Word: superhero
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Gilbert Arenas, wonder guard of the Washington Wizards, goes by a superhero nickname, Agent Zero, as in the number on his uniform. Here's a more appropriate appellation: Agent Weirdo. Why? This is a guy who at halftime of one game took a shower--fully uniformed--to cool down. He tickles the underarm of a teammate before tip-off for good luck. His addictions are many and, Arenas admits, "pointless," including bad DVDs, vintage jerseys and his latest, crappy basketballs. Arenas is collecting the synthetic balls the NBA unveiled and dumped this season after players complained about cutting their fingers...
...HERO AND THE SUPERHERO...
...Jules Feiffer became famous in the '50s for what many called the first adult comic strip, Sick Sick Sick (later just Feiffer), which ran in The Village Voice and other papers. But Feiffer knew the superhero comics so well because he loves them as a kid and he wanted to be an artist; he studied these strips from the wrist up. In his late teens he assisted Will Eisner in drawing The Spirit. Here's his evocative iconography of the comics hero...
...Before there was a superhero, there had to be a hero. In the early '30s that was Dick Tracy, Chester Gould's city cop with an FBI agent's love of forensics and gadgetry (the Crimestopper's Textbook instructed kids on how to catch bad guys). What's striking today about the strip is its sanctified sadomasochism. No question, Tracy could dish it out, as in this sequence from 1947: "Like a whip, a piece of chain flies through the air - a chain attached to Tracy's cane handle. AGAIN AND AGAIN, the chain slashes! Tiny pieces of glass...
...genres and tones. One week's story might be a melodrama, the next a comedy, the third a parable. But beyond the variety of stories was a striking visual consistency: the tone was bold, dark and mature - a grownup vision, compared to the adolescent world-view of the standard superhero strip. To quote Feiffer: "Will Eisner was an early master of the German expressionist approach in comic books - the Fritz Lang school. ?Muss 'Em Up' was full of dark shadows, creepy angle shots, graphic close-ups of violence and terror. Eisner's world seemed more real than the world...