Saturday, September 16, 2006

Victim's Rights/Wrongs

As you may have heard, a woman committed suicide the other day after a blistering interview with Court TV host Nancy Grace. The few times I've watched Grace, I've found her whole act pretty tasteless. She seems to operate off the premise that a person who's under suspicion of a crime is probably guilty and once they're arrested, you can remove that bothersome "probably" qualifier and get on with the sentencing.

Even worse to me is this notion that if your life is touched by crime, the only appropriate response is pure, uncontained rage. For some, that may well be the proper course but there are those forms of anger that are self-destructive and which serve to extend the damage. There are also some people who simply can't handle the anger. I'm thinking now of one acquaintance of mine who, years ago, was a crime victim. The harm done to him by the criminal was nothing compared to the harm my friend proceeded to do to himself, hungering for some kind of revenge that became increasingly unattainable. In fact, it was almost like he was consciously enlarging his victimhood until it became so large that no one could ever take it away from him.

In the case of the lady quizzed by Nancy Grace, the news clips I've seen suggest that she was almost attacking Melinda Duckett for not playing her prescribed role on a TV cable news crime investigation. It's all pretty disturbing and I think I agree with most of what Dahlia Lithwick wrote about it.

• Posted at 12:43 PM · LINK

No-Prizes Galore!

A lot of e-mails this morning from Jack Kirby fans taking wild and informed guesses as to who inked the Orion figure on the cover of New Gods #1. The first five to get it right were (in order of time stamps on their messages), Joe Frank, Giles Lindley, Kurt Mitchell, Mark Daniel and Patrick Shaugnessy.

The correct answer is Don Heck but there's a little more to the story than that. I have to write my next column for The Jack Kirby Collector this weekend and I'll recount it all in there. I figure anyone who cares about this stuff has a subscription to that fine publication.

• Posted at 10:25 AM · LINK

Ever the Source

DC Comics has announced that they will soon issue The New Gods Omnibus, a series of volumes that will reprint in full, Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" series from the early seventies plus the additional material Jack did in 1984 — an extra story plus his grand finale graphic novel, The Hunger Dogs. I hope to have more information on this project after some firmer decisions are made...but I wanted to mention it's coming, which pleases me greatly. When the core books (The New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle) were cancelled in their second year, Jack was very depressed. He knew the work had value and felt there was a market for it if it was released properly. What mitigated his upset was that he knew, even if no one else believed it at the time, that those issues would be reprinted and re-reprinted and re-re-reprinted, etc., over and over, remaining in print long past most other comics of their day. I just wish he could have been around to see it happen for real.

Several people have written to ask me what I think of a petition that is now circulating in some Internet circles. It asks DC to expend the cash and effort necessary to restore, to the extent humanly possible, the original Superman and Jimmy Olsen drawings that Jack did for the Jimmy Olsen comic (some portions of which will figure into the Omnibus) and the first issue of Forever People. My opinion, along with an overview of what I believe happened there, can be found in this article, which I recently revised.

Hey, I've written dozens and dozens of articles about Jack and done loads of interviews...but as I posted the above cover to New Gods #1, it dawned on me that I've never explained — because no one ever asked me — what happened there. Jack did the cover without the odd textured pattern in the background. That was added by the DC Production Department when they fiddled with his design. I'll write up the whole story for a future column in The Jack Kirby Collector

Now that I think of it: I'd wager most Kirby scholars don't even know who inked the drawing of Orion on that cover...and I've just decided we're going to have a contest with no prize whatsoever. First person to send me the correct answer will win...nothing. I'll mention your name here but that's it. And to give you a bit of help, here's a hint: It wasn't Vince Colletta, it wasn't Frank Giacoia, it wasn't Mike Royer, it wasn't Jack himself and it wasn't rainbow sugar nonpareils. It was someone who did no other work on Jack's DC books...and that's all I'm going to tell you now. Good night.

• Posted at 2:28 AM · LINK

The Great Cookie Mystery

We seem to have solved half the mystery — alas, the easier half — of what to call my favorite cookie. About a hundred of you have written in, including a half-dozen folks from Australia where the little colored balls (excuse me, coloured) are known as "Hundreds & Thousands." Others suggested they were called "sprinkles," "dragees" or even "round jimmies."

But the consensus seems to be — and many of you sent links to pages that sell them under this name — "rainbow sugar nonpareils." Some sources hyphenate the last word and some spell it, "nonpariel."

Okay, that's what the decorations are called. Now, what are the cookies called?

I have about a dozen answers, no one of which was given by very many people. So I'm leaning towards the theory that no one is widely accepted. I'll wait a few days to see if anyone convinces me otherwise and then I'll post some of what I've learned.

• Posted at 1:33 AM · LINK

September 17, 2006 • Current • September 15, 2006