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Spring Robins

I’ve been seeing robins everywhere this season
on the lawn when I leave for work
outside my window at the office
in the yard while I’m playing with the kids

they wander to and fro, looking lost and confused
and who can blame them — it’s still early days
prey is scarce and the bright red gives them away
before they can pounce

I think the main problem, though, is that
they’re longing for Batman
he’d only choose one of them anyway
who ever heard of Batman and the Robins?

the warm weather always brings them out
once it’s clement enough for short shorts
and tights, they don their masks and capes
and head out in search of crime

do you think Batman and Robin were dating
like the Comics Code people claimed?
I don’t — they were too far apart in age, and
Robin was in great shape, he didn’t need to settle

for a much older man with obvious identity issues
that said, Dick did agree to let Bruce
dress him in that ridiculous outfit
he should have been twirling a baton

not swinging punches into the jaws of
painted evildoers and crazies
you don’t keep your boyish good looks
being eaten by a shark or buried alive

if you see a Robin, don’t feed him
you’ll only encourage him to come back
before you know it he’ll be on your porch
looking glum and asking if you’ve seen the Batmobile

Journalist and comic book artist Joe Sacco has been rightly praised for this intense account of his time in the Palestinian territories during the first Intifada. Sacco decided from the start to tell the Palestinian side of the story — not to aim for the false balance of much of modern journalism. His graphic novel is primarily a series of interviews with Palestinians, some arranged in advance and some on the spur of the moment.

If you enjoyed Art Spiegelman’s MAUS books, you’ll probably like Sacco’s work.

Highly recommended.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this collection, which gathers together Eisner’s three graphic novels about the mythic Dropsie Avenue, a street in New York patterned after Eisner’s own childhood neighborhood. I’d never read any of Eisner’s work, famous as he is, and I mostly thought of him as the creator of The Spirit, a comic book hero.

This trilogy, though, is both an autobiography of sorts for Eisner and a biography of a street in New York City. The three books share an attention to detail combined with an epic sweep of history. Eisner explores religion, the meaning of life, aging, poverty, immigration, racial and ethnic relations, and the development of urban centers with a keenly observant — if not objective — eye.

The black-and-white illustrations are perfect for the stories. The drawing has a raggedly realistic style that catches every piece of cracked plaster, every shadowed face, every trick of the light.

Recommended.

This brilliant graphic novel tells the unvarnished story of the development and amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The book is no hagiography of the document or its authors. Hennessey and McConnell point out the flaws in the Constitution and its unfortunate application to restrict the rights of many Americans.

In total, though, this book, like the best history books, inspires both an appreciation for past events and a desire to improve conditions going forward. Hennessy and McConnell are to be commended for furthering the cause of Constitutional literacy. Get this for every middle- and high-school student you know, and get a copy for yourself, too.

Highly recommended.

If you, like me, are a fan of comics legend Jack Kirby, don’t miss Mark Evanier’s new book. You can pre-order it now at Amazon and save an extra 5%.

By the way, Mark’s popular blog, News From Me, is worth a daily read, too.

You should be reading the comic book Ex Machina. Really, you should. In fact, if I were you, I’d throw a coat on and go pick up the latest issue right now. There’s a nice video interview with the artist, Tony Harris, at the DC Comics site. Message ends.

Yoikes! It’s been way too long since I posted something here. Work has been crazy recently. As you know, I work as a labor union organizer, and that’s not a 9 to 5 job. I worked every night last week, and almost every night this week (in addition to every day).

Despite all that, I have had a bit of time to read, watch and listen to some cool stuff. In the reading department: I just checked out Scurvy Dogs, a pirate comic written by Andrew Boyd and Ryan Yount. The premise? Classic pirates (Yar! and all that) try to get jobs and find love in the modern city. It’s hilarious, and the preceeding description can’t hope to do it justice. Get it today. You can thank me later.

I also had a conversation in my local comic shop (Comics, Etc.) the other day about the big crossovers of the 1980s. I was buying some back issues to fill in my collection of DC’s Millennium crossover, and the guys and I got to talking about how “the kids these days are reading Infinite Crisis without ever having read the original Crisis On Infinite Earths.” Before I go on, I’d just like to reiterate: I’m married, and I’ve fathered two children. Thank you.

The point is that some of those old crossovers were really hip. OK, they were also shameless attempts to get you to drop a whole month’s allowance in one trip to the comic shop, but still…

In defense of “these kids today,” the big comics companies (DC and Marvel, primarily) haven’t made it easy to get into the back-catalog material. It seems like they reset their entire universes about every six months, and most of the changes that take place in the big crossovers don’t last. Robin died — now he’s back. Superman died — he’s back, too. In Millennium, the parents and friends of many of the DC universe’s biggest heroes were revealed to be Manhunters bent on destroying the universe. All those people are still in their respective comics, and it’s as if the whole Millennium series never happened. Oy!

On the listening tip: My friend Otto Bruno is host of the fantastic Sunday Music Festa program on my favorite jazz station, Jazz90.1. He recently loaded me up with more than 400 episodes of the Jack Benny radio show from the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve been collecting old radio shows since I was a kid. This was quite a haul! I’ve been listening to them in cronological order. I’m still in 1933. It’s great to hear Jack make jokes about current events, just like Letterman or Leno (except funny, unlike the latter example). For example, one 1933 monologue contained jokes about Greta Garbo, King Kong, and Gandhi. That’s right, Gandhi. The sound quality is all over the place on these recordings, but they’re a priceless snapshot of that time. You can check out a big collection of Old-Time Radio mp3 CDs at OTRCAT.com.

Back to the reading list for a moment: In combination with these radio shows, I’m reading a biography of Jack Benny written by his wife, Mary Livingstone, with the help of her brother (and former Benny writer) Hilliard Marks. It’s a fun read, and a touching look at the life of a great entertainer. As far as I know, it’s long out of print. I found a first edition of it this week at the Yankee Peddler Bookshop here in Rochester, NY.

Finally, the watching list. Jen and I have been catching up on the TV show Scrubs. My sister gave Jen the first two seasons for her birthday and Xmas. It amazes me that a show this good even made it on to TV, let alone that it has survived for several years. Brilliant!

A final note: If you’d like to know more about my family than you could ever imagine, you can head over to The Flanders Family Blog and download the latest edition of Flanders Family News, the monthly newsletter I publish. Enjoy!

One of the hip features of the fan site is a regular column by writer Joe Casey called The Genre, in which he explores the world of classic “cosmic comics.” In the first edition, Casey paid homage to Steve Englehart’s “Celestial Madonna” storyline, which ran in The Avengers from 1974-75.

It’s very, very hard to write a simple synopsis of the storyline, mostly because I’m not in possession of whatever mind-altering substances Mr. Englehart was using back in the day. Suffice it to say that the story begins with the appearance of a mystical star glowing above Avengers Mansion, and ends with the character Mantis marrying a tree. Yup — a tree. (Insert sound of bong hit here.)

On Mr. Casey’s recommendation, I asked Andy at Comics Etc. to order the Celestial Madonna trade paperback collection for me. I finished it this morning. Yoikes! This thing was written back in the day when comic book dialgue made George Lucas sound like David Mamet. As Carrie Fisher said of George’s scripts: “You can write that stuff, but you can’t say it.” The Celestial Madonna collection takes that adage even further — you can barely read some of this stuff, let alone say it out loud. That is not an indictment, particularly if you grew up reading comics in the 70′s, as I did. Sure, things have come a long way, but it’s still cool as heck to sink deep into the pages (and pages and pages and pages and pages…) of ridiculous narration and even more ridiculous dialogue.

I was never a big Avengers fan, although I did collect West Coast Avengers for a while in the 80′s. The version of the Avengers featured in Celestial Madonna includes Thor, Iron Man, The Vision, Scarlet Witch, Mantis, and the Swordsman, along with appearances by Hawkeye, Nomad (the former — and future — Captain America) … and every villain Marvel could dig up and dust off. The main heavy is Kang The Conqueror, and that means that our heroes will be traveling through time. They do, visiting the past and the future, and even making a pit-stop in Limbo (!) to fight the likes of Frankenstein’s Monster and WWII-era villain Baron Zemo.

If your head is already spinning just from reading this, imagine how reading all 224 pages must feel!

It was worth it, though. I’m really getting into the whole cosmic adventure thing, and it’s fun to bone up on my cosmic history while enjoying modern treasures such as GODLAND and the equally brilliant Fear Agent, written by Rick Remender and drawn by Tony Moore.

As a teaser, I’ll tell you that I have my own GODLAND project planned, and that it won’t be in the form of a comic book. Stay tuned, true believer…

As it happens, manga are also becoming wildly popular in the English-speaking world. I recently read a review of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim manga on somebody’s blog. I wish I could remember where, so I could give the blogger credit. In any case, this person gave a huge recommendation to the Pilgrim books, so I had my local comics shop order them for me. They came yesterday, and I read them both last night.

Manga are smaller in height and width than regular comic books, but they’re several times longer. Every manga I’ve ever seen has been in black and white, as are the Scott Pilgrim books. Thus far, Bryan has written two books: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS VERY MINOR SPOILERS: The premise is a combination of the mundane and the fantastic. Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old bassist in a crappy Toronto rock band. He’s dating a high school student named Knives Chau. And he’s having strange dreams about a roller-blading woman with exotic hair. Things turn weird when he actually sees this woman in the real world. Turns out she’s Ramona Flowers, the only delivery worker in Toronto for amazon.ca. She’s been traveling through Scott’s dreams as she delivers packages. They end up dating. But before they can live happily ever after, Scott must fight Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. And Ramona must defend herself from the jilted Knives Chau. Hilarity ensues.

Like any description of a visual work, the preceeding paragraph pales in comparison to the real thing. You really need to see and read Scott Pilgrim for yourself. You can visit the Web site to learn more, or you can cut to the chase and order the books from the Oni Press site. And of course, if you’re in Rochester, you can stop by Comics, Etc. at 274 N. Goodman St. in Village Gate and ask Andy to order them for you.

When I moved back to the Rochester area five years ago, I started going to Comics Etc. in Village Gate, the best comics store in the area. I read Sandman and a bit of Preacher and a few others, but I stopped after a while.

About a year ago, I fell off the No Comics Wagon again — even going so far as to set up a weekly reserve list at Comics, Etc. That means that the fine folks at CE pull a bunch of comics for me every week, and I troop in every Wednesday to pick them up. I’m hooked again.

I’m not sure why I’m enjoying comic books so much these days, but I’m definitely recapturing some of the excitement I felt when I was a kid. There are a lot of great comics out there these days, although most of them seem to be outside the normal superhero realm. Here are a few I’ve been reading recently:

• Fell
• DMZ
• Local
• Batman
• Detective Comics
• Ex Machina
• Tom Strong
• Chicanos
• Daredevil
• Fear Agent
• Ferro City
• Godland

I’m reading more than that, but the memory ain’t what it used to be.

Turns out that my love of podcasting dovetails nicely with my new funnybook passion. And one of the best comic book podcasts out there is The Comic Book Haters. Two guys from New Jersey who spend 30 minutes every couple days hatin’ or lovin’ (but mostly hatin’) a particular issue of some comic book. Sloofus digs comics, Schooly G hates ‘em. They’ve done a dozen-plus episodes so far, and you’d be doing yourself a favor to check them out. NOTE: If you’re easily offended, beware. However, if you’re easily offended, we probably don’t run in the same circles, and you’re probably not reading this blog. ANOTHER NOTE: You can subscribe to The Comic Book Haters podcast through iTunes, too, using this link. If you drop the guys a note, tell them you heard about them at jasoncrane.org. Enjoy!