EVEN THE LOSERS GET LUCKY SOMETIMES

I mentioned on my last blog page that I’d recently gotten a CD of Tom Petty and the Heartbreaker’s amazing 1979 album Damn The Torpedoes. I didn’t mention, however, just how delightful it is to re-experience this CD after maybe ten years without owning a copy in any medium.

This record was probably the very first album I ever bought on vinyl, during my sophomore year of college (which would have been 1980-1981, for the latter day Okhrana agents out there keeping track of the names, dates, and places). In my odd childhood I never owned a turntable of my own, but my college roommate that year, the Late Great Jeff Webb, had one, so I bought quite a few albums right around then… this one, Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, and several by a British band named City Boy being the ones that I can immediately pull out of memory.

I may still have that copy of this album on vinyl, somewhere in a box, but I still don’t have a turntable, so it wouldn’t do me much good. I had this same album on cassette tape for a long while, but it, like my two Eagles Greatest Hits and a couple of Eurhythmics and a few Blue Oyster Cult cassettes, was stolen from my then-girlfriend Kristy’s car back in 1990 or thereabouts. And while I’ve picked up a few Tom Petty albums since, also on cassette (which I can listen to when I want to, but, having been spoiled by the much more convenient media of CDs, I don’t, much), I hadn’t managed to get this one back, until Saturday, when I got it in the mail from my friend who has decided to spoil me rotten this month.

The hits off this album, which you’ve probably heard if you ever listened to rock n’ roll radio in the 1980s, or if you listen to oldies stations now, are Refugee, Here Comes My Girl (a weird predecessor to rap, as Petty more recites the verses and only really sings the chorus, but for him, it works), and the endearingly bouncy, utterly habituating Don’t Do Me Like That. I’d heard these tracks enough over the years on the radio to keep me more or less familiar with them, but I’d forgotten some of the other really delightful musical gems in this collection, like the bittersweet, hard-driving lyrical snarl of Even The Losers, the wide eyed disbelief and appall so hilariously expressed in What Are You Doin’ In My Life?, and the wonderfully innocent, upbeat appeal of Shadow Of A Doubt, which is such a hook-laden, beautifully crafted little sparkler it amazes me it wasn’t released as a single itself.

Even a more downbeat, slower track like You Tell Me has an addictive bite.

The album has two lesser tracks, the mediocre, fairly generic fast rocker Century City, and the musically beautiful but lyrically incoherent Louisiana Rain. The latter track sounds lovely and is a pleasure to listen to, but reading the lyrics in the liner notes along with the song is a mistake, as they not only make absolutely no sense, but they were clearly written by a severely hungover Petty, probably on a napkin in five minutes, so he could finish out the album.

Musical taste is, of course, largely subjective, and I know Tom Petty is one of those singer-songwriters who has had a long enough, and successful enough, career to have earned the contempt of thousands simply for being popular. I generally enjoy his music, sometimes very much indeed, especially his material from this album (where I feel he really started to hit his stride consistently) up through his 1989 solo effort, Full Moon Fever. In between these two albums, Tom and the Heartbreakers put out four more excellent albums -- Hard Promises (1981), Long After Dark (1982), Southern Accents (1985), and Let Me Up (I've Had Enough) (1987).

Over the course of Full Moon Fever, I can really hear Petty’s talent dwindling. Zombie Zoo and Feel A Whole Lot Better seem to represent Petty at nearly full strength, but monotonous crap like A Mind With A Heart Of Its Own seems to presage the lackluster drone that was going to become Tom Petty’s signature through his utterly mediocre or outright bad 90s releases. Full Moon Fever generated a hatful of hit singles, but none of them really reward a good hard listen, nor would I ever bother hitting the repeat button so I could check out Free Fallin, I Won’t Back Down, or Runnin Down A Dream again.

But Damn The Torpedoes literally rocks my world, and I’m very pleased to be listening to it again, even as I type this.

JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AVENGERS

Over on Mike Norton’s generally excellent blog Miraclo Mile , where he’ll pull your comment in a heartbeat if you say the mystical phrase ‘Ward’ (Bubastis alone knows what he’d do if you brought up June, Wally, or the Beaver), mention is made of Fred Hembeck giving other comics related bloggers the ‘homework’ assignment of coming up with a list of 100 Things They Like About Comics. Mike posted his, and also wondered if this would be shortly followed by a fad for posting 100 Things You Hate About Comics. I am, as nearly always, well ahead of the pack on this, as I long ago posted such lists here , here, and here , for anyone who cares (and, well, they’ll still be there even if you don’t care, this isn’t subjective, or anything).

While there are only 28 actual comics stories (or comics runs) listed in each article, those out there with a few grey cells to rub together (and I feel quite fortunate that all my tiny audience are really rather intelligent, except for, you know, that idiot over at Speedmonkey) can fairly easily get to a list of 100 things I like and hate about comics from reading those articles, if only by assuming that (for example) as I’ve listed “One Shot Hero” as one of my favorite comics stories of all time, I must, therefore, also very much like Cary Bates, Dave Cockrum, and the Legion of Superheroes, especially when done by Bates and Cockrum (and they’d be right).

Similarly, if you take a look at the smaller list in the third article of comics stories nearly every other fan likes that I think are crap, you should fairly easily be able to figure out that since I’ve listed John Byrne’s Man Of Steel, I really hate John Byrne’s comics writing, and then apply that to pretty much every writing assignment Byrne has blackmailed hapless editors into giving him by unprofessionally and childishly insisting that he won’t draw anything unless he gets to fill in the word bubbles, too.

I suspect if you list separately every piece of garbage Byrne has ever abused a typewriter or word processor into printing out, and then drawn stick figures around so moronic fans would buy the drivel, you’d easily get to 100 right there. But that article also talks about badly overestimated nonsense like Denny O’Neil’s very nearly unreadable 1970s work on Green Lantern/Green Arrow, too, so, really, as far as a 100 Things I Like Or Dislike About Comics list goes, well, my work here is already done… almost.

See, the problem is, I wrote all that stuff a few years back, and a few years back, I hadn’t read one of the greatest superhero comics stories every produced, because, well, it hadn’t been produced yet. So, while those articles I noted above do very nearly cover the waterfront, I really can’t in fairness bring all this up without spending some time talking about perhaps the finest four volume miniseries to come out of mainstream superhero comics in the last thirty years - - Kurt Busiek’s and George Perez’s JLA/Avengers.

Honestly, I can’t get over how good this story is. For one thing, this was a much anticipated, long promised crossover that every true blue red blooded superhero comics fan has wanted to see for forty years. It had been on the drawing board three times prior to this, and all three of those times, the artwork was fabulous (it’s always been Perez’s assignment) and the story was appalling (two of the past projects were supposed to be written by Gerry Conway, one of them was assigned to Roy Thomas, and every single plot was the most deplorable drivel imaginable outside a Chris Claremont X-Men Annual).

Yet even leaving aside the fact that Busiek took a project that in the hands of every previous writer had been nothing but crap and did something worthwhile with it, this story excels entirely without comparisons to its utterly execrable predecessors. Busiek innately understood what Conway and Thomas couldn’t seem to grasp – that an event like the first, and probably, only, meeting between the Justice League of America and the Mighty Avengers was BIG. It was eagerly anticipated, it was literally a clash of titans, it was world shaking and epoch making – and it had to be more than simply one more interdimensional team up story hastily thrown together to make a few quick bucks, where a couple of superheroes from two rival companies got together and fought a couple of similarly dimension-baffled supervillains.

That last description is all that the various Marvel-DC crossovers had been up until JLA/Avengers came out, and it was pretty much all that Busiek’s non-writing predecessors had planned and plotted for their versions of the book. In one preceding plot, the JLA and the Avengers were supposed to fight Ultron and Amazo, because, you know, both of those guys were androids. Yeah. That’s about as good as it got, too.

Not so with Busiek on the job, though. Busiek has written some great stuff, and he’s written some wretched stuff, and he’s done long stretches on books which were nothing more than mediocre (the phrase "Power Company" very nearly leaps unbidden from my lips at this juncture, but I’ll let it pass). But with JLA/Avengers, Busiek capped his career and gave purpose to his existence. If he never writes another readable word (and in fact, he has; his current work on JLA is very interesting so far), it won’t matter; with this miniseries, he has with one stroke redeemed himself for any number of wretched issues of Power Man/Iron Fist, fairly boring Conan stories, and a thousand near criminal creative larcenies in Astro City.

Unlike Marvels, one of Busiek’s other generally well received projects, JLA/Avengers never lets down and never loses focus. I’m an avid follower of Kurt’s work, even to the point of once having a complete set of his Liberty Project series, and his runs on any particular title tend to start out strong and then begin to slump somewhere in the middle. Sometimes he’ll get it back again before the end, but that’s rare; generally, you can see him struggling to re-attain the heights he was hitting in the initial numbers, but ultimately he fails, and moves on to another project.

I expected this to happen in JLA/Avengers, and I was delighted when it didn’t. Kurt got this assignment on the basis of his long run on Avengers and a very few fill in issues he did on Justice League of America back in the mid 1980s, but still, the obvious love he feels for both teams shines through in every panel and every lettered sentence in every chapter of this miniseries. From issue 1, where both teams first separately journey to and travel around observing each other’s Earth to their mutual disbelief and disgruntlement (Captain America is revolted by the near godlike worship the JLA is regarded with on their world, while Superman is rather dismayed to find the Hulk loose in the Chicago meat packing district unmolested by the seemingly hapless local authorities, and Batman beats the living crap out of the Punisher, albeit, regrettably, off panel), through issue 4, where the entire roster of both JLA and Avengers assembles to battle every supervillain who has ever existed to save both universes, and Superman ends up wielding both Captain America’s shield and (briefly) Thor’s hammer, Busiek and Perez never once fail to deliver a palpably epic feeling to their titanic tale.

This story needed to be HUGE and by God they made it huge. Busiek may have indulged himself slightly by writing in an appearance of the otherwise nearly forgotten (and utterly forgettable) Triathlon, but he had the sense to keep it brief, and more than made up for that quick self indulgence (he created the character during his run on Avengers) by contriving an extremely lucid mechanism for resurrecting the Silver Age versions of both Avengers and Justice League for long stretches of the middle two issues of the series. It was wonderful to watch Hal Jordan and Barry Allen back in action again, and seeing Busiek actually weave the truly dreadful plots and idiotic story contrivances of the Modern Age continuities at both DC and Marvel into his story and making them a fulcrum for these characters’ essential, long unseen larger than life heroism and self sacrifice was absolutely exhilarating.

This is great, great storytelling. If you’re a superhero comics fan and you haven’t read it, order a copy right now.

In short, you may, if you wish, extrapolate a list of a Hundred Things I Like About Comics, and a Hundred Things I Dislike About Comics, from the three articles I posted links to. And you’re going to have to put Kurt Busiek on both of them.

Of course, if I made up a list of a Hundred Things I Like About Reality, and a Hundred Things I Dislike About Reality, Kurt would be on both of them, too, for entirely different reasons I won’t go into here.

George Perez, on the other hand, is firmly on the Good List. In both categories, since I met him at a mini-con once and he seemed like a really nice guy, as well as a brilliantly talented artist.

Okay. I could write a lot more here, but I need to go turn some apartment dwellers into undead ghouls. For at least 2,500 words.

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.