Remembering Len Wein, 1948-2017

Last month while I was at the Toronto International Film Festival, one of the great figures in comic book history died, and I didn't have the chance to say anything about him. I'd like to fix that. 

Len Wein died on September 10. If you heard about that at all, you probably heard that he was the co-creator of Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, and Swamp Thing. That's true, he was those things, and he was also a very good comic book writer, particularly in the 1970s. 

But what I want to talk about is how he was one of the five best comic book editors ever, and maybe even #2 (behind Stan Lee, with Jim Shooter, Karen Berger, and Joe Quesada being the others in the Top 5 conversation). When we talk about the history of comics, and the creators we love, it's almost always a conversation that hinges on writers and artists, and rarely on editors. But in comics (and in several publications), the major editors do so much more than just copy edit--they're the people choosing the creative arcs of the entire company. They're the people hiring the writers and artists, and essentially choosing which comics exist and which don't. They're the people responsible for recognizing and cultivating talent--which is, itself, a major talent. And Len Wein was one of the best ever at it. 

If we look at the history of comics from that perspective--what existed and why--then Len Wein is clearly one of the most important figures in the medium since 1970. He might even be #1. In the modern history of comics, two dominant forces stand out--superhero franchises, and creator-owned comics and graphic novels. It could be argued (and I'm arguing it) that each of these forces derived from two single moments, 30 or 40 years ago, when Len Wein hired the right person at the right time, and encouraged them to follow their creative muse. 

The first moment came in 1975. Len Wein had just relaunched Marvel's long-dormant X-Men series. The series had been cancelled five years earlier and most of the characters were barely being used. Len Wein (with artist Dave Cockrum) created a group of new members for the team (Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus) and relaunched the series. When the first issue of the relaunch was a success, Wein quickly realized he didn't have the time to keep writing it (because he had just been promoted to one of Marvel's top editors), so with the second issue of the new series, Wein passed the writing reins onto a young writer named Chris Claremont, who had done a handful of fill-in work for Marvel but had never had a permanent writing assignment on any title. Wein stayed on as editor of the new X-Men title for a time and encouraged Claremont to write the characters how he wanted to. At the time, X-Men was still a bi-monthly title (meaning it only came out six times per year), and it stayed that way for the first few years of Claremont's tenure, as he slowly built an audience for the new group of characters. 

Claremont would end up writing X-Men for 16 consecutive years, 1975-1991. During that time, the X-Men went from one title coming out six times per year, to, at the time of his 1991 departure, six monthly titles that were regularly shattering comic book sales records. For most of those 16 years, Claremont was virtually the only writer on any mutant titles (though he eventually ceded some of them to other writers, such as his editorial partner Louise Simonson, when he couldn't keep up with the demand for so many books). To say that the X-Men--as a franchise, an institution, and one of the biggest reasons so many kids got into comics in the 1980s and 1990s--would not have ever been what they were without Claremont is a gross understatement. He built almost the entire X-Men mythos, which led to Marvel adopting the idea of franchises built around closely connected groups of titles which would frequently crossover with one another, which is now virtually the entire superhero publishing model. And don't forget, the 2000 X-Men movie is what launched the modern superhero film craze. None of that happens without Claremont, which really means none of it happens without Len Wein hiring the right person at the right time. 

And that was only the first time. 

The second time happened in 1983. Wein was now at DC, and was an editor on Swamp Thing, a character he had co-created 10 years earlier. The title had relaunched the year before to coincide with a Wes Craven movie, but now sales were lagging again and the writer, Martin Pasko, wanted to move on. Wein had to hire someone else. He was intrigued by a young British comic writer named Alan Moore, who was extremely heralded. But at the time, there was virtually no precedent for a British comic creator working for an American comic company. The appetites of British and American audiences were seen as too different. But Wein hired Alan Moore anyway, and, in what was an extremely bold move at the time, Wein allowed Moore to completely change every aspect of the character--his origin, his identity, his abilities, his motivations--in just his second issue. Moore had never written an American comic book before. Not only did Wein hire him, but Wein gave this person, a total unknown to American comic audiences, complete freedom to write what he wanted, even though it all went 180 degrees against the entire publishing history of the character. Moore's brilliance cannot be overstated--that second issue of Swamp Thing that he wrote is my single favorite comic book ever. But Wein giving Moore that opportunity really cannot be overstated either. 

The first page of the legendary Swamp Thing #21, Alan Moore's second issue, and my all-time favorite single comic issue

Within three years, Swamp Thing was the first American comic by Marvel or DC to carry a "Mature Readers" label. Around the same time, Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons launched Watchmen at DC, which is still regarded as the greatest graphic novel ever made. Len Wein was the editor on the series, and he's the one that allowed Moore and Gibbons the creative freedom to make such an industry-defining masterpiece. By the end of the 1980s, American comics were being flooded with a wave of British writers and artists that completely changed the medium, such as Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. In 1993, DC turned six of their mature readers comics (including Swamp Thing) into a new imprint called Vertigo, which led to modern graphic novels and creator-owned comics as we know them. The literary success of Vertigo books like Sandman are also what led places like Borders and Barnes & Noble to start carrying graphic novels. And again, it all happened because Len Wein hired the right person at the right moment. 

So much of modern comic book history can be traced back to these two Len Wein decisions. It also so happens that my two absolute favorite comic series ever are Chris Claremont's X-Men run and Alan Moore's Swamp Thing run, and I'm eternally grateful to Len Wein for being the decision maker that provided me with so many rewarding reading experiences in my life. The creative works that Len Wein helped birth into the universe profoundly shaped who I am. 

And now I'm a professional editor. Huh. I wonder who I got it from?

Roger Ebert: A Personal Eulogy

Note: This essay was originally written on the evening of February 4, 2013 (shortly after the news hit that Roger had died), and it initially appeared on Detroit's Metro Times blog that night. That link is sadly now broken. 

“Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.”

     -Roger Ebert, 2002

I first read those words in early 2006, during a particularly cold winter and a particularly cold time in my life. I had just graduated from college after a long series of changes to “the plan,” and the path to a life that I was interested in living still seemed painfully foggy. I had also just been the unwilling participant in a particularly painful breakup, and I was suddenly facing the prospect of weekends with no girlfriend and no college parties to go to. Though I didn’t know it yet (because I hadn’t actually seen the film yet), I was just as directionless—and just as non-waspy—as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. All I wanted was an adult to do something other than ask me about my future, to say something other than “plastics.”

Roger Ebert filled that void. During one of many evenings spent aimlessly wandering around Borders (RIP), I stumbled on the first volume of Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies, and I can honestly say it changed my life.

I had always been a bit of a cinephile. Seeing Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption in theaters as a 13-year-old first opened the floodgates of my movie love, and before I knew it I was probably the only 8^th-grader in Muncie, Indiana checking out old Scorsese and Kubrick movies from the local Hollywood Video. This love of film continued through high school, when I was dazzled by late-90’s masterpieces like Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, American Beauty, and Three Kings. But college nights and weekends simply presented too many temptations and distractions, and I went through a period of several years where I just didn’t see that many films. I eventually finished college with an English degree and the idea that I would be a rock critic, but I quickly realized that I just wasn’t very good at writing about the mechanics of music.

Finding Ebert’s The Great Movies on the shelf at Borders that cold January day was the moment of clarity that I needed. I couldn’t believe how many of these films I’d never heard of, and I couldn’t wait to start watching them. As luck would have it, TCM was playing one of the movies, The Third Man, that night, and I loved that film so much I eventually named my blog after it. My journey had begun, with Roger Ebert as the best tour guide I could ever imagine.

One of Roger’s favorite quotes is from Groucho Marx, who once said “I would never want to be a part of any club that would have me as a member.” It’s a funny idea, but perhaps the reason Roger loved it so much is because it couldn’t have been farther from his ethos. Roger Ebert wanted everyone to be a part of his club. No one has ever made the discussion of art feel more inclusive, more accessible, and downright friendlier than he did. That he was able to do this without ever dumbing down himself or his subject matter is a truly remarkable achievement.

While Roger was an academic in the most flattering sense of the term (it’s difficult to fathom anyone understanding or studying film more than he did), he never came across that way in his writing. To Roger, the point was never to speak only to other cinephiles, but rather to help everyone become a cinephile.  Roger wanted the conversation to have the widest reaches possible, to touch everyone. As he says in the quote at the top of this piece (taken from the introduction to The Great Movies), the best movies can “make us into better people.” Roger truly believed that (as do I), and that’s why he wanted everyone to have the opportunity to be so affected.

Roger’s conversational tone has been a great influence to my own writing, and reading his work over the years has taught me an incalculable amount of lessons in how to convey ideas clearly, effectively, and simply (though I still have some work to do on that last point). I clearly remember my first few weeks and months pouring over The Great Movies (and eventually its sequels). The anecdote from Omar Sharif that begins his Lawrence of Arabia piece—about how unlikely it was that the film would even get financed—still informs my ideas about the business of Hollywood. When Roger spoke of The Shawshank Redemption absorbing you to the extent that you lose the realization you’re watching a movie, I knew just what he was talking about. When he discussed the concept of real truth versus perceived truth in his JFK piece, he helped me realize that the latter can be just as important, or even more so, than the former.

And reading Roger’s work might have been the first time I realized that simply stating what you like wasn’t breaking the rules. It seems obvious now. After all, isn’t stating what you like what a critic is always doing, at least to some extent? But nobody did it better than Roger, and nobody did it more passionately. Roger’s favorite movie scene was in Casablanca, when the singing Nazis are suddenly drowned out by Victor Laszlo leading the singing of the French National Anthem, La Marseillaise. For someone who believed that good movies could make us better people, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Roger was a sucker for people overcoming the odds to do the right thing.

But I am too, and good movies have definitely made me a better person; hopefully they still are. My thoughts on murder are inseparable from those of William Muny in Unforgiven—“It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.” One of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day, is about learning how to become a better person, one day at a time. And The Third Man, the very first movie I ever watched on the recommendation of Roger Ebert, ends with its protagonist doing the right thing knowing it would probably cost him the girl, and yet he still goes after her at the end only to watch her walk away.

In recent years, I’ve found that I haven’t agreed with Roger’s taste as much as I used to. As his health continued to decline in the last few years, I felt that his taste was becoming a little less discerning, as though he was so thrilled to still be able to go to movies he just couldn’t bear to be as critical of them. But there’s an important lesson to be learned there, and it’s that no one has ever loved what he did more than Roger Ebert.

Here’s a painful truth to consider: Roger Ebert has probably seen more terrible movies than most of us have seen movies, period. When Michael Caine won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 2000 for The Cider House Rules, he famously joked in his speech about how much crap he’s made. Well, Roger Ebert saw all of that crap. He saw all of everyone’s crap. He saw every latter-day Eddie Murphy movie and every Katherine Heigl movie. He saw four Scary Movies, but the Movie Gods mercifully saved him from a fifth with just a few days to spare. And yet there was no one more excited for the next movie he’d see than Roger Ebert. Even after a long series of health setbacks robbed his ability to speak, Roger still looked forward to interacting with an audience.

I noticed this when I encountered Roger at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. He sat two rows in front of me for a surprisingly un-crowded interview with the heads of Sony Pictures Classics. Despite the fact that a handful of major directors (Jonathan Demme, Gus Van Sant, and Atom Egoyan, off the top of my head) were in the room and chatting with people after the interview, I only wanted to meet Roger. I could tell he was having trouble moving, he seemed tired, and obviously he couldn’t speak, so I didn’t want to keep him. I didn’t bother him with talking about my writing, I didn’t give him a business card, and I didn’t even introduce myself. This wasn’t networking. It wasn’t about what Roger could do for me, but what he had already done for me. I simply shook his hand and told him that his writing has been very important to me.

But of course, that was an understatement. Roger Ebert has been so important to me that, like Bruce Springsteen, I no longer even like the informality of referring to them by their last names. I (falsely) feel like I know them too well for that. Just Roger will do nicely. And something Roger has always done is steadfastly called them “movies,” not “films.” Films sound stuffy, while movies sound enjoyable. Roger always thought movies were enjoyable. In my own writing, I’ve often struggled with this to the extent that sometimes I switch back and forth between the two terms in the same paragraph. Should they be films or movies? I’ve never really figured out an answer I’m satisfied with. But today, at least, they’re movies.

When the news of Roger’s death hit Thursday afternoon, I immediately felt the need to honor him somehow in what I watched that night. Then I figured out what seemed like the perfect solution. Just a few days prior, I had checked out Gates of Heaven from the library, which was one of the 14 movies from Roger’s first volume of The Great Movies that I hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. Ostensibly it’s a documentary about pet cemeteries, but really it’s a film about how people deal with death, so it felt like the perfect movie to watch as I celebrated the life of Roger Ebert in my own little way.

To my surprise, I didn’t really like it. The pacing was a little too glacial, the action a little too sedate, the interviews a little too meandering. But like I always do with a movie that Roger recommends, I read his review afterward. And even though Gates of Heaven had disappointed me, Roger’s thoughts about it did not. Through his words, I understood what he saw in it, why he found it so interesting, so revelatory about the human condition. Tastes will never overlap all of the time, and the goal of the critic isn’t to get people to like everything (you think) they ought to. But that doesn’t mean you can’t help them understand the things they don’t like, and maybe even appreciate them. I’ve never learned more from disagreeing with someone than I have with Roger. And on the night that Roger Ebert died, he was still teaching me.

Revisiting 1991's Hook, the Most Important Bad Movie of My Life

There are few movies that I liked better as a child than Hook, and there are also few movies that were bigger debacles in the careers of great directors. Steven Spielberg regards Hook as the worst movie he's ever made, and he's embarrassed to even watch it now. Roger Ebert panned it, along with most other major critics. The movie made money, but also fell hugely short of expectations.  All of the film education I've given myself as an adult should have prepared me to see it for the failure it is, and yet I can't. I acknowledge that huge chunks of it are an unmitigated disaster. The sets and production design are terrible. They make Neverland look like it was designed during Michael Jackson's worst kind of sleepover. The final set piece of the Lost-Boys-versus-pirates-war is reprehensibly cheesy. Dustin Hoffman gives what might be the worst performance of his career, so overacted that the titular character is turned into a Looney Tunes parody. It takes waaaaaaay too long to get us the hell to Neverland, spending almost 40 minutes with a cell phone as the movie's breakout star. And yet, there's so much magic here bubbling up from all of the bad decisions. 

The great French filmmaker Francois Truffaut once said that a bad film by Jean Renoir (who he regarded as the greatest filmmaker ever) was far more interesting than a good film by a lesser director. The takeaway is that hugely talented people reveal something to us through their failures that's still fascinating, and those failures allow us to see their genius in interesting ways. And so it is with Spielberg's Hook. Spielberg is not an art-house auteur, but he's almost inarguably the greatest mass-audience filmmaker of all-time. He's the auteur of the people. One thing Spielberg is fantastic at, even when everything else is going wrong, is making his audience (i.e.: everyone) feel the magic. There's a scene in Hook when the adult Peter first encounters the Lost Boys, and they refuse to believe he's their former leader. Peter doesn't believe it himself, until one particularly young Lost Boy dares to look past the obvious and find the extraordinary. 

Everything about this scene works. The lighting, the incredibly subtle and powerfully nostalgic John Williams score that envelops us in crashing emotion at just the right moment, the silly-putty ability of Robin Williams' face and the look of confusion in his eyes, and the excitement on the faces of the rest of the Lost Boys as they receive their first indication that maybe this really is Peter Pan. I have seen this scene dozens and dozens of times--I just watched it another three times while writing this--and it has never failed to give me goosebumps. But something that took me a long time to realize is that it's not the story that's giving me goosebumps. Even as a child, it wasn't my desire to believe in Peter Pan that was having a physical reaction on my arms and the back of my neck. It was the filmmaking. This is just a marvelously executed moment that figures out how to sell the viewer on a world of magic without actually showing or mentioning any. 

Hook has a handful of moments like this. Dustin Hoffman, for however bad the bulk of his performance is (and to be fair to him, it's a terribly written part that he had no way to save) still manages to give one of the film's best moments. When Hook is first confronted with an adult Peter Pan that doesn't remember who he is, Hoffman gets very close to him, slowly pulls down his glasses, and in an exaggerated voice that sounds like half-southern drawl and half-British aristocracy, calmly says "Can it really be you, my great and worthy opponent?" Spielberg's camera is so close to the faces in this moment that we're basically analyzing the rings on their cheeks to determine age, and Hoffman draws out the word "opponent" as though he's trying to fill up the time quota in high school speech class. And it works. It's another mini-moment of magic. 

In Roger Ebert's list of the best movies of 2005, he wrote of King Kong, "If movies like this didn't delight us with the magic of cinema, we'd never start going in the first place." That quote has stuck with me because I'm fascinated by the origins of ideas. Loving certain disciplines and fields might be something that we're biologically predisposed to do (maybe), but even if that's the case, the predisposition still has to get fertilized. Maybe the genetic raw matter swirling about my head suggests that I was likely to fall in love with film as an art form, but something still had to trigger it into action. I've always told people that my two film Eureka! moments were seeing Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption in theaters when I was thirteen, and that those two movies awakened in me my love and appreciation for cinema. But I realize now that's only a partial truth. After all, if something in me hadn't already been awakened, then I wouldn't have been seeking out movies like that as a thirteen-year old. The more and more the idea marinates in my head, I think Hook might have been my Eureka! movie. Even if I now see it as a movie whose flaws heavily outweigh its attributes, its still those attributes that speak loudest to me. Amidst everything Spielberg did wrong in Hook, his natural talent for selling the magic of cinema found ways to shine through. 

About two thirds of the way through, there's a truly awful extended sequence of Captain Hook teaching the other pirates how to play baseball, to try and win sway over Pan's son. Every time I watch the movie, I just want the scene to end. Nothing about it works. But the ending of that scene directly leads to Peter's own Eureka! moment, when he remembers who he is. This is where Robin Williams is at his best. I re-watched Hook most recently the day after Williams died, and it was this scene that most struck me. Hook is both the best and worst role of Williams' career. On the one hand, it's perfect for him, because he plays a character that's supposed to be an eternal child. On the other hand, this specific movie saddles him with being a boring adult for the vast majority of the run time. It's sort of meta, because the viewer is trapped with Williams' fake/bad adulthood as much as the character of Peter Pan is. But it's also a waste of his strengths as an entertainer. When Peter finally seizes back his youthful identity, we see all over Williams' face how much he seems to have found his true self. It's another transcendent moment, and Spielberg nails it. Just as Williams is lost in his newfound childhood, Spielberg is visually drunk on his ability to create it. 

Of course this high can't last. Just minutes later we see the Lost Boys "armor up" for the big war, and it's easily the worst sequence of the movie. It's so bad that watching it as an adult makes you want to reach back through time and slap yourself in the face for not realizing how bad it was when you were a kid. But whatever. By that point, the movie has already won. You're still watching because the isolated moments of true greatness have permeated so deep into your desire to see high seas adventure that you can no longer be discerning about the form in which it manifests. It doesn't matter that the rest of the movie is bad, because you're still high on the moment where it briefly became everything you wanted it to be. I remember watching that scene with my mom once back when I was a kid, and I told her I didn't understand how Peter was suddenly wearing his green tights just because he remembered how to fly. My mom laughed and basically told me not to worry about it, and that characters can just do things like that in movies. I still think about that plot hole every time I watch it, and then I still heed my mom's advice and stop worrying about it. Even though they're everywhere in Hook, the flaws aren't the point. They just make the few great parts even better.