Estoreal

Just in time for the holidays

2011-12-03T19:48:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-30T16:51:00.001-05:00

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

2011-11-25T17:59:00.000-05:00

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

2011-11-19T01:05:00.001-05:00

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

2011-10-25T00:44:00.000-04:00

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

2011-10-19T15:51:00.000-04:00

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+

The word from high

2011-09-22T13:42:00.000-04:00

(click to enlargify)

Directions:

Maxwell's is located at 1039 Washington Street in Hoboken, NJ (map) about a dozen blocks north of the Hoboken PATH station or four blocks south of the 14th Street Pier.

If you're attending NYCC, ferry service leaves for Hoboken every twenty minutes from 39th Street and 12th Avenue, directly behind the Javits Center. If you're not attending NYCC and aren't already in midtown Manhattan, PATH might be a better option.

Tickets are available at venues listed on the flyer. Sure to be the best $10 you could spend that weekend. Hope to see you there!

Update: In response to this post, there has been an outbreak of comics history over at Rip Jagger's Dojo. All passengers are advised to remain seated until comics history has come to a complete halt.

Another place you can find me not doing a whole lot

2011-08-10T22:44:00.001-04:00

I know, I know, I know. I've neglected my homestead here and the place has gone to seed. The last thing I need is to be distracted by some shiny new hangout in another part of town. But they have pinball there! And a billiards table!

Anyway, I'm now on Google+ thanks to an invite from a friend who is infinitely cooler than I ever could be. However, I can strive to emulate him at least in some small way. So if you're there yourself, please feel free to look me up and circle me, or whatever the operative verb would be. And if you're not already on Google+ but would like to be, I surely have an invite or two to spare. Just let me know.

Things just haven't been propitious for any kind of longish writing lately, and the really brief posts I've done recently never felt to me like an appropriate use of the blogging form. I'm thinking that Google+ might be the best place for the one or two sentence updates and photos and YouTube videos, the lightweight stuff I haven't been sharing anyplace online mainly because I'm not on Twitter nor Facebook. I've avoided Twitter only because I fear the temptation of being sucked into it; I've avoided Facebook only because it is pure evil.* Maybe this can act as a substitute for both.

Let me emphasize that I'm not giving up blogging here. I love blogging here. Longer posts will appear whenever I feel like it. Could be next week. Or next month. Who says this isn't the astounding Estoreal Age of Delayed Gratification? Until then, face front, true believer!

* Yes yes yes, I know. Google may also be pure evil…but as far as I can tell, regular folks have more options to protect themselves against Google than they do with Facebook.

Children remember Sarah Jane

2011-04-20T19:15:00.000-04:00

Recommended only if you're willing to risk a fair-sized lump in your throat. Here are comments left by young viewers in memory of Elisabeth Sladen on the BBC website:

CBBC - Newsround - What are your memories of Sarah Jane star?

I don't think I've ever seen something like this for a children's show before, but it's a very good thing for the BBC to present online. Not just in terms of paying tribute to one of their own or honoring a well-liked celebrity and respected actor, but in sending the message to kids that it's safe to acknowledge the fact of death and normal to feel upset when someone you like dies. Even if it's someone you only knew from watching television with your family.

As I said in a comment to cerebus660, describing Lis Sladen as best known for her role in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures kind of misses the point: a lot of folks now in their forties and fifties, and still others who might not even be ten years old yet, know her best for being there during our childhood. It's not that a companion from Doctor Who is gone, but that we've lost a companion.

No cover no minimum

2011-04-06T01:57:00.001-04:00

(via The Mary Sue)

Please forgive the extended absence. A bit longer before I'm up to blogging again, but this I had to share right away. I recommend viewing in fullscreen mode for the total effect.

P.S.: And now there's a sequel with 100% more Ian Anderson!

Totally called it

2011-02-01T13:52:00.000-05:00

Me back in October:

NYCC may have to consider adding a fourth day, and making that extra day for industry and trade people, including librarians and teachers and press. For people who are working during the con, those early hours on Friday before the doors open to the public might end up being the only chance they have to see the rest of the con (as it was for me). And really, the definition of "professional industry person" is becoming so diffuse, it's not so elitist as it might once have been. It still rankles to make the suggestion. I come out sounding like the guy who's just got in, trying to pull the ladder up behind him. But it may have to happen.

According to the official NYCC blog today:

NYCC will take place over four days this October. New York Comic Con has experienced exponential growth since it was launched in 2006, and our expansion into a fourth day now will allow the show to accommodate even more attendees and provide additional programming and business opportunity for the artists, creators, and exhibitors who are the foundation of the show's success.

According to the blog, NYCC 2011 will be from Thursday, October 13 through Sunday, October 16. The show is open to the public all day Friday through Sunday, plus a limited number of four day tickets will be sold. Thursday will feature academic programming beginning at noon, and the show floor will be open for professional hours and a new preview night on Thursday from 4 to 7 PM.

I don't think this will ease crowding at all on the other three days, but that isn't the purpose of this move. If folks who are working the convention or attending it as guests actually get to see the rest of it first, they'll be in a better mood -- it won't be quite so much like being herded through cattle pens and getting put on display -- and I think that will make the overall convention experience a tiny bit nicer for everyone. But maybe that's me trying to rationalize privilege as a universal virtue. I expect to be working behind a table (or two) again this year, so the extra day makes a huge difference for me.

One other surprise is that tickets go on sale February 7.

Crazy

2011-01-22T23:55:00.000-05:00

(via PZ Myers)

For the man who has everything but

2011-01-10T01:33:00.000-05:00

What do the above images have in common? Colorist Tom Ziuko.

I used to act as Macintosh troubleshooter/repairman/tutor for Tom about ten years ago, when he lived in a tiny closet-sized apartment near the U.N. building in midtown Manhattan. When I say this place was closet-sized, I mean it literally -- I know for a fact some people who read this blog have closets larger than that whole apartment. Tom shared the apartment with a three-legged cat; there wasn't enough room in that place for a fourth leg. Tom was one of the nicest people I ever worked for, and absolutely one of the sweetest and most generous people I encountered in the comics field.

When I was looking over Tom's published credits, I was surprised by just how many landmark comics series and cult favorites he was directly involved with. Among many others and in no particular order, Tom was colorist on such titles as Mazing Man, Amethyst, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Legends, Thriller, Phil Foglio's Angel and the Ape, and John Byrne's Superman reboot. My own favorite comics work of his is the 1985 Superman Annual by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons preceding their collaboration on Watchmen. Check out that link at the start of this paragraph for more of his credits.

In spite of all his ability and all this terrific work to his name, a health crisis has left Tom in financial peril. I've donated what I can, and the only other thing I have to offer is trying to raise awareness. The comic book business has been pretty hard on a lot of people who worked on comics I loved, and pretty hard on friends of mine who were employed by it. Tom is both of those, and you'll understand I get kinda tired of watching it happen. Read this post at Daniel Best's blog and see what you think.

Also, comics scripter and letterer Todd Klein offers a post about Tom that really captures the guy.

Thundersnow

2010-12-26T18:54:00.000-05:00

Apparently this is a thing that happens.

I'd never even heard of it before, but it's happening as I write this. In all the fearsome Pennsylvania winters of my childhood, I never heard thunder or saw lightning during a blizzard…but we just had both a few minutes ago. Awesome. And such a heavy metal name, too. This is better than Hanukkah and Christmas and the Going Forth of Wadjet rolled into one.

Heimdall

2010-12-19T02:02:00.001-05:00

The following is posted here so as to spare myself the trouble of retyping it in lots of other places and I can just direct people here. Especially non-comics people who are trying to make sense of the contradictory and sometimes very foolish things being said on this topic. I'm far from an expert, so if you spot any mistakes please give a shout in the comments.

A few random points about this:

Yes, a character whose nickname is "the White God" is being played by someone whose skin color is not what Westerners colloquially refer to as "white." Why, that's almost as unthinkable as a Hellene referring to the Furies as "the kind hearted ones" or someone calling a very large man "Shorty."

Brown-skinned people were not unknown to the Vikings; they raided Iberia and encountered Moors. And funnily enough, Norse mythology itself features two races of gods -- the Aesir and the Vanir -- fighting and then joining forces. (Something like the Avengers/Defenders War.) There's a line in one poem that seems to say Heimdall was originally a member of the Vanir who crossed over to join the Aesir. So the notion of Heimdall being a different race is not completely unheard of.

In Marvel folklore, discrepancies between the depiction of gods in the pages of Thor and in standard Norse myth -- Marvel's Thor not having red hair, for instance -- were long ago rationalized by the explanation that the comics characters are not the Aesir and Vanir et al but their successors, reborn after the fall of Asgard at Ragnarok. Subsequent writers have probably fiddled with that explanation. (However, that thing some people are saying about "they're actually shapeshifting space aliens who took the form of Norse gods" is something else altogether and not considered to apply here.) The point is, historical considerations about what the Norse would have had in mind for Heimdall as noted above aren't strictly relevant.

Thor comic co-creator Jack Kirby also created the first African superhero, the Black Panther. After that, he tried to make sure all his comic series were racially integrated. He even wrote and drew an African-American romance comic that was never published. When he was working on Thor, I bet if you had asked him "Hey Jack, why aren't there any Black gods in Asgard?" he'd have told you "Sure there are!" and introduced one in the next issue.

And most importantly, Jack Kirby nearly died fighting the Nazis…and if you ever told him that something in a movie made out of his Thor comics was going to cause irritation and annoyance to a bunch of ignorant bigoted white supremacist assholes, he would have been delighted. He would have said "Tell me what pissed them off and I'll do it twice as much!"

Its origin and purpose still a total mystery

2010-12-08T17:35:00.000-05:00

It's full of stars!

I can't believe this is actually real, but apparently it is. I want one but I'm afraid of what might happen if my action figures evolve to become sentient tool-using creatures. And then one day the Monolith tells me "All these toys are yours, except the ones on the top shelf of the left bookcase. Attempt no landing there." No, the danger is just too great.

(via John Gruber)

Days of miracle and wonder

2010-11-15T17:24:00.000-05:00

Astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson looks out the Cupola window bay of the International Space Station at Earth, about 350 kilometers below, sometime in September 2010. More information here and here.

Don't forget that we live in a time when this is a real thing that actually happens.

(Link courtesy Mark Bourne, whose blog Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL is always a source of great edification and information.)

Something to think about

2010-11-08T01:10:00.000-05:00

"I see the Christian Science church already has its Christmas tree up."

"Yeah…and you notice, it's always a Christmas tree. Never a Science tree."

Costumed character

2010-11-07T01:43:00.000-05:00

From Brooklyn to Beijing, and Into a Caldron:

Mr. Cabo favors the kind of dress inspired by turn-of-the century Chinese aristocrats: a long, black silk tunic with a mandarin collar that opens to the side and a black trilby over a black do-rag bearing Chinese characters for "dragon" and "trust." On his feet he wears black Dr. Martens boots.

One early Sunday morning, while commuting to work by subway, he explained his look. His attire communicates his respect for Chinese culture, he said, but it also has a more practical function. Because angry Chinese parents do not knock before barging into his office, when they see him behind his desk in the fashions of yesteryear they are momentarily flabbergasted.

"It gives me time to think," Mr. Cabo said as he walked through the crowd. At 6-foot-3, he appeared nearly a head taller than almost everyone around him. "Plus, they’re going to stare at me anyway," he said.

Recently, a 4-year-old started crying in fright at the sight of him. "I’m a little afraid to talk to you, because you’re black," a parent said to Mr. Cabo, who speaks fluent Mandarin.

From the New York Times, November 3, 2010.

He comes from a distant place. He's not like anyone else around him, and though he tries to fit in to a certain degree he is always apart. He's assumed to have special powers and abilities because of his alien heritage. He wears a distinctive outfit for psychological advantage, to evoke a specific response in the people he deals with. I don't say that Paul Cabo is heroic…but he may have more to tell us about what it would feel like to be a costumed hero in real life than you'll find in Watchmen or the works of Ellis or Millar.

(And if only he were an ex-hitman instead of a former Starbucks manager, the whole story would be like a sequel to Ghost Dog.)

Boo

2010-10-30T21:28:00.000-04:00

"So I said to Edge, 'Okay, Edge, play the blues.' And he did."

I was thinking this for my Halloween costume. No? Too scary?

Birthday honors

2010-10-25T00:51:00.000-04:00

As ever, birthday greetings on this unusually fine day to Adam at The Blue Meanies Are Coming! and Becca at No Smoking in the Skull Cave. May the birthday elves leave every gift you want underneath the birthday tree...while birthday revelers dressed in their traditional costumes as Katy Perry, James Carville, and Helen Reddy knock on your door to offer you birthday candy and treats…and in the evening, birthday fireworks light up the skies and make your neighbors gasp in surprise and cheer the anniversary of your birth. Or however you do the whole birthday thing where you are.

How interesting that two of my favorite bloggers just happen to have birthdays on the same day. I mean, what are the odds?

For me, it's the day I apologize yet again to my mother for having caused her inconvenience one day many years ago. But as she points out, she didn't have anything better to do that day.

Never ending or beginning

2010-10-17T16:06:00.000-04:00

So long, Benoît Mandelbrot…until we zoom in close enough to reach the point where you appear again.

(Animated gif via Infinite Cake.)

Welcome back, Mr. Kotter

2010-10-14T15:17:00.003-04:00

After a year and a half absence from my sidebar, we hail the return of mighty Mark Kardwell to his rightful place of honor.

I just can't stay mad at a guy who does this.

Now I have to get the rest of that list up to date...

Lost weekend

2010-10-12T23:59:00.000-04:00

photo by Rich Johnston

I feel a bit funny here without my initials -- they've been with me so long -- but it was time to let them go. They served their purpose, and I was getting uncomfortable with people actually calling me "Rab" (or sometimes, strangely, "Rob") in real life. It's time people know me not merely as an acronym but as the fellow who edited that book, and then that other book, and then wrote a book, and that comic that never came out and another one that did a long time ago.

Anyway, so yeah…NYCC 2010 went by in a blur of about ninety million people. That's the figure they announced, right? I'm prepared to believe it. For the first time, I feel like I missed a convention while actually attending it, mainly because the crowds kept you from walking the show floor freely. Most of my time wound up spent behind the Sequart table, plus an excursion to the world premiere screening of Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods on Saturday evening and helping out at the Q&A session for the film at the con the following day. If you were there at the convention panel, did you notice how the lights went off when they showed clips from the film and back on when they were done? That was me. Pushing the light switch.

I still maintain a table can be the best way to see a convention -- just stand there and let everyone come to you -- but this time it didn't work as well. I hate to say this, it really goes against the grain philosophically to sound elitist…but NYCC may have to consider adding a fourth day, and making that extra day for industry and trade people, including librarians and teachers and press. For people who are working during the con, those early hours on Friday before the doors open to the public might end up being the only chance they have to see the rest of the con (as it was for me). And really, the definition of "professional industry person" is becoming so diffuse, it's not so elitist as it might once have been. It still rankles to make the suggestion. I come out sounding like the guy who's just got in, trying to pull the ladder up behind him. But it may have to happen.

Overall, Sequart had a really good con, including the aforementioned film debut. The company launched two books at the con, my own Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen and a pre-release convention beta edition of the Gotham City 14 Miles anthology. Both sold out during the con. The Watchmen book sold out before the first day was over. The copies that Sequart expected to last the entire three days of the con went in less than a day. Finally we had to reserve two copies as display copies marked "sold out, please order online" so that prospective customers would have something to pick up and flip through at the table. And we did have people saying they'd come looking for the Sequart table specifically because they'd heard of this book and wanted to buy it. Amazing.

One factor that may have fed demand was a curious gap or omission I noticed at the con. Last year NYCC took place just before the Watchmen film opened, so the merchandise was everywhere. Toys, costumes, the works. This time, virtually no new Watchmen merchandise to be found. One costume merchant was selling Rorschach-style fedoras, with accompanying mask; you could find action figures at a steep discount. Not much else. Surely people didn't stop liking Watchmen just because the movie came and went? Having liked it for 25 years already? But that's how media marketing works. This time, because no one had any motive to generate false demand for it, Sequart had the market cornered for people who genuinely still wanted to know about Watchmen.

(If you're also one of those folks, Minutes to Midnight is not yet listed on Amazon but is now available on Lulu. I'll be sure to mention it when the Amazon link arrives.)

At the con, we also worked out what my next two projects for Sequart are going to be, so I've got a nicely packed schedule over the next several months. More as this story develops…

No cause for alarm

2010-08-03T20:10:00.002-04:00

Monty Python - Airplane Pilots - watch more funny videos

Despite the title, the above video is not actually Monty Python, but comes from a television special called How To Irritate People starring three future Pythons and produced by David Frost. Though I didn't know it until recently, I was watching when it aired in the States back in January 1969. Funny thing: this very sketch was a huge joke in my family for many years after this brief exposure…but for all this time none of us could remember where we had seen it. Every once in a while, something like this gets stuck in our memory and become a huge part of our personal mythology. Who can say why, or what significance it may come to have later on?

So, yes, six months. No cause for alarm. I'm not quite ready to start blogging again, but there's some news I've been sitting on for way too long and I've been dying to share it with everybody. You may already have read about it here or here or here, but the official word is here.

The book is Minutes To Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen. 184 pages, $19.95 cover price, a dozen genuinely terrific essays about Watchmen in print and on screen inside, and my name slapped on the cover purely for being in the right place at the right time. Available this October from fine vendors of printed graphic storytelling everywhere, as well as through Amazon and Lulu.

A couple of the contributors may be folks you know by different names; a couple of them are just on the verge of becoming prominent; and a couple of them are such big names you'll be asking yourself "What kind of dirt does Richard have on these people that they'd be willing to write for him?" I can't figure it out myself. But they all did an outstanding job. Unbelievably, all of them found something worth saying about Watchmen 25 years after it was published. You'd have thought there was nothing new left to say. I did too. We were wrong.

Minutes To Midnight will be launching at NYCC this year -- as will the documentary film Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods directed by one of our contributors -- so it promises to be a wild ride in October. If anyone reading this is going to be at NYCC, let me know in comments or via e-mail so I can pencil you into my timetable...!

I'm also more than happy to answer any questions you may have about the book. Or anything else, really!

Verbatim

2010-02-21T21:31:00.002-05:00

My mother, yesterday afternoon: "Do you hear someone drumming?"

I listen for a moment and say, "Yeah, I hear it too. There's someone playing drums in the park across the street."

"Oh good," my mother replies. "For a moment, I was afraid I was turning into the Master."

Woman talking on cellphone at 1st Street and Second Avenue:

"And she said girl, your face is red, your eyes are glassy, and you're swaggering. And I said whoa! what do you want from me?"

A sighted woman and a blind man are walking down Lafayette Street towards the Astor Place Tower.

The woman says "I wish you could see this building."

The man says "I don't need to see it. I can hear it. It sounds terrible."

A very short story

2010-01-28T16:32:00.005-05:00

When I was ten or eleven -- sometime during the year before my family moved to New York City -- I have a vivid memory of a substitute teacher coming to my class and, in lieu of a lesson, reading us The Laughing Man by J.D. Salinger.

Which, if you know the story, was a profoundly weird thing to do.

A holiday message from Kamandi

2009-11-26T02:21:00.004-05:00

Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth, would like to wish everyone in the United States a very traditional, utterly conventional, and totally unremarkable Thanksgiving dinner.

And should this be the case, Kamandi would very much like to spend Thanksgiving with you instead of the mutants next year.

The jungle lord

2009-11-24T19:21:00.002-05:00

The following was written at the behest of pillock, who asked to see it, in connection with Andrew Hickey's revisionist Pop-Drama Manifesto. This piece also combines elements from two of my favorite films.

Some of what you've heard is true.

In 1890, the British Colonial Office dispatches a young nobleman and former Army officer named John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, to investigate reports of forced labor conscription of natives by a rival colonial power. Clayton departs for Africa with his bride of three months, the former Alice Rutherford, intending that they present themselves as wealthy idlers whose family owned a rubber plantation there before the colony changed hands in 84.

The couple never reach their destination. Following a mutiny aboard their ship out of Sierra Leone, Lord and Lady Greystoke are put ashore at a remote spot on the coast. Rather than following the coastline, the couple head inland in hopes of reaching a Christian mission, because the pregnant Alice urgently needs medical attention. The mutinous ship is attacked and sunk before its crew can reveal the Claytons were spared rather than killed in the mutiny, so a search never takes place. Husband and wife are never seen again.

In 1902, a lone survivor from the lost ship emerges to describe how John Clayton had saved the life of the black sailor who subsequently led the mutiny. Putting the Claytons ashore was meant to protect them, not further endanger them. (An allegation that the ship's captain may have been employed by the rival power Clayton was sent to investigate can neither be proved nor denied.)

The following year, heir presumptive to the Greystoke estate William Clayton mounts an expedition to learn the fate of his long-lost Uncle John and Aunt Alice. Joining this expedition is Professor A.Q. Porter of Baltimore, with Porter's sixteen year old daughter Jane serving as caretaker and factotum to her naturalist father. Finding no trace of the Claytons on the coast, the party moves inland. Very much further inland, they find a secluded village. Among the villagers they're stunned to see a twelve year old boy, in all respects a normal member of his tribe…except for his distinctly Caucasian skin color. The boy is nearly as surprised: he's never seen any albinos other than himself before, but now several show up all at once!

Through their interpreter, Clayton and Porter hear an outlandish story of hunters from the village discovering a female gorilla trying to nurse a hungry newborn human baby. Bringing the infant back to their village, one of the hunters and his wife raised the boy as their own. Going by the child's apparent age, William Clayton works out what anyone would at this point: Alice apparently gave birth to a child in the jungle. This boy may well be William's cousin, the true heir to the Greystoke estate.

The interpreter explains to the villagers that William is the son of the brother of the boy's father, and wishes to bring the boy to his family home. As soon as the boy hears this, he flees into the jungle. The albinos want to buy him from his family? He won't go! The expedition tries to lure him back, but he stays hidden. Finally, after much effort, they're obliged to give up and leave. As they make the long journey back to the coast, the expedition are aware of the boy tracking them the whole way. They continue trying to coax the boy, but they've misunderstood his motives. He's not watching them leave with ambivalence: he just wants to make sure with his own eyes that they're gone and won't come back.

Sometime around 1906, a scruffy vagrant youth is spotted in fishing towns and shipping ports along the coast. He's sometimes dubbed "the white savage" and sometimes other, less benign names. Over the next couple of years, he picks up bits of spoken German and English and French and Dutch from sailors, though he remains illiterate. The boy watches black workers driven past the point of collapse by white bosses, as their forced labor builds railroad lines connecting the ports to the plantations of the interior. Finally he hops aboard a steamer heading across the Atlantic, working his passage as a deckhand.

On the crossing to America, the boy becomes the responsibility of Julius, an old merchant sailor. Julius outfits the boy with an old Navy coat for the approaching cold weather. It's the first winter coat the boy has ever worn. He's overawed. Seeing the boy parade back and forth in his big coat with the brass buttons, admiring its finery, Julius mutters an affectionate insult in Hebrew -- "tarzan," which means a dandy or a toff. From then on, "Tarzan" becomes the boy's nickname aboard ship.

Apart from his new coat, Tarzan has only one other possession. He keeps it hidden away, but pulls it out to examine when no one else is watching. It's a piece of paper given to him by the ugly albino girl during her well-intended but futile attempt at teaching him to read. Although he still can't read, Tarzan knows -- because the ugly girl told him so -- this slip of paper holds the location of the ugly girl's home. And she can tell him where he came from.

John Clayton, the Viscount Greystoke, and his wife Jane arrive in New York City at the start of the Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age. Art Deco. Prohibition. Speakeasies. Bootleggers. Gangsters. Babe Ruth playing for the Yankees. The music of Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bessie Smith. Clayton loves the towering buildings and the lights and the sights and the sounds. It's like he can see the future being assembled before his eyes.

The Claytons are hailed as celebrities. At age 21, John Clayton -- not yet granted his inheritance and needing some quick cash -- sold the story of his African childhood to a writer in Chicago. The tale became a magazine serial and then a series of popular books. The arrival in New York of a titled young English nobleman with money would be exciting enough; the arrival of the real-life Tarzan is an absolute sensation.

When Benjamin Franklin was the American Ambassador to France, he affected shabby clothes, a fur cap, and a folksy demeanor. The French ate it up. Playing to their lowest stereotype of a simple country bumpkin, Franklin conned the pants off the French aristocracy. John Clayton does something similar, playing at being "Tarzan the jungle man" for the crowd while leading a refined upper class lifestyle. He's the urbane and debonair "natural primitive" in fine tailored suits. His looks and charm make Clayton a hit in society.

But inwardly he's seething. The book based on his childhood left out his adoptive family and his entire village in favor of claiming that he was raised by apes, because readers would more readily accept a human raised by apes than a white boy raised by blacks. Raised by apes! The sequels were spun from whole cloth: Clayton is sickened to hear of his fictional alter ego becoming the king of "savage black cannibals" who he calls "my children."

The racism of the sailors and bosses he saw in the port towns as a boy barely prepared John Clayton for what he's seen since then. Lynchings. Race riots. Cross burnings. Men in white hoods. The persecution of immigrants and trade unionists in the Red Scare. Perhaps Julius could have explained it, but Julius was killed by a lynch mob in 1915 while traveling through the South.

Jane Clayton shares her husband's views. The Porter family had been abolitionists and freethinkers, and Jane's mother a suffragist. Jane no longer seems ugly to John. Now that John has finally come into his long-delayed inheritance, the couple move to New York City to advance their hidden social agenda.

(His cousin William Clayton would readily sympathize with his disdain for the Tarzan novels. They made him out to be a cowardly buffoon grasping to keep his wrongful inheritance, then killed him off. In fact, William had urged John to claim his full due, and stayed on to manage the estate after the courts declared John the rightful heir. William was also surprised to find himself cast as Jane Porter's jealous fiancé, when in reality he belonged to the Order of Chaeronea. He chose not to sue the author.)

In August of 1920, John Clayton is among the audience of 25 thousand seeing Marcus Garvey at Madison Square Garden. Some alongside Clayton in the audience know him only as the racist Tarzan of the books, and don't know what to make of his presence at the rally. Neither does John Hoover of the government's Bureau of Investigation, whose agent spots Clayton there while keeping watch on Garvey. Clayton is vexed when Garvey has himself named "the Provisional President of Africa" but nonetheless is deeply moved by the rhetoric, and shares Garvey's rage at the current state of things.

The wealthy white nobleman is a black nationalist, ardent anticolonialist, and clandestine backer of African native uprisings. He's a foe of Gandhi for his support of the British against the Zulus in the Bambatha Rebellion. Spied on by Hoover. Pursued by Garvey. He wouldn't use guns, but he's no stranger to hunting with knife and spear. In his exploits, Tarzan becomes the nemesis of rumrunners and racketeers and slumlords and feds alike.

And then, in 1924, the Klan marches into Tarzan's city to support their candidate for President of the United States…

Without boulders

2009-10-12T20:04:00.004-04:00

Recently, Mark Evanier wrote:

"The story was that Woody Allen had been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones and had handed in an unusable script that was essentially a Honeymooners episode set in the stone age. Among the things wrong with it was that it presumed the limited-animation Barney Rubble was capable of an extended pantomime scene a la Art Carney, and that it was all set in one room for the entire half hour. This never happened and Joe Barbera even told me it had never happened...but a lot of people believed it."

Apparently I have better show business connections than Mark, because after some time and effort I was finally able to get hold of Woody Allen's long-lost story for The Flintstones. It's not exactly as it was originally described to Mark, but it's easy to see why Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were ultimately forced to pass on it. Despite its shortcomings, I'm very glad to present this rare document for the first time.

There's this old joke: these two elderly dinosaurs are talking, and one says to the other "My brother's crazy, you know. He thinks he's an archaeopteryx." And the other dinosaur says "Really? Why don't you take him to a doctor?" And the first one says "I would, but we need the eggs…even though archaeopteryx eggs are gritty and tasteless."

That's pretty much how I think relationships are like dinosaur eggs: we need them, even when they're hard to swallow.

I was born in the Jewish neighborhood of Bedrock, in a house built directly underneath the Pterodactyl ride at Coneyrock Island. Which I think accounts for my personality: to this day I can't shake the feeling something traveling very fast is going to swoop down on me from above. It was here that I first began to contemplate the inhumanity of the modern stone age family.

At the age of nine I fell into a profound existential crisis, the roots of which I tried to explain to a doctor summoned by my nonplussed mother. "Why are there all these dinosaurs around?" I asked him. "What is this, the late Cretaceous era? The early Triassic? How can there be hominids coexisting with dinosaurs? We shouldn't even be in the same epoch!"

"So we're coexisting. Everybody's getting along peaceable. This is a bad thing why, exactly?" The doctor turned to my mother, puzzled.

"It's something he read." My mother turned back to me in exasperation. "How is this your business? Take your chisel and stone tablet and finish your homework!"

When I got home last night I found a message from my ex-wife Betty on the answering bird saying I was behind on alimony payments. Maybe my payments would last longer if she didn't take in so many extra mouths to feed; I don't know who told Betty it was her duty to adopt underprivileged cave children from every nation. When we were together, it was just the one boy.

It's funny, I remember how nervous she was about adopting a child for the first time. "I heard the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine gossiping about it last night. They talk to one another when they think no one else is listening," Betty said.

"In fairness, a baby woolly mammoth on wheels and a pelican with a beak full of soapy water probably don't have that much else to talk about," I answered. "I don't understand why we have to have so many gadgets in the first place."

"Well, pardon me I should want just a taste of the good life! After all, the Jetstones have a robot maid to do their chores."

"The Jetstones do not have a robot maid. What the Jetstones have is a velociraptor with a metal pot over its head that they call a robot, just to make everyone think they have all the latest conveniences up in that treehouse of theirs. Besides, what kind of name is Jetstones anyway? What does that even mean? And don't get me started on the way their daughter runs around in that skimpy outfit with the bare midriff -- "

"Their daughter Judy? What about her? Is there some reason you should notice what a teenage girl is wearing?" Betty's eyes narrowed suspiciously.

Our son moved to Rock Orleans a few years ago to pursue his career as a celebrity chef. He isn't speaking to me anymore. To be honest he wasn't the most articulate of children, so it was hard to tell. But I knew deep down he had never forgiven me for taking up with his former girlfriend. What can I say? The heart wants what it wants.

Pebbles was the daughter of my next-door neighbor and the childhood sweetheart of my son. I could remember a time when her greatest intellectual pursuit was reaching into a bowl of dinosaur pudding and rubbing it into her hair. Eventually she left home to attend Stoneford University. After graduating summa cum laude, she returned to Bedrock with a degree in Pleistocene philosophy and a figure worthy of a Penthouse Pet Rock of the Year.

We had an argument after Pebbles attended the funeral of her Grammy Slaghoople, a fact which I found deeply arousing. I always associate arguments and funerals with sex, probably because I've been ejected from all three for not having the correct ticket. Anyway, Pebbles was leafing through an issue of New Rockpublic in bed while I smoked a Winstone cigarette and mused. "Bedrock. New Rock City. Rockville. Rock Vegas. Rock Angeles. Haven't you ever wondered what's behind this mania for adding 'rock' to proper names? It's anti-semitism, that's what it is."

"What? How can it be anti-semitism? Anyway, Prinstone doesn't have 'rock' in its name. Neither does Sand Simeon."

"Aha! That just proves my point!"

Pebbles sighed. "Is this going to be another one of your things? You always find something trivial to obsess over as a way to avoid facing your fear of success. Sigrock Freud says that -- "

"Sigrock Freud? Really? I mean, do you even listen to yourself?"

"Don't get so worked up. Remember what daddy said about watching your stress levels."

"Your father should talk. At the rate he pounds back those bronto burgers, he's going to be extinct a few years before the rest of us."

As it happened, Pebbles' father was also my best friend. Our friendship survived not only my involvement with his daughter, but also his increasingly strong conviction that he was being followed everywhere by a small, invisible green man from another world whose sole purpose in life was to subject us to constant scorn and verbal abuse that only he could hear. He was completely psychotic, but a good man.

We were heading home after a meeting of our lodge -- or as I liked to think of them, the Ku Klux Klan with fur hats. I'm not saying the Water Buffaloes were intolerant, but if the Grand Poobah of Lodge 26 ever found out I was circumcised, he would invite me down to Slate's gravel quarry late one evening for a friendly chat. Shortly afterwards, small portions of me would be evenly distributed among every driveway in the town of Bedrock.

"Barn, that little girl of mine is her own woman," Fred explained. "It's not my place to get involved in a quarrel between you. Oh, and Gazoo says to tell you you're a microcephalic dum dum whose grasp of interpersonal dynamics is facile at best."

"Whatever you say, Fred." I sighed. "But I still can't help feeling the whole concept of Neolithic tool-making hominids domesticating Mesozoic era dinosaurs is inherently self-contradictory."

"Not that again? Look, I may just be an ordinary working class Apatosaurus operator, but I know the fossil record is incomplete by its very nature. Our picture of mass extinction events is necessarily limited, so we can't rule out the survival of certain dinosaur species. After all, Darwin said -- "

"Darwin?" I shouted. "You don't know what you're talking about! I just happen to have Charles Darwin right here, and he says we can't possibly exist!"

With that I pulled Charles Darwin from his hiding place behind a nearby movie poster. "I heard what you were saying, young man, and you know nothing of my work. Indeed, your very existence contradicts all established scientific fact!"

Boy, if the stone age were only like this.

Content advisory

2009-09-02T01:40:00.001-04:00

Well, that was a month. It's going to be a little while yet before I can resume blogging. But I did want to mention that if you're not already completely burned out on articles about the Disney/Marvel deal, this is the one to read. Bob Iger's connection to comic book history will blow your mind if you haven't heard it already.

Also, the top of this post features an overview of the best reporting so far on the topic. A lot of silliness is being spoke on this subject, but these two links will not steer you wrong.

I form a tactfulness merely to carry out to another tactfulness

2009-07-27T01:18:00.000-04:00

I don't know. You try to write something that conveys all the ambivalence and conflicted emotions brought on by the death of someone who loomed large in your personal mythology, you wrestle with irreconcilable desires for honesty and discretion, you lay the result before your readers despite its many shortcomings...and then someone else comes along and turns it into a work of genius.

Maybe from now on I should just run all my writing through whatever produced that.

The headless men all doff their hats

2009-07-21T03:28:00.007-04:00

When I wrote the previous post I had a feeling I'd be writing this one soon afterward, but it happened a bit sooner than I expected. If I were in the habit of tagging my blog posts, I'd probably have to label both of these "brushes with fame" or something like that.

It's been very strange to see all the media coverage for the death of Frank McCourt, because I spent three years in his class, probably somewhat longer than most students. He was my English teacher in the sophomore year of high school. The following year, I sat in on his class unofficially while skipping an especially boring math class. (Yes, I cut a class only to attend another class. That's the kind of place Stuyvesant High School was.) In senior year -- while making up the missed math class with a different teacher who was not boring -- I took his writing class. If you add in that one time he was a substitute teacher during my freshman year, Frank McCourt was a constant presence throughout the whole of my high school education.

Going back even further, he was part of the reason I wound up attending that particular high school, despite its reputation as an "elite" math and science school with no emphasis on the humanities. This turned out to be complete nonsense -- shielded from excessive meddling by administrative indifference, the History and English departments at Stuyvesant were up there with the finest in NYC; hobbled by micromanagement and constant pressure on the faculty to produce prizes and awards, the Math and Science departments were a mess -- but I had no way of knowing that in advance. What won me over was getting a copy of the school science fiction magazine, for which McCourt served as faculty advisor. If a New York City public high school had its own student science fiction magazine, that had to be the place for me.

(In fact, that particular issue even had a four page comic strip satirizing McCourt himself, written and drawn by a student named James Fry. James and I didn't get to spend much time together when I got to Stuyvesant, two years behind him, but we became close cronies when we both worked at Marvel Comics a few years later. But I don't remember if I ever told him about seeing that satirical strip or what an impact it had on me...)

If you'd asked me at the time, I'd probably have told you I kept going back to McCourt's classroom because I was going to be a writer, and he was a writer. Even if he was unpublished, he could tell you all you needed to know about being a writer. When I got to be a little less pretentious, I'd have said I kept going back because he was so entertaining: full of darkly humorous tales of his grim boyhood in Limerick, always ready to turn the class into a freewheeling discussion of whatever struck our fancy, never bound by whatever he'd told us we were going to be doing the previous day. But if I'm brutally honest, I always knew the real reason I kept going back to his class year after year was that I'd discovered early on you didn't need to do any work to get by in his class. You could always distract him, or get him talking about something else, or make an excuse, and he'd never push back or make a fuss. I was just incredibly lazy, and that's no reflection on him...but I never thought much of him as a teacher, and to be honest I still don't.

Please understand, this isn't some lingering bitterness speaking; I didn't have some grudge against McCourt that I've been nursing for all these years because he savaged my masterpiece, dashed my hopes and dreams, or anything like that. I don't recall we ever had any problems, and he was as encouraging about my writing as he was for any other student alongside me in his class.

Where McCourt excelled -- and I don't mean this as dismissively as it may sound -- was in playing the role of a writer for his students. For students who wanted to be writers, he was the embodiment of that world, a living gateway to the patrons of the Lion's Head and the White Horse and all the other two-fisted literary hangouts (i.e., bars) of New York. That life was tantalizingly within reach so long as he was in front of us, even if at the time it was almost as notional for him as it was for us.

I wonder how many of his former students were as stunned as I when Angela's Ashes was published? That was sixteen years after I graduated high school and I certainly never expected to see his name on the cover of a book. He and his brother Malachy had written a comical two-man play about their childhood in Limerick and I'd seen them perform it, but I expected that would be as far as things ever went. Surely he was destined to be just another of those sad figures at the bar, talking about the great work they were going to write someday, or would have done if life hadn't got in the way. And then suddenly he was at the White House, more than once, and winning a Pulitzer.

It's very odd when someone you knew as a regular person becomes a celebrity, and then becomes a crazy international mind-blowing celebrity consorting with heads of state and royalty. I've probably had more than my share of experience with this. (Is it normal to have known two people who went on to win Pulitzers for literature? Why, Lord, have you blessed me so?)

Because Frank McCourt's subject was himself, everyone who's read his books feels as if they know him. They don't; they know a version of his life that he rehearsed and refined and pared down for dramatic impact and maximum charm. He did know how to get through bad times on little more than charm...and that's certainly one respect in which I've tried to copy him over the years. He could be sarcastic and disdainful and ungenerous in his opinion of others. But you didn't forget the things he said. I certainly haven't.

Mr. McCourt, I know I left class owing you an essay or two. Sorry this one was so late.

Everything you see here was as it happened that day

2009-07-19T01:34:00.001-04:00

My dad met Walter Cronkite once.

It was very shortly after the episode of Mary Tyler Moore in which Cronkite made a guest appearance as himself. That episode aired in February 1974, and this would have been no more than a few weeks later. Cronkite was visiting someone at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, where my father was working at the time. My dad saw Cronkite in the elevator and said "Mr. Cronkite, if you're willing to shake Ted Baxter's hand, you should be willing to shake mine." Cronkite laughed, and they shook hands.

Look, I didn't say it was an exciting story. But it's the only story I have about Cronkite, and I won't have any other occasion to tell it.

My family had only just moved to New York City a couple of months earlier...and on the basis of this incident, I probably assumed meeting national celebrities was just something everyone took for granted here. Like it happened so often that it wasn't even worth mentioning. Actually, that last part turned out to be true.

The most apt memorial writing I've read is Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did. The increasingly pompous Brian Williams in particular is the new Ted Baxter. In his self-congratulatory reminiscences you can hear an echo of those booming stentorian tones: "It all began at a small 5000 watt radio station in Fresno, California..."

Words fail

2009-06-10T21:49:00.000-04:00

O.o

Via Cartoon Brew. I need to see this movie. How its existence eluded me for the past ten years I'll never know.

Pure radio, this is

2009-05-21T01:09:00.003-04:00

Seems like only yesterday I came across a young film student writing astoundingly thoughtful blog posts about The Invisibles, among many other topics. Now Patrick Meaney teases his latest project...

Pass the word along to any Grant Morrison fans of your acquaintance, okay? This looks like it'll be something to watch out for.

Patrick's webseries The Third Age is also well worth your attention.

The real him

2009-05-19T13:43:00.001-04:00

Because 64 years have passed since May 19, 1945, happy birthday wishes as always to Mr. Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend of Richmond.

Whoa

2009-05-07T02:19:00.001-04:00

You can totally see my house from here.

Actually, I think you can see everyone's house from here.

(Um...stewardess, may I have another airsickness bag?)

Every time I read the papers that old feeling comes on

2009-05-03T13:51:00.002-04:00

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Season 2, Episode 24, aired on February 25, 1968 after some technical difficulties. It still seems like it could have been written today. I'm afraid it always will.

Happy 90th birthday to Pete Seeger! I'm all for him getting a Nobel Peace Prize.

(Hat tip to the great Scott Edelman for reminding me to post this.)

Seventy bat years

2009-04-18T00:52:00.003-04:00

As noted by my pal Tom Bondurant, today marks seventy years since the arrival of Detective Comics #27. The issue was cover dated May, but apparently hit the stands on April 18, 1939.

That issue of Detective was packed with several ongoing features, including Slam Bradley and Bart Regan, Spy (both created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster), the Shadow-like Crimson Avenger, Cosmo the Master of Disguise, ace investigator Speed Saunders, Bruce Nelson, and range detective Buck Marshall. Several of these had been running since the first issue of Detective in February 1937. But the cover of this issue showcased a new feature: “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” by Bill Finger and Bob Kane introduced us to Police Commissioner James Gordon, idle playboy Bruce Wayne, and an eerie figure of the night called the Bat-Man.

I never thought of myself as a Batman fan. I always figured I was much more a Superman guy. As Jules Feiffer explained in 1965:

"If I were ever to be trapped in a steel vault with the walls closing in on all sides, I was obviously going to have to break out with my fists because it was clear from my earliest school grades that I was never going to have the know-how to invent an explosive in my underground laboratory that would blow me to safety...my idea of a superhero was some guy, bad with his hands, who came from an advanced planet so that he didn't have to go to the gym to be strong or go to school to be smart."

That sounded about right. (Other acceptable answers would have included receiving a power ring from a dying alien, or becoming super-fast after being struck by lightning while chemicals splashed over me.) I was always willing to read Batman comics -- particularly during my peak comics-reading years in the Seventies -- but I don't remember going out of my way to seek the latest issue, the way I did with Green Lantern or the Flash or Superboy or the LSH or the JLA. So I was a bit surprised when Tom presented his list of seventy favorite Batman stories and I remembered pretty much all of them.

A few months ago, I was asked to do fact-checking and proofreading on a book about Batman. I really didn't want to do it. "I'm not your guy. I don't know Batman the way I know the Legion of Super-Heroes. I haven't even seen all the Batman movies. There are more qualified people who'd do a better job of spotting errors," I said. "We'll pay you," the publisher said. "Give it here," I replied. The funny thing was, as I read the manuscript I found myself going if you're going to mention this, you need to mention this other story here and no, they wrote out Aunt Harriet in this issue, not that issue and the Outsider was revealed as Alfred in... and so on, all from memory. Obviously I'd absorbed way more Batman lore than I realized in what I'd thought was casual and haphazard reading over the years.

Maybe part of the reason it all stuck is that the character's seventy year history in comics is more or less a solid edifice. Superman and Wonder Woman and the rest have had their pasts and personalities and backstories tossed out and reinvented and reimagined several times, to ever-diminishing returns. By contrast, Batman has remained sufficiently coherent -- even allowing for the occasional Earth-1 versus Earth-2 hiccup, or multiple mutually incompatible origins for the Catwoman -- that Grant Morrison was able to craft a story starting from the premise that the entire body of stories had all "really happened" to one individual.

At the same time, Batman has always been the most protean of costumed superheroes. Depending on your age, Batman might be the scientific detective of Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino...or the "hairy-chested love god" of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams...or the humorless psychopath of Frank Miller. For me, he's the purposeful, driven yet totally sane adventurer written by folks like Archie Goodwin, Steve Englehart, and Len Wein. (And for those to whom this distinction means something, my Batman has his chest emblem inscribed in a yellow oval. That's just the way it is.) Each generation gets the Batman it wants, but somehow it's always still the Batman. That's quite an accomplishment for something that's lasted this long and passed through so many diverse hands.

I never thought of myself as a Batman fan...and I thought I had nothing to say about him in this post. Instead I could go on for a few thousand more words, but I'll leave it at this: Happy birthday, Batman!

Fresh roasted

2009-03-31T02:11:00.003-04:00

Just a few months shy of sixty years later, computer game expert and webcomic creator John Harris has set himself the task of blogging every single Peanuts strip starting with its debut on October 2, 1950. Along the way, John notes the evolution of character design, the early focus on characters other than good ol' Charlie Brown, the variable aging of the gang, the curious question of Snoopy's original ownership...and offers links to purchase those Fantagraphics collections with the gorgeous covers.

I first read these early strips in paperback collections published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston some twenty years after the fact. Most of us have never had the chance to see them one a day, as they were originally meant to be read in a daily newspaper, until now.

The right man for the job

2009-03-25T01:35:00.005-04:00

Tom Hanks circles 'Major' toy story

Universal will develop "Major Matt Mason," a live-action feature based on the vintage Mattel action figure. Pic will be developed as a star vehicle for Tom Hanks, and Graham Yost will write the script.

Playtone partners Hanks and Gary Goetzman will produce.

The toy line originated in 1966; Mason led an astronaut team that worked on the moon and lived in a space station. The toy was a hit in the buildup to the first manned moon mission. Mattel retired the line in the 1970s.

When Mattel execs Tim Kilpin and Barry Waldo came to Playtone for a meeting, they brought an arsenal of the Matt Mason figures. Hanks came armed with his own.

It might be difficult to convey how huge this is unless you were seven years old in 1969, in which case it doesn't require explanation. The toy line was iconic. I would ordinarily be pretty upset at the thought of someone unearthing a bit of my personal mythology and turning it into a Hollywood project all these years later. I mean to say, it's not like someone taking a book or comic you loved and turning it into a crappy film. It's more like someone stealing your favorite childhood toy and making you watch while he plays with it clumsily and breaks it. Right after taking twelve dollars from you.

However...if there's anyone in the world who could do this right, it's Tom Hanks. He might just pull it off and produce a film that conveys what space travel -- and space travel-based toys -- meant in the Sixties, up until we actually landed on the Moon. After that happened, it suddenly became boring and a waste of money and a distraction from the serious business of ending the war in Vietnam and campy and hopelessly naive and a relic of Cold War thinking. When it was no longer fantasy, nobody wanted to hear about space anymore (other than sad nerdy kids) and Major Matt Mason sales plummeted. But for a while there, this was the future.

(I do hope he puts in a female astronaut, though, because that's been waiting 40 years to happen. And Matt's space buddy Jeff Long damn well better be there too...)

Changing as you can plainly see

2009-03-18T04:39:00.001-04:00

My last couple of posts were a bit preachy and uptight, so I felt it might be nice to mellow things out with a rendition of my mother's favorite gospel song, as performed by Gail Farrell and Dick Dale on The Lawrence Welk Show:

This clip seems to be extremely popular on the You Tube, proving that it's useful for more than filthy double-entendres and adolescent smut. Interesting fact: the young men who wrote this song, Michael Brewer and Tom Shipley, were in London when this originally aired and never had a chance to see it for themselves until decades later.

And to prove cognitive dissonance can work in both directions, here's Patti Smith:

Via vee_ecks.

Scanning frequencies

2009-03-06T15:45:00.004-05:00

This one goes out to all my pals on the late ~~scans_daily~~:

From Radioactive Man #100 (December 2000), script by Batton Lash, art by Bill Morrison and Steve Steere, Jr. Enjoy more from that issue here, if it doesn't completely blow your mind to read a few sample pages from a comic book for which you haven't actually paid yet. Warning: it might include eight year old spoilers!

I was too preoccupied by other things (and too darned angry) to post anything about the community's demise on this blog, though I posted some comments on the topic here and here. But that place was probably my favorite thing on the whole Internet and there are a few aspects of how it all went down that still totally bum me out.

Anyway, long live the new scans_daily and noscans_daily. And for those who cheer the end of the original community -- including those creators incapable of distinguishing between discussion and scholarship on the one hand and piracy on the other -- here's another panel:

Silent malevolent voices

2009-02-28T17:50:00.003-05:00

You'll be seeing a post more or less identical to this one on a number of blogs this weekend, I think. But to add one personal note: it's been impossible to watch what's been happening in Britain over the past few years without a sense of surreal horror. It's as if the government wants to turn the UK into a theme park devoted to recreating scenes from 1984, The Prisoner, and V for Vendetta, but they're doing it so slowly and quietly that too few realize what's happening until it's too late to say anything.

Philip Pullman wrote an essay on this topic for the Times of London which would be worth reading for the power of its language alone. That essay appeared in the print version and then online. Now I'm posting it in its entirety below. Many other bloggers are posting this text on their own sites, for a reason I'll note at the end.

To mark the Convention on Modern Liberty, the children’s author has written this article

Are such things done on Albion's shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake's prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don't know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don't know who you are

You're mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don't want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation's dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don't mind if we are. They don't think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum

Source: Times Online - Malevolent voices that despise our freedoms

The above link now gives a 404 error.

Update: After being missing from the website for around three days, the original piece has been restored and can be seen at the above link. No word yet on why it took so long to fix. Thanks to Garrie Burr for the heads up in the comments!

Aqua marina

2009-02-26T17:57:00.002-05:00

Ms Vessey's mermaid tail was created by Wellington-based film industry wizards Weta Workshop after the Auckland woman wrote to them two years ago asking if they could make her a prosthetic tail. She was astounded when they agreed.

She lost both legs below the knee from a medical condition when she was a child and told Close Up last night her long-held dream had come true. "A prosthetic is a prosthetic, and your body has to be comfortable with it and you have to mentally make it part of yourself," she said.

Mermaid dream comes true thanks to Weta

That sound you just heard was the world becoming slightly more awesome.

All stars, all lamps, all sources of light

2009-02-22T04:31:00.003-05:00

As previously mentioned, the original broadcast of Between Time and Timbuktu in March 1972 was a major formative event of my childhood. With a script by David O'Dell based on characters and ideas from novels and short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, I found it endlessly fascinating and deeply disturbing, with the sense it was introducing me to truths about the world I wasn't actually supposed to learn just yet.

Many years later I acquired the published version of the script, loaded with stills from the broadcast, and that did a lot to refresh my memories...but I was never able to view for a second time the actual program that had such an impact on me. Until now.

Thanks to a fellow by the name Randy Wilharm, Between Time and Timbuktu can now be seen in its entirety on YouTube starting here.

My first reaction after thirty-seven years? I'd remembered the show as being dark and dystopian; I'd forgotten how funny it was. I remembered how funny Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were, but the rest of it has more humor and less savage social commentary than it seemed when I was little. But if you give it your time and attention, you might still see what unsettled a nine year old so much as to make me read all the Kurt Vonnegut books on my parents' shelves.

I'm indebted to Mr. Wilharm for making this available. Randy's blog Pre-70s Sci-fi Pictorial is full of stuff you will enjoy looking at, so go look at it.

"If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too." -- Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

Putting the pieces together

2009-02-17T03:30:00.005-05:00

Thanks all for your patience with my continued lack of updates! I devoted this past week after NYCC to getting some work out of the way, some of which was directly or indirectly the result of the convention. So, a brief update on where I'm at and where I'll be in the weeks to come...

I had some misgivings going into NYCC this year...partly to do with not yet being fully recovered from my medical stuff and not feeling quite ready for all the running around congoing entails, and partly to do with various unrelated personal and professional stresses weighing on my mind the night before. But it all came out well in the end. I felt a bit shaky the first day, and folks told me I looked pale and wobbly, but the exercise did me a world of good and by the end of it I was in great shape. Right now I could do another convention standing on my head if they'd only let me.

I had a good time, but I won't be doing one of those massive con reports this year. My one big regret is failing to hook up with fiend of this blog Sean Witzke at any time during the weekend, but it sounds like his dance card was full up without me. Much quality time was spent with Patrick Meaney, Redhead Fangirl, and the indefatigable Rob Kelly, Rand Hoppe of the Kirby Museum, and the folks from TwoMorrows and Sequart. Also, former Doctor Who star Colin Baker turns out to be a mighty engine of sheer charisma and likeability who turns otherwise sensible people into blabbering starstruck idiots. Not, some might say, so very far a journey for me, but there you go.

Since the con, I've finished my third script for Flashback Universe. (You know, if Jim had asked me first, I would have advised him against those initials...) My second script for them -- a two-fisted pulp adventure starring Flashback's Doc Savage homage character, Doc Nomad -- is on hold, so the new one would be my second published story for the line. I'd like to see the Doc Nomad story released someday, mainly because it has one scene in it I'd been waiting over fifteen years for a chance to write! But the new script features Flashback's most popular character and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

(In unrelated comics news, because people have asked: yes, I wrote a six-issue miniseries for an indie publisher last year. The book is currently being drawn. I've seen the first few pages and they're spectacular. Given the present state of the market I have absolutely no idea whatsoever when this project will appear, but it won't be this year. I can't discuss the story itself because my contract includes a confidentiality clause. I think telling you even that much violates my contract, so let's keep this between us for now.)

I'm also going to be editing a new book for Sequart, the publishers of Teenagers From The Future. This will be another anthology, but very different from the Legion book. The contributor notes in Teenagers included word of another project I've been writing for Sequart; that book has been pushed back -- entirely due to extreme slowness on the part of the writer, I hasten to add! -- and this one is being brought forward.

And as a reward for wading through all this self-promotion, here's something awesome:

Behold the Star Trek pilot episode "The Cage" lavishly recreated in Lego form by Flickr user Detail Man 60, a.k.a. Frank Elchesen: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Con schedule update

2009-02-03T19:41:00.003-05:00

I've been very busy and slowly recuperating from surgery over the past month, so my pre-convention blogging hasn't been up to much lately...but things are starting to improve both healthwise and schedulewise. Just to clear up some questions about my plans for NYCC this weekend:

I will not in fact have a prearranged signing schedule at any publisher's table this year. However, if you see me at the con, I will be more than happy to sign copies of my Fantom Force comic or my essay in Teenagers From The Future. If you don't already own a copy of the latter but will be at the con and want to purchase one there, the publisher, Sequart.com, will be at booth 2251. I'm just saying. If you don't already own a copy of Fantom Force as well as everything else published by Flashback Universe...what's your freaking damage? You did realize they're all free, didn't you? Yeesh!

I will not be appearing on or moderating any panels this year. However, I am willing to pay someone else to ask Dan Didio a certain question about the horrific train wreck that was published claiming to be Legion of Super-Heroes #50.

I will not be announcing any new miniseries or ongoing titles. I've been asked to wait on these until the moment is right/the economy has improved/this group of pigs receive their FAA certification as airline pilots rated for instrument-assisted takeoff and landing.

I will not be doing sketches or taking new commisions at the con. For a small gratuity, I will write you into my next script for Flashback Universe or another publisher to be named later. For a larger gratuity, I will give you a lead role, subject to editorial approval.

I will not be selling RAB-themed merchandise this year, nor will I be giving out t-shirts saying "Richard Bensam is Indifferent" to the first 100 people who speak to me. I'm sorry, but the logistics simply didn't work out this time. I'm not at all sure about the prospects for a line of RAB action figures at NYCC 2010 next autumn; I'll have to get back to you on that.

I will not autograph copies of the Richard Bensam nude calendar, as this was released without my permission and against my wishes. Nah, I'm kidding. There is no nude calendar. I just wanted to see if I'd get any hits on this blog from people searching for "Richard Bensam nude calendar."

What I will do is keep my eyes peeled for anyone whose blog I read who's attending the con -- or who reads this blog and mentions in the comments below that he or she will also be there -- and I look forward to the chance of putting faces to names as well as catching up with some really cool people. As in past years, my nametag will once again say "Estoreal" so as to spare you the ordeal of perhaps seeing my name but not remembering where you know it from, walking up to me to start a conversation, then awkwardly backing away in embarassment.

Hope to see some of you there!

A dent in the world

2009-01-24T19:56:00.006-05:00

Twenty-five years ago today, Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh at an event in the Flint Center for the Performing Arts to an audience of about 3000 people.

The above link has links to many historical resources about the occasion, including a YouTube video of that event a quarter century ago. Highly recommended!

It would be fair to say that the Macintosh changed the course of my life. Believe it or not, at one time I was fairly well known in the Mac shareware community for my user interface designs and was training to go to work for Apple itself. Some of the highest highs and lowest lows of my life have been connected with Apple hardware and software and the people I met because of them.

And if you're reading these words now, you can say the same thing. You owe the web itself to Tim Berners-Lee developing his global hypertext system on the NeXTstep platform -- which was both successor to the Macintosh and direct ancestor of the current OS X operating system. But more than that, by marrying the vision of Jef Raskin back in the late Seventies of a relatively affordable computer for ordinary people to the mouse-driven graphical user interface borrowed from Xerox PARC, the Macintosh so fundamentally altered the way people thought of computers that we can't even see it anymore.

Computers used to be Colossus: The Forbin Project and math geeks with pocket protectors handling stacks of punched cards with loving care. All of a sudden, the world of computers became a space ordinary people could see and reach into. In one sense, the Internet had existed back in late 1969, well before there was an Apple Computer...but we would not now think of it as a place for us to be in, if not for the innovations brought to us by the Macintosh.

That is some big dent in the world right there.

Tattoo

2009-01-21T04:12:00.008-05:00

Images found at grickily's Krazy Kids Items set at Flickr via the amazing collection of Dan Goodsell.

I remember buying these because they featured the JLA, but I'm pretty sure I never wore any of the tattoos.

This post inspired by a chance sighting at Jon's Random Acts of Geekery.

Update: a bit more here and here -- both of us drawing on the original post here.

Feel free

2009-01-18T01:33:00.001-05:00

Another treat from the XTC vaults with this video for "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul" taken from The Laughing Prisoner, filmed on location in Portmeirion and broadcast in April 1987.

Simply because of the title, I'm going to call this a tribute not only to Patrick McGoohan but also to John Mortimer -- barrister, champion of civil liberties and freedom of expression, political activist, writer of the autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father (a film which helped me better understand my relationship with my own father) and, of course, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.

(Funnily enough, McGoohan and Mortimer are both most famous for their work involving Leo McKern, who played both Horace Rumpole and the most formidable yet ultimately sympathetic Number Two in The Prisoner.)

A while back, I swore off making any more posts about the deaths of any of my childhood icons...but I had to violate that promise once again, because the careers of both these guys were so important in my life. (Mortimer also advised Monty Python on avoiding prosecution over the film Life of Brian so he gets a twofer in my personal pantheon of heroes.) So here's to you both, for the things you did in both fiction and real life that helped other people become a bit more free.

As a bonus, here's the real meaning of The Prisoner so far as I'm concerned:

The correct answer to "Why did you resign?" is it's nobody else's business. That's not avoiding the answer, it is the answer.

Hope that clears up any questions.

From the blueprint of the weird

2009-01-14T02:06:00.003-05:00

This might be the best thing ever.

I have almost no tolerance for Kirby pastiche. Whenever I see people refer to GØDLAND as "Kirbyesque" I wince inwardly, even though the artist is an old chum from the Jack Kirby mailing list. The very word "Kirbyesque" or the term "Kirby as a genre" employed in the pages of The Jack Kirby Collector causes me pain. Even Rick Veitch doing his best Kirby just makes me shrug and go "yeah, cute, whatever" and put up with it. The only Kirby homage I've genuinely enjoyed is Doris Danger by the thoroughly wonderful Chris Wisnia. And now this.

Unlike the equally good Crime and Punishment by Dick Sprang pastiche by R. Sikoryak, this isn't a mashup intended to produce irony via the juxtaposition of incongruous source materials. At least, I don't think it is. These guys seem to get that Kirby's Fourth World genuinely is about personifying these inner drives and primal urges...and that Freud really does present psychoanalysis as a heroic struggle against vast power principles locked in Cyclopean conflict. Kirby and Freud were already speaking the same language anyway; Ryu and Hans Rickheit just pointed it out to the rest of us.

(Thanks to Matthew Brady for the link.)

Update: Among previous Kirby tributes, I forgot to mention I also liked the charming Donatello TMNT one-shot from 1986 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the entirety of which is available online.

I choose to believe what I was programmed to believe

2009-01-12T22:30:00.003-05:00

One nice thing about recuperating is the chance to catch up with all those old episodes of Futurama I've only seen seventy times, especially now that we've also got the direct-to-DVD original movies I've only seen twenty times.

I associate Futurama with sick beds and recuperation because Cartoon Network aired a farewell marathon of the show at the beginning of last year, right when I was laid up with severe bronchial pneumonia. I spent all that time propped in front of the television set, unable to function and hoping only for a momentary distraction from my misery. If I'm ever in a severe auto accident and suffer frontal lobe damage, I'll spend all my time saying "People said I was dumb, but I proved them!" and "I'll make my own theme park! With blackjack! And hookers!" and "I'm literally angry with rage!" -- or conversely, "I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" -- and "Teach me to love, you squishy poet from beyond the stars!" Presumably I'll still be trying to sputter out "Hey baby, wanna help me kill all humans?" when someone finally smothers me with a pillow.

So anyway, I'm out of the hospital and back home and everything is going well. In medical terms, my body has sustained what it considers an unprovoked assault and is retaliating against this perceived insult by trying to drive out all intruders. When this immune response calms down a bit, I should be able to breathe better than I have in many years. Soon I'll have to get caught up on work I've missed over the past few days in order to be ready for NYCC at the start of next month, though right now I'd gladly skip the convention this year...which says more about how tired and achey I am at the moment than anything else.

Thanks to everyone who posted a comment or sent an e-mail wishing me well. You deserve a special treat for that. Since folks seem to like the links I find, please enjoy Andy Partridge of XTC discussing how "The Man in the Ant Hill" by Jack Kirby and Dick Ayers in Tales to Astonish #27 inspired a song on the 1989 album Oranges and Lemons.

P.S.: That song is called "Across this Antheap" and may be listened to here.

A joke for the occasion

2009-01-08T03:18:00.000-05:00

"O woe! O misery!" cried the wealthy lady. "My son is in the hospital, having an operation! His promising musical career is at an end! He may never play the grand piano again!"

Her butler was confused. "I beg your pardon, madam? Your son doesn't play the grand piano!"

"What? Of course he does!" she replied. "I hear about it all the time. People are always telling me, your son really is an incredible pianist, isn't he?"

Maybe it works better if you read it out loud.

Anyway, this is just a heads up to say I'm off to the hospital today for some minor surgery, and I might be out of touch for a few days while I recuperate. Obviously my wonderful blog readers are forebearing and patient folk who aren't ever bothered by me going for days or even weeks without posting...but it seemed worth mentioning here in case anyone is waiting for an e-mail or other communication from me.

Highly interesting link

2009-01-05T15:32:00.002-05:00

According to the anonymous author, "The Gerber Curse is a work in progress. As of this writing, there are three chapters covering Steve Gerber's life and work up to 1978. More information and illustrations may be added to these chapters in the future, or some information may be deleted or altered. There's still another 30 years to cover."

I don't know who the author is, but there's a lot of good stuff in these three chapters so far...though it's much less detailed than it could be. I hope the author will a) step forward to receive credit, and b) expand and continue the project as promised.

On a personal note, if you consider that essay I wrote about my childhood move to New York from Pennsylvania while reading the description of Omega the Unknown in The Gerber Curse, it should be fairly obvious where my fixation on the Omega series came from. My parents were not, to my knowledge, robots...but I definitely had that too intellectual, trying too hard to be a detached observer thing down pat. Part of the reason I still feel cheated we never got the resolution Gerber and Mary Skrenes had in mind for the series is that I really was desperately hoping to get some more tips on how to cope with life from James-Michael Starling.

Students of abnormal psychology take note

2009-01-02T15:06:00.002-05:00

Sayre, PA was an almost impossibly perfect manifestation of the ideal American small town. It was unbearably picturesque: the town in which Norman Rockwell paintings seem to take place. Fictional towns like Smallville or Riverdale would have seemed bustling and cosmopolitan by comparison. But the town was also narrow minded, parochial, conservative, economically depressed and oppressive, with little hope of escape for those born there. The television series The Prisoner never seemed like science fiction; I always felt as if I'd lived it.

Among the half dozen highly entertaining blogs maintained by indefatigable blog master Rob Kelly at any given moment, perhaps my favorite is Hey Kids, Comics! Its mission statement is "to share the beloved memories of discovering comics for the first, second, tenth, or hundredth time" and over the past couple of years, some two dozen contributors have stepped forward to share heartfelt, sentimental, touching, and sometimes painfully honest essays and ephemera about their childhood memories and earliest associations with comic books. The focus is not so much on the comics themselves but rather on the authors' lives and formative experiences.

In the latest installment, Rob has posted an essay by me about a major change in my life at the start of a new year and how it connects with my childhood fixation on comics, written in one sitting shortly after midnight this New Year's Eve. This is probably the most openly I've ever written about my childhood; normally I like to keep my cards a lot closer to my chest and not reveal a lot about my past. But Rob had graciously invited me to contribute...and though I didn't think I could offer anything up to the level of what usually appears on that blog, when this anecdote bobbed to the surface it seemed like the best thing I could offer in the way of thanks to the other contributors for their excellent posts.

As I told Rob, I have a sinking feeling this essay will convince everyone I'm secretly autistic. Well, maybe so: I am pretty devoted to watching The People's Court every day. Be that as it may, I promise anyone who reads this will know me a lot better...even if it does make you look at me a bit more suspiciously from now on.

Unsung casualties of the new year

2009-01-01T21:10:00.001-05:00

The year 2008 has claimed one final victim. The guys who invented those New Year's novelty eyeglass frames in the shape of the year numbers starting in 1991 are closing shop as of 2009.

"It doesn't look very good for 2010. You wind up with a '1' in front of one of your eyes."

You see these things at parties and high school graduations and on television every year and you just take them for granted until suddenly they're gone. Even worse, like all true innovators, these guys were undercut by cheap knockoffs and never received their full due for the original idea. But here at least, we celebrate the names of Richard Sclafani and Peter Cicero, unsung visionaries.

More details here.

Fanfic

2008-12-21T15:58:00.002-05:00

What follows is more than a bit silly and may only make sense if you read this first. For maximum effect start at the linked entry and go forward chronologically. In fact, you should probably just be reading that blog anyway, because it's really good.

Anyway, taking the statement "...you guys should really be writing Scale Guy, not me..." as an official request, I offer a piece of fan fiction celebrating one of the most unsung heroes of comics art. We should not take him for granted when he offers us so much.

THEY ALSO SERVE WHO ONLY STAND

"Stand here for one moment."

Scale Guy walked over to the prototype and stood next to it where the general had indicated. The technician (whose waistline was one and one-half the width of that of Scale Guy) and the general (half a head shorter than Scale Guy) looked from the prototype to Scale Guy and back again repeatedly. Scale Guy was used to the darting glances. People often did that around him.

"Yes, there, you see?" announced the general at last, waving his arm at the prototype. "The doorway does need to be slightly higher, as I said. Otherwise our taller soldiers will need to stoop over slightly as they pass through the dimensional threshhold..."

The general and the technician walked away, deep in conversation, forgetting Scale Guy was still there. As people usually did.

It was the peculiar fortune of Scale Guy to be precisely average in both height and weight throughout his entire life, the embodiment of the perfect median of the population for his age group. He had been a statistically average baby, an unexceptional teen, and an utterly common adult.

Over the years he had developed a slight tendency toward weight gain. At first he wondered if this mild paunch would make him more distinct, more individual...but then he learned that due to an increase in the average body mass index of adult males in his age group, he was still (and would always be) perfectly average.

But he was the best there was at what he did, and what he did was demonstrate relative size.

"We stand gathered here in William Foster Memorial Park to dedicate this monument to a fallen hero..." As the politician continued his oration, those in attendance at the dedication ceremony looked up at the towering statue of Bill Foster and then looked at Scale Guy briefly before their gaze returned to the memorial statue. Scale Guy thought this must be what the crowd at a match looks like to a tennis player.

No one there knew Scale Guy, and he was not invited to speak. Scale Guy knew no one cared if he had anything to say about Bill Foster, or whether Scale Guy had preferred the name Black Goliath or Goliath or Giant-Man. They wanted Scale Guy around for one reason: so that all present could say "Yes, it certainly is a big statue we've built. Look how big the statue is compared to that average fellow over there. The size of the statue shows how much we honor the memory of Bill Foster."

It was a big statue, though not quite as big as Foster had been when he died. Scale Guy noticed things like that.

That's very big of you. Don't be small about this. We'll keep you on standby. He'd heard them all.

"The Minister is deeply concerned about the possible threat from infiltration of military assets by terrorist organizations via the use of homebrew Pym particles. What strategies have MI-13 developed to address this threat?"

The agent gestured to Scale Guy, who held out his open hand for inspection. "Miniature weapons," she explained, "for use by miniature troops deployed in response to psychic detection of miniature brainwaves at key locations."

The assembled Defence officials peered into Scale Guy's palm to examine the flamethrower, the rocket launcher, and the submachine gun. There was no doubt these were indeed miniature weapons: everyone could see it plainly. They were like trinkets from a charm bracelet in Scale Guy's perfectly ordinary-sized hand.

Afterward, as they left the Main Building, the agent tried to make small talk with Scale Guy. "I went back to my childhood home this weekend. Hadn't seen it since I was twelve. I couldn't believe how small it was."

Scale Guy smiled politely, but inwardly he sighed. A place was the size it was. It didn't change just because someone looking at it became bigger or smaller. Why didn't people see?

He'd tried to join the Avengers once.

Luke Cage stood next to him in front of a mirror and studied their shared reflection. "Not bad...not bad at all. With you standing there, everybody can tell I'm not someone they should mess around with. Of course, everybody knows that already."

Wolverine looked up at Scale Guy and said "Stay the hell away from me."

Alarm klaxons sounded but Scale Guy could barely hear them over the crashing of machinery. Injured staff moaned with pain. The staging area began to fill with smoke and flame.

"Enough!" shouted the Reaver. "No more resistance! Your soldiers have been dispatched as easily as lead toys, and your superhumans are nowhere to be found!" It was true. The most powerful heroes of the British Isles were away facing Dormammu; the others could not arrive soon enough to stop the intruder. "Now turn over to me the secret of your dimensional threshhold generator! With its power to eliminate distance and reach the furthest barriers of space, I shall conquer this world and raise here a mighty army to subdue the cosmos entire!"

"Er...excuse me." Scale Guy stepped forward out of the chaos, speaking slowly and calmly. "But have you really considered the magnitude of what you propose?"

"What do you mean?" the Reaver asked.

"Well, conquering the world...that's over six billion six hundred million people. Spread across a globe with a diameter of twelve thousand kilometres and a surface area of 510 million square kilometres. Logistically speaking, that's a nightmare. And all those people have to be housed and clothed and fed, not to mention trained if you want them to be an army. But really, more of them will have to be farmers and factory workers than soldiers. And they'll need communications and support systems. Did I mention doctors and nurses? By the time you rule the entire world, you'll be spending so much time on management and administration you won't be able to concentrate on anything else.

"And that's merely one world. There must be countless habitable worlds, and you'd have to do the same for all of them. Not to mention the logistics of communication and transportation. You'd become the manager of a crushingly huge galactic bureaucracy that would become unbearably slow, and spend your days putting your seal on their forms and filling out paperwork dealing with alien races you'd never even see. Your days eaten up with the tedium of managing the spoils of conquest, and it would just go on and on..."

And as he said this, Scale Guy stood there. He stood next to the Reaver.

Next to the entire world.

Next to the galaxy and all its neighbor galaxies and the teeming universe beyond.

The Reaver blinked, realizing how small he was in relation to an eternity of paperwork. "You...you're right. My ambition was far too grandiose. No lone individual could ever truly subjugate the entire universe. It's so vast...!

"Far better I devote my energies to taking only what I need to live in unrivalled splendour whilst my raging ego is soothed by incessant praise. Without a troublesome cosmos to tend and administrate, I shall be able to enjoy pure material comforts free of distraction.

"I have no need of the dimensional threshhold. Truly, there are infinite reaches to conquer within my own mind. Thank you for giving me this new perspective!" the Reaver shouted to Scale Guy before he flew off into the distance. In the relative quiet that followed, as fire control extinguished the smouldering wreckage, the staff of MI-13 looked in amazement at Scale Guy.

Hearing the acclaim and congratulations of his coworkers, Scale Guy realized his own problems weren't so big after all. You had to keep things in proportion.

The moth, the snake, and the stingray

2008-12-06T02:12:00.008-05:00

Batman #682 by Grant Morrison and Lee Garbett includes in passing an understated sequence in which Alfred speculates on other guises Bruce Wayne might have taken had something other than a bat come through his window that fateful night long ago. Had a moth flown in, we might have a Mothman instead of a Batman. Or Bruce might have mused "My actions must be swift and decisive, my approach silent and undetected...' just before his eye was caught by the stuffed and mounted snake on his bookcase. "That's it! I shall become...a serpent!"

This plays on an idea Morrison has toyed with during his run on the series: the idea of Alfred as a Batman fan, someone who delights in the character to the extent of writing his own Batman fan fiction and imaginary stories...and who might even be vicariously living out his own desire for two-fisted action through the travails of his employer. That idea certainly didn't originate with Morrison, but he's used it to good effect.

Another thing Morrison has done is to incorporate bits and pieces from every era of Batman, taking the position that no story is so ridiculous or inappropriate it needs to be written off completely; that with some judicious reinterpretation, the entire 68 year history of the character can be read as the internally consistent life experiences of one individual. Use every part of the animal: Bat-Mite, Kathy Kane, Man-Bat, Ras al Ghul, it all goes into the mix. And the above sequence reminded me of the following item from Batman #256 (May-June 1974), written by Martin Pasko (with considerable snark, one feels) and drawn by Pat Broderick.

One can only ponder the crime-fighting effectiveness of the Iron Knight. (Full marks for intimidation value, but how many getaways would have been aided by the armored hero clomping towards them very...very...slowly?) And Aquaman would probably have been pissed off at the Stingray horning in on his turf. Anyway, I'm sure GM remembered this mini-featurette and I suspect he knowingly alluded to it with the above scene.

Thanks to commenter Frank at Final Crisis Annotations for providing the issue number, enabling me to track down the issue and present these scans here. I thought non-Korean readers might want to enjoy it for themselves. (Props also to Jidol for making it available to Korean readers...)

For the record

2008-12-01T18:47:00.003-05:00

Death-Man was created by Bob Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff in Batman #180, cover dated May 1966. The character was not created by Bat-manga artist Jiro Kuwata. I don't know if the change in his name to "Lord Death-Man" was an accident of translation (in either direction) or a deliberate choice by Kuwata, but it definitely sounds better.

I don't expect some new guy at Newsarama to know something as obscure as this, and I have no idea if Chip Kidd or Saul Ferris know it or whether they attribute the character's origin correctly in the text of their Bat Manga! collection. But someone, somewhere, needed to point this out, so here it is.

Some assembly required

2008-11-29T15:35:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Adam for this questionnaire in two parts, which he in turn discovered via Samurai Frog. Happily this meme comes without forced tagging, but anyone who wishes should feel free to give it a try.

I. The first half involves bolding the things you've done.

Gone on a blind date
Not as such. Gone out with someone I only knew through online correspondence but had never previously met in person, yes.

Skipped school
Most of my senior year in high school! Honestly, I'm amazed I managed to graduate...which may explain my recurring dream in which I have to go back there all these years later and finish all those classes I skipped.

Been to Canada
Not for a very long time, and I'd really like to go back.

Been to Mexico
Sadly, no.

Been to Florida
Sadly, yes. To my lasting dismay.

Been to Africa
Never, but I kind of like the music.

Been on a plane
I love flying and still consider airports to be exciting and romantic places, but I've avoided both for the past few years...partly due to the idiocy of "security theater" at the expense of genuine safety.

Been lost
It's one of my favorite ways to get to know a new place.

Gone to Washington DC
I've been there four times, and each visit was a lot of fun.

Swam in the ocean
At least two of them!

Broken a bone
I don't know how I've managed to avoid it all these years.

Been in a traffic accident
It was an extremely foggy afternoon in California. The car I was in got a cracked tail light. The front of the car that rear-ended us crumpled like foil. Happily, everyone involved had excellent insurance.

Cried yourself to sleep
And that was just last night! (Okay, and the night before.)

Been on TV
Once as recounted in an earlier meme here. More recently, I was in the audience for a Throwdown with Bobby Flay on the Food Network, but I don't know if I appear on camera.

Stole traffic signs
Why would anyone want to do that? I don't get it.

Played cops & robbers
Let's not bring my sex life into this. ("Now this time I'll be the cop and you be the sexy bank robber I've just arrested who's trying to seduce me into letting her go...")

Recently colored with crayons
Not recently enough.

Sang Karaoke
In fact, it was with Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good. Disturbingly, we sang a duet of "I've Got You, Babe." This is true.

Paid for a meal with coins only
It's strange that would be considered strange. See Horn and Hardart for details.

Done something you told yourself you wouldn't
And that was just last night!

Made prank phonecalls
Leaving allegedly "funny" messages on answering machines is the closest I've come.

Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose & elsewhere
Ew.

Caught a snowflake on your tongue
Someone claimed no two of them tasted exactly alike and I was determined to prove this wrong.

Danced in the rain
No, but I have sung.

Written a letter to Santa Claus
Nor have I written to Kwanzaabot. Or the Hanukah Zombie.

Been kissed under the mistletoe
A gentleman never asks and a lady never tells.

Watched the sunrise with someone
Sure.

Blown bubbles
I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles, in the air...

Gone ice-skating
Once. Miserable experience.

Been skinnydipping outdoors
Does anyone still call it that?

Gone to the movies
It seems hard to imagine anyone hasn't...though I wonder if that might change within our lifetimes.

Have a nickname
None of which I care to repeat.

Have body piercings
Sorry, afraid I spent too much time undergoing surgery as a child to see anything liberating or transgressive about cutting holes in myself. Totally cool with other people doing as they please, but it's not for me.

II. The second half is a set of random questions, which I've decided to answer in random order.

1. Favorite drink?
No

2. How much do you love your job?
Cape Cod

3. Birthplace?
Coffee

4. Favorite vacation spot?
Sashimi

5. Ever eaten just cookies for dinner?
Connecticut

6. Favorite pie?
Full of regret

7. Favorite holiday?
With great difficulty

8. Favorite food?
The sea

9. Favorite smell?
My birthday

10. How do you relax?
Oodles and oodles

11. How do you see yourself in ten years time?
Empanada or Cornish pastie

What are you doing here?

2008-11-24T18:45:00.000-05:00

A belated happy 45th birthday to the gentleman in the blue box.

Not always to the swift

2008-11-20T16:31:00.002-05:00

At last the Presidential contest is over, and a joint victor has been declared.

I extend congratulations to my former opponent Ellen Bischoff -- who made a courageous, daring, and above all foresighted bid for the lead position -- and now shares with me the complete absence of any reward whatsoever, other than the satisfaction of seeing our names mentioned repeatedly on Mark Evanier's blog. At no point did Ellen stoop to mudslinging, character assassination, or dirty tricks, despite ample opportunities. The mutual respect and civility we have shown one another makes it much easier for us to come together now as co-recipients of this honor.

Congratulations also to my runners-up Michael Kilgore, Kris Mandt, Cory Strode, Corey de Danann, Tony Thomas, Roger Green, Bill O'Brien, Michael Hagan, Bob Claster and Anand Kandaswamy. Judging by the fact that we all selected the same number, I can only conclude that each of you is an insightful and discerning individual. Had I not decided to enter the race and then beaten you all, one of you would be accepting this win in my place; I'm certain you would be as gracious and humble about this honor as I am now.

For the benefit of future historians, the hard-fought campaign began here, with further developments recorded here and here. However, I need to address something Mark says here, where he attributes to me this description of the winning strategy:

A lot of us arrived at our guesses by figuring out which states might go black and not go back, and how many electoral votes each represented. Richard may have beaten us all by, he says, picking a number that just sounded about right.

Obviously, this needs to be cleared up. By the time of the Democratic National Convention in August, I was reading Electoral-vote.com every day, as I do every year when the election season begins. I added the now-indispensable FiveThirtyEight.com to my daily political reading immediately after all-star statistician Nate Silver appeared on the Colbert Report. So my choice followed several weeks of closely reading analyses made by highly informed people extremely skilled and crunching numbers and interpreting data. It was a guess, but I'd prefer it to be characterized as an informed guess rather than simple blind chance.

All that said, I indicated to Mark at the Big Apple Con that I felt a bit guilty about being in the lead of his poll because my choice was more wishful thinking than a serious projection: I was certainly hoping the electoral votes would break down somewhere close to where I placed them, but on an emotional level I didn't really expect it would happen. That wish was not for the sake of Barack Obama becoming President (he could have done that just as well at 271 electoral votes) but because I was hoping against hope that voters would repudiate McCain for the clumsy, ill-considered, and frequently offensive campaign he conducted. In other words, it wasn't so much about wanting Obama to win decisively as wanting the McCain campaign to lose thoroughly. Mark tells me he's been hearing this from a lot of people. Neither of us is surprised.

Now that the contest is over I can finally relax and enjoy my shared triumph, as indeed may all America. I hope Ellen will accept this post in lieu of the traditional congratulatory telephone call. And now, on to the victory party!

Hello tomorrow

2008-11-14T03:30:00.005-05:00

Via Cult of Mac:

Fans of comics’ “Golden Age” now have a great way to feed that jones on the iPhone and iPod Touch with Comic Zeal from Bitolithic.

The $1.99 app lets you download an unlimited number of classic comics from the 1930s and 1940s, a period that saw the arrival of the comic book as a mainstream art form, when the medium’s artistic vocabulary and creative conventions were defined by its first generation of writers, artists, and editors.

The app downloads full comics to store locally on your device for easy access offline, and takes full advantage of the iPhone platform’s pinch-zoom and fingertip scrolling so you can move around pages quickly and zoom in to detail as you wish. A recent update makes turning pages with the swipe gesture a breeze and counts as an excellent improvement to the original released version.

The Comic Zeal developer site is here. Now, compare and contrast Sean Kleefeld on the economics of current comics production:

Marvel has hired Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch to create The Fantastic Four. Hitch receives an electronic script from Millar and begins drawing an issue. But he doesn't make his drawing paper himself; he buys it. Some company had to chop down a tree, convert it to wood pulp, press that into paper, and ship that to wherever he bought it from. Looking at just the gas consumption alone, the paper costs more to make. So they pass those charges on to Hitch in the form of a price increase. Maybe one or two cents a sheet.

Marvel receives all the material electronically. It gets reviewed, approved, and then sent (again, electronically) over to their printer in Canada. That printer needs paper to print the books on, so they have that shipped in not unlike the way Hitch does. Except Marvel needs around 60,000 comics at 32 pages each. Even at only one mil (one one-thousandth of a cent) per page, that amounts to an additional $1,920 every month. Sure, Marvel has deeper pockets than I do, but I don't mind saying that's a fair sight more than my monthly mortgage payment!

But now that printer needs to move those 60,000 comics. They get shipped out to regional Diamond warehouses. Again, increased gas prices impact how much that will cost. And from those warehouses, the books will then be distributed (i.e. shipped by a gas-guzzling truck) to your Local Comic Shop.

The above quote comes from an outstanding series of posts by Sean on the economics of comics, starting here. I'm quoting him out of context to make a rhetorical point he was not trying to make and may not agree with at all, but that's what happens when you say stuff on the Internet.

One place you can get your feet wet in the search for Golden Age comics in public domain available for free download in .cbr format is here. (The same site also offers original and equally free comic stories by some outstanding creators just waiting to be discovered by the world at large.)

This is not an endorsement of Comic Zeal in particular; it will be some time before I'll have any chance to try this particular app out for myself. But the work going in this direction is promising. The absence of those printing and shipping costs (and the oil they consume) is going to make an even bigger difference to the general public in the coming year. That, combined with the popularity and glamor of the iPhone platform, may even be enough to override the major publishers' pyhrric insistence on digital copy protection, which is seriously hampering their thinking about digital comics; if not, other publishers will step in to fill the gap.

Update: John Rogers of Blue Beetle fame weighs in.

The alphabet meme

2008-11-11T02:59:00.003-05:00

Still too busy for regular blogging yet, but Adam at Movie Chunks tagged me with a meme devised by Fletch at Blog Cabins, to wit:

It's a simple concept (my favorite kind) - pick your favorite film for each letter of the alphabet. Some will be tough because there's too many choices (R, S, T, L, N, E...wait a sec - that's Wheel of Fortune) and others will be tough because there are so few choices that you have trouble finding much of anything (Q, anyone?). I'm sure I missed some great ones and I'm hoping that you find them.

The Rules

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Return of the Jedi belongs under "R," not "S" as in Star Wars Episode IV: Return of the Jedi. This rule applies to all films in the original Star Wars trilogy; all that followed start with "S." Similarly, Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs under "R," not "I" as in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Conversely, all films in the LOTR series belong under "L" and all films in the Chronicles of Narnia series belong under "C," as that's what those filmmakers called their films from the start. In other words, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release. Use your better judgement to apply the above rule to any series/films not mentioned.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

The rules don't specify any criteria, but each of these is a particular favorite of mine -- except for one which is an obvious ringer that I've never even seen and probably never will. See if you can spot it! All the rest of these have strong personal associations for me and would be on any list of my favorite films regardless of alphabetical necessity:

Ali
Blazing Saddles
Casino Royale (1967)
Dick
Excalibur
Fantastic Voyage
Ghost Dog
Help!
Idiocracy
Johnny Dangerously
King Kong (1933)
Letter to Brezhnev
M.A.S.H.
North by Northwest
Office Space
Pee Wee's Big Adventure
Quadrophenia
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Sexy Beast
Tommy
Until the End of the World
Viva Las Vegas
Witness for the Prosecution
Xanadu
Young Frankenstein
Zabriskie Point

I won't tag anyone; I'm looking for five volunteers to step up and take the challenge. Or are you all cowards?

Update: Indeed you are not, as the stalwart crew of TS, Mark, Johnny Bacardi, Walaka, and Sea of Green have each risen to the occasion. And honorable mention to plok for fessing up, which also takes courage.

Long time coming

2008-11-04T23:10:00.000-05:00

It's nature's way of receiving you

2008-10-29T19:33:00.003-04:00

First of all, thanks so much to all you guys who sent birthday greetings, either in comments to my previous post or by other means. I'm feeling shy and bashful now.

Tom Spurgeon said something a few days ago that made an old man very happy. I quote it here mainly so that I'll be able to find it again later when I need it, because we old folks are always forgetting where we put our bifocals and are scared of all these newfangled computing devices and whatnot. Responding to a particularly self-serving remark by a particularly snot-nosed comics scripting guy about the usefully productive lifespan of comics creators, Spurgeon opines:

However, if you allow yourself to define comics as something more than its leading edge in terms of monies received and pop culture currency obtained, it's clear that plenty of its creators do extraordinary work over the age of 45. Jack Kirby was older than that for his best period at Marvel Comics, and then went on to the very fruitful Fourth World period that by itself dwarfs the career output of all but handful of mainstream comics creators. The majority of the most popular MAD cartoonists were older than 45 during its 1970s flush period. Charles Schulz was older than 45 in the late '60s and the early '70s on Peanuts, its most popular and culturally relevant period. One of the best, most prolific cartoonists of the last five years, Gilbert Hernandez, was older than 45 during that astonishing period. I'd rather have all the Joe Kubert Comics made after he was 45 than the ones he made younger than 45.

One might also add that the productive years of comics creators might be longer on average if the major publishers hadn't been geared for all these years to actively drive out creators when they'd gained sufficient experience and maturity to stand up and refuse to accept being screwed. That may be a side issue compared with Spurgeon's point that seniority doesn't automatically equal cultural irrelevance...except that we can only wonder what other brilliant work we may have missed out on seeing because Marvel and DC were always ready to shove aside troublesome old folks in favor of new kids dazzled by getting their shot at the big time.

On the other hand, age need not bring wisdom either: leave it to Jim Shooter to go out on a sour note. I've been thoroughly enjoying Shooter's latest run on the Legion of Super-Heroes, just as I enjoyed his previous stints on previous incarnations of the Legion, and was sorry to see it ending. But when Shooter starts airing his complaints about his artist and his supposed lack of storytelling chops, he demonstrates a total lack of class.

I understand that Shooter's criticism is couched in the form of praise -- at one point, if read a certain way, Shooter is apparently suggesting Manapul might be the next Frank Miller, which he presumably intends as a compliment. But the tactful and classy thing to do would be simply to praise the guy and leave any critique for a more private occasion...especially in an interview which is all about the cancellation of a book. Don't leave the impression that he let you down and hastened the book's demise by not being good enough. But, for all that I've admired the guy's writing over the years, this is sadly typical of Shooter's defensiveness and self-justification...a tendency sometimes verging on the positively Nixonian.

The good news is that Francis -- who seems by all evidence to be a sincere, modest, and tactful person as well as one of the best new talents at DC today -- doesn't have to depend on Jim Shooter to vouch for him.

Update: Credit where credit is due -- Shooter acknowledges criticism for these remarks and tries to clarify them. It still comes across too much like "I'm sorry you took offense at something that wasn't offensive" for my tastes, but it's something.

24194160 minutes later

2008-10-25T15:00:00.002-04:00

It turns out to be my 200th post on this blog, but it's also a special occasion here for another reason:

Birthday greetings today go out to one of my very favorite bloggers, the charming and talented and always entertaining Becca of the charming and talented and always entertaining blog No Smoking In The Skull Cave. And to Adam of the blog Movie Chunks, of whom I was previously unaware until today but I'm sure will become a great favorite of mine in due course.

Though the personal significance of this day may often be overshadowed in the public imagination by events like the Feast of St. Crispin and the Battle of Agincourt as well as the birthdays of Pablo Picasso and Minnie Pearl, it is nonetheless extra special to us. May you both prevail over all those who scorn and mock you, and see your enemies driven before you in the dust, begging for mercy which will never be granted as the unstoppable force of your conquering armies march ever onward to victory over those who dare defy --

-- oops, sorry, that was my birthday wish. Anyway, you guys have a good one too!

Local news

2008-10-22T01:13:00.005-04:00

I was surprised to discover in yesterday's Doonesbury that my former hometown has achieved fame as an exemplar (at least for one cartoonist) of the small-town values held up by the likes of Sarah Palin as "the real America." It's a surprise because I know from personal experience that that town is actually built on top of an ancient hellmouth and controlled by sinister, malign forces who plot the downfall of all humanity. Sort of like Twin Peaks or Sunnydale or Smallville, except without the plucky young people to save the populace from eternal damnation at the mercy of unspeakable nameless things who delight in pain and torment.

In a cruel twist, it's also home to one of the best restaurants I've ever been to in my life. That kind of sucks. You have to enter this vile place of horrific torture to reach this spectacular meal. Still, worth it if you like really excellent Italian food.

Unless he meant the one in Oklahoma (which turns out to be named for the same person) because that place is nowhere. What a dump!

Written in the eaves

2008-10-10T20:19:00.004-04:00

Foo Fighters tell McCain to stop using song

And in breaking news...

NEW YORK -- Popular indie rock band Vampire Weekend today issued a statement asking that Senator John McCain refrain from using any of their songs in his campaign, in case he was thinking of doing so at any time in the future. A spokesperson for the band explained, "First it was John Mellencamp, then it was Heart, then ABBA, then Jackson Browne, then Van Halen, and now the Foo Fighters. The band thought it would save a lot of time to make it clear at the outset that permission to use their songs would not be granted."

Following up on this development, fellow indie rockers Death Cab For Cutie subsequently issued a companion statement, declaring "Let's nip this one in the bud right now and spare everyone the trouble of calling their lawyers, okay? Don't use our songs either."

Garage rock revivalists The Strokes, currently preparing to release their fourth studio album sometime after the inauguration ceremonies in 2009, also issued a statement indicating their back catalog was henceforth to be considered off-limits to the McCain campaign.

In response, the McCain team dispatched operatives to all forthcoming campaign stops to verify that all background music played during personal appearances by the candidate and his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin will consist exclusively of music by Ted Nugent, Pat Boone, John Rich, and "anyone else who didn't expressly and specifically tell us not to."

Senator McCain (pictured above with Senator Barack Obama during their debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee on October 7, 2008) was unavailable for comment.

Update: And Bon Jovi.

They got the guns but we got the numbers

2008-09-09T02:10:00.003-04:00

Found on Gothamist, this map illustrates the sheer number of people living in each borough of New York City by comparison with an entire state of the U.S. of similar population size. For instance, the estimated population of Maine in the year 2007 was 1,317,207; the population of the Bronx the same year was 1,373,659. The above map uses estimates from 2006, but the principle is the same.

Actually, a couple of them now fall short: the entire population of Idaho in 2007 was 1,499,402 people while Manhattan alone had 1,620,867 residents. And New Mexico the same year was quite spacious with 1,969,915 citizens...while the borough of Queens was a little more, um, let's say neighborly at a population of 2,270,338.

And I can get to all these places by subway except for the island of Wyoming, but the ferry there is free.

And we're out of beta, we're releasing on time

2008-09-02T20:16:00.004-04:00

Teenagers From The Future, the anthology of essays about the Legion of Super-Heroes edited by Tim Callahan and published by Sequart Research and Literacy Organization, is now available from Amazon.

The book includes my essay "The Perfect Storm: The Death and Resurrection of Lightning Lad" about the early days of the Legion series. The particular storyline I examine is one of the first examples of a multi-issue "story arc" in superhero comics (I also mention a few precursors) as well as an early instance of the "death as a revolving door" motif which has since become a staple of comics as well as other serialized entertainment. All this and a tribute to the great Jerry Siegel, plus a comparison of the different working relationships he and his successor Edmond Hamilton had with their editor, the controversial Mort Weisinger. And even though that seems like it should be enough for one book, this particular volume comes with seventeen other essays at no additional cost, written by...um, a bunch of other people who I'm sure have interesting things to say too. Whatever.

(I'm kidding, of course -- I've read this entire book several times in painstaking detail and I'm proud to be one small part of it. Also, this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the first appearance of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and it means a lot to be able to participate in commemorating that.)

According to Tim, the book will also be available for order through the direct market in either the October or November Diamond Previews catalog. Tim isn't sure whether the book will still be available through Amazon after it appears in the Diamond catalog, so anyone who wants to be sure of getting a copy without actually going into a comics shop should probably order it now.

And that cover is amazingly cool, isn't it?

This post is inappropriate

2008-08-31T20:06:00.002-04:00

This was my mother's actual response to news that the first day of the Republican Convention might be postponed or curtailed due to Hurricane Gustav:

"I just hope the men's restrooms in St. Paul are prepared for all those Republican delegates with nothing to do..."

See? Now you know where I got my crass sense of humor.

The whole thing is a blessing in disguise for the RNC. The last thing Republican strategists wanted at the convention was to have those high-profile appearances by Bush and Cheney -- reminding everyone yet again how closely tied McCain is to the staggeringly unpopular incumbent -- but there was no way to exclude them from appearing without it being noticed and remarked upon. Now those speeches can be cancelled altogether without it looking like a sign of embarassment.

Plus McCain and Palin now get an opportunity to rush to the Gulf Coast for a photo op that will make them look presidential. It's like McCain received a special blessing from above in return for picking a running mate so beloved by Christian conservatives.

On the other hand, Focus on the Family may not be able to savor this victory, as they'll be preoccupied with filing a breach of contract suit against the Almighty for utterly failing to live up to their demands. Whose side is that guy on, anyway?

Search for tomorrow

2008-08-08T01:58:00.007-04:00

When I was seven years old, one of my most prized possessions was a book called The World of Tomorrow written by Kenneth K. Goldstein and published by McGraw-Hill. (Miraculously, I still own that book today, and it's still one of my most prized possessions.) As the title indicates, this was a book about the future, lavishly illustrated with gorgeous full-color photographs of life in the year 2069.

You wouldn't believe how many hours I spent staring at those photos when I was seven. Well, actually, maybe you would. It was so authoritative: these were detailed photographs, not merely drawings created by some artist, so any reasonable person could only assume this was how the future was actually going to be. I tried to put myself into the world of those pictures to better understand how the future would feel to live in at ground level. What would it be like to walk down that street? What view would you see from that park? What sounds would you hear from the traffic of those automated cars zipping by on their grooved tracks? How would it feel to ride in one? Were those rosette-like buildings carousels or restaurants? Would it be strange to sleep in an underwater hotel?

Because of all those hours staring and contemplating, these images are still the indelible default setting for "the future" in my imagination. This is still the future cityscape I envision when reading a science fiction novel. It's the utopian future Earth of Star Trek; the three-dimensional version of what Curt Swan drew in old issues of Adventure Comics with the Legion of Super-Heroes.

It turns out the photos in The World of Tomorrow actually came from the Futurama II exhibit presented by General Motors at the 1964 New York World's Fair, the very building I wrote about in my previous post. (The original Futurama was presented by GM at the 1939 World's Fair.) Neither the corporate connection nor the association with the World's Fair were highlighted in any way by Goldstein or singled out in the acknowledgements. The book was published several years after the fair closed, in which time a lot had changed in America...and the surprisingly progressive, socially conscious, and environmentally enlightened text wasn't a commercial sop to the automaker. As a result, I went a decades not ever guessing the connection until I came across the familiar pictures by accident a couple of years ago while researching something else.

And now, because we live in the future -- where this home computer terminal I'm using at the moment is connected to a worldwide communications network -- I can share with you something I never dreamed existed: actual motion picture footage of that other future I kept trying to visit throughout my childhood.

Note: the above scans were found at nywf64.com, which offers a thorough guide to Futurama II among other attractions.

If you've only seen it once, you haven't seen it all

2008-08-04T01:16:00.006-04:00

As a special treat for those who follow the exploits of the internationally famous super-scientist Dr. Thaddeus "Rusty" Venture and his clan, we present an actual photograph of their home and research headquarters, better known as the Venture Compound, circa 1964:

The above picture is the best quality photo I was able to find online after long hours of research. Because the flags and the throngs of tourists may obscure your view of the main building, we also offer an artist's conception depicting a wider angle, as seen in a postcard from the same era:

And this image from yet another angle clarifies the overall design of this impressive structure:

The unfamiliar corporate signage may seem puzzling, but this is easily explained. At the time these images were created, Dr. Jonas Venture leased his distinctive home and research center to the General Motors Corporation for use as their pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, New York. General Motors used the complex for their Futurama exhibit, in which visitors seated in moving armchairs glided past detailed scenes depicting urban life as it would be lived in the early 21st Century. Futurama proved to be the most popular attraction of the World's Fair: nearly twenty-six million people took the journey into the future during the Fair's two year run.

I've visited the fairgrounds at Flushing Meadows many times, but no trace of the Venture Compound remains. I assume that, having made a tidy profit on the temporary use of his abode, Jonas Venture removed it from the site after the Fair ended and returned it once more to the remote location where it stands to this day. Courtesy of a Mr. Jackson Publick, we conclude with this image of the Venture Compound as it appears today:

Dark as his shadow

2008-07-31T01:10:00.001-04:00

This kind of thing fascinates me:

First, Marc Tyler Nobleman -- whose book on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Boys of Steel, has just been published -- notes a significant, but totally expected and unsurprising, omission from the credits of a recent superhero movie, leading him to wonder about the origin of the phrase "the Dark Knight" before it appeared in Detective Comics #40 in a story written by Bill Finger in 1940.

Then, doing the literary legwork, J.L. Bell traces the coinage back to Irish gothic novelist Charles Robert Maturin in 1816.

What, you didn't think Frank Miller invented it, did you?

Found here. Both blogs are really excellent in general and, it should go without saying, well worth reading.

Temporally unavailable

2008-07-17T00:49:00.001-04:00

I'm back but I'm not back. Or do I have that backwards? Maybe it's the other way around. I've concluded my annual retreat for another year and have returned to my usual surroundings to get caught up on work and e-mail but I'm not quite in a position to resume normal blogging activity just yet. Thanks in advance for your continued indulgence.

The title of this post is a phrase that seemed funny and apt when I first saw it just a couple of days ago. It was on a sign in a shop window announcing iPhones were out of stock at that location. Doesn't it seem like something out of Doctor Who? On checking Google, I've come across a lot of people using this phrase the same way. The funny thing is, even though the phrase is properly speaking a mistake, if it did exist it would probably mean more or less just what these people think it means. Unavailable in this time. If you come to this locus in spacetime seeking this item, you will not find it here and now. Adjust your temporal and spatial coordinates and try again.

Lightful dwellings

2008-06-26T03:17:00.004-04:00

Photo ganked from Gothamist.

I was only peripherally aware of Buckminster Fuller for all these years, but in recent months I've become a bit of a fan and suddenly, as if in reply to my vague stirring of interest, he's everywhere. Really, don't you think it's time we gave the Dymaxion car another shot?

In a pleasing coincidence, a Fuller dome has been constructed near my home on the very week I'm heading off to visit another dome that has a special place in my heart. In other words, it's time once again for this blog to enter a state of hibernative naptosis while I go off to recover from the first half of this year. I will be travelling with geeks, but I won't be checking my e-mail often (if at all) or keeping up with my favorite blogs while I'm in retreat, so try not to ask me anything or say anything interesting while I'm gone.

I have some good stuff in mind for when I return so we'll see about that, eh?

People we couldn't do without

2008-06-24T01:51:00.000-04:00

Strangely enough, the vast majority of search engine traffic arriving at this blog comes from people searching on Google for the origin of the phrase "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." For the benefit of anyone who arrives at this entry looking for the same information, those words are written on the tombstone of Billy Pilgrim in the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and they appear again on Stony Stevenson's tombstone in a television program called Between Time and Timbuktu which adapted scenarios taken from an assortment of Vonnegut's novels and short stories. As I describe it at the above-mentioned link, seeing that program at an impressionable age was a major formative influence on me.

I usually claim that my top search referral is "Kim Possible erotic fan fiction", but the truth is those hits take second place to the Vonnegut post. Given the choice, I'd much rather have a blog where people went looking for erotica about cartoon characters than one best known for eulogizing my childhood heroes and role models. Sadly, fate hasn't helped me much in that department.

When I was writing about Steve Gerber, I wish it had occurred to me to call him "the George Carlin of comics" because in some respects that's exactly what he was. (Fortunately the same comparison occurred to Jim McLauchlin of the HERO Initiative, so at least the world was not denied this insight due to my mental slowness.) Of course Gerber and Carlin and Vonnegut were radically different in a lot of ways -- perhaps more ways than they were similar -- but they occupied the same continuum of thought and embodied the same outlook. Devastatingly intelligent, viciously funny, outspokenly skeptical, fiercely enraged by stupidity and hypocrisy, able to see the humor in our vanity even as they watched the human race needlessly destroying itself. These are qualities I've always wanted to possess...especially that last one, because finding the humor in disaster is a necessary survival skill and it's getting harder and harder all the time. I listened to what all three of them said and read what they wrote and always hoped they'd give us still more clues on how to get by. And now these three of my lifelong icons are gone in the span of a little more than a year.

Oh, and one other: although I never met him, I had a tenuous family connection of a sort with Algis Budrys and was a huge fan of his work, especially the novels Who? (made into a very good movie with Elliot Gould and Joe Bova) and the astonishingly prescient yet criminally out-of-print Michaelmas. Carlin, Gerber, and Vonnegut all saw America from the inside; Budrys arrived in this country in 1936 as the five year old son of the ousted consul-general of Lithuania and he never forgot those inexplicable childhood glimpses of Nazi insanity that caused his family to flee their home.

In some ways the immigrant learns a new culture more thoroughly from the outside than the native ever knows it from inside. If you learn a second language, you may be more conscious of its formal rules of grammar and its odd linguistic quirks than you are of your first tongue; you might speak the language more correctly than a native because of all the things they can take for granted that you had to acquire through hard study. In most ways Budrys lived as the perfect assimilated American immigrant, but inside (he would later say) he never lost sight of the fact that friends and neighbors and community were essentially werewolves -- capable of transforming from kind, reasonable people to bloodthirsty monsters given the wrong impetus.

Now that makes two more people who were huge personal icons of mine gone away this year. If you'll excuse me being so self-centered about this, it does feel meaningful: as if something is being stripped away, as if the world is being diminished around us. More so than usual, I mean. And I had a brush with serious illness at the start of this year, and then my mother did, and then I nearly lost one of my best friends, and I did lose another who meant a lot to me. So I really don't want to write any more memorial posts. From now on, nobody I like die, okay?

In the news

2008-06-19T01:51:00.002-04:00

N.Y. attorney general forces ISPs to curb USENET access

Verizon offers details of USENET deletion

Verizon blocks access to whole USENET hierarchy

You really have to admire the bravery of Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for standing up to the all-powerful Usenet criminal cartel that no one else dares oppose. At last, thousands of innocent Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint customers are spared exposure to the depraved rituals of newsgroups such as alt.adoption, alt.arts.ballet, alt.astronomy and so on and so forth, all the way down to those havens of twisted perversion that call themselves alt.yoga and alt.zen. Don't be fooled: obviously those are assumed names. While it may look on the surface as if these sickos are talking about astronomy or gardening or yoga, they're actually trading kiddie porn right under your nose. That's how deep this thing goes. Anything and everything you see is a secret code word that actually means "kiddie porn." Even this very paragraph might be full of sickening perverted filth and neither of us would ever know it!

Moving on...

I need someone to tell me this is a hoax. Hmm, the Telegraph, that's like a British version of the Onion, isn't it? It just does gag stories and satire that aren't meant to be taken as fact, right? Whew, that's a relief! Because this actually being true would have made me sick as a parrot. A dead parrot.

Also, I was literally three blocks away while this was happening, and I had no clue.

Seven songs

2008-06-09T02:58:00.002-04:00

At the behest of sean, who bade me answer the following:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

And my reply:

Feist, One Evening -- The tune from the iPod commercial that made her reputation in the States didn't grab me...but it led to her back catalogue getting more exposure here, and when I heard this it pleased me in all the ways the better-known song didn't. Enjoy the video directed by Leslie herself and costarring her fellow Nova Scotia music sensation Buck 65 here. (Edit: damn you anyway, sean, you know everything takes me longer because I'm so old! I was just getting to this!)

Broadcast, Come On Let's Go -- What if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were taken over by the Lloigor from Zenith to become a pop group in Swinging London circa 1967 and wrote the missing love song from the soundtrack of Billion Dollar Brain? It would sound like this.

The Jigsaw Seen, Baby Elephant Walk -- You'll recall their gorgeous cover of the Scott Walker tune "30 Century Man" on the soundtrack of Bender's Big Score. This is another track from the same album, Songs Mama Used To Sing. (The album also includes a peppy version of "Tattoo" by the Oo.) Video here.

Donovan, Barabajagal -- Jeff Beck on lead guitar, Ron Wood on bass, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and Micky Waller (who just passed away a few months ago) on drums. Wikipedia claims no less than Robert Plant also helped on backing vocals, but I'm not sure about that. People might think of Donovan as the folkie tunesmith with the Dylan cap who introduced the Beatles to the Maharishi, but he's also the guy who recorded songs like this and did backing vocals for Alice Cooper a bit later. Set to images here.

Spanky and Our Gang, Like To Get To Know You -- Looks like I've fallen into a 1967 groove here. This may seem very much of its time to modern ears, from the days of The Mamas and the Papas and the 5th Dimension, but the truth is this was pretty unconventional even then. Check out this vintage performance clip from the Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour.

Rench presents Gangstagrass, Pistol Packin -- Speaking of crossing genres! I've been waiting years for someone to do this, but I didn't expect it to be so awesome. Listen to this and three other tracks here or download the whole album for free here.

John Cage, 4'33" -- Free download here.

I just don't feel like tagging anyone, but consider yourself tagged if you wish to be and haven't been tagged by someone else.

The road to oranges and lemons

2008-06-08T16:57:00.002-04:00

While promoting one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite bands, said favorite band (XTC) demonstrates their willingness to commit career suicide and gives new meaning to the act of burning one's bridges while still crossing them. In other words, it's brilliant. For some reason it also puts me in mind of Joel Hodgson...

Who's blogging now

2008-06-01T01:14:00.002-04:00

And doing a good job of it too? Gerry Conway.

No, not the drummer from Jethro Tull, Steeleye Span, and Fairport Convention. This one is the former EIC of Marvel Comics and onetime writer of Daredevil, Iron Man, Thor, Fantastic Four, Avengers, Justice League of America, Batman and Legion of Super-Heroes and apparently several hundred other comics I bought and read during the 1970s. Creator of Firestorm and Ms. Marvel. Author of Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man. The guy who killed Gwen Stacy. Also he's written some things for television. That Gerry Conway.

One of the strange benefits of the interwebs and this blogging stuff in particular has been encountering people who loomed large in my personal mythology many years -- decades! -- ago, and seeing them now in an entirely different light as regular folks instead of impossibly distant icons of comicdom. It's happened to me a number of times now and it never gets less strange. This particular guy was a major figure in my past, especially during the time he returned to DC Comics as a writer/editor and spawned new characters and series like mad, in what seemed at the time like a bid to make him the next Stan Lee. It didn't quite work out that way, but he was a huge part of the comics conversation of the era. Now, far removed from the hype of those days, he turns out to be a thoughtful and lucid commentator.

Well, unless this is another one of those Fake Stan Lee deals. In which case I look pretty stupid now.

Anyway, check his blog out.

No point at all

2008-05-31T00:23:00.005-04:00

From the evidence of Final Crisis #1, it seems Grant Morrison doesn't know what a Lagrange point is.

Lagrange points (or libration points) are areas formed by the orbit of one body around another, positions in which gravitational forces are balanced so that things put at those points tend to stay there, relative to the other bodies of the orbital system. A celestial body by itself doesn't have "a Lagrange point" as such; you need two bodies in an orbital relationship. There isn't one Lagrange point in such an orbital system but five of them, all moving with the orbiting body in fixed relationships. This diagram should make it clearer than words alone could do:

The two bodies shown above could be the Sun and the Earth, or the Earth and the Moon. The Sun–Earth L4 and L5 points lie 60° ahead of and behind the Earth as it orbits the Sun; the Earth–Moon L4 and L5 points lie 60° ahead of and behind the Moon as it orbits the Earth. Because things put in libration points tend to stay in those positions relative to their bigger neighbors, they've been considered as potentially useful places to put space stations or other orbiting hardware. As it is, they tend to collect interplanetary dust.

Morrison seems to get that "Lagrange point" has some relationship with a planet's gravitational field, but the term doesn't quite make sense the way he uses it here. (He might instead have used a term like "the Lagrangian zone" to indicate "a spherical zone as far away from the planet as its Lagrangian points" or "out to the Trojan points" which is a more colloquial term for the L4 and L5 points.) The subsequent lines about "no one must enter or leave the gravity well" and "dust for radiation prints" are equally senseless for different reasons, except to reinforce the conceit of this being a cosmic police procedural, and to tip us off that none of this should be taken seriously.

It disappoints me when a writer I otherwise admire immensely devotes time and attention to promoting crackpot pseudoscientific drivel, Whitley Strieber UFO abduction books, and supposed Mayan astrological forecasts while not knowing real scientific concepts and terms. It's okay for him to throw in a misused word just because it sounds sciencetastic. After all, who would know what a scienceish word actually means? Unless you were a practitioner of scienceism or something.

Whirling transient nodes of thought careening thru a cosmic vapor of invention

2008-05-30T00:59:00.004-04:00

I have no personal anecdotes or strange associations to relate, nothing special to say here. It's just that Blazing Saddles has always been of nearly religious significance in my family -- no, screw that, it was totally religious for us, no "nearly" about it, that movie is what my family followed instead of deity or church or religion. So the passing of another of its stars is something I must acknowledge with considerable regret and reluctance.

Even when Harvey Korman wasn't the actor doing the "funny" thing in a scene, he's still the center of attention, but without upstaging any of the other performers. See for instance here, but it's the case all throughout Blazing Saddles -- even when he's performing with Mel Brooks. The people around Hedley Lamarr are all insane, but it's his withering glare and icy putdowns that get the laughs. I don't know anything about acting, but it seems like he was was genuinely paying attention to the others in the scene with him, responding to them and not just waiting for his next funny line, and that's why those scenes work so well. In this film Korman pulled off one of the best comedic performances recorded on film, and I hope he's remembered for that (and a few dozen other times he did the same) instead of only as the guy who kept cracking up at Tim Conway on The Carol Burnett Show. That always bugged the hell out of me.

And I may be the only person who feels this way, but I'm also inordinately fond of his performance as Colonel Slaghoople in Viva Rock Vegas -- the second and infinitely superior live-action Flintstones movie -- a minor yet warmhearted role in which he gets a comedic bit that may be silly and completely throwaway but never fails to crack me up because of his perfect off-the-cuff delivery.

Also, he once performed a touching romantic scene with Bea Arthur.

War is a racket

2008-05-26T00:23:00.004-04:00

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 34 years. Butler served during the Boxer Rebellion and saw action in Honduras, Nicaragua, Veracruz, commanded a base in France during the First World War, and led the Marine Expeditionary Force in China during the late Twenties.

On his death in 1940, Major General Butler was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. He was one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor (since Butler's death, no one has received more than one Medal of Honor) and one of only three to be awarded both a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor, and the only person ever to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two different actions.

After retiring from the Marine Corps in 1931, Smedley Butler went on a national speaking tour. His standard speech was so well received that he prepared a longer version to be published as a small book in 1935. It also appeared as a condensed book in Reader's Digest. Here's the opening page of that book:

The text of War Is A Racket can be found here among several other places online.

Major General Butler was no misfit or wild-eyed radical, and his name is still honored by the U.S. Marine Corps to this day. The Marine Corps base in Okinawa is named after him. We can only speculate what his view of the Second World War might have been, because he died before America became involved. We know Butler was no admirer of Hitler or Mussolini, and he was a firm supporter of President Roosevelt. We can very easily guess what Major General Butler would make of the world now.

On a day like today, when Americans like to repeat comforting phrases about soldiers and the sacrifices they made, it's worth remembering that this man -- who clearly knew the business of war as well as any man of his time but held no illusions about what he had done and what it all meant -- turned around and said in no uncertain terms: to hell with War.

In honor of Mother's Day

2008-05-11T01:05:00.002-04:00

On this special day we salute the world's most huggable industrialist. Tender as corned beef and warm as pastrami, her fondest ambitions are to see her enemies eaten by scorpions and to become Supreme Overlord of Earth. Whether making her robot oil with 10% more love than the next leading brand or rushing off to some charity BS for knocked-up teenaged sluts, Mom is one clever old skank. And don't you forget it!

Of course we all know and love Mom from her many heartwarming appearances on the television series Futurama but even her most devoted fans may not realize Mom has continued to enjoy a thriving career on television in the present day. Here's one interview she granted to a local affiliate back in December of last year, displaying all the folksy homespun charm and compassion she's always demonstrated as the head of Momcorp:

When asked for further comment, Mom replied "You call that a pressed ham? What is this moose drip? I'm sick of hearing about those turtle squirts! Jam a bastard in it, you crap! Shut your filthy trap!"

I am a clown, yet I am filled with indifference

2008-05-07T01:44:00.003-04:00

For those of you who weren't fortunate enough to score a copy of Bongo Comics Free for All on Free Comic Book Day, nor saw this story when it appeared previously some time ago, enjoy The Simpsons manga courtesy of Chuck Dixon and the astoundingly wonderful Nina Matsumoto. There isn't a panel of this that isn't packed with awesome.

A losing play

2008-05-05T18:32:00.000-04:00

My daydream goes something like this:

(RAB enters a tavern located somewhere in another state. Spying a patron not otherwise involved in activity or conversation, he approaches and doffs his hat.)

Me: Good day to you, sir. I am an avid supporter of a sporting team not local to this region and which has frequently competed against your own favored team.

Other person: Based on this statement, I assume that you may be a visitor to this area. If so, welcome to our community, my good fellow.

Me: My thanks. It is a lovely community and does yourself and your neighbors much credit. You know, I am firmly of the opinion that in their next encounter on the playing field, my preferred sporting team will best your preferred sporting team and emerge with the winning score.

Other person: Well, such an outcome is entirely possible. After all, both teams are composed of talented and dilligent players who will have trained extensively for the encounter...and of course one must never entirely discount the role of luck in determining the outcome of a given competition. However, bearing in mind these reservations, I remain of the opinion that in the event my own favored team will triumph, owing to their demonstrable skill and fortitude.

Me: A reasonable position. Watching their next encounter on the playing field shall be all the more enjoyable for me now. Should my expectations be vindicated, I shall enjoy the satisfaction of having correctly predicted the outcome of the game. On the other hand, should your prediction come to pass and your team achieves victory rather than mine, I will at least be able to take vicarious pleasure in the thought of you enjoying this vindication as I would have done.

Other person: So it would be safe to say there will be reward in the sporting event for both of us no matter what the outcome. I will enjoy my role as spectator even more for knowing this.

Me: As will I. Let us purchase and enjoy beverages together at this tavern in commemoration of our mutual respect in this matter.

Other person: Yes, let us.

(all exeunt)

That's my daydream. This isn't.

III. Conclusion

2008-04-26T01:20:00.007-04:00

In which you will kindly recall that you asked me to write a convention recap. Well, at least one of you did. Don't blame me that it turned into another three-part epic no one is reading apart from my mother, and then only if there's nothing good on television tonight.

On Saturday evening, Lisa Hoppe and I attended the ReBoot panel (video here and doesn't it make my life easier not to have to recap all these panels when you can watch them for yourself) featuring series cocreator Gavin Blair and onetime producer Dan DiDio. This panel was for me what conventions are for. Not shilling things, not hype and press events and publicity for your big budget film, but seeing folks who are delighted to talk about something they had fun creating, and who are equally delighted to see how many people responded to it.

Dan DiDio in particular was a surprise. My close personal friend Gavin Blair -- by which I mean he once shook my hand and he signed my booklet, which is more than many of my so-called real life friends can say -- remarked afterward that comics people only get to see DiDio trying to promote the latest DC event under the scrutiny of his corporate employers, but the Dan DiDio he knows as friend and colleague is a completely different person. There was nothing to hype here, just a couple of guys reminiscing about this really cool thing they did a few years back...and it was obvious DiDio was having the time of his life telling those stories. If someone attended this panel without ever having seen or heard of ReBoot, that person would have left wanting to see the entire series right away, simply because Blair and DDio made their experiences working on it sound like so much fun.

That night saw a big dinner with the TwoMorrows/Kirby Museum crowd and Jack Kirby Collector contributor Mike Gartland, plus some sort of Philly art mafia consisting of Mike Manley, Jamar Nicholas, and Scott Cohn. Believe me, I am as shocked as you are that I got to sit with those guys. Have you seen their artwork? Go look: it's awesome. My presence there was solely because none of them knew me and generously assumed I had some right to be in their company. If only they knew.

Moving along to the last day of the convention, a few highlights...

Waiting for the Kirby: King of Comics panel to start, I ran into my actual real world friend Jeff Brady as well as JKC contributor and all-around swell guy Adam McGovern. They probably regretted sitting next to me when I heckled Mark Evanier about feral cats in his backyard. Also in attendance were several major participants in Kirby fandom, such as Harry Mendryk (whose own convention recap is much more informative than mine and has cool photos, so I encourage you all to check it out) and the shockingly erudite Atlas historian Michael Vassalo.

Sometime after the panel, I heard of one attendee grumbling that it had focused too much on the entire careers of guests Joe Sinnott and Dick Ayers and gave insufficient attention to Kirby. This strikes me as doubly mistaken. First, both offered a lot of praise for Jack and discussed the work they did embellishing his pencils, how they approached it and what it was like to work with him. Sinnott was particularly effusive in his love for Kirby; Ayers is less outspoken about it but the respect and warmth are there as well. More importantly -- look, I'm the big Kirby fanatic, right? Write a book about the guy, have a panel in his honor, mention his name in passing and I'm right there, as most bloggers learn all too quickly. But Sinnott and Ayers are still with us, their careers are worthy of attention, and I'd rather give them a standing ovation with both in front of us to enjoy it than only offering them praise at yet another memorial service.

I'm proud to be one of many at the con who personally congratulated Laura Hudson on her success at irritating those jerkwads at Virgin Comics. You can tell the worth of any journalist by the caliber of person she offends. To be called an "evil writer" can only be considered praise...because anyone who uses the phrase "evil writer" as a pejorative richly deserves offense. I told Laura to bear in mind the example of investigative reporter Wayne Barrett: on hearing former New York Senator Al D'Amato violently disparage him on television as a scandalmonger, a gutter journalist and worthless hack, Barrett beamed and declared it "better than winning a Pulitzer."

I was also glad to hook up my close personal friend George Khoury with a cheap source of Tom Strong action figure sets. A dealer was selling these at such a steep discount that having bought one I felt obliged to buy a bunch of other action figures from him simply to ease my feeling that I was taking unfair advantage. Yesterday at St. Marks Comics I saw the exact same set going for $44.99. I should have bought out the guy's whole stock. Around this same time, George and I got into a conversation with Erik Larsen about the original Fawcett version of Captain Marvel as compared with more recent interpretations, another of my favorite hobby horses. Okay, now I really am just dropping names...but Larsen is getting a lot of Gerber and Kirby work back into print as well as many other good comics, so if there's kissing up to be done I for one don't mind getting in that line.

As the convention wound down, I hung out for a while in Artists Alley with Richard Howell and his Claypool cohort Jesse Reyes, where my fatigued rambling was tolerated with characteristic graciousness by the always charming and civilized Carolyn Kelly. Carolyn was mercifully spared further babbling from me, however, when I went off to help John and Rand and Lisa pack up the TwoMorrows display before we all got hustled out by the Javits Center maintenance crew. When one of these shows ends they waste no time in letting you know you aren't welcome anymore. After loading up the van, a bunch of us went to dinner just off Times Square, and another convention weekend was over.

I feel as if the preceding entries have been just a big list of names, but that's what the whole convention experience is about for me. I don't go to buy stuff or see a lot of panels but rather to see people, so that's what I've recorded here. Although they were also at the con, I totally missed connecting with Sean Witzke and Jog and Neilalien and the returning favorite Redhead Fangirl. Dammit! There's always something you didn't manage to do.

II. Consolation

2008-04-26T01:18:00.006-04:00

In which the author is moved to contemplate human mortality.

The Steve Gerber memorial panel on Saturday is covered extensively here and here sparing any need for yet another recap. From the world of comics there was Mark Evanier, Gail Simone, Paul Levitz, Buzz Dixon, Marty Pasko (who delivered the single funniest line of the event), and Hildy Mesnik (a coworker with Steve at Sunbow Productions on the G.I. Joe and Transformers cartoons), as well as Steve's brother Michael Gerber and Steve's daughter Samantha, and finally (and most surprisingly) Steve's writing collaborator on Omega the Unknown and Hard Time Mary Skrenes, not known for attending conventions or interacting with fans. After the memorial, I had a brief chat with the charming Hildy Mesnik, who was also an editor at Marvel in the early Nineties, and with Len Wein, who seems not to have aged even slightly in the nearly twenty years since I last saw him at a convention.

The Legion of Super-Heroes panel in honor of their fiftieth anniversary -- that really just does not sound right, no matter how technically accurate it may be -- is discussed here, including a link to a full podcast so you can hear the whole thing for yourself. As moderator, Peter Sanderson left me uncertain as to whether or not he's actually ever read a Legion comic...but Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen were both lively and entertaining nonetheless, while current series editor Mike Marts was a bit more reserved and was disinclined to reveal anything about the future of the series other than stating that Jim Shooter was sticking around for the long haul. It would have been a much more lively and possibly contentious panel if Shooter himself had been present, but he skipped the con altogether for reasons as yet undisclosed...

Paul jolted me a little by naming a couple of my old friends from Legion fandom back in the Seventies as two people he particularly enjoyed hearing from; he also gave a namecheck to the original founders of the old Legion Fan Club in the letters pages of Superboy way back when. This combined with the reminiscences of the Gerber memorial panel contributed to a feeling of creeping nostalgia...or if not nostalgia per se, at least a sense of passing time. Like revisiting your old grade school or seeing the summer house where you spent your vacations decades later, it's not a desire to be young again -- who'd want that? -- but a feeling that being so far away from your past makes you somehow bigger. Your life occupies a bigger volume in spacetime than it used to. The years seem shorter because each year represents an increasingly smaller percentage of your total lifespan to date than they did when you were twelve.

I'd been looking forward to the Grant Morrison spotlight...but I ducked out of the packed hall shortly after the deliberately over-the-top and very entertaining intro was screened. The truth is, after the Gerber panel it just didn't sit right. Morrison made a concerted effort -- as he says in so many words; see the above-linked video -- to become a rock star of comics, a pop culture icon and media celebrity, to create this aura of glamour around himself previously unknown to comic book writers. (Neil Gaiman, his only rival in this achievement, is a special case.) He set out to do this and succeeded admirably and of course it's a sound decision in terms of his career. But at that particular moment, I didn't feel any pressing need to be in that audience.

Coming out of the panel I headed for the convention center cafeteria on the lower level, where someone unexpectedly called my name. It was Jon Browne, proprietor of They Walk Among Us, an outstanding comics shop in the London borough of Richmond for the past 18 years. I've often held up TWAU as the perfect example of a comics retailer who gets it right -- by presenting a welcoming and friendly environment, by diversifying stock to include a wide variety of toys and games and memorabilia, and mainly (as Jon is quick to point out) by an iron-jawed tenacity in sticking it out through lean times. I'd encourage any retailer to follow their lead, but I suspect the main lesson they'd have to offer is "work harder!"

We discussed the recent death of Steve Whitaker, who introduced me to Jon and his wife shortly after the store opened. Like me, Jon had also fallen out of touch with Whitko, in their case when the latter moved away from London...and had only just reestablished contact with him online a mere six days before he died. We also talked about happier things, like how the shop is doing and a number of celebrity customers who shop there.

After a while it was time to get in line for the Venture Bros panel, so I made my farewell to Jon and went off in that general direction. Last year the VB panel was one of the highlights of the weekend, but a line had started forming an hour before it began...and it had received a lot of publicity and was sure to be even more crowded this year. I'd been telling people that turning up more than an hour in advance was not uncalled for and I was all set to heed my own advice -- but. En route I ran into one Roz Kaveney, who at one time many years ago was very nearly my editor when I was very nearly a writer. She invited me to join herself and a friend for coffee, so I found myself heading straight back to the cafeteria. From now on, if anyone ever says "but you've never bought coffee for a transgendered former civil servant who works in British non-governmental organisations and writes scholarly tomes on teen movies and Buffy the Vampire Slayer" I'll be able to say "don't be silly, of course I have."

This was definitely worth being late to the line for the Venture Bros panel...but it had ceased to be any sort of line and was instead a confused heaving mass. Way more people had turned up than the hall outside the panel rooms could contain, and it tested the convention staffers on their crowd control abilities. They handled the situation smartly, moving the panel to another room three times the size of the room it was scheduled in -- even then, it was standing room only once more -- and everything got under way peacefully if twenty minutes late. A good recap of the panel can be found here (along with coverage of the Battlestar Galactica and Moonlight panels if those are your cup of coffee as well).

Something I haven't seen get quite the coverage it deserves. According to my close personal friend Lance Festerman -- that is to say, I spoke to him once for about two minutes, but I think there was a real bond formed between us and I'm sure we could totally hang out together and talk about stuff -- who was running the convention for the first time this year, NYCC had 15,000 more attendees this year over the previous year. I'll assume that's accurate pending evidence to the contrary. Yet we saw little of the traffic congestion and overcrowding of the past two years...partly because of the increased space available, but also partly due to better coordination and planning. The Venture Bros-related pileup was the only major issue I witnessed, and it was cleared up pretty quickly. I know a few people who swore off attending after last year, but this time was a lot more comfortable.

And next year I'm not going to commit to doing one of these goddamn post-con writeups no matter how much you beg me. Next: Lo, there shall come an ending!

I. Contumely

2008-04-26T01:16:00.002-04:00

In which many names will be named.

Almost as soon as I arrived at the Javits Center for NYCC 2008, Rand Hoppe of the Kirby Museum introduced me to John Morrow, who'd travelled up from North Carolina along with Jim Amash to staff the TwoMorrows Publishing table. As previously mentioned, even though the Kirby Museum wasn't sharing space with TwoMorrows at NYCC this year, that table remained my default rendezvous point: the place I told everyone to look for me if I couldn't be found anywhere else and the first place I looked for other folks.

I also spent a good bit of time hanging out with Mike Philips and Tim Callahan of Sequart Research and Literacy Center -- publishers of Teenagers From The Future, the epic collection of essays about the Legion of Super-Heroes that sold out its entire preview run before the weekend was over. I was lucky to score a copy at the rate they were flying away.

Totally by chance while I was still scoping out the show floor, I ran into Gavin "Gavok" Jasper of 4th Letter (though apparently he slept through meeting me), and the following day I also met David Brothers of 4L when he stopped by the Sequart table. They're both every bit as cool and personable as one would expect from reading their blog. I also had the fortune to spend time with Patrick Meaney and Rob Kelly, however statistically unlikely it was that any of us would cross paths that way. My long term plan is to get all four of these guys doing work for Sequart and/or TwoMorrows so that hooking up with them will be much simpler at future conventions. It's all about who you know...

The multi-talented Thom Zahler was almost directly opposite the Sequart table, and one of my stated goals for the con had been to pick up a full set of his really very wonderful Love and Capes comic series. Later this year, IDW is going to release a collection in trade paperback form: a much more convenient form for gift-giving if you happen to know anyone who might enjoy a) warm-hearted romance with a comedic superhero motif sometimes compared to The Incredibles and b) receiving gifts.

I missed the screening of Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist but made it to the Will Eisner panel with producer Jon B. Cooke (who turns out to display previously unsuspected gifts as a panel moderator, and future convention organizers are encouraged to make use of him in this capacity), the film's director Andrew Cooke, Paul Levitz, Mike Uslan, Mark Evanier, and Will's nephew Carl Gropper. Gropper was probably the most interesting panelist for his family perspective on having Eisner for a relative. There was also plenty of discussion about Eisner the visionary genius who saw the comic book page as a unique graphic entity unto itself and not merely a vehicle for reprinting comic strip panels, and Eisner the unusually shrewd businessman (according to Levitz, rivalled only by Joe Simon and Joe Kubert in that respect). I still regret missing that film, though.

Later in the day, my actual close personal friend (as opposed to the countless people I refer to as "close personal friends" but who are in fact complete strangers or at best passing acquaintances who would barely recognize me under most circumstances) Richard Howell put me on the trail of Peter Sanderson, who was facing a last-minute cancellation by an intended member of his Legion of Super-Heroes panel the following day. I had a good idea of someone who could fill that gap, and spent a lot more time than I probably ought to have done trying to track down all the involved parties and get them on the same page.

It all turned out to be for nothing -- Peter found someone else to fill in -- but to be honest, I enjoyed the temporary excitement all the same. A few years ago I found work as roadie and guitar tech for a rock group simply because I was tired of watching gigs from the audience. Standing there with nothing to do but watch always made me feel antsy; I only ever wanted to be backstage, sorting out minor emergencies behind the scenes so the show could run smoothly. By the same token, I don't feel comfortable just passively attending a convention; I like to have a problem that needs solving.

In fact, I might as well admit it: I'm the one who stopped Jim Shooter from attending NYCC this year, just so he'd miss the Legion panel and I could run around all afternoon trying to line up a replacement for him. I'm so ashamed of myself.

Next: Death be not proud!

Tuesday evening coming down

2008-04-22T22:18:00.004-04:00

And so another New York Comic Con comes to a close. Funnily enough, I've spent some of my free time since the con ended shopping for comics. Yeah, I know, right? But there's a reason for it.

My friend Howard, the Henchman 21 to my Henchman 24 if you will*, went into the hospital for emergency surgery last week, as I briefly hinted in my previous post. There were complications and he's been through a rough time of it. But I finally received word that Howard was doing a lot better and, although he's still not up to receiving visitors, he wanted me to get him some reading material to pass the time. I didn't see this last message until late Sunday night...that is to say, just after three whole days during which I was surrounded by dealers eager to sell me their comic books at low, low prices. If only I'd thought of it at the time, I could have got a huge stack of comics right there. Complete with autographs for the sick boy in hospital. That would have been lovely. Not to mention a prerelease copy of Teenagers from the Future before they all sold out.

But I didn't, so I hit the comic shops to get the books he wanted (Dynamite Entertainment's Lone Ranger and Project Superpowers and the latest Buffy) plus some others I hope he'll find entertaining (my chance to make him read Patton Oswalt's brilliant JLA: Welcome to the Working Week has come at last). Howard keeps up with the current titles a lot more than I do, so this means for a change I'll actually be hitting the shop every Wednesday and scoring his weekly fix for him until he's back on his feet.

Hey, it's the least I can do for a guy who keeps a complete set of Legion of Super-Heroes action figures on display next to an open window, hoping a stray bolt of lightning will transform him into the Composite Superman.

I'm working on a writeup of the convention, but I've also got a backlog of messages to catch up on so please bear with me a day or two longer.

* Or am I the 21 to his 24? It's a tough call. On the one hand I'm the thinner one and he's the one with the bigger collection of geeky memorabilia...but I'm also the more emotional one whereas he's the more grounded and efficient one. **

** No, I am not saying he's the husband and I'm the wife. That kind of talk is childish, not to mention sexist, and has no place among adults. Quite frankly I'm surprised you even thought such a thing.

Now these points of data make a beautiful line

2008-04-16T01:21:00.001-04:00

Jonathan Coulton's song for the video game Portal is lovely all by itself, but this tribute to the Amiga computer -- animated on an Amiga 4000T -- takes it to an even higher level. (Even more so if you know the context of the song in the game.)

Read the comments at the above link to understand the regard in which the Amiga platform is still held by hardcore computer graphics geeks. I am neither a hardcore computer graphics geek nor a video gamer, but I can enjoy good geek humor and good animation when it's put in front of me.

And like I say, the song is great by itself. (Lyrics here.)

This post is for Howard, as soon as he has a chance to read it.

Stan Lee even called to remind me

2008-04-15T19:41:00.002-04:00

As various people have noted, the New York Comic Con begins Friday.

New York may not yet have the repute or high profile of San Diego, but if this year's guest list is anything to go by, that won't be the case much longer. And you thought last year was overstuffed! We're moving from "finally a major comics industry event in New York again" to "another multimedia showcase promoting Hollywood that pushes aside the comics people, sending them in search of smaller events" with remarkable speed. Two years ago it was all about the comics, man.

That said, it's certainly been a major event of the year for me over the past couple of years and this year will be the same poignant combination of joy and heartbreak as always. Since some folks have expressed an interest in my plans, I thought I'd post a quick rundown here.

To start with, I'll be there all three days. My name badge lists "Estoreal" as my company affiliation -- apart from anything else, this is the only way Redhead Fangirl can recognize me from year to year -- so if you spot a debonair stranger with a certain reckless charm wearing a badge that mentions this blog, feel free to say hello. I always have time for my public.

I originally expected to spend most of my time at the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center table -- this has always been the best way to meet everyone at a convention, since everyone stops by to visit sooner or later -- but it turns out we won't have one this year. Instead, Rand Hoppe will be helping out at the TwoMorrows Publishing table, so chances are good I'll be hanging around there instead.

I'll also be stopping by the Sequart.com table, as they'll be showing off copies of Teenagers From The Future, the Legion of Super-Heroes anthology edited by the rugged yet urbane Timothy Callahan. If you want, I'll even sign your copy...if Tim says I can.

The one panel event I expect to be attending on Friday is a screening of the Will Eisner documentary at noon, and the discussion afterward. On Saturday, there's the Steve Gerber memorial panel, and the Legion of Super-Heroes panel, the Grant Morrison spotlight, and the Venture Bros panel which was such a highlight last year, and then the ReBoot panel...

I'm going to be totally burned out when this weekend is over.

Sweet food of knowledge

2008-04-05T00:58:00.002-04:00

1. I so wanted this to be true:

(via Serious Eats)

2. Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

"Caffeine appears to block several of the disruptive effects of cholesterol that make the blood-brain barrier leaky," said Dr Jonathan Geiger, who led the study. "High levels of cholesterol are a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, perhaps by compromising the protective nature of the blood brain barrier. Caffeine is a safe and readily available drug and its ability to stabilise the blood brain barrier means it could have an important part to play in therapies against neurological disorders."

And I really hope this one is true. I make a lot of jokes about getting old and my memory failing and does anyone else remember The Amazing Three because that was a very strange cartoon and what was I just saying a moment ago? But the reason I make such jokes is that my family history contains more than a few examples of dementia and it's something that scares the crap out of me. But I also drink coffee.

(via Daring Fireball)

3. Finally, an ad jingle for Rice Krispies by The Rolling Stones, circa 1964:

(via The New Yorker)

Jim Mooney

2008-04-01T02:35:00.005-04:00

Jim Mooney interviewed by Chris Knowles:

Certainly I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about the nine years I spent on Supergirl. First of all, it was a strip that wasn't terribly challenging. After a while, you were pretty much doing the same thing over and over. The other thing I didn't like about it was, before that I was doing some stuff for DC, House of Mystery and so on, in a much more sophisticated style. When I started on Supergirl, Mort Weisinger insisted it had to be what he considered the "house style." It had to look the way he wanted it, which was much simpler than the way I'd been drawing previously. So, I was pretty much fenced in by that particular requirement that Mort had. If I changed my style at all, he'd call me into his office and say, "What are you trying to do, make a million bucks? Do you have somebody ghosting for you?" I said, "No, I was just trying something a little different." He said, "Well, don't! Draw it the way you were drawing it before."

Steve Gerber interviewed by Dan Best:

I first became aware of Jim Mooney without even knowing that the person drawing it was Jim. That’d be Tommy Tomorrow back in Action Comics in the mid ‘50s. With the Planeteers in their purple and red Bermuda shorts. I first became aware of him at DC in one of Mort Weisinger’s letter columns. They were having a vote for a new hair-style for Supergirl and in the lead up Mort wrote that the drawings were all done by Supergirls’ regular artist, Jim Mooney. Then all of a sudden it was, Oh, that’s who this guy is! He’s been drawing this stuff for ten years and I’ve been loving it as a kid and now I know who it is.

Omega was a departure for Jim, although it had all of the elements that made a strip like Supergirl really appealing. The way he drew kids was just remarkable. I’m sure that an editor brought up his name and I agreed to it immediately of course, but I don’t recall the exact process of his selection. We did have a lot of phone conversations and I liked him a hell of a lot, he’s a wonderful guy to talk to and he really understood what Mary (Skrenes) and I were going for with Omega, and what I was trying to do with Man-Thing. He was a very, very perceptive artist with a keen appreciation of story.

Above, just a couple of my favorite sequences by Jim Mooney. However he may have felt about working on Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes for Mort Weisinger, he still managed to do some exceptional work...and Gerber was exactly right in seeing a direct line from the strengths of that earlier work to his later accomplishments with Omega and Man-Thing and Son of Satan and even to his final work for Claypool Comics.

Yet another of life's little disappointments

2008-03-03T03:02:00.007-05:00

Wow, I really don't know what to...oh. Branson. I read too quickly. Dammit.

But really, can you blame them? Imagine the house Richard Branson bought for his mother. Now think of what Jesus put his mom through. Which one would you rather have for a son?

(Read the original here.)

The first cut won't hurt at all, the second only makes you wonder

2008-02-24T15:57:00.002-05:00

Steve Whitaker 1955-2008

Whitko was the first person I ever knew who was as crazy as I was about Kirby's Fourth World and Gerber's Omega the Unknown. He helped me find a flat in London that was walking distance from his place in Twickenham. Before that I must have stayed at his place ninety times. (So you see why he was so keen to help me find a place of my own.) He wasn't born in London and he didn't die in London...but he loved that city and simply walking down the street with him was an education in the history and customs and noumena of the place. Everyone wanted to be near him for the endless stream of learning and knowledge he had to share.

Others at the link above have more to say.

I am so totally fucking sick of death right now.