Writer/artist Steve Bissette is 70

more than Swamp Thing

I first met writer/artist Steve Bissette in the backroom at FantaCo Enterprises, 21 Central Ave., in Albany, NY, probably in 1987. Steve had come from Vermont to talk with Tom about contributing to the comic book Gore Shriek. I worked primarily on shipping the publications and mail orders.

I tried to be cool because I didn’t want to appear like a fanboy. “Oh, I love your Swamp Thing!” even though I did love his Swamp Thing. He also does some great dinosaurs.

We developed an easy rapport, partly because of his genial nature and because I was impressed by his intellect. He has a historian’s and librarian’s mind.

Steve showed up at FantaCo maybe a half dozen times before I left the company in November 1988. He also worked on a horror magazine called Deep Red, founded by the late Chas Balun (d. 2009), who was as wonderful as Steve said.

I lost track of Steve for a bit, but I started regularly commenting on his blog around 2008. Then, I would link to posts Steve wrote in my blog. I found over 100 references to Bissette, some of which were comments on his Facebook pages.

“If you work in a brick-and-mortar retail establishment, and if you tell me when I ask if you have something that I can only get it online, then you have lost me forever as a customer at said brick-and-mortar retail establishment.” I quoted that verbatim because I agreed with the sentiment.

“I always thought Bob Marley HAD to have seen or heard the BANANA SPLITS theme. Compare Bob’s ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ riff; —c’mon, don’tcha think so, mon?” I had never given any thought before, but he may be right.

IP

His thoughts on intellectual property tended to align with mine.: digital music; Disney/Marvel, SONY, and copyright overreach; can you defend public libraries and oppose file sharing?

Likewise, “As my buddy, Steve Bissette ranted – I think it regarded a policy by Adobe or Microsoft: ‘We can afford them once, and that’s what we can afford. We want to own almost all the things we buy. With few exceptions, we don’t wish to buy or support those things that do not wish to be purchased outright. We do not need more monthly bills. We do not wish to interact with you regularly for permission to be permitted to use what we purchase to use.”

His comments on boycotting Marvel/Disney movies, such as The Avengers, because of the treatment of Jack Kirby, HERE and HERE, informed my thoughts, which is why I didn’t see the Marvel movies from 2012 to 2019. 

Stephen Bissette‘s open letter to DC on Facebook about NBC’s Constantine.
“My friend Steve’s dissection of DC is so deliciously understated and addresses the issue of common courtesy.”

He solved a movie mystery for me!

FantaCo

Our overlap with FantaCo is important. Even though Steve stopped working with Tom in the early 1990s, Steve and I need to ensure the record is straight. We spent some time trying to fix the FantaCo Wikipedia page, which contained much egregious misinformation, some of which has been rectified.

When I wrote about FantaCo, Steve would link to me, and vice versa, such as here.

Steve drew the cover of a book called Xerox Ferox, which debuted at the FantaCon 2013 in Albany. I got him, Tom, and several others to sign the book. Maybe I am a fanboy.

Bio 

You can read his frankly meager Wikipedia page, but he worked on much more than is noted, some of which I own.

Steve attended the Kubert School and wrote the lovely To Joe, With Love: A Sad Farewell to the Man Who Opened All the Doors. He taught at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT, for about a decade and a half.

There are several Steve Bissette interviews I linked to:

You can NOW hear him blather [his word] with Robin at Inkstuds: PART 1 and PART 2. 

Stephen R. Bissette: comics pioneer & evangelist from Radio New Zealand

Deconstructing Comics Podcast: #500 – Stephen Bissette: Comics, Movies, and Creator Credits.

The Stephen Bissette Shoot Interview! A Career-Spanning Chronicle!

Interview with Swamp Thing Comic Artist Stephen Bissette.

Stephen R Bissette – CCS instructor, monster-maker for Next Up Vermont. 

Steve is one of 21 individuals selected to be inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame for 2025.

He’s written a LOT of pieces, particularly in the past several years, some of which are catalogued here. However, this Facebook page is a better source of his recent work.

On his Facebook page, he’s mentioned life difficulties, such as the devastation caused by the Vermont flooding in 2011, HERE, HERE, and HERE, and other stuff, which I won’t go into.  

For some birthday of mine, I swiped this from Steve’s Facebook page at least a decade ago – he’s a fellow March Piscean, of course – and I thought it both appropriate and true, though I’ve never seen the film:

“You think grown-ups have it all figured out? That’s just a hustle, kid. Grown-ups are making it up as they go along, just like you. You remember that, and you’ll do fine.”
– Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), MATINEE (1993)

Peace and joy and love to my friend Steve Bissette.

Five years of COVID

Am I sick?

I always mark March 13 as the anniversary of COVID-19 because that date in 2020 was when it started to feel real to me—five years of COVID-19. Of course, the disease started in the fall of 2019, but it seemed remote. Oh, it’s in other countries; it’s in Washington state, on the other side of the country.  

In 2023, I noted its third anniversary at some detail, which included getting the first two vaccines in March 2021, and my family’s bout with the disease in August 2022. But I didn’t mention some of the other issues, such as Real Countries fight COVID.

I’m reminded how every visit outside at the time was a negotiation, often with myself. The Spectrum theater in Albany opened in 2021, though people were distanced and masked. I’m pretty sure I went by myself initially. I decided it was still worth going to the movies because -damn! – I’d seen so many plays and movies and meetings online on little screens in 2020. It was making me terribly melancholy. The small screens made my life feel small.

Booster

I received my most recent COVID and influenza shots in August and September 2024. According to the CDC website, which is being “modified to comply with… Executive Orders,” “Everyone ages 6 months and older should get the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine. This includes people who have received a COVID-19 vaccine, people who have had COVID-19, and people with long COVID.” These are some factors for folks to “more likely to get very sick with COVID-19.”

Additionally, in the Weekly US Influenza Surveillance Report: “Seasonal influenza activity remains elevated and continues to increase across the country.” 

Every time I get a sore throat, I wonder, “Am I sick? Do I have COVID?” I still have enough unexpired tests, especially with the extended expiration dates, to test periodically. 

Am I worried about the CDC, FDA and other medical entities being compromised by… certain parties? Yes, yes, I am.  

NYT: How COVID remade America, starting with it turned us into hyperindividualists.

NYT:  Covid’s Deadliest Effect Took Five Years to Appear

Gallup: How COVID Changed the Workplace

Truthout: Don’t Forget the History of COVID in Prison—An Interview With Victoria Law. The pandemic exposed the cruelty of prison in new ways. It was a lost opportunity to move away from mass incarceration.

This picture is 75 years old

March 12, 1950

This picture is 75 years old.

I looked through all of the pictures of my parents, Les and Gertrude (Trudy), on their wedding anniversary, March 12th, that I have posted on this blog. Interestingly, from 2005, when I started the blog, to 2011, the year my mom died, I didn’t post any. Since my dad had died in 2000, I didn’t even think to mention their anniversary.

After she died, though, I felt liberated to write whatever about them. And it also recontextualized how I saw them as a couple. My sisters and I often have ZOOM conversations on Sunday afternoons, which started during COVID, and early on, a lot of conversations were about their dynamics individually and as a couple.

Still, I often used a group photo, as I did here on March 12. It’s probably because I think it’s a hoot; it looks like a bunch of wary relatives.

Changing it up

But to my knowledge, I’ve never used this photo. My sister Marcia, the keeper of the pictures, posted it on Facebook eight years ago, and then sister Leslie reposted it recently. I have no idea who took it. If I were a betting man, it would probably be one of my maternal grandmother Williams’ brothers, Ed or Ernie Yates.

This picture is in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, near 13 Maple Street, on March 12, 1950. I was always grateful that they decided to get married in a year ending with a zero; it made the math much more straightforward. So I can remember the family drama on March 12, 1995, for instance, a story for another time.

My father looks happy in this photo. But my mother is more contemplative, wondering what she’s gotten herself into, which is a reasonable concern. Or maybe she’s just looking at someone, maybe a younger cousin. I use the terms “mother” and “father” loosely because I wasn’t born until five days shy of three years later.

My parents were married 50 years and two days shy of five months.

Movie review: The Brutalist

Adrien Brody

The Brutalist was the last of the Best Picture films still playing at the Spectrum Theatre that I had not seen. So, I attended the 12:15 matinee with eight others during the week before the Oscars. (There was no way I would see a three-and-a-half-hour movie at 6:50 p.m.) 

I really liked the opening and closing credits, which had the stationary text with the camera’s focus moving.

The first part was “The Enigma of Arrival,” a fictional account of a Hungarian immigrant named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who comes to the United States.  He stays with a cousin from back home (Alessandro Nivola) who has Americanized himself. That works for a while until a seeming debacle.

Ultimately, though, he gets a commission from American tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), who discovers Tóth’s genius. His beloved wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) finally joins him, unlike when he last saw her. 

I appreciated the intense portrayal of the immigrant experience, including their credentials from their previous country that were not applicable in the US. The movie showed how people can be marginalized and fall into traps of drugs and other problems because of their difficult situations.

Let’s take a break

Then there was a 15-minute intermission. I haven’t been to a movie with an intermission since Reds in 1981, and like that film, I thought the first half of the movie was far more substantial than the second. 

Even some critics who liked the film, 93% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, noted that “The Hardcore of Beauty 1953–1960” was a lesser part. “If The Brutalist stopped after the intermission, it would be a near-perfect film, an immigrant story in the vein of The Godfather Part II”. Russ Simmons of Kansas City radio station: “The film’s second half meanders and leaves us with dangling plot threads.”

A negative review by Brian Viner (Daily Mail UK): “There are many impressive things about this film, not least the acting, but for me it too often loses its narrative grip in the second act, veering off on tangents that feel unnecessary, distracting and self-indulgent.” Audiences were 80% positive. 

Afterwards, another patron asked me what I thought of the film.  I said I liked it but didn’t love it. He had been in situations where he was an artist with a patron, and he saw first-hand how the patron could try to take over the artist’s whole life, which he related to immensely. I can see that.

There are other days…

A  Stranger In The Room

Some days, you feel assertive and directed. We’re going to fight against the forces of ignorance and evil. The tide will turn if we spend enough time informing people about what’s happening.

There are other days when you feel exhausted. I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a poster, not the one above, but a picture with dialogue from the movie A Face In The Crowd with Andy Griffith. It’s an excellent film, by the way, and you should see it. I didn’t know until I started Googling that there was a 2024 London production story involving Elvis Costello.

“Stop me if you think you have heard this one before: A man gains television fame on the strength of his purported connection to everyday Americans and their resentment of elites, and before long he converts that fame into political influence in a right-wing presidential campaign…”

Of course, we’ve been here before: January 20, 2017, and the months preceding and following. Not incidentally, TCM aired A Face in the Crowd on rump’s first Inauguration Day. In 2015, CNN asked if the film predicted his rise.

Version 2

This time, it’s more complicated because so much stuff is coming. Here’s a list of the Executive Orders. Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness contains a certain amount of gonzo entertainment. Is he going to have a whole bunch of trees chopped down? More or less. 

What’s going on at Social Security? Even career officials are unclear, but expect “‘DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA,’ the acting SSA commissioner, Lelan Dudek, told senior staff” and others.

Are the tariffs on or off? It depends on the day of the week. The tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China would cost the typical US household over $1,200 annually. But they become functionally a tax on the poor, with the people with the least income disproportionally harmed, but the top 20% are faring well.

DOGE moves to cancel NOAA leases on key weather buildings. “Why it matters: One of the buildings is the nerve center for generating national weather forecasts. It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency. It houses telecommunications equipment to send weather data and forecasts across the U.S. and abroad.” On this last topic, I’ve read online, “Oh, private forecasters will provide this for us!” And where do you think they are getting the bulk of their data?

Meanwhile, FOTUS and Juvie Vance Pulled an Old Hollywood Trick on Zelensky. “By letting his vice president instigate the Oval Office blowup with the Ukrainian leader, [he] resorted to a time-worn industry technique veteran screenwriter calls ‘A  Stranger In The Room.'”

It’s not the individual acts but the tsunami of actions that are impossible to track. The answer is yes when people ask whether we could run our government more efficiently. But this isn’t efficient; this is taking a hacksaw to it.

And yet

This story from Axios gave me a modicum of hope. 

In a chaotic and unpredictable world, the federal government normally acts as a stabilizing force. Under Trump, it has become the primary driver of the chaos.

The big picture: Across-the-board tariffs on Mexico and Canada — two of America’s three largest trading partners — have been on and then off and then on and then off. Colombia knows the feeling.

The Hamilton cancellation at the Kennedy Center, after FOTUS put himself in charge, is getting under his supporters’ skins. Some companies are NOT backing off from DEI initiatives. (Hegseth was ridiculed as Enola Gay photos were swept up in DEI purge over the word ‘gay’.)

The pushback is starting against these mean-spirited and incompetent people doing, quoting Canada’s Trudeau quoting the Wall Street Journal, “very dumb things.” Those protests at town halls, especially with Republican members of Congress, are having an effect. A  House Democrat is planning a ‘Bad DOGE Act’. Even GOP senators are telling Musk that DOGE actions will require their votes. This means Congress is waking up to the fact that they, per Article I of the Constitution, actually have a say in the process, that it is not an imperial presidency. 

Ramblin' with Roger
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