Here you'll find some fine pieces of short fiction and humor by best-selling author Joe Quirk, British humorist Chris Wright, prolific poet Max Kleinman, and comic book veterans Tim Hamilton, Paul Kupperberg, and Mindy Newell. You'll find our humor writing at three other websites:
Million Dollar Ideas is a novel about a couple of down-at-the-heels screenwriters in '40s Hollywood who don't have much talent for anything but a speedy rewrite—except for one extraordinary ability that turns out to be both their great gift and their great curse. And if you like Ed and Johnny, you'll probably enjoy exploring Million Dollar Ideas—The Photonovel, where we've posted a ton of period photos illustrating the chapters.
Meanwhile, on our sister website, My Pal Splendid Man, we're uploading a series of stories about the odd friendship between the greatest superhero in the cosmos and his singularly un-super and un-splendid friend, a would-be writer named Will Jones...all with a subtext that dares not speak its name!
And now we're bringing you The Burly Boys, about America's greatest teenage detectives, idols of millions of wholesome boys, who follow the trail of a missing girl out of the idyllic confines of Balmy Bay to a stranger world than they could ever have imagined: San Francisco at the height of the Summer of Love.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Poems of Max Kleinman
Max Kleinman is a Korean War veteran, a long-time resident of downtown San Jose, California, and the author of 30,000 poems.
HOT SHOT
I pulled up to her in
My ’57 Nash
The sun beat down
On my shrapnel
She got in (and I got lucky)
Opening the door to Korea
Opening the door to cheap wine
Opening the door to my apartment
We settle for Mantovani
And candle light with the curtains drawn
The heat is unbearable as we
Jockey for position
And race to beat the dawn
MY HEART SKIPS A BEAT
Down that narrow street
Away from my life
Away from my money
Away from my fine talents
Her body is concealed in a skin
That hides her heart
That hides her birthmark
That hides her blue-eyed soul
She turns the corner
As a priest races to the rescue
With an act of Extreme Unction
Trailing out from his mouth
THE SKY IS WHISTLING
I kiss her goodbye at the
Doorstep
Of the abortion clinic
Dead babies
Mean nothing
When the sky is whistling
ATOMIC BREATH
If only Rilke could have been
Alive
To see man scampering about the
Moon
Like poets without college degrees
Trying to get in print
He might have opened up a
Workshop
In the Santa Cruz Hills
And taught
Astronauts
How to describe the smell of
Daisies
After a heavy rain
When the breath of
Hiroshima
Gargles with Listerine
And auto mechanics
Contemplate suicide
In the vaginal dawn
MY TANK AND WELCOME TO IT (#1)
Augustus is nothing
Aquinas passes into air
The host is spilled
Steel is your communion
MY TANK AND WELCOME TO IT (#2)
Let loose the dogs of war
Said Caesar
He didn’t have to push
The shovel after them
Once in a tank
You never leave it
Except for occasional
Rinses in the john
And quests for the one good beer
Wine dribbles down your lips
Or is it blood?
You clean the barrel with your words
You grease the wheels in your dreams
You pry bullets from your shell
And scrape gooks from your treads
Do they scream?
Only in your sister’s dreams
She creams on them
Let her lie
The cigarette burns low
The ducks are dying
The dogs of war have had
Their run
The shovel comes to scoop
Us all away
MY TANK AND WELCOME TO IT (#4)
I built a tank in my living room
I thought it would bring you back
When you saw it you let your Proust
Fall to the floor
And your sprouts turn brown
You spoke the words to me
I had waited twenty years to hear
You spoke them in French
And I did not understand
You left again
At the usual time
Like Kant
I thought
And, like Kant, I saw
Life turn to ochre in your eyes
A HAIKU MISCELLANY
Screeching brakes and thumps
A backpack on the sidewalk
Has been disemboweled
The bottle shatters
The eight ball falls to the floor
The nun lies bleeding
The two dogs eat meat
The have both eaten their fill
The nun is now gone
The shrapnel has come
To the grey Korean dawn
The neck awaits it
A black sparrow falls
Who will smear it on the street?
Kenji Shibuya
TWO ROSY BEADS
Her habit’s become a habit
The habit she inhabits
She used to be inhibited
But now she’s unhabited
She prays for me, I prey on her
The prey I used to pray for
She used to be prayful
Now she’s playful
And the rosary beads
Come tumbling down
Tumbling as they fall
And the crucifix
Becomes a cross
When Christ turns to the wall
The con crawls through the vent
And hence out of the convent
She used to be a nun
But now she’s on the run
KENTUCKY NUN
She’s quick to flare up
Like a rear-ended
Pinto
“How can you imply that the
Bible
Was wrong?”
She demands
Applying her prime time
Psychology
To the world at large
Only to lose it by
Gaining her soul
She claims to throw pots
But she refuses to
Designate
Where she threw them
“What’s a Zen Buddhist
To do during a
Gasoline shortage?”
I ask
Her eyeballs roll up into her
Head
And her eyelids flutter
Like a freight train
Thundering
Across the plains of
Afghanistan
TAKING THE BACK SEAT BY STORM (#1)
You question my existence
But you cannot question
My protuberance
As it dissects
The lobes of your
Tripartite being
METAL SOUP
The transmigration of a soul
Any soul
Mankind takes a sleeping pill
And pulls the shades
The alarm is set for 7:30 p.m.
But the morning is frozen over Korea
Like metal soup
THE FOUR HORSEMEN RIDE ON A RAINY NIGHT WHEN ALL IS DRY AS DUST
The sun goes out
And there you are
Still in your living room
HOT SHOT
I pulled up to her in
My ’57 Nash
The sun beat down
On my shrapnel
She got in (and I got lucky)
Opening the door to Korea
Opening the door to cheap wine
Opening the door to my apartment
We settle for Mantovani
And candle light with the curtains drawn
The heat is unbearable as we
Jockey for position
And race to beat the dawn
MY HEART SKIPS A BEAT
Down that narrow street
Away from my life
Away from my money
Away from my fine talents
Her body is concealed in a skin
That hides her heart
That hides her birthmark
That hides her blue-eyed soul
She turns the corner
As a priest races to the rescue
With an act of Extreme Unction
Trailing out from his mouth
THE SKY IS WHISTLING
I kiss her goodbye at the
Doorstep
Of the abortion clinic
Dead babies
Mean nothing
When the sky is whistling
ATOMIC BREATH
If only Rilke could have been
Alive
To see man scampering about the
Moon
Like poets without college degrees
Trying to get in print
He might have opened up a
Workshop
In the Santa Cruz Hills
And taught
Astronauts
How to describe the smell of
Daisies
After a heavy rain
When the breath of
Hiroshima
Gargles with Listerine
And auto mechanics
Contemplate suicide
In the vaginal dawn
MY TANK AND WELCOME TO IT (#1)
Augustus is nothing
Aquinas passes into air
The host is spilled
Steel is your communion
MY TANK AND WELCOME TO IT (#2)
Let loose the dogs of war
Said Caesar
He didn’t have to push
The shovel after them
Once in a tank
You never leave it
Except for occasional
Rinses in the john
And quests for the one good beer
Wine dribbles down your lips
Or is it blood?
You clean the barrel with your words
You grease the wheels in your dreams
You pry bullets from your shell
And scrape gooks from your treads
Do they scream?
Only in your sister’s dreams
She creams on them
Let her lie
The cigarette burns low
The ducks are dying
The dogs of war have had
Their run
The shovel comes to scoop
Us all away
MY TANK AND WELCOME TO IT (#4)
I built a tank in my living room
I thought it would bring you back
When you saw it you let your Proust
Fall to the floor
And your sprouts turn brown
You spoke the words to me
I had waited twenty years to hear
You spoke them in French
And I did not understand
You left again
At the usual time
Like Kant
I thought
And, like Kant, I saw
Life turn to ochre in your eyes
A HAIKU MISCELLANY
Screeching brakes and thumps
A backpack on the sidewalk
Has been disemboweled
The bottle shatters
The eight ball falls to the floor
The nun lies bleeding
The two dogs eat meat
The have both eaten their fill
The nun is now gone
The shrapnel has come
To the grey Korean dawn
The neck awaits it
A black sparrow falls
Who will smear it on the street?
Kenji Shibuya
TWO ROSY BEADS
Her habit’s become a habit
The habit she inhabits
She used to be inhibited
But now she’s unhabited
She prays for me, I prey on her
The prey I used to pray for
She used to be prayful
Now she’s playful
And the rosary beads
Come tumbling down
Tumbling as they fall
And the crucifix
Becomes a cross
When Christ turns to the wall
The con crawls through the vent
And hence out of the convent
She used to be a nun
But now she’s on the run
KENTUCKY NUN
She’s quick to flare up
Like a rear-ended
Pinto
“How can you imply that the
Bible
Was wrong?”
She demands
Applying her prime time
Psychology
To the world at large
Only to lose it by
Gaining her soul
She claims to throw pots
But she refuses to
Designate
Where she threw them
“What’s a Zen Buddhist
To do during a
Gasoline shortage?”
I ask
Her eyeballs roll up into her
Head
And her eyelids flutter
Like a freight train
Thundering
Across the plains of
Afghanistan
TAKING THE BACK SEAT BY STORM (#1)
You question my existence
But you cannot question
My protuberance
As it dissects
The lobes of your
Tripartite being
METAL SOUP
The transmigration of a soul
Any soul
Mankind takes a sleeping pill
And pulls the shades
The alarm is set for 7:30 p.m.
But the morning is frozen over Korea
Like metal soup
THE FOUR HORSEMEN RIDE ON A RAINY NIGHT WHEN ALL IS DRY AS DUST
The sun goes out
And there you are
Still in your living room
Friday, November 7, 2008
Female Promiscuity Controls the Size of Your Testicles
An excerpt from Joe Quirk's book, It's Not You. It's Biology: The Science of Love, Sex & Relationships, which has been translated into 16 languages. Joe is also the author of The Ultimate Rush, a Boston Globe bestseller.
Psychics gaze into crystal balls and tell you vague things about your future. Biologists gaze at your actual balls and tell you precise things about the scandalous behavior of women in our ancestral past.
Breeding experiments with sheep and mice have illustrated the testicle phenomenon swimmingly. Over the generations, monogamous female mice and sheep have little effect on the size of the males’ gonads. But female mice and sheep who are monogamous in public—but promiscuous in secret—quickly cause the evolution of larger gonads in the males.
Let’s take a close-up look at your testicles.
First let’s measure output. This is no time for squeamishness. When it comes to male ejaculations, biologists take a hands-on approach. The sperm populations of different ejaculate have been measured and quantified. The proof is in the pudding.
Fellahs, you may trust your wife, but your sperm don’t. Measurements show that men, returning home from a long trip, produce a more prodigious amount of sperm—up to 300% more!—for their first copulation with their mate than at any other time. If men see their mate every day, they produce a conservative amount of sperm. The longer the woman is out of sight, the more the male burns extra energy going into sperm production overdrive.
And sperm don’t call in reinforcements just to compete with each other. Sperm use teamwork. Many sperm don’t try to reach the egg, but fan out in kamikaze blocking maneuvers so comrade sperm can reach the coveted egg. It looks a lot like an American football team blocking for their runners. Get out your microscope and watch these mindless little guys run plays.
Teamwork evolves in nature for one reason: to compete against another team. But where is the other team? Who are these sperm blocking and out-flanking? It’s as if the sperm think there is another group of sperm in there.
The scientist’s answer: In all apes, testicle-weight as a ratio to male body-weight correlates with the frequency of female “extra-pair copulations.”
In English: Male chimps have big balls, because female chimps are big sluts. The second a female goes into heat, she sends signals that no human of propriety would consider decent. She inflames her posterior, douses the whole tribe in scent, and tries to copulate with every male she fancies. Female chimps exercise some discrimination, but not a whole heck of a lot compared to a human female. Soon we’ll find out why chimpettes defy the standard model of the coy female.
You’d think this would be paradise for the males. Wrong. Every male chimp is a cuckold. Chimp alpha males are in a tizzy, running around trying to stop secret copulations between females and lower-ranking males, but the female drive for sexual variety outwits the male chimps while they are busy fighting. Alphas can only control one or two of these nymphomaniacs at once, who throw themselves on male penises every time the alpha male’s back is turned. Males can only strategize for a higher percentage of copulations, never for faithfulness. When a chimp female in heat presents her posterior to a male, there could be any number of different guys’ sperms already swimming around in there.
This is why primatologists never watch TV. When females go into estrus, the chimp-offs are pure entertainment. It’s funny, violent, full of chases and trickery, and it’s X-rated—imagine a pornographic Three Stooges-- and the researchers get to claim that counting erections is scientific research.
But let’s recover our scientific gravitas. For it’s not until chimp sperm are analyzed that sexual competition takes on an epic scale. So many gallons of semen go into horny female chimps, the sperm have evolved to work as huge armies. They fan out like S.W.A.T. teams, seek and destroy foreign sperm using chemical warfare, swim like speedboats for the egg. Ninety-nine percent of sperm aren’t even sperm. They are anti-sperm, semen of mass destruction. Inside the chimpanzee vaginal tract, it’s a battleground much like an ant battle. The sperm fight it out inside her, leaving only a few sperm standing, from which the egg chooses her favorite.
When it comes to the sexual competition of chimps, some of the competition goes on between the big beasts, but most of the competition goes on between the sperm. Often it’s a war of attrition. The higher your sperm count, the better your reproductive chances. You better believe these chimps are bred for balls.
When the chimp babies are born, nobody knows who is the father of whom, so the male chimps have evolved shared paternity. Female promiscuity pays off in many vaguely interested fathers. Chimpanzee genes have achieved something human ideology never will: socialist paternity: not much incentive, just a shared half-assed sense of duty.
Remember this scientific principle: The sluttier the females, the bigger the balls.
So where do Homo sapiens females fall on the Slut Scale? Let’s check the ball barometer of other apes.
Gorillas have teeny weeny testicles. But they have big shoulders, fangs, and brow ridges. The competition goes on between the big beasts. Sperm can take it easy. There’s no selection pressure for them to compete with other sperm, because nobody has sex with an alpha male’s female without killing the alpha male. Female gorillas are faithful to the promiscuous alpha male. As a result, gorilla sperm can barely figure out which way to swim. Under the microscope, chimp sperm look like Patton’s D-Day, and gorilla sperm look like Hogan’s Heros. The male gorilla only gets to mate a couple times a year at most, and his teensy testicles are all he needs to get the job done.
The orangutan male-to-testicle ratio is slightly bigger than the gorilla’s to account for the rare instance of a two-timing female orangutan.
Look at you, you big ape. Yes, I’m talking to you, Homo sapiens male. What ornaments do you have to distinguish you from a female? Feeble knuckles, slightly more upper body strength, a beard, an ability to read maps, a refusal to use this ability.
Now look at your testicles. Compared to more monogamous apes, yours are slightly ... hefty.
Like your brain. Which co-evolved to impress the big brains of females, which co-evolved to impress your big brain. Everything big on you, Homo sapiens male, is big by female choice. Your brain is to wow her with your creations. Your oversized penis—humongous compared to other apes—is to please her sexually. Your balls ...
... well, your balls are just big enough to suggest that while you were out hunting on the savanna, back on the Pleistocene homestead, women were having a ball.
Sure, rest assured, they don’t approach the gigantism of a chimp’s. His orgying females have bred his balls to balloon to absurd sizes. Your testicles are one-fourth the body-to-ball ratio of a chimp. But they’re four times the body-to-ball ratio of a gorilla. Look at the faithful female gorillas. Look at the promiscuous female chimps. You fall exactly in between.
To produce enough sperm to fertilize a woman, we only need one half of one ball max. That explains how Benedict Arnold had children. Our balls are an eloquent testament to sneaky hominid women.
Yes, I said sneaky. There is little chance that Pleistocene females attained extra-pair copulations with her mate’s permission. The violent jealousy of Homo sapiens males is well-established. Psychologist David M. Buss’s studies of wife-killing in the USA and among African tribes found that approximately half were caused by sexual jealousy. In the Sudan, Uganda, and India, sexual jealousy is the leading cause of murder. Worldwide, about 20% of all cases of men murdering men result from rivalry over wives and daughters. Scary stats. Yet hominid females who risked grave consequences to steal a tryst on the side passed on enough genes to be represented in our swollen testicles and paranoid sperm.
You just checked them again, didn’t you?
Go on. Feel their weight. Why so much mass to house such microscopic sperm?
I wish there was an alternative theory, but there ain’t. Without cheating females, balls just don’t get big. Nature doesn’t favor organs that require extra energy costs if they don’t confer reproductive advantage.
Conduct the test yourself if you don’t believe me, Homo sapiens male. Next time you ejaculate, grab your microscope. Scientists usually keep one by the bed. (For some reason this doesn’t impress the ladies, despite the romantic light emanating from the bedroom Bunsen burner, but if you are a truly rigorous scientist, a bedroom guest is a rare occurrence for you anyway.) Analyze your fresh sample.
You’ll notice real sperm don’t act like cartoon sperm. Many sperm clasp tails and hold a rearguard bulwark against intruders for several days. To inseminate a female is not just to invest in possible impregnation; it is literally to block her vaginal tract from rival sperm. That’s why men who have not seen their lovers in a few days can triple their sperm count. This does not happen if the man stays home but just doesn’t have sex for a few days. Even if the conscious mind of the homecoming male is assured his mate is faithful, his sperm have never listened to his brain in evolutionary history. Sperm are worried there will be a united front of foreign sperm standing between them and her ovaries, and they arrive in her vagina ready to rumble. Absence makes the heart grow fonder because absence means rivals, and fondness was created by natural selection because fondness re-secured ancestral bonds. Though I wouldn’t recommend saying this in a love letter.
Our conclusion? It looks like Homo sapiens females evolved in an environment mostly monogamous, but occasionally, females copulated with more than one male on the same day.
Makes you insecure? You were engineered to be insecure, Homo sapiens male. Because you have no positive way of knowing that child is yours. Because jealous men passed on more genes. Because males who would rather kill, die, and mete out severe punishments passed on more genes than men who were fine with their mates accepting sperm donations from other men. We even invented a word for such a fool: cuckold. There is no verbal corollary for a women who is cheated on. No name of shame.
There is a word for promiscuous women, those wily designers of the testicle: slut. There is no corollary for a man who sleeps around. No name of shame. Almost every language in every culture has this double-standard of insults.
Worldwide, the way you insult a male is to tell him his mother is a slut, which is bad. Which means he is a bastard, which is bad. Which means his father was a stud, which is good. In almost all cultures, it’s considered good for males to make women sluts, and make their children bastards, but it’s bad if your mother is a slut or you are a bastard.
These insult double-standards emerged in almost all languages because of statistical differences in how male and female emotions are structured when to protect their genes.
Males of our species should never feel secure in their manhoods until men evolve teensy weensy testicles and disorganized sperm. Our titanic testes are measures of our ancestral cuckoldry.
Next time another male challenges you, “Whatsamatter? Got no balls?” you can answer, “I wish I had less balls.”
Whew! I’m glad that seminal chapter is over with. Now let’s answer The Great Mystery of the Universe.
[Short, R.V. (1979) “Sexual selection and its component parts, somatic and genital selection, as illustrated in man and great apes.” Advances in the Study of Behavior 9: 131-158]
[Short, R.V. (1981) “Testes weight, body weight, and breeding systems in primates.” Nature, 293, 55.]
[Baker, R. and M.A. Bellis. (1995) Human Sperm Competition, Copulation, Masturbation, and Infidelity. Chapman and Hall]
[Buss, D.M. 1994. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies in Human Mating. New York: Basic Books.]
Psychics gaze into crystal balls and tell you vague things about your future. Biologists gaze at your actual balls and tell you precise things about the scandalous behavior of women in our ancestral past.
Breeding experiments with sheep and mice have illustrated the testicle phenomenon swimmingly. Over the generations, monogamous female mice and sheep have little effect on the size of the males’ gonads. But female mice and sheep who are monogamous in public—but promiscuous in secret—quickly cause the evolution of larger gonads in the males.
Let’s take a close-up look at your testicles.
First let’s measure output. This is no time for squeamishness. When it comes to male ejaculations, biologists take a hands-on approach. The sperm populations of different ejaculate have been measured and quantified. The proof is in the pudding.
Fellahs, you may trust your wife, but your sperm don’t. Measurements show that men, returning home from a long trip, produce a more prodigious amount of sperm—up to 300% more!—for their first copulation with their mate than at any other time. If men see their mate every day, they produce a conservative amount of sperm. The longer the woman is out of sight, the more the male burns extra energy going into sperm production overdrive.
And sperm don’t call in reinforcements just to compete with each other. Sperm use teamwork. Many sperm don’t try to reach the egg, but fan out in kamikaze blocking maneuvers so comrade sperm can reach the coveted egg. It looks a lot like an American football team blocking for their runners. Get out your microscope and watch these mindless little guys run plays.
Teamwork evolves in nature for one reason: to compete against another team. But where is the other team? Who are these sperm blocking and out-flanking? It’s as if the sperm think there is another group of sperm in there.
The scientist’s answer: In all apes, testicle-weight as a ratio to male body-weight correlates with the frequency of female “extra-pair copulations.”
In English: Male chimps have big balls, because female chimps are big sluts. The second a female goes into heat, she sends signals that no human of propriety would consider decent. She inflames her posterior, douses the whole tribe in scent, and tries to copulate with every male she fancies. Female chimps exercise some discrimination, but not a whole heck of a lot compared to a human female. Soon we’ll find out why chimpettes defy the standard model of the coy female.
You’d think this would be paradise for the males. Wrong. Every male chimp is a cuckold. Chimp alpha males are in a tizzy, running around trying to stop secret copulations between females and lower-ranking males, but the female drive for sexual variety outwits the male chimps while they are busy fighting. Alphas can only control one or two of these nymphomaniacs at once, who throw themselves on male penises every time the alpha male’s back is turned. Males can only strategize for a higher percentage of copulations, never for faithfulness. When a chimp female in heat presents her posterior to a male, there could be any number of different guys’ sperms already swimming around in there.
This is why primatologists never watch TV. When females go into estrus, the chimp-offs are pure entertainment. It’s funny, violent, full of chases and trickery, and it’s X-rated—imagine a pornographic Three Stooges-- and the researchers get to claim that counting erections is scientific research.
But let’s recover our scientific gravitas. For it’s not until chimp sperm are analyzed that sexual competition takes on an epic scale. So many gallons of semen go into horny female chimps, the sperm have evolved to work as huge armies. They fan out like S.W.A.T. teams, seek and destroy foreign sperm using chemical warfare, swim like speedboats for the egg. Ninety-nine percent of sperm aren’t even sperm. They are anti-sperm, semen of mass destruction. Inside the chimpanzee vaginal tract, it’s a battleground much like an ant battle. The sperm fight it out inside her, leaving only a few sperm standing, from which the egg chooses her favorite.
When it comes to the sexual competition of chimps, some of the competition goes on between the big beasts, but most of the competition goes on between the sperm. Often it’s a war of attrition. The higher your sperm count, the better your reproductive chances. You better believe these chimps are bred for balls.
When the chimp babies are born, nobody knows who is the father of whom, so the male chimps have evolved shared paternity. Female promiscuity pays off in many vaguely interested fathers. Chimpanzee genes have achieved something human ideology never will: socialist paternity: not much incentive, just a shared half-assed sense of duty.
Remember this scientific principle: The sluttier the females, the bigger the balls.
So where do Homo sapiens females fall on the Slut Scale? Let’s check the ball barometer of other apes.
Gorillas have teeny weeny testicles. But they have big shoulders, fangs, and brow ridges. The competition goes on between the big beasts. Sperm can take it easy. There’s no selection pressure for them to compete with other sperm, because nobody has sex with an alpha male’s female without killing the alpha male. Female gorillas are faithful to the promiscuous alpha male. As a result, gorilla sperm can barely figure out which way to swim. Under the microscope, chimp sperm look like Patton’s D-Day, and gorilla sperm look like Hogan’s Heros. The male gorilla only gets to mate a couple times a year at most, and his teensy testicles are all he needs to get the job done.
The orangutan male-to-testicle ratio is slightly bigger than the gorilla’s to account for the rare instance of a two-timing female orangutan.
Look at you, you big ape. Yes, I’m talking to you, Homo sapiens male. What ornaments do you have to distinguish you from a female? Feeble knuckles, slightly more upper body strength, a beard, an ability to read maps, a refusal to use this ability.
Now look at your testicles. Compared to more monogamous apes, yours are slightly ... hefty.
Like your brain. Which co-evolved to impress the big brains of females, which co-evolved to impress your big brain. Everything big on you, Homo sapiens male, is big by female choice. Your brain is to wow her with your creations. Your oversized penis—humongous compared to other apes—is to please her sexually. Your balls ...
... well, your balls are just big enough to suggest that while you were out hunting on the savanna, back on the Pleistocene homestead, women were having a ball.
Sure, rest assured, they don’t approach the gigantism of a chimp’s. His orgying females have bred his balls to balloon to absurd sizes. Your testicles are one-fourth the body-to-ball ratio of a chimp. But they’re four times the body-to-ball ratio of a gorilla. Look at the faithful female gorillas. Look at the promiscuous female chimps. You fall exactly in between.
To produce enough sperm to fertilize a woman, we only need one half of one ball max. That explains how Benedict Arnold had children. Our balls are an eloquent testament to sneaky hominid women.
Yes, I said sneaky. There is little chance that Pleistocene females attained extra-pair copulations with her mate’s permission. The violent jealousy of Homo sapiens males is well-established. Psychologist David M. Buss’s studies of wife-killing in the USA and among African tribes found that approximately half were caused by sexual jealousy. In the Sudan, Uganda, and India, sexual jealousy is the leading cause of murder. Worldwide, about 20% of all cases of men murdering men result from rivalry over wives and daughters. Scary stats. Yet hominid females who risked grave consequences to steal a tryst on the side passed on enough genes to be represented in our swollen testicles and paranoid sperm.
You just checked them again, didn’t you?
Go on. Feel their weight. Why so much mass to house such microscopic sperm?
I wish there was an alternative theory, but there ain’t. Without cheating females, balls just don’t get big. Nature doesn’t favor organs that require extra energy costs if they don’t confer reproductive advantage.
Conduct the test yourself if you don’t believe me, Homo sapiens male. Next time you ejaculate, grab your microscope. Scientists usually keep one by the bed. (For some reason this doesn’t impress the ladies, despite the romantic light emanating from the bedroom Bunsen burner, but if you are a truly rigorous scientist, a bedroom guest is a rare occurrence for you anyway.) Analyze your fresh sample.
You’ll notice real sperm don’t act like cartoon sperm. Many sperm clasp tails and hold a rearguard bulwark against intruders for several days. To inseminate a female is not just to invest in possible impregnation; it is literally to block her vaginal tract from rival sperm. That’s why men who have not seen their lovers in a few days can triple their sperm count. This does not happen if the man stays home but just doesn’t have sex for a few days. Even if the conscious mind of the homecoming male is assured his mate is faithful, his sperm have never listened to his brain in evolutionary history. Sperm are worried there will be a united front of foreign sperm standing between them and her ovaries, and they arrive in her vagina ready to rumble. Absence makes the heart grow fonder because absence means rivals, and fondness was created by natural selection because fondness re-secured ancestral bonds. Though I wouldn’t recommend saying this in a love letter.
Our conclusion? It looks like Homo sapiens females evolved in an environment mostly monogamous, but occasionally, females copulated with more than one male on the same day.
Makes you insecure? You were engineered to be insecure, Homo sapiens male. Because you have no positive way of knowing that child is yours. Because jealous men passed on more genes. Because males who would rather kill, die, and mete out severe punishments passed on more genes than men who were fine with their mates accepting sperm donations from other men. We even invented a word for such a fool: cuckold. There is no verbal corollary for a women who is cheated on. No name of shame.
There is a word for promiscuous women, those wily designers of the testicle: slut. There is no corollary for a man who sleeps around. No name of shame. Almost every language in every culture has this double-standard of insults.
Worldwide, the way you insult a male is to tell him his mother is a slut, which is bad. Which means he is a bastard, which is bad. Which means his father was a stud, which is good. In almost all cultures, it’s considered good for males to make women sluts, and make their children bastards, but it’s bad if your mother is a slut or you are a bastard.
These insult double-standards emerged in almost all languages because of statistical differences in how male and female emotions are structured when to protect their genes.
Males of our species should never feel secure in their manhoods until men evolve teensy weensy testicles and disorganized sperm. Our titanic testes are measures of our ancestral cuckoldry.
Next time another male challenges you, “Whatsamatter? Got no balls?” you can answer, “I wish I had less balls.”
Whew! I’m glad that seminal chapter is over with. Now let’s answer The Great Mystery of the Universe.
[Short, R.V. (1979) “Sexual selection and its component parts, somatic and genital selection, as illustrated in man and great apes.” Advances in the Study of Behavior 9: 131-158]
[Short, R.V. (1981) “Testes weight, body weight, and breeding systems in primates.” Nature, 293, 55.]
[Baker, R. and M.A. Bellis. (1995) Human Sperm Competition, Copulation, Masturbation, and Infidelity. Chapman and Hall]
[Buss, D.M. 1994. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies in Human Mating. New York: Basic Books.]
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Wedding
Our second short story by Mindy Newell. Mindy was writing and editing comics for DC and Marvel back in the days we were also in the business, and is probably best known for her work on Wonder Woman and Catwoman.
The rest of the house was dark and quiet. Everyone was asleep. Except for me. I was 11-going-on-12 and I was absolutely terrified. I lay in my bed and stared at my hand, balling it into a fist, spreading out my fingers, twisting it up and down and all around. My hand was real. It was solid. It was here. I was here. But it was all temporary. One day I would be gone. Death lay ahead of me as sure as my birthday in two weeks. There was no escape. No one could save me. Not Supergirl. Not Peter Pan. Not my little brother or my Mommy and Daddy.
One day I would be dead.
***************************
As usual, I’m late. Jeff and Linda’s wedding has already started as I quietly slip into the last row of pews in the rear of the sanctuary. I had expected to have to stand through the ceremony, as both Jeff and Linda have large families, many friends and important business associates in our town—my mother had warned me that she wouldn’t be able to save a seat for me if I was late, as “everyone who was anyone was coming,” so you better be on time for a change.
But the temple is oddly empty. Only the first 3 or 4 pews are filled. I can see the backs of my daughter, my brother, his wife and my parents all sitting together in the second row, and I think I recognize Renee and Lenny, Jeff’s aunt and uncle, next to them. I see Sandy, Jeff’s mother, in the first pew with Jeff’s older sister and youngest brother, Louis—Barry, two years younger than Jeff and my brother’s best friend, died from Ewing’s Sarcoma, a type of bone cancer, when we all still in high school. There’s a man sitting next to Sandy, but I don’t recognize the hairline. Jeff’s father had died 12 years earlier, a few years after Barry’s death, so obviously it’s not him. I wonder why my mom, the perpetual yenta, hasn’t mentioned Sandy’s new beau.
Another weird thing. Linda’s family isn’t here. I know they are thrilled about their daughter corralling the primo scion of the Walling Jewish community, so I can’t imagine what would keep them away.
All of a sudden I feel like I’m watching a movie that I’ve seen before, only the film is chopped up for commercial time and the colors are a bit faded, like an old print of My Fair Lady before it had been restored to feature length in all its full Technicolor glory and aired without commercials on Turner Classic Movies.
But something is wrong with the television. The wedding is a tableau, an image seen from afar, an episode from The Twilight Zone. The empty pews stretch before me like the headstones at Arlington Cemetery. The aisle stretches towards the altar like a road to eternity. Far down that road my family and friends are gathered in front of the open Temple Ark to celebrate one of life’s most joyous moments.
But I am apart from that joy. I cannot share in it.
I feel terribly alone. And terribly frightened. And I recognize it. That same dread I felt as an 11-going-on-12 child who realized how ephemeral life really is.
I can’t deal. I can’t look at this. I want to close my eyes, but I can’t, so I look everywhere but straight ahead. Up to the gothic ceiling, left to the stained glass windows, right to the empty pew across the aisle—
And Barry is sitting there.
He looks exactly the same as the last time I saw him. No. Not exactly. Then he had been sick, and pale, and three days from death. Barry looks as he had when I was 14, when he and my brother had teased me constantly and mercilessly about my crush on Jeff. Young and full of life. Healthy. Before the cancer. Not dead.
He slides over and I get up and cross the aisle and sit down next to him.
“Hey, Barry,” I say. As if it’s the most ordinary thing in the world that I should be sitting and chatting with a boy twenty years and more in his grave while his brother gets married.
“Hey, Min’,” he says.
“It’s good to see you.”
I think about the man sitting next to Sandy, the one whose hairline I couldn’t recognize. Now it makes sense.
“Your dad’s here, too, isn’t he? Does your mom know he’s here? Does she know you’re here?”
He doesn’t answer me. He just looks at me with eyes that are deep with patience and serene with ancient knowledge.
And then I have a question. “What do you do now, Barry?”
“I help people cross over.”
It makes sense. Barry had always been kind, behind the teasing and laughter.
“Were you there when your father died? Did you help him cross over?”
“Uh-uh. And sometimes I bring them back to visit, like I did today with him, to see Jeff get married.”
He sits and waits, without the appearance of waiting. Just sits.
Until I am ready.
“I’m afraid to die, Barry. Really afraid.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t comfort me, he doesn’t take my hand. He just looks at me with his eyes—the eyes of an angel.
“Will you be there when I die, Barry? Will you help me cross over?”
“I promise.”
“I’m so afraid, Barry.”
He smiles at me. And I jump into that smile, that well of peace, and feel it wash over me.
“Thanks, Barry.”
“See ya, Min.”
And then, I swear to God, deus ex machina or not, I wake up.
*******************
Was it a dream? I mean, was it only a dream, or did Barry really visit me that night? I only know that when I woke up, I still felt that peace, and that peace has stayed with me. I kept it to myself for a very long time; not wanting to share it, not wanting to be told it was only a dream by disbelieving people, not wanting to be laughed at. I especially avoided telling Sandy about it, for years, because I was afraid that somehow it would hurt her, or that I was belittling Barry’s death in some way to her; but I finally did, because I thought she should know. To this day I’m not sure if I did the right thing telling her; did it comfort her, or did she think it was just another one of Laura’s crazy daughter’s imaginings?
After I told Sandy, I told my mom about it, I think to give her a head’s up in case Sandy mentioned it.
I’m not sure what she thought about it, either.
She didn’t laugh.
But she didn’t scoff, either.
The rest of the house was dark and quiet. Everyone was asleep. Except for me. I was 11-going-on-12 and I was absolutely terrified. I lay in my bed and stared at my hand, balling it into a fist, spreading out my fingers, twisting it up and down and all around. My hand was real. It was solid. It was here. I was here. But it was all temporary. One day I would be gone. Death lay ahead of me as sure as my birthday in two weeks. There was no escape. No one could save me. Not Supergirl. Not Peter Pan. Not my little brother or my Mommy and Daddy.
One day I would be dead.
***************************
As usual, I’m late. Jeff and Linda’s wedding has already started as I quietly slip into the last row of pews in the rear of the sanctuary. I had expected to have to stand through the ceremony, as both Jeff and Linda have large families, many friends and important business associates in our town—my mother had warned me that she wouldn’t be able to save a seat for me if I was late, as “everyone who was anyone was coming,” so you better be on time for a change.
But the temple is oddly empty. Only the first 3 or 4 pews are filled. I can see the backs of my daughter, my brother, his wife and my parents all sitting together in the second row, and I think I recognize Renee and Lenny, Jeff’s aunt and uncle, next to them. I see Sandy, Jeff’s mother, in the first pew with Jeff’s older sister and youngest brother, Louis—Barry, two years younger than Jeff and my brother’s best friend, died from Ewing’s Sarcoma, a type of bone cancer, when we all still in high school. There’s a man sitting next to Sandy, but I don’t recognize the hairline. Jeff’s father had died 12 years earlier, a few years after Barry’s death, so obviously it’s not him. I wonder why my mom, the perpetual yenta, hasn’t mentioned Sandy’s new beau.
Another weird thing. Linda’s family isn’t here. I know they are thrilled about their daughter corralling the primo scion of the Walling Jewish community, so I can’t imagine what would keep them away.
All of a sudden I feel like I’m watching a movie that I’ve seen before, only the film is chopped up for commercial time and the colors are a bit faded, like an old print of My Fair Lady before it had been restored to feature length in all its full Technicolor glory and aired without commercials on Turner Classic Movies.
But something is wrong with the television. The wedding is a tableau, an image seen from afar, an episode from The Twilight Zone. The empty pews stretch before me like the headstones at Arlington Cemetery. The aisle stretches towards the altar like a road to eternity. Far down that road my family and friends are gathered in front of the open Temple Ark to celebrate one of life’s most joyous moments.
But I am apart from that joy. I cannot share in it.
I feel terribly alone. And terribly frightened. And I recognize it. That same dread I felt as an 11-going-on-12 child who realized how ephemeral life really is.
I can’t deal. I can’t look at this. I want to close my eyes, but I can’t, so I look everywhere but straight ahead. Up to the gothic ceiling, left to the stained glass windows, right to the empty pew across the aisle—
And Barry is sitting there.
He looks exactly the same as the last time I saw him. No. Not exactly. Then he had been sick, and pale, and three days from death. Barry looks as he had when I was 14, when he and my brother had teased me constantly and mercilessly about my crush on Jeff. Young and full of life. Healthy. Before the cancer. Not dead.
He slides over and I get up and cross the aisle and sit down next to him.
“Hey, Barry,” I say. As if it’s the most ordinary thing in the world that I should be sitting and chatting with a boy twenty years and more in his grave while his brother gets married.
“Hey, Min’,” he says.
“It’s good to see you.”
I think about the man sitting next to Sandy, the one whose hairline I couldn’t recognize. Now it makes sense.
“Your dad’s here, too, isn’t he? Does your mom know he’s here? Does she know you’re here?”
He doesn’t answer me. He just looks at me with eyes that are deep with patience and serene with ancient knowledge.
And then I have a question. “What do you do now, Barry?”
“I help people cross over.”
It makes sense. Barry had always been kind, behind the teasing and laughter.
“Were you there when your father died? Did you help him cross over?”
“Uh-uh. And sometimes I bring them back to visit, like I did today with him, to see Jeff get married.”
He sits and waits, without the appearance of waiting. Just sits.
Until I am ready.
“I’m afraid to die, Barry. Really afraid.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t comfort me, he doesn’t take my hand. He just looks at me with his eyes—the eyes of an angel.
“Will you be there when I die, Barry? Will you help me cross over?”
“I promise.”
“I’m so afraid, Barry.”
He smiles at me. And I jump into that smile, that well of peace, and feel it wash over me.
“Thanks, Barry.”
“See ya, Min.”
And then, I swear to God, deus ex machina or not, I wake up.
*******************
Was it a dream? I mean, was it only a dream, or did Barry really visit me that night? I only know that when I woke up, I still felt that peace, and that peace has stayed with me. I kept it to myself for a very long time; not wanting to share it, not wanting to be told it was only a dream by disbelieving people, not wanting to be laughed at. I especially avoided telling Sandy about it, for years, because I was afraid that somehow it would hurt her, or that I was belittling Barry’s death in some way to her; but I finally did, because I thought she should know. To this day I’m not sure if I did the right thing telling her; did it comfort her, or did she think it was just another one of Laura’s crazy daughter’s imaginings?
After I told Sandy, I told my mom about it, I think to give her a head’s up in case Sandy mentioned it.
I’m not sure what she thought about it, either.
She didn’t laugh.
But she didn’t scoff, either.
The Ring
Mindy Newell
She sits on the couch and stares into nothingness while her fingers turn and twist and push and pull and play with her wedding ring until her knuckle is red and aching and the heat from the friction burns her skin; all the while he is throwing handfuls of M & M’s into his mouth and laughing at Kramer using a blowtorch to break into Jerry's apartment on Seinfeld.
"I love America," he says during the commercial.
"And that’s why you married me.”
"Of course. That, and the green card." He gives her a kiss.
He smells of sweat and deodorant, tastes of tinned sardines and baked beans. His hands are flecked with indigo ink and acrylic paint. Strong hands. Good hands. Artist's hands that have known how to paint the canvas of her body to reveal the lightness of her being and the deep dark depths of her passion from the very second she met him.
And now he is gone.
“GOD DAMN HIM!”
She yanks the ring off her finger. It flies out of her hand, and she does not see where it lands. She goes down on her knees, searching under the couch, the coffee table, behind the entertainment unit. Her search spreads out, into the kitchen, the bathroom, the hall, the bedroom. Every light in the house is on. She uses a flashlight.
The ring is gone. She cannot find it. It's as if it never existed.
She starts to panic. Maybe it did never exist. Maybe he never existed. Maybe she imagined it all, the last two years of an international love affair made up of e-mails and telephone calls and flights back and forth across the Atlantic, the proposal on bended knee in front of the whole family, her acceptance, the wedding gown, his kilt, the roses, the breaking of the glass, the marriage, maybe it was all a dream. The hallucination of an aging, lonely woman of fading beauty with only pictures on the wall to remind her that here there was once a vibrant, laughing girl with sunshine dreams of her future.
She takes a Xanax. And sits in front of the TV, watching, but not really, the rerun of Seinfeld, the one where Kramer tries to break into Jerry's apartment with a blowtorch.
She sits on the couch and stares into nothingness while her fingers turn and twist and push and pull and play with her wedding ring until her knuckle is red and aching and the heat from the friction burns her skin; all the while he is throwing handfuls of M & M’s into his mouth and laughing at Kramer using a blowtorch to break into Jerry's apartment on Seinfeld.
"I love America," he says during the commercial.
"And that’s why you married me.”
"Of course. That, and the green card." He gives her a kiss.
He smells of sweat and deodorant, tastes of tinned sardines and baked beans. His hands are flecked with indigo ink and acrylic paint. Strong hands. Good hands. Artist's hands that have known how to paint the canvas of her body to reveal the lightness of her being and the deep dark depths of her passion from the very second she met him.
And now he is gone.
“GOD DAMN HIM!”
She yanks the ring off her finger. It flies out of her hand, and she does not see where it lands. She goes down on her knees, searching under the couch, the coffee table, behind the entertainment unit. Her search spreads out, into the kitchen, the bathroom, the hall, the bedroom. Every light in the house is on. She uses a flashlight.
The ring is gone. She cannot find it. It's as if it never existed.
She starts to panic. Maybe it did never exist. Maybe he never existed. Maybe she imagined it all, the last two years of an international love affair made up of e-mails and telephone calls and flights back and forth across the Atlantic, the proposal on bended knee in front of the whole family, her acceptance, the wedding gown, his kilt, the roses, the breaking of the glass, the marriage, maybe it was all a dream. The hallucination of an aging, lonely woman of fading beauty with only pictures on the wall to remind her that here there was once a vibrant, laughing girl with sunshine dreams of her future.
She takes a Xanax. And sits in front of the TV, watching, but not really, the rerun of Seinfeld, the one where Kramer tries to break into Jerry's apartment with a blowtorch.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
A Visit to the Footbinders
From Chris Wright's blog, Grapes of Wrath: The Maunderings of Percival Peregrine Oatenshaw, itinerant wine critic and bon viveur. Chris himself is neither an itinerant nor a wine critic but, as he describes himself, "an Englishman of a different stripe, a humorist, and a dedicated repurposer of other people's titles."
Mr. Cornelius Clinch emerging from the back of the shop, neat and impeccably shod, an expression of conspiratorial expectation etched upon his features.
Owner of ‘The Footbinder,’ purveyor of shoes and hand tooled suitcases to the gentry of Muswell Hill and the surrounding countryside, Cornelius had plied his trade in my father’s day and, it is rumoured, his father’s day. His real age was the subject of earnest debate and it was thought that at some stage in the august establishment’s life, proprietorship had passed from father to son – nobody could say for sure when.
“I can recommend a Jeffrey West for a gentleman such as yourself – not a shoe for everyone, but a man of your bearing…”
“Thank you Cornelius, I was rather thinking a brogue, perhaps Loake’s?”
“A brogue sir? For you sir? Loake is a very traditional house, a good shoe, one of the best – suspect temperament on occasion…”
“Good god man! I’m purchasing a pair of shoes, not a wife!”
“Sir...”
The smell of new leather, reminding me of childhood, my father’s shoes laid out in the scullery, Jackson, the butler, shirt sleeves rolled up, applying the polish with vigorous strokes of the brush. Molly, giggling in the pantry, rosy cheeked and rumpled clothing.
“Elbow grease…”
“Sir?”
Cornelius at my elbow, a box, tissue paper spilling over the sides, a pair of outstanding brogues, unsullied and factory fresh.
“If Sir would observe, the storm welt, a shoe for the big occasion, a shoe that will guide sir through the dismal passages, a shoe that will roar in the face of adversity and …”
“Really Clinch, please try and exercise a modicum of restraint – I want to purchase a shoe that I can walk in, not one that will pick a fight…”
“Sir.”
This good fellow, sorrowfully disappearing behind the curtain at the back of the shop, the creak and groan of a stepladder and the slow climb of an old man. The sudden curse, the slow collapse, curtain bulging outwards then billowing as Clinch’s descent, more rapid and less deliberate than the climb ends. Clinch emerging, one collar awry, dust besmirching the impeccable black jacket, long strand of hair escaping the crown, creeping down across the shoulder.
“For Sir, the last pair, Church’s, a prince amongst men sir. The cobbler of choice for your father sir…”
Seated now, the silver handled shoehorn, the loosened laces.
“The 73 last sir, welted leather sole…”
The chestnut brogue the same colour as Hermione’s soft curls, the leather embracing my feet. I stand, observe my stance in the mirror – the shoes, perfect and the knife edge crease of my trousers breaking at the front, settling at the heel behind.
“Clinch, I’ll take the Church’s, have them sent to the Mews, this afternoon.”
“A most excellent choice sir – and how will sir be settling his account?”
“Cash, Clinch. Cash”.
Outside, the world a poorer place, a shell suited urchin racing past on shoes that light up - I spin the umbrella, a swift jab, a hook and natural order is restored. Justice is done. I stride on, briskly up the street, hail a cab.
As the cabbie performs his turn, I lean forward and in the pale yellow light of the early evening sun, Cornelius Clinch holding a Samuel Windsor to his aquiline nose, his nostrils flare and a little point of colour appears on each pale cheek as he breathes in the sumptuous perfume of the hand crafted split welt shoe.
Me Draw Pretty Some Day
A reminiscence by Tim Hamilton, an illustrator and cartoonist who has been published in the New York Times, MAD Magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine, assorted DC and Marvel Comics, and a lot of other places. He adapted Stevenson's Treasure Island for Puffin Books and John Marquand's (one of Will and Gerry's favorite writers!) Mr. Moto for Moonstone Books. He is now writing and drawing the stunning Adventures of the Floating Elephant for the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate.
Imagine it if you can. Way, way back before Star Wars Prequels, before the internet, back around the time a strange new “fourth network” entity known as the “Fox Television Network” was just a pool of swirling, congealing peptides. It was 1987 and I was a poor artist in Pittsburgh, PA fresh out of a two-year art program looking for work. At this time, the comic book industry was going through a period known as the “Black and White Explosion.” There were many small companies popping up and publishing alternatives to Marvel and DC’s mainstream super hero lines.
But that’s another story.
In fact, me getting my first job in comics is another story too. This story is about my very first art job out of school. After graduation, my roommates and I had no phone, of course no internet and in fact, no hot water for showers! We took many trips into the job placement office of our school and stunk the place up while we looked through all the terrible art jobs we never heard of while in school. The list included: illustrating the packaging of no-name brand toys, drawing line art for teddy bear coloring books and even testing out new drugs. Yes, drug testing. The woman on the phone at the pharmaceutical company sounded so cute we almost did that for a weekend!
Where were the animation jobs?! Movie and TV set design jobs? Why wouldn’t Marvel Comics hire me??! They must have received my amazing sample packet by now!
In a depressed state, my friends and I often bought as many six packs of Mickey’s Big Mouth as we could afford and drank away our sorrows. It often ended with someone breaking one of our Betamax tapes and me throwing up in the bathtub.
Finally though, after months of self-pity, a ray of hope arrived in the job placement office. A charming fellow, who I’ll call “Ted,” came to our school and recruited artists to help him start a new gaming company. This was something we could sink our teeth into! Illustrating wizards, trolls and creatures who could take 100 hit points before dying! Ted hired me and a few others with starting salaries of 30,000 a year and promises of a new gaming empire! We immediately went out, got ourselves a six-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth and celebrated until someone broke my Walkman while I threw up in the bathroom sink.
We should have been suspicious of Ted when, to meet with him, we had to take three buses out to rural Pittsburgh (picture that house where Buffalo Bill lived in Silence of the Lambs). Ted seemed to live with his aging mother who sat silent in the living room watching hit shows like Family Ties and St. Elsewhere while we drew characters like White Dust Wizard and Magical Mushroom Monsters. Of course, after a month or so of illustrating fantasy kingdoms and wondering why Ted always seemed to have the sniffles, it became apparent we were not going to get paid. The school looked into his past for us and found that not everything he said was quite true. No he did NOT play for the Dallas cowboys, help in the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show or write a proposed spin off of Cheers called “Carla and Kids.” He flipped out when he found out we had looked into his past. He had his mother write us a terse note informing us he could no longer work for people who did not trust him, and who were unwilling to wait a few years for our first pay checks.
My friend Eric, who did quite a bit of writing for this new gaming company, refused to let Ted get off that easy. Without the internet mind you, using only telephones and … well, just telephones, he found out that Ted was actually wanted by the F.B.I! Seems he had been running seminars (the kind that people pay to get into) at hotel conference rooms and then skipping town without paying the hotel among other things. Eric set up a meeting with Ted under the guise of wanting to patch things up and give him all the writing he’d done for the new game they had been creating. They were to meet at Eides Comics in downtown Pittsburgh. When Ted came into the store, undercover F.B.I. agents were milling all about the place pretending to be interested in the latest issue of Watchmen or Dark Horse Presents. Ted was quickly led off in handcuffs as Eric snapped pictures while customers at Eides went back to continually asking the employees if issue four of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight had arrived yet.
As we sat and raised our collective glasses of Jack Daniels (the lure of Mickey’s Big mouth had worn off) to celebrate a lesson well learned, I talked of Malibu/ Eternity Comics, the new comic company I just found out I was going to work for. I was going to do a book called The Trouble with Girls, while classmate and future Spider-Girl artist Pat Olliffe was going to illustrate a book called Strike Force for the same company.
“No more working for undependable people who would not pay!” I exclaimed. “In a few months, after they see my published work, Marvel or DC would be knocking on my door asking me to illustrate Star Brand or Ambush Bug!” You’d think I would have learned my lesson, but that night someone busted our record player as I puked on the bathroom floor slightly to the left of the toilet.
At that moment, some where in New York City, future ACT-I-VATE founder Dean Haspiel and writer Martin Powell approached Malibu/ Eternity comics with an idea called, The Verdict.
But that’s a story for another time.
And just to prove that Tim did indeed learn to draw pretty, here are the first two pages of Adventures of the Floating Elephant—though they look a lot better full-size:
Imagine it if you can. Way, way back before Star Wars Prequels, before the internet, back around the time a strange new “fourth network” entity known as the “Fox Television Network” was just a pool of swirling, congealing peptides. It was 1987 and I was a poor artist in Pittsburgh, PA fresh out of a two-year art program looking for work. At this time, the comic book industry was going through a period known as the “Black and White Explosion.” There were many small companies popping up and publishing alternatives to Marvel and DC’s mainstream super hero lines.
But that’s another story.
In fact, me getting my first job in comics is another story too. This story is about my very first art job out of school. After graduation, my roommates and I had no phone, of course no internet and in fact, no hot water for showers! We took many trips into the job placement office of our school and stunk the place up while we looked through all the terrible art jobs we never heard of while in school. The list included: illustrating the packaging of no-name brand toys, drawing line art for teddy bear coloring books and even testing out new drugs. Yes, drug testing. The woman on the phone at the pharmaceutical company sounded so cute we almost did that for a weekend!
Where were the animation jobs?! Movie and TV set design jobs? Why wouldn’t Marvel Comics hire me??! They must have received my amazing sample packet by now!
In a depressed state, my friends and I often bought as many six packs of Mickey’s Big Mouth as we could afford and drank away our sorrows. It often ended with someone breaking one of our Betamax tapes and me throwing up in the bathtub.
Finally though, after months of self-pity, a ray of hope arrived in the job placement office. A charming fellow, who I’ll call “Ted,” came to our school and recruited artists to help him start a new gaming company. This was something we could sink our teeth into! Illustrating wizards, trolls and creatures who could take 100 hit points before dying! Ted hired me and a few others with starting salaries of 30,000 a year and promises of a new gaming empire! We immediately went out, got ourselves a six-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth and celebrated until someone broke my Walkman while I threw up in the bathroom sink.
We should have been suspicious of Ted when, to meet with him, we had to take three buses out to rural Pittsburgh (picture that house where Buffalo Bill lived in Silence of the Lambs). Ted seemed to live with his aging mother who sat silent in the living room watching hit shows like Family Ties and St. Elsewhere while we drew characters like White Dust Wizard and Magical Mushroom Monsters. Of course, after a month or so of illustrating fantasy kingdoms and wondering why Ted always seemed to have the sniffles, it became apparent we were not going to get paid. The school looked into his past for us and found that not everything he said was quite true. No he did NOT play for the Dallas cowboys, help in the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show or write a proposed spin off of Cheers called “Carla and Kids.” He flipped out when he found out we had looked into his past. He had his mother write us a terse note informing us he could no longer work for people who did not trust him, and who were unwilling to wait a few years for our first pay checks.
My friend Eric, who did quite a bit of writing for this new gaming company, refused to let Ted get off that easy. Without the internet mind you, using only telephones and … well, just telephones, he found out that Ted was actually wanted by the F.B.I! Seems he had been running seminars (the kind that people pay to get into) at hotel conference rooms and then skipping town without paying the hotel among other things. Eric set up a meeting with Ted under the guise of wanting to patch things up and give him all the writing he’d done for the new game they had been creating. They were to meet at Eides Comics in downtown Pittsburgh. When Ted came into the store, undercover F.B.I. agents were milling all about the place pretending to be interested in the latest issue of Watchmen or Dark Horse Presents. Ted was quickly led off in handcuffs as Eric snapped pictures while customers at Eides went back to continually asking the employees if issue four of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight had arrived yet.
As we sat and raised our collective glasses of Jack Daniels (the lure of Mickey’s Big mouth had worn off) to celebrate a lesson well learned, I talked of Malibu/ Eternity Comics, the new comic company I just found out I was going to work for. I was going to do a book called The Trouble with Girls, while classmate and future Spider-Girl artist Pat Olliffe was going to illustrate a book called Strike Force for the same company.
“No more working for undependable people who would not pay!” I exclaimed. “In a few months, after they see my published work, Marvel or DC would be knocking on my door asking me to illustrate Star Brand or Ambush Bug!” You’d think I would have learned my lesson, but that night someone busted our record player as I puked on the bathroom floor slightly to the left of the toilet.
At that moment, some where in New York City, future ACT-I-VATE founder Dean Haspiel and writer Martin Powell approached Malibu/ Eternity comics with an idea called, The Verdict.
But that’s a story for another time.
And just to prove that Tim did indeed learn to draw pretty, here are the first two pages of Adventures of the Floating Elephant—though they look a lot better full-size:
Jew-Jitsu: The Hebrew Hands of Fury
An excerpt from the book of the same name by Paul Kupperberg and Rabbi Daniel Eliezer, coming from Citadel Books in October of this year. Paul is a veteran editor and writer of comic books and author of young adult books whose blog is right here.
Chapter 1
Turning the Other Cheek Was a New Testament Concept
The Chosen People of Israel have, across the millennia, been chosen for their fair share of aggravation. From the Egyptians and the rest of the Middle East, the Romans and the Catholics to the Roman Catholics, the Spanish, the Germans, the Russians, the Germans, the Americans, and the Germans again, the British and, at long last, bringing history full circle, the entire Middle East.
Jews are accustomed to misery, to tsurus, which is misery so deep, it transcends the heartbreak of everyday life. Misery is your brother-in-law moving in with you. Tsurus, he brings his whole family and your mother-in-law.
And knowing they were at the top of everyone’s hit lists, Jews learned to take care in the perilous world in which they lived those heartbreaking everyday lives. They formed tight-knit communities, little ghettos in which eyes and ears were ever alert for trouble and lines of communication went off in every direction, from housewife to peddler to shop owner to colleagues and to the rest of the population. Survival was dependent on the Jews knowing what was happening before it happened, leading to a tradition of bareden yenem, or gossip, as practiced by the unsung heroes of this underground struggle, the yenta.
So adept did they become at conveying information from one end of the Jewish community to the next that Rabbi Goodunov of Moscow wrote in his history of the Jewish self-protection movement, Ich vel dir geben a khamalye (Striking Back) that even Tsar Alexander II came to hear of their intelligence gathering prowess:
“How is it the Jews know everything before even we do?” the tsar demanded of his intelligence minister.
“The Jews have an expression in Yiddish,” the minister responded. “One Jew meets another and asks, ‘Vus titzuch?’ which roughly means, ‘What’s happening?’ By this method do they easily identify one another and speed the progress of information.”
In disbelief, the tsar decided to investigate this story personally, so he dressed as an Orthodox Jew and, without telling another living soul, he slipped from the Kremlin and went down among the Jewish people.
Within half an hour, having encountered no one along the way who gave him a second glance, he arrived in the Jewish ghetto where he almost immediately met an old man, shuffling down the street.
The disguised tsar nodded in greeting and whispered, “Vus titzuch?”
The old man glanced conspiratorially about before he whispered back, “The tsar is in the ghetto!”
The Rabbi and the Samurai
But while knowledge is power, it’s no good against a klop on the head by a Cossack’s club. It took an act of kidnapping and one man’s literal and spiritual voyage to bring him to a place where he could discover a way for the victims of choice to fight back.
Chiam Mangawicz was a Polish Jew from the port city of Gdansk. In 1841, the young rabbinical student was waylayed by a press gang and put to sea as a cabin boy. Trapped aboard the Orient-bound trading ship, the devoutly observant lad incurred the wrath of the ship’s captain by refusing to slop the deck, serve swill and grog, and be abused down in the bilge on the Shabbos even though his defiance was rewarded with cruel punishments.
Mangawicz’s courage under the lash won him the admiration of the scurvy crew and, by the time Pesach rolled around on the high seas, he was allowed to put together a makeshift sedar at which all hands celebrated the Hebrew exodus with the shank bone of a coxswain and a milchidik menu.
When the trader dropped anchor at the Ryukyu Islands of southeastern Japan, Chiam jumped ship and swam to safety in the tiny village of Kumentsugast. There, a compassionate farmer named Meshpokha and his family hid the young rabbi in their soy field until the ship sailed on. Stranded, the youth was invited to stay with the family. In exchange for their kindness, he taught them Judaism and Talmud, performing the first bris in Japan on the converted Meshpokha. From them, he learned Japanese and how to roll sushi.
One day, Mangawicz saw what appeared to be the old farmer and his sons fighting in the garden. He ran out, seeking to make peace between the warring family members only to be told that they were merely practicing a fighting technique they called "jujitsu," the "gentle art." Using nothing more than their hands and feet and whatever might be handy to double as a weapon, the practitioners of this Asian art turned a foe’s own strength against him, utilizing no more force than necessary to deter an attacker.
Chiam likened this method to a familiar Jewish tradition: “As the mama will deftly sidestep objection with the gentle application of guilt, so does the student of jujitsu move his opponent with subtle leverage.”
Fascinated by this very Jewish way of thinking, what Rebbe Mangawicz would later call “Japanese yiddishe kop,” he joined their daily exercise routine and found in it not only physical confidence, but spiritual satisfaction as well.
Chapter 1
Turning the Other Cheek Was a New Testament Concept
The Chosen People of Israel have, across the millennia, been chosen for their fair share of aggravation. From the Egyptians and the rest of the Middle East, the Romans and the Catholics to the Roman Catholics, the Spanish, the Germans, the Russians, the Germans, the Americans, and the Germans again, the British and, at long last, bringing history full circle, the entire Middle East.
Jews are accustomed to misery, to tsurus, which is misery so deep, it transcends the heartbreak of everyday life. Misery is your brother-in-law moving in with you. Tsurus, he brings his whole family and your mother-in-law.
And knowing they were at the top of everyone’s hit lists, Jews learned to take care in the perilous world in which they lived those heartbreaking everyday lives. They formed tight-knit communities, little ghettos in which eyes and ears were ever alert for trouble and lines of communication went off in every direction, from housewife to peddler to shop owner to colleagues and to the rest of the population. Survival was dependent on the Jews knowing what was happening before it happened, leading to a tradition of bareden yenem, or gossip, as practiced by the unsung heroes of this underground struggle, the yenta.
So adept did they become at conveying information from one end of the Jewish community to the next that Rabbi Goodunov of Moscow wrote in his history of the Jewish self-protection movement, Ich vel dir geben a khamalye (Striking Back) that even Tsar Alexander II came to hear of their intelligence gathering prowess:
“How is it the Jews know everything before even we do?” the tsar demanded of his intelligence minister.
“The Jews have an expression in Yiddish,” the minister responded. “One Jew meets another and asks, ‘Vus titzuch?’ which roughly means, ‘What’s happening?’ By this method do they easily identify one another and speed the progress of information.”
In disbelief, the tsar decided to investigate this story personally, so he dressed as an Orthodox Jew and, without telling another living soul, he slipped from the Kremlin and went down among the Jewish people.
Within half an hour, having encountered no one along the way who gave him a second glance, he arrived in the Jewish ghetto where he almost immediately met an old man, shuffling down the street.
The disguised tsar nodded in greeting and whispered, “Vus titzuch?”
The old man glanced conspiratorially about before he whispered back, “The tsar is in the ghetto!”
The Rabbi and the Samurai
But while knowledge is power, it’s no good against a klop on the head by a Cossack’s club. It took an act of kidnapping and one man’s literal and spiritual voyage to bring him to a place where he could discover a way for the victims of choice to fight back.
Chiam Mangawicz was a Polish Jew from the port city of Gdansk. In 1841, the young rabbinical student was waylayed by a press gang and put to sea as a cabin boy. Trapped aboard the Orient-bound trading ship, the devoutly observant lad incurred the wrath of the ship’s captain by refusing to slop the deck, serve swill and grog, and be abused down in the bilge on the Shabbos even though his defiance was rewarded with cruel punishments.
Mangawicz’s courage under the lash won him the admiration of the scurvy crew and, by the time Pesach rolled around on the high seas, he was allowed to put together a makeshift sedar at which all hands celebrated the Hebrew exodus with the shank bone of a coxswain and a milchidik menu.
When the trader dropped anchor at the Ryukyu Islands of southeastern Japan, Chiam jumped ship and swam to safety in the tiny village of Kumentsugast. There, a compassionate farmer named Meshpokha and his family hid the young rabbi in their soy field until the ship sailed on. Stranded, the youth was invited to stay with the family. In exchange for their kindness, he taught them Judaism and Talmud, performing the first bris in Japan on the converted Meshpokha. From them, he learned Japanese and how to roll sushi.
One day, Mangawicz saw what appeared to be the old farmer and his sons fighting in the garden. He ran out, seeking to make peace between the warring family members only to be told that they were merely practicing a fighting technique they called "jujitsu," the "gentle art." Using nothing more than their hands and feet and whatever might be handy to double as a weapon, the practitioners of this Asian art turned a foe’s own strength against him, utilizing no more force than necessary to deter an attacker.
Chiam likened this method to a familiar Jewish tradition: “As the mama will deftly sidestep objection with the gentle application of guilt, so does the student of jujitsu move his opponent with subtle leverage.”
Fascinated by this very Jewish way of thinking, what Rebbe Mangawicz would later call “Japanese yiddishe kop,” he joined their daily exercise routine and found in it not only physical confidence, but spiritual satisfaction as well.
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