92615_RAA_LooseCannon_Text_R1_PROOF

adventures for the uninitiated... getting the newbies and the old salts at the same time.

It seems like that should be a publishing model for the ages.

I, myself, welcome the time when trade paperbacks are representative of the comics you can purchase…

…but that shouldn’t surprise you, at all.

Everything Old Is New Again April 6, 2001

Back when we all listened to Squeeze and wore our skinny ties and Jordache two-color jeans, back when Lone Justice opened for U2 and "whippets" seemed like a good idea, back when your father was the guy sporting the tattoos he got on shore leave in Tahiti somewhere during the Big One, and the Bush in the White House was the Veep , I worked in adver tising. The agency I worked for was run by the son of the guy who started it, so while the old man had the smarts and the connections to keep the agency a going concern, the son was the one with the blow, the mistresses, and the cliched marketing short-hand. We peons all shared sort of running joke about with which verbal shrug the son would try to pass off one of his cockamamie ideas during a meeting: "Let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes," or "Let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks." The father would sort of smile ruefully, as if he couldn’t believe that such a jackass had sprung from his loins, and kind of steer the conversation towards the plan he wanted to follow.

It was with thoughts of that long-ago ad agency guy that I read the news of the Ed Harris film "Pollock."

It seems that Ed Harris, known best around these parts as Flight Director Gene Kranz in that better-than- Citizen-Kane film Apollo 13 , as a result of his role as the painter Jackson Pollock, created some paint-splashed can vases.

It further seems that these ersatz-Pollocks, created, I stress, expressly as

47