THE QUAKER OATS BOX OF DEATH TOTTERS PRECARIOUSLY

I’ve been asked this question as a story-teller over the years in a variety of ways, but this message from Ali on the Don McGregor Discussion List covers the queries pretty thoroughly.

I can't see a moment in Don's work where I see a significant transformation in Don's writing. When I look at his letters e.g Captain America#122 and even that first Detective Inc. cover from 1969 and the Warren stories and the first Killraven and Black Panther stories all the elements that I like in a Don McGregor story seem there already.

I'm not saying he was born with a gene with these elements already inscribed. He must've learnt how to do them; but in the writing that I've seen I can't see that moment or moments.

Am I making sense?

Ali

I have no idea if there is a story-teller gene that some writers are born with. 

I do know I always loved having a story told to me; and I don’t recall a time I didn’t love telling a story.

I do recall the moment I realized the power that telling a story could have.

I was only five, maybe six years old.  So, I’m not sure that surge of awareness was something I could put into words, but I can still feel the emotion of seeing the effect that the telling of a story, in the moment, on someone else.  I never thought about audiences.  At six, I didn’t know about audiences.

I’m not sure I thought much more about audiences when I was older; because it was still about that organic next moment, what you would write next, what the characters would do or say, what the visuals of that next comic page might be that was central in my mind when I was writing. Trying to hear the words in my head.  I was already playing the characters out, virtually acting them out, at six, riding imaginary horses hell bent for leather, even if I hadn’t a clue what that meant, or becoming a six year old version of a serial hero facing a cliff hanger chapter ending every day just on the trek to school.

Jumping Anthony was the audience for the first story that made me realize how much a story could actually move other people, could transfix them, the way I was transfixed by stories in comics and on TV shows.  But it was my story that was capturing him, and I had never seen that before.  In fact, at six, I wasn’t much aware that they were stories, they were as much real life to me a real daily life, and certainly an undeniable part of my every day life.  Right there, with Jumping Anthony, I saw a kid my own age risk getting himself in serious trouble because he had to know how my story was going to end.  Didn’t matter that I didn’t know how it was going to end, he didn’t know that, and I was making it up as I went along, but the more he reacted, the more I saw the power of the story, and what worked, and what didn’t.

Jumping Anthony’s mother was calling from his house, blocks away, her voice getting angrier as the dusk sky kept turning darker, as did my story.

Now, at this point in time Jumping Anthony was not known as Jumping Anthony, but he would carry that moniker within a couple of years, after the infamous incidents with Tarzan over a rock and sand cliff edge over a garbage dump strewn with jagged rocks.

I sometimes told this story on stage at conventions, years ago, under the umbrella title, TARZAN KILLS KIDS.  In my experience, the fear that was instilled in parents by some of those society watch-dogs and the media, was that kids might jump out windows if they watched Superman fly.  If any fictional character ever came close to me having serious bodily harm done, or even life threatening, that I experienced, it was Tarzan, not Superman, who inspired us kids to do really nutty things.  It was easier to believe you could swing on vines than fly.

Someone apparently even taped my telling of those stories and transcribed them into a fanzine.

Since I had intended to use these humorously traumatic incidents within some of the RAGAMUFFINS stories, I stopped telling those stories.  And I hope I haven’t lost them; the tone of them, that the essence of what happened is still within my ability to tell.

But back to Anthony before he was Jumping Anthony.  Anthony had toy cowboy towns and all the cowboy figures to go with them.  Most of the time, Anthony did not play with the cowboys.  He liked to watch me play with his cowboy figures and act out stories with the plastic heroes and villains.

I didn’t have big cowboy towns you could buy.  I used to take Kleenex cartons and cut them up, and make my own Sheriff’s office and jail cells.  I would glue two Kleenex boxes together, cuts holes in them somehow, build a staircase from lower to upper deck, a skill I probably could not do today, and make the lower section  a bar room , and fashion hotel rooms out of the top deck.

Once, in my outdoors setting,  I set fire to my cardboard town, with the plastic figures, good and bad guys within, to see who would survive…And who wouldn’t. I’ m real little here, maybe seven, so give me a break.  It was nuts, but I already told, I was living this stuff as if it were real, until reality crashes into your head and leaves it dents inside your skull.  I did cheat a little bit, placing the good guys where they had a little edge to get out of the flames alive, but nothing could be taken for granted.

Well, until it went bad.  It went bad when the fire escaped my little cardboard town, swept up on dead leaves, and caught the ground ablaze.

And suddenly the story had a adrenalin spurting reality that took on a life and frenzy of its own, and the outcome of the heroes and villains were forgotten, as the fire spread in the dead leaves!

But that, again, is a another story.  There’s always another story.

I’m just setting the mindset here for you.

One night, Jumping Anthony was at my house, and we were on the linoleum floor.   I don’t recall what the story was that I was telling, but there was danger to all the people in town. 

Since I didn’t have ready-made, store-bought props, I had made a gigantic boulder out of an old, large, circular Quaker Oats box.  And this boulder was atop a mountain, the town below in its shadow.  And here’s what I really recall.

The Quaker Oats box was tottering on the top.  It was obvious that it would soon topple down on the town.  And there was stuff happening in the town, showdowns were approaching, good had to face evil, the outcome was uncertain.  But what was certain was that the Quaker Oats Box of Death was going to crash down the slope and smash through the town.  And it would be devastating!

Who would survive?  Who would die? 

Who knew?  I didn’t I know.

Jumping Anthony was jumping up and down!

And shouting at me, “What’s gonna happen?  Who’s gonna get smushed?”

Anthony’s mother called him to come to dinner.  He knew he should go.  He knew it was in his best interests, I’m sure, to get on home. Each time his mother called, her voice was louder, and you could hear anger building in it, every time the call was met with silence.

But every time he started to get up off the linoleum floor I’d shake that Quaker Oats box, and for sure, this was time it was going to carom down the hillside and wreak its havoc!

And he couldn’t go!  He just couldn’t leave!  He had to know.

And the Quaker Oats Box of Death didn’t fall just then, it was only a false start, a threat, it was wobbling, but it wasn’t going to happen yet.

And Anthony’s mother would call to him again, each time, five minutes later, her voice angrier and angrier, a real threat, and still, because he knew, this time for sure, the Quaker Oats Box of Death was going to claim its toll, he just couldn’t leave.  He had to know how the story came out!

Anthony would have to face certain hell, before the plastic cowboys faced their own Hell.

I was six years old, and I told that story with those plastic cowboys and that Quaker Oats box with everything I had as a story teller.

And on some level, on that night, I knew the power that telling stories could have.

And sensed, on another level, the importance of telling stories.

Now, if only I could learn how to write a simple “Yes” for e-mails and Facebook and all those social Internet tools calling for existence, cyber screams that “I AM HERE!” then you’d probably see me writing much more in cyberspace, telling you how I had my morning coffee, and snuffed it out my nostrils. Actually, the snuffing out coffee through your nostrils might be a little interesting.

I don’t know, maybe it’s got something to do with telling stores, for me.

I don’t know if Tony Isabella recalls this, but back in the days when we were working in the hallowed halls at Marvel, on staff, Tony told me he was writing his “Don McGregor” story.

I have no idea what story that was, or if Tony even remembers this.  And the guy writing this can forget within 30 seconds that he put his cup of coffee in the Microwave to heat it up, but I do remember saying something to Tony like, “Well, when you know what a Don McGregor story is, would tell me, because this would make this intense story-telling thing a whole lot easier.”

It has something with that next blank page.

Often, maybe, just about what that next damn blank panel will be.  What will make it the most effective panel I can do at that point in time.

By the way, a couple months back I did a few daily pieces, just to make sure I didn’t forget what happened when, on what happened with Marsha having to go into the hospital.

If any of you should want to see those pieces, write in, and I’ll post them up here.   Well, you know, if I can figure out how to do that.

Don