Ninety years later...

As I've said before, why make a special post for Jack Kirby Day when every day is Jack Kirby Day?

Two and two is...

Lately it seems I've fallen in with a bad crowd of meme addicts. True story: when I saw that Ben had been tagged by Becca with "The Meme of Four" my first thought before he even posted his entry was "I bet Ben tags me for this next, because I've previously shown myself to be an easy mark, a patsy, a sucker for this sort of thing." And lo, it came to pass!

The way this one works is that I give four responses in each category, then add a new category of my own at the end before tagging four other suckers. And so...

Four jobs I've had or currently have in my life:

1. sales clerk in a bookstore
2. answering telephones in a print shop
3. sign painter (only once: I misspelled "stationery")
4. handing out flyers in the street

Four countries I've been to:

1. Canada
2. England
3. Holland
4. New Zealand

Four places I'd rather be right now:

1. Ordering lunch at the Fishmonger's Cafe.
2. Visiting the Akihabara for the first time.
3. Having a pint at the Melton Mowbray in Holborn, London.
4. In bed with your sister, if by some unlikely chance you happen to be Jake Gyllenhaal.

Four foods I like to eat:

1. tuna sashimi
2. shrimp tempura
3. Belgian-style fries
4. oil-cured black olives

Four personal heroes, past or present:

1. Jack Kirby
2. Kurt Vonnegut, for reasons previously stated.
3. Mary Shelley, a brilliant writer who at the age of 19 understood what science was all about before they even used that word.
4. My dad -- this might seem a safe or gratuitous choice, but the truth is every day I find myself consciously emulating him in one way or another.

Four books I've just read or am currently reading:

1. The Homeward Bounders by Diana Wynne Jones
2. The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain
3. Changing Planes by Ursula K. LeGuin
4. Science Fiction At Large, edited by Peter Nicholls

Four words or phrases I'd like to see used more often:

1. gawrsh
2. flibbertigibbet
3. pellucid
4. spot on

Four performances in history I'd attend If I had a TARDIS to bring me there:

1. 9 December 1978, Studio 8H in the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center, New York: Kate Bush performs as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, hosted by Eric Idle.
2. 30 January 1969, roof of 3 Savile Row, London: the Beatles perform "Get Back" three times (!) as well as several other songs from the album Let It Be for a bemused audience of office workers before the police show up.
3. 24 November 1964, Marquee Club, 90 Wardour Street, London: the Who play a gig for an audience of less than 30 people. We have reason to believe it was spectacular; word of mouth from those who attended was so positive that one week later, the band's next show at the Marquee had an attendance of nearly 300.
4. I'm stumped for a fourth choice. With the whole of human history and every variety of performing arts to choose from, I've picked three examples of pop music from within my own lifetime. I should probably mix it up a little and go for something like, I dunno, a 1599 performance of Henry V at the Globe Theatre? But that seems so forced. I'm definitely not fond of crowds, so the big theatrical events of history aren't what I'd choose anyway. I'd rather find something small and intimate that no one knew was going to be historic.

And the category I'll add to this meme is...four things I like:

1. coffee
2. used book stores
3. Earth shoes
4. voice actors and actresses

And the four people I'll tag are:

1. Rob
2. Mark
3. Joel
4. Jeff

Gotham on the Champlain

I don't know how I missed hearing about this, but apparently it's old news that six-term Senator from Vermont, Senate Judiciary Committee chair, nemesis of Dick "go fuck yourself" Cheney -- and longtime Batman fan -- Patrick Leahy has a speaking role in The Dark Knight.

After the attention his bonehead colleague from Alaska got simply for wearing a Hulk tie, I'm surprised the Leahy news didn't get more play in the comics blogosphere. Or maybe it did and I just didn't see it?

They certainly seem to be loving it in the political blogosphere, especially since it provides endless opportunities for all the predictable Adam West/Burt Ward-inspired headlines like "Zap! Pow!" and "Holy Beltway, Batman!" Surely we can do better than that...

The road

That's my mom a few steps ahead of us on the road into town one evening.

In 1977, my family started spending summer vacations in this town. The year is fixed in my mind because I remember hearing on the radio that Elvis Presley had died while we were there. We took a house about a mile away from town, and we'd walk along this road -- past the route to the beach with the cast iron lighthouse, past the restaurant in the geodesic dome, past the dock where tourists boarded the ferry to the more desirable tourist destination -- to reach the post office, the grocery store, a few places to eat, and the drug store. Besides aspirin and suntan lotion, the drug store sold paperbacks and magazines and comics.

A couple of my happiest discoveries were Robert Heinlein's Time Enough For Love and Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven. The last year we were there, I found the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson in that same drug store. I scoured the magazine rack for new issues of Starlog and its spinoff publication Future Life. But of course I lived for the comics spinner rack. I don't know why the memory of buying Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes #233 there should be particularly vivid -- the comic itself didn't seem especially good or memorable to me even at the time -- but it's inextricably linked to that time and place. I can remember a dozen other comics I bought in the same place just as clearly.

As we walked back I'd usually be a few steps behind the rest of my family, lost in thought while plotting comics. My imaginary comics tended to be multi-issue epics, closely patterned after what Chris Claremont was doing in The Uncanny X-Men and Iron Fist. One of my ideas involved a time-travelling mutant sent back to our era by a benevolent future leader to protect the leader during his present day boyhood. How could I have guessed that both The Terminator and The Invisibles would swipe from me? Besides my own characters, I mapped out an elaborate story featuring the Legion of Substitute Heroes, because it seemed like no one had done anything interesting with them. I devoted much thought to a thorough revamp of Karate Kid -- the comics character, not the film series -- a great character cursed with a lame solo series. I was always more inspired by bad comics and the desire to improve on them than by good ones. I never put any of it down on paper; just endlessly rehearsed and reworked it all in my head. To this day I still do most of my writing on long walks, and this road is where I developed the habit.

Our last family trip has to have been in 1981. (This date is the subject of much heated debate between my sister and myself -- she's convinced it was earlier -- but I'm right.) This year my mother and my sister devised a plan for us all to return there and rent a house the way we used to. The town was almost exactly the same as I remembered it, but of course there were some differences: my dad is gone (he died shortly before I started blogging, in fact) and we were joined by my sister's husband and their two sons. The drug store is gone, replaced by a coffee house which offers live jazz in the evenings and free wi-fi connectivity. The nearest comics shop is an hour's drive away, though the book store in the neighboring town had a shelf of graphic novels and several shelves of manga had I been so inclined.

My sister's older boy spent a great deal of time inside reading the last volume of Harry Potter, but as I've mentioned he and his younger brother aren't interested in comics so they didn't go around plotting imaginary series in their heads. While we were up there, my first story for Flashback Universe came out (as you may have heard) with more to come. I've scripted a yet-to-be-announced six-issue miniseries for an indie publisher, and I've got a new project coming up soon. I could walk down this road again and honestly tell my younger self I didn't forget...

...hey, are they having a party down at the Coast Guard station? With all those colored lights it sure looks like it...


...no, it looks like that every night. Sure seems festive, though.

Tom Swift and his geodesic dome

It's nearly impossible to get a good full shot of it due to the surrounding trees, but this is the first geodesic dome building ever constructed by Buckminster Fuller. Despite a bit of sagging and superficial damage, the structure, sixty feet in diameter, is in remarkably good shape 55 years later.

For a very long time it was a restaurant, a good one. Disappointingly, they put a roof inside to cover the interior of the dome...but while it would have been spectacular to see, I can only imagine how difficult it would have been to manage such practical matters as acoustics and air conditioning if they'd left the entirety of the dome interior exposed. The restaurant closed not too long ago; the interior view shows the place in its present abandoned state.


The Dome is currently being investigated by the state historical commission and may qualify for listing in the National Register of Historic Places...but the property on which it rests has been targeted by a developer seeking to build condominiums on the land. This is a major story for the local newspaper (only published twice a week and 80% of each issue seems to consist of obituary listings) and may end up playing a role in a statewide grassroots effort to repeal an outdated state law which grants developers the right to bypass local zoning laws more or less at will.

I'd like to see the Dome preserved and revived. Perhaps used as a restaurant again, or perhaps some other use that would make it accessible to the public rather than making it the private property of the owners of expensive condos. I don't believe in ghosts, but if I did, I'd think that place would be full of them. Not only ghosts from the past, but also from the imaginary techno-utopian luxe future where posh restaurants are built in geodesic domes and robot valets accept the keys to your Dymaxion car before you board the Pan-Am space clipper for a jaunt to the orbital Hilton.

Valkyrie

A specimen collecting ship docked near the oldest research aquarium in the United States.

Having four research institutions devoted to marine biology and environmental science located in one town guarantees one thing at least: the quality of the raw seafood is spectacular. The look of horror mingled with disgust on my sister's face while I savored cherrystones and littlenecks on the half shell only made them sweeter.

Thirty years earlier in the same town I watched with fear and envy as adults consumed piles of raw shellfish, wishing I was brave enough to try one but never daring to make the attempt. To come back three decades later and actually be one of those adults (while my sister's children looked on as I once did) was everything I could have hoped it would be.

Well, except for not being married to Kate Bush and not flying there on my jetpack. But I don't want to sound greedy.

A long walk

One of the docks at the seawall, with a fisherman barely visible at the far end. This particular town is not a tourist destination...though many hundreds of them pass through every day en route to the ferry going to the island in the distance, which is a major tourist spot.

Where I've been

Yeah, I came back after all! Many thanks to John and Red and Jeff for reminding me I hadn't been forgotten, and to GTS for plugging my Flashback Universe debut while I was away. These thoughtful gestures are much appreciated.

Above is the same beach from the previous photo, now seen from the other end, taken from the twisting road that runs past a cast-iron lighthouse from 1876 which is still in use. Most days were remarkably clear and sunny...but on the particular day I chose to get these shots of the beach an afternoon fog came in, making the distances recede into an atmospheric haze.

Where I'm at

Further updates after I return. If I return.

In the meantime, my friends Felix, Nick, Tommy and Jenny invite you to join them for afternoon tea over at their place. I'm not entirely sure of their address, but directions can be found here.

Shuffle mode

I managed to screw up my back last weekend through overzealous exercise, leading to a couple of days when walking around was excruciatingly painful and merely sitting in front of this keyboard was very uncomfortable indeed. So my renewed burst of regular blogging got conked on the head just as it was getting started. I'm mostly better now, but on Friday I was still concerned enough about not putting extra strain on my back that I cancelled plans for dinner and an outing to Rocketship with Jeff Brady...

...only to have my sister show up unexpectedly with my nephews. They're great kids -- funny, jaded, cheerful, and well-adjusted in all the ways my sister and I certainly never were -- even if they do insist on being far older than they ought to be. I remember seeing each of them the day they were born and now the older one is getting ready to start high school. Surely children must be starting high school at an earlier age these days, that's the only reasonable explanation. I hardly get to see them...but I greeted the visit with mixed emotions, as I'd bailed on those dinner plans specifically to take it easy Friday evening to be sure I was in good shape to attend the MoCCA Art Festival on Saturday. And here I was entertaining two energetic boys and their harried mother instead, trying to think of refreshments and diversions that would make me seem like Cool Uncle instead of Lame Tired Pathetic Uncle. I had what seemed like a brilliant inspiration to take them to Forbidden Planet which is very close to me. Bit of an ulterior motive there, the store has toys and models and video games so surely something would be a hit with them...and I'd get to see what caught their attention and what their sort of kid thinks is cool. But when we got there, my nephews were about as excited as they would have been on a trip to a shoe store. No, I tell a lie: they would have been much more excited by a shoe store. Both kids used to read comics and were at one time very keen on the Spider-Man films as well as anything Harry Potter. My sister had warned me it would be a dud, but I had to see it for myself. These are two completely normal, well-adjusted kids...and completely normal, well-adjusted kids have no interest in anything to do with fantasy or SF or (least interesting of all) comics in any form. There may be some added parental influence there -- my sister has always disapproved of anything to do with SF or comics; her vehemence is very telling indeed, considering that both our parents were avid SF and comics fans -- but my nephews almost certainly don't have any geek friends at school either.

It was a good evening out overall, apart from that one entirely predictable disappointment...but that one bit gave me a vision of my comics writing ambitions leading to a future where at best I'd be writing for an ever shrinking group of sad holdouts, getting on into their fifties and sixties, waxing nostalgic as we wheeze at one another "Remember that one, 52 it was called? Came out every single week! Ah, comics were great in those days, not like today..." And no one else will know what we're talking about. I want someday to write a comic that my counterpart, someone who might be ten or twelve now, would think was cool. But would I even be reading comics at all if I were twelve today? I probably couldn't afford them...

...so I was in a funny state of mind going into MoCCA the next day. Fortunately my mood was considerably lifted by spending time with that paragon of manly ruggedness Timothy Callahan, the shockingly talented and destined for imminent greatness Todd Casey, and the aforementioned pillar of virtue that is Jeff Brady before my back started to ache again and I decided it was time to call it a day. I no longer care if only elderly people will be reading my scribbling, so long as they are fine elderly folks like those people, and the other people I met and chatted with at MoCCA, and of course all the wonderful people reading this blog...

...and at MoCCA was some inkling of what my next big project will most likely be, and if this comes through as planned it will be a corker indeed...

...and with Harriet now deputy leader of the Labour Party, this spares her any need to be locked inside the Cabinet Room with a visiting doctor and his assistant before rising to national prominence. But if I were her, I'd be very careful around Christmastime: that's when people are prone to start asking "Don't you think she looks tired?"

I'm pretty sure I do. So now I'm going to bed.

Eight for a fool

Knowing I'm a willing patsy, Ben Varkentine has tagged me with another meme:

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.


2. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.


3. People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.


4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. (You’re not the boss of me!)


5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

And here are the guaranteed true facts:

1. I was born with severe strabismus. By the time I was four years old I had undergone four separate eye operations, two on each eye. As a result I have never had stereoscopic vision or depth perception.

2. When I was ten, a teacher admitted to my parents that she'd been giving me lower grades in English class than my work deserved because she thought this would motivate me to work harder. This was about a year after I started reading Kurt Vonnegut.

3. I'm the only member of my family who has never been fluent in any other language besides English.

4. My first kiss was in a theater at a late afternoon showing of Monty Python's Life of Brian. I had already seen the film a couple of days earlier, and took this girl I liked to see it after we got out of school that day. We're watching the movie, and suddenly she starts kissing me. My first thought was "I've waited for this my whole life! This is awesome!" My second thought was "But she's gonna miss the scene where the alien spaceship swoops down and grabs Brian!" My third thought was "Eh...so she'll have to see it again."

5. I worked for a few years as a professional guitar tech -- and once built an entire electric guitar from leftover parts -- despite not actually being able to play guitar. But I could wire pickups, set the action, and correctly intonate a bridge like nobody's business.

6. Twelve years ago I appeared in a television commercial. It was one of those things where they have ordinary people who've tried the product give testimonials to its benefits: "I'm amazed at how well it worked" and "I would recommend this without hesitation" and like that. I got to see the commercial only once, at about 2 AM. My expression on camera looked like a stunned deer staring into the headlights of an oncoming car.

7. I have received fan mail from Michael Chabon. I also once touched the sleeve of his corduroy sports coat: my tendonitis cleared up and has never returned since. I wish I'd asked him to heal my eyes as well.

8. I own two santoku knives, two serrated bread knives, a chef's knife, a cleaver, and three cutting boards. If you live in the New York City area and need a body disposed of, I'm your guy.

Tagging people always seems like such an imposition, so consider yourself free to ignore this if you'd prefer...and anyone else who wants to try this meme should consider themselves retroactively invited. But the rules say I have to name names, so hello Cole, Erich, Fortress Keeper, Gordon, Matt, Rob, Todd, and Walaka!

Half a page of scribbled lines

The meme theme continues with a challenge from plok to create a premise for a new television series about time travel.

The problem with loving time travel stories and reading every one you can find and then trying to think of an original idea is that you keep recognizing what's already been done! Heinlein did that already. John Varley covered that. I had one idea I really liked before realizing Trey Parker beat me to it. (South Park is surprisingly fluent with its time travel episodes.) What I've ended up with instead is a knowing and deliberate homage/rebuttal to one of my all-time favorite stories: "Vintage Season" by C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner. Also a fair bit of influence from stories by William Tenn, namely "Child's Play" and "Errand Boy."

This one is called "Tourists."

Four people arrive at JFK Airport. Nothing about them gives any clue where they're from. They speak flawless unaccented English -- and, it turns out, every other language they encounter, with equal perfection. The first is an incredibly successful artist, hungry for authentic sensation and experience to be transmuted into her future work. The second is a jovial and friendly old man who has retired from his life's work and now indulges his passion for learning. The third is a graduate student in history whose trip was paid for by a wealthy patron. The last is their somewhat stiff-necked tour guide, showing the rest around and pointing out things of interest. His three charges look around gaping, awestruck by the sheer strangeness of their surroundings. They're charmed by how primitive and pastoral this airport and its inhabitants are. So many people! The jumbo jets -- people actually get inside those huge rickety things? How delightful!

They're a tour group from the distant future visiting the present day, here to fully experience the last phase of our culture before...that really bad thing happened and it all fell apart. Centuries later it simply isn't discussed in polite company but everyone knows how awful it was. The hints of it are all around but no one living at the time sees where it's going to lead. It's quite touching and tragic, really, how blithely they dance on the edge of the precipice without ever realizing it's there.

The behavior of the tourists is much like that of the wealthy person visiting the Third World today. They're friendly to the natives and absolutely charmed by our strange primitive customs and quaint way of life...but with a smiling condescension rooted in the assumption they're better and smarter than we are.

As they explore New York City, the group is supposed to stay together...but the student wanders off on her own. She's spent considerable time in the ruins, of course, but actually seeing the place when it isn't submerged under the ocean is amazing. Anyway, a history major certainly knows the rules of chronal disengagement and she hardly needs that supercilious Guide to instruct her on how to behave. She befriends a poor inner city child and asks the little girl to show her around, to see the 21st Century through the eyes of a typical crecheling. As a reward, the student entertains the little girl with a demonstration of some future gadgetry: the pantograft, the attolens, the gravisend -- it's so sweet how the simplest things dazzle them! -- and that's when the others catch up. The flustered Guide gives the student a warning on not contaminating the past with anachronistic displays of technology. They argue over what constitutes harmless fun.

This foreshadows the growing conflict within the tour group. As they travel around the world, the history student gets increasingly involved with our time: seeing how basically innocent and naive we are, and so totally undeserving of...well, you know, what's coming. How can decent people just stand by and watch? The kindly old man is sympathetic, but he also knows sometimes you just have to let things happen as they will. The conceited artist is unsympathetic: she needs to take in more unmediated misery and suffering in its purest form to make truly powerful art. Come on, people, there's a horrible famine going on: you can't honestly expect her to miss that! The Guide is caught in an awkward position: each of his charges represents serious power and wealth, and his impulse is to be subservient and win favor. Any one of these people could wreck his career and ruin his life if they become displeased; he has to act as referee without offending any of them.

The student, who's on our side and wants to help us, is essentially the bad guy here: she's talking about changing history, or at least helping ease the suffering of individuals if they must leave the vast flow of events intact. But how can she know what's acceptable meddling and what's too much?

Structurally I see this as episodic, not a story arc building up to a huge climax a la Heroes or The 4400, but still with continuing threads and character building. The student's desire to get involved develops slowly over a series of episodes, as does her conflict with the artist: the two of them would finally get fed up and have a big actual fight with future technology and gadgets, so ray blasts and force fields and anti-grav circuits ahoy...but it wouldn't really solve anything.

We would never get to see the future the tourists come from, getting our picture of it solely by implication from the things they say. (The budget department is welcome to send me flowers.) Weirdly enough, given the premise of this challenge, we don't ever see time travel take place: the tourists have just arrived as the story opens, and time travel itself is so expensive and power-expending that it isn't done lightly. You set off on your tragical history tour -- ha ha ha, I crack myself up! -- and you had bloody well better be finished when the Guide activates the recall signal that brings the group home.

And finally, we do not see or find out much about the big event that's so terrible in our future. That would erode the premise and destroy whatever mystique it originally had. The tourists will leave before it arrives, no fools they. (Whether or not the student decides to stay, marooning herself to eventually die here, is another matter. Or will she resign herself to the past being inevitable? Will the artist learn empathy? Will the old man find out something shocking about an ancient ancestor? Will they meet other visitors from the future? Are there contemporary people who know about the time travelers and serve as native bearers?) The real point here is to look at our culture and ways through the eyes of visitors who know how it all turns out, and give us the opportunity for poignant or humorous or satirical commentary on our failings...and while we're at it, to show how America and the West in general treats other cultures in our own time.

So whaddya think, sirs and madams?

Just what I needed

The following meme comes from PJ via Ben Varkentine: search for “[your name] needs” on Google and see what comes up.

*

Richard needs...

...your votes
Some campaign donations wouldn't go amiss either.

...forgiveness
Constantly.

...to have life ordered and predictable
It's a coping mechanism because so much of my life has been neither of those things.

...to finish grade school
That's not very nice.

...to give out the coupons to the orchestra
Please stand in an orderly line, woodwinds in front, then brass, then strings, then percussion.

...Elizabeth right now
Last name please! I've known a lot of Elizabeths.

...Nick
Nick, you know Elizabeth, right? I hope you two get along.

...his red horse
Whee!

...a Mac
Sure, I'm always looking to upgrade.

...100 new bandanas for his fitness class
They'll conceal my physique and make me look fabulous.

...serious help
Hey!

...to get a better editor
To my editors: this is not true, I love you all.

...the mud people to call a council of seers
I know if we all work together, we can develop this "shower" thing.

...coffee now, or he’ll slip away
So very true.

...to shower because he has a stink about him
Man...only a stranger will tell you, huh?

...the audience as an outlet in a world where he is alone
Welcome to my whole freaking life!

*

Having found these, it occurred to me that I might be tampering with meme karma somehow by using my given name rather than the name I blog under. So I tried again:

RAB needs...

...help, says leading psychologist
Yeah, yeah, we got that already.

...to be modified
I've heard that before as well.

...writers
Now that's just mean. I do the best I can.

...support
I'm looking for something that will lift AND separate.

...defined procedures and a mission and goals that are clearly stated and understood by all participants
Step one, steal underpants. Step three, profit. What could be clearer?

...to just read the Plain Dealer
Mainly I just use it to cover my head in the rain.

...to understand the power of horcrux to view destroying it as essential to Voldemort's destruction
Surely you're thinking of someone else.

...a car
And a driver's license.

...to calm down
Aren't there pills for that?

...a detox
Okay, maybe the pills weren't such a good idea.

...to learn how to spell
If you keep throwing made-up words like "horcrux" and "gillyweed" at me, naturally there will be the occasional mistake.

...to buy new cymbals
Buy your own damn cymbals. Bad enough I had to lug your old ones around for all those years.

...to be seen in perspective
I'm more worried about my vanishing point...

Out from under

For the first time in months I have no pending writing jobs or deadlines hanging over my head. Now I can do stuff like, I dunno, watch a DVD instead of...watching a DVD and feeling guilty about it because I should be writing that thing instead. Of course I'll still be writing every night, but without the crushing guilt and shame. Except for the crushing guilt and shame that's with me every waking moment -- but that's another story, doctor.

The biggest thing on my plate this past month was an essay for an upcoming book on the Legion of Super-Heroes being compiled and edited by Tim Callahan, who is both author of Grant Morrison: The Early Years and my close personal friend.

I got an early copy of Tim's book -- the first of a promised three volumes, corresponding to three phases of Morrison's career to date -- at NYCC this year. I've read it all the way through more than once since then...most recently while trying to get in the right frame of mind to write in a similarly analytical manner about old Legion stories from Adventure Comics. Tim strikes a very good balance in writing about comics from a literary perspective without getting mired in lit crit jargon. He hasn't got anything to prove; if you're reading a book about Grant Morrison in the first place, presumably you're already of the opinion that Morrison's comics are worth writing about and stand up to close reading. If you're that sort of person, and I am, this book is well worth a look. The sample pages at the sequart.org link above as well as this appreciation of Morrison's early "Future Shocks" from 2000 AD will give you a good idea of whether or not the book is for you.

Do not think for a moment that my appreciation of the cultured and urbane Mr. Callahan is in any way influenced by the fact that a piece of my writing is now awaiting his approval. The last thing I would ever want would be for his objective evaluation of my work to be swayed at all by my deep and heartfelt admiration for the brilliance of his critical insights. Fortunately, a man of such high moral and ethical caliber as Mr. Callahan would not allow his head to be turned by mere flattery. Truly a paragon among men, and one whose example we can all but hope to emulate.

Writing at length about the Legion of Super-Heroes was a trip and a half. I was heavily involved with organized Legion fandom back in the day, but that day was a long time ago. Doing the essay was partly an act of personal archaeology. I tried to look at those stories more objectively than I ever did before in a way that I hoped would satisfy the editor (mere words cannot do justice, I am unworthy to offer praise) and maybe even persuade a few readers that those stories were a bit cooler and more innovative than they might seem from a distance of more than forty years. It's probably a safe bet that anyone reading a book of essays about the Legion already thinks that, but who can say for sure?

About a hundred times while writing it, I wished comics scholar supreme Richard Morrissey was still around so that I could check my facts with him and get some historical insight...and then a hundred times I would realize that if he were around I wouldn't have been writing it in the first place, because he was better qualified for the task.

Anyway, that's all done with, and I'll be starting on a new round of pitches and query letters soon. Here's a thought, maybe I'll write some blog posts too...

A giving thing

Courtesy of Stuart Immonen:

If you're like me, and have wanted to donate to the fund to assist the family of the late Tom Artis, but are unable to write a cheque in U.S. funds, Tom Spurgeon has announced on the Comics Reporter that he is collecting PayPal funds for a single mass donation on Memorial Day.

More on Tom Artis from his friend and collaborator Peter B. Gillis here and here.

I can't afford a large donation myself, but being able to contribute even a small amount via PayPal lets me feel like I was able to do something. All the more so if mentioning it here can help encourage other people to chip in a tiny bit: maybe it all adds up. Tom Spurgeon says he's sending a check to the Artis family on Monday, so there's still time if anyone reading this also wants to join in.

I know what it's like to be at home as a full-time caregiver to a terminally ill family member. My situation wasn't comparable to the one Kim Artis and their children were in, or are in now...but when I think of how psychologically devastating it was, in addition to the simple material demands, I can only guess at how overwhelming it must be for the Artis family now, and how brave that woman has to be in facing these additional financial woes with two children to raise on her own.

I didn't know hardly anything about Tom Artis before he died: reading the reminiscences of Peter Gillis made me feel like I really missed something there. Here was a guy who loved the comics medium and chose to work in it despite considerable risk and little reward, and that makes us part of the same family. So I made the small donation I could manage, and encourage you to do the same.

Doctor Wayne

Since "The Black Casebook" mentioned in Batman #665 has received favorable mention (here for instance) as an example of Grant Morrison refusing to throw away even the bizarre and goofy bits of Batman history, I thought it might be interesting to look at the little-known part of the Batcave where Bruce Wayne might store that particular volume.

From JLA Classified #1 by Grant Morrison, Ed McGuinness and Dexter Vines:



Let's have a closer look. He's got what appear to be Thanagarian police wings, he pulls out a Kirbyesque-looking "Boom Tube Gauntlet" for travelling through spacetime, and there are a few other items I can't identify but which look familiar...and oh yeah, over there on the right...



...Batman keeps a freaking Dalek in his "Sci-Fi Closet." Presumably captured during the Dalek Invasion of Gotham City. Which he stopped all by himself. Didn't even need a sonic screwdriver. That's how tough he is. Goofy wandering Time Lords are advised to stay out of his city.

Was this JLA story never reprinted? Why not, when it provides significant information on the backstory to Seven Soldiers?

Congratulations are presumably in order

My old friend and former drinking buddy Neil Gaiman reports:

I have to fly to the UK this afternoon, for Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's wedding on Saturday. There's too much travelling involved in the next few weeks, especially when I just want to stay home and walk the dog and write before the madness of the summer, but this one trip I'm doing because I want to, and I'm looking forward to it. Alan says he's going to wear a blue bowler hat for the wedding, and frankly that's worth flying across the Atlantic to see.

It's always touching when pornographers get married, isn't it? No, I kid. I kid because I love pornography nearly as much as I love Moore's and Gebbie's comics.

The prospect of marriage has always seemed very strange and foreign to me -- I felt that way even when I was actually engaged and wondering what it would feel like to go through such an alien ritual, though as it happened I never did find out -- but I'm sure it's a lovely thing for them what are keen on it. And if Alan Moore or Melinda Gebbie were reading this blog, I'd offer them my best wishes.

See, this is why you don't want me as best man at your wedding.

New universes will be born from ours

Not a quote from the last issue of 52, but a headline from the New Scientist a few weeks ago:

What gruesome fate awaits our universe? Some physicists have argued that it is doomed to be ripped apart by runaway dark energy, while others think it is bouncing through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. Now these two ideas are being combined to create another option, in which our universe ultimately shatters into billions of pieces, with each shard growing into a whole new universe.

Maybe this has happened already, and our universe is just one among of billions. Why should our universe occupy any privileged position of being the first and only, simply because we happen to be in this one? I'm just saying...

Parallel universes and alternate Earths have always been my favorite science fictional concept...all the more so since I started learning they had some scientific plausibility, or at least theoretical respectability: parallel universes have been well established in the fields of quantum physics and cosmology for the past century.

I first encountered the concept in The Flash #179, cover dated May 1968. Knocked into an alternate Earth where he exists only as a comic book character, the Flash visits Julie Schwartz at the offices of DC Comics, seeking his help to build a Cosmic Treadmill that will bring him back to his own Earth...itself a world where a man named Gardner Fox wrote comic books about a Flash named Jay Garrick, not Barry Allen. Then came Justice League of America #64, set entirely on Earth-2 and introduced the new Red Tornado to the Justice Society of America -- my first introduction to any of those characters. I was fascinated not because I found these new characters inherently more interesting than the JLA I'd already been reading about, but because these were counterparts to them. Not quite duplicates, but conceptual analogues. And then, just a month later, was Avengers Annual #2 in which the Avengers meet themselves from a parallel universe altered by the time machinations of the Scarlet Centurion.

These three comics came out within a span of five months, so I was getting a concentrated heavy dose of...um, "parallelism" there. And I developed a heavy bias for the kind of story that didn't just focus on the alternate history -- What if...Spartacus had flown a Piper Cub? What if...Joe McCarthy had become vice president? -- but that brought counterparts or alternates together, in which we see how the Northerner reacts to a world where the South never fell or you get to meet your own double from an alternate Earth. How do people react to learning that things aren't the way they are because that's the way they are and there's no alternative, and in fact things could have been very different?

Because I was so keen on this kind of story, I did a bit of reading on quantum physics, and discovered Schrodinger's mocking dismissal of parallel universes by putting an imaginary cat in an imaginary box and thereby making the cat even more imaginary, and thought that when Heidegger asked "Why is there something rather than nothing?" he might also have phrased it as "Why does one thing happen rather than another thing?"

So I always wondered why Marv Wolfman resorted to such extraordinary means to eliminate all those wonderful parallel Earths from DC Comics. The original concept had real science (well, scientific theory) behind it, but this new single DC Universe was a manifestly illogical and internally inconsistent construct. (For that matter, I'm still always a little bit thrown by the anal-retentive impulse in comics writing that says "I don't like this story element, so I'll devote huge amounts of time and energy to explaining it away and eliminating it so that no one else can use it" instead of, you know, just simply not using it in stories.) And now I wonder why the last issue of 52 had to employ such convoluted and baroque means to bring back those same universes, shoehorning it into the last issue...especially when Infinite Crisis teased us with the same reveal and then chickened out. I'd have been just as happy if Rip Hunter or someone turned up and said "No parallel universes? Are you nuts? They've been here all along! Oh, except for this weird vibrational anomaly that kept us from visiting them for the past few years. Fixed now!"

But whether by chance or by reading that same New Scientist article, the writers of 52 found the correct image of universes shattering into new ones, and that counts for something. The notion that there are only 52 of them is still unnecessarily constricting...but it can easily be ignored by subsequent writers, who can say very simply that the process doesn't end, that new variant universes must always be splitting off and forming all the time. The question comes down to "can we tell interesting stories?" rather than "how tidy does this look on somebody's wall chart?" and anything that increases the number of possibilities and options rather than decreasing them is a good thing.

Some readers may be welcoming back the multiple Earths because that's how things were when they started reading comics -- as I've said, there's a fair bit of that in me -- just as some folks may now be a bit peeved because they started reading DC comics since 1985 and this isn't the setup from their childhood. But I'm gonna say there's another reason to welcome this change, beyond mere nostalgia. It's the same reason I fell in love with the concept way back when, the same reason parallel universes and alternate histories fascinate me in real life: letting the tyranny of "this is how things are" be replaced by the possibility of "...and things are every other way too."

Headline news

Virginia Gun Dealers Taunt NY Mayor

"The truth is, if Bloomberg hadn't picked on Virginia, we wouldn't have gotten involved. But he made the mistake of stepping into Virginia with this," said Philip Van Cleave, president of the pro-gun Virginia Citizens Defense League and mastermind of the giveaway, which has boosted business for the two participating store owners.

Oh, wait...that was last month. Right about the time the governor of Virginia signed a bill to keep those nosy parkers from interfering with gun dealers even if they're doing something illegal.

And now?

Not even the worst campus massacre in American history is about to stop Bob Moates Sports Shop of Midlothian, Va., from going ahead with its big Bloomberg Gun GiveAway. The winner will receive a Para-Ordinance Model 1911 .45 automatic, silver and no less deadly than the black pistol a witness says the Virginia Tech psycho used. The 1911 is part of the company's new line of "Gun Rights" pistols, which carry the guarantee the company will donate $25 to the National Rifle Association for every one sold.

"The drawing is April 19," a man at Moates said yesterday.

More here.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt

When I was nine years old, the local PBS channel aired a science fiction special called Between Time and Timbuktu and it scared the hell out of me. I mean the particular type of scared you get when you're about nine years old and something so totally blows your mind that you can't stop thinking about it no matter how much you'd like to stop, and you're up all night afraid to go to sleep for fear that you'll start dreaming about it.

Amateur poet Stony Stevenson wins the Blast-Off Space Food Jingle Contest, with the prize of being the first human launched into a Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum in space: a space-time warp. After passing through the Infundibulum, he meets himself and then reappears on Earth, where he passes through a variety of weird and disturbing possible futures -- scenarios (I later discovered) taken from assorted novels and stories by Kurt Vonnegut. Stony meets Bokonon from the novel Cat's Cradle just as soldiers arrive to assasinate the religious leader; he visits a cryogenics laboratory where world leaders are frozen and a substance called ice-nine could cause the end of all life; he visits an overpopulated world in which the government provides "ethical suicide parlours" and body-numbing pills to eliminate the pleasure of sex; he witnesses a dissident trial in a machine-run dystopia; he sees a future in which the drive for equality has gone wild and citizens are forced to wear debilitating handicaps to make sure no one is superior to anyone else in intellect or looks or physical ability. Finally he visits Heaven, where he befriends a little girl killed by an ice cream truck on her birthday. And then the image of Hitler shows up to make everyone disappear and destroy Heaven...before Stony works out the ultimate secret of everything he's experienced and gets some friendly advice from God.

Any one of those sequences would have been unsettling to my young mind...but the cumulative effect of them all concentrated into a single broadcast depicting so many different nightmarish possible futures was terrifying. The underlying message of atheism and skepticism, sadness at human failings and mockery of our pathetic vanities balanced with affection for human kindness and imagination -- the whole thing was itself like seeing a message from the future and being introduced to fears and disappointments and even hopes of a sort that maybe I shouldn't even have been thinking about. But obviously on some level I was ready for all that, because it resonated so deeply with me I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Somehow I had to conquer the fears that tv show woke up in me. And I did that by reading all the Kurt Vonnegut books my parents had on their bookshelves. That's how The Sirens of Titan became the first adult novel I ever read. It was swiftly followed by Cat's Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five as fast as I could read them. I don't think I understood a fraction of what was in those books, but I had to master them as best I could. Over time, I came to feel the viewpoint of these books represented the truest and most objective view of the world I'd ever encountered, and my horror at a world stripped of meaning and without a benevolent patriarch who was always right in charge was replaced by fascination. And the writing was by no means unsophisticated, but it had a particular sort of straightforward simplicity that made it accessible to anyone who cared to read it. Vonnegut wasn't out to dazzle us with the brilliance of his language, but to convey ideas he felt were so important they needed to be expressed as plainly as possible. Before then I didn't realize books for adults could be like that. When Breakfast of Champions was published the following year, I insisted to my probably bemused parents that we had to get it right away.

More than thirty years later, I've never found a writer who saw the world so clearly and accurately (or so it seems to me -- obviously my entire view of the world has been so thoroughly shaped by that early exposure to Vonnegut's work that I still judge everything else by those values on a level I can't possibly examine objectively) nor a writer who was so utterly determined to communicate something to his audience rather than impressing them with his erudition. And more than thirty years later, I still feel sad when I think of that poor girl Wanda June and the ice cream truck, and shiver when I hear the word "ice-nine."

I haven't even mentioned all the other Vonnegut books, or the other translations of his work to the screen. Between Time and Timbuktu isn't available, but if you're curious to see what Vonnegut is like without cracking open a book, I recommend checking out Slaughterhouse-Five and Mother Night. (Bonus points for the first person to mention Vonnegut's hilarious cameo appearance in a Rodney Dangerfield film...)

Update 1: Matt Brady has written an overview I wish I had written of Vonnegut's work.

Update 2: Check here for more information on Between Time and Timbuktu.