The big comics news today is that Hal Jordan is returning as Green Lantern later this year. This should come as a surprise to exactly no one, since it's the kind of thing one expects when a publishing company, trying to play catchup with all the cool young comics companies, decides to turn a beloved, long-running character into a psychopathic murderer and then systematically tear down pretty much all of that character's mythology, leaving just enough pieces around which to base their cool! new! young! hip! Green Lantern character.

That's not to say that replacing Hal, or even killing him off, was an inherently bad idea, but the execution was so ham-handed and metafictionally wrong that it was pretty much inevitable that there would, eventually, be a restoration and a hand-wave of all the bad stuff the character was made to have done, just because, well, a very large portion of the reading public's reaction to the last 10 years of what DC has been doing with Hal Jordan was basically, "No, really, when's he going to be Green Lantern again?" If Hal had died heroically and been replaced, there would have been grumbling from fans -- there's ALWAYS grumbling from fans when characters die, or are massively changed, or just change their costume or hairstyle or codename -- but it wouldn't have been the same sort of grumbling that followed taking a great character with one of the best costumes ever and making him a psycho killer, and then teasing his return two or three times a year for the better part of a decade. I'm pretty sure that in 1998 Hal Jordan, as Green Lantern, in flashbacks or time-travel stories or whatever, appeared in more comics than his replacement, Kyle Rayner.

I don't even know if I'll be picking up a new GL book, but it will be nice not to have to dance around the subject of what's going on with Green Lantern these days every time the character comes up with my father-in-law, who's told me in about every fifth conversation I have with him that he owned all the old Green Lantern comics from the 60s when he was a kid.

My one hope, actually, is that John Stewart gets to keep his ring and remain an active, heroic character. When I was a freshman in college, I was waiting for a Metro train and reading something or other that had the Hal on the cover. And a middle-aged black man walked up to me and said something like, "Excuse me, but...I had heard that a black man was now Green Lantern?" Thank GOD, I was able to tell him truthfully that, yes, you'd heard correctly, and that there were several Green Lantern comics featuring different versions of the character, and one of them, Green Lantern: Mosaic, starred John Stewart. And that answer seemed to please this guy, who had probably not read a Green Lantern comic in years.

Fortunately, this encounter didn't happen six months later, when John's book had been cancelled, or a few years after that, when John lost his ring and was, first, shunted off to join a third-rate super-team and, second, crippled and put in a wheelchair for several years, until the use of the character on the new Justice League cartoon prompted his return to active GL status in the comics.

So if anyone at DC is reading this, well, find a place for John Stewart in the new green order, OK? It matters.

Wow. Apparently if you're an active blogger you can get a GMail account. That's pretty damn cool.

Can you dig it?


:: how jedi are you? ::

Here's a painful review of DC Comics' 1988 crossover event, Millenium.

So I’ve been reading “Millennium” lately. Don’t ask why – really, is there a possible good answer for that? I mean, reading “Millennium” is the comic book equivalent of a horseradish enema. It’s not fun.

And yet I’m reading it. Apparently the Guardians of the Universe, who had left the universe sometime either right before or right after “Crisis,” have decided to return to the planet Earth with their Zamoran brides and usher in the next evolutionary stage of mankind. This involves ten people chosen totally at random by the Guardians in order to fulfill the cosmic prophecy that Earth will spawn the next race of galactic immortals. But, here’s the hook to really get all the kids – the Manhunters are opposed to this, so they want to stop the Guardians and the superheroes from bringing about the next step in human evolution – which everyone refers to as “The Millennium.”

Mostly what I remember about this book was that, while it was cool to see all those scenes of just about every DC super-hero together, it was really lame that, in the final issue, when the Guardian and Zamaron (don't ask) used the last of their cosmic powers on a select group of chosen individuals to jump-start the evolution of mankind to the next level (please, don't ask), the chosen became -- wait for it -- a bunch of super-heroes. And really, really lame super-heroes, at that; I remember one of them (a Japanese computer magnate) gained the power to control computers, or something. Which is nice and all, but seems awfully specific for cosmically-induced powers. I mean, if the story had taken place in the Stone Age, would he have gained the power to control wheels?

Now that I think about it, I think this story closely preceded my high school comics hiatus. Wonder if there's a correlation.

If, having just seen Kill Bill Vol. 2, you find yourself wondering, "Gee, I wonder if David Carradine has a web site," don't type in www.davidcarradine.com . Especially if you're at, say, work. Or a public computer lab. 'Cause, well, ain't no David Carradine site at that address, is all I'm sayin'.

Tax day got you down? Read Reason Magazine's lengthy, funny, and oddly touching report on the "tax honesty" movement.

The partisans of the tax honesty movement go beyond complaining that the income tax is too high, or that out-of-control IRS agents enforce it in thuggish ways. They claim, for a dizzyingly complicated variety of reasons, that there is no legal obligation to pay it. The continued life -- and even flourishing -- of that notion, in the face of obloquy, fines, and jail sentences, says something fascinating about a peculiarly American spirit of defiance. It may even say something encouraging about what it means to live in a nation of laws, not of men.

...

Not merely Protestant, the tax honesty people are strangely reminiscent of fandom -- of the comic book, fantasy, science fiction, role-playing-game variety. They have the same obsession with continuity and coherence within a created fantasy world of words. It’s just that, in this case, that world of words isn’t a multivolume fantasy epic or a long-running TV series -- it’s U.S. law. When these people try to reconcile the definition of income in this subsection of Title 26 of the U.S. Code with the definition in a 1918 Supreme Court case, it’s like hearing an argument over the inconsistencies between a supervillain’s origin as first presented in a 1965 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man and the explanation given in a 1981 edition of Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man.

The tax honesty movement’s vision of the world is fantastical in another way. It is not merely obsessed with continuity; it is magical in a traditional sense. It’s devoted to the belief that the secret forces of the universe can be bound by verbal formulas if delivered with the proper ritual. There are numerous formulae in the tax honesty spellbook, with rival mages defending them. Which spell is best: The summoning of the Sovereign Citizen? The incantation of the Constitutional Definition of Income? The banishing spell of No Proper Delegation?

The tax honesty folks similarly believe that their foe the IRS must also be bound by these grimoires of magic: that without the properly sanctified OMB number an IRS form holds no power, that without uttering the mystic word liable no authority to tax can truly exist.

And always, always, the ultimate incantation, The Question: Where does it say that I owe income taxes? Show me the law!

So the Twin Cities bus strike is (tentatively) over, according to the Star-Tribune. As far as I could determine, this strike revolved around bus drivers, the vast majority of whom make more than Matter-Eater Wife and I do combined, objecting to increased costs of their health plan, for which they pay less than either Matter-Eater Wife and I do, and putting a very great many people who can only dream of making what the drivers do, or who are disabled or poor and can only get from point A to B via bus, at tremendous disadvantage.

Are you detecting, perhaps, a lack of sympathy? I knew you could.

"No details of the agreement" are being revealed. If this strike is anything like the clerical workers' strike we had at the University last fall, that means the union leadership will hold a press conference to crow about how great a deal they've gotten and how the strike was a rousing success, and then it will turn out that, basically, the union members don't really get anything that will make up for six weeks without paychecks.

And, of course, there's this:

Projected savings from suspending bus service amounted to about $5 million. Some of that money will be used to meet the terms of the new agreement, Pawlenty said, but he denied the strike had been prolonged in order to increase the size of the pot.

What's that saying about rivers in Egypt?

Dammit, no one told me Joel Achenbach has a new book out! As titles go, The Grand Idea : George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West doesn't compare to Captured by Aliens, but Achenbach still rocks.

Dahlia Lithwick looks into the disturbing and weird world of the Supreme Court's marshalls:

Some of the oddest conversations ever to be had in the United States of America are the ones between the reporters and marshals in the U.S. Supreme Court building. They resemble nothing so much as those bizarre discussions you'd have with your mother about waiting half an hour between a hot dog and a swim—the ones that ended in, "Because I said so." I have had marshals in the court confiscate newspapers and books (including, once, Franz Kafka's The Trial) for no articulable or articulated reason. I've seen them order the removal of neck scarves from some reporters, and head scarves from others, and I've seen them remove sketch artists in T-shirts. I have seen them remove handicapped protesters crawling up the front steps of the court building, while refusing to cite any rule that prohibits such conduct. These same marshals who demand a press badge to enter the courtroom, then march up during oral argument and ask that you not display it on your jacket. Query them as to why you cannot display the same badge needed to enter the proceedings, and they tell you that 3-inch plastic badges distract the justices.

No more Stamosing for you:

Married life is over for "Full House" actor John Stamos and "X-Men" actress Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, the former Victoria's Secret model.

They have separated after five years of marriage, publicist Lewis Kay said Monday.

Sheesh. What man in his right mind breaks up with a shape-shifter?

When Ebert gets going, he really gets going, and produces gems like this:

Lazlo Gogolak is played by Kevin Pollak (again) in one of the most singularly bad performances I have ever seen in a movie. It doesn't fail by omission, it fails by calling attention to its awfulness. His accent, his voice, his clothes, his clownish makeup, all conspire to create a character who brings the movie to a halt every time he appears on the screen. We stare in amazement, and I repeat: What did they think they were doing?

Ever since the Food Network's Rachael Ray posed for FHM, I've found it hard to watch her cooking shows. I keep expecting her to strip down to lingerie and climb in the sink or something. At least I can still watch Alton Brown without worrying about that happening.

Oh, look, another political thread at Peter David's site. This promises to be insightful, if by insightful you mean "a bunch of mostly poorly informed people screaming at each other from opposite ends of the political spectrum and ascribing the worst possible motives and intentions to all who disagree with their particular axe to grind, and by the way Bush is evil/Kerry is evil."

Have I mentioned how very, very much I hate Fox? How can the same network develop so many great shows and then piss them all away with crappy timeslots, no promotion, and hair-trigger cancellations?

Here are some pictures of Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne. Which really, you know, amounts to "Christian Bale with a haircut in a really nice suit."

Poop.

(Via Obscure Store, right.)

De Baisch reminds me of some things I will NEVER miss about living in Washington DC.

Not only would this news be the only thing that could make me seek out an episode of Enterprise, but the same article tells me I've been missing out on Shatner on The Practice AND that he'll be on the upcoming non-spinoff of the Practice. No word on whether they'll paint Camryn Mannheim green on the new show.

Someone should start a band called Camryn Mannheim Steamroller.

EDIT: It's fixed now, wife.

Penn & Teller's Bullshit returns for a second season on Showtime this week, apparently; this is good news, since at the moment we get something like 73 Showtimes that never seem to show much of anything good. So far I think the only things I've watched on it were an imported episode of the BBC series Strange (Imagine Jeff from Coupling as a defrocked priest battling a conspiracy of demons. Now imagine it done on a BBC budget, and imagine watching it unable to stop waiting for Jeff to say "hippo" or "jam sandwich," and you will probably be able to imagine why the show was not picked up for additional series and why Richard Coyle, who played both Jeff and the former Father Strange, is not returning for the next series of Coupling) and, during an insomniac fugue, the unspeakably awful Jason Bateman/C. Thomas Howell/Jonathan Silverman/Annie Potts cancer road trip movie Breaking the Rules, away from which I simply could not look.

What the hell was I talking about? Right. Penn & Teller. Oughtta check out their show.

Brian Vaughan speaks over the computer internet.

The Rock IS Joe Don Baker IN Walking Tall!