The sore throat is still present, but seems to be getting better, from either the zinc lozenges or the regular gargling with a generic Listerine type mouthwash. So that’s okay, I hope.

This weekend is pretty much a blur. I know I watched Mission to Mars somewhere in there… probably on Saturday. Reviews of it had been bad, so I wasn’t expecting much. I found it interesting… it was an okay little SF film without being all that spectacular, but there was a lot of good attention to detail in the film… I liked the fact that the near-future space station and space vessels were all rigged to rotate in order to provide crews with artificial gravity, and that at least lip service was paid to the notion of Earth and Mars not being in good orbital positions for a transit, and the fact that the trip took nearly a year… all of this was pretty tight attention to actual science, for, you know, Hollywood. (You can’t overcome a bad orbital position simply by recalibrating and adding more fuel, though, as Gary Sinise indicated at one point… if Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun, it doesn’t matter how much fuel you take, it’s still going to be impossible to make the trip in anything like a reasonable amount of time. But I suppose, if they’d just slipped a few weeks out of optimal approach, it would be doable… barely.)

The movie has a good cast… Tim Robbins, Gary Sinise, Connie Nielsen, everybody’s favorite African-American Don Cheadle, and as a special and pleasant surprise to me, in a couple of flashback scenes, my favorite NYPD Blue babe Kim Delaney played Gary Sinise’s dead wife Maggie. (The movie also had Jerry O’Connell from Sliders in it, but I don’t like him, so to hell with him.) And it had some interesting moments in it, like the fumbled EVA transit that wound up costing one astronaut his life due to the heartless laws of ballistics and his own noble, self sacrificing nature. Most of the cool moments, however, are pretty much cliches to long time SF fans. However, it was interesting to see them so well visualized; the movie did have pretty convincing special effects.

What I found most interesting, in fact, came out of that whole ‘this is an old SF cliché suddenly visualized with good special effects on the big screen’ thing. The climax of the film features a very very old idea in spacefaring SF… the notion that long ago, Mars was more Earthlike than it is now, and is, in fact, the original home of the human race. Some cataclysmic disaster (in this movie, it’s a huge meteor strike) destroys Mars’ ecosystem, and Earth ends up being colonized instead.

In most SF where this idea gets used, it takes up a paragraph of background and then we get on with the real story. However, in this film it’s the whole climactic revelation, and it just made me realize one of the essential differences between text and the more visual mediums… in film or on TV, things seem more ‘real’ and thus, larger and more important, and an idea that would only be one small part of the background of a science fiction story or novel can be the entire point of an SF film.

I suppose this means that text has much more scope than any other medium, but at the same time, less visceral impact, and I also suppose everyone knows this already, so who cares?

Yesterday we had a cook out over at Chad and Mel’s, and played a LOT of Wiz-War, which was fun. Mel began to get alarmingly good at Wiz-War by the end of the third game, so we’ve decided we can’t let her play any more. When they threw us out we came back over here and played Star Wars Monopoly, which is mindlessly fun but which requires no skill at all, it’s simply all about the dice rolls.

I also started re-reading my Top 10 collection this weekend, for reasons that will become clear somewhere below, and did up a new set of Killquest rules, which will also be explained at tedious detail below.

Tonight, a bunch of us (Pat, Kyle, me, Paul, maybe Chad) are supposed to be driving into Tampa to watch 28 Days Later, which I hope will be enjoyable.

Oh, and here’s a weird thing… I used my ATM card to pay $75 on Paul and my utilities bill on July 3. It hasn’t shown up on my electronic bank statement yet, and usually those things appear immediately. But I called the utility company this morning and they report the payment being made on July 3, and that our current balance is $7.21, which obviously we’re not going to worry about until next month.

Now, I’m not dumb enough to think this isn’t going to catch up with me eventually, but right now, the utility company has been given money that hasn’t been taken away from me yet. It’s just one of those weird situations that comes up when you’re living in a virtual economy. Now if I could just figure out how to erase the debit coming into my bank account eventually without effecting the utility accounts…

LATE BREAKING NEWS FLASH: Chad can’t go tonight. Reports vary as to why, but, well, let’s just say, this is one of those occasions when I’m happy to be single. Sometimes it has its advantages.

WARNING – WARNING – WARNING – It’s all geek stuff from here on down… gaming and comic book crapola… so if you’re not a geek, you may and should bail at this point. Thank you. Enjoy the veal. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.

KILLQUEST: THE LEGEND CONTINUES

Back in college, the Late Great Jeff Webb and I created a game we called KILLQUEST. Basically, we took three empty pizza boxes and put a copy of a detailed dungeon map we’d made in each of them. Then, two players would set up five person teams of superheroes under certain broad guidelines, and those teams would enter the dungeon map from opposite sides. A referee would keep track of both team’s movements on his master map (each player had 5 push pins labeled 1 through 5, the referee had ten push pins, one set blue, one set red, also labeled 1 through 5 each, and a list of which character on which team corresponded to each number), duplicating each set of moves each player made on his own master map and then examining it to see if there had been any encounters yet. When one character ran into another character on the map, the referee would announce it, pointing out on each player’s map where they saw the other character, and who each character saw.

This was one of the most fun aspects of the game, namely, finding out who was on the other team. The framework for setting up teams was very vague: we divided all supercharacters up into roughly six levels – level 1, non-super powered characters (Batman, Captain America), level 2, characters with only one, not particularly powerful, ability (like nearly any member of the Legion of Superheroes, or Mr. Fantastic, or Hawkman, or Cyclops, or Green Arrow), level 3, characters with multiple super-powers that still weren’t overwhelmingly powerful (the Beast, say, or Spider-Man, although I always made Spider-Man a level 4 when I was referee, because of his goddam spider-sense, which is annoying, because the referee has to keep track of it), level 4, characters who were very very powerful but not quite top hole (the Thing, Hank Pym, the Wasp, Ultra Boy), level 5, characters who were pretty much just as powerful as we’d let anyone play in the game (Wonder Man, Thor, guys like that). Then there was the sixth class, characters that you simply couldn’t play… the Silver Surfer, Dr. Strange, Iron Man (due to his diversity of technological gimmickry that no one could keep track of and that in the comics, he never uses to potential or he’d just be unstoppable), nearly any DC character at the time (this was in 1981, before Crisis cut most DC characters down to size; you just couldn’t let someone play Superman or Wonder Woman or the Martian Manhunter, they were orders of magnitude more powerful than a level 5 Marvel character).

Basically, within your five person team, you could have (if you wanted) 5 level 1 characters (no one ever did that, though) or up to 4 level 2s, or 3 level 3s, or 2 level 4s, or 1 level 5. Obviously, most people took 1 level 5, two level 4s, and then 2 level 3s, although sometimes for fun people did mix it up and take a level 2 or even level 1 character if they had a ‘concept’ team.

As I say, the most fun aspect of this primitive version of Killquest was discovering little by little who was on the opposing team. It was the sort of game where nearly anything could happen… Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., could come around a corner in his skintight blue SHIELD battle-suit with a blaster-pistol in his hand, and find himself face to face with… the Super-Skrull! (a favorite villain among Marvel geeks; he’s an alien invader who possesses all the powers of the original Fantastic Four, nobody you want to run into in a dark dungeon if you have no superpowers and your only advantages are James Bond-type training, a blaster, and a battlesuit full of useful spy type gimmicks that aren’t going to do much to prevent something with the strength of the Thing and the stretching powers of Mr. Fantastic and the flame powers of the Human Torch from simply grabbing you and ripping you to shreds while incinerating you at the same time).

Killquest was a lot of fun for whoever was playing it, but had two overwhelming disadvantages… first, it was ALWAYS a three person game, because you could only have 2 players and you NEEDED a referee to keep track of the different teams on their maps and describe encounters and make difficult judgment calls. And it is sometimes difficult to get three players to play anything… in a gaming clique, you can generally always find at least one other person for a two person game, and you can often find four or more people who want to play something, but three people is an odd number that doesn’t come up much.

Second, and worse: being the referee blew. Nobody ever wanted to do it. Everyone wanted to play, but no one wanted to be the referee. There were two major factors why this was true:

All the referee did was, well, referee. It wasn’t like being a roleplaying game master, where you have NPCs to run and you’re telling a story and describing a whole world. Killquest took place in a simple map of indestructible hallways with very few features to them. There is no ‘story’ or ‘arc’, simply ten people trying to kill each other. Being the referee was kind of boring; you didn’t get to play or do anything fun, you just kept track of the different moves and described encounters when they occurred.

Worse, however, was the fact that the game really had no rules structure. Any game without a rules structure is simply rife with potential for endless acrimonious arguments by its players, and the referee’s job, supposedly, was to settle these arguments by making final judgements one way or another. However, no one in my gaming clique from college had the kind of willpower or charisma or sheer force of personality necessary to simply make the other players back down… none of us were ruthless enough to say ‘okay, I’ve made my ruling, you assholes forced me to be the referee, now I say Thor CAN’T call his hammer back to his hand if it’s on the other side of the dungeon from him, because the hallways are indestructible and the mystic signal can’t penetrate them’. Oh no. See, the guy running Thor will know damned well that if Thor can’t call his hammer back, he’d turn back into Dr. Don Blake in 60 seconds and Hyperion would squash him like a bug, and in our group, that meant endless and eternal bitching. Nobody was EVER willing to accept a call against their own interest, and without a set of rules to point to, a referee has a really hard time enforcing his own arbitrary whims… however, SOMEone has to make these decisions to keep the game moving.

So, as referee, you didn’t get to do anything fun, and worse, you got screamed at a lot by both players any time a controversy came up and you had to rule in some way that annoyed one of them. So… everyone wanted to play, but no one wanted to referee.

As a side note, all of that could have been settled simply by any one of us (we all refereed at one time or another, and we all D.M.ed our own superhero RPGs, too, in a similarly rule-free environment) just putting his foot down and saying ‘okay, I’m sick of this, from now on, if people give me shit about my judgement calls as referee, I’m just going to stop running the game and you can find something else to do’. But there was a vaguely uneasy and never articulated sort of social contract between all of us that I think we were all very hesitant to break; the notion that if one of us just decided he wasn’t going to run his RPG any more, or referee games any more, nobody else would, either, or he wouldn’t be allowed to play in other people’s games… no one wanted to test it, anyway. Which meant that, well, we all refereed, and we all played in each other’s games, and when someone made a referee judgement we didn’t like, we screamed bloody murder about it. It was a fractious time.

Regardless of the problems, Jeff and I always fondly remembered Killquest, and we both felt that at base, there was a core concept in there… teams of interesting and detailed characters entering a limited environment to kill each other… that no other game we’d seen had incorporated yet. Oh, some of the DOOM type games, where people could hunt each other through virtual reality mazes, came pretty close to our original vision of Killquest… but still, the idea of teams, made up of legendary or famous characters that people would be interested in seeing pitted against other legendary or famous characters… hadn’t been used. And as far as I know, it still hasn’t been used.

Years later, living in New Jersey, Jeff sat down and re-configured Killquest to make it more of a conventional board game with a real rules structure. He created a set of very basic stats you could define characters by (I think he had STR, CON, DEX, and IQ) and a fairly elaborate list of weapons you could equip them with. He kept the two five-man team feature, but gave up on the refereed aspect that was so difficult, so we lost the whole ‘teams move around covertly until they run into each other’ factor that had made the game so much fun. Instead, the characters simply entered on opposite sides of a limited arena, approached each other, and fought it out to the death.

Jeff’s rules were interesting, but had at least on crucial flaw in them (which I exploited to slaughter him in the second game we ever played; Jeff not being a good loser, that was the last game we ever played under those rules), and I thought his approach lost a lot of the fun of the original. However, Jeff also came up with half a dozen beautifully illustrated game arena boards, all of them different, with different features on them, and I wish to hell I still had those. But they seem to have vanished when Jeff committed suicide; I imagine he mailed them to someone (I wish he’d mailed them to me!) because Jeff’s friend Patsy couldn’t find them in his effects and Jeff didn’t mail them to either of us. (Patsy did send me Jeff’s TITAN game, though, which I still have and play occasionally when I can find other players.)

Anyway, while we were playing Wiz-War last week (which is an amusing little game, obviously largely derived from Magic: the Gathering, in which various wizards scramble around on this ever-shifting dungeon type board stealing each other’s treasures and hurling horrible magical spells at each other) it occurred to me that my Wiz-War boards would make an adequate arena for Killquest. So I spent some time this weekend creating my own set of rules, which you can find (badly formatted, which always happens with an HTML conversion, at least, to me) at the other end of that link.

The one crucial thing I want to incorporate into this version of Killquest, however, is that I want to encourage players to make individuals in their teams into pop culture characters… either real people, or fictional characters, that will be interesting and recognizable to the other players, and that the players will enjoy seeing pitted against each other in battles to the death… kind of like MTV’s Celebrity Death Match, except in Killquest, you might very well have five residents of Gilligan’s Island, armed to the teeth, striving mightily to blow away Matchbox 20, all of whom are carrying Uzi’s and wearing body armor. (Paul would enjoy blasting Matchbox 20 to shreds, since he loathes Rob Thomas.)

My printer sucks (actually, it’s fine, but the cartridge is nearly shot and I don’t have a replacement) so I’ve emailed the rules to Chad, who hopefully can print them out and get copies made up for everyone, and at some point, we can playtest this bitch. I’m sure many changes will have to made, since I’m mathematically illiterate, and I’ve probably created formulas that will either result in the instant death of all characters at the first confrontation, or nobody ever actually getting hit at all. But we’ll see.

JAILBAIT LEAGUE OF AMERICA

Scott Shepherd, Man Among Men, has been reading quite a lot of Alan Moore’s modern day superhero stuff at America’s Best Comics based on my recommendations. However, unlike me, Scott has a life, and he isn’t a raving, doddering, middle aged geek-obsessive most of whose memory capacity is taken up with useless trivia regarding various fictional characters in long underwear few living people still care about or are even aware of, so a lot of the stuff Moore is writing about, specifically in Top 10, has gone over his head. When I mentioned a particular story Moore had done via email, Scott said he hadn’t picked up on those references, and asked me for more details.

Blame him for this.

Alan Moore’s Top Ten #12 features what is probably one of his most shocking and controversial stories ever, as he reveals that the previously introduced ‘Seven Sentinels’ superhero team, who are fairly clearly analogues for the Silver Age Justice League of America, are, in fact, not a superhero team at all. They are, instead, a pedophile ring, who have faked and lied about all of their major, universe saving cases, all of which conveniently took place in deep space or in parallel dimensions.

The actual reason for the ‘Seven Sentinels’ existence, as we learn, is to recruit and sexually exploit ‘sidekicks’ for the carnal use of the adult team members.

Normally, this is a type of story that simply enrages me: a deconstructive, ‘post heroic’ story that depicts one, or many, of my childhood imaginary idols in a considerably non-heroic, sleazy, and seamy light, with the intention of making such characters, and the world they live in, seem more ‘realistic’ and ‘four dimensional’. When James Robinson gave this kind of tawdry treatment to the entire DC Golden Age in his mini-series of that name back in the late 1980s, it infuriated me.

You’d think, then, that this depiction of a thinly disguised Justice League of America as child molesters would also sicken and exasperate me, but in fact, there are a couple of crucial differences here. First, Robinson’s story was, to say the least, badly written. His ‘grim-n-gritty’ characterizations made no sense and had absolutely no consistency with previously established behaviors for the characters he assigned them to. Worse, while Robinson’s story was, we were told, either an ‘Imaginary Story’ or took place in some ‘parallel universe’ that was not the ‘real’ DC history, nonetheless, Robinson did not disguise the characters he was writing about. That was Johnny Quick, acting like a sulking, childish idiot. That was Robot-man, going on insane, flesh-hating, sociopathic rampages. That was the real war-time JSA, cowering in America throughout WWII because of one particular Nazi operative named Parsifal, who had the insanely stupid ability to cancel all superhuman powers, regardless of whether those powers came from alien DNA, magical artifacts, or advanced technology.

Moore’s story isn’t anywhere near this obnoxious. For one thing, he didn’t write a story in which he depicted Superman having sex with Supergirl, or Batman raping Robin and sharing him with his friends in the Justice League. Yes, Atoman and Atomaid, The Hound and the Pup, the Seven Sentinels (of whom there are actually 9) and the Young Sentinels, are all pretty direct and obviously recognizable surrogates for certain established and iconic characters and groups, if you’re a Silver Age geek like me, but the fact that the characters have been changed somewhat gives them enough distance to make this palatable. It’s a speculation… an unsavory one, yes… but at least it’s not a direct smear, the way The Golden Age was (or at least, the way it was perceived to be by me).

Beyond that, Moore himself writes far better than Robinson ever will. And, like it or not, there isn’t a Silver Age superhero fan in the history of the world who has not, at one time or another, made uneasy jokes about what Batman and Robin do in the Bat-cave in between cases, or who has not speculated as to exactly how close a relationship Superman and Supergirl, or Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl, have. Sexual liaisons between adult heroes and teen sidekicks are an old riff for Silver Age fans; they’re an intrinsic part of the queasy sublimated sexuality of superhero comics of this era (an era when nearly every adult hero, at one time or another, had a youngster, always of the same gender as them, following them around into combat and, generally, sharing their living quarters out of uniform, as well) and a constant, surreptitious and furtive back beat to any discussions Silver Age fans have of these characters. The simple fact is, adult superheroes running around with 12 or 13 year old sidekicks (or younger; Robin was 10 or so when he first showed up) all of whom are nearly always dressed rather provocatively, is one of the kinkier aspects of a melodramatic sub-genre that is already fairly rife with kinky aspects anyway.

Which makes Moore’s exploration of that theme, rather than an insult or an outrage, almost a relief… it’s like he’s bringing it out of the closet and holding it up to the light of day and saying ‘okay, this is what we’ve been whispering about and exchanging guilty little adolescent giggles about all this time, and this is what it would be like, if all those superheroes really did do their sidekicks in the ass’.

And what it would be like is pretty sleazy and reprehensible… but it’s good to have it out there, and to acknowledge that, because, in a way, it simply reinforces that this is something that never, ever could have really happened with the real Justice League of America. This kind of tawdry victimization of children is so far beneath the likes of Superman, Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter, Hawkman, and Aquaman that it becomes obviously simply something we could only cook up in our own dirty, geekish, sex addicted, seriously frustrated, eternally adolescent minds.

Moore’s explorations of the theme are also far more forgivable than, say, Rick Veitch’s were, during his own four dimensional, post-heroic, deconstructionist exposition of similar ideas in the execrable Brat Pack, mostly because where Veitch’s approach always seemed rather leering and masturbatory, full of sniggers and titters and really palpable ‘nudge nudge wink wink SAY no more’ overtones, Moore seems to take a much dryer, more distant, and clinical approach to the whole sordid mess. We don’t get the impression that Moore has to stop typing every hundred keystrokes or so to frantically whip his skippy, as one (or at least, I) very much did with Veitch’s efforts, and that makes a real difference in perception and portrayal of subject matter like this.

What’s interesting is to note that Moore himself probably didn’t plan this story very far in advance, and it seems, in fact, to have come about from the melding of two separate, earlier plotlines introduced in the Top 10 canon – the arrest of former Seven Sentinel M’rrgla Qualtz, the Vigilante from Venus, as an alien serial killer, and the involvement of her legendary team mates in attempts to intimidate our heroes, the cops of Precinct 10, into letting her go free, and the continuing rumor that Glenn ‘Bluejay’ Garland, former member of teen pop band Sidekix and, purportedly, a one time big name heroic sidekick himself, was about to publish a tell all autobiography that would severely inconvenience several of the heavy movers and shakers in Neopolis.

The giveaway here is how poorly ‘Bluejay’ later fits in with the obvious JLA/Teen Titans parallels being drawn, eventually, in issue #12. When any Silver Age superhero fan first hears ‘Bluejay’ and ‘kid sidekick’, we automatically think ‘oh, he’s supposed to be a Robin, the Boy Wonder surrogate’. It’s the first assumption you go to, and doubtless it was what Moore intended, too… an assumption made, really, undeniable by the fact that Bluejay’s costume is clearly modeled after Robin’s, as well. However, although few of us give it much thought, the Batman and Robin pair is really, thematically, rather discordant… a robin being something that has nothing whatsoever to do with a bat. In future hero-sidekick teams, the associations were generally much stronger and clearer… Flash & Kid Flash being perhaps the most obvious of those, but even with oddly opposed names like Green Arrow and Speedy, at least Speedy dressed like Green Arrow and also employed a bow and arrows. Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl were thematically identical, as was, later on, Superman and Supergirl (although Supergirl was never really Superman's ‘sidekick’).

So, when Moore created his ‘Seven Sentinels’ super-team, in order to do the story where an old time legendary hero was revealed to be an alien who needed to eat a certain chemical secretion of the human brain to survive, without realizing it, he set up an inherent contradiction, when he created Atoman and the Hound, respectively, to be obvious Superman and Batman parallels. If Bluejay was meant to be Robin, then that leaves us with a Silver Age team of The Hound and Bluejay… which is about as discordant, actually, as Batman and Robin, but Moore knew that just wouldn’t work for a modern audience faced with new associations they hadn’t become so used to as to simply not think about any more. So Moore made The Hound’s teen sidekick into someone named The Pup (Moore often comes up with really lousy character names; it’s just something you deal with)… which left him with a problem… whose sidekick was Bluejay?

Another problem Moore had was that he’d, probably off the top of his head, called his JLA surrogates ‘the Seven Sentinels’, probably assuming that he could simply pick out seven members of the original JLA. However, again, it’s obvious that Moore didn’t plan the ‘pedophile ring’ story out in advance. The first four Sentinels we saw were Atoman, the Hound, Sun Woman, and Black Boomerang… obvious surrogates for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow. This left Moore with three more slots to fill, one of which had to be given to his Martian Manhunter surrogate, the Vigilante from Venus, who was, obviously, what the whole ‘Seven Sentinels’ storyline, at that time, was about.

Once the ‘pedophile ring’ story suggested itself to Moore, though (and it must have seemed like a diabolically brilliant inspiration and a story that, once Moore thought of it, simply HAD to be told; Moore’s post Modern super-cops bringing down the most legendary heroes of the Silver Age who are really simply kiddie rapers posing as world saving champions… now THAT’s a post modern deconstructionist statement if ever there was one!), he realized he was going to need adult Silver Age heroes who had sidekicks… which meant, the last two slots for the Seven Sentinels had to go to his Flash surrogate (Sizzler) and his Aquaman surrogate (Davie Jones; again, if you’re a Moore fan, you just deal with the lousy names and move on), because their sidekicks, Kid Flash and Aqualad, respectively, made up nearly half of the Teen Titans, the Justice League’s sidekick team.

This left nobody that ‘Bluejay’, who was now the entrance point to the entire story, could credibly be the sidekick of. Oh, at the point this started to come together for Moore, none of the sidekicks had really been dreamed up yet, but still… none of those heroes could, really, credibly, have a sidekick named Bluejay. However, Hawkman had legitimately been a member of the Silver Age JLA, and a Hawkman surrogate could, credibly, have a sidekick named Bluejay. This was a slight departure from the original template Moore was paralleling, since Hawkman had no teenage sidekick; his crimefighting partner was his wife, Hawkgirl. (And despite the ‘girl’ tag, she was an adult; back in the Silver Age, no female character was ever referred to as a ‘woman’.)

Moore probably also wanted to somehow work in the Atom and Green Lantern. Since he’d already gone one over his ‘Seven Sentinels’ membership number by adding ‘Kingfisher’ (the Hawkman surrogate, remember), Moore doubtless felt he could easily add in a Green Lantern type (‘Scarlet Sceptre’) as well. The Atom, I imagine, Moore reluctantly abandoned plans for – for one thing, his Superman surrogate was already named ‘Atoman’, and for another, Top 10 has a shrinking character of their own, and an Atom surrogate would have just been even more confusing for those reasons. Or so I theorize.

Thus, while the ‘Seven Sentinels’ (really 9) are all fairly obvious parallels to original JLA members, the addition of sidekick characters causes some divergence from the original DC template. ‘Atomaid’, the Supergirl character, is a member of the ‘Young Sentinels’ and obviously meant to be ‘Atoman’s kid partner (and in the story, she refers to him as ‘Uncle Craig’, whereas Superman and Supergirl are first cousins); however, in real life, Supergirl hardly ever teamed up with Superman and was never his ‘junior partner’, nor did she ever join the Teen Titans or work with the JLA much until she became a member herself as an adult.

‘Bluejay’, as we’ve noted, became the kid sidekick to ‘Kingfisher’, who must be a Hawkman parallel (although he doesn’t much look like one), and who never actually had a teen sidekick.

The remainder of the sidekicks… Pup (Robin), Scorchy (Kid Flash, made female), a version of Aqualad referred to only as ‘Fishboy’, which is probably a derogatory nickname, and Blackie (presumably a female version of Speedy, Green Arrow’s sidekick), are all close and accurate parallels. Interestingly, the one sidekick/mentor relationship we fanboys were most fascinated with, Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl, isn’t paralleled in Moore’s story, since Sun Woman, his Wonder Woman surrogate, has no sidekick. Is this a simple oversight, or is perhaps Moore squeamish about adult woman/teen girl relationships… more so than he is about man/boy grappling? Something I’d email Moore and ask, if he weren’t fanatically opposed to ever owning a computer.

Moore is quite careful throughout his story to show that the relationships between the adult ‘heroes’ and their sidekicks are pretty much entirely coercive and unhealthy. None of the sidekicks in question seem to enjoy their roles as sexual playtoys to the grown ups, and most seem to be there, at best, because they feel they have no better alternatives. Atomaid actually warns her uncle, using hypersound, that the police are coming for him, but I suspect that’s Moore’s way of showing the sad fact that abused children… well, abused adults as well… often form unhealthy emotional dependencies on their abusers (said dependency which is often or usually deliberately fostered by the abuser, who gets as much or more gratification from the sense of power over another human being as they do from the sexual release).

Moore uses this to make the courageous, and seditious, and by late 20th and early 21st Century thinking, absolutely outrageous point, in the end, that not all such adult/teen relationships are necessarily wrong or unhealthy, when he has one of his adult heroes, the Captain of Precinct 10, go home and ask his much older lover exactly how their relationship was any different when it started, since he was ‘just barely sixteen’ and his lover (another man) was in his mid to late 20s at the time. The Captain’s lover responds quite succinctly: “The difference is, I loved you, baby. I still do.”

One can only assume that few, if any, members of the modern day Decency Police read TOP 10, or the screams of outrage from that particular denouement would still be echoing from the welkins, and there would have been bonfires of everything Alan Moore has ever written touched off by church going moms and PTA lynch mobs all across America and Britain sometime last year.

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.