Michael Rawdon's webjournal
Stan Lee on the game show To Tell The Truth, possibly circa 1970. It’s a YouTube video about 6-1/2 minutes long.
Very strange, and not just for the psychedelic sets: Stan looks very different here than he does today.
(Via my non-blogging friend Bruce.)
Comic books I bought the week of 4 January 2007.
And this week it really was a haul:
Manhunter is an acclaimed ongoing series about a Los Angeles lawyer who gets tired of super-villains going free for various reasons, and decides to take the law into her own hands by lifting some superpowered gadgets she has access to and playing vigilante by night. While it’s “acclaimed”, it hasn’t sold very well, and was nearly cancelled last year, but reader outcry caused DC to revive it. This kerfuffle was enough to make me decide to try it out, and my shop got a copy of the first collected volume this week, since the second volume, Trial By Fire, just came out.
It’s okay, but not great. Penciller Jesus Saiz does a fine job drawing both Kate Spencer’s everyday life and her extracurricular adventuring. Writer Marc Andreyko’s scripts, though, are rather haphazard: Kate’s broken family life hits us over the head. The source of her weapons is shown to subtly that it’s hard to believe (why didn’t anyone know the stuff was missing and put two and two together?). For the book’s supposed realism, chain-smoking lawyer Kate is surprisingly athletic and skilled in combat. And Kate is certainly not a likeable protagonist. (In fact, everyone in the book is rather unlikeable.)
And yet, despite these rough edges, I can see the attraction of the book, that it might develop into something with more depth and texture, and that this volume is merely the set-up for more interesting stories down the road. I’ll check out the second volume and let you know what I think.
This is the first issue of All-Star Superman to come out since I started this journal. To the extent that the series has a premise, it concerns Superman before he was rebooted in the 1980s, finding out that his cells have been overloaded by sunlight and that he’s going to die sometime soon. So writer Grant Morrison gets to put the classic incarnation of Superman in some unusual situations as a result. Each issue only advances the story a little bit, though, and it reads more like a set of standalone stories. This issue sees several of Superman’s descendents coming back to the beginning of his career to meet him and fight a time-eating Chronovore who arrives in Smallville.
I’ve never been a big fan of writer Grant Morrison: I think he’s a great idea man, but his characterizations border on nil and his dialogue often feels stilted and ridiculous. I think he’s basically the same writer he was when he broke into American comics back in the 1980s, and frankly I have never really seen what all the hubbub is about. Honestly, I think his best work was his run on JLA a decade ago. All-Star Superman is largely more of the same: Inventive. Loud. Emotionally void.
I’ve never been a big fan of Quitely’s art, either. Mainly I feel that most of his characters’ faces look the same, and often they look downright inhuman. His renderings of Lana Lang and Pete Ross here are completely unrecognizable and kind of grotesque. He also seems to skimp on the backgrounds, which is really clear in this issue, which takes place in Kansas. His basic antatomy is quite strong, but while anatomy is a necessary element of a good artist, it’s not sufficient.
I keep trying out Morrison’s comics because he’s a great idea man, but All-Star Superman is not one of his better outings. Of course, neither was Seven Soldiers. And both of these opinions seem to put me in the minority of comics bloggers.
newuniversal #2 shows us that the original New Universe series was actually in-continuity, and it does so in that very Warren Ellis-esque way. Kinda neat.
If you’re a fan of medieval fantasy, give Artesia a look. I’m not a fan of the subgenre, and I enjoy it: Artesia begins as a concubine for a king in a remote hills country, but for various reasons she overthrows her king and siezes power for herself, and then gets caught up in a major invasion of her land by armies from the south. It’s at its best when it’s dealing with the characters of Artesia and her supporting cast. Writer/artist Mark Smylie has a tendency to introduce way too many characters at times, and focus more on Artesia’s position as a character of destiny and less on her as an actual character, so motivations and feelings tend to get lost in the shuffle. The series is uneven. Smylie’s a terrific artist, though, especially in his figure designs and ability to draw large battle scenes, which are often stunning.
I really need to sit down and read the whole thing at once to reacquaint myself with all of the details and see if I appreciate it more.
These two volumes are new hardcover collections of the first two mini-series. They look like nice packages, although the first volume has a big, yellow “Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award Winner” badge on the front cover, marring the artwork. They couldn’t have put this on the back cover, or used a removable sticker? Sheesh!
Kane is a noirish police series by Paul Grist. Grist published 30+ issues of the black-and-white series in the 90s, and then put it on hold to work on Jack Staff. Grist has a simple but capable style with strong use of light and shadow and interesting panel layouts. I can imagine it wouldn’t work for everyone, but it works for me. His writing has the signature note of playing with time perception, leaping between events that take place at widely different points in time (and sometimes in dream) without warning. When it works – as when Kane is flashing back to confronting his on-the-take partner – it’s very cool. Grist vastly overuses the stunt, though, which has made Jack Staff nearly unreadable at times. Kane is still pretty nifty, though, mainly because the characters are all playing different games with different motivations, and that transcends the sometimes-awkward storytelling. (Grist has a nice, warped sense of humor, too.)
If you’re a fan of character-driven police shows such as Homicide (as opposed to today’s never-ending crop of procedurals), then give Kane a try. Start with the first volume, Greetings From New Eden.
Finally (whew!), Richard Moore’s Boneyard is another series on an irregular schedule, although supposedly Moore has had some (as he puts it) setbacks recently which have slowed down his production of the series. This is a very fun comic, and it’s one of the few that Debbi reads. Our hero, Michael Paris, inherits a plot of rural land which happens to hold a graveyard. An, uh, inhabited graveyard. The series is mostly about Paris’ relationships with the inhabitants of the graveyard, especially the vampire, Abbey, to whom he is attracted (and it’s reciprocated). The gang has a few supernatural adversaries who pop up from time to time as well.
It’s fun, and has been collected by NBM in several volumes. Annoyingly, we seem to have the choice between full-size black-and-white volumes, or small-size color volumes. I go with the B&W volumes. If they ever produce full-sized color volumes, I’ll switch to those.
(Can you tell that it bugs the heck out of me when creators or publishers make unfortunate decisions about the format of an otherwise-handsome collection? All I can do is vote with my pocketbook, or complain about it here, so that’s what I do.)
Whew. And with that, it’s time to collapse.
Interesting article: Closing the Collapse Gap. It works from the premise that the US economy is likely to collapse in the not-too-distant future, and compares how well prepared the US is for such a collapse with how well prepared the Soviet Union was. (Summary: The US doesn’t do as well as the Soviets on that score.)
It’s a chilling read, and seems a plausible line of reasoning if the economy does collapse. (I know nothing more about the author or web site than that, but I don’t think the author needs any particular credibility to judge the plausibility of his presentation.)
I will admit that I basically have my head stuck in the sand when it comes to the prospect of the US collapsing (economically, politically, or otherwise). I don’t think a collapse is imminent, but I think it’s likely that sometime in the next hundred years the US will have to change or die. If nothing else, I think a hundred-year horizon should see us to the end of accessible oil reserves, and that will force some sort of fundamental change. Living as I am at the top of the world consumption curve (and if working at a major high-tech company isn’t the top of the consumption curve, then I don’t know what is), I realize that I personally am not well-prepared for such a collapse. That’s probably a big part of why I don’t like to think about it. 🙂
I think one of the take-away points of the article is the value of do-it-yourself knowhow. That’s one thing I cling to in the software biz: Acquiring the tools to do certain useful things myself if I need to, because convenient software packages can obsolesce before you know it. (This is one of the great things about Mac OS X: It has all the UNIXy scripting tools I’m used to using for my DIY projects.) Obviously in a collapsing economy, self-sufficiency is a prime virtue, and I agree with the author that American urban and suburban culture doesn’t contain much of the DIY nature.
Okay, back to burying my head in the sand…
Pickles is a rare comic strip in that it can make me laugh out loud. It’s the story of a retired married couple, Earl and Opal, and their extended family (their daughter Sylvia, her son Nelson, their cat and dog, and various other friends and relatives). I guess I would describe Earl and Opal as being tolerably married: Earl is a wise guy with too much time on his hands and not a whole lot of energy, while Opal is cheerful and motivated but won’t put up with Earl’s guff. (I’m reminded of the joke: “Retirement: Twice as much husband, half as much money.”)
The new collection came out last year: Let’s Get Pickled! It’s more of the same, but that’s not a bad thing. Creator Brian Crane has a clean line and a straightforward, Peanuts-like approach to panel layout. Most of the humor is in the characters rather than the pictures. This strip sums up Earl and Opal’s relationship pretty well:
The strip has lots of jokes about Earl and Opal’s sketchy memory and generally being elderly. I suppose whether all this is funny will depend on your point of view, but I usually find the humor to be tasteful:
Roscoe and Muffin are pretty hilarious at times, by the way. To some extent they’re similar to Percy and Pooch in Sinfest, although Roscoe is more befuddled than he is hyperactive, while Muffin can be downright mean to anyone but Opal. Sylvia I think mostly doesn’t know what to do with her parents, while Nelson loves his grandparents but frequently gets taken in by Earl trying to play tricks on him.
Earl is really the heart and soul of Pickles, which means it’s a very smart-alecky strip, which is probably why I like it:
Pickles reminds me a bit of Fox Trot in its cast of characters trying to one-up one another (or retaliate against those who already have), but I think Crane is a better artist, and his repertoire of humor is broader. It’s also not nearly as well known, which seems a shame. If you haven’t already, I suggest checking it out.
Earlier Pickles collections:
I don’t often make New Year’s resolutions, but it is a convenient time to try to think of things I can do to make my life better. It’s not so much that it’s a new year, but that I’ve just spent over a week on vacation and hopefully I have a little more energy to effect some changes.
My resolution this year can be summed up as “Eat less and write more.”
Or, as I put it to one fellow, my resolutions are means-based rather than ends-based.
Eat less: It’s not like my doctor didn’t tell me four years ago to eat less, and that trying to lose weight is through exercise is difficult because it’s very easy to stop exercising. My only success at losing weight through exercise is when I was working out a lot (4-5 times a week, for many months), and it comes back pretty easily when you stop. So, it’s time to try the other approach.
Write more: While it’s tempting to try to become a professional blogger like J.D., the fact is that I know I’m mainly writing for myself, and that my journal is just not compelling enough to bring in the sort of traffic that J.D. gets. So what I really mean here is to write more fiction. While I know I’m not at this point up to committing to the sort of regular writing that Deathless Pose [sic] demands, it would be nice to get to the point where I would be up to it.
And having finished writing this non-fictional (I hope) post, it’s time for lunch. How’s that for irony?
If there’s a true inheritor of the mantle of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, then I’d say it’s got to be Jef Mallett’s Frazz: Well-drawn (with more than a hint of Bill Watterson’s style), intelligent, and occasionally-off-the-wall, it’s got that tension between childlike fun and cynicism down pat.
The second collection came out last year: 99% Perspiration. The setting is Bryson Elementary School, and our titular hero is the janitor of that fine institution. But Frazz is something of a renaissance man, an avid bicyclist and jogger, he also earns money writing songs. And he’s got a crush on Miss Plainwell, one of the teachers. Bryson is populated by a variety of teachers, from the grouchy Mrs. Olsen to Frazz’ friend Mr. Burke (he and Frazz are just hopeless at basketball, by the way).
Frazz mostly plays goalie for the school’s student population, propping them up when they get run down and giving them perspective when their youthful exuberance and, uh, creativity run away with them. Frazz has a special fondness for Caulfield, a brilliant kid who finds school boring beyond belief, but who loves hanging out with Frazz.
Mallett’s one of the better artists working the comic strip page these days, and some of his gags have a certain wonderful simplicity:
Mallett’s sense of humor often takes an intellectual bent; you’ve gotta appreciate a guy who can mix zaniness with intellectual/cultural trivia:
Lest the comparisons to Calvin and Hobbes get laid on a little too heavily (and there are plenty more at the Wikipedia article), my feeling is that fundamentally Frazz is a funny, creative strip which feels more textured than most strips around today, and Mallett is just a darned good artist. While there are stylistic similarities, I assume they are mainly an homage to Watterson, whose strip I think Mallett admired (as did we all), as he pays homage to a few other people in the strip, too.
It took a while for Frazz to get my attention, but it’s got it now. It’s one of the gems of the comics page. Funny, charming. Check it out.
(You can also buy the first Frazz collection, Live at Bryson Elementary.)
During our Christmas day gift exchange last week I came away with, of all things, a squid whisk. It’s pretty nifty. So, for your viewing enjoyment:
Review of the film Happy Feet.
I thought it was borderline criminal for Debbi and me to have a week off and not go see at least one film, so today we went to see Happy Feet, the computer-animated film about singing penguins.
It’s a cute film: Mumble (voice – and apparently the eyes – of Elijah Wood) can’t sing, but he can dance up a storm. But the elders of his tribe of emperor penguins reject this as aberrant, and Mumble leaves his home in searh of, well, himself, as well as a way to win the heart of Gloria (Brittany Murphy). Along the way he makes friends from another group of penguins who don’t care about singing but appreciate his dancing, and he gathers clues to why his tribe’s fish seem to be disappearing.
The animation is quite good, although it looks like the creators decided to punt on rendering humans, since those that appear look like actual filmed humans (either that or animation has gotten even more sophisticated than I’d thought!).
The film also takes the interesting approach of putting Mumble in a completely untenable situation which he can only get out of by being, well, just as different as everyone thinks he is. This highlights one of the problems with the abundance of Pixar-style settings in which creatures or entities which aren’t intelligent or have human-like societies are portrayed as being basically human: Either they need to stick to their own world and only have limited impact on humans, ones that people can dismiss as accidents or their own bad memories, or they’re eventually going to do something which is going to cause some fundamental change in the world. Neither approach is really wrong, but until Happy Feet I don’t think anyone’s really committed to taking the latter approach.
Happy Feet is basically supposed to be cute and a bit of a tear-jerker, so if you hate films like that, then you should skip this one. But it’s a nice little uplifting movie otherwise, which can be a nice way to get away from it all for a couple of hours.
The singing and dancing bits ain’t bad, neither.
We’ve had a fun but low-key transition to the new year here. We once again attended Mark and Yvette’s Drunken Scrabble New Year’s Party. There was actually less Scrabble than usual, but no one seemed to mind. Several of us played Kill Doctor Lucky a couple of times, and then we switched around for a bit.
I played Speed Scrabble with a couple of groups, doing well with one group and poorly with another. I also played a game of Scrabble with Mark and Subrata, which wasn’t a recipe for a great outcome since both of them are better Scrabble players than I am. We were actually pretty close for most of the game until Subrata made a triple word play with the Z and pulled ahead, but I did finish ahead of Mark, which was a pleasant surprise.
I drank a surprising amount of champagne (for me), but stopped well before midnight (and we didn’t leave ’til after 1).
Debbi and I rang in the new year with a smooch and with silly New Year’s hats. (I think there’s even photographic evidence of the hats somewhere!)
A good way to wrap up the calendar year and (almost) my week off.
A look at the Boston Red Sox’ off-season moves.
My team, the Boston Red Sox, are entering the third season of what I like to think of as their rebuilding phase. After they won the 2004 World Series, they lost three key players (Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe and Johnny Damon) to free agency, and only retained Jason Varitek by handing him a large 4-year contract.
It’s been a rough couple of years: Two of their big free agent investments – SS Edgar Renteria and SP Matt Clement – have not really panned out. Clement is mired in a cycle of injury and ineffectiveness that leaves me wondering if he’ll ever be useful again. Renteria was shipped out after one season in a pair of trades that resulted in Coco Crisp patrolling center field (which isn’t such a bad thing). Meanwhile, Manny Ramirez and Trot Nixon have continued to age, David Ortiz has continued to be one of the best hitters in baseball, and the Sox brought in Josh Beckett and Mike Lowell from Florida, and while Lowell had a bounceback season, Beckett was very uneven.
The Sox have developed some in-house talent, such as Dustin Pedroia, Jon Papelbon and Jon Lester, and there’s more in the pipeline. Nonetheless, they did have some work to do this year, and here’s the scorecard so far:
Leaving:
Arriving:
Returning:
(Full free agent data can be found here, and recent Sox transactions here.)
I find it very hard to evaluate Red Sox transactions: With the second-largest payroll in baseball, they’re not quite playing the same budget-oriented game as most other teams. Is that Drew contract overpaying for an injury-prone outfielder, or is it a straightforward investment within the Sox’ budget? These last few years, I’ve found it easier on my brain to ignore the dollar signs and just evaluate the talent.
Because budget is only one constraint that baseball teams have to live within: The others are roster constraints (you can only have so many players on your team before you have to start cutting some to make room for others), and positional constraints (“You have to have a catcher because if you don’t you’re likely to have a lot of passed balls”, but of course most catchers can’t hit). So we can always consider whether the Sox have acquired good players, and look like they’re going to play their best players.
Anyway, with the Red Sox’ payroll and the savvy of their front office, they’re practically guaranteed make plenty of off-season headlines. That makes the winter almost as exciting for Sox fans as finishing below second place for the first time since 1997.
The Sox blew away all the competition in the $52M posting fee for the exclusive rights to negotiate with Matsuzaka (thus ensuring that the posting system will probably be overhauled if not scrapped next year), and then signed him to what I think is a surprisingly reasonable deal. One projection rates Matsuzaka as a very good starting pitcher in the Majors; if true, then he could be the true ace the Sox will need once Curt Schilling retires. If Beckett can work out his problems, then the Sox could have a nice rotation for the next few years.
Although, in 2007 the back end of the rotation is a bit of a concern, with Clement’s status unclear, Jon Lester recovering from cancer, and Wakefield at that age where he might collapse any year (he turned 40 in August, after all). Ace closer Jon Papelbon is slated to move into the rotation, but one wonders whether he might be more valuable in the bullpen, especially if he can’t make the transition smoothly. Still, the Sox are also bringing in several new bullpen arms, so they have options.
On the offensive side, the Sox are working through a bumpy negotiation process over J.D. Drew, who is a very good hitter with a length history of injury problems, and who’s had trouble passing his physical to finalize the deal. Whether Drew continues to be an offensive force through age 35 is a good question; it’s hard to say whether I’d be sad whether he finally gets signed or not. He’d probably be an upgrade over Trot Nixon in right field overall, though, and he supposedly can play center, too.
The Sox also brought in Julio Lugo, who is a pretty good shortstop. That’s a lot of money for a guy who looks to me like he might start a sharp decline at any time. But I think the Sox have soured on Pedroia at shortstop, which leaves them with few options for starter (and Alex Cora shouldn’t be one of them), so it might be their best option. Besides, if Lugo doesn’t completely go into the tank, then the trade market for fair-to-middling shortstops should be as strong as it has been in the last few years and the Sox could flip him for something useful.
It sounds like Pedroia might slot as the starter at second base, while some sort of Lowell/Ortiz/Kevin Youkilis tandem (plus whatever other spare hitters they can scrounge up) ought to be able to cover 3B, 1B and DH perfectly well.
In their third place finish in 2006, the Sox were outscored on the season, and finished 86-76. The Yankees might regress somewhat next year, but the Sox still need to improve to win their division. Matsuzaka, Drew and Lugo will help (assuming everyone’s healthy and performs up to their expected levels), so they’ll probably be a better team overall. But I think the Yankees will need to regress substantially for the Sox to make it a horse race. The Blue Jays are a pretty good team, too, but I suspect they’re going to regress a bit in 2007 as well.
All of which adds up to more of what we’ve seen lately: A Sox team which hasn’t quite gelled, but which feels like it’s on the cusp of being an AL powerhouse again. This is a team which could surprise in 2007, but after the World championship, I’d figured a 3-year rebuilding period was in order, so look for the Sox to work through a few more bumps and emerge in 2008.
Which is not to say that I’d be sad if they emerge a year earlier than I expect!