Year: 2002

Just came from Toys R Us, having purchased the gloriously huge talking Ent, Treebeard. And, just to be complete, I also picked up Merry and Pippin who are sized close to proportionately correct. Sure beats the heck out of my previous Ent action figure, which consisted of a carefully carved broccoli stalk.

By the way, I wonder: Would people start crabbing that “Two Towers” is “inaccessible.” After all, it makes zero effort to summarize the previous film. It just assumes you know what’s going on.

PAD

There’s a Bozo going around on my alt.fan board (and using the popular sock puppet “a friend of mine was wondering this” tactic to bring it up on Newsarama as well) who was pondering why my

titles, such as “Supergirl” and “Young Justice” get cancelled, and “Captain

Marvel” struggles. And when he posted it on my alt.fan board, he made sure to include the usual Usenet “bet you don’t have the balls to respond” nonsense, because, y’know, these guys always have to have a “muy macho” thing going. Because I take on Marvel execs to the point of probably being fired, but I’m going to be afraid of some Usenet numbnut.

Since this website represents my central response point, I’m posting my reply to the Bozo here as well as over on the alt.fan board. Two responses, actually: A short and a long.

Short answer:

Because, y’know, “Supergirl” never had a title canceled before I wrote her. Because, y’know, “Captain Marvel” has a long and proud history of sales success, as do all cosmically-related Marvel titles. Because, y’know, two of the three “Young Justice” mainstays, Impulse and Superboy, never had a title

canceled. When other books are canceled, oh well. When mine are canceled, something’s wrong somewhere. Bozo.

Long answer:

As all Gaul was divided into three, all comics are divided into three: Those that are halted by the creators, those that have already been canceled, and those that haven’t been canceled yet. The middle category is by far the largest. A look at the top 100 shows that, except for evergreens such as UXM,’Tec, and Action, no book is numbered over issue #100…which is 180 degrees from the market less than twenty years ago.

Readers don’t stay. Consequently, neither do creators. There’s no point in sticking with a title five, six, twelve years, because sooner or later, the audience will turn on you. Always. Without exception, and often without relation to the quality of the material being produced. That which they liked several years earlier, they now despise. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Always.

Creators are faced with two choices: Stay until that occurs, or leave.

So fans bìŧçh about creators who are transient in their loyalties, while at the same time take for granted, or even come to despise, those creators who stay.

Why are “my” books canceled? Putting aside that YJ was dumped to make way for a new cartoon series. Putting aside that if retailers had actually ordered sufficient copies of “Supergirl” to keep up with fan interest and demand, the series would have continued. Putting aside that many people *still* refuse to even sample “Captain Marvel” simply because they don’t like the character. Putting all that aside…

Why? Because I cared enough about the characters and readers to stick with series, year in, year out, getting the books out on time rather than months late.

Because I stayed.

Bozo.

PAD

In case you folks gave up on me, wonder no more. I’ve just returned from a five day sojourn down to Atlanta, visiting Kathleen’s family for the holidays. Three week old Caroline had the opportunity to meet her eight week old cousin, Genevieve (hope I spelled her name right). Whereas Caroline was 6 pounds 13 ounces at birth, Genny was over nine pounds. At this point, Caroline is approaching seven while Genny is at twelve. We posed the two of them together and it looked like the opening sequence of “Twins.”

I’m never much for trying to do entries while on the road, because I have a hard time typing with any keyboard that’s non-ergonomic. If you do a lot of typing and you’re still using a standard keyboard, I cannot suggest more strenuously that you switch to an ergonomic. It’ll take about a week for you to adjust, but you’ll get your speed back and you will save your hands. There’s no question in my mind I’d have Carpal tunnel by now if I hadn’t switched five years ago.

Because we were reluctant to expose Caroline to a crowded airplane, we wound up renting a van and driving down.. The van rental place didn’t have the one we contracted for, and wound up upgrading us to this deluxe nine passenger vehicle I promptly dubbed “Cattlecar: Galactica.” There was onboard TV and video player, and a ton of room, and yet Kath and I still managed to repeatedly hit our heads whenever we moved around the interior.

Stopped at several comic book stores while down there: Oxford Comics and Doctor No’s, where I chatted with long-time friend and store owner Cliff Biggers. Cliff’s “Comic Shop News” is going to be doing an exclusive feature on “The Fallen Angel” when we’re ready to promote it in a couple months.

Happy holidays to all.

PAD

I’ve got at least five e-mails from folks telling me that Joe Quesada made no mention of “Captain Marvel” in his Newsarama interview, and didn’t list me in his X-Mas song even though he mentioned just about every other living person currently employed by Marvel. Which is being seen as a snub and not a good sign of things to come. Which it probably was.

So you can stop telling me now. Okay?

PAD

Okay, well THAT series makes somewhat more sense now.

I still think the lack of any kind of score aside from those sleep-inducing guitar licks and the occasionally pokey editing didn’t help, but overall I liked the two hour pilot of Firefly quite a lot. As far as an intro to the characters goes, it certainly was far superior to the episode that Fox insisted on airing that helped cost the series so many viewers from the get-go. And it wasn’t remotely the snore-fest that reports from Fox execs made it out to be.

And of course, barring any unexpected developments, this is the last episode we’re going to see. Bottom line is, Fox blew this one. From running the show out of sequence to a non-existent ad campaign once the series was on (during FX reruns of “Buffy” they aired only promos for “John Doe.” If there’s *anyplace* to push a series to fans of “the creator of Buffy,” that’s the place), it’s obvious that there was no one internally at the network pushing or supporting the show. Unusual series always need someone on the inside to go to the mat for it, and clearly no one existed in that capacity for “Firefly.”

PAD

Get over to http://www.politicalstrikes.com. Go. Right now. I won’t tell you why because that’d ruin it. Just go.

PAD

The writer of the TCJ column “Journalista,” after taking inaccurate swipes at this blog, announced that I could have “the last word” on the subject. This is a popular on-line gambit in which one person actually endeavors to have the last word himself by trying to present himself as above whatever rebuttal could be offered. The usual hope is that the other party will then want to show that he’s as above-it-all as the first guy, so he refuses to avail himself of the opportunity. I don’t know whether that’s the intent here. But I–who Gary Groth has referred to as one of Fantagraphics “favorite whipping boys”–do know I want to say something.

It’s been a good long while since Fantagraphics took something I didn’t write, acted as if I did, and then offered a half-hearted, Well we meant everything we said but we’re sorry we said it apology. The time before was a fabricated letter defending some former Fanta employee that Groth utilized to produced a multi-page slam, without anyone there bothering to verify that I’d actually written it. Which I hadn’t. This time around, Journalista was incapable of reading an entry that referred to Kathleen and me in the third person, featuring such phrases as “Peter and Kathleen” and “their child,” ascribed it to me, and took me to task for it. Endeavoring to subsequently explain the mishap, the author claimed the posting carried no label of authorship…even though it said “posted by Glenn Hauman” right under it.

But hey, in the world of journalistic accuracy that passes for Fantagraphics, it’s all even-steven because I stated a decade after the fact that, as I recall it, Groth was a guest at Carol’s house even though he claims it was the other way around…while, eleven years ago, at the time it occurred, journalistic maven Groth couldn’t get the cause of Carol’s death correct (it wasn’t a heart attack, it was a brain aneurysm.)

One of the two things that Groth and his stooges has never been able to wrap themselves around is that I don’t care what Groth said about Carol. Carol was beyond his ability to hurt. What I care about is that Groth revealed himself as someone with a total lack of human decency. A young woman dropped dead. A woman he knew, that he had presumably broken bread with. She collapsed in the street, was rushed to a hospital, briefly regained consciousness, and then died. And he used that tragedy as a pretext for two things, and two things only: To bash Marvel, and to promote the Comics Journal, holding it up as the gold standard of how to do euologies correctly.

Here’s the other thing Groth et al never got: Carol always saw Marvel as a stepping stone. She was only going to be there another six months to a year. She always planned long-term, you see. She had meticulously been putting everything into place and was preparing to make the jump to her own business. To create her own publishing firm, producing work of artistic merit. She truly loved comic books, but she wanted more out of life than pushing superhero titles. She had great and lofty goals.

And she didn’t get to achieve them.

The people who mourned her didn’t know that, of course. But they were aware that, at the very least, a life with vast potential had been cut short. They got that. Criticize the effusiveness with which they did it if you must (though God knows why one would feel compelled to), but they got that. And Groth didn’t get that, making him less understanding and more devoid of anything approaching human feeling than any of them. Instead he pontificated over how he “abominated” the use to which she put her intellect in building her career.

Carol used Marvel Comics as a foundation toward a publishing career that was cut short. Gary Groth, who has published pørņ (the Eros line) and a magazine extolling the virtues of the very superheroes he despises (Amazing Heroes), all to generate revenue to keep TCJ going, doesn’t get to excoriate others for the way they build a career.

Here endeth the word.

PAD