"Outlaw life is hard, Dewey Crowe."

I never watch the Academy Awards. This surprises some of my friends because I'm such a movie nut, but I always quote Bill Murray from an old SNL skit, "The Oscars are always wrong, and when they're right, it's for the wrong reasons." These are wise words coming from the man who has never won an Academy Award despite great performances in such movies as Groundhog Day, Rushmore, and Lost in Translation.

There are plenty of times when the Academy choices are debatable. Did The Best Years of Our Lives deserve the 1947 Best Picture nod over It's a Wonderful Life? I happen to think they got it right that time, but I can certainly see merit in the opposing view. Other times there is no room for debate. There is no way that Shakespeare in Love was a better movie than Saving Private Ryan or Out of Sight. In 1976 Rocky won Best Picture. Rocky is a lot of fun. It's a rousing feel good story, and in 1976 there was no way of knowing that it would produce five sequels, each worse than the last.  Of course it was up against All the President's Men, Bound For Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver, all of which were more ambitious, more nuanced and more original. It seems impossible that John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers, consistently listed as one of the greatest films of all time, failed to receive a single Oscar nomination in 1956. Speaking of my all-time favorite moviemaker, one of my least favorite Ford films is How Green Was My Valley. It's a slow paced slog through sentiment and platitudes that somehow beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture.

My favorite movie last year was Boyhood. If Richard Linklater's bold journey through the life of a middle-class American family wins any awards, I'll be happy for him. If the big prize goes to American Sniper, Birdman, or Transformers vs Marky Mark, it won't change my opinion a bit.

In the early 1970s I was just about ready to give up on comic books. My favorite series were either cancelled or being written and drawn by creative teams I wasn't interested in. Artists like Neal Adams, Jim Steranko, and Barry Windsor-Smith were channeling their energies into other more lucrative endeavors and only showed up sporadically in mainstream comic books. Fortunately for me a new wave of comic book creators was arriving on the scene. Artists like Jim Starlin, Howard Chaykin, and Paul Gulacy appeared full of energy and new ideas. Writers like Steve Englehart, Doug Moench, and Don McGregor were given unprecedented freedom at Marvel to take chances.

This was the atmosphere that produced Don McGregor's magnum opus - "Panther's Rage", a thirteen issue story that took McGregor and his collaborators (artists Rich Buckler, Gil Kane, Billy Graham, and inker Klaus Janson) over two years to tell. It was a pretty bold move on Marvel's part. Black Panther was an African prince, and this story was set in his homeland, the fictional Wakonda. The entire cast of the story was black, no Tarzans or Ka-Zars to be found. McGregor's writing dealt with revolution, petty tribal bigotries, and inequality and was filled with beautiful prose, passionate dialogue, and complex characterizations. The pencillers used cinematic techniques (prompted at times by McGregor's detailed plots) and then newcomer Janson's inks show his now trademark heavy spotting of blacks and zipatone.

I still own the original comics bought off the newsstands over forty years ago, and I bought the recent reprint collection. It is well worth a look.

http://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Masterworks-The-Black-Panther/dp/0785141987

Steve Ditko is one of my favorite comic book artists. I discovered his work when he was drawing for DC comics during the late 1960s. His creations The Creeper and Hawk and Dove were must buys for me. Then I came across his Charlton work of this time period - The Blue Beetle and The Question. I loved his attention to detail, his wild action scenes, and the imaginative gadgets and back stories he gave his characters. Finally I discovered Marvel Tales and the reprints of his early Spider-Man work. Before this I had thought John Romita was Spidey's only artist. I've stuck with Ditko through the years, following him back to Charlton for various mystery comics, to DC for crazy stuff like Shade, the Changing Man, and back to Marvel for Machine Man and Rom. Along the way, there were also his Ayn Rand inspired self-published tales of Mr. A.

Today Steve Ditko is 87 years old, and he still goes into his Manhattan studio every day to draw comics. His friend and publisher Robin Snyder finances Ditko's comics through Kickstarter campaigns, and a new 32 page comic book comes out every two to three months. In all honesty, Ditko's art is not as strong as it once was, and his scripts are little more than Libertarian screeds populated by straw men, but this diehard liberal still contributes to every Kickstarter and reads every new issue. I do this because Ditko had such a profound influence on the history of comic books, and regardless of what I may think of his politics, I genuinely admire the way he lives his philosophy and writes and draws just what he wants to.

This link provides information about Steve Ditko's current work.

http://ditko.blogspot.com

As a blogger focusing on comic books I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast. You can call it a graphic novel, an illustrated memoir, or whatever you'd like, but make no mistake, it is a comic book, and a pretty good one at that. Roz Chast is a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine. In this book she tells the story of her elderly parents slow deterioration and her struggle to deal with it and help them. The subject matter could easily slide into maudlin sentiment, but Chast is uncompromising in her examination of the complicated relationship she has with her mother and father and the relationships they have with each other. Chast never portrays herself as a noble caregiver, but instead shows all the selfish thoughts that many of us try to hide during similar situations. The book is alternately hilarious, terrifying, and tragic - sometimes all on the same page. At times I was laughing uncontrollably at Chast's storytelling and cartooning abilities, but at one point near the end I literally had tears in my eyes. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a brilliant work of art, and its choice as a finalist for the National Book Award was well-deserved.

This is the cover for DC Comics' Showcase # 74 featuring "Anthro" by Howie Post. Post was much more prolific in the newspaper comic strip format, but this short-lived (this issue of Showcase plus six issues of his own comic) series was a gem. Post's art was not typical for DC or Marvel comics at that time, but his scratchy cartoony style was both eye pleasing and appropriate to the subject matter. I was nine years old when this came out in 1968, and I enjoyed it for what it was at face value - cavemen. Rereading it years later, I realized that Post was using the genre to give his own take on issues of the day such as the Generation Gap and Women's Liberation. I still find it amazing that major comic book publishers took chances on offbeat series like this. Now it's spandex clad heroes or nothing from DC and Marvel.

Sometimes it's fun to just draw a big ol' green super hero.