a panel with no borders

I’m proud to be a part of this beautiful calendar now out from Asgard Press. The 2009 Vintage DC Super Heroes Calendar features a selection of cover reproductions from DC Comics classics, some of which were taken from our collection at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum. I also contributed a short introductory essay for the calendar and it was fun to be part of this project. They even present the two essays included in the calendar on the website as well.

I have friends and colleagues with blogs like this, as well as people whose work I just admire who don’t know me at all, and all of them play that game of teasing readers with tidbits about future projects. They always use euphemisms like “the thing I can’t talk about yet” or “that project I’ve been telling you about but I can’t really say anything at this point.”

I have two new things coming down the road. There’s a small one and a big one. Oh hell, there’s a story - my second piece of professional fiction - and a book - the next non-fiction guide in my growing arsenal. But I can’t really discuss either of them yet. Does this matter to anyone? Or do we all do this to add to the essential drama of our writerly lives?

So anyway, the small thing, the story, which I can’t talk about yet (heh heh), contains the words “psychotropically,” “gumbo,” and “pod.”*

The big thing, the book, will be in the same vein (heh heh - again) as Zombiemania but will not focus on zombie movies. Instead my co-author and I will be turning to another cult horror subgenre. But rest assured no matter how horrifying it gets, we won’t back down. We ain’t yellow.

*The three-word bit is borrowed from a running magazine column written by the esteemed Russell T. Davies, soon-to-be-former-executive-producer of Doctor Who. Now it seems a lot of us are doing it. I’m happy to join the throng.

Yesterday was a landmark for me, academically and professionally speaking; I taught the first class in my tenth semester as a professor at UMBC. It’s also ten years since I first introduced my course in Comic Book Literature to the university, and although the reading list has transformed over the years – more so in the last two than ever before – most of the class and its structure has remained pretty much the same. I’ve been gratified by its popularity and staying power in an environment that still tends to look askance at subjects other than the accepted literary canon (although I should add that the UMBC English department – where I completed my undergraduate degree – has always been a rather cool place to work, so I’ve never encountered much difficulty there). And although I’m reaching the end of a decade, I’ve never grown tired of meeting a new group of students and talking with them about comics for a few months. What could be better?

Years ago, when this course was in its infancy, I wrote a series of articles for a superb (now defunct) UK-based periodical on comics called Borderline. I basically discussed the initial conception of the course, how I chose the reading list, and whatever other thoughts I had about the ways in which teaching comics as literature can help to improve the medium’s standing in the academic world. I plan to present those articles again here in this column for the next few weeks, but updated to my 2008 reading selections and mindset as I look forward to another ten years at the front of that classroom.

Next time, I’ll talk about how the class was conceived and pitched in the first place, back during a time when there weren’t very many college-level courses on comics at all (when they were there, they were invariably in the Art department and not English). Then we’ll look at the reading list and why these comics/graphic novels were chosen. And if any of you reading this ever took my class in the last ten years, please e-mail me and offer your thoughts on the course for inclusion in this column.

See you next week in the 1990s…

Over at iF Magazine, I offer ten suggestions for comic books that should be adapted into television series.

Thanks to DVDs, Netflix, iTunes, and countless other avenues for obtaining movies and television shows, a lot of us steeped in pop culture have found ourselves revisiting old favorites with extraordinary frequency, but perhaps more exciting, we’ve been able to fill in all those strange gaps in our pop culture experience that never made much sense but can now be addressed in earnest.

For instance, as a child of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, I can’t explain why I saw so many movies but missed a crucial few. How did Buckaroo Banzai get past me? What about Big Trouble in Little China? Or Monster Squad? Each one of those, and many more, are beloved childhood classics to my contemporaries, but while we can all talk in depth about Star Trek II or Escape from New York and a million others, I never caught these and don’t understand the references except second-hand, thanks to books and magazines and (now) IMDB.

I’ve tried to take care of this, but found quickly that most of the time, the movies you cherish most from childhood will only really embed themselves in your psyche if you see them as a child. Try to catch up, and you find out those doors have been closed, perhaps permanently. Buckaroo Banzai? Don’t get what all the fuss is about. Sorry, I just don’t. Pick a dozen movies right alongside it and I’m with you, but that one? Nope.

So I’ve always loved Watership Down (the animated movie adaptation). It’s not only a beautiful, melancholy film with a wonderful score and brilliant voice actors (ah, John Hurt), but it’s one of those childhood moments. I can watch it anytime and feel like I’m right back in the past. It’s just wonderful.

But I never saw The Plague Dogs, a sort of spiritual follow-up produced by much of the same team and with the same director, Martin Rosen. It is equally loved by people that saw it at the time, perhaps more so by those that feel it captured something more profound. Never saw it…until last night, and I didn’t like it at all. It’s depressing, flat and episodic (although I did see an edited cut and now the international unedited version, but never mind), with horrible music, no strong characters, and a very downbeat ending. The Plague Dogs for me will never be even close to Watership Down.

But would I say the same if I saw it first in 1982 or ’83 instead of 2008? Who knows? But that’s the way it is with pop culture – you’re either on the train when it leaves the station or you’re not. It’s very hard to create nostalgia or even understanding out of nothing, although it can happen. But with The Plague Dogs, I definitely found myself on the outside looking in.