Unfocused linkblogging

Neat stuff I've run across this week:

• Wired profiles Neal Stephenson in advance of his next novel, Anathem.
  
• Take the McCain house tour!
  
• John Scalzi talks about the neurology of emotional reactions to written and visual fiction.
  
• Absolutely nothing has changed in the presidential race. Obama has a small but steady and significant lead. He has had a small but steady and significant lead for months.
  
• More than you ever wanted to know about the novelization of Gremlins, which I'm fairly sure I owned at one point in my preadolescence (which means it's got a good chance of still being in a box in my parents' basement).
  
• The Savage Dragon endorses Obama.
  
• Obama's reshaping the Democratic party.
  
• Bronze medal winners are happier than silver medal winners.
  

Dare I suggest...?

After reading about the origins of this summer's Hulk movie mulligan, and seeing the trailer for Frank Miller's movie adaptation of The Spirit (featured below), I have to ask: Why doesn't Marvel Studios make its next movie do-over a Daredevil feature by Frank Miller? No one remembers, or much liked, the 2003 movie with Ben Affleck (except, I imagine, Affleck and Jennifer Garner and their kid). So why not let Miller return to the character in a great big graphic green-screened tale?

• MTV
• Music Videos
• MTV Shows
• Entertainment News

That's ONE way to name a kid

Reading about the curious tale of Batman Jones, I am suddenly grateful all over again for the easy time we had driving V. home from the hospital...

If not separated at birth, perhaps really close cousins?

Gil Kane's cover of Omega The Unknown #8 (May 1977)...





...and his cover for The New Adventures of Superboy #48 (December 1983)?

Links count as a post.

No, really, they do. So here are a bunch of links:

• John Scalzi presents The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.
  
  
• Check out Keith Giffen's Legion poster from way back when.
  
  
• Johanna brings us fun with fanboys who will not do as they're told.
  
  
• Ken Levine shares the background of that episode of M*A*S*H that's shot from a wounded soldier's point of view. He should know, since he wrote it.
  
  
• This defies description, and may well drive you mad.
  

Things like this make me miss THE BRAVE & THE BOLD

Batman meets Tim Gunn.

Stupid DC

I heartily agree with this sentiment:

It’s certainly nice that DC is re-re-re-re-releasing the first Justice League International trade paperback (I think that’s as many times as they’ve printed it in the past) as a fancy hardcover (for 25 bucks! on page 92), but wouldn’t it be nice if they released the rest of the Giffen/DeMatties run? I mean, the second trade is way out of print, I think, and no others exist. I mean, if this signals that the rest are coming, then fine. But a 25-dollar hardcover probably won’t sell well, especially for something that’s available elsewhere. DC: Masters of Marketing!

The JLI run is one of my two or three favorite comics runs ever, but DC has handled reprinting these stories about as well as it has not killing off these characters in gruesome and stupid comics. A hardcover reprinting the same contents as a still-in-print trade is, well, just about useless. One of the best things about collected editions is having an entire run of a series on your bookshelf, whether that's the Morrison Doom Patrol and New X-Men or Neil Gaiman's Sandman or Bob Haney's Super-Sons lunacy. And there's no way in hell DC is going to reprint a run that included sixty issues of JLI, 35 of JLE, plus multiple annuals and specials and the occasional story by Giffen & DeMatteis in Mister Miracle in a series of seven-issue hardcovers. If the hardcover included the first year of the series and the relevant annuals, I might be willing to hope DC would eventually put out another eight books to complete the run. But trickling them out seven issues at a time? Pull the other one.

Cap and Spidey apparently share the same haberdasher

Is it just me, or does Alex Ross's Captain America redesign seem to have an awful lot in common with his unused Spider-Man movie redesign?



There's nothing wrong with that, but the similarity is kind of amusing, even if taking note of it does push the Alicia Witt stuff further down the page.

More on Mike Wieringo

As wonderful as Mike Wieringo's work is, I don't know that I'd appreciate it the way I do if I hadn't encountered it as part of Mark Waid's wonderful run writing FLASH, fourteen (!) years ago. Wieringo's run as artist came on the heels of the epic "Return of Barry Allen" storyline, where Wally West, the former Kid Flash, finally came to terms with the legacy of his predecessor Barry. It was a smart, thrilling storyline -- someday, honest, I'll write about the special place Flash #79 holds in my heart -- and one that reset the board for the rest of Waid's run. In embracing Barry's legacy, Wally simultaneously became his own man; he stopped worrying about being as good as Barry and focused on becoming Wally.

Waid and Wieringo were a perfect marriage of writer and artist. And I think, at that particular point in my life, when I was finally settling into college and life away from home, I was a particularly receptive reader. Wally West was becoming an adult at same time I was. It was a nice bit synchronicity that made their run really resonate with me in a way that I don't think it would have otherwise. And the sheer sense of joy and freedom that leapt off of every page of Wieringo's wonderful artwork made the whole thing all the more perfect.

There's that word: Joy. Certain artists you just associate with one word or one feeling because their work seems like a monument to it. Theodore Sturgeon and love. Clifford Simak and decency. Isaac Asimov and reason. Mike Wieringo and joy. The worlds and the people he drew just looked like fun places to be -- whatever villainy the Flash faced was doomed from the start, because Ringo drew us a world where evil was a non-starter and the good guys would always prevail sooner or later. It was a nice place to visit every month.

I never met the man. I'll miss him anyway.

Mike Wieringo, RIP

Comics artist Mike Wieringo died at the obscenely young age of 44 this past weekend. I first came across his work on Mark Waid's amazing run on The Flash and was thrilled when he reunited with Waid on Fantastic Four a few years ago. His work was thrilling and joyful and buoyant, and I particularly loved the sense of movement and possibility that he brought to his work on Flash. There was no one else who drew quite the way he did, and he will be sorely missed.

Who Wants to Watch Who Wants to be a Superhero?

Greg Hatcher takes a look at the Sci-Fi Channel's genuinely weird and strange reality series "Stan Lee's Who Wants to be a Superhero." The primary purpose of this show, I think, is to demonstrate that these days Stan will put his name and face on just about anything this side of hemorrhoid unguents. When the first season of the show aired last summer, a girl I knew in college e-mailed me to tell me that she thought of me when she watched. Then I watched an episode and fervently hoped that it was Major Victory and not the creepy, dismal, and desperate Feedback who was doing the reminding...

Iron Man may not suck.

The final version of the armor actually looks pretty frakkin' cool.

Still more comics journalism that sucks

From Newsarama's front-page blurb about DC's Blue Beetle series:

Despite the odds and naysayers, DC's Blue Beetle keeps gaining fans as it moves into its second year.

From this analysis of DC's month-to-month sales at another site:

03/2006: Blue Beetle #1 — 50,678 [69,752]
04/2006: Blue Beetle #2 — 43,770 (-13.6%) [50,190]
05/2006: Blue Beetle #3 — 41,711 (- 4.7%)
06/2006: Blue Beetle #4 — 38,622 (- 7.4%)
07/2006: Blue Beetle #5 — 35,490 (- 8.1%)
08/2006: Blue Beetle #6 — 33,181 (- 6.5%)
09/2006: Blue Beetle #7 — 29,079 (-12.4%)
10/2006: –
11/2006: Blue Beetle #8 — 25,861 (-11.1%)
11/2006: Blue Beetle #9 — 23,785 (- 8.0%)
12/2006: Blue Beetle #10 — 21,358 (-10.2%)
01/2007: Blue Beetle #11 — 19,865 (- 7.0%)

And a little stuffed bull shall lead them.

Bully fixes the DC Universe.

Super-sickness

So it turns out being really, really disgustingly sick puts one in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate crazy-ass Silver Age Superman comics. There's something about being in a vaguely feverish state that makes the insane leaps of plot, logic, and characterization found in such tales seem perfectly sensible (which is slightly different from rational). Grant Morrison is right -- for all the weirdness of the storytelling and plots of these things, there's often an oddly resonant emotional core to many of them, under the high concepts and giant krytonite gorillas and Phantom Zone villains, as when Superman thinks his dead foster parents have traveled to the future to visit him in Metropolis and he's showing them around. Sometimes it just takes lots of over-the-counter cold medicine to see that.

Astonishing Irony

Is it just me, or is it rather ironic that in the final storyarc in Astonishing X-Men -- the book that began by putting Marvel's merry mutants back into traditional super-people costumes -- nearly everyone on the team is wearing street clothes?

In honor of the new Congress...

...a nice little (NSFW) video. (Via Oliver Willis.)



And may I also say that my Congressman's kung-fu is mighty? I knew one of the fringe benefits of his election would be that it would piss off all the right people, but I didn't expect it to pay off so much so quickly.

A study in contrasts

Things that are worth mutiple posts in the span of a few days: The secret origin of Frasier, via guest-postings at Ken Levine's magnificent blog.

Things that are not: Hyping the new Justice Society comic. I don't think a comic exists that's worth six puff pieces in the space of a week, even at a comics news/press-release-regurgitation site.

Some people are just plain stupid

For instance, a person who dresses like V and then goes to the White House.

Or a person who, on reading about someone who dresses like V and then goes to the White House, is mystified as to why anyone dressed as V by the White House would attract attention from the Secret Service.

Presents!

Tucked in among the rest of DC's solicitations for December is this:

SUPERMAN: BACK IN ACTION TP
Written by Kurt Busiek, Fabian Nicieiza, Len Wein and Gerry Conway
Art by Pete Woods and José Luis García-López
Cover by Dave Gibbons
Collecting ACTION COMICS 841-843! An alien race is collecting unique specimens from Earth— and the Man of Steel is first on the list! Plus,Kurt Busiek introduces stories from DC COMICS PRESENTS #4, #17 and #24! Guest-starring Nightwing, Aquaman, Firestorm, the Metal Men, Deadman and more!

If you've gotta pad out a trade collection to justify its publication, Bronze Age Superman reprints drawn by the masterful Jose-Luis Garcia-Lopez are far from the worst you can do, especially if you get them from a fun comic like DC Comics Presents. I'm not sure ANYTHING from that series has ever been collected other than the New Teen Titans preview that ran in #26. This will tide me over until the day we get a big fat black and white reprint edition of DC SHOWCASE PRESENTS DC COMICS PRESENTS...