NJW&C 09: Nostalgia, or The Real Reason I Don’t Own a Copy of Justice League International #14
Hey, Kids! It’s Nice Jewish Words & Comics!, the latest installment from Neil Kleid's bi-monthly newsletter with updates and info about his latest projects!
Happy Leap Day!
We’re leaping toward Spring, and eyeing that oncoming sunny weather, and so here at NJW&C HQ we’re directing our energy toward positivity and good vibes. Sure, it may still be February—in fact, today we get a whole extra day of February, which is like, whose idea was this?!! Why not give us an extra day of June or July? And then, of course, we have to deal with the traditional "March-coming-in-as-lion" scenario. But before you know it, friends, we’ll be trading ski jackets for t-shirts and knit caps for sunglasses, and off to make comics while sitting on a beach somewhere, sipping on a cool glass of something with alcohol and citrus in it, right?
Or, you know, we’ll still have to go to work and everything, but at least our commutes won’t be as miserable. Let’s try and stay positive, shall we?
STAYING POSITIVE ABOUT UPCOMING COMICS
And to that end, here’s something great—we’re less than a week away from the release of the fifth and final issue of Nice Jewish Boys! Can you believe that it’s nearly over, and soon we’ll discover what might happen to Jake, Chaim, Nina, Lenny and our wonderfully conflicted cast of characters? Can you believe that some of them may actually survive?!!
More importantly, can you believe it’s only been four months since we first announced the mini-series at New York Comic Con, and that now all of the issues are nearly out and available to you and everyone via the Amazon Kindle app? Time, friends. She sure does fly.
Anyway, Nice Jewish Boys #5 is out this Tuesday, March 5th, from our pals at Comixology Originals. The cover’s below and you can preorder the issue here. The short and skinny of it? Parker Levin’s bar mitzvah has arrived, and with it, a final choice for his father, Jake: will he choose loyalty or the law? Finances, family or faith? When brisket turns to blows during Parker’s tense bar mitzvah weekend, Jake must defuse the situation, put an end to the tensions between himself, Chaim, Lenny, and the FBI… and ultimately reveal the truths he’s been hiding from his wife, the law, and his two best friends.
I’m pretty excited to see if folks like the way it all turns out. I’m also happy that this may be the first ever comic book to feature a traditional bar mitzvah speech about the speaker’s actual parsha (Torah portion) — yes, the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing did give a Dan Slott-penned speech at his own sequential bar mitzvah reading from the Book of Job in an issue of Fantastic Four, but selections from the Book of Job aren’t usually read from the Torah at a bar mitzvah (not even as part of a haftorah reading, which are selections from the books of Nevi'im —“Prophets”—publicly read in synagogue as part of Jewish religious practice.) The Thing would probably reference something from his weekly Torah portion for his bar mitzvah, and so I stake my claim that Nice Jewish Boys is the first comic book in history to include an accurate bar mitzvah speech. Clobber that, Benjamin J. Grimm.
(Yes. I’m a petty, petty man.)
Anyway, Nice Jewish Boys #5. Next week, March 5th, from Comixology Originals. Buy it on Amazon and then read it on your Kindle app. We’ll unpack the series a little more in the next newsletter. You can also get the other issues here.
Another something great when it comes to Kleid comics: the collected Kings and Canvas hardcovers are printed, signed and getting prepped to be sent out to backers!
As some of you know, last year me, Jake Allen and Frank Reynoso teamed up with Outland Entertainment to crowdfund a hardcover collection of the boxing fantasy comic we originally produced with Monkeybrain Comics back in 2015. Until now, the only way you could have read the comic was digitally—and we only ever produced six issues: a ‘zero’ issue one-shot and issues #1-5, the first five parts of a six-issue story arc.
This past Fall, 151 backers helped fund the first-ever physical edition of Kings and Canvas, helping to produce a beautiful hardcover which collects not only the one-shot and the first five issues, but also presents the never-before-seen sixth issue, wrapping up “Mammoth” our first story arc. Jake and Frank did some fantastic work on that new issue, and I hope everyone who backed our book really digs the final product (which, again, is lovely).
Backers should be hearing from Outland Entertainment very soon, as we collect shipping information and prepare to send out everyone’s rewards. This week, in fact, Jake and I signed 25 copies of the book, packaging them up with any drawing commissions Jake did for those who selected that reward tier. Soon enough, Outland will get them out to those of you who funded the campaign.
(Fun little thing—my signatures include a lil’ sketch of the boxing glove inside the KaC logo…but it’s really sketchy…except for one. Some random special person is gonna get a more defined, full boxing glove sketch marked with a “1/1” which will hopefully make that particular copy even that much more special! I have no idea who’s gonna get it—I randomly inserted it into the stack of 25. Jake actually did the same with a sketch of his own. Enjoy those 1/1 editions, random recipient readers!)
We’re looking forward to these books reaching the hands of those who supported our campaign. Again, the creative team cannot thank you enough. Without readers and patrons like you…we would have no audience for the stories we create. So, on behalf of Jake, Frank and myself…thank you again.
And for those of you who missed the campaign…and are just now hearing about it for the first time…GOOD NEWS: we printed some extra copies! So if you want to get your hands on a copy of the collected Kings and Canvas, go purchase one directly from the Outland Entertainment website right here.
Will there be more volumes of Kings and Canvas? Only time and demand will tell. For now, we leave our adventurers and readers at the end of issue six…but you never know what the future will bring. I choose to cling to hope, and hopefully one day we’ll get to make more Kings and Canvas. For now, though, enjoy the collected edition we’re lucky enough to have.
As for me? I’m gonna finally re-read this story one more time. This time, though, I’ll be able to hold a copy in my hands and not page through it on a screen.
STAYING POSITIVE ABOUT OLDER COMICS
While we’re keeping our outlook sunny and bright, let’s agree that (sometimes, depending on whether or not you weaponize it or use to justify shitty sexist or racist opinions about comic books, video games or films which, you know, have you heard of Twitter?) it’s fun to wallow a bit in nostalgia.
I mentioned re-reading above, but this goes for re-watching or playing games you’ve already played, or even browsing eBay for the toys you had as a kid but now can (maybe) afford to buy again because you’re an adult—or at least pine about owning again when and if you have disposable income.
I’m definitely the nostalgic type. My wife doesn’t understand why I re-read books, or watch movies or TV shows over and over. My kids laughed when I bought myself an A-Team Wrist Racer off eBay for my birthday a few years back or why I was so happy to track down a video game I hadn’t played since high school (Captain America & The Avengers) which I beat back in 1992 over five days and hundreds of quarters…and beat in 2020 in thirty minutes on free play. I love talking about the things I’ve loved—I can do it for hours—and even more, I love to share the things I’ve loved with my family, friends and colleagues.
Naturally, this nostalgic bent extends to comic books.
During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time hunting down and digging into comic books from the late 1980s and the early-to-mid 1990s—comics that I hadn’t read for a good, long while. It started with a visit to a new, local shop which was offering boxes and boxes of fifty cent-to-a-dollar comic books, and most of them were firmly published during the time I was in high school and college. For twenty bucks, I could acquire a decent chunk of Marvel’s original G.I.Joe run…but truthfully, what I really wanted to do was re-read the entirety of a series I’ve loved and admired for a long time: the 1987-launched Justice League series brilliantly conceived by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, and Andy Helfer, and universally embraced by DC Comics readers en masse.
The concept? After a bunch of company-changing crossovers (including the widely-known Crisis on Infinite Earths which decimated most of DC Comics confusing multiple Earths and redundant characters), Batman and a few other mainstays, along with a bunch of newer and legacy heroes, formed a brand-new Justice League—this time, though, with no “of America” tacked onto the end. Sure, it was another superhero team comic featuring folks with cool powers fighting other folks with cool powers determined to take over the world.
The difference? This superhero team comic was funny. And I loved it. I still do.
I’m not going to sit here and talk about the specific characters or storylines…the reason I bring up the ‘87 Justice League comic—which became known as JLI, or Justice League International, and inspired a bunch of spin-offs and later sequels—was that I first read the series at a time in my life where I was preparing for high school, at the end of the Eighties, where music and video games and pop culture were incredibly important to me—as were my friends and family. So when I re-read those issues…I’m instantly transported back to certain moments or memories. It’s like sense memory, where I can recall certain tastes, smells and feelings associated with buying, reading or owning those issues. Food or snacks I ate while reading them; where I was, what was around me. The smell of the comic book store where I bought them and who I was with. And those feelings bring me a certain comfort, along with a sense of wistfulness and longing to be back there once again, at a time in my life where I was happy and dealing with petty middle school or high school nonsense.
And so I started tracking down those comics during the pandemic, beginning with “Breakdowns”, a twelve issue Justice League storyline that changed the status quo of the team starting in 1991. I was a junior in high school—living states away from my family, buying my books at Capital City Comics in Milwaukee where I was friendly with the owner and spent every Friday hanging out in his shop. I can tell you exactly what the place looked like, what it smelled like even today. One year, on my birthday, the owner had to run out and asked me to look after the store for a few hours—so I can add “comic book retail” to my resume, if I want. Later, I bought a die cast Green Lantern miniature and he gave me a copy of the Marvel Comics graphic novel Emperor Doom as a birthday gift, both of which I held onto for decades. Thinking about (or reading) that first JLI installment of “Breakdowns” puts me back in my high school dormitory on a Friday night, laying on my bed with an open bag of sweet-and-sour Ferrara Pan Lemonheads candies, working my way through a stack of comics and feeling very much at peace.
That’s what I often hope to recapture with the older comics I read these days. Feelings I associate with parts of my life I hope to keep with me even as I chart new paths, making new memories. Nostalgia, sure…not for just a comic book, but rather moments in time that I’ll never truly get back which make me happy or even sad. And those feelings are hard to describe to folks who may not have those same associations.
Right before the pandemic, DC Comics began collecting Justice League International in massive hundred-dollar omnibus collections. Though I already own some of the original issues, I wanted to re-read the entire thing in a single sitting, so I requested the volumes from the library. Boy was I thrilled, burning my way through issue after issue on a Friday night in the house I now pay for as an adult, in the place where I conceive and create comic books of my own. It’s been a long time since middle school, living in my parents’ home in Oak Park, Michigan. I have kids of my own now, none of whom particularly enjoy older comics or understand why I like re-reading them. So imagine their surprise when on that Friday night—as they played with toys or read books and magazines of their own—I gasped in surprise and placed aside the omnibus in my hand.
Because, friends, I had reached Justice League International #14, which had been originally released in June 1988.
Now, the comic itself isn’t anything special—it introduces the characters of Fire and Ice as new member of JLI, and featured some of my favorite, ridiculous, Giffenesque dialogue from characters I now love (Manga Khan! G’nort the Green Lantern! The always good for a laugh Ted Kord/Blue Beetle and Scott Free/Mister Miracle before Tom King and Mitch Gerads made that character critically acclaimed). A funny, serviceable issue…but nothing out of the ordinary. So why the gasp of surprise?
Well, back in 1988, twelve-year-old Neil shared a room with his older brother. And let’s just say, the shared space was smaller than one would like. And as brothers did, we often fought with one another. Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you what the hell we were fighting about at the time. But I do remember what stopped the fight: our mother storming into the room, aggravated and fed up with our squabbles, threatening to destroy every comic book in the house if we didn’t just shut up and let it go. To prove her point, Mom—all five feet of her, angry and frustrated—snatched up a copy of (you guessed it) Justice League International #14 and tore it to shreds before our eyes.
Suffice to say, the fighting stopped. And since that day—nearly thirty-six years ago—I hadn’t repurchased or even read another copy of that issue.
Until a Friday night in 2020, when I finally hit the fourteenth chapter of the heavy omnibus that lay in my hands. I stopped, instantly transported back to my childhood bedroom. I could remember which posters were affixed to the wall, and the Transformers and superhero toys that littered the room. I could see the Secret Wars Doom Roller vehicle peeking out the bottom of my closet, next to a tall gray canister filled with loose G.I. Joe, Star Wars and super hero action figures. I can recall the slant of light from the blinds, and the look on my mother’s face. Struck with a wave of memory, I explained to my wife and kids why I had gasped…
…and secretly to myself, asked Mom—who had passed away ten years prior—if it was finally all right if I read that issue again.
Nostalgia’s a powerful drug when it comes to re-reading comic books, I gotta say. Whether it’s me flashing back to the copies of DC Comics Presents, Marvel Team-Up and Captain Carrot filling misshapen boxes in the old musty, dim basement of my family’s first house (long-since razed for a freeway); reading both the first issues of the Spider-Man “Kraven’s Last Hunt” and “Captain America: No More” storylines on my uncle and aunt’s living room floor one Shabbos afternoon in Monsey, New York; or buying copies of Crisis on Infinite Earth #8 (Death of Barry Allen Flash!) AND Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 (first appearance of Spidey’s black costume!) directly from future comics colorist Pat Garrahy who manned the counter at the Wizard of Comics & Cards in Nanuet, NY—the store that would eventually birth Wizard: The Guide to Comics. No matter the memory, there’s a feeling, a sound or a smell…a sense of who I was, where I was and a place I would (and will) always long to return.
As I’ve grown, I find, this sort of thing doesn’t limit itself to comic books I read as a kid. Once I began telling stories of my own, new sense memories attached themselves to other comic books…the ones that I’d created.
When I re-read a copy of X-Men Unlimited #14, for instance, it puts me back in my third apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where my girlfriend (now my wife) threw me a birthday party with X-Men tablecloths, plates and cups to celebrate the issue’s release…or back at my old, terrible job at a dingy family printer in Queens, where I read an email from editors Warren Simons and Michael O’Connor containing the notes for the script, for my first-ever Big Two comic book story. Or it puts me in my first home here in Teaneck, New Jersey, in my old wood-paneled, nautical-themed (look, we bought it from someone else and never changed the light fixture) art studio on the second floor of the house—soon to become my daughter’s bedroom—where my wife and I hung a framed copy of XMU #14 along with cherished art and other comics I had written.
When I re-read Brownsville, I’m firmly stuck in my tiny West Side apartment (the second one, in which my room was basically a corner of a shared living space with sheet rock dividing it off from the rest of the place) after the events of 9/11/2001. There I sat—unemployed, having lost my freelance design gig, trying to make rent and worried I needed to head back to Michigan if I ran out of cash—typing on the iMac I was trying to sell for groceries and bills, hammering out the first draft of my soon-to-be-published first graphic novel. When I re-read Brownsville, sometimes I smell printer’s ink—from that family printer in Queens—where I sat late one night and ran off 100 copies of an ashcan to hand out at a convention. And sometimes I remember the beers and dinners I enjoyed, or the hotel room in which I stayed, at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, where I made my first deal (and my second, though I didn’t know it yet, for Ursa Minors! With Slave Labor Graphics) to have Brownsville published…and met Harvey Pekar, he of American Splendor fame, who agreed to blurb the final product.
Comics and nostalgia, I tell you. They go hand in hand. Where were you when you read that issue, or bought this one? Which comics shops or drug stores did you frequent, and at what time in your life? What were you wearing? Who were you with? What were you eating, watching, listening to, despairing? Who were you, the comic book asks, when you first read me? Who are you now when you read me again?
Those old Giffen-penned comics, by the way…they’re a bastion of nostalgia for me, truth be told. Whether I’m down a rabbit hole searching for issues of The Heckler or Vext, both of which my brother swore I’d love, or burning through old issues of JLI. They make me smile, those comics. And I’d rather smile while reading a comic—any day—then read it and feel frustration, anger or nothing at all. Nostalgic, yeah—like the first two Lobo mini-series I just got from the library, both of which I hadn’t read in a bulldog’s age, and man did I forget how insane, ridiculous and over the top they were—and also, how incredible. The sharp writing, from the late geniuses of both Giffen and Alan Grant, and the fantastic artwork from Simon Bisley. When I read them, I can recall exactly who I was at that time. It was 1990, and I was a sophomore in high school—in a new school, having transferred from New York to Milwaukee, with new kids and roommates all of whom intimidated me.
But I could draw. And the guys seemed to like that—especially when I drew over the top shit, like Lobo (in fact, I think the second professional piece of art I ever sent into a comics "anything" was a Lobo cover I did in 1992 for one of the first Wizard cover contests. Lobo was eating the wizard's hat.) My roommate at the time was a big of a weight-lifter and had kind of a faux hawk and he sort of reminded me of Lobo at the time, to be honest. And so when I re-read Giffen, Grant and Bisley’s insane, ridiculous and over the top story about a bounty hunter with a chain and a bike, some fish and a dog, out there among the stars and trying to escort his dismembered childhood teacher past bikers, truckers and all sorts of ne’er do well without killing her himself…well, yeah. I’m right back there with a smile on my face, sitting at my desk in that back bedroom of a two room dormitory suite on the second floor of the Wisconsin Institute for Torah Study. There I am, ignoring my math homework so I can draw more pictures of Lobo, Batman, Guy Gardner/Green Lantern and other DC heroes…drawing cool shit and showing it to my friends, hoping they’d invite me to participate in whatever insane goings on they were getting up to after-hours in our high school dorm.
And I smile. And I turn the page of this Lobo mini-series, sitting here on my couch, a forty-eight year old comics writer who those high school classmates always said should make comics of his own, thinking about both the good times—and the bad—of my life, a life spent reading and now making comics. And I think about the old memories…and the memories I still have yet to make.
And that, dear friends, is why I re-read comics.
STAYING POSITIVE ABOUT SHIT I’M WATCHING
It’s also the reason I re-watch TV, you know—but lately, I’ve been doing that more and more for one of two reasons:
I can’t sleep, am sitting up on my phone, and have something on in the background I can either ignore or am interested in as a distraction.
I’m sharing something I watched and loved with my wife or kids
I do watch a lot of television—definitely more than I should be watching, especially if I want to keep making comics and have a career, right? But I find myself enjoying that second category a lot more, to be honest. I have four kids—two older boys, a girl, and a younger boy.
The girl, bless her and love her, mostly watches TikTok and Gilmore Girls with her Mom. She shows very little interest in the stuff I want to watch.
My youngest, my nine-year-old, is (thankfully) still in his Spider-Man cartoon phase, and so I can always just binge a bunch of old Marvel series with him on a lazy afternoon. All my boys, really, are into the MCU shows and films, so we watch those as a unit whenever we can and the series or movie appropriate for their ages.
My older boys…we’ve been doing a lot of re-watching together, along with my wife in some cases—and let me be clear: they’re seeing this stuff for the first time; the wife and I are re-watching. First we enjoyed Ted Lasso, and then we burned our way through The Good Place. Now, we’re watching Cobra Kai, getting ourselves ready for the final season. I’ve been trying to convince my oldest, fifteen, to watch Band of Brothers with me but he’s got no interest. But I’ll wear him down. Oh, yes. I’ll wear him down.
A lot of the above ranges from light to super dark to over the top…and so I did want to call out one show I have been re-watching lately…and watching for the first time with my boys as the new season gets underway…
…and that’s Star Wars: The Bad Batch.
Look, not everyone is into the Star Wars cartoons. I get it. My brother, bless and love him, has never seen an episode of The Clone Wars or Rebels, for instance, and so I wonder sometimes how aspects of both The Mandalorian or Ahsoka have landed.
My two older guys watched The Clone Wars without me after Disney+ premiered, and we had all watched Rebels together when it first aired years ago. So when The Bad Batch came along, suffice to say we were very ready to dive right in.
But, boy, we weren’t ready.
See, I love a good war movie. And The Bad Batch often plays out like one. Deep like Andor, but full of thrills and adventure like most good Star Wars vehicles, The Bad Batch follows the ‘defective’ clones of Clone Force 99 following the events of Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of The Sith, and the fallout of Order 66, which had the Republic’s Clone Army swivel about and hunt down every single Jedi in the galaxy. There have been two fantastic seasons so far, filled with pathos and heartbreak but also lessons on family and brotherhood, purpose and duty. It connects to many other corners of the Star Wars galaxy, and the third season promises to tighten those connections even further, as is evidenced by the first three episodes of the final season. Watching The Bad Batch — maybe because we started watching it during the pandemic — reminds me what it’s like to share a Star Wars film or show with the people I love, and always transports me back to when each of my boys turned six, and I ran the original film for them for the very first time. It reminds me of us watching Rebels together in our old crappy basement, huddled together on our blue futon. It reminds me of 2015 when I took my oldest to his first ever Star Wars movie in the theatre. And it reminds me of every single “Force Friday”, when the wife and I would drag our kids to a Toys R Us or Disney Store at an ungodly hour to buy the first toys and clothes from whichever movie was about to be released.
So, yeah. I like watching The Bad Batch with my boys. I dig it because of the fantastic animation, the multi-layered storytelling, and the intimate connections it makes to other part of the Star Wars mythology.
But then I get the added plus of connecting the experience watching it with my boys to the many, connected moments I’ve had with Star Wars as a franchise over the years, stretching all the way back to the 1980s when I saw The Empire Strikes Back for the very first time, and bought my very first Star Wars toys, cards, stickers and Underoos.
Nostalgia. It’s a hell of a thing.
Hopefully, one day one my stories, books or comics will make someone out there feel it, too.
We’ll see you in two weeks, and talk about how we all felt about the end of Nice Jewish Boys, yeah? In the meantime, preorder issue #5.
Until then, take it sleazy. See in two weeks.
—Neil
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