Category Archives: Comics

Working Out

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My workout regimen is a nightly two hour long cardiovascular adventure.

I start the first hour on the treadmill and over time I have increased the angle on the treadmill deck progressively all the way up to where I now use it, at five degrees of inclination. I set the speed at 3.8 miles per hour, which is enough to get my heart pumping but not enough to take my breath away. I read once that if you were going to use walking as an exercise that if you are short of breath or breathing so that you cannot maintain a conversation well, that you are exercising beyond your capacity for maximum cardiovascular benefit. At some point walking has to drop away and give up to running. I was doing some running on a Nike+ program but when I started to run into joint aching that was a pretty clear signal to me that perhaps I need to stretch out my expectations of running, at least in the short-term. This time on the treadmill, at least by the computer in the treadmill declares that I burn around 745 calories for the entire hour.

The second hour I spend on the Elliptical Trainer. This machine replicates the general motion of cross-country skiing mixed with stair-climbing and walking. I set the time to be an hour and the “difficulty” to 14 out of 20. I don’t really know what the units are for the Elliptical trainer when it comes to its “difficulty” and I think that each machine manufacturer has it’s own concept of this. When I finish with this exercise I’ve burned about 845 calories.

I do this every single night, except on Sunday. That’s the day I select to rest and recover. So far it’s working very well for me. I do have some mildly entertaining problems, first of which is that I sweat a LOT. Even when I wear UnderArmour, which is supposed to wick sweat away. I find myself soaking my entire kit to saturation and then the sweat starts to rain off of me. It’s not just a little either, not a pitterpat, but more along the lines of a light rainstorm. I try to keep from swinging my hands too much so I don’t accidentally splatter nearby people who really would rather not take a shower from me. The sweat gets going on the treadmill but goes out of control on the Elliptical machine. It runs down my face and into my eyes and stings. So I’ve altered my kit and now I have a towel with me. I mop myself up every two or three minutes and by the end I’m wringing what I imagine to be about 300 to 500 milliliters of water out of myself. They say Cancer is a water sign, of this I have no doubt. Along with my issues with water, it’s getting colder outside. No longer can I work out, then dash outside to hop in my car. I did that once, and when the 40 degree air hit me it took my breath away. Evaporation consumes a lot of energy, in moments I was shivering. Now I take my time, change, wear more seasonally appropriate coverings so the short jaunt outside to my car isn’t so breathtaking.

What has it done for me personally? Well, I’ve lost a lot of weight. I started this adventure at 280 pounds, and I was wobbling around there and 278, back and forth. Mostly that was my sedentary lifestyle expressed in my weight. At this point I was hypertensive and really on the road to later disaster and I knew it. Now I weigh in at 242.6. I have lost 37.4 pounds. It’s interesting to see where it loses first. The first zones that showed immediate and surprising (almost shocking) improvement were in my legs. I used to have what I affectionately described as thunder-thighs, because I keep a lot of my weight there. That has since started to drop away. The next place was my ass, which as pretty much disappeared. Then I started to notice the drop in my face and neck, and oddly enough, my wrists and arms. The most resistant area for weight loss is the obvious regions, right along my trunk and back. So I still have a belly and love-handles, although the further I go the more I am noticing that I’m starting to develop an actual body-shape that is in line with my overall goals. I’m never ever going to look like the other gym bunnies, and I’m okay with that, but I am tired of being fat, and that fat made me tired. In a way I’m tired of being tired. That leads into the next expected-but-still-a-surprise personal result for me, my energy level has shot way up. All this exercise has also done wonders for my mood. When I carried all the weight I was always tired and irritable and generally a moody bitch. Now that I’ve shed a lot of that, I find myself not so quick in the grouchiness arena. Exercise physiologists say that regular exercise has benefits for mental health in addition to what it does for the body and of that I believe them. Body image is very important to me and it struck me square between the eyes a few days ago. I was about to head into the gym and I was wearing too much bulk, so it wasn’t terribly cold and so I stripped down to my UnderArmour Heat Gear Tee. Almost always I want to put something else on over that because I’m self-conscious about how I look with such form-fitting clothing on but that day I tossed off the layers and didn’t give it a single thought. When I got half-way to the changing rooms at my gym and noticed that I just had on my heatgear tee, and that I was okay with that, that feeling was like a blossoming reward for all the hard work I had been doing. It’s only going to get better, and I have another 42.6 pounds to lose. When I get to 200, then I’ll be just right where I want to be.

Working out this way is exceptionally dull work. I get out of work at 5, get to the gym around 5:30, and I really don’t get started on the machines until 6pm. Two hours of working out push my days to 8pm before I can even think of going home. While I’m working out I found that mental diversions really help. Listening to Podcasts works okay, but often times I get transfixed by the timer on the machine and then it just drags on and on. Reading on my Nook Simple Touch is better, especially when I can make the text very large. I sweat too much, and so the Nook has fallen out of favor in this use because I don’t want to drown it in sweat and short it out and kill it. What works best to keep my mind occupied while my body chugs away is my iPad. I’ve found that Flipboard, DC Comics app, Uno, Bejeweled 2, and Qrank really work well to keep me entertained so the time just flies on by. When I’m working out at the Anytime Fitness in Kalamazoo, they offer free Wifi so it’s great and very easy. When I’m at the Anytime Fitness in Portage, they don’t offer free Wifi, so I have to create my own Wifi through my iPhone. It’s not too bad, but I do wish I could get Wifi down in Portage as well.

When I began this new regimen I started out dreading my afternoons, schlepping off to the gym and huffing and puffing and sweating like a rainstorm. Now I think I might be getting addicted to working out. It’s not that I really like it, but it’s an odd sort of craving I have now. It’s good for me and is one of the reasons why I’m dropping weight so very quickly and I really don’t have a problem with that. I just wish I had more hours in the day to do the other things in my life. But if trading some fun for what I’ve been able to do for and to myself over these past few months is very much worth it.

Green Lantern Review

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We just finished watching the opening night for Green Lantern at the Rave Theater in Kalamazoo Michigan. The movie was well constructed and delivered a good story and a wonderful summer movie-going experience. We had some problems with our local Rave Theater, their 3D projectors, Christie Projectors had some really awful color malfunctions throughout the previews but after “rebooting the projector” they got it working properly to display the movie, which we were all thankful for. In order to avoid spoiling the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it, I’m going to place the rest of this review under a more break.

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Meh

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Oh how does DC drop the ball. They’ve perpetrated a hat-trick of meh.

  1. Brightest Day was a concern at the very beginning. I remember commenting that it felt like a sleek aircraft on the tarmac slowly winding up it’s engines. There were some notable explosions that were, on reflection, where it was really at. The biggest payoff for Brightest Day was Deadman learning to live. This of course was undone at the end, of course, so even the biggest feel-good part of the event was whacked with a tire-iron and left to float around in limbo. The climax of the tale was more about stroking Alan Moore than it was about a really good story. It harkened back to elements of the DC Universe that nobody remembers and nobody values. “The Parliament of Trees” and “Swamp Thing”. That went out with disco balls in your bedroom back in the late 70’s kids. So that’s the first most painful bit of meh. Brightest Day. An investment for sure, lots of little minis to soak up the money like little sponges and a payoff that made 40 and 50 year old comic nerds happy but left the rest of us in a lurch wondering what the hell happened. Upon later reflection the entire Blackest Night/Brightest Day was really just a monumental reach-around for Alan Moore. Marvel did a zombie thing, zombies seem like such a great idea… blah blah blah. We forgave Blackest Night because it had a payoff at the end we valued, enough to forgive the obvious Alan Moore heavy petting. It wasn’t until we got shafted with Brightest Day did we discover that we had been sold. Sold to advertisers, sold to the ghost of the still living Alan Moore, and most damningly, sold to the nostalgia that DC seems to be utterly trapped in. Which of course leads us to…
  2. DC’s re-(whatever) event. They are redoing everything, killing off a raft of beloved characters, incinerating the past 75 years of comic book history all in a bid to regain what they’ve lost. Traction and relevancy. I’ve written about this before, the precipitous drop in sales, how last month was better than this, and so on and so forth. The cross-eyed procession done by both of the giant comic book houses when it comes to their events and pricetags, ie “Fear Itself is worth the money!” and “Flashpoint doesn’t have to break the bank!” point out quite clearly that we know it’s a ploy and so do they. This wouldn’t come up unless the fans were tired of $200 misadventures (cough, Brightest Day, cough). It’s bittersweet to me that they are going to do day-and-date release for both physical comic books and digital ones. I suspect that DC hit a point where the pain from poor sales drove them like a horde of disorganized Trollocs right into the sunny vale of the digital comic world. Yes, that’s right, I used a Wheel of Time metaphor, it’s apt! This re-(whatever) you want to call it feels like a clutch. It’s a back-against-the-wall move that has the metallic tang of desperation splattered all over it. “We need hip young heroes with bad attitudes and saggy pants! We need to amp up the Speed-P-Diddy-Yo factor in our stories!” And what do I have as proof for this conjecture? They eliminated the Justice Society of America. The characters, the setting, the story – all gently and transparently euthanized. Jay Garrick doesn’t go out in a Speed Force draped blaze of glory, he just evaporates in a puff of logic. Piff. All gone. Jay Garrick? Who? Yeah. Who. This isn’t the only speedster to get the short end of the stick. Our favorite Speed Force Scarecrow of course is Wally West. If you were able to put a team of DC people in a room, strap ’em down with “I Love Me” jackets and then over the PA say “WHAT ABOUT WALLY WEST?” they would all moan, their eyeballs would slide back in their heads and they would dash their brains out on the nearest wall until they all stopped moving. I’d like to think this was in any way inaccurate but we’ve seen as much, in the little taste of the ostrich-head-in-the-dirt reaction when we posed this very question to DC during C2E2. The only thing I brought to the setting were the straight jackets, the lunatic asylum, and the ultraviolence.
  3. The third bit is the upcoming Green Lantern movie. People like me, who are very fond of the Green Lantern series of comic books are beyond-thrilled that we’re going to see a live-action rendition of our beloved Lanterns. I’m even willing to put aside my urge to throw erasers at Hal Jordan for the time being (think Roger Rabbit). Of course we’re enthralled beyond all reason and enthusiastic beyond measure but I distinctly was very leery about GL hitting the silver screen. I implored the people at DC “Please, if you are going to do it, do it as best you can.” Because anything less would be a heartbreak to the Green Lantern fans who put their entire comic-book-fandom on the line for DC’s effort to cinematically monetize the Green Lanterns. I was at least initially buoyed up by the early reports that the first 15 minutes of the movie make it worthwhile, but then all my good vibes crashed when I saw the reviews of the movie from rottentomatoes.com. 33% Fresh. It is as I feared. It’s going to be a niche movie with a heavy blade. It’s going to make fanboys like me squeal with delight but it’s going to alienate the casual moviegoer who isn’t into comic books.

So it’s just a matter of time now. These three meh-tastic events all lined up and it really tests my affections and my loyalty to DC. I can hope for a few things. I can hope that the “Lets go stroke Alan Moore” well has dried up and we can get to some truly original storytelling instead of digging up 1975 and trying to pretend that it’s a PYT, which, if you have seen me, anything from 1975 can no longer be regarded as a PYT. How about something new DC? Something novel, something daring? Something you didn’t find floating around a pile of very old and very fally-aparty comic books from the deep past? On your current track, it seems as though this is the death-rattle before the end. That I think is the saddest thing, all of this, just falling apart. 

Misplaced Loyalty

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After reading some twitter feeds recently, and for the record there are twitter people and twitter feeds. You follow a person and you can enter into a conversation with them, a feed doesn’t have conversations, they’re just semi-human-shaped billboards that yark. Anyways, following the twitter feed there was a discussion over whether or not a classical bookstore that carried comic books would upset a local comic book store, assuming that if the huge chain sold comic books that it would muscle out the smaller comic book stores the same way that Walmart kills off mom-and-pop stores in towns they occupy. This whole thing got me thinking about the loyalty many have to comic book stores. It’s a feeling I’ve wrestled with as well and for me personally it’s right smack dab in the center of the digital comic book debate. If you roll out day-and-date comic book releases digitally you are essentially removing the impetus for customers to go to a comic book store. I wonder where this sensation of misgiving is coming from, if a comic book store dies, does it threaten comic books? Is it really a bad thing? It’s almost as if comic book stores have established themselves as an habitual destination and when you upset a habit it causes a great deal of discomfort for people who are principally embedded into that particular habit.

Specifically I am writing about DC’s coming overhaul in September. They are going to day-and-date digitally deliver their comic books so technically I would never again have to visit my local comic book store. For clarities sake I don’t read Marvel comic books, so I wouldn’t be drawn in by those books, so why go? Do I feel bad about not patronizing my local comic book store? I don’t know to tell the truth. I’m quite betwixt over it. Life goes on, losing a very small customer like me certainly won’t hurt their bottom line – but what if it does and they can’t make ends meet. Do I feel responsible? Do I feel like I’d be missing out or somehow or guilty even? I feel like I should, but I don’t. When September comes I can just carry my iPad with me and enjoy Comixlunch on Wednesdays without having to carry around a stack of comic books I’ll read once and then pile up somewhere. They’ll pile up on some storage device instead.

When an EF10 hit DC

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They say that God’s pinky is an EF5 tornado. It’s got the power to wipe away a whole city from the map. Yesterday DC Comics announced that this fall they’ll be resetting everything back to #1’s and rewriting the entire “DC Universe”. This I regard as an EF10. God isn’t satisfied with just scrubbing Keystone City off the map, he’s going after every bit that is DC.

So what does this mean? Could be good, could be bad. Nobody knows. Not even the writers know. The artists are in the dark as well. I suppose WB knows, and DC management certainly must know. Here we take a little tangent, and we hope that none of this is an emergent error! It would be something completely comic if someone misheard someone else at a WB/DC meeting and what was a lighthearted dalliance is now company direction! That it could be this way is absurd, but when a comic book company makes a 180 like this one, can you really discount any possibility?

That’s another part of it. It’s gotta be a marvelous thing sitting at the head of DC and watching everyone spinning in tight little circles as fast as they can coming up with possibilities and suppositions and blurting them out on Twitter. I’ve often thought that it would make for awesome marketing cleverness to seed a rich and passionate social network with something mind-boggling and then listening to what people are hoping for, what they are afraid of, and looking at all the outliers as the news causes certain tightly wound fans to figuratively explode all over the place. I’ve also thought about a wholly emergent marketing campaign. The company has no idea what the end-game is, nobody does. The company shocks the fans, the fans then blaze feedback to the company and the company follows a path laid out by the fans. Nobody is leading at all, there is nobody at the helm, it’s two groups dancing without anyone leading. I’ve always thought that could be exceptionally cool or utter disaster. I’m sure “Marketing” and “Business Types” have already modeled that and discovered Captain Trips at the end of it, so, whatever.

Getting back to DC and this EF10 storm that just hit it. One thing I can say is dumping history can be massively liberating. Many years ago I had my car and all it’s contents stolen in Chicago. Whoosh, gone, just like that. It left me with an odd feeling afterwards, I had lost everything, but there was a certain sense of cleanliness left over. That out of a massively unpleasant experience a nugget of pure liberation could spring out of it is marvelous to me. This could be a similar liberating thing for DC Comics. By hacking 75 years of history into kindling and setting it all on fire gives them the chance to tell new stories and free the characters from their pasts.

Who needs liberation then, when it comes to characters? Well, dumping the Hawkcritters is a great start, along with the sheer goofiness of “Power Putz” and “Shockingly Buoyant Girl” in the 45th Century! Both of those can just snap-crackle-and-pop to ash. Other characters can get some much-needed historical mopping up. Who needs a good and deep mop-job? Aquaman. The butt of jokes about a rather lame silly power set really needs to be pulled apart and reconfigured. He could shine if they draw on some cojones and fix his story to match.

For those people who bemoan a lost 75 years of history, you can always go back and relive the glory days anytime you want in the back-issues aisles of a con or your own basement. Much of comic book history is self-contained anyways and you knew that everything was malleable when you grabbed your first comic! What’s the difference between Hal Jordan resetting the entirety of existence in Zero Hour compared with this? Instead of Hal Jordan, it’s just Dan DiDio, or Geoff Johns, or since Brightest Day came along and plotzed on us all, why not just peel back the layers and show Alan Moore underneath it all, as it really is? Is what DC is doing now any less upsetting to people than Kyle Rayner, as Ion, re-igniting the Power Battery on Oa and creating a bumper-crop of new tiny-blue-guardians and then pulling a whole Book-of-Genesis-Surprise on us all by creating male and female pint-sized-guardians at the same time, only years later to have someone else write about the Zamarons, who apparently are Shaq-sized? One has to wonder how Sayd feels when she looks at a Zamaron. I’m just saying. The fact that DC changes things, creates bits and eliminates others, retcons with sheer gleeful abandon and treats time like it’s silly putty – something like this isn’t really anything worth getting upset over. They’ve done this in the past, they’ll do it again, because it’s not about some sort of romanticized tradition but just about storytelling. People accept new actors playing roles they love in soap operas all the time, this isn’t anything different from that. The characters change, the history is binned over and over, but you’ll keep on paying because the stories are compelling and frankly, that’s what you’re really paying $2.99 for. You aren’t clinging on to Adam West as Batman, so just let go and enjoy the ride!

I’ll leave you all with a great little aphorism that fits here really well “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Enjoy.

Blackest Night and Brightest Day

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Just finished off Brightest Day #24 from DC Comics over lunch with Scott. My experience with this twin comic book event started out strong. Blackest Night was done quite well and was a pleasure to read, kept you on the edge of your seat for many issues and was easy to follow.

Then the opposite came out, in the guise of Brightest Day. The entire series of Brightest Day was very complex with many players and their sub-stories felt more like meaningless chores than actual meaningful events that I could really get myself wrapped up in. There were a group of incidental characters featured throughout that primarily appeared in the theme of “use ’em or lose ’em” and I couldn’t really form a good emotional bond with any of them. The best thread in the story was how Boston Brand learned how to live again, but that was pretty much squandered in the finale of the story. Many of these second-string characters underwent life-changing events and I couldn’t really care one way or another. The entire series ended with each of the characters setting out on their own separate paths, as if the events of Brightest Day were just a dalliance. I was very excited at the end of Blackest Night, and I was really quite concerned after a few of the first issues of Brightest Day, it felt like the excitement-craft was parked on the tarmac and the engines were very slowly winding up. The entire series felt a lot like that, a kind of regressive, perpetually tripping-on-itself story that always was just on the lead up to the excitement curve but once it started to climb it trembled and fell back away from actual payoff.

The entire two-part story borrowed a lot of creative energy from much of the work that Alan Moore dropped off on DC’s front-steps when he wrote some stories for the Green Lantern series of comic books. The Blackest Night prophesies were the start and at the end of Brightest Day you discover that the major player is “The Green” which is another batch of Alan Moore-inspired material that was injected into DC. I know a lot of professionals regard Alan Moore as a fundamental power in comicdom and I’m sure they would be upset if anyone, let alone little old me, were to tread on any of his hallowed works. In light of that, I can only PRAY TO GOD that we are done with the Alan Moore-inspired stories and we can move on to really creative new stories yet to be told. No more Blackest Night bits, no more Brightest Day “The Green” / “Parliament of Trees” material and get to something, anything else.

Then there is the biggest gyp of the entire series, which comes at the end of Brightest Day. They trot out Swamp Thing, then Alec Holland. There’s some retcon tomfoolery under the covers and a surprising failure of potency in the power of The White. All of a sudden we have to accept Swamp Thing and all the odd “It came from left field” oddity that lays at the core of how this story ended. I never read Swamp Thing, I have no emotional connection to Swamp Thing and the last time I spent any time thinking about that character was after I watched the Swamp Thing B-Movie/80’s rendition of it on VHS tape. I had a dim recollection of Swamp Thing and couldn’t really get into the ending of Brightest Day because all the “momentous” revelations at the end meant very little if anything to me. I still don’t really get what The Green is all about and frankly I don’t care enough to look it up. The crowning moment to Brightest Day was at the very end, they drew a character smoking a cigarette with only one thing to say: “Bollocks”. I had no idea who this character was. As it turns out, Scott knew and let me in on it. It was Constantine, AKA Hellblazer. I didn’t even know that Constantine was even connected with DC, let alone big enough to be the crowning climax of Brightest Day. So this guy is back and he smokes and he swears in an adorable british way. The only thing I have in my memory about Constantine is a rather awful portrayal of the character hacked off by Keanu Reeves. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than he was alive, or dead, or something – that he smoked and had something clever to do with housecats.

So here I sit. I’ve spent a lot of time congratulating Geoff Johns, who was the writer for both of these comic book events and here I sit feeling the opposite of how I did for Blackest Night for Brightest Day. I feel like much of the Brightest Day story was telephoned-in half-heartedly and I fear that Geoff was given too many projects and too much to do and that Brightest Day suffered for it. I don’t want my money back, DC can keep it. I don’t know if I’m going to follow DC anymore with the Flashpoint event. I’m a little leery that we’ll be back to the same feeling of ‘we’re just revving the engines, it’s gonna be cool! just wait for it!” feeling that marked the beginning of Brightest Day. I’m pretty much sitting right on the fence between writing Flashpoint off completely or following it. I suppose I will defer that decision until I read The Flash #11. I have to admit that the way DC has treated their one Flash character, Wally West isn’t helping retain me as a reader. The cagey no-information/why-did-I-sit-through-this feeling I got during C2E2 has me thinking that I could save a lot of time and money pulling away from DC Comics. I don’t really feel a lot of interest for any of Marvel’s projects since I got burned so badly with all the inane Deadpool titles and fell off the event wagon back in Civil War. My weekly take for comic books is right around five bucks and perhaps walking away from them is the best for me. Seeing Geoff Johns’s name as lead writer used to excite me, now I’m filled with wariness and trepidation.

Herculean

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As I stood in the bathroom, toweling off from my shower I saw a comic that Scott left for me. Herc #1. I read the byline “Savage First Issue” and instantly I thought of a scene that could have been in the Kentucky Fried Movie:

“Their Savage lovemaking was of Barbaric proportions!”

And then I stood there brushing my teeth and giggling with the idea of Herc and some unknown assailant on the cover dropping their weapons and falling into a passionate embrace. I kept on hearing “Savage Lovemaking” and “Barbaric Proportions” in my head. My giggles turned to little “bar bar” noises and I had to sit down on the edge of the tub so as to not fall over.

I entertain myself. I am odd. Where does this crap come from? Best ask the Dalai Dolly dolly! 🙂

Gasoline and Comics

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Gasoline here in Michigan is about ready to break through the $4.00 per gallon level. To fill my Hyundai Santa Fe would start to impact my budget and begin forcing me to decide whether I want to buy food or not. I am not like any of the other people who live here who are natives, Michiganders would pay for the “pleasure” of driving their vehicles even if gas was at $10 a gallon. My New York sensibilities have already kicked in. Nobody in this state has “carpool” in their vocabulary so I’ve elected to not even bring up the concept to them and instead just take the bus.

And so I have, and this week is the model for how the rest of my weeks will be structured. On Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays I get up at 6:15, out the door by 6:45, to catch the East Main Bus, all in all I would estimate that it’s one mile per trip, so effectively two miles walked per day. I get to work at 7:20, and then I’m pretty much stuck at work the whole day long. I have to leave by 4:45 to catch the return bus, and if I miss that, I have to wait until 5:45.

Wednesdays are my favorite days now. It’s on Wednesday that I take my car to work. Wednesday is Comics Lunch Day. I pick up Scott, we go to the comic book store and get our weekly comic books and then we find someplace cheap to have lunch. I then get back to work, and can take a more comfortable and leisurely path home whenever I like.

But for the most part I don’t regard driving a vehicle as a pleasure. It’s a horror, a terror, a harrowing trip through a nightmare hellscape populated by people who shouldn’t be allowed to use a vehicle at all. All manner of human trash is on the roads these days, morons, pinheads, dopes, dorks, losers, meth-heads, pot-heads, and the rest… “If god wanted for them to drive, he would have given them XXXXX” What is the XXXXX? It all depends on which racial, gender, or national gripe you’re fond of. And they are out there. In this state it’s a uniquely unpleasant experience, driving with these “people”. Nobody in Michigan has a single clue what a directional signal is for, they simply could not be bothered and the police can’t be bothered with enforcing any laws beyond running their speed-traps. The best way to jail a Michigander is to put them in their vehicle and arrange for 4 cars to approach a 4-stop intersection all at the same time. They would starve to death before any of them moved. I’ve never witnessed such overwhelming mind-lock in my life. They’d likely start gnawing on their tastefully appointed leather seats, whine, wet on the carpet and dry wash their hands in frustration. Eventually you’d see 4 bone-white skeletons sitting behind the wheel, the cars rusted solid and the gas tanks empty. As a native New Yorker it’s my right and pleasure to plow through all these mind-locked yoyos, even if it isn’t my turn. They won’t move, so screw ’em, I will.

And that’s why I don’t drive. It just makes me angry. It makes me angry and well, terrified for my life. So if something is dangerous, terrifying, *and* expensive then giving it up is comically obvious.

I have to admit that taking the bus is like it is in any nowhere midwest town. There are train tracks that divide this place and it colors the entire experience. You have sides of the track, and you can plug any harsh stereotypical reality into that division. Good, Bad; Rich, Poor; White, Black; Safe, Dangerous. Every city has something like this, a good place and a bad place, but it’s where the railroad exists that you see “The Wrong Side Of The Tracks” is so starkly apparent. Whats the most comedic of all is how lame and insignificant the railroad has been allowed to droop. It used to be the preferred way to get from one city to another, but now you have to pay top-dollar to sit in a seat soaked with urine and arrive, if your lucky, on the same calendar day you left even if you only need to go 150 miles away. But that’s another rant, the train tracks color the people and the people color the bus system. Who takes the bus? The poor, the workers, the minimum wage victims, and thanks to WMU’s deal with the bus system, students and employees, Hiya! You wouldn’t see any of the high and mighty, the good and great of this town even get on a bus. I don’t even think they perceive buses. It’s pretty clear that they don’t perceive people like me, the middle-class, the “little people”. That’s actually quite a pleasant thing and lucky for us “little people” because we don’t have to be bothered by their obnoxious overhousing problems, their sexual perversions and their raging alcoholism. They get in their obnoxiously priced gas-guzzling vehicles and disappear into their gated-communities-without-gates (sometimes they have gates!) and leave the rest of us in peace to imagine a world where they don’t exist. Because they wouldn’t be caught dead with the rabble, it’s as easy as falling off a log.

So really my most convenient and pleasant day is fundamentally bound up with comic books. In a way Diamond Publishing determines my weekly calendar, even if it is only very subtly.

I don’t expect to run into anyone I recognize using the bus system here. They are all monomaniacally obsessed with their vehicles and I seriously doubt anything will ever dissuade that. Perhaps someday when all the oil is up out of the ground and we’ve burned it all, and there isn’t any way to make these boxes of metal move, then people will be up against the wall. That will be a very interesting day, indeed.

Favorite Lantern

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Last night I had a complicated knot work of dreams and a central theme was this epic-level conflict that happens cyclically between ages of time. It was, I’m sure, inspired surely by The Wheel of Time, but there were elements dragged into the dream by DC comics twin events Blackest Night and Brightest Day. A pillar of this dream was a central figure that provided a safety net and a structure to ensure that the conflict was always won by the right, and not by the wrong.

I woke up with this idea in my head and I started to muse about what this might mean in the fictional DC Universe. It’s been a story theme that my favorite Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, has served to hold up everything in the bleakest of times. For a while he was the only Lantern in the stories and the writers seem to enjoy using him as a character for these situations. Now that we’ve entered The GL War we’ve got all these emotions floating around and Kyle has already proven himself capable of surpassing fear in his willpower, so he’s one of the few who can cope with actually feeling things while maintaining his abilities. While the GL universe falls apart, it struck me that Kyle could once again play the role of torchbearer-in-dark-times by handling all seven emotional-spectrum rings, and there is a little part of me at thinks that Kyle could carry the White Lantern and play the part temporarily as he did when he served as the vessel for Ion. It’s just a shot in the dark, but perhaps that’s where DC will take the GL War. I’m always very excited whenever my favorite lantern gets some action. It’d definitely be gratifying to know that Kyle is always the go-to-Lantern leaving Hal in the dust. One can hope. 🙂

C2E2 March 19th 2011

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And this ends the second day of C2E2. What did we learn today? We learned that DC Artists make really bad panelists when DC Writers should be featured, but they make great panelists when DC Artists should be featured. We also learned that any phrase that includes “Wally West” will force everyone who is connected to DC to slip into a vexed silence. DC panels are quite like playing a guessing game where the rules are hidden, the vocabulary is hidden, and the success of your attempts are also hidden. It’s magnificently fun and actually a delight, especially when played with annoying children who ask impertinent questions to utterly disaffected DC staffers.

We also learned that DC is wholly preoccupied with how their fans had reacted poorly to the idea that the new event, called Flashpoint would require a significant number of purchases. DC spent an inordinate amount of time trying to “cover their ass” by informing us all that the financial burden wouldn’t be that bad and that we could all read the central work and none of the tie-ins and still enjoy the work. Shortly thereafter Marvel announced their big event with the exact same protestations that nobody really had to buy the entire run but only purchase a core number of books to get enjoyment from the story. Nothing like aggressive retreat in the face of decline. Snatching the brass ring of failure from the maw of a dark and uncertain future.

It’s good to note that DC and Marvel still behave like petulant children when it comes to each other. The fans are pretty much ignorant of the distinctions and many DC fans like Marvel work and the opposite is also true. The backbiting and sniping however are quite choice. Really it’s a pissing match between Warner Brothers and Disney. It’s quite something to watch Bugs Bunny piss all over Mickey Mouse. It just helps build that image that whatever you thought about the health of your inner child is properly violated now that the two companies that you thought would never turn on you and treat you like a slab of cash-stuffed meat-product, in fact, are.

About midway today I was so tired of DC treating this as a throwaway trash event that I was close to giving up on the entire company. I read Brightest Day only because I have respect for the lead writer and I have hope that the story will go somewhere before it ends. It feels a lot like a Stephen King novel, which is to say very flat for 80% and maximally great for the last 20%. I vowed I would never read another Stephen King book sohelpmegod, and I’m getting close to throwing Brightest Day in with Stephen King.

Marvel is just an exercise in impenetrability. I fell off the Marvel wagon years ago and I have no idea where to start. Because I can’t get started again I don’t really feel like I want to start. There’s five or six, maybe, events between Civil War and Fear Itself, and I don’t really care that much to even try to come up with the right questions that might give me some traction. So Marvel keeps on publishing and have created several tounge-in-cheek comedy gold moments, like the endless Deadpool titles, the Rainbow of Hulks, and an endless house of mirrors when you bring up the word “Avengers”. Now Marvel is trying to address this with “.1” releases, but it has the same stain that these overarching events have, that it feels like a cash-grab. When I was a kid I really liked the Fantastic Four. Now that I’m an adult I read it and even after reading a dozen issues it has lost that special feeling I used to have, so I’ve stopped caring about it, stopped reading it, and I don’t really think much of it any longer. It occupies no mind-space in my head. DC used to, but ever since the blind wandering that is Brightest Day (read: The Stephen King-ization) I’ve been finding it very hard to continue interest in DC’s work either.

This leads to the next blog entry, which is a marvelous load of WTF laid by Marvel just tonight in my email inbox. That gem is coming up next.