• Tangent: Superman’s Reign #5 of 12, by Dan Jurgen, Jamal Ingle & Robin Riggs, and Ron Marz, Fernando Pasarin & Matt Banning (DC)
• Astro City: The Dark Age book 1 HC, by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson & Alex Ross (DC/Wildstorm)
• The Perhapanauts #3, by Todd Dezago & Craig Rousseau (Image)

On the bright side, the week did deliver the hardcover collection of Astro City: The Dark Age book 1, collecting the first half of this longest of Astro City stories. I won’t go into detail about what Astro City is about (after all, you can read about it yourself), but as for this volume: The story covers the 1970s, a period of Astro City largely skipped over by earlier stories, except for the hint of the hero the Silver Agent, a sort of Captain America figure who is featured on a monument in the city dedicated to “our eternal shame”. This story fills in some of the blanks in the Agent’s story, while raising new questions. The prologue takes place in 1959, when the brothers Charles and Royal Williams witness a fight between the Honor Guard (Astro City’s equivalent of the Justice League or Avengers) and a crop of villains. We later learn that disaster befell the Williams family that evening. Jumping forward to 1972, Charles has become a cop who’s suspicious of the heroes, while Royal has become a small-time crook, and the two have a strained relationship. The book is nominally their story, although there’s so much more going on that they simply get more pages than any other set of characters, plus they narrate the tale, but it’s not entirely their story. They follow the tragedy which befalls the Silver Agent, and Charles gets wrapped up in a police corruption ring while Royal hooks up with one of the city’s crime lords. The second half of the volume grows increasingly complex with threats to the city and the world, mysterious figures pursuing strange agendas, and the big mystery of the Agent. This volume ends in 1977, and the second volume will likely cover the next 5 years. Astro City has long been a favorite of mine, and it’s fair to say I think it’s the best superhero comic of the last 15 years. But The Dark Age isn’t the book at its best. There’s too much going on, and with tantalizing glimpses of neat stuff going on, but not a feel of a whole lot of progress. A big part of the problem is that neither of the Williams brothers are very compelling as characters, certainly nowhere near the protagonists of the two earlier long-form stories, Confession (my favorite volume in the series) or The Tarnished Angel. They’re realistic and sympathetic, but the story goes for scale and intricacy rather than depth and character, and that doesn’t play to the series’ strength. Indeed, the series has often used the feeling of scale and depth of “real” superhero stories as a mere springboard for a moving character piece, so turning the series’ formula on its head just makes it feel a little less special. And the intricacy probably makes it a lot less accessible to new readers. All that said, there’s still a lot here to delight the regular readers of Astro City, as mysteries of the city’s past are brought to light. And the book reads much better in a single shot than as a serial, especially given how slowly the series has come out in recent years. Brent Anderson’s art is stylish and dynamic as always, chock-full of fun character designs and settings (by Anderson and Alex Ross) and a terrific coloring job. I guess The Dark Age is only disappointing by comparison with earlier Astro City volumes, which frankly were often just plain amazing. It’s still pretty good and rewards re-reading. And as this is only the first half of the story, I have to allow for the chance that there will be a great payoff to all this set-up in the end. Meanwhile, this is all we’ve got, and with the series’ erratic schedule we can’t know when we’ll see the next set of issues in the series. Hopefully it won’t be too long.

I’ve actually wanted to ride the light rail for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it because, well, light rail in the valley doesn’t really go places I want to go, and it’s a lot slower than driving (3-4 times slower). The big problem is that downtown San Jose just isn’t a destination for me; I go there maybe 3 times a year, usually for fairly random things. Otherwise light rail mostly goes through residential and office neighborhoods.

However, I do enjoy riding the train just for the experience, and also to see where it goes and what the neighborhoods are like. It goes through a lot of back-avenue areas in Mountain View before running down the middle of streets in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose, so there was a lot to see that I hadn’t seen before, not to mention watching people getting on and off. A lot off teenagers ride the train and switch at the Tasman station, probably to go to the Great Mall in Milpitas (another non-destination for me).

Downtown Campbell has changed a lot since I lived there in 1999-2001: Aside from the light rail, they’ve built several new commercial buildings and a parking garage, so there are more stores and restaurants worth visiting. It’s no longer a depressing little avenue of antique stores with minimal foot traffic. We had lunch at Stacks and poked our heads into several stores and enjoyed the lovely weather. Then we headed back to the train and reversed our commute.

This probably sounds like a pretty weird day out, but I enjoyed it. Why did I enjoy it? That’s a good question. I think I’ve always enjoyed watching the ebb and flow of the city, seeing how things have been built up and torn down and looking for old things among the newer things. There’s a lot to see in this way when riding the T in Boston, and while there’s less out here there are still some interesting tidbits: The closed-and-abandoned building and parking lot that looks like it used to be an activity center, with basketball and volleyball nets in the parking lot. The older rail lines on which the light rail was built, whose remnants are still lying around. The vacant storefronts in downtown San Jose, just a block away from a fairly-busy dining district. And, just sitting on the train being taken somewhere is a lot more relaxing than driving. Slower, but more relaxing.

I think Debbi finds my interest in taking the light rail for no particular reason to be pretty odd, although she was the one to suggest indulging my weird desire a couple of days ago (though I’d talked about it a few times in the past). But I enjoy doing things with no particular aim in mind from time to time. And at least this one got us out of the house!

However, apparently Josh Hamilton put on quite a show at the Derby yesterday, and Joe Sheehan wrote an excellent article about it.

“The House That Hamilton Knocked Down” - classic.

It’s a cute film. It does a terrific job of portraying the eponymous character’s unending life as nearly the last living thing on a used-up, abandoned Earth. Without dialogue, but with plenty of body language, WALL-E conveys his begrudging acceptance of his workaday life, with his hopes and dreams behind it. And when the more advanced robot Eve shows up on a mission, his realization that his dreams could come true is quite poignant. From there the film turns into a madcap adventure as we find out what happened to humanity, and WALL-E and Eve try to complete Eve’s mission and figure each other out (not necessarily in that order.

The film is at its best when it’s dealing with the robots - and there are plenty of them - but at its worst when dealing with the humans, and what they’ve become after 700 years. Okay, it’s a cautionary tale about out consumer culture, but it has all the finesse of a sledgehammer to the forehead, with people having become obese and slothful, entirely reliant on stimuli from the computer network. It’s not like it’s particularly new, either; except for the fat angle, it’s pretty much the same premise as that of Adventure Comics #379, which was published around the time I was born. I think if they’d come up with a more nuanced explanation for humanity’s absence it would have been a much better film.

Still, the robots are at the front and center, and that makes it a fun film despite its flaws. WALL-E is a terrific-looking creation, expressive and sympathetic, and Eve isn’t far behind him. And the film is touching and funny and exciting as WALL-E and Eve try to get together. The animation is stunning, of course, and the music is very distinctive compared to earlier Pixar films. Overall, a fun film.

Topping it off - actually leading it off - is the short before the film, “Presto”, which is absolutely hilarious, as good as any old Warner Bros cartoon. Sometimes it seems like the shorts are better than the features!

Leftfield being down always stresses me out more than I feel it should.

Anyway, send me e-mail via this site in the meantime.

We’re experiencing another heat wave in the Bay Area this week, although it’s not as bad as the last two; highs in the low 90s where I am, and temperatures down to a bearable 80 degrees by 7 pm, and in the low 70s by bedtime. It should break on Friday and be a nice weekend.

I finally went out and bought a new garbage disposal for the kitchen sink, as the old one has been busticated for a couple of years. I hired a contractor through Sears to install it, as it seemed like a little more work than I wanted to put in. I’m willing to screw with the electrical system in my house for fun and education, but I don’t really want to mess with the water system, as I think I could really do some damage if I screw it up. Anyway, the contractor’s coming out tomorrow. Hopefully it will all go smoothly.

And that’s the news.

• Fables #74, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
• Legion of Super-Heroes #43, by Jim Shooter, Francis Manapul & Livesay (DC)
• Avengers/Invaders #3 of 12, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Steve Sadowski (Marvel)
• Echo #3, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
• Hellboy: The Crooked Man #1 of 3, by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben (Dark Horse)
• The Boys #20, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
• Star Trek: Assignment Earth #3 of 12, by John Byrne (IDW)
• The Sword: Fire vol 1 TPB, by Joshua Luna & Jonathan Luna (Image)

The Luna brothers’ last project was Girls a suspense/horror story in which a small town was enclosed in a force field while being overrun with an army of cloned girls who wanted to kill all the women in town. It was mainly a psychological drama about how the poor souls trapped in the town dealt with their situation (mostly not very well). Their latest project is The Sword, which is more adventure than horror, but contains the same elements of suspense that were present in Girls. Our heroine, Dara Brighton, is a paraplegic living with her family. One evening three strangers barge into their house, accuse Dara’s father of being their lifelong nemesis, display fantastic powers, and kill her family - and nearly her. However, the ensuing fire drops her below the house, where she grasps an ancient sword which not only cures her paralysis, but gives her super powers of her own. This being a suspense story there are hijinks, such as being hunted by the police, and losing the sword at an inopportune time. And the volume wraps up with an explanation of where the sword came from, and why those three were chasing Dara’s father to get it. The Luna brothers’ style is based in a realistic looking and feeling world, into which these fantastic things are dropped. Jonathan Luna’s layouts are simple and understated, with uncomplicated finishes, usually with a constant line width in his inks, making the art seem even more unpretentious. As with Girls, The Sword’s story focuses on the characters’ reactions to the amazing things they’re experiencing, which are typically enough to push most of them to their breaking points. All of which makes their stories stand out pretty well from the rest of the comics being published. It doesn’t necessarily make them great comics, though; they are, after all, pretty firmly grounded in pulpy suspense fiction, just with more fallible protagonists. And the character bits take a back seat to the adventure bits, which hold back the story’s full potential. The flaw in the art is that it’s so unassuming that the fantastic events themselves seem unassuming, so their impact is lessened. So it’s entertaining stuff, but it’s different without being really better than your mainstream superhero comic. Bloodier, certainly (the death count in The Sword is both significant and graphic). But it’s worth a look for a change of pace from the usual comics rigamarole.

I look around in the kitchen but don’t see anything. I also go look around upstairs, with the other cats following my around. They’re also a little agitated and want to smell Blackjack when we put him back on the floor.

We were pretty baffled about what had gotten into him. My best guesses were that he was feeling sick, or that he was freaked out by the occasional day-after firecracker we heard, or (and here’s a pleasant thought) that there’s an intruder in the house. The last thought wasn’t made better by noticing that the dome light in my car was on for some reason, although it’s possible we either turned it on accidentally today, or that we turned it on last night while we were stuck in traffic coming back from fireworks (when we often turned off the engine and played some rummy since traffic was at a dead stop for minutes at a time).

However, we eventually heard another firecracker go off, and Blackjack quickly high-tailed it upstairs and hid in the closet. So I’m pretty sure he’s just scared to death of fireworks, while the other cats are a little agitated by them but not too freaked out. We’ve been out of town for the last two July Fourths so we haven’t recently seen what he thinks about the fireworks.

So that’s made for a rather creepy evening. But hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow.

I feel really bad for Blackjack, though. Poor guy.

Anyway, the bike’s been making lots of funny sounds recently, and the rear rim was clearly out of true, so I wanted it to get fixed up, since I’m biking in to work twice a week this year.

Well, it turns out the rim was not just bent, it was cracking. When I picked it up they showed me how two of the holes where the spokes attach to the rim were cracking across the rim, which was clobbering its structural integrity. So I had them rebuild the wheel with a new rim, and I biked in yesterday. And wow what an improvement: The bike is nearly silent, and the ride feels much smoother and easier. Combined with the other basic maintenance, such as turning the gears, it almost feels like a brand new bike!

The guy at the shop said I got my money’s worth out of the old rim, so I guess I can’t complain. Hopefully I can go a few years without any significant trouble from the bike, now. Because next time I start having major problems with it, I might just replace it.

Space: 1999 was a childhood favorite of mine, and I still had fond memories of it in young adulthood - but at that point memories are all they were, since I hadn’t seen an episode in years at that point. In the 90s I found a couple of videotapes of episodes at an SF convention and plonked down some ridiculous price to pick them up.

They’re, you know, not very good.

The acting could be best described as “wooden”. Martin Landau shows less range than William Shatner at his most Shatnerian, Barbara Bain seems vaguely similar to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, and Barry Morse seems like a slightly drugged Isaac Asimov. Eeg.

The story involves a carniverous, hypnotic, disappearing space alien which lives in a sargasso of spaceships which somehow moved itself from the edge of Earth’s solar system to a location much further away. (Though remember that this is the series in which the mon is blasted out of Earth’s orbit at faster-than-light speeds, and yet which slows down to sublight speeds when it enters another solar system.) The creature is defeated through nonsensical means (with an axe).

And honestly this is pretty typical of an episode of the first season of the series. The second season turned from emphasizing the horror of outer space to becoming an action/adventure series, but it wasn’t really either an improvement or a decline; the whole series was just fatally flawed.

And yet, watching this episode tonight there are brief moments when I think, “This could have been cool.” The laser pistols are neat. The scenes with the Eagles flying above Moonbase Alpha evoke a certain feeling, that humans are surviving even in this barren environment with only a bleak hope. The notion that by this episode they’d been drifting in space for over two years. And of course the Eagles have that cool modular design. There’s also a throwaway moment when Commander Koenig (Landau) mentions that his predecessor on the base had left a bunch of junk in his office which Koenig was going through and salvaging, which made me think that of course any human habitat is going to build up junk as people fail to clean it out, but in these peoples’ circumstances that trash could be treasure indeed. The series is completely oblivious to the more profound implications of these little ideas, it’s just an adventure series. But still.

Sometimes I daydream what it would take to try to resurrect Space: 1999 as a serious science fiction series. It’s a mind game, since the series is so ludicrous by any serious SF standards, far more so than the original Battlestar Galactica was. You could have an experiment with an alien device go awry and drop the moon into the network of wormholes across the galaxy. Really play up the challenge of trying to keep 300-odd people alive on the moon using technology which we might actually achieve in a century or so, and how their mental state changes when living in isolation from the rest of humanity for years. Have some really alien aliens, not just guys with big hair and forehead bumps, or even just pull in the old chestnut of humans on Earth just being an offshoot of an older, starfaring species (which popped up in the original series, too). I’m not saying it would be a great series, but what would it take to try to make it a good one?

All very silly, I know. Space: 1999 will remain a bad TV series which has been mostly forgotten by almost everyone who ever watched it. But somehow there’s just enough there to make me think stuff like this, that maybe there’s something here that could have worked, in other hands, given a different treatment.

After all, something makes me pop that videotape in once in a while to watch an episode. That’s not something I ever feel moved to do with, say, The Six Million Dollar Man.

Check it out.

Incidentally, the original GrimJack series from First Comics had the interesting twist later in its run of having GrimJack be reincarnated repeatedly, and after 50-odd issues about the original character he jumped forward 100 years into a new body. That new character’s arc played itself out over about 30 issues, and then the plan was to have him jump forward again, but First went out of business before that happened. These new stories (Killer Instinct and The Manx Cat) take place early in the career of the first GrimJack, so they’re really prequels to the original series. Which is a little disappointing since it means there’s not so much Ostrander can do to move the character forward, but they’re still fun reads.

So my brain hasn’t been in a journalling place lately. But maybe soon.

I am looking forward to the upcoming long weekend, though!

This would be bad enough, but on top of that Debbi’s still sick. She was laid low by a cold or something on Tuesday, missed two days of work, and although she’s got some of her energy back and her sore throat is gone, she’s now got a terrible cough along with some congestion. We’d though of going to see a movie today (to get their air conditioning), but Debbi was afraid she’d have a coughing fit in the theater. And she’s spent a chunk of the afternoon asleep on the couch.

To add insult to injury, I realized the Red Sox were on TV today, but Daisuke Matsuzaka melted down in the first two innings and the Sox lost to the Cardinals 9-3.

So, a pretty brutal Saturday. I’m hoping it will cool off a little earlier tonight, and that the heat wave will pass tomorrow. Of course, yesterday the weather report thought it would pass today, so I don’t know. Hopefully soon, though.

Prompted by an article in the Washington Post, J.C. Bradbury, whose blog Sabernomics I read and enjoy, doesn’t understand why it’s more useful than other metrics, and questions the need for the concept of “replacement level”. Moreover, he finds VORP to be socially exclusive:

I view VORP as an insider language, and by using it you can signal that you are insider. It’s like speaking Klingon at a Star Trek convention. I can signal to others who speak the language that I am one of you. But, the danger of VORP is that once you bring it up the discussion goes down the wrong path as the uninitiated have reason to feel they are being told they are not as smart as the person making the argument. It’s like constantly bringing up the fact that you only listen to NPR or watch the BBC news at dinner parties. The response is likely going to be the same, “well fuck you too, you pretentious asshole!”

I don’t really understand why he finds this such a big deal, especially since in the very same article he tosses out a couple of similarly-advanced concepts, OPS+ and MRP. OPS+ is a very useful stat, but I’d hazard that most people who know what OPS+ is will also be familiar with VORP. (Conversely, if your casual baseball fan doesn’t know what VORP is, it may be a stretch to expect him to know what OPS is, never mind OPS+.)

Like any stat, you don’t so much need to understand the finer points of VORP as just have a feel for what it represents and what its values mean. The key concept is that a VORP of 0 indicates that a player’s hitting is only minimally valuable at his position, and if it were any lower his team would be better off releasing him and calling up practically anyone from the minors instead.

Others have written some excellent posts in response to Bradbury. I especially liked this one by Tangotiger, but this one by Phil Birnbaum has an excellent perspective by putting VORP in economic terms, which is Bradbury’s stock-in-trade.

Admittedly, VORP and other advanced stats are relatively geeky, in that you’re not likely to care unless you’re pretty seriously interested in baseball research. But then, Bradbury’s blog is all about baseball research, so it seems to me that he ought to be comfortable using the more common advanced stats. I guess we all have our limits of how far down the path we want to go - my own eyes start to lose focus when we get around to WXRL - but picking on VORP seems silly to me, since I think it’s a pretty straightforward and intuitive stat. It has its flaws, but then, they all do.

I realized as I was bringing down Res Publica that these two games are sort of the two halves of Civilization: Antike is the building-cities-and-moving-armies part, while Res Publica is the acquiring-cards-and-trading part. I find the trading to be the most interesting part of the game, so I have a preference for Res Publica; I think I’d like Antike a little more if it featured a little more conflict than it does. (For what it’s worth, I’ve never really cared for Civilization.)

Whump came by later in the evening to say hi since he was heading home after hitting the comic book store. And the cats came down and said hi to people, especially Josh, whom they know has fed them in the past. So a good time was had by all. I might try hosting every other week for a while, barring other commitments.

On the down side, Debbi has been hit with a nasty illness, with a sore throat and a bad cough, and has been laid up for a couple of days. It really sucks, she’s been miserable. (Though she did get a few hours of Roulette lying on her lap, which is a rarity indeed!) Hopefully another good night’s sleep and she’ll be just about back to normal, but unfortunately it might be a couple more days.

By the time I saw Bruce, the Celtics had already completed the trade for Kevin Garnett, and Bruce said his friends then were saying, “You know, if you don’t think you’re going to use all those tickets, I could take some of them off your hands…” Bruce assured them that he’d be just fine with them.

Seven months later, the Celtics are NBA champs, ending a 22-year drought. I know Bruce got to at least one playoff game, and that he’s a happy guy, a true Boston sports fan. No doubt my friend Rob is a happy camper, too.

I’m not a basketball fan, but when we saw the Celtics were up 30 points (!!) in the third quarter, we ended up watching most of the rest of the game. Even if it’s not your sport, you don’t often get a chance to see a team from your city win a championship.

Well, unless it’s the 21st century and you’re from Boston. With 6 titles among the 4 major sports in this century, it’s a good time to be a Boston sports fan.

Now it’s time for the Bruins to represent, right?

It’s the story of Antimony Carver, a girl who starts school at Gunnerkrigg Court, and the adventures she has. It has robots, ghosts, gods, heroes, faeries, and schoolwork. Annie’s laid-back demeanor is an effective counterpoint to the fantastic things she witnesses. At first I was a little doubtful about Siddell’s artistic chops due to the prdominantly simplistic art style, but this sequence put those concerns to rest. Creepy!

It’s also going to be collected in hardcover, assuming the publisher’s financial problems don’t deep-six it.

A few of my favorite pages in the strip:

• The Minotaur
• This freaky sequence about Zimmy and Gamma, two strange girls I haven’t figured out yet
• Antimony and Reynardine sneak into a robot complex
• Annie and Kat meet a wizard of some familiarity (guest strip by Ali Graham)
• A faerie learning how to be human

Anyway, fun stuff. Check it out.