Ahhhh, Boston Market.

I shouldn’t have done it. It’s not good for me. It’s not going to help me lose weight or make me seem more attractive to my peers. And on a very limited income, when every penny counts, I have no excuse… I should be eating Dollar Store off brand canned ravioli and spaghetti with really cheap generic sauce unto the Millennium (the next one, I mean).

But what the hell, I wanted some comfort food, so off I went to Boston Market and blew $34 on a Meal for Six… half ham, half chicken… two side orders of mashed potatoes and gravy, one each of mac n’ cheese, their really delicious herbed corn, garlic dill potatoes, and since they were out of broccoli and red peppers (I pick the peppers out), hot apple slices. And, of course, can’t forget the six pieces of cornbread. My God, I love Boston Market’s corn bread.

It’s a weekend’s worth of food for me, although the cornbread goes quickly because I nosh on it. Although every last ounce of food sold by Boston Market is filthy and gravid with the worst kind of cholesterol (I believe they actually marinate every food product they have available in butter for several days before they actually cook it), my God, I’m just addicted to the shit. Gotta have it. And to an extent it does sort of slow down my mad caloric intake, because I have to take the stuff out of the fridge, pile it on a plate, and microwave it before I can eat it… unlike KFC or left over pizza, you can’t just open the fridge and grab a handful of Boston Market to munch on cold. No, it takes a tiny bit of planning and effort, so I tend to go for it at structured meal times.

Which does not in any way make up for the fact that the stuff is really really bad for me, but what the hell. So is breathing the sweet free Tampa air.

I cornered Sondra today after a brief phone call from me mum (she’s doing well, platelets are high out in California, and she’s giddy as a schoolgirl) and demanded to know what the hell was up with my lease. Dragged her into an interview room, sat her down under the hot lights, worked her over with a rubber hose. Oh, wait, I’m talking about reality, not Darren World. (Okay, I wouldn’t work Sondra over with a rubber hose in Darren World, either, she’s generally nice, if only in a cool, distant, professional fashion.) And she said I’d be getting a renewal form on my door next week sometime, but, you know, if they were planning to not renew my lease this year, she wouldn’t admit it until she had to because she knows from the last time they did it I’ll throw a gigantic hissy fit.

People don’t like me much when I’m just ambling around calmly with a stupid grin on my face, but they find me totally uncool when I’m having a monstrous spaz attack right in their face because I’ve been disrespected. And I consider being told to pack my shit and git from the apartment I’ve lived in since December of 1997, for absolutely no reason at all that anyone wants to tell me, to be enormously disrespectful. Fortunately, after calling a lot of different phone numbers from work to find out if there was anything I could do – short answer, there was nothing, Florida is a landlord friendly state and tenants have no rights at all – I called Sondra up and spewed about eighteen different kinds of utter and total bullshit at her, about how I worked with the City and I knew City Attorneys and I’d spoken to them and been advised to ask the apartment managers to put whatever their grievance with me was in writing, and to formally request that my lease be renewed because it would be a hardship for me to have to move. And actually, that wasn’t bullshit, every last separate part of that was absolutely true. I did work for the City at that time. I did know City Attorneys. I had spoken with them. (They often come into the City Clerk’s office where I worked then and said ‘hi’ to me, and one of them, named Jodi, was a total babe and I always struck up just as much of a conversation with her as she would tolerate, which usually wasn’t much, and whenever she wasn’t within visual range of my nameplate, she never could remember my name, but what the hell.) And I had been advised (by a couple of people I knew) to ask for my apartment complex to put their reason for non-renewal of my lease in writing, and to put my formal request for a new lease in writing as well. Now, if Sondra assumed from the way I carefully constructed my statement to her that City Attorneys had advised me to take this course of action, or even remotely cared if I had to move or not, that’s not my fault.

Anyway, that time (two years ago) the apartment management backed down and gave me a new lease, but I’ve lived in fear ever since. And this current lease is up at the end of June. But, anyway, Sondra at least told me I’d be getting a renewal notice next week sometime. But I won’t feel really reassured until I get it, and it offers me the option of signing a new lease, rather than saying, in very scary legalistic terms, that they’ve decided not to offer me a new lease and I will have to vacate the apartment by June 30, 2003. Which will proFOUNDly suck, if it happens.

The rest of today’s entry is hopelessly geekish, so y’all are hereby issued an official Brown Eyed Handsome Absolution from doing comments on the following Geek Report.

GEEK REPORT

Haven’t done one of these in a while, and I did buy comics on Tuesday, so let’s run ‘em down:

AVENGERS - I was set to stop buying this title when Kurt stopped scripting it. (For those of you who are new around here – Kurt Busiek and I have history. See THE LIES KURT BUSIEK TOLD US: Funeral For A Friendship for more details. Or don’t. You won’t believe me anyway.) However, I liked Geoff Johns’ work on JSA and Hawkman, so I persevered. So far, I’ve enjoyed his work on AVENGERS, but this issue (66/481, don’t ask, it’s a geek thing), while as good as any of his other issues, really underscored for me one of the things I dislike the most about Modern Age comics, as opposed to Silver Age: the lack of plot that gets done in any single issue. I swear to God, in this entire issue, all that really happens is, the Avengers wander around in a red cloud of toxic vapor for a while, before they discover that this strange, deadly cloud has been released from a secret government lab.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby could and would have done the last year’s worth of AVENGERS stories in two issues. God, I miss the Silver Age. (Well, I don’t miss being 11 years old and having to live at home or anything. But I miss the way people wrote and drew comics back then.)

FRAY#7 - Joss Whedon’s future Slayer comic. It had been so long since issue 6 came out, I’d forgotten a lot of the plot, so I was startled to see Fray (the future Slayer) sporting the ‘scythe’ weapon that Buffy recently got hold of in the last two eps of the show. Apparently, Joss created the weapon for the comic and decided to work it into the show before the last curtain went down.

Beyond that, Fray is a typical Dark Horse comic… it’s good without being brilliant or anything. Buy it if you like Buffy a lot, and if you can find it. And don’t expect it to come out regularly. And I’m told it’s a limited series… at least, it says Part 7 of 8 on the back cover. So don’t fall in love with it if you can find back issues, either.

Hawkman #15 – Anyone who’s read DIAL H FOR HAWKMAN,one of my earliest Martian Vision articles, already knows I am insanely and absurdly devoted to this particularly bizarre DC superhero. Golden Age, Silver Age, Modern Age… I just love Hawkman and couldn’t begin to tell you why. DC has screwed up the admittedly convoluted continuity on this character so profoundly since the death of the Silver Age that for about ten years, they simply dropped him out of existence and pretended he had never been. Finally, though, they let Geoff Johns revive the character, probably figuring if anyone could straighten the mess created by many many awful writers prior to that point out, it would be the guy who also straightened out the mess that the JSA had similarly become years before.

I’m not even going to bother going into exactly what the hell is up with Hawkman and the ‘new’ (kinda) Hawkgirl these days, since it’s all bound up with time paradoxes and reincarnation and three different characters being melded into one guy and spiritual migration and I don’t know what the hell all else. However, Johns is relentless in his attempts to tie up continuity loose ends, and I like writers who are relentless in their attempts to tie up continuity loose ends (see my previous lecture on Continuity Nazis vs. The It’s Just A Freakin’ Story, Fanboy Society). This latest issue has the Hawkwoman of the late and not very lamented Hawkworld title show up, wondering who the hell this new Hawkman is and what happened to her Hawkman, the Thanagarian named Katar Hol who, for a brief and completely nonsensical time period under John Ostrander (writer) and Mike Gold (editor) was the Modern Age replacement for the Silver Age Thanagarian Hawkman named Katar Hol. (See? You really don’t want me to get into this.) But I will note here that I once wrote a letter to Hawkworld bitching at them for their really piss poor continuity keeping, and Mike Gold laughed at me and called me names in the lettercol, and much much later, when DIAL H FOR HAWKMAN was published in CBEM, Mike sent me a nice email apologizing for his churlishness and admitting that I’d been right all along. HA! I WAS RIGHT! A former big time DC editor actually said so. Boy, that doesn’t happen every damned day of my life.

Anyway, I managed to piss Mike off a few emails later and he’s not talking to me anymore, and I think he’s a shrunken bald gnome of a homunculus anyway, from what I’ve heard, but still, he apologized and admitted I was right. So that’s something.

As to Hawkman, I like it a lot, but it’s a really continuity intensive strip and hardly anyone likes the character, so I expect it to be cancelled soon. But you should all buy it, if only for the really brilliant Rags Morales artwork. But then, you should all have bought Hourman too, and you didn’t.

POWER COMPANY #s 15 & 16 – the other Kurt Busiek title I still buy… wait… the only Kurt Busiek title I currently buy. (If George Perez would get his thumbs out of his ass and finish JLAvengers, I’d buy that, too.) #15 is a waste of paper and ink, a bad tribute to the Goodwin/Simonson “Manhunter meets Batman” story from some issue of DETECTIVE I can’t recall the number of, back in the 1970s. Kurt is a more promiscuous literary swiper than Alan Moore (which is saying something) and it’s far less forgivable in Kurt because unlike Moore, he rarely improves on the original template he’s stealing from. He did not improve on the original template with this issue, either. (Would have been hard; the Goodwin/Simonson MANHUNTER stuff is brilliant.) I buy Power Company because I like the basic set up of a superhero team that is run like a law firm and a business, and I enjoy the L.A. Law type office politics that goes on between the characters. So when Kurt occasionally tosses off an issue that features one of the team doing a solo adventure, like this one, I get bored, even without him trying to ‘tribute’ a story that is simply out of his league… nowadays, anyway, since Kurt has started writing on about 2 of his 16 creative cylinders.

#16 was fun, though, from the Silver Agesque cover right through to the last page, where the Power Company is lured by Dr. Cyber into some sort of… well, we don’t know what it is, but it ain’t good. I enjoyed Kurt’s use of the Haunted Tank to set up (however laboriously) the birth of a new superhero, and also enjoyed seeing another powerful, but non-super powered, black character show up in a leading role. Witchfire going to Baron Winter and discovering that she is, in fact, a homunculus (hey, that’s the second time I’ve used that word in this entry, how about that) was also a nice little bit of continuity.

What’s sad about POWER COMPANY is that this is what Kurt wanted to do with POWER MAN/IRON FIST back in the early 1980s and Denny O’Neil wouldn’t let him. Ten years later, Marvel let John Ostrander do Kurt’s precis, and Ostrander’s HEROES FOR HIRE book sucked so bad and failed so miserably that Marvel didn’t want to see any more corporate superhero team ideas, ever. So Kurt has to do his idea over at DC, where he doesn’t know a goddam thing about the continuity, and has to call Mark Waid long distance any time he needs a story idea or has a question about something that happened in 1977. And I say this is sad because if Kurt could have done this book at Marvel, it would have rocked hard, but over at DC, it’s just kind of mildly entertaining, at best.

Of course, at Marvel Kurt wouldn’t have gotten to work with Tom Grummett… just off the top of my head, I’m not sure who Marvel could have assigned to such a book who would have looked decent on it. All Marvel’s current artists look like 15 year olds who love manga, and who only study post modern comics where people stand around all issue and posture in spandex and hoods.

JSA: ALL STARS #1 – I don’t really know what’s up with this. It features the Hal Jordan Spectre and some new villain named Legacy in key roles, so I pretty much hate it already (all new villains at DC suck relentlessly, especially the ones with names like Legacy, and Hal Jordan is Green Lantern; Jim Corrigan is the Spectre, and I hate comics that try to insist otherwise, because it simply isn’t so). It looks kind of interesting and I’m sure the guys at my shop will keep putting it in my pull, but it’s even more forgettable than JSA has been lately.

JSA #s 47 & 48 – the latest extended story arc is Princes of Darkness, in which a lot of shadow based supervillains get together to pound on the JSA. Eclipso, Obsidian, Mordru possessing the body of Arion, Warlord of Atlantis… I’m amazed the Shadow Thief isn’t in there, but he’s over in Hawkman. As with most JSA stories lately, I find I can’t keep much track of this one, or remember much of it after it’s over. I do remember that the Star Spangled Kid, who is a 15 year old girl (and I don’t know why) got stuck in a shadow dimension with Captain Marvel, who for some reason reverted to Billy Batson, who is a 15 year old boy, and, you know, the predictable predictably occurred. (Okay, they only kissed, so I guess in the 21st Century, that’s pretty tame and not predictable at all. But they are heroes, and Billy is from the Golden Age, so it’s understandable.)

Looking down the road, though, one can see how shocked the rest of the JSA (who don’t know Captain Marvel is actually a 15 year old boy) are going to be when they catch him making out with the Kid. In fact, it’s going to be a pretty profoundly weird and disturbing visual, when it happens. As I’m sure it will, if only for the shock value.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy JSA, I do, or I wouldn’t buy it. But Geoff Johns is really into continuity, and I like that when he’s dealing with Golden Age or Silver Age continuity, but he also has to deal with a lot of post-Crisis Modern Age horseshit in this book, and that tends to make me lapse into traumatic amnesia quickly. BLACK PANTHER #s 57, 58, & 59 – I hate it when comics shops do this to me. I buy comics for the writing, and 57 & 58 are by some other writer than Chris Priest, and if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have bought them. As it is, I tried to read 57 and it was brainlessly simple minded compared to the really Byzantine plots I’m used to from Priest, and jumped a year into the series’ past, which was also really annoying. Only with 59 did we get back to the current storyline, featuring the new, moronic Black Panther whom I hate anyway. I really have to stop buying this book. I’d hoped we’d do one story with Kasper Cole and then get back to T’Challa, but no, this loser is looking like a permanent fixture. I should take this title off my pull.

Right after I see what happens with him and the Rite of Ascension, I mean.

TOM STRONG’S TERRIFIC TALES #7 - The only reason I buy this book is for Steve Moore and Art Adam’s Jonni Future stories, which are good solid pulp SF type stories with a post modern twist and a lot of horny fanboy T&A artwork too (which occasionally I find so gratuitous as to be annoying, but what the hell). Alan Moore generally does something obnoxiously cutesy and stupid for each issue, and this one is no exception, as it opens with this truly aggravatingly and goddam soporific story called ‘Blanket Shanty’ about a five year old having a dream about Tom Strong. I mean, JESUS CHRIST, ALAN! You’re the greatest fucking writer in the history of superhero comics. Would you, you know, sit down and take just ONE of your strips seriously, just for a change?

Okay, he takes Promethea seriously, but that’s really overkill.

Jonni Future was enjoyable, as nearly always, in this issue. Young Tom Strong, the adventures of Tom Strong when he was a boy, was dumb as hell, again, as always. I should really give some thought as to whether one 8 page pulp style SF/sex strip is really worth $2.95 a month, though.

TOM STRONG #20 – at first glance, this looks like the cover of issue #1, which is purposeful… Moore is launching a three part story arc detailing an alternate timeline version of Tom Strong known as Tomas Stone, who is a mulatto, didn’t grow up in a gravity chamber, but who has nonetheless become his world’s greatest adventurer and hero. On opening the cover and starting to read, I thought I’d missed an issue, because the story seems to start in the middle, with Tom Strong questioning some mysterious woman in futuristic garb. For reasons that I’m sure will become clear over the next few issues, we never see Tom clearly, and the woman immediately launches into the story of this alternate timeline version of Tom.

As it turns out, I didn’t miss an issue, and Alan Moore being Alan Moore, we can’t count on him ever filling us in on what we’ve missed, because he might just forget to, or decide it’s not important. (I hate writers who decide important story stuff ‘isn’t important’.)

Apparently, this plot concerns the old deal where the timeline has been artificially split and only one history can survive (which is nonsense, since we know that the ABC Universe is part of a multiverse, so one more timeline more or less shouldn’t matter) and knowing Alan Moore, I imagine that at the end of this, Tomas Stone will take over the title and Tom Strong will have never existed. Seems like a Moore thing to do. Fortunately, I’ve never been emotionally invested in Tom Strong as a character, since he’s obviously just a device Moore uses to play with pulp heroic and super heroic themes, so I don’t much care how this comes out.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 2 No. 5 – The second volume of LOEG has been really weird, much weirder than the first one. This latest issue, in which we meet Dr. Moreau and his bizarre animan hybrids, nicely conveys just how disorienting and surreal it would be to meet real talking animals walking around on two legs wearing business suits. Hyde’s revenge on Griffin (or his retaliation for what Griffin did to Mina) was both appropriately vulgar, hideous, and, well, just in every way an absolutely perfect vengeance for the distillation of all Victorian evil to take on someone he really, really disliked a great walloping lot. It would take a writer as fiendishly brilliant as Alan Moore to realize, ‘say, Griffin’s invisible… that means we can actually SHOW Hyde… hmmmm… yesssss…”

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re probably glad.

Anyway, next issue, all of Victorian England may well go up in a blaze of Martian death rays, followed shortly by the rest of the Earth. That, too, seems like an Alan Moore thing to do.

Since we’re on the subject of the League, let me take a moment to mention, just in passing, how much I despise the upcoming movie. I’ve seen several trailers for it, online and in the theaters, and it’s obviously going to be dreadful… dumbed down by several orders of magnitude, glitzed up and sensationalized, with all the characters remaining from the original comic having all their flaws airbrushed out and super powers added to make them more spectacular, and several other characters who were never in the comic added in, apparently for marketing purposes. Plus I guess they’ve changed the setting from the late 19th Century to the 1930s, judging from the big ass Rolls-Royce some kid (Tom Sawyer? I swear I don’t know) is driving in the trailer.

However, whether it’s 1898 or 1930, Tom Sawyer is not a kid any more. Tom Sawyer was around 11 years old around 1836, meaning he was born around 1826, meaning that if he had shown up in Moore’s original LOEG in 1898, he’d have been 73 years old, or just about as old as Alan Quatermaine… and, most likely, without all the high adventuring experience. (Since Twain often said he was either going to have Sawyer end up a Senator, or hung as horse thief, it’s unlikely Tom would show up as a member of the same League as Mina Murray and Alan Quartermaine and Mr. Hyde at all. But never mind.)

It doesn’t surprise me that the producers of a major Hollywood motion picture are completely ignorant of the literary figures they are writing, and it shouldn’t surprise me that the producers of a major Hollywood motion picture can’t even do basic math, since they also obviously cannot spell. ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ is abbreviated as I have previous to this (LOEG), not as the obnoxiously subliterate ‘LXG’. But I should be grateful to them, for tipping to me so comprehensively that I need not waste my money on this particular moving picture, and therefore, I shan’t.