On the return of a nigh-extinct mode of fannish communication

Last year, DC Comics announced they were reducing the price of their books back to $2.99, a move that got quite a lot of positive reaction.  The down side was we'd get two less pages of comic story per issue. They were reticent to say what they were going to put on those two pages, tho. Today they dropped the news - they were bringing back letter columns.  Old-school fans (raises hand) were over the moon at the news, and younger readers were all asking, "What's the point? we have Facebook and the electric-type twitter to let everyone know our opinions".  And the old school fans just shhok our heads and sighed...

Back before everybody had unrestricted access to every other person on the planet, you had to WORK to be heard.  You needed actual talent to be on television (Or if you were a woman, two talents), a tremendous amount of luck to get your music heard, and you had to be real witty to make it into the letter columns in the back of the comics.

Metropolis Mailbag.  The Ha-Ha-Hacienda.  Flash-Grams.  The JLA Mailroom. Europinion. This is where most fans met each other.  Indeed, comics fandom STARTED as a result of the lettercols.  When EC comics started publishing the names and addresses of letter writers in the columns, the fans did something weird - they started writing to each other.  Pen-pal friendships were started, and eventually fanzines started to make the rounds.

Look at the the current plight of the three major TV networks; When there were only three or four channels, it was easy to have a big hit. Now you're competing with hundreds of cable channels, not to mention video games, video on demand, Tivo and who knows how many other electronic hobbies.  Far harder to get your show in front of a lot of eyes.  Nowadays, anyone can start a blog, and like Syndrome said in The Incredibles, "When everybody is special, then no one will be".  With thousands, maybe millions of blogs out there, everyone has an equal voice, but not everyone has an equal talent.  There's no filter.  Making the Letter Column was an achievment - the editor (ok, assistant editor) decided your letter was better than the piles of other letters they got that month.  Or, if you wrote to a book with limited readership, the letter was better than one they could make up themselves to pad out the page.  It meant that thousands of other people who read the book were seeing your name.  Like Navin R. Johnson once said, that's the kind of spontaneous publicity a person needs.

Some of comics' biggest names arose from those letter columns. Bob Rozakis and Martin "Pesky" Pasko were regular letter-writers. And in more recent history, a fan named Geoffrey Johns wrote to the editors of Superboy, suggesting that Kon-El might not only be a clone of Superman, but lex Luthor. Needless to say, he was laughed off the page by the editor, and he was never heard of again.

There were other perks too. Lucky lucky letter hacks and fans got tuckerized in the comics. There are more fans' names in Legion of Superheroes than about any other title; Here's a list of the ones we know about. BBC TV and radio host Paul Gambaccini was once a massive DC fan and letter hack. When they wrote the story about the guy who makes the costumes for the Rogues, his name was... Paul Gambi.

Being a regular guest of the letter columns meant other fans knew your name. It was like having a blog today, but a blog that people actually READ. Marc Lucas, T.M. Maple, Charles J. Sperling, Uncle Elvis; these are names well known to readers from the 80s and 90s. I was a fledgling letterhack, and in the equally fledgling days of Compuserve, would often get notes of compliment when I had a couple of letters published in one week. I even got a hand-written note from up-and-coming writer Jeph Loeb when I wrote a positive letter about his Challengers of the Unknown miniseries. Indeed, it was John Ostrander who got my career started, when he asked that I take a comment I'd made about his Hawkworld book on the Compuserve comics forum and send it in to the letter column, where more people would see it (The times, how quickly they changed...)

So seeing those letter columns return means a chance for fans not only to get their voice heard, but gain the extra little note of approval that those opinions were interesting enough to see print.  And proper print, with ink and paper.

To gain the legitmacy of the printed word is a vanishing achievment.  I'm pleased to see it make a return.

(And yes, I'm aware of the irony of talking about the advantages of letter columns on a blog, so there's no need in pointing it out...)

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On the last role of a great man, that of the last plot of an evil man

Peter Sellers' talents as a comedian and an amasser of automobiles are inarguable.  But in many eyes, his last film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is a letdown.  IMHO, the people who are disappointed by it don't know a great deal about the character, or Sellers' earlier work.

Very few people have seen a Fu Manchu film that they weren't snickering at; fewer still have read one of the books.  Fu Manchu is the archetypal Asian mastermind, spawning endless imitators; from the comics' Yellow Claw to Buckaroo Banzai's nemesis Hanoi Xan, leader of the World Crime League.  He’s fallen madly out of favor in recent decades, thanks to encroaching political correctness, but if you can track down the original novels, they’re classic pulp entertainment, very much “of their time” but no less entertaining. 

Sellers plays a double role in the film, that of the titular Oriental master of crime and the English detective Dennis Nayland Smith, Fu’s arch-nemesis.  As the film opens, both Fu and Smith are worse for the wear. At the ceremony where the Devil Doctor was to drink his Elixir Vitae, the potion which grants him eternal youth, it's used by a clumsy minion (Burt Kwouk, Kato to Sellers' Clouseau, in a cameo) to put out a fire.  Near death, he is forced to hatch a scheme to obtain the ingredients for a new batch.  Once it's clear the insidious Si Fan is active again, the British police are forced to contact Smith, long since retired.  A series of torture sessions by Dr. Manchu have left him a broken man; he spends his time dazedly puttering around his country cottage in the company of Delight, a manual lawnmower (you heard me) he found and befriended after his escape.  The news that Fu and his hordes were on the march rouses him from his torpor and he agrees to help. 

Fu Manchu needs diamonds for his elixir; not a large number of small diamonds, but a small number of very large diamonds.  The 75-karat Star of Leningrad is stolen shortly after the film begins, and the plot to steal its twin, the King George V diamond is the meat of the story.  Smith realizes that Fu would not allow himself to simply steal the diamond; he predicts the yellow devil will attempt to kidnap the King and Queen, and ransom the gem. 

Still early in her career, Helen Mirren shines as  policewoman Alice Rage, selected (after a stellar audition where she tap dances and plays the saxophone, together and at the same time) to impersonate Her Majesty as a decoy.  She is captured by the evil Doctor, only to fall in love with him when he reveals his softer side. ("Call me 'Fred'!  That's what they called me when I was at Eton!") Her subtle lisp never fails to bring a giggle ("Oh, Fwed...") and her rendition of the music hall standard "Daddy Wouldn't Buy me a Bow-Wow", just a hair off-key is hilarious. 

American TV legend Sid Ceasar plays American FBI agent Giuseppe “Joe” Capone who spends most of the film acting the boorish American, spouting embarrassing racism ("You're one great Limey bastard!") or talking on the phone to a relative in Chicago, barely able to hear him over the sound of machine-gun fire.  David Tomlinson (best known to Americans from Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks) plays the British chief of police, his last role before retiring.

Many reviews complain of Sellers’ laconic performances in the film.  I must assume they didn’t make it through the film.  Smith slowly awakens over the course of the film as the chase reinvigorates him. Fu Manchu find love in Constable Rage, and that carries him through much of the film, until his quest to formulate his elixir.  So the soft  line readings many mention work perfectly for the character, and even if he was a bit weak during the filming (he was advised not to take the role due to his heart condition) it didn’t stop him from being funny. 

I have a rule of thumb for a spoof.  Read the script and take out the jokes.  If you still have a good script, you have a good spoof.  Following that rule, this is a fine spoof, as the plot is a solid (if formulaic) Fu Manchu story. 

As for the jokes…a majority of the humor in the film follow the madcap form of Sellers’ earliest success, the Goon Show.  The character “Fred FuManchu”, noted bamboo saxophonist, appeared in his own adventure as well as several cameo appearances over the run of the show.  The odd last names of many characters like “Minge”, not to mention Nayland’s wacky mode of travel at the climax of the film are also reminiscent of the wild mindset of the series.  This is even different from Sellers’ Pink Panther films, where most of the comedy was from slapstick and Sellers’ clever mime-style reactions to things.  Here the comedy is in the plot and the dialogue. There’s a fair amount in stereotypical humor as well, but again, seen in the context of the time, before people got skin the thickness of rice paper, it’s a lot of fun.

The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu is now available from Warner Archive, as is another of Sellers’ films, The Bobo.  No mechanical spiders are necessary for purchase.

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On the many faces of Aquaman, and the importance of keeping Batman clean-shaven

On the DC blog-site The Source, Dan Didio writes about the recent Kevin Smith miniseries "Batman: The Widening Gyre". 

(TANGENT ALERT) Which I REALLY enjoyed.  When he's stayed responsible and gets the scripts written on time, Kevin does really good comics work.  This and the previous mini Cacophony (the pair making the first two thirds of a trilogy) are really fine "possibly in continuity" stories, with the kind of just shy of filthy humor that kevin does expertly.  The story he's building is very interesting, and the third chapter will be interesting indeed. I'll go so far as to say that his "Batman and the Joker" scene at the end of cacophony can stand toe-to-toe with the end of Killing Joke in the fight best "masks off, hearts on sleeves" scene between those characters.  And Walt Flanagan, a man best known to fans of the Askewniverse for having a fast dog, and who we met while he was working in Kevin's comic shop (he always remembers his friends; gotta give him that...) has a very different style, one that might not work for a regular monthly but worked perfectly for this very uniquely themed story. (END TANGENT ALERT)

In said piece, he discusses a sequence from the book which, as originally written, was hilarious, and could never be published.  The scene involves Aquaman misunderstanding Bruce Wayne's cries of private interpersonal communication (AKA Making The Beast With Two Backs) with cries for assistance.  The scene was still damn funny as published, but allegedly they were SCREAMINGLY funny as first handed in. And Dan knew they could never see print.

(TANGENT ALERT PART DEUX) Which right there is an argument for a Mature label for DC titles.  Like any character, there are stories that can be written for DC characters that might not be suitable for every reader.  Very good stories, stories that might attract new readers (I know, the semi-mythical "new reader" argument again) but since DC makes books for kids, they're loath to do "mature" stories with those mainstream characters for fear of Mommy or Grandma buying one for junior by mistake and starting a shitstorm.  The Vertigo line, originally intended to be the place for those kind of stories, has become its own successful and separate fiefdom, where characters go and (until recently,at least) don't return from.  If I may make a comparison to the films, DC has a "G" line (The exemplary Johnny DC books) a "PG" line (The mainstream DCU) a per se "R" line (Vertigo) but no "PG-13" line where slightly more mature (In the complexity and dramatic sense, not necessarily the salacious "boobies and poo-poo words" sense) stories can be told with an opportunity to give fair warning that the title "might not be for everyone".  The first of Kevin's minis danced controversially close to that line, to the point that some claimed it "went too far" for a DC book.  People were REALLY put off by the idea that the Joker even MENTIONED Batman's junk, let alone saw it.  The editors were cool with everything that got into the book, but (according to Kevin) had problems with the idea of Batman having stubble, something I find a great example of counting the pennies and letting the nickels fall where they may.  Anyway, If DC had a sub-imprint for the more adult-y stuff, such complaints could be addressed before they start.  MOST mini-series and one-shots are of questionable continuity already.  Implicitly suggesting that these "DC-13" books are slightly more questionable in their timeline placement is not going to make too many heads explode.  And the more mature reader is likely not going to want to worry (or care) about which two issues this story shoehorns into anyway, so BFD. (END TANGENT ALERT)

At first read, it seems Kevin wrote Aquaman in that slightly naive, "new to the surface world" mindset that Mark Waid experimented with in "JLA Year One", where Hal Jordan gets him to scour the Secret Sanctuary for a bulb wrench.  But in some Q&A sessions, he revealed he was basically writing Aquaman as a surfer/stoner, one who's not quite in phase with the world of the dry-legs.  (The result being that when I re-read the scene, I hear Jason Mewes in my head reading Arthur's lines)  This of course upset hard-core Aqua-fans, claiming that that's "not what the character's about".

(And this is not a Tangent alert, because it's what I actually planned to write about)

Interestingly enough, there have been SO many different interpretations of Aquaman in recent history, in many different media.  In addition to this "Hang loose" one, there's the "OUTRAGEOUS" version on B: B&tB, a version that, before he re-appeared in Blackest Night and Brightest Day, I'd have happily read comic books of.  Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner's included him in their Supergirl strip in Wednesday Comics, where Jimmy described him as "The Denis Leary of the Sea". His take was that Aquaman's zone of patrol is the ENTIRE OCEAN, so naturally he was gonna get a little testy.  Again, great idea; how well you could use it in a continuing story, who knows, but perfect for that moment at that time.  Even the Young Justice preview played him more in the regal sense, more than we've ever seen him played in the comics.  And I'm not even COUNTING the older animated versions, voiced by (variously) Marvin Miller and Norman Alden.

Now each of those interpretations, especially the ones for the cartoons, are all perfectly valid.  But as a rule, when you see that many interpretations of a character, it's because they don't have a personality to speak of, or at least not one that everyone identifies.  Aquaman is one of those characters that has gone though so many iterations, both subtle enroute changes and radical revamps, that he's one of the biggest messes DC has.  Dan would regularly ask at conventions "What's 'the Right' Aquaman?  Is it the green and orange suit, the more tied to Atlantean myth version Peter David wrote, the water-hand guy, which?" It was only after the vast majority of answers he got was "The orange-and-green-suit guy" did he start to have a course to pilot for a return.

Right now, the best solution DC has for sorting out a character is Let Geoff Do It.  That's not a dig - his work is spectacular, he hits all the points, and come up with a version of the character(s) that respects  the previous iterations, explains (or explains away) the less successful ones and results in a strong "first position" character that he or any other writer can then move forward with. Nobody's going to please everyone (especially comics fans) but his versions provide the greatest good-enough for the greatest number.  And now he's addressing Aquaman in Brightest Day.  He's bringing the character back to a recognizable state, while simultaneously making wholesale changes.  Mera is now a kickass warrior, though not from the extra-dimensional race she once was.  There's a new Aqualad, and his story is still unfolding.  And the Aquacave is back.  If Storm and Imp show up, I may lose the ability to digest food for a brief period.  The reaction to Tusky the Walrus is too horrifying to imagine.

But again, we're not getting the return of a past version of Aquaman, we're getting yet ANOTHER iteration, but one with enough similarities to the past ones it seems familiar enough not to inspire (much) controversy.  And that's the right way to go; namely, forward.  Flash, Green Lantern, Toyman (I've talked about that one before) nothing was un-done, just addressed, and moved past.  When we see  the much rumored and prayed for Captain Marvel fix (I'm invoking personal opinion and choosing the term "fix" over "revamp" on purpose), I imagine we'll see something the same.  Much of the previous versions (hopefully the best bits) will remain, with re-told version of other bits, forming a new paradigm intended to appease, appeal, and attract the various audiences.

Let Geoff Do It.

Aquaman currently appears in Brightest Day.  The TPB of Widening Gyre is out now.

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On the presumption of error

My appreciation of James Robinson's recent work at DC is well known.  He's recently come off a run of Superman Minus Superman that gave more character to Mon-El than he's had in the decades since he was created.  He's been writing Justice League for about a year now, more if you count Justice League:Cry For Justice (!) which you pretty much have to since it serves as a prologue to his run perfectly.

James has a very different style than we've seen on JLA for a while.  He's more interested in character building that just having people fight each other.  So there's a lot more thought-captions and internal narratives that you'd see in other books.  And if you read those captions, you'll see that the characters he's writing about are growing exponentially.  He's made Congorilla and Mikaal Tomas into more three-dimensional characters than they've likely ever been.  He's done a good job of showing that the former Teen Titans deserve a place on the JLA, as opposed to merely being interim title holders.

His first arc brought a good close to the characters he used in CFJ, with an obligatory Blackest Night crossover folded in.  His JLA JSA crossover, "Dark Things" gave a proper return to Jade, as opposed to her one-panel return in BN. And all throughout he's been building up the foundation to his current arc, Omega Man.  He's given us a look at bunches of classic DC characters, in a series of flashbacks designed to set up the existence of a powerful device.  He's come up with a solid use and explanation for Doctor Impossible, a character introduced in Meltzer's run on the book, one who almost every writer since has used and tried to explain, and failed.  He's been given permission to use the Multiverse, something that had been allegedly locked down until Morrison gets his Multiversity mini-series done.  In the  most recent issues, we've discovered that these "dark gods" have been trying to resurrect Darkseid, only to end up bringing into existence the mysterious Omega Man.   In short, he's been writing a series of pretty cosmic-level threats, exactly the kind of things the JLA should be fighting.  And doing it well. Add in a few done-in-one semi-solo stories that further build up the character of the characters and you've got a pretty solid run to date.

So why is he still catching crap from the readers?

I think Cry for Justice is where the honeymoon ended. That CFJ was a divisive storyline is a grand understatement.  And perhaps of that, his run on JLA has been met with many brickbats.  "He doesn't have any of the big guns on the team" (like that's the first time that's ever happened) "the roster is changing too much" (Again, lots of precedence, and he's got it to a stable point now, and considering the rasher of shit the DCU has gone through in the last year, it's no surprise things have been in a tizzy) and lots more.

Sometimes I get the impression that fans are angry at him that he won't just suck under and give them what they want (i.e. more Jack Knight) and view everything else he does as lacking. They come off sounding like a spoiled child at Christmas saying " I don't CARE that you got me a little battery-powered car that I can ride around in, I WANTED a pony".

Also, ever since the rumors (persistent but so far very without merit) of a Johns/Lee helmed JLA, some readers have been viewing everything else as a long lame-duck session that they must suffer through.  It's bad enough when that happens to a book when a team change is actually announced; current events JLA are being looked past for something that doesn't even exist.

So readers are in a funk, and are reading the book with a chip on their shoulder. And so every plot-point that they don't like or understand are painted as colossal failures.  Case in point; in the cliffhanger in the latest issue, The Omega Man transforms Supergirl into the black-costumed "Dark Supergirl" that we saw in the early issues of her solo title, the ones that had a lot of readers scratching their heads.  Readers quickly clamored that Dark Supergirl had been expunged from continuity by Sterling Gates, and for James to bring it back means that either A) he didn't know it had been removed, B) He knew, and didn't care, or C) some other explanation that can end with "and so he sucks".

Depressingly few people seem to be considering D) He knows what he's doing and has a story in mind.

When asked, Sterling Gates has said that James does indeed have a plan in mind for this story ("and it's pretty cool"), from which I infer that he didn't "forget" anything.  Considering the pair worked together for a year on Superman, I'm willing to bet that's true.  But since the readers have already made their choice, any data that comes along MUST go into the negative pile, or they run the risk of being proven wrong.

It's a mindset that I've come to call "The Presumption of Error".  If the reader has already decided (for whatever reason) that they don't like the writer of a story, they assume that any change they make to continuity is due to gross incompetence or disrespect, and not that they may have a good story planned.

In some cases, it's hard to tell if a change is an error or not, but if the end result is a good story, it's usually not too big an issue.  The very creation of Wonder Girl was the result of a mistake; Bob Haney mistakenly read a series of "impossible tales" (AKA "Imaginary stories") featuring Wonder Girl as if they were a separate character, and added her to the Teen Titans.  Nobody's demanding to go back and write off all those stories because he got the continuity wrong. (They've gone to great lengths to try to explain her past, but that, to say the least, is another story.)

In Justice league, Generation Lost, Judd Winick has been delivering a solid story, one far better than a lot of people thought him capable of; myself included.  So when little "oopsies" started appearing in the narrative, the staunch anti-Winick crowd declared the story an abject failure; if he can't get little details like this right, how could he possibly write a good story?

One of Captain Atom's "powers" is that if he absorbs too much energy, he jumps forward in time.  It's the basis of his DC Post-Crisis origin.  But in JL:GL, Atom has now been able to travel BACK in time to the point of his departure, once his body had processed the energy.  Now I've yet to find precedent for this new ability, unless it's an extrapolation of the dimension-hop from the Wildstorm "Armageddon" mini, which was pretty damn good.  So it appears to be new.  But again, in the eyes of those who presume error, he's either just unaware of how Atom's powers work, or he doesn't care. He's been quoted in interviews saying that he doesn't worry all that much about the details when telling a story.  I understand what he means, and he's right - one should never let continuity get in the way of a good story.  Making Atom now be able to only temporarily jump in time isn't too big a change, unless he tries to claim he could do it all along, in which case it would rather invalidate his whole origin. So yes, it's a change.  At the moment it's made, it may sting a little, but in the fullness of time, it will either become canon (hey, Superman only used to leap an eighth of a mile once) or it will be ignored or re-written by someone else.  Often, both.

Also in the latest issue, Power Girl was able to be taken down by Kryptonite, possibly artificial Kryptonite.  Small problem; PeeGee is from Earth-Two, the pre-Crisis Earth-Two to boot;  Earth-zero/New Earth Green-K doesn't affect her, or at least not to the degree it would (our) Superman.  So while I recognized that and assumed that it was somehow successfully synthesized E-Two Green-K ( a challenging prospect but hey, they had 120 years to perfect it, so who knows), the haters just used it as another log for the Winickaust.

View continuity as a foundation garment and not a strait-jacket.  It's supposed to support you without restricting your movements.  Don't let the length of Batman's cape keep you from reading a great story.

David's Law says "If the reader or viewer wants a particular ending or event to happen, they will accept any damn fool thing you have to do to give it to them"  Bartilucci's Inverse to David's Law states "If a reader does NOT like the ending you have written, they will latch onto any "error" you made in narrative or continuity to prove it's invalid".  Alas, far too many readers nowadays live by the latter and not the former.

It is entirely possible for a writer you've never liked to knock it out of the park.  But if you insist on spinning the stats so it didn't count, or finding ways to find fault with every story based solely on your dislike of the writer and their past performance, you run the risk of cheating yourself out of some great stories.

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On the forty-seventh anniversary of a 900-year-old man

It was supposed to be an educational program.

This time-traveling Doctor would visit assorted parts of history, have some adventure laced with enough fact to qualify it as educational, and off to another land the next week.

Then came the Daleks.

As of today, Doctor Who has been running on TV and other media for an astounding 47 years.  Eleven actors in the part (not counting film, stage and radio format productions), dozens of companions, hundreds of enemies, and millions upon millions of fans.

There's no analogue to Doctor Who in the United States.  No science Fiction show has become as ingrained in American culture as it; Star Trek comes close, but The Doctor is almost as a part of the British mindset as Sherlock Holmes.  Sci-Fi had a higher level of respect in the UK-The Quatermass experiment was one of the first major dramatic presentations new television owners got to see after they bought their sets to see the new Queen get crowned in 1953.  By the time Doctor Who came along ten years later, Sci-Fi was as respected a form of fiction as any.

Something to bear in mind that while Doctor Who is as good as many American Sci-Fi shows aimed at adult audiences (and better than most), it's still considered a Children's show in Britain.  That's amazing compared to the insipid crap that passes for children's entertainment here.  Part of the thing is that they don't think children are brainless clods in other countries.  A children's show doesn't mean less intelligent, just a bit less violent and scatological than the adult programs.  They were often written by the same people as the adult shows.  Both Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat got their start in children's television and moved on to impressive careers in adult drama before returning to their roots as Who-fen.

Doctor Who is also amazing in that it survived being off the air for almost two decades.  Save for the US-produced TV movie, new episodes of Doctor Who did not appear from 1989 - 2005.  Of course, that only meant new episodes on television.  Fandom kept the character alive via new novels from Virgin and a number of other publishers, fan-produced tribute shows like PROBE and eventually authorized audioplay productions by companies like Big Finish.  Almost an entire generation of writers like Moffat, Davies, Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts became established and successful writers for British television, all assuming that they'd never get a chance to write for the one show they got into writing for in the first place.  "People try to impress you" says one of the Doctor's companions in a recent episode.  The same seems to be true of writers. Once given a chance to write for the character, people seem to up their game, sometimes pulling out plots and stories they've been polishing like jewels just in case the call ever came.  Neil Gaiman will be writing an episode for this coming season, Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral) wrote one for the last one; quite the pedigree.

Similarly, the actors who have appeared on the show is equally impressive.  Not even counting the ones to play the Doctor, the people playing cameos reads like a Who's Who of acting.  Comedians like John Cleese, Elanor Bron, Peter Kay, and Rowan Atkinson, dramatic actors like Derek Jacobi, TV legends like Bernard Cribbins, all lined up to have a part on a show that has as much respect in the eyes of the British public as anything you'd see on Masterpiece Theater.

Craig Ferguson dedicated an entire episode of the Late Late Show the Doctor Who recently when the current Doctor Matt Smith appeared.  He summed up his love for the show and the character perfectly - he's a man who fights horrors of the universe with only his mind and intellect. 

It's an amazing show, one built by love and creativity over nearly fifty years.  Nothing can hold a candle to it.

Special surprise - I've used that So Hot Right Now text-to-movie program to have this entry presented by a fitting host.

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On how the day Superman graced your village was the most important day of your life...

If you put aside all the vitriol about the choices JMS made for his (abortive) run on the series, Superman #705 is a nice little story.  Pretend it takes place in Metropolis or something.  The fact that he's walking the Earth like Kaine is ancillary to the idea that he wants to get down to Earth and interact with people on a more personal level.  But that's another conversation we've been having endlessly, and as I say, we'll just table it for now.

The core of the story is how Superman saves a mother and child from an abusive father.  The boy puts his faith in Superman utterly to save them, making a banner to hang from their home to let him know they need help.  The father is about to attack the mom, and the boy steps in between, warning his dad to stop.  Now in endless stories (and often in real life) that's the turning point in such a relationship - the father backs down, the child finds the strength to fight him, or some other heartwarming result.  But that's not how it goes.  The dad backhands the kid, who drops like a sack of batteries, and the dad throws him down the stars to the basement.  Played slightly differently, and if it weren't about a little kid, that could be a moment of evil black comedy, on par with the first issue of Kick-Ass.  But alas, it's just how it really happens too often.

The kid screams loud enough for Superman to hear him, and he comes to their rescue.  Again, heartwarming, makes you feel good, and Superman even makes a little comment about this is something anybody could have stopped this by keeping their eyes open.

But consider this.  The kid has learned what he pretty much knew at the beginning of the story; he's not able to solve his own problems, Superman has to do it.  It's exactly the argument Luthor was making all along.  Not exactly the best way to grow up, is it? 

Compare this story with G. Willow Wilson's fill-in from last issue.  That was a story about humans, and missed opportunities and roads not taken.  Again, taken with a cynical eye, the summary of that story was "Thank GOD I got out of this burg!" But it was a set of characters who could understand each other's lives and problems.  Nothing got magically fixed at the end.  If Superman had been in that story, he'd have called Bruce Wayne and amazingly, a fat architectural and graphic design contract would have landed at their door. 

Because that's how Superman is being treated in JMS' stories, like a primary-colored Santa Claus, touching down in selected lives, changing them forever by direct action, or sometimes just by showing up.  It's very difficult to write a story that deals with both gods and commoners.  Eagles and ants, to allude to a controversial Peter David comment.  It begs the question of how Superman can choose to help this one individual over another; who can guess how many other abusive homes he's passing on his constitutional, or other crack houses?  The only thing you can go with is the idea that Terry Pratchett put forth in Hogfather: he doesn't have to actually visit every house, just certain selected ones, and the help for the other people just sort of...happens. 

There was a real good JSA story from a while back where Jakeem Thunder decides he's going to start using his Thunderbolt magic to help people individually.  He has the T-bolt build a whole row of houses for people.  The next day, more people come for serious help, and he helps them. Eventually, people are coming asking for large-screen TVs. He also learns that for everything he creates out of nothing with magic, a similar item crumbles and collapses elsewhere in the world, in accordance with the law of conservation of personal possessions, or something.  Alan Scott sums the lesson up in two parts:

1) You can't use magic to solve people's real-world problems, they have to fix them on their own.
2) People are greedy dicks.

OK, he didn't actually say that part, but it was pretty damn obvious.

These "one on one" stories work better when done rarely.  "The Kid Who Collected Spider-Man" is an awesome story, but if they did one every month, you'd be wishing the kids dead.  The Superman books used to do the annual "Metropolis Mailbag" story every Christmas, and they were delightful, and hilarious and heartwarming all at the same time. And most importantly, they were a year apart.

That's been my problem all along here.  Once in a while, these kind of stories are fun.  All in a row, they get tedious, and both in the DCU and in the real world, people start asking, "Don't you have something better to be doing?"  For all the talk JMS made about what an inspiring character Superman is, he's not been doing a whole lot of inspiring here.  Personally, I think the idea of Superman as inspirational figure was better done by Mark Verheiden in his "What Would Superman Do?" story in Superman #225.

JMS's stories have been good, but so far, I'd have to describe them with a very ironic adjective. 

Pedestrian.

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On the freedom to be a belligerent asshole, a right which is not guaranteed in the Constitution

Amy Alkon, The Advice Goddess, has a wonderful syndicated column that we never miss.  Her website collects those columns and the comments are often as entertaining and engaging as the columns.  She also collects various clips and articles on topics close to her heart.  She believes (like I do) that the hysteria over vaccines causing autism is placing kids at risk as diseases that have been all but dead are making a resurgence because parents are choosing not to get their kids vaccinated.  She's staunchly anti-carb, and has gone on record as calling sugar poison.  She thinks that the Islam religion is inextricably connected to politics, their only desire is to destroy all other religions and cultures, and the Muslims you know who AREN'T like that simply don't know enough about their own religion.

In short, she's a human being.  She has beliefs that I agree with, some I disagree with, and when I disagree, she responds intelligently and engages in reasoned debate.  I hasten to add, I have never changed her mind on any such topics, nor has anyone else. Her work is worth your time.


Right, that's out of the way...

Recently she posted  a series of videos featuring people being "mistreated" by TSA employees; clips that were supposed to display how close to a police state we are, filled with faceless officers that will demand our ID at a whim and come into our houses and take away our butter and rap records.

Here's the problem.  All I saw were two guys deliberately "acting up" to see what would happen.  And in both cases, nothing did, save for some tension and some harsh, even poorly-chosen words.

The first fellow STARTED with "if you touch my junk I'm gonna sue you" and he was surprised that he kept getting passed up the supervisory chain? 

The second guy was recording/broadcasting for his blog was surely hoping and praying that he'd get a response. And after a few minutes of checking over...he didn't get one.  He showed them his ID and his boarding pass, and they let him go.  They kept an eye on him, yes, but he didn't get the rubber truncheon up the jacksie that he was hoping for.  Both started the situation with a confrontational attitude.  Both went in all but assuming that there would be trouble, and feigned surprised when there was.

Penn Jillette once told a story (can't find the original; this is a report on same) about going through security, but his leans toward the security person doing something wrong, and Penn calling them on it.  He got his junk brushed in a pat-down and asked to file a complaint, as he was just assaulted.  They brought any number of people over to address his issues, and it eventually ended with him being offered a VIP service that would allow him to bypass security entirely.  in short, he waited UNTIL something went wrong (however small or inadvertent), and THEN complained. Penn, BTW, is also awesome.

Now, let's spin it around - did the police/TSA/what-have-you overreact?  In the first case, all they did was pass the guy off to the next person because they didn't want to deal with it, or knew they were out of their depth.  All the claims and accusation of 10K in fines were not on the tape - is there a part two as there was with the second fellow?  So in the first case, we have no recordings of anything but the TSA folks explaining that he does have to be searched before he's allowed to board his plane, and interpreting his heigtened reaction as all the more reason of making sure that he is.

I didn't see (well to be fair I didn't see a lot as his video showed almost everything but the cops, but I certainly didn't hear him report) any hands being laid on the second fellow, or any other actionable things that he could legally complain about.  Any ramping up of language was in reaction to his actions.  It's what cops do.  It's a cop's job to keep a situation under control.  So if the cop thinks you're moving away, or moving towards his partner (dog), they're going to do what they feel is necessary to maintain control. And to do ao, they...spoke harshly to him. 

Now yes, absolutely, they could have started with Guy Two by sending over a person better trained in dealing politely with the public, someone who could have started a courteous conversation more to his liking.  But here's what it looked like from the security folks' point of view - a person was videotaping them.  This is permitted, but when a person was asked if they were press, his answer was mumbled and noncommital, and after being asked, he packed up and walked away.  Tell me that isn't gonna set bells off in their heads. 

For all the claims that the guy made that they were so anxious to catch a terrorist over and above the simple desire to keep passengers safe, they let him go without a scratch, or even a terribly good story to tell. When you want to perform an experiment, it's important not to affect the experiment with your own notions or any contamination.  Accusing the TSA people who are talking to you of "liking" the power they wield is pretty much gonna affect their response.  But ultimately, they were able to identify this guy as a blogger who was hoping he'd get a story to get famous with, and let him go. 

It is highly important that we keep changes in our daily lives like these from turning into the nightmare end that people like this constantly insist they will. Keeping an eye on the government is vital.  The methods chosen by these two fellows are of questionable efficacy. 

I lead my life by two quotes:

"If you look for the evil in men, you will always find it."
--Karl Malden (allegedly quoting Abraham Lincoln), Pollyanna

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
--many, including Robert J. Hanlon

Ultimately they both mean the same thing.  I try to go through my life believing that things are done for good reason (or at least good intention), and their failure or going pear-shaped is the cause of poor planning, not Machavellian-level good planning.  If we work under the assumption that the police are out to get us, and every arrest is an attempt to keep us down, we insult the policemen who really are trying to help, and increase the risk that the ones who are on the side of the angels will walk away, unwilling to deal with the daily enshitting. 

We are in an unpleasant period.  The perfect security system is the one that only goes after the guilty, or at least only checks everyone else, because I'M innocent and should just be let through.  Until they invent a device that allows the TSA to see the guilt in a man's soul (an assuming the ACLU would allow them to use it) we are stuck with the various methods we are stuck with.  Similarly, since they involve humans, they will proceed at varying degrees of smoothness. 

So far, the massive two-handed grabs of our liberties that have been predicted have consisted of the occasional two-year-old being mistaken for someone on the no-fly list, and the odd person carrying things in their luggage being mis-identified by security and resulting in some measure of inconvenience to the passengers and occasionally others.  Both fall under the second of the quotes above.  I've heard FAR more stories like these, of people deliberately testing and challenging the system in place, and achieving no more than making life difficult for themselves, and again, the people around them.

Something that I find interesting is that quite often, when people making claims like this hear the arguments that the government is out to, say, take our guns away, those theories are laughed off as ravings of a lunatic paramoid.  Interesting how some accusations of government takeover are seen as gospel and others are seen as manic, depending on which side you're on.

The proper response is not "keep your head down and shut up", nor is it "Never give them a moment to try anything".  Keep your eyes open, maintain oversight, be prepared to call them on errors and infractions, but remember that ultimately, we are dealing with humans, and the mistakes you see may be the fault of bad or incompetent people, and not the system itself.  Scrolling back on Google Society, there is a lot wrong with the entire government; corruption, people out for themselves, and The Peter Principle proving itself over and over.  But the problem is with the people, and not the system that was set up two centuries and change ago.  But as I mentioned before, the act of contaminating, of even measuring, an experiment runs the risk of changing the outcome of the experiment.  Even the grandest of them.

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