Amused in Review

JLA: Year One #12
by Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn & Barry Kitson
DC, color, $2.95
Rating: Neat-O

The first year of the (revised) Justice League wraps up neatly with this issue, and I'll be sorry to see it go, despite my occassional qualms about this not being the real Justice League of America.  It may not have been quite what I wanted, but it was way more than I had any reason to expect given DC's current editorial direction.  Using elements from the original series, Waid and Augustyn have formulated a updated, nineties version of comics' number one super-team, and unlike mostt updated, nineties versions of classics...it doesn't suck.  Okay, that's damning with faint praise--it did far better than lack of suck: it rocked, if not ruled.  Now that it's over, I'll have a hole in my comics-buying until the next Waid project (there's that Kingdom Event in December, which I wish I could be more enthusiastic about), but at least I can get my monthly fix over in Captain America and Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty.   And Cap does rule.  So there.

Death on the Mississippi
by Peter J. Heck
Berkley, 290 pages, $5.99
rating: Neat-O

An amusing little historical mystery, with the gimmick that this time, the detective is Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.  The book is told from the point of view of Clemens' travelling secretary, a naive young Yalie named Wentworth Cabot, Peter Heck not being fool enough to attempt to do an entire novel in Clemens' voice.  The mystery deals with the attempt by Twain to recover a missing treasure (the basic story of which was laid out, as a shaggy-dog joke, in an anecdote in Life on the Mississippi. The conceit of Death on the Mississippi is that the story that appeared in Life wasn't fiction, but a fictionalized account of something that happened to Clemens when he was a river-boat pilot, which he passed off as a joke.  Years later, he decides to actually look for the treasure, but finds that he isn't the only one in on the hunt. Basically fun, although it suffers a little from Wentworth Cabot being too much of a naïf.   Wanting to reach into a book and slap some sense into the narrator isn't usually a good sign.  The plot resolution also requires slightly larger doses of coincidence than are comfortable outside of a Twain yarn. Still, I'm a big enough Twain fan, and the book has enough authentic feeling to it that it's worth a read.  Or you could start with the second in the series (as I did), A Connecticut Yankee In Criminal Court and get a slightly more mature version of the protagonist, and a more involved and less gimmicky mystery, to boot.  Just last weekend I picked up the third, and rest assured that a review will be forthcoming once I've had a chance to read it.

Iron Man #11
by Kurt Busiek & Sean Chen
Marvel, color, $1.99
rating: Keen

I don't know.  While this, like Thunderbolts, still shows flashes of promise, in a large part it's just another ho-hum super-hero story.  I expect better of Kurt, and lately I demand more of comics.  I'll give it another couple of issues, but the current story-line leaves me thinking the unthinkable: will this be the first Kurt Busiek book that I ever drop?  The suspense is killing me, which is more than I can say for Iron Man.

Shadow  Lady: Dangerous Love #1
by Mazakazu Katsura
Dark Horse, b&w, $2.50
rating: Keen

More and more lately I've found my comics purchases dominated by manga and by collections, and even the collections are as often as not collections of manga.  For some reason, even mediocre manga, which so far Shadow Lady certainly is, have a certain...wakarimasen, as the French would say if they were speaking Japanese.  Which is just it, there's an exoticism to them that, at least for me, provides an entertainment value even when I find the story somewhat lacking.  Of course, the joy of comparing the English translation to the Japanese text, to get that "Aha! So that's what that sequence was about!" feeling is not something that I anticipate most of my readers will share, but I'm willing to accept that if they don't there's probably not a lot of reason for them (that is, you reading this) to be reading things like Shadow Lady.   Unless you like the lovingly rendered T&A, that is; I have to admit that Katsura does the sexycute thing as well as anybody out there.
    Shadow Lady is the story of painfully shy Aimi, a demure young lady who just happens ta-da to have a magic eye-shadow case that transforms her (when she applied the eyeshadow) into the daring, dashing, master burglar "Shadow Lady", scourge of the city.  Sort of a magical-girl-gone-bad, as it were. (Magical girl, by the way, is the name of the genre to which things such as Sailor Moon belong--stories of young girls who have the power to transform into more glamorous, usually older, versions of themselves complete with magical powers and fashion accessories.)  That's pretty much all that the first issue had time to set up.   I'll probably give this another couple of issues, at least until I figure that I understand the basic set-up and characters well enough that I can follow the Japanese version without cross-checking against the English translation: unlike Ranma or Maison Ikkoku, I don't think that I'll care enough about the nuances to keep buying both versions.

I wasn't able to log on until late on Sunday, so this page is intentionally left blank

Mind if I rant a little?  Thanks.

It's been one of those days...in Computer Heck. (It's not Computer Hell, 'cause I still have my hard-drive, and if nothing is working any better than it did when I started, nothing is working worse--at least so far.) First of all, I have a headache, but I'm trying to avoid taking my pain medication (for no good reason, I just feel like I'm cheating somehow if I file the edges off with Tylenol and codeine).  That doesn't put me in the greatest of  moods to deal with a cranky computer; if I had been as smart as I like to think I am, I would have put it off.  On the other hand, I actually don't have anything I have to do today, so I thought it would be a good time to fix some of the things that have been going wrong with The Box.
     One of the things that has been a minor annoyance is that ever since I upgraded to Outlook 98 (which I did to improve the connectivity with my Palm Pilot--not that I've noticed any improvement) whenever I fire it up, it whines at me that the PGP plug-in is older than the version of Outlook and may not work properly.   Well, short of de-installing PGP, I don't see a way of removing that plug-in or of getting Outlook to shut up about it, so I figured that's one of the things that I'd look at today.  Well, it turns out that PGP, Inc has merged with McAfee and some other company to form Network Associates, and while they'll still gladly sell you a copy of PGP-for Personal Privacy 5.0 (from about three different places on the new web-site), it's fallen off the face of their web-site as far as support and downloadable updates.  I even went as far as to start ordering the software, to see if there was an obvious upgrade path, but no....The technical support page doesn't list it in the pull-down menu when you submit a request for assistance.  I submitted it anyway, under a different product, and I'll see what kind of response I get.  If I don't get any satisfaction, I guess I'll scrub it from the hard drive and see if that stops Outlook's complaints.  (It's not as if anyone I know actually uses PGP when they e-mail me.  They probably should, but I'm not going to push them to do so if the product is unsupported.)
     Meanwhile, on the newsreader front, Agent, which is a really slick product except that it doesn't work reliably with my ISP (Forté, the maker of Agent, claims it's Compuserve's fault for having a really slow news server, but Netscape's Collabra Discussion Groups news reader doesn't  have any trouble) continues to tantalize me (and you all know the story of Tantalus, right?).  When it works, it blows the socks of the Netscape built-in news reader; but when it doesn't...Outlook isn't bad as a newsreader, but, somehow something essential got blown away at some point, and although the news reader continues to come up, it's utterly unable to find any discussion groups on the Compuserve news server, although it claims to connect to the server.   Just for the heck of it, I decided to see if there was a new version of IE and Outlook to download (besides, I'd gotten an ominous message from Microsoft about a security hole in IE and Outlook that I should download the patch to, so I figured it was probably about time to do that).
     I tried following the link in the e-mail message to the security directory at microsoft.com.  Sure enough, it identified that I needed the security patch.  Clicked on next to begin downloading--and got an internal server error, please contact your server administrator.  Thanks, Microsoft.  I gave up on that, and just went to the IE download page and let it sniff my system to see if it thought anything needed updating.  Yep, there was a new version of IE, a new Java VM, and some other crap.  Sigh. What the hell--I had already decided I wasn't doing anything productive today, so I let it rip.  A few hours later (about 2) it was done, and then it started installing.  Oops.  Everything that it installed complained about a DLL that was meant to be used for NT 3.something only.  Then it finished installing, and reported that everything installed correctly.  Tried it out, and it seemed to work--but the newsreader still didn't see any newsgroups.  Screw it.   I reset Netscape as the default newsreader.
     I'm seriously considering scrubbing the whole drive and installing Linux.  Not that I know anything about Linux, but at least it would be a whole new set of problems, and none of them would have anything to do with Microsoft.   Since I don't play any games on the computer, and in fact mostly what I use it for is Internet stuff (like this Web-page, here), and I'm sick to death of Front Page (it now has the habit of switching any graphics that I put on a page to 640*800, regardless of the size it's supposed to be--even if I type in the HTML Height and Width tags by hand.   Last time I updated the Bookstore page, I had to do it by FTP) I don't know that I'd lose anything by it, even if I couldn't re-install all my software.  Linux is supposed to let you boot to Linux or to Windows, but even if I had to give up Windows entirely, I'm not sure that I'd care at this point--as long as I could still connect to my ISP.  And if I couldn't, maybe I'd just get a new ISP.  I'm that sick of the whole business.
     On the plus side of things, and on my work computer, not my "fun" one, I have a new toy to play with.  I downloaded a new programming language called Python Friday, just before I left work, and got a book on it Saturday; today I've been playing around with it while this computer was gronking away loading the latest point-revision of IE, and it's pretty fun.  I like reading about computer languages, even ones that I've never actually programmed in (e.g. Forth, and Modula-2), so it's pretty neat to be able to get a freeware language and start hacking around in it.   I'm not sure that it's ever going to replace Perl for my little programming projects,  but it might--at least for a certain kind of project (ones where the data structures matter more than munging a text file around--you can construct elaborate data structures in Perl, but it's hardly intuitive--at least for me).  In case you were wondering, it's itty-bitty Perl programs that keep this site running by feeding you the current day's columns, quotes and lyrics.
     Anyway, it's good to get that off my chest, even if it's caused eyes to glaze and fingers to stab at the back button all across this great nation of ours.

I've been without internet access all weekend, so nothing for today.  Full story tomorrow, but right now I'm late for work.

Well,  yesterday marked the end of an era.  I had been a member of Compuserve since before the internet revolution, back when dinosaurs roamed the planet and 2400 baud was a fast modem.  I was running on a 286 machine, and everything was text based, using the modem software's capture buffers to read the threads.  Ah, the good old days.
     Compuserve's Comics and Animation Forum was the birthplace of this column, and to this day was probably where it had its greatest readership (although it was hard to tell--there were no statistics for individual threads)--or at least its most active responses.  Even after I took the column to this site, I still cross-posted to the Comics Forum as often as I could, although I confess I started to drop off after most of my regular respondents left the service for one reason or another.   And even after that point, I kept Compuserve, by then swallowed up by AOL as my ISP.  It was slightly more expensive, but they had nodes all over the country, the service was good, and it still let me access the forums from the Web.
     All that ended Sunday, when I had a problem logging into CSI to get to the Web and update this site.  No problem, thought I, just call CSI tech-support for some help.  "I'm sorry," the surly techie told me, not sounding sorry in the least, "but we can't help you if you're not using Compuserve's software."  I never use Compuserve's software.  I never have used Compuserve's software.  In the six-plus years I've been a member of Compuserve, I've only had the software installed on the machine when it came pre-installed. Compuserve's software, to put it charitably, stinks on ice.  But that's okay, because you never really needed to use it anyway.  For a long time, all you needed was a modem and a terminal program--and even after they changed the fora so that plain ASCII wouldn't work, you could get around that with either share-ware, or more recently any old browser.   I had my Win-95 Dial-up Networking set up to dial directly into the Compuserve gateway, just as I had for the past two years, just as the Compuserve tech-support guy had told me to set it up last time I called them, just as I had it set up when I successfully dialed in on Saturday night...only now, now,  (post AoL) they tell me that they can't support that.  "Why not?" I wanted to know.  "Because we don't.  If you don't use Compuserve 3.0 or higher, there's nothing we can do for you.  Install it and call back."
     "No," I said, "there is something you can do for me.  Cancel my account."
     As it turns out, I was wrong about that: I had to call a different number to get them to cancel my account.
    
     I'm with Earthlink now, and so far, everything's fine.
     In fact, the Agent newsreader software that I never was able to get to work correctly with Compuserve is working like a champ.
    Adieu, CSI.  Let flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Sergio Aragon駸' Groo: The Game
by Ken Whitman, illustrated by Sergio Aragon駸
Archangel Entertainment, $14.95
rating: Neat-O.

I've just gotten back from a dinner party where we played Groo: The Game, and it was a lot of fun.  This was a group of coworker-type friends, not gamer-type friends, so the games that we usually play after dinner are more on the order of Pictionary or Trivial Pursuit.  My friends found the rules a little confusing at first, particularly that all the cards had their own individual special effects, much like Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games. It's important to note that Groo: The Game is not a collectible card game--every set is the same, and has everything you need (there is one expansion set, with more cards).  The game consists of cards, special dice, and a rule-book. The object of the game is to be the first to build a town worth seven victory points, before the armies of the other players, and the ravages of Groo can destroy your town.  Each turn you have the opportunity to roll the dice to see what resources you have that turn to construct building with: Laborers, Supplies, and Kopins (money).   There's a special die that controls where Groo wanders next. Different buildings cost differing amounts of the various basic supplies, but beware--every die also has a Groo head, which is the resource needed to unleash the walking catastrophe that is Groo, and whatever town Groo is currently in suffers the effects of Groo Events that are brought into play (the usual run of calamities that follow Groo: Famine, Panic, War.  I don't think there's a Pestilence card, though).  Any resources that you can't use in your turn pass to the next player, and to the next, until every player has had a chance to use the left-overs to build with--including the chance to unleash Groo effects on whatever hapless town Groo is currently residing in. There are also wild-cards, most of which redirect Groo's wanderings to a new town.
    As I said, at first my friends found the array of options bewildering, but once they came to accept that despite the seeming complexity, there wasn't a lot of clever strategizing that you can do--since any town, no matter how close to victory, is about one unlucky die-roll away from being wiped out of existence by Groo, and every other player just waiting to gang up on someone nearing victory, they started to get into it.
    Highly recommended, and not just because I happened to win both games.

Well, for some unknown reason Front Page (and the Feedback forms) are working again--which probably means that the problem was on the server end, and that I slagged Microsoft unfairly.  I can't feel too badly for ole Microsoft, though, considering all the times their software has given me fits and I didn't say a mumblin' word.  Still, since everything's copacetic for the moment, lets get busy....

Inhumans #2
by Jenkins and Lee
Marvel, color, $2.99
rating: Neat-O

I would never have given this comic a second look if it hadn't been for my good friend Jeff Lang's recommendation, and that would have been a pity, since the only thing I didn't like about this comic was its (relatively) high price--and even then it's only high for a Marvel book.  I pay that much without blinking for almost anything that, say, Viz puts out--and that in black and white.
    While this is apparently the second of a four-issue mini-series, as far as I can tell it's a stand-alone one-issue story.  If it ties in to what had gone before (I didn't read #1), or leaves anything that really cries for resolution in #3, it's not obvious to me.  What it is is a basic coming-of-age story in a rather odd society, focussing on the night before a group of young Inhumans are to enter the "terrigen mists" that will transform them from basic human stock into full-fledged Inhumans, and the uncertainty and fear that they deal with since nobody who enters the mists knows what they will do to them.  Some get beneficial, or even beautiful mutations, some...

JLA/Titans #1 of 3
by Devin Grayson and Phil Jimenez
DC, color, $2.95
rating: Keen

Another recommendation of my pal, Jeff Lang (a pretty keen writer himself), this is more interesting for its ambition than for anything else, although it shows enough promise that I plan on picking up the next issue.   Grayson and Jimenez apparently have been infected by the spirit that possessed Busiek and Perez when they decided to write a story involving everyone who was ever an Avenger--only this time it's everyone who's ever been a Titan getting at least one panel.  Sheesh.  I'd say nobody's going to top that anytime soon, but I'm sure that as soon as I did DC would announce a mini-series featuring everyone who was ever in the Legion of Super-heroes.
    Despite the somewhat "stunt" nature of the book, and the usual constraints imposed by trying to set up a three issue mini-series, Devin Grayson does a creditable job of shoe-horning in some actual characterization, at least on the Titans side of things.  The JLA are treated as more of a known quantity, and her handling of them confirms for me that it's not just Morrison's style that has put me off the current JLA line-up; the Big Seven aside, is there anybody at all besides the creators who cares about characters like Huntress and, for Heaven's sake, Zauriel?  Come one, if you're out there, 'fess up.

The Avengers #11
by Busiek and Perez
Marvel, color, $1.99
rating: Keen

"Earth's Mightiest Corpses" about says it all, I think.  A good, solid issue of Avengers, but really not a patch on what goes on in Astro City.   I'm beginning to think that Astro City has spoiled me for ordinary, straight-forward super-hero melodrama.  I read this issue, I enjoyed it, but none of it really sticks with me. As usual, Perez' art is gorgeous, and Busiek's writing, particularly the diaolog, is spot on, but the thrill just isn't there.

Shadow Lady #2
by Masakazu Katsura
Dark Horse, b&w, $2.50
rating: Neat-O

Whoops.  Looks like I spoke too soon about Shadow Lady.  Without a doubt issue number two is much goofier, much more energetic, and much more fun than the first.   The art is still probably one of the big draws for the book, but the story is finally showing promise of being more than an excuse for the art.  This issue introduces several new characters, including the head of the Police Anti-Shadow Lady Squad, and a new detective on the squad (and possible love interest for Aimi, Shadow Lady's painfully shy alter-ego).

Sluggy Freelance
by Pete Abrams
http://www.sluggy.com/
rating: Gosh-a-rooty!

I spent a great deal of Saturday afternoon reading the almost two years' worth of daily Sluggy Freelance comic strips on Pete Abrams' web-site, and although I laughed my ass off, I still have no idea why it's called Sluggy Freelance.  Perhaps I should read the FAQ.
    Q: What does the title Sluggy Freelance mean?
    A: Something cool and mysterious! Not telling.
                            - The Sluggy Freelance FAQ

    Well, there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth.
    Anyway, Sluggy Freelance is an insanely funny daily online-only comic strip that's a combination parody of popular science fiction (Star Trek, Aliens, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, and so forth) and soap opera.  The major cast consists of Torg, a freelance web-designer, Riff, his buddy with no visible means of support but a penchant for demonology and mad science, Torg's "pet" lop-eared rabbit Bun-Bun, complete with switchblade and major attitude problem, Zoë, the girl next door, Kiki the ferret, Aylee the alien, and a cast of thousands.  Don't worry about keeping track of the extras, though: as in the fiction that it parodies, red-shirts don't last long in Sluggy Freelance.  Particularly not tele-marketers.
    Because it's a strip with strong continuity, the author recommends starting from the beginning, when Satan infects Riff's computer.  But if you end up blowing off the rest of your day to catch up, don't say I didn't warn you.

Murder at Mt. Fuji
by Shizuko Natsuki
Ballantine, 235 pages, translated by Robert Rohmer
rating: Neat-O

A slim, atmospheric mystery by Japan's bestselling mystery writer, Murder at Mt. Fuji is in essence a police procedural, but with a very different flavor from similar American or British works.  I found it interesting that the protagonist, to the extent that there is one, is a young American woman named Jane Prescott studying in Japan.   I suspect that Natsuki uses her presence as a distancing device, to allow him to examine some of the family relationships that drive the story that the Japanese might take for granted, but to an American, Natsuki's Jane Prescott is doubly distancing--without being blatantly wrong or stereotypical, there's something about her reactions and her aquiescence to the family's plotting that seem odd.
     The plot is roughly this: Jane is Chiyo Wada's English tutor, and to help Chiyo with her term paper she's invited to the ultra-rich Wada's New Year's family gathering at Mt. Fuji.  There, the patricarch of the Wada clan is murdered, and when Chiyo confesses to doing it in self-defense, the rest of the family comes up with an elaborate plot to protect her and make it seem like an outsider did it.   But things aren't always as they seem, and when the Five Lakes District police begin investigating, not only does the plot unravel, but the most basic "facts" about the murder are called into question.

Patty Cake & Friends #11
by Scott Roberts
Slave Labor Graphics, b&w, $2.95
rating: Neat-O

This issue: The wonderful world of Beanie-Babies, or Pocket Pets as they're known in the Patty-verse.  As usual, Scott Roberts has a laser eye for bullshit advertising aimed at kiddies, and the parody ads in this issue (particularly one of The Gap's clothing for kids ads) are almost worth the price of admission by themselves.  In fact, this issue is pretty much the all consumerism issue: every story deals either directly or tangentially with advertising and buying stuff.  Even the Birdy interlude does, sorta.  But throughout, Roberts manages to sound humorous, rather than scolding; the kids may be easy marks for Madison Avenue manipulators, but the pleasure that they take in their toys is genuine and heartfelt.

Geisha #3
by Andi Watson
Oni Press, b&w, $2.95
rating: Neat-O

This just gets better and better; either rhat, or I keep forgetting how good it is in between issues.  This issue: Jomi goes to a museum.  No, really, that's the big sequence.  Geisha is probably the comic that's most self-consciously about Art since, well, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.  It's also about what is real, and what is fake, and whether it makes a difference--all important concerns to an android girl in a society that treats them as second-class imitations of real people.  There aren't many writers, of comics or otherwise, that I actually think have interesting things to say when they tackle "deep" subjects, but Andi Watson is one of them.