31
Jan
Paul Giamatti voicing Asterix in the English-language version of Asterix and the Vikings.
Brad Garrett as Obelix works quite well, but every time I see Asterix open his mouth I now expect him to say “dubbayooENNNNNNNNbeesee!”
31
Jan
I’ve gotten a few emails from people asking me about Citizens United v. FEC, and what I think about it.
So, in order:
1.) Corporations were already mostly free to engage in political speech anyway, thanks to Wisconsin v. RTL a few years ago, which said they had the right to engage in “issue” advertising. In other words, a corporation running an ad saying “vote for Senator Floozits” would be prohibited, but running an ad saying “Do you want to lose your job because of spotted owls? Tell Senator Floozits you don’t want to lose your job because of some vote on environmental regulation!” would be more or less kosher. The dividing line here is obviously a very fine one, and for the purposes of influencing an election it’s largely meaningless.
2.) After President Obama gave his State of the Union speech saying that foreign-owned corporations could now influence elections, a bunch of conservative organizations and the New York Times jumped up to play fact-checker, saying that parts of the U.S.C. said that foreign corporations weren’t allowed to buy electoral advertisements. First off, this is only a technicality; a domestically-owned subsidiary of a foreign corporation with a majority of foreign-born board members (or even simply license requirements allowing them to be influenced) can get past that restriction quite easily. But that’s before you get into shell corporations. (After Citizens dropped, I asked a friend of mine who’s big into business law how many ways he could think of to get around the foreign ownership restriction. He thought about it for a minute and then said he could think of six.)
3.) Some people have suggested that this decision is a victory for smaller corporations to enter into political dialogue, or that individual citizens can now form corporations for the purposes of generating political speech. These are both extremely stupid arguments. Smaller corporations by and large can’t afford to influence political dialogue on any meaningful level that wasn’t available to the individuals participating in them already, and individual citizens already had the opportunity to form advocacy groups (and have done so with some impressive successes).
4.) And yes, of course I think it’s a bad decision – mostly because I’m very much in favour of greater restrictions on corporate rights rather than less, because they are imaginary people, and imaginary people do not, as a rule, have moral character which informs their action. People complaining that campaign finance reform failed to stop corporate speech miss the point: ideally elections should be solely publicly funded. You sign up for your campaign, you get X dollars and a paid half-hour of media time somewhere to make your case for electability. Of course this will never happen, but so will lots of other things that are great, like McDonald’s bringing back the Shamrock Shake on a permanent basis. Why doesn’t the Supreme Court make a decision saying McDonald’s has to bring back the Shamrock Shake forever? And also the McRib.
5.) Additional commentary on the decision that I recommend can be found here.
31
Jan
All right, I hope this is not an abuse of my posting priviledges here, but I thought there might be a chance that someone here could help me. There’s bit in the Tank Girl movie with Lori Petty where Malcolm McDowell says,
“Eight, eight, the burning eight. Between Sunday and Monday hangs a day so dark it will devastate.”
Okay, what the hell is that from? (Might also be “The burning hate”?) Surely that’s not original to the movie; there’s got to be a source, hasn’t there? But Google turns up nothing but quotes from Tank Girl itself. McDowell later quotes some variation on “Abandone all hope, ye who enter here” from Dante, but the “burning eight” bit does’t turn up in a cursory glance of the English translation of The Inferno I have.
If anybody out there could tell me the source, or if it really is an invention of the screenwriter, I would appreciate the hell out if it, because it’s been driving me crazy since Friday.
Oh, and um … so that I’m actually providing some measure of content and not just a plea for assistance … Okay, I know that Tank Girl gets a bad rap, particularly among comics fans who see it as a travesty to the source material. And I guess it sort of is a travesty to the source material. But divorced from all that, it’s still a pretty iconoclastic movie. In the pantheon of Early To Mid Nineties Sci-Fi Dystopia Movies Made On A Modest Budget, it’s a very fun and unusual experience (and I will watch Malcolm McDowell in pretty much anything, frankly). This is a movie in which Lori Petty gets a weird haircut and takes a bath in sand, Iggy Pop cameos as a pedophile, a bizarre animated interlude takes the place of a proper ending, two songs by Bjork are played, and Ice-T receives second billing as a mutated kangaroo-man designed by Stan Winston’s company. It’s a testament to that insanity of the Hewlett and Martin comics that a movie like this comes off a totally watered-down, cleaned-up Hollywood adaptation. It could have been a little better, but it could have been a hell of a lot worse. At least it was directed by someone who wanted to get some of the visual feel and anarchic flavor of the comics, and who hard the absolute nerve to make a sci-fi movie with a female lead who wasn’t “conventionally” hot.
Weird thing, though, the box to the DVD has a banner across the top that says “AVANT-GARDE CINEMA,” and that’s probably stretching it. Avant-garde a clue, maybe. (Joke copyright 1968 George Harrison.)
28
Jan
Now, if you look at the Jester without knowing anything about him, you’d probably write him off as Yet Another Bad Idea From The Golden Age (Which Is Forgivable Because It Was The Dawn Of Comics And So On). Seriously, that’s possibly the silliest, most garish superhero costume of all time. Not only does it include a fool’s cap and bells and a muscle shirt with poofy sleeves, but it has both stripes and polka-dots in an eye-popping yellow-and-black motif.
But here’s the thing: the writers, even then, knew what they were doing! See, Paul Gustavson, who created the Jester (and also the original Golden Age Marvel Comics Angel, the one with the moustache, who has shown himself to have some legs as the more-or-less official symbol of Marvel’s Golden Age – the one who isn’t Namor or Captain America), recognized that the Jester was a pretty silly idea. Probably he created him after a three-day bender, looked down at the paper, then at the bottle of whatever he had been drinking, and quietly said “fuuuuuuck…”
And then he made it work. He did so by having the Jester’s total ridiculousness be his gimmick: the criminals the Jester fought were scared of him because the Jester, so far as they were concerned, was goddamn crazy. Gustavson emphasized the Jester’s freaky-sounding high pitched laugh in the stories, which makes sense because if you were a criminal, probably the last thing you would want to hear at 2 AM in a shadowy alley would be giggling from the shadows. That would be seriously creepy.
Basically, the Jester is the Joker if the Joker were a hero rather than a villain. And also not (too) crazy.
DC got the Jester along with the rest of the Quality Comics properties, but have barely touched him. With one major exception – a guest shot in Starman #46, where James Robinson basically let the Jester do his crazyfied schtick in a teamup with Ted Knight – he’s gone more or less unused. In a way it makes sense, because the Jester doesn’t really work in a modern setting and DC isn’t doing any titles like All-Star Squadron right now where they focus on a past historical era of superheroing. But it’s still a shame nonetheless, because there’s some real storytelling meat here.
27
Jan
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places – and there are so many – where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Rest in peace, you ol’ rabble-rouser.
27
Jan
Look, I hate iTunes more than just about anything, but Apple understands design. People complaining that it is in the “uncanny valley” of gadgets – too big to be as portable as the iPhone, just big enough to be clumsy in your hands – don’t get it. This is the ultimate messenger-bag mobile device: it combines the sheer usability of the iPhone with the additional power and application flexibility of a laptop.
I’ve already seen a few complaints from people who don’t like that Apple’s application standard turns the tablet future into a closed-book sort of scenario, but frankly this was more or less inevitable: Apple’s the only company bothering to design with mass usability in mind3 and if they’re going to price their products anywhere near affordability (and honestly, the iPad’s price points are really stupid cheap for what it is) they need to be able to profit off the applications in order to make back their initial investment until such time as the rest of the pack catches up.
So, yeah. I’m in. Even with iTunes and the fact that “iPad” is a terrible, terrible name. The keyboard dock for people like me who hate the screen-keyboard is just icing on the cake.4
Also, think what this could do for comics! Just imagine: in 2015 or so, Marvel or DC will debut their iPad comics app! (Yeah, you wish I was joking about that, don’t you.)
27
Jan
As we all know thanks to Science, the octopus is one of the smartest animals under the sea – and when enraged, it becomes deadly! What do you do? What do you do?
Thankfully, you can breathe underwater and therefore have no worries that you can defeat the beast, seeing as how you are Rex the motherfucking Wonder Dog.
26
Jan
The year is 1958. The month is June. The teenagers of small-town America are filled with a nebulous sense of rebellion against repressive sexuality and social convention. It was inevitable that some business genius would make money off their forbidden longings. A proto-beatnik named Forsythe P. Jones opens his own “escort service,” which involves not only renting himself out to all the women of Riverdale, but wearing any disguise that suits their kinky fantasies. He even tries to expand the business by taking on Reginald Mantle as a sort of junior gigolo, to take up with women who are too scary for the boss to handle himself.
I’ve once again done the embeddable YouTube video thing, but some of the panels are hard to read in this format, so you can also click here to see the story with the original page layouts. (For those who care about such things, Archie comics had a lot more panels in the late ’50s and early ’60s than they had before or after. Sometime in the ’60s most of their artists switched to a rule whereby there couldn’t be more than six panels per page.)
Also, an important principle that Dan DeCarlo followed in his ’50s prime was that girls’ skirts must be flowing in the breeze whenever possible. Riverdale must have been some windy town.
One thing I’ve been wondering for years is whether “It sounds creamy!” was actually a slang phrase of the time or if it’s just a vaguely dirty-sounding substitute for “dreamy.”
25
Jan
25
Jan
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist, as is the latest edition of that thing I do with the making fun of commenters on the internets.
25
Jan
I referred to the “battle around the world” sequence in Crisis On Infinite Earths last week and then a couple of people who hadn’t read it emailed me and asked me why it was so brilliant. Consider this the Cliffs Notes introduction, then.
So, a bit of recap. Previously, the super-baddie Anti-Monitor tried to blow up all the various alternate universes in the DC Universe, and in fact managed to kill all of them except Earth-1 (the Justice League’s world), Earth-2 (the JSA’s world), Earth-4 (the world with the Charlton heroes like Blue Beetle, Question and Captain Atom), Earth-X (the world with the Quality heroes – Uncle Sam, the Ray, the Human Bomb, et cetera) and Earth-S (the Fawcett heroes like Captain Marvel and the rest of the Shazam! family). The heroes stopped him from doing this multiple times and then managed to fuse all of the Earths into one uniform Earth. The Anti-Monitor was not pleased and as a final gambit pulled the new Earth into his Anti-Matter Universe entirely, reasoning (correctly) that if he destroyed the Earth and its heroes, the rest of the matter universe would probably be much easier pickings. After a great “I am the villain and you are going to die” speech, the Anti-Monitor cloaks the entire planet in shadow.
(Anybody complaining about how the Earth would instantly freeze without the sun or how matter and anti-matter would make each other go foom instantly: comics. Shut up.)
Anyhow. A few scenes with the entire world cloaked in shadow, and then:
continue reading "Crisis On Infinite Earths #12 – The Battle-Around-The-World Sequence"
21
Jan
This is the interesting thing about Sunburst: other than one appearance in a Global Guardians backup story in a Superboy comic, he was a total nonentity in the DCU Universe. I mean, total nonentity: he’d even been hypnotized – at his own request – to become unaware of his superpowers. Possibly this was because whoever was writing the story realized that Sunburst’s powers and gimmick were almost entirely a duplicate of the Global Guardian known as Rising Sun, who is pretty awesome in his own right.
But then, in Crisis On Infinite Earths #12, with literally no advance warning whatsoever, Marv Wolfman pulls Sunburst out of just about the deepest obscurity a comics character can go into, and not only gives George Perez the opportunity to draw Sunburst fighting the Anti-Monitor’s shadow demons alongside Rising Sun as part of the superb “battle around the world” sequence (seriously, Crisis #12 is probably the most brilliantly crafted ending to an epic comics story ever and if anybody says different they are wrong and bad and also wrong), but he goes even further and he gives Sunburst a little story arc.
It’s Sunburst who convinces Dr. Light (the female Dr. Light, not Dr. McRapeyrape) that to serve as a superhero is the highest honor one can undertake. With no introduction beyond Sunburst explaining that they both had to learn this, Wolfman makes Sunburst a noble figure without giving him more time than the character deserves – Sunburst gets maybe five balloons’ worth of dialogue. And then after that he kills Sunburst off, offscreen to boot, because that’s Sunburst’s arc: he learns he has to be a hero, he nuts up and is heroic, and he dies nobly in battle against baddies. With five lines of dialogue and maybe six or seven panels over an entire double-sized comic book, which was not incidentally one of the most important books DC had ever published, the final issue of the absolutely enormous gamble that Crisis was.
Basically, Sunburst is the Biggs Darklighter of Crisis on Infinite Earths, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s an object lesson on how obscure characters should get killed off: he gets a noble ending and his death isn’t fetishized for the sake of gore.
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