NGUPLUS

Friday School

Each Friday morning we attend a prayer meeting at a friends house. The kids play while moms fellowship and pray. The meeting wraps up at about 12:30 just in time for lunch.

Last year, I had good intentions for our Fridays. My good intentions included getting up early to work on school before we left and finishing school once we returned home. Unfortunately, getting up early is not a talent I possess. And after we returned home and ate a little lunch there just wasnt enough time left in the day for a full day of school.

This year, I developed a plan. M, T, W, and Th we do school as usual...you know,bible, math, English, spelling, history, science...the works. But on Friday we will go to our prayer meeting, go to the library, and complete two subjects at home: music and art.

This accomplishes many things for us...Ive always wanted to take the kids to the library each week, but we could only manage to get there about once a month. Since we are all already dressed and out of the house, its not such a big deal to swing by the library.

Also, adding art and music to the end of a full school day was always difficult and rushed. Since these are the only two subjects we do on Friday, we can spend more time enjoying them.

Last April I purchased Mr. Everybodys Musical Apartment 3-book set at the Midwest Homeschool Convention. Its a simple way to teach young elementary students to read and play music notes. We decided to use a xylophone with this book that we purchased through amazon.


The kids learned three notes last Friday and each played their first song. Theyve been continuing to practice it throughout the week.


Weve chosen to study Mary Cassatt during the months of August and September. I plan to add a composer of the month as well, but havent done so yet. We brought home books from the library last week and looked at all the beautiful pictures.

Finally, G9 and A8 both are required to read two books independently a month a complete a book report on those books. The reports must be completed by the 2nd and 4th Fridays of each month. Remember, how I told you about the new friend living in our home? Well, G9 and A8 both decided to read the above book for their first report.


Im allowing them to choose different styles of book reports, and this time they both wanted to give an oral report and create a poster.


A8 got rather creative with her poster. She did this all on her own!

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Friday in the Shooter Gallery

Going to be a short one this week, because we are rapidly closing in on the Emerald City Comic-Con up here in Seattle, which means that I am frantically trying to get enough of my students giveaway ashcan zines printed to get us through the show weekend. Thankfully, I have some connections in the printing industry who are willing to donate the use of their equipment, so Im not having to do it out of Kinkos like some of the other indie publishers Ive met. But I AM having to do it in short after-hours bursts, in and around the printers actual paying jobs, at various odd hours of the evening.

So I didnt get a whole lot of reading done this week. Barely had time to swoop into the comics shop and clear the reserve box, and as I blew past the new comics I did a spit-take, because I saw a whole bunch of New Universe books.

Of ALL the things to revive.... the New Universe? Seriously? A Jim Shooter project that bombed so horribly it was the laughing-stock of the entire industry for the next couple of years? (Remember the bit in DCs "Legends" miniseries where Guy Gardner or somebody stomps a lame villain named Sunmark, a villain raving about how hes going to bring about a new universe, and just in case we didnt GET it, hes dressed just like Star Brand and bears an amazing resemblance to Jim Shooter?)

Actually, I rather liked Star Brand early on, when it was Jim Shooter and John Romita Jr. doing it. The idea behind the New Universe was kind of cool, though the execution was screwed up from day one. The premise was that one weird thing happened, the "White Event," and then everything else that came afterward would deal realistically with the various repercussions of this one fantastic impossible thing. Its known in SF circles as the one-gimme school of speculative fiction.

Unfortunately, when you set six different superhero books in the same fictional universe, and have them all cross over and interact, youve already blown it. Thats six gimmes right out of the gate. And they multiplied as the books went on, I think because nobody but Shooter really understood how the one-gimme idea was supposed to work. Despite the whole real-world-no-costumes mandate, the books all ended up being standard super-hero melodramas... except the first few issues of Star Brand.



Star Brand was a very odd book, kind of like the early Green Lantern might have been... that is, if young Hal Jordan had been a dumb car mechanic who just wanted to get laid, instead of a heroic jet pilot. Yet it was somehow compelling, because it seemed like this was a really personal book for Jim Shooter; the way Howard the Duck was for Steve Gerber, or the Silver Surfer was for Stan Lee. This was where Jim Shooter was determined to by God create capital-A Art in comics, Make His Statement. At least, thats what it felt like.

But the weird thing was that the statement of Star Brand was vaguely unpleasant. The themes of the book were mostly, men are jerks, women are clingy, money talks, and foreigners should die. The book was deeply personal, but the person just wasnt someone we wanted to get to know.

Star Brand -- the REAL one, which is to say the deeply personal Jim Shooter one, didnt last. Shooter left Marvel, or Marvel left him, or whatever, and John Byrne made it his business to dismantle everything Shooter had set up in the book when he took it over.

Star Brand, as hypnotically unpleasant as it was, wasnt the most famous bit of Shooter nastiness, though. That honor has to go to the time Bruce Banner got accosted at the YMCA. Think the Identity Crisis rape controversy was something? You should have seen the way Shooters characterization of gay men cruising the showers at the Y lit comics fans on fire. This was before the internet, so they got mad enough to bury Marvel in actual paper letters. It was all over The Comics Journal for months.

As it happens, I got this issue in the mail a couple of days ago -- eBay again, alert readers will recall that collecting the Marvel magazine line is a hobby of mine -- and it was the first time Id seen the story in twenty-five years.



The Hulks magazine had always been a bit of a problem child, even for a magazine line that was itself something of an unwanted branch of the Marvel family. For the first nine issues it was black-and-white, went under the title The Rampaging Hulk! and it purported to give us untold tales of the Hulks early years. (I think this was all retconned out later, with some lame excuse about how these stories were just movies an alien artist made or something.) The stories themselves seemed a little off somehow. Doug Moench, the go-to scripter guy for the magazine line, tried hard, but you could never quite tell if the stories were meant to be serious or funny or both. Mostly they were just odd. The art was by Walt Simonson but you could hardly tell, the pencils were so smothered by Alfredo Alcala.

Then came Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, and suddenly the magazine was in full-color, now called just The Hulk! and featured stories in more or less the same style as the TV show: lots of Banner getting involved in peoples lives, not too much Hulk, Bruce on the road again at the end of each issue. You could almost hear that lonely piano music rising as you got to the last page of the story.

As Hulk versions go this was actually pretty good. I really liked the TV show (laugh all you like, gamma purists -- its the biggest mass-market success the big green guy ever had) and I enjoyed seeing it reflected in these comics, after a fashion.

But Shooter felt that the magazine was still too comic-booky, not real enough. The structure was the same as the show but the things happening to Banner were too fantastic. So he decided the easiest way to demonstrate what he wanted was to write one himself. He wrote "A Very Personal Hell" for #23, and ironically enough, a kind of hell did break loose, mostly from the gay readership. Shooter vainly tried to defend the whole thing by complaining that he didnt see why anyone would be offended because he showed two gay men as rapists, it wasnt about being gay it was about rape, and "if I offended rapists, Im GLAD."



It dawned on me, rereading it again last week, that "A Very Personal Hell" had exactly the same vibe Star Brand had in its early issues a few years later. This was Jim Shooter trying to Say Something. This was his one-gimme Hulk story -- with the Hulk himself as the "gimme." Everyone else in it, he claimed virtuously at the time of the controversy, was based on a real person he knew or had met. Well, if thats true, then everyone Shooter ever knew is either a creepy predator or a spineless victim.

The funny thing was, as ham-handed as the story is, and as clumsy as his impatient arguments defending it were at the time, Jim Shooter was right -- he DIDNT single out gay people, because if you actually read this story, you can see theres lots of contempt for humanity to go around. Theres not just the two lisping leering shower rapists; theres also the evil manipulative mother, the worthless stoner chick, the abusive boyfriend, the wimpy suicidal woman. Victim or predator, either-or, nothing in between. Eat or be eaten. The Shooter philosophy.

I know nothing about Jim Shooter, never met the guy (though my friend Kurt Mitchell likes to tell the story of showing his portfolio to Shooter at San Diego one year, and how he got one of the best art lessons hed ever had when Shooter spent forty minutes patiently, but ruthlessly, dissecting the work.) For all I know Jim Shooter may be the sweetest guy in the world, and never mind his press. Most of that came with the job. The editor-in-chief of Marvel always gets yelled at by the fan press, its what we do. I admit it. But whatever Jim Shooter is like as a person, as a writer theres something unsettling about his most personal works. Like Star Brand, "A Very Personal Hell" has that same vaguely unpleasant fascination, an emotional train wreck you cant look away from.

All that being said, having had the intervening two and a half decades to calm down about the whole gay rape thing (and lets face it, in the wake of stories like Identity Crisis it seems almost quaint) I decided that I kind of like this story, despite everything. Its sort of Bill Bixbys David Banner trapped in the middle of an Aaron Spelling rewrite of "Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" until Lou Ferrignos Hulk shows up and smashes everything. And come on, who wouldnt stand in line for THAT play?

See you next week.

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Friday Undercover

Thinking about comics-to-prose last week, it occurred to me I left off one of the best examples of all. What it is and why I think so will take a little backstory, so bear with me.

Spy comics never have done particularly well, not even during the 60s heyday of Bond, Flint, and U.N.C.L.E. In fact, several folks tried to adapt some of those properties to comics back then with what might be called, charitably, indifferent results. Of those, the longest-running of the bunch was Gold Keys "Man From U.N.C.L.E." which ran some twenty or thirty issues. These were... well, they were okay. Not great. Basically you had to love the show SO MUCH that you would take MORE in any form, as long as it was MORE. For hardcore UNCLE fans only, in other words.



Spies and secret agents that are original to comic books are a lot harder to find. Probably the most successful is Marvels Nick Fury, but even Nicks success has been limited at best. I looked it up, thinking that the numbers would be a lot bigger, but if you discount Strange Tales (where Nick had to share top billing with Dr. Strange) then what you are left with is the solo title that Steranko spun out of that book that ran 18 issues, a couple of mini-series and one-shots, and -- this surprised me -- the 90s run that went a whopping 47 issues. For a secret agent book thats huge.

Are they worth getting? Well, the Steranko stuff from Strange Tales and the first few issues of the solo book ("Who Is Scorpio?", that stuff) is available in trade, and Id certainly recommend that. The 90s book... well, I havent actually seen it. Some talented folks worked on it -- D.G. Chichester, Doug Murray, Jackson Guice -- all of whom have shown a knack for macho adventure comics. So maybe if you found a bunch in the dollar boxes somewhere or something it might be worth taking a chance. But really Fury seems to work best as a supporting character these days.

Who else? Well, a sentimental favorite of mine was the original Secret Six, probably as close as youll get to seeing Mission: Impossible done for comics. (Yes, closer than the actual IMF comic Marvel put out in the 90s, smart-ass.) Six outcasts brought together by the mysterious Mockingbird, blackmailed into performing outlandish feats of undercover derring-do.



This only ran seven issues and I adored every one unreservedly. Years later, Martin Pasko and Dan Spiegle undertook to finish the original story in a serial that ran in Action Comics Weekly, with mixed results. It was pretty good, but it didnt quite have the zest the original one did. And of course now, with Villains United doing a superhero riff on the name thats pretty much all she wrote for any chance of a revival... not that anyone besides me was hoping for one. Still, it would sure be nice to see a DC Showcase gathering up the seven issues and the weekly serial.



Who else? Well, on the other side of the Atlantic, Modesty Blaise was a huge success... in NEWSPAPER comics. But her strip really never caught on over here, and even though Peter ODonnell did an original graphic novel for DC (beautifully illustrated by Dick Giordano, who, as it happens, was the editor of -- ta da!-- The Secret Six) shes mostly a trivia question on this side of the pond. Although I believe Titan Books is reprinting the strip, packaged as a nice series of paperback graphic novels, that you could probably order online without too much trouble.



There are others. You could make a case for Master of Kung Fu being a spy strip, though thats a bit like saying the movie Enter The Dragon with Bruce Lee is a Bond knockoff... you can make the case but its not a very GOOD case.

Anyway. All this is preamble. What got me thinking about spies in comics was our other Greg talking about the new Checkmate and Greg Rucka, and how he should check out Queen & Country one of these days. Which reminded ME that, in talking about prose novels starring comics characters last week, I neglected to mention the two best ones Ive ever read, period.

They are A Gentlemans Game and Private Wars by Greg Rucka, starring Tara Chace and the gang from Queen & Country.



I already loved Queen & Country the comic, so admittedly the book versions were a pretty easy sell to me. But these two books are unique among comics novels, I think, in that they fit right into the regular comics continuity. I read Queen & Country in trade, and A Gentlemans Game picks up, essentially, right where volume seven of the trades ("Operation: Saddlebags") leaves off. And Private Wars is right after that, and so you have to figure that #29 of the monthly comic, as yet uncollected, takes place after that.

It sounds like a stunt but its not. I think Rucka took the two-novel pause becvause he had reached the point in the story of the life of agent Tara Chace where he needed to use the prose form, comics would have taken too long. Because these are huge, complex stories.

But then, thats one of the things I love about Queen & Country, the complexity of it. If Nick Fury is James Bond and Modesty Blaise is Emma Peel, then Tara Chace is the comics version of spies like George Smiley or Peter Quiller, the street-level, unglamorous agents doing dirty, unpleasant jobs for an uncaring and stupid government. Its an incredibly dark and cynical book. Tara Chace is not terribly noble. She is vengeful and crude and mean, she drinks too much and smokes like a chimney and shes not in the least bit sexy (though she is SEXUAL, almost to the point of seeming slutty) and certainly not idealistic. No Emma Peel here.

Yet somehow, she seems vulnerable, even likable, and you want her to win, even while you are cursing the screwed-up world and the corrupt politics and all the rest of it that she --and we-- live in. The structure of Queen & Country is always dual-layered: Tara and the other Minders of the Special Section are out in the field, shooting people and getting shot up in return, while on the home front Paul Crocker, their boss, fights internal political battles just as dirty with other factions of Her Majestys Government. Its all very compelling, especially when the parallel stories converge, as they always do (usually with harrowing results for Tara.) Everything that I dont care for when Greg Rucka writes DC superhero stories: the dark, adult tone, the relentlessly bleak grimness, the lack of a firm resolution... in Queen & Country, these things are all strengths. This is the kind of story where he really shines as a writer.

The book is black and white, which helps the whole dark, film noir, gritty atmosphere of the thing, and the often-cartoony style of the artists on the book doesnt take away from the adult feel. Weirdly, it adds to it, because the net effect of having a stylist like Steve Rolston doing the art is that it amps up the emotional content. So Rucka doesnt have to write a lot of palpitating Claremontesque dialogue or Miller-style internal-narrative captions. The dialogue is terse and to the point; the captions are almost nonexistent. "Afghanistan. 0500 hours." Thats about as much as you get. The emotions are all conveyed with the art, which is why the prose novels were such a revelation. Somehow Rucka managed to keep the characters true, still sounding as grim and pragmatic as they do in the comics, and yet still seething with all the suppressed emotions his artists usually have to put across. Its an amazing job of writing.



It occurred to me writing this that with two successful mainstream novels now in print and a movie deal in the offing, Queen & Country may be the most successful spy comic anyones ever done (well, stateside -- hard to beat Modesty Blaises UK record.) Be that as it may, certainly, its the BEST spy comic Ive ever read, and now its two of the best spy NOVELS Ive ever read, too. You should check them out, and the regular book too, if youre not already.

See you next week.

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Friday is a Holiday!

Ok, not really a holiday, but I have the day off - so it is a holiday to ME! Im going to a NEW YARN STORE! And Im taking the boys - because they have a KIDS AREA!!! Woo HOOO!

Blue Bell Ice Cream - Im also going here on Friday. They really do honor the "eat all you can and sell the rest" motto! If they let us take pictures, Ill share them.

Next - On Fathers Day, June 19 so you dont forget, Im getting a new dad! My mom has found the most amazing guy to finish her life with and theyll get married on Fathers Day. In her words - he might be the 3rd, but hes definately the last!

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