I hope over the next semester, readers will start to notice the same students appearing in the comic over and over again. For example, two of these three appeared in this comic last week. I teach something like 160 students every day. I always felt it was disingenuous to add too many recurring student characters here. I did it a few times to varying success, but I wanted to give the feeling of there being tons and tons of kids… and just me. I’m sure that did not come across and I’m happier focusing on the 15 or so recurring students you’ll see throughout the next four months.

Most of these ethical dilemmas came via The Book of Questions, that classic repository for debate and commentary. I used to use it ALL the time in college to stir up conversations with people in the dorms.

I sort of like this comic, but (full disclosure here) doing comics where I set up what we’re doing in the week are sort of unnecessary and definitely a crutch. In theory, if I’m doing these things right, tomorrow’s comic should be able to set things up simply by being about the topic I want to discuss this week.

Does that make sense?

It’s an all Spider-Man villain theme week!

Venom is a weird character in that his presence in the Spider-Man rogues gallery and your fondness for him really depend on when you were reading Spider-Man comic books. For people of my generation, he’s probably thought of as THE Spider-Man villain. For anyone reading before or after the mid 1980′s to late 1990′s, they could care less for him. Also, this should have been WEDNESDAY. We had Monday off this week. My bad.

…where as The Green Goblin, if you think of him as the BIG Spidey villian, you were probably reading the book in the 1960′s and 1970′s. GG was barely in the Spider-Man comics when I was a young reader. I only really knew about him through flashbacks and collected trades. Hobgoblin, the GG knockoff, made more appearances during my childhood. Heck, Demogoblin, a knockoff of Hobgoblin made more appearances!

As a fan of comics, I already know which books I’m likely to come across in a thrift store, either due to popularity of the comic or the noteriety of the cartoonist. Although I stress emphatically I am no academic when it comes to comics, I generally know what to expect. For example, I will find a lot of Family Circus comic paperbacks, because they are inoffensive and many children buy them, read them, and their parents donate them after they’re grown up. A Family Circus paperback is easy to anticipate.

That’s the long way around saying I was pleasantly shocked when I found this book.

Office Lover Boy by Stan and Jan Berenstein, published in 1962 by Dell Publishing.

I am sure the majority of you immediately recognize the names of the authors of this book.

Stan and Jan Berenstein are prolific cartoonists and authors, most famously known to children all over the world for their series of books featuring The Berenstein Bears. I read the Bears’ series of picture books like crazy when I was a young’un. Their colorful mix of pro-social values and gentle good humor was a favorite in my house growing up. In fact, Office Lover Boy was published the same year as the very first Berenstein Bears picture book, The Big Honey Hunt.

…which is part of the reason I was so shocked to find that Stan & Jan spent the early part of their career drawing comics about oversexed men and women with gigantic tits! I don’t expect that children’s book authors ONLY write for young tykes, but I frankly had not considered the Berensteins doing any work outside of the Bears’ series.

Office Lover Boy seems to be the third part of the Lover Boy series, Some light Googling shows two other books released in the series; Lover Boy, published in 1958, and Bedside Lover Boy in 1960.

The majority of the comics collected in this volume are one panel gag strips. I can’t find any evidence that these Lover Boy strips were published anywhere before being collected in this volume, although the tone and tenor of the majority of these strips makes me think they wouldn’t have been out of place in a men’s magazine like Playboy. Case in point:

Interestingly, most of these gags go on for pages and pages, so the “girls stuck in elevator/guys look up their skirts” gag gets extended into the next couple of comic strips. I’ve never seen that concept done before in a comic paperback collection like this. If this really was an original collection rather than a reprint book, it makes sense that the Berenstains would have that kind of freedom to expand into their gags a little bit.

That isn’t to say that the comics collected here are lewd, even by the standards of the Sixties- the tone of Office Lover Boy is more of a tittering, snickering teenager than an out-and-out horndog. In other words: these aren’t porn comics, they’re just comics where the authors are slightly bemused about the prospect of drawing big ol’ boobies and butts on women.

Office Lover Boy deals in the politics and stereotypes of the office environment of the 1960′s- the voluptuous secretary, the adulterous businessman, the killjoy wife. For sure, these stock characters have real and legitimate basis in reality; the television show Mad Men is basically build upon them!  Looking at Office Lover Boy from 2011, and some of the strips and punchlines seem a little rote to me. Like the authors didn’t want to go in for the kill and instead decided to play with their food for awhile.

I thought this section of the book was pretty successful- in “Patterns” the word balloons are characteristic of the unspoken intent of the character’s words. It’s an easy gag, but it’s plenty clever. I’m surprised I haven’t seen reused too often.

Again, what’s most fascinating about this book is not the actual content of the strips, but the inherent weirdness of them. Seeing two beloved children’s authors go dirty was something of a headtrip!

All these books cost me less than $7 dollars. I bought them from Hastings, a regional merchant of new and used books, movies, video games, and all sorts of other things. I’ve made some really fun purchases from Hastings before (see my Halloween decorations post for more on that) but this past week they had a 30% off Used Books sale… and since Hastings always has free shipping for books, I indulged $7 bucks worth.

The Buffy: Panel to Panel book is usually $15 to $20 dollars in stores… I got it and three of these other books for like a buck and a quarter. Ditto all the other books save for the Aliens Omnibus. I believe that one set me back like $2 dollars… but we all know how much I love the Aliens franchise.

Most of these are books I’ve been wanting to check out for awhile but haven’t had the money or the time to give a shot… Jon Sable: Freelance being at the top of that list. In fact, the only dud of the bunch was the NewUniversal trade, which I bought on the strength of Warren Ellis’ writing. Still, at $1.25 or so, I don’t exactly feel cheated about not liking the book.

I mention Hastings here because I had a really good experience with the company and highly recommend them. The books came in like-new condition and they were shipped to me in like a day and a half. Hastings does  sales all the time so it might be worth bookmarking them and/or checking back from time to time.

——

Besides my Hastings orders, I’m also making my way through the addictive I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum.

This is an “oral history” book very much like the seminal Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Music, or the more recent Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live. Marks and Tannenbaum interviewed hundreds of personalities, executives, and talent involved with the golden age (1981 to 1992) of MTV. The results are engrossing, especially if you remember the channel from its’ music-playing heyday.

I watched MTV regularly during the early 1990′s (early enough to appreciate the book’s later coverage of Nirvana and Pearl Jam) but I also remember being a kid and scouring the channel during their  “all music, all the time” period. My tastes back then were limited to Michael Jackson, any video employing animation (Take on Me, Sledgehammer, You Might Think), and Weird Al cuts… but there was something to be said for the format, where the randomness of what videos played and when demanded you sit down and watch for hours at a time.

One of the book’s virtues is that it doesn’t seek out many of the big names you associate with MTV; you won’t find candid sit-down interviews with Madonna or Bruce Springstein here. Instead, you’ll find those superstars’ stories being told by the rank and file who surrounded them and I think that’s a pretty apt way to look at those folks. The secondhand nature of the stories shared here extends the air of mystique those performers carried with them then and now.

At any rate, it’s a good read. It will make you think about Alan Hunter for the first time in decades… but it will also make you think of Kennedy for the first time in decades as well, so I don’t know why where I’m going with this.

A couple of things:

1. I’m sorry for overusing the word “always” in this comic. It happened. I saw it. I didn’t fix it. My apologies.

2. Our discussion of “word of mouth” was made unexpectedly interesting this past week with the passing of former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. His death was falsely reported on Twitter and spread like wildfire on this Saturday past. Paterno’s family made public statements that Paterno was still fighting. He did  succumb to lung cancer on Sunday, but it was an interesting lesson on the nature of news reporting on social networking services.

Seriously, folks… newspapers are DEAD after my generation. It breaks my heart… growing up, I lived in a “three newspapers a day” household (The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and our local paper). I would by the Daily News with my own money because I wanted to know what was going on in NYC. By and large, my students have no need or interest in picking up a traditional newspaper.

I guess I’ll talk about this a little bit more as we go further with these journalism class comics, but man oh man… goodbye print media.

So far, it’s been interesting to teach a class where most of the students chose to be there, rather than be required to participate. Add onto that many of my former students coming in for another go-around and it’s a nice combination.

Eagle eyed among you will recognize some students from this comic, all the way back in September.

…and I’m not slagging off ice breaker games here, don’t get that idea! I’ve done plenty of comics in the past about the different activities I use to get the ball rolling in my 9th grade classes. It’s just, a 12th grade class? At least in my school, most of those kids know one another already. You could argue that an ice breaker could, in some ways, bring the class together even if they DID know one another already. That’s a fair point, but with a half-year class, it’s hard to give up time for something like that. You hope the culture of the classroom will form regardless.

Wow, that probably could have been a comic in and of itself.

That being said, I went with the movie interpretations of the characters because they are the best known. Also, John O’Neill is WAY too good an artist for me to try and imitate. He’s incredible.

The Tin Woodsman was always my favorite. I dressed at him for Halloween when I was like four years old.

The Cowardly Lion however, was always my least favorite… which explains why his chalkboard drawing is the weakest.

The Wizard was weirdly fun to draw.

I went with a flying monkey because the rest of the Oz characters were women. I have no problem drawing myself in Dorothy drag, with all the baggage that entails… but I thought it might be a strange drawing to sit on the chalkboard all Friday.