Kurt Busiek responds

When inaccurate information about a writer is posted in a small venue such as this, some writers simply couldn’t be bothered to address it personally.  The stakes are low, the influence minimal, and the overall return on investment not much compared to the effort involved.  Not so for comic book scripter Kurt Busiek, to whose credit redound such excellent works as Superman: Secret Identity, the JLA/Avengers crossover, and the ongoing Astro City series; some misconceived comments posted here earlier today drew forth a response from Busiek concerning the creative genesis of the 1994 miniseries Marvels, and in the comments on that post he sets the record straight:

Alex [Ross] and I worked up the concept of MARVELS together, as a context for stories about subjects Alex particularly wanted to paint. We worked up a proposal together, and it was rejected, with a request for revisions. I revised it heavily, solo, ran it past Alex and then past Marvel, where it was approved, and at that point, I wrote the scripts. Alex and I talked things over and he had input into the stories, but it was overwhelmingly my plotting (where it wasn’t, y’know, Jack Kirby’s) — just as I had input into the art, suggesting revisions and changes. It was a collaboration, idea-wise, but in no way did I simply script Alex’s plots.

Anyone who wants to read the actual proposals can find them in the 10th Anniversary hardcover edition.

Alex had much more to do with the plot and story of KINGDOM COME, but even there it’d be inaccurate to credit Alex solo with the plotting. But I didn’t work on the series, so I can’t speak to the details.

As to the other points — DC didn’t ask Alex to do KINGDOM COME, he pitched it to them. So he did it rather than me because he came up with the idea and pitched it, just as I pitched other things to other people. I didn’t work on it because (a) Alex needed someone who knew as much about DC as I knew about Marvel, and at that point that wasn’t me, and (b) he didn’t want to get typecast as working consistently with one writer.

EARTH X also didn’t come about because of something Marvel asked for — it started as something WIZARD asked for. They asked Alex in part because Alex was an art superstar by that point, with a reputation for doing terrific redesigns of characters. When the Wizard project came out, it was popular enough that Marvel asked Alex to do more with it. They wouldn’t have asked Mark instead of Alex, because it was Alex’s project.

None of this is meant to denigrate Alex’s work — he’s an enormously creative artist, and a pleasure to work with. It’s just inaccurate to claim either that he came up with MARVELS solo, or that KINGDOM COME or EARTH X began because the publishers decided who to ask for a new project.

Thanks for the clarification, Kurt.  It’s great that the Internet has made things like this possible.

A poetic interlude

Ecce Ancilla Domini

The tribe they sang Ave Maria
And a dolce Maria was she
Tall striding forth on the moonlight
With a jaguar at her knee
With veil that was blue in the moonlight
With feet that were bare in the clay
With face that was fair in the moonlight
With eyes that were solemn and gray

For she is the bane of the snake-kind
Who crawl and who feast on dust
Who slide like a whisper through water
Who torture the sleep of the just
Who tighten their coils like error
Who rage with an infinite calm
Who maketh one lie down in shadows
Who maketh one cry out in terror
Who maketh one fallow with slaughter
Whose days on this earth runneth long

And they of the jungle
With vines and with creepers
With ghosts at nightfall and echoes by day
With heat and with anguish and with rain
With the tapir, who knows all secrets
With the sloth, who is genial
With the wasp, whose name is legion
With the ant, who surprises all
With the ape, who flies weeping
With the snake, who strides invisible
With the jaguar, who is their strength
They hail her, with seven swords and a crown
And a Son who was for them
And the jaguar at her knee.

==

All poetry on this blog not obviously written by someone else is sole property of Nick Milne, and is not to be sold or altered without permission.  Works may be freely distributed, if not for profit, with written permission and proper attribution.

An atheist and his data

Noted polemical atheist Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) has conducted a survey through his website collecting answers from both atheists and Christians concerning their opinions on a number of topics and the intensity with which those opinions are held.  The sampling is problematic in some ways; although about 37,000 people took part in the survey, not all of them answered all of the questions, and the ratio of atheists to Christians runs at about 9:1 in any event.  To counteract some of these problems, he presents only the data culled from those who, when asked their degree of belief in the God of the Bible and their degree of belief that the Bible is the word of God, responded only with either “1. Disbelieve Strongly” or “5. Strongly Believe.”  This leaves a sample of about between 5000 and 6000 respondents, most of them being atheists but several hundred being Christians.  This is not an insubstantial pool.

Harris himself stresses that he has not analyzed the data yet nor drafted any conclusions based upon it, but there are a number of trends that suggest themselves fairly quickly.

The first trend is one that is common to all surveys of this type: the questions are often flawed.  Too many simply cannot be answered on the 1-to-5 scale of belief intensity provided, instead demanding answers that might begin with “yes, but…” or “no, if…”  As this is a methodological one – albeit a common and sometimes inescapable one – the fault lies with Harris, who chose the questions, rather than in the quality of answers the respondents were or were not prepared to give.

Another trend is, perhaps surprisingly, one of agreement between both atheists and Christians on a number of issues.  This was part of Harris’ intention, actually; he writes that he hoped to find a series of propositions with which both atheists and Christians could readily agree, thereby producing

…stimuli of two categories – factual and religious – which would behave appropriately once we put members of each group inside our MRI scanner. We needed factual statements that both atheists and Christians would accept with the same order of confidence and religious statements that would divide them more or less diametrically.

I await the results of that study with interest as well, but for now the results of this one are fascinating enough.

One thing you’ll see a lot of throughout the graphs presenting the data from this survey are tall blue bars, representing the responses of atheists (Christians have red bars).  This is not to say that there are no extremely tall Christian bars as well; indeed, in many cases the graphs show two tall bars, one on each side of the gulf of opinion, with very little occupying the ground in between.  But what strikes me as interesting – and very likely being an unintended consequence of his survey – is what a statistically significant number of these data sets do to the question of what Harris and his crew might call “dogmatism.”

Take a look at these three exemplary charts:

Notice anything peculiar?  While religious opinion on these issues varies in both intensity and focus, there is no notable variance whatever when it comes to the atheist respondents.  This will hardly prove surprising to those who have long ago recognized that there’s simply no surpassing atheists like Harris, Dawkins et al. when it comes to closed and inflexible thinking.  While the Christian is permitted to have – and does have – any number of different opinions on these fruitfully-debated topics, the atheist couldn’t have any other opinion if he tried.  The whole sphere is closed to him.  Some of them endure this loss by pretending that the sphere doesn’t even exist, which would I guess be a sort of hyperatheism (in which it is even denied that discussion of God exists).  This does not strike me as being particularly honest, though.

Most interesting to me is how one-sided this phenomenon is.  While there are dozens of charts showing a blue bar up in the high eighties or low nineties, I can not see a single chart on any topic – religious or otherwise – in which Christians have such a solitary bar compared to a broad variety of atheist opinions.  The only one that comes close is the chart graphing the response to the question of whether or not marriage is a purely heterosexual affair, but even there the Christian side only hit 70% on “strongly agree.”

What is to be taken away from this survey remains to be seen, and I’m sure there will be a notable variance between what we’re meant to take away from it and what we actually do.  Nevertheless, I feel as though Harris could have firmed up his numbers a bit by approaching one of the larger religious sites (Beliefnet, perhaps, or GodSpy) to conduct the same survey on his behalf to compensate for the fractional Christian numbers who participated in the thing as it is.  Perhaps he may yet do this, but for now this is what we’ve got.

Getting ‘em while they’re young

In a bold move guaranteed, as ever, to accomplish nothing and look tremendously foolish while doing it, England’s National Children’s Bureau has instructed nursery school teachers and similar educators to be on the lookout for racist incidents among their youthful charges.  Children as young as three are to be carefully screened for adverse reactions to The Cultural Other, with such evidence as a resistance to funny-looking and unfamiliar food being gravely noted.  A “[negative reaction] to a culinary tradition other than their own” is one of many warning signs that the tousle-haired infant standing at your knee is well on his way to a supporting role in This is England.

Now, when it comes to social planning such as this, naturally every safeguard will be put in place to prevent the frivolous reporting of incidents or mere misaprehensions, right?  Surely it’s best to err on the side of caution when it comes to saddling a child with a reprimand for racial bigotry before he’s old enough to form complete sentences.

I would have hoped as much, but apparently one can’t be too careful:

Staff are told: “No racist incident should be ignored. When there is a clear racist incident, it is necessary to be specific in condemning the action.”

[. . .]

Nurseries are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible to their local council. The guide added: “Some people think that if a large number of racist incidents are reported, this will reflect badly on the institution. In fact, the opposite is the case.”

The article does not say whether the children are to be encouraged to inform upon and denounce one another as well, but I would be very much surprised if they weren’t.

Marvels

Brian Visaggio of Saint Superman has a lengthy look at the excellent Busiek/Ross miniseries Marvels, in which the focus shifts away from the superheroes themselves, landing instead on the average joes who have to live in a world in which they exist. It’s truly excellent work, and Brian’s take on it is right on the money.

My only qualm with the piece is that it tends to make it sound as though Alex Ross was responsible for Marvels and DC’s slightly similar Kingdom Come in their entirety, but this is not in fact the case. As great as Ross is, his job on both series was to provide the eye-popping watercolour artwork; scripting the stories themselves fell to Kurt Busiek, in the case of Marvels, and Mark Waid, for Kingdom Come.

Apart from that, though, well worth your time.

UPDATE: Brian informs me that Ross’ contributions to both projects was much greater than I had thought; while Busiek and Waid did in fact write the scripts for their respective books, the concepts, promotion and entire creative thrust of both enterprises were essentially down to Ross himself. I stand cheerfully corrected.

UPDATE UPDATE: Now Kurt Busiek himself has appeared in the comments below to cast some doubt on the previous update.  Will he return to put things right?  Have I unwittingly offended my favourite comic book writer?  Find out in the next senses-shattering issue.