Might want to strip out the commentary-upon-current-action commands there.

I’m just saying. Would anybody have noticed that robot stealing those clothes otherwise?

“Hey, what would the Justice League be like if they were Nazis?” This is a question that has been posed to the comics reader again and again and again. Frankly by this point it is kind of boring. But luckily, here is one of the earlier iterations of the answer!

If Superman was a Nazi his name would be “Ubermensch,” because Nazis have no imagination and just like to translate very literally and not even come up with a new name. Plus they would be all “we invented the term anyways so screw you.” (But that’s Nazis for you.) Also, he would be bald, because nothing says “master race” like “male pattern baldness” with a side order of “shaving your head so you can pretend you are not going bald and that it is instead a personal choice, much as Moby or Bruce Willis does.” Nazis understand that we subconsciously link Bruce Willis with Superman (and Moby). They are using Nazi psychology to fuck with your head.

If Batman were a Nazi he would be “the Horned Owl” and his sidekick (because every alternate Batman needs an alternate Robin, regardless of how forced and ridiculous the Robin idea is once you remove it from its original context) would be named “Fledermaus.” The Nazis cleverly take the Batman-and-Robin concept and invert the species of the costumed archetypes! And they need no superpowers! Despite the Nazis being perfectly willing to give the other heroes they created superpowers, which kind of makes you wonder if Horned Owl pissed people off at the secret Nazi mad-scientists-making-supersoldiers base. “Fuck, Hans, that asshole Horned Owl won’t shut the fuck up about how he got tap water instead of spring water at lunch yesterday.” “What were we going to give him? Super-speed?” “Ja.” “Fuck it, let’s give him the kid sidekick and no powers, see how he likes that.”

If Wonder Woman were a Nazi she would be Gudra the Valkyrie, every bit as impressive as the Marvel Comics Valkyrie. Which is to say, not really that impressive. Admittedly, she has a spear that can kill people with a single touch. This is not as impressive as it sounds, though, considering most spears can kill you with a single touch anyway. You just need, you know, a bit of a firmer touch. However, unlike most of Axis Amerika, she did manage to kill an American superhero. Sure, it was just T.N.T., which is kind of like being the New York Yankees (if they were Nazis) and killing, I dunno, a Toledo Mud Hen. But nonetheless…

If Aquaman were a Nazi he would be Sea Wolf, who is a werewolf, because nothing says “Nazi Aquaman” like “werewolf.” Really, it is a testament to the importance of Aquaman in the enduring Justice League canon that in this Nazi version, his Nazi equivalent appears to be the result of a game of Mad Libs as played by Chris Sims. “Nazi… undersea… werewolf. Right! To the drawing board!” (Chris Sims has a drawing board, but you don’t want to know what he uses it for.) However, in fairness, Sea Wolf looks pretty badass, because he is a wolf-man and wolf-men look inherently bad-ass. So good for you, Sea Wolf! No, who am I kidding. You suck, Sea Wolf. Dogs are not inherently aquatic animals, no matter how much they might enjoy splashing on the shore, and the alternative is that rather than be a werewolf, you are some sort of, I dunno, were-seal. And come on. Were-seal? Really now.

If Green Arrow were a Nazi he would be Usil, the Italian super-arch… wait, seriously? Italian? Man, Green Arrow is even less important than Aquaman on the Nazi scale of importance. He was deemed so important that they felt willing to outsource his development to Italy, a nation with the following prominent superbeings: none of them. Even all the good Italian supervillains are from America, because all evil Italians in comics are Italian-American mobsters. Except Usil. Italy was probably so proud, with crusty old Italians in the streets and cafes saying things like “well, say what you will about Mussolini, but democracy never got us anybody wearing tights and fighting other people in tights!”

But let’s be honest: Usil will never be any good, because people’s tolerance for a concept as flagrantly silly as “superhero still stupid enough to use a bow in the modern era” extends to Green Arrow and Hawkeye and nobody else. (Yes, “nobody else” includes Roy Harper, who earns double scorn points for being briefly intelligent enough to pick up a goddamned gun and then put it down again so he could get into the Justice League and be violently outclassed by everybody. And have sex with Hawkgirl, which I suppose is actually a good enough reason to do it, although then again Roy Harper has never had any trouble getting laid with the women of the DC Universe.).)

Because even by the depreciated standards of World War II heroes and villains (where Mr. America was actually taken seriously as a going concept), these guys are pretty lame. I mean, come on. Sea Wolf.

Some forum kid over at Comic Book Resources is running a poll for “best comics dog.” Their options are Krypto, Lockjaw, Bandit from We3 and “other.”

Okay, let’s be clear here. Lockjaw is a really dumb dog. That is not just opinion: that is canon. If it wasn’t for his ability to teleport Lockjaw would be the Marvel Universe’s equivalent of Marmaduke, and everybody knows that Marmaduke sucks. Also, Lockjaw has a slingshot sticking out of his forehead and everybody is too polite to tell Black Bolt “hey, you might want to take that slingshot out of your dog’s forehead” because he might say “sorry” and blow up the world. So Lockjaw is clearly not the best dog in comics.

For all the jokes people make about Superman being a dick, Krypto is worse. Krypto is a psychotic little beast who is not technically even a real dog but instead some sort of alien thing. Everybody in the DC universe is kind of afraid of Krypto, because he has all of Superman’s powers trapped in something with the temperament of a Rottweiler – friendly one moment, and then the next he’s killing everything in sight. He will even attack his master. So clearly Krypto is not the best dog in comics.

Now, you can make a solid case for Bandit, who just wants to be a good dog even when he is a robot death machine. But he is still kind of not that impressive, because any dog can be a pretty impressive dog when they are encased in cybernetic weaponry – Spuds McKenzie, Old Yeller, that dog in the Jennifer Aniston movie, you name it. Plus I am pretty sure cyber-dogs have to cyber-poop, and I am sure nobody wants to deal with cyber-poop.

But, come now. There is only one choice as to best dog in comics. You know who it is. If Krypto is the Superman of Dogs, then this character is the Batman of Dogs (no, not Ace the Bat-Hound – Ace the Bat-Hound is a dumbass hanger-on). He is always prepared, and even with no powers will always come out ahead in any given situation. And his poop possesses a refreshing lack of nanotechnology.

Because he is Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

“Pork and Beans” by Weezer and “So What” by Pink. 2008 was a really great year for “fuck you” songs, as the general frustration of the world with stupid bullshit finally hit its boiling point, and these were two of the best. Weezer’s song was “Fuck you, I’m a nerd” and Pink’s was “Fuck you, my marriage didn’t work out and who are you to comment.” They both had fantastic hooks (Pink’s “na-na-na-na” in particular will burn itself into your brain) and great musicality, and while Weezer’s video might have been a love letter to internet geeks, Pink’s video had Pink dancing naked and chainsawing down a tree, so at best the “best video” contest between these two is a wash.

The Incredible Hercules. Let’s face facts: 2008 was a remarkably shitty year for Big Two superhero comics. Other than the tail end of All-Star Superman‘s glorious twelve-issue run, what was there? “Event” comics repeatedly failed to impress (something which, at this point, should surprise absolutely nobody) and most superhero comics held up as this year’s exemplars of the form (Jason Aaron’s Ghost Rider, say, or Geoff Johns’ work on Green Lantern, or Abnett and Lanning’s writing on Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy) are barely more than what should be expected out of the form – competent, entertaining storytelling that isn’t particularly revolutionary. The one bright light in all of this was Incredible Hercules, a comic which takes the mythological scope of Walt Simonson’s Thor and marries it to a humourous style not unlike that of Giffen and DeMatteis’ Justice League International (with the same core of pathos that that latter title had). Constantly wonderful and only getting better with time.

WALL-E. The single best film Pixar Studios have ever made – and considering this is the studio with Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles under its belt, that says something. Confident enough to wed most of its storytelling to physical comedy – and physical comedy created by a junky little robot no less – the scope and ambition of WALL-E is only more breathtaking. Yes, Andrew Stanton and company walked it back in public, claiming that it wasn’t “about” consumerism and the ecological destruction of the planet. The rest of us knew ass-covering bullshit when we heard it.

Nation by Terry Pratchett. Nobody knows how many swings at the plate Pratchett has left in him at this point, so that makes this home run of a book all the more glorious; a book which manages to be horrifying without being gory, romantic without being crass, sad without being melodramatic, spiritual without being moralistic, and praiseworthy of science without being annoyingly self-satisfied. As it is a Pratchett book, it is of course also very, very funny and clever throughout, and its message – of the possible comingling and even necessary interdependence of science and religion – is timely and welcome.

Leverage. God, how did John Rogers pitch this and ever have any trouble? “It’s Ocean’s Eleven versus evil corporations who screw over the little guy.” Why did it take so long for someone in Hollywood to throw money at him to get it made? But finally it happened, and this show is a glorious triumph – funny, exciting and most of all you never, ever have to watch it in Idiot Mode because the characters are doing stupid things for stupid reasons. Leverage is a show where the characters, at their worst, do smart things for stupid reasons. Or stupid things for smart reasons. And that makes all the difference.

Furr by Blitzen Trapper. I like music with energetic beats and operatic ambition, so the fact that I’m putting simple, folky, gentle Blitzen Trapper on my “best” list should serve as notice to how brilliant this record was. The title track is a love song about a werewolf, for crissake – just saying that should prepare you for some of the shittiest filk imaginable, but instead Blitzen Trapper makes it work, avoiding cute jokes and writing pure, eloquent poetry, and sounding all the while like a young version of Bob Dylan backed up by The Band. Just fantastic.

Berlin: City of Smoke. Jason Lutes’ epic continues to be absolutely fucking staggering. You should read this comic. Enough said.

In Bruges. Tanked at the box office, as people expected from the shitty advertising campaign that it would be another Lock, Stock-lite English gangster caper film, but instead this was by turns a funny and solemn story about two gangsters (in Bruges) taking cover after a crime gone horribly wrong, a crime that left scars. The comedy comes from razor-sharp dialogue; the pathos from absolutely brilliant work by Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes, and a story that inverts the usual heh-heh-we’re-gangsters tropes and unabashedly, without moralizing, points out that the criminal life really, really sucks at your soul. The best directorial debut of the year, by a country mile.

Northlanders. Brutal, vicious, and utterly fantastic Viking stories that only served to once again remind comics fans of why Vertigo still matters if you’re not interested in medium-dark fantasy (along with the equally fantastic Scalped). Totally hard-ass and uncompromising about both the virtues and flaws of the Viking world, and the lack of an overarching supernarrative means that Brian Wood can do what he does best – stories more connected by theme than by plot. (With Vikings in them.)

Fallout 3. Everybody else has already said everything that could be said about this game, so I’ll just throw in a backhanded compliment: the game is so crazily chock-full of content that I maxed out at level 20 when I was less than a third of the way through the main plot. Dear Bethesda: please to patch game to give more levels please.

Bob on Survivor. You have to love it when a 57-year-old physics teacher (and clearly still a very fit one) dominates the competition challenges over people half his age and invents multiple realistic-looking fake immunity idols to keep himself in play. Bob was the runaway fan-favorite of Survivor: Gabon and easily one of the most dominant players in years, his only failing being an early willingness to trust the wrong people (which merely made him all the more sympathetic).

The Boys. The next time somebody tells me that Garth Ennis just likes to take the piss out of superhero comics and that’s the only reason he’s writing The Boys, I will make them read #15, wherein Annie, undergoing a severe crisis of faith, demands that God give her a sign He exists, and leaves the church disappointed and on the brink of collapse when nothing happens – and then promptly runs into Hughie, who of course is exactly the sign she asked for. Then I will beat them to death with a lead pipe because I am sick to fucking death of people whining about shit that isn’t true. Be forewarned.

The Battlestar Galactica board game. An ingeniously designed board game, featuring the standard cooperative-survival mechanics one would expect given the setting, but with a brilliant twist: some of the players are actually Cylons and they are secretly trying to destroy humanity. The game’s system is designed to make hiding and striking against humanity a thing of subtlety and play-skill; if you’re really good you can even set up other players to take the fall for you, framing them as Cylons using nothing more than your own ability to lie. Similarly, it takes true observational skill to ferret out a really good Cylon player, as well as time your incarceration of them properly. Yes, it’s kind of a shame that Boomer sucks compared to most of the other characters, but other than that this game is seriously just about perfect in its execution.

Chuck. With a promising mini-season start last year, Chuck was already a solidly entertaining little show, but now? Far and away the most improved show on television; the plots are more clever, the dialogue snappier, the action higher quality and the unrealized romance between Chuck and Sarah satisfyingly boiling away behind a thousand actually-good reasons for them to not be together. Also good: the elevation of the Buy-More supporting cast to credits-level importance. Last season I was worried Chuck might waste them in favour of the annoying guy who plays Morgan. This season – well, less Morgan! That’s a start.

Metropolis by Janelle Monáe.

I trust that was self-explanatory, but if it wasn’t – that blend of nu-funk, futuristic soul and utter batshit craziness (it’s a concept album! Set in 2719!) is like what I think Legion of Super-Heroes should be if it were transposed into musical form. And she’s an obvious music nerd. Any other P.Diddy “discovery” diva-lite would want to be all pretty and sexified in their debut video. She wants to be Robot James Brown. How awesome is that?

2008 was a year that produced many singular and outstanding creative works. These were not those.

Waltz with Bashir. One of the most overrated films of the year, the recipient of far too many movie-critic blowjobs to count. Admittedly, the idea of a documentary presented entirely in rotoscopic animation is novel, but one novel idea doesn’t necessarily make a film good, and once you get past the gee-whiz factor of the cartoony Waking Life visual treatment of the film’s material, what do you really have? You’ve got a documentary that’s somewhere in between indulgent and boring, relying on the “oh this is serious stuff” aura that journalists will cheerfully hype about absolutely any inferior creative work related to the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict. Pretty cartoons do not redeem it.

“Lollipop” by L’il Wayne. L’il Wayne has so much awesome work under his belt that it seems a cruel trick that this, one of the most annoying songs he’s ever written, should be his biggest mainstream hit ever. It’s not catchy, it’s just repetitive.

Countdown. It seems almost besides the point to mention how fucking terrible Countdown was, because everybody remembers how fucking terrible it was. But people deserve to be reminded of how shitty, how absolutely crap every fucking week of this fucking shitty comic was, in case they are considering buying a DC “event” comic. So: Jason Todd spent a long time becoming Red Robin. Then he quit being Red Robin. Mary Marvel became a magic-eating psycho whore. Then she stopped doing that. Then she started doing it again. Kamandi finally got the origin story nobody ever demanded. God only knows how many pages were spent detailing the slow death-by-superdisease suffered by Karate Kid, which would have been compelling if the payoff hadn’t been “they fail and he dies anyway.” (Memo to Keith Giffen: I know you’re proud that you’ve managed to kill off Karate Kid twice, but at least the first time it only took you one issue.) We met the Earth-3 “good guy” version of the Joker. Then they killed him off. Jimmy Olsen fucked a bug. Then the bug dumped him. Then Jimmy Olsen fought Darkseid. Again: Jimmy Olsen fought Darkseid, and they were serious about this, which gives one new respect for George Lucas because as bad as the prequel trilogy was, at least he never had C-3P0 fight the Emperor. And finally, a series ostensibly intended to “count down” to Final Crisis in the end turned out to have absolutely jack shit to do with Final Crisis, which begs the question what the point of this shitty, shitty comic was in the first place.

Four Christmases. I sat through this when a friend of mine’s son and I couldn’t get into The Transporter 3 and we needed to see something. Sitting outside in the cold for two hours would have been preferable to sitting through this lifeless, unfunny waste of time, a movie which just screams out “we only did it for the paycheque” en masse. If I ever see Vince Vaughn in real life, I will punch him in the cock.

Heroes. Okay, yeah, Heroes always sucked, but I am gratified that this was finally the year where everybody else figured out that it sucked too. Masi Oka, one of the few actors on this show capable of more than two facial expressions, got saddled with plotlines and dialogue apparently designed to make everybody hate his character. (It worked!) The writers continue to come up with new ways to not deal with the fact that right out of the gate they created three characters (Sylar, Hiro and Peter) who are massively overpowered compared to everybody else on the show and who need permanent power-downs or else the show’s idiocy level will rapidly become terminal. Of course, before they do that they need to figure out how to write a basic plot worth a damn. Also, if I ever see the guy who plays Mohinder in real life, I will punch him in the cock too.

The AI in Call of Duty: World at War. When I play the solo mode I want to really feel like I’m in the middle of the biggest war of all time. This is tricky when you have American GIs and Japanese banzai solders shooting at their respective opponents while standing literally shoulder-to-shoulder because the GIs are stuck in “shoot pointlessly at enemy” and the Japanese are stuck in “shoot pointlessly at you.” Do not even get me started on the Russians and their propensity to throw grenades at the same time they’re calling for you to charge something.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. Introduced “nuked the fridge” into common parlance to complement “jumped the shark,” wherein the former means “movie franchise jumping from beloved icon to joke nigh-instantaneously,” but the phrase could have just as easily been “swing with the monkeys” or “watch the alien spaceship.” This movie is stupid, where previous Indy movies were so pointedly not, and that is the greatest disappointment imaginable. Shia Labeefs’ status as “Next Big Thing In Hollywood, No Really, We Mean It” aside, he sucked in this. Of course, everybody else sucked in it too – even Harrison Ford for god’s sake – so he’ll probably be fine.

DCU: Decisions. What was the point of this comic, anyway? Never mind that simply getting Judd “I’m A Liberal!” Winick and Bill “I’m a Conservative!” Willingham to tag-team-write a comic doesn’t actually ensure any sense of political balance so much as it boils down political positions to ludicrous cariacature (Lois Lane and Power Girl are Republicans because they’re for “strong national defense,” and Green Arrow is a Democrat because he’s a big enviro-hippie!). Forget that the plot made no sense. But seriously, who was going to care about this comic when real life was more important and interesting than figuring out who Batman would vote for? (And before anybody says “well, they scheduled it months before anybody knew Obama was going to be a candidate” – whatever, any real American election would be more interesting than this comic.)

The third season of Dexter. Oh man I have never seen a show go this badly off the rails before. What was previously sharp and savage got dull and indulgent real goddamned fast. And Jimmy Smits? Jimmy Smits is never bad in anything. What the hell happened? Did they put something in his water? Who is poisoning the waters of Jimmy Smits? I will discover who is doing this thing, and I will harm them!

“I Kissed A Girl” by Katy Perry. Any music critic talking about this piece of shit being “catchy” is trying to earn populist cred. Sometimes shitty popular songs are just that and nothing else. The only thing more annoying than the chorus and the lyrics was the ginned-up “controversy” about Katy Perry (WHO IS TOTALLY STRAIGHT EVERYBODY AND IT IS JUST A SONG) endorsing bisexuality. Christ, like James Dobson needed something else to get him hard?

Comics fanboys pre-emptively whining about The Dark Knight getting ignored by the Oscars. Heads up, guys: Heath Ledger is already practically a lock to win Best Supporting and that’s great. But you know what else? The movie is half an hour too long at least, the sonar thing was distracting and hard to watch, and that middle bit where Jim Gordon is dead and Bruce decides to quit being Batman then Harvey says he’s Batman then it turns out it was all a trick to catch the Joker except why did Bruce tell Alfred he was quitting being Batman – that bit made no fucking sense and Christopher Nolan, that clever little bastard, was just figuring we’d all cream our pants over everything else so much we wouldn’t notice and he was mostly right about that. The Dark Knight is a good movie, close to being a great one, but it wasn’t even the best superhero movie this year (that would be Iron Man). So please shut the fuck up.

(Okay, it’s supposed to be molten gold.)

Over the past few years, there’s been an increasing trend in the comics fan community to praise comics for “awesomeness,” where the term is generally used to describe a willingness to cut-and-paste/mix-and-match various genre elements for additional thrill value. When people describe Jason Aaron’s run on Ghost Rider, for example, they’ll talk about how Ghost Rider fights a gang of evil biker nuns armed with machine guns, and how that is awesome. If you press them for details, the response will frequently be something like “because biker machine-gun nuns.” “Batman RIP” got a lot of this as well. “There’s an evil karate mime! How can you not love that?”

Of course, it’s more than that. When we describe the evil biker machine-gun nuns as awesome, it’s not just because Jason Aaron pulled the lever on the Slot Machine O’ Descriptive Elements and got a jackpot; it’s because Aaron, in his Ghost Rider issues, managed to both realize and inform the concept in a matter of pages. He didn’t just throw in the biker machine-gun nuns as a one-off joke; he made them a plot element, made them plausible without making them mundane, kept them interesting without letting them devolve into ridiculousness.

That’s extremely difficult to do. When comics fans talk about “awesomeness” these days, more often than not harkening back to the batshit insane works of people like Robert Kanigher or Bob Haney, who seemingly fueled their stories on pure imagination and a total disregard for things like logic. The problem is that precisely recreating that spirit in a modern work is near-impossible, because modern readers – even young modern readers – now expect a certain level of narrative complexity. (An issue of Marvel Adventures: Avengers, for example, is, from a narrative standpoint, far more complex than most stories produced in the Silver Age despite it being perfectly suitable for younger readers. And this is fine, because kids can actually handle a lot more complexity than most writers will give them.) The level of what-the-fuck-ness that allowed the creation of things like the Saga of the Super-Sons isn’t really there any more. The work of Bob Haney, fun as it may be, is mostly kitsch and most fans who didn’t grow up with it enjoy it mostly on that level.

From a critical standpoint, though – and I really do see this all the time – the works of the present-day are still often being evaluated on the same scale that Haney got. Partially this is because of a vocal group of fans who want comics to be “fun again” (because, what, Hitman and Astro City weren’t fun?); partly it’s because objectivity regarding the comics you read in your youth is difficult to manage and older fans are, unfortunately, often the loudest.

And partly it’s because fans tend to be generous. I call this “Grodd syndrome,” thanks to the huge number of comics fans who will enthusiastically tell you how Gorilla Grodd is a great character without being able to mention one truly great story prominently featuring Gorilla Grodd. (Maybe they’ll say the third season of Justice League Unlimited, but that’s really a Lex Luthor story, not a Grodd story.) When asked to justify why Grodd is a great character, they will simply say “psychic gorilla conqueror.” But that’s not a great character; that’s a great concept.

Which in a sense describes a lot of what “awesomeness” means to comics fans nowadays – it’s a descriptor of concept rather than execution, and an awesome concept is, simply, always a high one. “High concept” is Hollywoodese for “sellable idea that can be expressed in a single sentence.” Twins is the classic example. “Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger are twins!” They literally built the movie out from that idea. The fact that comics have reduced “single sentence” to “single phrase” isn’t even new: Dirty Dancing originated as a title before there was ever a story attached to it (the script from a different project was attached to the title later).

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If superhero comics are going to remain relevant, they need to be evangelized, and the word-of-mouth that made Pirates of the Caribbean wasn’t “it has a strong plotline and good actiony bits and it’s funny,” it was “Johnny Depp is this crazy pirate who acts like he’s Keith Richards with a sword and he fights zombies.”

Concept is the quick sell. That’s what it’s there for.

But behind concept there has to be heft. There has to be forethought into what makes the idea tick. Jason Aaron’s evil machine-gun nuns worked not just because they were evil machine-gun nuns, but because they were devoted to an angel who had gradually gone evil and brought them along for the ride (and wasn’t it a nice touch that the young nun who didn’t know anything about the cultish aspects of her convent was horrified?); they were willing to be violent machine-gun nuns because they’d long since grown settled into their beliefs that violence was justified because the angel said so and because anybody they’d be shooting at would be a sinner anyways. It didn’t take a lot of work to do this, but the work had to be there to really make the concept jump from unformed collection of nouns to living, breathing idea.

This is important because people can tell the difference between just throwing out words at random to masquerade as a plot element and a fully formed idea on the backs of those seemingly random words. (He said, unabashedly discarding one idea he knew was crap and endorsing another he knew was solid.) The first one might entice readers temporarily but people aren’t stupid and they know when they’re being spun literary candyfloss in place of word-meat. The second is what keeps readers around.

We think that spinoff characters started in the 90s when they created Venom and then had Carnage and then Venom 2 and Carnage 3 and Venom: The Venoming and now there’s Anti-Venom. Also there was Vengeance, who was like Ghost Rider, but spikier and with a fiery horse skull (or something) rather than a fiery human skull. I think there was also a Morbius spinoff who was even more vampirey.

But no – even in the good old days, there were spin-off characters. Take Hawk, who is the son of Tomahawk. Tomahawk was DC’s Revolutionary War comic character. He fought the British – including the notoriously awesome Lord Shilling (fun fact: this site is now the #1 search result for “Lord Shilling”) – and, uh, other Britishers and Britishese. Maybe some Hessians too, I dunno. Possibly a Welshman somewhere.

However, Tomahawk, educational as he might have been, was not “down” with the kids of the 50s. Enter Hawk, Tomahawk’s rather unimaginatively named son. Now, maybe you are looking at Hawk and thinking “why does he look like Elvis?” But this is merely a coincidence. Hawk is the result of painstaking historical research, which conclusively demonstrated that in the late 18th and early 19th century, men wore ducktail haircuts, slit-navel jumpsuits and neckerchiefs.

Hawk was excellent at all things. He was friend to white man and Indian alike! (Black men, not so much. He was in 1950s comics, after all.) He could shoot the wings off a fly, track just about anybody, see further than a hawk, hear better than a wolf, outwrestle a bear, outrun a puma… no, wait, sorry, those last four were Bravestarr. Actually, that reminds me. Why the hell did Thirty-Thirty let Bravestarr ride him around? I mean, Thirty-Thirty must’ve thought, at one point, “why can’t we just get damn hoverbikes like everybody else?” And what was up with all the natives of the planet being hobbits? (Yeah, yeah, “Prairie People.” We all know they were hobbits.)

…ahem.

Because, silly as it might be to have Elvis be pre-incarnated as a wilderness scout, it’s actually kind of ludicrously awesome at the same time, you have to admit.

So somebody emailed me saying that Dan Slott popped up on some forum somewhere and when someone “confronted” him with stuff from this post, he totally called me out for being like a net-nerd or something like that. But they didn’t give me the link and they haven’t responded to my request for it.

Now, far be it from me to assume that Dan “Using Bittorrent isn’t stealing when I’m downloading foreign TV shows, because it would be so much work to purchase a region-free DVD player and purchase DVDs of those shows instead as they become available, but don’t you dare download She-Hulk or you are dead to me” Slott answered anything I might have said in bad faith. But what can I say – I am curious as to what he said, and I’m not finding it on the Google.

Has anybody seen this?

Your glider is going to crash into the side of a mountain if you can’t get its flight plane stable! What do you do? What do you do?

Well, maybe you steady it out using only your own body weight, if you have a basic grasp of aerodynamics and you happen to be Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.

Go read Kevin’s post on comic cover design as regards book sales.

Really! Go read it!