Dave Cockrum and Rob Liefeld: A View From the Throne

Difficult as this might be to swallow, there was a time when Dave Cockrum couldn't get work as an artist. I'm not talking about when he was just back from the Navy seeking that first soon-to-be-fabled assignment as a professional. That actually didn’t turn out so badly. Armed with a folded letter of introduction from Neal Adams, who saw something in the young Cockrum that the rest of us would soon discover, Dave’s early career was something America’s Got Talent legends are made of.

But two decades later, it was over. Just a single generation after Cockrum’s ground-breaking Giant-Size X-Men #1, which introduced his characters Nightcrawler, Storm, Thunderbird and Colossus to the world, there was a new Pharaoh. And suddenly Dave Cockrum couldn’t catch a cold at Marvel. He was viewed as old hat by the new turks. Stodgy. That’s the word Joe Quesada used for Dave Cockrum’s art.

Leap forward another two decades and Dave’s artwork is selling for stupid money. You can hock one of his original covers, if you have one, and buy a car with the proceeds. Fans have canonized his creations. A sure sign of that is their inability to accept anyone touching the Futurians.

Don’t get me wrong. When the announcement that Rob Liefeld would be taking on the Futurians was made, I didn't exactly expect old fans to wet themselves in anticipation nor trample the halt and the lame on their way out the door to buy a copy. I know how old guys are. I had one staring back at me in the mirror this morning, bleary eyed, slack jawed. It's not a pretty sight. Old guys don't like any manner of change. I get it. Give me the same bran cereal I've always eaten. Give me the same beer. And don’t expect me to segment kitchen garbage into compost piles and "legit" trash. Julie Newmar—now that was a Catwoman. Adam West is the real Batman. I get it.

We all hate change. Change is evil. Nothing new can ever hold a candle to what was. I don’t care when you were born—you know as well as I do it was better back then.

But tell that to young folks just graduating from school this month, or just attempting to break into show business. We don’t want young punks looking for work in the comic book industry. Comics represent the idyllic Golden Age of our fleeting youth—a plane of reality where good is good and bad is bad, and no one ever ages or dies.

Except creators.

It partially explains why the entertainment world seems to contain a finite creative well, a manifesto where 90% of everything is recycled or at least derivative. Is it because there’s so few fresh ideas or just a bludgeoned audience that’s unreceptive to novelty? Perhaps certain things really are worth revisiting? And revisiting. And revisiting.

I'll leave that riddle to you smarter people to solve. The old guy in the mirror doesn’t like to burden himself terribly much with things he has no control over, which is just about everything. But one thing he has some say in is the Futurians.

Years ago, Dave Cockrum took a chance on me and gave me license me to write a Futurians story. Some years after that, Steven Brown, the head of IDT Entertainment, took a chance on me and allowed me to write a Futurians screenplay.

Paty Cockrum—Dave’s widow—took a chance on undiscovered comics creator David Miller and allowed him to develop a comic series out of one of her husband’s Futurians characters. She took a chance on undiscovered comics creator Richard O’Hara and allowed him to pencil the final pages of Dave Cockrum’s last, unfinished, final Futurians.

Forty years earlier, Sol Brodsky and John Verpoorten at Marvel took a chance on Paty.

Sometimes you have to take chances.

The old guy in the mirror laments the abandonment of childhood pleasures that just don’t present themselves anymore. Worse, he misses his pal Dave, who just isn’t around to phone and shoot the shit with, or drive out to visit, or produce terrific new comics and characters. But the physical absence of Dave Cockrum does not mandate the absence of characters he designed and blew life into. You can be certain Marvel won’t let their Dave Cockrum creations die.

It’s up to the Dave Cockrum estate to make certain that intellectual properties Dave conceived continue to delight generations to come. Even if it doesn’t delight old guys who insist that Neal Adams was the only Batman artist or prefer Adam West wearing the cowl.

So maybe Rob Liefeld isn’t your favorite artist. He isn’t mine either. My favorite was Gene Colan. How dare David Mazachelli or Lee Weeks or Tim Sale touch old horn head after Gene had been on the book for a decade!

Rob Liefeld wasn’t selected because Paty Cockrum and I expected a clone of Dave’s artwork and writing style. He was accepted because he loves Dave's work enough to ask for the project. He’s been wanting this for 15 years. And Rob’s own accomplishments are vast. It would be demeaning to enumerate them.

When the announcement was made that Rob was taking on the Futurians, his fans were thrilled. But the old boy’s club held their midnight convention at the Dave Cockrum Appreciation Society on Facebook and I was unprepared for the vitriol that poured out of some of these codgers. One guy compared the announcement to Donald Trump winning the presidency. He didn’t mean it as a compliment. Another individual’s hysterical invective, which seemed to gather hysteria with each subsequent post, demanded a boycott of Liefeld’s Futurians. To be staged at the U.N., no doubt, or at least on the steps of City Hall.

“You could—you know—wait and see,” suggested unreasonably sane author Mark Ellis.

But that would be too easy. When change comes, it's better to rail against it, better to bash one's own head on the wall, to scream at the top of one’s Facebook lungs and proffer a call to arms, and perhaps take out a Senator or Congressman on their way to a baseball game just for good measure. Clearly, one’s level of ire must rise to the degree of the offense. A comic book drawn by someone else?! Heresy!

I thought about that as I stepped away from the old guy in the mirror and took the throne of indignation. And upon further pondering such, I concluded that those who spend so much energy bashing projects before they are even born have likely never struggled to produce anything beyond a good bowel movement. And even that was hard.

Alas, Poor Facebook

If I only had a nickel for all the apologies I’ve made. Or was asked to make. Or a dime for the ones people think they deserve.

To wit: My Facebook activity wanes when life’s other distractions loom larger. But, as many of you know, FB has a nifty feature aimed at dragging you back by reminding you of what you posted a year ago, two years ago, and so forth. “Here’s your memory!” it says. And sometimes it’s appropriate to revisit the post.

I wrote about Chuck Dixon and Tony Isabella and the politics of comics (and the comics of politics) three years ago, prior to the recent presidential election. Post the election, I’ve only written about politics when paid to do so. I won’t explain that. You either get it or you don’t.

You really don’t? Fine, I’ll explain.

Most people mark time by the BIG events we have in common. As in “before Emancipation,” “after the Stock Market crashed,” and so forth. In my short lifetime, it was “after Kennedy was assassinated,” “before the Beatles played Ed Sullivan,” and “after 9-11.”

And, most recently, “Post November.” Some of you call it “Post Trump.” Others, “After Obama.”

Before the Beatles played Ed Sullivan, there was one set of expectations about music. After they played, there was another. Don’t bother arguing with me. On this subject, and few others, everyone is wrong and I’m right.

No need to go into what occurred after 9-11.

But “Post November,” things got ugly. The power shoe was on the other foot. The emotional civil war (which is more dangerous than the ideological civil war) went into overdrive. People really got their hate on.

On Facebook (because all roads lead to Facebook), I watched people banning and “unfriending” each other like it was a bodily function, which was sort of sickening. Most bodily functions are, unless they’re your own. These weren’t my own. Mine smell okay to me.

I decided to stay out of it. No politics on Facebook. I wasn’t stumping for “my side” (who is it? who is it?) or any side, or joining any conversations about the president, the parties, or the various tribes. Unless, of course, someone was paying me to do it. Because that’s what I do—I write about things professionally (as in “for a living”). I’m okay with that: I've maintained my convictions; I don’t write anything that I don’t believe, regardless of who I write for, but neither do I jam my professional writing into my personal social media space. I save Facebook for hobbies and things I enjoy. Comics. Music. Family. Martial arts.

Three years ago—“Pre November”—I wrote about writer Chuck Dixon’s take on Conservatives being banned from comics and writer/editor Tony Isabella’s disagreement with Chuck, and Chuck’s with Tony. That was something I wrote for fun, as in I wasn’t paid to write it. It wasn’t really fun but I was interested because I like Chuck’s comics writing very much and Chuck and I are several degrees more than friendly, and Tony Isabella was very kind to me when I was getting started as a writer (“Post Nixon,” “Pre 9-11”)  and has remained so on-again, off-again for three decades. I'm not sure how Tony feels about me today (is it Wednesday?) but we share a close friend in author Harlan Ellison, a terrific author who was born “After the stock Market crashed” but not very much after.

The piece I wrote about Chuck and Tony and Politics and Comics popped up on its third year Facebook anniversary, lest auld acquaintance be forgot, and I reposted it. And because I reposted it in a “Post November” world, it has already received 500+ comments. The comments come from members of various tribes. People who would, given the opportunity, banish their fellows to another country or even another planet and, failing that, block and “unfriend” each other on Facebook after a liberal (and I use the term as Oxford does, meaning “generous”) dose of criticism, often bile covered, minimally snarky.

I’ve been asked to chime in. I’ve been asked how I feel about a particular comment in a thread of 500+ comments. But I can’t answer that because I haven’t read most of those comments. Comments from people that I don’t know are graffiti to me and if I only learned one thing from Chargé D'affaires Harlan Ellison it is this: avoid the tar pit.

This doesn’t mean I don’t care what people write, or what they write on my Facebook wall, within reason. There’s certain things, I’m certain, that could raise my dander, and those who’ve worked hard to pull my tail over the years undoubtedly have stories to tell. But I won’t be drawn into the milieu of “Post November” tribalism. I don’t feel the need to banish and unfriend people that I don’t even know.

“Don’t even know? Why are you friends?”

We’re not. They “friended” me. The holy word Friend has been re-nuanced and defrocked and made into garbage. Like the words conservative and liberal. Like the word gay, which once meant “light hearted” and trump, which meant “to have superior power over.” People “friend” me for various reasons. Facebook tells me I have 3659 friends.

I only have six or eight Friends. And only three of them are on Facebook.