Here's a Comic Book I Enjoyed Very Much!

Did you ever stand up from the dinner table still feeling hungry? After I read a pile of new comics releases, I sometimes find myself wishing they were as good as the ones that came out when I was growing up. A few of today's comics are superb, but many of them leave me longing for the days when Jack Kirby was still in the arena.

Recently, The Brave and The Bold #27 was released by DC Comics. The story is by J. Michael Straczynski, the artwork is by Jesus Saiz, and after I finished reading it I said to myself, "Wow, that's how comics used to be!"

First off, this issue has a good story with good writing; there's even a moral. And also, instead of being chapter x in a y-chapter epic, this tale is complete with a beginning, middle, and end all right in the same issue. Let's not forget the visuals. I have admired the artwork of Mr. Saiz for years now, and it is as beautiful as ever in this book.

This is the first issue produced by Straczynski and Saiz so I'm in no position to predict whether its quality is a fluke or the beginning of a wonderful run (sort of like what began in issue 27 of Detective Comics), but I can tell you I am definitely looking forward to next month's B&B to find out!

How about that Johnny DC!

A couple of items of interest that appeared in two of DC's kid-oriented Johnny DC titles recently might have slipped through under your radar.

Tiny Titans by Art Baltazar and Franco is one of my favorite currently-published comics and I've told you so previously. (Click here if you'd like another look at some Baltazar originals that I am proud to own.) But let me tell you about a subtle salute that appeared in issue #

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Cosmic Irony

This morning just as I was belatedly getting around to reading last week's Blackest Night #1, I received a call from the doctor that I should waste no time in transporting myself over to the hospital.

My mother was a fine and strong lady. May she rest in peace.
Jeanette Ann Hayes (26 April 1917 - 26 July 2009)

"Don't touch that dial!"

I've been a fan of Old-Time Radio Shows since I was a teenager. My favorites include Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve, and one you might not be familiar with named Life with Luigi.

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Please check back again
in a week or so
for the rest of the story!)

Yesterday I Spoke for a Duck

Yesterday was the day to pick up The Catt from school. The 5:40 a.m. embarkation had been wise; the traffic presented not a single snaggletooth all the way from Point A to Point B. About a half hour outside of Champaign I started with the wake-up calls, but to no avail. Wouldn't you think that the sarcastic barbs I kept leaving on The Catt's voicemail would jar him into awakenness by osmosis? But no.

I got off the interstate and refilled the gas tank, tick tick tick. I arrived at Ye Olde Hopkins Hall but still no answer on the phone, tick tick tick. It was a nice sunny morning and I strolled through the courtyard, tick tick tick. I meandered through the glass-encased study lobby which looks out on the courtyard, tick tick tick. And then I... but wait! Through the window I saw a beautiful brown speckled duck with two ducklings! Directly outside on the grass where I had just been minutes before! The mother duck was 1.5 feet long from head to tail and the two ducklings were each three inches long from head to tail; the babies were a much lighter hue than the mother and their coat had the appearance of fur rather than feather. The three of them were marching around in single file on the grass in the courtyard right outside the picture window while I watched from inside. Why do I never seem to have my camera with me when I want to take a picture?

As you know I was in no particular hurry, so I kept watching the parade. But the longer I watched the more peculiar the whole milieu struck me. That the duck family was even in this courtyard was unusual right off the bat; how many times have you seen ducks marching around in your back yard, for comparison's sake? And the mother duck was quacking in a non-stop and frantic manner. Also, the mother had a fairly pronounced limp in her right leg (maybe that's what all the quacking was about?). And this marching the three were doing followed a perfectly circular pattern. Around and around and around they went, circling what I then saw was a two-foot by two-foot metal grate that was right there in the middle of the grassy courtyard.

Hold on, the cast of characters is poised to grow. From stage left, a uniformed grounds-maintenance man enters the scene. He must hear the maniacal quacking out there, but he seems oblivious to the duck parade and instead is focusing on the metal grate. He steps gingerly toward the grate, seemingly on tiptoe, and apparently not wanting to disturb the circular march that I was watching. He briefly peered down into the grate and then exited the scene as gracefully as he had entered it; maybe his responsibility had been to check on the flow of water that was under that grate?

I decided it was time to try ringing The Catt's phone again. No answer, of course. I left a message about how I was communing with nature and enjoying the circular parade. As I was blathering into the phone, I watched as one of the ducklings broke formation and wandered onto the crossbar of the metal grate. The crossbar was wide enough for this little duckling to walk across it, but how steady on its feet do you expect a baby to be? I was right to be worried! As I was finishing up that latest voicemail message, I was horrified to see the duckling hop blissfully upward an inch and then FALL into the abyss! I SCREAMED! I ran through that long lobby to go back outside to the courtyard to see if there was something, anything, I could do to help that little duckling that I feared was lost to a raging current far below the grate.

Here comes the feel-good part of the story. When I reached the grate I was VERY relieved to see that there was no water under it at all! Probably at some point in the past there used to be some water-related functionality to the grate, but I was pleased to see a solid bottom about three feet below the grate. The duckling was hopping around down on the floor, and it was even lined with grass clippings that had cushioned his fall. He was fine!

Now get ready for the twist you didn't see coming. I sure didn't! On that grass-lined floor where the little duckling was hopping around, there were also five of his brothers hopping around with him! Six ducklings had fallen through that grate, one by one by one. Imagine the distress of that mother duck! Her frantic quacking (which was continuing at full volume through all this, by the way) had nothing to do with her limp but everything to do with the fact that her babies were disappearing one right after another. Oh, she knew exactly where they were and that they were unhurt, but she also knew she was helpless to save the little guys.

So I got to work with the rescue. I curled my fingers around the bars of the grate and pulled and OOF! Nothing! It must be screwed in place, I thought to myself. I tried squeezing my hand between the bars of the grate, but that wasn't going to happen. I spun my head around with three hundred sixty degrees of frustration, and then tried pulling on the grate again. This time it budged! It hadn't been screwed down, it was just very, very heavy. Slowly and deliberately, I lifted off that heavy grate. The quacking continued, of course.

I carefully put one foot down on the grass-lined bottom and was happy that it was solid and I didn't fall through. The six ducklings were scurrying around, not fully realizing that their adventure was drawing to a close and they would soon be reunited with their mother. I put my open hand under each duckling and, one at a time, boosted them up to the freedom of the grassy courtyard where their mother was (of course) quacking, about ten feet away. Each one waddled directly over to the mother duck. The instant the last one was out of the hole, she stopped her quacking. How about that! The mother duck started marching, now trailed by all seven of her ducklings. (Where is that camera when I want it?!) No longer in need of a circular parade, the group marched to a covered spot under a nearby shrub.

(Can we fast-forward for one paragraph? After The Catt eventually woke up and the duck family had marched far away, I put T.C. to work taking a few pictures. Here is the infamous grate and this is what the inside of it looked like. Most ominous of all, here is photo of a sister-grate located just twenty feet across the courtyard from the grate we've been discussing; yes, that is water you see down there!)

The uniformed grounds-maintenance man came back on the scene and had witnessed the completion of my mission. He told me he had seen the ducklings trapped under the grate and went to call somebody to help get them out. He said he had been worried that the mother duck wouldn't take the babies back if he had intervened. I told him (and I'm quoting myself here), "She knew she needed help."

I Finally Got One!

It was back in 2007 that I told you I had been searching for years for any page of Batman artwork drawn by the idiosyncratically stylistic Frank Robbins. Go ahead and click here if you'd like to re-read that article.

One of the great joys of collecting, of course, is to ascertain an item that has long been elusive. It is my pleasure to announce that I am now the owner of a beautiful Robbins Batman page. You can savor it yourself right here! (And you can earn extra credit points if you observe that the beautiful lettering on the page is by the great Ben Oda, my favorite comics letterer of all time.)

Allow Me to Introduce. . . Ken Paulson

I used to (and maybe I still) wish that throngs of people would discuss the current week's new comic book releases in the same way that all the sports fans rehash the week's big games. Great hay has been made of the fact that President Obama is or was a bit of a comic book fan. Did you read earlier this month how much the drummer of System of a Down paid for Action Comics #1? And with seemingly half of all theatrical releases focusing on the four-colored characters that we've been lifelong fans of, it's no longer scandalous in the western hemisphere to proclaim that you're a comics fan. It is just a little refreshingly exhilarating, however, to discover that a high-profile celebrity shares our hobby. Ken Paulson is or was a bit of a comic book fan. (And, though my journalistic training is minimal at best, I am fully aware that I just buried the lead.)

Who is Ken Paulson? For the past five years, his name was glanced over every day by millions of peoples' eyes (possibly including yours). You see, from 2004 until just last month Ken Paulson was the editor of USA Today. And how do I know he likes (or liked) comics? Because I personally bought a handful of beauties from him thirty-one years ago!

Back when I was a college freshman, I joined the University of Illinois Comic Book Club. We would congregate in a University meeting room every Thursday evening and have lively discussions about the latest comics and the goings-on in the world of comics. It was great fun, but I wanted to prosletyze beyond the boundaries of that meeting room.

I decided to join the staff of The Daily Illini to write articles about comics. The DI was a five-day-a-week (or was it six?) tabloid-sized paper that printed wire stories of world news and syndicated columns as well as student-produced features and local content and commentary. The weekly entertainment-related pull-out section was entitled Revue.

Ken Paulson was the editor of Revue. It slips my mind whether Revue was just starting up when I came around or whether they were rejuvenating an existing construct, but it was announced that a Revue cover logo was needed. I wandered off and came back to the next meeting with this. Ken liked it and selected it and this design did serve as the Revue logo for at least the next year. (Department of full disclosure: I handed in the hand-drawn design but declined when Ken asked if I wanted to draft the camera-ready technical drawing. The unnamed draftsman who drew it up did a perfect job and has my belated thanks.)

I told Ken that I wanted to write an article about comic books (not knowing yet about his interest in them). He asked what did I want to write about comics? I had been collecting original artwork for a couple of years by that time, so I picked that as the topic. Ken approved the idea and off I went.

You can see here what the article looked like in print. The New Gods artwork that accompanies the article is by the great Don Newton and Dan Adkins with crisp lettering by the always-excellent Ben Oda, but that is not the panel I would have suggested for inclusion. You can see here the original of the page of artwork, which I supplied to the DI when I handed in my article; I was probably hoping they would instead use the beautiful three-panel sequence that you can see at the top of the page. (By the way, I claim without substantiation that this was the first article about collecting original comic book artwork that was ever printed in any newspaper; there have certainly been others since then, such as this one.) To help my little article find a wider readership, I sent a clipping of it to Don and Maggie Thompson who reprinted it in their Beautiful Balloons column in The Buyer's Guide (and they rightfully questioned some of the brash and fannish claims I made in the article, by the way).

Ken Paulson was pleased enough with the piece on original art that I was given a green light to propose another. It was around this time that Superman Versus Muhammad Ali was being published by DC Comics, so I pitched doing a phone interview with artist and writer Neal Adams covering his entire career but focusing especially on the Superman/Ali book. Ken flashed the green light again and off I went. It was a bit daunting to be interviewing one of my all-time favorite artists, but Adams was very easy to get along with and the call went well. When I later handed my article to Ken, he grew frantic as he skimmed over it, paging faster and faster. Tell me there are quotes, he said. Well, there (gulp) weren't; I had paraphrased all of Adams' answers, and that wasn't what Ken had been expecting. I made a follow-up call to Continuity Studios in New York City and garnered some quotes that I interleaved into my existing manuscript. The centerspread of that issue of Revue was dedicated to my article and you can see here how it looked.

Mike Gold of DC Comics had provided me with photstats that I requested of Adams artwork and the DI's production staff hit one out of the park with their marvelous layout design. Oh, and one more thing! Ken Paulson even let me draw the cover of that issue of Revue, as you can see for yourself here.

I must have gotten busy with my studies after that because those were the only two articles I ever wrote for Ken Paulson and The Daily Illini (although I did shift gears and produce quite a few drawings for editorials and feature articles, but that's a blog story for a different day!). Somewhere along in here I did learn of Ken's own interest in comics, and when he told me he was selling some of his collection I couldn't resist seeing what there was to see! If you can imagine this coincidence, I gravitated toward and purchased his run of Neal Adams X-Men issues, which had been a gaping hole in my collection.

Now fast-forward a few decades with me and look at this article from 2004. Yes! The white hair couldn't stop me from recognizing the Ken Paulson that I had known years before, and there he was being named editor of USA Today (not one of the three newspapers I read every day, but I have a respect for every daily newspaper). I couldn't help myself from penning a little congratulatory note to Ken, and I sprinkled it with anecdotal remembrances to tickle his memory bone (such as the fact that he would sometimes invert his name on a byline into the pseudonymous Paul Kennison). Ken dashed off a note in return and he complimented my memory!

A couple of years later a nice article about Ken and USA Today appeared in The New York Times (which is one of the papers I read daily). Then at the end of last year it was announced that Ken was moving on. My first thought was to write him another little note, but my second thought was to headline him here in The Hayfamzone Blog. Hooray for second thoughts! And congratulations to Ken Paulson on his successes!