posted April 15, 2003 05:50 PM            

Archives do a good job of collecting a complete run (in time). And they can provide a lot of material for certain popular characters. But when it comes to targetting works of great importance to history--not so good.

Two examples of works that need to be reprinted come to mind. One is not DC, but it serves my point. That's the death of Meatball in the Little Wise Guys. Having only read of this story (in All in Color for a Dime), I don't know specifics, but it seems to me that that is one story that needs to be preserved for posterity. Another example is the Monster Society of Evil storyline in the Captain Marvel comics. Eventually the archives should get around to that, but it seems like this is an important storyline that needs to be archived as soon as possible.

posted April 15, 2003 09:13 PM            

I;m not familiar with the Little Wise Guys, so I can't comment on that.

As far as material that DC owns, I'm not sure that there is a problem.

The most important Silver Age comics either have been Archived or otherwise collected, or soon will be.

Most "works of great importance to history" since the Silver Age have been reprinted in some format. In any case, they do not need "to be preserved for posterity" because they are readily available in their original format.

The Golden Age is the only area where I see any real need. The Monster Society of Evil is probably the best example, but even that has been reprinted, just not by DC. The later Green Lantern and Flash stories, particularly those with Harlequin and Icicle seem to be important.

posted April 15, 2003 09:15 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by vze2:
Sort of like the plastic on Jack Cole

---

Sort of like the plastic BOOK on Jack Cole

posted April 16, 2003 12:26 AM               

I remember reading that in that book, and wondering, why did they reprint that. I wanted to read about the guy with the boomerang, not some kid gang.

Monster Society of Evil will probably be reprinted again. In the archives though, it will be reprinted chronologically with all the other stories, since the serial ran two years, being the third or fourth story in each issue of Captain marvel Adventures.

Hawk Books is the only company that has ever reprinted it in its entirety.

DC has reprinted most of the stuff the fans want now, early appearances of their most important characters.

posted April 16, 2003 01:22 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by REKLEN:
What was so great about the death of Little Meatball? An obscure character in an obscure strip?

---

Because death of a regular character in a golden age comic was almost unheard of, and the death of a child character, even more so. Meatball may be the only instance of the later example.

posted April 16, 2003 03:50 AM               

-Scott

posted April 16, 2003 04:57 PM            

That said, at the moment, the preservation of comic books concerns me a good less than, or in any event is insufficiently distracting from my concern for, other, much older artifacts. I respectfully submit the following extract from Maureen Dowd's column, titled "History Up in Smoke," published in the April 16, 2003 edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES:

"Whether [Saddam Hussein] is MOAB dust or has a new face, he's gone. And we now own his country for the bargain down payment of $79 billion. America broke away from the British empire, and now it's building its own British-style empire. We are, as Niall Ferguson, the author of 'Empire,' put it, 'an empire in denial.'

"We obviously have some things to learn from the British. When they carted off the treasures of the nations they conquered to the British Museum, they at least preserved them for future generations to fight over who should own them.

"The coalition forces were guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry building while hundreds of Iraqis ransacked and ran off with precious heirlooms and artifacts from a 7,000-year-old civilization. Rummy blew off the repeated requests of scholars and archaeologists that the soldiers must protect Iraqi history in the museum as zealously as they protected Iraqi wealth in the oil wells.

"The secretary of defense made it clear yesterday that he was not too worried about a few old pots in the big scheme of things. He said it was 'a stretch' to attribute the looting of the museum to 'a defect' in the war plan.

"'We've seen looting in this country,' he said at the Pentagon briefing. 'We've seen riots at soccer games in various countries around the world. . . . To the extent it happens in a war zone, it's difficult to stop.'

"The government should have taken 20 seconds, when it was awarding the Halliburton contract, to protect the art, the books and the hospital supplies.

"Even when they had the museum as an awful example, the war planners let more of Iraq's priceless intellectual history be destroyed, as looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted the National Library.

"Just because we didn't go to Iraq to bring artistic treasures home doesn't mean we have to be utterly indifferent to their fate.

"Just because we don't want to be an empire doesn't mean we have to be utterly lacking in grandeur.

"Just because the leaders who prosecuted this war were oil men doesn't mean they have to prosecute the war like oil men.

"Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf's husband, was sent to govern part of Ceylon in the early 20th century and resigned, discouraged about the difficulties of occupation. The most an imperial administration could hope to do, he said, was to 'prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp.'

"And that's the least we must do."

Ms. Dowd, mind you, is talking about The Cradle of Civilization. Among the items last seen in Baghdad but presently unaccounted for are, besides Rumsfeld's "few old pots," some ancient tablets, as yet undeciphered, comprising a portion of the world's earliest-known work of literature, and one of its most poignant, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

posted April 16, 2003 05:40 PM               

quote:

---

That said, at the moment, the preservation of comic books concerns me a good less than, or in any event is insufficiently distracting from my concern for, other, much older artifacts. I respectfully submit the following extract from Maureen Dowd's column, titled "History Up in Smoke," published in the April 16, 2003 edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES:

---

Do we really need to discuss this on a DC Comics message board?

posted April 16, 2003 06:41 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Steven Utley:
I love and, back when I collected comic books, avidly collected the Charles Biro titles, DAREDEVIL, BOY ILLUSTORIES, CRIME DOES NOT PAY, and even CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, which was to CDNP what PANIC was to MAD -- the best of many imitations. I would love to see the material preserved in durable, presentable form.

That said, at the moment, the preservation of comic books concerns me a good less than, or in any event is insufficiently distracting from my concern for, other, much older artifacts. I respectfully submit the following extract from Maureen Dowd's column, titled "History Up in Smoke," published in the April 16, 2003 edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES:

"Whether [Saddam Hussein] is MOAB dust or has a new face, he's gone. And we now own his country for the bargain down payment of $79 billion. America broke away from the British empire, and now it's building its own British-style empire. We are, as Niall Ferguson, the author of 'Empire,' put it, 'an empire in denial.'

"We obviously have some things to learn from the British. When they carted off the treasures of the nations they conquered to the British Museum, they at least preserved them for future generations to fight over who should own them.

"The coalition forces were guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry building while hundreds of Iraqis ransacked and ran off with precious heirlooms and artifacts from a 7,000-year-old civilization. Rummy blew off the repeated requests of scholars and archaeologists that the soldiers must protect Iraqi history in the museum as zealously as they protected Iraqi wealth in the oil wells.

"The secretary of defense made it clear yesterday that he was not too worried about a few old pots in the big scheme of things. He said it was 'a stretch' to attribute the looting of the museum to 'a defect' in the war plan.

"'We've seen looting in this country,' he said at the Pentagon briefing. 'We've seen riots at soccer games in various countries around the world. . . . To the extent it happens in a war zone, it's difficult to stop.'

"The government should have taken 20 seconds, when it was awarding the Halliburton contract, to protect the art, the books and the hospital supplies.

"Even when they had the museum as an awful example, the war planners let more of Iraq's priceless intellectual history be destroyed, as looters and arsonists ransacked and gutted the National Library.

"Just because we didn't go to Iraq to bring artistic treasures home doesn't mean we have to be utterly indifferent to their fate.

"Just because we don't want to be an empire doesn't mean we have to be utterly lacking in grandeur.

"Just because the leaders who prosecuted this war were oil men doesn't mean they have to prosecute the war like oil men.

"Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf's husband, was sent to govern part of Ceylon in the early 20th century and resigned, discouraged about the difficulties of occupation. The most an imperial administration could hope to do, he said, was to 'prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp.'

"And that's the least we must do."

Ms. Dowd, mind you, is talking about The Cradle of Civilization. Among the items last seen in Baghdad but presently unaccounted for are, besides Rumsfeld's "few old pots," some ancient tablets, as yet undeciphered, comprising a portion of the world's earliest-known work of literature, and one of its most poignant, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

I should be sorry to lose Daredevil and the Little Wise Guys, Crimebuster, Squeeks, Iron Jaw, and Mr. Crime, but incalculably sorrier to lose Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Ishtar, the Bull of Heaven, and the Scorpion People.

---

Why bother? Saddam can't take it with him and neither can anyone else.

posted April 16, 2003 08:21 PM               

quote:

---

Why not? Good discussion is its own reward. Let's not stifle any interesting discussion for the sake of slavish adherence to an imaginary rule of etiquette. We can always decide on our own which threads to read and which not.
Besides, the situation Steven mentions is appalling, isn't it? The more it's discussed, the better. It's an issue that should concern anyone, regardless of political affiliation.

---

I just didn't care for the political tone of some of the writing being quoted. Stolen art treasures are bad, we can all agree on that I guess. But knocking the Bush administration is taking sides in a political debate. And though I do like talking politics, I do it in political forums, not comic book message boards. I guess I just don't see the need to talk politics on a forum designed to talk about comic books. There are after all many places one can go to talk politics that are specifically set up for talking politics. Why bring it here and risk setting off a polarizing debate?

--Mark

posted April 16, 2003 08:37 PM            

WE and generations to come have been deprived of our collective memory, by the loss of these artifacts (largely through the carelessness and indifference of a few).

But I didn't choose my words well when I talked about DC stories being preserved. I think they already are. Let me use another word in an unusual way, and say that these stories aren't being advertised by DC [Meriam-Webster on-line dictionary: "1 : to make something known to"].

It's possible these stories can be captured in a Giant or Super-Spec; or in a greatest stories type book. But it seems to me that some of the more innovative developments in comics may not have always occurred in well-known comics (the Meatball example goes toward this point, since the Little Wise Guys while well-known in the forties are not so well-known now, yet that story was revolutionary for its time and prefigures similar types of stories decades later).

posted April 16, 2003 09:04 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Melkor:
Why bring it here and risk setting off a polarizing debate?

---

Because it's fun! As long as personal attacks are avoided, that is.

Another reason why current events should be allowed, as opposed to shunted off to some other board, is that we are a community of a hundered or so regulars and a few hundered more semi-regulars. The community is difficult to reconstitute on another board, so why shouldn't it discuss other topics from time-to-time?

Concerning the looting: I'm of mixed minds on the subject. First, it's no more than has happened every few generations since before Ur was founded. It's almost a law of history. I'm sure it will happen again the next time war sweeps thru (probably a war of secesion within a generation).

Second, wars are messy. To think otherwise is folly. Accidents happen. Friendly fire happens. Chaos happens. It may be a little much to expect the military to protect non-military assets while the military campaign is still underway. Like it or not, oil facilities are military assets; museums are not. Once the military objectives are met, the military can move into "peace-keeping" mode. But to do so early compromises the effectiveness of the "war-maker" mode.

Third, is it too much to expect people to not foul their own nests? Apparently it is, since every rioting/looting episode seems to most hurt the community the rioters/looters come from. The Rodney King riots didn't happen in Beverly Hills, did they? The Baghdadis have impovrished themselves almost as effectively as Saddam and the war did.

Fourth, many (most?) artifacts were not destroyed. They are merely out of sight. The vast majority of them will turn up again within a generation or two. Scholarship delayed is not scholarship denied.

On the other hand, any destroyed artifact is to be mourned. It's not like new ones are being made. Whatever's left in the ground is all that's left. At some sites, there may not be much left.

posted April 17, 2003 03:02 AM               

See if you can follow me here:

1)The breakdown in law enforcement in Iraq is 100% the result of US action in invading the country. We won't go into the justification of that invasion--in fact, let's assume that it was justifiable for the narrow purpose of what we're talking about here.

2)This should have been--in fact, was--predictable: the same thing happened to the National Museum in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation in '91. Again, let's not waste time casting blame or saying they did it to themselves--it was predictable!

3)This material is an enormously important part of all of humanity's common cultural heritage. This country is the original homeland of civilization. This is a loss that can never be replaced, unlike oil or cities or even people.

4)Points 1 and 2 demonstrate clearly that it's our responsibility. Sure war is messy. That's why we don't do it more often. But a couple of tanks detached to guard the museum on a permanent basis during the occupation should have been as much a part of advence planning as letting out contracts for quenching oil fires--and it's a much more important thing to be doing.

I'm getting too angry to continue.

This pisses me off more than any of the Bush/Cheney junta's previous crimes, precisely because it was a crime of negligence.
There's no money in it for any of them or their fellow corporate scum, so it's not important.

In fact, NO price, even in American lives would have been too great to pay to prevent this from happening--better to die for history and knowledge than for oil and profits. Better yet, of course, no one needed to die in the first place.

posted April 17, 2003 08:09 AM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by James Friel:
it's entirely the US's responsibility

---

I think this is a little extreme, but not by much. I agree with your logic. I'd say that we are about 95% responsible.

Consider the following situation. A well-known gangster gets a poor, uneducated man fired and evicted. The gangster threatens to kill the man and rape his wife and daughters. He gives the man a gun and drops him off 2 blocks from his target with a map.

Obviously the gangster is primarily responsible for the murder. However, that doesn't change the fact that the man ultimately chose to kill. He had other options, even if they weren't good ones. He could have killed himself and hope that there would be no incentive left to rape the wife and children. He could have run away and hoped that the gangster thought he jumped off a bridge. In this case, I'd say the gangster is 99% responsible, but definitely not 100%.

Before and during the war, there have been concerned groups alerting the Bush administration of the situation. It was predictable. I wasn't suprised when I first heard the news, although I was suprised by the degree and the lack of action on our part. We could have detailed those tanks and we could have dropped messages telling the Iraqis which locations were off limits, why they were off limits, and what the penalty would be for violating these areas.

As far as the appropriateness of this discussion is concerned, I obviously have no problem. Most, if not all, of us have been a member of some sort of club or team. When you go to a meeting or a practice, you are focused on the purpose of that club or team. However, that doesn't mean that you can't talk about other issues during breaks or before or after the meeting.

posted April 17, 2003 10:54 AM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by James Friel:
I really got wound up there, didn't I?

---

I have a tendency to get wound up far too quickly in these conversations, hence my usual withdrawal after a single post.

The thing that is bothering me the most is that the American public seemed to buy into this war hook, line, and sinker, after it commenced.

Since the debate began last September, I have fully expected that Iraq will be found to have chemical weapons. I also expected biological weapons to be found, although my confidence in this was shaken a bit when I read somewhere that these agents have shelf lives of a few years. I still thought it was fairly like these would be found, but I admitted some possibility, perhaps 25%, that Iraq may have let its program lapse, and any such materials would have degraded.

I didn't expect nuclear weapons, and considered it an embarassment when one of our most respected statesman went before the UN and lied about Iraqi progress on nucear weapons development. As an aside: what the heck happened to Colin Powell? The administration's noteworthy dove suddenly became a hawk. Was he blackmailed? Does he have access to some Top Secret info that would convince even the most skeptical of us that war was needed?

Anyway, coming from the position that Iraq did have chemical weapons, and most likely biologicals; and acknowledging that they mistreated a significant portion of their own populace; I still did not feel the USA was justified in dismissing further cooperation with the UN in order to launch a war. The only justification for such action, in my opinion, is a nation's right to defend itself. And the USA failed to show that Iraq had the means or intent to attack the US with its WMD.

The line the administration kept feeding us was this:
A) The Sept 11th hijackers killed a lot of people
B) Iraq can not have WMD by terms of the agreement signed at the end of Gulf War I
C) Iraq has these bad weapons, and might share them with terrorists
D) Terrorists with these weapons would be really, really dangerous

I agree with statements A, B, and D. And C, as written, can not be disproved. But really, C is supposition, and we were never given any reason to believe it would occur. In fact, starting Sept 11, 2001, the Bush administration pushed the idea of an Iraq/Al Quada link. Sometime earlier this year, Feb 2003 perhaps, the administration finally quit pushing this. And when they did so, the argument for war became even weaker. And yet, they ignored the rest of the world and started a war anyway.

On the other Iraqi war thread, there was a large quote from (I believe) Salon columnist Andrew Sullivan, in which he frothed at the mouth about how much more we had learned about Iraq since the war started, and how much more the American people now believed this war is justified. I feel the opposite. The war was justified originally by claims of an Iraq/Al Quada link. The Bush administration apparently gave up on proving this point several months ago. At that point, the war became much less justified.

posted April 17, 2003 12:42 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by quincyjb:
From the polls I've seen, public support for the war increased from about 46% before the war began, to about 68% after it began. So one in five Americans signed off on it, after the fact. I would really like to know what changed their minds (or whether the polls are being manipulated, which might be more likely.) Is it just a playground bully tendency? "We're kicking their butts, hey, I guess this really isn't that bad after all?" Personally, I am still searching for a justification for this war. And I haven't found one.

---

I think the change is because most people realize that once the war began, we wouldn't be pulling out after a day, a week, a month, or even a year, no matter how many citizens protested. The milk was spilled, and it was now time to make the best of it. "Best of it" in this case means as quickly and as painlessly as possible. It seems like that end was acheived.

posted April 18, 2003 12:52 AM               

The original Daredevil and the wiseguys are not. It is interesting to read that story in retrospect, but it isn't in any respect a lost classic.

And about the Iraqi museum, the same thing could have happened in a natural disaster, like an earthquake. I mean nothing lasts forever. Besides, contrary to Steve's belief, I'm sure there are photographs and digital documentation on Giglamesh and the others, they'll never be truly lost.

It is not like we bombed the museum on purpose. Should we have shot the looters? Would that have been any better.

I just remember the quote from the film "Hope and Glory" when the little boy returns home after his house has been bombed by the Germans, and all his friends are looting it. His little girlfriend tells him"

They are only things, only things!"

Art and literature are great, but aren't people more important?

posted April 18, 2003 06:06 AM            

A comic that cries out for reprinting by DC - solely for historical purposes is New Fun 1. It is the very first DC comic and I think it was the first comic that presented original material rather than reprinted newspaper strips.
Did this comic get a Millennium Edition?

posted April 18, 2003 06:29 AM            

***

from THE NEW YORK TIMES (April 17, 2003)

Missing in Action

By BENJAMIN R. FOSTER and KAREN POLINGER FOSTER

When looters descended upon the Iraq Museum in Baghdad last week, they despoiled one of the world's pre-eminent collection of artifacts from the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys. Founded in 1923, the museum displayed thousands of objects in a score of galleries, from prehistoric stone tools to medieval manuscripts. The most important finds from archaeological excavations in Iraq in the last 80 years were housed there, plus their records and photographs. Tools and painted pottery bore witness to the beginnings of human agriculture and settled life. Indeed, the whole range of human productive endeavor for 5,000 years was there: sculpture, metal work, glass, ceramic, ivory, textiles, furniture, jewelry, and parts of ancient buildings. Inscriptions and documents told the story of peoples, states, empires, and civilizations every school child can name: the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Jews, Sassanians and Arabs.

Only a few of the most famous objects and inscriptions in this enormous collection have been published. The rest of a collection of more than 170,000 objects awaited study and publication, including a Babylonian library whose cuneiform tablets told a creation and flood story closely related to the one found in the Bible. That library is now scattered or destroyed. And it was only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of unread documents stored in the Iraq Museum.

We can only hope that Unesco and the Mesopotamian scholars meeting today in Paris can find ways to recover artifacts like the ones on this page. For now, we mourn both the loss of the treasures we knew and those we will never know, all once painstakingly preserved in this great museum for us and for future generations.

Benjamin R. Foster is professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature and curator of the Babylonian Collection at Yale. Karen Polinger Foster is a lecturer in art history and Near Eastern civilization at Yale.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

***

U.S. Culture Advisers Resign Over Iraq Museum Looting

(posted Thu Apr 17, 6:55 PM ET)

By Niala Boodhoo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two cultural advisers to the Bush administration have resigned in protest over the failure of U.S. forces to prevent the wholesale looting of priceless treasures from Baghdad's antiquities museum.

Martin Sullivan, who chaired the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property for eight years, and panel member Gary Vikan said they resigned because the U.S. military had had advance warning of the danger to Iraq's historical treasures.

"We certainly know the value of oil but we certainly don't know the value of historical artifacts," Vikan, director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, told Reuters on Thursday.

At the start of the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq, military forces quickly secured valuable oil fields.

Baghdad's museums, galleries and libraries are empty shells, destroyed in a wave of looting that erupted as U.S.-led forces ended Saddam Hussein's rule last week, although antiquities experts have said they were given assurances months ago from U.S. military planners that Iraq's historic artifacts and sites would be protected by occupying forces.

"It didn't have to happen," Sullivan told Reuters. "In a pre-emptive war that's the kind of thing you should have planned for." Sullivan sent his letter of resignation earlier this week.

The Iraqi National Museum held rare artifacts documenting the development of mankind in ancient Mesopotamia, one of the world's earliest civilizations. Among the museum collection were more than 80,000 cuneiform tablets, some of which had yet to be translated.

Professional art thieves may have been behind some of the looting, said leading archeologists gathered in Paris on Thursday to seek ways to rescue Iraq's cultural heritage.

Among the priceless treasures missing are the 5,000-year-old Vase of Uruk and the Harp of Ur. The bronze Statue of Basitki from the Akkadian kingdom is also gone, somehow hauled out of the museum despite its huge weight.

The White House repeated on Thursday that the looting was unfortunate but the U.S. military had worked hard to preserve the infrastructure of Iraq.