Amused in Review

Well, it's been a longer gap than I had anticipated, and I'm sorry about that. Unfortunately, I thought I was joking about which prize a trip to Philadelphia was--but Providence keeps a weather eye out for comments like that, and since my arrival, and with little respite, I've found myself plunged into...The Dilbert Zone. Much as I'd like a good therapeutic vent on that topic, you never know who might be reading this, so discretion being the better part of valor, I'll sublimate. In other words, I'll vent about something else.

Why I don't like X-Files...

Blasphemy to some, I know, but there's something (several somethings) about that show that just gets up my nose. It's one of the only shows that I've seen where I find it takes an effort of will just to sit there and watch it without giving it the home-grown Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment. Here, in no particular order of irksomeness, are some of the things that irritate me. Now, in all fairness, I haven't seen that many episodes in their entirety, but if you're looking for all fairness, you've come to the wrong place. I'm fresh out.

• Dempsey & Makepeace Syndrome: I don't know how many of you remember the BBC cop-show Dempsey and Makepeace, but it was a fairly uninspired "fish-out-of-water" thing about a loose cannon New York cop (Dempsey) on semi-permanent loan to the London police, teamed with a by-the-book English copy (Lady (!) Harriet Makepeace). My college room-mate watched it regularly, and since the actress who played Makepeace was a dish, so did I. The mainspring of tension in the show was that every episode, Dempsey and Makepeace would disagree--about everything, although most often about proper procedure--and every episode Dempsey was right. Despite the fact that I understood full well why the show was structured that way, after a while it began to bug me. Even taken at face value, why didn't Makepeace ever learn that Dempsey was always right? Other than that blind spot, the show went out of its way to portray her as intelligent and competent. Well, from the episodes that I've seen., the X-Files has the exact same problem. Despite everything she's seen, Sculley always (except once, with a necrophiliac or something) takes the skeptical side, and she's always always always wrong. You'd think she'd eventually cotton on. Well, I would, anyway. My friends who are X-Files devotees tell me that's not always true, but how many episodes of the darned thing am I supposed to watch before forming an impression?
• Bad Science: I'm a science-fiction buff; I've read a lot of science-fiction, and I like science-fiction. If something uses science-fiction tropes, I tend to hold it to a higher standard. (This is why, despite the common use of science-fictional elements in comics, I regard the creators who seem to have a genuine feel for it--such as Masamune Shirow, Warren Ellis, or Jeff Lang--more highly than the nameless hordes who just use it as window dressing.) One of the rules of thumb of good science fiction is that it uses as few central conceits (points on which you just have to suspend your disbelief in order to make the story possible--FTL travel is a common one) as it can, and that it works out plausible consequences with rigor. I'm not sure that the X-Files even tries. I'm particularly reminded of an episode where they encounter a silicon life-form, which, despite the fact that it only exists in the interior of volcanoes at temperatures and pressures that no human can survive (without protective gear along the lines of wearing a sub-marine), and despite the fact that contact with air at temperatures and pressures found on the surface kills its spores within 30-seconds of sporulation, and despite the fact that its method of reproduction kills its host, somehow manages to be so perfectly adapted to parasitism on humans that its presence in the body causes a precise form of psychosis that makes the host behave in such a manner (e.g. handcuffing itself to Sculley) so as to make the transmission of the organism's spores possible. If this were supposed to be a genetically engineered bio-weapon it would be merely silly; as a naturally evolving organism, it's ludicrous. But as an X-Files episode, barring the ones that are straight-out supernatural, it's merely par for the course.
• Character for Plot's sake: I'm thinking of the episode where, despite Sculley's alleged competence as a pathologist, she misidentifies the cause of death as (probable) wounds from a motor-boat propeller, when it actually turns out to have been alligator attack. Why? Because at that point in the plot, it would have been inconvenient for the writer to have Sculley be able to tell the difference between bite-marks and blade wounds.

Believe it or not, I could go on, but I'll spare you. Some of my friends tell me that I just don't get it: it's supposed to be about mood and character, not about science and consistency. And, in support of that point, I have seen an interview with the creator (a creator?) of The X-Files, in which says (paraphrasing like mad) that he doesn't think of The X-Files as being science fiction, since he doesn't really like science fiction and has read much of it.
     All I can say is that it shows.

Bug Park
by James Hogan
Baen Books, 405 pages, $6.99
rating:  Neat-O.

This reminded me quite strongly of one of the Danny Dunn books that I was so fond of when I was younger:  specifically,the one where Danny's Dad invents a mechanical dragon-fly that you could remote control with VR-style tele-operator gear.  Danny, of course, ends up wielding it
against spies (whether industrial or political espionage I cannot at this late date recall).
     Jump forward twenty or so years in real life, and we have the enterprising 15-year old Kevin and his companion Taki, building and manipulating micro machines ("mechs") ranging in size from a coke can on down to--well, by the end of the book they're running a tour-bus through
a paramecium park.  Kevin's Dad, you see, has invented a really cool neural induction technology that lets you control the mechs with a subjective sense of being there that blows away the traditional VR body suits-and-goggles approach, and Kevin and Taki figured out how much fun
it would be to use that technique to walk the mechs around in the back yard, exploring and fighting insects, instead of just running microscopic machine tools in a shoe-box factory.  So much fun, in fact, that Taki's uncle, who owns a bunch of theme parks, is thinking of opening a series of "Bug Parks" as the next entertainment craze.
     If this sounds like it's heading toward Jurassic Park territory, it's an unfortunate coincidence based on the name of the book (and besides, Kevin's the type of kid who would be able to tell you that the Jurassic is the wrong period for the kind of dinosaurs in that story)--because
the plot stays fairly squarely in the Danny Dunn territory, as the potential billions to be tapped by the Bug Park idea attracts an extremely hostile takeover bid, aided and abetted by (mild spoiler
warning) Kevin's wicked step-mother.
     The science, however, is quite cool, as is typical of James Hogan's work, and the gosh-wow factor of the micro-machines is off the top of the meter.  It's the kind of technology that leaves you thinking:  I want that, and I want it now.
     The book loses a few points for telegraphing its punches and a paint-by-numbers plot, but it more than compensates with its virtues: likable characters, fast pace, and big (or in this case very, very tiny) ideas.

Origins

I first began reading comics so young that I don't actually remember when I first began. It seems to me that I've always been reading comics, off and on. I know that when I was very young, I read Richie Rich, Little Lotta, Uncle $crooge, and so forth, but I don't have any distinct memories of any of the stories (or at least any that I trust as having come from that period, rather than when I re-read them many years later). Later on what I read was mostly DC: Batman, Superman, and Flash were big favorites, although again it's hard to separate out the memories of what I read at the time with what I read later.
     The first comics that I actually remember owning are two JLA stories that I had until I was about nine years old when, you guessed it, my mother threw them away when we moved: 
     The first was JLA and JSA Team-Up on Earth-X (where they meet the Freedom Fighters, and battle the Nazis in a world where the Nazis won WWII--a concept that just about boggled my young mind. I'm pretty sure that's the first place that I ever ran into the parrallel worlds concept.) Now team-ups and cross-overs are such a glut that it takes an inter-company cross-over before anyone takes any notice, and even then there's a inescapable been-there-done-that for most of us who've been around more than a year or two. I sometimes wonder, as we old fogies are given to wondering, do the kids who read X-Men/WildC.A.T.S. think it's as cool as I thought those annual JLA/JSA cross-overs were. Are there any kids reading comics these days? Circulation figures would seem to indicate not...The thing that I remember best about these stories is the Freedom Fighters: Uncle Sam, The Human Bomb, The Ray, Phantom Lady, Black Condor, and Doll Man. Now, I can appreciate them as a clever use of Golden Age characters that DC happened to aquire; then I knew nothing about their history, I just knew that they were something out of the usual run of heroes in the DC comics I was reading. The Human Bomb was my favorite, although I can't really say why. Something about the diving suit, and perhaps the pathos of being unable to touch anything without the gauntlets (although I don't recall that being made much of in that particular story) got to me. 
     The second, which was if enaything even cooler to my young eyes, was an issue of the JLA where they, along with Adam Strange, battle Kanjar Ro (the pink-skinned multi-faceted-eyed alien dictator from "The Slave Ship of Space", in JLA #6), who has given himself more powers than the entire Justice League combined by exposing himself to a triple sun that bears the same relationship to his normal sun that yellow suns do to Krypton's red sun. Three times as super as the Silver Age Superman! The entire JLA was stymied, and it was Adam Strange, who's just a guy with a jet-pack, a ray-gun, and a keen intellect, who saved the day. If material from Superman's native Krypton weaken him, then it stood to reason that material from Kanjar Ro's home planet would be three times as deadly to Super-Kanjar Ro. Then and there I began a life-long fan of Adam Strange. There aren't many comics that I actively collect any more, as opposed to simply buying in order to read, but appearances of Adam Strange are among them. 
     It was at this point that my favorite characters began to shift. Everyone (well, everyone I knew) liked Superman and Batman, and I still read them, but I became more interested in some of the second-or-third stringers. Adam Strange was first, but then Metamorpho, The Metal Men, the JSA (particularly Sandman)...Marvel wasn't in it for me anywhere, except, except...some time in here I also started reading Westerns: Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt: Outlaw, Apache Kid. Lot o' kids. Again, looking back I'm not really sure why. I never was interested in Western movies or television shows; it was only the comic books. It may simply have been that I stumbled onto a cheap supply of them, or was given a bunch. I can't really recall, and I know that I had forgotten all about them until relatively recently, when as a lark, and because Tony Isabella had brought up the subject I did a review consistingly only of old Marvel Westerns. I was reading the Two-Gun Kid, and thinking this seems vaguely familiar, when suddenly I encountered--or rather re-encountered, his side-kick Boom-boom, and the whole thing came back to me in a rush. Despite my only too evident fondness for the older style of comic-book story-telling, it's not too often that I'm overwhelmed with a flood of nostalgia, but this was one of those times.

This is the column that I wrote about the Western comics I was talking about yesterday:

Howdy, buckaroos! It's been a spell, but I've got a powerful hankerin' to strap on muh guns, saddle up, and hit th' ole reviewing trail agin, so why'nt you ride along side me a-whiles, so's I kin tell you 'bout:

KID COLT, OUTLAW #144
RAWHIDE KID #73
TWO-GUN KID #90

and jes' fer a change o' pace,

CAPTAIN SAVAGE AND HIS LEATHERNECK RAIDERS #4.

Ratings:
bad <- Lower'n a snake's belly; Ain't worth the rope to hang; 'bout as much use as teats on a bull; don't make me no nevermind; right decent; mighty fine; Sell muh clothes I'm a-goin' to Heaven! -> good

KID COLT, OUTLAW #144: Mighty fine. No credits, other than to Stan Lee. Frankly, until I read these, all these Marvel Western heroes were kind of jumbled in my mind. Kid Colt, it turns out, is the blond one who wears a red shirt, a blue bandanna around his neck, and a black-spotted white vest and a white hat. He is, without a doubt, the fastest gun in the West (and the most accurate)--gun-fights against him are presented as no contest, which I found interesting. In the first, five-page, story a gun-slinger seeks to make his reputation by riding into town ahead of Kid Colt and swearing to the townspeople to kill Kid Colt on sight. The sheriff of the town rides out to warn Kid Colt, who decides to bypass the town and avoid the fight. When Kid Colt doesn't show up, the gunslinger rides out after him, forces him to duel--and Colt shoots his holsters off his belt before he has time to draw. The gunslinger rides back into town, humiliated, and swears never to wear guns again. There are three more stories in this issue, two of them KID COLT, and one generic. What I found oddly compelling about these stories is they are all unabashed morality plays, directly addressing the questions of what is right and proper behaviorm, whether it's Kid Colt allowing a law-man to arrest him for something he didn't do, or him convincing a young gunslinger wannabe that the outlaw's life is not what it's cracked up to be. Compared with many of today's comics, where the only way to tell the good-guys from the bad-guys is by their costumes, I found it refreshing.

RAWHIDE KID #73: Right decent. Written and drawn by Larry Lieber, inked by John Tartaglione. Edited by Stan Lee. The Rawhide Kid is a fairly short red-head, who dresses in a double-breasted leather jacket (I think it is), with four big buttons down either side of the central panel, and a red-and-yellow triangle arm-band design worked into it. Much is made of his outlaw status, and his need to keep ahead of the law, and this issue's story (20 pages) is about him being "adopted" by an elderly couple who are taken with his resemblance to their own dead boy. The husband is gunned down in a hold up, and the Rawhide Kid spends the rest of the issue tracking down and confronting the killers (two he kills in gunfights, two he defeats in a fist-fight and turns over to the law, and one he shoots the holster of the belt--apparently a standard tactic in these). Basically think THE FUGITIVE, without the one-armed man. I didn't find this as interesting as KID COLT, I think because the emphasis is much less squarely on the morality-play aspect, and more on the characters--ordinarily I'm all for character drama, but not with such stock characters.

TWO-GUN KID #90: Mighty fine. Written by Denny O'Neil, drawn by Ogden Whitney, edited by Stan Lee. The Two-Gun Kid wheres a blue shirt, and orange vest with black sports, a blue hat, and a blue mask (of the wrap around the eyes with two holes cut in the cloth variety). This was the only one of these that I really have any nostalgic feelings for. I had forgotten about it entirely, but when I saw Two-Gun's side-kick Boom-Boom and his battered stove-pipe hat, I felt a glow of recognition. Frontier lawyer Matt Hawk dons a mask to fight crime as The Two-Gun Kid when the law isn't enough. In the first story (nine pages), Matt's side-kick Boom-Boom is framed for robbery, and sentenced by a fake judge to be hanged--fortunately Matt figures out the judge's secret when the judge fails to notice that "Delerium Tremens" is not a real legal term, and changes to the Two-Gun Kid and rescues Boom-Boom and the _real_ judge. In the second story (written by Stan Lee, Art by Jack Kirby, Inking by Dick Ayers), Moose Morgan, Gunman At Large is terrorizing the community's school. He doesn't want his kid to go to school, and so decides that he won't let any of the other children go either. Matt's sweetheart, the school-marm (ah, the Old West, where men were men, and women were school-marms...) asks him for help (little knowing that secretly he is The Two-Gun Kid, whom she detests), and he takes her to the Sheriff, but the Sheriff won't do anything unless one of the parents signs a complaint, and they're all too scared of Moose to do that. Matt stands up to Moose, and gets beaten, since he can't reveal his...aw, you get the picture. But when Moose wants to burn down the school-house, the Two-Gun Kid shows up, and teaches Moose (and his boy) a lesson. But is it a victory? "Too bad, though," says one of the townpeople, "that it took _another_ roughneck to tame _that_ one!" "That's right! What did it _really_ prove?" "'Cept that one gunman can be tougher thatn another!" Two-Gun replies, "Prove? I'll _tell_ you what it proved! It proved that you can't ever rely on brute strength, because there's _always_ someone stronger! It's only through _knowledge_ that a man can ever _really_ be superior to another! The kinda knowledge that yuh find in that little red school-house!" As he rides off he thinks, "I hope they understand--I hope I convinced them! They think of me only as the Two-Gun Kid, a rough and tough brawler! They don't suspect that I'm _also_ Matt Hawk, attorney and scholar! They'll never know how important I think education is!"

CAPTAIN SAVAGE AND HIS LEATHERNECK RAIDERS #4: 'bout as much use as teats on a bull. Gary Friedrich, writer, Dick Ayers penciller, Syd Shores inker, Stan Lee editor. I found this pretty confusing for a war story. Captain Savage and his Leatherneck Raiders (a six-pack of stereotypes) are teamed up with some Japanese soldiers against the forces of Hydra, under command of Baron Strucker, who are planning to steal an A-bomb and conquer the world. A snooze-fest from start to finish, and almost a self-parody of bad comic-book writing. "Onwards for ze glorious cause of FREEDOM, Oui?" "The Americans fight like DEMONS! Only a MIRACLE can...AAGHHHH!"

Pick O' Th' Pack: TWO-GUN KID.

Well, that 'bout wraps it up fer now, buckaroos, so I'll jes' be ridin' off into th' sunset, with a hearty "Hiyo, Syllabus, Away!."

Amusingly enough, it was that exact issue of Captain Savage and His Leatherneck Raiders that was recapped in Roger Stern's recent Marvel Universe #1.

Well, there's bad news, and there's good news, and there's bad news. The bad news is that I have a brand-new notebook computer to take with me to Philadelphia. That's bad news because our technical resources guys (aka the Spawn of Mordak, Preventer of Information services) couldn't copy the configuration of my old notebook--which means that despite 64 meg of RAM, a 4 giga-byte hard-disk, and a 233 Mhz Pentium processor, I don't have any of my software. In particular, I don't have a copy of Microsoft Front Page 97, which is what I use to update this site, and I don't have the connection to my ISP configured.
     The good news is that, after wrestling with it on and off for most of the weekend, I've managed to get it to connect to Compuserve, and reinstall my FTP software (no way I could get FrontPage up and running without the use of a portable CD-ROM, which I don't have). That's what I'm using to post this to the site.
     The bad news is that the process took so long that I don't have time to write a column for today (i.e. tomorrow, which is your today when you read this) so instead you have to read this, which is what you're reading now. Clear?
     More good news is that I have a nice, long, plane flight back to Philadelphia tomorrow, so that I'll have time to catch up.
     Tomorrow we'll continue my origin story, with a chapter I call "I was a Teen-Age Marvel Zombie!"
    See you tomorrow, True Believers!

I was a Teenage Marvel Zombie

I don't recall why I stopped reading comics; it was just one of those things that happened. It wasn't the traditional excuse, that I discovered girls: it would be a long while yet before that happened. Certainly part of it was that we moved, and the comics that I had were a casualty of that move (yes, indeed, my mother threw out my comics). Another part of it might well be that I was reading more books than ever, mainly science fiction and mystery, which are still two of my mainstays. But most of it was that for some reason, they just didn't appeal to me on the same level that they once did. I still read them occassionally, at friend's houses, but besides the occassional appeal to nostalgia (and thinking back, it's a wonder to me that as young as I was I could feel nostalgia), such as Richie Rich or $crooge McDuck, they didn't interest me. Whether it was they or I that had changed, I'm still not sure.
     If I'm vague on the reasons that I stopped reading comics, I'm clear as crystal about why I started again: it was a single comic that attracted my eye on the spinner rack at the neighborhood convenience store when I was about fourteen.
     The cover showed a single super-villain (whom I recognized from some reprints that I had read), single-handedly fighting off a group of heroes (I presumed they were heroes, since they were fighting the villain; this was long enough ago that it was a safe assumption, besides which one or two of the characters looked familiar), inside what appeared to be a collapsing volcano. The art was stunning and dynamic.
     If you haven't recognized the above, the villain was Magneto, and the comic was The Uncanny X-Men #112. I bought the comic, and I was instantly hooked. This was exciting stuff, with characters for whom I immediately felt affinity. I don't want to knock the DC characters that I grew up with (or had until that point, since as hard as it might have been for me to believe at that time, I still had plenty of growing up to do), but I did at the time. Despite the super-heroes being larger than life, the problems they faced, in between facing collapsing volcanos that is, were more mundane than keeping their identities secret, or wanting their girlfriends to love them for what they weren't (mild mannered reporters) instead of for what they were (the world's greatest super-hero). The X-Men faced trivial problems (bickering and rivalry among themselves), and profound problems (anti-mutant prejudice), but most of all, they faced problems with which I, as an adolescent, truly identified. I had encountered for the first time, almost a generation late, the Marvel formula. When, not long after that, they added Kitty Pryde, a girl about my age--and the first super-hero, heck, practically the first character in the super-hero comics that I had read, who was Jewish, I was totally sold. I wanted to read more about them, and all of a sudden, I wanted to read other comics like this one as well. I started following the X-Men, but since this was long before the days of the X-Men as franchise, if I wanted to read more, I had to branch out, and branch out I did. Besides X-Men, I read Iron Man (The Invincible), Spider-Man (The Amazing), Hulk (The Incredible), Marvel Two-In-One (starring Thing), Marvel Team-Up (starring Spider-man). I read Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, The Defenders, and Howard the Duck. No matter what, though, I stuck to one basic principle: Make Mine Marvel!
     In other words, I ended up reading a mixed bag of comics, in terms of tone, and also in skill of execution, but all held together by the thread of being published by one particular publisher (Well, the single shared Universe aspect of it no doubt had a certain appeal as well). Partly this was because of my Mom giving me gift subscriptions--this was before I ever encountered such a thing as a comic shop, so when I picked comics off of the subscription list, it was sometimes sight unseen. That further channelled my reading toward Marvel, but it had another interesting effect. I began to notice that the differences between the comics that I liked and the ones that I didn't were more than just which character was featured; it was who was writing it.
     Today there's such a cult of the creator, with little kids following the hot artist (not usually the hot writer, more's the pity) that it's probably hard for those of you much younger than I am to understand what a great revelation this was for me. It seems to me that when it came to books, I had always known the importance of the writer, and chosen books based on that, but for some reason, when it came to comic-books I just didn't make the same connection. I'd like to think that it was partly that so many of the comics that I had read up until that point weren't clearly attributed, but it's probably just because I was being dense.
     (To be continued....)

Take it from one who ought to know, computers are the tools of the devil. After another day in configuration hell, I'm not sure whether I'll be able to post this. If you can read this, it worked, but since two components have crashed during the time it took me to write this, somehow I doubt it.

Thanks to the miracle of Fedex, I have my old computer back, and I'm back in business. Whe now rejoin our narrative, already in progress...

The Return of I was a Teenage Marvel Zombie

So what was it that awoke me from my zombie trance? I can tell you in two words: George Perez
     I met Mr. Perez (no chance that he would remember this) at a small comics convention in Boston. I was there mostly to fill holes in my X-Men collection, and in fact I finally completed my Claremont/Byrne run at that convention. Mr. Perez was the major, perhaps the only (this was a small convention), pro guest, and so when I was done with my mission in the dealer's room I went to see him talk.
     At that time he was working on the Teen Titans, and his passion for the book convinced me to give it a try. Once again, the characters only vaguely resembled characters that I had read when I was younger, but once again I was hooked instantly.
     For a while that's where it stood, a whole passle of Marvel comics, and Teen Titans, but the dam had cracked. By the end of high school and into my first years of college I had started frequenting a comics shop (The Million Year Picnic, which is still located in Harvard Square, although not in the same location), and Marvel's hold on me was broken. I was reading books like American Flagg, Badger, E-Man, The Dark Knight Returns, Night Force, Zot!, Cerebus, Megaton Man, Army Surplus Komics starring Cutey Bunny, Mr. Monster, Swamp Thing, Journey, Neil the Horse, and so forth.
     Next Episode: Graduation and Gafiation

The Ex-X-Men Reader

I still remember the exact panel when I stopped reading the X-Men. John Byrne had left the book, and in my opinion it had never fully recovered. At first he had been replaced by Dave Cockrum, who, despite the fact that he had co-created most of the then current line-up of the X-Men, I had never warmed to. It wasn't the art, although I loved Byrne's art, and didn't have feelings one way or the other about Cockrum's: it was the direction the book was taking.
     The X-Men had gone on an extended jaunt in space, palling around with another of Cockrum's creations, the Freebooters, and getting mixed up with the Shi'ar and the (ugh) Brood, an extended and pointless rip-off of the Aliens movies.
     It seemed to me at the time that Chris Claremont was getting stale, and letting his momentary whims run away with the story. Characters were getting re-vamped, and then re-re-vamped, relationships were dropped abruptly, past histories arbitrarily re-written, and sub-plots meandering on without an end in sight. Sound familiar, X-Men readers?
     I had already given up on the New Mutants, after an episode in which the Hellfire Club came up with its own version of the School For Gifted Youngsters, and its own team of New Mutants. In itself not such a bad idea for a story, but it just got pushed too far. Not only did the Hellions (yugh, what a name) have the same number of members as the New Mutants: each and every Hellion was a direct analog of the corresponding New Mutant.
     The New Mutants had a guy who could fly and crash into things (Cannonball), so the Hellions had a guy who could fly and crash into things (Jetstream); the New Mutants had a girl who could change into a humanoid wolf-creature (Wolfsbane), so the Hellions had a girl who could change into a humanoid cat-creature (Catseye). And so on, ad infinitum, and in my case, ad nauseam. Despite the fact that Claremont seemed bent on introducing as many mutants into the Marvel Universe as there were superheroes with a different origin combined, I couldn't bring myself to believe that there were so many that the Hellfire Club could field a team from among the applicants to its academy that would exactly match the New Mutants, nor could I conceive of a reason that they would wish to.
     It just seemed to me that Claremont was running out of ideas, and out of good names besides.
     I couldn't conceive of dropping the X-Men, though, despite the fact that it didn't thrill me half as much as it once did, until I hit that fateful panel: the straw that broke this camel's back. It was yet another Brood story (I think Cockrum had left the book by this point, but I could be wrong): this time the Brood had come to Earth, and they planned to plant eggs in various mutants to create super-powered Brood (Xavier was one of their targets). At any rate, there was this sequence where one of the Brood eggs hatched, transforming a boy who had super-strength into a Brood Warrior--who immediately gave himself a code name. "I," he announced, "am BRICKBAT!"
    I hurled the comic across the room, and haven't read the X-Men since.
    I still read comics, of course, lots and lots of comics, but looking back on it, I think that was probably the beginning of the end. That had been the comic that got me back into comics--if I could let go of that and never miss it, what would be next?

Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

Last episode, I had reluctantly given up on my teen idol Chris Claremont; what, I wondered, would be next to go?
Well, John Byrne, for one thing. As X-Men was entering its slow, painful decline, John Byrne was rising in my estimation as a storyteller, with an excellent solo run on The Fantastic Four. But then it happened. After an aborted run on The Hulk, John Byrne went over to DC to re-boot Superman.
     How do I loathe John Byrne's Man of Steel, let me count the ways:

1. No Superboy
2. Clark Kent, the teen, went from High School nerd to foot-ball hero and babe magnet. Instead of being Walter Mitty-esque fantasy identification figure, he became everything I loathed about High School.
3. Clark Kent, the adult, went from mild-mannered reporter to yuppie columnist and best-selling novelist. Again, the whole sub-text of appreciating people's hidden virtues is thrown out in favor of virtues which, if present, are always visible on the surface: The Adventures of Super-ficial Man.
4. Superman went from being unarguably the premier super-hero of planet Earth to just another super-strong guy who can fly (I think that Byrne kept the heat vision, but all the rest of the powers went). Even long after Byrne left the book this continued to be a problem. Can anyone tell me why the current Superman is treated as if he had legendary status, except that he was the stuff of legend before John Byrne got his hands on him? After Zero-Hour, he's not even the first super-hero.
5. No Supergirl, Krypto, Streaky, Comet, or other members of the Superman family.
6. No Kandor, multi-colored Kryptonite, Mxyzptlk, Bizarros, or any of the rest of that neat stuff.
7. Pre-catastrophe Krypton went from being one of the most complete and detailed alien worlds in all of comics and science fiction to a "it was raining on planet Mongo" cliché ice planet.
8. Finally, and unforgivably, Lex Luthor went from scientific criminal genius to evil industrialist. Not only is Donald Trump not a fitting villain for Superman, but Byrne changed the core dynamic of his rivalry with Superman. Since Luthor's only power is his wealth and respect that wealth generates, instead of his intellect, if Superman ever triumphed over him, he would cease to exist as a threat. So Superman is never permitted to triumph. Byrne locked Superman in a never-ending battle to administer minor set-backs to Luthor's criminal empire. The message of Luthor vs. Superman became: Truth, Justice, and The American Way doesn't work! Not even Superman can prevent villains from prospering; the most that he can do is wound their pride. Now, some people may think that's a salutary dose of realism, long overdue in the Superman milieu, but I say unto them: Piss off. There's plenty of places where you can get your dose of cynical nihilism; Superman doesn't have to be one of them.

I only got a few issues in to John Byrne's run of Superman before I despaired. The villains were either incredibly lame (Magpie, Bloodshot), or were re-toolings of old Superman villains, minus everything that made them interesting (the John Byrne version of Bizarro--the one that exploded in the same issue that it was created in, not to be confused with the later, multi-part Bizarro story in the post-Byrne era). And, in fact, the flaws that characterized The Man of Steel seem to have become part and parcel of John Byrne's approach to writing other people's characters (he can still do work that I appreciate on his own): What's this baby doing mucking up this perfectly good bath-water?

Testing, One, Two, Three....

If you can read this, that means that I've successfully gotten connected to the Internet, for the first time in about three weeks.

It's Memorial Day, and it's about ten o'clock, so I'm not going to do much of anything for today's column; I'm sure that you've all taken a few moments today to reflect upon the real-life heroes who've given their lives so that we could be here today (wherever here is for you) enjoying the freedom to communicate with one-another across this wonderful medium, so I'll not be waxing on about that. Instead I'll just bid you good-night, and I'll see you all tomorrow.

Well, I'm back again. Sorry about that, but it's been a hectic few weeks for me, and this is the first time I've had to even connect to the Internet, let alone try to write a column and catch up. I have a new computer (again), or rather the old new computer which didn't work is back; it works now, but I have to reinstall all the software. I've just managed to get hooked up through CompuServe, but I haven't had a chance to reinstall my FTP software, which means that the Quotes and Lyrics are going to be dry for another day or two. I'm thinking of letting the History go, or at leas revamping it, since as far as I can tell from the site statistics, hardly anyone visits it.
     I'm also back in Philadelphia again, as of this evening, after spending the week-end in California. We just moved to Huntington Beach, from Irvine, the week-end before that, and then I spent all week in Orlando, attending a computer conference, so there was a ton of unpacking to do, as well as setting stuff up in the new house. I don't even have my home computer unpacked yet, and the futon is still on the floor (the frame didn't quite make the journey intact, alas). I go back home again Friday, just in time to receive delivery on the futon frame (and maybe some other stuff. I forget: I think that the refrigerator is scheduled to be delivered Wednesday, but beyond that I'm foggy.)
     Starting tomorrow I'll resume my personal history of a comics reader, but for today I'll just leave you with a review:

The Quest for Camelot
Warner Bros.
rating: So-so.

I was really looking forward to this: not only am I a sucker for animated movies, but I really get a kick out of Arthurian subject matter. The previews looked pretty good, so when I needed a break from unpacking yesterday, I went and caught the matinee.
     Since it was a matinee, I didn't feel too ripped off, but this was pretty disappointing fare. The biggest problem with it is that there are too damn many songs, and none of them are any good. Every big emotional moment is accompanied by an eminently forgettable song. I comment more on them, but I've already forgotten them all except the two-headed dragon's production number, which was about as good as the worst song in Aladdin (the one where Aladdin whines "There's so much more to me").
     The other big problem with the movie is that they were so wrapped up in creating it according to the Disney formula that they didn't notice when their paint-by-numbers approach skipped some of the numbers. Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against formula when it's handled properly, particularly in the context of fairy-tales. Unfortunately, The Quest for Camelot doesn't handle the formula properly. For example, when the plucky young heroine and the hunky hero fall in love after having bickered their way through the movie up to that point, it's inevitable because that's the formula, but it doesn't seem inevitable based on the development of their characters. Important middle bits, where they come to recognize eachother's worth and catch glimpses of the feelings behind the bickering, get left out--possibly because the creators never noticed that they were there in the movies they are trying to imitate. A similar thing happens between the comedy relief dragon and the heroine: when the hero calls upon the dragon to aid him in rescuing her, invoking the dragon's feelings for her, you fully expect the head voiced by Eric Idle to point out that he's only known her for less than a day. The writers continually confuse formulaic necessity for dramatic necessity, and it gives the movie a flat feeling, even in its moments of highest drama. 
     All in all, not an auspicious beginning for Warner's feature-film animation department.

Graduation and Gafiation (finally!)

For those of you just tuning in, or who have forgotten what I was talking about before my recent unfortunate unplanned hiatus, a quick recap is in order. For the past few columns (available in the back-issues bin) I've been reminiscing about my personal involvement with comics as a life-long fan, with a couple of major gaps....and I was detailing some of the turns on the road to one of those gaps in the last two columns before the break, namely my giving up on two of my teen idols, who had brought me back into comics after my first disenchantment: Chris Claremont and John Byrne.
     By that point in my life, however, I was reading bunches of comics, most of them not even in the super-hero genre, and I had no reason to think I'd be giving up on them anytime soon....but events soon overtook me. For one thing, I graduated from college, and for the first six or seven months (although it seemed like much longer than that at the time) I was barely scraping by. My disposable income went from slight, but positive, to zero, with the distinct prospect of it hitting negative once my loans came due, unless I could find something that paid better than office temping. Although my expensive liberal arts education actually did prepare me for a job in computers, it didn't prepare me for the job market--I had trouble convincing the firms that were interested in me that I was interested in them; the common assumption seemed to be that I was just taking a short break in the "real world" before my inevitable return to academia, so I wasn't a good long-term prospect.
     That wouldn't have been enough to get me to quit comics, though, if it hadn't been for the fact that comics seemed to be quitting me. It seemed like every week I'd go to the comic store (The Million Year Picnic, in Harvard Square--at the time a great comic store. It probably still is, if it's still there.) only to find that another of my main-stay comics had been cancelled, or changed creative teams. First Comics went kaput, and with it almost half my reading list. Neil the Horse was cancelled in the middle of a wonderful and touching two-part tribute to Fred Astaire. Joshua Quagmire's Army Surplus Komics Starring Cutey Bunny vanished, as did Don Simpson's Megaton Man. Phil Foglio's Myth Adventures was replaced by a lackluster second series by Valentino, before it, too, was cancelled. Zot!, which had gone to black and white to reduce costs went with the rest of the First books. Journey experimented with sepia-tone, before it, too, went the way of the dodo. At long last, when I went on my weekly pilgrimage to the comic store, all I'd emerge with was Cerebus, and even that seemed to have lost its vigor.
     I don't think that I ever consciously decided to quit comics: it just became easier to go just once every two weeks, then once in a while, and finally not at all. Almost without realizing it I had gafiated (fan speak from the Golden Age of SF fandom; it stands for Get Away From It All. Fandom had a number of such aggregates, including the famous fiawhol (Fandom Is A Way of Life) and fijagh (Fandom Is Just A Goddam Hobby).)
     Of course, this story has a happy ending. After all, I've got a substantial part of a web-site devoted to comics. Fandom may just be a goddam hobby, but it's my goddam hobby.

See you tomorrow!

Heroes, Reborn

So how did I get back into comics, yet again?
Well, what goes around comes around. I had given the bug to my great good friend Russell Impagliazzo when we were in college together, and he had not gone astray. During my burned-out period I, of course, knew that he was still reading comics, but although I would occassionally read one while visiting him, or when he came to visit me, I didn't think much of them. He was into a number of them, but the ones that I particularly remember are the early (and maybe not-so early) Valiants: X-O Manowar; Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom; The Harbingers. Pretty pedestrian stuff, I thought then. (Still do, for that matter.)
     One comic that he recommended in particular was Sandman, but I was reluctant to give it a try. I had been, not exactly a fan, but I had read and enjoyed Jack Kirby's Sandman, and a newly revamped and horrific version didn't sound like my cup of tea. Then one day he mentioned that the writer's name was Neil Gaiman, which sounded awfully familiar. Suddenly it hit me: I had just read a wonderful book called Good Omens, by one of my favorite writers in the world: Terry Pratchett. Only Pratchett wasn't the sole author; Good Omens was co-written by one Neil Gaiman. Was it the same Neil Gaiman? Russell allowed as how it probably was, so that night I read one of the collected editions, and I was hooked.
     For a little while it might have stayed that way, but when I find a new enthusiasm I tend to mine it pretty thoroughly--it wasn't too likely that I could walk into a comic-book store more than a couple of times without casting around for something else, and I happened upon something else almost immediately: I found the first trade paperback of Bone.
     All of a sudden I realized that the kind of comics that I loved hadn'd died out with Neil the Horse and Journey; there were people producing that same kind of quality, of adventure and of whimsy, and I had to have more.
     And I had a good idea for how I could find them, too...

Tune in tomorrow for the origin of Amused in Review!

"It felt like I was having an origin!"

While I had been away from comics I had gotten involved with CompuServe, primarily in the Science Fiction Forum (which has since split into three or four forums, SF Media 1 and 2, SF Lit, and maybe another), so when I became interested once again in comics, it seemed only natural to check out the CompuServe Comics Forum.
     The first thing I did when I joined the Comics forum is I posted a message saying that I had just stumbled across Bone, and was in love with it, and was there anything else being published that was like it? Well, I got quite a few suggestions in reply, and while some of them really made me wonder in what way the comic was supposed to be reminiscent of Bone the ensuing conversations were informative, entertaining, and much more polite than rec.arts.comics....
     One comic in particular that was getting a lot of good word-of-mouth in the forum was this mini-series called Marvels, by this writer of whom I had never heard, a fella by the name of Kurt Busiek. It so happened that this Kurt Busiek guy was a regular participant in the forum, and came across as an articulate, reasonable, and amusing writer, so I decided to give his comic a shot. As those of you who've been following this column for a while know, this was the start of a beautiful fanship; Kurt quickly rocketed to one of the top spots of my personal pantheon of comic writers, a position that he occupies to this day.
     Now, at that time in the forum, there was a weekly column of reviews posted to the message board by Brian Hibbs, under the title "The Savage Critic." Brian is the owner of one of the nation's best comic stores, The Comics Experience, in San Francisco (and is a frequent contributor to one of the comics weeklies, but I forget which one at the moment, and a judge on the Eisner Awards panel, and so forth), and he made a practice of reviewing every comic that came into the store that week (except for the subscription only titles, since he drew the line at reading people's special-order books before they did). Often the review was a single word, and his standards were pretty harsh, hence the "savage" critic, although if I had to read every damn comic on the stands, I'd be pretty harsh to most of them, too. Hibbs' column was a weekly must-read on the forum--everyone read it, and a whole lot of the subsequent traffic was discussion of the comics mentioned in the column.
     After a while, The Savage Critic spawned an imitator. Lucio Perez started writing his own column, on the books that he read during the week, and putting his own wacky spin on things; when writing his column, Lucio adopted the persona of a total fan-boy--everything was assessed for it's coolness, how much it rocked, how smokin' the art, and the babes, were. It was a laugh riot, if you got the joke (some people, alas, didn't--they thought that he was serious. Lou is passionate, but he's never serious). In tribute to Brian's "Savage Critic" column, Lucio called his "The Mildly Peeved Peon." (     Eventually, Lucio changed the name of his column several times, finally settling on The Stinky Peon, the title by which it goes today; some time later his column left CompuServe for its current home on the Wildstorm website, but that was years later.)
     Of course you see where this is going. If Lucio could do it, I figured, why couldn't I? By then I was reading a bunch of comics every week, but they tended not to get much discussion on the forum, since they were often these odd-ball things--particularly manga--that Brian didn't stock, so didn't review. If I wanted to talk about Maison Ikkoku, for instance, I had to start the ball rolling myself.
     Originally I called the column "The Amused Alternative", amused being even lighter in tone than "savage" or "mildly-peeved", and alternative meaning an alternative to the other two columns, covering slightly different comics. I also liked the alliteration. The column was a success, judging by the number of responses, but several people, most notably Chris Crosby of SCC Comics, found the "Alternative" part confusing; they figured it meant that I was concentrating on so-called "alternative" comics, which would make my reviews of Mark Waid's Flash, or even Ranma 1/2, somewhat out of place.
     Taking this criticism to heart, I wrestled with the problem of coming up with a new name for the column. I wanted to keep the "amused" part, since I thought it fit the tone I wanted to establish, and to preserve a sense of continuity with the first few weeks of the column. I half-remembered a column of reviews in the New Yorker (I think it was), which I hadn't read since the time I was working in the library in college, that went by the title "The Muse In Review", so I thought, why not "Amused In Review"? And so a legend was born...