Irene and I have owned four Cadillacs over the last couple of decades—all bought used, of course, since we are definitely not, and probably never will be, the kind of people who could afford to buy one new. But are we the kind of people meant to own a Cadillac at all?

According to an anecdote in the February 2012 issue of Fast Company, maybe not.

Veda Partalo, who works for the ad agency in charge of Cadillac’s makeover, had this to say about what distinguishes Cadillac owners from the owners of other luxury cars:

I needed to know what makes a man choose Cadillac over BMW or Lexus. So I travelled to nice restaurants around Chicago, Detroit, L.A., and New York. I interviewed the valets, those pimply 18-year-olds. What makes car owners different? They dress and tip the same. It’s in how they react when the valet scratches their car. I heard consistent stories: Lexus owners don’t say anything and immediately call the police and insurance company. BMW owners scream at him—”I’ll have your job!” That sort of thing. But Cadillac owners pat him on the back, say, “It’s gonna be all right, kid; we’ll figure it out,” and then tip him anyway and drive off.

I don’t think I’m that guy.

Does this mean we need to sell our 2003 DeVille?

I was chatting with a couple of people a few days back who didn’t realize that original comics art was drawn larger than it was printed nor that the standard size for such art had shrunk over the decades. And it struck me: Hey, they might not be the only ones out there who don’t know that!

And so … here I am with two choice pieces from my collection.

In my left hand, I’m holding a page from All-Star Western #104 (1958; art by Gil Kane), and in my right, I’m holding a page from Dead of Night #11 (1975; art by Rico Rival). Supposedly, the change from one size to the other occurred in 1967, and was all thanks to Murphy Anderson.

I bought the Kane at either my first or second comic book convention; I think I paid $2.00. As for the Rival splash, it’s one of the pages I was given back at Marvel for having written that issue.

As Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

Now you know.

I was feeling slightly glum last night about some of the things I wrote about Sharon Moody over the past few weeks, because even though I did write that “I’m not saying Moody isn’t a skillful artist, or that she’s bad person” and reported that her paintings are “a spot-on recreation of the original, showing a high degree of craft,” my bottom line, that I was unmoved by her part in the power of the supposedly transformative paintings, had to be a difficult message to hear.

Not that I felt at all guilty about it, you understand, because I said what I thought and still think needed to be said.

But none of us who puts work out in the public arena likes our work to be unloved, unadmired, and (from our point of view) misunderstood, and I don’t like making anyone feel the way I know I would feel had those words been written about me.

Then I came across Philip Hensher’s devastating (and entertaining) review this morning in The Guardian of James Thackara’s novel The Book of Kings, and all I could do was laugh. (more…)

I headed to Manhattan Saturday for a visit to the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery so I could see for myself those Sharon Moody paintings which had so ticked me off three weeks ago. Would experiencing the real-world art hung on a gallery wall, as opposed to seeing them diminished into relatively small .jpgs, change the way I felt? Would attempting to see the artwork with the guidance of gallery director Frank Bernarducci lessen my irritation about what I saw as an obvious attribution issue?

I believed both the art and the artist deserved a shot at changing my mind, so it was worth a trip before the exhibition closed, which it will do on the 15th. So if you want to see it yourself, you’d better hurry.

[And since I don’t want to recap everything I’ve said before, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, and want to catch up, check out this, this, this, this, this, and this, in that order.]

But first, before diving into the visit itself … a tangent.

One reason I’m sensitive to this issue is because the artists whose work has been repurposed here are more than just names to me. Sure, some of them I may know from their work only (albeit work that affected me deeply and helped transform my life), but there were others who were far more than that to me. I worked alongside many of these creators during my days on staff at Marvel Comics (and yes, that’s what I looked like below, seen with my then-future wife in photos from the 1975 Marvel Comics Convention program book) and later as a freelancer for both Marvel and DC.

So I think of these people as friends and colleagues. And when I see an image by Jack Kirby or Ross Andru or José Luis García-López (the last of whom actually drew one of my own stories) or any other comics creator used without even a tip of the hat, I take it personally.

Ironically, even the gallery visit itself was personal. Because 37 West 57th Street happens to be only a block and a half away from 575 Madison Avenue, where I spent so many years working for Marvel during the ’70s. Whenever I’m in that part of midtown Manhattan, I usually pause in front of the building to remember of how my life was changed there. So you can see how wading through the geography of comics past to speak up on behalf of comics past might have gotten me a little verklempt.

But enough misty-eyed nostalgia … (more…)

As I head to New York to see in person the Sharon Moody art exhibition I’ve been going on about ever since this post—I’m hanging out at the Baltimore Amtrak station right now—I realize I’ve never shared the ad that started it all.

So here it is!

I’m looking forward to seeing the paintings in their natural habitat … and to trying to see it all through the eyes of the exhibition curator. Should make for a very interesting day!

Tune in tommorrow to learn exactly how interesting!

I’ll be heading into Manhattan tomorrow to visit the Bernarducci Meisel Gallery and, I hope, reach some sort of closure as far as those Sharon Moody paintings are concerned. But while in town for the day, a guy’s got to eat, right? And if this guy’s got to eat in Manhattan, it’s going to be at Shopsins as often as possible.

I’ve told you before how much I love the place—because of rather than spite of all those one-star Yelp reviews that say things such as: “Incredibly rude. Incredibly ignorant. Incredibly sexist. Incredibly disgusting. Being called a c***sucker multiple times and told to ‘go f*** myself’ while I’m photographing on assignment for a very well regarded city food magazine at the cheese shop next door by a foul-mouthed old man and his idiot son is not my idea of a hip Lower East Side foodie experience.”

Hey, they’ve never given me any trouble.

Anyway … I was checking out the insane menu in preparation for tomorrow’s brunch, and saw the following image on their eclectic homepage:

(more…)

With the news today that Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it seems like the right time to share a Kodak photo wallet you would have received had your film been developed in the UK during the ’30s.

The copy declares—”What fun we had!”

And yes, Kodak, we did. We did.

(more…)

So who and what did I dream about during the month of December? Harvested from my Twitter stream are George R. R. Martin, Harrison Ford, Bill Gaines, porcupines hurled through the air by trebuchets, Agent Nelson Van Alden, an imploding apartment building, and more.

And who knows … maybe you’re in there somewhere, too!

DECEMBER 2010

I’ve lost a dream, since I no longer know what this scrawled night note means: “librarian complain me not donating ALL letters.” Any ideas? 31 Dec

I dreamt I was chef Janette Desautel from HBO’s Treme, whipping up a storm in the kitchen and then breaking to taste what others had done. 30 Dec

I dreamt I had a conversation with a relative filled with so many malapropisms and spoonerisms that I had no idea what he was talking about. 30 Dec

I dreamt I went to an experimental Scandinavian art installation and spent half an hour staring at a screen before I was told it was broken. 30 Dec

I dreamt I got a job as a political strategist at the White House, and my entire first day was spent in figuring where my office should be. 30 Dec

As usual, a night in a hotel destroyed my dream memories. Only snippets remain — so I have no idea what Don Draper was trying to sell me. 29 Dec

I dreamt we were on the top floor of an apartment building about to implode, and as we started to pancake, I shouted for Irene to go limp. 27 Dec

I dreamt my mother had a boyfriend — the rapper Young Jeezy — and we chatted, trying to get comfortable with the new, strange situation. 27 Dec

I dreamt I ran around a castle trying to catch a chicken in a royal game, and once I did, lay down with it on my chest to protest the king. 27 Dec

I dreamt I was a low level flunky for a mob boss, and it was my job to slip a tracer into the shoes of a yakuza when he wasn’t wearing them. 26 Dec (more…)

2011 is over and done with, so I thought I’d look back and see which of my posts were read the most last year.

One thing that’s clear is you’re all as interested in the issues raised by those Sharon Moody paintings of comics books as I am—my initial commentary on the matter was my most-clicked post of the year (almost virally so), and 3 of the top 10 posts were directly related to the case. (Which means you’ll want to check back in a week after I see the paintings in person Saturday.)

Here are the stories you read the most:

1. A few words in defense of Jack Kirby, Sal Buscema, Irv Novick, and other anonymized artists

2. Optometrist says blonde drivers “much more dangerous” than brunettes

3. Win $200 by making my zombie play into a mini-movie

4. Brian Bolland’s brilliantly blistering rebuttal

5. A few further thoughts on the artwork of Sharon Moody

6. It’s not too late to attend last weekend’s Nebula Awards

7. Can you identify this romance comic?

8. My favorite photo from San Diego Comic-Con: Pat and Dick Lupoff

9. Can you recognize this face?

10. Wall Street architect literally occupies Wall Street in 1931

Several readers who’ve been following my posts on the paintings of Sharon Moody have pointed me toward a recent New York Times article titled “Apropos Appropriation” by Randy Kennedy. Kennedy, reporting on a lawsuit that arose over appropriation by artist Richard Prince, wrote:

In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince—whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others—broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works. …

The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used—or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. …

Over the last couple of decades part of the equation for deciding whether fair use is indeed fair is how much the thing copied has been transformed. In other words, even if we are long past making anything completely new under the sun, as Ecclesiastes declared a couple of millenniums ago, copying should be allowed only to the degree to which it adds to or builds on what came before.

What those who sent me the article from which I plucked the excerpt above want to know (and please do go read the whole thing) is whether I believed Moody’s actions bore any similarities to what Prince had done. And my initial thought on reading the article was that—even though I found it a fascinating piece—I didn’t really care. (more…)