Insane Comics Moments, Part Nine

You know...after you spend long enough reading Silver and Bronze Age comics, eventually you get kind of jaded. I mean, there are only so many ways that Red Kryptonite can make Superman act goofy, and eventually you just get used to cruising through the story with your brain on auto-pilot and waiting for the wacky twist at the end. Not that it's boring, but I'm just saying that after a while you do get to feeling like there's nothing they can do to surprise you anymore.

And then something like "World's Finest #189-190" happens.

This two-parter by Cary Bates, respectively known as "The Man With Superman's Heart" and "The Final Revenge of Luthor", opens with a dying Superman plummeting to Earth like a meteor and taking out a child's playground. (For those of you who are proponents of the Superdickery theory of Superman's behavior, this is an entirely fitting final act.) You may think that this is an imaginary story, one of the many "What if Superman died?" tales that DC published over the years, but nope. This is entirely in continuity. Superman's corpse is lying there on the ground, his killer (a space alien named "Motan") boasts of offing the Man of Steel, and Superman's last will and testament is to have the United Nations use a Kryptonite laser to carve him up and donate his organs to worthy people around the world so that they can have his superpowers.

And of course, that's not crazy enough. No siree. Not while there are supervillains out there. Batman has refused to accept Superman's heart, stating that he's unworthy to have a Kryptonian heart beating in his human chest...and also, what exactly would it do for him? I mean, that's one of the few things that hasn't been mentioned in connection with his bizarre profusion of Silver Age abilities, at least not unless there's something we don't know about his super-ventriloquism. But anyway, Batman is trying to find worthy donors, while also dealing with the Gang of Four. (Um, not the disciples of Chairman Mao who instigated the Cultural Revolution. This is a gang of criminals who were so well-organized and cunning that they gave Superman fits even while he was alive, and are going on an unprecedented crime spree now that he's dead.)

But Luthor decides that now's the time to up the ante on creepy supervillainy, so he breaks into the UN building, steals Superman's organs, and auctions them off to the highest bidder. So, um...for those of you complaining about how comics have gotten too "dark" lately, it's 1969 and we've got a story about Lex Luthor's black-market organ harvesting of the Man of Steel.

The Gang of Four use their ill-gotten gains to buy Superman's organs (all except for the heart, which Luthor keeps for himself in the hopes that someday he will figure out a way to perform a heart transplant on himself and become immortal) and immediately embark on a SUPER-crime spree, with each of them having one set of Kryptonian body parts to aid in their wilding. One gets super-strength from Superman's fists, another gets super-breath from his lungs, a third gets heat vision and x-ray vision from his eyes, and the last gets super-hearing from Superman's ears. (He hangs around with the eyes guy a lot, on the not unreasonable basis that having super-hearing by itself doesn't really do much against being punched in the face by Batman.)

Batman is totally outclassed by the new supervillains, but he nonetheless announces that he's got a secret weapon against them and challenges them to a showdown at noon. (I know what you're thinking, but the weapon isn't Kryptonite, despite it being a really obvious choice that existed in quantity in the DC Universe at the time.) The villains show up, immediately realize that Batman didn't pack Kryptonite like a sensible person would, and start kicking his butt...

Until suddenly their super-organs fail. Blinded, deafened, paralyzed, and suffering from catastrophic lung collapse, they pose much less threat to Batman. In fact, he's getting ready to save the guy whose lungs stopped working when Luthor shows up and stops him. Turns out Luthor has figured out what Batman knew all along...Superman's not really dead, and the organs are synthetic. Supes shows up, whipping off his "Motan" disguise to deliver the required exposition--remember how much trouble the Gang of Four was giving him? Well, his solution to the problem turns out to have been to trick them into buying defective black-market body parts and permanently disfiguring/crippling themselves. HEROISM!

Batman and Superman haul the survivors off to jail, and lament the tragic demise of the one criminal who learned that the wages of sin are death...and also that Superman will straight up trick you into ripping your own lungs out if you cross him...and the two-parter comes to a close. And frankly, there's just not much they can do to top that one.

The LucasFilm Sale: How It All Went Down

(SCENE: A BOARDROOM AT LUCASARTS, MAY 2011. A KEY EXECUTIVE IS SITTING AT A TABLE, ANXIOUSLY AWAITING THE ARRIVAL OF HIS BOSS.)

(GEORGE LUCAS ENTERS.)

LUCASARTS EXECUTIVE: Hello, sir. You said you had some big news for me?

LUCAS: Very big. I think this could be the biggest thing for this company since 1999.

EXEC: You mean...we're...?

LUCAS: Exactly.

EXEC: Episode Seven?

LUCAS: Huh? Oh, that. Um, yeah, I have a few ideas I've been tossing around. No, I've been thinking about new revenue streams for the company. I mean, the movies have always sold well, but eventually we hit saturation on that. People have the originals, they have the Special Editions, they have them on video and DVD and Blu-Ray, and they've all seen them in the theater a couple dozen times on top of that. It's the ancillary revenue streams that keep us in dough, you know that.

EXEC: Um, but Episode Seven would be a new film. They'd want to see that.

LUCAS: But you have to spend money making it, first! Millions of dollars scouting locations, hiring actors, putting them into mo-cap suits so that you don't actually have to see them on-screen when you're done...arranging all those pixels into fake aliens costs money, you know. And when you're all finished, what do people do? Complain that you didn't do it right and decide not to see it another sixteen times! No, if we're going to do this, we have to make sure it's profitable before the first ticket sold. Like 'Phantom Menace'. That's where my idea comes in.

EXEC: More merchandising, sir? I'm really not sure there's anywhere else to go with that. We've sold 'Star Wars' action figures, 'Star Wars' video games, 'Star Wars' tissues, 'Star Wars' muffin tins...we sold that candy that made you french-kiss Jar Jar Binks! I don't think we can really put the logo on anything else, not unless you're willing to sell 'Star Wars' toilet paper.

LUCAS: Hmm. Actually, write that one down. But no, I was thinking along the lines of advertising tie-ins.

EXEC: Kids' meals, drink cups, that sort of thing? I mean, I'm sure we can round some up, no problem, but--

LUCAS: You're not thinking big enough. Ever watch any sports?

EXEC: Well, um...yes, but--

LUCAS: Not me. Never really had the interest. Not enough CGI. But one of my kids had on a basketball game last night, and do you know where those guys play? Staples Center.

EXEC: ...um...

LUCAS: "STAPLES" Center! Don't you get it? The guys at Staples paid big bucks just to get a building named after them! I looked it up! It's like, millions of dollars! And I was thinking.

EXEC: OK, maybe we should do a little less of that--

LUCAS: Naming rights! How many of those damned aliens do we stick in the background of each shot? Twenty? Thirty? And every freaking one has an action figure, its own novel tie-in, and something like three comic book series about them! And we've just been naming them after our friends and stupid inside jokes! All this time, we've had a frigging gold mine right under our noses, and we haven't touched it!

EXEC: I'll be honest, sir, this sounds--

LUCAS: Brilliant? Lucrative? Like the future of cinema? Here, I've drawn up designs for a few new characters. That's Wal-Martto, he's going to be a wacky alien sidekick who does all the bargaining for the heroes. This, this is Darth Verizon. He's going to be a villain, but a "cool" one. Over here is Starbuck, a new Rebel pilot who loves to fly with the kind of energy only a Chai Latte can give you. And...you're giving me a look. What's the look?

EXEC: Well, first off, Starbuck is already a pilot in another series.

LUCAS: I know! And they didn't charge a dime! Don't worry, I've got a product placement deal going with the BSG people. We'll get twice the money for the same character, and they'll get a free ad for their DVD boxsets. It's win-win...you're still giving me the look.

EXEC: It's just that...I mean, doesn't this kind of cheapen our franchise? I think the fans will see it as kind of, well...lame.

LUCAS: They didn't complain about Sio Bibble, Salacious Crumb or Elan Sleazebaggano. I think if we can get away with Elan Sleazebaggano, we can get away with Darth Verizon.

EXEC: ...OK. Look, George. How much would it cost to get you to not make this movie at all? Or any movies? Ever?

LUCAS: I dunno. Four billion dollars?

EXEC: Let me get Disney on the phone.

(Disclaimer: All kidding towards Lucas aside, I'll be honest; I really only did this because I wanted to get the name "Wal-Martto" down in print somewhere.)

A Sentence I Can Never Finish

I've had the opening line of a book in my head for years, never quite knowing where it connects to. Today, I'm sharing it with you, because it's such a good opening sentence that I want to share it with people despite not knowing what comes next.

"They say that a man who seeks revenge should begin by digging two graves. I dug three; but in fairness, two of them were very small."

I dunno, maybe it's my "For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn."

'The Winter Soldier' Was In Color, but the Morals Were Gloriously Black-and-White

Recently, I read a very nice review of 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier' at this blog(caution, contains spoilers for the film. Actually, so does this post.) It's a good review with some excellent points about the way that the film brings home the growing acceptance of constant surveillance and preemptive attacks, but there's one thing I have to disagree with it on. The reviewer suggests that the final figure arrived at by SHIELD/HYDRA in their quest to eliminate all the potential threats to global order is too high, and that it would have been a more interesting dilemma if there were only a couple dozen targets on the list.

I think this misunderstands the whole point of the film. It's not about an interesting moral dilemma. Allowing people to frame the question as a "moral dilemma" is, in no small part, what's gotten us into this mess, and it's telling that the villain attempts to do that even as the heroes are trying to stop him from murdering twelve million people. When the moral dilemmas are sliced thin enough, it's hard for anyone to know when exactly the line is crossed. Nobody's going to be the one to stand up and suggest that a single terrorist's life is worth more than a thousand innocents. Nobody's even going to be the one to suggest that one innocent life is worth more than a thousand. And at some point, the sunk cost fallacy kicks in, and saying "no" means that all those other deaths were meaningless because we still didn't make the world 'safe'. And each little atrocity justifies the next, slightly larger one.

'The Winter Soldier' cuts through all the justifications. The Insight Program is nothing more than the ultimate, logical extension of everything America has been doing for the last thirteen years. If you accept that it's okay to spy on people without evidence...if you accept that it's okay to attack terrorists before they attack us...if you accept that drone strikes are better because they don't put our soldiers in harm's way...then the ultimate extension of that is right there in front of you. And America supported it all the way. If A led to B, and B led to C, and C led to D, then this movie is saying, "Hey, I just found what Z looks like!" Moral ambiguity is exactly what's not needed here.

Captain America stands for something better. He stands for the ideals of America, not the debased realities we sometimes allow to overcome our better judgment. Yes, he would have stood up for a couple dozen people the same way he stands up for twelve million. But his point, as graphically made by the movie, is that once you become the kind of person who can kill a couple dozen people for 'all the right reasons'...it never stops there.

Other Paul Ryan Plans to Help the Poor

RYAN: "The other day, I saw a young child in a wheelchair. The poor thing confided in me that he didn't want to be in a wheelchair; he wanted to walk, like the other kids. That's why I believe it's important to take away wheelchairs from poor children, because the Left doesn't understand how stigmatizing it is to them to have one..."

RYAN: "This old man was forced to get a pacemaker, possibly by liberals who don't understand that medical intervention might keep your heart beating, but it doesn't keep your heart warm. That's why I want to rip his still-beating heart out of his chest, because I understand that 'free pacemakers' only sustain physical life, not emotional support..."

RYAN: "Being forced to work a degrading, menial job in the janitorial services for minimum wage, well...that's no way to live. I understand that, unlike the godless liberals. That's why I want to repeal the minimum wage laws entirely, so this man doesn't have to work for minimum wage..."

RYAN: "Due to his mother's substandard health insurance, little Timmy here is having to watch his poor mommy die a slow death due to a preventable illness. The Left thinks they can make things better through 'better health insurance' and 'reforming the medical care system', but what does that mean? Consigning Jimmy to watch his mom die at a later date? No. That might be what those monsters in the Democratic Party want, but we conservatives are filled with boundless compassion. One quick, humane bullet between the eyes, and we can make sure that Jimmy never sees his mother die."

"And we can also probably spare some ammo to shoot his mom, too."

The Truth About Cats And...Um, More Cats

As you might have noticed, the blog's been a little quiet lately; I've been indulging in my traditional February habit of huddling in a tiny ball under the electric blanket and cursing the hellish cold, and wondering if spring will ever come or if some demented sorceress has cursed our land to the blight of eternal winter as some sort of messed-up Narnia tribute. That doesn't leave much time for writing.

But it's March now, and time to talk about cats. Specifically, it's time to talk to all the people who hate cats. "Ewww!" they say. "I hate cats! They're so aloof! They're not affectionate and demonstrative like dogs are!"

This is, and I speak from personal experience, a load of hooey. I have cats, and one of them literally sprints into the room as soon as I come through the door and launches herself in a spirited leap to land on my shoulder (yes, this is slightly unnerving) in order to headbutt the side of my face with repeated nuzzles. This could not be defined, by any stretch, as "aloof" behavior. If a person did this, you would not be saying, "Oh, Phyllis, you're so aloof!" You would be saying, "Agh, Phyllis, get off of me, you just broke my collarbone!"

This brings up the most important point about cats: They're small. Smaller than people, but more importantly smaller than most dogs. Even the biggest healthy domestic cat probably weighs in at about twenty pounds, whereas your basic "mutt" dog tips the scales at closer to fifty. Dogs get bred down, of course, but the general canine mentality is of a sizeable-to-large pack-bound predator.

A cat, on the other hand, is a prey animal as well as a predator. At five to twenty pounds, it has to treat larger animals as a potential threat. A fox, wolf, bear or other large animal can do a lot of damage to a cat, and being territorial animals instead of pack animals, they can't rely on safety in numbers. This is an important point in the psychology of the feline: Until you demonstrate otherwise, a cat considers you to be something that wants to eat it.

So most of the people who consider cats "aloof" are people who are interacting with a cat in the same way they interact with a dog, and expecting the same result. They walk into a room, they see the cat, and they race over to it with a big smile on their face! They pick the cat up and they snuggle it and they roughhouse with it and they...well, they probably don't get past the "roughhousing" part without getting some nasty scratches, because from the cat's point of view, a large animal has just walked into the room, bared its fangs, charged, and grabbed it. The cat assumes that its only chance of survival is to scratch and bite until the horrible monster lets it go, and then run like buggery and find someplace to hide until it goes away. The bleeding human blames this on the cat, and the cycle of "aloofness" continues.

In general, the best way to get a cat to be affectionate to you is to present yourself as non-threatening. Don't go to the cat. Take a quiet seat somewhere, relax, and let the cat come to you. If it's like most cats, this may not happen right away. Survival instincts are strong, and the cat that survives best is the cat that's cautious about new things. It may take a day or two for the cat to let its guard down and decide that you're not a potential cat-eating monster. (It might take even longer if the cat spent any time as a stray, or had a previous owner that abused it. Operant conditioning is harder to overcome than simple instinct.)

When it does approach you, don't go nuts on the petting right away. Let it settle in and get used to you. Once it's sure you're not a threat, you'll know...primarily because it'll flop down in your lap and start purring. That's the point when you'll understand why cat owners look at dog owners funny when they complain about "aloof" cats.

Epic Fantasy Football Needs To Happen

Had this idea for a while now, but I need some help working out the details. The idea is that it's "fantasy football" mixed with fantasy gaming; you select a party of real-life football players, with the positions roughly corresponding to classes. (Wide receivers are rangers, quarterbacks are wizards, defensive players are thieves, running backs are fighters, et cetera.) Each week, you select a monster from a list of monsters ranging from "dire wolves" up through "dragons" to fight; the fantasy league points are translated into damage, and you kill the monster if you do enough damage to exceed its hit points.

Killing monsters gives you experience points, which you can then spend on magical items and class bonuses to modify your party's damage each week. This allows you to take on tougher monsters, which allows you to gain more experience, and so on. At the end of the season, whoever has the most impressive group of monster trophies wins.

I think it could work, but I don't know enough about fantasy football to be able to construct a workable baseline for weekly points scored, and that's needed in order to be able to build workable monsters for the party to kill. Anyone know more about fantasy football and want to help me out on this?

And Doctor Voodoo Is the Sorcerer Supreme

Someday, I totally want to write a story where the Winter Soldier is drawn to an artificially-created Earth where all the superheroes are the edgy, alternative versions of themselves created to replace the real ones with anti-heroes. This world's Avengers are the USAgent, War Machine, Thunderstrike, the Red Hulk and the Scarlet Spider, and they're periodically joined in team-ups by Venom and the Red She-Hulk. They've just been waiting for the Winter soldier to join them on their perfect Earth, the ones where they're the real heroes...only, of course, there's a dark secret to its creation that they have to fight, because otherwise where's the conflict? But then at the end, their world is preserved as a running in-joke, a sort of Second Banana Heaven for superheroes.

And then a few years later, they can have a crossover with the Justice League, which is composed of Artemis, Azrael and the Eradicator...

Review: Buffy Season Eight

It's been a while since this originally came out, which means that I finally found copies that were sufficiently discounted that I could pick up the missing volumes and read the whole thing. And now that I finally caught up to the season behind the season that just finished, what do I think? (Oh, spoilers for a years-old comic book series ahead...)

The first thing I noticed is the same thing I noticed after Seasons Four, Five, Six and Seven: Joss Whedon has really had to reinvent the series a lot ever since Season Three ended. The central concept of 'Buffy', the idea that everything else grew out of, is that high school is hell. The series took the metaphor and made it literal, with the demons of adolescence transformed into actual demons and killed by a girl who grew into a woman. 'Graduation Day', where Buffy told the Watchers where to shove it and became an confident adult, was the culmination of everything that had gone before.

And without that central concept, the series has had to completely remake itself with a new core premise, time and time and time again. 'The Freshman', 'Buffy vs Dracula', 'Bargaining' and 'Lessons' all function as pilots for an entirely new series featuring the same characters (and some function better than others...) And likewise, Season Eight is a whole new, completely different series where Buffy runs a team of paramlitary Slayers that travel the world and fight evil monsters wherever they may go. It's the sort of epic, ambitious storyline that really could only be attempted in comics. Whatever else you might say about it, Whedon really tried to use the medium to its fullest extent.

Unfortunately, "whatever else you might say about it" is that it never really gels as a concept, and it's just not as much fun as the previous seasons, and it eventually devolves into a series of plot kludges designed to get us to the next reinvention of the series for Season Nine. (Which is, weirdly, what you can say about Seasons Seven, Six, Five, and arguably even Four.)

The first problem is that while there are some great moments to be had in making a big, globe-trotting epic with a Slayer cast of thousands, the concept really does get too far away from what made 'Buffy' good. The characters and their relationships get lost in the noise, and they feel like pale shadows of themselves in a lot of ways. Worse, the moments they do get all feel like rehashes of the stuff we've already seen; Buffy is still worried about getting her friends killed, Willow is still agonizing over magic abuse, and Xander is still trying to figure out what it's all about to be a grown-up. Oh, and Dawn is still metatextually complaining about her utter irrelevance to the story save as a replacement peril monkey for Willow now that she's competent, and Andrew is still nothing more than a vehicle for all the lazy "geek culture" jokes that the writers want to stick into the story. There were the same anchors that got hung around the characters' necks in Seasons Five through Seven, and they're still just as depressing and mopey as they once were. It'd be nice to change that up with a little, I dunno....joy? Just a titch? Reading comic books shouldn't make me want to cheer myself up by helping out at food shelters.

The second problem is that the whole thing doesn't really feel like it makes any sense. The identity of Twilight, while it's a pretty good reveal, never has legs because nobody seems to know why he's doing anything he's doing. There are no less than three conflicting explanations given in the final two books--either Angel is running a con on Buffy's enemies by tricking them into letting him lead them, or he's been possessed by a baby-universe-to-be called Twilight who wants to bootstrap itself into existence by tricking Angel and Buffy into sexing each other up in the longest, dullest sex sequence committed to paper (for which I don't blame Brad Meltzer one bit--he got the absofreakinglutely nightmare brief for his arc). Or he's secretly helping Whistler with some other even more devious plan that involves tricking Twilight into making Buffy and Angel sex it into being so that reasons.

And the ending...ugh. The last two books involve Giles suddenly remembering an ancient prophecy that came directly from his butt, a mystical artifact that's just all of a sudden the most important thing in the universe and everybody wants to do stuff and things to it for reasons (because corks and bottles and other metaphors--like letting the air out of a balloon!), a baby universe as a bad guy who's possessing Angel and making him do more things for other reasons and it's bad because of its badnessness, the return of the Master because why the heck not at this point, and finally Buffy just literally gets sick of all this garbage and breaks the plot device and goes home. And that works because reasons too.

The only thing that really felt like it actually gelled, happily enough, was the epilogue, where Buffy is now living in San Francisco and slaying vampires. That whole idea of a "vampire slayer", which had gotten utterly lost by the end of the tangled mess of gibberish that was Season Eight's final moments, feels like it at least was part of a process to get Buffy back to where she should be. And while I'm aware that it's almost certainly not going to be that simple, it did give me at least a little optimism that this could be a series I might be able to get into again someday unequivocally.

Five Things That Really Surprised Me In DC's 'Showcase Presents' Collections

If I said that I was surprised at being considered "knowledgeable" about Marvel's history, that goes double for DC. I never even read DC Comics until I was in high school, having utterly rejected the output of the company as a child, based primarily on Superman #337, which made so little sense to my four-year-old self that I pretty much gave up on everything associated with the company. (If you don't know who Don-El and the Superman Emergency Squad are, the thing is sheerest gibberish.) It wasn't until my future brother-in-law told me that DC had really improved its output that I decided to take a flyer on their comics...and promptly ran headlong into 'Armageddon 2001', right after deciding that 'Hawk and Dove' was my new favourite comic. (DC Comics: Proudly crushing the dreams of its fanbase for over two decades.)

And yet, here I am, having read most of the Silver Age output of DC and a good chunk of the Bronze Age as well. What really surprised me about it? What do I want you to know? Well...

1) Some of their best material wasn't superhero stuff. Before Julius Schwartz kick-started the Silver Age by recreating most of their superhero properties with a sci-fi twist, DC was surviving the lull in interest in guys in funny outfits by publishing a wide variety of comics in a number of different genres. And even after the superhero genre took off, DC hedged their bets for several decades. They published war comics, westerns, horror and romance...and they produced a lot of brilliant, iconic material. House of Secrets and House of Mystery were both excellent, especially under Joe Orlando, and Joe Kubert's Sergeant Rock and Enemy Ace were both legitimate works of high art. Jonah Hex was such a brilliant, ahead-of-its-time western that it's a damn shame that it produced such a loud, stupid, anti-quality movie. And they even produced some good fantasy comics, like 'Warlord' and 'Amethyst', before it became apparent that the audience for comic books had diminished to superhero fans and nothing but. Changing audience tastes were as big a part of the problem for DC as anything else.

2) The Bronze Age was really rough on DC. One thing I've noticed about reading Marvel vs reading DC is that I look more and more forward to reading Marvel's books as they get into the Bronze Age (and even beyond, into the Eighties and Nineties)...but DC's superhero books got weaker and weaker as they went on. Part of it was the way they went deeper and deeper into their own over-complicated mythos; the aforementioned Superman #337, which involved a renegade member of the Superman Emergency Squad escaping Kandor and being attacked by a whole gaggle of supervillains who were all Superman in disguise, was a classic example. It also served as an example of the way that they got more and more obsessed with gimmick plots and bait-and-switch "twist endings"; every issue seemed to revolve around creating some impossible situation, then coming up with a contrived explanation for it all. (And all in twenty-two pages...DC took a long time to adapt to the concept of the "multi-parter", and it shows.) But mostly, and I think Chris Sims has also said this, DC was trying so hard to be Marvel that they forgot how to be DC. Marvel was "hip", it was "relevant", and it catered to teenagers and young adults...and so DC wrote all of their comics like they were going through a mid-life crisis, using the slang that all the teeners were into and chasing the hip trends. And there is nothing guaranteed to feel more awkward than watching someone in their forties try to act like a teenager. The Bronze Age was full of DC comics that were trying too hard, and it showed.

3) DC's second-tier heroes were second to nobody. That said, DC had some of the most fun back-ups and second-tier superhero titles in the business, especially in the early Silver Age. The Doom Patrol, the Metal Men, Metamorpho, the Elongated Man, Hawkman and Adam Strange were all great titles worth picking up and plowing through in a single sitting. Even supposedly ultra-lame characters like Aquaman had surprisingly great solo titles. They all floundered a bit in the Bronze Age, when DC wasn't sure what to do with themselves (actually, now that I think of it, Marvel floundered in the mid-Nineties the same way when faced with a challenge to their teen-cred from Image). But they had some great material in there.

4) DC did a better job of imitating Marvel when they used Marvel writers. Admittedly, there's not a lot of material from the Eighties in the 'Showcase Presents' series, primarily due to royalty issues, but the stuff they did put out shows that when Marvel writers crossed over to DC, they produced some fun material. Batman and the Outsiders, while not an instant classic, was a solid title with a lot of Eighties team book energy, while Booster Gold deserves a lot more credit than it got for trying something new and interesting with a character who wasn't your typical superhero. And although it doesn't have a black-and-white volume, the Teen Titans absolutely exploded in that era.

5) Comics in the Silver Age were freaking mental. Between the super-compressed storytelling that necessitated very sudden plot developments (one issue of Aquaman announced, in the span of one panel, that there was an ancient city filled with evil demons that only came into alignment with our universe once every thousand years, and this was one of those periods of alignment--this would have been about ten issues of foreshadowing and build-up in a modern comic, but Aquaman got it out of the way in less than half a page), the abrupt conclusions that returned everything to the status quo, and the assumption that they were writing for an audience of small children who accepted arbitrary rules to their stories much better than adults, DC wrote some of the craziest stuff you can imagine. Superdickery makes fun of it all, primarily because it does look pretty silly when you imagine it as part of the same line of comics that gave you 'Identity Crisis', 'The Dark Knight Returns' and 'Watchmen', but there's a certain perverse glory to it all if you just take it as an a priori assumption that it's not going to make a lick of sense and let it all flow over you. You really do have to read DC's Silver Age work differently than you do modern comics...most of the complaints from modern fans are from people who either can't or won't do exactly that.

Bad Advice

'Bad Advice' is a notionally-syndicated column that dispenses with any worries you might have about the reliability of getting advice from random people who got a newspaper advice column based on dubious credentials instead of going to a professional therapist, doctor or lawyer. 'Bad Advice' is guaranteed to give only useless and inaccurate advice that you can feel free to utterly disregard. 'Bad Advice' makes no warranty as to the efficaciousness of its advice, other than to suggest you not follow it. 'Bad Advice' is written by a guy on the Internet with no credentials whatsoever.

Dear Bad Advice:
I'm a 28-year-old woman with a fantastic job, a wonderful boyfriend and many friends whom I love dearly. I'm the only one without a child.
Maybe I don't understand because I'm not a parent myself, but all my friends can talk about is children. Whereas before, we were interested in each other's lives, I feel like my concerns and accomplishments are being brushed off. An example: I was excited to meet up with a pal to talk about my promotion, but the hour-long dinner was spent mostly teaching her child how to walk between the tables of the restaurant.

I enjoy hearing about my friends and their families, but I feel they are no longer interested in me. Am I expecting too much because we're at different points in our lives, or am I a bad friend? I'm growing resentful, and I don't like it. Any words of wisdom? -- STILL RELEVANT IN MASSACHUSETTS

Dear Relevant,
The key here is to understand that you'll never be able to relate to your friends ever again until you can talk about what it's like to be a mother. Since you're presumably not interested in going off the Pill without telling your boyfriend (although it's not too late!) then the next step is to get inventive. Specifically, the next step is to invent a child. You can find plenty of pics on the Internet (make sure they're all of the same kid, though--that's a rookie mistake) and a book of baby names is less than twenty bucks. That's a lot cheaper than an obstetrician!

Most of the time, that should be enough. Make up a few stories about how precious and adorable your kid is--first word, first steps, gosh-aint-they-cute-at-that-age, you probably know the drill from your friends' stories. Just regurgitate it all back at them; they'll be so thrilled to find out their kid is "normal" they won't even notice that your kid has all the same weird habits theirs does. If they want playdates or some other crazy crap, tell them little Insert Name Here has the flu. Worst case scenario, you can probably rent a homeless kid from a shelter for less than ten bucks an hour if you ask around anonymously.

Dear Bad Advice,
I am 25 years old and have had an obsession with vacuuming for many years. I usually vacuum three times a day, seven days a week.

Whenever I feel stressed or nervous, I start my vacuum. I also feel anxious when I have company and the floors don't have those neat vacuum tracks. I can't stand to have any dirt or mess on the floor. The strange thing is that I am not as meticulous in other areas. It doesn't bother me if my closets or drawers are a mess.

Do you know what could be causing this strange behavior? It is driving my family and me nuts. --Vacuum-Crazed in South Carolina

Dear Vacuum-Crazed,
I think the clear problem is those bastards at Dyson. They're constantly advertising about how good their vacuum cleaners are, and about how important it is to have a vacuum cleaner designed by aliens or whatever the heck it is they keep claiming. Their stupid commercials are on the air twenty-four/seven on every single channel; it's no wonder you're going out of your ever-living mind with paranoia.

The clear answer is to retain a lawyer and sue the Dyson Company for all they're worth. Don't listen to the first guy who tells you that you have no case, or even the second. Keep going until you find some shyster who promises you a seven-figure payout, minimum. Go to every media outlet until you find one willing to print your incoherent screed against Mister Dyson and he's forced to counter-sue you for slander. Become known on the Internet as "Vacuum Woman" and try to get your own reality show. Don't stop until you've made them all pay. Every last one of them.

Dear Bad Advice,
My friend Emily dated Andy a few years ago. They broke up spectacularly. Emily has always said that Andy was the most controlling and insecure boyfriend she has ever had, which always surprised me because that does not come across at all when I interact with him.

Andy and I have gotten close over the years and have recently been on a few dates. Emily has totally moved on and is fine with it, but it really bugs me that I feel like I'm waiting for these negative traits to suddenly appear. Is this something I should talk to him about, or do I just discount Emily's opinion until given a reason to do otherwise? -- D.C.

Dear D.C.,
Dump Andy. Emily sounds like she's got a lot more going on upstairs.

Got a question for 'Bad Advice'? Leave it in the comments, and we'll answer it in a future installment!

Yes! I Can Finally Feel Superior To Someone!

I don't talk much about my day job on this blog, primarily because we deal with a lot of proprietary information (housing industry, not medical industry, but similar principles) and I don't want to get into the habit of blabbing because it's easier to draw that boundary early than navigate fiddly ethical issues later. But the long and short of it is that I do technical support for home appraisers who are delivering reports on the value of homes. I regularly deal with people who have less technical expertise than I do...which is scary, quite frankly, because my knowledge of computers is woeful. I am not certified, I have no education on Microsoft and/or Apple products, and the only reason I'm able to do my job is that the software we use is proprietary and we had on-the-job training. When people's computer problems start getting away from our system and into the general, I have to basically tell them to find someone who knows what they're doing.

Except the other day, when I got someone calling to complain about how bad our servers were. "I've been trying to connect for the last half-hour now, and it gets all the way through to the end. Then it just freezes up for about fifteen minutes and finally tells me it's 'unable to connect to server'."

"Well, ma'am," I replied, "we're not receiving reports of any server issues on our end. The problem could be with your connection. Are you having any other issues accessing the Internet?"

"Look, I really don't have a whole lot of time to mess with this, okay? Can I just email you a PDF of the file? I've got a baseball game to get to, and it's already started. I've been sitting here in the parking lot for the last half-hour trying to get this stupid thing to send, and it just won't go."

"Um...ma'am, that could be your problem right there. These files are usually about five to ten megabytes of data. If you're trying to send it over a wireless connection--"

"It's the same connection I always have!"

"But what's your signal strength like?"

"I'm getting two bars of 3G."

Fortunately, once I explained to her that two bars of 3G wasn't really enough signal strength to send ten megs of data in a timely manner, she agreed to attend her baseball game and send the report when she got home. Nonetheless, I remain surprised at my job's ability to uncover people who make me look technically inclined. (Like the person I had to do a walkthrough for on "copy and paste"...but that's for another day.)

Buffy Summers: Strong Female Character?

Back in the day on my guest posts for MightyGodKing, I discussed the ways that "strength" was such a nebulous quality that virtually any female character could be termed as a "strong female character" by someone who wanted to bandwagon feminism to some of that sweet, sweet progressive/liberal cash while still writing something unbelievably sexist. I tried to set out some criteria for an actual strongly- written female character, and I'll put down the quick and dirty version of my five points here, for those who don't want to wade through the original post or can't follow the link.

A genuinely strong female character should have these five qualities:

1) She should be active, not merely powerful. A genuinely strong female character should make her own decisions, and those decisions should drive the plot.

2)  She should be strong in a way that does not confirm gender stereotypes. A strong female character is not strong in the way women are allowed to be strong (femme fatale, mama grizzly, etc); she's strong in the way people are strong.

3) She should be allowed to explore a spectrum of sexuality outside of the virgin/whore dichotomy. An active sexual identity is fine, but it should not be presented as an object of male sexual fantasy.

4) She should not derive her power from a determination to avoid repeating a defining moment of victimization (particularly not sexual victimization). This isn't to say she can never have been hurt; only to say that she should not just be an ordinary woman who was hurt/brutalized/raped and swore, "Never again".

5) She should not be defined solely by her relationship with a male protagonist. Any character who is primarily motivated by her feelings for a man is being limited in some way.

I recently mentioned these on the feminism-in-pop-culture website Jezebel.com and was told that I should blog about how this relates to popular characters and series. Since I'm already doing way more blogging than I can handle, I felt like a better avenue would be to do it when I was stuck for ideas on my own blog. Which is kind of a shaggy-dog way of saying, "How does Buffy Summers stack up against these criteria?"

Pretty well, I think. Obviously, seven seasons of television, two seasons of comics with a third on the way, and a movie will produce a number of off-model moments...that said, for the most part, Buffy fares successfully when judged by all five criteria. In terms of the first, the series pretty much defines itself through Buffy's conflicts with authority figures; she is supposed to be simply the latest Slayer, a tool used by the Watchers in their endless battles (and if there's a better symbolic encapsulation of the patriarchy than the Watchers, I can't think of it). But she refuses to accept a subordinate role in her relationship with Giles, even though she accepts his role as a mentor and teacher, and their power dynamic changes repeatedly over the course of the series. By Season Eight, she is the leader of a group of Slayers, and her decisions guide most of the major story arcs throughout the show's run.

Moving on to Item Number Two...obviously, Whedon's initial concept of the series was a deliberate inversion of gender roles. Buffy is specifically chosen as an example of a gender role that has no power in traditional narratives--the damsel in distress--and then is given the power to subvert that trope and rescue herself. In one sense, this is still a gender-normative role; Buffy is a stereotypical teenage girl, at least in the early seasons. But looking at the definition, she is not drawing her power from a gender-normative role; she is drawing her power despite it. Whedon is kicking against the damsel in distress cliché, entirely on purpose.

The third question is the easiest to answer. Does Buffy get to have sex? Yes. Is she portrayed as nothing but a sex object? Nope. Even though there are times when she has had sex and regretted it afterwards, it was not sex itself which was portrayed as negative but the situation in which she had it. (And in a series where pretty much every character is sexually active, it'd be absurd if none of them ever had a bad experience.) Whedon probably has the best record here that we're likely to see in this blog.

On to Item Number Four. Does Buffy derive her power from victimization? Nope. She derives her power from ancient magic. This isn't to say that she's never been helpless or victimized, but she's no Red Sonja. (Yes, Red Sonja is the poster child for this particular trope. I may well do an entry for her just to show it.)

And finally...what is Buffy's motivation? Is she doing it all for Angel? Or Spike? Or Riley? (Who was totally my favorite, by the way, and got a bum deal from the show.) No. Although she cares for them, and although she does do things to help them out over the course of the series, she is primarily defined by and motivated by her knowledge that she is the only person who can do what she does and that the world depends on her. It's a weighty burden that sometimes feels like a trap, but ultimately she decides to do it because it needs doing. Which brings us right back to the beginning: Buffy Summers makes decisions that drive the plot. At least in my books, Whedon has done a good job of writing a genuinely strong woman.

L'Esprit D'Escalier, Final Crisis Edition

Meanwhile...

Over at Phil Sandifer's always-interesting blog, guest writer Andrew Hickey has written (in the words of the Young Ones) "a highly articulate outburst" relating the generally poor reception of 'Final Crisis' and the subsequent launch of the New 52. And while I think there is something to be said for connecting those two dots--let's face it, a big part of what people complained about with 'Final Crisis' was that they were looking for a grand, Wagnerian finish to the 73-year long story DC comics had been telling all those years, and instead they got a longer version of 'Rock of Ages' that somehow managed not to tie in to 'Rock of Ages' (the JLA storyline that Morrison wrote, that is, not the musical) and that almost certainly sparked the idea of blowing everything up and starting over in Dan DiDio's brain--I nonetheless think that Hickey extends the idea too far by suggesting that DC made a wholesale rejection of quality because they gave their readers the bestestest thing ever in 'Final Crisis', and they didn't like it so DC decided its readers must hate things that are good.

For one thing, he mentions the tie-ins and promotional efforts for 'FC' as though they were some sort of unfortunate summer storm, an event outside of Morrison's control that wrecked the lovely picnic he had planned. Whereas the truth is...look, I try very hard not to swear on my blog, but it is hard to think of the events leading up to 'Final Crisis' without using the words "unprecedented clusterfuck". Nobody working for DC seemed to have the slightest clue what anyone else was doing, and in fact the only thing they did seem to share was naked contempt for each other and their audience. Morrison was out doing interviews where he openly insulted people who thought that Barry Allen's death should be permanent, because death in comics never was and only pathetic fanboys gave a toss...while that same month, DC was marketing the first issue of his new epic with the tagline, "WHERE WERE YOU THE DAY THE MARTIAN MANHUNTER DIED?" Dan DiDio gave months and months of interviews, talking excitedly at conventions about how 'Final Crisis' was the culmination of everything the company had been planning since 'Identity Crisis'...only to have Morrison explain later that nobody had told him any of that, and he'd just been planning to write a fun little story about Darkseid, and 'Final Crisis' just meant that it was the last crisis he was planning to write about, and people needed to either just get over it or stop buying comics if they were going to whine about every single story they didn't like. And that's not even counting the weekly interviews about 'Countdown to Infinite Crisis' with editor Mike Marts on Newsarama, which started out as a fun promotional exercise (a la the interviews with '52' editor Steve Wacker on Newsarama) and gradually devolved into an exchange of insults between an interviewer who patently did not understand how DC could publish such unreadable garbage and an editor who didn't know why he was bothering anymore.

In short, everything about 'Final Crisis' was practically designed, by everyone concerned with the creation of it even tangentially, to make it impossible for the story to live up to anyone's expectations of it. And that includes Morrison, who pretty much threw everyone under the bus including his fanbase in the course of his interviews by suggesting that he just came up with the idea for the story and then went off into the cloisters to work on it for a year or so, like some sort of Zen comic book warrior monk, and came back out utterly flabbergasted that they'd screwed it up so badly. The sad part is that this could very well have been true--goodness knows that DC was inept enough for me to freely believe that they weren't talking to Morrison about their plans for the series he was writing--but Hickey seems to feel that Morrison should be held blameless for never talking to his editors, never reading any industry press about the series he was in the middle of writing, and never thinking to get involved with the PR in any way shape or form until all the money was spent and it was time to start apportioning blame for who was responsible for essentially defrauding comics fans of a couple hundred dollars of their hard-earned money.

Which is something that I think Hickey, and quite honestly most of the people who write about "angry fanboys" miss. We spend our money based on what we are told about these stories. Most comics stores, in the immortal words of every comic book store owner ever, are not libraries. Fans have to rely on what they hear about the series ahead of time, and the marketing strategy ever since 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' has been to tell fans, "You really can't miss this one. So much important stuff happens in it that you'll be totally lost if you don't buy it." And that's worked for a long time, because 'COIE' really was so important that it could not be missed. Fans have been conditioned to believe editors when they said that a storyline was a really big, huge, important development in the metastory, and that they had to read it even if it wasn't that great. (Well, they never said that last part. But it was sometimes implied.) And 'Final Crisis' was the point at which fans realized, en masse, that it was all just a big con to take their money. There was no grand plan. There was, it seemed, no plan at all. To discount that anger, or even to underestimate it, is to completely miss why 'Final Crisis' was so hated when it came out. It wouldn't have mattered what it was, because what people disliked was what it so tangibly wasn't.

Instead, Hickey goes with the tried-and-true sneering disdain for anyone who disagrees with him, the old "Well, it tried to make readers think, and all the people who disliked it were really just stupid and didn't get it." Which, while obnoxious and smug, is really just the flipside to the equally obnoxious disdain for anyone who did like the series, most of whom used the classic "You didn't really understand it either, nobody did, it's just that you're pretending you did so you can act intellectually superior to the rest of us" tactic of disingenuously dismissing their opponents' criticisms without engaging them, so I can't complain too loudly because nobody involved in that discussion ever came out looking very good. (In case you couldn't tell here, I don't actually have a lot of patience for debates about the quality of 'Final Crisis'. I didn't read it myself, because I gave up on DC in general about the same time Hickey gave up on 'Countdown', but I do find the haters and the defenders of the series equally meretricious.)

And so Hickey moves to the ultimate conclusion I mentioned at the beginning. Having misread the reason for the backlash against 'Final Crisis', and having taken as an a priori assumption that the series was flawless, he proceeds to the only answer he can under the circumstances. DC must have decided that it wasn't worth their time doing good comics, and went to the utter clusterfuck that was the New 52 on the grounds that the only thing that mattered was getting buzz in the industry media. Whereas in fact, when you examine the entirety of 'Final Crisis' in light of the year's worth of stories leading up to it, the story was at best an accidental aberration in a sea of editorial ineptitude whose only goal seemed to be getting headlines on Newsarama, and the thing that connects 'Final Crisis' to the New 52 is that they are both the products of a company that is, fundamentally, not very good at its job. The New 52 is a change in direction only cosmetically. The actual direction DC Comics has taken has been unchanged since DiDio took over--wandering randomly, spinning their wheels, and ultimately going nowhere.

Review...ish: The Apple

For the first two minutes, 1980 musical 'The Apple' is perfect. It opens with letter-perfect and savagely incisive parody of a glam-rock stadium concert; the act is Pandi and Dandi, but they could just as easily be the Bay City Rollers or any one of a dozen Iggy Pop/David Bowie wannabes out of the late Seventies. Their anthem, 'BIM's On the Way', is a perfect evocation of the way major record labels repackage independence and rebellion into product--it's a brainlessly catchy tune that seems to have no other purpose but to laud the very same label that endlessly promotes the musicians singing it. ("BIM" is a stab at BMI, a gag I didn't even notice until it was pointed out to me.)

And yet, underneath the empty-headed vapidity of its lyrics, there's a sort of soul-crushing deadness to the lyrics...Pandi and Dandi might sound like a glam-rock version of any number of studio-hyped groups, but their song carries the explicit message that there is no good, no evil, no joy, no shame, nothing but power and the will to use it. And BIM has that power...and by extension, is the only thing worth your adoration. It is, in short, nihilism given a catchy beat and a clever call-and-response bit that invites the audience to join right in with the death of society. ("Be!" "I am!" So's Darkseid, buddy.)

Then people start talking, and that's about when the movie goes downhill. Because 'The Apple' is supposed to be an audacious glam-rock musical bookend to 'Jesus Christ Superstar', telling the story of the Book of Revelations in the same counter-culture rock-and-roll terms that it assumes its audience grooves on--while simultaneously being a scathing indictment of the music industry and the way it grinds up individualism and talent and turns it into pop-culture pablum. That's the goal, and it's actually an impressively lofty one. But...

Setting aside the second musical number, which is supposed to be a welcome antidote to the soulless glam and instead comes off as a schmaltzy salute to the Osmonds...and setting aside all the other musical numbers as well, which seem to have been written according to the well known songwriting technique of, "Sod it, at least it rhymes"...actually, I can't set that aside completely. One couplet goes, "It's a natural, natural, natural desire/to meet an actual, actual, actual vampire." This is not a vampire story. This is not even a story with vampires in it. This is a story where a vampire pops up into shot for three seconds as Dandi sings the above couplet, and then is never seen again for the remainder of the film. I'm not a professional songwriter, but I think that might be a sign that you should rethink your lyrics.

But reluctantly setting the music's flaws aside, the story doesn't do what it's trying to do. Mister Boogalow is woefully miscast and misdirected. He should be kind and warm and friendly and exactly the last person you'd expect to be the Anti-Christ; Alphie should be torn by self-doubt and indecision for breaking up with his beloved Bibi and giving in to his hallucinogenic visions of doom and disaster if he signs on with BIM. ("BIM" = "Boogalow International Management".) But instead, he's a sinister smirker with a goatee and a Russian accent. He couldn't be more obviously evil if he had horns. Which he does, in some scenes...well, horn. Not sure what happened to the other one. Maybe there was a wardrobe malfunction.

With Boogalow obviously evil, Bibi looks stupid for signing on with him. Her journey through the highs of becoming a superstar to the lows of personal destruction and drug abuse, on to her final personal transformation and reconciliation with Alphie, basically just becomes a waiting game for the bimbo to realize what the audience figured out 87 minutes ago.

It doesn't help that the film is catastrophically unsubtle. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a glam-rock Rapture is not the place for subtlety. But that's the wonderful thing about a musical; people get to openly sing about their emotions in big music numbers, getting all that subtext out of the way in a song so that they can be subtle in the actual story. Bibi's getting ready to sign a contract, but she has doubts...so have Boogalow and Dandi sing a song about temptation likening the contract to Eve's Apple. It's unsubtle, sure...but it's the right kind of unsubtle. As it is, Alphie has a hallucination where Bibi is literally presented with a giant prop apple while standing on a set that evokes a downright Ed Wood-ian vision of Dante's Inferno, precisely so that Dandi can sing a song about how she should take a bite of the giant prop apple. The song was already metaphor enough without turning the costumes, set decoration, and dialogue into a walking literalist extension of it.

The film's pacing also has issues. Far too much of the film is spent on Alphie moping over Bibi and Bibi pining over Alphie (while sleeping with other people and taking copious amounts of drugs). The actual plot, such as it is, sort of hovers around in the background trying not to intrude. There are a few scenes where Mister Boogalow's marketing gimmick of a "BIM Mark" goes from being a trendy fashion accessory to a mandatory identification badge, and one where BIM's dancercise show becomes mandatory for every American, but these are so abrupt and unmotivated that the allegory fails. It's now less an allegory, and more some guy wandering past the movie and mentioning, "It's all about Satan, by the way," when he thinks the A-plot isn't looking.

The conclusion, in which "Mister Topps" shows up to spirit Alphie and Bibi away to a new world in his pimped-out Caddy (if this movie does nothing else, it teaches us exactly which machina the deus exes from) is just as abrupt as all the other things that happen. In trying to give us both a savage expose of major record labels and a trippy rockpocalypse, the film really succeeds at neither. But I have to admit, there's just enough of a glimpse of what the film could have been that I can't help but love it a little. It fails miserably at everything it tries...but it tries at something. I don't think there's a single Michael Bay film I could say that about.

Five Things That Really Surprised Me In Marvel's 'Essential' Collections

It still surprises me, sometimes, that I'm kind of sort of maybe just a little bit of an expert on Marvel Comics. I mean, I don't really feel like one; I've read the first 100-300 issues of the Avengers, the Defenders, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Wolverine, X-Factor, and Daredevil, along with a smattering of obscure titles like Man-Thing, Spider-Woman, Howard the Duck, Ghost Rider, Godzilla, and Son of Satan...but that doesn't feel like it should make me an expert. That feels like it should make me an obsessive reader with a good memory. And yet, when I go to conventions, I invariably wind up on panels where I explain the backstory of Marvel characters (and DC as well, for that matter) to comic book fans. This weirds me out. I feel like they should recast me for these things.

But I do appear to be settling into a mantle of expertishness. And so, having read more comics than any sane person probably should, I figure I should pass along a few of my more unexpected responses to you, the reader, so that you can then pass them along as received wisdom to a bunch of people who will tell you I'm full of it. I feel that it's only fair.

1. The Defenders really went catastrophically downhill around issue #125. The thing about the Defenders was that it was a great title for a very long time. There was great chemistry among the cast, they played off the quirky, counter-culture concept really well for a very long time and did fun things with the idea of a team as a social grouping rather than a family or an organization (the two directions explored by the FF and the Avengers, respectively). Doctor Strange worked perfectly as a guide and mentor rather than a "leader" per se, and they had a nice mix of headliners like the Hulk and interesting B-listers like Valkyrie and Hellcat...although I'll admit, Nighthawk never worked for me. The bigger a role he got, the less I liked the series.

But then J.M. DeMatteis, a writer who I generally like and respect a lot, decided to write out Doctor Strange and the Hulk and turn the series into a vehicle for Angel, Beast and Iceman, and to turn them into an official team. The headliners were written out, and most of the new additions felt charisma-free. Suddenly, the book felt like an amateur-league group of Avengers, rather than a social grouping of powerful and interesting characters, and the series went into a slump it never recovered from. This is a shame, because the reboots have all tried to go back to the very basic concept (Doctor Strange, Hulk, Namor and Silver Surfer) rather than to the middle period that worked so well, simply because of the stench of failure that clung to the later efforts. I'd love to see a modern Defenders reboot that kept Doc Strange and maybe added "non-team" heroes like Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and Wolverine. (Yes, I know I'm describing Bendis' Avengers. Your point?)

2. Stuff actually happened in Thor. I know, this shouldn't be as surprising as it was, but I really never touched Thor as a kid. Even Walt Simonson's legendary run barely impinged on my consciousness, other than the bits they mentioned in Avengers where every bone in his body was broken inside his armor. I knew the very basic stuff, like the Warriors Three and Odin and Loki, but I had no idea that this was where Ego first showed up, and where Galactus' origin was first revealed, and where Firelord made his initial appearance. It was surprising to me to find out how much cosmic space adventure occurred in a comic that was ostensibly high fantasy mixed with Earth-bound superheroics. (It still didn't wow me for a lot of the run, I'll admit. The whole always felt like it was less than the sum of its parts. But it was an interesting look at a piece of Marvel history I never heard of.)

3. Howard the Duck really captured the zeitgeist of the Seventies. To be honest, it captured the zeitgeist of the Seventies so well that it really doesn't work as a modern comic; you have to read it as a piece of history, a record of the mood of a particular time to be able to enjoy it. But Steve Gerber got it perfectly; the fads, the crazes, but more than that the sense of palpable disaffection and disorientation that the Sixties had produced. People had spent a decade searching outside the norms of society for meaning, and the Seventies was where they realized that they still hadn't found it and weren't even sure what they were looking for. There was a sort of existential despair that permeated the era, and Howard ("trapped in a world he never made"--aren't we all?) hit it perfectly.

4. Some of these series really work as stories with beginnings, middles and ends. I don't actually think that anyone intended any of their series to have endings. Endings in comic books, save for a few notable exceptions, come about due to low sales and not due to any kind of overarching intent. But many of the comics that were collected into big, thick Essential volumes turned out to have really good endings that summed up their whole series. Ghost Rider, for example, had a finale that finally brought together all the revelations about the character's past and gave him something he'd never had, a meaningful nemesis who was a match for him in his final battle. Godzilla had a truly epic conclusion, featuring a huge battle against the Avengers in mid-town Manhattan that was everything you could hope for. Killraven turned out to be the story of the Second War Against the Martians, from first strike to the final human victory. And Super-Villain Team-Up was the fore-runner of the modern crossover, pulling in the major players of the Marvel Universe in a war between Atlantis and Latveria that spanned two years of comic book history. Had these titles not been canceled, they might have had to do very different things to keep going. But the ends they had cemented their reputation.

5. Marvel deserves more credit for their horror books than they ever got. Most of the praise you hear for horror comics is for horror anthology books, specifically the EC comics of the Fifties and the later DC horror renaissance under Joe Orlando. But Marvel had some excellent continuing horror series, something that was amazingly difficult to achieve given the natural tendency of the genre to end in the death of the protagonist. They had an amazing werewolf comic, Werewolf by Night, and an underrated Monster of Frankenstein series that went back to the character's roots. And Tomb of Dracula is one of the best things Marvel ever produced, bar none. Even their lesser lights, like Man-Thing, Son of Satan and Satana, had some great stories in there. (I will not work too hard at defending Brother Voodoo, though.) They really deserve a critical re-evaluation by enthusiasts of horror comics, because they had some amazing stuff in there.

I could probably go on longer--I've barely even touched on Spider-Man, which seems criminal--but I've got five already and I haven't even touched on DC's output. But that seems like a good topic for next time...

In the Special Edition, Lumpy Shoots First

Recently, Rifftrax released a VOD edition of the 'Star Wars Holiday Special', complete with their signature commentary. A lot of people have been wondering exactly how they can do this, given that the intellectual property rights to the Special are currently owned by a company who have, on numerous occasions, issued Cease and Desist orders on public domain works solely on the basis of, "By the time you prove it, your legal bills will have bankrupted you anyway. Why not give up now?"

I don't really have any answers to this, but it has gotten me thinking about the Special. Namely, it's got me wondering if it will ever see daylight in an official sense. (I suppose this may be the basis Rifftrax was using to release it; their lawyers might go to court with a defense of, "People have been bootlegging this for decades and Lucas has never said anything apart from disavowing the damned thing, so they've lost their chance." I don't think that's a defense that'll work, but more power to them if it does.)

Because the key thing is, Lucas has disavowed it. He notoriously hates the thing, wishes it had never been made or at the very least that he'd taken more of an active role in its creation (by all accounts, he simply took the paycheck and let the people who normally produced these kind of variety specials do their thing, only stepping in to design Boba Fett). He hates it to the point where he won't even put out a commercial release of it, even though it's been selling from fans to fans for decades now. But as we all know, George Lucas has just sold the rights to all of the Star Wars properties to Disney for an exorbitant sum of money. And Disney is, by all accounts, going to milk that sucker for everything they can.

So does this mean we're going to see a brand-new Blu-Ray version of the Special, with remastered video footage and special features where the cast discuss their experiences working on it? (Oh, that alone would be worth the cost of the DVD. Harrison Ford squirming uncomfortably, Carrie Fisher explaining just what she'd taken that day to make her pupils dilate like that...) Perhaps we could even get new CGI special effects for the Jefferson Starship box and the miniature aquarium.

If they do release it commercially, I hope they embrace the campiness. Let's face it, the only reason anyone ever watches it is that it's the one thing in the franchise that you can make fun of without sputtering fanboys declaring that you just don't know about the piece of Expanded Universe lore that totally explains that apparent plot hole and you shouldn't be allowed to watch the movies if you're not going to do your research first. (As much as I love geekery, I will admit that the Comic Book Guy comes from a real place.) If they try to sell this as a "lost classic", they're going to run into a major problem when people buy it and realize it's eye-bleedingly terrible. So I say, run with it. Promote it as the "So Bad It's Good 'Comedy' That's Funny...for All the Wrong Reasons!" Include the original Seventies ads (where possible), and add the "Fighting the Frizzies at Eleven" bumpers. Heck, go right ahead and subcontract the Rifftrax guys to include their commentary track. Pretty much everyone involved has already either displayed that they have a sense of humor about it or that they're going to pretend it never happened anyway.

Then again, all this assumes that Lucas did sign the rights away. Maybe the four billion dollar contract includes a clause prohibiting Disney from ever releasing the Special in any way, shape or form. I know it sounds crazy, but keep in mind that when DC bought Wildstorm, they created a separate company for disbursing funds solely to ensure that Alan Moore's paychecks didn't say "DC Comics" on them. Weird and seemingly insignificant clauses are a staple of big contracts. I guess the only way to be sure is to watch for the DVD. Or ask Lucas, but it'll take a braver person than me to bring up the 'Star Wars Holiday Special' around him one more time.

What I Liked About 'Thor 2', and What It Says About Marvel

I'm not going to say that 'Thor 2' was the best of the Marvel movies to date. The plot is very generic fantasy in its tropes and basic structure (ancient enemy, ultimate weapon that's buried instead of destroyed, said enemy returns looking for its old weapon which is now in the hands of a single Hobbit...er, Natalie Portman...) and while I don't think that Malekith was quite as under-baked as some of the reviewers, he was kind of a waste of Christopher Eccleston. (Seriously. You get a guy like Eccleston, you give him some good speeches. Malekith didn't make speeches, because he was fully convinced that there was no need to justify his actions. I'm okay with that--when you've decided that the universe is a mistake and needs to be erased, there's no real point in explaining that to its inhabitants. But it means that Eccleston doesn't talk much, and he's an actor who's good at giving speeches. Just think of his scenes in '28 Days Later', which are all about self-justification, and you'll agree.

But what I did love about 'Thor 2' was its sense of playfulness, its understanding that there's something just a little bit goofy about a series of films whose hero is a big doofy guy who thinks that "hit things with a hammer until they stop moving" is an actual strategy. Thor wanders through the world like this big, glorious, crazy chunk of four-color simplicity, and some of the best gags involve the ways that he interacts with mundane life. (The symbolic heart of the movie is the tiny little gesture he makes when he comes into Jane Foster's apartment and hangs Mjolnir up on the coat rack.)

This sense of fun infuses the whole movie. The big final battle is as much farce as it is drama; Thor and Malekith chase each other through dimension-spanning portals in a fight that owes as much to Looney Tunes and Benny Hill as it does to Lord of the Rings. (Oh, sorry, there's something of a spoiler there...although if it really surprises you that there's a big fight at the end between Thor and Malekith, I suspect you're not really the film's target audience. Although you'll probably be blown away with shock when Thor wins--oh, sorry, more spoilers there.)

The point is, this is a film that's not afraid to lose a little dignity to gain a lot of charm...and it vividly contrasts another problem with comics these days. (On top of all the other ones I mentioned in all my other posts.) Marvel is absolutely terrified, at least in its comics, of looking silly.

I think the root of this is that Marvel has, for a long time, been aiming its publications at kids. And kids love to laugh as much as they love to be frightened, to be excited, and to be grossed out at mushy stuff. When the Hulk talked in his big, dumb, "Hulk smash puny humans! Bird-nose shouts too much at Hulk!" patois, it was meant to seem silly and goofy, because that helped humanize the Hulk and make him less of a monster. When Daredevil fought villains like the Leap-Frog and Stilt-Man, you were not supposed to see them as necessarily a figure of utter terror.

But nowadays, Marvel comics are written by adults for adults. Or, more accurately, they're written by adults who hate having to explain to people that comics aren't just for kids anymore, for adults who hate having to explain to people that comics aren't just for kids anymore. They have a pathological fear and loathing of anything that might smack as "childlike", because they're afraid that some non-comics fan will spot that one panel as their first exposure to comics since they were five, and they'll look derisively at the fan and say, "You actually read this stuff?" Or worse, "You actually write this stuff?"

So humor has been banished. Everything is, if not grim and brutal, at the very least to be taken absolutely SERIOUSLY. Everyone is serious about everything they do, and every villain is a serious threat to humanity that must be fought by serious heroes being seriously serious. The only humor still allowed is to make fun of how silly things used to be; everyone can mock the way that the Hulk used to talk, but nobody seems to understand that it was a joke. Even when we're not getting on-panel disembowelings and villains raping women to show how evil they are and the other trappings of arrested adolescence, the pathological avoidance of anything that might be considered "fun" is almost total. (Maybe this is why Squirrel Girl and Deadpool are such fan favorites. They actually get to be...gasp...silly.)

So again, I find myself gravitating to the movies, where Thor has to take the London Underground to get back to his battle for the sake of the universe, and Jane Foster's best friend calls his hammer "Mew-Mew". Because it is silly, it remembers that the whole idea of superheroes are wonderfully and gloriously silly, and it understands that it's not something to apologize for. It's something to embrace. Because, in the immortal words of Terrance Dicks, "What's the point of growing up if you can't be childish sometimes?"

My Thoughts On the New Ms Marvel

For those of you that may not already know about this, Marvel Comics is launching a new 'Ms Marvel' series, creating a legacy hero to fill the shoes of Carol Danvers (who has in turn decided to become a legacy hero filling the shoes of Captain Marvel, because Marvel has to publish a comic called "Captain Marvel" once every so often or DC will swoop in on the trademark like a turkey vulture that happens on a wrecked tour bus). The new hero will be Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenager from New Jersey who learns that she has shapeshifting powers and decides to follow in the footsteps of her favorite Avenger. Her parents, who are first-generation immigrants from Pakistan, aren't sure if being a superhero is a good career move for her; and her brother, who has picked up some strongly conservative views about the role of women, is very sure it's not.

My initial thought is that this sounds like great stuff. The editor of the book, Sana Amanat, helped to create the character by drawing on her own experiences growing up as the child of Muslim immigrants, and I feel like this could be a real, authentic character with something fresh to say about the superhero genre. All too often, even the earnest attempts at getting more diversity into comics come across as ham-fisted box-checking (as opposed to ham-fisted bun-vending) and descend into stereotypes, because as well-meaning as they are, it's still the same old bunch of white guys writing them. (The ultimate example of this, by the way, would have to be the New Guardians. It had a Japanese businessman with technology controlling abilities, a Chinese woman who could manipulate ley lines, an aboriginal Australian with "dreamtime" powers, and Extrano, who was gay. Only they couldn't say that, because of DC's publication standards at the time, so they hinted it by having him lisp and mince until audiences got the point. Suffice to say that the road to unintentionally hilarious gifs circulated on the Internet among gay comics fans is paved with good intentions.)

So this is great. It's an attempt to get a fresh perspective on comics that isn't out of the Straight White Male Club, to give representation to a lot of people who look at the comics shelves and don't see themselves, and as such don't read comic books. One of the things that's very invisible to most straight white male comics fans is how much of their fandom is based on audience identification; because just about every comic book character out there falls into at least two if not all three of those categories, they're so used to having someone they can identify with that they don't even need to examine why they tend to like some characters more than others. They don't even notice, "Hey, this superhero is just like me," because they're all just like them. (I remember having a half-hour long conversation with a comic-shop employee on why it was a bad thing to get rid of Oracle. I think it was the first time it had ever occurred to him that every single superhero he liked was a straight white able-bodied male.)

But as always, I run smack-dab into the brick wall of my cynicism here, which is best summed up by the 'Dilbert' quote, "You know, if you put a little hat on a snowball, it can last longer in Hell." Because the unfortunate reality of the marketplace is, Marvel and DC have already done a pretty damned good job of marginalizing non-straight white male able-bodied fans to the point where most of the target audience for the new Ms Marvel probably won't even know it exists. Title after title for decade after decade aimed squarely at the "white teenage boy" market, combined with a marketing strategy that has made comics virtually invisible to anyone outside of a tiny, dedicated fanbase that actively seeks them out, has self-selected Marvel's market down to the point where launching a book like this might as well have a blurb on the cover that says, "The New Ms Marvel! She's Not For You!"

Yes, there are some fans who will seek it out even though they don't personally identify with the character. There are also some fans who do personally identify with the character, either in terms of race, religion or ethnicity, who haven't been burned out on the hobby despite the worst efforts of fans and professionals alike, who will pick it up. But experience has taught me the lesson that these fans aren't enough to sustain a book. Marvel needs to reach out to a different audience on this one, and I don't think they're going to do it. They're just going to put the book on the rack next to 'Spider-Man' and 'Captain America', in the store that has all the cheesecake posters up behind the counter and the clerk who gives the stink-eye to anyone who looks vaguely ethnic because "they might be shoplifters", and then wonder why it fails. And inevitably come to the conclusion that it's just because nobody wants to read about superheroes who aren't white guys like them.

And from there, it's about five years to the point where Kamala Khan dies in the next crossover so they can introduce the NEW Ms Marvel, who will coincidentally be white. And then someone will write another article like this lamenting the fact that Marvel and DC always kill off their ethnically-diverse legacy characters so they can bring in whiter versions, and the company will placate these concerns by introducing a NEW ethnically-diverse legacy character in a different role, but without having learned any of the marketing lessons involved so that hero won't do any better because they're still marketing them hardcore at the same audience that rejected all the previous ones...and who have learned that if they just act pissy enough, Marvel and DC will back down from ethnic diversity every single time and give them back the comforting whiteboy fantasy world they got used to as a child. (I swear, sometimes I think that fans have gotten less tolerant over the years, simply because they know that at least when dealing with comics companies, xenophobia is rewarded.)

Obviously, I hope I'm being cynical. I'm certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is, and to go back into comics stores come January to actually pick up a copy of the new 'Ms Marvel', because as much as I think it's an effort that comes pre-doomed for your convenience, that doesn't mean I won't support it. But I do wish that one of these times, Marvel or DC might realize that there has to be more to reaching a new audience than just putting the book in the store and expecting teenage girls to have a sudden flash of telepathic insight that the industry that's been semi-overtly hostile to them for generations is making another half-assed attempt at getting them interested in the medium.*

*Post #7,352 in the "Why Marvel's Entire Marketing Department Should Be Lined Up Against the Wall and Shot" series. Collect them all!

Two-Sentence Review of 'Drive Angry'

It wasn't that it was bad, per se; it was just that despite some clever stuff with Hell's Accountant and his open disdain for Satanism ("Satan is a thoughtful man, very well-read, and the idea of sacrificing children in his name annoys him") the movie really didn't live up to the trailer--the trailer was just such a perfect encapsulation of its own concept that extending it out to a feature length only got repetitive. But it wasn't bad.

I'm Not More Politically Active Because They Won't Let You Have Cattle Prods

So the current manufactured scandal afflicting Obamacare (and as an aside, I am more than happy to have the biggest improvement in America's healthcare since Medicare permanently associated with the name of a prominent Democrat, who by the way got bin Laden and Qaddafi) is that many people are finding out that their old plans are no longer available to them under the new insurance rules. My goodness, these people are having to pay more money for better insurance! This is a cosmic injustice that simply cannot be borne! What happened to their freedom of choice? The Republicans, who utterly demand freedom of choice for white males and white males only, are predictably outraged. They are also predictably outraged that people are having difficulty signing up for the thing that they tried to delay, defund, and repeal for the past three years running, probably because it infuriates them that Obama is even better at obstructing Obamacare than they are, but that's a different story.

The simple answer, which for some reason isn't getting more press, is that one of the things Obamacare does is set up minimum standards for what an insurance company can get away with actually calling "insurance". You see, basically there's been a trend over the last decade of predatory, anti-consumer "insurance policies" out there that offer ultra-low premiums, but that have coverage so limited and deductibles so high as to be useless in any kind of practical way. This has been sold as a great alternative for young people without much disposable income and a low likelihood of getting sick or injured...but these are exactly the people who need good insurance the most.

Why? Because if you've got low income and a low likelihood of getting sick or injured, you probably don't have much of a safety cushion in place for when you do get sick or injured. Lots of people are living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford to be out of work for a few weeks under any circumstances, let alone with massive medical bills. These people are basically suckered into taking a major gamble with their health, one that could have catastrophic consequences for their financial future should they get into a car accident or fall down the stairs or get a major illness. And up until now, selling these people high-deductible, limited-coverage plans has been a lucrative scam for insurance companies.

How do we know it's a scam? Simple. If it wasn't, the insurance companies wouldn't sell it. Think of it this way--these plans give health insurance companies thousands less in revenue per person per year. For a theoretically healthy person who's not using their insurance, the insurance company's most profitable strategy is to convince them to sign up for the most expensive plan possible, because all of that money is pure profit to them.

But they're not. They're pushing--actively pushing--the cheapest plan possible. They're tacitly admitting that they make more money when you buy a plan that has very low premiums but less ability to make claims. The only way that this is a financially viable business strategy for them is if they expect you to make claims often enough to more than offset the difference in premium price. In other words, they're gambling that you're going to underestimate the likelihood of making a claim. The only way this isn't a scam is if insurance companies don't understand odds as well as you do. Have I mentioned that they employ hundreds of full-time statisticians and actuaries?

So when the news says, "Obama is taking away your insurance plan, young people!" ...they actually mean, "Obama is ending a scam that ends up bankrupting thousands of sick and injured people each year." But for the news to say that, they'd have to admit that several of the biggest corporations in America have been running a scam on its most financially vulnerable citizens for years and they haven't said anything, and we're not a country that generally likes admitting that the only difference between Blue Cross/Blue Shield and that guy on the corner offering to sell the Brooklyn Bridge for fifty bucks is that one of them wears a suit and tie. So it's easier to sell this as a "choice" and hope nobody's paying attention.

Lucky for us, the federal government is paying attention and doing its job. No wonder the Republicans hate it so much. They've been insisting that's impossible for so long that finding out they're wrong is kind of breaking their brains.

Horror Anthology Drinking Game

(To be played during the reading of DC horror anthologies like "House of Secrets" and "The Witching Hour".)

Take a sip whenever a character is revealed as a vampire in the last two pages of another kind of horror story ("It was then that the alien realized he'd abducted...a vampire!" Or similar.)

Take a sip whenever the protagonist of a ghost/werewolf/vampire/mummy/whatever story realizes that he/she is the ghost/werewolf/vampire/mummy/whatever.

Take a drink when a character finds out he/she is actually a robot. (This may result in a sip and a drink if it happens at the end of a story about robots.)

Take a sip when the host's closing narration completely changes the story ("...but of course, he died in a car accident a week later.")

Take a sip when the main character's significant other turns out to be a witch. Take a second sip if it happens on the last page of a story where witches were not previously mentioned. Take a third if it was a story where the supernatural was not previously a plot element.

Take a drink every time someone recognizes which Edgar Allan Poe story they're ripping off this month.

Finish the bottle every time the narrator shows up as a character in the story.

Take a drink every time the narrator refers to the narrator of another DC horror title in their narration.

Take a drink every time the real monster is...Man! (As opposed to taking a drink every time the real monster is Woman.)

Pour a shot whenever an ugly character is victimized by a pretty one to drive home a point about being shallow. Drink it when an ugly character is the villain anyway.

Drink a shot of the oldest alcohol you have in the house whenever immortality is depicted as a curse.

Take a sip every time you catch yourself wondering why there are Sergio Aragones drawings in a horror anthology.

And lastly, take a drink every time the story is a thinly-veiled ripoff of 'The Monkey's Paw', 'The Most Dangerous Game', or 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'. (As with all Fraggmented drinking games, the management cannot be held responsible for any incidents of alcohol poisoning related to the practice herein described.)

Re-Spooning

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. Been feeling all kinds of sick, and just as I felt like I was starting to get it together, my workplace took away Google Chrome, leaving me with a greatly diminished set of posting options. I'm posting this from a Kindle, and we'll see how that goes. On the other hand, there appear to be nine more new Doctor Who episodes out there since I last posted, so that's awesome...even if it does mean Ian Levine will be even more insufferable about his insider fan status.

Speaking of cult TV, I have been watching the Agents of SHIELD series, and liking it. I am not unaware of the complaints about the series, and don't entirely disagree--Ward is a stiff, and I'm not loving the chemistry he has with Skye. But as with so many series out there, I feel like people are complaining not because the show is bad, but because it doesn't seem to be building a huge, overarching metastory that they can invest their emotions into speculating about. But I am actually a fan of episodic these days, primarily after being disappointed by series like Heroes, so I'm not disappointed that it's not being something it wasn't trying to be. (I still feel like this was the cause of a lot of the fan backlash against Dollhouse.)

Oh, and the Amazing Race is happening again. For fans of train wrecks, I guarantee you that you will not find a better train wreck than Tim and Marie. These two are already divorced, meaning that the bickering has already reached nuclear proportions, and they lucked into the double Express Pass in the first round, leading to some of the most hilariously inept attempts at manipulation EVER. At one point, she tells a team who she thinks has a lead on good tickets, "You know I have the Express Pass." My current working theory is that she thinks it works like Wonder Woman's magic lasso, forcing other racers to tell the truth. I'm torn between despising her sense of entitlement and not wanting the shitshow to end.

I know, talking about TV ain't exactly Shakespeare. I'm easing my way back, OK? Next time I might even be up to complaining about comics.

It's Funny If You Play 'Avengers: Alliance'

"My name is Fury, Captain Rogers. Nick Fury." The man stood in the shadows...or perhaps the shadows gathered close to him. "The Avengers need you. SHIELD needs you. There are threats out there, threats to America that only you can face."

Captain America smiled wearily. "How can I turn my country down?"

They took him to the future, then, with a time machine they claimed was confiscated from someone named 'Doctor Doom'. They set him up with his own room in the SHIELD helicarrier, and told him he'd be going on his first mission shortly. Within minutes, a SHIELD agent met him at the door.

"So, how about a little sparring session? You, me and Wolverine against another team. The practice will do you good."

Cap shrugged and grabbed his shield. "Sure. It'd probably be a good idea for me to get used to some of these strange new threats, Agent..."

"ContractKiller, sir."

"...um, right. Just show me the way to the gym."

A few minutes later, and he returned to his room, bruised and exhausted. His 'sparring partners' had tried to murder him with some sort of powered suit of armor that shot missiles and lasers. Luckily for him, Howard Stark's shield held up to the punishment, but he'd be feeling the pain for days even with the Super-Soldier Serum coursing through his bloodstream. He needed to rest, or he'd be no good for whatever mission Fury was planning for him--

There was another knock at the door. "Hello, sir, I'm Agent Deathbringer. I'm afraid that Doctor Strange and I need you for another sparring session."

"Um, I really think that I need a little R and R, can't you just--"

"Sorry, it's tournament season." He pressed a button, and the two of them were teleported back into the gym. This time, a ten-foot tall green monster pounded away at him for five solid minutes while his teammates picked off its allies. Cap couldn't help but notice that they kept hiding behind him whenever anyone attacked.

He staggered out of the gym, but he didn't even make it back to his bunk before 'Agent Play947325' dragged him back for another 'sparring session', this time with a woman named Storm as his partner. In the brief moments before a crazed telekinetic tried to drop a boulder on him the size of a Buick, he whispered to her, "Um...do we ever fight bad guys around here?"

"Sometimes," Storm whispered back. "To keep in practice between sparring sessions."

Thankfully, he didn't remember much after that. He woke up back in his room, his skull ringing and a lump the size of a hen's egg on his forehead. He tried to sit up, but the room swam unpleasantly around him and he sagged back onto his bunk.

There was a knock on the door. "Go away!" he shouted.

The door opened anyway. Cap realized he'd never actually seen any sign of a lock on it. "Hi," the SHIELD agent said. "I'm NickFury232, and we have a sparring session scheduled. Don't worry, Cap, it's just to keep your skills honed."

Cap tried to hit him, but he was too dizzy to do anything but swing wildly. "I understand your feelings, sir," the Agent said as he teleported them back to the gym, "but we need to use the best in these fights. And you are the best."

He wasn't kidding. As the other team teleported into the room, Cap saw that they had another Captain America right at the front. "How...?" he mouthed, almost too confused to speak.

The other him shrugged, his expression resigned. "I'm from fifteen minutes in your future. Agent Dudebr0 here used Doom's time machine to make sure he had me on his side." He sighed. "If it helps any, I remember making it quick."

It didn't.

Twenty-one days later, they finally stopped coming. Cap felt like he'd been through World War II...again. He tried his best to patch up his wounds, though. The new recruit, a man named Cable, was explaining to him that it all started up again in a couple of weeks. Captain America briefly wondered if the living legend of World War II could get away with deserting.

THE END

Blogging Isn't a Pain in the Neck, But...

I have a pain in the neck that's stopping me from blogging. Posted a couple of things I've already written, but I'm taking a few days off of writing anything new. The discomfort is just nagging enough to wreck my concentration. See you folks next week!

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Twenty-One

I really thought I was still dreaming when I woke up. Can you blame me? I was disoriented, I was in an unfamiliar place (yes, we took over the building eight months ago, but it's not like I slept there every night--I still have school and family and stuff, and I probably don't sleep in the dorm rooms more than about one night out of every twenty) and I was in the middle of a weird horror-movie dream. And I woke up out of the dream to see my favorite movie star saying, "Are you okay?"

Well, I say "movie star", but even I have to admit that June isn't going to win an Oscar any time soon. Not because she's a bad actress or anything; it's just that movies like 'Night of the Blood Leeches' and 'Deathrain' don't exactly aspire to be the kind lofty art that the Academy looks at. But if they did, there'd totally be a little gold statuette with 'Best Actress - June Munro' written on there. Honestly, I think she deserves it way more than Meryl Streep; anyone can imitate Maggie Thatcher if they just watch enough old news footage, but how many people can convincingly pretend to be hypnotized by a lesbian vampire cult? ('Cult of the Blood Sisters'. It was direct-to-DVD. You might not have heard of it.)

That was what made me so sure I was dreaming. I wasn't just seeing an actress, I was seeing my absolute all-time favorite actress. I had watched entire movies for her thirty-second cameo appearances, and she was in my metaphorical bedroom? No way. No freaking way. I just rolled over and closed my eyes again, because if June Munro was showing up in my weird horror-movie dream then it was probably about to get weirder and more horrory, and I didn't want to deal.

And then she shook me on the shoulder a little, in that way that people do when they're touching a stranger. And then I realized I wasn't dreaming after all.

I flipped over so fast that she probably didn't even realize what was happening, and luckily for me, I also went through my embarrassing celebrity gush phase so fast that she didn't realize that either. "OmigodAAIIIEEEEEyoureJuneMunroIvegoteverysingleoneofyourmoviesonDVDIlovedyousomuchinMegaScorpionvsVampSharkcanIhaveyourautographwhatareyouevendoinghereOMIGODdoyouhavesuperpowersdidyoujointheteamthatissoawesomeItotallycantevenbelieveitEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!"

She gave me a blank look. I think that was probably the best thing I could possibly have hoped for. "Hi," she said. "I'm Skreem Queen. Captain Light told me to come and wake you up?"

I nodded. I had calmed myself, collected myself, gotten over my embarrassing gushing, and was now into the next phase of being awkward around a personal idol, paralyzing shyness. "Um. Hi. I'm Cassie. Hummingbird. That's, um...you know, what I call myself." I could feel my cheeks getting hot, and I knew I was blushing bright yellow. (I still have red blood, even though my skin is green, so when I blush, I blush yellow. Science is fun!) "Um...what did Josh need? Er, Captain Light. What did he need?"

She looked at me with a little furrow in her brow. It was a look that screamed, 'I want to ask if you're okay, but I don't know you well enough.' She shook it off and answered my question. "He said that there was a laboratory of some sort that was reporting a hostage situation. A place called PerfecTech?"

That took my mind off of my awkward celebrity encounter pretty quick. PerfecTech had been on our radar for a few months now, and if they were having problems, it automatically fell into the category of 'not good'. They'd been showing up after our fights, grabbing anything weird-looking that wasn't nailed down and driving off with it. We'd tried stopping them, but they flashed some official-looking paperwork in our faces that said that they had legal authority to 'salvage' anything unusual they found abandoned. There was a lot of jargon on there about 'extraordinary technology of sufficient interest to national security', and some signatures of people that I'd seen on the nightly news. We weren't interested in getting those people on our bad side, so we let PerfecTech go. A couple of us even thought it might be good to have someone securing all that weird alien technology and magic artifacts and stuff, just so that it wouldn't wind up on the black market or something, but most of us wanted to know a whole lot more about who was doing the securing before we relaxed. This looked like a good chance.

Or possibly a very bad one, if there was someone who had already broken in and had access to everything they'd piled up and a whole bunch of hostages with it. Imagining a person armed with all the leftover junk from a half-dozen invasions, a small horde of supervillain rampages, and a smattering of mad scientists was a pretty big wake-up call. "OK," I said, realizing she was waiting for a response. "Give me a minute to splash a little cold water in my face, and I'll meet you down in the hangar."

Life as a superhero never seemed to stop. Still, I did get to meet movie stars.

TO BE CONTINUED...

I May Very Well Have Snapped

I'm going to try doing a thousand words a day on a long-form story, until it's done. Since I don't want this blog to turn into "seven posts a week on one topic and then one or two a week on everything else," I've created a separate blog for it here:

http://iamundeadforlife.blogspot.com/

I will try to make it look prettier later. The quick and dirty description, for those of you who won't click on a link without a little enticement, is that it's a novel about zombies...but they're not mindless, they don't hunger for human flesh, and they don't eat brains. That doesn't mean that the dead rising from the grave isn't causing the end of civilization as we know it; it just means that it's happening in ways that Romero fans never imagined.