All good things must come to an end. Same with bad things. It's up to you to decide if this column has been a good or bad thing -- but it is coming to an end. Right here, right now, due to the impending transformation of this magazine.
Of the nearly 70 columns I did for MARVEL AGE and the 100-odd ones for letters pages of the Bullpen Bulletins, my favorite was for MARVEL AGE #100, where I provided a list of 100 random remarks on a variety of topics. I composed them in an intensive weekend. Thinking I would do another 100 for MARVEL AGE #200, I've been scrawling down thoughts as they occurred to me, determined to be prepared. I'm currently up to Remark Number 60 or so. Looks like I won't need them -- unless...yes! I will share them with you here in my last column. Be forewarned -- only some have to do with comics; all of them have something to do with the world view of this idiosyncratic comics writer.
- 101. Pain plus time equals funny.
- 102. When brushing my teeth, I take an extra three seconds to brush the germs off my tongue.
- 103. No life is exactly like anyone else's, so it is virtually impossible to learn from others' mistakes.
- 104. Comic artists improve by the page, comics writers by the story. That's why artists leave titles more rapidly than writers do. They feel they've done all they can sooner.
- 105. Always give as good as you get. No -- give better than you get. Make it a point of honor.
- 106. I have talent. Big deal. I want genius.
- 107. We all draw the line somewhere, and we all draw them in different places. Take eating: I won't eat my own species, genus, family, order, or class (mammals), but I will eat within my own subphylum (vertebrates).
- 108. If they tell you they're not worthy of your love, believe them.
- 109. Know how old you are in days. Your 10,000th day on Earth is important. No matter how old you get, you will never get more than 5 digits. (Right now I am 14,916 days old.)
- 110. Tread lightly. The Earth is alive.
- 111. Koko the sign-language proficient gorilla's greatest insight about humanity: "People frown sometimes."
- 112. The job of those in the arts is to help people connect with life experiences of people other than themselves, thereby expanding upon their concept of humanness.
- 113. My friend Mike Carlin once told me his theory that every American movie since the '70s rated PG or above has at least one scene where a man suffers a groin injury. Thereafter, whenever I see such a scene in a movie, I shout out in the theater, "Mike's Maxim!"
- 114. Know something? Share it.
- 115. You can't love another person unless you first love yourself. It's not difficult. Find something you and yourself have in common and learn to appreciate it until that appreciation turns to love.
- 116. Sometimes it takes more creativity to not create something but utilize well something that already exists.
- 117. You can have any dream you wish, but you'd better strive to be worthy of that dream.
- 118. When my daughter was two, she asked me why things have to die. I told her something to the effect that things have to make room for new things. At two, you don't want your parents not to know the answers to the hard questions.
- 119. Do not marry any person whose breath you cannot stand first thing in the morning.
- 120. There are good accients and bad accidents, but everything -- even your ability to disbelieve what I have just written -- is an accident.
- 121. A bald man once told me he had only so many male hormones and he had better things to do with them than to grow hair.
- 122. Love something that's unloveable by most people's standards. It's good practice for your spirit.
- 123. Gruenwald's formula for lunch length: Four people equals one hour. For each additional person add on 10 minutes.
- 124. We are all cover bands, playing songs composed by our species, our culture, and our time era. Take the trite songs and do an original arrangement. Make good art out of bad by the insight and energy and passion of your specific life force.
- 125. It's amazing to me that we may learn the ultimate fate of the universe in my lifetime, but we'll never really know if Marilyn Monroe fooled around with JFK.
- 126. Back when there were still "relaxation centers," I used to rent sensory deprivation tanks. Having never taken hallucinogenic drugs, I was hoping that the chemicals in my brain would provide me with an hallucination. No such luck -- though I believe I could hear the distinctive ticking of my grandfather's mantle clock...
- 127. Life is slime. It begins in slime. It thrives on slime. It ends when the slime inside you dries up. Let's keep our slime as clean as possible under the circumstances.
- 128. Which will come first: the comics medium will gain mainstream respect or there will be a real-life costumed super-hero?
- 129. Rule #1 of good relationships: Never get involved with a person more messed up than you are.
- 130. Rule #2 of good relationships: Never get involved with a person who has such little interest in your inner life that (s)he's not willing to read everything you write.
- 131. Rule #3 of good relationships: Find someone who wants you, not someone who needs you.
- 132. Hemingway once said, "Writing is dangerous. Few survive it."
- 133. If God only helps those who help themselves, does He also only hurt those who hurt themselves?
- 134. I hate the smell of the inside of my nostrils.
- 135. You are not entitled to anything. If you get something you did not work for, you'll pay for it in other ways.
- 136. It takes a while to learn how to deal with a gift you don't want. I recycle them. I have a friend who has difficulty throwing anything away. I send him everything I do not want. Recycling is better than junking.
- 137. Ask an astronomer the significance of the number 137.
- 138. You don't have to be a bad person to make good art, writing, music, etc. There's not a negative correlation between niceness and creativity.
- 139. You can become a good person. All of us are presented with opportunities every single day to be a jerk or a nice guy. If you train yourself not to choose the jerk option, doing the right thing might become a reflex.
- 140. What doesn't kill you only makes you funnier.
- 141. Gruenwald's infallible guide to dream interpretation: 1. Every character in your dream represents some aspect of you. 2. Every event in your dream is something you do or don't want to have happen to you. Sorry, Freud.
- 142. We live in a "ketchupist" society. Everyone assumes that everyone uses ketchup.
- 143. Jack Kirby first wrote about the Anti-Life Equation. I figure there's a Life Equation, too. It took me three and a half decades to figure out what the factors were in my own Life Equation. Now I'm working on solving it.
- 144. I sometimes wish I had never heard music. Now I have a soundtrack going on inside my brain at all times that only turns off when I'm listening to outer music. Ask me at any moment what song is going through my head and I can tell you!
- 145. Writers take note. All stories boil down to one single plot: Somebody wants something. All you have to do is figure out who that somebody is, what that somebody wants, and what's keeping that somebody from getting it.
- 146. People's energy determines what happens to them. Some call it luck, some call it karma, some call it vibes. It's just energy.
- 147. How to get the person of your dreams to fall in love with you: (1.) Make sure s/he is the person of your dreams. (2.) Make sure you're a person worthy of dreaming about. (3.) Don't pretend to be anything you're not.
- 148. Gruenwald's Principle of Laughter: The more obnoxious a laugh a person has, the more things that person finds funny.
- 149. The only way to ever find something is to consciously stop looking for it.
- 150. Every comic book could be somebody's first. Every comic book could be somebody's last.
- 151. I can go for months without having a self-revelation. Sometimes.
- 152. Just because the female characters in the two series I was writing a few years ago were traumatized for months doesn't mean I was then having problems with women. Really. In both cases it was part of their character evolution and it resulted in them becoming more empowered.
- 153. I'm the perfect audience. I give all media experiences a fair shot. I want to like things. You've got to go out of your way to lose my interest, irk me, make me tune out. Just do your job as well as you can and you'll wish your audience was filled with me's.
- 154. I recently cut off my ponytail after having one for four years. While most of the women I know told me they like me better without it, this homeless guy to whom I always gave change told me he liked me better with it. I still give him change.
- 155. My grandfather told me this joke dozens of times: Two carpenters building a house, one kept throwing half of his nails over his shoulder. First one said, "Why are you throwing away perfectly good nails?" Second one said, "The heads are on the wrong side." The first one said, "You idiot, we can use them on the other side of the house!" It was funny every time. Still is.
- 156. We live in a "dressingist" society. Everyone assumes everyone else wants dressing with their salad.
- 157. Common comic creators' fantasy: To travel back in time and start working in the industry before all the good hero names were taken.
- 158. I wasn't raised Catholic but it still came as a shock to me that certain saints -- like Saint Nicholas -- had their sainthood taken away from them by Vatican decree. Is there a quota? In Saint Nick's case, I'll bet the Church got irked because he appropriated the name Kris Kringle, which is a corruption of Christ Kinder or "Christ child."
- 159. Speaking of Santa, it's tradition in my house to give one another at least one "Trasha Claus" gift -- something you know you'll like better than the recipient does, but you give it anyway.
- 160. If your child grows up to have different values than you, you have no one to blame but yourself.
- 161. Even if I'm not doing it for a living someday, I will never outgrow my love for heroic fiction. Why should I?
- 162. I am certain that if I became rich, it would not corrupt my values. I would love to test this theory out.
- 163. It took me years to peel away self-consciousness and find my natural writing voice. It can be done.
- 164. Comedian Steve Martin said, "I feel very lucky in that I always knew what I wanted to do...I don't think you have a minute to spare." I feel the same way. By the time I realized I would probably not become a super-hero, I wanted to spend my life making up stories about them.
- 165. Meld the scrap of the old bar of soap to the body of the new one. Then you can say that cleanliness is next to infinity.
- 166. I've recently acquired property of my own for the first time in my life, and I am amazed by how fulfilling it is to tend your own land. I'm giving every one of my trees a name from mythology. So far there's Daedalus, Kali, Yggdrasil, Huitzlopochtli, Nicodemus, Shango...
- 167. Ideas are tools to transform brains. Ideas are weapons to combat ignorance. Ideas are friends to comfort you when you're bored.
- 168. Someday the universe will tire of me and will break me down into the components I came from. Right now I'd mind if that happened, but when the time comes I imagine I will welcome no longer being separate from the rest of reality.
--Mark Gruenwald
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