Friday, November 26, 2004

Tarzan wasn’t a ladies’ man

Ehhhhh… work.

That’s pretty much been the long and short of my week. But there are a few other things to discuss.

Wednesday, Mutant Mayhem came out. Some of the small handful of readers I have know what that means. The rest don’t care, so I won’t go into it. However, I did get a friend of mine from work to swing by the local comics shop for me and pick up a few boosters. The guy at the shop was somewhat suspicious; he’d never seen my friend before (my friend buys all his own stuff online) and he knows nearly everyone in this small town who does geek stuff. He questioned my friend closely as to what he wanted the boosters for (at least, according to my buddy, he did) which is yet another reason I dislike shopping with this guy… I mean, honestly, it’s not like we were asking him for munitions, or anything.

Anyway, my buddy brought the boosters by work on Wednesday, even though he had the day off. I tore into them and… well, not to keep anyone in suspense or anything, I didn’t get ANYthing cool. Unlike a certain other remarkably lucky fellow I know named Mike Norton who picked up four boosters and promptly got two Uniques, I got diddly squat. Which is to say:

Two rookie Arclights and a veteran, an experienced and veteran Skullbuster, an experienced and two veteran Polaris, a rookie Havoc, a rookie Bishop, an Experienced Bone-Claw Wolverine, a full REV of the Grey Hulk, an Experienced Firestar, a rookie Spider-Man, a rookie and experienced Wonder Man, a rookie and experienced Sasquatch, a rookie and experienced Snowbird, a rookie Puck, an experienced and veteran Wildchild, a veteran Vanisher, a rookie Cloak, a veteran Domino, a rookie U-Men, a rookie Blade, and a rookie Blink.

I mean, for God’s sake, it’s nearly impossible to sit down and calculate a worse pile of plastic crap I could pull out of 8 boosters.

My work buddy is, however, in no way to blame for the mishap. According to my friend, the comics shop guy was filled with lamentations that he’d been shorted on his shipment; according to what was said, he’d only gotten 10 boosters in, and my buddy had picked up 8 of those boosters.

This immediately reminded me of the gory old days of Magic: the Gathering, specifically, when an expansion named Legends came out back in 1994. Distributors shorted shops on their orders right left and sideways, opening half or more of their shipments and holding back the rare cards to be resold later in the profitable singles market. Since this particular expansion of HeroClix is the first to incorporate such highly sought items as Limited Edition figs and a special Spider-Man chase fig, I have no doubt distributors are pulling the same crap now. And as these are not trading cards, but, rather, collectible figurines, well… me, I’m thinking that a wonderful way for shop owners and distributors to keep all the good stuff for themselves would be one of those airport fluoroscope machines that shows what’s inside a package. I’d imagine they’re pretty expensive, but, on the other hand, you’d have to figure some distributors at least would know somebody who works security at a local airport... and I'd think the kind of money you could make from knowing for sure which boosters in a case to hold back would be worth a trip out to there at 4 a.m. one day.

All that being said, the lousy distribution of figs in the 8 boosters I got may simply be my luck of the draw… but if there’s more to it than that, well, it won’t surprise me. Either way, it’s certainly not my friend’s fault… I say, in an abundance of caution, since, while I don’t think anyone I work with knows about this blog, you never know, and I wouldn’t want him to think I was blaming him in any way for this debacle.

Still, not to worry. Expenses were rather lighter than expected this week given that my vacation evaporated like the very dew, so I’ve put in an order for a case of Mutant Mayhem. God knows when it will get here (I doubt the place I ordered from will even open today, and I ordered it last night) but one hopes at least I can count on it as a Christmas present to myself.

Of course, running cases through a fluoroscope would reveal, at least, which ones had boosters on the outside layer that had good stuff in them… so if jiggering is going on (and given the money involved, it’s almost certain some is) I may not get a great case, either. But at least it should be fun to open.

Having said all that, rookie U-Men got no reason to live.

This particular set’s Blade figure seems a solid improvement, though, if only because he has a range strike, which even the rather Shaft-esque comic book version of Blade had, much less the Wesley Snipes cinematic incarnation that the figs seem to be more closely modeled on. This set’s Spider-Man is quite a nice piece, too… well sculpted, and he’s a two target Incapacitator, which is always useful. Cloak looks to be effective, too, if his experienced and veteran versions keep their opening click of Find Weakness while showing increasing attack values. The rookie has it with a 2 damage, but alas, his attack is a generally lousy 9… meaning anyone you really need to hit, he’ll need at least an average roll against, and I don’t like needing an average roll. I never get it at crucial times.

I’m pretty thoroughly disgusted to have pulled that full REV of the Grey Hulk. He is, to my mind, a completely useless click, as I am already running over with different versions of the Hulk and this one does not seem to be an improvement in any particular way. And, you know, he’s more boring looking than the green versions, too.

All right, enough of that nonsense. Let’s see. What else can we talk about that’s happened in the past few days…

I got yet another package from my comics pusher up north. This one contained a complete run of Steve Gerber’s Son of Satan stories in Marvel Spotlight from the mid 70s. As I think I’ve noted on this blog a few times prior to this, I get endless amusement envisioning any editorial conference in which anyone tried to pitch a comic book called “Son of Satan” nowadays. In fact, when the character was briefly revived a few years back for Marvel’s Midnight Sons line, they called him “Hellstorm” – a cover logo much less likely to attract the infuriated attention of conservative Christian thought police. (Dialogue from another 70s Gerber book, Man-Thing, springs to mind at this point: “How can we control what our children think if we can’t control what they read?” All this, right before the local PTA rampaged through the local high school and held a mass book burning of ‘indecent’ text books and ‘ungodly’ volumes pulled from the school library’s shelves.)

Unfortunately, Son of Satan is consistent with nearly all the 70s Gerber strips I have painstakingly re-acquired over the past few months, which is to say, it’s disappointing. Gerber is a talented writer, no doubt, but he’s an exasperatingly preachy one, and his constant lecturing on the horrors of corporate conformity and how we are killing the planet and destroying our own souls with mass production and unleashed avarice and overly materialistic values just gets really old really quickly… even though I agree with nearly everything he’s saying.

However, I also read superhero comics to get away from all that gnarly real world nonsense. Leaving aside the fact that Gerber’s work is always a downer, all his characters tend to blend in together when you’ve read enough of his different strips, and his storylines all start to blur pretty quickly, too. Beyond that, most of his dialogue is so painfully earnest you want to smack him with a brick, and if you happen to chance on a 70s Gerber comic in which one of his characters isn’t embroiled in an agonizing psychic journey through their own psychological landscape in which they are forced to do deadly battle with the physical embodiments of all their inner most demons, well… wait four or five panels, they’ll get there.

Of all the Gerber stuff I read back when I was in my early teens and enjoyed immensely… Defenders, Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, Son of Satan, Marvel Two In One, Daredevil… only Defenders seems to have held up well over the years, to a now middle aged perspective. And the one Gerber book I didn’t read much of when I was a kid (because I loathe funny animal comics with a passion), Howard the Duck, is actually Gerber’s best overall work, because while he’s still preaching endlessly on the same old sermons, he’s actually funny while he’s doing it, instead of pedantic and wretchedly, fulsomely sincere.

Gerber’s Foolkiller mini from the early 90s is worth reading, as well, but it’s a far more mature strip than anything Gerber did in the 1970s.

Other than the Gerber Son of Satan stuff, I also picked up Englehart’s run of Dr. Strange in Marvel Premiere, a couple of issues of Wally Wood’s T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents that had an Englehart story in them (the Deluxe Comics editions from the late 80s, I believe), and the Superman Annual featuring Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s classic “For the Man Who Has Everything” story.

The Englehart stuff… well, the Dr. Strange issues in Marvel Premiere by Englehart are what got the good doctor his own title again, and they’re definitely worth reading. Englehart really only does two stories in these six issues or so… he brilliantly wraps up the Shuma-Gorath story begun by Roy Thomas and continued by Gardner Fox (Thomas apparently had very little idea what ‘Shuma-Gorath’ actually was, other than a menacing sounding phrase, and Gardner Fox seems to have believed it was a ruined, eldritch city, but Englehart’s Shuma-Gorath is simply unforgettable, if you’ve read the story even once) and then takes his readers on an astonishing tour of occult history, as he and Baron Mordo follow a 31st century sorcerer back to the dawn of time to witness said future wizard’s mad quest to become God.

Englehart’s 70s stuff never disappoints me; on re-reading it, I often find it even better than I remembered it, but it’s never worse. Over on crowded books like Avengers, he did more than occasionally have problems with consistent plotting (the story in which Taurus, leader of the criminal cartel Zodiac, manages to lure the Avengers into an innocent seeming warehouse and then launch them into orbit, because that warehouse just happens to be a DISGUISED SPACE SHIP, always just cracks me up, I mean, yeah, a space ship disguised as a warehouse, every super-criminal genius needs one of those, and they’re so easy to build, too, and that blocky, rectangular warehouse shape is well known throughout the universe as being aerodynamically optimal, too), but even when you’re gaping in disbelief at stuff like that, the dialogue still crackles and the characters still seem vibrant and three dimensional on every page.

The T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents story is goofy fun, and if I think someone should dig Wally Wood up and slap him hard for creating a classic comic book concept that forces me to type in all caps with initials in between every letter in ‘thunder’ whenever I mention it, well, that’s just a quibble.

As for Moore’s Superman story, I happen to agree with an old college buddy of mine that in this story, Moore gets very nearly everything about Superman’s characterization wrong. It’s still a very powerful story (doubtless it’s the best story that could ever feasibly be told using Jim Starlin’s stinker villain Mongul) and deserves, for that reason, to be a classic… nonetheless, Superman would never fantasize about a still existent Krypton enmeshed in social crises like drug abuse, violent street riots, and racism; this is the sort of fantasy that the much more world weary and cynical Batman might have, if asked to visualize what Krypton might be like today had it not blown up, but Superman is way too cheerful and upbeat to wallow in this nonsense.

Superman also isn’t the kind of drama queen Moore portrays him as, shrieking “MONGUL!” in big lettering effects that send Robin sprawling, holding his ears, and then, a bit later, spitting out “Burn” in tiny grim letters before lighting Mongul up with his heat vision. This is all rather too X-Men angsty for the Man of Steel to indulge in. Oddly, later on, when Batman gets sucked into his own ‘perfect fantasy’, he has the sort of upbeat, normal, rather Leave It To Beaver dream life that one would expect Superman to immerse himself in. Moore has, for the sake of conflict and drama, neatly exchanged the two heroes’ personalities.

Nonetheless, the story is lovely, and the art by Dave Gibbons is even lovelier, and this is probably the only time we ever got to see the Jason Todd Robin do anything cool, so I’m happy to once more have a copy of the story.

Let’s see. I’ve also had some email over the course of the last week. One fairly new correspondent has warned me repeatedly through several emails that, as long as I keep bringing up a certain subject (in this case, ‘bringing up’ seems to mean, responding to his ongoing comments on it), he will simply have to keep discussing said subject with me. If I don’t want to talk about it any more, this fellow urges me rather often, I should simply drop the subject entirely.

I have to say, this seems quite annoying to me, as, if I’m interpreting this correctly, what he’s saying is, he is congenitally incapable of letting anyone else have the last word about anything. Now, I’m no Hawkeye Pierce; I can live without the last word on any number of subjects, and do so reasonably cheerfully.

However, the subject this fellow is cautioning me to avoid if I don’t want him to continue beating me about the head and shoulders regarding is, well, a subject I feel I’m entitled to the last word on… namely, whether or not I will make certain changes to various of the articles and pieces of fiction I have already written and published on my Doc Nebula website. This guy seems to feel rather vehemently that I MUST make certain changes, that I will never experience true happiness if I do not immediately and slavishly follow every last jot and tittle of his completely unasked for advice in this regard, and he can never never rest until I have and I am.

Now, I’m not out to embarrass anyone in public, so I’m not going to mention this fine fellow’s name. And I do enjoy his emails, as he and I have quite a few viewpoints and interests in common. However, I am rather aggravated to be told that he simply will not allow me to have the last word on, you know, the contents of my own goddam website. In my last email to him, previous to his most recent response, I responded at length to his insistent importuning, telling him that while he made some good points, I was not going to follow his advice, and then going into some detail to explain why.

I do not do this to invite further debate on the subject, mind you. If some strangers writes me out of the blue and says "I think ENDGAME is a wonderful novel but you should change all the characters’ names to some variation of Annette Funicello”, well, I will thank the stranger, and if I am feeling chatty, I may say “I don’t think changing the names of every character in ENDGAME to Ann, Anna, Annie, Annette, Nettie, or Nette Funicello is a really good idea, so I won’t”.

And, you know, I will expect (I think, with some rationality and at least a little reason) that that will be the end of it.

If said stranger then writes me back and declaims at great length that I really really SHOULD change every name in ENDGAME to Annette Funicello, and I’d be happier if I did, and it’s VERY IMPORTANT that I acknowledge this and follow these instructions immediately, and if I continue to respond to this subject, then he will take that as license to keep belaboring me with his viewpoint on something that isn’t any of his goddam business in the first place, well… I don’t know.

I guess, when and if I write this guy back, I’ll just have to avoid the entire subject, since it appears I am not allowed to have the final denouement regarding it, but, well, I find that annoying, because it seems to me that I SHOULD.

Now, to be fair, the subject this guy is busting my balls about isn’t as trivial as the example I’m giving above, and he does make some sense. However, in my opinion, I make more sense, and on this subject, that’s my call to make. I have taken the time to explain this to him at length, because I do not like people who simply say “nah” and then move on. However, my explanation was meant as a gesture of respect, not an invitation to further debate.

All of which is to say, if the fellow I’m talking about is reading this, then he needs to understand that while people are welcome to comment on everything on my website, and they can even offer advice (although, honestly, if I want advice on what and how to write, I’ll ask for it, generally, from someone specific whose writing abilities as well as judgement I know and respect), once I respond to said advice, they need to shut up and move on.

Actually, this seems to me to be good advice regarding nearly any subject of debate. I do try to enter most discussions with an open mind, and it is possible to turn me around on some subjects, and I have no hang up with admitting that I can be, and have been, wrong.

Nonetheless, if, for example, you are bound and determined to see fictional characters as nothing more or less than fictional characters, interesting symbols and archetypes of various human impulses and inclinations, and I tell you repeatedly that that’s fine for you, but I tend to see fictional characters as real people within their own imaginary milieus, because otherwise fiction isn’t much fun for me, well, I’m not going to keep beating you about the head and shoulders with my opinion in your email box or on your blog, because I consider you have the right to maintain your own opinions, however unwise, no-fun, unimaginative, and/or moronic they may be.

If, however, you continue to badger me to change my mind and adopt your viewpoint, and in fact, you seem to regard the effort to get me to do so as being some sort of insane religious crusade, I will pretty quickly stop interacting with you.

As I have proven, in the past.

Now, having said all that, let me talk about one more thing:

I am, lately, starting to buy more and more Best of and Greatest Hits CDs.

When I do this, I occasionally run into this pissy attitude on the part of people who seem to consider themselves to be superior music afficianados. They, it seems, would never sully their CD cases with a Greatest Hits collection. After all if you are an Elvis Costello fan, then, by God, you have to own EVERY CD Elvis Costello has ever recorded, including all that horrible country & western and weird Big Band revival crap he’s done when out of his mind on cough syrup. And you have to listen to all of them, and you CANNOT really like anything that has ever been released as a single for radio airplay… or, at the very least, your very FAVORITE tracks from each CD have to be something really obscure, that is 12 minutes long and filled with ancient Celtic bagpipe melodies, or something.

I say this is elitist horseshit, and I say to hell with it. I like Best of and Greatest Hits volumes; they save me an enormous amount of time and money, and sure, maybe I don’t have all those obscure Eagles songs from early in their career like “Doolin’ Dalton”, but honestly, WHO CARES? I got “Best of My Love”. I got “Hotel California”. I got “Life In The Fast Lane” and “New Kid In Town” and “Lyin’ Eyes”, AND on Hell Freezes Over I got cool live versions of “The Last Resort” and “Wasted Time”, too.

So, if you’re a music fanatic and you don’t like “Best of” collections, I say go soak your head.

Right NOW.

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.