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Whatever else you do today, have a thought for those who have given their life to secure and defend the freedoms that some of us hold dear. Even if certain folks do not appreciate these people or the sacrifices they make, and use them instead as their own little playthings with which to enact their fantasies, recognize that they are real human beings put into unreal circumstances.
A couple of interesting Linktank developments!
First, you can now link to the tank this way:
Second, el gracias grande goes to Shasticon, for hooking the Linktank up to an RSS feed. If that’s your thing, you can get with it here:
http://slithytoves.sytes.net/~dave/lt-rss.php
Finally, me and Shas (depending on who gets to it first) are working on having the Linktank ping blo.gs when it’s updated. Might happen as early as this afternoon!
And for those for whom none of this makes a whole lot of sense, enjoy this picture:
Full story is here.
[Note: Kurt showed me this here.]
Top 10 Other Things that Han Shot that Didn’t Shoot at Him First
Got this in an email that is making it way around the net. Enjoy.
10. A poor, defenseless Mynock. This flappy critter couldn’t even operate a gun, much less shoot at Han.
9. The Space Slug. Just moments after the cold-blooded Mynock shooting, we see Han shoot the insides of a space creature kind enough to have an atmosphere and gravity in its stomach.
8. A stormtrooper. Given slightly lower test scores, this guy could have been a bounty hunter.
7. The garbage compactor door. Even Leia thought this was excessive.
6. The intercom at the Detention Block. Think of all the calls home Imperial troops had made from that comm unit. “Hi Mom. We blew up Alderaan today. Give love to Pop.”
5. An officer on the Death Star. Hey, that could have been a Bothan spy. They’re masters of disguise, you know.
4. Imperial probe droid. Before he left the base, Han listened to the garble it was transmitting and said, “It isn’t friendly whatever it is.” If you don’t know what it is, how can you tell it is bad? There might have been space kittens in there.
3. Vader’s wingman. The guy was given a direct order not to fire. He was just around for moral support.
2. The Sarlaac tentacle. It was only trying to eat Lando– heck, didn’t Chewie want to do that at the end of Empire?
1. His poor, dying Tauntaun. Perhaps in the special edition, Lucas should have animated the tauntaun going nuts and in the throes of death, clawing out one on Han’s eyes or grabbing his blaster and squeezing off a few shots– making it justifiable to spill its smelly macaroni guts in the snow.
(Note: Han cut the Tauntaun open with Luke’s lightsaber, so I’m not sure that one counts. But the Tauntaun didn’t lunge at him with the lightsaber first … so I guess it’s still in the spirit of things.)
Get me! I’ve got an RSS Feed now! Check out the link under the “Visit” box on the left for the feed.
Credits: Deirie asked me to do this and Shas showed me how.
Monday is Memorial Day, and I’ll be celebrating the traditional way by heading up to Modern Myths for their three-for-a-dollar back issue sale!
Well, I was there last night picking up my books (Promethea #30, Fortean Times, Runners #3, Previews, and, since it was a light week, the fourth Queen and Country TPB) and got a sneak preview of some of the offerings. Two titles in particular:
Spectacular Spider-Man #200 - HOLOGRAPHIC COVER, BABY! No idea what Wizard says it’s worth (do they do that anymore?) but several copies of it can be yours for a mere 33 cents each.
X-Force #1 - BAGGED WITH TRADING CARD! Has it really been 12 years since Rob Liefeld rocked our collective faces with this senses-shattering debut? My fondest memory of this book was seeing one for sale in a shop, two weeks after it came out, for $30. The price was so high because this particular bagged issue DIDN’T have a trading card in it! SOLID GOLD.
Somewhere there’s still someone with a box full of these things, thinking it’ll get him a Ferrari someday. Yet for a mere third of a buck, you can own a piece of history, a sample of the junk that nearly sunk the entire industry. I’m sure there are other holographic, die-cut, limited-edition, pop-up, rare variant, foil-stamped refugees from this sad era in comics history to be had for mere pennies.
Or…you could just wait for the summer, when Marvel and others plan to start it all over again with a NEW batch of variant gimmick covers!
Wow, nothing gets the terrorists motivated like bad news for the Bush campaign. Just as we’re starting to find out that our entire foreign policy, such as it is, for the past two years was being determined by some guy in Iraq who was probably an Iranian spy…
(Let that sink in, folks. An Iranian Spy got us to send troops to Iraq to get killed. Wrap your mind around that one.)
…it turns out we’ve got all kinds of reports of a major terror attack this summer! These reports are so urgent, news outlets have no choice but to push that unpleasant Ahmad Chalabi and Abu Ghraib news off the front page!
It’s unclear from the article whether these terrorist attacks will be threatening enough to raise the terror level to Red, in which case we have martial law and no one is allowed outside their homes (to vote, for example), or whether they’ll be grave enough to suspend the Constitution. I mean, we already know that Bush has conspired with Saudi Arabia to illegally manipulate gas prices so that gas is cheap on Election Day, so is it really loony to consider other depths to which his team might sink?
No word yet on how Iran is going to have us respond to these threats.
In the 1980s, the United States had a good friend who was going to help them fight our enemy, Iran. This friend was Iraq, specifically a Mr. Saddam Hussein. We gave him all kinds of presents, including weapons of war (and mass destruction) that he not only used against our enemies, but against his own people. At the time, though, he was our friend, so we didn’t have a problem with it.
Much later, we needed a friend to help against the Soviets, who wanted to take control of Afghanistan. Luckily, we found one — a Mr. Osama bin Ladin, whose organization was more than happy to receive military training and equipment from us.
I don’t think I need to tell you how those friendships turned out.
Only a few months ago we found a new friend, a Mr. Ahmad Chalabi, who was going to help us fight against our old friend, Mr. Hussein (and, in Mr. Bush’s mind, against Mr. bin Ladin.) Mr. Chalabi gave us all sorts of information about the bad things Mr. Hussein was up to, and we presented this evidence to the world, which largely remained skeptical. Nevertheless, we went to war, since it’s what we’d been wanting to do anyway.
Now it’s turning out that our new friend might have been lying to us. It looks like he might have been a spy for our old enemy, Iran, and hoping to get rid of Mr. Hussein just so he could be the new leader of Iraq. Mr. Chalabi should have learned a lesson from our previous friends — once their usefulness expires, anything goes.
You’d think that we’d learn lessons as well. Considering that some of our other friends are Pakistan, which gave shelter to Mr. bin Ladin and financed his activities, and Saudi Arabia, which provided most of the 9/11 hijackers and possibly some more funds to Al-Qaeda, you’d think we’d start to choose our friends a little more carefully. Instead, we just keep cozying up to other dictators who torture their enemies.
I wonder which of our current good friends will be flying hijacked airplanes into our buildings in ten years?
Being a fan of both comics and character-driven fiction, Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay was right up my alley. I found it to be quite enjoyable and thought it did a good job of integrating the fictional comic character, the Escapist, and its fictional creators into reality.
But when I heard that Dark Horse was planning on doing actual Escapist comics, I wasn’t sure what to think. I got the somewhat overpriced trade paperback collecting issues one and two, and read it this weekend. The stories are written by the likes of Chabon, Kevin McCarthy, and Glen David Gold (whose novel Carter Beats the Devil I liked as much as, if not more than, Chabon’s), and drawn by Kyle Baker, Eric Wight, and others.
I was right to be wary of this project. On the one hand, the idea of making the actual comics seemed cheap and gimmicky to me, as well as unnecessary. Anyone who knew comics could see exactly what was written about in the book. After all, it’s not like the comics Chabon describes are so otherworldly that no one could really get their minds around them. Though the idea of the Escapist, his origin, and the multiple layers on which he works are all very good, one didn’t need to see the actual panels for the metaphor to work. Mechanically, we’ve all seen it, whether it was old Whiz comics, Superman comics, or Captain America comics. If one didn’t have any idea how an Escapist comic might look, then I doubt they finished the book or picked up this collection.
The move also seemed a bit like pandering to me, in a way. “Here you go, comics fans…as your reward for reading a book without pictures, you get a comic book based on it!” I can’t explain why that is. But think of the movie Galaxy Quest. If, after the movie, they decided to actually go back and do a series based on the series in the movie, well, that’s rather redundant, isn’t it? And misses the whole point of the pastiche, homage, spoof, whatever you want to call it.
But there was a way that Escapist comics could go that in my mind wouldn’t have been redundant. Sadly, this isn’t it. For one thing, despite all the faux-comics-history trapping within the book, very few of the stories read like anything other than modern day post-Watchmen ironic superhero tales. And none of them look like anything done before the 80s. What I would have loved to see would be “reprints” that actually looked like the products of their eras, not modern day stories unsuccessfully masquerading as something else. Perhaps, with things like Alan Moore’s (you knew he’d get mentioned) 1963 series for Image, or the current Big Bang Comics, this sort of thing would also be trite, but there was a real chance here to escape from the leaden drudgery of modern day superhero comics and allow people to rediscover the joy of comics that were allowed to be amazing.
I don’t want it to seem like I just dislike the collection because it’s not what I wanted it to be. But taken on its own merits, there’s little to praise here. The stories are trite, predictable, and pedestrian, with only Gold’s story really doing anything interesting. The manga entry is based on an interesting idea, but even I, with my rank amateur experience with manga, could immediately identify about five different things that destroyed the illusion of looking at an actual manga (not counting the fact that the entire 10-page story seems to summarize what allegedly went for a thousand pages according to the text). In short, the collection can’t decide what it is, despite my expectations. On the one had it pretends to be an ersatz collection of Escapist stories culled from the many different eras of the character, yet few of the stories emerge as anything other than decidedly average examples of current comics. On the one hand it seems to want to evoke a definitive history of the character, yet stuff like “The Escapegoat” throws a wrench into this idea while providing no benefit, as though it’s there to only sabotage the project. I’d say that this seems like a project where everyone else had a great time but forgot to make sure the reader did as well, except that it doesn’t even seem like they enjoyed it. For a character from a book about the incredible golden age of comics, we’re given dull, lifeless, joyless stories to look at.
If you enjoyed Chabon’s book, you’ve already gotten your money’s worth. I would take the $17.95 for this collection and instead apply it towards some good Marvel Masterworks volumes, or DC Archives, or something of that ilk. Rather than seeing this age of comics filtered through a few different people (and unnecessary lenses of cynicism and “realism”), go straight to the source.
