Peter David's Blog, page 45

The Wicked Witch Still Has It

So playing at our local movie theater was “The Wizard of Oz” courtesy of TCM. We went to the 2 PM showing.

Featuring an intro and outro by Robert Osborn, it’s always fun to spend a couple of hours with Dorothy and company. But here’s the thing I found most interesting.

Kids were freaking terrified of the witch.

It was remarkably evident that for quite a few viewers, this was the first time they were seeing the movie, and I heard genuine sobbing and whimpers of absolute terror as the witch threatened and menaced Dorothy. When she flipped over the hour glass several kids came close to screaming, managing to choke it off at the last second.

I found that absolutely amazing. With the level of scary things kids are confronted with these days, ranging from TV shows to video games to films to, hell, the news: Margaret Hamilton in green makeup was still able to reduce kids to tears seventy five years later. Ten years of “Wicked” hasn’t made a dent in the sheer terror that that woman could summon.

I think she’d be thrilled.

That and I STILL think Glinda is a psycho. Why not tell Dorothy the shoes would take her home? “She wouldn’t have believe me. She had to find out for herself.” YES SHE WOULD HAVE BELIEVED YOU, YOU ASSHOLE.

Jesus.

PAD

The Captain Marvel Price Challenge

Originally published March 29, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1480

AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL JEMAS AND JOE QUESADA:

Well, I gotta tell you guys: Reading that Captain Marvel was going up in price to $2.75, along with other critical favorites/fan snubs Spider-Girl and Black Panther, just gave me a warm, squishy feeling in the pit of my stomach; and that’s a considerable amount of pit.

I know, I know, I could have just called you and discussed this privately. But on the suggestion of a fan, you raised the prices without calling and discussing it with me. So I’m just going to follow your lead and air my thoughts on the matter publicly. And hey, Joe, when you challenged Todd McFarlane, you didn’t do it in a friendly phone call or a telegram. You did it on the Internet. So if Marvel’s leaders have opened the door to handling publishing affairs publicly, then I’m going to follow that lead right through the same door. And yes, at the end of this letter, there will be a challenge, so keep reading.

I’ve had a good number of fans tell me that they don’t buy Captain Marvel—never even sampled it—for three reasons. First, they have no intrinsic interest in, or even have an antipathy for, Genis-Vell, the son of Mar-Vell and our titular hero. Second, believe it or not, because the book is $2.50 rather than $2.25, I’ve been told point blank that some fans are not interested in spending the extra quarter on a character who holds no draw for them.

So learning (second hand, thanks for the heads-up, guys) that the book would be jumping yet another twenty five cents, well; that loud ringing in my head sure sounded like a death knell to me, yes indeedy.

I’ve never written a series like Captain Marvel before. I have never written a title that has been such a consistent, uniform, resounding critical success and simultaneously ignored by fans. It’s rather wearying, I have to say, to read review after review that boils down to two things: “This is one of the best books Marvel is publishing,” and “Why is no one buying it?”

Well, it’s not exactly “no one,” is it. It’s “DC numbers.” Which is kind of funny when one thinks that DC numbers include a $7.95 book pulling in the number one slot, but let’s put that aside for a moment.

How creatively uplifting do you folks think it is to have the top guys in the company singling out a title you work on as in line for the chopping block? Until now, no one had publicly been saying anything about the series being in trouble. It was Spider-Girl that had been canceled. But now Captain Marvel has been given that same near-cancellation taint, and believe me when I say it is a taint. Just as many people stop watching television shows when they hear they’ve been canceled, they will also stop buying a comic when they think that the end of the title is near. They figure, “What’s the point?”

Indeed, Marvel’s history of quick cancellations has been one of the stumbling blocks to getting people to try Captain Marvel in the first place (bet you thought I forgot all about a third reason when I mentioned it in an earlier paragraph, huh?) The reasoning is, “Why bother getting attached to a title when Marvel’s just going to cancel it anyway? If the book does wind up hanging around for a few years, Marvel will collect it in trade paperbacks, I’ll buy those, get caught up and then start buying it.”

Here you’ve got a title with a loyal readership. It can be perceived that by raising it a quarter, you are rewarding that readership by allowing the book to continue. And some of them are indeed grateful, and have the attitude that they would pay any amount of money to keep reading it.

But not all of them. There is certainly a percentage who will feel that they are getting screwed. That Marvel is rewarding their continued support by singling them out to bear an increased cost. That their devotion is effectively being punished. They’ll feel they’re being told, You like this book? Hah! Then you’ll have to pay through the nose to get it. And they’re going to resent it, and silently voice that resentment with a closed wallet. Furthermore, many fans come into stores with a set amount of money they’re going to spend. If a rise in a book’s price puts it over that set amount, they drop the title. Simple as that.

And in the meantime, will anyone new sample the book? Good lord, no. If they weren’t buying it at $2.50, they’re sure as hell not going to start at $2.75.

So by bumping the price up, let’s see what’s been accomplished in exchange for keeping the title around for another year: You’ve stitched the scarlet “C” of cancellation on it, you’ve virtually guaranteed a drop in overall readership from people who will not want to pay the increased price, and also virtually ensured that no new fans will pick it up because they consider the title terminal or simply not worth the inflated cover price. Yes, a handful of fans are grateful. But I suspect the attrition from the fans who don’t share that gratitude and the likely lack of expanding readership will wind up causing that increased price to be a wash.

Were there other ways to help the title aside from raising it a quarter? Of course. First, advertising would have helped. There’s been none. No promotion of this book.

Second, every time I did something story-wise to give Marvel a hook into pushing the series, Marvel has not only fumbled the ball, but the ball’s never even been picked up. I custom wrote a story for #19 to take advantage of the Marvel Slashback program, a program designed to try and get readers to sample titles they weren’t already buying. Except the program was limited to Avengers and Incredible Hulk, and at the time, Hulk was ranked #55 and Avengers was ranked at #6. These needed help? And then the program was scuttled right before Captain Marvel, buried in the low 80s ranking-wise, could take advantage of it. Then I developed a four-part time travel storyline featuring characters from 2099 and Future Imperfect. Not only was there no promotion of it—not so much as a store flier or in-house ad—but the solicitation info didn’t even make mention of Spider-Man 2099 being in the series.

Third, the retailer at my favorite local store, Fourth World Comics in Smithtown, New York, came up with a simple suggestion: Instead of jacking up the prices twenty five cents on three books not selling well, which will likely cost sales, why not raise the prices fifteen cents on three books that are selling great and won’t even notice. Yes, that’s right, bump up the price on the X-Men titles. For crying out loud, X-Treme X-Men is priced at $2.99 and it sells comparably to the other titles at $2.25. Use the increased profits from those books to float critically acclaimed titles that still need time to find their audiences.

Fourth, you could display faith by saying, “You know, we feel so strongly that people should be buying Captain Marvel that we’re going to knock the price down to $2.25 to encourage people to pick it up, and heavily promote it to boot.” But I suspect you won’t do that because, in business terms, it would be perceived as “throwing good money after bad.” You’ve decided the series will never sell better than bottom rung, and are simply going to help it limp along for a while so that you’re not the bad guys canceling a critically acclaimed book.

Well, guys: I don’t like to limp. I don’t like to see fans penalized an extra quarter just for supporting the book. Young Justice has been on a consistent sales upswing lately, and I’ve got plans afoot for Supergirl that I think are going to pull people in by the carload. But Captain Marvel has an albatross around its neck that you hung there, so I think a different and more drastic approach is called for.

I did the math. When we multiply the book’s circulation by twenty five cents, and then subtract the distributor discount, we’re really only talking a few thousand more dollars in the coffers.

Fine. I have faith in the book and faith, as foolish as it may sound, that quality—given enough time—will pull in readership. There are books that I do more for love and interest than money, since the publishers can’t afford my normal page rate. Soulsearchers and Company has been one. The Haunted is another. I’m prepared to put Captain Marvel into that category; and hopefully my work on those lowly DC titles you diss will help offset the sacrifice.

If Marvel does not raise the price on Captain Marvel, then I in turn will effectively write the book for free. Not completely; we all know that if I don’t get paid, that jeopardizes the book’s “work-for-hire” status. So I will write the book for .95 cents a page, for a total of (get this) $20.99 per issue. The difference between that and what I presently earn should offset the increase of 25 cents that you would have charged the fans. And I will continue to write the book for $20.99 an issue until such time that the book breaks into Diamond’s top 50 or sells over 25,000 copies an issue, whichever comes first.

And in addition, there’s got to be some serious promotion for the title. House ads, at the very least. Ads in CBG or Wizard. Another trade paperback collection would be great. In short, act as if the acclaim the book’s been receiving is something you’re genuinely proud of and want to run with, instead of simply a cross to bear that requires you to keep the title around in some fashion.

On the surface, this seems an insane offer. But I don’t see it that way. See, I’m convinced that if you bump the series up to $2.75, we’re dead in a year. So the income will stop anyway. But I think the book, if given time, will eventually attract the audience that critics and Wizard Magazine have been screaming it deserves, so in two years I’ll still have a book to write and with any luck I’ll be back to getting paid for it.

So that’s the offer. I don’t want to see the fans who have been supportive up until now be singled out for a price increase just because they’ve been enjoying the series that the Captain Marvel creative team has been producing. And if Marvel feels that the book simply can’t be profitable enough to continue publishing under the current P&L situation, I can respect that. So I’ll change the P&L, cutting out my P to offset your L. In short, I’m willing to put my money, rather than the fans’ money, where my mouth is.

Over to you.

Best regards,

Peter David

Media Tie-Ins

Originally published March 22, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1479

It is not easy working in a field that is treated by many with unadulterated disdain. A field that is, in fact, often blamed for the deterioration of literary quality across the board, and believed to be bringing ruin and damnation to us all.

No, surprisingly enough, I’m not talking about comic books. I am speaking instead of media-related novels.

You know the ones: novels tied into such series as X-Files, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5, etc. The popular notion among many is that these books are springing up all over to the detriment of science fiction and fantasy with far more “merit.” That they are weeds choking the life out of the pure green lawn of SF/F. That they are keeping far worthier books off the shelves, and slowly smothering the entire literary SF field to the point where the entire industry is going to collapse.

That’s a lot to lay on a genre.

Now obviously, I’m not going to feel dispassionate or unbiased on the subject. I’ve written more Trek novels than I can readily remember. I’ve written novelizations and tie-ins to Babylon 5, and I wrote the upcoming novelization of the Spider-Man movie. And I should just note, as an aside, that people who think a novelization is a cakewalk are obviously people who have never done it themselves. The average screenplay is 120 pages. The average manuscript is 350 pages. You do the math and figure out just how much the novelizer has to bring to the party in order to get the job done, ranging from explaining plot holes to expanding characterization to developing entire additional storylines that integrate seamlessly with the rest of the movie. As Alan Dean Foster reportedly commented at a convention, turning a movie into a novel can get you labeled as a hack; turn a novel into a movie, by contrast, and you could get an Academy Award.

There seems to be this warped perception that if all the media tie-in novels went away, that would free up space for this mythical flood of dazzlingly wonderful novels which currently aren’t seeing the light of day. Somewhere out there, there are hard-working authors who can’t get their books a fair shake because those damnable media tie-ins are taking up all the editorial time and energy of the publishers.

Now I admit there’s a downside to media books. When I was shopping Sir Apropos of Nothing, many publishers dismissed it, and me, out of hand because I was mostly known for writing Trek novels. Not only was it assumed that my work was automatically inferior, but it was further assumed that people who read my Trek books (or, for that matter, my comic book work) would never in a million years pick up a straight-up fantasy novel by me. Of course, not every fan would. My reasoning was that it only required a percentage of the readers who followed my other work to purchase Apropos to make it a success. Almost no publishers saw it that way. So despite years of working in the publishing industry, and dozens of books published, I was being treated as a first-time author. Even having gotten books on the New York Times list didn’t matter because those were “only” Star Trek novels (blithely ignoring the fact that most Trek novels don’t hit bestseller status.)

But setting aside my personal experiences, let us ponder just how many authors there are out there who are sending in their novels and not getting a fair shake because of media tie-ins. Well, kids, here’s a hot news flash: The vast majority of would be break-in novels are unpublishable. Years ago Theodore Sturgeon, when faced with the comment that ninety percent of published SF is crud, replied that ninety percent of everything is crud. This promptly became engraved in stone as Sturgeon’s Law, and time has not diminished its accuracy. And break-in novels not only don’t beat the law, they probably exceed it. They don’t call stacks of unsolicited manuscripts “slush piles” for nothing. All the media tie-ins do is the job of enabling publishers to survive so they can provide a marketplace for those new writers to send their material. Publishers are starving for quality work. Now if fans and would-be-writers want to cling to the notion that the existence of media tie-ins is preventing new work from seeing print, rather than the simple lack of material that isn’t garbage, then they can do so. They can continue to use Star Trek or Star Wars as convenient whipping posts and cheerfully ignore the fact that media tie-ins help keep SF sections and publishers alive. And oh, by the way, look… there’s the readers’ noses. Perhaps they want to take a shot at cutting them off to spite their collective faces.

What infuriates me is the dismissal of media tie-ins as having any worth.

First and foremost, I have the same reaction that I have to parents who are flipping out because their kids are reading Harry Potter. “Oh my God, oh my God, little Jimmy is reading books about magic! Our children are being destroyed.” Setting aside that there is not one documented case of a child—inspired by the books—flying about on a broomstick and playing Quidditch, the obvious response to these howls is, “Hey, jerkface, at least the kids are reading something!”

In this day and age, with a staggeringly small percentage of the US population constituting an incredibly large percentage of the buying audience, readers are becoming a dwindling commodity. If a bookstore is able to make its payroll that week because some kids who ordinarily couldn’t be bothered to read are interested in snapping up the Spider-Man novelization, I have zero problem with that.

Second, I am sick and tired of media-related novels being dismissed as garbage, trash, worthless, etc. The notion is that anything media-related is automatically of no value implies that every novel not media-related is of far greater value. It is a pea-brained reader who somehow feels that a well-written Star Trek novel is by definition inferior to a poorly written “original” novel, or has less right to exist.

The galling truth that snobs don’t want to wrap themselves around is that any number of bookstores and publishers owe their fiscal health to those much despised licensed tie-ins. In the great mall of book publishing, they are the anchors, the Sears or Macys that pull people in due to name recognition. And all those fun, charming, and entertaining non-chain stores in between Sears and Macys (or Star Trek and Star Wars) survive in these dicey economic times thanks to those very anchors that the oh-so-savvy fans openly despise.

Not only is there no guarantee that if media books went away tomorrow, the SF sections would be filled to the brim with new and exciting genre novels, but I will instead wager that bookstores would just as likely shrink down their SF sections and expand proven genres such as mysteries or Harlequin romances.

People wonder why it’s SF series that attract tie-in series more than any other genre. That’s easy: It’s because those people who watch SF on television tend to be more literate and intelligent. So naturally they would be more inclined to support book series that tie-in with TV shows.

And finally, around the time that people started telling me they were using Riker’s poem from Imzadi as their wedding vows, or that my novelizations made movies more watchable and enjoyable because they filled in all the gaping holes left by the filmmakers, or that New Frontier enabled them to enjoy Star Trek again, I came to the realization that these media-related endeavors are just as entitled to move, enlighten and uplift readers as any other novels.

So I suggest to all those who show nothing but disdain for licensed tie-ins that they might consider broadening their horizons or, at the very least, show a little freakin’ respect for a genre that not only is not, to my mind, destroying SF, but instead helping it to survive.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Young Justice: The Vote

Originally published March 15, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1478

With Al Gore pointedly re-entering the stage of American politics, we are awash in memories of the extended civics lesson this country received over a year ago. You remember: The one in which we discovered that Your Vote Doesn’t Really Count. You may have thought you were voting for our nation’s leader, but you were wrong, because votes carry little to no force of law. In the words of Doctor Peter Venkman, “It’s actually more of a guideline.”

Now we all know we’re not allowed to complain. We’re at war, after all. Not a declared war, but a war nevertheless. And at such times, we’re not supposed to make the slightest whispered mention of dissatisfaction with the way that the government leaders fighting the war took office (and I do mean “took.”)

So instead, let us focus our energies into a positive direction. A fun, uplifting direction.

You say you feel that one-man, one-vote no longer applies? You say you still have bile in your mouth? You say you want to know that your contribution means something and that casting a vote still counts? You say you want to have direct influence on the destiny of a superteam?

Well, I don’t know why’d you’d be saying that last one, but as it so happens:

YOU’RE IN LUCK!

Back when I was reading comics as a kid, at a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we read our comics by candlelight since electricity hadn’t been invented yet, the Legion of Superheroes would hold yearly elections of its leadership. Those were fun times. We haven’t done anything like that in a while.

Oh, there’s been votes on stuff… and yet, somehow they always manage to piss people off. Retailers crabbed endlessly over ordering blindly on the reprint books containing the all-time best Marvel Comics, and certainly many of the choices themselves seemed… dubious. Not that I felt personally put-off by the fact that my work was barely represented in any of the voting, no, not even Hulk #467 or Future Imperfect or the Hulk AIDS issue or the Bachelor Party story or the Death of Jean DeWolff, ’cause hey, I’m not bitter, you miserable little—

Ahem.

And then there was the voting that determined which Marvel and DC heroes beat whom in Marvel vs. DC, which gave us such preposterous results as Wolverine apparently defeating Lobo rather handily. And let us not forget—would that we could—the phone vote that resulted in the death of Jason Todd and a PR black eye for DC Comics.

You might think that what we need is a good, old-fashioned vote, like in those Legion days of yore, that fans really can’t get angry about. That even though there’s only one winner, really there’s no losers. And if you happen to be thinking that…

YOU’RE IN LUCK!

Why? Because we’re holding leader elections in Young Justice, that’s why!

Yes, Young Justice, the monthly adventures of a group of teen friends who hang out together and also, by the way, occasionally fight bad guys while wearing spiffy colored tights, is finally going to be selecting, formally, a leader.

Now as is the tradition in just about any teen group which features Robin, the teen wonder has been the unofficial leader since the series’ inception. He wasn’t exactly elected to the post. He just seemed the most organized, and so stepped in to take charge. However there has been occasional head-butting with other members of the team as to who should be steering the ship. Furthermore his enforced “urban legend” low profile and trust issues raised as a result of both his secret ID and Batman’s troubles with the JLA have prompted other members to step more into the forefront.

Matters are going to be coming to a head in #46. At present, Robin has quit the team, but he will be back as of #46 (I’d list that as a spoiler, but c’mon, who didn’t think he’d be back? Well… actually, I didn’t. It was more a matter of the Powers That Be saying, “Peter, very nice dramatic beat, very well played, uhm, could you put Robin back in the team please?”) In that issue, there will be a definite struggle for leadership that will result—at the suggestion of team mentor Rick Jo… I’m sorry, Snapper Carr—in an official election. In the context of the book, the voters will be the members of YJ itself. But we’re planning to expand the voting roll to all you lucky interested (and disinterested) fans out there.

And no, not everyone in YJ is actually running for the office. Some wouldn’t touch the job with a ten-meter cattle prod. There are the four candidates:

ROBIN: Tim Drake, the once (and future?) leader. PLUS: A tactical genius and superb athlete who was trained by the world’s greatest detective. Has leadership experience. Has his own title that’s selling respectably. MINUS: Has quit the team once, and still may have leftover trust issues with his team mates. His urban legend status has proven a drawback and left him unable to be the public face of the team.

SUPERBOY: Kon-El, the teen of steel. PLUS: Brimming with confidence, not exactly a dummy when it comes to strategy, and a devastating and versatile force in a battle. One of the three founding members of the team. Has his own title which sells okay, but not great. MINUS: Impetuous to the point of occasional recklessness, Superboy counts on his power to see him through dangerous situations that he gets himself into. Can be dismissive of others whose opinions don’t match his own.

WONDER GIRL: Cassie Sandsmark, protégé of Wonder Woman. PLUS: Extremely well-read and knowledgeable, and quite possibly as strong as Superboy. When thrust into a leadership capacity during “Sins of Youth,” was not only more than capable of handling it, but found she had a knack for it. MINUS: Less superhero experience than her teammates, and the only one who can literally be grounded by her mother. Doesn’t have her own title. Can be stubborn to the point of idiocy when she thinks she’s right.

THE RAY: Ray Terrill, light-powered son of the original Ray. PLUS: At nineteen, he’s the oldest of the group which gives him a more adult perspective. Can move the fastest, which would be valuable in terms of coordinating team activities. Has snappiest costume. MINUS: Being newcomer to the team might give him outsider status. Extended night maneuvers could pose problem. Had his own title, but it was canceled. Willingly resides in Philadelphia which brings his judgment into question.

There you have it: Our slate of candidates.

Currently our intention is to confine the elections purely to print media, because computer votes too easily lend themselves to abuse, and because darn it, that’s the way they did it in the Legion, and that’s good enough for us. Readers, retailers, feel free to circulate the ballot to as many fans as possible. We’re looking to close voting by the end of March, so get to it! And we can guarantee: No hanging chads!

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Informing the Misinformed

Originally published March 8, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1477

When you’ve had a career going long enough, certain misperceptions are going to start creeping in among the audience. They’re easy enough to spot: They’re the ones I see over and over on computer boards and such. No, I’m not referring to the same old saws, tossed around by people who seem to believe they have cameras set up inside my head, the ones who say with authority that I’m anti-this or anti-that. I’m referring to either misinformation or opinions which are groundless, but stated enough times that people seem to believe there’s some foundation in truth.

So I figured I’d address some of the most prevalent ones.

Misinformation: I wrote a book called Triumph in the Desert detailing the events of the Gulf War.

Back in May of 1991, people started bringing this book up to me to sign. The author was indeed one “Peter David.” Despite the fact that the bio indicated the author was a British guy who was International editor for The Economist, some fans weren’t able to suss that it was a totally different fellow. I must admit that booksellers haven’t always helped when it comes to distinguishing us. Amazon.com informs anyone who evinces interest in Triumph in the Desert that they might also enjoy the works of Diane Carey, Susan Wright, Keith DeCandido, John Vornholt, Jean Cavelos… most of them known primarily for their work as Star Trek novelists.

One time, just for laughs, I endeavored to track down my (presumably not evil) twin. As a piece of investigation, it wasn’t all that difficult. It’s not as if The Economist has an unlisted phone number. I finally located his office in, I believe, the Washington, D.C. bureau. Asking for him at the switchboard got me connected to an efficient sounding secretary with a British accent. “Peter David’s office,” she said.

“Hi, I’d like to speak to Peter David.”

“Who’s calling, please?”

“Peter David.”

I have to give her credit; she didn’t blink a telephonic eye. Instead she simply said, “Hold, please.” A few moments later, a male voice came on and said, “Peter David speaking.”

“Hi,” I said. “I know this is going to sound kind of strange, but my name is also Peter David. I’m a writer also, mostly of science fiction and fantasy, and I thought it’d amuse you to know that people keep coming up to me and asking me to sign copies of your book, Triumph in the Desert.”

There was a thoughtful pause, and then he said, “Would you be the reason that people keep asking me to sign a book called Vendetta?”

 

Misinformation: Supergirl keeps ripping off Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

When I first started developing my ideas for Supergirl, I wasn’t watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the simplest reason of all: It wasn’t on the air yet.

In the course of my setting the series in the smallish city of Leesburg, I decided there should be some sort of practical reason why all manner of bizarre doings occurred in what should have been a “normal” town. I concocted something called a Chaos Stream, a tributary running off the River Styx, which caused all manner of insane things to happen in Leesburg (including, naturally, supervillain attacks.) Meanwhile Joss Whedon was faced with the same conundrum in explaining why Sunnydale, of all places, kept getting hit with weirdness. (Interestingly, writers of Kolchak: The Night Stalker never felt a compulsion to explain why the intrepid reporter kept bumping into things that went bump in the night. I guess it was felt Chicago had it coming.) Whedon’s solution was the Hellmouth.

But although the two concepts were developed independently, fans gave benefit of the doubt to Buffy and assumed I was the rip-off artist.

As time progressed, it only got worse. The demonic character of “Buzz” is now widely seen as a rip-off of Spike in both his speech patterns (distinctly British) and his romantic interest in our heroine. No matter that Buzz predates Spike’s debut by at least a year, and the romantic interest by three years. “Obviously” Buzz is “modeled” on Spike. When Buzz became physically unable to take action against Supergirl without a huge headache, that was seen as proof positive… again, even though the storyline was already in development when Spike got the chip in his head.

Oddly, it’s purely one-way. No one ever accuses Joss Whedon of ripping off Supergirl. For the record, I don’t think he is. Still, let us consider Supergirl #49-50. In those issues, our blonde heroine is in nearly catatonic shock while a godlike villain is on the verge of a total triumph that will unleash hell on earth. Brought out of her psychic funk by a peptalk from a being with magic-based powers, our heroine musters her allies, confronts the villain, and ultimately triumphs through a demonstration of love that leads to her apparent demise. This is not remotely to be confused with the concluding episode of Buffy’s fifth season, “The Gift,” (airing some time after the publication of the issues in question) in which our blonde heroine is in nearly catatonic shock while a godlike villain is on the verge of a total triumph that will unleash hell on earth. Brought out of her psychic funk by a peptalk from a being with magic-based powers, our heroine musters her allies, confronts the villain, and ultimately triumphs through a demonstration of love that leads to her apparent demise. Nope. No parallel there.

 

Misinformation: I replaced Aquaman’s hand with a hook.

No. I replaced it with a harpoon. If you go back and look at the zero issue of Aquaman, you see he took a harpoon off a wall of the Aquacave and lashed it to the stump. It lasted for a number of issues until it was melted off, at which time he replaced with a high-tech harpoon, capable of extending, retracting, or firing with a cable line attached. But from the very beginning, fans who are simply not happy unless they’re dissing Aquaman dismissed him as “Captain Hook.” The barbed and spear end didn’t seem to matter. The fact that it wasn’t curved down and in like a hook didn’t matter. He was “hook hand.” It’s a damned harpoon.

 

Misinformation: I transformed the Hulk back into his gray incarnation.

No. Al Milgrom wrote those stories, although Bob Harras states that he was the one who originally developed the idea.

 

Misinformation: I came up with the idea of doing a Rashomon-type story for an issue of Spec Spidey.

Yeah, well, this one was my fault. After I made mention of that several weeks back in the column about John Buscema, Richard Howell called to remind me that it was actually Carol Kalish’s idea to solve the book’s deadline crunch by cribbing the multiple POV story that the famed Japanese film popularized. I then presented the idea to editor Jim Owsley and we ran with it. It’s been well over a decade, and that aspect of it totally slipped my mind, but I’ve no reason to think Richard’s lying, and now that he’s brought it up I’m vaguely remembering it that way. So I’m taking the opportunity to clarify it.

 

Misinformation: I wrote books under the name “David Peters” because I was ashamed of them.

Years ago Ace books hired me to write two sets of novels that were work-for-hire: The Photon novels and the Psi-Man series. No different a set-up than writing comics…except that in comic stores, books are racked by title whereas in book stores they’re racked by the last name of the author. Which is why, when publishers produce series, they want them under one “house name.” These days there’s more flexibility, as Star Trek and Star Wars novels are all displayed together despite a variety of authors. But back then, it was an inviolate rule. So, over my objections, both series were published under the moniker “David Peters,” conceived as a sop to me by having it be reasonably close to my own name. Psi-Man in particular was botched, as any conceivable audience was eluded when the books were published with a fake name and categorized as “Men’s adventure” rather than SF.

Eventually, when Penguin-Putnam (formerly “Ace”) was re-releasing my novel Howling Mad, I mentioned that if they had any brains they’d rerelease Psi-Man properly classified and with my name on it. The response I got was, “What’s Psi-Man?” They’d forgotten they had it. So they revisited the books, found that it was “just like X-Files” (although naturally it pre-dated X-Files by a few years) and re-released them with my name placed above the title.

 

Misinformation: I have a boundless supply of autographed photos I love sending out for free.

For some reason lately I’ve been getting lots of e-mail requests for either autographs or autographed photos. I’m not entirely sure why that should be the case, but it is. The problem is that I don’t have autographed photos, and even if I did, I see no reason why I should bear the cost of mailing them out. So, as always, if anyone wants anything signed, send it to the address below with a self-addressed stamped envelope.

 

That’s it for this week’s column.

Well, okay, sometimes the truth is out there.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. If anyone has any other possible misinformation they want cleared up, feel free to let me know.)

 

Been two years

Two years ago, I was lying in bed in a Florida hospital, sleeping for the most part, while the doctor was telling Kathleen that she might have to make some tough decisions if my stroke took a downward turn. At this point in time, Caroline was still being protected from the news about her father, but she was pretty much the only one who didn’t know. The internet was alive with word about my condition. Kath’s phone was ringing off the non-existent hook. Fans were buying my books like mad for financial support and the Heroes Initiative was amassing money to be sent to us.

And I was unaware of pretty much everything. I was barely conscious and of my ten day stay in the hospital, I remember perhaps sixty minutes of it. The rest is a complete blank.

Please remain vigilant for signs of a stroke. If your vision is blurring, if you suddenly start losing feeling on one side of your body, if you can’t stick your tongue out straight, get to a hospital immediately. Minutes count.

And if you’re one of the people who pitched in to help me two years ago, thank you.

PAD

Newspaper comic strips reviews

Originally published March 1, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1476

A couple weeks ago, I was told one of the topics being discussed in CBG would be newspaper strips. At the time I was writing about other things and so didn’t have the time or space to get into that. But I’ve got some free time now, and so thought I’d give a quick perusal of the funny papers and talk about the stuff that’s making an impression on me these days, both good and bad.

Understand going in: I think the hardest comics-related job there is is producing a daily strip. Particularly a gag strip. I can’t even conceive of doing such a thing myself, and even those strips that I’m lukewarm on, I’m still impressed that the writers and artists are able to hit their deadlines week in, week out. I could never, ever do it. With that said…

Peanuts. I think it may be time for me to reassess just how much I enjoyed the strip. That’s a painful admission to make, but it’s unfortunately true.

Ever since the unfortunate, although amazingly timed, passing of Charles Schulz, the strip has been in repeats since it was his wish for the adventures of Charlie Brown and the gang not to continue beyond his death. That wish has been respected, and all for the good. What’s not for the good is that I’ve been reading Peanuts every day for… well… forever. And I’m continuing to do so. What I find disturbing… is that I don’t remember them. One here or there has rung a very vague bell, but for the most part, it’s as if I’d never seen them before.

When I pick up collections of other old strips at random, I’ll invariably find myself smiling and saying, “Yes, I remember this one, ah yes, that was a funny one.” When Doonesbury artist Garry Trudeau takes a week or two off and they drop in a recycled strip, even if it’s not one of the ones that requires timeliness to be effective, I’ll always recollect having seen it before.

Peanuts just isn’t having that impact on me. Each day is as the one before it, and the one after it: Nothing all that interesting or different occurs to the characters, and the gags themselves, for the most part, aren’t especially amusing. Eminently forgettable. I know, because I’ve forgotten it. Is Peanuts the only strip that would fit this description? Heck no. But it’s Peanuts, for heaven’s sake. To discover mediocrity in what you once thought was great is kind of disheartening. Like tuning in to those old TV shows you used to groove on when you were a kid, only to discover as an adult that it was such drek that Barney or Power Rangers look like “Masterpiece Theater” in comparison.

Liberty Meadows. I have only read Frank Cho’s brilliant cast of characters—most particularly his lovelorn veterinarian (by pure coincidence, I’m sure) Frank, and the object of his affections, animal psychologist Brandy—in the collections rather than in any newspaper. (I also perversely admit I get a kick out of Brandy’s mom, the woman so frosty she leaves icicles on the panel borders and probably roomed at Prep School with Mrs. Robinson.) On the one hand I regret that I can’t just turn to it every day in the paper. On the other hand, considering the horror stories that Cho has described in his dealings with the censorious hand of the syndicate, it may be better that I haven’t.

It’s also moot, since Cho has announced that he will be taking the strip solely to collection format, abandoning the newspaper venue altogether. This strikes me as dangerously eggs-in-one-basket thinking, but it’s his call to make. For a while now I’ve been on the Liberty Meadows comp list. But now that it’s his sole source of revenue, my warrior princess Kathleen is going to be buying the new issues when they hit the stands in order to show support.

Zits. I’m sure that parents of teenage boys will relate even more to this strip than I do, but there have been enough dead-on depictions of classic teen attitude in this series that I can say with confidence Zits cuts across gender lines. The protagonist, Jeremy, is aggressively clueless, as opposed to his parents who are, I believe, both bereft of names. They have no need of them. Like the point of view provided by Calvin, they exist only to serve the needs of the kid, and have neither persona nor requirements of their own beyond that. Any time I’ve called parents to RSVP on Ariel’s behalf for a birthday party and said something like, “Hi, Samantha’s mom? This is Ariel’s dad,” there’s a tacit and amused understanding that once upon a time, we had our own identities… but those are long gone. The most amusing moments are when Jeremy’s mom tries to apply advice taken from those books on parenting that always seem to have been written in a vacuum (considering how much most of them suck). Invariably her frustration mounts as the advice from the experts proves maddeningly inapplicable to her eternally frustrating son. And the best thing is, you wish you could look twenty-five, thirty years down the road to when Jeremy has his own kid… who will hold him in as much disdain as he does his own parents. And you just know his own parents will be around snickering at Jeremy’s comeuppance and spoiling their grandkid behind his back.

Mallard Filmore. There are certain strips where you just kind of go, “Okay, I get it, you’ve made the point so many times that it’s lost its point. Move on.” Kathy falls into that category. The number of times Kathy stuck her tongue out and said “Acckkk!” over the pitfalls of single womanhood eventually dragged a funny strip down into repetitiveness. Dilbert treads the line, but the style is so minimalistic and the variations on corporate stupidity are so diverse that it continues to hang on. But Mallard Filmore… geez. My guess is that this ultra-right wing strip is presented to be some sort of counterpoint to Doonesbury. But Trudeau deftly skewers all sides of the political spectrum. Heck, family man Mike Doonesbury is a Republican, while ultra liberal Mark Slackmeyer has been shown presenting on-air diatribes on radio so over the top that even he was mortified. Mallard Filmore, on the other hand, has one joke: Liberals are stupid. Left wingers are stupid. Anyone not conservative is stupid. There’s no cast beyond the titular duck who appears to be a TV broadcaster commenting on how stupid liberal viewpoints are. If you’re a conservative reader, you might be a bit embarrassed about the one-note opinion. If you’re a liberal reader, you probably think, “Okay, we get it. You think liberals are stupid. Do you have anything else to say?” The answer seems to be “no.” Of course, arch-conservatives might say, “Ha! You just can’t stand humor at your expense!” The response naturally is, “Sure I can… if it’s funny and consistently innovative.” Mallard Filmore is neither.

Boondocks: In comics pages replete with interchangeable bland gag-a-day strips, Boondocks abounds with attitude and is anything but bland. It’s also, more often than not, anything but funny. The strip initially centered around the adventures of two young black kids, Huey and Riley Freeman (Freeman. Get it?), and their dissatisfaction with their grandfather’s choice to move them out of the ‘hood and into the most whitebread suburbia this side of Family Circus. Lately it’s just kind of wandered around (as have the characters), looking for humorous opportunities and instead just coming across as forced. Artist/writer Aaron McGruder renders the strip in a Doonesbury-esque style, and we can take comfort in the knowledge that Doonesbury was no great shakes when it started out either. The strip is at its best when the kids are either butting heads with their no-nonsense grampa, or gleefully exploiting the obvious fear they inspire in the WASP mentalities they encounter. But the cast has yet to fully click as individuals, and when the strip is off, it’s way off. But there are the seeds of something truly great there, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

For Better or For Worse: When I first started reading this strip years ago, it just bored the hell out of me. Over the years, as the family has grown in both height and number, it has morphed into my single favorite strip. By turns touching, tragic, and always true to life, the Patterson family is the only one in comics you could actually see yourself hanging out with. A personal chart of Lynn Johnston’s brilliance is that the youngest daughter, April, was born within a few months of Ariel, and their development has been pretty much consistent with one another. There have been moments where the drama of their lives has tripped over into melodrama… but the same has happened in my life as well, so it’s understandable and even believable. If Johnston ever retires the strip, then more than any other strip that’s gone away, I’ll feel like I’m losing touch with true friends.

(Peter David can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Writers’ Rights

Originally published February 22, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1475

I’ve found myself sucked into discussions over in my Usenet newsgroup (the only one in which I still participate) involving the notion that writers should just stop being so darned upset about their work showing up on the Internet.

The arrogance one encounters from people who hold such a position can truly be astounding. The sentiments, boiled down, seem to be, “Information and literature should be available to all, and writers shouldn’t be carping about losing ‘a few pennies’ in royalties.” This displays an amazing amount of contempt for writers… or maybe not so amazing.

There’s this notion, you see, that writers should be willing to throw themselves on their metaphorical sword in order to accommodate the desires of their fans to snag freebies. In the best J. Wellington Wimpy spirit of “Let’s you and him fight,” writers are expected to set aside their own needs and desires in favor of the audience… and the audience, on the other hand, is eminently entitled to be as selfish as it wants. Readers’ access to books should be untrammeled and inviolate, while writers’ access to proceeds from the books should be deferred in favor of some greater good. One guy even went so far as to quote (or attempt to quote; he mangled it pretty thoroughly) Mr. Spock in Star Trek II by claiming that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. My response was that quoting fictional characters in a debate carries very little clout with me, and furthermore, Captain Kirk said in Star Trek III that the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many, and Kirk outranks Spock, so there, nyaaah.

What’s truly staggering is that supposedly intelligent people can’t suss the difference between books available for electronic distribution and books from libraries. “Folks can take books out of libraries for free, so why isn’t this the same thing?” Yet the differences are obvious. First, libraries actually pay for the books they acquire. The library-buying market is a considerable one, and don’t underestimate the clout that librarians have. Second, the book is loaned out for a specified period and then (ideally) returned, on a one-to-one basis. This is contrasted to illegal electronic transmission which can be done on a massive scale, and once the books are in someone’s hard drive, they stay there forever. It’s not a loan-out; it’s a rip-off. It’s not enough that hundreds of years worth of literature is available and unprotected by copyright; the needs of the many will not be satisfied until the entire oeuvre of Stephen King is available to people who wouldn’t dream of walking into a bookstore, shoving a book in their pocket and walking out with it. Because, y’know, that would be stealing. In the meantime, people are busy posting the Star Trek: New Frontier novels onto Usenet because they apparently think I don’t deserve to earn royalties on them.

Somehow the reasoning goes that books should be able to be free to everyone in order to serve the requirements of the commonweal. It should be pointed out that if the wiring in the commonweal’s house shorts out, or the commonweal’s toilets back up, the electrician and the plumber are not going to attend to the situation out of the goodness of their hearts. But writers are not likened to hard-working guys like electricians and plumbers. They are accorded rarefied status… except when they’re being treated like garbage.

Let me make it clear, though: Writer abuse is not limited to computer nets. Indeed, when you consider it on a world wide scale, denizens of boards who swipe books whole are a fairly small percentage of those who make writers’ lives difficult. No, if you want sheer arrogance, raised to levels that you and I can only dream about, you need to think about large corporations. About Big Business.

It’s hardly confined to attitudes regarding writers, of course. I mean, yeah, as I mentioned before, people are swiping New Frontier off the net. But hey, at least I don’t have a pension plan being overseen by Enron. Still, one of the purposes of major corporations is to create barriers. Barriers between the upper echelon and the higher courts, between the big boys and the “little people,” between the CEOs and the IRS. Insulated in their ivory towers, they don’t give a damn about anyone except themselves, save for those times when it’s going to net them some positive publicity value by creating a public face of a corporation that cares.

When faced with megaliths such as these, it is tempting to simply lie there when they have their foot in your face. Why? Because they’re major corporations. They have more money than God and more lawyers than Lucifer. They will issue you contracts with onerous phrasing upon it and say, “Can’t do anything about it. It’s boilerplate.” Presumably, you’re supposed to sigh and say, “Oh. Boilerplate. Bummer. Well, that’s the final word on that.” Faced with the sheer immensity of the opponent, you become paralyzed by a “Can’t fight City Hall” ennui.

Except that’s not true. You can indeed fight City Hall, and you can win. And two recent events have underscored that.

First is the news that Critical Path and RemarQ settled the case with Harlan Ellison. As was reported in CBG last week, RemarQ is developing software “to delete unauthorized postings of (Ellison’s) works of which he becomes aware.” Consider the number of people who told Ellison he was misguided or foolish in his endeavors, but consider even more the many who sent money to support KICK Internet Piracy, believing that copyright law and protection of published material should actually mean something. AOL continues to refuse to settle, probably still viewing it as a David and Goliath match-up. Apparently they’re ignoring two things: Number one, what happened to Goliath, and number two, with Critical Path settling, the shepherd has considerably more stones in his sling. Despite the depletion of time, energy and his personal finances, Ellison has pressed on because not only is he unimpressed by the smugness of his opponent, but instead it only gets him riled up. Hopefully AOL will take the hint.

Second is the passing of Peggy Lee. An accomplished singer and songwriter, true, but her greatest achievement may be that she violated the cardinal rule of Hollywood: Don’t screw with the Mouse. Peggy Lee went toe-to-toe with Disney and she won.

Disney is legendary for the contractual chokehold it puts on its talent. Now the only Disney contract I ever saw personally was when I was doing work for the comic book line. They sent me a contract that had language in it to which I objected. For instance, one of the items stated that not only was the work that I produced automatically the property of Disney, but even any “idea” was theirs automatically. Now I’m just a little familiar with the monetary value of ideas. For instance, years ago I voiced the observation, in the presence of then X-Men editor Bob Harras and several other writers, that I never understood why Magneto wasted time with Wolverine. Why, I wondered, didn’t he just rip Wolvie’s skeleton out of his body and be done with it. “Great idea!” quoth Bob Harras, and Marvel proceeded to milk the notion for years. Amount of money Marvel made off the idea? Millions. Amount of money other writers made off it? Thousands and thousands. Amount of money I made off it, considering I wrote none of the books involved? Goose egg. So I know from personal experience that ideas can make piles of cash for everyone but the person who conceives them.

Furthermore, the Disney contract claimed sole rights through “the entire Universe.” Now I’m told that’s in there because of satellite broadcasts, but still, it seemed a bit obsessive.

So in the one clause I just crossed out the word “idea,” and in the other, I struck out “Universe” and replaced it with “Solar System.” That seemed reasonable to me… plus, on the off chance that someone from Proxima Centauri showed up looking to make a deal for subrights on an issue of The Little Mermaid, I could have some leverage. I sent the contract back with the changes. Curiously, I never heard from them again, although I did get paid for the work. Go figure.

But whereas for me it was almost fun and games, Peggy Lee cut a deal with Disney of a far more serious nature. At the time that she contracted with the Mouse for her work in Lady and the Tramp, including writing and performing the inimitable, “He’s a Tramp,” Disney’s rights to the material were confined to audio recording, movies and broadcasting. So when Lady and the Tramp hit the home video market years later, there was Peggy Lee to point out that her contract didn’t include those rights. Disney tried to blow her off. Why not? They’re a big corporation. They’re Disney. They don’t have to play ball. They’re not only City Hall, they’re Main Street USA. Fighting them was impossible. Except Peggy Lee did it, and the courts agreed that Disney owed her a considerable chunk of change.

Creator’s rights have taken some hits in recent days, with the lack of support the courts gave to Marv Wolfman’s fight for Blade and Dan DeCarlo’s over Josie and the Pussycats. But it’s not always that way. One need not, should not, must not knuckle under to corporate insensitivity and bullying. It’s not an easy decision to make, there are risks involved, sacrifices such actions often entail, and you can get well and truly bloodied along the way. But at the end of the day, it comes down to this: When some corporate goon tells you that if you don’t like it, take a hike, go ahead and do it… but make sure that the shoes you’re wearing are long distance shoes, and that they’re very squeaky so you can make a ton of noise and they’ll dread the sound of your approaching footsteps.

(Peter David can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Remembering John Buscema

Originally published February 15, 2002, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1474

I’d never been to a viewing.

You know: A viewing. Where the body of the recently deceased lies in a coffin while people gather, one at a time, and stare. It always seemed grotesque to me, an exercise in morbidity. Why gather in large numbers to stare at a shell? The body… the body isn’t the person. Whatever it was that made up the person, whether you believe that its purely biological neurons, personality traits hardwired into DNA, or a soul… whatever it is, it’s gone. To me it would be like appreciating a fine wine by gazing at an empty bottle. The whole notion just kind of creeped me out. It probably doesn’t help that I’m a regular viewer of HBO’s Six Feet Under where they show corpses being prepared for viewings while the ghost of the deceased chats with the morticians.

And there’s always people looking around saying, “(The deceased) would have liked that,” be it the flower arrangements or the suit chosen to be dressed in or the number of mourners showing up. Except I always think that what the deceased would really have liked is to not die, and everything else is just beside the point.

I’m sorry. I know it sounds like I’m making light of a topic that’s all too serious. I do that; I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable talking about something.

Like the death of John Buscema.

I can’t pretend I knew him particularly well. That we were best buds, that he’d call me up all the time and we’d chat the afternoon away, or we’d go out for drinks or roll a few frames or hit the links or whatever. I didn’t really know him.

What I do know is that some years back, when I was writing Spectacular Spider-Man, we were falling behind on deadlines and editor Jim Owsley wanted me to come up with a stand-alone issue that could be done by four different artists simultaneously without looking like a mishmash. And I said, “Well, let’s riff Rashomon.” Owsley stared at me blankly. I explained, “It’s a famous Kurosawa film. It focuses on the nature of reality, by showing how different people have different perceptions of the same event. (As an aside, it’s out on DVD end of March.) So we can have some event that Spider-Man is involved in, and different characters, like JJ and Mary Jane and Peter, all have different takes on what happened. And each of the sequences, including a framing sequence that sets everything up, would then be done by a different art team.”

Owsley immediately loved the idea, and that’s what we did. I wrote the story while he started lining up art teams. And then one day he came to my office (I was still working in sales during the day at the time) and said, “Who’s your best friend in the world? Who cares about how your stories look?”

“What happened?” I asked. “What’d you do?”

Grinning, he said, “Guess who I got to draw the framing sequence.”

I wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. “Who?” I said.

“John Buscema pencils, John Romita Sr. inks.”

I was stunned. Excited, elated. You have to understand, I grew up reading the work these guys produced. I was something of a latecomer to Marvel; I wasn’t in there at the very beginning. I didn’t cut my teeth on Ditko and Kirby. Instead I started slow and played catch-up. The first Spider-Man issues I bought were drawn by John Romita, Sr. (before he was a senior). And my first exposure to the Silver Surfer was not in the pages of Fantastic Four, but instead in the first issue of his comic book (which I bought ‘cause the cover looked so weird. Imagine seeing the Surfer for the first time with no background on him and all and thinking, “What’s up with this guy?”) And it was penciled by an artist of such power and strength that it made most other comics I’d been reading up until then look sick in comparison. Those issues of Surfer remain, to me, an absolute pinnacle of comic book storytelling.

Spec Spidey was the first time I had the honor of working with either of the gentlemen, and the excitement I felt when those first Buscema pencil pages came in, I can’t even begin to express. I worked with him on one or two other occasions, and it was a joy to see the stories produced in that clear, unmistakable style, but nothing can possibly compare to that first rush of enthusiasm that comes with having the opportunity to collaborate with someone whose work you’ve always admired.

John Buscema, as you know, passed away on January 10. I learned that services were going to be held at a funeral home that was barely a half hour away from me. I didn’t feel I should go to the funeral; I’d always felt that such things should be reserved for close friends and family, while I was just an occasional co-worker and long-time fan. I would have felt intrusive. But I felt that, at the very least, I should pay my respects to the man and his family by attending the viewing to be held the day before, despite my reservations. So with Kathleen at my side, I went to the viewing which was being held from 2 to 4 Sunday afternoon.

Upon arrival, we were handed a little card which I was told is traditional at such things. It had John’s name, date of birth and passing on it. Usually such cards have a picture of Jesus or a saint on them. Not John’s; his (at the suggestion, I believe, of his son) had a lovely Buscema rendering of Conan roaring into action alongside a fierce lion.

Familiar faces were in the viewing room. Tom DeFalco and Al Milgrom, Marie Severin, Bob Larkin, John Romita Sr. and his wife, Virginia. Saying “It’s good to see you” always seems so odd in those situations, because the reason you’re seeing each other is such a damned depressing one. But what else can you say?

Tom reminisced about little things, such as an ongoing debate he would have with Buscema over who was the better storyteller, Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard. Tom solidly believed the former (for the record, I concur), but he remembered laughingly how sometimes out of the blue he’d get a phone call from Buscema who, without even bothering to identify himself, would start busting on him about how Howard was far superior to ERB.

People spoke of how Buscema was always dismissive of his work. That he acted as if his career choice was a waste of time, how it was disposable and meaningless. But no one believed that he truly believed that. Because John Buscema’s obvious love for the medium in which he plied his trade for decades was evident in every line, in every brushstroke.

At the far end of the room lay John Buscema, which was more than enough reason for me to remain at the opposite side. But his widow, Dolores was near the coffin, as were his grown children, John Jr. and Dianne. It was only right that I go talk to them, even though somehow I irrationally felt as if I was invading John’s privacy by going so near his body. So grasping Kathleen’s hand firmly, we approached. We extended our condolences to the family, and inquired as to brother Sal’s whereabouts. Dolores informed us that, as if things weren’t bad enough, Sal never made it up. Instead he’d been taken to the hospital with chest pains. Fortunately enough he was back home at that point and resting comfortably, his condition probably due more to stress than anything else. How horrific, though, would that have been? If Sal Buscema had made it up for the funeral and collapsed upon arrival?

Other people were waiting to speak to the family, and Kathleen and I stepped aside. It brought us within such close range of the coffin that I found myself yielding to—please pardon the expression—morbid curiosity. I took several steps closer, looked at what appeared to be the sleeping form of John Buscema, nattily attired in jacket and tie.

And there, neatly tucked between his fingers… was a drawing pen.

I do not lie. I am not making an extremely poor joke. It had been carefully placed there, presumably at the request of the family.

Big John Buscema, one of the greatest artists in the history of Marvel Comics, went to his final reward with a pen in his hand.

I think he would have liked it that way.

(Peter David can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

How Would You Like to ask Stan Lee a Question?

I’m working with Stan Lee on a biographical project and I think what it needs is a Q&A.

So here’s what I’m looking for: What question would you like to ask Stan Lee about his life? I’m not looking for anything with inherent negatives (no “Did you hate so-and-so?” style questions.) If your question is interesting enough, I’ll ask Stan, and include it in the book with his answer and attribute it to you.

So what do you want to know?

PAD