Category: But I Digress…

Originally published November 21, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1253

We were speaking last week of how satisfying all fans, everywhere, is an impossibility. How fans can set such expectations for those whose careers they follow that meeting those expectations can become an insurmountable task.

It can become extremely frightening for those who are in the public eye. For every thousand fans who are decent, polite, caring folk (and there are thousands, tens of thousands out there) there’s the one or two who have their own agendas. Some of them deliberately target you for the purpose of building themselves up, or proving something by showing they can be tougher or smarter than “the pro,” or feel the need to show that they are not intimidated by you—even though intimidation was never your intention. (I can’t tell you the number of times fans have told me that they were afraid to come up to me; what did they think I was going to do, bite their heads off like a circus geek?)

And then there are the fans who are so obsessive, it gets… well… scary.

Continue Reading “Danger, Will Robinson” →

Originally published November 14, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1252

It’s never enough.

No matter how much one does for the fan base, it is absolutely never enough. Because for every thousand or so fans that you manage to satisfy, there’s going to be a 1001st who is going to decide that you haven’t fulfilled whatever standards he or she has set for you. And, even more dangerously, there’s a 1002nd who is going to take it upon him or herself to try and make your life miserable—just because he can. Just because he thinks that there’s some sort of satisfaction in “standing up” to the pro, or showing the pro that he or she is “no better” than anyone else.

Several cases in point:

Continue Reading “Doing Enough” →

Originally published November 7, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1251

You want stories to go a certain way.

I was thirteen years old, living in Verona, a jock town where my athletic ineptitude was one of the key ingredients in my inability to make any friends. I sorely missed my previous home in nearby Bloomfield, which might as well have been on another planet for all the opportunity I had to socialize with the friends of my younger days. Since my daily humiliation in school was insufficient, I also joined the local synagogue’s youth group, United Synagogue Youth. I figured that we would spend time discussing Judaism. Learning about our cultural history. Socializing.

Nope. USY’s activities centered around one thing and, apparently, one thing only: Basketball.

We had a basketball team which played the teams of other USYs. Naturally I was bottom-ranked on that as well. I was slow, I could dribble only adequately, and I couldn’t sink a basket. So I spent many a game watching the more athletic members—namely, anyone—charging up and down the court. Basketball. What a great game.

So there I was, having won the opportunity to go to a Knicks game and, at half time, shoot a foul shot in an endeavor to win some sort of further prizes.

Continue Reading “The Radio Contest, part 2” →

Originally published October 31, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1250

Do not seek great depths of comics wisdom in the following words. It’s just, well, something that happened to me that’s kind of bizarre, and I went along with it because I thought, “Well, might be able to get a column out of it.”

Continue Reading “The Radio Contest, part 1” →

Originally published October 24, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1249

We write of heroes.

Yes, yes, I know there is a whole big, wide world of comic books outside the realm of the superhero. But it is there that I have most of my experience, and it is there that—for the moment—I am dwelling.

Continue Reading “Planet Comics” →

Originally published October 17, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1248

One never knows.

With all the topics I write about, all the opinions I toss around—what column of mine drew the single greatest number of comments? The one where I took the liberty of lettering Rob Liefeld’s first issue of Captain America, making use of the special preview which Rob had graciously supplied.

Well, since Rob was kind enough to provide a similar preview of Fighting American at the Chicago con this year, I decided to take another stab at it. I hope it will meet with the same degree of amusement afforded by my previous endeavors.

So I present: Fighting Digression.

Continue Reading “Fighting Digression” →

Originally published October 10, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1247

Well, once again I find myself under the deadline gun. I guess the worst thing you can do for a writer is hire him, thus leaving him all sorts of cause for complaint. Which is particularly upsetting because I wanted to talk about the settling of the Planet Comics case. But that’ll have to wait until next week, and I’ll have to push back the brand new relettered Fighting American another week as well. So here, once again, is humor from the computer barrel drawn from the apparently endless gags that folks keep sending me.

Continue Reading “From the Jokes File” →