Vintage Barkley

By Alex Dalenberg

February 20, 201

And now for something completely different. At the risk of alienating our nascent fan base of one or two readers who may or may not care about sports (I haven't dug deep into the analytics yet), I just want to take a moment to recognize Sir Charles Barkley's 50th birthday. 

​H/T to Wired staffer and fellow UA Journalism alumnus Nathan Olivarez-Giles for cluing me into the fact that the NBA Hall of Famer is hitting the big Five-O. 

But what does this have to do with popular literature? ​Not much except for the incredible volume of now-retro Barkley swag generated during the Mound Round of Rebound's heyday. Sure, Michael Jordan's 50th birthday got the bigger shout-out this week. But while Jordan's global brand was always tightly controlled, Barkley is the hands down winner in the sense of humor department. 

And lest we discount the classic 1990s film Space Jam, let's not forget that Jordan basically played straight man to the Looney Tunes, not a very difficult draw.

Barkley, meanwhile, battled Godzilla one-on-one and solved mysteries. The former in the aptly titled Godzilla vs. Barkley, by Dark Horse Comics, and the latter in Hamilton Comics' Sir Charles Barkley and the Referee Murders​, both published in 1993, the same year Barkley's Phoenix Suns fell to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Finals. 

I can proudly say that — growing up in the Phoenix suburbs — our family had a copy of each, which my stepfather kept in an armoire convinced they would one day become collector's items. Alas, they might need to live in the attic a few years more, because, as far as I can tell, they're worth maybe $20 today. 

I was surprised to learn that the Referee Murders​ were actually written in part by Alan Dean Foster, a successful fantasy and science fiction author. Foster is probably most notable for his film novelizations and expanded universe novels, including the Alien series, Star Trek and Star Wars. Foster actually wrote the original novelization for the first Star Wars film.

According to almighty Wikipedia, he also has what basically amounts to a lifetime achievement award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. Sure, he's never won a Hugo Award, but, in my mind, if you're going to pick an industry, there's no shame in being the best at it. I'd take it. 

At any rate, Barkley remains a huge personality in every sense of the word and, at least in an alternate universe created by Alan Dean Foster, one hell of an amateur detective.

Also, in perhaps one of the weirdest Nike spots ever filmed, an opera star.​

Holy Fabrication, Batman!

By Alex Dalenberg

February 13, 2013

Once upon a time, our fair nation — or at least its politicians — decided to investigate an insidious threat to America’s youth: sex and violence in pop culture.

Actually, make that, any time in America, ever, but in this case I’m talking about the 1954 hearings in which a U.S. Senate subcommittee took the comic book industry to task over graphic content, as well as the presence of a pool hall in River City, Iowa.

The hearings have long been the subject of ridicule, but recently published research from a University of Illinois professor have found that the urtext of the anti-comic book crusade, Seduction of the Innocent by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, was pretty much bogus.

H/T to comic book industry blog Bleeding Cool for digging this one up.

Dr. Carol Tilley dug into Wertham’s personal archive, which wasn’t made available to researchers until 2010 even though Wertham died in 1981. That’s pretty amazing to me, considering the impact Seduction of the Innocent had on an entire arm of the publishing industry. Congress took up the issue in large part due to widespread public outrage tied to Wertham’s book which, among other things, suggested that reading Batman comics could turn a child into a sexual predator.

Turns out Wertham distorted key quotes, left out critical contextual information and altered even basic data such as his subjects' ages while conducting his research into comic books. You can find a nice summary of Tilley’s work here at the Illinois website.

Tilley also uncovers some overlooked historical footnotes, such as letters written by young readers in defense of their comic books, some of them pointing out that works of Shakespeare, Poe and the Brothers Grimm are similarly gory.

As any comic geek knows, the committee hearings and ensuing fallout from advertisers led the industry to form the Comics Code Authority — sort of the comic book version of the Motion Picture Rating Association. Similar to the way an NC-17 rating is the kiss of death for mainstream box office success today, advertisers tended to avoid any comic book without the Comics Code Authority stamp.

Amazingly, the Comics Code Authority persisted until 2010 (ironically, the same year Wertham's archive was finally made public). The verdict is still out whether or not it achieved its mission of halting the nation's slide into decadence and moral decay.