Gets Judge Dredd mostly right – which is to say that as a consequence of getting it mostly right (e.g. brutally violent and extremely dark), this movie is definitely not going to be for everybody.

Via Leah, this is fantastic:

For those of you not already aware, it’s a new season of ‘Doctor Who’…and before I do the jump-cut that separates out the spoilers for those who haven’t seen the season premiere yet, let me just say how utterly strange it is to be a fan of ‘Doctor Who’ in an era where that series is enjoying such tremendous popularity. This year at DragonCon, Doctor Who cosplayers outnumbered Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and any three Joss Whedon series you’d care to name. Full Daleks, TARDIS dresses, and Elevens too numerous to count. It’s a good feeling, don’t get me wrong; this isn’t one of those, “If you weren’t reading ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’, man, you can’t really understand what it’s like to be a fan!” rants that you occasionally see when something cult becomes mainstream. But I’ve spent the vast majority of my life as a Doctor Who fan, probably since I was two or three years old, and for the vast majority of that vast majority I could expect to meet another fan (outside of the Internet fora specifically designed to assist Who fans in congregating) perhaps once, twice a year. It was an obscure British import with laughable production values (especially compared to ST:TNG, which slightly overlapped the classic series in its dying days) and black-and-white repeats. To see it now rise from the ashes as a world-conquering juggernaut, right around the time that Star Wars and Star Trek (the Big Two when I was a kid) are fading to some extent, it’s…surreal. I keep expecting people to change their minds.

But since they’re not doing that, let’s talk ‘Asylum’, shall we?

continue reading "My Sneaking Suspicion Regarding ‘Asylum of the Daleks’"

So I’ve been busy the last week, not with work (well, I’m always busy with work-a-day work, but you know what I mean). I’ve been busy writing, because Harper Voyager announced this, and I’ve got a half-finished novel that’s at about the 60K word mark and if I bust ass I might be able to submit it by deadline and have it not be shitty.

I’m going to try and maintain the regular posting level for the next few weeks, but if things drop off, things drop off a bit. Sorry, guys. If it looks like I won’t make deadline I will ease off the throttle.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

In this particular case, I think it’s probably “Things Everyone Loves About Comics: Karl Kesel”. Because really, who has bad things to say about Karl Kesel? He’s a phenomenally talented inker who’s been working in the indsutry for decades, alongside everyone from John Byrne to Rob Liefeld, and who has a gift for making everyone he works with look better. (If you’re thinking, “He sure didn’t make Rob Liefeld look good,” remember that I just said “better”. Industry legend has it that Rob turned in the pencils for the final issue of the ‘Hawk and Dove’ mini-series late, without and hands or feet drawn in for any of the characters, then took the metaphorical phone off the hook. Those hands and feet you see there? All the work of the inker, which means they may be the only correctly drawn feet in a Liefeld book ever.)

In addition to his art, he’s got a lot of great writing work under his belt. The 90s ‘Hawk and Dove’ series he did with his then-wife Barbara remains a cult favorite, with all sorts of the things I absolutely love about comics that we never get to see enough of. (They actually created new villains for the series! It had unironic humor! The heroes used their powers cleverly, and were sympathetic and likeable! There was a really strong supporting cast, and good love interests for each of the two leads, who despite being male and female didn’t spontaneously fall in love! …until after the series ended, but in the interests of staying relentlessly positive I will not touch ‘Armageddon 2001’ with a twenty-meter cattle prod.) (And neither should anyone else.)

He did a phenomenal, well-remembered run on ‘The Adventures of Superman’ that’s perhaps best known for introducing the new Superboy…who wasn’t always that emo, I swear! As with ‘Hawk and Dove’, his run was always characterized by well-written, funny dialogue and fast-paced adventure (which he carried over to his two excellent runs on ‘Superboy’. Probably my favorite moment in the history of the character was when Knockout tried to manipulate him into becoming a supervillain, finally trying to cement his corruption by telling him to kill another villain in an issue-ending cliffhanger…only to  told, at the start of the next issue, “Are you nuts?”) He wrote ‘The Final Night’, which was a nice, tight, one-month crossover of the kind we saw for about four years from DC and then never again, which gave Hal Jordan a noble, dignified send-off that undid a lot of the poor treatment he’d suffered at the hands of DC’s editorial crew and probably should have stayed as the final end for the character. He also did some nice work for the probably-misconceived but still well-written Tangent line from DC (he was the one who did the Joker stories).

Over at Marvel, he had a tragically underappreciated Daredevil run (anyone remember the awesome story where Mister Hyde was framed for murder and Matt Murdock had to defend him? That was Karl Kesel.) He also wrote the first few issues of ‘Fantastic Four 2099’, the really high quality ones before the line utterly imploded because Marvel fired the line editor and all the talented writers walked in protest. (There is, somewhere, an alternate universe where Marvel kept Joey Cavalieri on, and Peter David and Warren Ellis and Karl Kesel kept writing their respective titles for another few years at least. I want to go there and steal all the comics.) He wrote an awesome FF annual where Ben Grimm traveled to a parallel universe where Marvel time mapped to real time one-to-one, and Johnny was in his late forties and thinking about retiring and leaving the whole “super hero” business to his kids. (High concept, and funny as hell.) He also wrote some great fill-in issues of the regular FF series, including the one where Ben Grimm was revealed to be Jewish (in what was ultimately a very touching Jack Kirby tribute. Another thing that Kesel loves to do is to tribute Kirby in ways both small and large. I approve.) I’m still hoping that someday he’ll get a regular gig writing the FF, because he has their voices down perfectly.

Oh, and he also did a really cute and clever “inverted X-Files” series called ‘Section Zero’ that was a victim of the implosion of the Gorilla Comics company, but that was way ahead of its time and presaged series like ‘The Middleman’ and ‘Warehouse 13′. It’s a frustrating theme of Kesel’s writing that all too often, he’s not considered to be a “hot” creator, and his work gets short shrift as a result. Either someone more famous comes along to write the book (like Kevin Smith on DD), or sales aren’t high enough to sustain a series. Which is a damn shame, because I’ve never read a Karl Kesel comic that hasn’t brought a huge smile to my face.

Oh, and if all that doesn’t convince you that he’s awesome, he just sold his whole comics collection. Why? To pay the medical bills of a special-needs baby he adopted. Even if he’d never written or drawn a single comic, that’d make him special. When you add it to everything else, it makes him one of comics’ unsung heroes…but I like to think that everyone who knows anything about him knows that he’s one of the great ones.

JEFF (MY BROTHER): So I saw that you had good things to say about New Normal and Go On in your column this week.
ME: Well, sorta. They’re both uneven. Comedies generally don’t bust out of the gate on all cylinders, you know? Like, you can tell when a show is just going to suck, most of the time. But a comedy can have a mediocre pilot and then become really good.
JEFF: Like Men At Work.
ME: No, that one is just shitty.
JEFF: Are you sure? I mean, you just said all about how you can never tell. Maybe you’re getting elitist.
ME: I stand firm in my conviction that Breckin Meyer does not, as a rule, lead to good things.
JEFF: Who’s he?
ME: He’s that guy. Who’s in things.
JEFF: That’s not very specific.
ME: That’s the sort of actor he is.
JEFF: So he’s a character actor.
ME: Not really.
JEFF: But you said he’s that guy –
ME: I didn’t mean he’s a Hey-It’s-That-Guy guy. Because he’s not that guy. He’s just a guy who acts and writes.
JEFF: Has he done anything I might recognize?
ME: He was the guy who made Robot Chicken who was not Seth Green.
JEFF: I think you have to give him some credit for being involved with Robot Chicken. What else was he in?
ME: He’s in Franklin and Bash right now.
JEFF: What?
ME: Exactly.
JEFF: Okay, I’m gonna iMDB him and see what’s what. Surely this guy has been in lots of stuff you like.
ME: Oh, sure he has.
JEFF: And I’m gonna – wait, what?
ME: Look, I’m not saying he is bad. He is there. Do you understand the difference?
JEFF: Look, he was in Josie and the Pussycats and Can’t Hardly Wait and Rat Race. You own all of those.
ME: You just listed two cameo roles and one where he’s part of a large ensemble cast that has John Cleese, Rowan Atkinson, Alfre Woodard and Jon Lovitz in it. Also, Seth Green is in all of those movies, so I think we have established a pattern now.
JEFF: Yeah, but Breckin Meyer didn’t ruin those movies, did he?
ME: No. In fact, he wasn’t even a negative. But you’re missing my point. I didn’t say “Breckin Meyer ruins things.” Because he doesn’t ruin things. I said “Breckin Meyer, as a rule, does not lead to good things.” That doesn’t mean he leads to bad things. Breckin Meyer is just sort of there. I think he played Jon in Garfield, which is the ultimate “just sort of there” role. I mean, at least when you play, say, Dave in Alvin and the Chipmunks, you get to shout at Alvin like you matter.
JEFF: I think this still seems terribly harsh. I mean, he did help create Robot Chicken.
ME: He’s also responsible for Inside Schwartz.
JEFF: Good point.
ME: Actually it isn’t exactly, because I don’t blame him for that show sucking because, again – just sort of there.
JEFF: I hope he doesn’t read your blog and get offended, seeing as how I am sure you will blog this.
ME: It’s my understanding that he has millions and millions of dollars, so presumably he has people to read blogs for him, and even if he stays true to his roots by reading blogs himself, he has millions of dollars so he can afford to not care what I think.
JEFF: True enough. I mean, I don’t have millions of dollars, but I don’t care what you think.
ME: Yeah, but you’re family.

Dear Mayor Rob Ford:

Recently, Sue Edworthy wrote a thoughtful and friendly letter to you. It was a thoroughly positive letter, given that it was written in response to you skipping out on an executive meeting of city council so that you could go coach football. Ms. Edworthy has, very nicely I might add, suggested that perhaps you would be happier if you made your foundation which helps underprivileged kids play football your life’s work, which dovetails neatly with the conflict of interest charges you face for using city resources to solicit donations to said foundation.

She’s right. But her letter to you is a classic “mom letter.” And this is the thing: you do not deserve positive reinforcement for its own sake at this stage in your life. You are a grown-ass man, in years if nothing else. God knows that, as the privileged son of a wealthy family, growing up and acting like an adult has always been something you treated as sort of an optional extra. And I’m certain that the useless son of a rich and connected family will find no shortage of donors for his nonprofit, because you were lucky enough to be born into a class that can almost always find something for its less talented children to do, and at least you’re good at coaching football (by all accounts).

But you aren’t a football coach first and foremost, no matter how much you might like coaching football (and I’m sure it is rewarding). You are the fucking Mayor of fucking Toronto. You ran a long and dirty campaign to become Mayor. You spent an extremely large amount of money to become Mayor – most of which, needless to say, was other people’s money. Every one of those people should take it as a personal insult when you blow off work – and that is exactly what you were doing.

I’m sure you don’t like being Mayor of Toronto any more. I’m quite sure you didn’t realize what you were getting into when you decided to run for Mayor; I’m sure you didn’t understand what the position entails and in fact am still sure you don’t (I strongly suspect you think the entire job consists of taking constituent phonecalls, like you’re some really, really well-paid customer service representative). Tough. I don’t care. You’re the Mayor. Do your fucking job. Don’t like it? Well, then, maybe you should quit. Ms. Edworthy was quite right about that: if you don’t want to do the job, you could at least have the courtesy to hand it over to someone who won’t half-ass it the way you’re half-assing it. That’s the choice most everybody else has every day: do your job or quit. Most of us just do our jobs even when it’s on a day we don’t want to be doing them, and for those of us where it becomes unbearable, we quit (and generally we don’t have the assurance that you do that someone will come along to make sure there’s something for you to do).

But if you’re going to remain Mayor (assuming you don’t get booted for that conflict of interest violation – and I note that 55 percent of Torontonians have said they would be happy to see you get the boot on a technicality, so please understand you would not win an emergency election), and it certainly seems like you want to keep being Mayor even if you don’t like doing the actual job – then you have to do the work. This might seem like a dreadfully obvious thing to say, but apparently you need it said to you, because you are an enormous bawling child of a man. Do the job or go home. You’re already quite probably the least effective Mayor in the city’s history (and given that we had Mel Lastman in charge less than a decade ago that really says a lot); leaving early won’t tarnish your reputation further because there is simply nothing left to tarnish.

There’s an invisible prison, with invisible walls
Invisible cells and invisible bars.
On Wednesdays you’re allowed to exercise
Under invisible guards’ watchful eyes.

It’s not just a metaphor for mental illness, you see. Like most metaphors, it’s borne from something quite real. Unlike most metaphors, it’s not used in a way unconnected to the original use. The Invisible Prison is a very real thing: it captures one or two mages, sorcerers and wizards every year. Nobody knows who invented the bit of not-very-well-written doggerel that later became a skipping-rhyme (where, one figures, some smart kid grew up, became an expert on mental illness, and coined the phrase to better describe a very real societal problem with no connection to the rhyme’s origin). Nobody knows why it happens or how it happens. But they know it happens, and they know what happens to the people it captures. You see them on street corners, talking to themselves and begging for change. (Not all of them, of course. But a very few.)

Of course, lots of cut-rate supervillains have used the gambit since, because “make your enemy think he is crazy” is something every garden-variety sadist can come up with. But all of those supervillains miss the point. It doesn’t matter if you try to make Wolverine crazy because sooner or later he’ll pop his claws or realize his healing factor still works. It doesn’t matter if you try to make Captain America crazy because sooner or later reflex memory will kick in and he’ll do something he wouldn’t be able to do. You can’t convince a superhero that they’re delusional – at least, not enough for it to matter.

The invisible library has magazines
Which you read and you dream your invisible dreams
Of when you won’t sleep on your invisible cot
And will not get lost in invisible thoughts.

But you can convince a sorcerer of it. Because magic depends on will and belief – and if you doubt your ability to do magic, you won’t be able to do it. And if you take away their ability to do magic, then the underpinning of their world falls apart because you’ve destroyed the defining tenet by which they’ve organized their lives. It’s very effective and it hardly ever fails, which is why there are more than a few wandering, unstable homeless people who still, very occasionally, do magic by accident wandering the streets of New York City (where they are inevitably deposited by the Invisible Prison these days; it has done for centuries now, although before that it dropped people in London, Paris, Rome and Ur).

And, because we’re talking about magic, the Invisible Prison has advantages your standard villain-lair-designed-to-convince-the-hero-that-they-are-in-an-asylum does not. Because it’s not a physical place (although it can be). In many ways it’s more a state of mind. The Invisible Prison is wherever you are, and it takes a different form each time. It’s when you wake up in a hotel feeling the end of a three-day bender on which you never went. It’s going outside and feeling eyes on you from above, but when you look up they’re not there. It’s when you look in the mirror when you brush your teeth in the morning (because any mage worth their salt knows that dental hygiene is important) and you see bars in front of you – but only in the mirror. And sometimes, yes, it’s a dank cell in a dark pit, in the middle of a complex whose geography is odd and non-linear.

It is as subtle or as blunt as it needs to be, because the Warden (and there is a Warden) provides a tailored experience, whatever will destroy your mind most effectively, be it brutal, terrifying horror or creeping, steady paranoia. And there’s a relevant side-effect: once you’re in the Prison, you go “off the grid” for the purposes of divination magic. In the Prison, it is as if you never existed – until you leave it, a shell of what you once were. Nobody knows why it does what it does. Some think it’s a leftover tool of vengeance by a master mage who wanted to destroy a rival, and that that tool gained a sort of self-driving awareness. Others think it’s a conspiracy that tries to reduce the number of magic users in the world (and there are plenty of people who would like that to happen). But given its success rate, it really doesn’t matter.

One day you might stride out the invisible gate
After a lengthy invisible wait
But the invisible prison will not leave you whole
It tears at your mind and your heart and your soul.

Now, Dr. Strange isn’t going to get trapped in the Invisible Prison. Dr. Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme, after all, and you don’t get to that level without being able to deal with psychological warfare – even magically-assisted psychological warfare. The reason anybody knows the Invisible Prison exists in the first place is because a Sorcerer Supreme was the first (and only) person to break out of it in the mid-1400s. The Prison doesn’t go after Sorcerers Supreme. Maybe it’s because it only wants to grab people it knows it can break. Maybe it’s because it was scared off that one time. But in any event, Stephen Strange is quite safe from it.

But if a Sorcerer Supreme were to not live in isolation (as most do), and were to take apprentices (as most do not)… well, then the Prison might find itself a target that would allow it to strike back at the Sorcerer Supreme, albeit indirectly…

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

When The Golden Girls debuted in 1985, Bea Arthur and Betty White were both 63, Estelle Getty 62 and Rue McLanahan 51.

Accordingly, were there to be a big-screen remake: Meryl Streep is currently 63, as is Sigourney Weaver. Cybill Shepherd is 62. And Bonnie Hunt is 51.

Alternately: Jessica Lange, Pam Grier, Julie Walters and Meg Ryan.

SOMEBODY NEEDS TO GET ON THIS, PEOPLE.

Click on thumb to see full

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I was at DragonCon last weekend when I found out that City of Heroes is being closed down. (I was also at DragonCon last weekend when I was supposed to be making last week’s post, which is why, along with some boring work-related stuff, you haven’t heard from me in a while. But I digress.) It’s hard to really describe how I feel about this news; I don’t really have a whole lot to analogize it to. I was too young to be in organized fandom when ‘Doctor Who’ was canceled, and I had already lost a lot of my emotional investment in ‘Buffy’ by the time it went away. Even situations like the sunsetting of the WotC Star Wars TCG, or the various times that I’ve seen Shadowfist look like it was going to go the way of all flesh don’t apply, because I still had the cards I’d already bought. I can’t get new Netrunner expansions anymore, but WotC didn’t come to my house and burn my collection. This feels more like finding out that a new highway is coming through my neighborhood. My house isn’t being wrecked, but a lot of the places where I spent time with my friends over the last seven or eight years aren’t going to be there anymore.

Even if the game does go down, though (and I know of and approve of the various efforts to save the game in one form or another) I think that the people who worked on it can take a lot of pride in what they did over the last eight years. City of Heroes might not have been one of the biggest MMOs out there, but its influence was out of proportion to its subscriber base. It was the first MMO to really push the idea that you shouldn’t punish people for playing your game; lenient death penalties, casual-friendly loot systems, and a grouping design that pretty much everyone in the industry scrambled to emulate made it clear that MMOs could, if done right, appeal to a large audience. It might be an exaggeration to say that MMOs might be a much smaller genre without City of Heroes, but I don’t think it’s wrong.

I’m trying not to be angry at NCSoft over this. I’m certainly not a satisfied customer, and I don’t think they see it from the same perspective as I do, but I think it’s about as useful to get mad at a company for making a business decision as it is for getting mad at a shark for biting you. NCSoft is a business, their goal is to make the most money they can. They think something else will be more profitable than CoH is for them currently, and they have the numbers to back that up. I can get upset over that, but I can’t really argue with it. In some ways, I think the saddest thing about all this is the way that it’s revealed an ugly vein of racism in the fan community, as some people are muttering darkly about how the Korean-based NCSoft is somehow doing this because they don’t like their American playerbase. I know these people are upset, and I can sympathize with that anger, but that doesn’t make what they’re saying right or appropriate. They’re doing what any company does, trying to find the most profitable investment of their funds. City of Heroes is profitable, but it’s not a cash cow and it’s never going to be. Do I wish NCSoft cared more about its fans and the wonderful development team that have put years of effort into this game? Of course. But companies don’t work that way.

I know that if the various efforts to save the game fail, I’m going to spend a lot of time missing Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. But I think what I’m dwelling on most right now, though, is the lost potential. I was still creating characters up through about three weeks ago, taking advantage of the new powersets and looking forward to the next issue (I already had an idea for a Chow Yun-Fat inspired Dual Pistols/Martial Combat blaster.) So many things that were teased and hinted at now may never be revealed. (Although I have to confess, I’m amused by the speculation that the “Coming Storm” and the mysterious enemy referenced over the last several issues was, in fact, the end of the game world at the hands of the developers.) Playing City of Heroes was always fun, but more than that, it seemed like a world of limitless possibilities that stretched out into the future. That’s gone, now, even though the memories are always going to be great ones.

What will I do with the time I spent playing City of Heroes? I don’t know. I probably won’t pick up another MMO. The setting was always a big part of the draw for me, and Champions Online never caught my interest in the same way. (As for DC Universe Online…I think I played it for five minutes, but that was only because it took me four minutes and thirty seconds to figure out how to quit.) I’ve already backed up my characters (thank you, mad genius who invented the character export tool!) and I’ll probably move on to other interests, and wait for the day when someone’s fond memories of this are strong enough that they make the game live again. Because to me, this game is worth waiting for.