Under anesthetic, subdivided and synthetic

Because I thought that more than a few of us have been...how shall we say...transitional, lately, and since I haven't done this in, oh, 14 months or so...how about a little indulgence?



( Below: good and bad luck, voyeurism and vandalism, futile magic and furious Makoto.... )

You know what's surprising me lately? Castle. MightyGodKing likens it to The Thin Man and someone else elsewhere compared it favorably to Murder, She Wrote (only, I imagine, with the age demographic shaved to one-quarter) -- the important thing to remember about it is that it's a trifle. It's a pre-CSI police procedural, more cute than clinical, and you certainly don't watch it for the same reasons you watch other shows ostensibly of the same genre. Took it a while for it to get its sea legs, but it's found a groove and it's one of the more unrepentantly fun shows out there. You get Nathan Fillion going IM A RITER in front of a camera for an hour. Silly, goofy fun.

So the final issue of Planetary came out and...well, the two-and-a-half-year wait didn't do it any favors. It was perfectly excellent for what it was, don't get me wrong, but as it stood, it served as more of an epilogue than an actual final chapter, but that pronounced anticipation might've raised expectations just a touch beyond rational levels -- we already knew from #26 basically what shape the major plot had taken, all that was left was to tie up a few loose ends...one in particular, and handled satisfactorily. (If you haven't read Andrew Wheeler's excellent post on everything that's happened both since the first issue of Planetary was released and since the previous issue of Planetary was released, do read it -- it's been a busy decade.) It was an excellent little series, and I'll be sad to see it go.

Speaking of seeing it go, I did try the first issue of Mark Waid's Irredeemable and maybe I was looking for a reason not to keep going, but I did find one -- in the midst of the created-from-whole-cloth characters standing around laying down necessary exposition one of them insists "I don't want to talk about that day. We said we never would." Of course the day in question is the day in which the Ubermensch main character went murderous bugfuck, and I'm sure this is supposed to be a device to keep the reader interested and intrigued and not smack at all of being coy or a writer stepping in to stop perfectly natural exposition amongst a group of individuals who should, under these circumstances, feel as secure as they're ever gonna. At best it feels contrived, and there's too much artifice in a title that seems to pride itself in being unsentimental for me to suspend myself in. And this is after reading the last issue of The Boys, where Mallory actually appears in flashback, obligingly staying far in the background and keeping his face shadowed -- contrived, sure, but how many other questions were answered in that same issue? Strange, innit?

But my favorite thing from last week? Cyberball Robot Player's Union Says Lockout Likely In 2073 Season. Yes, that Cyberball.

Finally got around to watching Green Lantern: First Flight. It was...disappointing. ( Vaguest spoilers and four-color tealdeer below. )

Embarrassing revelation time: I used to get Jeph Loeb and Geoff Johns confused. I think it was the fact that their first names were both irritating variations on the same root name, that both of their last names were short, and they both came into my awareness at about the same time. But rest assured I'll never mistake them again. Loeb's been helming the suckfest that calls itself Ultimatum, a dramatic upheaval of Marvel's Ultimate universe, while Johns unleashes the first issue of the final chapter of his Green Lantern trilogy, Blackest Night. ( Cut for comic rant.... )

So President Obama took the oath of office again today. Some see it as necessary, others redundant. Me, I think it's a fantastic idea -- hell, he should take it every day, like a Green Lantern.

I said, I specifically said as the game was loading up that I had a sense of impending doom re: Goddamn Batman's wedding. Let's just say I should've seen it coming.



( Below: marital doooooom -- a ton of pics and one video clip.... )

I'm beginning to wonder if the idiot legacy children of editors and publishers who find themselves obligingly employed at Daddy's newspapers or similarly oblivious media outlets invariably end up getting shunted off to entertainment desks. That would explain two stories indicative of the media coverage of "Batman R.I.P." so far: Batman to be killed off after 70 years and Batman Killed by Own Father in Controversial New Comic Book Storyline.

From the first story, graphs two and four: There are rumours that Batman will suffer a gruesome end when his sidekick Robin goes over to "the dark side" and destroys him in a terrible betrayal. ...Others speculate that Wayne may either retire from his duties or be killed by a mystery villain known as the Black Glove. Aside from saturation in what Wikipedia editors would gleefully label "weasel words" (rumours from where? Which others?) there's a classic misstep of advertising your innate unfamiliarity with the material you're supposed to be covering ("mystery villain?" Singular? It's a Grant Morrison book; the beginning of this storyline has been on shelves long enough to have calcified already. There's no excuse for lack of a cursory Google just to bring yourself up to speed if you're going to cash a check based on writing fifteen column inches. Don't just reiterate the press release, please.)

The second story attempts even less depth, and as such, fails less. Ordinarily it'd get points for indicating Dr. Hurt claims to be Thomas Wayne (though in the issue he also claims to be the Devil, the fifth Beatle and a word that rhymes with "orange") and for including Morrison's quotes that indicate his goal in the storyline transcend the usual killing-off of the character. Of course the headline ignores those subtleties, and the story itself asserts Bruce Wayne as being dead three separate times, so it's hard to be charitable to this piece.

Old-media writers: here are a few ways and levels that writing about the "death" of Batman-slash-Bruce-Wayne are wastes of time and column inches.

1. DC/Warner will not kill its cash cow. Yes, Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes and wanted to make it stick, but if he couldn't resist the fan tide back in the days before slash and Mary Sues, imagine when said character is a $1 billion revenue hog. From a business standpoint, it makes no sense.

2. Batman will never consent to being dead. If Warner and DC Editorial were both under full control of the lunatics (insert Dan Didio assessment here) and they mutually decided that Bats should, indeed, become the Dirtnap Detective, that his tales had run their course, that there was no point in milking the fanbase anymore, that might stick for several years. But Batman as icon endures. He exists primarily in a medium where resurrection gets invoked now at funerals, where the most ancillary and nondescript characters from yellow-paged archives return with nearly mundane ease. The character might be freeze-dried coffee on the sidewalk; the idea endures and will persist, if not under this regime, then the next.

3. In terms of comic-book deaths, that's a two, maybe a three. Exploding helicopters? Meh. Tom Tresser and Oliver Queen have both endured those and gotten much better since.

4. For that matter, just looking at the big guns of the Justice League -- how many of them have been dead? Superman (notably), Wonder Woman (yes), Flash (some more so than others, but yes, that's Barry Allen again), Green Lantern (Hal Jordan's fall, death and resurrection got about as much paper devoted to it as a character of his stature could justifiably warrant), Aquaman (I lose track -- is there a new one?), Hawkman (Byzantine continuity issues aside, I'm sure he's been dead *and* alive simultaneously), Green Arrow (of course), J'Onn J'Onzz is currently suffering from death but for God's sake let's just move that right along, shall we?

5. Shall we even bother looking up the Wikipedia entry on Batman R.I.P.? "According to DC Senior Vice President and executive editor Dan DiDio, Bruce Wayne does not really die in the storyline, though it leads to his absence." Or, better still, Morrison on his still-unfolding Final Crisis miniseries: "First it's R.I.P., and we'll see how that winds up for Batman. Then the two-parter I mentioned (#682-683) goes through Batman's whole career, in a big summing up of everything that also ties directly into Final Crisis. And Final Crisis is where we see the final fate of Batman."

It's one thing to write about subcultures and miss the boat -- hell, it's to be expected (note the lack of split hairs over "Which Robin?"). Now, to miss the boat so badly you end up throwing yourself under a train instead, that's pretty impressive. And in entertainment writing, let's face it, it's excusable. It's ephemeral, it's pointless. But the scary thing is if this is indicative of the effort and discipline that goes into the "news" you consume without familiarity, why aren't you terrified?

First off, props to tviokh's Politisims -- fun and gleefully irreverent, and very much a precursor to all of this -- so much so that it preceded the 2004 election, to say nothing of 2008. I kept meaning to mention it, but kept forgetting, because my mind is full of mice.

And yes, I'm sorry, it's been over a month. Next month may be worse with NaNoWriMo, but I'll keep trying.



( Below, slightly obscured nudity and horrible lighting. )

So, let's count the things that have failed today¹.

-- The markets
-- The bailout
-- Wachovia (we could split hairs over what constitutes true fail, but face it, it's close enough -- spell-check wants to replace "Wachovia" with "Chekhovian" and I don't think even Anton was ever this dour)
-- The Legion of Super-Heroes (paging Christopher Bird, please pick up white courtesy phone)
-- Scott Linehan, former coach of the St. Louis Baabaas
-- The Hubble
-- Naked 52-year-old sex offenders found naked in a neighbor's daughter's bedroom with a knife, rope, condoms and a bad heart
-- Bat-flavored coffee
-- Gina Rue's suicide attempt (and I find this just after finishing Crysis Warhead with the riveting bridge cutscene)
-- Getting your butt stapled shut
-- Chili-eating-related fatality (from the Daily Fail, no less)
-- The New York Sun (final issue tomorrow -- print is dead, I tells ya)
-- My sanity and, of course, progress on GDBM (soon, I promise)

I'm sure there's more I'm missing, but those are your highlights. This should be a bank holiday -- like April Fool's, but inevitably self-inflicted.

¹Yeah, I'm cheating on some of these things having happened a few days ago. I'm adopting a quantum denial filter -- they didn't happen until I saw that they happened, and thus the waveform stabilized.