Month: June 2012

Flubs

2012-06-09, 8:08 pm
Categories: Announcements, Cartoons, TV

It's interesting, the kind of small but glaring errors that take you out of something.

Mad Men has an absolutely fantastic crop of writers, editors, directors, and actors -- so it's jarring when not one of them notices that, say, "1960, I am so over you" is a phrase that no human being has ever uttered. It's one thing to use a 1963 Bob Dylan song as background music in an episode set in 1960; it's another to actually have a character use slang that would be out-of-place in a show set in 1990.

A less severe but still amusing flub: in last week's Thundercats, a character said he had worked his math out to "the thousandth decimal point". I think I can see the error in his calculation: he used more than one decimal point.

Also: I changed the name of the "toons" category to "cartoons", because this is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The only reason I used the shortened form of the word in the first damn place was for a set of link banners I made back in 2000 that only one guy ever actually used.

A Meeting of the Minds

2012-06-08, 10:03 pm
Categories: Comics, Music

And continuing with Zappa and Kirby, here's...Zappa and Kirby!

No fooling! It's a picture of Zappa and Kirby!

This one made the rounds back in aught-nine, after an article by Jeff Newelt at Royal Flush Magazine, who caught up with Ahmet Zappa to ask him about it.

The son of a gregarious rock star, Ahmet grew up meeting every celebrity musician under the sun. But it wasn't a rocker who gave Ahmet that first feeling of being around greatness. "I was not starstruck at all by rock stars because music is its own language and my father spoke it, so we spoke it," Ahmet explains matter-of-factly. "This totally demystified the fame or the celebrity. There was no currency for 'oooh, that guy sold a million records, we just cared about good music. One of the most significant moments in my life is when my dad said, 'meet Jack, he's the guy who created all those superheroes you love.' That blew my little mind. I thought it was awesome and weird that my dad had this friendship with this guy. It was like meeting like a real magician!"

[...]

"I remember Jack confided in Frank that he felt like the stories he created helped shape the Star Wars saga, that he saw direct parallels between his characters and the movie's story arcs."

Of all rock stars in the world, Zappa, famously an outspoken champion of free speech and artist's rights, was the ultimate sympathetic ear.

"He told my dad stuff like, 'Darth Vader was Doctor Doom and the Force is the Source' and that George Lucas ripped him off. Now this you may not know, and I was only a kid, but I remember learning at the dinner table that my dad was asked to write the music for Star Wars; he turned it down, he said he wasn't interested. That would've been really strange, the lives of us Star Wars fans woulda taken a different turn and that whole score woulda sounded like Tatooine Cantina music."

Give the article a read; it's also got a neat Rick Veitch illustration of Zappa as a Kirby-style superhero complete with outlandish headgear. Which is also available as a T-shirt at World of Strange!

Hudson

2012-06-08, 9:42 pm
Categories: Comics, Politics, Stream of Consciousness

News out of the Comics Internet today is that Laura Hudson is stepping down as EIC of ComicsAlliance. It's one of those things where the headline shocked me but the story actually left me feeling it's a good thing -- Laura described the frustration of having to maintain a website instead of just being able to write.

I've been grousing about that very thing on this blog -- and this blog is tiny, has one writer, no comments section, and nobody looking over my shoulder to make sure I don't use the word "fuck".

So, Laura Hudson not worrying about site admin crap and, instead, focusing on writing more articles? Yes please.

Because the woman writes a damn fine article.

Last September, she set the Comics Internet aflame with a post titled The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their 'Liberated Sexuality'. She wasn't the first person to point out sexism in mainstream American superhero comics, obviously. Nor was she the first to point out that it was a barrier for entry in DC's "New 52", ostensibly an attempt to attract new and lapsed readers.

But her piece was clear, heartfelt, and became something of a rallying cry, the first of many on CA, and linked frequently in other articles on other sites.

She's more patient than I am.

Somebody tries to tell me there's no sexism in American superhero comics, I'm less likely to deliver a point-by-point set of examples and how they make me feel, and more inclined to look incredulous and say "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I don't think people should have to write pieces like that. I think every example, every explanation, that Laura gets into in that piece is blisteringly obvious and self-evident.

But obviously there are people who just don't get it. For many of them, their instinct when confronted with such a piece is to get defensive, or to deny, or just to spew a bunch of crazy misogynistic crap in the comments section. I swear that the CA comments section got permanently stupider after that post. (And people are still writing terrible comments on that single post, nine months later -- you're probably better off not scrolling down to the bottom.)

But I think some people do listen. I think some people do take a look at what they're doing and look for ways to fix it. Just the other week Greg Rucka wrote a great post at io9 discussing superhero misogyny and how to fix it (basically: you want to write a well-rounded female character, talk to some women). The discussion is ongoing -- and with Hudson back writing articles, I like to think she'll keep the heat on.

I think it's a little optimistic to say that Big Sexy Problem could be the most important thing written on the subject since Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators list -- but I really think it has the potential to be.

Course, she's more than welcome to just post cat pictures from here on out, too. She's earned it.

And she writes a mighty fine Mark Millar Valentine.

Watermelon in Easter Hay

2012-06-07, 10:08 pm
Categories: Music

Yesterday I started off my day with a Frank Zappa quote.

And you know what? I think more Frank Zappa is just what this site needs.

Here's Frank performing Watermelon in Easter Hay; if the comments on the video are correct, it's in Barcelona in 1988.

It's not one of his better-known songs, but I think it's just gorgeous -- it reminds me of what Douglas Adams said about Wonko the Sane:

But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face made you suddenly feel "Oh. Well, that's all right then."

Particularly in its context in Joe's Garage -- it's the last song in the rock opera (it's followed by A Little Green Rosetta, but that's after the story ends and the band drops character) and it's the end, the song about letting go and saying goodbye and knowing that you're going to lose something but making the very best of the short time you have left with it.

Music is the best.

Even Superer

2012-06-07, 8:26 pm
Categories: Games

You know what would be great?

A version of Super Mario World that added all the cool shit from the Advance version (different physics for Luigi, randomly-colored Yoshis throughout the game) without any of the bullshit (voices, completely game-breaking extra point of damage).

Wonder if there's a hack out there.

X-Files

2012-06-07, 7:53 pm
Categories: Movies, Stream of Consciousness, TV

So you know what I just watched?

Well, it says "X-Files" up there, so yeah, you probably do.

My fiancée is out of town and I am bacheloring it up. This is rather less exciting than it sounds; as it turns out most of my friends my age are busy raising kids and said they'd get back to me about going out for beers sometime.

So I've largely been sitting at home playing Nintendo and watching Netflix.

You know, Thursday.

Anyway. I watched X-Files pretty religiously from probably about '96 to '98. I missed most of the early stuff and most of the late stuff. I saw enough to know that when it was on it was on, and when it was off...it got pretty bad.

Tonight I fired up the pilot. And while a lot of shows don't quite click in the pilot, this is definitely one of the "on" episodes. Right out the gate, the show is smartly written, beautifully directed, and convincingly acted. (Yes, even Duchovny. Guy only ever plays one part, but that part is Fox Mulder.)

And they look so young.

There's an immediate charm to it -- and I think part of it is in the tiny budget. There's something that's always fascinated me about watching people try to make something on a shoestring -- Evil Dead, Doctor Who, MST3K (which, incidentally, is the show I stopped watching X-Files for; it was moved into the same Sunday night timeslot in its last season or two). Even terrible stuff -- like, say, most of the movies they actually showed on MST3K -- there's a charm to the trying, to the heart of it all. I said recently that I'd rather watch a cheap, terrible movie like Manos: Hands of Fate than an expensive, mediocre one like...well, anything by Michael Bay -- and I stand by that.

But X-Files, at its best, was something that did great with a tiny budget.

Indeed, I think it was the Emmys, the movie, the relocation to LA, that led to the show beginning to dip in quality.

But even then, even during the Doggett and Reyes era -- when it was on, it was on. (Hell, I may be the only guy who thought the '08 movie had some charm -- course, it helped that I looked at it as just another episode instead of an attempt at a triumphant return.)

Anyhow, the whole series is up on Netflix.

There are lots worse ways to spend an hour...

LeakedOut

2012-06-06, 9:07 pm
Categories: Tech

So apparently LinkedIn didn't salt any of its users' passwords before hashing.

Man, if only they'd had some way of finding people who understood basic fucking network security and were looking for work.

On Alan Moore

2012-06-06, 5:14 pm
Categories: Comics, Movies

Arguments on the Internet are waged through cliché.

Before Watchmen is out today. Alan Moore isn't too happy about it, and has made it abundantly clear that he did not approve it.

Bring this subject up, and sooner or later somebody -- perhaps even an ordinarily intelligent person -- is going to introduce the false-equivalence argument, "Did JM Barrie approve Lost Girls? Did Bram Stoker approve League of Extraordinary Gentlemen?"

I shouldn't have to explain why that is a stupid comparison, but let me just get it out of the way:

JM Barrie did not approve Lost Girls and Bram Stoker did not approve League because JM Barrie and Bram Stoker are fucking dead.

Alan Moore: Not dead. Still alive. Vocally complaining about the use of his characters and concepts.
JM Barrie and Bram Stoker: Dead. Not still alive. They do not have an opinion about Alan Moore.

Not remotely the same thing.

So, okay, point that out and whoever brought it up might concede that point, but then next on the list is "But Watchmen is based on the Charlton Comics characters; it wasn't original in the first place."

Well, you're getting warmer, but still no.

While it's true that the Watchmen cast is deliberately derivative, it is distinct. Rorschach is not the Question, Dr. Manhattan is not Captain Atom, and Nite Owl is not Blue Beetle.

I do think it would have been nice for Moore, Gibbons, DC, or somebody to offer Steve Ditko a check for inspiring their runaway success. (Ditko would likely have refused, because he is Ditko, but it would have been a nice gesture.) But I also think that that's a fundamentally different situation than if, say, the story actually had featured the Question, Captain Atom, and Blue Beetle and Ditko had been asking them not to make it.

Being able to create original characters who are clear analogues to existing characters is a good thing, and the comics industry is built on it. Superman is based on Doc Savage and Batman is based on the Shadow. But they are most certainly not Doc Savage and the Shadow; they're not merely distinct legally, but also morally and artistically. Just as the characters in Watchmen are distinct from their inspirations.

Even in current issues of League, where Moore is clearly using still-living creators' characters with the serial numbers filed off -- most notably Voldemort --, it's still not the same thing. Including a popular, culturally-important character in a minor role or cameo in an ensemble book and never referring to him by name is qualitatively different from making him the main character and sticking him on the cover.

All that said, there are some people who have made a fair point and a rational comparison in this debate: Alan Moore did spend most of the 1980's working on other people's characters. Superman, Batman, Green Lantern -- for someone who now bemoans DC's predatory contracts, he didn't seem too concerned about Jerry and Joe's cut when he wrote Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

And that is a fair point. You can take this a number of different ways, I suppose -- it could be that Alan Moore was simply young and naive and didn't think about things like that in those days. Or it could be that he, Scott Kurtz-like, knew about the injustices of the past but naively believed that things were All Better Now.

Or, cynically, it could just be that he didn't care about unfair contracts until one affected him, or until after he was already rich enough that he could afford to tell DC off.

Honestly, that's a valid interpretation. I can respect that opinion. It's not flattering, but it's at least logically consistent.

And the other thing is, you know, Alan Moore is kind of a dick.

First, there are the blanket statements he constantly makes about everyone at DC and Marvel being terrible and doing nothing but rehash his ideas from 25 years ago. Now unfortunately, I do believe there's some truth to that -- grim-'n'-gritty stories attempting to duplicate Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns are a blight on the superhero genre -- but to say that there's not one person with a single original or creative idea at either company is just, by Moore's own admission, an insult delivered from a position of ignorance.

There's also a whiff of the paranoid conspiracy theorist to Moore's ranting about DC. I don't really think DC bought WildStorm just to get Moore back. And neither do I think that Steve Moore (friend, no relation)'s novelization of the Watchmen movie was scrapped out of petty revenge against Alan, acted out through coded threats transmitted through an unwitting Dave Gibbons -- I find it far more likely that someone at DC just realized that making a novelization of a movie that tried its hardest to be a shot-for-shot adaptation of an existing comic book they already published was a fucking stupid idea.

But his claim that DC was using Gibbons to send weird coded threats brings us to another problem I have with Moore: he has a pretty spotty history with his co-creators.

I think it's wonderful that he refused his share of royalties from V for Vendetta and Watchmen and insisted that it be given to David Lloyd and Dave Gibbons, respectively. I also think that it's a damn shame that, afterward, he accused them of being ungrateful and refused to speak to them ever again.

And that's something that I think too many people have ignored here: comics is a collaborative medium, Alan Moore didn't make these comics by himself, and unfortunately he doesn't just have a history of falling out with his collaborators, he also has a history of blocking their old work from being reprinted.

Steve Bissette -- who says he still has no idea what he said that made Moore refuse to speak to him anymore -- has spoken at length about his attempts with Rick Veitch to reprint 1963 and Moore's refusal to let it happen, and has noted, sardonically, that as much as he hates work-for-hire, it's his WFH collaborations with Alan that are still in print and earning him royalties, not their creator-owned work.

So while I still think Moore and Gibbons should own Watchmen, I acknowledge the very real possibility that if they did, Moore might still have declared Gibbons to be persona non grata and might very well have forced Watchmen out of print. We'll never know.

To the matter of the Watchmen contract: I don't think anyone was attempting to hoodwink Moore and Gibbons with the reversion clause; neither they nor DC had any expectation that the book would stay in print and never revert.

To that end, I can see DC's point that it tried, for decades, to reach an agreement with Moore that would be favorable to all parties, up to and including offering him the rights back if he'd write the prequels himself, and that he was intractable. And I can see Moore's point that DC was moving the goalposts and offering him what it had already agreed to give him, in exchange for more in return from him.

In that sense, it can be viewed as simply a dilemma, as two parties unable to reach an agreement (with Gibbons trapped in the middle) and both sympathetic to a certain extent.

On the other hand, there were cases where DC clearly took advantage of Moore and Gibbons, most notably in the case of the Watchmen buttons it sold as "promos" so that it wouldn't have to pay them their cut for merchandising.

And Moore has recently claimed that his contract actually stipulated that if he ever refused to agree to anything DC proposed to do with the property, they could hire their own lawyer to sign in his stead. And if that's true, then yeah, I think the contract was predatory.

Which does, of course, mean that Moore should have had a lawyer go over his contract in the first place -- I don't think anyone, including Moore himself, disagrees with that.

But what I don't quite get is the frequent line of reasoning, "He signed a contract, therefore he deserves anything that happens as a result of that." Well, legally, sure, but ethically that's far too callous a worldview for my tastes. The notion that it's Moore's fault for allowing DC to take advantage of him -- well, certainly he deserves some share of the blame, but what I don't get is how that absolves DC of any blame for actually taking advantage of him.

JM Straczynski's "Did Alan Moore get a crummy contract? Yes. So has everyone at this table. Worse was Segal [sic] and Shuster, worse was a lot of people" dismissal is particularly galling.

But JMS inadvertently brings up another point -- by being, himself, a perfect example of a famously difficult person to work with, a guy known for publicly criticizing the people who sign his checks, who DC puts up with anyway because he brings in good money.

Moore may seem intractable, but DC hasn't gone to much trouble to keep him happy. As Heidi MacDonald recently noted, he was willing to collaborate with them on a Watchmen retrospective back in 2000 -- but after that, DC pulled one of his stories, almost didn't publish Black Dossier, and never did publish it in the format Moore and O'Neill wanted.

Hell, Moore was even consulted for the V for Vendetta movie up until he read a script written by Americans who didn't even have a working idea of how British people talked or the basic structure of the British government.

Moore may be a crank, but MacDonald's point is sound: DC is making the same mistake it's been making since 1939. It's focusing on the characters as its treasure trove instead of their creators.

Way I see it, Before Watchmen will sell well at first and be largely forgotten in a year or two. It's another example, like the New 52, of short-term gimmick thinking -- it'll be a blip on the radar, rather than something that brings in new long-term readers and fans.

You know what could have brought in new readers and fans? New material by Alan Moore.

DC is so singularly focused on wringing every last penny out of Watchmen that it hasn't even stopped to consider what made the book great. It wasn't Ozymandias and the Comedian. It was Moore, Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins.

And maybe Moore was always going to get pissed off and take his ball and go home. Maybe nothing DC could have done would have been enough to get him to stay. Or maybe, if they'd gone to more trouble to keep their biggest-name creator happy, he'd still be around churning out new bestselling books for them -- we'll never know.

Course, there's also the point that Before Watchmen is a terrible idea in the first place, and it would still be a terrible idea even if Moore gave it his blessing -- even if Moore wrote it himself. (And yes, he was planning on it at one point.)

Watchmen is a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. It stands alone, and should continue to do so. I love Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner (and I've enjoyed some stuff by JMS and Azzarello), but I'd much rather see them working on something new.

Discuss this in the Watchmen thread at Brontoforumus!

As True Now...

2012-06-06, 6:43 am
Categories: Politics

The Democrats stand for nothing except "I wish I was a Republican" and the Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.
- Frank Zappa, Spin interview, 1991

Features

2012-06-05, 10:21 pm
Categories: Announcements

Tweaked the Features Page a bit. It's still outdated as hell -- I think the newest stuff on it is from 2006 -- but at least now there aren't so many broken links or as much use of present tense.

Added my last few forum avatars, too. Which I guess technically means that the newest thing on the page is now a comic book panel from 2009.

I'm tempted to at least rearrange the page a bit at some point. And part of me is tempted to tweak the layout a bit so it matches the current site style -- but part of me figures that since the page is basically a historical artifact anyway, maybe I'm better off leaving the old site style on it too.

And another part of me is pointing out that that's one of those bookkeeping things that takes too damn long, isn't worth it, and distracts me from actually adding more content to the site.

And hell, I've just managed to post three updates in two days. By the standards of this site, I'm on a roll.