Smiling faces sometimes lie

I haven't read them all by any means, but I can tell you right away that you won't find a more cogent response to the announcement of the Watchmen prequels than this one by Lance Parkin. That just about nails it.

Alan Moore's daughter Leah posted a reaction on Twitter that points out the real issue: DC Comics -- and Marvel, for that matter -- don't actually want new characters or properties. They literally wouldn't know how to promote or sell anything new anymore. New things are a real pain for a media corporation. Honestly, the very last thing they want is to publish a new original character created by Darwyn Cooke.

For that matter, the only reason either company has invested money in buying up other publishers' existing characters over the past couple of decades is to keep them away from some publisher who might be able to do something productive with them. Consider the strange tale of Marvelman for instance. There may have been a time when DC and Marvel were like EMI Records, almost accidentally enriching us all by recording acts like the Beatles and the Pink Floyd. Now DC and Marvel aren't even record companies with a roster of oldies and nostalgic tribute bands anymore; now they're companies in the business of selling Beatle wigs, who put out records only to create the illusion they're still a vital part of culture.

And yes, I've been trying to figure out how I can parlay this news into a lucrative volume of Hours Before Midnight: Twelve Essays Prior To Watchmen but so far I just can't see it working. Is there some potential I'm missing? I would do it in a heartbeat. Suggestions gladly accepted!

(I'm still on blogging sabbatical but felt a need to acknowledge today's announcement somehow for reasons that should be obvious. Makes a great Valentine's Day gift!)

Just in time for the holidays

Guess what? A new edition of the anthology Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen, edited by yours truly and featuring a dozen awesome writers, is now available on Amazon and Createspace for the new low price of $11.99. That's 40% off the original cover price.

And that's not all. It turns out a new edition of Teenagers from the Future: Essays on the Legion of Super-Heroes, edited by Tim Callahan and with an essay by me, is now $19.99, which is shockingly low for its doorstop-like 340 pages.

Everything published by Sequart has been well worth reading and is highly recommended; these are merely the two books I had the most to do with. More information on the line wide price cuts here.

I'm still waiting for word on these titles becoming available as digital editions. So far only Grant Morrison: The Early Years by Tim Callahan and Improving the Foundations: Batman Begins from Comics to Screen by Julian Darius are available for the iPad; further details can be found here. I'll pass along any further info as it comes in.

Dinner

Tonight, President Obama heads to Gotham Bar and Grill on 12th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place for a fundraising dinner with 45 supporters who contributed $35,800 apiece for the honor, including Caroline Kennedy, Jerry Seinfeld, and Susan Sarandon. They'll dine on Satur Farms beet salad, 28-day dry-aged prime Niman Ranch steak with marrow mustard custard, Paffenroth baby carrots, Vidalia onion rings and Bordelaise sauce, Migliorelli Farm Honeycrisp apple strudel, and chocolate pecan pie with cinnamon ice cream for dessert. I definitely wouldn't turn that meal down, though I'd want to pay less for it.

Right now, the area surrounding the restaurant is cordoned off with metal barricades along that block of 12th Street, and along Fifth and University from 11th Street to 13th Street. Many officers at every intersection. We've had this President in this neighborhood a few times before and it's never been like this. Understand, these barricades don't do anything other than making it harder to park along any of those streets, and people are doing that anyway. It's still possible to walk right past the Gotham Bar and Grill and people are still doing that too. It's not for reasons of security. It's about security theater. The NYPD wants to make sure we see those barricades there so that we'll know they're in charge of the situation. I assume they anticipate some kind of Occupy-themed protest and are sending a message of authority and control. No hijinx will be tolerated. It was exactly the same in lower Manhattan on November 17th in the midst of the protest march; everything was running smoothly and traffic and pedestrians were going about their business normally that evening, except for the massive police presence making sure you knew they were there and slowing everything down long after the march had gone past.

Still, it's an interesting location Obama's fundraisers have chosen. The intersection of 12th Street and University Place became notorious a couple of months ago. That's because the Gotham Bar and Grill is right across the street from this spot:

This has been a very strange year for my neighborhood. Just in the past four months we've had an earthquake, a flood, and a police riot, not to mention multiple protest marches and acts of civil disobedience. Part of me hopes it will be a bit quieter next year, but another part of me is glad I don't have to feel like I'm missing out on any of the excitement.

Update: photos from today here.

Pre-viral alert

Before everyone else on the Internet posts a link to them, I want credit for being the first person to tell you to look at these famous comic covers adapted by Kerry Callen.

Police action

The start is a bit of a shock, but watch the whole thing. You might not expect how it ends.

This took place on Friday afternoon, November 18. Video found on and further discussion at Boing Boing.

Update: more video from another vantage point here. The officer casually using pepper spray against nonviolent students as if he's treating his garden for aphids has been identified as a Lt. John Pike. Some folks are suggesting that in honor of his actions, the unnecessary use of pepper spray against peaceful protestors who pose no threat or resistance should be referred to as "Piking" and those who carry out such action be called "Pikers."

Utter bloody shambles

My birthmates Adam and Becca are both away on highly dangerous top-secret government missions requiring complete abandonment of their blogs for security reasons (I am forced to assume) so I'm all by myself for the birthday commemorative post this year. That being the case, I'd like to share a bit of personal archaeology and self-indulgence -- not specifically birthday-related, but instead a memory prompted by something Andrew Hickey mentioned a few days back.

On the evening of April 14, 1969 I was left alone in front of a television set. If we're being brutally honest that probably happened more often than my parents would have liked to admit, but on the other hand just look how I turned out. What I saw that particular night was so scary and inexplicable that it stayed with me…though it became so muddled as the years went by I began to wonder if I'd simply dreamed the whole thing. A supervillian or magician or mad scientist had kidnapped a quartet of rock musicians and turned them into robots. (Or had he built robot doubles to take their place while they remained in captivity? I wasn't sure.) I couldn't recall the rock group escaping and defeating their captor. I remembered something about the villain laughing as the show ended. Could the bad guy have won in the end? Surely that couldn't be right? For many years, I would remember bits of this at odd moments and wonder. Honestly, I would literally be lying awake in bed at night thinking what the hell was that?

As a teen, I wondered if this was some tv appearance by the Beatles, or if I was misremembering something from the movie Help!, but further investigation quickly proved that wrong. In my twenties, it seemed obvious that unfortunate quartet of abducted musicians must be the Monkees, and when the series aired as a marathon on cable I watched it closely. When nothing showed up matching my recollections, I became even more convinced it must all have been some kind of delusion on my part.

It was four decades after the original airing before I found out what it really was: I had seen the ill-fated NBC broadcast of 33 & 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee, a legendary fiasco of television history. I'd remembered the plot pretty accurately, as it turns out, and watching it as an adult my confusion was easily explained: it really was as strange and hallucinatory as I'd remembered it. The difference was, now I utterly loved it. That something so chaotic and undisciplined and shambolic, something so unfiltered and utterly of its moment, could have found its way onto national television is remarkable. And as I've said elsewhere, some of the music on this show is just spectacular.

More discussion of 33 & 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee can be found here and here. Here's the finale of the program, featuring the Monkees joined by The Buddy Miles Express, Paul Arnold and The Moon Express, Brian Auger, Julie Driscoll and the Trinity in a jam session. This is one of my favorite tv musical performances, even if it took forty years to realize that. Just once, almost by accident, this aired on network television:

Forgetting to remember

I guess it's inevitable that Occupy Wall Street will give in to the pressure to issue a list of specific policy demands, but I still wish they wouldn't. A list of demands would turn a protest movement into a hostage situation. It risks becoming a form of blackmail. "Agree to this list of conditions or we'll never return this captured piece of property." And OWS isn't a hostage situation; it's about calling attention to a broken system, not trying to take advantage of the brokenness to achieve the wishes of a small group undemocratically. This is the kind of thing the banks and financial institutions have been doing that we're all so unhappy about.

Anyone reading this has got to be familiar with current Doctor Who, right? The banks and corporations are the Silence. You're supposed to forget they exist as soon as you look away, but they own our country and our government and our mass media. To follow this analogy down the most obvious path, the Occupy movement all around the world is like the Doctor and his team. For the past month they've been the ones making us notice what we're conditioned to ignore and forget, and telling us not to look away.

(Yes, I realize that analogy followed to its logical conclusion leads to the human race being conditioned to kill them all on sight, but I hadn't really thought that far ahead. There is such a thing as being too literal, okay?)

The people in Zuccotti Park aren't the ones doing the occupying. They're the ones protesting the occupation.

crossposted from Google+