On October 28, Pop-Up Magazine will be staged at the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture. But what exactly is it? Cofounder and editor in chief Douglas McGray explains.

“The name is inspired by the idea of a pop-up book, like books you may remember from when you were a kid. Sort of flat, you open [it] up, and then all of a sudden it springs to life in this three-dimensional way. . . . We were inspired by the idea of a classic general interest magazine, stories about anything and everything, but performed by writers, filmmakers, audio producers, artists, musicians, and other kinds of performers, with different kinds of media mixed together and live music.” 

The event will also offer accessibility features such as ASL interpretation, open captions, and audio descriptions, sponsored by Google. McGray and his friends initially staged the concept in San Francisco a few times for fun, then realized that there was a broader opportunity to take the storytelling show across the country. In 2016 they restaged it as a national touring show. McGray sets the stage for what the audience can expect on a typical night. 

“So you’re in this big beautiful venue, the lights go down, and somebody takes the stage. And they start to tell a story. And maybe it’s a personal story. Maybe it’s something about other people, places, things. As they start to tell that story there’s a band onstage, and the band begins to play underneath them like a movie soundtrack. And then images begin to appear on the screen—we’ve commissioned original film and photography and animation, then the story begins to come to life visually. Sometimes it’s a fast and funny story, sometimes it’s beautiful and epic, and there are typically about seven of those stories in a show.” 

Overall, it creates the effect of a multimedia variety show, offering the audience a sampler of artistic genres that would rarely inhabit the same space. Most of the time, the stories shared are disparate, without an obvious connection. However for the Chicago edition of the show, the theme is love. McGray shares:

“The theme is love stories. And that means all different kinds of love stories—you know, everything from first loves, blind dates, and heartbreak and disconnection, but also music and animals, and place and purpose, and all the different ways that you can feel that kind of connection. We’ll see stories that are really funny, and stories that are profound and moving.”

While some of the guests are unknown, others have a bit of notoriety, and some are downright famous, and the Chicago edition has some interesting characters. McGray shares the lineup.

“There’s Ryan O’Connell (Queer as Folk), who is the writer and star and creator of a show on Netflix called Special. And Sarah Kay (Project VOICE) is a brilliant poet and performer, Victoria Canal (Elegy EP) an amazing musician. Writer Jenée Desmond Harris (Slate’s Dear Prudence), advice columnist and contributing writer for the New York Times. Rachel Cusick, who’s with Radiolab. Filmmaker Nadav Kurtz (Paraiso) and comedian Pamela Rae Schuller (What Makes Me Tic). And then Ben-Alex Dupris (Sweetheart Dancers). A really great filmmaker who has a really beautiful, sweet story.”

While the stories are supposed to be a surprise each night, McGray shares a tantalizing preview. 

“Someone discovers a story from her own family. Someone as a teenager discovers a pretty incredible family secret that she never knew about. Everything’s totally out of character for her parents. So she gets to the bottom of this incredible saga from when they were younger, before she was born, that they’d never told her about. There’s another story about this pretty epic secret love affair between an intelligence officer stationed overseas and a famous international actress that had been kept a secret for their entire lives.”

Pop-Up MagazineFri 10/28, 7:30 PM, Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture, 2936 N. Southport, $39, popupmagazine.com

This isn’t Pop-Up Magazine’s first time in Chicago, and during their last visit, before the pandemic, they staged a really unique collaborative story. McGray recalls:

“So you know, we like to figure out all the different kinds of ways that we can tell a story. One example is Jenna Wortham, who is a writer and podcast host for the New York Times, who did a story about someone who lost the ability to form memories. She did it in collaboration with the amazing Chicago shadow puppet theater company Manual Cinema. So, she told the story, and Manual Cinema brought it to life in shadows.”

If your instincts are like mine, you love watching someone spin a great yarn and will want to go online and binge-watch past shows—but these are one-of-a-kind experiences meant to be shared communally. McGray explains:

“You have to be there. We won’t be filming the show and putting the stories online. You have to be there.”

Read More

There are some 38 uninhabited islands in Norway,* and three in Humboldt Park. Of course, there are the two in the Lagoon, but these days Ørkenoy—the two-year-oldNordic-inspired brewery, cocktail bar, and restaurant—is “deserted” in name only. (The word is a rough mash-up of two Norwegian words: ørken, for desert, and oy, for island.)

But at its seemingly ill-timed opening, at the height of the pandemic, the threat that the seats in its bright, open confines—hard by the elevated Bloomingdale Trail greenway—would remain empty was very real to chef-partner Ryan Sanders. The name, he says, “was in relation to the fact that we are in a space still off the beaten path, the idea of the 606 as a current that would bring things to us. It was the question, ‘If you got to bring one thing to a desert island, what would it be?’ Our answer was beer.”

Sanders and his former partner, brewerJonny Ifergan, spent a year and a half building out the space in the Kimball Arts Center, planning to offer an alternative to the hoppy, IPA-dominant brewery scene: Scandinavian-inspired lagers and farmhouse ales to accompany Sanders’s nimble menu built around open-faced smørrebrød on dense sourdough rye rugbrød.

“When the pandemic happened, floors were torn out, plumbing was going in,” says Sanders, who’d previously cooked in the taproom at Lagunitas Brewing. “There was no slowing down at that point. We couldn’t stop if we wanted to. The bank wants its money. The landlord wants his rent.”

They’d opened in September 2020 with all the precautions and safety measures they could establish: reservations only, QR code menus, and rigorously minimal contact between staff and guests. “It was, from a service perspective, awful.” Six weeks later, the city shut everything down again, and Sanders and Ifergan had to lay off their entire staff, apart from brewer Briana Hestad.

Still, the space came to life as conditions relaxed. The following June they introduced biannual block parties and pop-up markets for independent, itinerant craft and food businesses, which was always part of the plan. “The very first one, of course, there was, like, a hurricane that day,” says Sanders. “We thought the building was going to flood, but this place was packed to the gills. There were still masks and we were still asking for vax cards and all that stuff, but people just wanted to be out. They just wanted something to do.”

The vibe is much less restrictive these days, though guests still order from their phones, and when Ifergan stepped away at theendof last year to start his own brewery, Hestad stepped up. Both the beer and Sanders’s menu began to evolve, and he’s just introduced a bunch of new fall dishes, highlighted by larger shareable plates and dishes that range far beyond northern European flavors.

Right now he’s braising pork ribs for 36 hours with Mick Klug plums, and shellacking them on the pickup with mezcal barbecue sauce. There’s a dino-sized lamb shank, barely clinging to the bone, drenched in an orange wine-spiked reduction of its braising liquid, its richness offset by a crunchy herb salad.

Credit: Ryan Sanders

These augment the portable smørrebrød and small bites core, which now features a dollop of chicken liver mousse atop a tiny apple cider donut with a drizzle of lingonberry glaze, which can serve as a kind of gateway organ for the offal adverse. He’s brought back brussels sprouts, this season seared in brown butter and glazed in cider-gochujang sauce, which ought not deter anyone weary of this menu standard. And some of the open-faced sandwiches have gone pretty far afield from the more traditional mainstays, like the Seitalian Stallion, a vegan riff on Italian beef—a “sacrilege,” jokes Sanders, with mushroom seitan drenched in a caramelized onion bechamel.

The bar is now fully open, serving luminous, fruit-forward cocktails, in addition to the drafts, which Hestad, who has a PhD in Scandinavian language, culture, and history, has scaled back from some of the more challenging smoked beers (though a very approachable one remains), in favor of lighter, refreshing, herbal-kissed brews like a farmhouse ale with lemon verbena and shiso, and a gooseberry wheat with lemon balm and sage.

Ørkenoy1757 N Kimball312-929-4024orkenoy.com

Ørkenoy continues to evolve into an ever more multifaceted concept, hosting Wednesday oyster nights, art exhibits, and dance parties, and selling a carefully curated selection of packaged goods out of its retail market. Friday, October 28, it’s staging an interactive beer blending dinner with Primary Colors, whose customizable brews are also produced on-site, and its next midwinter market featuring some two dozen-plus independent vendors is set for December 3.

In some ways the long, slow, organic easing out of isolation was good for the brewery. “It’s been an interesting few years for everyone,” says Sanders. “I like the box because then you can bounce off the walls and find something to create with what you have. We don’t have a wealth of resources, but the silver lining was everybody brought something to the desert island and we got to create with what we have.”

*so says Wikipedia

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After John Carpenter’s Halloween was released in 1978, my small tribe of suburban teenage babysitters became terrified to go to work. My favorite family kept me only by doubling my rate. For $2 an hour, I’d manage that fear and keep the knives handy. It was an early lesson in the intersection of the U.S.’s two fundamental engines: capitalism and horrific violence. 

It was a lesson that eluded me for years because Michael Myers was so clearly an aberration, like evil itself. When Halloween opened, I’d been sweating over a social studies report on former president Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, an act so monstrous I couldn’t wrap my head around it—and also clearly an aberration. This I knew to be true: facts, reason, and compassion were the dominant guiding ethos of the world. Or at least, we could all agree they should be. 

Directed in its original incarnation by Carpenter and produced by Debra Hill, Halloween remains a groundbreaking movie on many levels, from the voyeuristic opening tracking shot that pays homage to Touch of Evil (and rivals it in terms of taut storytelling) to its creation of the Final Girl trope, from its haunting score to its closing images of empty rooms steeped in unseen menace. It was bloodless until the final quarter: Carpenter and Hill knew that fear is as much about the anticipation of evil as about its manifestation. 

The original in the 13-movie Halloween franchise was scary for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was this: most previous horror movies (The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws, Horror Hotel, and Nosferatu loom large in my 1978 memory as formative) all either had supernatural monsters or locales far removed from my boring life. 

Carpenter was among the first to create a blockbuster wherein evil invaded a place as mundane and midwestern as Haddonfield, Illinois. The town was fictional. But for the odd palm tree Carpenter failed to shoot around on location in Pasadena, California, Haddonfield deeply resembled Wheaton, where I lived during high school. Moreover, the targeted women here weren’t damsels in a murky far-off castle or mad scientists howling in vaguely Eastern European accents. Instead, the Shape (as Myers is referred to in the credits) was all about killing babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut) and her friends.  

Still, Halloween was the good kind of scary because Michael Myers wasn’t real once the lights came up. He was so unreal there weren’t even words for him: the term “serial killer” didn’t exist in 1978. “Stalking” was something to do with deer hunters. 

The real monsters that had defined the headlines of my wandering youth (the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, Son of Sam in New York, Gacy in the Chicago area) were no longer threats. They were vanquished or at least gone, just like Richard Nixon, who everyone knew was the scariest thing that would ever happen to the White House. 

Now, as I watch silver-haired AARP and red carpet headliner Jamie Lee Curtis reprising a role she created as a teenager, I’m struck by how innocent we were when the Shape showed up the first time. How did we ever believe that real monsters didn’t stalk our actual everyday lives? Why did we ever believe that when monsters did manage to surface, the world would be sane and united about killing them or least punishing them? 

At 60-something, Laurie Strode has spent her life fighting. In the latest installment, Halloween Ends, she has three speeds: Too Depressed to Move, Physically Exhausted, and Time to Stab That Motherfucker. It’s relatable—even in a mediocre addition to the franchise.

Also relatable: the part where Laurie literally spends years trying to warn people about the encroaching chaos and everyone tells her to stop being so dramatic. In 1978, the town sheriff all but patted Laurie’s head and told her to go have a glass of warm milk when she voiced concerns about being followed by a strange man. 

Sheriff Brackett didn’t take Laurie seriously until his own daughter turned up butchered. “Haddonfield” attitudes haven’t changed much over the generations—not in Laurie’s world nor ours—and now she’s viewed as a crazy old lady rather than the dramatic young one.  

Here are mini reviews of the three Halloweens that matter.

The first Halloween was brilliant. Carpenter saved the bloodshed and gore for the final quarter, and reportedly shot the entire production for under $200,000, of which Curtis got about $8,000. 

Carpenter ratcheted up the tension not by violence but by the harrowing terror leading up to it. He composed a score that had the ruthless simplicity of Jaws and the insistent violence of Psycho. Carpenter put Easter eggs (the term didn’t exist then) dealing with death everywhere: Laurie’s English teacher droning on about fate. Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” on the car radio after school. The old Myers place, the porch a gaping mouth with pillars for fangs. 

Carpenter is a master at tapping into the lizard portion of the brain where fear lives, sometimes subtly, sometimes with staccato, arrhythmic stabs. 

Director David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween was fairly entertaining and a fitting sequel in contextual terms: the violence was at least triple the original in quantity and quality. Thematically, the #MeToo movement hung large over Michael’s crimes. Which brings us to Halloween Ends, where the Shape is still getting away with murder.

Halloween Ends (also directed by Green) is notable mainly for its cockamamie plot and its reverence for the original. Shot after shot—curtains blowing in an empty room, Laurie in a closet with a coat hanger, Laurie on the couch with a knitting needle, a backyard seen through a bedroom window—calls back to 1978. 

The screenplay is bollocks. Michael, ridiculously, takes on a young protege, who looks and acts like Clark Kent until he goes supervillain rogue. 

Halloween Ends2 1/2 starsR, 111 min.Wide release in theaters and streaming on Peacock

SPOILERS AHOY! Stop reading now if you don’t want any more details about the end of Halloween Ends. 

This time around, the fate of Michael Myers does finally seem about as final as that of a cow that has completed its duties in the stockyards. If they bring him back again, I’m out. I do not want to see Laurie Strode at 70, still sleeping with a butcher knife because some asshole without a face has decided her life—like that of all the women in her family—doesn’t mean shit. 

Trash reboots aside, the moral of the Halloween franchise is enduring: Myers has evolved from seasonal tentpole villain to metaphor. He—and everything he stands for—simply won’t die. 

He’s been shot, stabbed through the neck, locked in a burning cellar, and pushed from multiple windows. Myers is the looming embodiment of every femme’s worst nightmare: a tireless, unstoppable man who decides they are disposable.

If the years between 1978 and Halloween Ends taught me anything, it’s that Halloween was always about more than some guy in a William Shatner mask that you were fairly unlikely to encounter in actual life.  

In 1978, Nixon’s resignation was fresh in memory. I took it as proof that adults in the room could be trusted to deal with the monsters. I knew that as surely as I knew we’d never go back to the pre-Roe v. Wade days, because laws were laws. Abortion became legal when I was 11. Young as I was, I knew that nobody with a functioning brain stem would ever send us back to the medieval days of coat hangers and babysitters dying of “anemia.” That was as likely as a vampire showing up at your castle. 

There is nothing new under the sun about horror movies with underlying social themes.  Halloween is good, scary fun. But it is also more than that. As the movie’s producer in an era when female producers in Hollywood were all but unheard of, Debra Hill understood the threat of Michael Myers and all that he represents. 

I miss the days when I thought of him as just another scary story.

Read More

After John Carpenter’s Halloween was released in 1978, my small tribe of suburban teenage babysitters became terrified to go to work. My favorite family kept me only by doubling my rate. For $2 an hour, I’d manage that fear and keep the knives handy. It was an early lesson in the intersection of the U.S.’s two fundamental engines: capitalism and horrific violence. 

It was a lesson that eluded me for years because Michael Myers was so clearly an aberration, like evil itself. When Halloween opened, I’d been sweating over a social studies report on former president Richard Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia, an act so monstrous I couldn’t wrap my head around it—and also clearly an aberration. This I knew to be true: facts, reason, and compassion were the dominant guiding ethos of the world. Or at least, we could all agree they should be. 

Directed in its original incarnation by Carpenter and produced by Debra Hill, Halloween remains a groundbreaking movie on many levels, from the voyeuristic opening tracking shot that pays homage to Touch of Evil (and rivals it in terms of taut storytelling) to its creation of the Final Girl trope, from its haunting score to its closing images of empty rooms steeped in unseen menace. It was bloodless until the final quarter: Carpenter and Hill knew that fear is as much about the anticipation of evil as about its manifestation. 

The original in the 13-movie Halloween franchise was scary for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was this: most previous horror movies (The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Jaws, Horror Hotel, and Nosferatu loom large in my 1978 memory as formative) all either had supernatural monsters or locales far removed from my boring life. 

Carpenter was among the first to create a blockbuster wherein evil invaded a place as mundane and midwestern as Haddonfield, Illinois. The town was fictional. But for the odd palm tree Carpenter failed to shoot around on location in Pasadena, California, Haddonfield deeply resembled Wheaton, where I lived during high school. Moreover, the targeted women here weren’t damsels in a murky far-off castle or mad scientists howling in vaguely Eastern European accents. Instead, the Shape (as Myers is referred to in the credits) was all about killing babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut) and her friends.  

Still, Halloween was the good kind of scary because Michael Myers wasn’t real once the lights came up. He was so unreal there weren’t even words for him: the term “serial killer” didn’t exist in 1978. “Stalking” was something to do with deer hunters. 

The real monsters that had defined the headlines of my wandering youth (the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco, Son of Sam in New York, Gacy in the Chicago area) were no longer threats. They were vanquished or at least gone, just like Richard Nixon, who everyone knew was the scariest thing that would ever happen to the White House. 

Now, as I watch silver-haired AARP and red carpet headliner Jamie Lee Curtis reprising a role she created as a teenager, I’m struck by how innocent we were when the Shape showed up the first time. How did we ever believe that real monsters didn’t stalk our actual everyday lives? Why did we ever believe that when monsters did manage to surface, the world would be sane and united about killing them or least punishing them? 

At 60-something, Laurie Strode has spent her life fighting. In the latest installment, Halloween Ends, she has three speeds: Too Depressed to Move, Physically Exhausted, and Time to Stab That Motherfucker. It’s relatable—even in a mediocre addition to the franchise.

Also relatable: the part where Laurie literally spends years trying to warn people about the encroaching chaos and everyone tells her to stop being so dramatic. In 1978, the town sheriff all but patted Laurie’s head and told her to go have a glass of warm milk when she voiced concerns about being followed by a strange man. 

Sheriff Brackett didn’t take Laurie seriously until his own daughter turned up butchered. “Haddonfield” attitudes haven’t changed much over the generations—not in Laurie’s world nor ours—and now she’s viewed as a crazy old lady rather than the dramatic young one.  

Here are mini reviews of the three Halloweens that matter.

The first Halloween was brilliant. Carpenter saved the bloodshed and gore for the final quarter, and reportedly shot the entire production for under $200,000, of which Curtis got about $8,000. 

Carpenter ratcheted up the tension not by violence but by the harrowing terror leading up to it. He composed a score that had the ruthless simplicity of Jaws and the insistent violence of Psycho. Carpenter put Easter eggs (the term didn’t exist then) dealing with death everywhere: Laurie’s English teacher droning on about fate. Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” on the car radio after school. The old Myers place, the porch a gaping mouth with pillars for fangs. 

Carpenter is a master at tapping into the lizard portion of the brain where fear lives, sometimes subtly, sometimes with staccato, arrhythmic stabs. 

Director David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween was fairly entertaining and a fitting sequel in contextual terms: the violence was at least triple the original in quantity and quality. Thematically, the #MeToo movement hung large over Michael’s crimes. Which brings us to Halloween Ends, where the Shape is still getting away with murder.

Halloween Ends (also directed by Green) is notable mainly for its cockamamie plot and its reverence for the original. Shot after shot—curtains blowing in an empty room, Laurie in a closet with a coat hanger, Laurie on the couch with a knitting needle, a backyard seen through a bedroom window—calls back to 1978. 

The screenplay is bollocks. Michael, ridiculously, takes on a young protege, who looks and acts like Clark Kent until he goes supervillain rogue. 

Halloween Ends2 1/2 starsR, 111 min.Wide release in theaters and streaming on Peacock

SPOILERS AHOY! Stop reading now if you don’t want any more details about the end of Halloween Ends. 

This time around, the fate of Michael Myers does finally seem about as final as that of a cow that has completed its duties in the stockyards. If they bring him back again, I’m out. I do not want to see Laurie Strode at 70, still sleeping with a butcher knife because some asshole without a face has decided her life—like that of all the women in her family—doesn’t mean shit. 

Trash reboots aside, the moral of the Halloween franchise is enduring: Myers has evolved from seasonal tentpole villain to metaphor. He—and everything he stands for—simply won’t die. 

He’s been shot, stabbed through the neck, locked in a burning cellar, and pushed from multiple windows. Myers is the looming embodiment of every femme’s worst nightmare: a tireless, unstoppable man who decides they are disposable.

If the years between 1978 and Halloween Ends taught me anything, it’s that Halloween was always about more than some guy in a William Shatner mask that you were fairly unlikely to encounter in actual life.  

In 1978, Nixon’s resignation was fresh in memory. I took it as proof that adults in the room could be trusted to deal with the monsters. I knew that as surely as I knew we’d never go back to the pre-Roe v. Wade days, because laws were laws. Abortion became legal when I was 11. Young as I was, I knew that nobody with a functioning brain stem would ever send us back to the medieval days of coat hangers and babysitters dying of “anemia.” That was as likely as a vampire showing up at your castle. 

There is nothing new under the sun about horror movies with underlying social themes.  Halloween is good, scary fun. But it is also more than that. As the movie’s producer in an era when female producers in Hollywood were all but unheard of, Debra Hill understood the threat of Michael Myers and all that he represents. 

I miss the days when I thought of him as just another scary story.

Read More

I first met Batman battling villains from the Hall of Justice with the other Super Friends, part of the Saturday morning cartoon lineup of the 1970s, and soon afterward I caught the campy reruns of the 1960s live-action TV show. This led me to scour my brother Aaron’s Bronze Age collection of DC Comics, the ones with macabre covers by the likes of Dave Cockrum and Neal Adams, like Robin hanging dead or a menacing-looking Batman seeking vengeance. 

Here I discovered the real Batman, the one envisioned by his creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger in Detective Comics #27 which debuted on March 30, 1939, a dark knight fighting for justice. While Superman was all-powerful, and Spider-Man could climb walls, Batman was just a man. A rich man, with badass training, and cool gadgets, but a man nonetheless. He had his demons, his strengths, and his failings but he was, and still is, my all-time favorite comic book hero.

The Mark of KaneThrough 12/4: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 11/21 and 11/28 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $30 previews through 10/29 ($25 seniors, $12 students, and military); regular run 10/30-12/4 $34 ($29 seniors, $12 students, and military)

He is also Mark Pracht’s favorite hero, which inspired Pracht to write the play The Mark of Kane, making its world premiere at City Lit Theater, directed by City Lit artistic director Terry McCabe. Spanning eight decades, the play delves into the relationship between Kane and Finger, how Kane went on to fame and fortune and Finger languished in obscurity and poverty.

“The Bob Kane and Bill Finger story is just so fascinating,” says Pracht, who notes that the Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster story (the creators of Superman) is more like David and Goliath, the small-time artists versus a corporation, “but Bill Finger and Bob Kane is like Cain and Abel . . . artists conflicting with each other.”

While the exact facts of who created what remains unclear (the play is historical fiction based on a conflicting loose set of facts) it is generally accepted that Kane and Finger, two friends in a Bronx apartment, created the character of Batman over a few days. Kane has claimed sole creation credit and in 1939 ultimately got written credit from DC Comics in perpetuity, leaving him to decide what credit, if any, Finger received. Finger’s granddaughter, Athena (who along with her son are his only living heirs) fought to restore his legacy, which led Warner Brothers to officially recognize Finger as cocreator of Batman on film and TV projects going forward.

In reality, Finger, as a writer, claims to have contributed quite a bit, from the look of Batman, his costume, his skills as a detective, and his secret identity of Bruce Wayne. “Most of the things that we think of as Batman came out of his mind,” Pracht says. 

What contribution Bob Kane actually made, as writer and artist, to the creation of Batman, including the name itself and even the actual artwork, remains a debate. Even the characters of Robin and the Joker were allegedly mainly created by Finger, with Jerry Robinson contributing to the latter.

When the Batman TV show became a hit in the 1960s, it made Kane a millionaire. Finger (along with his writing partner Charles Sinclair) wrote a two-part episode (introducing the villain the Clock King), which became Finger’s only public credit for anything related to Batman in his lifetime.

When Batman was originally created for DC (Detective Comics), these two were just young men, happy to be making something new. This love of art for art’s sake was what drew many early comic book artists to this growing industry. Neither expected it to live much beyond a handful of issues, and no one could predict what a huge impact Batman would have on the world now over 80 years later and how many billions (gazillions?) of dollars would be made from this one character alone.

As Batman’s fame grew, so did Kane’s, who became a kind of caricature of the big-time Hollywood hotshot, Pracht notes. Kane worked hard on generating a persona. “Bob Kane had one good idea that he got untold scores of other people to work on,” Pracht says.

In contrast, fellow comic artist Jim Steranko (famous for his work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.), who is a featured character in the play The Mark of Kane, also built a mythology around himself, though his was well-earned—Steranko not only was a seminal artist, but in his early career worked as an escape artist, illusionist, and musician. Jack Kirby, considered one of the greatest comic book creators and artists in history, claims to have created his character of Mister Miracle, an escape artist, through inspiration drawn from Steranko’s early life.

In addition to the relationship between these two men, The Mark of Kane is also about the birth of an art form as well as a multimedia empire. Like many of the great art forms, comics were rife with plagiarism, cronyism—even gangsters. (The first Batman story, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” in Detective Comics #27 was essentially a copy of the story from popular pulp comic The Shadow #113, written by Theodore Tinsley, and Kane claims to have been “inspired” by Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter design for Batman’s wings.)

Plus, as Pracht says, it is a story of “kids just making stuff up by the seat of their pants. And out of this comes these things that are so beloved and so part of our national consciousness.”

Pracht notes that for something like Batman to survive this long proves what a significant creation it was. “This art form has become so important in the American experience. Knowing these people who maybe got forgotten for a while . . . I think it behooves us to know where these characters came from. They’re important in a way I don’t think anybody really comprehended until now, almost 100 years later. We’re still going to the movies to see it, we’re still buying comic books and playing video games.”

Through this play and a lifetime collecting and appreciating comics, Pracht has considered the roles that superheroes play in our lives and our psyche. “It’s a safe way to confront ideas that are not acceptable. It’s their job to show us there is a way to stand up to things that are frightening and stand up to things that are wrong. You can still do that and be compassionate and still be thoughtful. Bill Finger says, ‘What if we tell kids that they don’t have to be an alien from another planet to be a hero?’”

And that is the core of Batman. You can be just a human being and still be a hero. And we can turn to these comic books, these disposable stories that have been derided for so long, and find inspiration and even art. “Comics are a viable and interesting art form, and it is a medium that is worth talking about as an art form,” Pracht says.

In addition to his own contribution to the comics-as-art-form movement through The Mark of Kane, Pracht will be presenting two additional world premieres of his work in what he is calling the “Four-Color Trilogy.” The second play will be called Innocence of Seduction and will be set in the 1950s during the juvenile delinquency scare and will highlight, among other things, the contribution of Black and female comic book artists as well as the creation of the Comic Code, which grew out of the moral panic of the 50s into the de facto censor for the comic industry for decades. The third play, tentatively titled The House of Ideas, will focus on two titans of the comic book industry, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and their working partnership.

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Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

11/10/202211/24/202212/8/202212/22/2022

Download the full 2022 editorial calendar is here (PDF).

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2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through June 2023 are:

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Healing is often a long and winding process. Try as we might to pretend that we have it under control, healing is usually messy and nonlinear. But even when all seems lost, there are moments that remind us that the light at the end of the tunnel is still worth venturing toward.  

South side rapper Freddie Old Soul’s healing process began when she picked up a pen and expressed herself creatively. She also credits music for helping her find God. That discovery led to digging deeper into spirituality, following a West African tradition known as Ifa, and becoming a trained healer.

“I started to go to herbal school with an organization called Gold Water Alchemy, and I just naturally became a woman healer before I knew it. I was doing healing circles to help women get through very traumatic experiences that have happened to them,” she said with pride. “When I say I help heal women, it’s more so about ‘what are the tools that God gave you? And how can you best utilize those tools to be the best version of yourself?’ So that’s my gift back to the community.”

Freddie’s healing work goes hand in hand with her music. She refined her craft as a spoken word poet at the Young Chicago Authors program Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB, since renamed the Rooted & Radical Youth Poetry Festival). That later translated into musical projects. Her lyricism invokes messages of inner work and self-love over mellow boom-bap production. It’s smooth and easy to listen to, allowing you to truly absorb every word she spits. The end result is alchemized gold.

“Writing poetry, being a part of LTAB, and literally sometimes even locking myself up in my room until I just got the words out of me—I would discover more about myself,” she said. “That’s why music is so important to me, because without it I just wouldn’t be able to self-reflect the way that I do. A lot of the times I rap about something and then like three months to a year later, it’s literally happening to me. I had to get through it because I wrote about it. So it’s magic, kinda, in a way.”

Freddie’s upcoming album Water, Music, and Love focuses on the transitional period of her life as a mother and her journey to rediscover herself as a musician. The title represents the three things that she says are essential to her well-being. The project’s genesis came from making music every day in her living room with her close friends and collaborators JazStarr and _Stepchild, which was a healing process in and of itself. 

With the album, Freddie Old Soul looks to claim her place among Chicago’s pantheon of great rappers, something she humbly but firmly believes she’s worthy of already.

“I think the people have been waiting on me to realize how much of an impact I truly make. I think when we name people like Mother Nature, Semiratruth, and Brittney Carter, these are my friends,” she says with earnest. “These people are reflections of me and they’ve come into my life and reminded me, like, ‘Freddie, you the coldest.’ I feel the community, and the people are waiting on me to be the impact that I know that I always have been.”

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