Idol Gives a Little Back

So last night was the big Idol Gives Back special, and I don't really have much to say about Idol in general, because I figure everyone else is babbling on about it plenty, but last night's performance of "Barracuda" by Ann and Nancy Wilson, with Fergie (?WTF?), was awesome. The Heart girls can still rock just as hard as they did thirty years ago, and Fergie amazed me that she could mostly keep up. I've never thought of Fergie as an actual singer, but she kicked ass on that number last night. And she wore dark pants so you couldn't tell whether she was peeing her pants from the coolness of singing with Heart.

CBS Throws Their Hat in the Ring

After watching a bit more Hulu, I've now found out that CBS.com has the ENTIRE RUN (all three seasons) of the original Star Trek. The video looks decent at full-screen; it doesn't seem to pixelate the way Hulu's does, but it does strobe (not sure if this is an artifact of the video compression or the streaming).

And these are not the "enhanced" versions of the episodes that are currently running in syndication. These are the original versions with the original effects, which shouldn't make much difference in most episodes for most people and may actually be preferred by some hard-core fans.

They also have the first two seasons of the original Twilight Zone, and the first seasons of Hawaii Five-O, MacGuyver and Melrose Place (although I couldn't get anything other than Star Trek to actually play).

Out of the Vault - Nova

I had figured to make Out of the Vault a weekly thing, but since I've just started and I'm anxious to get going, I figured I'd throw in a bonus this week.

Sometimes, a hero comes along in which everything just clicks. Everything seems new and exciting, and the creators manage to put a new spin on just about everything in the book, so that by the time you finish one issue, you're dying to read the next.


Most other times, there's something like The Man Called Nova.

Nova debuted in 1976, and you can't fault the talent involved for trying. Marv Wolfman was the writer, and the first issue featured the art team of John Buscema and Joe Sinnott. Buscema was the number one talent at Marvel. His style was what Marvel considered their "house" style after Kirby left to do the Fourth World books at DC. And Buscema's work never looked better than with Sinnott's inks. So issue one looked beautiful.

The alarm bells were already ringing after that first issue, though.

Here's the basic set-up: Richard Ryder is a normal, put-upon high school kid who is basically selected at random by a dying alien warrior to receive his power. The alien, who holds the rank of Nove Prime Centurion, has come to Earth chasing this other alien who killed his planet. The Centurion can not survive long enough to take his revenge, so he gives the power to Rider instead. Once the initial menace is dispatched, Rider has to learn how to use his powers for the good of mankind. The concept, as described by Wolfman in the first issue, was to make a throwback to the first books Marvel had produced, books that were just plain fun. It succeeded only halfway.

The basic problem with Nova was that there was nothing at all special about him. His powers weren't special; he could fly, and he was really tough and strong. Pretty vanilla. What's more, everything else about him seemed rehashed and recycled. A kid with an alliterative name dealing with bullies in high school--he was a less distinctive Peter Parker. A dying alien comes to Earth, the last of his race, and passes his power on to a human--he was Green Lantern without the cool-ass ring. And besides, not only was the "last of his race" alien thing done by Superman way back when, but it had just been used by Marvel the previous year for (you read it yesterday) Omega the Unknown.


Not only that, but the story in the first issue depended on coincidence combined with stuff that just didn't make sense. Rider is apparently selected completely at random to receive the Nova power, which isn't at all satisfying. Even worse, in that initial battle, Nova fights an alien named Zorr. The battle, as illustrated by John Buscema on the left, is basic exciting Marvel action, but it ends when Zorr mysteriously disintegrates, apparently killed as the orbiting alien's dying act. But keep in mind that not only had Zorr supposedly destroyed an entire planet full of Nova's people (who presumably had comparable powers), but the alien centurion passed on his powers to Rider explicitly because he lacked the strength to defeat Zorr himself. The whole thing had the stink of a deus coming out of a machina, if you know what I mean.

So Zorr, who was being set up as some kind of cosmic threat, a poor man's Galactus if you will, ended up being a stooge who only existed as an excuse to get Rider into the costume. Once he disintegrated, he was completely forgotten.

I kept reading after that first issue, though. Like Omega, there was just enough promise in that first issue to keep me coming back, hoping to see it fulfilled. I was mostly pretty disappointed, though.

The first disappointment: Big John Buscema was replaced with his brother Sal in the second issue. This was a standard Marvel bait-and-switch: put a hot artist on the first issue or two to get kids reading, then switch for a less popular artist once kids have gotten to know the character.

Sal Buscema wasn't a bad artist. When he was really clicking, he did some memorable things. The problem with Sal was, he was fast. And Marvel, especially in the mid-70's when they were putting out a ton of books, really needed artists who were fast. There was a time when it seemed like Sal was drawing half the Marvel line.


But the way he achieved that speed was to settle into a rhythm of stock poses and stock faces. For instance, here: two panels from issue 10 showing the standard S. Buscema "guy flying toward reader after getting hit" pose. The villain doing the hitting here is The Sphinx, Nova's Doctor Doom. One thing Nova did do was establish a Rogue's Gallery for Nova right off the bat, and though they were derivative (The Condor was a Vulture knock-off, and Diamondhead pictured here ripped off Hammerhead), at least they were exclusive.

After the first 15 issues, Sal Buscema was replaced by Carmine Infantino, best known for his work on Batman and Flash at DC. By this point in his career, Infantino's art had degenerated into its own collection of tics and tricks and weird angular poses. When I was a kid, one of the first comics I ever read was an Infantino Batman featuring a character called Blockbuster, who was sort of a non-green Hulk with hippie sandals. The panel in Nova where the Hulk punches Nova looks just like a panel in my memory of Blockbuster hitting Batman: the same backward lean, the same flapping pant leg, the same daintily turned leading foot.


The Man Called Nova ended after 25 issues due to low sales, a combination of derivative writing and villains, mediocre art, and a shift in audience expectations. Midway through Nova's first run, "Star Wars" had hit the theaters and changed everyone's perceptions of what space adventure could be. And though Nova tried to respond by sending him into space to take part in a war involving the survivors of the original Nova's world, it was too little, too late.

He's been revived a few times since, but I never read those stories, so I can't comment. For me, it doesn't matter how many times they try to put lipstick on that particular pig, it's still going to be basically complicating something that never quite worked in the first place.

Which sucks, cause his flying looked really cool.

Out of the Vault - Omega

For the first edition of Out of the Vault, I figured I'd talk about an odd Marvel title from the 70's: Omega the Unknown. Omega ran for 10 issues, starting in early 1975 (Wikipedia is wrong about this) and running until mid-1977. It was written by Steve Gerber and Mary Skrenes and drawn by Jim Mooney (Gerber died in February of this year, and Mooney died this week, on March 30).

Omega was about the relationship between a 12-year-old boy named James-Michael Starling and a mysterious alien with no name (the Daily Bugle dubbed him Omega due to the symbol on his headband, apparently). It only ran for 10 issues, but it made an impact on several readers of my generation, apparently. For instance, Jonathan Lethem, author of Fortress of Solitude, mentions Omega in several essays, and even included him on a list of the "Top Five Depressed Superheroes."

The series started with a bang, as Omega battled killer robots on his home planet. The robots enslaved the population, but Omega managed to break free, steal a spaceship, and escape the planet. It was a slam-bang opening, and I, for one, kept reading through 10 issues of second-rate supervillains and all manner of depressing crap, waiting for the series to fulfill the promise of this first page.

I mean, look at this (click on the picture for a larger version). This is the very first page of the first issue and shows Mooney at his best. The form is solid, the blacks defining the shape in space to perfection, and though the anatomy is good, the pose is exaggerated beyond all belief. I mean, look at his back foot. It's practically over his head. Dynamic action, solid basic drawing, polished inks: that's what Mooney brought to this book when he was at his best.

Unfortunately, Mooney's style fell a little short of everything the book required. His characters, with their delicate features and often stilted poses, looked more at home in a romance comic than in a gritty story about the mean streets of Hell's Kitchen in New York City. Not that Mooney didn't produce some excellent moments; his action scenes were pretty good, and he used a lot of blacks and shadows to create a foreboding mood. But there was just something sunny about his work, some holdover from the days when he was illustrating the adventures of Supergirl for DC, that he just couldn't get rid of and made scenes like this confrontation between James-Michael and a streetwalker ring false.

I'm not sure what it is, whether the delicate eyes or the Samantha Stevens hair, or just the clean inks that make the backgrounds look so sterile, even when he draws a street full of trash, but Mooney just never managed to make the pictures really fit with the mood of the script in these scenes.

But of course, that was part of the problem with the series as a whole. It was half a gritty tale of life on the street, and half a superhero story, and the two halves never really merged into a coherent whole. Omega as a hero never went out and battled crime as a conventional crimefighter; he literally seemed to stumble from one fist into another throughout the entire series. He never had a signature villain, never had a grand adventure. If Mooney never managed to juggle all the elements in the book just right, neither did Gerber.

And Marvel had no idea what to do with the book after a while. How do you put a compelling cover on an issue about a mentally disturbed handyman who beats an old lady to death with his wrench? Romita tried, God bless him, but this cover just completely misrepresents the story inside. I mean, "The Power of the Wrench?" Please.

In the final issue, cover dated October 1977, the book finally starts picking up momentum and looking like it's going somewhere. Omega and an old man he's befriended go to Vegas so Omega can earn enough money to get James-Michael out of Hell's Kitchen. Meanwhile, James-Michael runs away from Hell's Kitchen with a classmate to his old home in the mountains, where he discovers robot duplicates of his dead parents (who were also revealed to be robots when they died in a car crash in the first issue). At the same time, James-Michael's guardians, Amber and Ruth, are going crazy with fear for James-Michael while trying to deal with the menace of the Foolkiller, a nutso ex-cellmate of Ruth's boyfriend.

At the end of the issue, Omega is gunned down by cops in the street, with the promise that the story will be wrapped up soon in an issue of The Defenders (which I'm guessing Gerber was writing at the time). About a year later, Marvel announced that the story would actually be wrapped up in Captain America. Another year after that, in 1979, the story was finally wrapped up by a different writer, Steven Grant, in The Defenders after all.

The story was a big disappointment, in which both Omega and James-Michael were also revealed to be robots. Omega never shows up in the story at all, because the cops really killed him dead, apparently, and James-Michael goes crazy and self-destructs. A fitting end, I guess, given the downer tone of the series, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, nevertheless. Then again, this was America during the malaise of the Carter administration. Maybe if they'd waited until the Reagan administration, things might have turned out better, but by then, who would have cared?

The Vault

I mentioned that I might be pulling things from the vault. I meant that literally.

My dad, you see, may not have been the coolest dad ever. He couldn't fly jets or juggle fire. But he bought a jewelry store in Eufaula, Oklahoma, in a building which used to be the local bank. Which means there is a literal walk-in vault in the store.

And when I went off to join the Army, rather than put my comics in a commercial storage space somewhere, I put them in his vault. Plenty of room, after all. And it was just so cool to be able to tell people, "My comics are locked in a vault."

Now, though, I've decided to pull some of them out. And I'll be sharing with you what I've found. Starting tomorrow, a long trip down memory lane in four colors.

Hope you enjoy it.

Firefly

So I get halfway through watching Firefly on Hulu.com, and I find this link that basically says "don't watch Firefly on Hulu," because of the Writer's Guild strike, you see. But since hte strike has been resolved, and since even before it was resolved, I didn't like people telling me what I should or shouldn't do based on their politics, I went ahead and watched the rest.

I've never been a Browncoat, I've got to say. I enjoyed Firefly when we aired it on Fox, and I really liked Serenity, but I'd never been a big enough fan of Westerns to really appreciate the melding of SF and Westerns that Firefly was.

But watching the series again, I was really struck by how good it was. How the crew really seemed like a family, so that I could feel sentimental about people who are, when you come right down to it, awfully unsentimental. When I got to the end, I immediately went over to Hulu's feature film section to see if "Serenity" was there, but alas, no. So I may end up buying the DVD of that soon to watch it again, although I'm not sure I can take seeing what happens to Wash again.

One thing that surprised me: I thought there had been at least one other episode where River showed off her talents in a big way (other than the one where she shoots the three guys with her eyes closed). There's a hint of it in the final episode, but I thought there had been more than that. Memory playing tricks, I guess.

Oh, and speaking of mixing entertainment and politics, try reading this, and you'll see what I mean. A radical feminist (self-described as such, lest you think I'm name-calling) rips Firefly for the woman-hating bile it really is.

Hulu

I decided to try out Hulu, given all the fanfare of its debut, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Firefly among the television series it includes. The entire series, mind you (not difficult, since only one season was produced).

So I ended up watching the entire run of Firefly over the weekend, along with random episodes of The Tick (the live-action series starring Patrick Warburton), Night Gallery, and It Takes a Thief. In order to provide these copyrighted properties without charging subscription or download fees, Hulu shows commercials during the breaks (about 2 minutes total per show). It works out okay, because in any given break, you're not having to wait more than 30 seconds to get back to the show. Also, since the shows were designed to break for commercials, they don't really break the experience.

The problem is that there is a very limited number of advertisers, so you'll be seeing the same commercials over and over again. The other problem is that they do the same thing during feature films, which were not designed to break for commercials. This means that they break the films at odd random places, sometimes in the middle of a scene, which does sort of ruin the experience.

So I'd recommend Hulu for TV series watching, not so much for feature films. They have a fairly long list of series available now, including old shows that don't see syndication, like I Spy and the aforementioned It Takes a Thief. However, since it's still early days, they only have the first seasons of those classic shows available, so if there's a particular episode you're dying to see, it might not be available yet.

I'll get back to Firefly tomorrow.

A Month of Surprises

As part of the blog relaunch celebration, I'm going to be doing a One-Month Experiment. What is this, you ask? I'm going to try (try being the operative word here) to post every day for 30 days. There are a few things that I have not gotten to work on the new template yet, so you'll be seeing some gradual tweaking happen over the next couple of weeks as I figure things out.

I'm also going to be experimenting with new content, including more writing discussion and some retro comics stuff. I would like this blog to work in synergy with the Digger-verse stories, so I'm going to be talking quite a bit about the sources of my inspiration, the comics of the 60's, 70's and 80's. I may even be digging into the vaults to scan some illustrations and examples. I may or may not bust out the World's Cheapest Microphone again, too. Those are fun to put together, but they apparently are only fun for me, so I may not waste the time during the One-Month Experiment.

If you have any subjects you'd like to see me take up, drop me a comment. I need 30 topics, after all. Yours could be one of them.

Changes Coming

I know I haven't been updating much in past months. The fact is, I've had a number of other things going on, and something had to get pushed back, and this blog ended up being that something.

That, plus the fact that I was just getting sick of this puke-green look I've got going.

But I'm happy to announce that this situation will soon be remedied. Sometime within the next couple of weeks, I will be debuting an all-new look, along with a veritable flood of new and (I hope) entertaining content. I'm hoping to get things established and running smoothly well in advance of the summer convention season.

Stay tuned...

Watchmen Pics

I'm slightly excited over this. The graphic novel was so uniquely superior that the movie is bound to disappoint, and yet the pics, at least, look good.

Speaking of "Watchmen," there was a review of "Double-Secret Weapon" in The Fix, which is apparently a short fiction review site. Short version: they weren't thrilled with it.

But it's interesting that he seems to dismiss it in the context of "'Watchmen' and 'The Incredibles' said it all already." Never mind the fact that both those examples are long-form stories with different purposes than my short story. Never mind the fact that both stories appeared in different media with different advantages and different limitations. Never mind the fact that "The Incredibles" was written by a staff of folks over the course of years, and that "Watchmen" was written by the ferociously talented Alan Moore. Never mind the fact that even by Alan Moore's standard's, "Watchmen" is an amazing achievement, but that didn't stop him from writing more stories in the genre. Never mind the fact that in many respects, "Watchmen" and "The Incredibles" are the same story, albeit with very different characters and themes.

Nope, the message is, "it's been done perfectly already, so don't even try."

Thanks, Mr. Cowboy, I'll take it under advisement. Meanwhile (big announcement), I hope you like my upcoming pale-shadow-of-"Watchmen"-and-"The-Incredibles" short story, "No Love For the Middleman," slated to appear on "Strange Horizons" sometime in June, I hope. This is the first story I've sold that wasn't a Digger story, although it happens in the same world and Digger does get a brief mention. So the Digger lucky streak continues.

Dave Stevens, RIP

I was planning to post something about Gary Gygax's death, but hadn't gotten around to it, because what I had to say was rather complex and had to do with a lot more than Gygax himself. And then I just found out that Dave Stevens died two days ago.

I'll still get around to talking about Gygax in the context of Dungeons and Dragons sometime soon, but right now, I'd like to talk about Dave Stevens. Stevens was an awesome artist with a unique combination of talent and skill that stood out above his peers. He emerged as part of a wave of influential talents who burst onto the comics scene in the early 80's, guys like Steve Rude and Matt Wagner and Scott McCloud. But Stevens was the only guy who managed to write a wildly entertaining and influential comic while also illustrating it in a polished style unmatched by other artist-writers.

Gygax was like D.W. Griffith, in a way. He came out of nowhere with something that no one else had really put together quite that way, and if his final product was crude and his politics questionable, well, he still pointed the way for a host of other people who came in and improved on his pioneering work, people who could point back to him and say, "We would not be here if he hadn't come first."

Stevens, on the other hand, was a Frazetta. A guy so talented that we needed more than he could provide, so a host of lesser imitators sprang up in his wake, guys who mimicked him in style and substance, and since Dave was so slow, we were content with second-rate Stevens imitators, because that was better than nothing.

I met him once, at a comic con in Dallas. He was a nice guy, and I was pleasantly surprised to learn that he was left-handed. I wish I had more than that. I wish I could tell a funny Dave story; I wish I could say more about him as a person than, "I loved his work. It entertained and inspired me."

But that will have to be enough, and frankly, it's probably more than enough.

"Spiderwick Chronicles"

Saw "The Spiderwick Chronicles" this past weekend. Didn't much like it. It felt very by-the-numbers--ooh, look, a special world of enchantment, a kid that no one believes who holds the fate of the world in his hands. Yawn. I don't know if it was the severe compression a novel-to-movie has to go through, but the MacGuffin (the special book) wasn't convincing at all.

Even worse, the cast all seemed to be sleepwalking through this thing. Freddie Highmore was so preoccupied with making his dual roles seem different that he forgot to make either one believable. Mary-Louise Parker was just off-note the entire time. Even David Strathairn, who is usually great, seemed to be just mouthing his lines while counting his salary in his head.

My daughter, of course, loved it.

Quick Bit of Nothing

I've been preoccupied with other things lately, but I've been saving some things up and will be posting more regularly soon (with maybe a big surprise early next month). But thought I'd just make a quick post to mention something that caught my eye.

Okay, actually, first, go to lileks.com for today (3/7/08) and read his discussion on Leonard Rosenman, who died recently. I've been planning to mention basically the same thing (which is that Rosenman's scores all seem to repeat the same riff), but he does it better, with audio illustrations.

Right after reading that today, I clicked over to Yahoo and saw an ad for a sleep aid that used an image from an old movie of a gorilla suit. And it reminded me of an old article I read in Famous Monsters of Filmland (IIRC) about guys who specialized in gorilla work. There were only like three or four good "gorilla men" back in the 30's and 40's, and they did most all of the movie gorilla work because they had their own suits ready-made (there's a pretty good article here that talks about two of the greats, Charles Gemora in the old days and Bob Burns in the 60's and 70's).

It's really amazing to think about, because the movie industry is such a different animal now. Movie make-up and special effects technology have advanced so far, and budgets are so big, that virtually every suit is custom-made, assuming you even use a suit. Audiences are so much more familiar with real gorillas now that it's getting increasingly hard to sell them on a suit; better to go with real gorillas or CGI versions.

Lost Is Back + Eli Stone

Well, Lost has returned, and the first two episodes look very promising. As the show enters its fourth season, it is entering a mature phase which allows it to do some very interesting things, story-wise. In the early days of the show, it used to surprise people with how much every detail seemed planned to fit into a larger pattern. Something that seemed insignificant in episode 1, like Locke wiggling his toes on the beach, took on much greater significance a few episodes later when we learned he had been in a wheelchair before crash-landing on the island. And soon, viewers were scrutinizing every single detail to figure out what it might come to mean later.

Now the show has several seasons of material to echo back on, so that we might notice a detail and say, "Oh that's a call-back to a season two episode," without realizing that it is also foreshadowing something else we don't even suspect yet. I think some of that happened in the season four opener, which was Hurley-centered. The episode raises all sorts of questions:

If Hurley sided with Locke on the island, against rescue, how did he end up being one of the Oceanic Six who ended up back in civilization?

Who are the other three members of the Oceanic Six?

Is Kate living with Sawyer in the third season finale, or has she started a new life with someone else?

Are the other characters still on the island, or are they dead?

Was Hurley the one whose death prompts Jack to tell Kate "We have to go back" in the third season finale?

Who is Abaddon, and does he really work for Oceanic?

Why is Hurley having visions of Charlie? Is Charlie simply a hallucination, like Hurley's friend Dave from the mental hospital, or is he a manifestation of the Black Smoke reaching all the way to the continental U.S. (or something else like it)?

Enough questions for now. One scene I really liked in the season opener was the moment where Hurley closed his eyes and counted to five to get rid of the Charlie-vision; nice call-back to Kate doing the same thing in the pilot, upon Jack's earlier advice.

After Lost, ABC has started running a new show titled Eli Stone. It's funny and entertaining, but it must be one of the most intellectually dishonest shows I've ever watched. The show itself is Ally McBeal with a sex change (and with a less entertaining senior partner), but the thing that really gets my goat is that it takes on hot-button topical issues with either a populist or liberal slant, then throws in a disclaimer to keep from offending the half of the audience whose intelligence or politics they've just insulted.

For instance, first episode: a mother suing a pharmaceutical company because she claims her child became autistic after receiving a vaccine. Now, the link between vaccines and autism is not proven, and even if it were, the cost/benefit of vaccinating and becoming autistic versus the chance of dying from whooping cough or something is a complex issue that can't be sufficiently debated in an hour-long dramedy. The show's solution: demagogue the issue by having a jury find in favor of the link between a vaccine with a fictional preservative, but throw in a couple of lines of dialogue stating that the link is not, in fact, proven, plus a disclaimer at the end.

Second episode: poor Mexican immigrants suing a pesticide manufacturer. Evil chemical company making poor people infertile, how dare they? But they can't prove it, so the poor people lose. Evil big-city lawyers working for deep-pocketed corporations! Even worse, turns out the poor Mexicans are illegal immigrants who snuck into the country in a truck, then paid a con man to help them become naturalized. He pocketed the money and filed no paperwork, so now the poor, poisoned, infertile people are going to be deported. Solution? Eli gives an impassioned speech about how illegal immigrants love America more than people who are born here, so we should give them a pass, although "no one's saying illegal immigration isn't a problem."

The writers try to have it both ways: yes, we acknowledge that some people might think this is a problem, but our solution is to just pretend it isn't.

Bad enough the show is a clone of a better show. Worse is when it preaches without conviction. Worst of all, it's just entertaining enough, in a time slot where there's nothing better on, that I'll probably keep watching.

Podcast Ep. 4 - Cloverfield

I keep thinking these things will get easier to make as I build a library of sounds and get more experience with the program, but I haven't hit that point yet. Instead of getting easier, they're taking more time because I get more ambitious with the effects. Anyway, have fun. (21 MB, 23:09)

Show Notes:

A Thanksgiving mishap.

Saw Cloverfield.

Ruminations on the history of giant monsters, including Godzilla, the Chicken Heart, King Kong, the Golem and others.

A brief commercial interlude (from Lights Out, available at Internet Archive)

Discussion of Cloverfield with comparisons to The Blair Witch Project

Danger Alert! A Surprise Attack! A Shameless Plug for Daikaiju!3!

Opening and closing theme music by Partners in Rhyme.

Sound effects obtained from Absolute Sound Effects Archive.

Superfriends theme remix, "The Time Is Now," by Blue Tube.

If you like the show, please drop me an email or a comment here.

Movie Trailers

So in the several months since I stopped posting regularly, I've seen some trailers for films coming out in 2008. This year looks like an awesome year for superhero movies.

One of the most anticipated is "Iron Man."

The trailer is genius. The second half is bursting with kick-ass action to make the fanboys go,"whoa!" But it's the first half that makes it rise above your average trailer. Robert Downey Jr. is shown in several scenes that establish the character of Tony Stark--mercenary, perhaps amoral, yet charming. The storytelling economy here is perfect. Action, effects, and an appealing, interesting character: this trailer has all the elements that make you say, "I have GOT to see that!"

Another one that I'm really anxious to see is "Hancock," starring Will Smith.

Good stuff. I mean, it's Will Smith doing his standard Will Smith schtick, but the action is over-the-top cool, and it's an interesting take on the hero genre. According to Wikipedia, the screenplay was originally titled, "Tonight, He Comes," about a hero with sexual dysfunction. I love the final lines.

Hancock: I don't even remember that.

Jason Bateman (character is not named in IMDB): Greenpeace does.

I'm also anxious to see "Hellboy II: The Golden Army."

This looks like everything you want in a sequel: the same, but bigger. Ron Perlman in perfect form as Hellboy, same supporting cast in place, huge monsters, kickass action and special effects.

I'm not as excited by "The Dark Knight."

I liked "Batman Begins," I think Christopher Nolan is an excellent director, and I think the Bat-Cycle looks badass. But from what little I've seen of Heath Ledger as the Joker, it looks like he channeled all the aspects of Jack Nicholson's performance that I liked the least. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised, but seeing the trailer made me less excited about the movie, not more--not a good thing in a trailer.

Still waiting to see a trailer for "The Incredible Hulk," starring Edward Norton. The new film is supposed to be more action-oriented than the Ang Lee version. I actually liked the Ang Lee version, or aspects of it at least. I thought the size-changing bit was a pretty cool reimagining of the concept, and I didn't mind the fact that Lee gave Banner a traumatic backstory that explained why radiation turned Banner into the Hulk instead of giving him cancer. That being said, I was disappointed with the climax of the film. I thought it was a feeble payoff after a pretty good buildup.

So all in all, it's looking like a pretty good superhero year. One film I didn't mention is "Jumper," which features teleporters. I'm saving that for its own post, since I've been a fan of the book since it was published.

New Podcast? Back From the Dead

So reaction to "Astromonkeys!" on Escape Pod has been mixed, but mostly positive (which is probably pretty normal--if they don't like, they'll tend not to comment rather than comment negatively). But listening to it got me listening to other podcasts again, as well as searching Jonathan Coulton, of whom I am now officially a fan.

Listening to other podcasts made me start itching to try my own experiments in the Secret Lab again, so once more, I have returned to the World's Cheapest Microphone for an Adventure in Mediocrity. This one was fun to make, and I hope will be fun to listen to. I rushed things a little at the end, but I hope it gives you a smile. (19MB, 20:06)

Show Notes:

Back from the dead, appropriate for a discussion of I Am Legend.

First film adaptation was "Last Man on Earth," starring Vincent Price.

Second film adaptation was "The Omega Man," starring Charlton Heston.

Commercial interlude from "Space Patrol" (available at Internet Archive)

Spoiler-filled discussion of new Will Smith version of I Am Legend, interrupted by a danger alert!

Opening and closing theme music by Partners in Rhyme.

If you like the show, please drop me an email or a comment here. These are fun to make, but they're even more fun if I think people are enjoying them. Oh, an you can find old episodes here
and here.

King Midas's Lunch

A while back, I posted on the anniversary of the Big Mac, so now it's the Whopper's turn. 2007 marked the Golden Anniversary of the Whopper.

I have an odd ideological truce with the Whopper, since I have always been pretty much a Mustard Guy when it comes to saucing preferences on my burger. Mayonnaise just doesn't work for me. Yet something about the particular combination of mayo and ketchup on the Whopper (mixed with grease, of course) makes the Whopper the exception that proves the rule. The Whopper is the one mayo burger that I will occasionally go out of my way to eat.

Of course, part of the success of the Whopper was that it was more of a home-style burger than its competitors. McDonald's, White Castle... those burgers were fast and tasty, but you'd never make something like that at home. At home, you'd throw some burgers on the grill, then load 'em up with lettuce and onions and tomatoes, just like BK. The King tried to play up this feature of their burgers in the 80's when they trotted out what is possibly the worst jingle I've ever heard in a national campaign, "We do it like you'd do it when we do it like we do it at Burger King."

The ironic thing, of course, is that the Whopper's home-style goodness, its char-broiled flavor and the way it comes to your hands hot and fresh, is the result of a series of industrial, machine-fabricated illusions. There's no guy in back flipping burgers on a charcoal grill; the patties are run on a conveyor through a flame-broiling machine, which imparts their smoky flavor and burns in the sear lines. Then the cooked patties (caveat: I have never worked in a Burger King, so I may have some process details wrong, but I've watched the guys in the back enough to think I've got a good handle on the general process) are held in a warmer until a burger is ordered, at which time the precooked patty is assembled with the other ingredients, then zapped in a microwave to give it a "fresh-cooked" feel.

In fact, the first microwave I ever saw was in a Burger King in Oklahoma City when I was a teenager. We didn't have many Burger Kings where I lived. We had tons of McDonalds, a few Wendy's (urgh-square patties, greasy buns and no flavor to speak of), the odd Whataburger where rumor had it there was actual meat mixed in with the salt. When I was very small, we went to the A&W Drive-In. Soon enough, those phased out and we were stuck with Sonic and Coits (a local drive-in with excellent root beer).

Then there were the local independent places with really awesome burgers, although I'm sure I'd be horrified if I saw the kitchens. Charcoal Oven and Split-T and Johnny's all had real charcoal broiled taste and hickory sauce. There was another place that I loved, but can't remember the name of, where you ordered via a little red phone at your booth. Their burgers were good, but what I really loved were the curly Q's. Thin and long with the peel still on, they were the standard by which all other curly fries must be measured.

But Burger King... It was a franchise operation, and nobody in our part of town seemed willing to risk opening one or something. I wasn't introduced to Burger King in a big way until I moved away to college. There was one right across the street from the USC campus, and I ate there at least three times a week, and twice on Dungeons and Dragons Saturdays. And then, when I moved back home, why, there was a Burger King a half-mile from my house, so I became a frequent visitor.

It's been an odd strange trip for Burger King. Always relegated to the number two spot behind McDonald's. They tried competing with the Golden Arches for the kid market by introducing the "Marvelous, Magical Burger King" in the 70's, but it didn't go over. They tried competing by burger quality and flame-broiled taste, but they were never able to penetrate McDonald's market share. The Pillsbury sell-off in the late 80's really hurt their operations and morale, and next thing you know, they were trying desperate experiments like deluxe platters with table service.

But all of that is in the past, right? Burger King is now a resurgent brand, with off-the-wall viral ads like Subservient Chicken and a revitalized menu of politically incorrect choices like the Triple Stacker. And concurrent with the 40th anniversary of the Big Mac, BK could honestly say that the Whopper is even more distinguished at 50. This is the Whopper's time to shine, its golden age. Surely if there were ever a time that the Whopper could stand on its own with pride, without acting like McDonald's envious little sister, that time is now.

But sadly, no. I've got a Burger King tray liner in front of me, celebrating the 50th anniversary, where it describes the Whopper's attributes in what are supposed to be breezy, fun, light-hearted terms. Reading through it, though, the thing just reeks of desperate envy. "Burgers with a bun in the middle will feel much lighter." "Kissed by fire, never fried." "'Secret Sauce' not required." Reading the tray liner as I eat, I'm thinking, "Man, a Big Mac would sure be tasty right now."

Basically, I just want to grab the King by the throat and say, "Congratulations on your anniversary. Now get some therapy. Seriously."

Escape

So "Astromonkeys!" is now up and available on Escape Pod. I have kind of mixed feelings about it, since the guy who reads the story sounds nothing like the voice in my head when I read it. But you know, it's so cool to have it selected and posted that I'll give not another word of complaint as soon as the check clears.

I know I haven't posted in a l-o-o-o-o-o-n-n-n-n-n-g time, and there's a long story behind that which I won't tell here. Suffice it to say that I think I'm back. I'm writing stories again, contemplating draft 3 of Hero Go Home (I think this one might actually be worth submitting to someone if it works out on paper the way it's feeling in my head), looking at job options. A lot of things got put on hold in the last three months, and now they're starting to get moving again.

Funny thing is, even though I haven't posted here in over a month, traffic has remained virtually unchanged. Mainly that's because hardly anyone ever reads this blog anyway. The other reason is because most of the people who do visit, do it because they're Googling "Whack the monkey" and landing on this. So if you came here from Baen's Universe or Escape Pod, thanks for dropping by, and please check out the T-Shirts. The link is at the bottom of the left column. Cafe Press shirts are expensive, but you would have the only one in existence (other than the one I wear to cons). Meet me at Conestoga this year, I'll even sign it. Such a deal!

Still Alive

Yes, I'm still here. I've just been on a brief personal hiatus from a lot of things. But I have a bit of news.

My third Digger tale, "Double-Secret Weapon," is now live at Baen's Universe. This issue doesn't have quite the all-star lineup of issue one (but quite frankly, what could?), but still, Nancy Kress, Mike Resnick, Eric Flint, Norman Spinrad... not bad to share a TOC with.

Funny, though, how the last few jobs I've worked all used the acronym TOC with different meanings. In the Army, it was Tactical Operations Center. At TV Guide, it was the Transmission Operations Center. At Clear Channel, we're the Television Operations Center. When I'm writing, though, it's a Table of Contents. I wonder if there's a big publishing house somewhere that has a department just for producing tables of contents for all their different book divisions. They could call it a Table Of Contents Operations Center (TOCOC).

The illustrations for this story (by Luis Peres, example at left) are better than the ones for "Astromonkeys." A nice comedic flavor, although the guy apparently kind of skimmed the story. He gave Digger a helmet with dog ears apparently because someone mentions Dig-Dog at one point. And he gave Digger white hair, although the story quite specifically assigns that feature to Professor Pierce. But those are tiny nitpicks against what is a Really Cool Thing: having another story officially published.

I actually started to do an illustration for this myself a couple of months ago, but couldn't get it looking the way I wanted, so I gave up. I may give it another try.

The story went live late Friday, and then today, Monday, I got another cool piece of news. "Astromonkeys" has been accepted for Escape Pod, so double-sale for that one. Yay!

Now I just need to start writing again. Haven't written a lick for a couple of months. Time to get back on it.