So I was going to do a list of “every comic book ever ranked in order of quality” because I figured nerds would totally get into that and there would be fistfights over whether Tomb of Dracula #7 should be ranked one higher than New Teen Titans (vol. 2) #21 and nerds fighting each other in the streets would make for some excellent slapstick comedy before they all collapsed from exhaustion (because your average person who would get into a fistfight over that sort of thing needs it to be a really, really short fistfight). But it’s harder than it looks.

I mean, obviously Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! #14 has to be the number one comic of all time because it is where the Zoo Crew teams up with the Just’a Lotta Animals and there will never, ever again be a comic as important as that one. (It is well-known that Alan Moore stole all of his ideas from unused Zoo Crew plots Scott Shaw! threw out in the trash. Well, either that or Moore rolled them up and smoked them. Both are equally possible.) But after you select the #1, it turns out selecting the #2 comic book of all time is actually much harder because it’s easy to figure out the best of all things, but what’s the second-best? The second-best is harder to decide, is my point.

Like, is Action Comics #1 the second-best comic of all time because it is the first appearance of Superman and sets the stage for essentially all superhero comics over the next 75 years? Or, on the other hand, is the second-best comic of all time Jughead’s Diner #4 because it has Jughead fighting an evil blob monster to save his future-restaurant? These are the questions that you have to grapple with when you are writing a quality listicle. People think it is just slapping numbers on things and they are so wrong because it is, in fact, a process.

You guys make fun of Buzzfeed all the time, but hunting down all those individual GIFs that express how they superficially feel about any given issue is, in fact, an act of curation and that is hard work, just ask anybody who works at a museum. Well, anybody who is not Ben Stiller in that museum where the exhibits come to life, that’s probably not typical of museums. Or is it? I don’t know, I don’t spend my nights in museums where ghosts or whatever make all the thingies come to life.

Anyway, my point is that Jughead’s Diner #4 is probably the second-best comic of all-time, and then Action Comics #1 is third obviously, but then what is fourth? Amazing Fantasy #15, the debut of Spider-Man? Or Cherry #5, where Cherry gets involved in an orgy? (Well she gets in an orgy in most issues really so maybe Spider-Man wins this round.) Man, this is going to take longer than I thought, and that’s before you factor in the time it’s going to take me to go looking for GIFs.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Let’s just start this right off with spoilers.

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I was chatting with David Uzumeri on Twitter recently about Bioshock on account of we were both playing the new DLC campaign for Bioshock Infinite, and I said I wished that all of the Bioshock games were, in fact, stealth games like Thief or even Dishonored (which is sort of a stealth-action first-person shooter). This is partially because I really like stealth games, but it’s also because stealth games, more than other games, require you to interact with the world around you: you have to really involve yourself with the environment, every table, fence and building becomes something you have to intimately know – this nook is safe to hide in, that cranny isn’t.

(It also means that good stealth games can immerse you into the world’s wider story in a way that feels far more organic than what Bioshock does with its “oh look the big bad of the game just happened to leave a diary recording of his nefarious plan here on this fruit stand” mechanic. Dishonored was particularly good about this: documents that you could sneak into rooms and read were always relevant to where you were and often didn’t have anything to do with your personal plotline while still being interesting.)

But why I particularly wish the Bioshock games were stealth games ties into the reason why I find most zombie games boring as sin. Stealth games make so much more sense when you are traveling through a world undergoing armageddon because during the end of a world, the tall grass gets mowed down. Why wouldn’t you want to sneak through a world where people with superpowers are trying to kill each other and also you? And this is of course why there are no truly great zombie video games that really capture the fearful aspect of zombies: they’re all action games like Left 4 Dead (which I really like, don’t get me wrong) or comedy-violence games like Dead Rising or Dead Island (which I really don’t like at all).

A zombie game that would be primarily about stealth would really make the problem with zombies plain: there’s more of them than there are of you, and they never get tired and they never stop coming, so the trick is to make sure they’re not coming for you. That game doesn’t exist yet and doesn’t appear to be coming. Instead, right now, the big thing is “build a base and defend it” zombie games, which also kind of miss the point: bases, in zombie stories, exist to be overrun. They’re honey traps for humans, that’s the point of bases.

(Day Z kind of got stealth gaming in zombie games right, but it’s also not fun because it’s an MMO and first off there’s all the PVP, which is just frustrating – and sandbox play doesn’t really work for a stealth game because at some point you have to get to your safe point, your stage end, and breathe out and relax. But War Z is at least a step in the right direction.)

Anyway, it’s just another of the many failures of Bioshock Infinite, which has to top my list of games that could have been so much more than they were but which I still play because what they are isn’t terrible by any means.

For those of you who didn’t read the previous entries, this series of posts is related to a bit of pop-culture archaeology I did a few months past, trawling Netflix for a bunch of movies that I’d been meaning to watch but never quite got around to seeing. On the logic that if I was still thinking about them years later, they must have something going for them, I finally watched them all in one long binge, and am sharing the results with you!

This one, ‘Pontypool’, was part of the glut of zombie movies that have taken over the horror genre in the last decade or so. I don’t think I’m providing any deep psychological insights by suggesting that there’s a link between the events of 9/11/2001 and the wave of zombie movies; 9/11 traumatized American culture, and stories about societal collapse and the return of fears long thought buried are a pretty sensible response to that horror. (That’s also why we got our first “fast zombie” movies after 9/11; slow zombies are an implacable march of horror, while fast zombies represent that sense of chaos and rapidly-escalating threat that became very familiar to people who turned on their TVs one morning to see a national landmark suddenly disappear. The 2004 ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake absolutely captures its zeitgeist perfectly. But I digress.)

‘Pontypool’ isn’t a “fast zombie” movie, but it does use one of the most popular tropes of the zombie story; it evokes societal collapse through modern media. When society crumbles and the zombie horde overruns humanity, we’re not going to learn about it first-hand…at least, not if we’re lucky…we’re going to learn about it from the news. In this case, it’s a radio station out in the middle of nowhere, in a small town called Pontypool, whose reports slowly and eerily turn from the mundane day-to-day routine of traffic and weather to reports of riots, martial law, and finally the town’s own little apocalypse.

All of which would be a bit over-familiar even if executed well, except that ‘Pontypool’s zombie hordes aren’t exactly the kind you’re used to. Sure, they’re mindless. Sure, they rampage. Sure, they even lumber around and attack people. But this movie has a whole different way of conceptualizing zombies; this zombie plague isn’t spread by bite or scratch, but through an entirely different and unsettling manner. I’m trying hard not to spoil it, because one of the most interesting things about this movie is the way that it presents its information in a way that disorients not just the characters, but the audience as well. You never quite feel like you know what’s going on in ‘Pontypool’ on first viewing, and that’s one of its best elements. I’d like to preserve that for you. So I’ll just say that it’s not quite your typical zombie movie and leave it at that.

The “Run! It’s the zombies! Barricade the doors!” part of the film, which is pretty much de rigeur for the sub-genre, does bring it back to predictability just a tad. There are only so many ways that you can have people fend off a zombie horde, after all. But I forgave the movie that little bit of bog-standard zombie-ness, because there’s still a ton of excellent characterization and creepy atmosphere leading into that end of things…not to mention a weird, lingering epilogue that takes a strange detour into arthouse surrealism. On the whole, I’d say it’s worth your time to look it up on Netflix.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

SEVEN: the coleslaw. Fast food creamy coleslaw is always, always the worst thing, you guys. Like, creamy coleslaw is already pretty bad – if you need an excuse to eat sour cream, maybe you can just tell people your doctor said you need to eat it or you’ll die, you’d have more dignity that way – but fast food creamy coleslaw is never anything else than gross. If you put this next to KFC’s creamy coleslaw you would not be able to tell the difference. I think there is just one factory that makes all the fast food creamy coleslaw in the world and they, like, freeze it into giant bricks, and then the individual restaurants just chip off some of the coleslaw brick and let it thaw out each day.

SIX: the Cajun fries. They’re just spicy fries, and they’re not even good spicy fries, because good spicy fries are good on at least one of two levels: either they are really nice and spicy or they are really good fries with spice on them. Popeye’s fries are White Person Spicy (i.e. they are not really spicy at all, unless you think onion powder counts as a spice) and they are kinda stringy and not good fries in the “yes, this is definitely some nice fried potato” sense. Chicken places never have good fries so I’m not really surprised by this. I think the angry souls of the chickens have something to do with it. The reason McDonald’s fries are good is probably because McDonald’s “chicken” isn’t actually chicken. Or maybe they converted to McWorship, those chickens. (Coming soon to a church near you. McWorship: all the spirituality in one-fifth the time! The prayer you need for your busy schedule.)

FIVE: the green beans. They actually don’t do the green beans in Canada but I had them once in America and they are not particularly good, but on the other hand you’re eating green beans in a fast food restaurant and that is definitely something of a novelty, and green beans don’t really go below “eh” unless they are burned to a cinder, so you can do worse. Of course, the reason they aren’t that good is because Popeyes decided – probably not incorrectly – that people wouldn’t eat green beans when they go get fast food, so they smothered them in really bad bacon. Actually I just looked at Popeye’s website and it’s not even real bacon, it’s turkey bacon, that is like counterfeit bacon to people who care about bacon. (I don’t really care about bacon.)

FOUR: the mac and cheese. It’s not bad at all. It’s mass-produced mac and cheese. It’s better than Kraft Dinner, but it’s not proper mac and cheese, but you knew coming in this wasn’t going to be proper mac and cheese anyway so what are you complaining about? You probably eat pizza with a fork, don’t you, Mister Special. Anyway, when you pour some of Popeye’s hot sauce on the mac and cheese it becomes quite good, because Popeye’s has decent hot sauce and decent hot sauce makes any mac and cheese nice. And besides I like Kraft Dinner.

THREE: the mashed potatoes and gravy. The mashed potatoes are above-average fast food mashed potatoes in that they actually appear to have been real potatoes at one point, but nobody gets this for the potatoes. You get this side dish for the gravy, which is actually proper slightly lumpy slightly spicy gravy; it is REAL GRAVY and in fast food that is distinctly rare. FUN FACT: If you just ask for some gravy, they look at you weird. Then they ask “are you sure you don’t want the potatoes?” Then they try to give you the potatoes and the gravy separately. Then, when you say “no I just want a little cup of gravy so I can dip things in the gravy” they look at you weird like when you said that you meant things other than the other items of food that you ordered. Which you didn’t. Because that would be weird. What is so wrong about wanting to dip your biscuit in gravy? Nothing, that’s what I say.

TWO: the Cajun rice. It’s good. More restaurants should offer rice dishes as sides, really. I don’t have anything else to say about the Cajun rice though because of the next item on the list.

ONE: the red beans and rice. The rice is only okay – it’s just plain rice without the nice seasoning and whatever the little bits in the Cajun rice are, it doesn’t have those. But who cares? You order this for the red bean goop. The tasty, tasty red bean goop. It is like primordial DNA, the stuff that Life Itself emerged from, except it is edible, nay delicious, and you are creating new life by eating it because the bacterias that live in your stomach (don’t worry, they’re supposed to be there because of science) get the red bean goop and then they start inventing algebra. You can even pretend this side dish is healthy because it is protein, that is how good the red beans and rice are, they let you lie to yourself convincingly. And also you get an algebra stomach and probably that has real-world applications of some kind.

NOT RANKED: the biscuits. Because even if Popeye’s wants to call the biscuits a side dish, they aren’t a side dish. They are the reason you go to Popeye’s.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Thoroughly fun Lord of the Rings-meets-sky-lasers flick, partially (but not entirely) spoiled by some pretty regressive gender politics.

There are some comic creators out there that I feel don’t get the praise they deserve not because they’re unrecognized, but because it’d be really hard to imagine what comic books would be like without them. Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Julius Schwartz, Neal Adams…lots of people who have been so influential and prolific that it’s hard to really imagine a superhero genre existing without them. And I’m going to add Carmine Infantino to that list as well, because the man really was astonishingly good at everything he did for an amazingly long time.

Infantino is probably best known for his work on the Silver Age Flash, which would certainly be enough to leave him fondly-remembered by itself. His new take on the character was iconic, from the new costume with its crisp, elegant simplicity to his amazing artwork that conveyed an incredible sense of motion and energy–perfect for a series about the Fastest Man Alive. (I’ve already commented previously on his Elongated Man backups, which also conveyed a lot of dynamic energy in an entirely different way, showcasing the lead character’s elasticity and finding visually exciting ways to weaponize it.) To this day, I’d say that if you asked Flash fans about the definitive artists on the series, Infantino would make the top of just about everybody’s list.

But that was really just the tip of the iceberg. He was already an industry vet by the time he did ‘Flash’, and he went on from there to do a lot more for DC. He moved up to their editorial division, working at times as an editor, art director and publisher, and was responsible for getting Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil onto titles like ‘Batman’ and ‘Green Lantern’. Oh, and he got Joe Orlando in as editor on ‘House of Mystery’, and he got Kirby away from Marvel to do the Fourth World stuff, and he was also responsible for getting the original DC/Marvel crossover made. And from there, when DC let him go, he went over to Marvel and did all those ‘Star Wars’ comics you probably read as a kid. (Just so nobody thinks I’m Rand Paul-ing this, by the way, I’ll admit that I had to look a lot of this up. When you’re as important a figure to comic book history as Infantino was, practically nobody remembers every single thing you did off the top of their head, not even you. Carmine Infantino probably forgot about more influential comics than most people will ever create.)

But as great a job he did editing, and as important he was to getting the most iconic and influential runs of DC’s Bronze Age made (and oh yeah, he was also the guy who drew the New Look Batman and made the little yellow oval around the Bat-Symbol work) it’s always going to be his stellar art that stands out for me. An Infantino story always had art that stood out, that popped with life and zest and excitement and made you feel like something was happening. Comics is all about the art of conveying motion through still images, and I would be hard-pressed to find anyone better at that than Carmine Infantino. He passed away this April, but I hope he will be long-remembered by everyone who loves the medium he gave so much to.

I’ve been sitting in front of the monitor for about fifteen minutes trying to find something cogent and erudite to write about Renisha McBride and I really just can’t come up with anything. Partially it’s because I feel like any attempt to express outrage and shock is, in some way, appropriating the right of response from black people who might want to do so. I know that’s kind of silly in some respects, but it’s how I feel nonetheless; after all, nobody’s ever going to shoot me in the back of the head for being white. I don’t have any particular stakes that I have to worry about.

But nonetheless I think it’s important that I write something, if only because I’m white, and because I didn’t hear about this until the few segments of Black Twitter that I follow exploded over this story (as they were entirely right to do). I think it’s important that white people acknowledge this, and say it’s wrong, and say that laws that allow this to happen are bad laws. I think my friends who are black deserve that from me (and more, although to be honest I don’t know what more could be done in this instance – and it appears, not unfairly, that many black people don’t know what more could be done either, because it seems that regardless of anything else they’re still going to keep getting screwed over by laws and getting shot for no goddamn good reason).

But I think white people need to be reminded of this, every day. And if they whine about how black-on-white crime is never reported as intently or how black people don’t treat black-on-black crime seriously, then they also need to be smacked upside the head at least a little. And so I’m writing a post about a tragedy that should not have happened but did anyway when I don’t really have anything constructive to say about it: because I think it’s important to do that, if nothing else.