Credit where credit is due

I really like J. Caleb Mozzocco’s handy little guide to the characters in Guardians of the Galaxy and their creators:

And, if a lot of people make a lot of money and there are a lot of accolades being thrown about, then a lot of credit is going to go to a lot of people, from whoever cut those winning trailers to the designers and animators who got Rocket’s fur to look just so to Gunn himself. If comic book people get any credit, chances are it’s going to be as a collective (i.e. “Marvel”) or under a “Special Thanks” near the end of the end-credit scrawl (IMDb has comics writers Dan Abnett and Andy Lannning receiving writing credit; if that’s on the screen near the “written by” credit, then that’s awesome).

I especially like his idea of making a donation to The Hero Initiative equal to the cost of the movie ticket, to help that charity help out comics creators screwed over by the comics companies. Of course it would be better if the comics industry as a whole, and especially the Big Two, should treat their employees better and let the people who actually created the characters that are now making millions in movies for them have a little bit of the slice as well. Still, it was nice that Marvel arranged for a private screening of the movie for Bill Mantlo.

Remember Bill Mantlo? Marvel’s most prolific writer in the eighties, about the only one who could make something as uninspiring a toy as ROM into an actually readable, perhaps even good comic. When Shooter was ousted, Mantlo got less and less work, dropped out of comics to try and become a lawyer, then had a car accident that left him paralysed and penniless. Thanks to the Guardians movie, no less a newspaper than the New York Times wrote about Mantlo:

Like millions of moviegoers over the weekend, Bill Mantlo watched “Guardians of the Galaxy,” the Marvel Studios space adventure that sold more than $172 million in tickets worldwide in its first four days of release.

The film’s success is particularly meaningful to Mr. Mantlo, 62, a comic-book writer who helped create one of the movie’s main characters: the foul-tempered, gun-wielding anthropomorphic Rocket Raccoon.

Mr. Mantlo did not see “Guardians of the Galaxy” in a theater, but in his bed at the nursing home where he is being cared for after a 1992 accident in which he was hit by a car and left with brain damage.

Michael Mantlo, his brother, said Bill owed his health partly to Medicaid and partly to the grass-roots efforts of comics fans, who not only made donations on his behalf but also brought attention to his involvement in creating a character whose value to Marvel had suddenly mushroomed.

As Michael explained in a telephone interview, the focus on his brother has encouraged the studio to reconsider its obligations to him. “The more often Bill’s name gets mentioned, and the more often he is given public credit for something that he did, the easier it is for me to go to Marvel and say, ‘You might want to consider raising your offer.’ ”

It was only the negative publicity around the first Superman movie that finally got Siegel and Shuster a small part of the millions DC/Warner had made of their characters, it’s good to see Michael Mantlo taking advantage of that for his brother here. Bill Mantlo deserves it.

Your Happening World (June 27th)

  • The Transformers and the Middle Ages – Having been a boy of a certain age in the 1980s, I was one of the many, many fans of the cartoon show The Transformers (confession – I still watch the show on occasion, and have a collection of the toys in a box in my basement). Now, as the fourth live-action Transformers film hits the screens, I want to take you back to when the Autobots and Decepticons went medieval!
  • Sibilant Fricative: Ian Watson, Mana (Lucky’s Harvest, 1993; The Fallen Moon, 1994) – I’ve been holding back writing about Watson’s two Mana books, for reasons to do with that mode of debilitation called ‘but where to start?’ Given my peculiar academic background, and the topic of my PhD, excuse me if I open with a completely left field comparison to Robert Browning. A critic once described Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello as like ‘three dragons, guarding the entrance to the gold of Browning’s mid-career poetry’. You see what he means: however much you enjoy ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, you know that you can’t get a proper sense of Browning’s work without tackling the three brontosaur-sized texts with which he commenced his career.
  • Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City – The Daily Beast – As the world held its breath during the Cold War, England built a top-secret underground city to save its government in case of nuclear attack. For half a century, "Burlington" lay ready.
  • Is Ann Leckie the Next Big Thing in Science Fiction? | Riverfront Times – The Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Hugo awards are the Triple Crown of science-fiction writing. If Ancillary Justice claims the Hugo, it will become the first novel to win all three. After years toiling in obscurity, Leckie's given up trying to wrap her mind around how quickly she and her gun-slinging, galaxy-traversing heroine, Breq, have climbed to critical and popular adoration.
  • Trinity: The Black Fantasy. – But who could blame Harmony? What black woman wouldn’t envy Storm? Storm had no need of relaxers or sunny Saturdays spent beneath the searing metal of her grandmother’s pressing comb. She never sat patiently while a beautician sewed blonde ringlets to her head to hide her tightly woven brown cornrows from view. Her hair was naturally straight. Her hair was naturally light. She was born conforming to the majority of our society’s beauty norms. She was born not looking like all the other little black girls. And because of that, she was lauded as beautiful. Because of how not black she appeared to be.