MARK AND DEE - The Journey Part 18

MARK AND DEE - The Journey Part 17

MARK AND DEE - The Journey Part 16

MARK AND DEE - The Journey Part 15

Yeah, you're not imaging things... after nearly a year, THE ACTUAL, SEMI-TRUE ADVENTURES OF MARK AND DEE is relaunching, taking up where it left off when my direction got quite de-railed over various reasons...


1. Not happy with how my art and the story in the comic was working out.

2. Dealing with not only my own health situation but also that of my mom, whose health has been up and down over the past year.

3. Our financial situation over the last year got me in a real deep depression.

What's changed?
1. I took this last year to work out the story and do a lot of improvement to my artwork, using new techniques, learning more about cross-hatching and shading and bringing it to the comic strip. Thanks to my own art text books and the invaluable Showcase Presents Batman Vol. 5 where I sat at the feet of the masters (Adams, Novick, Giordano, Brown, and Giella) and studied. The results will become apparent in the next few episodes.

2. We both got better.

3. We paid off a huge debt we've owed for years, freeing much monthly income. Still more debt to pay, but we're finally seeing that light at the end of the tunnel.

So, newly re-energized and eager to pick up where I left off, and in the tradition of the great Lee Falk...

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO CAME IN LATE:

As Mark prepares for his trip to Los Angeles to meet with a publishing firm interested in his comic strip, his best friend Mickey Walton, prepping his newly acquired comic shop for a grand opening, is abruptly whisked away to England by his girl friend antiquities dealer Tandy Breckinridge. There, Mickey learns much about Tandy... that her family holds an aristocratic title, a sprawling mansion near London, and have a job for Mickey to take on, which, for now, is a secret....

Getting Back on Track

An afternoon with nothing to do, and quite a while since I've sounded out around here. So let's get started:

First off, a big event is coming up this weekend at my church The Crossing: our monthly Open Mike Night, hosted by my brother Tim (a musician on the rise, trust me!), featuring the fabulous talent of our church members or anyone who has an itch to perform (singing, acting, poetry reading, etc.). All acts must be family-friendly, but not necessarily religious oriented. Here in Columbus, Indiana, the show will kick off this Friday at 7:00 PM at The Crossing in the Roviar Building, Second Floor, 316 12th Str., in the Teen Room. Dee and I have something very special planned during our set, and we're just dying to show off.

*****

Trying to get my near-to-capacity DVR harddrive cleared off, which is very hard to do during "Sweeps Month", as some cockamammie series or another pops up out of nowhere. But there are some really great shows that have caught my eye this season:

Being Human: I haven't seen all of the BBC original this comes from, but I'll get around to it eventually. Meantime, it did take me a while to get to the Syfy series, but I'm fully onboard and eagerly awaiting the next episode of the second season.


For those out of the loop, the American series (as in the British version) revolves around three Boston roommates: Aidan McCollin (Smallville's Sam Witwer), a male nurse who is also a vampire, Josh Levison (Superman Returns' Sam Huntington), a neurotic Jewish werewolf working as a hospital orderly, and Meaghan Rath as Sally Malik, a ghost who haunts the house that Aidan and Josh have leased from the man who murdered her. Despite the pressures of their current conditions and those of the secret world of the supernatural, the three are determined to cope by living as normal lives as possible. It's a show rich in a great mythology that unfolds a little bit every episode, and the chemistry of the cast just clicks with great dialogue.


Last season was mostly centered around Aidan's attempts to free himself from the control of his sire Bishop and his Mafia-like attempt to wipe out the governing council known as "The Dutch", taking over the Boston vampire syndicate. Winding through this compelling plotline was Josh's love for a beautiful co-worker, Nora (Kristen Hager) and his fear that she (and his immediate family) would discover his secret life and Sally's journey of self-discovery as a ghost as well as learning the truth about her murder.


This season, Nora must deal with two new developments in her life with Josh, Sally is trying to escape her limitations with the help of other ghosts and a nurse at the hospital who helps lost spirits "reincarnate", Aidan deals with the reprecussions of his fateful battle with Bishop, and Josh is desperately trying to develop a cure for his lycanthropy with the help of a brother and a sister who are full bred werewolves. Our three protagonists are facing the temptations that have fallen in their path to "being human", and it's certainly going to be interesting in how they extricate themselves... if they can. (Syfy, 10:00 PM EST Mondays)

Justified: He's like Andy Griffith, only armed and pissed off. He's U.S. Deputy Marshall Raylan Givens, the creation of mystery novelist Elmore Leonard. He's two-gun justice, a man out of place in the 21st Century, and whether his fellow officers want to admit it or not, he's Kentucky's No. 1 deterent to crime.

And the bad guys he goes up against aren't the typical cardboard cut-outs from every third rate cop show. More often than not, they're folks Raylan has known since childhood growing up in his native Harlan County, a mining area hit by hard times, forcing many of the residents to make choices for the worst. And Raylan often finds himself in the unenviable position of having to haul them in, either in handcuffs or with tags on their toes.

Timothy Olyphant, previously best known for his role as Sheriff Seth Bullock on HBO's Deadwood, brilliantly plays Marshall Rayland as a man who grew up on classic Western TV shows and firmly believes that the best way to deliver true justice is a bullet in the skull than in the belly. He's not perfect by any means, both in the field and his personal life (he recently broke up his ex-wife's marraige to a shifty real estate broker and the two are expecting a baby Raylan). And for his amazing efforts, Olyphant has been nominated for Emmys two years in a row, and may be working on his third as of this date.

Of course every iconic hero has to have an arch-villain, and in that we have the perfect yang to Raylan's yin, Boyd Crowder, as portrayed by The Shield's Walter Goggins. A boyhood friend of Raylan's, Boyd went bad at an early age and just kept getting worse. Originally the leader of a neo-Nazi crime ring in Harlan, his initial encounter with Raylan upon the marshall's return to Harlan left him severely wounded, his organization in ruins, and, supposedly, Boyd repentant of his prior misdeeds. Throughout the last two seasons, Raylan and Boyd have found themselves united to a common cause, as any good adversaries should. But Boyd is trying to rebuild his criminal empire, and his hillbilly exterior masks a calculating mind that will go to any lengths to make that a reality. And Raylan is the black cat crossing his path.

Tuesdays at 10:00 PM EST on FX just don't come soon enough for me.

I'll be back with more stuff very soon.

Saturday Night Live (with the Dooleys)

Things have been kinda mixed for us as 2012 kicked off... no sooner did the new year start than I wound up with the sniffles, which graduated into full-blown pestilence. And its timing could not have been more perfect, as I had scored fairly good tickets to the Saturday night Pacers game, the first one we've attended in almost four years. The Charlotte Bobcats were in town, and it was great to see most every seat in the Conse- er, sorry, Bankers Life Fieldhouse, filled, whereas over the past four years you couldn't get people to come to the games with a shotgun. Even the security people and Fieldhouse ushers were just super enthusiastic, some remarking to us just how much fun it was to see the crowds back and the love for the Pacers along with them. Many, many props to Coach Frank Vogel, who turned what was once the NBA laughing stock into a team to be feared come playoff time. 

Dee and I made a night of it in downtown Indianapolis, taking in dining at the Hardrock Cafe, then doing a little sightseeing at the Circle Center Mall, while desperately ducking at least a dozen ticket scalpers. I was feeling much better by gametime, and with the 20 pounds I'd taken off over the last few weeks, my legs weren't as sore from the stair climbing and the several blocks of walking we did.

Not only did we get to see the Pacers come from behind during the second half and deliver a sensational 22-point lead at the end of the game (this despite a fearful injury in the third quarter to Ron Hibbard's ankle that put him out of the game... until he came roaring back in the fourth), we got coupons for free milk shakes at Steak and Shake! Perfect end to a perfect day.

Showcase Presents Batman Vol. 5: A Life-changing Tome

DC has recently released the fifth volume of their Showcase Presents Batman series, reprinting the entire run of Batman stories from the debut of the "New Look" in 1964 to the present in inexpensive phonebook-sized editions in black-and-white, and this is the collection containing stories that, for me, not only launched my seriously taking up comic collecting but also defined my love for the character and appreciation of the art of comics. My passion for creating my own comics was directly inspired by these tales, now conveniently stored in this single volume.

As a young teenager in 1970, I'd been separated from comics for about three years, having been moved from my beloved downtown apartment in Columbus, Indiana to a house in the township of Newburn about twenty miles away... far away from the wonderful stores I regularly bought my comics from during the super-hero fad of the mid-sixties. Things were not good between my Mom and my stepdad, as he had become very abusive toward all of us and her in particular. And I was facing a lot of problems at school with bullying, which at one point forced me to forego taking the regular school bus back to Newburn and walking the three-mile distance from the north side of town to the downtown area and my grandparents' house on 2nd Str.

Between the two were the recently rebuilt Cleo Rogers Library, where I could pick up any number of great books, and my three favorite places to buy comics... Nagel's Bookstore (if you couldn't find it at Nagel's, it hadn't been published), Murphy's 5-and-10, and Cummins' Bookstore, all within a half-block radius of one another. Mom was initially alarmed by my walking so great a distance by myself, but Grandma and Grandpa’s house was on the way home from her workplace, and I promised not to do it except on the days new comics came out (which actually back then was every Tuesday and Thursday) and I went directly from there to the Grands.

Well, came the day I walked into Murphy’s and saw the comic that would change my life forever… Batman #222, with the eerie Neal Adams cover of Batman and Robin huddled in the shadows of a graveyard and observing what appeared to be the Beatles walking away in single file from a freshly-covered grave in a bizarre tribute to the Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper album covers.

Having been a late-blooming Beatles fan for the last couple of years and curious to see how things had been going for the Dynamic Duo since the Batman fad faded in 1968, I picked up the issue (even though I found that comics were now at the unheard-of price of fifteen cents! Highway robbery!).

What I found in those pages was an excellent mystery rendered by writer Frank Robbins, “Dead… Till Proven Alive!”, a send-up to the “Paul is Dead” era of the Beatles’ careers, excellently rendered by artists Irv Novick and Dick Giordano. Besides the nifty story, I was gobsmacked by the facts that Dick Grayson was no longer living at Wayne Manor, and was now a full-fledged college student only occasionally teaming with Batman when he was on leave, and that Wayne Manor and the Batcave had been closed down for some time, as Bruce was now living at the main Wayne Enterprises building and operating a new Batcave below it.

But what really changed everything for me, changed everything I knew about Batman, was the back-up story, also superbly illustrated by Irv and Dick, and written by Mike Friedrich, “Case of No Consequence”.

It was unlike any Batman story I’d ever read. No Robin, no arch-villains, no Batmobile, no gadgets… just a weary man in a costume, beaten and broken by his brutal vocation, trying to make his way back home in the wee hours of the morning, and suddenly having to come to the aid of a mugging victim, a deaf photographer whose thin wallet and means of support, his camera, were stolen by a cheap petty crook. Despite the temptation to walk away and turn the case over to the local cops, Batman spends his dwindling energy to pursue the punk and render justice.

To say the least, I was absolutely absorbed by everything… the grittiness of the writing, the fact that the bat costume was no longer just another super-hero costume but like a living creature itself, the deftly rendered nourish artwork, and that the true meaning of the Batman concept had finally been restored after years of being buried by the camp era.

It was the equivalent of that fateful bat flying into Bruce Wayne’s foyer, bringing him the icon he was searching for to launch his crimefighting career. I wanted to become a writer and artist of comic books... and the best way to do that was to study.

My comic buying, particularly with any new Batman comics, would pick up steam over the next few months. Batman #224, “Carnival of the Cursed”, took Batman out of Gotham and into the heart of New Orleans, courtesy of writer Denny O’Neil and artists Irv and Dick, searching for the murderer of a famed jazz musician. Again, none of the usual trappings of a gimmick-filled Batman story of the 1960’s… just one determined man using his mind and body to hunt down a bizarre killer in the perfect setting of Mardi Gras.

And that pretty much sealed the deal.

I picked up practically every Batman book I could get my hands on. I made some pretty nice deals with a comic-collecting friend of mine to swap some old books for much of his Batman collection, which got me up to speed on everything that was going on with the Caped Crusader.

The next book I picked up off the newsstand was Detective Comics #402, “Man or Bat?”, the second appearance of Prof. Kirk Langstrom, the Man-Bat, written by Robbins and illustrated by Dick Giordano and a man who would become one of my idols, Neal Adams. Langstrom’s final metamorph, the sprouting of giant wings, gave me nightmares for weeks.

One of the eeriest stories that have made it to this volume is “The Demon of Gothos Manor” from Batman #227, marking the second appearance of Alfred’s niece Daphne, whose kidnapping by a demon-worshipping cult draws the Batman into a gothic tale of the supernatural. Recommendation: this story is at its best when you play “Green-Eyed Lady” by Sugarloaf in the background.

Also, the League of Assassins made its first appearance in Detective Comics #405, “The First of the Assassins”, a meeting that would eventually lead to Batman’s confrontation with Ra`s Al Ghul and his daughter Talia… moments that will undoubtedly be found in the next volume.

And these are just a few of the classic stories to be found in this book.

There are not enough stars on the grid to recommend this great volume. Coupled with the fact that I lost many of these to the flood of 2009, this book is more than a treasure. It’s the seed of my years as a true fan of comics.

By the way, if there are some of you who reject stark black-and-white reprints in favor of color (no matter that these are invaluable as a study of inking styles uncluttered by the generally poor color press process of the time), well, that's why God made Crayons.