I will freely admit, it has been a long, long time since John Byrne has been the kind of potent creative force he was back in the late 70s/early 80s. I don’t know how much of that is him being out of step with current comics trends, and how much of it is him starting to believe in his own myth to the point that he can’t accept constructive criticism anymore, but it has been a long time since he was anything other than a punchline. Which is why I feel like it’s worth mentioning just how good his Fantastic Four run really was.

At the time, the series was in something of a doldrums; Marv Wolfman’s run, while not actually bad, never managed to really strike many sparks. Byrne’s principal contribution was to revitalize the series by bringing back its classic Lee/Kirby foes like Diablo, Annihilus, Galactus and Doctor Doom, while finding ways to view them through a new light by concentrating on them as characters in their own right. Doom stopped being merely a snarling would-be worldbeater and became a complex, nuanced character with his own goals and code of warped ethics; one terrifyingly powerful storyline even suggested that Doom might have a point by showing that a Latveria without Doom was actually worse off than one he ruled. Annihilus was taken back to his roots as a raving paranoid and a devastating force of nature, and Galactus was re-envisioned as a cosmic entity beyond human understanding.

All this was combined with a lot of new material, too. Byrne’s Doctor Who-inspired exploration of the Negative Zone contained some wonderful self-contained, continuity-free stories, and he also had a strong run of early sci-fi stories like “The Man With the Power” which were conceptually very fine. In a modern, story-arc heavy world, we wouldn’t see something like these, but they were perfect for their era.

And he also did a great job of exploring the main characters. Susan endured a tragic miscarriage, and went through a lot of personal growth that led to her becoming the Invisible Woman. Johnny grew up in a lot of meaningful ways, ultimately turning into a responsible adult with a mature relationship, ready for marriage. And most controversially, the woman he was dating and ready to be married to (the wedding took place a few issues after Byrne left the title) was Ben’s old girlfriend, Alicia. Byrne’s treatment of Ben and Alicia’s relationship was both startlingly mature and bittersweet, and also a perfect outgrowth of what had come before. Ben constantly struggled with the question of whether he should end their relationship for her own sake, and finding out that she’d made the decision for him was part of a personal journey for Ben that really culminated a lot of the long-simmering tensions to the character. All that, while making Reed a likeable and well-drawn genius and quietly demonstrating his burdens as the leader of the FF and the steel beneath his “genial egghead” nature. (The scene where he tells Doc Ock that he knows he won’t have to personally escort him back to jail, because he’d be in a very bad mood if he had to chase him down, is startlingly effective.)

On the whole, I’d say this was one of the three best runs in FF history, and one I’m proud to own in its entirety. It’s been a long time since either Byrne or the FF was this good, but it’s worth savoring the whole thing.

It’s very good, of course, but Tarantino is never going to make a truly great movie again until somebody forces him to cut a movie down to under two hours, because he always wants to put in all the things and while the extra stuff is usually entertaining it’s almost never necessary.

So, the King William’s College Quiz has come and gone another year, and as always, I was barely able to answer anything, but then again the real point of the Quiz is to go on a knowledge scavenger hunt. And it seems a shame that there is only one per year. So here is a – doubtless easier – quiz of similar mindset. And I know it is easier, because this Quiz is expressly nerd-themed, if you will. Cooperation and collaboration are, of course, encouraged. Googling is not, because come on, it’s not like you win a prize for this.

ONE

a. Which being created clues throughout space and time to ensure their own creation?

b. Who saved at least one President and possibly many more?

c. Who leads a conglomerate of villains much admired by doctors?

d. Who possesses numerous toys to compensate for their illiteracy?

e. Who pretended to each be the other in order to gain an informant’s trust?

f. When did a hunter suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder?

g. Who felt they should have been born female due to their extreme beauty?

h. Who dreams of helping to scrub space whales?

i. Which New Jersey food products are thirty-two ounces of in your face?

TWO

a. Which alien was sentenced to spend time with cavemen as punishment for inventing a doomsday machine?

b. Which rich businessman detonated his livelihood to pursue a dream of performance?

c. Who bled so greatly that he inadvertently invented a unit of measurement for it?

d. What concept requires one to be a navigator across millions of worlds, all with too much of one and not enough of the other?

e. What is it called when elders from every stedding meet to discuss and deliberate?

f. Who shackled the chosen one to the stone of triumph?

g. The mightiest of what race had a wingspan of over thirty fathoms?

h. What would a newspaperman utter when startled?

i. What was dedicated to fifty dead men?

THREE

a. Who was trapped by her brother within a diamond-hard prison?

b. Where may you control the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Senator and the Tax Man?

c. Who gave his people hope in the face of a dying star?

d. Who rose to prominence from criminal beginnings after the success of their own brand of energy drink?

e. Who were taught German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic, and French by their mother, and used it in their quest for justice?

f. What did Victor cry out on the sixteenth day?

g. Who spoke to the audience at the beginning of every episode?

h. Who created a group of assassins and named them after the angel of death?

i. Who ended up having boat drinks thanks to the actions of a man with a plan?

FOUR

a. Whose return led to a magical renaissance in England?

b. Which exhibitor suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta?

c. What requires you to look into the Eye of Eternity?

d. Who was responsible for introducing people to a life of thievery?

e. In what work did four gunslingers arrive at Topeka?

f. What commences with a story about Kanubai?

g. What is said to be effective against the walkers from the north?

h. What was the most important aspect of Castalian social life?

i. What 70-ton machine was designed expressly to counter the threat of invading clans?

FIVE

a. What film was a coming-out party for a dead man named Smedley?

b. Which social butterfly found themselves forced into a difficult situation involving a super-suit?

c. Who alternated twice between being a man, and being not a man?

d. What killed the Norwegians first?

e. Who caused a man to find himself traveling through time, due to an anomaly which never existed?

f. From where do you return to find the hot supper your mother made waiting for you?

g. Whose secret rings of power were only known to his best friend’s little sister?

h. Who played a convict on death row who was able to escape his sentence thanks to an extremely unusual medical procedure?

i. What was the name of the Znutar‘s mascot?

SIX

a. What was the ultimate goal of the research centre in Sprodj?

b. Who refused to wait for Eliza?

c. Who went to Las Vegas and returned alive?

d. Who befriended and managed a collection of curious oddities?

e. What was the last act of Circadia Senius before he was killed?

f. Who pursued two hunters through Heaven to satisfy his own agenda?

g. What company specializes in the construction of artificial memories for the dying?

h. Who created the hit TV show “Legends of the Khonshu”?

i. Who always had trouble finding work due to a problematic medical condition that was largely his father’s fault?

SEVEN

a. What adventurer found that her secrets were preventing her from speaking clearly?

b. Which ship was both the largest traditional capital warship ever when it was built, and an expression of tyrannical might?

c. Whose would-be nemesis wished to raise their son as his enemy?

d. Who did not recognize his sentient ship when she took human form?

e. In the foretellings of a dead god, what was the instrument of prophecy to contain within her flesh?

f. Who was eventually revealed to be an angel, even though she denied it fiercely?

g. Who swore to fight the Instrumentality for as long as he lived?

h. Who eventually became the immortal ruler of her husband’s kingdom?

i. Which ship cannabalized the fleet it was guarding for supplies?

Proof that 2013 has quite a bit of fucking up in order to match 2012:

I dunno. It’s no Ponponpon, but it’s still pretty weird. PSY doesn’t even begin to measure up to the glorious tiny mountain of WTF that is Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

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.

So here’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now: If you were to find someone in the early stages of geekery…a “proto-geek”, if you will, with an interest in cult fiction but no knowledge of it to speak of, what would you feel like they’d need to know to develop a useful cultural vocabulary for hanging around with other geeks? That is to say, if you had to write a capsule summary of every “essential” piece of geek fiction, something that would at least let them follow a conversation until they can see it themselves, what would you sum up? Obviously they’d need to know Star Wars and Star Trek…but what are the key points they’d need to be aware of? (For Star Wars, I’d say the six movies and at the least the Zahn trilogy. For Star Trek, I’d say you could suffice with an explanation of Starfleet and the various main characters of each series, and a summation of the types of adventures they get into. Since Trek has looser continuity, I don’t think you need a timeline.)

Beyond that…what else would you at least try to instill a knowledge of into this proto-fan? Doctor Who? Babylon 5? BSG? Buffy/Angel/Firefly? X-Files? Farscape? Hercules and Xena? Those seem to have pretty well-established fandoms, and giving someone a capsule summary seems fair. Then there are the Alien, Predator, and Terminator movies, Blade Runner, Highlander, the Evil Dead series, the Marvel movies, the Indiana Jones series…older films, like the Universal horror films would be good to know, and there’s always Godzilla and its sequels…and of course you’ve got the basic timelines of the Marvel and DC universes. And what would you call the essential books? Dune, perhaps? Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov? Maybe even the Dragonlance series, as a way into Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop and computer games?

The more I think of it, the more exhausting it seems. But I do think you could reduce it down to just one book, at most, a sort of Compleat Geek Primer. What do you think should be on the list? Do you think it’s doable? Do you think it’s desirable? Share your thoughts in the comments?

I can safely say without making any allusions to the film’s quality (which I thought was quite good overall) that this movie is going to win all the Academy Awards, and possibly some of next year’s if they can figure out a way to give the filmmakers those.

When I wrote last week’s post, about how it it’s okay to form opinions on things you haven’t seen yet, and even to not change those opinions in the face of opposition from people who have seen those things, many people pointed out the perilous downside to this. Which is that, just as we have all (or most of us have) been faced by an angry fan snarling out, “How can you judge it if you haven’t even seen it?”…we have also all been on the receiving end of dripping disdain wielded by someone who read about a casting rumor on io9 that shows that the movie is totally going to suck because the gay cowboy from ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is playing the Joker and there’s no point in even watching it now.

Those people are absolutely right. (The people who point out the perilous downside, not the people who refused to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ because Heath Ledger was in it.) There’s no question that fans can be obnoxious, and that any creative decision that’s daring and unconventional will attract a crowd of people not just ready but eager to jump on it with hobnailed boots before they have a chance to really judge it. The impulse to see a truly spectacular failure in progress is an old one, and there are many who will say that it resulted in a lot of brilliant stories never getting a fair shake. (Even now, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ has its defenders, and I’ve met someone who will insist that ‘Sucker Punch’ is a Brechtian masterpiece.)

We all have a responsibility not to be that fan. It is okay not to like things. It is even okay to not like things irrationally, based on little to no evidence. If you are wrong, the only thing you’re hurting is you, after all. And yes, it is okay to tell people that you’re not interested in something when it comes up in conversation (like, say, a discussion of “Things You Irrationally Dislike Based On Almost No Evidence”.) But what isn’t okay is to be aggressive. Going into a comics forum to tell everyone that you’re not even going to pick up ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’ because it’s s obvious it’s going to suck…not cool. Sitting in on a DC panel just so you can tell everyone that ‘Flashpoint’ was the last DC comic you’re ever reading…why bother? Clearly nobody there will agree with you, because they’re all there to hear about the new comics coming out of DC, so why do you want to start an argument? It’s okay to let people disagree with you. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever say you didn’t like something, or even to have a friendly argument about the relative merits of a film/book/TV show/comic/play. It’s good to discuss things, and and even to have wildly differing opinions. The point at which you start getting upset at people for liking things you have no interest in, though, is the point at which you need to just take a step back, relax, and remember that just as nobody can make you watch ‘Green Lantern’, you don’t have to make a pre-emptive strike on their enjoyment in order to stop them from forcing it down your throat.

If for no other reason than someday, you might change your mind. And when you do, the last thing you want is for all your friends to remind you of the time you said you wouldn’t watch ‘Buffy’ because you weren’t a thirteen-year-old girl.

I really wish Django Unchained hadn’t been sold out because really, This Is 40 When You Are Stupidly Well-Off would have been a much better title for the latest from Judd Apatow’s Wildly Uneven Movie Factory.

I know some of you readers might choose to celebrate Vandalhkah rather than No Doubtmas, and we celebrate diversity of course, but this is how we do things here:

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.

I still haven’t seen ‘Revolution’.

Honestly, I don’t even know if it’s been picked up for a second season, or whether it’s going to be another one of those post-‘Lost’ series that the networks poured money into hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time only to see it die a quick and painful death. (Along with ‘The Event’, ‘FlashForward’, ‘No Ordinary Family’, ‘Heroes’…and yes, ‘Heroes’ died a slow painful death instead…the point is that a lot of people have tried to recreate what made ‘Lost’ popular, only to find out that it doesn’t work like that.) And the greater point is, I haven’t watched it because it looked lousy.

I kind of do this a lot. I didn’t see ‘Cloud Atlas’, I didn’t read ‘Avengers vs. X-Men’, and I have no intention of checking out ‘The Lone Ranger’. Why? Because they all look awful. This is one of those statements that feels like it shouldn’t be contentious, but it very frequently is. Because everyone has different tastes, and each of the stories described above has people who will defend it passionately and vociferously. (Except maybe ‘The Lone Ranger’. That thing will sell tickets to Johnny Depp’s immediate family only. And even they’re going to sneak out and see something else.) And these defenders always have a single defense whenever anyone says, “I didn’t see that because it looked awful.” That defense is, “Well, how do you know it’s awful if you didn’t even see it?”

On some levels, this is the perfect attack. It paints your opponent as ignorant…and worse, as prejudiced. They saw two minutes of footage from a movie, and instantly decided they knew what was going to happen in the entire 90 minutes. (Or 186 minutes, if you’re one of the people who skipped watching ‘The Hobbit’.) They don’t know the ending, they haven’t experienced the twists, they can’t possibly judge a film/TV show/book/comic based on an ad for it!

But there’s a simple counter-argument: Life is too short to waste on shit that you know is going to be shit walking in. This was a gigantic revelation to me as a college student, when I sat down to watch ‘Godzilla’ (1997 version, free ticket) and I realized that even for free, I had overpaid for this by spending my time on it. It looked like it was going to be a bad movie, it got terrible reviews, the word of mouth was lousy, and you know what? It was exactly what everyone said it was. I was not going to discover a secret gem of cinema that the masses had disdained when I saw ‘Godzilla’. I was going to be wasting my time.

And since then, I have (for the most part) trusted my judgment when it came to ads. If it looks bad in two minutes, the odds that they picked the worst two minutes to show you are not high. If the concept sounds stupid, it probably is stupid. (Peter David once said that everyone judged ‘The Other’ as dumb based solely on hearing the concept of “spider-cancer”. Speaking as someone who read it, the people who judged it as dumb before reading it are probably happier. They certainly have more money in their pocket.) You do not have to sample everything that comes down the pike just to see if it’s really as bad as it looks, and you don’t have to apologize for skipping something that looks bad. Yes, you might be missing out on something wonderful. You know what? There’s plenty of other wonderful things out there. You can spend your whole life watching movies and not get through them all. Why waste time on the bad stuff? (Unless the bad stuff has a guy and two puppets making fun of it. Then the reasons are self-evident.) Demanding someone go out and watch a bad movie just so that they can argue it’s bad based on more evidence is like demanding they touch the stove just to prove that bright red glow emanating from the metal isn’t a paint job.

So I won’t be watching ‘Revolution’. I won’t make a big deal of it–there’s a whole companion post to this that could be written about people who jump into forums just to tell everyone how lousy the show they like is, and how stupid they are for enjoying it–but I also won’t back away from my opinion on it. Because if I’m right and it’s bad at two minutes, it’s going to be punishing at twelve hours. And I have too many good shows to catch up on to spend twelve hours punishing myself.

“Newtown Answers”

Charlotte Allen: This massacre might not have happened if some manly men were working at the school rather than weak, helpless women.

Jim Daly: The massacre was horrible, but it’s Christmas!

Anthony Daniels: The problem is that people think they deserve to be happy. Also, psychology is bullshit.

Charles A. Donovan: It was all downhill from A Clockwork Orange for our culture.

David French: Trying to create policy solutions to avoid tragedies like this is pointless, because we are meant to suffer like Job.

Roger Kimball: Evil. Man, I don’t know.

Thomas Lickona: There are so many possible causes for this tragedy – like freely available guns, or the interference of demons – that we cannot truly ever know why it happened.

Emily Stimpson: Free will is part of God’s plan and Jesus loves us.

Heather MacDonald: School shootings are so rare that policy proposals may be overreactions. Therefore, we should study the problem more because we do not have enough data yet.

Father Gerald Murray: The massacre was horrible, but it’s Christmas!

Michael Pakaluk: We should all give thanks that we haven’t gone on a mass killing spree.