Thursday September 8th

The news for today is that I slept last night. It was delayed and fragmented sleep but it was sleep. I'm kind of groggy today... the effects of a sleep deficit without the insomnia high. I'm trying to avoid sleeping all day so I can hopefully just lay down and go to sleep tonight, but I'm still taking it easy-ish. I'm going to start writing in the next half hour or hour, though, if my head-fog continues to clear off.

Dangerous Instrumentalities: Scenes From A Night-talian Restaurant.

Finding myself unexpectedly working on Dangerous Instrumentalities, the modern-day wizard story I teased a chapter and a half from in the second newsletter. I think I'm going to drop another preview in the next newsletter, but I find myself unable to wait on sharing part of it.

For those who don't get the newsletter, this story grew out of the basic idea in "Rhymes With Itch", though I don't know that I'd call it a sequel or an expansion. It started off as such, but I'm not sure how well the original vignette as written would connect with the way the larger the story is developing.

A few years back, some magazine did a cover story: "Night Life: The Supernatural Set's Favorite Haunts", detailing twenty-five semi-notorious hangouts for things that go bump. It wasn't exactly a watershed event in the annals of post-apocalyptic life. Most of the places on the list were already pretty touristy. That's how they made the list.

It did have one lasting effect, though. The cheap wordplay in the subtitle entered the public consciousness, and soon anywhere that werewolves and demons and such were said to chill became called a "haunt", to the point that we started using it among ourselves.

The Insomnia Cafe is my haunt. It caters to "night life" in a very real way, being open from sunset to sunrise. There are all kinds of reasons for supernatural people to prefer going out at the darker parts of the day, but this only furthers the idea that haunts are full of vampires.

And why not? They're the archetypal "creatures of the night", right?

Except a vampire isn't the sort of person who goes out for a cup of coffee, because a vampire isn't a person. A vampire isn't even what's left of a person who's died. They only resemble people in the way that an outline of a thing resembles that thing. Vampires are the hole that's left in the world when everything that makes up a person is completely obliterated. What a vampire consumes is not transformed or stored, it's just gone. Completely. Forever. They aren't supernatural, they're unnatural... walking and talking violations of the laws of thermodynamics.

A vampire's skin is cold to the touch not because the body is dead. That would make it room temperature. It's cold because it obliterates heat. They continually lower the temperature of wherever they are. When you look at a vampire, if you could see past its mind-warping powers, what you would see is nothing, a pit of pure void from which no light escapes. This is why vampires avoid mirrors: only the most intelligent and most powerful have the foresight and ability to fix their reflections, too.

The good news is that vampires are rare. They don't have many allies. Other supernatural beings have a tendency to be freaked right the fuck out by them and destroy them on sight, or try to.

You wouldn't know any of this walking into the Insomnia Cafe. A lot of what people think they know about vampires--"vampire culture"--comes from the way people act and dress in haunts. Some of them are just wannabes who assume that among the sea of similarly-dressed folk there are honest-to-moral-ambiguousness vampires. Some of them are other sorts of supernatural folk who dress that way because they know that's what the masses of humanity expect supernatural folk to look like.

I mean, I'm sure that some of them dress like that because that's the way they want to dress, but it's not like they arrived at that preference in a vacuum, right?

For background, the "apocalypse" referenced in the first paragraph isn't an end-of-the-world scenario; Riley uses the word in the classic sense of "revelation", which is what most people in the world call the point at which mundane society learned of the supernatural.

Under Construction: TOMU 2-30

5:30-6:00: ~400 (+50)
4:00-4:30 ~800 (+400)
4:45-5:15 ~1600 (+800)
5:15-5:45 ~2200 (+600)


( Spoilers. )

Thanks to the generosity of readers like you.

Every once in a while I get someone who sends me money with an instruction to "buy something fun with it". I'm usually in a position where this is something I can reasonably accommodate. Today I had someone offer to send me $25 if I'd spend it on DC comics. I understand the thinking there... they want to support the relaunch (I do, too), I've been blogging about my impressions culled from preview and reviews, and I said in a comment that I'm not in any position to buy any right now.

But by that token: at this point in time I would rather have the $25. So I talked them down to this: $25, and I spend $10 on DC's digital comics. Now, if the donor hadn't budged I would have accepted and abided by the conditions.. I'm not complaining about having basically been offered free comics.

Anyway, this left me with some hard choices. Action Comics was the first thing I picked, because that's the one that has me most intrigued. It's not necessarily the comic I want to read the most on an ongoing basis, but I've obviously been interested in what Morrison is doing with it and I wanted a clearer picture.

The next thing I decided was "no Batgirl". No, I'm not boycotting it or anything over the de-Oracling... but I want my purchases to have some impact and Batgirl has been the breakaway pop hit of the relaunch. Another sale the day after launch is not going to help it. Me getting a copy after the price drops is not going to hurt it. If I weren't so dang curious about Action Comics I would have skipped it, too.

My next selection was Green Arrow... again, curiosity. Ollie is one of my favorite DC characters, and I love everything that's been done with him since Kevin Smith brought him back. (I don't love everything that's been done to his son Connor, but I love Connor, too.) This means he's one of the ones I have very mixed feelings about rebooting. And this is also one of the books that's been talked about the least. So I wanted to 1) scope it out and 2) give my $3 "vote" to its continued existence in case it's good.

The last choice was the hardest. Though some of them rate lower than others, is no book that's dropped yet that I'm not interested in checking out, but going with the principle of giving my initial purchases as much impact as possible, I decided to make sure I wasn't picking yet another book focused on a white guy. By title alone, Justice League International sounds like it should be perfect, but... well, to judge by the previews it's another book focused on a white guy. (The more things change...)

I almost grabbed Static Shock, but Static has an established following that I hope is giving him a boost. In the end, I picked Batwing. There are bound to be some problematic aspects of a character who's been advertised as "The Batman of Africa" (given that the whole point of Batman Incorporated is that one man can't be everywhere, shouldn't a continent merit more than one?), but I'd rather those problems have time to be addressed than see the book fail and have that failure be chalked up to a lack of interest in anything other than whitebread All-American Heroes.

I'll be reading them now and posting my impressions.

Review of Action Comics #1 (The Nerdiest Thing I've Written So Far)

Alan Moore wrote a story in Swamp Thing in which some military goons trying to kill the indestructible Swamp Thing pay Lex Luthor something like a million dollars for fifteen minutes of his time. (I wouldn't swear to either figure, but you get the idea.) He starts by telling them "Gentlemen, you don't know from invulnerable." and then outlines how his ray gizmo will sever Swamp Thing's consciousness from the earth's biogenic field or whatever.

Even with Swamp Thing planted (heh heh) firmly back in the DC universe of capes and cowls, this story is not likely to be considered canon any more, as it involves Gotham City building a statue to Swamp Thing and a Batman who can just pull up in front of City Hall in broad daylight and start telling city officials what's what.

Despite a very clearly Silver Aged Batman, this story was Post-Crisis... in fact, I believe it landed around the time that John Byrne's Man of Steel comic was introducing the post-crisis Superman and Lex to the world, so Legitimate Businessman Luthor was kind of a new thing. Moore's portrayal of Lex stood out as a sort of balancing act between the Luthor who would spend untold amounts of money inventing world-changing technology and use it to rob a bank and the one who would patent that world-changing technology, sell the world a nerfed and DMR'd version of it for millions, and keep the best for himself. It was only a cameo, but it gave the sort of balanced portrayal that Mark Hamill would bring to the Joker years later in Batman: The Animated Series - not straddling the line between conflicting versions of a character, but integrating them.

So when DCnU's Lex Luthor is introduced to us in Action Comics as a paid consultant for superhuman-hunting military figures, it gave me goosebumps. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Grant Morrison's portrayal was inspired or informed by Alan Moore here. I don't know that. It's definitely reminiscent. But at the same time, this isn't just Supervillain!Lex meets Businessman!Lex. This is also paranoid xenophobic humanocentric Lex, whose hatred of Superman isn't just that he can literally look down on him or that he stands in the way of his schemes (indeed, Superman can't yet fly and there's no sign that he's actually impeded any of Lex's undertakings yet)... it's also (or perhaps solely, we don't know yet) that Superman is an alien, a being foreign to his world who comes with untold power and unknown attention.

Regarding the last parenthetical aside: it's entirely possible that Lex's villainy will all be motivated by this factor this time around. However, motivations aside, it would be wrong to label him as only being a villain for opposing the designated hero. This issue makes it clear that he has no qualms with putting any number of his fellow humans (at least the kinds of humans who live in condemned buildings in poor neighborhoods and who take the train) at risk of death if it helps his plan to bring down the being he refers to as "the creature" and "it".

While the upshot of the comic is that Lex is that sort of fictional genius who can treat an entire city as if it were no more complex or unpredictable a system than a billiard table, it also clearly reveals the occlusion of his bias. His interest in Superman is motivated by the idea that Superman is an alien invader who threatens humanity, but his plan depends from start to finish on the idea that when he himself throws lethal danger at human beings, Superman will put himself in harm's way to protect them.

It can't be said he doesn't see Superman's altruism or believe in it... he was counting on it. If pressed, he would probably say it's a pose to gain people's trust. But in that case his plan didn't just hinge on everything physically falling into place as he predicts, it depends on Superman not blinking when Lex calls his bluff. Would he have felt so confident in that case? I doubt it. Whatever he would like to believe about the strange visitor, his study of Superman's psychology can address only the outward pose. He based his plan around the idea that Superman absolutely would not back down with human lives on the line, and he based this on observation of Superman's behavior.

So what we must conclude is that Lex knows Superman is a moral being who places a higher value on human life than he himself does and has no problem at all reconciling this with his idea that he, Lex Luthor, is protecting the world from a dangerous alien menace. It's the kind of contradiction that is rare in fiction (except when it's lampshaded so that someone can have a Come To Jesus moment and be instantly converted to the protagonist's cause, or double-down on their evilness in a rage-filled rejection of logic) but extremely common in real life.

Basically, Lex Luthor was the highlight of this issue for me... though part of that is because I've already been exposed to the Superman character in the preview pages that went out. I'd have to give myself high marks for my first impression. This version is definitely strong shades of the classic Superman, the illegitimate son of Hugo Danner and Tom Joad, if only they had been created to star in wish-fulfillment fantasies.

There has been much comparison of the new, young Clark Kent to Peter Parker and I think there's something to be said there. What I haven't seen a lot of commentary on is just how effectively the Clark Kent/Superman double-down disguise is sold in this book. Superman has slicked-back hair, yes... but Clark's is not just combed differently, it's pointedly mussed up. Clark wears glasses, but Superman keeps the red glow in his eyes. Superman wears an outfit designed to show off his physique (not exactly tights anymore), Clark wears a big bulky sweater that buries him. Clark acts mousy and bumbling, Superman is... well, he's arrogant, showboaty, and confrontational.

(I believe the red glowing eyes idea was used in Superman: Secret Identity, a pre-Infinite Crisis take on the "Superboy-Prime" story... in Secret Identity a young boy whose parents thought it would be hilarious to name him "Clark Kent" and who lives in an apparently mundane and power-less world suddenly finds himself with powers mimicking those of Superman, the fictional character he was named after. It's later revealed that some event gave a certain number of people powers and implied that he subconsciously shaped his. In this more "realistic" world, the point of wearing a Superman costume is it makes people doubt their eyes and accounts of his appearances, and keeps people from trying to recognize his face... the red glow is another touch for that purpose.)

You see him mugging and belting out lines like (paraphrase) "Tell it to someone who cares, because that ain't Superman." and you think "This has to be a put-on." And of course it is. That's the point. That's what Superman is. An identity he puts on so he can use his abilities without it being connected to him.

Now, it's going to be really grating if he keeps doing things like that... I really hope he dials it down to an 8 or a 9 at the very least. But it's a great take on how to make Superman into somebody nobody would mistake for Clark Kent, and vice-versa.

(Which raises the question: what's he really like? I don't mean the "Is Superman real and Clark Kent is the mask, or is Clark Kent real and Superman is the mask?" conundrum. The Superman that the world sees and the Clark Kent that the world sees are both caricatures. I think Grant Morrison understands this, to judge by All-Star Superman... and by this.)

Now, the criticisms:

First, as was pointed out to me in the last post, there's what seems like a whole plot point missing from the middle of the book, turning Lex's scheme into what feels like an Underpants Gnome plan. It's like watching Back to the Future on FOX: they cut out stuff that's kind of integral. After reading it, I understand what happened. I know how Lex's plan worked. I was deeply confused in the middle, though... it feels like they were a two-page spread over their count and they decided we could just infer what was happening.

Second, the crowd that moves to protect Superman from the authorities after he saves them looks a bit more... homogeneous... than the people he actually saved. If enough people read through this TL;DR I'll surely get someone commenting to tell me to quit looking for racism everywhere and it was just random. Here's the point: if you "randomly" populate a building with squatters and you end up with Black faces, and then you "randomly" draw a crowd of people heroically standing down some heavy ordinance to protect a beloved and iconic superhero... well, the crowd isn't even random. It's drawn from the people we saw Superman saving.

Now, it could be said that the Black folks were less confident about the idea that their presence would stop anyone from firing. But as the issue stands, it feels like they were stuck in for a single frame to help sell the "urban poorness" of it all or as a nod (but only a nod) to diversity.

I don't know if this would have even tripped me, but representation has been a hot topic around the reboot, both from DC's critics and from players within DC who maintain that they're using the reboot to help redress the balance a little. We have a white businessman using the military to make a literal assault on the poor. The economic stratification of the U.S. is a racial issue, as it feeds into and from racial stratification. This was not the place to shoehorn a couple of faceless and voiceless people of color into a frame and call it good.

But missteps and missed opportunities in the middle aside, this is a book with a strong opening and a glorious finish, and it makes for a strong introduction to the new DC Universe.

"I Shall Visit Broadway When The Candles Are Lighted"

Cartoonist Winsor McCay's best known creation is Little Nemo in Slumberland, also known as In The Land of Wonderful Dreams. Most people alive today who have encountered Little Nemo did so through an animated adaptation or the NES game that reached U.S. shores ahead of it. That's how I first became aware of the character, but it happens that Little Nemo is far older than that... old enough that the entire original run of comic strips is in the public domain.

Though they broke from the established slapstick dynamic of strips that were popular at the time, the Nemo comics were a fairly formulaic affair. Within that formula, though, any number of wonders were depicted.

To quote Wikipedia:

Although a comic strip, it was far from a simple children's fantasy; it was often dark, surreal, threatening, and even violent. The strip related the dreams of a little boy: Nemo (meaning "nobody" in Latin), the hero. The last panel in each strip was always one of Nemo waking up, usually in or near his bed, and often being scolded (or comforted) by one of the grownups of the household after crying out in his sleep and waking them. In the earliest strips, the dream event that woke him up would always be some mishap or disaster that seemed about to lead to serious injury or death, such as being crushed by giant mushrooms, being turned into a monkey, falling from a bridge being held up by "slaves", or gaining 90 years in age. The adventures leading to these disasters all had a common purpose: to get to Slumberland, where he had been summoned by King Morpheus, to be the "playmate" of his daughter, the Princess.

Sometime during early 1906, Nemo did indeed reach the gates of Slumberland, but had to go through about four months of troubles to reach the Princess. His problem was that he kept being awakened by Flip, who wore a hat with "Wake Up" written on it. One sight of Flip's hat was enough to take Nemo back to the land of the living during these early days. Although at first an enemy, Flip went on to become one of the recurring heroes. The others included: Dr. Pill, The Imp, the Candy Kid and Santa Claus as well as the Princess and King Morpheus.

Even more bizarre and obscure than Little Nemo in Slumberland, though, was the comic strip that preceded it. It seems Nemo was a spin-off of an earlier McCay project about a series of anonymous dreaming adults who suffer similarly bizarre (if often more pedestrian) nightmares and, upon awakening in the last panel, invariably blame the experience on having eaten a toasted cheese dish, mince pie, or mince pie with cheese before retiring.

The strip is called "Dream of the Rarebit Fiend", and if you don't think I'm pulling your leg you probably aren't reading closely enough.

...

But I'm not.

( Read on... )