I come to bury Wizard, not to praise it.

Wizard #21, featuring one of the Youngblood teams.

“Can I see that?”  he asked me in study hall.  We were supposed to be working, but he’d been staring at the ceiling for the last twenty minutes and I’d been alternately writing some really bad short story and flipping through the magazine he wanted to look through.

“Uh … okay, but give it back,” I replied, as if what I had in my hands was serious contraband that would get us sent down to the principal’s office in a heartbeat.  Was it an issue of Playboy?  In study hall?  No.  It was Wizard: The Guide to Comics #21.

I’m the gabillionth person to write about this today but when I read that Wizard magazine folded, I couldn’t help but think, just like so many others seem to be doing, about the time I used to collect it and what effect it had on my comic book collecting life.  I’m not one of those people who seems to be saying “good riddance” to the once popular magazine, partly because I don’t particularly enjoy seeing people lose their jobs (unless they’re the cast of Jersey Shore or something) and partly because as much as I think Wizard shoulders at least some of the blame for the comic crash of the early 1990s I stopped buying the magazine before I graduated from high school and long before I stopped collecting comics so I really can’t hold a grudge against it.  Besides, I think I can add my voice to the many who say that the magazine really was a true guide to comics for me back then.

When I first got into comics in the early 1990s I was being guided along by the characters I knew from either seeing movies or watching cartoons.  Batman was the first character I gravitated toward and then I instinctively picked up a few issues of Superman because I’d been a huge fan of the Christopher Reeve movies and it just seemed like you’d automatically buy at least a few Superman comics in your lifetime.  I had heard of the X-Men and knew that Spider-Man was worth reading (I’d bought the “Kraven’s Last Hunt” storyline a few years earlier), but couldn’t have told you fact one about anything that was happening in any of their books.  I’d latch on to the Titans a few months after I bought my first issue of Detective Comics and would really spend most of my time collecting back issues of stuff from the 1980s, especially Crisis on Infinite Earths and its related crossovers.

I am pretty sure that I would have done very little more than that had I not spent part of the summer of 1991 down in Florida visiting my friend Chris and reading through all of his X-Men comics, especially one of his five different versions of X-Men #1 as well as most of the others in Jim Lee’s Uncanny run, quite a few Todd McFarlane Spider-Man books and the first issue of a new book called Spawn, a copy of which he’d bought me for my birthday.  That trip, which included spending a lot of money at two different comic book stores, was one of the most important trips I’d ever taken in terms of comic collecting for several reasons, one of which was that I got the chance to leaf through a few copies of Wizard.

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Interlude (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Six)

The Titans contemplate death (and Gar Logan's mullet) at the funeral for Jericho while Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, looks on from afar.

Traditionally, the issues after a big storyline in a comic book are pretty tame.  Unless the reader knows that something big is right around the corner, a writer will spend that next issue cooling things down, whether it be Superman and Batman stopping a one-of villain or X-Factor going into therapy.

Marv Wolfman, over the course of his run on New Teen Titans and New Titans, became somewhat of an expert at the post-event story, starting all the way back in 1981 with “Private Lives,” the acclaimed story in New Teen Titans #8.  The team had just formed, encountered Deathstroke, and fought back both Trigon and the Fearsome Five, so Wolfman and George Perez took an issue to show the heroes getting their lives in order before ramping up a multi-issue storyline that involved Deathstroke, the Titans of Myth, and a hunt for the killers of the Doom Patrol.  Similarly, the parade/camping issue of #6 of the Baxter series came between a Trigon and Titans of Myth story.

There seems to be a pattern there.

Anyway, Wolfman seemed to be very aware that big events or moments, especially tragic ones, don’t end neatly, and many take a long time to resolve.  The most famous new Teen Titans storyline of all, “The Judas Contract” (which I will delve into one day) officially endedn in New Teen Titans Annual #3, but there was action versus one of that story’s villains–The HIVE–for three more issues, and the resolution between the titans and Deathstroke wouldn’t come up until nearly a year later with a scene in a coffee shop.

So it is with “Titans Hunt/The Jericho Gambit.”  At the end of New Titans #84, the Titans have escaped what’s left of Azareth and are sitting around wondering: a) what the hell just happened, b) what’s going to happen next, and c) does anyone have some clothes we can borrow?  When “Dirge” begins in issue #85, what happens next is Jericho’s funeral, which Slade Wilson does not officially attend (he chooses the tried and true tactic of being in the cemetery but staying far away from everyone) and that leads to resentment from our heroes, who are already acting self-righteous because he killed his own son.  Then again, you can kind of excuse it because they’re obviously working through some serious grief.

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XOXO

One of my favorite things about looking at old commercials, especially those from when I was a kid, is how someone thought that their idea was what kids back then thought looked cool.  Granted, in 1988 this wasn’t very hard.  I mean, this was the decade where you could put a bunch of random cartoon characters on screen for thirty seconds and tell us there was a toy involved and parents would be beating one another down in parking lots for the toys.

But those were toys.  How did you sell something that wasn’t a toy, or say a movie that looked like it would have cool toys?  How did you sell, for instance, food?

A few weeks ago, I took a glance at an old McDonald’s commercial, which was this sappy brother-sister number where the brother is obviously stalking his sister but it’s supposed to be all cute because he offers her a french fry or something.  Phone company commercials from that era are noted for this type of syrupy fun, and soft drink commercials?  Well, I’ve already talked about the epic nature of Dr. Pepper’s early 1990s ad campaign and at some point I’m going to get around to Coke.

But a lot of those commercials weren’t specifically geared towards kids, mainly because kids weren’t the only people going to drink Coke or go to McDonald’s.  However, we were the people most likely to eat Chef Boyardee.

Canned pasta has been around for what seems like eons (I think that’s its shelf-life, too) and there have been quite a number of products geared towards kids, such as Franco-American’s Spaghetti-O’s and Chef Boyardee’s Tic Tac Toe’s (yeah, I know it’s a misused apostrophe … it was their mistake, not mine).  The former is somewhat of an American institution because even those of us who have never eaten a single Spaghetti-O know the jingle “Uh oh, Spaghetti-O’s!”  Tic Tac Toe’s, however, don’t enjoy the same iconic status.  In fact, they’re not even made anymore.

But back in the late 1980s, the pasta company tried to break Spaghetti-Os monopoly on kids’ pasta consciousness and unveiled one of those commercials that I have never been able to get out of my head since:

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Revolution!

Stephanie Kaye next to one of the many "Out of the way Stephanie Kaye" posters that were up in the halls of DJH. Yes, they made posters. Photo from Degrassi Online.

Lately, when I’ve rewatched old Degrassi Junior High episodes, I’ve been marveling not only how realistic it is but how typical the plots seem to be.  Not cliche, mind you, but a lot of the episodes seem to be what I would expect from the junior high/high school drama genre:  drugs, sex, alcohol stories that are just “hard” enough so that you can picture a person of that age dealing with the issues.

Furthermore, when it comes to character development there are expected outcomes to the way certain characters act or consequences for their actions, even if the consequences come a few episodes down the road.  In the first season of DJH, Stephanie Kaye was one of the spotlight characters, or at least one of the characters that I remember being so prominent.  Her big struggle through that season, which detailed the first half of her eighth grade year, was how to deal with being popular while becoming more mature.  The last episode I discussed, “Best Laid Plans” addressed that, especially how she wore provocative clothing while at school yet dressed “down” at home.  We also saw how she treated her younger step-brother, Arthur, like crap.

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If I could just hold you again

When it comes to nostalgia, there are those things that are true memories and those which are false memories.  No decade has more of this going for it than the 1980s.  Eighties nostalgia is a juggernaut that began when I was in high school back in the early 1990s and really hasn’t stopped since, especially since I’ve had students who say they’re nostalgic for the 1980s, something I find hilarious considering they weren’t really old enough to remember it (And no, they don’t, because that would be like me saying I remember the 1970s when I was born in 1977 and my only memory of anything world events before 1981 is seeing Jimmy Carter on a television screen.  That might be a 1970s memory but it doesn’t exactly put me inside Studio 54).

If you are truly a Child of the Eighties, you are fully aware of these two sides of nostalgia because for every movie, television show, compilation album, or Glee medley that says, “Remember Eighties?  Here it is!  No, don’t think about anything that really happened.  This is Eighties.  Enjoy these memories.”  You’re not supposed to remember that Wang Chung had three good songs, only that they recorded “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” and made a seizure-inducing video to go along with it.  You’re not supposed to remember Fresh Horses, the piece-of-crap other Molly Ringwald/Andrew McCarthy flick, just Pretty In Pink.  And you’re not supposed to remember the Cloris Leachman years of The Facts of Life.

Okay, sorry about that last one.

Anyway, I’m one of those people who will listen to a flashback station on Sirius and be happy that Alan Hunter has decided to play “Stone in Love” instead of “Don’t Stop Believin'” for the hour’s dose of Journey.  Maybe it’s because I’m a nostalgia dork, or maybe it’s because I’ve been exposed to so much Eighties nostalgia for the past two decades that I need more than something that scratches the surface.  I think that everyone reaches that point in his life, where he wants more than just another playing of “Hungry Like the Wolf,” and usually there is one work that serves as a trigger for the true memories that lie beneath the VH-1-produced surface.  For me, it was “At This Moment” by Billy Vera and the Beaters.

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Can I Have Christmas Chocolate?

My English classes this week were reading Dylan Thomas’s short story “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which is a cute story about –well, the title’s kind of self-explanatory.  But what I love about the story, besides Thomas’s use of the English language, especially in his imagery and his wit, is that it’s one of the few Christmas stories that I have read (or seen on TV) that doesn’t attempt to teach me any sort of lesson.  Instead of Scrooge, etc. learning the “meaning of Christmas,” Dylan Thomas simply talks about the Christmases of his youth as a matter of fact.  I’m not sure if my students enjoyed the story (most of them spent two days either bitching about the fact that they had to be in school when every other school district in the area had the entire week off, or attempting to sleep), but we had a great discussion about holiday traditions and why we enjoy them so much.

Over the course of this discussion, I brought up some of the things my family has done since I was a little kid.  This included such time-honored traditions as my mother forcing my sister and I to sit at the top of our stairs and take a picture, getting a toothbrush in our stockings, and the long arduous process of opening the gifts under the tree.  Furthermore, I talked about how when you get to be my age and you have a family on your own, you find yourself either starting new traditions or carrying on old traditions either by yourself or with your siblings or children.  One such tradition has been holding on to the idea that while Christmas is a day, there is a whole Christmas season.

The idea of Advent has been around for at least a few hundred years and is marked in several ways by different religious denominations.  I grew up attending the Lutheran church and the tradition there was that during the four Sunday services prior to Christmas, there would be an advent wreath, which is a wreath with five candles (four purple candles in a circle and a white one in the center), sitting near the altar.  At the beginning of the service, the acolyte (which I think is what Catholics would call an “altar boy”) would light one of the purples candles (each a different shade of purple and I believe with a meaning, which I once knew, but my rejection of most things religious in my teens and twenties and suppression of Sunday School trauma led to this information being purged from my memories), with the  white one for Christmas Eve/Day to signify the birth of Christ. 

However, this wasn’t the only way I knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.  There’s been the obvious running of the Christmas shopping gauntlet and a barrage of Christmas-themed television specials and movies (as well as short stories in my English classes), but the most important one, since I’ve been a kid, has been the PeA advent calendar. 

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The Routine

A "fall in the suburbs" shot of a brother and sister that's worth some caption about Americana, but I can't think of one.

In the middle of my sister’s wedding last month, I walked over to her and said jokingly, “Now we are so happy, we do the dance of joy!”  She finished the sentence along with me, as it’s one of the many weird in-joked the two of us have, most of which have something to dow ith the countless hours of crappy 1980s-era sitcoms that we grew up watching in syndication because my father was too cheap to spring for cable. 

It is entirely fitting, by the way, that I turn to sitcoms when I think about what growing up with my sister was like.  I know brothers and sisters who are weirdly close, or have one of those relationships where the brother may as well be another father.  I also know brothers who are perfect confidants and had greeting-card upbringings.  While Nancy and I had annoyingly ordinary childhoods, we weren’t exactly the Cleavers of the Bradys.  On some level I guess you could say we were the Cunninghams, even though my parents didn’t have an older child who mysteriously disappeared (I’ve always thought that Chuck Cunningham was an early anti-war activist and a member of the communist party so Mr. C. drove him to the Canadian border under the cover of night because while he loved his son, he was proud of his country and didn’t want to face the humiliation of HUAC) and none of my friends were cool guys who lived above my parents’ garage.  Besides, we didn’t really grow up watching Happy Days unless WPIX was rerunning it in the afternoons.

No, we were more accustomed to vegging out in front of stuff like Growing Pains, The Wonder Years, Full House, or Charles in Charge.  Full House, especially, stuck with us over the yars because it gave my sister her longest-running nickname (unless you count the Wonder Years reference “butthead”).

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The Jericho Gambit (My Life as a Teen Titan, Part Five)

The cover to The New Titans #82, picking up where we left off four issues ago.

Is it me or does it seem that I’m taking forever to get through coverage of what amounts to about 12 issues of Titans comics?  Well, I guess when you’re doing these once a month it is going to take a while, but in thinking of what it was like to buy New Titans off the shelf back in the early 1990s this is very appropriate.  The title, creatively, was doing very well and what the new editor, Jon Peterson had brought was the shot in the arm it had so desperately needed.  However, there were several times where it was terribly late, and that makes it kind of surprising that within a year or so it would be selling well at all.

Who knows why fans put up with it?  Perhaps having a book run a couple of weeks late isn’t that bad in the beginning of the Image Comics era of books that would ship late up to a year (to the point where it would become a running joke), although DC was able to get four Superman titles out on time each month, so it’s not like their operation was a complete disaster.

Anyway, I remember riding up to Amazing Comics each month with my money in my pocket and being excited when the book was there and a little dismayed when it wasn’t, although not having Titans meant that I could dive into the back issue bins for a few minutes and maybe add to my Wolfman-Perez collection.

It’s also pretty appropriate that I took forever to get to this point because not only had the book been shipping late, but the story itself had been dragging on for a little bit.  Not in an X-Men sort of way, but the last issue that I covered was New Titans #78 and I’m starting this with #82.  There are four issues (three plus an annual) that had a little bit to do with the story but didn’t advance it, and all of which I’ll get to next month when I take a look at the long road to the “Total Chaos” storyline.

For now, though, we have “The Jericho Gambit,” which concluded the “Titans Hunt” in New Titans #82-84.  What “The Jericho Gambit” actually means is beyond me.  Webster’s defines “gambit” as  a chess opening in which a player risks one or more pawns or a minor piece to gain an advantage in position.  No, seriously, that’s what Webster’s says.  I looked it up. But whose opening move is this?  I’d say that Jericho made his gambit back in issue #71 when he kidnapped all of the Titans or maybe even #72 when the ‘beests killed Golden Eagle in an effort to get Aqualad.  I think that they were going for a title that sounded a little like “The Judas Contract,” which is the most famous New Teen Titans storyline (and one I’ll get to at some point), but this time around there was nothing on the cover to indicate the name of the istoryline and I don’t know how much the book was advertised.  From what I remember, It wasn’t covered in Wizard (then again, DC had to kill Superman in order to get coverage in Wizard).

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Roy Rogers Rides Into the Sunset

The last Roy Rogers on Long Island.

This afternoon, my sister informed me that the last remaining Roy Rogers restaurant on Long Island, located off of Sunrise Highway and the William Floyd Parkway in Shirley, has closed its doors.  She linked to a story on Newsday but because Newsday and Cablevision have teamed up to nickel and dime everyone for everything, I wasn’t able to read the story.  But the gist is that Hardee’s (which owns the franchise) decided not to renew the restaurant’s lease.

It truly is the end of an era.  Roy Rogers was one of the only fast food restaurants in the Sayville area when I was a kid, located on Sunrise Highway near Johnson Avenue in the same shopping center as TSS.  That location closed in the early 1990s and I believe a Vitamin Shoppe stands there today.  Not that there aren’t any Roys restaurants out there anyway, especially for those of us traveling up and down I-95 through the mid-Atlantic corridor, and in the greater Alexandria, Virginia area.

In honor of the demise of Roy Rogers’ presence in my native land, I am reprinting a piece from an old website of mine.  In December 2002, I took my only trip to the Roy Rogers in Shirley, traveling out there with my sister.  I then wrote about it on “Inane Crap”, the site I had at the time.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the photos from that day (somehow they were lost and the Internet archive has been no help).  But you can enjoy my pretentious use of son lyrics and attempts at wit, and at the end of the piece I’ve linked an old Roy Rogers commercial.  So at least there’s something to scroll down to.

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Heaven in a Can

I don’t have much for this week, except that after years of looking for this commercial on YouTube and various websites, I finally found the classic Franco-American turkey gravy commercial where a turkey gravy can actually has a turkey inside of it!  It’s one of my wife’s favorite commercials and a sure sign that it’s now time for the holidays.  A Happy Thanksgiving to all!