*Sigh*
I'm not sure I even have the heart to rant about this Newsarama interview with 52 editor Michael Siglain:
Let me just pick out one thread from the skein...
NRAMA: Obviously, it's easy to armchair quarterback this fight, but...Adam was killing people on the ground, and the casualty and damage rate was staggering. Why not haul his butt into space from the start?
MS: That would've been ideal, if the heroes worked together enough to formulate a plan that would've launched him into space. Instead, chaos reigned supreme and the fight was more a free-for-all...at least until Captain Marvel and the mystics got involved.
At the risk of repeating myself: Marvels, Martians, Amazons, Green Lanterns, and the entire Justice Society fighting across the globe for an entire week, and in that time (and boy, aside from a few scrapes and costume tears, sure doesn't look like these folks have been in the %$#@ for an entire week) and not a single person in the entire assembly of heroes thought to step back from the fray for 30 seconds to think of, you know, a plan?
And, I mean, we're not so much talking about an original plan here or anything. We're talking about the exact same plan that Superman and Superman, and the Green Lanterns, and every single other DC hero capable of flight had used against Superboy Prime less than a year earlier.
Superboy Prime is rampaging on Earth? Haul his @$$ into space. It worked once, and no one thought to try it again during the entire course of a @#$%ing week-long battle?
Friday, April 20, 2007
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Life During Wartime
And another thing: the whole idea that World War III was necessary to explain all the stuff that happened to Aquaman, and why the Titans were all broken up and dysfunctional at the start of OYL, and what happened to Manhunter, and how Jason Todd came to steal Nightwing's thunder, and whatever seems like a real Fibber McGee's closet construct. Was it really necessary to cram all that half-baked exposition into four issues? Did it really explain anything? Did all that change have to happen in one week?
Seems a poor excuse for good storytelling. Is this the new rug under which the powers that be at DC will sweep all their half-baked pre-One Year Later continuity questions?
"Why did Aquaman..."
"World War Three."
"So, what's up with Martian Manhunter's new look?
"World War Three."
"Okay, and the thing with..."
"World War Three."
"Right. But you know how..."
"World War Three."
As someone who has participated in the exercise in endurance that is 52, I can attest that a year is a hell of a lot of time. A lot can change in a year. Hell, that's the core conceit of works as varied as Babylon 5 and Rent. Change is a process, and throwing all this change into such a short span is nothing more than the manifestation of a broken process.
If the beginning of One Year Later represents Week 53 of the post-Infinite Crisis DCU (and the first OYL appearance of Superman seems to suggest this was the case), then it seems surprising that no one would mention the big global conflagration that had just happened.
It's one thing to realize you need to spackle the cracks in the wall. It's quite another to use an off-color spackle, and then claim the wall has looked that way all along.
Seems a poor excuse for good storytelling. Is this the new rug under which the powers that be at DC will sweep all their half-baked pre-One Year Later continuity questions?
"Why did Aquaman..."
"World War Three."
"So, what's up with Martian Manhunter's new look?
"World War Three."
"Okay, and the thing with..."
"World War Three."
"Right. But you know how..."
"World War Three."
As someone who has participated in the exercise in endurance that is 52, I can attest that a year is a hell of a lot of time. A lot can change in a year. Hell, that's the core conceit of works as varied as Babylon 5 and Rent. Change is a process, and throwing all this change into such a short span is nothing more than the manifestation of a broken process.
If the beginning of One Year Later represents Week 53 of the post-Infinite Crisis DCU (and the first OYL appearance of Superman seems to suggest this was the case), then it seems surprising that no one would mention the big global conflagration that had just happened.
It's one thing to realize you need to spackle the cracks in the wall. It's quite another to use an off-color spackle, and then claim the wall has looked that way all along.
War! Huh! Good God y'all! What is it good for? Absolutely nothin'!
Friends, duty is a terrible burden. That sense of obligation to something beyond ourselves, that drives us forward -- at times despite our better judgement, or our personal desires, or just the fact that we're so gosh darned bone tired that putting one foot in front of the other seems like a herculean task, to say nothing of stepping up and fighting the good fight -- is a difficult yoke to shoulder. Duty can be imposed either internally or externally, but either way it falls to the individual to answer the call. Regardless of the stakes, regardless of the consequences of not stepping up, we are each and every one of us responsible for how we respond.
It is in that spirit of willing acceptance of the call of duty -- and in weary but fervent anticipation of the fact that our long journey is nearly at its anticlimactic end -- that I turn my attention to Week 50 of the year long train wreck DC Comics calls 52.
Heh; train wreck seems an apt term. A train wreck is what happens when you don't have Superman there to stop the train that is barreling down the tracks, running out of control toward the gap in the bridge, or the fuel tanker stalled across the tracks. Superman is the guy who can use his own body as a makeshift rail to bridge the gap, or reach out with a casual hand to stop the train barrelling toward its fiery destiny. Without him, the train goes off the rails, even when the final station stop is in sight.
I'll also cop to the fact that I went ahead and bought all four issues of the tie-in miniseries WORLD WAR III. I did this with full knowledge and acceptance of the fact that I am a sucker. I knew I was being played for a dupe, and that nothing in the series was worth the investment of my time, my attention, or my money. I rationalized it thusly: to date -- and to my horror -- I have invested $125 in following 52. What's another sawbuck against that investment? You can say many things about this decision, but at least you can't say it's a sign I'm on the road to hell, because good intentions were nowhere around this purchase.
At best, it's a parenthetical train wreck; the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and while this little series magnifies details about the precise pattern and weave of that handbasket, it really exists as an exercise in heroic narcissism. It's not about the war, but about why Martian Manhunter is Sad, and why he feels cut off from humanity. And, yes, along the way they manage to work in little details about how Aquaman got turned into a squid, and how Black Adam ripped off a guy's face, and punched Terra's heart out through her spinal column, but mostly, it's about why Martian Manhunter is sad. Because that story's never been told before.
As for Week 50, the aforementioned World War III plays out across the pages of this single issue.
Before we get to the details of this issue, let's pause for a moment to consider the implications of this idea: Given the real time conceit of 52, this means that a war that spans the globe, that was precipitated by an attack that killed millions of people, begins and ends in the span of one week. A 168-hour war.
Why? Apparently because series writer Greg @#$%ing Rucka thought it would be a spiffy-keen idea. To quote from this week's DC Nation column:
In reviewing all the OYL changes, we realized that most could be tied to one massive event. One that could affect all our heroes on a global level And that's where World War Three was born. You'll have to forgive my memory--I'm always at a loss for the old "who said what"--but I remember Greg Rucka discussing the implications of a World War fought by super-heroes. And while everyone debated how it would be fought, they all agreed on one thing; the war would definitely be fast. One week fast.
To quote Guy Gardner taunting the Flash: "Haw! You're not even half-fast!"
A war that encompasses the entire globe, fought in one week. A war perpetrated and carried out on all levels by superhumans. By that very definition, this is a war in which ordinary humans have no role to play but that of victims, where all human works -- hell, where every drop of rain and blade of grass -- is nothing but collateral damage.
Even if these creators are right -- and aren't just adopting an idea that fits the conceit of the project on which they're working -- a war that lasts seven days, particularly one that leaves millions of victims and billions, arguably trillions, of dollars of damage in its wake, won't end in seven days. Hell, look at history. Israel fought a six day war almost 40 years ago, and it's part of a pattern that has been @#$%ing up that part of the world ever since. You don't put something like this back in the box at the end of a week, because you've used the time to explain why Raven is sad, or why Martian Manhunter is wearing pants, or why Billy @#$%ing Batson now has a streak in his hair.
Unless, of course, putting the whole thing back in the box at the end of the story is what you have in mind. Even if Dan Didio is correct, and this story was needed to explain away all the changes that happenehttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.italic.gifd between the end of Infinite Crisis and the beginning of One Year Later, this is a clumsy, half-assed, hamfisted, and downright incompetent way to do it. How do you get from a global catastrophe to the establishment of a new status quo -- one in which there isn't a massive, global-level humanitarian crisis taking place all over the world? One in which the war among super-heroes doesn't spark other wars once the storm surge of spandex recedes? One in which all the cities that are destroyed get rebuilt, and the millions of dead are buried, and hunger and disease and looting and hopelessness and post-traumatic stress of an incalculable scope doesn't hold sway in tens of millions of hearts and minds?
How is it possible to go from that to a status quo where a repowered Superman spends his time fighting the same old battles, and making the same old speeches to Lex Luthor? Or where a newly-lighthearted Batman can find the time in the wake of watching Harvey Dent embrace Two-Face again to adopt Robin? Or where the Teen Titans get back together, and nobody really talks about the fact that they went through a war mere days before their story picked up? Look, like it or loathe it, but Marvel did have a point with Civil War: at some point, something will happen that's big enough to get people asking the question about how smart it is to allow superheroes to run around unchecked. The execution suffered, but the fundamental question is germane. In Marvel's case, all it took was the destruction of one city in Connecticut. With millions dead, an entire country destroyed, and who knows how many victims around the world, the DC heroes just dust off, wrap up the story, and take their marks on the OYL stage?
There's only one way it's possible. Somebody's gonna have to hit a reset button. Otherwise, the whole enterprise falls apart. Somewhere in the next two weeks, whatever Booster Gold has been working on, or the spirit of Ralph Dibney, or the three spacebound stooges will maguffin the %$#@ out of things, and millions of people will come back to life, and the leaning tower of Pisa will rise again from the rubble, and peace and happiness and puppies will reign again, making the world safe for Superman to punch hell out of the Kryptonite Man with a clean conscience.
And so, I'm forced to ask, what the hell is the point? Why do it if it doesn't matter? Why walk into a place that is both so dark and so filled with story-telling potential? Millions dead. Countless others displaced. What is the role of superheroes in such a world, especially when they are complicit in creating those circumstances? Why shake up the status quo merely to reinforce the notion that the status quo is the only viable state, and that the only change that is truly possible relates to haberdashery? Is it a failure of talent? Of imagination? Is it simple sadism?
And really, even if there is a point I'm simply incapable of seeing, I don't buy the core of the story. So Black Adam is on a rampage. So he is so full of rage and grief that nothing matters to him, and any vestige of conscience or restraint is lost amid the maelstrom of these powerful emotions, making him as powerful and dangerous as he has ever been. Fine, I get that.
Only here's my thing:
Martian Manhunter. Power Girl (who's a kinda sorta maybe never really clear on this but, you know, as close as makes no odds Kryptonian analogue). Two Green Lanterns (Gardner and Stewart); three if you count Alan Scott. Three Marvels. And, oh, yeah, Mister @#$%ing terrific, a character established as the third smartest guy on the planet (presumably coming in right behind Wayne and Luthor). Plus a couple of Amazonian-empowered heroines.
Where does the war come in? How is this thing not essentially over before it starts? Given the talent and power available, we're not talking about a world war. We're talking about an episode of 24. It's only a war because the brane trust decided they wanted a war, decided that after making a personal investment of a year of their lives, and after dragging readers along for the better part of a year, there needed to be some manner of payoff, no matter how devoid of logic.
It's poorly conceived. It's risibly executed, or would be, if there was anything risible about the subject matter. It reflects the same one-note, tone-deaf approach to currency, and relevance, and real-world detail we've seen in this series's depiction of everything from how stock offerings work to how long it takes the police to make an arrest.
More to the point, it perpetrates the ongoing conceit of the series: ain't no hero like a legacy hero. There is nothing of value in the new. Four legs good, two legs bad. It's the stuff my little 52 Zoo Crew has been ranting about for a year now. Take out Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, and you're left with a void (at least that seems to be the gospel according to the creative and editorial teams behind 52). Promote whoever you want, but never forget that they're placeholders.
We see it in everything from Jay Garrick's throwaway "For once Guy's right..." line. Really? Twenty years after the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, and his own series, and his death and resurrection and rehabilitation, and we're still stuck with the same tired old "Guy Gardner is a jackass, but even a broken clock is right twice a day" schtick? Why? Do the brane trust not read DC comics? Do the editors? Hell, say what you will about Geoff Johns and his slavish devotion to the past, but he's been one of the prime movers of Gardner's rehabilitation. But we still get lines about why it's usually okay to ignore the guy (er, Guy)?
But that absolutely pales in comparison to the treatment of the Infinity, Inc. characters. I get that the brane trust invested in their unworthiness. I get that the legacy heroes see them as sullying a proud tradition. That's all well and good. But with the fate of the world on the line (however unnecessarily), they decide to make these characters abject cowards? Why?
Good, bad, or indifferent, aware of the true meaning of heroism or not, these characters somehow made it halfway around the globe to answer the call of duty, to answer a call they imposed on themselves, because no one else believed in them enough to impose that call on them. They suited up. They stepped up. They even got validation from the old guard. Alan Scott went so far as to call Nuklon "son." And what happens? They turn tail and run. Because they're not true heroes. Because they don't pass the test. They don't get a baptism of fire, merely a look of utter contempt from Wildcat before the JSA runs into action, because That's What Heroes Do.
Now of course cowardice is the flip side of heroism. Of course for every person who runs headlong into the burning building, there is someone who runs away from it. It's easy to make characters with no history, no real backstory or dimension, embody the other side of the heroic equation. But it's just as easy, and suggests a lot more storytelling potential (unless they're setting these characters up for some sort of redemption arc, but i'm not sure I believe that) to use these characters, and this situation, to tell a baptism of fire story.
And yet, for all that, I will confess that while I hated the conceit behind World War Three/Week 50, I appreciated the outcome. The innovative use of the Marvel power. The (reversible, but for the moment sympathy-inducing) fate of Black Adam. The likelihood that the answer is simple, and obvious, because that's how Billy Batson rolls, but still completely beyond Adam's comprehension: hope, or love, or forgiveness, or something like that.
Two issues left. A lot of territory to cover. To what end? To what import?
It is in that spirit of willing acceptance of the call of duty -- and in weary but fervent anticipation of the fact that our long journey is nearly at its anticlimactic end -- that I turn my attention to Week 50 of the year long train wreck DC Comics calls 52.
Heh; train wreck seems an apt term. A train wreck is what happens when you don't have Superman there to stop the train that is barreling down the tracks, running out of control toward the gap in the bridge, or the fuel tanker stalled across the tracks. Superman is the guy who can use his own body as a makeshift rail to bridge the gap, or reach out with a casual hand to stop the train barrelling toward its fiery destiny. Without him, the train goes off the rails, even when the final station stop is in sight.
I'll also cop to the fact that I went ahead and bought all four issues of the tie-in miniseries WORLD WAR III. I did this with full knowledge and acceptance of the fact that I am a sucker. I knew I was being played for a dupe, and that nothing in the series was worth the investment of my time, my attention, or my money. I rationalized it thusly: to date -- and to my horror -- I have invested $125 in following 52. What's another sawbuck against that investment? You can say many things about this decision, but at least you can't say it's a sign I'm on the road to hell, because good intentions were nowhere around this purchase.
At best, it's a parenthetical train wreck; the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and while this little series magnifies details about the precise pattern and weave of that handbasket, it really exists as an exercise in heroic narcissism. It's not about the war, but about why Martian Manhunter is Sad, and why he feels cut off from humanity. And, yes, along the way they manage to work in little details about how Aquaman got turned into a squid, and how Black Adam ripped off a guy's face, and punched Terra's heart out through her spinal column, but mostly, it's about why Martian Manhunter is sad. Because that story's never been told before.
As for Week 50, the aforementioned World War III plays out across the pages of this single issue.
Before we get to the details of this issue, let's pause for a moment to consider the implications of this idea: Given the real time conceit of 52, this means that a war that spans the globe, that was precipitated by an attack that killed millions of people, begins and ends in the span of one week. A 168-hour war.
Why? Apparently because series writer Greg @#$%ing Rucka thought it would be a spiffy-keen idea. To quote from this week's DC Nation column:
In reviewing all the OYL changes, we realized that most could be tied to one massive event. One that could affect all our heroes on a global level And that's where World War Three was born. You'll have to forgive my memory--I'm always at a loss for the old "who said what"--but I remember Greg Rucka discussing the implications of a World War fought by super-heroes. And while everyone debated how it would be fought, they all agreed on one thing; the war would definitely be fast. One week fast.
To quote Guy Gardner taunting the Flash: "Haw! You're not even half-fast!"
A war that encompasses the entire globe, fought in one week. A war perpetrated and carried out on all levels by superhumans. By that very definition, this is a war in which ordinary humans have no role to play but that of victims, where all human works -- hell, where every drop of rain and blade of grass -- is nothing but collateral damage.
Even if these creators are right -- and aren't just adopting an idea that fits the conceit of the project on which they're working -- a war that lasts seven days, particularly one that leaves millions of victims and billions, arguably trillions, of dollars of damage in its wake, won't end in seven days. Hell, look at history. Israel fought a six day war almost 40 years ago, and it's part of a pattern that has been @#$%ing up that part of the world ever since. You don't put something like this back in the box at the end of a week, because you've used the time to explain why Raven is sad, or why Martian Manhunter is wearing pants, or why Billy @#$%ing Batson now has a streak in his hair.
Unless, of course, putting the whole thing back in the box at the end of the story is what you have in mind. Even if Dan Didio is correct, and this story was needed to explain away all the changes that happenehttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.italic.gifd between the end of Infinite Crisis and the beginning of One Year Later, this is a clumsy, half-assed, hamfisted, and downright incompetent way to do it. How do you get from a global catastrophe to the establishment of a new status quo -- one in which there isn't a massive, global-level humanitarian crisis taking place all over the world? One in which the war among super-heroes doesn't spark other wars once the storm surge of spandex recedes? One in which all the cities that are destroyed get rebuilt, and the millions of dead are buried, and hunger and disease and looting and hopelessness and post-traumatic stress of an incalculable scope doesn't hold sway in tens of millions of hearts and minds?
How is it possible to go from that to a status quo where a repowered Superman spends his time fighting the same old battles, and making the same old speeches to Lex Luthor? Or where a newly-lighthearted Batman can find the time in the wake of watching Harvey Dent embrace Two-Face again to adopt Robin? Or where the Teen Titans get back together, and nobody really talks about the fact that they went through a war mere days before their story picked up? Look, like it or loathe it, but Marvel did have a point with Civil War: at some point, something will happen that's big enough to get people asking the question about how smart it is to allow superheroes to run around unchecked. The execution suffered, but the fundamental question is germane. In Marvel's case, all it took was the destruction of one city in Connecticut. With millions dead, an entire country destroyed, and who knows how many victims around the world, the DC heroes just dust off, wrap up the story, and take their marks on the OYL stage?
There's only one way it's possible. Somebody's gonna have to hit a reset button. Otherwise, the whole enterprise falls apart. Somewhere in the next two weeks, whatever Booster Gold has been working on, or the spirit of Ralph Dibney, or the three spacebound stooges will maguffin the %$#@ out of things, and millions of people will come back to life, and the leaning tower of Pisa will rise again from the rubble, and peace and happiness and puppies will reign again, making the world safe for Superman to punch hell out of the Kryptonite Man with a clean conscience.
And so, I'm forced to ask, what the hell is the point? Why do it if it doesn't matter? Why walk into a place that is both so dark and so filled with story-telling potential? Millions dead. Countless others displaced. What is the role of superheroes in such a world, especially when they are complicit in creating those circumstances? Why shake up the status quo merely to reinforce the notion that the status quo is the only viable state, and that the only change that is truly possible relates to haberdashery? Is it a failure of talent? Of imagination? Is it simple sadism?
And really, even if there is a point I'm simply incapable of seeing, I don't buy the core of the story. So Black Adam is on a rampage. So he is so full of rage and grief that nothing matters to him, and any vestige of conscience or restraint is lost amid the maelstrom of these powerful emotions, making him as powerful and dangerous as he has ever been. Fine, I get that.
Only here's my thing:
Martian Manhunter. Power Girl (who's a kinda sorta maybe never really clear on this but, you know, as close as makes no odds Kryptonian analogue). Two Green Lanterns (Gardner and Stewart); three if you count Alan Scott. Three Marvels. And, oh, yeah, Mister @#$%ing terrific, a character established as the third smartest guy on the planet (presumably coming in right behind Wayne and Luthor). Plus a couple of Amazonian-empowered heroines.
Where does the war come in? How is this thing not essentially over before it starts? Given the talent and power available, we're not talking about a world war. We're talking about an episode of 24. It's only a war because the brane trust decided they wanted a war, decided that after making a personal investment of a year of their lives, and after dragging readers along for the better part of a year, there needed to be some manner of payoff, no matter how devoid of logic.
It's poorly conceived. It's risibly executed, or would be, if there was anything risible about the subject matter. It reflects the same one-note, tone-deaf approach to currency, and relevance, and real-world detail we've seen in this series's depiction of everything from how stock offerings work to how long it takes the police to make an arrest.
More to the point, it perpetrates the ongoing conceit of the series: ain't no hero like a legacy hero. There is nothing of value in the new. Four legs good, two legs bad. It's the stuff my little 52 Zoo Crew has been ranting about for a year now. Take out Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, and you're left with a void (at least that seems to be the gospel according to the creative and editorial teams behind 52). Promote whoever you want, but never forget that they're placeholders.
We see it in everything from Jay Garrick's throwaway "For once Guy's right..." line. Really? Twenty years after the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, and his own series, and his death and resurrection and rehabilitation, and we're still stuck with the same tired old "Guy Gardner is a jackass, but even a broken clock is right twice a day" schtick? Why? Do the brane trust not read DC comics? Do the editors? Hell, say what you will about Geoff Johns and his slavish devotion to the past, but he's been one of the prime movers of Gardner's rehabilitation. But we still get lines about why it's usually okay to ignore the guy (er, Guy)?
But that absolutely pales in comparison to the treatment of the Infinity, Inc. characters. I get that the brane trust invested in their unworthiness. I get that the legacy heroes see them as sullying a proud tradition. That's all well and good. But with the fate of the world on the line (however unnecessarily), they decide to make these characters abject cowards? Why?
Good, bad, or indifferent, aware of the true meaning of heroism or not, these characters somehow made it halfway around the globe to answer the call of duty, to answer a call they imposed on themselves, because no one else believed in them enough to impose that call on them. They suited up. They stepped up. They even got validation from the old guard. Alan Scott went so far as to call Nuklon "son." And what happens? They turn tail and run. Because they're not true heroes. Because they don't pass the test. They don't get a baptism of fire, merely a look of utter contempt from Wildcat before the JSA runs into action, because That's What Heroes Do.
Now of course cowardice is the flip side of heroism. Of course for every person who runs headlong into the burning building, there is someone who runs away from it. It's easy to make characters with no history, no real backstory or dimension, embody the other side of the heroic equation. But it's just as easy, and suggests a lot more storytelling potential (unless they're setting these characters up for some sort of redemption arc, but i'm not sure I believe that) to use these characters, and this situation, to tell a baptism of fire story.
And yet, for all that, I will confess that while I hated the conceit behind World War Three/Week 50, I appreciated the outcome. The innovative use of the Marvel power. The (reversible, but for the moment sympathy-inducing) fate of Black Adam. The likelihood that the answer is simple, and obvious, because that's how Billy Batson rolls, but still completely beyond Adam's comprehension: hope, or love, or forgiveness, or something like that.
Two issues left. A lot of territory to cover. To what end? To what import?
Friday, January 12, 2007
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Infinite Crisis "Novelization"
Pal Bombasticus threw down the gauntlet, challenging all comers to "novelize" Infinite Crisis. He sweetened the pot by offering up the treasury edition big format 1970s comic of each entrant's choice as an incentive. With such glory on the line, who could possibly resist.
So, without further ado (and with tremendous apologies [and most especially to Mr. Yeats] to all for the liberties taken, and the lines intentionally misinterpreted in the interest of appropriating a good image), I present:
The Infinite Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:
a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs,
while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
So, without further ado (and with tremendous apologies [and most especially to Mr. Yeats] to all for the liberties taken, and the lines intentionally misinterpreted in the interest of appropriating a good image), I present:
The Infinite Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:
a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs,
while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Brief bit on 52, Week 17
Bombasticus asks:
Wonder what was going through the heads of those Kobra guys that
the luthor-wolverine was slicing. i know what was going through their
torsos, hyuck hyuck.
AFOB replies:
*Sigh* Claws and disemboweling are sooo 1993. Making fun of claws and disemboweling is sooo 1997. Finding complexity and nuance in "claws and disemboweling" characters is sooo 2001. Don't these people realize the new trend is to take claws and dismboweling back to basics and pretend the past 20 years never happened?
Meanwhile, speaking of Lord Naga's l'il buddies, I don't imagine I was supposed to root for the Kobra goon squad during their little set-to with the Luthor Schmuck Brigade. The fact that I did is a measure of the accretion of disappointment that I've built up about this series.
Wonder what was going through the heads of those Kobra guys that
the luthor-wolverine was slicing. i know what was going through their
torsos, hyuck hyuck.
AFOB replies:
*Sigh* Claws and disemboweling are sooo 1993. Making fun of claws and disemboweling is sooo 1997. Finding complexity and nuance in "claws and disemboweling" characters is sooo 2001. Don't these people realize the new trend is to take claws and dismboweling back to basics and pretend the past 20 years never happened?
Meanwhile, speaking of Lord Naga's l'il buddies, I don't imagine I was supposed to root for the Kobra goon squad during their little set-to with the Luthor Schmuck Brigade. The fact that I did is a measure of the accretion of disappointment that I've built up about this series.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
If art imitated life
This item from NPR got me thinking:
By Philip Reeves, Morning Edition, August 29, 2006 - In India, several states have banned the sale of Coke and Pepsi after a group called The Center for Science and Environment said the soft drinks contain unacceptably high levels of pesticide.
Is there really an acceptable level of pesticide content in soda? Doesn't any amount of, say, Raid greater than, you know, NONE qualify as too @#$%ing much? Can we not take it as read that I'm well and truly boned on the basis of the phenylketonurics I suck down with every Diet Coke without compounding the problem by dosing me with D-CON as well?
The story made me wonder how such news would play in the DC universe...
By Philip Reeves, Morning Edition, August 29, 2006 - In India, several states have banned the sale of Coke and Pepsi after a group called The Center for Science and Environment said the soft drinks contain unacceptably high levels of pesticide.
Is there really an acceptable level of pesticide content in soda? Doesn't any amount of, say, Raid greater than, you know, NONE qualify as too @#$%ing much? Can we not take it as read that I'm well and truly boned on the basis of the phenylketonurics I suck down with every Diet Coke without compounding the problem by dosing me with D-CON as well?
The story made me wonder how such news would play in the DC universe...
- Gotham - City Police Commissioner James Gordon today ordered the closure of the Gotham City Bottling Plant when it was revealed that recent batches of Jolly Cola that shipped from the facility contained trace amounts of the Joker's trademark laughing gas compound.
- Blue Valley - The Blue Valley school board voted to ban the sale of soft drinks in school vending machines. The unanimous vote taken at last night's meeting comes on the heels of revelations that Kryptonite-laced soil in the Smallville, Kansas, fields used to grow the corn-based sweetener used in Soder Cola Company's midwest production facilities was responsible for a recent surge in students exhibiting powers and abilities far beyond those of their classmates.
- Pangai, Lifuka, Tonga - Local investigators looking into the riot that claimed the lives of four foreign tourists and led to the injury of eleven other tourists and locals have discovered that toxins from a so-called "Lazarus Pit" leached into the spring that serves the PangaiBrau brewery. According to an anonymous expert, "the substance that fills [the] pit is a chemical blend of unknown composition, seemingly originating from somewhere within the Earth's crust." In some documented cases, exposure to Lazarus Pit chemicals has caused temporary psychosis.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Sick
Spent the better part of the last week down with the worst bout of the ick I've exprienced in over 20 years. I haven't been this sick since I had mono in the 7'th grade. Just like then, I whiled away the hours* with massive doses of Vitamin C.
Comics that is.
Back then, I went back and forth between an issue of Batman (possibly Detective) - I recall little of the issue except that it had Catwoman on the cover - something that I variously remember as an issue of Action Comics, an issue of Daredevil, and, like, Rom or Micronauts or somesuch thing** and the sheer brain-melting glory of this:
I've never been a huge Iron Man fan. I like the character fine, but the Crimson Avenger never grabbed my imagination the way that, say, the Scarlet Speedster did. Even in my personal ranking of heroes rooted in the Cold War who used cutting-edge - and cool as all @$#% - technology and gadgets, Shellhead comes in a distant second to the S.H.I.E.L.D. ramrod himself, Nick frackin' Fury.
But this issue was different, and I don't believe it was merely a function of Amusing Brain Sickness. This issue featured an Iron Man with malfunctioning (his power cells may have been depleted, the specifics are kind of fuzzy) armor who had to save the day, including rescuing kidnapped members of his supporting cast - one of whom (possibly Jim Rhodes?) was staked out and left as a sidekick buffet for a passel of poisonous spiders - using nothing but his wits and a bunch of random gadgets (which had presumably never been used before because no previous writer had backed themselves into a corner where they needed to be used, and had therefore had no need to retcon them into the armor's configuration) like diamond-tipped microsaws hidden in one of the fingers of his gauntlets. All that plus an acidic purple gas that ate throug the armor making the suit look like the Toxic Armored Avenger, which was cool. But the real point was this was an Iron Man whose non-armored brain was at the core of his heroism; it was the man, not the costume.
This time I dosed myself with the Marvel Essentials Ghost Rider collection.
This is probably no great revelation, but Ghost Rider was an exceedingly bad series. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to be a charming valentine to the goofy 70s. I wanted to find in it the sort of needy potential Charlie Brown found in that darn Christmas tree, or that you might find in an three-legged, one-eyed, mangy, incontinent dog that just wants to be loved, darn it all. But it's just not there - at least not in the first volume.
It's repetitive. You know the annoying pace of the newspaper Spider-Man strip, where a week's worth of strips offers on average two panels of plot development, with the rest given over to recapping? That's pretty much every issue of Ghost Rider: Sun goes down, Johnny Blaze becomes Ghost Rider, and reflects on how he became Ghost Rider - we're talkin' the same @$#%ing origin sequence every damn time! - rides around for a while, kvetches about: a) his girlfriend; b) how doomed he is when Satan finally gets his hands on Johnny's soul, and; c) how lucky he is that his girlfriend's (and let's not overlook the fact she's his stepsister) purity of spirit keeps the devil at bay, gets outsmarted by biker gangs (who would need about 17 rewrites two rise to the level of two-dimensional villainy), fights ridiculous demons, and occasionally gets rescued by Jesus (no, really), just in time for the sun to come up, for Ghost Rider to turn back into Blaze, and for the whole spirit-deadening process to begin anew.
Too be fair,the whole mess shows a marginal improvement when the action moves to Los Angeles so Blaze can become a TV stunt rider (although there isn't a tremendous focus on the job, since writer Tony Isabella seems to recognize that Blaze isn't a terribly interesting character) but it's still baffling the series lasted nearly ten years.
*between the fever-induced hallucinations, expectoration of toxic mucus, desperate longing for the return of such luxuries as my senses of taste and smell, amazement that a body could ache so much without any exertion, and fervent, fevered prayers for either the sweet, sweet release of death or more juice [not sure which, as I'm pretty sure I was speaking in tongues by that point.]
**Look, I was, like, 11 at the time, and my brain was being slowly cooked in its own cerebral-spinal juices by viral invaders from Planet Ten by way of the 8th dimension, so we're not talking about a Proust and his @#$%ing madelines level of nostalgic recall here. Hell, I was so incoherently paranoid at the time that I thought Tina Yothers on Family Ties was the same kid as the one from Poltergeist, and I was convinced she was going to leap out of the TV and drag me into some hell dimension that it's a wonder I remember anything.
Comics that is.
Back then, I went back and forth between an issue of Batman (possibly Detective) - I recall little of the issue except that it had Catwoman on the cover - something that I variously remember as an issue of Action Comics, an issue of Daredevil, and, like, Rom or Micronauts or somesuch thing** and the sheer brain-melting glory of this:
I've never been a huge Iron Man fan. I like the character fine, but the Crimson Avenger never grabbed my imagination the way that, say, the Scarlet Speedster did. Even in my personal ranking of heroes rooted in the Cold War who used cutting-edge - and cool as all @$#% - technology and gadgets, Shellhead comes in a distant second to the S.H.I.E.L.D. ramrod himself, Nick frackin' Fury.
But this issue was different, and I don't believe it was merely a function of Amusing Brain Sickness. This issue featured an Iron Man with malfunctioning (his power cells may have been depleted, the specifics are kind of fuzzy) armor who had to save the day, including rescuing kidnapped members of his supporting cast - one of whom (possibly Jim Rhodes?) was staked out and left as a sidekick buffet for a passel of poisonous spiders - using nothing but his wits and a bunch of random gadgets (which had presumably never been used before because no previous writer had backed themselves into a corner where they needed to be used, and had therefore had no need to retcon them into the armor's configuration) like diamond-tipped microsaws hidden in one of the fingers of his gauntlets. All that plus an acidic purple gas that ate throug the armor making the suit look like the Toxic Armored Avenger, which was cool. But the real point was this was an Iron Man whose non-armored brain was at the core of his heroism; it was the man, not the costume.
This time I dosed myself with the Marvel Essentials Ghost Rider collection.
This is probably no great revelation, but Ghost Rider was an exceedingly bad series. I wanted to like it. I wanted it to be a charming valentine to the goofy 70s. I wanted to find in it the sort of needy potential Charlie Brown found in that darn Christmas tree, or that you might find in an three-legged, one-eyed, mangy, incontinent dog that just wants to be loved, darn it all. But it's just not there - at least not in the first volume.
It's repetitive. You know the annoying pace of the newspaper Spider-Man strip, where a week's worth of strips offers on average two panels of plot development, with the rest given over to recapping? That's pretty much every issue of Ghost Rider: Sun goes down, Johnny Blaze becomes Ghost Rider, and reflects on how he became Ghost Rider - we're talkin' the same @$#%ing origin sequence every damn time! - rides around for a while, kvetches about: a) his girlfriend; b) how doomed he is when Satan finally gets his hands on Johnny's soul, and; c) how lucky he is that his girlfriend's (and let's not overlook the fact she's his stepsister) purity of spirit keeps the devil at bay, gets outsmarted by biker gangs (who would need about 17 rewrites two rise to the level of two-dimensional villainy), fights ridiculous demons, and occasionally gets rescued by Jesus (no, really), just in time for the sun to come up, for Ghost Rider to turn back into Blaze, and for the whole spirit-deadening process to begin anew.
Too be fair,the whole mess shows a marginal improvement when the action moves to Los Angeles so Blaze can become a TV stunt rider (although there isn't a tremendous focus on the job, since writer Tony Isabella seems to recognize that Blaze isn't a terribly interesting character) but it's still baffling the series lasted nearly ten years.
*between the fever-induced hallucinations, expectoration of toxic mucus, desperate longing for the return of such luxuries as my senses of taste and smell, amazement that a body could ache so much without any exertion, and fervent, fevered prayers for either the sweet, sweet release of death or more juice [not sure which, as I'm pretty sure I was speaking in tongues by that point.]
**Look, I was, like, 11 at the time, and my brain was being slowly cooked in its own cerebral-spinal juices by viral invaders from Planet Ten by way of the 8th dimension, so we're not talking about a Proust and his @#$%ing madelines level of nostalgic recall here. Hell, I was so incoherently paranoid at the time that I thought Tina Yothers on Family Ties was the same kid as the one from Poltergeist, and I was convinced she was going to leap out of the TV and drag me into some hell dimension that it's a wonder I remember anything.
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