Miscellaneous Annoyances

Originally published June 14, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1178

Okay. Let’s see how many people we can annoy in just one column.

Let’s annoy…

–Autograph hunters.

Okay. What’s the deal with these “Certificates of Authenticity?”

I was at Defense Con at Oklahoma City, as you might remember from last week. I was sitting there signing autographs, and next to me was Barry Burns, manager of New World Comics of Central Oklahoma. After getting me to sign books, autograph hunters could then purchase, from Barry, “Certificates of Authenticity,” for a dollar each. The money, in turn, went to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (as did all the money that the convention generated.)

Now I, of course, am more than happy to do anything that will contribute to the CBLDF’s income. And yet, somehow the irony of the situation struck me. What it boiled down to was this: If you wanted my autograph, it was free. But if you want Barry Burris’ autograph, that’ll run you a buck.

I can sort of understand the notion behind such a certificate if a store owner is selling something and he’s issuing the guarantee as a sort of suitable-for-framing receipt. You buy an autographed book from the retailer and he includes this certificate as a guarantee that–if it turns out the comic is a forgery–he will somehow make restitution.

But what’s the worth of these things on the secondary market? Especially when, more often than not, they’re not witnessed. They’re not notarized. In other words, someone is so tacky that they’re willing to forge a creator’s signature on a comic book…but they’ll stop short of fabricating a certificate of authenticity? C’mon.

Bob Ingersoll even tells me of a convention where fans could purchase certificates of authenticity, which they were then filling out themselves and getting signed by the same person autographing the comic. I can just see them reselling that. “You can tell that it’s a genuine autograph. See? Same guy even signed the certificate saying so.”

Barry and I started wondering just how far we could carry it. We figured that, next to Barry, we could set up another guy selling a Certificate of Authenticity Authentic Certificate. Something that will absolutely certify that the just-purchased Certificate of Authenticity is an absolute, genuine, accept no substitute Certificate of Authenticity. We could charge five dollars for that one.

And then we’d set up a notary public who could notarize the Certificate of Authenticity Authentic Certificate for ten bucks. And for another fifteen, we’d have a photographer take a photograph of me signing the book, Barry signing the Certificate of Authenticity, the new guy signing the Certificate of Authenticity Authentic Certificate, the notary public notarizing the Certificate of Authenticity Authentic Certificate, and the purchaser of the whole thing waving in the background.

With all that money rolling in, we could probably have the CBLDF in the black before the end of the day.

–Marvel.

There is a lesson to be learned from the following, which was pointed out by someone on Usenet: If you’re involved on a Spider-Man title, never muck with a character whose name ends in “Goblin.” The dámņëd name is jinxed.

The story may well be apocryphal, but it’s nonetheless part of comic book lore that Steve Ditko was incensed over the revelation of the Green Goblin’s identity being Norman Osborn. Some even claim that disagreement over who the Goblin should be was one of the things that led to his departing the series.

Many years later, Roger Stern created the Hobgoblin. Roger had his own notion as to who the Hobgoblin should be, but eventually it was revealed (as I covered in an earlier column) to be Ned Leeds.

Unfortunately, as Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and I didn’t remember the past when I attended to editor Joey Cavalieri’s desire to see… as he put it…” some kind of Goblin character” in Spider-Man 2099. It had been over a decade since the creation of Hobgoblin, but the curse was as much in force now as it ever was.

I had just wrapped a storyline in which I’d introduced an incarnation of Venom to the 2099 universe. I’d set a number of red herrings to make the reader thing that Venom was, in fact, Gabriel O’Hara… the brother of our hero, Miguel O’Hara (a.ka. Spider-Man 2099, marked down from Spider-Man 2199). As it so happened, Venom was not truly Gabriel. And as it further so happened, I did such a thorough job laying hints that it was Gabriel, that virtually no readers bought it. “Too obvious,” they said.

So when I embarked on the Goblin storyline, I decided to double-fake out the readers. Once again I laid down clues that pointed to Gabe. And I figured that, this time, I’d catch the readers in a bit of a bind: If I was doing the same gambit again so soon, was I now trying to catch them off-guard? Sure, clues point to Gabe… but they pointed to Gabe last time and it wasn’t him. So this time it must be him… unless, of course, that’s what I want them to think, and it’s a fake-out again. It was sort of like a chess game.

And the truth was, it was a fake-out again. I didn’t want to make Gabe a villain, if for no other reason that I was busy doing the brothers-at-war bit over in Aquaman.

In the meantime, though, I had another character who’d been floating around the series for some time: Father Jennifer. I figured, what the hëll. Here was a Catholic priest who was female and sexually active. Might as well go for broke and make her a villain, too… although a villain who had, at heart, decent intentions. There have been saints who went to war, so it didn’t seem a reach to me that a futuristic priest might take extreme measures to accomplish a long-term, positive goal.

So while I waved red flags in Gabe’s direction, I planted quiet clues pointing to Father Jennifer. Like making a point of the fact that she wasn’t around while Spider-Man battled the Goblin; like the Goblin’s speech pattern, speaking of redemption and such; like Jennifer sporting a bruise after the fight, and the bruise was never explained. That kind of thing.

But the curse of the Goblin was particularly strong this time around. First, Joey Cavalieri was fired not long after the character saw print. Upon Joey’s departure, I decided to leave the series.

Issue #44 was to be my last issue, and I had a lot to wrap up. And in that issue, I had a scene in which Gabe goes to Father Jennifer, they deal with a crisis, and then Gabe takes his leave of her. After he does, we see Father Jennifer open a trunk she has stashed away, and lo and behold, it’s the Goblin’s costume inside. It didn’t give resolution; that was impossible in the brief amount of time I had to wrap things. But at least it spelled out one of the mysteries I’d introduced.

So the book came out and imagine my confusion when, on computer boards, people started saying, “Aha, so Gabe was the Hobgoblin.” I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about.

How could the sequence have possibly been misinterpreted? I posted messages that said, No, Father Jennifer was the Goblin; how could anyone possibly not understand that?

But it became clear when a fan posted a message which read, “But what about the dialogue you yourself wrote, where Gabe says to Father Jennifer, ‘Here, Father, could you watch this trunk of mine for a while?’ If it’s Gabe’s trunk, and it’s got the Goblin costume in it, then clearly Gabe is the Goblin.”

Well, imagine my surprise.

I grabbed my just-arrived copies of that issue and flipped to the page in question and, sure enough, there was a spanking new word balloon that trashed my storyline. It was not written by me, nor did it make any sense. Gabe had arrived on foot, carrying no trunk, yet now he was supposed to have produced one out of nowhere and left it with Jennifer for no reason at all? Unlocked, yet?

Thus did I discover that my story had been unilaterally changed by Marvel without consulting me or even doing me the simple courtesy of picking up the phone and letting me know that it had been done. It’s enough to make you… I dunno… go off and start your own comic book company.

And now I hear Roger Stern is actually being afforded the opportunity to resolve the Hobgoblin story the way he wanted to in the first place. Brave lad, that Roger. He should be cautious, for who knows what form the curse of the Goblin may take?

–Gun Enthusiasts.

It never ceases to amaze me what does and does not get response in this column.

Some weeks ago, I observed that I thought it was hypocritical, if not outright bizarre, that Congress was obsessed with regulating and monitoring television violence (via the V-chip), while at the same time there was a movement to try and overturn the Brady bill banning assault weapons.

And I was promptly deluged with mail from gun supporters, criticizing me six ways from Sunday, declaring that here I was upholding the First Amendment while advocating the undercutting of the second.

This is a dangerous thing for me to say to people who are big on guns, but: Bull. My position is utterly consistent with both itself and the Bill of Rights.

Why did I say that the politicians’ priorities were out of whack? Well… because no one was ever caught in crossfire and died from TV violence. No criminal has ever stolen a TV from a house and then used it to kill someone in a subsequent robbery. And if we include my position regarding the First Amendment, comics, and Oklahoma City, I daresay that no one ever used a copy of Verotik #4 to accidentally kill their daughter who was planning to spring out from a closet and scare them for a practical joke.

But let’s put that aside for a moment. As noted, gun supporters want to turn what seems, to me, a fairly common sense observation, into a referendum on the Second Amendment. How both must be argued for with equal fervor, and how my alleged failure to do so calls my credibility into question.

To me, it wasn’t a Second Amendment question, but rather a common sense question. Nonetheless, my position was this: my allegiance to the First Amendment comes from the text: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

People spend a great deal of time wondering what the Founding Fathers meant. Call me wacky, but I think that they were fairly bright guys, and meant exactly what was said. “No law” means “No law.”

Now, let’s go to the Second Amendment: “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

And my position on this is entirely consistent with my position on the First Amendment. They were fairly bright guys and said exactly what they intended to say.

Now let’s put aside for the moment that any and all gun owners would have to, in the spirit of the Second Amendment, have to be part of state militia. Put aside that this invalidates the Congressman who was arguing against the Brady Bill by claiming that his wife lived in a fairly remote area and she had to be able to protect herself… which has zero to do with being a militia man. Put aside that I suspect that when people who are part of a militia do go out for practice maneuvers, they do so with weapons supplied by the government.

Let’s put aside the entire militia aspect for a moment.

“The right to of the people to keep and bear arms…”

I cracked open my dictionary and looked up the word, “Arms.”

The definition was exactly one word long: “Weapons.”

Weapons.

The Second Amendment doesn’t say “any and all arms.” It doesn’t even say “firearms.” It just says, “arms.” And I’d like to think that if they’d meant any and all arms, or even firearms, they’d have said that. But they didn’t.

To my reading, we’re simply talking about the right to arm oneself. There’s nothing in there about infringing upon the rights of citizens to be able to reduce an opponent to ground chuck in a matter of seconds out of a sense of wanting to keep the state safe.

There’s plenty of states that have laws against sawed off shotguns, passed out of a sense of wanting to cut down against concealed weapons. Why is “arms” being read in the broadest possible sense, to the advantage of those who would want to arm themselves? What’s “arms?” Bazookas? Cannons? Mortars? Perhaps people should be allowed to purchase plutonium so every single person on the block can go nuclear.

I choose to read “freedom of speech” as being able to speak freely. And if I choose to read “arms” as… oh, I don’t know… bows and arrows or spears… that’s not contradictory or hypocritical with the free speech position. Yeah. That’s good. The government shall not infringe on the right of the people to be armed with bows and arrows, spears, and swords. Those are all “arms.” That satisfies the Second Amendment.

Or, to put it as succinctly as I can: I’m in favor of anything that makes it easy for people to communicate, and not in favor of anything that makes it easy for people to kill each other.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)