Political Science

Maybe I’m just reading the wrong blogs, but I can’t help but get a sinking feeling from this re-cap of Republican VP pick Sarah Palin’s very own, ongoing, troopergate scandal:

Eventually, Palin got fed up and fired Monegan from his job. This is an important point. Wooten never got fired. To the best of my knowledge, he’s is still on the job. The central bad act was firing the state’s top police official because he refused to bend to political pressure from the governor and her family to fire a public employee against whom the governor was pursuing a vendetta — whether the vendetta was justified or not.

Soon after this, questions were raised in the state about Monegan’s firing and he eventually came forward and said he believed he’d been fired for not giving in to pressure to fire Wooten.

After Monegan made his accusations, Palin insisted there was no truth whatsoever to his claims. Nonetheless, a bipartisan committee of the state legislature approved an investigation. In response, Palin asked the Attorney General to start his own investigation which many in the state interpretedas an effort to either keep tabs on or tamper with the legislature’s investigation. Again, very questionable judgment in someone who aspires to be first in line to the presidency.

The Attorney General’s investigation quickly turned up evidence that Palin’s initial denials were false. Multiple members of her staff had raised Wooten’s employment with Monegan. Indeed, the state police had a recording of one of her deputies pushing Monegan to fire Wooten. That evidence forced Palin to change her story. Palin said that this was the first she’d heard of it and insisted the deputy wasn’t acting at her behest, even though the trascript of the recorded call clearly suggested that he was.

Seriously, McCain couldn’t have picked someone who wasn’t currently under investigation by the authorities? It was that important that he try to play the “I’m less scared of women than Barack Obama” card?

Re-Reading Comics

(Another Onomatoepeia essay, from July last year.)

“It’s no longer news that comics have grown up. A form that was once solely the province of children’s entertainment now fills bookstores with mature, brilliant works by artists like Chris Ware, the Hernandez brothers, Dan Clowes and Charles Burns, discussed in the sort of tone that was once reserved for exciting young prose novelists.”

Thus begins Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics, which is described by the publisher as “the first serious, readable, provocative, canon-smashing book of comics theory and criticism by the leading critic in the field.” Some may say that that’s hyperbole, but not me – I simply like to point out that Douglas Wolk is a man who will surely burn in several separate hells for his role in stealing both the credits and the plaudits that should rightfully be mine. Why do I have such scorn for the accursed Wolk, you may find yourselves asking? It’s astoundingly simple: 

I wrote Reading Comics.

Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “No you didn’t. I’ve read Douglas Wolk’s reviews on Salon and Rolling Stone and you only ever write for the Savage Critic, so if it comes down to me thinking that someone like Douglas could write a critically-acclaimed book that even has Hibbs saying that it made him realize new things about Watchmen, a book that he’s read twice a year since 1967, or someone like you, my money’s on the Wolkmeister every time.” And I have something to say to you about that. Firstly, “the Wolkmeister”? Really? But more importantly, that’s a fair point, and you may be right. But that’s not the point.

I admit it; I didn’t write the version of Reading Comics that was actually released. Instead, I wrote the first, unreleased version of the book – I was the first person contacted by the publishers, and the first person to come up with the title, although my version was slightly longer: Reading Comics Can Be A Fun and Fulfilling Pastime, Unless You Happen To Be Reading Civil War: Frontline Because, I Mean, Really. Apparently, my take on the book was decided to be “not exactly what we were looking for,” and I was ultimately passed over so that “Victor Von” Wolk would get all the plaudits and awards and love and and and.

However, knowing that good work never goes to waste, and also that I have to fill two pages of Onomatopea this month despite getting ready to go to San Diego, I figured, why not share some of my unseen work with all of you? This way, you can all know what you’re talking about when you bombard DaCapo Press with letters, emails and nuts (Hey, it worked for Jericho) demanding that my version of the book gets released. And so, my friends, I present to you, the real first chapter to Reading Comics, and you just tell me whether you’d want to read more:

Reading Comics: An Introduction

Reading comics is a solitary art, much like masturbation. Also like masturbation, reading comics may lead to a lifetime of sadness and loneliness if not done correctly, and can occasionally be responsible for weak eyesight in later life.

However, masturbation is popular amongst teenagers and adults of all walks of life, and the same cannot be said about comics, although I’ve heard that “manga” sells well to the kids these days. That’s why this book exists – To give you, Mr. and Ms. Joe Public, a chance to look inside the world of comic books, and learn just why this exciting bastard art form and discover just why it is responsible for making Transformers the most successful movie of all time that isn’t Titanic! Come with me on this exciting story I’m telling, why don’t you? Come on!

The History of Comics, 1

The first thing that you need to understand in order to read a comic book is the history of the medium. Comic books were invented in 1961 by Stan “The Man” Lee and King Kirby, a recently-deposed eastern-European monarch who had mad skillz with the pencils. Born in the midst of America’s “Great Depression” of the 1920s and ‘30s, Lee was raised that the one thing that America needed more than anything else was a readable anti-depressant. Understanding that comedy was said to be successful in fighting depression, Lee set out to create a cheaply-produced comedic periodical about life in the Fantastical Brothers Circus, illustrated by Kirby’s garishly-colored silent images of the circus’s celebrated freaks, including a rubber-band man, a disappearing woman, Pyro The Flaming Fool and a gentleman made of orange poo. Sadly, the first edition of The Fantastical Four Stories of Circus Magic Comical was printed so poorly by the sadly short-lived publishing division of New York’s Hodgeman Home For the Blind and Infirm that entire pages of text were printed on top of Kirby’s artwork, making it look as it the characters themselves were speaking the words.

Upon discovering that the botched print run had been mistakenly released to the public, Lee used his Mob connections to order everyone involved in Hodgeman Home murdered in seemingly-innocuous circumstances. That was before he found out that the public loved this accidental new medium that had been created, and as tribute, Lee went on to spend his seven-hour eulogy for the former residents of the by-that-point-exploded Home pledging that the new medium would be dedicated in their name. And so, comics were born!

The History of Comics, 2

Thanks to the successes of Stan “The Man” Lee and his most successful creation, The Amazing Spider-Man, comics went from strength to strength throughout the later half of the 20th Century. Sales kept rising as comics were seen as the only form of entertainment not to be under threat of the wave of political relevance that had ruined popular culture from Bob Dylan to Sidney Lumet’s movie where everyone’s as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore at least until they leave the theater and start taking it again after all. As Stan Lee grew older, his mind crept further and further into senility; following the creations of post-feminist icons like Spider-Woman, She-Hulk and finally disco diva Dazzler, Lee was ousted from his own company Marvel Comics and placed in a local old folks home. 

Sensing a void in the comics marketplace, indie publisher DC Comics quickly pushed out its first three books on the same fateful day in 1987: Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and Maus. These three funny animals books dealt with issues that comics had previously avoided, such as cartoonists growing old, cartoonists’ fears about growing old, and cartoonists dealing with fears about growing old by talking to their fathers who survived the holocaust but still feeling sorry for themselves for growing old. Finally, comics had achieved a legitimacy with an audience that was also growing old! And so, adult comics were born!

But How ARE Comic Books Born?

That’s a really good question, and I’m glad that you asked me. Comics are a collaborative artform, with many pairs of eyes, ears, hands and other body parts responsible for the final product. But it all starts with the most important ingredient: The desire to entertain. 

Normally, that desire comes from the writer. His (or hers, but, come on, let’s be serious here) hands will be the first ones to start the process of creating the comic that you’re going to give your hard-earned cash to a shop owner for. His will be fingers that will touch the keyboard, crafting a script for his collaborators to ignore later in the process. A script for a comic is similar to a movie script, but can involve more complex visual ideas than a simple motion picture. Let’s look at this example, from Chris Ware’s script to L’il Nicky Fury, The World’s Shortest Super-Spy #19:

PAGES 1 THROUGH 6

A rigid grid of nine panels on the page. Each panel is exactly the same size as each other, and each panel is entirely black, like the void that is my talent. Sweet God, why must I fail my readers so badly with how talentless I am? Each time that I release a precious book full of my well-designed and good-intentioned multi-colored stories illustrating the essential worthlessness of life and win not only critical plaudits but also awards, I want to scream back at them, I AM WORTHLESS! I AM SO PATHETIC, WHY MUST YOU ALL KEEP LOOKING AT ME? STOP IT STOP IT STOPPPPPPPPPPP IIIIIIITTTTTT!

Anyway, each of these nine panels on each of these six pages are entirely black. They are all wordless on the first five pages, but on the sixth page, the following script should be rendered in precise handlettering NOT COMPUTER LETTERING, PHILISINES:

PANEL 1

BALLOON (NO POINTER): *SNIFFLE*

PANEL 3

BALLOON (NO POINTER): MOM?

PANEL 5

BALLOON (NO POINTER): MOMMMMMM!!!

PANEL 7

BALLOON (NO POINTER): WHAT IS IT, NICKY?

PANEL 8

BALLOON (NO POINTER): I… I CAN’T SEE, MOM. I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING.

PANEL 9

BALLOON (NO POINTER): WELL, SILLY, THAT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE WEARING YOUR EYE PATCH ON YOUR GOOD EYE. *SIGH* HOW WILL WE EVER MAKE A SUPER-SPY OUT OF YOU AT THIS RATE?

From there, the script will go to an editor, who will look it over for spelling mistakes and occasionally insert parenthetical sentences ending in ” – Ed.” into new captions to see how much the writer is paying attention when it gets returned to them. Once the writer has approved the editor’s approval of his script, said script then gets scanned into a large supercomputer in Texas, where a “rendering farm” of 23 computers quickly transfers the difficult concepts into easy-to-understand pictures for the unwashed masses. After the art has been produced, crack teams of tech-savvy elves “letter” the book, and then send it to the printer. Amazingly, this entire process takes less than a day, and is performed seven million times each month across the globe to allow you, the reader, to be able to choose between such varied products as Astonishing X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, New X-Men, X-Men and Persepolis.

Now that you understand where comics got their start and just how they’re made, it’s time to move onto our next chapter, where I’ll explain just why comics have taken over popular culture, and what that means for not only popular culture, but also highbrow culture, in the next fifty years. It may sound weighty, but I’m sure that you’ll understand exactly where I’m coming from once you’ve finished reading We’re All Doomed: Roy Lichtenstein, I Blame You For Making People Think This Stuff Should Be Taken Seriously In The First Place.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

(I write for Comix Experience’s Onomatoepeia newsletter each month; I preview the new books in the back, and in the front, I do this short piece about… well, whatever comes to mind when I have a deadline, really. It’s one of the few things that I write that doesn’t show up online… so, of course, I thought that I’d change that. Here’s the first one I did – I think? – from June of last year.)

So, picture the scene.

There I was, post-dental surgery and in a crazed state because of the medication the doctor had given me. At least, I had been told that the doctor had given it to me; to be honest, everything from being clamped into the chair and having the nasal oxygen thing fitted until maybe two days later was kind of blurry. I mean, sure, I have vague recollections of having to sit somewhere afterwards while someone explained to me what I was and wasn’t allowed to do (Eating, for example, was a no-no. As was sucking anything through a straw. Who knew?), but everything beyond that is more than a little hazy. Kate promises me that I didn’t do anything too terrible in those missing hours and that, when she came to pick me up, I was quiet but not obviously in some kind of Manchurian Candidate-esque post-hypnotic programming state. But maybe she’s the Meryl Streep to my Liev Schrieber and is just lulling me into a false sense of security until it’s time for me to kill Hillary Clinton.

Anyway. Like I said, there I was, sitting in my bed, surrounded by no food whatsoever and all manner of comic books, trying to kill time and stay awake by coming to terms with everything that’s happening in two of the superheroic fictional universes that I occasionally visit. I realize that that doesn’t sound too exciting to all of you out there, but you have to realize that I was in the frame of mind where I didn’t want anything more challenging than a Brad Meltzer comic, and the only alternative at the time seemed to be watching reruns of Star Trek: Voyager on Spike TV. 

To be fair, though, it was actually surprisingly enjoyable: DC’s superhero books, for example, make a lot more entertaining when you’re on prescribed mind-altering substances; you begin to imagine connections and motivations and plots, everything that books like The Flash: Fastest Man Alive lack when you’re entirely sober. That said, nothing can make Countdown make sense beyond being the product of a mixture of Dan Didio’s twin fetishes for Jim Shooter and making every single book in the DC Universe meaningless unless you’re reading every single other book in the DC Universe, although the colors are pretty when Lightray explodes.

After having fun trying to work out just why Kyle Rayner’s been on the cover of Countdown twice despite never having actually been in the book yet, I found myself turning to the other Big Two company’s works. And that’s where it all started.

Reading through both World War Hulk and the latest issue of New Avengers, I started putting two and two together to myself through the haze. The less astute reader, I thought, may look at recent events in the Marvel Universe – Invasions from aliens who have watched “Gladiator” a few too many times, for example, or the revelation that apparently shape-shifting space aliens have been here for a long time, posing as humans while pursuing a secret agenda known only to themselves – as turning the line of books away from the ground level political and social commentary of series like Civil War and Chris Claremont’s Four Color Election Day Funnies (“Welcome to the White House, Alberto Gonzales- – Hope you survive the experience!”). Such a reader may be surprised at this apparent change in direction for the publisher; surely appearing on The Colbert Report a couple of times to memorialize the symbolic murdering of Captain America shows that clumsily trying to make political lemonade from superhero lemons has been working out for Dan Buckley and his band of merry men, after all, so why turn away from that and towards a more fantastic, less realistic style of story?

And then, with a chilling chill that went all the way up and back down at least a small portion of my spine, the truth came to me:

“What if,” I asked myself well aware of the Marvel-ous meaning of those two words, “What if the people at the House of Ideas know more about what’s going on the world these days than the rest of us? After all, it’s not called the House of Frickin’ Dummies Who Don’t Pay Attention To The World Around Them, is it…? It’s not that unusual a concept, I thought to myself – Think back to those issues of Amazing Spider-Man where Stan Lee singlehandedly told the world about the dangers of drugs, singlehandedly stopping the 1960s in their tracks and ushering in the highly conservative 1970s and ending the drug trade in one single blow. Or Steve Englehart’s ‘Secret Empire’ issues of Captain America where Richard Nixon was revealed to be a meglomaniacal dictator out to take over the world, which caused the entire Watergate scandal? Even in the 1980s, it took Marvel Comics to solve the mystery of who was stealing entire cities from the planet by ripping out massive chunks of land and lifting them into space, with its groundbreaking and Dan Rather-approved Secret Wars series. Marvel Comics kind of has a history when it comes to breaking the really big news stories before the mainstream media can get off their overfed, ‘respectable’ asses.”

I continued along my fevered train of thought: “This can mean only one thing. The world is under lowkey invasion from alien forces who really, really like Ridley Scott movies and Marvel are trying to get the word out on the downlow so that we can congregate and fight back like we’re all in a Michael Bay movie.”

It was the only thing that made sense.

Suddenly, I could see all of the signs that they’ve been sending us. It’s not just that Elektra turned out to be a Skrull, showing us that even our closest ninja adversaries can be affected by this Invasion Of The Body Snatchers-esque turn of events, but even the very titles of their books have been hinting at something for quite some time. Why, years ago, Bendis told us that we were part of a “Secret War”, and just a few months back, David Hine repeated that by reminding us of our “Silent War”. I had just assumed that Marvel was planning to trademark the word “war” in the near future (That, or it was a running joke; World War Hulk Prologue coming out exactly a year after Civil War #1, and both of them appearing in the first week of May, lead me to expect next year’s massive crossover to have a Spanish theme and be called Cinco De Waro), but no! They were trying to warn us! 

But the messages didn’t stop there! I looked at what their books are called, and it all became very clear what Marvel is trying to tell us: We all need to take “The Initiative” and fight back by becoming our own personal “Iron Man” or taking advantage of “Heroes For Hire”, in order to stop ourselves from mourning “Fallen Son”s while facing the aliens’ “Extinction Agenda”. Otherwise, we face “Annihilation”. Or, even worse, “Annihilation: Conquest.”

Holy crap, I thought to myself.

There was only one thing for it. I dragged myself up off my bed and staggered to the phone, dialing Joe Quesada’s phone number with a shaking, sweaty, finger. “Joe! Joe!” I yelled, once I’d gotten past the hold music and explained patiently to his personal assistant that I didn’t have any Hollywood connections. “I get it! I get what you’re trying to tell me! They’re here.”

“What?” he said. “Who’s here? Who is this?”

“Joe… You don’t have to pretend anymore. I’m with you. I understand. ‘One More Day’, Joe! You’re giving us the countdown to when we’ve got to rise up! It’s not just about Aunt May almost dying again!”

With that, the line went dead.

But I know that Joe was just trying to pretend that he didn’t know what I was talking about so that the aliens in the Marvel offices wouldn’t figure out his cunning plan. That’s okay. He knows that I know now. And he’s taking advantage of that with each and every solicitation that he sends out. Look! This month alone, they’re releasing comics with “Uprising,” “Survival Of The Fittest”  and, most tellingly, “Last of The Mohicans” in the title. I know what you’re telling me, Joe. And it’s okay. I understand.

Stay strong.

These pain drugs, by the way? Totally awesome.

Hello, Hello, And Welcome To Our Show Tonight

Yes, that’s right; I needed another blog.

But, to be fair to my crazy blogging masochism, this is the first personal blog I’ve had since, what, 2002? Something like that? Which is almost a millennium ago in internet years, so hopefully you can forgive me adding a verbal (well, written) release valve of sorts to my already-full blog portfolio of io9 (where I am writer by weekday and editor by weekend; yes, that’s right – I’m editing right now) and Savage Critics. What’ll I write about here? I don’t really know, to be honest. Comics, probably, but also music, movies, real life stuff, whatever. That’s kind of the point, after all. I’ll also pull in random quotations as headlines, like the one above, just to show how well-versed in meaningless pop culture I am.

Anyway. Hello. Good to meet you all. Glad this first post is done; I hate first posts.