More Astro-Sugar For Your Space Tea?

Matthew is going to love the categorizing-gobbledegook in this one, I predict.

Let me compare it all to music, just briefly, in a bit of a rhyme:

“I remember when “Pop” was on one side of the record store, and “Rock” on the other. And I remember — how I remember! — the First Pop War. Its flags, its body-count, its head-wounds in basements. Its tattered eyeliner. Its pointy-toed feet.

And I remember the days of “Alternative”‘s birth. The sea of failed punks, the shirts with false chains. When Fresca was cool. When bands were named “Silhouette”. The days before Nutrasweet.

What was it worth?”

Science fiction, Bloggers. The fight keeps changing.

In the days of my youth, so long ago now, there was a persistent and fierce debate about how much, and to what degree, science fiction should be kept separate from fantasy. For some reason, this was important at the time.

Such pointless arguments.

In related news, just recently I had occasion to remark on the old Buck Rogers show from the Glen A. Larson idea-abbatoir of the late Seventies, and how I felt some affection for it now…even though I hated it at the time.

Well, but maybe I’m just looking on that effort now, in the same way that I looked on the old Buck Rogers strips then?

Whatever, let’s talk Dr. Who. When the series was rebooted with Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor, I was thrilled. Everything that I had loved about old “real” Who was there…the melodrama, the quotable lines, the “silly” villains, the good writing and better acting…why they even had the occasional cardboard set. And in this lousy world of recycled genre we live in, where even the best attempt at revivification turns out to be no more than pastiche of pastiche…”upstream” pastiche, might we not call it?…I finally thought, wow, finally! We’ve finally pierced the membrane of the New Traditionalism, finally! We’ve finally managed, finally, after all these dreary nostalgia-experiments, to resume the past.

I am not so sure I think that now, though. Although I still hope it.

The thing is, there are three ways to make science fiction entertainments outside of the plain old printed word. Tom Bondurant would call these ways Does, Could, and Would…but I would call them slightly differently from a historical context, as Originating, Expressive, and Cynical. Where Expressive represents what is usually a second generation of creators who’ve found a way to talk about how they admire the psychological magnetism unconsciously employed by their predecessors, and Cynical (a loaded word, I’ll admit) stands for a later generation’s emulation of the Expressive attempt…but one fatally flawed by their failure to realize their own urge to dismantle the past, to engage in that Destruction which is also a form of Art…but not, I freely admit, always a type of Art which is my favourite.

Hmm. Actually, that doesn’t seem like quite enough fields, does it? Not to really cover everything that’s going on. So let’s have a couple more!

Patronizing, Non-Patronizing, and Deliberately Dissonant, where the third term denotes a sometimes-uneasy cooperation between the first two elements.

And yet a couple more:

Topical, Non-Topical, and Metatextual.

Further!

Idealistic, Exploitive, and Nostalgic.

And one more:

Classical, Modern, and Postmodern.

And okay, one after that:

Contemporaneous, Historical, Conscious

Now that last one may seem to have a lot in common with the one before it, but I warn you, I’m being pretty jargonistic here at times. Well, you’ll see how it shakes out. Anyway by my count that makes six fields of three values each, which would combine for a great number of faces on this crazy culture-cube I seem to want to make. But let’s set some Principia-type rules for that combination, let’s set some axioms for this system, and aside from the thing where terms in a set aren’t permitted to combine I mean, like:

The Expressive approach always includes a Non-Patronizing element.

Originating is never Nostalgic.

Cynical is often also Metatextual and/or Postmodern.

Nostalgic can never be Contemporaneous.

Patronizing can never be Postmodern.

Exploitive is not Classical.

God help me, I think I’ve nailed it. Now where’s that Wittgenstein, I thought I told him and Godel to go do the dishes…

Oh, right. Thanks for reminding me. Term-defining:

I hope everything’s fairly clear, except for Classical, Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporaneous, Historical, Conscious. Well, for the purposes of this discussion I define the Classical, Modern, Postmodern distinction as storytelling styles in science fiction and fantasy that depend on a) enlisting the attachment of belief, b) vindicating the attachment of belief, or c) challenging the attachment of belief. Like the Originating, Expressive, and Cynical axis, these are much more the concerns of nuts-and-bolts art than of business, or even high-level authorial tone-setting…and Contemporaneous, Historical, Conscious, that just means whether you feel like you can make up your own stuff, or if you have to make up stuff in an environment where what’s gone before you forms a constraint on you (useful or otherwise), or finally if you’re living in a world where influences are simply undeniable, like the air that you breathe, and what you make will necessarily reference what has gone before, because it’s part of it, and you accept that: in fact that’s what drew you to this business in the first place, the richness of influence.

Okay?

So…how many does that make?

Hopefully the point of it all will not remain obscure for much longer…as you might recall, we were discussing Dr. Who, specifically the “New Who” of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, which I delightedly took at first glance to be primarily Expressive, Deliberately Dissonant with a large component of Non-Patronizing (let’s just call that sort of thing DD/NP, shall we?), Topical, Idealistic, Classical, and Historical.

But now which I’m beginning to suspect is merely Expressive, Deliberately Dissonant (DD/NP), Metatextual, Nostalgic, Modern, and Conscious.

Not that the things in the first list of attributes are automatically the best things to have, in all situations; and not that the things in the second list are automatically the worst. In fact, in my assessment, even things which are Cynical, Patronizing, or Exploitive can be good, in their proper places…

Well, maybe not “Exploitive”…hello, Disco Buck Rogers with Wilfred Hyde-White…!

For elaboration, let’s take the case of the Doctor’s infamous Sonic Screwdriver.

To SF fans of an earlier time, the Patronizing approach was a particularly abhorrent one, as it demeaned the aspirations of a literature that was still trying to pull itself out of the ghetto of perceived subliteracy. Science fiction must not allow itself to be confused with “fantasy”, it was thought at that time: there must be no magic wands, no straight-up wish-fulfillment, no unscientific concepts. Where possible, academic journals ought to be cited, and math should be used. That’s what would keep the distinction nice and sharp, and so that was the only way to avoid the Patronizing approach to SF becoming further cemented in the popular consciousness by Exploitive efforts. Rise above Lost In Space, rise above Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea…don’t give ‘em the chance to co-opt us.

Of course it was a bad strategy, full of oversimplifications. The faith in “hard” science fiction’s plausibility that persists today, as a sort of dry, unproductive cough left over from that ideological illness, is after all this time still no easier to support with facts — what is truly “hard” science fiction? Very, very little of it has ever been written: the substratum of fantastic supposition is normally quite visible, in your average SF tale. Yes, even when you use math…

But at the time, because of reasons specific to the time (some of which, it must be said, were good reasons), this ineliminable aspect of SF was de-emphasized as much as possible. You see there was all too much of Glen Larson in the bad science fiction of the day: “more astro-sugar for your space tea, Captain? Do try the “phillmok” — what you Earthers call peanut-butter cookies…” Oh, it got pretty bad sometimes, folks. Pretty bad. “What’s the matter, June?” “Oh, it’s this darn electro-comb, can’t you get the handyman-robot to do something about its transistors?” Yeesh. Not just subliterate, but often scientifically and culturally subliterate, too. A real mess, actually.

Hence the early hate for the Doctor’s “sonic screwdriver”, although really…that makes half-decent sense even today, doesn’t it? A sonic screwdriver. My God, when will they make one. But at the time, it sounded like someone saying “love the new space-tie, Bob, what colour do you call that?” “Oh, this? I guess it’s astro-green with a little ultra-yellow in it…it’s the latest thing! Let me tell you, these Plutonian haberdashers really know their stuff! Now let me freshen your grav-Scotch, Tom…”

…Sorry, it’s just really hard to stop with that stuff, once you get going…

But the point is…you know, it just may have been a little Patronizing, at that. Well, I don’t really think of it that way — I’ll give the all-time award for Patronizing to Star Trek: TNG for its near-continuous trekno-wank — “modulate the shield harmonics” my ass — give me a sonic screwdriver any day — but the point is (hey, wasn’t I just talking about the point?), that sometimes a little Patronizing can be good. You don’t want to use too much of it! But in what’s been my business for the last little while (writing alt-country songs), cliche is definitely a kind of resource too, you see? In most kinds of writing, cliche is absolute total instantaneous death every time you touch it, but in some kinds of writing, just a pinch of it qualifies as spice. In the alt-country game it’s even a little more than that: you really have to learn how to ride up pretty hard alongside it, sometimes. Flirting with cliche is pretty important, although you must still never actually make the mistake of leading it on…because you have to be original and Non-Patronizing, too, obviously. But on the other hand, let’s face it, a genre’s a genre, right?

Right?

The Brits are past masters at the judicious use of Patronizing elements in their juvenile fiction (although I guess, now that I think about it, that they’ve also produced the most sickeningly egregious overuses of it, too), as they’re also past masters at crafting the Non-Patronizing children’s story. Hey, they’re pretty good at Deliberate Dissonance, too — Harry Potter may be ham-fisted, but it’s dissonant at least, and that’s definitely an artistic accomplishment of some stripe or other. I mean, Harry Potter’s no Hobbit, but then what is?

Back to the sonic screwdriver. What’s wrong with it? Nothing, except at one time it sounded faintly like “astro-sugar”. It sounded like kid stuff. Of course it was kid stuff, and even with that it might not really have sounded like kid stuff, anyway…but at the time, as I’ve been saying, this was an issue people tended to get caught up in.

In fact, it remains an issue, sometimes, even today. Odd as that may seem.

And so now, through the avenue of the sonic screwdriver, we’re back to my ongoing assessment of New Who. The sainted First Doctor was clearly Originating, Deliberately Dissonant with about an equal mix of Patronizing and Non-Patronizing (as most SF efforts in the Originating class happened to be, in those dim dark times before Star Trek), largely Non-Topical, Idealistic, Classical, and Contemporaneous. Later, it got a lot more Expressive, a bit more Non-Patronizing, and less Non-Topical to varying degrees in various episodes.

Now here’s my ideal New Who: E, DD/NP, largely N-T, I, Cl, and H.

And here, to recap, is what I saw when it started up again with Eccleston: E, DD/NP, T, largely I, Cl, and H.

Then that Cl changed to an M.

But I forgave the M, because I thought, yes, they kind of do need to vindicate the enlistment of belief at first — I mean we deserve a little vindication, don’t we? And I actively wanted it to be H — because with so much history, it could hardly function without paying attention to it as a constraint, could it?

But then a little while later I started to see it as E, DD/NP, still mostly T but increasingly Mt, increasingly N, M, and at times rather C. Which wasn’t quite so good.

And now I’m beginning to fear it’s becoming E, DD/P, largely Mt, N, M, and C. Which is fine, but you can run out of freshness pretty quick, that way. And frankly that M is tasting a bit sour on my tongue, now. But, okay: it’s still Who.

However E could change to Cy soooooo easily, you see, given the right conditions. And if that ever happens it won’t be proper Who at all, will it?

Tell you how it breaks down:

We can easily envision other possible regenerations of Who in which the genetic recipe gets fatally garbled. A Cynical Who, an Exploitive Who, a Who which is purely Patronizing. Of course that’s not the real recipe, not really: the real recipe includes a detailed list of ingredients like humour, intelligence, simplicity, character, novelty, excitement, fun. What I’ve attempted to describe in my fields is just how all that stuff gets inflected, how the ingredients are prepared or cooked. You can have a bad plate of moussaka; it’s still moussaka, just not very good. That is, it’s still moussaka unless you do something really radically non-suitable with the cooking.

What’s happening here, in New Who, is that there are several objectives that are being worked towards at the same time. There is, of course, an unavoidable nostalgic objective, cleverly addressed and defused (very effectively at first, I thought) by the conceit of the Time War, and the almost-imperceptible, yet thrilling, creep of the Companion over to the box labelled romantic-interest status. This is a little bit of a postmodern approach, a little bit of an influence-conscious approach, a bit of topicality, and a bit of the stuff I’ve called dissonance, that mixes patronizing elements and non-patronizing ones — and, naturally so, because to be more than pastiche, the modern-day Doctor must be, well, modern-day: Rose can’t be Jo or Sarah Jane, of course! She can’t behave as they did! Modern audiences wouldn’t stand for it. Just as they wouldn’t stand for the early twenty-first century being portrayed as a futurescape, since it’s where they live. And how are we to make the next generation of Whovians, if we don’t put the stuff in that we liked as kids, ourselves? The creepy stuff, the stupid stuff, the jokey stuff, the English stuff. And this concern leads seamlessly to a second objective: to make the thing live again, not just as a nostalgic copy of Who, but as Who itself, the real deal. Dissonance is absolutely indispensible, here, because if it’s all going to work, it can’t wish to be “Dr. Who, except good this time”…this is where the cardboard sets come in, the Cybermen design, the sonic screwdriver. The Doctor’s nonsense about reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. K-9. All of it. It must all be embraced, good, bad, and where necessary Patronizing…

And yet, the problem here is that “real” Who, ancestral Who, didn’t exactly love the cheese it had to put up with…it just put up with it, that’s all. Which meant, it got very creative because of it, but it still would’ve rather escaped it than deal with it.

Hmm…so if you want to do it right…if you truly want to resume the past…

Now all of a sudden we are deep into the postmodern, here (no, not my “Postmodern”, the real postmodern), because the question becomes, well…how do you resume the past? How is that done? You must have the creativity, clearly. You must be willing to break new ground. But, do you go with the restrictive cheese, when you don’t have to? Or do you not go with the cheese? Or do you mix it up…but then how do you mix it up?

I mean how do you even manage the theme song, for God’s sake, without deciding some things about spareness vs. richness?

In the end, it comes down to aesthetic, pure and simple. The aesthetic must be genius, because it’s the only thing that’s like a compass in this place. Some things must be pumped up. Some things must be pared down. But nobody knows which, except the man with the instincts.

And here we are again at the sonic screwdriver. What to do about it?

I was very pleased to see they kept it.

But I was even more pleased to see that the inevitable lantern-hanging regarding it had a light touch: some undercurrent of acknowledgement that the sonic screwdriver is not a dumb idea, without it openly degenerating into a declaration of the love of kitsch and “my childhood crap, which was brilliant, as opposed to yours which was stupid”. Always a danger, and SF entertainments that succumb to it aren’t exactly tough to find *cough*STAR WARS*cough*…

I mean, I’m still not really sure Billy Dee Williams even knew he was supposed to be in space, you know?

But maybe that’s a topic for another time…

Pickin’ up the space-ladies…hey, you space-ladies are looking absolutely beautiful tonight…

But the point is, you can even do astro-sugar right, if you can only figure out how to.

It’s still not the whole job, though. Well, in fact I am saying (though I certainly seem to be taking my time about it) that it is not even the job, anymore…!

Because what’s perhaps most interesting about New Who, and most central to the entire effort it represents, is the way it handles the Expressive stuff, to avoid the temptations of the Cynical approach. We’ve got some new directions here, the most obvious of which comes out in the sequence with the “Heart Of The TARDIS” — and this is the delicate bit, because this is where it gets goopy: romance symbolically blended with imagination, the two Holiest of the Holies in this new incarnation. Was it too much? Certainly it rode quite hard right up alongside “too much”, and exchanged some sweet nothings with it across the fenceposts. Of course, I liked it, you know…

But that’s when I started to worry about it, too. Because these recipes are delicate things. I don’t know if there’s anyone who can claim to be more delighted than I am, that it has indeed proved possible to resurrect real Dr. Who — resurrecting real anything was starting to look quite impossible for a time, wasn’t it? But now it seems as though there just might be life on Mars after all. Which is great: and we should all be studying the hell out of this experiment with the unexpected and longed-for result…so we can learn how it’s done…

However, this is not to say that we can’t still drown in the sea of Cynical, Modern, and Conscious, just because the menace of the Exploitive seems to have receded…or just because the old familiar sort of Patronizing seems to have disappeared. The naively Exploitive days following the insane success of Star Wars produced many bone-chillingly stupid movies and TV shows…but, they did know how to Originate, sometimes, and we are not so good at that anymore. Sure, they didn’t have a compass — well, Lucas did, and after a while it became apparent that Spielberg did (they’ve both lost it since), but nobody else did, for heaven’s sake even Gene Roddenberry couldn’t get the recipe quite right in the first Star Trek movie — and so it was all pretty lousy moussaka…but their very ham-fisted exploitive brainlessness represented a kind of productivity, and it’s a kind in short supply today. Not that new and even great things aren’t being created today, because they are! But my point is, these can be rough seas too.

Because the fight’s changed.

The old SF vs. fantasy war is over, and I guess somebody won, but I can’t tell who…and probably it doesn’t matter. The old Patronizing is gone — these days, even when somebody exclaims “felgercarb” it doesn’t make us cringe like it used to. Mostly. But there’s a new kind of Patronizing element evolving right under our noses, that’s got nothing to do with the sonic screwdriver or the astro-sugar, and that’s what we should be worried about.

Because, doesn’t vindication become patronizing too, after a while? And doesn’t a casual facility with Nostalgic and Conscious elements become patronizing, eventually? Even Postmodern storytelling or Cynical Destruction-As-Art, when they lose their novelty don’t these, too, start to pat us on the head a little too much for perfect comfort? Just how much legitimate mileage can be got out of these things, anyway? Now that the Pop Wars are over, everything’s finally become Alternative — both “hard” science fiction and “soft” science fiction have learned to either hold hands recombinatively, or suck. But that doesn’t mean the ship’s out of danger, and it doesn’t mean the good guys won. Even as we speak, the Empire of Suck is striking back. And, it is us. Was there ever a show more essentially Patronizing than the rebooted Bionic Woman, for example? And yet that was all for our benefit, the old pointy-shoed crowd…because it wasn’t the sort of patronizing that’s based on astro-sugar at all, that is to say it wasn’t intentionally, exploitively childish…

It just wasn’t grown-up, that’s all.

And, is Torchwood so different from Bionic Woman, in this respect? Does it not, just a little, seem to be an example of how the folks in charge of New Who might be as good at getting the recipe wrong, as they are at getting it right? I merely float the idea…I haven’t seen quite enough of Torchwood to really develop an informed opinion about how well it manages my crazy-cube fields, to produce the Expressiveness that could so easily be seen as pure anachronism…so naturally decomposable into a more Cynical approach, given only enough time…

But then I also haven’t seen quite enough of New Who to be able to decide that about it, either. So here’s the crux of it all, here’s the Heart Of The TARDIS if you will: can New Who truly be Resumptive, instead of merely Retro? An old professor of mine used to say that he thought “postmodernism” was a misnomer, because it was really just modernism with a new hat and a fake beard, a sort of Reggie Perrin modernism…and I don’t know if today I would agree with him, but it does seem to me that postmodernism is just what we call a certain kind of denouement, of a certain kind of story…the story of the detonation of History, of course. And, what happens after.

The post-War landscape, rubble and ruin and reconstruction. Chaotic terrain, and choices.

It’s the environment in which I came to adulthood; of course I love it, and I’m fascinated by it. I see all kinds of possibilities in it.

But, maybe my old professor was right, and that landscape’s just a story too. I hope it is, actually: because that would mean there could be such a thing as Resumptive, that was not just Retro in heavy disguise. And that would mean my vague, nagging worries that New Who might not last for another twenty-six years are unfounded, so long as the genius aesthetic doesn’t choose to move away from Expression, or embrace the Patronizing, or engage in too much Nostalgic navel-gazing or Modern fist-pumping and back-slapping.

Because that is the astro-sugar of our times.

Oh well. But if that all fails, there’s always Hellboy, you know!

…

[SPOILER ALERT: I may not have exactly "finished" this post -- so it still may be a little half-baked. Uh...whoops? Damn.]

Mad Madame Meme

Well, I have something in the works…but in the meantime, Madeley has taken my suggestion, and made a meme out of one of his recent ruminations.

His instructions for said meme:

“What creators who are usually associated with a certain company (or, indeed, medium) would you like to see writing someone else’s title? For example, would you want to see JMS on Hellboy? Which DC character should Bendis have a crack at? Should George Pelecanos write Batman? (Answer: Yes)

Let’s get taggy, and remember to get taggy in turn and spread the love like rapidly mutating wildfire. Hell, don’t wait for a tag if you’re up for it, just drop me an email and I’ll pop a link in.”

So okay, I’m in. Here goes…

Mike Mignola’s Captain America.

This one’s for Adam Star. And, can’t you see it? Those big black shadows, ornamental emblems, and this wing-headed blue-chain-mailed walking Masonic symbol in the form of a man? But actually, here’s what grabs me: it isn’t that Captain America is a symbol, it’s that he’s a magnet for symbols — or perhaps more precisely, he’s a target for symbols. They just aim straight for that big white star on his chest. Man, I’m telling you, Cap is Hellboy: he’s fought Nazis, extra-dimensional space loons, dead men from the future, a secret society of Tories (read: dead men from the past), Richard Nixon, a version of himself corrupted by idealism, mad sinister Dr.-Seussian genetic scientists, blank slates, cultural stereotypes, and his own mythology. In fact about the only symbolism he hasn’t faced is the Monolith from 2001. Red Skulls. Cosmic Cubes. The guy is buried to the forehead-emblem in iconography. So what could be more perfect than to put him in Mignola’s hands, who works almost exclusively in that very same artistic mine-shaft that Cap was dug out of? By issue #3, we’d probably see the beginning of a year-long crossover with our favourite Sentinel Of Liberty and Dr. Strange, to rival (or is it combine? well, Jung does tell us that the principle of opposition eventually becomes the principle of harmony) the most freaked-out work of Englehart and Kirby on this title. And, to perhaps embroider Englehart’s unfinished Dr. Strange work on “The Occult History Of America” while we’re at it? Hey, just toss in a little Nick-Fury-as-Odin stuff and you have, once again, that quintessential Marvel demi-mondean superhero comic…all the odd little corners, the unexplored implications, that used to be so attractive but have lately been forgot. I’m fond of saying that Captain America has often been the most cosmic book that Marvel puts out — so let’s return to those days of raw symbolism running red on the floor.

Darwyn Cooke’s The Mighty Avengers.

And while we’re at it, let’s get someone to return us to Marvel’s historical roots, in the time of skinny ties and Beatlemania and the Cold War, and a superhero clubhouse full of half-baked monstrosities. Pick it up with Cap thawing out, a man out of time — straight from the mid-Forties to the mid-Sixties. And then reboot — let Cooke take it anywhere he pleases. Forget “retro”; this wouldn’t be retro. This would be a hard reboot of the Avengers title, in fact the hardest reboot of any title ever seen: like being in the Sixties, buying those crazy Marvel mags for the first time, still warm from the spinner rack. How far can we drag these properties and stories up the river of nostalgia, and what happens when we finally get to the headwaters? What happens to nostalgia then? Cooke himself has flirted with it in the up-to-date New Traditionalist fashion, but as impressive as New Frontier was, it couldn’t quite go far enough — it couldn’t quite break the rules completely, and so it stands as a phenomenally-impressive riff. A love-letter to a dead darling, a story set irretrievably in the past…even if it’s a past largely invented.

His Mighty Avengers, by contrast, would be set in an invented present. The present of 1964.

Or, am I crazy?

Okay, but could it be done?

If it could, Cooke’s the man to do it. Because, let’s get this nostalgia kick right out of our system. I mean let’s really get it out.

Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s Phantom Stranger.

I’ll say nothing about this one, because to do so would give away a pet idea I’m nurturing — but do I really have to say anything about it? I wanted Mike Allred’s Solo to go on forever — this way it would. And this will no doubt prove to be the shortest little explanation in this whole list, but hey: it was either make it underweight, or leave it out altogether. And who would be so crazy to leave this out? Deadgirl, only with hats and more smack-talk. We’ll pick it up right after Zatanna leaves Cassandra Craft’s place. Oh, and speaking of Seven Soldiers…

Grant Morrison’s Marvel Team-Up.

Because there’s nothing wrong with Marvel that the judicious application of a little psylocybin couldn’t cure, and Marvel Team-Up has historically been the invisible stitching that holds the big softball of Marvel continuity together anyway, but inexplicably no one’s using it for that right now, so brew the tea up and let’s get started! Continuity from the bottom up, not the top down, how refreshing it’d be to see that again! One title, in a line of profoundly out-of-synch stories, that serves as the Clock of Marvel Time. Put all your Editor’s Notes in here, put your thought-balloons in here too. Forget explanations, tortured crossover inconsistencies, and just let someone write to that stuff, for a change — Marvel Team-Up, in Grant’s hands, could share a slogan with Java: the network is the system. Let him build a Virtual Machine of continuity, and decide what to feed into it. Let him play with editorial captioning even more aggressively than he did in All-New Atom, and get meta with it, and get WAY meta with it! Besides, I want to read his quippy, jerky Spider-Man dialogue. Just tell him it could be his rejoinder to Moore’s 1963. He’d mess the joint up. He’d bring this place back to life.

James Robinson’s Son Of Satan.

Think it’s a stretch? But of course it’s just more Starman, isn’t it? Family issues, forgotten history — let’s face it, Marvel’s Seventies-born Hellscape is a mess. No one can figure out how to tell a story in it anymore, and is that so strange, really? What was originally intended to be one simple thing, and mean that same one simple thing, has now been turned into fifty million things that are anything else but. And the reason for it all is that even the most expert explainer can’t fix up multiversal structures if they’re just set up to fail anyway. So split it all off: make an Opal of it. Bring in Space Cabbie and Ultra The Multi-Alien, and some red-headed cops and a Shade. In this era of Buffy and Angel, a person should be able to do this without falling prey to needless badassification, or obsessive timeline-tinkering. Take Daimon Hellstrom away to…oh I don’t know…Rutland, Vermont or something, and just let him live there. Exorcist Detective. Big old house. Spooky goings-on where the all ley-lines cross. Magic trident. Think of him as a cross between Kent Nelson Dr. Fate, and Jack Knight Starman. And just let him run for a couple of years, see what happens.

Steve Englehart and John Romita, Jr.’s Hawkman.

This one’s really a no-brainer, isn’t it? Because who do you call, when the roof’s caving in, and the basement’s flooding, and you can’t understand how you could ever have lost the plot this bad? Englehart looks on this sort of thing as a professional challenge, I believe: he’s a one-man superhero restoration company. He’ll find inconsistencies you didn’t even know were there (because they were buried under the other, bigger inconsistencies), and he’ll use the little ones to mop up the big ones. And the man does not waste other people’s paper, either: give him two years, and he’ll satisfy everyone but the people who enjoyed having a messed-up Hawkman that doesn’t make any sense and can’t be reconciled with himself. No reboots required with Steve E., that would be a cop-out! Everybody’s story makes it out of the burning building alive, because he doesn’t believe in the no-win situation. I was thinking of putting him on The Eternals, actually…just because Gaiman left a good amount of room to move in it…but Hawkman’s got room to move too, if one can only learn to see it, and so I’ll content myself with slapping JRJR on there, because wow, what a Hawkman he’d draw.

Peter David and John Romita, Sr.’s Wonder Woman.

If there’s anyone who could draw a perfect Wonder Woman, it’s probably Jazzy Johnny — why it’s simply the stuff of commissioned sketches. As for PAD, well…he’s an interesting case, a guy with a proven professional track record who can handle drama, an anarchic fanboy with an occasional tendency to be the person who laughs hardest at his own jokes, a guy who sometimes lets plots get away from him, or gets too chummy with his characters for their own good, but then again a guy who’s occasionally been known to spin straw into gold. A little like the love-child of Keith Giffen and Mark Waid, really. So, which PAD would show up, to work with the penciller who’s a Living Legend, on the character that seems to have suffered from being a living legend too? In many ways I think it would be an ideal assignment for him. The “clubhouse” atmosphere he seems so fond of is something every Wonder Woman scripter in the last few years has made their bread and butter, so clearly there’s something there…and it seems everyone agrees that a Wonder Woman without a certain amount of breezy off-hand humour just isn’t worth writing about. But I think PAD’s occasional excesses would be either restrained, here, or put to good use: if WW needs anything, it’s a writer who’s not afraid to get a bit too chummy with her, and the character’s iconic status (only to be enhanced by Romita’s pencils, no doubt) leaves little opportunity for running off with her in an absurd direction, as it probably would set an upper limit on just how raunchy the humour could get, and still serve the story. Yes…yes, I think PAD could potentially be a great WW scripter, actually, because for all his faults he does have voice…and sometimes he has too much voice, but then again sometimes Diana Prince has too little.

Worth a shot, anyway. And then there’s always Jazzy Johnny to bring him back down to earth, if he flies off it.

Wil Pfeifer and Michael Avon Oeming’s Iron Man.

You wonder why, so I’ll tell you. Put simply, it’s because this character needs a shot in the arm, and he needs it bad. So much like the modern-era Captain Atom, whose recent Pfeifer-scripted miniseries actually made me like him possibly for the very first time ever…and yet Tony Stark’s got bigger problems than just being boring, because he’s become the most horrifyingly conflicted character Marvel’s ever had. So what to do about him? Well, as I’ve had occasion to mention recently, the problem with this iteration of Iron Man is precisely that it isn’t a screaming departure from the original symbolic foundation of the character — he concealed a damaged heart back in the Sixties, and he conceals a damaged heart now. He wrestled with the morality of his business back then, and he does the same now. And he’s every bit as over his head now as he was back then too…well, okay, a bit more these days, that’s true. But in any case, this is the through-line, sure enough: this is how you rehabilitate him, by using the stuff that’s already there. Iron Man has very nearly gone right over the edge (and why was he in the Illuminati room instead of Cap, anyway? Doesn’t make sense; I blame Shooter), and so he needs some dramatic pulling-back: he needs a massive crisis of conscience, verging on a full-on nervous breakdown. And it’s all there; and Pfeifer has shown he can not only identify this stuff, but pull it out and put it to use; therefore it’s got to be Pfeifer.

But, especially it’s got to be Pfeifer with Oeming. Just think of Oeming’s art, so different from the techno-porn Iron Man’s been saddled with as he’s become more and more the machine, and not the man. And he’ll still be that way in all of his other Marvel appearances, no doubt. But in the Iron Man book, he’ll be playing on pause, taking off the clunky, blocky helmet to give one of those amazing soulful Oeming looks of regret, as he finds himself running more and more out of the ol’ crypto-fascist techno-porn gas. This is like every issue of Powers ever, pure reflection; but then when he puts on the suit again, what could be more muscularly comic-booky than how Oeming would make that look? Imagine, Iron Man a comic book again! Why, I’d read that…

Hmm, that’s only eight. I should probably try for ten. But oh well, maybe in the comments! For now I’ve really got to pop this thing in the mail, and tag some folks. So how about just five, chosen randomly from the usual gang of idiots, like…

Jim Roeg, the Fortress Keeper, Tom Bondurant, Sean Kleefeld, and Prof. Fury.

But I really shouldn’t put Sean K. in there, since he’s off Marvel…however the next three names on the speed-dial (the WordPress dashboard makes selecting these things plenty easy, let me tell you) happen to be Evie, who’s already done one, Fake Stan Lee, who’s just going to say himself for everything, and Madeley who came up with the damn thing in the first place…and so I give up. Anyone else out there who wants to consider themselves tagged by me, jump right in!

The More You Believe it, The More Fun It Is

Just check it out, True Believer!

I Liked Millennium

I liked Millennium.

What is wrong with this Internet? Every day I can read a score of people chiming in on how much they liked Secret Wars, but hated Millennium. On how they thought Inferno or Fall Of The Mutants or Atlantis Attacks or Acts Of Vengeance was totally wicked…but Millennium sucked.

Are they serious?

I have not yet heard one person inveighing against Millennium — not one! — who could say what they didn’t like about it.

And I’m not saying it was the best thing I’ve ever read in my whole life, either.

But as far as Mandatory Marvel/DC Event Crossovers?

Yeah. It’s up there.

Because, Inferno, Internet?

As Ed calls it, “Look Out, Big Nasty’s Coming To Get You”?

Have you lost your mind, Internet?

Yes; you have. Because I just read someone praising Secret Wars II.

Secret. Wars. II.

I sometimes forget that you are all kids, and don’t know any better. Then I read something like CSBG’s Top 100 Runs, where the Australian X-Men run sits about middle of the pack, and Ditko’s Dr. Strange sits at the very bottom. Mind-boggling. I read people saying Al Milgrom’s a no-talent hack. Christ, next they’re going to be saying Al Williamson’s a no-talent hack.

I mean for God’s sake.

Honestly, I’d like to know what you all consider a good crossover.

What’s a good crossover?

What’s the best crossover?

And what’s the worst crossover.

Although I suppose a better question would be: what’s the best single issue of a regular series that had to deal with a crossover?

Ooooh…now that I want to know.

Disco, Disco Buck

Part 1?

I can’t be sure yet.

Because, how incomprehensibly strange it all is.

Do you know I’d forgotten all about this episode of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century?

It’s called “Flight Of The War Witch”, and if I recall the content of Ed’s old Starlog mags correctly, they spent real money on it.

Or anyway, what to them was real money; these were tightly-budgeted shows, after all.

Hmm…

So maybe it’s finally time to reevaluate the Buck Rogers show. Was it cheap crap? Oh, absolutely; no question about it. The final product of the first wave of Star Wars knock-offs made for TV (at least, the final one that belonged in anything like an “A” grade classification), it made Battlestar Galactica look hip and glossy, earnest and honest, exciting and original. Boasting many of the most ill-conceived excuses for SF stories I’ve ever seen, at its worst it looked like a bloated high school play: unserious and overserious at the same time; hackneyed; inexpert; apathetic; dumb. A loose clutch of tired cliches, silly mood music, and anticlimaxes lifted from…well, from just about everything past Six Million Dollar Man’s third season, it essentially took Steve Austin, put him in the disco on the Love Boat with Bigfoot, Knight Rider, and the Man From Atlantis, and then dropped the whole thing on Supertrain before blowing it up with war-surplus photon torpedoes.

And yet…

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but in a way it was not unfaithful to the Buck Rogers strips it took its name from. These, after all, were always more about meaningless episodic adventure, and Buck saving Wilma, than they were about Bob Shaw’s “wee thinky bits”, though the strip certainly started off a bit stronger than it finished…and many of the authentic Buck Rogers elements were in fact present in this little corner of the Glen A. Larsonverse, disco-ed up even as they were.

Boy, were they disco-ed up. Sheesh.

But watching it now is a lot different from watching it when it originally aired. Then, the strong start of the title sequence (sweet, sweet William Conrad narration), and the man-out-of-time allure, produced high hopes that were rather quickly decomposed into feelings of disgust and betrayal. You got the strong feeling that, despite the presence of several professional SF B-movie people (did I say several? I meant dozens upon dozens), who were probably (in some key cases, indubitably) all very big Buck Rogers fans when they were young, that the show was being bossed by someone who’d looked up “science fiction show” in a dictionary, but halfway through the definition figured that it’d be hard to insult the intelligence of people who liked crap like that, so why keep reading? Well, that’s how it seemed, at the time: it was all a bit insulting, really. Disturbingly like a Rob Liefeld comic, in a way…

And yet…

Watching it now, I’m astonished at the sheer…what should one call it? The sheer pluckiness of the actors. There is Gil Gerard being asked to say some of the most unselfconsciously dumbass things anybody’s ever said on TV ever, there’s Erin Gray being asked to do very little more than have touchably soft hair, and to this day I’m not sure what the hell Tim O’Connor’s character was supposed to be doing for a living, besides huffing and puffing and saying “Buck” and “Dr. Theopolis” over and over again all day.

And yet, you know…it’s Tim O’Connor, right?

And as far as model-slash-actresses went…you know, damned if Erin wasn’t in there slugging.

And Gil Gerard somehow — somehow! — kind of managed to connect with his material, enough so that somehow — SOMEHOW, damn it! — he didn’t look completely lost in it. And I tell you, watch this show if you don’t believe that was a Herculean task. Who, in the mind of Glen A. Larson, was Buck Rogers supposed to be, anyway? A pinch of Steve Austin, a dash of Captain Kirk, a couple of teaspoons of James Bond, a sprinkle of Sheriff Andy Taylor, a few drops of Isaac the bartender, and just the faintest suggestion, perhaps, of Jim Rockford? Or was it Miles Monroe? Jesus Christ, I’m telling you, the thing was a mess from the beginning, and man did it get worse over time. Herculean task, ha. If anything ever needed a river redirected into it, it was this show.

And yet…

Here we are at “Flight Of The War Witch”, and it’s pretty obvious that this was the result of someone’s big Orson Welles/Ed Wood moment. If it’s crap, what can be done with it? What’s the best it could possibly get? Because let’s do that, by God! And now, quick, before there’s no more time left!

Well, they did it.

It was a two-parter.

Everyone got a speech.

Tim O’Connor got a speech.

Henry Silva got a speech…kind of.

Twiki even sort of got a speech.

Erin Gray got a speech!

Man, this show was cheap. I think if I just say “Disco Space Olympics” to you, that should about bring you up to speed. Yes, we got a long. long way from Jack Palance doing his best Dr. Doom impression in the pilot…I’m telling you. It never really rose to those heights again. I call them “heights”. You don’t know, seriously. We had some space vampires on this show. Mistakes were made.

Still, if they did it today…it’d probably be worse. As I’ve had occasion to note before, there’s something about the primitive clap-trappery of this kind of junk SF that’s oddly endearing. I mean just look at poor Gil Gerard, there. Unlike his fellow space-thespians, the poor bastard gets stuck in every single scene…and yet he goes at it quite manfully. Does he try to rescue the young defector couple from the Disco Space Olympics? Yes…yes, he does, and without so much as the twitch of an eyebrow to betray his disquiet at the astro-boxing or the orbital electro-luge. Does he always have a plan, based on good old twentieth-century American fisticuffs and “going with the flow”? Yes…unfortunately yes. He always does.

But would we have John Crichton in the Uncharted Territories, if not for Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century?

I would like to be able to say to all of these put-upon performers that no, we wouldn’t. And I even think that it might, might just possibly, be true that we wouldn’t.

Though I could be accused of stretching a point, there.

Tell you what, I feel like bloody Buck Rogers, watching this. It’s crazy. This is like being right back in my parents’ basement, sitting in front of the old colour TV with the UHF dial and the thirteen channels. I can barely believe how much I remember of this awful, awful show. I don’t know what I’m going to do when Hawk and Dr. Goodfellow make the scene. Probably pitch a fit. I’ve already seen far too much of Princess Disco Evening Wear in the last week or so to be confident that my mind is anything like as stable as it was in, say, late March of this year. I’m looking at Tigerman, I’m looking at Kane: I’m feeling their anguish.

I’m looking at the hated Dr. Theopolis, and thinking Dr. Theopolis, c’est moi: I, too, am hung helplessly around the neck of an inexplicably wisecracking robot, even more inexplicably voiced by Mel Blanc. Biddi biddi biddi, all aboard for Anaheim, Azuza, and KOOK-a-monga…what? What’s that you’re saying, Twiki?

Twiki, I can’t understand you…

For God’s sake, Twiki, where are you taking me?

Who are you, really?

Two-Headed Meme: The Claws That MEME, The Teeth That MEME…!

Hola, Bloggers.

No, I don’t speak Spanish.  I’m just thinking of that old musical number from Sesame Street with Luis and Maria:

“When you say Hola!  Hola! people are friendly –

People say “Hola”

When you say “Hola”…”

Now every one of my real-life friends is going to know it’s me behind this pseudonym, oh no.  But I can’t help it you see, because I was that white middle-class kid from another country who sat glued glued GLUED to Jim Henson’s educational idea of a program aimed at kids from the ghet-to…

And got brought up by it, totally accidentally.

Well, who knew.

Wow, Jim.  The instant I saw Guy Smiley, and heard the “mnah mnah” song, you changed my life.

And so, you Bloggers…!

Who changed your life, as a comics fan?

I’ll give you two categories of this, both fast, as I was converted to Hensonism fast…

1. What creator(s), in a single issue, blew your mind so much that you can still quote the dialogue. still see the art, in fact you think about it probably more than makes sense…! In other words what creator(s) made you love a character suddenly and unreasonably, like I loved Cookie Monster suddenly and unreasonably, or Ernie?  Or Grover.

2. What creators(s) went on a title, blew your little mind, and then went almost immediately (and unfairly) off it, just as you were getting revved up?

…

Okay, I’ll give a couple of mine.

1.  Flash #51: Nobody Dies, by Messner-Loebs and LaRoque.  It’s been too long since we’ve given this issue props, Internet — I mean it’s been like two years, come on.  I was, I confess, already deeply into Messner-Loebs’ Flash by this time, but even if I hadn’t been, Jesus Christ this would’ve been my Kermit The Frog Moment.  I gave this issue to comics-hating punker girls of my acquaintance…and they literally screamed for more.  This comic actually got me into a relationship; this is the one and only superhero comic that generates HUGE FEELINGS just on its way to showing that the Flash is cool.  Forget Watchmen;  if you want a BANG moment, this is it.  And anybody can feel it.  Even highly sexy disillusioned punker girls with green hair and a grudge against their father,, who are past caring about anything. Even they have been heard to say things like “Gee, I hope Wally’s all right!“

Go out and buy it.  Read it now.  If you’re unmoved by it, I’ll buy your copy for twice what you paid, and that’s a promise (NOTE:  Plok does not need more than three copies of this comic).

2.  William Messner-Loebs on Green Arrow. Sorry, it’s Messner-Loebs day here at Trout In The Milk...but if you ever wanted some strong circumstantial evidence, in the time when Ed was doing all the buying for our collection, and I had no money, I actually went out and bought a Green Arrow comic, because the previous issue had been written by Messner-Loebs.  Quoth me: “fucker, this Green Arrow — and I hate Green Arrow! — comic wasn’t written by Messner-Loebs at all!“

Quoth Ed:  “Yes…I knew that.  That’s why I didn’t buy it.”

Quoth Me:  “But what the fuck, then?”

Ed:  “Yes…yes, I know. I know all about it.  The genius Bill just was given a gig, that’s all.”

Me:  “But then why…”

Ed:  “Why didn’t they just give it to him?  Don’t ask me for answers to your questions;  I don’t know.  Yes, Messner-Loebs on an aging, womanizing Ollie Queen — holy jumpin’ catfish [NOTE: Ed did not say this, I'm only reconstructing from memory -- obviously a person with a sense of self-worth like Ed would never utter the words "holy jumpin' catfish"], that would be SWELL [Uh...ditto], but they DIDN’T give it to him, and yes it DOESN’T make sense, and STOP ASKING, because I’m mad TOO!”

Yes. Well, whatever.  Well, so what if Messner-Loebs believes the most powerful motivator of human action is LOVE?  And so what if Green Arrow’s character arc for the last thirty years has been about LOVE?  And so what if everyone else has written him as if he a) doesn’t understand it, or b) would rather do without it?

Messner-Loebs, people.  I want him to write Fantastic Four.  I want him to write Spider-Man.  Can you believe they never even asked him?  I want him to write a Speedball mini.  The thing is, they say these characters don’t work.  But they never ask freakin’ professionals to write them.  Just guys who need a lot of excuses.

Bendis on Powers?

Or on Alias?

Or just about every single issue of the first twenty of USM?

Yes, good God.  That’s a 1. The brilliance of Bendis.

Just in case anyone thought I was beating up on Bendis with my Messner-Loebs remarks.  Although truthfully they are two different galaxies of talent and craft, and I kind of was.  Bendis is really (let’s be honest) very good at some things, but not so good at others.  He’s precocious!  But he’s not fucking Mozart.  But who said he had to be?  Christ, you criticize someone for a minute, and all of a sudden it’s all “Mozart-hating-scum, you must DIE!! for criticizing Bendis!!!” But I like Bendis.  He’s not all that good, though.  But I like him.  He does some things excellently well…even so…I mean I’m not trying to be a bad guy, here…

Oh and oh shit, fine, you douchebags, why don’t I just give another 1.  BENDIS! (The one where Jessica turns down Ka-Zar!!!!), so I guess that means I have to give another 2.

So check it, scaredy-cats:  2. Doug Moench and Bill Sienkiewicz on Fantastic Four. Yeah, that’s right:  I wish they’d been given a thirty-issue run.  Woulda tripped you out.  Woulda been like Kirby’s final Cap run:  all science fiction slash horror, all the time.  And does anyone seriously imagine, can anyone seriously imagine who’s read Moon Knight, that FF would’ve been just some boring book with Moench and Sienkiewicz at the helm?

Cowards.

These guys were always super-pros, and never needed any excuses.  But, they only got four issues.  So whatever.  I liked Byrne’s run a lot.  But at the time, I remember thinking he’d make a freaking mess of it when he got there (thankfully that wasn’t the case), and I was a bit pissed that the always-progressive, always super-creative Moench/Sienkiewicz team didn’t get a chance to fly.

Later, I learned they weren’t really asking for that chance.

But even so.

I mean, come on.  It stands.

No?  Disagree?

GOOD!

So to recap, my #1 picks are Flash #51 and Alias #whateverthatnumberwaswhereJessicatriestogetitonwiththeMormonSheriff…

And my #2 picks are:  Messner-Loebs Green Arrow, and Moench/Sienkiewicz FF.

Let’s go to war, Bloggers!

It’ll be fun.

#1: Rock Your Mind Issue!

#2:  The Great Creator Didn’t Stay Long Enough!

Begin, please.

And pardon my ramble.

Spring Review #2: “Let’s Go To Utah!”

Oh Lord, this takes me back.

Right back to the Seattle Scene days.

Hello there, Bloggers; recently I got a couple PDFs in the old email from an enterprising young chap (very enterprising, to have got down as far on the review chain as where I am!) named Dave Chisholm.

Here’s his web site.

Anyway he’s sent me a couple chapters of his comic “Let’s Go To Utah!” to review, and I’m happy to do so.

Oh, why am I so happy?

Because I liked it.

I liked it a lot.

You can tell that our pal Dave is no stranger to comics, and the comics storytelling form: because if there’s anything this doesn’t read like, it’s a copy of something other than comics. It’s remarkable, really, if you think about it: so many of our straight comics narratives these days are so soaked in movie-ness that they sometimes seem directly transposed into print form from somebody’s DVD collection…or at least from somebody’s old pile of unfinished screenplays. But where comics approach realism, it’s necessarily of a different species than filmic realism, isn’t it? Mostly, I think, it is…because in real life things sometimes just happen, they sometimes just fall on you out of a clear blue sky, as often as not situations simply are; and in film it’s hard to escape a certain flavour of intentionality, that colours events. I think I’ve talked about this before, the gloom of premonition that hangs over a typical movie…every dream a prolepsis, every stick of furniture a foreshadowing, every character a symbol, at least partly…and often, it’s what makes movies as good as they can be…

It doesn’t happen here, though. Dave includes several nods to it — right down to the interrogation-room flashbacks, hah! — but Utah, at least so far, has a bit too much of randomness in it not to escape the emulation of film for something more open-ended. Something — in my opinion — greater.

Its own kind of story.

The antagonistic figure of Leif has a brief soliloquy about movies in Chapter One — yammering on about how AWESOME the movies of the Sixties and Seventies were in something of the manner of a psychotic Tarantino — that casually subverts the idea that a movie represents the acme of story, or of realism. It just isn’t so: although our protagonist is very clearly trapped in a set of “badass” movie cliches from the moment Utah begins, it’s equally clear that this isn’t a movie, this is real life…and therefore the troublesome meanings to be chased down are only burdened with cliche, not revealed through them, or even merely at play in their fields. Utah has nothing to do with sucking its reader in through duplicating filmed qualities of light, clarity, colour, heat, texture, transition, caesura…a sort of visual “transparency”, if you will, a clear-aired approach that allows the crafter of tensions to foreground what he wishes in high, high definition, as it were physically right next to the viewer…but instead the wonderful inkiness of Mr. Chisholm’s story makes everything part of a swirling pool of black, all the textures ink, the sky ink, the people ink, the road and the car ink…even, what people say is ink, lying heavy and liquid and black on the page, under the thumb…instead of raspy and rhythmic and cadenced against the eardrum, the music of the movements of the figures on-screen. It’s a different sort of juxtapostion entirely, you see: it’s got real tactility in it. And thus you may be sucked in, but you’re never sucked in to the point where you’re transported out of the comic, transported out of the true sense of reading and into the false sense of experiencing…because this is an entirely different kind of sight you’re being given, here. An entirely different method of participating in what comes before your eyes.

And damn, that’s refreshing.

In fact I’ve really missed it.

This is a short review. About Dave’s layouts I won’t say much: just that they’re again obviously the work of someone who knows a thing or two about making an interesting page. And there are some real hammer-blows in here, too — sight, sight, it all comes down to sight, and a way of seeing: from the moment Dave looks up at us in the interrogation room, through the speechifying in the car and the incident at the diner, and out even into the wilderness, it’s always the sense of a sight going unrecorded that is gripping, here: unposed and un-planned-out action, things you don’t want to see but do (and yet don’t), and in the last panel of the last page Dave’s sent me, the fantastic effect of a smudged-out square of raw black ink where sight becomes occluded. What comics can do, that film can’t: in a film this would’ve been empty frames whipping through a projector, something trite and transitory, light and some snappy, jolting noises — here, it’s a gloppy spill with fingerprints in it, silent and solid. No cameras, please. No privileged viewpoints, thank you. Just a matter of memory.

I won’t lie: this is a story that, if someone just spoke it out loud to you as a pitch, you would naturally “see” as a movie in your head. It is indeed very movie-like, as a high concept, and in that it’s nothing too, too special. Actually reading it is quite a different matter, however.

And I’m hooked.

So, bravo, Dave — and keep those PDFs coming, man!

I’ll be right here waiting, reading my Dennis Eichhorn comics and drinking my fancy latte.

Or maybe I should say, I’ll be reading my old copies of Black Hole, and sipping on a Ballard Bitter?

Tell you what, I’ll pour the coffee into the beer…!

Nice job.

Saw O.J. Play

This was during the O.J. trial:  a station in Seattle was interviewing people on the street (!) about whether they thought O.J. was guilty or innocent.  One fool stepped up to the camera to give his opinion…and underneath him this legend shimmered into view:

“Saw O.J. Play”

That’s it in a nutshell, really, isn’t it?  What passes for news these days.  Why on Feb. 29th of this year I saw a news story that uncovered the fact that the play Pirates Of Penzance exists.  No, really, I swear to you!  It exists!

Weird, wild stuff!

Feh.

I remember when the Kobe earthquake hit Japan a few years ago (remember, people died?), stations in Vancouver took it upon themselves to interview the man in the street in a similar fashion:

“When do you think the Big One’s coming?”

From my spot in front of the TV, I answered for myself:  “not soon enough, I’m guessing.”

Oh, narcissistic Vancouver.  So jealous of other people’s tragic disasters.  “Look at us, world!  We’re important too!”

I thought that was bad.

But obviously I’m too old to understand the virtues of the new, proactive news.  “Now invading the Iraq of your imagination twenty times a minute!  If you would like to pay by credit card press 1, now!”

A friend of mine told me the other day, he’d been listening to the radio (sports radio, actually), and the announcer had said that they (“they”) were predicting a pretty big earthquake in Vancouver over the next few days.  So, y’know…watch out.

To which I replied:

HOLY SHIT THAT IS THE GODDAMNDEST STUPID-ASS PIG-IGNORANT MOTHERFUCKING THING I HAVE EVER HEARD A PERSON SAY!  FUCK THOSE GUYS, WHOEVER THE FUCK THEY ARE!  WHAT BULLSHIT!  MAY THEY ALL ROT IN HELL!

I hope you will pardon my, uh…my French.

The point is:  no one now living can predict an earthquake.

No;  not even sports jocks.

I know!  They’re so good at predictions, usually!

You know, pretty soon I may have to give you a bit of a punch in the mouth, Vancouver.  You’re really starting to piss me off, lately.

By the way, I heard they used real mammoths in that 10,000 B.C. movie.

IMPORTANT: Advice For Starbucks Employees

Though I ought to make it clear: I Am Not A Lawyer.

But then again, and this is my point: You’re Not Cops.

Today I visited the Starbucks I frequent, and had occasion to speak both to my friend the manager, and to his District Manager.

And the word is: Starbucks has no official policy on the six-meter (turns out it’s six, not seven) non-smoking law.

Unfortunately, they do have an unofficial policy.

And in my (admittedly non-lawyerly) opinion, this is very bad news indeed.

Because the unofficial policy is to confront and remind customers who are lighting up outside the store that it’s against the law. But since Starbucks has no official company policy about the law, this isn’t the same thing as, say, if someone were to light up inside the store — in that case, my friend the manager could simply say “sorry, you can’t smoke in here, it’s against company policy, this is a non-smoking establishment, please extinguish your cigarette or leave.”

And if Starbucks had an official policy about their outdoor seating area, he could probably get away with saying much the same thing. But they don’t.

So, it’s just him out there. And he’s not a cop; he’s just some guy. And in the absence of an official Starbucks policy, he’s not authorized to tell people what they can and can’t do on the sidewalk outside his store.

This could easily lead to a confrontation. A confrontation in which he will not be in the right.

So for my friend there, in my opinion, it’s a goddamn can of worms.

So if you’re like him, please, for God’s sake, call up the ladder and tell your supervisor that you don’t feel comfortable interfering with people that way. Tell them that if they want to make it part of your job description in an official sense you’ll be happy to do it, but that as things stand you just feel like you’re pissing people off, and for no defined reason. Tell them that the only way this should even ever be a thing you have to deal with is if one of your customers complains to you about another one of your customers…and that in that case you would like to be able to say to the complaining customer that you’re very sorry, but it isn’t a Starbucks policy it’s a law, and you’re not allowed to enforce it because you’re not a policeman. Because only policeman are authorized to enforce the laws (at least for minor infractions like this one), and if Starbucks employees started taking it upon themselves to do the job of the police it could expose both Starbucks and their individual employees to potential lawsuits.

Alternatively, tell them you would prefer to simply post a notice on the door: “Starbucks would like to remind its valued customers that the Provincial Government has prohibited smoking within six meters of a doorway.” And then point to it when someone complains. Because it’s always good to have something to point to, that’s signed by someone who is not you.

Please tell your supervisors and managers this. Though I’ll stress once again that I AM NOT A LAWYER, I don’t think I need to be a lawyer to recognize that this sort of thing could go pear-shaped for the Starbucks employee in an awful hurry. And I have a certain fondness for Starbucks employees, and would hate to see them get into needless scuffles with angry customers over misunderstandings like this.

And Starbucks: get your act together. The government wants you to help it enforce its law, and in my opinion this isn’t right — IN MY OPINION THIS IS VERY, VERY, VERY WRONG, AND INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS FOR OUR DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM! — but if you’re going to do it, do it officially. Don’t hang your employees out to twist in the wind, it isn’t right, and damned if I don’t think it’ll do anything but insulate you from liability.

What a slippery slope this is. The more I think about it, the more like a quagmire it seems to me. This could be trouble.

I’ve never been more disillusioned with my government. And that’s really saying something.

This is, simply, a disgrace.

And no, I did not myself get into any sort of confrontation with my friend the manager. But I worry this is all going to blow up in his face in the next few days.

The Club Of Junius

Hello, Bloggers. Today I broke the law.

Well, I didn’t actually mean to break it; it was more that it broke itself, and I just happened to be there.

Here’s how it happened: in the Province’s wisdom, it’s decided to make all British Columbians “safer” by banning smoking outside within about twenty feet (I think it’s actually seven meters) of a door or bus shelter.

Hey, it’s not like it’s got a girl coming over in 2010, and is madly dashing around trying to clean its apartment up! No, this is a health issue…!

Except, obviously, not really: because it’s one thing to ban smoking in crowded and poorly-ventilated bars — no one doubts that forty hours a week schlepping drinks in such an environment constitutes a health hazard for the staff in such establishments, I hope — but I’d bet a LOT of money against the proposition that people are coming down with lung cancer from standing next to smokers at bus stops. Indeed, I believe the technical term for such contentions is bullshit — and the thing is, it’s hardly even worth attacking bullshit on intellectual grounds, is it? When any fool can simply smell it.

Anyway…

Our government, like all our governments here in B.C. for the last pretty long while, has a thing about being liked, you see. Oh, not by us! They treat us like sheep, of course! But so mired in World-Class-ism are they, that they’d be mortified to have someone breeze into town from some other, bigger, flashier country and sniff at our provincial (that’s with a small “p”, by the way) pretensions. My God, can you believe these farmboys all still smoke? Ha ha, how declasse. What an unfashionable little place, come: we return to London! Erm, that is…Paris!

No…no, that doesn’t work either…

Rome!

No…

Manhattan!

No.

Maybe L.A., I guess? Or somewhere in Scandinavia?

Jesus, of all the cues we could take from Scandinavia…and this is the one we choose. Well, that’s just us all over, isn’t it?

Anyway…

So in B.C., a pack of cigarettes costs ten dollars on average, and nine dollars of that is tax money paid to the government. Also you can’t smoke in bars or restaurants or music halls, or cabarets, or private member’s clubs, or sports arenas. You can still smoke on the top decks of ferries…but now only on one side of a ferry’s top deck. I guess to limit the cancer, or something?

Nah…it’s not to limit the cancer. It’s to clean this fucking place up. Because smoking is a filthy, filthy habit, don’t you know.

The restaurants I’m okay with. The bars, not quite so much, but I understand what’s going on there. Although it’s funny, because in downtown Vancouver on a Saturday night, only being able to smoke on the street just means that there’s a hell of a lot of belligerent drunks standing around unsupervised, waiting to start something. So the smoking ban carries some extra policing costs with it, basically because this is not a civilized town. In the country, no one cares, of course: it doesn’t matter. But in Vancouver, it’s a problem…

However, like I said: I understand what’s going on, there. And I suppose I must say, for the sake of the health of the staff, it’s probably necessary to do something about it.

But banning smoking outdoors?

This is something of a break point. Because now you cannot sit and have a smoke, now you cannot enjoy a coffee or a drink, while having a smoke. Because second-hand smoke is so much more toxic than any other substance known to man, that all the car exhaust on the street (emitted by drivers chattering away on cell phones, by the way — a kind of legislated reckless driving) is as nothing to it — people are simply coming down with the cancer left and right, why they’re practically dropping dead in the middle of the street. This must be stopped.

But not by making tobacco illegal! Heavens, no.

By making the practice of smoking illegal.

Only, not really.

Hence: today, one broken law. I bought my cigarettes. I opened the pack. I lit one to have with my coffee on the walk home.

And then I noticed I was on a commercial strip, which meant I was passing doorways every ten feet or so.

Renegade!

Breaking the law with each step!

And that’s when I started to laugh. No, I will not be obeying this law. Because it’s so clearly Draconian — it’s so clearly farcical, and a horrid misuse of my elected representatives’ time and effort. It’s clearly built on the most ramshackle collection of rotten old justifications that have ever been used as a legal foundation. If the government believes that tobacco smoke is so detrimental to public health that it needs a twenty-foot bubble around it even outdoors on a windy day, then they have no excuse not to ban its importation and sale. As a smoker (who wants to quit — well, don’t we all?), I’d support such a measure. I wouldn’t be inordinately happy about it, but if the argument is there, it’s there: smoking kills. Well, okay then: let’s get rid of it.

There’s your logic.

Now, don’t waste it…!

Because as long as tobacco is legal, and as long as I’m addicted to it, and as long as the government’s my freakin’ pusher when it comes to that, I’m not going to stand for any seven-meter bullshit. I’ll take a fine, and fight it in court. Because this law’s no good, and old Junius got it right the first time: the subject who’s truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate (that would be me, by the way, the “loyal subject”) will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.

And this measure’s arbitrary.

Smoking outside on a restaurant patio, or passing businesses with a coffee in my hand and a cigarette in my mouth, I am injuring not a single, solitary soul except myself. This habit runs a person about three hundred dollars a month, for the privilege of standing outside the party in the rain to get their fix, and putting a cloud on their chest X-rays. Oh, but now it’s making me a bad citizen, too? But only as long as I’m standing within twenty feet of better citizens. Right. I see.

Sorry, but the logic just won’t stretch that far. It won’t stretch seven meters. It may not even stretch one.

Ban the stuff if you must. Or leash it, if you like.

But don’t think you can ban or leash me, just because your precious Olympics are coming.