Michael Rawdon's webjournal
I’d originally planned to bike into work today, but I wussed out. It was cloudy and cold this morning, with a chance of rain in the forecast. I knew if I drove in then it would be nice and sunny out, but if I biked in then I’d get rained on going home.
Well, it was nice and sunny over lunch, but it’s glowering pretty good out there right now, so I may have made a good call.
Well, maybe later this week.
That’s another busy weekend in the books.
Saturday I suggested that we go play minigolf. We ended up making it a little date afternoon, having lunch at City Pub, then golf at Malibu. Then we drove up a little farther to Redwood Shores where we tried out the Milkshake Werks which was quite yummy, and recommended for anyone who’s not getting enough ice cream in their diet. I actually found this place because we recently got a card at work with which we can get discounts at many area restaurants and services, and they were listed at the card’s web site. I probably would never have found it otherwise! Good deal.
Sunday was the final tournament of this year’s ultimate frisbee season. It was cool, sunny, and quite windy, which made for some very long points and erratic throws. I didn’t play my best, but I had a good time anyway. Our team won a game by 4, lost a game by 4, and lost a game by 1, so we were pretty much the average team. I was wiped out by the end, but then I always am if I play the whole tournament. Debbi came with to watch me play, and we stayed for the post-game barbecue. At home we collapsed on the couch for a while; I ended up getting a little sunburned during the game, which probably wiped me out even more than just running around.
In the evening I managed to get up long enough to put together a bookcase we bought Saturday at Ikea to replace some plastic cubes we’d been using to store some stuff in the corner. It fit perfectly and gives us a little more space to store things. We’re definitely getting a little cramped in my house, and are thinking a little about looking for a new house, although not really doing anything about it yet. (The main deterrent for me is not getting a new house, but preparing the old house to be sold. I predict it’s going to be a pain in the ass.) Anyway, we keep doing little reorganizations and getting rid of stuff and it’s worked out so far. But it’s a temporary solution.
We both ended up coughing a bit in the evening, and today Debbi reports that she feels like she’s coming down with a cold, which is no fun. Hopefully it will blow over quickly.
I remembered to do some stretching last night, so I wasn’t as stiff this morning as I usually am. I could still use a walk to limber up the muscles, though.
For my next trick, I’ll start biking in to work again!
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The second story arc of The Brave and the Bold wraps up in disappointing fashion: George Pérez left the book after #10, and while Jerry Ordway is another of my five favorite pencillers, I don’t think he works as well with the madcap adventure yarns that Mark Waid is writing here as well as Pérez did. And this six-issue arc wasn’t that interesting: It involved a villain named Megistus collecting mystical artifacts in order to reshape the universe, which is not exactly a new storyline, and served to be little more than an excuse to romp randomly through the DC universe – much less interesting than the coherent single story of the first six issues. Worst of all, Megistus’ motivations are supposed to be an attempt to avoid the upcoming Final Crisis (assuming he was telling the truth, that is), which is as disappointing a tie-in as I can recall in recent memory. Sigh.
Not that it hasn’t been an enjoyable arc on some levels – there have been some good character bits and the gorgeous artwork – but it’s just not nearly as good as the first arc. I can see that Waid was trying to do something a little different, but I think a multi-character team-up book needs a tight framework in which to operate or else it just falls apart. Indeed, I think such books succeed best when a hodge-podge of characters are pulled together into a very tight, sensical story, but the loose framework of this second arc made it feel much less coherent, and thus much less enjoyable. |
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Two other series concluded their arc this week, with much greater success. Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag marks John Ostrander’s return to one of his more artistically successful series. The Suicide Squad is a covert government organization which forcibly recruits villains to go on missions; if they succeed, their sentences are reduced; if they fail, they probably end up dying on the mission anyway. This series picked up where the original series left off, even bringing back a character long assumed deceased. After careful set-up taking us back to the days of the earlier series, we’re also introduced to the tension between Amanda Waller, the leader of the Squad, and General Wade Eiling, an SOB who eventually had his brain transplanted into the body of an invulnerable, super-strong android.
Ostrander always made the Squad work because not only was his unflinching in killing off some of the characters – including the occasional major one – but he maintained a careful balance of distrust and respect among the main characters, both heroes and villains, and dug deeply into their motivations. Everyone here has some sort of pathology, as you might expect from people who dress up in spandex to commit or fight crimes. A couple of the heroes attached to the Squad are a little less nutty than the others – Bronze Tiger is arguably the most ‘pure’ of the heroes – but everyone has a point of view of an agenda which brings them into conflict with the others at some point. Anyway, this story wraps up with a mission – to which Eiling is now attached as a convicted villain – going horribly wrong. Of course, this being the Squad and not the Justice League, a decidedly different form of mayhem ensues, and it all wraps up rather neatly. Nifty character bits abound, especially those involving Deadshot and the new Captain Boomerang, the writing is sharp, and the art is mostly terrific, although inker Robin Riggs pencils a few of the last pages, and they’re noticeably stiff next to those of Javier Pina. But all things considered, this series is made of win. If it results in a new Suicide Squad ongoing series, I would totally be on board with it. |
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The first Annihilation series was totally awesome, and consequently was a hard act to follow. Annihilation Conquest doesn’t quite reach its heights, but it’s still a heck of a lot of fun.
Basically, the Phalanx takes over the Kree empire, seals it in an impenetrable bubble (dozens of light-years wide!) and starts infecting all beings inside with its technovirus, including Nova, Drax, Gamora, Blastaar, etc. Pockets of rebellion persist, primarily a team of misfits led by the former Star-Lord who seek to bring down the Babel Spire which is generating the field. Meanwhile Quasar – sister of the most recent Captain Marvel – find the High Evolutionary and a resurrected Adam Warlock (again?) and strives to enlist them, but the Evolutionary betrays her and puts the mind of the Phalanx’s leader – whose identity might elicit a groan from longtime Marvel readers, but seems almost obligatory to me – in Adam’s body. In the conclusion, Nova shows up with the cavalry, Star-Lord’s team makes its last stand, and Ronan the Accuser implements his final solution to the problem of the Phalanx infestation. As grand, “last, desperate hope” climaxes go, this one is pretty good. A lot of people really loved Star-Lord’s strike force, especially Groot and Rocket Raccoon, but I enjoyed the weightier characters, such as Nova and Wraith (I wish we’d seen more of the latter). I appreciate Star-Lord as a sort of tragic hero, having lost all his powers in defending the galaxy from an insane Herald of Galactus, but I don’t think the rest of his team is a very good foil for his character. I guess we’ll see how well it works in a longer form in the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy series, though. Overall, Marvel’s revitalization of their space characters has been a smashing success, relying on good stories, clever plotting, and well-defined characters who stay in character. The mess which is the rest of Marvel’s line of titles would do well to watch what these guys are doing, because they’re doing it right. |
This is pretty neat: Palo Alto Online has historical notes on many neighborhoods on the southern SF peninsula. For example, Castro City in Mountain View, or Loyola Corners in Los Altos, or Fair Oaks in Menlo Park.
Of course, my own house isn’t in a historical neighborhood. We’re newfangled sorts around hereabouts, I guess.
It’s strange that the former town of Mayfield hardly rates a mention. Mayfield used lie between Mountain View and Palo Alto, and it eventually was absorbed by the two other cities when it was outgrown by them. The southern half of Palo Alto was mostly Mayfield, and I believe California Avenue was Mayfield’s downtown, which is why Palo Alto effectively has two downtown districts. The now-defunct Mayfield Mall at the north end of Mountain View was named for it, and is the only location I know of which still bears the Mayfield name (though there may be others I just don’t know about).
The other night while the Yankees were routing the Red Sox, Alex Rodriguez hit his 522nd career home run, moving into 15th place on the all-time home run list. Combined with an article in this morning’s paper, I realized that there are actually a cluster of career stats milestones likely to be passed this year:
Of all the milestones on this list, I think Maddux’s are the most impressive. He’s not thought of as a strikeout artist since he’s not a classic power pitcher, but he’s 11th on the all-time list. He is, however, 52nd on the list for walk rate (and 2nd among active pitchers), which means he’s been both effective and efficient, which is why he’s been pitching for so long.
Maddux’s last great season was 2002, but he was 36 in that year, and he’s been a consistent league-average pitcher since then. Anyone who can be an average player in their 40s at the highest level of professional baseball is clearly doing something right. He still only walks about 1 guy every 8 (!!) innings, which is just amazing, so I could see him doing this for several more years. He doesn’t get a lot of fanfare since he left the Braves, but he’s still one of the all-time greats.
On the hitting side, Griffey and Ramirez are busy polishing their admission tickets to Cooperstown (or whatever bad metaphor you’d care to apply), but ARod is clearly going to blast through all sorts of records over the next 8 years, so we’d better save up some superlatives for him. Like Barry Bonds, he’s not a widely-loved player, but being likable is rarely a requirement for playing Major League baseball.
Went to dinner tonight with my friend Trish. Trish is another one of the “olden days” journallers, having started her journal, Rant and Rave, back around the same time I started Gazing Into The Abyss. We became friends when I moved to the area, and I introduced her to her “evil twin” Lucy, and they became fast friends. Trish moved away a few years ago to be with her boyfriend, then moved back here last year, and this is the first time I’ve seen her.
We went to Cascal, a local tapas restaurant I haven’t yet tried! Very yummy! Expensive, though!
Trish was her usual cheerful-yet-smartassed self. I think she’s happy to have a job in the tech sector and not to have the godawful long commute she had the last time she lived here. Plus she has two cats, which makes her happy. She’s more in touch with many of the “old time” journallers than I am, so I got the scoop on some people I haven’t heard from or about in years. And mostly we just caught up on what we’ve each been doing for the last few years.
We should do this again sometime.
My regular comics shop, Comics Conspiracy, closed for the weekend in order to do a major remodel – the biggest they’ve done in the 9 years I’ve been going there: They replaced the old dark red carpet with a lighter brown carpet, and rearranged the bookcases so they’re all up along the walls rather than forming little alcoves along the side of the store. As a result they were able to move the back issue bins to the middle of the room, providing much wider aisles on either side. Add a few new bookshelves and the place looks brighter and as nice as it has while I’ve been going.
The owner, Ryan, started as an employee there a couple of years before I moved to the area, and he’s been there through two previous owners. He bought the place from the last owner, Ken, last year. (Ken still comes by to work every so often, but his regular job doesn’t let him come by on Wednesdays anymore, so I rarely see him, which is too bad because Ken’s a fun guy, but that’s the way it goes, I guess.) Ken was into action figures and statues, while Ryan is more of a pure comics guy, and that’s the way he’s taking the store (though he says some action figures are still good to have to sell to kids).
(Incidentally, the store’s owner when I first started going there was the late comics writer Doug Miers. He published comics through a separate Comics Conspiracy imprint. I never really knew him, though, since he sold the store to Ken soon after I started going there.)
I remember their last really big remodel, when they moved the new comics racks from the front of the store to the back. It took me a while to realize they did it so that customers would have to walk through the store and see all the merchandise when picking up their weekly books. “Retail 101” Ryan called this when I mentioned this to him tonight.
I commented when I walked in that the place smelled like new carpet and paint – a smell I said is good for 2 months or 200 high school students, whichever comes first, since there’s a high school across the street.
The comic book market collapse of the late 90s – not to mention the economic ups and downs since then – have wreaked havoc on area comics stores, but several good ones have survived. Hopefully CC will continue to survive and prosper.
Here are some photos of the store. The guy in black in the second photo is Ryan, who was still restocking the shelves when I went by.
I just happened to take these photos when the store was nearly empty. There were about a half-dozen people when I arrived, and a couple more showed up after I snapped these. Once in a while I go by after running errands over lunch and there are several other Apple employees also picking up their weekly fix there.
As you’ve probably noticed, I’m now into my fourth week of updating at least once daily. Yeah I know, I’m as astonished as you are! I’m not sure where this flurry of blogging came from – maybe I just needed to recharge my batteries for a while. I’d certainly bottomed out during the first three months of this year.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up. I’ll surely miss a day sometime in the next month, perhaps when I have a really busy day at work and gaming or a baseball game or something scheduled at night. Who knows?
I’ve been getting a very small uptick of visitors during the flurry of activity. I’m not sure whether it’s significant (i.e., actual new readers) or just happens to coincide with more people happening to come in via search engines. My guess is probably the latter.
I know that FP will likely never be a popular blog. When I started journalling blogs were still called “journals”, and they were mostly chronicles of the authors’ lives. In the early 2000s they started getting more specialized, and it’s pretty hard to write a popular general-interest journal these days. But every time I think about trying to narrow my focus, I think, “Well, I don’t want to write about just comic books, or just science fiction, or just music.” And I know I don’t write often enough to keep a multiple blogs going with enough content for each one, so splitting up into several blogs won’t work for me. I also want to write about my personal life from time to time, since it’s often handy to go back and see what I was doing around thus-and-such a date, or when I last visited thus-and-such a place.
It’s slightly vexing to me that I haven’t gotten at least a little more traffic from my comic book entries, which I’ve been writing weekly since I started this site. Of course, that might be because they suck. :/ (I do get a fair amount of search engine traffic from people who find the cover images in my reviews.) That’s dissuaded me somewhat from following my original plan of also doing occasional music reviews here – particular because I find it very difficult to write meaningful music reviews – although I’ve been thinking about dusting off that plan in the near future.
Anyway. I’ve also gone back and added tags to all my old entries, which I find kind of nifty (tags for an entry are listed below the title, on the line after the categories). I might add a tag cloud to the sidebar, too; I haven’t decided.
My next medium-term plan is to come up with a new visual look for the site, as this one is wearing a little old. I might go with a more minimalist style, although I do like having some color around here.
Anyway, as always I mainly write here for myself, because writing entertains me and helps me organize my thoughts, and as I said it’s nice to have a record of these things. But it’s nice to have readers, too. My blog isn’t going to be all things to all people, but I do like to connect every now and then with someone new who shares some of my admittedly-peculiar tastes. Doing so has resulted in some of my most rewarding experiences on the net.
Like Valerie D’Orazio, I decided to pass on Titans #1. (Rachelle Goguen and others weren’t so lucky, apparently.)
To me, though, the interesting matter isn’t whether the book sucked or not, or why DC keeps bothering trying to revive the title so often (trademarks, if nothing else). After all, the beloved (and deservedly so) New Teen Titans from the early 1980s was itself the third attempt to do something with the Teen Titans property. So why did it succeed so brilliantly, and why have other attempts failed so badly?
It wasn’t all Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, was it?
I think what Wolfman and Pérez tapped into with New Teen Titans was not just a good mix of characters, it was a mix of characters all of whom were at a major point of transition in their lives. The first two attempts at a Teen Titans comic book featured characters who were teenagers and who were essentially stuck as teenagers: They were in the shadows of their mentors, and essentially unable to break free of them because, well, they were teenagers, and continued to be teenagers for quite a few years. In “real world” terms, it was because the characters weren’t really allowed by DC editorial to age until the 1970s, and it took Wolfman and Pérez – creators of enough stature that they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with the characters – to take them into adulthood.
So then, in The New Teen Titans we have four established heroes who actually do break free of their mentors and establish themselves as adults:
The other four major Titans of the Wolfman/P̩rez run РStarfire, Cyborg, Raven and Terra Рare new characters, but are all going through their own phases of maturation, and they play off of the four established characters, making for a dynamic set of personalities who happen to be at a complicated stage of their lives. Result: Drama and character development, even without the superhero action-adventure.
The Titans revivals since then have generally featured the same characters as adults, often with new characters mixed in, but have been far less successful by any yardstick. And the reason for that, I believe, is that you just can’t take established characters – especially iconic ones – through the life-altering transition to adulthood twice. You can unmarry Wonder Girl, rename her Troia, change her costume, or whatever (and DC has done all of that and more), but she’s an adult now, and even if her life is pretty screwed up, the stories you tell about her are going to be fundamentally different than those Wolfman and Pérez were able to tell.
The lesson to be learned here is that it’s not necessarily putting together the right mix of characters which makes the book work. It’s what you do with those characters that matters, not just sending them off on adventures, but illuminating them and changing and growing (or even diminishing) them in some way. The Titans books since the Wolfman/Pérez days may have been rollicking superhero action yarns (I’ve read a few of them and haven’t generally found them to be awful, just kinda… there), but they didn’t have that underlying sense of lives transforming because that’s the way life is which marked The New Teen Titans. (And, to be sure, once that title finishing bringing its characters to adulthood, it slid into mediocrity pretty quickly.)
We should be glad to have had the Wolfman/Pérez Titans, because they absolutely nailed what the book should have been, and produced one of the great superhero comics as a result. (And we should give them props for being great creators who had the skill to recognize how to deliver on the series’ potential.) But also because there’s never again going to be a Teen Titans series with those characters which works the same way. And it’s not entirely clear what the point of the Titans is, without that element of growing up driving it.
(Incidentally, Kid Flash was fortunate enough to be involved in another such coming-of-age storyline; after he left the Titans, he followed in his uncle’s footsteps to become the Flash, and after years of just sorta being there, Mark Waid had him make the mantle of the Flash his own in The Return of Barry Allen, which was one of the great superhero stories of the 1990s. So you can take a hero through this sort of transformative experience twice. But as in real life, it’s not the sort of thing that happens every month! Do it well, though, and you’ve produced something special.)
This morning we got up and were joined by Mark and Yvette for a bike ride. We headed into Shoreline Park and had lunch there, and then headed down the Stevens Creek Trail to check out the new reach that opened yesterday, including a tunnel under El Camino Real!
For those not familiar with the area, El Camino Real is a major artery down the San Francisco peninsula and through Silicon Valley. In Mountain View, it’s a 6-lane road with plenty of traffic. I have to cross it somehow whenever I bike to work, and I usually cross at a traffic light at one of three intersections. But this underpass will help make it easy to avoid all that, especially once they build the next reach (hopefully by the end of the year) which could make my bike commute a lot easier. They built the underpass with surprisingly light impact on the road and it looks great, nice and clean and wide and with a skylight at the median of the street to let some natural light into the tunnel.
A few shots of the tunnel and trail’s end:
Additionally, we’re in the middle of a heat wave here, with highs in the mid-80s. Zoinks! It was breezy and it wasn’t too bad in the shade, but a lot of our ride was in the sun. At least it was dry out, too, so it was still fun. After three days of heat, it sounds like it will be back to normal tomorrow (highs in the high 60s). And now that frisbee is winding down I should consider starting to bike to work regularly.
For dinner I made my recently-mentioned “ex-girlfriend tacos” and we watched the Red Sox/Yankees game on ESPN, and the god damned games between these two teams go on forever, this one running about 4 hours. Fricking Yankees. Fortunately, the good guys won.