My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

During the course of the comments thread on my post last week (and by the way, I’m just going to take half a second and digress to thank everyone who comments. Seriously, blogging is a writing gig that provides absolutely no financial recompense for most of the people who do it, but getting to hear so many people provide you with intelligent feedback on your work makes it all worth it. You’re all wonderful people, thanks!)

…in any event, during the course of the comments thread on my post last week, malakim2099 said, “Also, I would suggest this, because frankly the current status of comics bugs me. Let the characters age naturally. Or close to it. See, right now, if comics followed real chronology, Scott Summers should be the Professor of Xavier’s institute, Franklin Richards the grizzled field leader of the X-Men, etc. And that’s just a tiny example. The recent bout of “legacy” characters stepping in is a good thing (Steve Rogers as Director of SHIELD while Bucky is Cap, or Dick and Steph as Batman and Batgirl), but it’s a baby step in the right direction.” (They provided paragraph breaks, by the way. I condensed it slightly.)

And it’s interesting to me, because this is by no means the first time I’ve heard that statement, or some variation on it. The idea that comic book universes should age in real time seems to be a tremendously popular one in fandom, but everyone who espouses it seems to take it as self-evident. I’ve heard the idea dozens of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a justification for it.

The reasons against it are pretty obvious, of course; for one thing, it rests on the false assumption that comics time and real time are actually equivalent, despite the fact that a comics story that can take a year to come out might only cover a week of real time. (Fun comics fact: Uncanny X-Men #164 to Excalibur #24 take place over a single 365-day period, according to Chris Claremont. (Kitty Pryde’s 14th birthday takes place while she’s in space, infected with a Brood embryo, while her 15th birthday takes place right after she returns from the Cross-Time Caper.) This means that everything during that span, including both Secret Wars, Iron Man’s losing his company during his descent into alcoholism and his subsequent return to power as CEO, Spider-Man changing his costume from red-and-blue to black and then back to red-and-blue, Captain America being stripped of his super-heroic identity by the federal government and returned to power, several line-up changes in the Fantastic Four, the entire invasion at the hands of the Dire Wraiths and subsequent war, the destruction of Xavier’s mansion and the seeming death of the entire team of X-Men, the Mutant Massacre, and the temporary conversion of New York into a demonic outpost of the Limbo dimension…all take place in one year. Gives a new definition to “annus horribilis”, doesn’t it?)

For another thing, it’s never going to happen because comics fans (especially casual fans) read a series for more than just the title. When you read “The Fantastic Four”, you’re reading about more than just four people who are pretty damned fantastic. You’re reading for the dynamic between Reed, Sue, Ben, and Johnny, and their various supporting cast members and villains. The idea that an FF book would be just as good if it was a teenage Franklin Richards battling Kristoff von Doom is strange and alien to me. And you can apply this to any title you’d care to name. I don’t want to read about Ben Reilly, coffee-shop barista and part-time super-hero. I don’t want to read about Grim and Gritty Cyborg Assassin Bucky, and putting him into a Captain America outfit doesn’t make him Captain America. I, like the rest of the world, could care less about Jared Stevens. I’m not saying there haven’t been good legacy books out there–I loved the John Rogers Blue Beetle run, Tom DeFalco did good things with Spider-Girl, and Wally West is pretty much the poster boy for a successful transition from kid sidekick to official hero, at least until Geoff Johns found out he could bring Barry back. But in general, I think that legacy book succeed despite being legacy books, not because of them. The Silver Age DC relaunches were a unique success that everyone assumes can be repeated easily and effortlessly, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

But I’m a good listener, and this is an open-ended comments section. So please, if you want to see a legacy universe, explain your reasons to me. I’d love to know what makes the idea so appealing to so many!

1.) If Cortes had never caused the fall of the Aztec Empire, who would be the best-selling recording artist in history?

2.) If small dogs (up to the size of fox terriers) were currency, what derivative instrument would have caused the 2008 financial collapse?

3.) If guns had never been invented and sling-thrown grenades taken their place in military history, what would be the capital of the United States?

4.) If goat milk rather than cow milk had become the most popular milk in the world circa the mid-1500s, who would be the villain in the Star Wars movies?

5.) If continental drift was nonexistent and we all still lived on Pangaea, what would be the most popular type of house pet?

Show your work.

(yes i watch The Big Bang Theory but only ironically – no YOU shut up)

Your guest judges this week are Karen Kain OH MY YES and Dan Karaty, and any week where Karen Kain was not guest-judging Dan Karaty would be the highlight because he’s awesome, but, hey, Karen Kain.

Amanda and Edgar: hip-hop. A very strong opener. Edgar was of course predictably good because he’s just very good at everything, but in his genre he’s even better. However, Amanda was very nearly as good as he was – her pops were exactly right and her isolations were so good I would have figured her for a hip-hop dancer had I never seen her before. Probably the best hip-hop routine of the season so far.

Natalie and Denys: mambo. Arguably even better than the hip-hop. I would have liked to see Natalie maybe dance a little bit down into her hips just a little more, but this is at best a small complaint; she hit her footwork excellently and kept time with Denys, who of course nailed it, and this was far from being an easy routine. That first big lift was just so damn clean.

Charlene and Mackenzie: contemporary. The two most boring dancers left in the top ten dance a fairly by-the-numbers piece from Stacey Tookey, who is just not bringing it for me this season: there were some nice bits here and there (I liked that one pause en pointe that Charlene got about halfway through), but overall this felt as formulaic as many of her other pieces this season have. As for Charlene and Mackenzie, they danced this very well in a boring way.

Janick and Jeff: jazz/funk. Well, that was… awkward. Terrible idea for a prop (a whip, which the two of them were dancing them around like they were going to lose an eye), and Janick and Jeff were just stiff the whole way through for me. Judges were very nice about not saying that the choreography was bad, which it was. (Incidentally, I’m skipping discussing the solos for the sake of time, but I have to mention that I love Jeff a little bit for doing Ukrainian dance for his solo.)

Danielle and Sebastian: quickstep. Not the worst quickstep on this show, not by a long distance. In fact, I will go so far as to say that it was good. Not great, certainly not outstanding. But good, and the most entertaining and solid routine Pierre Allaire’s delivered in a while. The first time all season I have not at least slightly disliked Sebastian.

Should go home: Charlene and Mackenzie.
Will go home: Charlene and Edgar.

ITEM! Digital comics are the next big thing! That having been said, Dani Jones echoes my sentiments here: it is beyond stupid that DC and Marvel have their own apps for comic viewing on the internet. I’ve said before that comics seem determined to make every single mistake the music industry did enroute to finding a model for internet distribution that works, but really, I didn’t think they’d actually do it so literally – right now we’re apparently at the “every company wants its own service to beat all the other companies’ services” stage, which worked for music about as well as you’d expect given that nobody cared who Beyonce and Coldplay happened to be signed with; they just wanted to download the mp3s. Comics have a slight advantage over music in this regard in that some portion of the audience does care about which comic company produces what, but given that I’m pretty sure the majority of the population doesn’t know or care that Spider-Man and Batman are made by different companies, it doesn’t seem like a growth strategy.

Then again, it’s comics and audience growth is treated as sort of an optional extra. They seem to believe that internet distribution of comics are basically found money: put up comic on app for purchase, you’ve already paid for it, so if anybody buys the damn thing hey that’s five bucks in your pocket you didn’t have before. Until that philosophy changes I don’t think we’ll see a coherent one-stop “iTunes for comics.”

ITEM! Justice League: Lost Generation is actually quite good. No, really, it is. Most of the Brightest Day stuff is actively terrible schlock, but this book has been really upfront in saying “yeah, we’re doing a sort-of Justice League International reunion” and more importantly has a good deal of the tone you’d expect from that: it’s a good midpoint between the banter and the drama that were both emblematic of the Giffen/DeMatteis period. (Everybody remembers the BWA-HA-HAs and forgets that Giffen and DeMatteis had some truly scary villains in their run – the Gray Man, the Queen Bee and Dreamslayer were all really great bad guys, and let us not forget how awesome Despero was as the big bad of that comic.) Judd Winick is knocking his dialogue out of the park, the plot is interesting and non-derivative, and the new Rocket Red is hilarious. The only thing missing is Guy Gardner, but since he is busy over in the quickly-losing-steam Green Lantern books it is understandable that he is not around. I’m really enjoying this comic.

ITEM! Bob Harras is DC’s new editor-in-chief. I really have no opinion about this one way or the other. Some people are enthusiastic about it because they like him; others are horrified because his tenure as EIC at Marvel resulted in a number of creative disasters. At this point I think DC’s level of creative-disaster-ness is about maxed out, so even if the Clone Saga and similar things were entirely Harras’ fault, I don’t think he can make things worse, so why not give him a shot?

ITEM! Zack Snyder to direct next Superman movie. I considered doing a fake script for it, but then I realized all I would have to do is take a bunch of panels from widely-loved Superman comics and paste them together in rough chronological order.

Toronto’s papers did not react particularly well to the recent superior court decision striking down prostitution laws, so I wrote about it.

If I was to run a comic company, here’s how I’d do it. I’d start with a small staff of writers, a moderate-sized staff of artists, an editor (we’d have a small stable of launch titles, all of them family-friendly adventure stories, most of them super-hero comics) and an art director…and a few assistants for the latter two, for reasons which will become apparent. (And plenty of venture capital funding coming in, because you don’t expect this kind of company to turn a profit for a while.)

The art director is the key, because I’m going with the Archie route: We would have a house style, and all the artists at the company would be expected to conform rigidly to that house style. (Keep in mind that when I say, “the Archie route”, I don’t actually mean “looking like Archie”. I picture it as being something fairly timeless, a sort of Neal Adams/Jim Aparo hybrid. Something that you could still look at twenty years later and say, “Ooh, that’s nice.”) But the point is, we are not chasing big names here. If you come to my company expecting to be rich and famous, you’re coming to the wrong place.

Which isn’t to say that we wouldn’t have credits. On the company website, and on the inside front cover of every book, it would say, “(Insert Title Here) was produced by:” and it would proceed to list the writers, artists, editors, and art director that made the book possible. You would be able to say to your family, “Yes, I work in comics.” But you wouldn’t, y’know, be able to say, “I do all the work around here. Give me a raise.” This is not a place for rock stars. (Actually, you would, in a sense. Artists would be paid an hourly wage, but they would also get completion bonuses for every page they did that passed the art director’s approval. So the faster you draw, the more money you make.) To make up for the fact that I’m treating it like a job and not like a creative opportunity, you get the sorts of things you get in a job–hourly wages, health and dental, 401K, et cetera. This is a career for people who want a career.

The books themselves would be done assembly-line style. The writers break down the plot into pages, and each page breakdown is circulated to the pencilers to draw. They, in turn, pass the finished pages to the inkers, then back to the writers for dialoguing, then to the letterers, and then to the colorists. (Every step goes through an editor/assistant/art director/assistant, as well, just to make sure it all comes out nice.) Once the story is finished (all stories are thirty pages long, and entirely self-contained. No multi-parters, no exceptions) it goes up on the website, which is advertiser-supported free content. Anyone who wants to read the comic can do so there.

Or, if they don’t like that, they can read the magazine. It’d come out monthly, and be 120 pages long (90 pages of story, thirty pages of ads, contains three different titles.) This would be sold on newsstands, alongside magazines like Shonen Jump. For those who only wanted to follow one title in dead-tree format, there would be semi-annual anthologies, printed in manga-style digests, and cheap black-and-white “Reader’s Editions” that would be collected in eighteen-issue chunks. Oh, and the occasional hardcover “Best Of”. And, once there’s enough backlog material out there, cheap reprint editions that collect a few random stories together and can fit in supermarket checkout lanes, a la the Archie reprints you see everywhere.

So there’s my idea of the ideal super-hero comic book company. No big stars, heavy emphasis on the characters instead of the creators, self-contained family-friendly stories, and lots of reprinting. In short, the Archie model applied to super-heroes. So who wants to be the first to tell me I’m crazy?

L’il Wayne (@liltunechi)
TWEETS LIKE: Somebody in prison who is passing on messages to a friend to tweet for him, go figure
TYPICAL TWEET: “Kelsey Veert- I appreciate you for puttin your family on to my music & i hope they know that they have an angel for a daughter”
GOOD THING: Seems genuinely happy to pass along tweets via phone from prison, very considerate towards fans
BAD THING: Spells the F-word with two Ks

Russell Brand (@rustyrockets)
TWEETS LIKE: Someone reasonably clever who wants you to give him money
TYPICAL TWEET: “Dear Pope I’m not sure I understand your doctrine. Please send me an outline of the basics. And condoms.”
AMUSING BECAUSE: Gets into interesting exchanges with fans which always sound witty
UNTIL: You read both ends of the conversation and realize it’s a gunfight between the Terminator and Abe Vigoda, the latter of whom is carrying a squirt-gun

Tom Hanks (@tomhanks)
TWEETS LIKE: An assistant being told to tweet for her famous boss person
TYPICAL TWEET: “Nice props from JR on Dave last night. Bless you, “Mercy”. Hanx”
UNINTENTIONALLY AMUSING: Use of “Hanx” at end of every tweet to confirm that, yes, this is in fact Tom Hanks
BUT SECRETLY THE X IS A CLUE TO A VASTER CONSPIRACY! Probably not

Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano)
TWEETS LIKE: That person at the office who means well and sends you email about absolutely anything that somebody forwards her that she thinks people need to know about
TYPICAL TWEET: “iHouse! The Plans 4 Steve Jobs’ New House➛ http://is.gd/fA1rq”
MOST ENDEARING FEATURE: Willingness to get into actual conversations with other people
MOLLIFIED BY: Short attention span

Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago)
TWEETS LIKE: Somebody vastly smarter than you who is enthused about the new possibilities for communication that the medium presents, has considered their various plusses and minuses, and then decided that simply posting pictures of dogs is a waste of time
TYPICAL TWEET: “”When I get out of prison the only people I would care to be with are those who know what beauty is and those who know what sorrow is” – Wilde”
DEMOCRATIC BECAUSE: Retweets messages by new followers on frequent basis, tries to be deeply involved with his followers
UNDEMOCRATIC BECAUSE: He will never retweet anything you say

Dane Cook (@danecook)
TWEETS LIKE: Someone trying out his own material for the very first time
TYPICAL TWEET: “Isn’t everyone a food critic? When I eat a terrible sandwich I don’t need someone else to confirm this with a review.”
SURPRISING: You want to kick him in the nuts less when he’s only in text form
UNSURPRISING: He still mostly sucks

Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest)
TWEETS LIKE: A fourteen-year-old girl
TYPICAL TWEET: “On radio asking…do u think u can find true love thru online dating?? I think yes but u have to be careful!! What do u think?”
BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Lack of tweets asking fans if they think Simon Cowell is gay defies expectations
SECOND BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT: Not fake

Jewel Staite (@JewelStaite)
TWEETS LIKE: Your cousin, you know the one
TYPICAL TWEET: “Doing a Q&A at sachorror at 11am this morning! I better see at least one Jayne hat in the audience…”
MOST VALUABLE SERVICE: Reminding you that celebrities can be really, really boring
SECOND MOST VALUABLE SERVICE: Reminding you that celebrities can remain celebrities even nearly a decade after the last noteworthy thing they did

Janick and Denys: paso doble. Well, that was pretty goddamn awesome. Denys was obviously in his wheelhouse, but he’s growing as a performer by leaps and bounds. Janick was very good. This was great and there is nothing else to say, really.

Danielle and Jeff: contemporary. Danielle and Jeff danced the routine excellently, and I really wish I had liked it more, but I didn’t; it felt very “SYTYCD contemporary” formulaic, with the fast move-slow move-fast move shifts. Good work, but I was meh about it.

Charlene and Edgar: salsa. Oh, dear. Charlene completely fucked up when her shoe came off. Completely. It happens, but she really didn’t recover; her confidence was completely destroyed. You could see Edgar trying to rally her back (and keeping his Latin flavour as he did so) and improvise their way back into the choreo, but it wasn’t going to happen because even before the wardrobe malfunction Charlene was only at about eighty percent comfortable with the routine. Shame, because what there was of the choreo looked really good (because it is Gustavo MOTHERFUCKING Vargas, of course).

Amanda and Mackenzie: afrojazz. Well, this felt more like just regular old avant-garde jazz rather than Afrojazz ™ but CHEESEMAN~! has earned the right to experiment. Amanda is very good, as usual. Mackenzie was technically proficient and boring as all get out, as usual.

Claudia and Jonathan: hip-hop. Not a crowdpleaser, but technically proficient routine from Sho-Tyme, who likes intricate footwork better than big lifting stunts. Jonathan was very solid in this and I think I would have liked this much better if Claudia hadn’t been so terribly mediocre.

Natalie and Sebastian: disco. Quite a nice bit of choreography, although honestly I’m just thankful it was not “new,” but really: lots of the cheesy bits that make disco fun and a few good stunts, that’s all I want out of a disco routine. That having been said: Sebastian was clearly having trouble with the lifts and couldn’t disguise his effort. Natalie was great.

Probable bottom three: Charlene and Edgar, Claudia and Jonathan, Natalie and Sebastian.
Should go home: Charlene and Sebastian.
Will go home: Charlene and Edgar.

BEST MOMENT!

Either when he suggests that a 15-year-old gay boy killed himself because “he was unable to endure the guilt that the others of words prompted in him” and passive-aggressively asserts that it was the kid’s fault
OR
when he explains why he is a giant pussy who doesn’t allow comments on his Youtube page