Sad to hear of the passing of writer Len Strazewski at the too young age of 71. Strazewski only spent a short amount of time active in comics, working in the mid 1980s on the TROLLORDS comic by Scott Beaderstadt and Paul Fricke as a consultant, later editor and occasional writer. Later he'd write at DC with some fun comics, most notably in collaboration with the late Mike Parobeck on THE FLY and JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA. Then he was one of the founders of the Ultraverse line over at Malibu, writing their flagship book PRIME and other books like PROTOTYPE and ELVEN. He's mostly worked in other fields before, during and since, journalism and education it appears, which was a loss for comics.
Trying to pick something to post for a writer is always a bit harder, then I came across this in his final issue of the JSA series he did with Parobeck in 1993, which seems worth preserving for posterity. Maybe later I'll add some comic pages and panels...
Just a few thoughts about heroes, especially senior heroes, before I go.
Eighteen or so years ago when I was a cub reporter for an advertising magazine, I made my first business trip to San Diego to cover the annual conference of the Savings & Loan Marketings Assn., an august organization dedicated to convincing consumers that there could be nothing safer and more satisfying than putting their money in rock-solid savings and loans institutions. We all know how that worked out.
The luncheon speaker at the conference was Buckminster Fuller, the all-purpose genius who coined the terms “Spaceship Earth,” and “synergy,” and designed the first geodesic dome.
He was pushing 80 at the time, but was still spry in body and mind. He needed a microphone to be heard, but his ideas were still powerful. I ignored my rubber chicken lunch and focused my attention on Bucky. I consider myself a pretty bright guy, but I knew that what I managed to understand from his talk was just the tip of an intellectual iceberg I could spend a lifetime trying to figure out.
Around me at the table, the savings and loan marketers were starting to mutter. “Who is this guy? What does this have to do with marketing?”
“Shut up,” I said. “He’s trying to tell you how to save the world.”
After his presentation, I was the only person to go up to the podium to shake his hand. He was cordial and answered my questions with a smile. He didn’t seem at all disturbed that he had been ignored by most of his audience who had no clue about who he was or what he had accomplished in a 50-year scientific career.
I guess when you've spent most of your life tilting at windmills and have been dubbed “A Fool on the Hill” by the Beatles, a few marketing executives can’t get you down.
Some years later when I was in graduate school and taking a class in labor history, I attended the opening of “Union Maids,” a documentary about women in the labor movement. A few of the women who had supported the pre-World War II steel strikes were on hand to take questions from the audiences. In their 70s and 80s, they looked more like the grandmothers they were, instead of the dangerous radicals they had been said to be.
A young female student raised a hand and asked the Union Maids if they had ever experienced sexual discrimination in their activities. The old women turned to each other briefly and then started to laugh.
I guess when you've spent much of your life shoving a union card in the face of National Guardsmen armed with bayonets and live ammo, some of the social problems of the present don’t seem so imposing. Not that sex discrimination and sexual harassment isn’t an important issue—Anita Hill is, after all, one of my contemporary heroes.
When I received the opportunity to write JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA, I thought about the Silver Age JSA/Justice League crossovers and how much I enjoyed seeing two generations of heroes in action—good, solid slugfests against really despicable villains. But I also thought about what it must be like to be a hero at the tail end of your career. Would you be sad? Would you be depressed? Angry? Jealous of the younger generation?
Maybe, but the senior heroes of my experience, folks like Buckminster Fuller, the Union Maids and others of their sort who had been making their statements and bucking conventional wisdom for decades seemed to me, for want of a better word, secure.
They've been around, taken some lumps, given some back and have survived with their integrity intact. Eventually their end would come, but until then, they would continue on as they had before—representing the ideals they had always represented.
So, as I thought about the JSA, I figured that when you've fought Hitler, UltraHumanite, Vandal Savage and have been sent into another dimension to stave off the end of the universe, it’s hard to be upset by a few wrinkles and gray hairs.
As I’ve written these past ten issues, that’s the model I’ve used for the JSA: older, grayer, a little less active, but strong where it counts—in their hearts.
It’s been suggested that perhaps characters like the JSA have run their course and don’t have a place in contemporary comics. After all, they are not psychotic, misshapen or compelled by dark demons to perform tasks of ambiguous morality, so how could they sell seven million collectable copies?
That may be so, but I continue to believe that there’s room for all sorts of heroes in comics and in life, and that the greatest super power is the power to inspire. These characters have that power in abundance.
As I close out this DC comics assignment, I want to say thanks to my colleague Mike Parobeck who made the ideas come alive, to my friend and editor Brian Augustyn who dragged me kicking and screaming into comics writing, all of the fans who supported the JSA and wrote letters on its behalf and all of those heroes out there, past, present and to come.
So long, it’s been good to know ya!
—Len Strazewski
