Missing Dad

This is my fourth Father's Day without Dad. I'm still not really adjusted to it, and doubt that I ever will be.

Dad was always incredibly difficult to shop for, but incredibly easy to please. Dad came from a generation that had relatively little, growing up as he did in the tail end of the Depression (Dad was born in 1932 in rural northwest Georgia--not an affluent part of the country in the best of times). As a result, he was one of those people who never really wanted or expected anything from others, and would never tell anyone what he really wanted for his birthday or for Father's Day or for Christmas. With sufficient cajoling, he would furnish a terse list of possible gifts... a list that always included mundane necessities like "disposable razors" or "a can of coffee" or "socks." If Dad ever truly desired a gift, we never knew about it. When Mom was still with us, she was pretty good about ferreting out a gift idea or two--but even she admitted that Dad was relatively uncooperative as far as gifts were concerned,a nd I can recall many times when she was as stymied as we were.

At the same time, Dad was grateful for every gift he received. A CD of music by someone he once enjoyed, a VHS tape (and later, a DVD) of a film featuring an old Western star he remembered from his childhood, a bag of sugar-free chocolate candy that Dad had never previously sampled... each of them would elicit a wide-eyed look, then a beaming smile, then a satisfied chuckle, usually followed by a soft-spoken, "This is wonderful, but you didn't have to get me anything."  And when Dad said it, he meant it.

The thing is, we really wanted to give Dad things. I think that Kim and Susan and I always hoped we'd find just the right gift, the surprise that would truly make the holiday for Dad.  I've begun to understand over the past few years, though, that there really wasn't any such gift. 

The closest I came to understanding Dad's outlook towards gifts came in late 2004, three Christmases before Dad left us. That was the last Christmas when Dad seemed to fully embrace his love of the season, the last Christmas when he seemed self-assured and confident and as happy as he could be without Mom beside him. I was trying to get a list of potential Christmas gifts, since neither Kim nor I had any real gift ideas. "I don't really want anything," Dad said. "I've got everything I want and a lot more. Anything anyone gets me is fine, because it's something that they thought I would want. It's enough to know that they wanted to give me something." And he wasn't just talking--he truly meant it. Dad was touched to know that his friends and his family cared enough to try to find the right gift for him, to choose items tailored for his tastes and interests and needs. Coffee, socks, razors, a $6 shirt from the Belk's sale table, an unexpected lunch with the family... he loved them all, because he really, truly didn't want anything other than to know he was loved and that people cared enough to try to find a gift for him.

I can see Dad's point more clearly now. I think that, as we grow older, the importance of the gift becomes subordinate to the importance of the gift-giving. We appreciate it when someone cares enough to actually give us a gift that they thought we would like, because it means that we were important enough that someone went to some trouble, inconvenienced their own life just a little to show that they cared. Just as email largely supplanted the handwritten letter, so has a Facebook greeting replaced the birthday card and/or gift for most people. And that makes it all the more meaningful when someone goes to the rouble of finding a gift or delivering a card or sharing a meal.  It says, "you matter enough for me to do something I don't normally do."

Dad never expected anyone to do anything to celebrate his birthday, which is why he was always so touched when someone did. The same for Father's Day; Dad really meant it when he said that no one had to go to any trouble to come by or to bring him a gift. And that was why he was all the more touched when we did.

I loved Dad when he was with us, and I love him now even though he's not. I miss him terribly; sometimes I miss him so bad that I feel a yearning ache to hear that appreciative chuckle one more time, to hear his mellow, resonant voice say "hello dere!" again, to her him reply "just wonderful!" when someone asks how he's doing. I long to hear the stories of his time in the service once more, to hear about his childhood, to hear him share the little details of his life again.

Today I pulled out some of the family photos and remembered the stories that Dad would tell us. I remembered the happy times, the family gatherings, the shared meals, the laughs, the stories--and I missed Dad a lot.

I wish I could give Dad one more gift, take him out for one more meal.

I miss you, Dad. More than you could ever know.

A Defining Moment

A few distributor terms and the meanings I have come to recognize after more than three decades of retailing:

Net price: This is distributorspeak that translates to "you, the retailer, are getting such a horrible discount on this item that we're just going to tell you what you'll pay and hope that you're not smart enough to figure out your actual discount."

No guarantee of mix: We promise you six units in a case, you'll get six units in a case--probably six of the units that Target and Walmart didn't want.

May ship after mass market: You're going to get your orders on this about the same time that the big box retailers and Amazon mark theirs down to liquidation pricing.

Hobby market will have a two month exclusive on this product: You're going to pay through the nose to help us develop a player base for this product, and two months later you'll find out that it's available at Walmart with a retail price about 10% lower than the wholesale price you've been paying.

Timed for (insert name of convention here) release: We're going to sell every copy we possibly can at the con at retail, and we'll urge people who don't have enough money to order it from us when they get home. Then, after we've filled all those, we'll sell you whatever gleanings are left.

Please Inquire: The price on this is so high that you'd choke if we actually told you.

Will be be printed to order: We have so little confidence that anyone is going to want this once they see it that we're not risking any of our money on it, hoping that you'll risk yours instead.

Strictly limited: 80% of the time, this means "we'll print as many as we can trick you into ordering, but no more."  10% of the time, it means the same as Timed for (insert name of convention here) release; the other 10% of the time, it means the same as Will be printed to order.

Contains a mix of original and classic material: You're going to get about 10% new pages and a whole lot of reprints that no one really wanted, but the digital files were just sitting there, and we figured there was something to be done with them.

From the vault: We knew you didn't want this stuff the first time, so we stuck it in a drawer for a decade or so. Now we hope you're less discerning...

Digital day and date release: We're counting on your cash to pay our production costs so that we can sell it for less online and try to snake those customers from you.

A Life in Four Colors (Part Thirty-Three)

Everyone has childhood friends, but by the time I was in the 7th grade, my circle of friends began to change. I had my school friends--those with whom I hung out at school, swapped stories, shared in-jokes, commiserated over homework assignments... you know, all the usual junior high school things that kids do. For me, that group of friends included Greg Carter, Jamie Cook, Ken Barton, and Pam Astin--one of the few girls in school with whom I felt comfortable. You'll notice there's an alphabetical theme here--and there's good reason for that.

Most junior high school teachers sat students in alphabetical order. As a result, the students who sat around me, last-name-beginning-with-B, would be the A, B & C last-name students. So I got to know Greg and Jamie and Ken and Pam very well. We also shared many of the same classes, which meant that we spent most of our day together.

When I wasn't at school, however, I spent most of my time with Gary Steele. Our comics-buddy friendship had grown stronger at the same time that my friendships with Phil Patterson and John Ball had begun to wane. Gary and I gradually settled into a routine: every weekend, we would spent Friday night at either my house or Gary's house, and then on Saturday we were at the other's house. We would occasionally mix things up by spending the night at Gary's grandmother's house--she lived at the corner of Conn Street and Burnett Ferry Road, just a short walk away from my house, and she was more than willing to dote over two young boys who loved her stories, her color television, and her seemingly-bottomless baskets of french fries, made from fresh cut potatoes at our request.

When I discovered fanzines, Gary was as interested in them as I was. Both of us began perusing the fanzines we saw, writing our own comic book reviews and short stories--and more importantly, both of began to talk about publishing our own fanzine. We knew that there were both ditto machines and mimeographs at school, and we learned how to use them. We even bought color ditto masters at a local office supply store so that we could prepare our own multi-color artwork for reproduction.  Every now and then, we'd find a teacher who would give in to the pleadings of two junior high boys and run off a few copies on the school ditto machine--or even better, give us access to the machine so that we could run off our own copies.

Our material was crude and juvenile--but of course, we were twelve years old at the time. It would be a few more years before we'd begin doing fanzines for anyone other than our school friends to see.

So if Gary and I got along so well, then why didn't we hang out at school? The structure of junior high scheduling had a lot to do with that. I was in advanced classes, and Gary was in general level classes. I never really understood why; I talked to Gary a great deal, and I never believed that I was smarter than he was. But school scheduling was very rigid: once you were slotted into advanced classes, you had an entire schedule built around those classes, and your electives were shoehorned in afterwards. It seemed that when I had an elective class period available, Gary was in one of his core classes. So we rarely saw each other during school hours, outside of lunch periods, assemblies, and pep rallies.

As for my school friends--well, I really enjoyed the company of Greg and Jamie and Ken and Pam, but I rarely saw them outside of school because they didn't really share my core interests in comic books, pulp/adventure/science fiction, monster movies, model kits, and James Bond. There were times when I paid a visit to the homes of each of those friends, usually for some school-related project, but even at the age of twelve, comics in particular had become important enough to me that I chose to spend most of my out-of-school time with Gary, who shared those interests. In some ways, I regret now that I let my developing interests so dominate my life that I didn't pursue those friendships more fervently; to this day, I have fond memories of those friends.

Road to Nowhere

Here's a clue for the masterful meteorologists who write the warnings for the National Weather Service: you might want to use towns that someone has heard of when you're giving us landmarks. When your landmark locations include such major 'burgs as Ephesus, Homer, Watkinsville, Winterville, Blackwells, Chattahoochee Hill Country, White, and Aragon, most people are no more informed than they would be if you had cited Camelot, Xanadu, Shangri La, or El Dorado as geographical reference points. And if people don't know what you're referencing, that means that they won't know if they're in the path of the storm warning or not...

Just an observation for future reference, guys...

The Dark Spider-Knight

Think you know Batman's origins? Here, from the back of a Chinese toy, is the truth. (Thanks to Janice Gelb for sharing this!)

A Life in Four Colors (Part Thirty-Two)

1965 was a year in which I learned that not all comic book writers and artists were created equal—at least, not in talent.

Prior to this year, I was pretty much a comic book omnivore. While there were some characters I liked more than others, I'd rarely pass up the opportunity to read any comic book, and I seemed to enjoy the mediocre and second-rate books every bit as much as the great stuff. But I had become more and more aware of styles as my comic book collection grew, and by 1965, I had begun to recognize a few favorites even without seeing their signatures or the credits.

The first artist whose distinctive style really appealed to me was  Steve Ditko. Ditko's art was quirky, his characters were often dismally plain and ordinary, and his action scenes lacked the raw vitality of Jack Kirby's or Gil Kane's. But the emotion, the moodiness, and the normality of his world vision appealed to me. Artistically, I came to love his heavy ink lines, his bold black shadows and accents, and his flexibly distorted anatomy. I came to recognize those distinctive Ditko hands, those contortiionist poses, those striking angles. I soon realized that I could even spot Ditko's inkwork over Jack Kirby's pencils, as in the remarkable Fantastic Four #13.

At the same time, I realized that some of my favorite war comics were drawn by the same guy who had drawn those great Hawkman stories in Brave and Bold (alas, he didn't stick with the book when Hawkman got his own series--and as much as I like Murphy Anderson's work, it never captivated me the same way). That artist was Joe Kubert, and he was the primary reason I fell in love with DC's war books.

Then there was Wally Wood--perhaps one of the best "linemen" in comics. His bold inks, his remarkably cinematic backgrounds, his alluring women--there was no one like him. Daredevil went from a second-string hero to one of Marvel's best when Wood signed on for a few issues. He made T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents every bit as exciting as the best Marvel or DC titles.

Carmine Infantino's clean, angular linework and distinctive architecture was every bit as distinctive as Ditko's, but in a totally different way. Where Ditko's art was rounded and fluid, Infantino's was angular and sharp-edged.  His Adam Strange epitomized all that was science fictional in comics, as far as I was concerned.

And then there was Jack Kirby. No artist captured more explosive energy on every page than Kirby. He truly defined the Marvel look in the mid-1960s, which was probably why Marvel brought Kirby in to illustrate the early issues of virtually every series they launched. If anyone could make a book a hit, it was Kirby. And I came to love his art.

And those were the artists I loved... but they weren't the only artists I came to recognize. Once I realized that not everyone drew the same way, I started looking for other defining styles, and I realized that there were other artists whose work was identifiable just by the way they drew. Gil Kane, Murphy Anderson, Russ Heath, Ross Andru & Mike Esposito (I didn't know who did what, but I recognized their collaborative work), Don Heck, Dick Ayers, Curt Swan, Jim Mooney, Mike Sekowsky--I could spot their work the minute I flipped through the book.

That was a real eye-opener for me. Until then, I had thought of comics as almost an assembly-line production; it never really occurred to me that different people might draw the same characters in different ways. But once I realized that there was a reason that Superman looked different in Justice League than in Superman, for instance,  I made my first significant move towards appreciating comics as an art form, not merely as entertainment.

And that awareness changed my life, believe it or not. Once I recognized the people behind my favorite comics, I wanted to know about those people. As I merged that awareness with my recent discovery of fanzines,  I was laying the groundwork for my future without even realizing it.

A Life in Four Colors (Part Thirty-One)

The first fanzine I ever read was Rocket's Blast Comicollector. I'm fairly sure that I first discovered it through a small ad in Marvel Comics of that era, but I can't pinpoint exactly which book first introduced me to the world of fanzines.

By today's standards, the RBCC was little more than an adzine. For those not familiar with the vernacular, I'll explain: a fanzine features articles and creative content produced by fans, focusing on a specific area of interest. In the case of RBCC, that field of interest was comic books. An adzine is something more specific: a fanzine that devotes a significant portion of its contents to advertisements spotlighting products related to that field of interest. In the case of RBCC, the ads included both ads for other fanzines and lots of ads for back-issue contents from such advertisers as Howard Rogofsky, Robert Bell, and Stan's Magazine Exchange, among others.

Today, when the internet makes almost anything instantly findable and purchaseable for  a sufficiently high investment, it may seem impossible to believe that something like back issue comic books could be hard to find. But remember, this was a time when there was no internet, no eBay, no instantly accessible venue for free listings of available merchandise. Before I got my first issue of RBCC, I had no idea that there were people who sold back issue comic books from the 1940s to the present--and in fact, there were dealers who made a living selling those back issues. If I wanted to find an old comic, I had to try to work out a trade with my friends, scour used-comic-book sections at stores like Coosa Valley Book Shop or Croker's, or  write to Marvel Comics and get a dittoed list of what office copies they had available and hope that the list included the books I was looking for (yes, at that time, it was possible to order comics from Marvel--and I did so quite frequently!).

And then I opened that envelope, flipped through the pages of RBCC #38, and my comic book collecting world was turned upside down.

Pretty much any comic book I wanted (bear in mind that the comics I wanted were primarily books from the late 1950s to the then-present 1965... a period of six or seen years) could be had for the right price. Even better, comic books I had never dreamed I would see--comic books from the Golden Age--could be had for a few dollars each.

It was both liberating and exasperating. Here was a source for all the comics I wanted... but the cost of those comics was beyond my budget. A copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 for $8? Preposterous! A Tales to Astonish #27 for $6? Who could afford to pay the equivalent cost of almost fifty comics for one book?

The articles were interesting, of course, and I read every word and perused every piece of fan art. I was inspired to create my own art, in fact, and to create my own characters (most of whom were derivatives of characters I enjoyed--Marvel gave us Dr. Doom, so I created Doctor Dread; later, they offered Galactus, so I countered with Univus). But it was really those ads that fascinated me.

They also confused me.

Howard Rogofsky, perhaps the highest-priced source for comics in the pages of RBCC, had a habit of routinely listing future issues of ucpoming comics. Why not? He knew he'd get them--and if someone wished to pay fifty cents plus shipping for the issue of Batman that wouldn't be out for two more months, then he'd gladly take the money, hold it, and mail you that issue when it came out. I didn't know that, however; I assumed that if he listed those issues, he actually had them in stock right then (okay, I was naive...). I also learned the hard way that Rogofsky's grading was, to say the least, rather generous. He routinely listed books as VG-F (very good to fine) that would scarcely qualify as good by today's standards--and he didn't seem to consider tape or ink marks as detrimental to condition.

But he seemed to have almost everything, and his books seeemed to sell fast. Each issue of RBCC had an ad from Rogofsky, and each month, many of those rare books would drop off the list. So I started looking at those Golden Age books, trying to find books that I could afford.

Golden Age Captain America? Couldn't afford 'em. All Star Comics? Out of my price range. Even 1950's EC's were too expensive for me.

But Sensation Comics was in my budget. I could get 1945 and 1946 issues of Sensation for $1 and $2 each. Oh, the best they had to offer was Wonder Woman and Wilcat stories, but still--it was a Golden Age Comic!

So every couple of months, I'd save up a few bucks, order a few fill-in Marvel and DC comics--and I'd add an issue of Sensation. (I only fell for the "order a future issue" trick one time, and felt really foolish when I learned that he didn't have the book. Thankfully, he was willing to let me cancel that order and apply the half-dollar to my next order of back issues.)

I felt like I had discovered a secret marketplace. My comics buying habits were about to change, and collecting took on a whole new scope.  I had no idea that those fanzines would soon inspire me to do my own fanzines... and that would, eventually, give birth to a store newsletter that eventually metamorphosed into Comic Shop News...

Eerie Synchronicity

I've known for all of my life that I was related to author (and Charlie Chan creator) Earl Derr Biggers, but I was in my thirties before I discovered that Biggers and I shared the same birthday: August 26th. Now I've discovered more coincidences. There is some dispute over Biggers' year of birth--some sites list it as 1884, some as 1885 (for what it's worth, the family records have indicated 1885 as the correct year). It turns out that he and I suffered our heart attacks on the exact same day of the month as well--and if the year 1885 is the correct year of birth for EDB, then we were both exactly the same age when we suffered our heart attacks. 

(Thankfully, my heart attack ended up being less fatal than his...)

An Eighties Appreciation

It's no secret that I am an avid fan of 1960s music; it's the music of my childhood, the music of my adolescence, the music I grew up with, the first music that I bought. I think the latter is particularly crucial in anyone's music appreciation--the first music that speaks to us so intensely that we're willing to spend our limited allowance funds to own it is the music we're likely to love as long as we live.

However, I've been listening to a lot of 1980s music lately, and I'm about to say something that may surprise many of my friends: as much as I love 1960s music, I am convinced that the 1980s were the nexus of pop music, with more diversity, more energy, more vitality, and more creativity than any other pop music era, including the 1960s.

I credit MTV with a lot of that; when the cable channel launched with the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," they did a lot more than stress visuals as well as music. They also encouraged originality and experimentation. Since MTV of the early 1980s was hungry for videos to fill its airtime, almost any group with a strong sound and a striking look could get MTV airplay. And audiences were hungry to see music videos; watching MTV was a normal part of the weekly entertainment cycle in the 1980s, and people discussed music videos with the same intensity they devoted to hit TV shows, films, and books.

Groups like Scandal and the Motels and Wang Chung and the Stray Cats and Minor Detail and Quarterflash and Big Country would have probably gotten very little if any airplay in the pre-MTV radio-driven music days. However, MTV made room for anyone with a fresh sound and a catchy video, style notwithstanding. Rockabilly, new wave, punk, pop, dance, folk, techno, soul--there was room for all of these styles and many, many more.

I recently transferred several 1980s compilation sets to MP3 to listen to on my iPod, including Priority Records' Rock of the 1980s, Time-Life's Greatest Hits of the 1980s, Capitol's Sedated in the 80s, Rhino's Just Can't Get Enough: New Wave Hits of the 1980s and a few more--and I was amazed that, after transferring more than a thousand songs from a variety of greatest-hits packages, I had only about a 20%-25% duplication of titles. There was so much energetic, catchy music from the era that each label found distinctive songs from the decade that no one else had picked up on.

There are distinctive 1980s sounds--punchy, up-front drums, strong bass lines, swirling synthesizers--that add a lot to the sound of songs from this era, but the improved production values and upgraded recording quality also helped. Even the most minor groups could produce songs with the same production values as the big guys, and multitrack recording had become cheap enough that small groups could easily afford big sounds.

I'm having fun re-experiencing a lot of these songs, many of which I haven't listened to in years. And I've learned that even musicians and groups I didn't care for could capture the feel of an era much more intensely than I had initially realized.

I guess I was lucky enough to experience two remarkable musical decades!

So Long, Seventies

This evening, I watched the final episodes of That 70s Show, after beginning the series almost two months ago. (I only watch episodes of old series while I'm exercising, generally watching one episode in the morning and another in the afternoon, so it takes about a week per season for half-hour sitcoms.)

From the very beginning, I found the shows little elements of 1970s life to be appealing. I continually found little set elements that reflected our own life at the time, from the macrame plant hangers and spider plants to the addition of cable tv to the first VCR. The addition of so many spot-on decade-appropriate references made the series particularly engaging for me.

The kids themselves--well, they could have been students of mine. I started teaching high school in 1975, so I taught a senior class that graduated the same year as the Point Place kids. I have fond memories of my students of those years--Steve Callaway and Debbie Marsh and Bill Schroeder and Scott Prince and Leanna Leithauser and Edith Anderson and Jodi Crim and so many others who shared one character trait or another with Hyde, Eric, Donna, Fez, Jackie, and Kelso.  So I found myself both empathizing with the characters as their experiences reflected my own, and viewing their experiences through the eyes of one who saw real-world high school students come of age at the same time.

The show's humor works so well for me because it blends timely cultural references, ensemble-cast interaction, cleverly written dialogue, endearing characters, and just enough physical slapstick to season the series without overwhelming it.  None of the other elements would have mattered were it not for the endearing characters, however; for a show to succeed (in my eyes, at least), I have to like the focal characters.  I not only liked Eric and Donna in particular, I actually cared about them and what happened to them. That's a relative rarity for television. I like the cast of Seinfeld and How I Met Your Mother and The Middle and Rules of Engagement and 30 Rock, but I don't care about them; I don't find myself wondering at the end of an episode what might happen to them next, or how their lives might be made better or worse by what happened to them in that episode. By the end of Seinfeld or Malcolm in the Middle, I was ready for them to move on.  At the end of That 70s Show, I actually hoped that the lives of these fictional characters would continue in the way that I felt that it should.

Friends was the last sitcom whose characters made me care about them. And like Friends, I found myself thinking that I'd like to know if life continued to treat these characters well... if they found happiness, if their lives became what they hoped they would be, if they remained friends for years more. That, to me, is the sign of a well-crafted work of fiction; the characters, born from the imaginations of the writers, become real enough that the audience truly wants to think that their lives continued beyond the end of the fictional work.

If there were any one element of That 70s Show that I didn't like, it was the strong emphasis on marijuana use. I went through the 70s (and in fact, through my entire life) without using marijuana or other illegal drugs, and I sort of resented the implication that drug use was such an inherent part of the decade that every person who came of age during that decade just naturally used the drugs, regardless of gender or background or social or religious standing. However, I like the characters enough that I can empathize with them in spite of the drug use--and when you consider my personal anti-drug militancy, that's quite an accomplishment on the part of the writers.

The last season--most of which struggled along without Topher Grace (who left at the end of season 7) and Ashton Kutcher (who left a few episdoes into season 8)--was weak, to be sure. The plots weren't awful, by any means, but the interpersonal chemistry was missing. Donna, Hyde, Jackie, and Fez remained interesting, but not interesting enough; the disgruntled alienation of Hyde needed the reckless exuberance of Kelso to balance it, and the serious strength of Donna relied on the mercurial, ineffectual whimsy of Eric to give it direction. The addition of new characters like Randy and Sam was detrimental, because it forced the ensemble cast to act out of character in order to make room for the newcomers.

The series ended on a high note with the return of both Kelso and Eric to Point Place on New Years Eve, 1979. That 70s Show and those 70s came to an end at the same time, and with just enough optimism for the future that I can believe that Eric and Donna finally found happiness with one another. If you think otherwise, don't tell me--I see the entire show as building to the point where they not only accept the intertwined nature of their lives (they did that early on, in spite of several stumbles), but that they embrace it and walk into their futures together as a couple. Life gives us far too many missed opportunities; for me, this show, from the very beginning, was the story of a love's fits and starts as it searched for its true course.

Sure, it's a lot of burden to put on a sitcom.  The fact that it stayed the course and delivered an ending that these characters deserved proves that the series and its writers were up to the challenge.