(Where does one get hydrochloric acid, anyhow?)
23
Mar
(Where does one get hydrochloric acid, anyhow?)
23
Mar
…is the Blonde Phantom.
For those not in the know, the Blonde Phantom is a Golden Age Marvel comics character from the Timely era. (Of course, comics being comics, she eventually showed up as a middle-aged version of herself in John Byrne’s She-Hulk run, and her daughter eventually became the Phantom Blonde, her successor. Of course, comics also being comics, the Blonde Phantom was eventually de-aged by science or possibly magic. I forget which it was. The point is that she became a hot babe again.)
But she is not just a comics character – she is a tool of the patriarchy. Seriously, reading this comic is like a short lesson in why the women’s lib movement got started in the first place. Granted, Golden Age superheroines always had a weird sexual element to them at the best of times (insert token Wonder Woman comment here), but Blonde Phantom goes beyond that to something that isn’t just “kinda kinky” but instead is just deeply, deeply wrong.
Consider.
This is the Blonde Phantom in her alter ego of Louise Mason, trusty secretary to staunch private detective Mark somethingorother, although I always think of him as “Mr. Manlypipe.” Note the glasses. The little smirk. The bun.1 Louise is your classic overlooked girl, so she rebels against that…
…by becoming the Blonde Phantom! This should be empowering or something!
Well, except that she doesn’t actually fight anybody. What you see here is her standard M.O.: she goes around and, you know, asks people questions. They never seem to wonder “who is this chick in the evening gown and domino mask and why do I care what she thinks,” because that would make sense. I mean, at least when Golden Age Batman asked you questions, there was always the implicit threat of him beating the shit out of you if you didn’t talk.2
And why doesn’t she fight?
That’s why. Because she is a delicate flower. Notice that the thug here is holding her with essentially one hand. This is how much of a wuss the Blonde Phantom is.
Anyhow.
It’s really worth noting how much Blonde Phantom stories revolve around Captain Manlypipe.3 The Blonde Phantom doesn’t really resolve anything; even in her mask and glamour-gown she’s still ultimately just Captain Manlypipe’s assistant. Nothing can change her. It is her preordained place in the history of the world: servile to a pipe-smoking fellow of virile complexion. Isn’t this depressing?
This is about as physical as she ever gets.
And this is how she resolves most conflicts. She runs and she hides from the bad, bad men! Or in this case, man. Singular. Who is unarmed. But who needs weapons to take on the Blonde Phantom? She is a girl, don’t you know.4
This panel in particular drives me nuts. First off, it’s a jar of cold cream, so it manages to be stereotypically feminine just like anything else the Blonde Phantom ever finds or tries to use. (In this particular story, for example, the key clue that tipped off the Blonde Phantom? Was that a lipstick found next to the body of a dead woman was the wrong brand.) And throwing a little jar of cold cream at the Big Strong Hulking Bad Guy is just so stereotypically girly a move – I mean, Golden Age Black Canary is just looking at this and shaking her head. “Why don’t you kick him in the face? Do you need me to lend you Merry, Girl Of A Thousand Gimmicks to teach you how to slug a palooka like this? What’s wrong with you?”
But what’s more annoying than that is what she’s thinking. Again, the Blonde Phantom’s story is all about Captain Manlypipe. Why hasn’t Manlypipe come to save her yet? She was counting on that!
Which of course he does. Like he does every time.
And we come to our regular Blonde Phantom denouement: her blowing off Manlypipe, who wants him some Blonde Phantom action, because secretly she wants him to fall for her, Louise Mason, and not some beautiful girl in a domino mask and evening gown who looks exactly like her. Wait, is Captain Manlypipe mentally challenged? Or possibly blind? Because who the hell could not figure out that their secretary was standing in front of them when all that’s hiding her identity is a fucking domino mask? Ahh, Golden Age, you inspired so many and sucked so frequently.
P.S. In the end, Louise and Manlypipe got married, so that just goes to show you that if you rely enough on a big strong man, ladies, eventually he will do the right thing and buy you a large wedding ring and a house and a dog and give you babies!
Top comment: To be fair, the cold cream jar would have been made of glass, and would seem awfully heavy and tough to a little lady. And maybe she was secretly hoping it would shatter and a little cold cream might clear up his condition and he’d have a personality shift and become a good guy. Because, you know, most problems can be solved if you’d just try to be a little prettier. — Cookie McCool
22
Mar
In email:
In terms of internet business models, 2005-2015 will be to comics as 1995-2005 was to music. Discuss.
It’s a cute truism, but not entirely accurate.
Firstly, the key similarity: the market by and large considers the product to be poorly distributed and overpriced. People like comics, almost universally; the failure of the industry is pointedly not the failure of its product but of its marketing, distribution model, and its price point. This cannot be understated: comics used to compete with a chocolate bar at the newsstand.
That sentence contains the two failures of modern comics sales. Firstly: “at the newsstand.” Vastly enough has been written about the failures of the direct market and why we should or should not beat Diamond to death with a stick that I don’t feel the need to rehash it in depth, but the near-total noninteractivity of comics publishers with the larger market is damned near impossible to understand.
I don’t particularly want to reopen the scans_daily debate again, but one thing that always struck me was that its detractors in the wake of its collapse decried the “word of mouth advertising” arguments its supporters upheld as a solid raison d’etre for the tolerance of the community’s theft. It was argued that DC and Marvel put up previews on Newsarama, on their own websites, in Diamond’s Previews catalog, and had store presence, and that this was enough for the purposes of advertising.
The problem with this argument is that if you translate it over to any other product it makes absolutely zero sense. Does Coke say “well, we don’t need to advertise Coke to everybody. It’s there in the store, and we put advertisements in Cola Monthly, and we have a website”? Of course not, because that’s idiotic. You don’t even need to mention scans_daily in this argument because scans_daily wasn’t the answer to the larger problem (as much as its supporters wished it were); it was merely a reaction from the existing market to this failure, and an inadequate one at that.
Every so often some website will put up an old cover of a “crossover comic,” by which I mean not crossing over with an established intellectual property (like that Star Trek/X-Men comic that still makes me wonder), but crossing over with an existing and usually wildly divergent brand: J.C. Penney, Hanes, Post Cereals, that sort of thing. Marvel and DC (but mostly Marvel) would strike deals with these companies to put comics – usually crappy comics, but comics – into the hands of people buying things that had absolutely nothing to do with comics. The logic is of course obvious: if 100,000 people buy Hanes underwear with a Spider-Man comic in it, and one-tenth of them are entertained enough to want to buy another Spider-Man comic or three, that’s a big win for Marvel.
(How often does that sort of thing happen any more? Used to be it seemed like there was at least two or three promotions like that every year; now the only “promotional” comics I can think of that the Big Two give away1 – are the occasional comics Marvel produces for the United States Army for the troops. Can anybody think of any others?)
Anyhow. Secondly, consider “used to compete with a chocolate bar.” Comics are horrendously expensive, and in some cases needlessly so. A three-to-four dollar price point puts comics out of a lot of hands – especially young hands. And although inflation is part of that, paper quality is also a big issue. Why not print comics on newsprint again? Does anybody really need that shiny, glossy paper that’s in all the comics now?2
This is to say nothing of the Big Two’s current collection strategy, which is insane: release the more expensive hardcover initially and then delay the softcover for anywhere from six months to an entire year after that.3 Hardcovers might be pretty, but they’re for devoted fans because of their increased cost. A sales strategy concentrating on hardcover promotion is one that prioritizes catering to hardcores.
Now that we’ve covered the key similarity, let’s discuss the key difference, which is that comics, unlike music, does not have a good “try before you buy” mechanism. I’m not talking about previews on websites being comparable to Java-enabled song snippets being available before you download an mp3 from Amazon or the like; I’m talking about the radio. (Internet or otherwise.) That’s how most music gets marketed to the listener: the listener hears the song in some context in its entirety other than looking at a list of songs and says “hey, I like this.”
Some might argue that the previews posted to Newsarama qualify as “try before you buy,” but really, that’s not true. You get a snippet of story (usually not even the best part) which is only a portion of a portion of a larger story. Incidentally, this is another scans_daily argument that detractors didn’t understand – the scans_daily folks might have been excessive, but they concentrated on the “good parts,” the heart of the story, or at least what they thought those to be – and that makes for a better preview than the first five pages of a book.4
Try before you buy, when applied to written material, means a library. And no library is going to touch single issues for obvious reasons (cost, preservability, et cetera). Granted, most libraries now have a reasonable selection of graphic novels, but those graphic novels are the ones coming out after the fact. And since for the most part there aren’t library editions of graphic novels, that means they tend to go for trade paperbacks – or material that’s over a year old. Does the radio still play a lot of 2008’s hottest jams rather than play new tracks?
And that’s a huge hurdle that comics has to overcome that music never did. Well, that and the fact that comics have a much smaller audience, thanks to decades of bad decisions, but that’s neither here nor there.
21
Mar
Like most “life hacking” sites, it occasionally goes overboard in trying to describe new uses for existing items as “hacks,” but this bike rack, this desktop decluttering solution, these laptop stands or this DVD wall unit are all good examples of what the site can do when it’s not trying too hard.
19
Mar
Fifteen reasons why Brain Storm sucks.
1.) His helmet looks like an exotic dildo.
2.) He first attacked the League because he thought they had killed his brother, but in fact, he had accidentally teleported his brother himself, using his own powers – to France.
3.) Seriously, it says that right there. Teleported his brother to France.
4.) It says right in his roundup that he will run away if “threatened with physical harm.” So he’s a pussy.
5.) Why do all villains with mental powers always suck at fighting? Haven’t they figured out yet that being able to throw a good punch is worth at least 1/3rd of a telekinetic bolt in comics?
6.) Dildo helmet.
7.) His name is two words rather than one.
8.) His real name is Axel Storm, so this is Silver Age Example #735 of a guy who couldn’t come up with a good super-name until he took a look at his own name and thought, “well, what can I do with this?”
9.) I know I’m hating on the dildo helmet, but – while we’re discussing sartorial choices, what is up with those shoulder things? Did he decide “yeah, I should look like a 1959 Cadillac, that will strike fear into the heart of all who behold me,” or what?
10.) That having been said – dildo helmet.
11.) His nickname is the “Star-Bolt Warrior,” which makes him sound like one of the toys from Crystar or a similar crappy toy line that didn’t even last one season on teevee.
12.) His failure to recognize that a pencil moustache in everyday life might make you look like Clark Gable, but once you put on a supervillain costume you stop looking like Clark Gable and start looking like Vincent Price.
13.) He invents a floating hoverchair and, rather than becoming rich, uses it for supervillainy. This isn’t, like, Captain Cold or somebody, who invented something that’s basically only good for killing people. He invented an air-chair, for fuck’s sake.
14.) Did I mention that his brother was named “Fred,” incidentally? Because – yeah, what kind of parent names their two children “Axel” and “Fred,” anyway? The type of person who names their kid “Axel” is not going to name their other kid “Fred.” Well, maybe their dad wanted to name the second kid “Diego” or “Slice” or something, and their mom put her foot down and said “this one is Fred, goddamnit.”
15.) In conclusion: dildo helmet.
Blinky dildo helmet.
18
Mar
Hippo sweat to be turned into sunscreen. Key part is this:
After analyzing the hippo sweat under a microscope, the researcher found that there were two types of crystaline structures in it – banded and non-banded. He pinpointed that the banded ones were “characterized by concentric dark rings,” which seemed to be the key to the liquid’s amazing properties. “The rings are the result of a structural periodicity that occurs on a scale comparable to the wavelengths of visible light. This means that the sweat is an effective scatterer of light, so that it combines both sun-blocking and sun-screening properties,” Viney stated.
So basically they are saying that hippo sweat is, like, a cloaking device. Which means that hippopotami could be Predators if they ever bothered to get out of the damn river. We are extremely lucky that hippos are lazy.
LEONARD: Reads about Dick’s parents getting killed at the circus and he’s like “I should buy a circus!”
Top comment: Are you saying hippos are hungry? And also, hungry? — Matt
18
Mar
This is mine:
Let’s see what you got, people! In comments, or Photoshop them yourselves and post to your own blog, or whatever.
17
Mar
(Via J-Mo.)
Top comment: The logical conclusion is that the avian is in estrous, Captain. — wyrmsine
17
Mar
ME: So get this – Steven Seagal is reading my blog.
FLAPJACKS: Steven Seagal, or some comedy nerd pretending to be Steven Seagal?
ME: I’m pretty sure it’s the real Steven Seagal.
FLAPJACKS: And he’s reading your blog.
ME: Yeah.
FLAPJACKS: No, he’s just following you on Twitter.
ME: Lots of people follow me on Twitter. A lot more, lately. There were a few people at first and now they’re coming regularly.
FLAPJACKS: Perhaps you have reached… twittical mass.
ME: Don’t do that. Don’t do wordplay with “tw” because it is Twitter. I hate that.
FLAPJACKS: Wordplay… or twordplay?
ME: Stop it.
FLAPJACKS: Anyhow, like I said, he’s just following you on Twitter.
ME: But I don’t have a fancy phone that can do Twitter things, so all I do with Twitter right now is points to updates on my blog. Therefore, Steven Seagal is reading my blog. QED.
FLAPJACKS: Perhaps he is only reading your blog titles. Did you ever think about that?
ME: No, because that would be retarded.
FLAPJACKS: Why on earth is he reading your blog?
ME: I think it’s because I’m awesome.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe this will lead to a trend of other C-list celebrities reading your blog. If Steven Seagal is reading your blog, how long until Kevin Pollak starts reading you? And once Kevin Pollak is reading you, it is only a matter of time before you have Claudia Christian, Kevin Sorbo or Mike Ditka. And from there, it is but a hop, skip and jump to the lofty peaks of Lorenzo Lamas.
ME: Are you seriously going to refer to Steven Seagal as “C-list”?
FLAPJACKS: The last thing I saw him in was that movie where he dies twenty minutes in and then Kurt Russell has to land the jet plane, so yes.
ME: I wasn’t trying to debate your definitions. I was pointing out that you just called Steven Seagal “C-list” and that he is going to read that you called him that.
FLAPJACKS: Say what now?
ME: This is gonna be a blog post.
FLAPJACKS: But you didn’t give me the hand signal!
ME: What hand signal?
FLAPJACKS: The hand signal that means “I am going to blog this conversation!” You didn’t warn me I was on the record!
ME: First, we don’t have any such hand signal. Second, I never warn you and you never complain.
FLAPJACKS: That was because until now you didn’t have anybody reading your stupid blog that could kill me by twitching his thumbs slightly! It’s all been various kinds of nerds! The type of nerds who breathe heavily when they get out of their motor scooters! Steven Seagal doesn’t have a motor scooter!
ME: Maybe he has one that he uses to kill people.
FLAPJACKS: That’s even worse! Now all I can think about is Steven Seagal coming after me with a motor scooter and death is in his eyes!
ME: Hey, Wikipedia says he has his own brand of knife.
FLAPJACKS: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!
ME: “The “Steven Seagal Edition” knives feature 4″ blades with his signature etched in, and no auto-assisted opening mechanism.” You know why there’s no auto-assisted opening mechanism? Because auto-assisted opening mechanisms are for pansy-men.
FLAPJACKS: Oh god he’s going to cut me up and eat me.
ME: He’s a vegetarian.
FLAPJACKS: He’s going to cut me up and feed me to some animal with a strictly carnivorous diet so as not to waste my flesh.
ME: Possibly.
FLAPJACKS: WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY “NO HE’S NOT GOING TO DO THAT”?
ME: Well, he wasn’t going to eat you, but I have to admit, chopping you up into food for endangered species is entirely possible.
FLAPJACKS: Oh god. Oh god. I need a plan.
ME: Sure, why not.
FLAPJACKS: Okay. Okay. He’s an aikido champion. Right?
ME: And?
FLAPJACKS: “Aikido is a defensive martial art which focuses on not harming one’s attacker.”
ME: So I am guessing that your plan, such as it is, is to not attack him and therefore he will not be able to use his aikido skills?
FLAPJACKS: No, because I’m certain he knows how to kick my ass through some other method. I plan to attack him constantly, so he will fall back upon the aikido at which he is most comfortable, and I will be safe because he will deflect me harmlessly! Eventually his rage will subside, I am sure.
ME: Unless he’s learned to modify his aikido to use with his particular brand of knife.
FLAPJACKS: You just have to ruin everything, don’t you?
ME: Hey, he has his own brand of energy drink! Maybe he will drown you in a tub of it.
FLAPJACKS: How would he do that?
ME: Well, you attack him, he uses his aikido tricks to throw you harmlessly wherever he feels like it, except the harmless throw lands you in a vat of Steven Seagal Lightning Bolt Energy Drink, and then he just has to kind of hold you underneath the surface one-handed until your pitiful struggle finally ceases.
FLAPJACKS: I hate you so much that it is like I am made of poison.
Top comment: He also follows LeVar Burton, so I wouldn’t get too excited. Well, he was Kunta Kinte, I guess. And Geordie LaForge. And Reading Rainbow Guy…
Never mind. You’re hot shit! — Bill Reed
16
Mar
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.
16
Mar
Top comment: Now do Its vs It’s.
Then Reduculous.
ONLY YOU, MGK, CAN FIX ALL THE INTERNET — Ilan
16
Mar
Hey, MGK’ers – very occasional guest-poster Dan Solomon here. I’ve spent the past few days busying myself with the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX, and I wanted to share with you the future of film as we know it. Or something like that – anyway, here is a report on the first five movies I’ve seen.
The Snake
What It Is: A debut comedy about a serious sleaze who joins a support group for people with poor body-image because he wants to do it with one of the girls, and seduces her by enabling her bulimia.
Who’s In It: The co-directors and their girlfriends, some actors you’ve never heard of in your life, and, inexplicably, Margaret Cho for about two minutes.
Is It Good? Actually, it’s amazing. The screening on Friday night was introduced by Patton Oswalt, who hasn’t got a film in the festival, or even a gig in town – he was just taken enough by the picture to help promote it. His promotion included name-dropping the fact that other famous folks, like Joss Whedon, had seen the screener and loved it. If I were famous, he could cite me, too – The Snake is hilarious, and it manages to make a comedy about a protagonist with no redeeming qualities that neither offers him redemption nor asks you to sympathize with him in any way.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: The thing, while it’s drop-dead hysterical, looks like it may as well have been shot on a cell phone camera. The sound in certain scenes is full of background noise that makes you strain to hear the actors. Technically, the thing is a mess. And after five minutes, there’s no reason to care. If this one catches on, it could change the rules a bit in the same way that Clerks did fifteen years ago.
Alexander the Last
What It Is: The fifth movie from some dude named Joe Swanburg about how it’s really really hard to be a white person with artistic and creative ambition in your twenties in New York, and how it’s especially hard to be that sort of person and married, because you’ll be attracted to other people sometimes and you might have to stop being 100% self-absorbed for a little while as you decide not to fuck anyone else.
Who’s In It: The girl from Teeth is the female lead, some skinny dude with a punchable face is the male lead, and the dude who played Grover in Kicking and Screaming (the 90’s one, not the Will Ferrell one) has a small part.
Is It Good? It is most decidedly not good, no. The film expects you to be concerned enough with the plight of these attractive people who do nothing but make art and googly-eyes at each other all day that it doesn’t give them any sort of personality at all. And I’m not being mean and saying, oh, their personalities are bland, therefore they don’t have them – seriously, there’s nothing to them, like, as a stylistic choice. It tries to be a character-based picture, but it tells us nothing about the characters. Big-time flop.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: It had its world premiere last night at SXSW, and it was simultaneously shown on IFC, which could potentially be a new business model, I guess. It could also inspire a bunch of similar navel-gazing, if it somehow becomes a hit.
Pontypool
What It Is: Holy cow, pretty much the coolest, scariest horror movie since, I dunno, the last cool, scary horror movie.
Who’s In It: Stephen McHattie, who played Hollis Mason in Watchmen, is the lead here as the Kinky Friedman-esque iconoclastic host of a small Ontario town’s radio morning show.
Is It Good? The first 2/3 of the movie are fucking incredible. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it’s a rare horror movie that’s able to be as tense and that terrifying as Pontypool without showing you much of anything in the way of scary images. The thing falls apart a little bit toward the end, when it tries (with a plot point cribbed from Snow Crash) to explain what’s behind the “horror” incident.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: Giving Stephen McHattie some more work would be a significant enough achievement, but I suspect Pontypool is successful enough at finding a genuinely original way to scare audiences and defy convention that it will be ripped off for years to come.
Snowblind
What It Is: A documentary about Rachel Scdoris, the first legally blind athlete to race in the Iditarod.
Who’s In It: Rachel Scdoris, duh. Also her dad, whom the director seemed to try turn into a bad guy even though he didn’t deserve it, as well as Joe Runyan, a former Iditarod champion.
Is It Good? Kinda? Not particularly compelling, which is mind-blowing, considering the source material. You can tell that the director didn’t have much rapport with Scdoris, as she’s pretty guarded through the whole thing, and there’s not really an actual narrative or viewpoint – we just follow her around as she races, and occasionally her dad is played as a jerk living vicariously through her. Some of the photography is amazing, though.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: I can’t imagine it will, really. Maybe they’ll do it as a narrative film, a la Snow Buddies? That’d be cool.
Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
What It Is: Anvil were a powerhouse of Canadian heavy metal that inspired Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and more. They toured Japan and were cited as monsters of rock and roll, back in 1982. A few years later, they were working crappy day-jobs and forgotten, while their peers were busy getting famous. This is the story of what went wrong.
Who’s In It: The dudes from Anvil, of course, as well as metal luminaries like Lars Ulrich, Lemmy, Slash, and more, most of whom spend their screen time gushing over how good Anvil were.
Is It Good? Absolutely. This is one of those documentaries like Murderball or Spellbound that sells its story better than fiction ever could. Mostly it’s due to subjects who are endlessly fascinating, a couple lucky breaks in the events that heighten the drama, and a lot of compassion for the people on screen.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: Film? Who knows. Rock and roll? Well, Anvil are playing a showcase during SXSW Music now, thanks to the newfound attention they’re receiving in response to the documentary. If it’s not too late for some dudes in their 50’s to become rock stars after all, then everything you thought you knew about when to give up your dreams is wrong.
The festival’s only a few days old, so that’s all I’ve got. If there’s anything else amazing going on, I may sneak in another post.
14
Mar
If the case turns on this evidence there is no way it doesn’t get appealed; the judge’s reasoning seems questionable at best.
“Facebook profiles are not designed to function as diaries; they enable users to construct personal networks or communities of `friends’ with whom they can share information about themselves, and on which `friends’ can post information about the user,” he said.
But simultaneously, that information is not intended to be disclosed to the general public, but only to trusted confidantes (to put it in terms more friendly to the individual in question). That should potentially raise a privacy issue. I’m going to keep tabs on this one.
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