Note: This rant is actually an adapted and expanded version of an email I sent to someone in the industry. This person’s views and my own may be very different. All names have been left the same to point fingers accurately and with some malice, thereby ruining any chances I have with their organization.

So, comic book editors.

Editing really doesn’t exist as I know I would like it to anymore. To wit, look at the beloved Batman character. Bob Schreck has what seems to be no clue regarding what makes the character work and his administration has been pretty abysmal from a writing point of view. Hush was a non-mystery on Jeph Loeb’s side despite all the trappings and shiny art by Jim Lee. Its conclusion and big reveal, while certainly flashy in their presentation, made no logical sense to the reader – the clues quite simply were not there for us to make the same leap and feel any real satisfaction. (To not spoil it too much – the one Major Villain who didn’t make an appearance was the mastermind. That’s pat and lazy from a writer I hold to pretty high standards.)

After Hush came Azzarello’s Silent City which, while featuring lush art by Risso and I’ll take all of his work I can lay my eyes on, was a single issue of story stretched over six so they could do a trade. What I want from my DC icon books are clear stories that show why we should like the characters, at least in the books with the names Batman and Superman on the cover. Superman, frankly, needs to be knocking planets out of orbit and saving the planet on every page and he doesn’t do that anymore thanks to the depowering Byrne Effect. Batman needs to be doing detective work (when Rucka was writing Detective Comics and didn’t have to worry about stupid Bruce Wayne: Murderer and Bruce Wayne: Fugitive and Bruce Wayne: Party Dude At Cabo storylines, he did just that and it was a good read) or fighting larger-than-life villains to save the city.

There’s no strong guiding hand that sees to set goals for writers and makes them work in a tighter structure. I firmly believe that an 8 pager or 16 pager or 32 pager with a beginning, a middle, and an end is so much better for this industry than 12-part crossovers. Why? Because you can hand someone a single issue of that book and say “This is a really great Batman story.” It’s cheap, it doesn’t require them to buy a trade paperback, and hopefully they’ll Get It. I really want Julie Schwartz to come back from the grave and haunt the DC offices, telling them to stop writing for the trade and write for the issue. Yes, trades are great – for the current dedicated crowd. Getting new readers in on this (and thereby saving the industry, huzzah!) requires a balance that is going to be pretty hard to work out.

Another thing that drives me mad is that kids tune into Justice League Unlimited and they see a pure distillation of these icon characters and when they ask for the comics in the shop, I have to tell their parents “Oh, hey, no, you can’t buy Batman this month because he’s battling a dude who rips the faces off monkeys and rapes the elderly while wearing them. Here’s the animated version of the character instead.” Kids don’t want to buy stuff that’s written for kids a lot of the time – they want to buy what they think is cool and grown up and it’s hard to explain to them that Batman Adventures or whatever that book is called now is actually better in many respects than the adult books. They smell a grown-up putting them on.

You know, the Bongo Simpsons line works because it never actually tries to dumb down what makes that series work – same for their Futurama title and the shop sells the hell out of those books. Oh yeah, they’re usually done in one with enough room left over for a 4 to 8 pager in the back. Clever, those people.

It’s no wonder that many kids are all crazy for big-eyed manga and anime – at least that doesn’t act like they’re lobotomized three-year olds and talk down to them, even if it is often pretty insipid. (Not that, you know, GI Joe was my personal Shakespeare or anything.) There’s also a broader variety of stuff for them – there’s car-racing manga, kung-fu manga, and even romance comics adapted by internet pals of mine.

Anyway, back to editing. It seems that there’s no clear vision for the big guns at DC. I can sell Batman: Year One or The Dark Knight Returns or to just about anybody over 11 years old (even with the hookerdom of Selina Kyle in both, which is nothing they’d not see after 9 o’clock on prime time network TV) and feel pretty damned good about it. Both of Miller’s major Batman works hold up as you get older – I should know, as they came out when I was just past the decade mark. Alan Moore’s Superman Annual story entitled “For The Man Who Has Everything” works so well that it was the basis of a recent much-praised Justice League Unlimited episode and it’s almost twenty years old. I don’t think most of the books featuring those icons that the kids would or should read today can say that.

File Under: A Pair Of Open Notes To My Fellow Men.

Hey, Italian Dude. You may think that’s a fashionable manbag you’re carrying, but I know that’s called a purse. Your woman is way hot, though. Does she keep her keys and lipstick in your manbag?

Hey, Preppy Business Student. Wearing two Polo shirts is very 1985, and not in an ironic three-beers-watching-the-A-Team-with-your-friends way. It’s 1985 in the sucky way that I associate with jocks in the 6th grade humiliating a kid because his folks got his clothes at Sears through the catalog instead of the mall’s snotty stores. (OK, yeah, I was that kid. Fuck you.)

Superman’s Pal In Leather Bar Shocker!

“Jimmy, there better be a good explanation why you’re cage dancing during Biker Night at The Manhole!”

Mike writes in my comments:

I hear you. I don’t put money before my fellow man. I believe in helping my fellow man absolutely. However I also think it gets a little out of control sometimes with government social programs. Illegal aliens getting any kind of benefits from the government is not right. If your a citizen of this country you do deserve the help of our government.

The world we live in is vain. And money is everything to a lot of people. Your lifestyle may be fine with you, and the stock brocker driving the benz is fine with his. Just don’t judge people for working hard and making money. thats all.

I don’t see where I have judged people for working hard and making money. I really don’t. I don’t have any particular distaste for the wealthy but a lot of people don’t realize that the Horatio Alger ideal is harder and harder for the average American to obtain because of our societal differences and how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer because of unfair distribution of education, health care, and public services.

People in general, I daresay, are willing to work hard to get ahead and don’t want the government to solve all their problems, but they want the government to make sure that there’s an equality in the basic things that it provides and how it treats citizens. The government taking $100 from a guy making $7 an hour at a Wal-Mart who’s trying to make sure his daughters don’t end up doing the same work is very different than the government taking the same $100 or $200 or $300 from a lawyer. Wal-Mart guy should be able to join a union to make sure his rights are upheld by the company. Wal-Mart guy should be able to expect that he’ll be protected equally by the police, the fire departments. Wal-Mart guy’s kids should have access to the same computers, the same educational material as the lawyer’s kids (assuming they go to public school). Ideally, Wal-Mart guy should have the same access to health care to make sure that he’s able to keep working and contributing to our country’s economy.

Barack Obama’s speech at the DNC sums up how I see the world pretty succinctly. Wouldn’t it be nice if America were able to feed and educate its poor and shelter the homeless that need and want to take advantage of such services? Wouldn’t it be nice if American children were able to attend a trade school or public university for free like in many European countries? Wouldn’t it be nice if we weren’t engaged in a war (the reasons for which have shifted from “link to 9/11″ to “weapons of mass destruction” to “Iraqi liberation” as Bush’s lies fall apart) that’s cost over a thousand American lives and $131 billion dollars when people are starving in our streets?

I’m just going to ask: how much do “illegal immigrants” take from our system? Do you think it’s a billion? Two? Well, I think it’s obvious who wins in the “screwing our people” category.

Should the rich pay more? Yes, they have more. I bet if I wheeled a working mother up to their front door and said “Hey, can she take an extra 1% of your income to make sure she and thousands of others just like her are not having to choose between food or medicine?” they’d do it. It’s too bad they don’t actually see that woman on their way from the home to the office in their BMW 525i.

The fine folks at AIT/PlanetLAR have put out yet another original graphic novel. If they keep doing this, people are going to start to think of Larry as a real live publishing mogul or something.

This one’s called Bad Mojo and it’s got what sounds like a 24k solid gold premise – Bruce O’Connor is a young soon-to-be-major-league baseball player who falls asleep at the wheel of his SUV while on his way to spring training with his friends and runs his car into a Volvo station wagon being driven by the local witch. Being a big league player, Bruce offers to take care of the damage or even buy her a new car. Being a witch, of course, means that she isn’t going to be at all understand and decides to curse him in such a way that he dies every dawn and comes back and dusk. I’ll review that for you: he dies every morning and comes back at sunset. This, of course, completely bites for him – how’s he going to be a multi-million dollar player if he’s only able to play night games? Dying on a daily basis also apparently sucks the mighty hog when it comes to your outlook on life, too. He and his friends try to negotiate with the crazy broad to end this curse and get on with their lives, but it goes downhill from there.

As I said, the setup is really great – just like Larry’s own Astronauts In Trouble books that gave the company its name. Once the story moves past the setup, it seems that William Harms gets lost. His script flashes between “the present” and “a week ago” in a way that only reduces the impact of the story – it’s an ambitious technique that, while I admire it, requires a more deft hand to execute it well – even Christopher Priest, who many consider the master of the style, falters more times than succeeds with it. The witch and the small-town Texans that occupy the book are stereotypes – she’s a bitter old hag whose husband left her years ago, the townsfolk are crazed fundamentalist hatemongers. The story’s conclusion left me cold, too, as it seemed to be the direct descendent of O. Henry with none of the irony of his work.

After all this nitpicking over the writing, I feel I should point out one thing going for this book that kept me turning the pages – Steve Morris’s art. It’s very much like Paul Chadwick’s work on Concrete with the same attention to detail that never overwhelms and his storytelling is dead on. Look for more from this guy – I’d not be surprised to see him doing a Charlie Adlard-styled move to one of the big two in the near future.

It’s time to play the fun game If Kevin Were Gay, Would He (Theoretically) Want To Have (Completely Theoretical) Sex With These Renowned Comics Writers? Yes, I just made this game up. This is what happens when you have too much caffeine in your system.

First up, we’ve got Dan Firestorm Jolley. I met Dan a few times in college. He’s a good egg, but no, the beard doesn’t do it for me. Sorry, dude. I’m digging on Bloodhound, though.

Nice hair goes a long way with me, Chuck Austen, and that is one well-maintained bit of coiffure. I dunno, though – I can’t get the taste of “The Draco” storyline from Uncanny X-Men out of my mouth. I’d probably buy you a drink anyway and tell you that your Action Comics run is selling pretty damn well at the shop.

I don’t like bears. Sorry, Chris Claremont. I guess I could also rant a bit about how you’ve managed to undo all the fucking excellent work on X-Men by our next contestant, but I won’t.

Grant Morrison? You may look like a supervillain, but I would make the sweetest transdimensional monkeyfish love with you. Of course, my homegirl Courtney would protest.

Hey, if Grant turns me down, Brian K Vaughn would surely help a brother out!

Matt Fraction just gave my theoretical gay self a spacesuit fetish. His wife might have some four-letter invectives to use at me if I say anything more, so I won’t. Nice looking fellow, though. He’d be well advised to look into a Robin costume if he ever leans towards manwhoredom.

Garth Ennis? A bit normal looking, really. Not my sort. I’d buy him more than a few drinks and try to cop a feel, just because he got me back into reading comics with Preacher.

BENDIS! I’d lick his head and send him on his way – he’s got too many books to write to be a considerate lover. I like cuddling too much to subject myself to half-an-affair and bad spelling and grammar errors in the love notes he might decide to write.

Sorry, Warren Ellis. The smell of cigarettes, Red Bull, and plots remixed from long-forgotten BBC science fiction television shows is not an aphrodisiac to me. You do make many shiny books I like, though.

Mommy, Alan Moore scares me. He’d probably just use me, suck out my viable brain juices, and storm out of the room, leaving me to cry on the soiled mattress. That’s so hot.

Hey, did you hear? Nashville hates darkies!

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that rap artists should pay for every musical sample included in their work – even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music.

Lower courts had already ruled that artists must pay when they sample another artists’ work. But it has been legal to use musical snippets – a note here, a chord there – as long as it wasn’t identifiable.

I’ll repeat that for those playing the home game:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that rap artists should pay for every musical sample included in their work – even minor, unrecognizable snippets of music.

This means that if someone sampled something like, two notes on a Miles Davis solo decided to run them backwards, then decided to add effects, and then decided to stretch them so that was previously a single bar became, say, ten bars? They’re open to a lawsuit from Sony.

Yeah, that sounds completely fair. How the hell do they think they’re going to enforce this?

This is from savebetamax.com. You should read it.

Anyone who has ever used an iPod, taped TV shows, or made a mixtape for their friend needs to read this! Hollywood is pushing Congress to pass a bill that could make the VCR, CD-Rs, and iPods illegal.

Thanks for your time, and we hope you’ll join this historic and extremely important event.

C’mon, people! This is something that affects all of you every day and we’re not talking about taxes or terrorism! We’re talking about making sure you can put your Toby Keith CD into your red-white-and-blue striped iPod! We’re talking about making sure your Orrin Hatch CD gets to stay on the shelf while his version of “I Love America” (with the goddamn Osmonds, motherfuckers) can be on that mix disc you made for your road trip! SAVE BETAMAX. I’ve already signed up to call Tom Daschele, Nancy Pelosi, and Patrick Leahy – surely you can bother your guys for 10 minutes.

Oh, quick story about Comics Retailing from last night.

I’m in the middle of bagging and pricing about eleven zillion comics and talking to one of the owners when a dad comes in.

“Do you know how hard it is to find a comic book store?” He demands of me right off the bat.

“Well, we’re right here.” I smile and then do what so few other comic shop employees do – I ask “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, man. My son’s in the hospital and he wants some comics.”

“Sure thing.” I walk around the counter. “How old is he? What does he like?”

“He’s eleven – likes Batman a lot. I got him some Batman comic last week.”

As I was around eleven when the first printing of The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told came out and I read the shit out of that thing, I grabbed that for him and we’re chatting away, talking about what else his son likes – Star Wars, so there’s Star Wars Tales in the stack and then he pauses.

“How much is that book?”

“Well, the Batman book is twenty bucks, but we can do it for fift-”

“That’s too much! What about these?” He gestures towards the new release wall. Comics, being like they are, usually involve multi-part storylines and he didn’t understand that. I had to show him some comic (the new Iron Fist, I think) that had PART 4 OF 18 or something emblazoned on the front.

“Wow, comics are expensive!” He says, sounding surprised that somebody would want, you know, money for product and that there’s this thing called inflation that makes the value of a dollar shrink – that’s why milk isn’t 40 cents a gallon anymore.

“That’s why I’m thinking you’ll want to get a trade paperback – it’s better bang for the buck and he’ll get a book that he can read again and again.”

“This is too much! Why the hell are they charging so much for comic books?” (And he had that tone on the phrase “comic books.” That tone I reserve for “child pornography” and “compassionate conservative.”)

I end up selling him the Marvel Age: Spider-Man and Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures digests ($7 a pop) and I think to myself that it’s a mighty poor time to be a cheapskate, when your kid’s going to be laid up in a hospital bed for a few days with nothing to read.

(And no, after his petty penny-counting routine, he didn’t get any sort of discount. I was totally going to hook him up on the Batman book, but my kneejerk reactionary self couldn’t let him slide. I am, as they say, not a good person, really.)

Vote with your coffee order!

Stop your whining, Big Head. You’re in VEGAS, BABY, VEGAS during its height! Check out The Boys whooping it up at The Sands. Oh, wait. They’d probably make you sit at the back of the room, anyway. Sorry, Big Head! I suppose that you could gamble and with that super intelligence beam’s effects on you, maybe win enough money to hire friends who lie to you about not being bothered with the size of your enormous head. That might make you feel normal. Good Christ, is that Sputnik I see orbiting your huge fucking head?

Compared to some of the stuff Superman pulled on you, I’m being as gentle as a kitten, Big Head. Think about that when you’re trying to put a tiny pillbox hat on that blimp you call a noggin.

As before, image provided by Mile High Comics. I should get a scanner so I can use my own damn copies of these issues.

Too lazy to write anything today. Make up your own pithy witticisms and say something about Bush.

George W. Bush lied to you. He said you would pay less in taxes. You aren’t.

Last year (as someone pointed out in the comments section of my blog,) anyone who made over $6,000 per annum got a $300 advance on next year’s tax refund. Sure, that was great � who couldn’t use $300 to buy, say, cocaine for their “youthful indiscretions” in advance of actually having to file the taxes for which they were being refunded? Great, we were going to get taxed less by big brother! This means we can take a more active role own futures through investments and buying shiny things!

Sadly, that was just a bit of sideshow magic � a distraction from the right hand to keep you from noticing what the left hand was doing � namely, reaching into your wallet when you didn’t expect it. Bush claimed that his 2003 tax package was going to give the �average taxpayer� a $1000 break, which, through some strange Republican-exclusive calculus became a $97 increase in the average refund amount issued this year. Of course, there’s the decrease in what you’re paying to the federal government from each check. I know that when the plan hit, I was making about $30,000 a year and I received $3 more per twice-monthy check. That means I was getting $72 more right there. So, $372! Woo! That’s about 120 more lattes for my liberal ass to quaff down while reading Michael Moore books and planning on new ways to hate America. (Lattes, FYI, have replaced the dollar in our secret America-hating cult. “How much is that new digital camera?” “Oh, about 100 lattes plus an extra shot.”)

Going back to the tax cuts, I was probably below the �average� income, right? Without even doing any research I’ll say yeah, I probably was. Maybe somehow the average schmuck out there did end up paying $1000 less in taxes – but it sure looks like they got fucked elsewhere in a manner that even Ron Jeremy would look at and go “Dude, ouch!”

My state government was handed a whole stack of unfunded mandates by Bush’s administration (lots and lots of them directly linked to terror booga booga booga go hide!) and had to come up with clever ways to tax my monkey ass to help pay for all this when I wasn’t looking. A bare minimum of research on the web shows that people in Massachussets are now stuck with higher property taxes, higher tuitions in state-run schools, reductions in school staffing (despite a very catchily named No Child Left Behind act), fewer public services, higher utilities bills (thanks, deregulation), etc. I’m pretty lucky, as I do not have a car or home in this state so I’m missing out on the fun of the increased cost and taxes on fuel (even when we’ve helped �liberate� many, many barrels of crude) and utilities having strange surcharges and taxes (thanks, deregulation!)

While placating the populace with a bit of their own cash, the Bush administration has handed our state governments enough financial woes to ensure that more than half of them are going to be running in the red in fiscal year 2005.

Even the most short-sighted fan of the Republican party can see that this is not a good thing. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not how things should happen here – especially when it comes to things like fire departments, schools, and the cops that make sure that poverty-stricken people aren’t out sacking my local coffee establishment.

Everyone voting for Bush seems to rally around the idea of smaller government. Smaller government? Sure � small enough to fit in your bedroom while letting its pals screw their employees and the public over.

Alice models the latest in custom congratulatory wear from my CafePress shop. No, you can’t have one – I only made a single unit and she got it.

and…

Who’s a bitch? Superman’s a bitch!

(Image courtesy of, as it says, Mile High Comics.)

So, I finished Harry Potter And The Holy Jesus This Book Is Huge Does She Think She’s Tom Clancy Or Something and it’s pretty damned good. I do think that Rowling needs to listen to her internal editor a bit more – the storytelling style is fine, but it seems that she goes from big event through lots of incidental stuff that, while fun, really packs on the pages before getting to another big event. The scenes with Harry’s romantic life are achingly close to real stupid teen angst romance and I found myself wanting boot him in the rear, much like I’d like to go back and kick my fifteen-year-old-ass pretty thoroughly.

In contrast, I think that the last 100 pages or so are rushed and the exposition falters – I had no idea what was up with the Object That Voldemort Wanted and what its status was until I reread the relevant sentence. I’d skimmed over the sentence, obviously, but she should have, perhaps, had somebody say “Hey, the status of the Object That Voldemort wants has changed!” I will give Rowling credit for one thing involving the last chapters. There’s a huge emotional and story payoff at the end of the book and it was about damned time – events had been happening to our Harry without any purpose for four books now.

Now onto reading What’s The Matter With Kansas with my full devoted attention.

I want it known here – I was wrong, once.

I was wrong when I didn’t like the initial first few issues of Superman: Birthright and opted to not continue reading it. That was unfair to Mark Waid and Leinil Yu, who proved themselves worthy by the end of the series, which wrapped up a couple of months ago. I’ve got a pretty straightforward reason for this – the characterization of Pa Kent in issue 3 torqued me at the time and made me blind, causing what many would call a FANBOY RAMPAGE. More on that (and my fanboy loser mentality) a bit later in the proceedings.

First off, Birthright was DC’s attempt to make Superman more accessible than he’s been in the past, oh, thirteen years immediately proceeding John Byrne’s¹ reboot and successive handling of the Man Of Steel after the Crisis On Infinite Earths reset the stalwart comic giant’s continuity for easy accessibility to the fans at the time. They realized that, while Man Of Steel was perfect for 1986, if you were someone who walked in off the street and had seen Smallville, the characters presented in that show bore little resemblance to what was currently in the Superman comics on the stand, even allowing for the differences in age and medium. Taking a cue from the WB’s 800-pound gorilla, then at its creative peak², editorial took what worked from the Silver Age (1950s & 60s) Superboy and Superman mythos and fused it with a modern sensibility. One could also say that Spider-Man put them up to it. I like to blame Spider-Man for most things.

So, to the story – the first issue shows, of course, Krypton Blowing Up. As far as Superman Origin Story Pieces go, this one is essential � you can’t really show two people hurling their child into the void without making clear that it’s the only way to save them, otherwise they’d have those wacky Kryptonian Social Services people on their ass.

�And why, Jor-El, did you decide to send…was it Kal?…into space?�

�Well, Lara kept whining about his keeping her up at night and she won’t put out if he’s awake and damn it, man, I have to have that sweet booty!�

This is not what makes a compelling origin for Krypton’s Last Son. He must, in fact, be the Last Son Of Krypton or that nickname sounds silly. So, Krypton blows up and Mark Waid makes an odd decision here � instead of following the linear telling of the origin that we so love from Superman: The Movie, he jumps to the future � twenty five years later and Clark Kent’s in Africa, exploring the political situation in a country where one group is being oppressed by another. While this is well-done stuff, it really disturbs the narrative drive to suddenly go from space to show Clark roaming the planet, learning about cultures and emailing his mom³ from all over the world while poking around on an �ebook� left in the rocket by his birth parents.

The second half of the first issue and the first half of the second issue (uh) are devoted to this Africa Situation, where Clark reveals his powers while saving everyone (he is, after all, going to be Superman � have to start the saving thing early) and comes back to Smallville with the realization that he can’t be anonymous while doing good deeds � the S symbol that keeps appearing in the Kryptonian Atlas (that “ebook” thing) comes to mind.

The third issue addresses the issue outright � Clark needs to be able to be Clark while still making sure he helps his fellow man. There’s a sequence that pleased me highly wherein they go through different looks (�Clark, don’t wear a t-shirt � girls will see your six-pack coming from a block away�) for his day-to-day life while working on the costume. Jonathan’s reaction to this, though, bothered me highly. Yes, it may sound like I’m being a loser fanboy (moreso than usual, I suppose) but the idea that Pa Kent is churlish and a bit jealous over Clark choosing to act under a guise strikes me as wrong. Maybe it’s the Democrat⁴ in me, but I would presume that Jonathan would be happy that his son was doing what was right, no matter how he went about it. There’s some dialogue about how his father was a real son of a bitch and how that messed Pa Kent up, but that didn’t placate me one bit � I dropped the book because I thought Waid Didn’t Get It. Some might postulate that I have Father Issues if I freak out so much about how a fictional character’s father is presented. I shan’t comment other than to say my father can beat up your father.

It’s nice to be proven wrong. Today I decided to read the whole damn thing and give it a fair shot.

The second quarter of this 12-part series starts off with Clark arriving in Metropolis to interview at the Daily Planet. Of coure he gets the job, but not without a few hitches. You get to see the craft that Waid has put into his characterization of Clark, who has embraced a persona that falls comfortably between the �Aw, gee, Lois, I am wetting myself because it’s Monday!� of Christoper Reeves and many Silver Age tales and the �I am a flawless example of the very modern gentleman!� of John Byrne’s reboot. The way that Clark feeds off of and serves as a sounding board for the other members of the cast works perfectly and damn it, Waid’s Lois Lane is freaking hot, even when she’s verbally abusing the publisher of the Planet. You can see why Clark falls in love with her after she stands up for Jimmy to this foul, foul man.

This portion of the series also lets you see Superman in action for the first time in Metropolis and the hubbub he causes. You also see his first encounter with Lex Luthor since their time in Smallville together and that rolls into the best part of Waid’s writing for this series…

You can’t do a Superman origin without bringing up his archnemesis. Lex Luthor was, frankly, fucked most royally by Byrne and Marv Wolfman, who patterned him after Donald Trump⁵ and made him a power-hungry billionaire in an era where Reaganomics reigned supreme. He and Superman had no previous relationship until the day that Big Blue started operating in Metropolis, which deprives the character of any real motivation outside of being a dick that wants to be the top of the totem pole. Waid took the good parts of this (public image, lots of cash money from his inventions and family wealth, so no need to do stupid robberies) and made him a scientist with ties to Smallville again. Obviously heavily influenced by Elliot S! Maggin’s portrayal of the character, it’s Lex’s hubris that is his own greatest enemy and if not for that, he’d actually be the hero to the world that he percieves himself as being compared to the Byrne/Wolfman version, who is just a cock⁶. The issue of Smallville is raised and handled quite deftly and the issue that explores the relationship between Clark and Lex in their teenage years is easily my favorite of the series and is probably the most direct descendant of the Smallville meme � Waid and Yu even did a short story for the spinoff comic for the series that was referred to in this chapter.

Things move along in the series quite handily from this point. Superman’s alien origins are a central part of the second half of the book with Kryptonite playing, of course, an essential role in Lex’s plans to take down our hero and handle Metropolis his way. Without spoiling anything, the action set pieces here and the story beats are the strongest of Waid’s career. I consider his current run on Fantastic Four to be his strongest emotional work, but the build, ebb, and flow of story in this series’s second half is as close to perfect as he’s gotten. Of particular note is the fact that each issue, while ending on a cliffhanger, has a discrete set of events – the previously-mentioned #8 could easily be read by itself. All this praise of Waid (which is grotesquely out of character for me, rest assured – I have enough issues with his Kingdom Come to do an entry about this long about why I don’t like it) is not intended to short Leinil Yu � his work is just plain beautiful and conveys the power, grace, and even humor that Waid’s Superman has.

This isn’t perfect, but compared to the snail’s pace storytelling (that happens to be very pretty) presented by Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee in Superman, Chuck Austen’s heavy-handed slugfest version of Action Comics, and Greg Rucka’s just plain lame Adventures Of Superman? No contest � this miniseries has enough pep and verve to make me ignore its flaws and actually consider buying the hardcover coming out in November.

¹For those playing the home game, John Byrne was a prolific, well-regarded writer/artist whose attempt to tell the early years of Superman was about the last decent thing he did. Everything since has been a death-spiral of ego and laziness.

²In the last few episodes I’ve seen, the show has resembled the death-thrash of a shark. By playing its hand too early in regards to Clark’s origins and powers, it seems to have made the writers realize that they need to do some stunts to keep the show somewhat interesting � Lois Lane shows up in this coming season, as does Bart Allen, who bears the moniker of Kid Flash in the comics nowadays and is the distant future grandson of Barry Allen, the second Flash. Are you still reading this? Jesus, this stuff gets downright silly sometimes.

³As narrative devices go, the emails-to-mom thing, while a logical upgrade to the traditional letter style, doesn’t work for me. It looks silly to have Clark email martha@kent.com � but I think it’d be more disturbing to have HotKansasMom6969@aol.com to be the recipient of news from the road, so it’s probably a fair compromise, considering.

⁴Yes, that’s a poke. Poke poke poke.

⁵I don’t care what you’ve learned from The Apprentice – Trump’s a royal ass who lives largely off the largesse of creditors everywhere.

⁶Yes, I’ve used penis metaphors twice in relationship to the Man Of Steel take on Luthor. That is because he is a real piece of manmeat.

File Under: Warren’s Ears Are Burning

INTARNETPAL @ DRAGON*CON: Yeah. I suspect he’s not quite as miserable as he seems in the blog.

BeaucoupKevin: Enough fawning attention will make a man smile.

BeaucoupKevin: Even if that man is…BATMAN.

INTARNETPAL @ DRAGON*CON: BATMAN DOESN’T SMILE.

BeaucoupKevin: http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1401202063.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

BeaucoupKevin: FUCK YOU.

BeaucoupKevin: WHO IS THAT?

BeaucoupKevin: BATMAN.

BeaucoupKevin: WHAT IS HE DOING?

BeaucoupKevin: SMILING.

When all else fails, one can employ the Batman As A Psychotic Who Smiled And Ran Around In The Daytime Dressed Like That Defense.

I want you, the semi-loyal readers of this fine blog to do yourselves a favor. You see that CD up there, right? Write down the information about it. Go ahead. “Global” “Underground” (Yeah, I know it’s small – trust me, it’s there.) “#24″ “Reykjavik” “Nick” and “Warren.” Now, take this to your local place that carries CDs featuring music with beats and pick it up. If they don’t have it, then a certain internet sales behemoth does.

I have never, ever, ever led you people wrong and this is not the first time I’d suddenly decide to make you buy a CD that sucked, even if I was just lamenting about the current state of dance music. Starting off with cool ambient and slowly working into more groove-oriented fare on CD1 before going to full on Progressive House Madness on CD2, this is an entire night out conveniently packaged into a single package for you, the listeners. Global Underground’s quality has never been up for debate – their Sasha, John Digweed, and Deep Dish mixes are pretty much the compilations from those artists in the last half-dozen years or so, showing what they actually play on the dancefloor versus in-the-studio collections that tend to go a little more towards “Artist” rather than “DJ.” Nick Warren’s new mix and Sasha’s Involver (which was also released on GU) have blown me away. Both of them provide smart, sexy electronics with enough groove for even the dullest person to find themselves nodding along to, if not outright joyous dancing.

File under: I like the music, I like the disco sound.

If you never knew, Paul Oakenfold was a freakin’ amazing DJ at one point in his career. Thanks to the largesse of an er…afficianado for hire, I received a pair of CDs in the mail containing what many consider to be his definitive work, the Goa mix for BBC Radio 1′s Essential Mix program. Taking soundtrack pieces by people like Ennio Morricone and smashing it up with high-speed, day-glo psychedelic trance sounds like something that only the very foolish would attempt to do, but under his able hands it works – and it was recorded live to tape at the time with no digital editing or studio tricks, which makes it all the more remarkable. If you ever see it, the Perfecto Fluoro mix CD that follows the same idea is well worth your money – it’s the same idea with a different track listing. Sadly, Oakey seems happy playing just-next-to-cheesy trance with lots of big synth washes with a few clever moments. I buy his CDs when they go on sale and there’s always a moments where I’m like “Fuck, yeah!” but those seem fewer and fewer as he goes on. (And don’t even get me started on his debut album as an “artist.” What a piece of steaming crap served on toast that was! Give me his old remixes of Snoop Dogg any day over that.)

In the same large puffy envelope, there were also copies of four different mixes by Sasha from his early years as a guy who gets paid to play records. Starting with a gig at Hypnosis with early ravey-house tracks, through hands-in-the-air piano anthems at Shelly’s and anthemic proto-progressive at The Eclipse in 1991, this 4 disc set ends with an amazing live set from Renaissance in 1992, which would later be one of the foundations of what many consider to be the greatest dance music compilation ever. Classic and pure class, this is quality stuff that I won’t be sharing with anyone. It’s mine, the precious! Mine!

Of course, listening to these made me rapidly get very depressed at the current state of dance music. Dan’s fond of saying that 1996 was the year that jungle hit its peak and it’s hard to argue with that – Logical Progression Volume 1 came out, making it look pointless for anyone else to even bother trying to make atmospheric drum n bass and the impact of Goldie’s Timeless from the previous year was still the untouchable benchmark for that particular strand of the sound. Sure, Photek was making waves with “intelligent” jungle and techstep, but the sound he and a few others championed went down a dark road most clubbers didn’t want to visit on their ecstatic Friday nights but it sold well to college nerds who liked Aphex Twin and Orbital, which was fine by the labels. Nowadays, there’s a very small but fierce junglist scene in the US, but I’ve not picked up anything new in years – I don’t think anything can recapture hearing Dieselboy mash up “Super Sharp Shooter” and “The Lighter Track” in a sweaty room holding about 300 over its stated capacity.

Trance certainly had a three-year peak spanning from 1994 through 1996 and then things started to go downhill – the absolute worst point for me being 1999, when the sound went unabashadly pop and in an effort to cash in, every artist managed to get a “trance” rerub of their latest pablum hit and producers that could do better realized that they simply didn’t have to try that hard to get something on a compilation that would give them royalties far beyond a regular club-oriented release. To give an example, Paul Van Dyk’s Out There And Back is a fine record for 2000 – it’s got huge melodies, tons of build ups and break downs, and even features one of my favorite bands on “Tell Me Why (The Riddle)” – but it has no subtlety, no real intelligence compared to 45 RPM, which relied more on putting the listener into a trance state (ha) before building them up to peaks. While in the car or whatever, the latter release is pretty ok, but the former’s perfect for late-night writing sessions or even – gasp! – dancing.

Of course, Dan loathes Mr. Van Dyk (which isn’t Van DYKE, by the way – it’s pronounced kindasorta closer to “Van Duke,”), so in order to prevent him from jumping all over my ass, I’m going to say that Oliver Lieb is the greatest trance producer who’s ever walked the face of this planet – don’t even consider arguing that point. He’s stuck to his guns in a way that nobody else in the scene has, despite making a few blatant cash-in remixes to pay bills and buy scary electronic devices. His own releases tend to feature sounds that either A) nobody else can access on the same equipment or B)have been conjured up from the darkest, coldest parts of hell and applied to bizarre ambient that’s spacy and cold as easily as the sort of dance record that makes perfect sense at 4AM in a room full of sweaty Germans.

Now, if only I could find the enthusiasm to deal with the club culture in Boston. I went from being a guy that played records and had fun to actively loathing most of the people I’d see on the dancefloor. Now that I’m 30, maybe it’s time for me to drop that dream, go see bands that feature laptops and men with afros on drums when they bother to come over here and learn to chill out.

(I want it noted I did not mention Underworld once in this po-shit!)

Today was a minimal New Comics Day – the beyond-comparison madness of Tales From The Bully Pulpit came out. Any comic where a time-travelling Teddy Roosevelt meets up with the ghost of Thomas Edison to fight Hitler is a book that must be read to be believed and that’s my whole damn review of that.

I’ve been selling a lot of comics on eBay, in case you’ve been living in a vault buried under a military base and missed out on that fact. In order to do this, of course, one has to go through their older comics and sort them and I came across a few underrated series from DC that are currently not in Handy Trade Paperback Format that most people should be able to pick up on the cheap and thought to my self “Hey, self! Why don’t you tell the nine people who read your blog about them?” so that is what I am doing

First up is ‘Mazing Man, which is about the most charming book I’ve ever read. A Seinfield before there was a Seinfeld, this comic showed the lives and loves of a half-dozen characters in Queens with the title character (aka Siegfried Horatio Hunch III) trying his best to make the neighborhood a better place, however he could. Yes, there’s a dog-faced man, an overly stereotypical Italian male, and a near-psychotic sister-in-law but it never seems silly – it’s just plain funny. There were a scant dozen issues before the book was cancelled (not even a Frank Miller Dark Knight cover could save it) and they managed to get out three (progressively poorer-selling) specials before Bob “The Answer Man” Rozakis and Stephen DeStefano parted ways. This is a title I see in fifty-cent bins pretty often and it’s certainly worth that small investment.

The 90s series Young Heroes In Love was one of a handful of truly unique mid-90s titles that DC put out that died swift deaths – Major Bummer and Aztek being two other titles that come to mind – and didn’t really deserve it when the completely dreadful Batman-associated Azrael had a hundred issues. Dan Rasplar took the soap-opera format and added a chunk of Justice League International self-referential humor that nodded to the conventions of the medium while Keith Champagne’s “animated-style” art just sparkled with a certain joie de vivre in a market where the standard was leaning more and more towards the dark and extreme thanks to the Image Effect. The characters were, as the title indicates, young super-heroes whose lives and loves were the real center of the book no matter what villain showed up. I especially liked the nods to Marvel icons like Namor and Wolverine and the casual treatment of homosexuality as a fact of life. This one’s not that easy to find, sadly, as it sold not very well at all.

A more recent title from Vertigo that I never catch anyone reading is Midnight, Mass, which has just wrapped up its second miniseries. Basically, it’s Nick and Nora from The Thin Man movies meeting Buffy The Vampire Slayer on steroids. Adam and Julia Kadmon – charming, sexy supernaturalists (of course) – fight monsters straight out of Hellboy with a great deal of aplomb. There’s a lot of fun action (a rarity for Vertigo titles during the first miniseries) that’s punctuated by witty asides and the reader gets a genuine sense of these characters as people – once again, a rarity for Vertigo even now. One of the more interesting beats for the series Jenny, their brand-new employee who’s just moved to the book’s namesake – her adjustment to the strange world that she’s been dropped into (getting called up to read spells to Julia over the phone, for instance) and small-town New England life. Her narrative voice is an everyman’s view of the events, and it makes you respect John Rozum’s writing because it never bores or falls on well-worn phrases. The art in the first run is by Jesus Saiz, whose fluid work really does the scripting proud but I prefer Paul Lee’s moody style on the second series, titled Here There Be Monsters.

Boy, I can blah blah blah about the comics.