Now that Republicans control the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, and Sesame Street, I have three questions for America:

1. Where’s paradise?

2. When does the whining stop? Why do crybaby conservatives and fundamentalist Christians still feel so put-upon? What else do they need? Do all the blue people have to expire before conservatives can be happy? (The blue people not already on life support, I mean; if your brain has shriveled to the size of a pea, you fit right in, and they’ll do anything to keep you alive.)

3. When do Democrats wise up and stop running away from Howard Dean? This guy is exactly what the Democratic party needs — a spokesman who’s willing to be as aggressive, relentless, and outrageous as any of the Republicans’ legion of slanderers.

The liberals on the Supreme Court of the United States should be ashamed of themselves for their majority decision in the New London, Connecticut eminent domain case.

I’m ashamed to say I’m in complete agreement with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on a court decision — ashamed because this should have been a no-brainer for Clinton appointees Ginsberg and Breyer. Working people and retirees versus big real estate developers and tax-hungry municipal government? Come on!

(Justices Stevens, Souter, and Kennedy, who constituted the rest of the majority, were appointed by Republicans.)

No time for a long, pithy post tonight, but one quick reminder:

If you decide to display one of the Omega the Unknown Informational Banners on your blog or web page, please leave a comment with your URL, so I can add your page to my link list.

Major pith tomorrow.

(Or III, I guess, if you count dad.)

Has anyone else noticed that the time since our Proxident’s second inauguration has borne a strong resemblance to the period after his *first* inauguration? I think we’re now seeing what the first Bush administration would have looked like *without* 9-11.

Apart from the rampant lies, the blatant corporate favors, the abuses of power, the ongoing lingual exploration of the Christian right’s ass, and all the dead soldiers…it’s basically a big nothing.

I may have lent the wrong impression with my earlier posts about depression. Let me clarify a few things.

Depression has always been a problem for me, but some times have been better and others worse. It’s mostly been varying degrees of worse since the late 1980s.

Sometimes my creative focus has been more clouded, sometimes less. Sometimes inspired work has battled its way out of the fog; sometimes work that’s been mediocre, or just flat; sometimes work with intermittent flashes of inspiration; sometimes no work at all.

The last two years or so have been especially difficult. Just about the time I was beginning work on *Hard Time*, I fell — or was pushed, depending on how you look at it and whose story you believe — into a very deep emotional pit. I’ve spent the time since then climbing out. Recently, I’ve seen indications that I’m nearing the top. It’s been a slow, arduous climb, but I think I’ve learned something about the *character* of depression as an illness at various stages of the ascent.

I don’t consider myself expert enough or articulate enough to write about it in real depth yet, but this much I can tell you from long and sufficiently bitter experience:

If you suffer from depression — get help. Find a good therapist, even if you have to go to a city- or state-funded facility. Find an antidepressant that works for you. (And no excuses about not wanting to put chemicals in your body; St. Johns Wort and SAM-e can be very effective if you don’t want to go the prescription route.)

Don’t indulge depression. Don’t romanticize it. Don’t glamorize it. Don’t believe it makes you more creative. Don’t believe it makes you more attractive. Don’t believe you can’t keep your cynical edge without it. (Trust me. You can.) Don’t make it your hobby. Don’t make it your buddy. Don’t let it define your life.

Depression just isn’t worth the time and energy it takes to maintain it. There are better things y0u can do with your existence. And there’s more than enough *real* sorrow to experience in the world without sitting around and manufacturing more of it neurochemically.

That’s what I’ve been trying to share with you.

Visit the newly animated OmegaTheUnknown.com.

Not only will you get a little visual treat, you’ll also find a link to four informational banners like this one…

…that you can download and display on your own website or blog, in your email signature, or anywhere else you like.

Needless to say, Mary and I would like to see a these banners spring up all over the net.

A comics blog called The Great Curve picked up on my earlier post about writing from depression and commented as follows:

This reminds me of a book I read recently called Against Depression by Peter D. Kramer. In it, the author talks about research into the biological aspects of depression and critiques the way depression has become a part of our culture. He talks about the popular idea that depression is a gateway to creativity. This viewpoint is that without depression we wouldn’t have the works of Poe, van Gogh, Woolfe, and many other great artists. In addition, there’s the idea that melancholy in art gives the work greater depth. He goes on to explain:

“It is no longer that melancholy leads to heroism. Melancholy is heroism. The challenge is not voyage or battle but inner struggle. The rumination of the depressive, however solipsistic, is deemed admirable. And this value applies even in cases when the interior examination fails due to a lack of moral courage. No matter that the protagonist remains callow and self-deluding. Melancholic sensitivity is noble by definition.” [pages 221-2]

I haven’t read the Kramer book, but this quoted passage seems to mirror my own thinking of late — though I would draw a sharp distinction between melancholy and clinical depression. Melancholy, like any powerful emotion, can indeed inspire powerful art. (And, of course, *awful* art, as well.) Depression, due to its chronic nature, is something very different. It’s not so much a state of heightened despair as it is of blunt resignation. It blurs perception. It deadens every creative instinct. It sets the writer (or painter or sculptor or cartoonist, I presume) at an emotional and intellectual remove from both the world and the work.

There’s nothing even vaguely heroic about depression.

After a while, it’s just colossally boring.

(And yes, I can define “a while”. It’s two minutes and fifty-two seconds — the playing time of “I Am a Rock”.)

From The Jack Kirby Collector #42:

Give Jack Some Credit!

Many fans assume that the Kirby family will in some way benefit financially from the big-budget Fantastic 4 movie. The truth of the matter is, the Kirbys make very little from the legacy Jack left behind.

While DC Comics does pay royalties any time they reprint Jack’s work, Marvel does not. This is particularly galling when Marvel is currently paying other creators royalties for reprints of their work on series begun by Jack. The Kirbys didn’t see a dime for Marvel’s recent reprints of Jack’s 1970s Captain America and Black Panther series in trade paperback and most insulting, Marvel didn’t pay them for their hardcover Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby book which solely spotlighted Jack’s contributions to the company. Marvel is also set to release some high-ticket Fantastic Four publications over the next few months, including an over 800-page reprint of FF #1-30, and a 200-page tome devoted to FF #1 — and the Kirbys have no reason to expect payment for those, either.

While Stan Lee is contractually guaranteed to benefit financially from films like X-Men, X-Men 2, and Hulk, Jack had no such deal, and his family never got a cent from those films. We at TJKC feel it only fair the Kirby family, like Stan, should benefit financially from what looks to be a blockbuster film, based on Jack’s co-creation which started the Marvel Age. If you agree, we’d ask you to write to both:

James Gianopulos, Chairman

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

P.O. Box 900

Beverly Hills, CA 90213

Florence Grace, Senior VP, Corporate Publicity

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.

P.O. Box 900

Beverly Hills, CA 90213

Say something like: “Comic book artist Jack Kirby co-crated the Fantastic Four and so many other Marvel Comics characters with Stan Lee. I feel Mr. Kirby should be credited as co-creator on F4 film, and his family should be compensated for his achievements that are finally being brought to the big screen.”

Better yet, copy and paste this post on every online film forum you frequent.

Except in the interest of energizing fellow fans, don’t bother posting to the comics forums. That company cannot be shamed. Movie studios, though, tend to be a little smarter and more sensitive about their image.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry (since deleted) about Marvel’s *Omega the Unknown* revival and how word of it reached me concomitantly with news that a major problem in my life had been resolved. I wrote that the latter news so completely overshadowed the *Omega* announcement for me that I just didn’t care what Marvel was planning to do with *Omega*. The real damage, after all, had been done 28 years earlier, when the company’s former management went out of its way to ruin the characters and the series. I wasn’t interested, I said, in how the new regime reprocessed the remains.

Which was true.

For about a week.

As the euphoria over the personal news subsided, so did my state of denial: *Omega* was one of only two series from my early days at Marvel that I really *did* care about in a personal way. The other, of course, was *Howard the Duck*.

Like the duck, *Omega* was a completely original creation, with no roots in any extant Marvel character. Unlike Howard, who had made his first appearance in a “Man-Thing” story, *Omega the Unknown* even debuted as its own title. The series was my first long-term collaboration with Mary Skrenes, who is now my oldest and best friend and my collaborator on *Hard Time*. Much of *Omega*’s content was derived from personal experience, both mine and Mary’s. We drew heavily on our own childhoods for aspects of James-Michael’s story and on observation of our neighborhood — Hell’s Kitchen in New York, circa 1975 — for the setting of the book.

*Omega* meant a lot to both of us. Its cancellation was painful. Learning that James-Michael’s story had been brought to a conclusion by another writer was infuriating. But at least that seemed to be the end of it. Decades went by, Marvel did nothing with the series, and both Mary and I allowed ourselves to believe they never would. I was convinced *Omega* had been forgotten, and that was fine with me.

I can be such an idiot sometimes…!

I should have known that *nothing* in comics is ever allowed to stay dead. Characters who get their brains blown out are routinely resurrected. No series is ever really cancelled anymore; it just lies dormant until some writer or artist successfully pitches a new “take” to the publisher. Above all, no trademark is ever permitted to slide into oblivion.

I decided to express my frustration in a post to the Yahoo Howard the Duck Group, which I thought would be a *slightly* less public venue than this blog. (Anyone can join and read a Yahoo group, of course, but joining requires a conscious expenditure of effort, which deters far more people than you might imagine.)

The ensuing discussion “escaped” onto the larger Internet. I was going to write a long post about it myself, but Rich Johnston has saved me the trouble by summing it up very neatly in his Lying in the Gutters column (see the section titled “Into the Unknown”) on Comic Book Resources.

Take a look at that column, and I’ll have a few personal notes to add here tomorrow.

(Rich’s sidebar on the Ultraverse characters is interesting, too.)

At a time when House Majority Leader Tom Delay calls for enacting a “Biblical world view” in government, when Christians are asserting their ideals in the selection of judges, in public school science classes and elsewhere, [the Public Radio International series] This American Life spends an hour trying to remember why anyone liked the separation of church and state in the first place.

This is exceptional radio.

Here’s a link to the online RealAudio file.