James, in my writing classes to spark discussion: “Read widely and with discretion. Bad writing is contagious.” Good writing is contagious, too, and McBain certainly infected me even though it was over a decade between the last time I’d read one of his books and when I began my first procedural. His very visceral descriptions of the city are utterly absent from my work, reminding me of the difference between writing prose and comics; I got to lean entirely on Tim Hamilton’s artwork to conjure that. Not that you can’t use description powerfully in comics, but the format for Brooklyn Blood, with 8 page chapters originally published a month apart, didn’t encourage that. I wonder how I would have written it differently if it had been published in another structure?
Finding your direct influences in a fascinating and mysterious journey. Although I’m a great Tolkien fan, the inspiration that he provided for The Great Darkness Saga wasn’t apparent to me until years later, when I reread it in proximity to one of my periodic renewed visits to his Middle Earth masterpiece. If you’re ever so moved, see if you can spot the two lines in Darkness that are the direct links between the two. I’m not above conscious use of my inspirations, of course. The about-to-be reprinted Earthwar draws its fundamental structure from my love of Doc Smith’s Lensmen cycle, but only as to the matryoshka doll reveals of the levels of villainy, as opposed to the more wholesale inspiration it provided for the Silver Age Green Lantern’s mythology.
McBain’s series was adapted into a handful of movies (theatrical and television scale), a tv series, and even comics. But look to the books themselves if you ever want to study his textbook. It’s a worthwhile course.
The ACTION COMICS celebration volume is hitting stores this week, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about it and my journey with ACTION. In a way, I came to comics through ACTION, as #300 was brought to me by my babysitter when I was 6, the first comic I remember owning. I’d read others, from the boxes of comics older kids kept in their garages (a Brooklyn behavior of the ’60s), but this one was mine. And it had a subscription ad in it, offering a year more for only $1…a sum I managed to talk my parents out of, and soon the copies were coming through the mail slot, folded and wrapped in a brown wrapper.
I never got to write a story for ACTION, or even a letters page, though some of my ‘house’ pages like DIRECT CURRENTS certainly showed up there. The closest I came is the five page Superman story “The Game,” which is in the celebration volume. Neal Adams and I produced it not knowing whether it would make it into ACTION #1000 itself or get slotted for the celebration. Close, but no cigar.
There are a lot of stories that could have made it into the celebration volume, and a lot of other writers who would have had interesting commentary to offer. Almost got Michael Chabon to contribute, but other deadlines intervened. Still, Feiffer, DeHaven, Tye, Yang, Hajdu…not bad. And I remembered about Marv’s unpublished Siegel & Shuster era Superman story and he was willing to include it.
Best of all, though, was getting Laura Siegel Larson to pen a piece about her dad. It’s been a thrill/relief/pleasure to reconnect with Laura now that the long legal tangle between her family and DC is over. My long friendship with her parents was one of the nicest intersections of my fan spirit and professional life. Marred, of course, by the fact that it took so long to reach a resolution, but now rejoined and I can happily watch generations of Siegels benefit mightily from the magic that Jerry gave the world.
There are no letters pages any more, and precious little feedback on projects like the celebration, but if you enjoy it, shoot me a comment here or on Facebook or however. Hope you do…
