Sunday, January 9, 2005

The king in yellow, the queen in red

My boss talks a lot of smack, but in the end, she’s a cream puff.

Not, mind you, in a good way.

All this week – which for me, remember, began on Wednesday – she was dropping dire hints, interlarded with sinister chuckles, about our upcoming team meeting. Asses would be kicked, names would be taken, bubble gum would not be chewed. It was a New Year, and it was time for a fresh start. She was going to take out the trash. A lot of crap that had been going on around the workplace was going to stop… Or Else.

Now, there’s an understandable level of hyperbole in the workplace, always. When we say stuff like “my boss beat the living shit out of me today”, we are generally exaggerating, unless, of course, you are vying for the welterweight title of the world and your boss is Rocky Marciano. For most of us, though, this is something of a melodramatic distortion of the actual facts; the ‘beating’ in question usually turns out to be just your boss expressing their disapproval of your recent work habits in an unequivocal manner.

So I did not expect that my boss – I shall call her Kendra, regardless of what I may have called her before on this page, because my memory is less than eidetic and Kendra is nothing like her actual name – was actually going to string anybody up and flog them in public. And, having some experience with Kendra’s management technique, or lack thereof, I really shouldn’t have expected much of anything to happen, because Kendra dreads confrontations and she prides herself on the fact that she does not ‘micromanage’, which is, of course, true, because Kendra prefers, whenever possible, not to manage her team at all.

Still, she was talking so MUCH smack this time, I figured SOMEthing was going to happen at this meeting, and, for all I knew, something was going to happen to me. I am, in my considered opinion, the best writer on the email team where I work, and while I do have my little character flaws and performance shortcomings, I am a paragon of professionalism compared to… well, I’m thinking about 2/3s of the remainder of the team. And I am experienced enough with Kendra to know that doesn’t matter a whit; if I’d done something to annoy her, well, I was going to hear about it.

As it turned out, I hardly needed to worry. When Kendra ‘goes off’ on people, unless you are listening very carefully and have learned what nuances to pay attention to, you would not be able to distinguish such from her, well, talking to people. She talks in a reasonably forthright fashion, but she never seems particularly angry, or confrontational, or threatening.

And, well, there’s a reason for that: she’s not. Threatening, that is.

It’s taken me six months on the team to really get this through my head, but for all Kendra’s bluster, she won’t DO anything about ANYthing.

Oh, she went over some stuff. Certain people (prima donnas on day shift, where all the email team veterans have congregated, for the most part, because they’re all too good to work nights) had been taking too many breaks, and not clocking back in from them in time, and This Had To Stop. If it did not, Kendra warned us darkly, she could start assigning our break times and writing us up when we did not adhere to same. (The vast majority of non-salaried employees at the call center where I work take calls all day, and thus, have carefully assigned break and lunch times, and if they do not adhere to their schedule, they get written up and, eventually, terminated. It’s a very serious thing, and on my team, the much more lax daily schedule is probably THE major perk.)

Certain people (again, same day shift prima donnas) were still doing everything in their power to avoid taking calls like we are all supposed to, for two hours a day. And, again, This Had To Stop. If it didn’t, bad things would happen. Kendra didn’t specify what bad things would happen in this instance, but, well, her voice was very ominous.

This little bit of discussion was, by the way, the first inkling I had that the people on day shift basically got to pick which two hours they would take calls for. On night shift, we have always had our shifts assigned to us. Apparently, on days, they can just sign on the phones and take calls for two hours whenever they feel like it during the day, which means, since it gets busiest towards noon and then stays busy through 5 or so, they all log on at 8 am… when they bother to do it at all.

Then there was the ‘cherry picking’, which is to say, certain people (or, I should say, a certain person, we all know who it is on the team) going through the queues and pulling out all the easy emails while leaving all the very complex ones for other people, to pump up her own stats at the expense of everyone else’s. Kendra warned us all, in general, that she knew exactly who was doing this, and she wasn’t going to tolerate it, and It Had Better Stop. Or Else.

Over the course of this meeting, one day shift prima donna – I’ll call her Lisa – picked up a catalog and started leafing through it, obviously bored. Kendra told her to put it down and pay attention. Lisa complied, but her attitude was that of somebody who is… just barely… humoring a six year old. A little later, another day shift prima donna, whom I shall dub Angela, actually put her head down on the table and started to nap. Kendra told her to wake up and listen, and Angela actually murmured, in a whisper very much pitched to carry to all of us “Oh my god, is she still talking?”

Now, we’re an informal crew, and Angela has been on the team for years, and is very knowledgeable, but that kind of nonsense cries out for some kind of response. And it didn’t get any, as Angela did, with visible reluctance, sit back up and make a great show of listening.

There was other stuff, most of it having to do with several people on the team who were abusing their schedules, not working very hard, not doing what they were told to do, and who were, generally, acting like spoiled brats. Kendra made several threats, most of them schedule related. People were used to getting the shifts they wanted; well, if they didn’t shape up, they might not get those shifts any more. Some people never had to work Saturdays; that could change. People on the email team had gotten used to Kendra never doing stuff like the other team leaders do, such as writing people up and passing out occurrences, but, well, it was a New Year, and who knew what could happen?

It wasn’t until right about that point, I swear, that even after six months of this nonsense, it finally sank in fully to me – Kendra was never going to do any of this.

Her whole “It’s a New Year, we’re all starting over with a clean slate, I’m not going to take any action against anyone for anything that’s happened before this, but from now on, boy, you better watch out” thing – the underlying motif and message of the entire meeting – was a hollow sham. “It’s a New Year and we’re starting over” was simply Kendra’s way of justifying taking absolutely no action, at all, for stuff that had been going on for… well, probably for years.

Other than the small disciplinary measures I’ve mentioned above that Kendra could take – making our schedules much less flexible, assigning senior people shifts they don’t want, actually issuing written warnings that would go in our files and count against us if we ever wanted a promotion or a raise – Kendra has one big gun. And it’s a really BIG gun. Everyone on the email team is afraid of it to one extent or another, although, from what I have been told, in the history of the team, Kendra has only used it once, and then, she was given no choice… she had to either use it or lose half the team (or so I’m told).

The Big Gun is, Kendra can kick any of us off the email team at any time for any reason, or none at all. And however bad it may be on the email team, going back out to the floor and taking calls would be much, much worse.

As I said, Kendra has used that Big Gun once, and she only did it when three people on the team told her, either she got rid of someone who had gravely offended all of them, or they would all quit. Or so I have been told; it happened before my time. And from what I’ve been told, that person who did get put back on the floor (and who promptly quit; hardly anyone will go back out to the floor from the email team, it would be considered a major social disgrace) had done something truly reprehensible to provoke that reaction from her teammates.

People are afraid of the Big Gun… but not too afraid, because everyone knows Kendra doesn’t want to use it, and WON’T use it, unless she’s forced to. As for the smaller stuff Kendra threatened everyone with… well… nobody takes it at all seriously. See, in order to implement that stuff, Kendra would have to make an effort. She would have to actually manage us. And she absolutely does not want to do that, and as far as I can tell, she just WON’T do it… again, unless she is absolutely forced to.

Only at the end of the meeting did Kendra bring up anything that was aimed at me. The meeting was pretty much over when she gave me a sideways glance and then said, loudly, to everyone there, as we were pushing our chairs back to our cubicles, “Oh, by the way… if you’re going to vent about something, especially about me, be aware that that stuff gets back to me. Be careful what you say.”

I figured that had to be for my benefit, and I asked her about it afterward, and she said “Well, I’m not writing anyone up for anything that has happened before, but, just be aware, that stuff gets back to me.” Then she added, obliquely, “And, by the way, none of those things happened for those reasons.”

All of which leads me to believe that she was referring to some very specific instance of me bitching about her in regard to some specific incident, but honestly, I bitch about Kendra so much, and dislike the way she ‘manages’ us so much and so comprehensively, that I have no clue specifically which of my many tirades made its way back to her.

Other than the complete unwillingness to do anything that one might remotely call managing, as detailed above, here are the two other general things I intensely dislike about Kendra’s ‘leadership’ style:

First, she never gives positive feedback. She is one of those truly dreadful bosses who simply never has a good word to say about anyone’s job performance. You could talk Donald Trump out of switching his entire corporate long distance account from our client to a competitor, and get him to sign up for a more expensive calling plan to boot, and Kendra would never even mention it. All she cares about is whether or not the team is getting her in trouble or not, or she thinks there is the potential the team might get her into trouble.

The other thing I despise about Kendra’s management, and this I TRULY loathe, is that when she does give feedback (always negative feedback, always motivated by her catching someone doing something she thinks might get her in trouble, if it comes to someone else’s attention) she is NEVER CORRECT.

Kendra has smacked me around for stuff a few times in the six months I’ve been there. Not particularly often… three times, that I can recall. (This is not counting the occasion at a previous team meeting when she asked if people had any questions at all, I asked a question, and in front of the entire team, she looked at me and said “Well, I think that’s a pretty stupid question”. I don’t count that as feedback; it’s not intended to be constructive.) Whenever she has given me feedback, it has not been something she wanted to do. Once a customer wrote in with a problem I could not fix because he was not our customer and he wanted credit for something we were not billing him for. He got irate when I explained that to him and escalated it to our client’s executive level, and Kendra got some backlash for it, and made me suffer over it, too. Another time, Kendra did not like my feedback in a team meeting, and to shut me up she told me, really quickly (again, in front of everyone else) that I had “been giving customers a LOT of misinformation”. After talking about this with a few people and being advised my best course was to sit down with her and respectfully ask her for details so I could correct the situation, I did so. And the third occasion was just recently, when I came across a problem that had started seven months before when another rep at another call center made a stupid mistake, and did my best to correct it, and copied Kendra on the email so maybe we could try to prevent things like that from happening in the future.

On all of these occasions, Kendra’s feedback was absolutely worthless. It was contradictory, it was manifestly incorrect, and on one occasion, it was clear to me that she’d been caught flatfooted and at a loss, and was basically just making something up out of whole cloth because she really didn’t have any clear instances in her mind where I had actually been giving out misinformation to the customers.

The major reason Kendra’s feedback is always wrong and never useful, however, is simple, and goes back to her complete unwillingness to manage: she never knows what she’s talking about. By which I mean, she does not read anything except the one email in question.

The first time Kendra beat me up, over the nutjob who wrote in demanding credit for something we had not actually billed him for, and who then went screaming to corporate when I explained that to him, it became obvious over the course of her harangue that she had not read this customer’s email to me, nor had she acquainted herself with any of the details of the case. All she’d done was scan through the email that I had written back to this guy and pick out a few sentences to smack me around over. The second time I got feedback from her was the occasion where, clearly, she didn’t really have any examples of me providing misinformation to the customers in mind, she’d just rattled that off at the meeting to shut me down in public, and she just basically made some stuff up off the top of her head that didn’t even apply to me. (She told me, specifically, “Well, you’ve been canceling accounts by going to the Plan screen instead of the Account Information screen, and that’s wrong”. I told her, “No, I haven’t; that’s not how I was trained to do it and that’s not how I do it.” I explained, in detail, how I canceled accounts, and she said “Oh, well, then, I guess it was someone else” and that was that.)

The third time was just two weeks ago, before Christmas, over the email I’d forwarded to her in which I’d tried to straighten out a snafu that had gradually come about become someone else in another call center had dropped the ball seven months before. She explained to me that if that email had come to the attention of corporate, she’d have gotten her hand slapped really hard for it. She showed me how I had, in one place, been too harsh on our client, and in another place, I had not been nice enough to the customer, and how, overall, she just felt it hadn’t been a very good idea for me to do what I’d done, although exactly what I should have done instead, she did not in any way specify.

And, once again, her feedback was completely useless. Why? Well, as we discussed the situation, it became clear that Kendra had not read the customer's email to me, nor had she gone into his account and read the notes there that my email to him drew on and referred to. All she had done was read my email, and, again, pick out a few sentences and key phrases she didn't like to beat me up over.

Now, it was a long email, because it was a complex situation, and I had a lot to explain, and I suppose it is possible that in one part of it, I was overly harsh to the company I worked for, and in another part, I was overly harsh to the customer himself, but I am of the considered opinion that I am not that bad a writer, and I would not and did not do any such thing.

All of this is a large part of why I love my job as much as I do, and why I am so relieved to have my three day weekends back. 10 hour days are a bitch, but, well, Kendra leaves around 4 every afternoon, so most of them are spent without her direct non-supervision, and three days away from her, and my place of work in general, are a joy beyond measure, I tell you this in truth.

It is, of course, not all bad, having a boss that one is aware will only fire one (or anyone else on one’s team) under dire circumstances. And certainly, given a choice between a micromanager and a non-manager, I’ll take the latter every time. I’ve worked many jobs, and I’ve had a few micromanagers, and they are much MUCH worse.

Still, Kendra closed her statement about everyone being careful what they said about her behind her back by telling us that, if anyone had a problem with her, they should come to her and talk about it, and that is just hilarious. If there is anything Kendra absolutely WOULD fire someone for, it is coming to her with criticism of her management style, and it would only get worse if the criticism actually made sense and was well supported.

It goes without saying, but I may as well say it, that I’m reasonably confident no one I work with reads this page, or I wouldn’t be saying any of this here. Still… sometimes you need to vent.

And, hey, if I do get fired, certain people have been bugging me to move for a while anyway…

The ghosts that haunt me now

Time to give out some props. Quite a while ago, Jack Shaver sent me this , a copy of the first, and what may well be the only, piece of work I have ever authored that has been published in a professional mainstream comic. It was very kind of Jack, and I should have thanked him in public for it before this, but, well, I kept forgetting whenever I had the time to update this thing.

Jack and I aren’t corresponding any more, due to some unfortunate personality clashes which are, most likely, nearly all my fault. Still, I appreciate seeing the page, and I wanted to say that where people could see it.

Just before Christmas, Mike Norton sent me a package that contained a few HeroClix I was missing from my Mutant Mayhem set, a couple of bags of the aquarium pebbles he and I both use as action tokens (they work really well, much better than the pennies most other people seem to use, and I haven’t been able to find any down here), and a copy of Shaun of the Dead on DVD. I can’t remember if I mentioned that on this blog prior to this, but if I did, it won’t hurt to repeat myself, and if I didn’t, well, sorry, Mike, and thanks, you’re a man among men. (This time it’s a compliment.)

And I also need to give props to Tammy, who is not only always there for me, but who without even being asked to, printed out and Xeroxed off several copies of my newly revised House Rules and clix list, and sent them off to me in the mail. Tammy is a pearl beyond price, and she doesn’t let me thank her very often in public, but dammit, I’m going to now and she can just lump it. Thanks, Tams, you’re a doll and I adore you.

Beyond that, some odd people who edit an e-zine called Bewildering Stories are going to print one of my weirder short stories, a comical tale that may or may not be on my Doc Nebula's Phantasmagorical Fan Page, called Return To Sender (and the fact that I found a link to it all prepared on my links scroll would seem to indicate that, yes, indeed, it is on my Doc Nebula site, but now you can just hit the link and go there directly, not that any of you will). They don’t pay me anything, of course, but still, it’s nice somebody likes my work enough to give it a wider audience.

Oh, and I should also mention that Mike Norton sent me a link to an Ebay sale last night where some shop in Michigan or Minnesota was selling a sealed case of UNLEASHED HeroClix for around $130. And I bought it. Which was probably foolish, since all I'm really hoping for is a Kingdom Come Superman, and I could get one of those for around $60. But, still, I like opening boosters. Now if they'd just tell me when I can expect it...

Oh, and I also got a big box of comics from Steve Tice, and to my disappointment, he was sold out of JSA #s 59, 60, and 61. And since then, Doug Sulipa, my Canadian comics pusher who until now had been able to get anything I wanted, is also sold out of those issues (and worse, he doesn't have the BRAVE AND THE BOLD issue by Alan Brennert where Batman teams up with the Robin of Earth-2, which I used to own and really want to get a copy of). So if anyone out there knows any place I can get that stuff, please tell me.

On a less pleasant note, my one time Australian correspondent, James Newton, got in touch with me again. Under the guise of a cybernetic New Year’s greeting, he sent me a long email apparently calculated to rouse my sympathies. In it, he detailed the various travails he had recently gone through, including a friend of his stealing his entire comics collection, as well as a lot of other stuff, including all the work he had done on his doctoral treatise.

According to James, if that’s this person’s name at all, this was the same guy who was essentially editing and sending his email to me… the same guy who, purportedly, plagiarized the work of several other web geeks, inserting them into “James” email to ‘impress’ me, without James’ knowledge.

My few readers will probably recall that this guy, upon being busted for his plagiarism righteously by me, fell all over himself apologizing and begging me not to think badly of James for it, as James was, of course, just an innocent victim in this, and James loved my email, and the poor blind fellow would be doubly victimized if I stopped writing to him over something that, you know, someone else had done.

Well, I felt this didn’t add up… for someone who had to plagiarize other people’s work because he claimed not to be a good writer, this particular email was a masterfully crafted guilt trip… and so I stopped writing to James. And when, a week or so later, I got another email that purported to be from some couple who were traveling abroad and who had just happened to encounter my blog, and read what I’d said, and who then spent ten thousand words telling me that they could offer independent corroboration of this guy’s story, well… the rat I was smelling got even smellier.

These people also mentioned that somewhere in their attic, or their brother’s attic, or someone’s attic, they had a large collection of Silver Age comics they didn’t want any more, that they would be happy to send to me, at some nebulous point in the future, said offer which was, presumably, contingent on me befriending them and continuing to correspond with them.

So, honestly, the whole ‘James’ thing just really seemed to have a bad odor to it, and I didn’t write back to those people, and I stopped writing to James, too, no matter what I was told about how it wasn’t his fault at all.

Still, James’ latest email really did get to me. Oh, it still didn’t add up at all… after all, if his friend who had sent me all that email had been so noble and self sacrificing to admit to the plagiarization himself to spare James, it seemed unlikely he’d be the kind of rotter who would then turn around and rob a blind man. Still… James is, apparently, in Australia, so what could it hurt to give him the benefit of the doubt and keep corresponding with him? On even the off chance that what he was saying was true, hell… if I were blind, I cannot tell you what a hell my life would be. I would, honestly, want to die, and yet, I’m so cowardly I wouldn’t be able to kill myself. It would be dreadful, and if it happened to me and I found something I enjoyed, well, I would hope someone would extend the benefit of said doubt to me before they’d pull it away.

So I answered James’ letter, and said ‘okay, sure, we can try it, but if I ever catch you lying to me at all, that’s it’.

James said that was fine. And then launched into laments because, with the comic book collection stolen, well, he’d been planning to give it to me, to replace the comic collection I’d lost up north, and now he couldn’t…

And, honestly, it was just so much exactly like what I’d been told by this supposed other couple, who showed up out of nowhere, supposedly, to assure me that James’ account of things was actually very credible, that… well…

Nah.

I have no idea who James is, really. I have no faith in anything ‘he’ has told me to date, though. All that seems clear is, ‘he’ is someone who desperately wants my attention, and, well, ‘he’ seems to be a fairly knowledgeable comics fan. I suppose it could be that Julian kid who wanted to make a movie out of my life, and who I told to screw off after he annoyed me too many times… I don’t know.

Maybe it’s my old college buddy Slappy, trying to teach me an object lesson in how much fun it is to be ‘cyber-stalked’. Still, I don’t think he has the time to send me 100K emails on obscure bits of Marvel’s Atlantean continuity…

First pillage, THEN rape, THEN burn

Speaking of my old buddy Slappy, he’s writing Conan for Dark Horse now, which just seems very odd to me.

Back in college, Slappy had a roommate whose name was Andy Gillespie. Andy was a fine fellow, and I got along with him well most of the time, as did Slappy. However, Slappy found endless amusement in the fact that the only comic book Andy enjoyed was Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian, said comic which endlessly depicted the same three or four plots with minor variations as rendered by Roy Thomas and an apparently perpetually assigned John Buscema. Andy also liked any other Conan related book, like the Savage Sword black & white mag Marvel was publishing at the time, and the occasional King Conan Special Marvel would put out. And Andy would pick up and read the occasional other comic Slappy or I or Jeff Webb or Scott MacLeod would leave lying around, but the only one he’d buy, or that he really enjoyed, was Conan the Barbarian… and, as I say, Slappy just thought this was hilarious.

Slappy never much cared for the sword & sorcery genre, as I recall. It was something he’d poke fun at whenever it came up. Not that I was a whole lot better back then; I’d read Andy’s Conans every once in a while, but, well, as I mentioned, the plots were pretty repetitive (and all Conan plots can essentially be boiled down to one essential arc – something bad happens, usually involving evil sorcery or a great big monster; Conan shows up and kills a great many people, including evil sorcerers and/or big monsters; a good looking woman sighs and faints in his arms, and he rides off with her), and Roy Thomas at full power wasn’t much competition for the writers I really enjoyed back then, like Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber and Roger Stern.

Anyway, it’s all twenty years and more ago, and people change, and I suppose Slappy could have come to just absolutely adore the sword and sorcery genre and the brawny tales of Robert E. Howard’s most famous barbarian in particular.

I suppose.

Anyway, I got a big box of comics from Steve Tice, who owns a comics shop up in Pennsylvania somewhere, last Tuesday. Among these comics were many of Slappy’s current run on Dark Horse’s current revival of Conan (Steve didn’t have issues 0 or 2, so I’m missing those). And, well, they were interesting. Some of them were even good… well, one of them was, anyway.

Judging from these comics, and their lettercols (I nearly fell over when I saw Conan had a lettercol; it’s been so long since any comic I read regularly had one), my old college pal and mentor is in quite a quandary. See, when you write Conan, you apparently do it on sufferance. There are, it seems, roughly ten kazillion Robert E. Howard fans out there, and all of them worship Conan to a degree that I would find surprising if I had not already encountered similarly deranged zealots who follow the work of Warren Ellis, John Byrne, Robert A. Heinlein, and Slappy himself.

These Conan fans are not shy about expressing their opinions, and judging from these lettercols, their opinions are unequivocal – no one is allowed to write anything new about Conan the Barbarian. A Conan comic, while considered to be as desirable to these fans as a weekend in a hammock with Mischa Barton would be to any normal heterosexual male, MUST NOT DEVIATE from the canon as established by Howard. NO NEW STORIES ARE TO BE TOLERATED. Those who write Conan in any other media besides Howard’s original pulp publications are considered to be adapters only, and Mitra help them if they are less than faithful in their adaptations, as well.

From what I’ve seen in these particular comics, this is something of a problem for Slappy, because, well, Slappy is primarily a writer who enjoys accomplishing two things when he writes fiction: (a) bringing a realistically detailed alternate reality setting to credible, three dimensional life, and (b) doing interesting character work.

Now, Robert E. Howard was good at creating fantasy settings, there can be no doubt. I’ve recently read a few of Howard’s original Conan stories, and REH does a fabulous job of establishing atmosphere and creating sometimes surprisingly nuanced fantasy backgrounds filled with political intrigue.

However, Howard couldn’t write characterization at all. Virtually all his heroes seem to be all but indistinguishable from each other, and, as I’ve noted, most of his plots tend to be rather similar, as well.

So, if my old buddy Slappy, who is somewhat rightly lauded as a modern master of characterization, is going to be stuck doing nothing but faithful adaptations of original REH barbarian stories… well, he’s got a problem.

And I think the problem goes deeper than that, because, in all honesty, I don’t think Slappy has changed much at all, at least, in the regard I have been discussing, namely, his fondness or lack thereof for the sword & sorcery genre. I honestly don’t think REH’s Hyborian Age, or anything else remotely resembling it (and all sword & sorcery backdrops resemble it to some extent, Howard pretty much created the genre) is within a parsec of being Slappy’s particular cup of tea. If one of the things my old friend excels at is bringing an alternate reality to credible life, well, this isn’t one he particularly wants to sink his teeth into, as it were… and that IS a problem. We’ve seen my one time housemate take on an ongoing series set in a world he didn’t have much particular interest in once before, and that series was called Power Company, and even the most generous Slappy fan (which, oddly, given the personal history between us, I honestly am) couldn’t call that series anything more than mediocre.

I’d be puzzled as to exactly why Slappy even took the assignment, much less actively campaigned for it the way it seems to be generally understood he did, if I weren’t so painfully aware of how difficult it is for even popular writers to find regular assignments in comics these days. The industry has been purported to be dying for decades now (and I’ve been predicting its imminent demise since the early 90s), and, well, it might not be in Cheyne-Stokes respiration yet, but still, it ain’t exactly boom times in the medium, either. A regular gig is nothing to be sneezed at. And if I suspect that Slappy’s presence on Conan at Dark Horse is a dire indicator of just how hard it is to find assignments on more mainstream books at Marvel or DC right now, well, that’s very much by the by.

Having said all this, just how is the new Conan?

Well, Slappy’s compromise with the diehard Conan fans is to do adaptations of Howard’s stories, but to try to put them in some kind of linear sequence (something Howard never did) and to fill in that sequence with original bridging material that Howard himself did not write. So we get an issue adapting “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”, but before it, we get an issue showing how Conan met all those thinly disguised Vikings and why he was hanging out with them, and after it, we get another issue showing how it was Conan proceeded from the end of that story to the setting of the next one in sequence, “The God In The Bowl”, and following that, we get yet another issue setting up “The God In The Bowl”, after which, that story itself is adapted pretty faithfully. And then, we get more original filler showing how Conan wanders off in the direction of another Howard story.

None of this is exactly Slappy’s finest work, and to me it seems clear he isn’t particularly enjoying what he’s writing. Now, Slappy doesn’t always do first rate work when he’s enjoying himself either; he waited his entire life to write Iron Man, and nobody has ever tried to claim that his run on that title was even remotely memorable or even good (but I’m fairly sure he was hamstrung by editorial directions that were, most likely, idiotic and utterly inimical to the notion of writing the character at all well).

Nonetheless, if a writer is not enjoying himself, it’s going to show in his work, and I think that lack of enjoyment shows in most of the scripts on Conan.

There is one exception, however. Interspersed among the adaptations and their barely tolerated filler, Slappy is doing another multipart flashback story… the tale that REH never bothered to tell, of how Conan came to be. Called “Born On A Battlefield”, this story is drawn by an entirely different artist than the regular guy on the book, and is supposedly meant to give that artist the occasional breather so he can maintain an otherwise monthly schedule. This story is entirely original… and it is the only issue of this Conan series I have read where I get the impression my old clique-mate really enjoyed himself writing it.

Besides being quite well written, “Born On A Battlefield” is a completely unique Conan story for one reason I can see: it is the first and only place I have ever even heard of Conan being referred to as 'quick witted’.

See, one of the other reasons I never had much patience or fondness for Conan when I was younger is that he is very nearly the antithesis of the intellectual hero. He is, essentially, a fist with a sword in it, a great big dumb galoot with the writer on his side. Conan solves every problem, no matter how sophisticated or complex that problem may be, by killing things. And this is no coincidence. REH, for all his undeniable scholarly acumen, well developed intellect, and creative talents, was a morose, self pitying sonofabitch who frequently claimed that he would like nothing better than to have been born into some tribe of subliterate savages who did nothing with their lives except drink and fight.

Conan is, largely, the exemplar and avatar of what REH would have liked to be… big, strong, stupid, and deadly. (This is no exaggeration; while REH wrote prolifically, he did it for money, not pleasure or creative fulfilment. When he got tired of using his imagination, he blew off steam by heading over to an abandoned ice house and whaling the bejesus out of some stranger in drawn out bare knuckles boxing matches. These brawls, according to Howard’s own statements, were the only times he really felt alive. Apparently, REH was an early 20th Century, real life Tyler Durden without the soapmaking skills.)

For this reason, I have never much liked Conan, and for this reason, it hit me like a thunder bolt when I read, in the course of Slappy’s dialogue for “Born On A Battlefield”, the phrase ‘quick witted’ as applied to a young Conan the Barbarian. REH, and his various adapters, have, in the past, described Conan many ways. Conan is mighty thewed, he has a dark, fierce, brooding barbarian vitality, he is broad shouldered, he has a panther’s natural grace and startling, cat like speed. His strength is ox like, his well delineated form is massive, his brow is thunderous, his mane of dark hair is savage and wild, his countenance is sullen, and, occasionally, his eyes have been known to glint with a ferocious, animal-like cunning.

But ‘quick witted’?

No, Slappy is making this up out of whole cloth.

Still, “Born On A Battlefield” is, in my opinion, the only solidly good piece of work in the 9 issues of Slappy’s Conan I’ve seen to date, and I think that is largely, if not entirely, due to the fact that for all his myriad faults, my old buddy is an intellectual who respects other intellectuals, and the ultimate power of the human mind to conquer all adversity. Underneath it all, I believe this writer has to implicitly understand that Conan, as depicted by REH and worshipped by thousands if not millions of devotees, is a brainless thug. There’s nothing heroic or admirable about that, and certainly nothing mythic, or even particularly entertaining. When a character’s approach to solving every problem is hauling out a broadsword and hacking it in two, well, I would say it is difficult to do Eisner award winning writing about such an entity.

Therefore, what Slappy has to do is inject some element of mind into Conan’s barbaric, near elemental mindlessness… and, to make it even more difficult, he has to do it without offending the character’s enormously devoted fan base, none of whom are exactly going to be happy about Conan suddenly becoming more cerebral and introspective, should they become aware of it.

And I wish him the best of luck, because, in all honesty, it’s not going to be easy.

I will, for the nonce, probably keep reading this version of Conan. But I expect I will enjoy Slappy’s work on JLA much more… and I’ll talk about his first three issues on that series at some point, too… but not now.

Now, I need some sleep.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.