You largely go through groups thinking, well this lot’s alright but it only uses major seventh chords and I want to be in a group that uses ninths and then you get in another group and you’re thinking ahead to a group that uses thirteenths, but this group uses everything that I know about music. That’s great, but on the other hand there’s no one left for me to work with after this one and the logical step is not to be a musician after this one, which is frightening. So hopefully it’ll go for a long time.

There’s a number of groups, fewish number, but a number of groups that are on the precipice in a way, beyond which there’s a blackness, a kind of void, and they’re peering into it hoping that it may go this way, but knowing that it may not go this way at all, it may be completely wrong.

I feel that King Crimson now is one of those groups.

–Bill Bruford, drummer, King Crimson, as quoted in the liner notes to KC’s 1973 album Larks’ Tongues in Aspic

This is not the kind of thing you hear from members of Good Charlotte.

Sorry to keep bothering you about this annoying nuclear-proliferation thing, but I thought it should be pointed out that China was involved at the most fundamental levels, too.

So that gives us a nuclear smuggling ring involving Axis of Evil members North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, AofE junior auxilliary members China, Pakistan, Libya, and Syria, “moderate Muslim nations” like Dubai and Malaysia, and amoral companies from Old Europe, created and successfully executed under the “watchful eye” of international institutions like the UN and IAEA. Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but could those bumbling, tragically disaster-prone and wrong-about-everything neocons actually have been, y’know, on to something here? No, you’re right, that’s crazy talk. Back to talking about Vietnam, everyone.

I spent my Valentine’s Day alone. Actually, I’m spending the whole weekend alone. Amanda is visiting her family in Colorado and I stayed behind to work on things here on the homefront.

What I’m trying to say is that I miss my wife a lot!

Now that Dirk is gone, who’s around to respond to articles like this?

In Brian Hibbs’s latest column, the reknowned and respected retailer attempts to debunk the optimistic appraisal of comics’ success in bookstores, and of the power and potential of manga. Without even going in-depth into Hibbs’s numbers, I found quite a few points that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.

1) The Bookscan sales-stat list from which Hibbs derives much of his argument doesn’t have a single book from Pantheon on it. Not even Persepolis, for pete’s sake, which I can’t imagine did worse than, say, Death of Superman that week. To me this throws the entire number-crunching enterprise into question, not to mention Hibbs’s specific point about artcomix not doing well in bookstores–a point which most artcomix publishers would be happy to refute.

2) I have never, ever, ever before heard a businessman say “the secret to success is ignoring the desires of teenage consumers,” yet this is what Hibbs is telling us. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I suppose teenagers are “fickle,” but tweenagers and teenagers are also the people responsible for rock and roll, hip hop, blockbuster movies, and the Harry Potter publishing phenomenon. And we’re supposed to say “Hey, let’s not put all our eggs in this basket”? What basket are we supposed to put them in–the dwindling, ageing, insular, 20-30-40-50something superhero audience?

3) Hibbs haphazardly conflates manga format with manga stylistic tropes. For a while, he starts acting like the pro-manga people in the biz want to see big-eyed Superman comics, which simply isn’t true–Marvel’s ill-fated attempts to duplicate manga style seem to have put paid to that notion. Moreover, I don’t think citing ElfQuest stats is an ironclad barometer of what manga-formatted American comics can sell. What if those really good, perenially strong-selling American books Hibbs touts as proof that manga/bookstores aren’t where it’s at–Sandman, Ultimate Spider-Man, Love & Rockets, Transmetropolitan, Bone, and so forth–were put in manga format and sold in bookstores? I doubt sales would decrease, that’s for sure. And naturally Hibbs doesn’t mention the true advantages of manga format–looks more like a book, you get more story for your buck, kids are already used to buying comics that way. This has nothing to do with Asian fetishism–it just makes good market sense. (This mish-mash argument also gave rise, I think, to Hibbs’s dodge of the issue in saying “well, why don’t we ape Calvin & Hobbes instead?”)

4) Hibbs constructs everything as an either/or proposition, when no one is saying “we must abandon the DM for the bookstores right now!” or “we must abandon western-style comics for manga right now!” Even the late, great Dirk Deppey repeatedly said that he wants the DM to succeed, because if it crashes, the whole of the American medium crashes. I mean, duh. Bookstores and manga may be part of the salvation equation, but we’re talking about methodical expansion into these markets, not abandonment of the existing model altogether. Hibbs is arguing with a straw man.

5) Speaking of straw men, who besides the PR people at DC and Marvel actually go around saying that movie successes increase comics sales?

6) Hibbs also ignores the biggest point, I think: Comics have been a sizeable sales phenomenon in bookstores for only three or four years, whereas the DM has been around for decades now. I think it’s safe to say that in terms of non-superhero comics in the DM as it’s currently run, we’ve hit the ceiling years ago. There is a potential for growth of other genres and types in the bookstores that the DM simply cannot match, and as evidence we can cite years and years and years of DM behavior towards artcomix, manga, eurocomics, and non-superhero genre comics. No one is saying bookstores are a sure thing, but it seems safe to say that as it stands now, the DM is an un-sure thing for anything but the spandex set. Also, no one is saying bookstore sales dwarf that of the DM in terms of American comics–quite the opposite in fact. Of course American comics sell better in the Direct Market right now–decades of existence have taught comics fans that this is the only place to go to find them. But that’s right now, and most publishers and creators who aren’t the Big Two aren’t happy with their DM sales. Bookstores have only seriously been selling comics for a few years, and already they’re on a comparable footing on many titles. The point is that there’s room for expansion there, and there quite simply is none in the DM as it stands right now.

7) When Hibbs coyly starts doing the whole “is it a fad? too early to tell” thing, he ignores that unlike other comics-industry boom/busts, this one is content driven, not speculation driven. No alternate covers, no series that come out with one or two single issues and then disappear, no one scrambling to buy the first issue of the next Spawn or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles–these are people (teenagers! kids! female teenagers and kids!!!) buying comics in order to read them. Yes, I suppose that could still be a fad–there’s an unmistakeable element of Japanophilia that strikes me as being faddish–but when kids are actually reading the books, instead of just looking at them and filing them away, these “fads” tend to last. Look at the fantasy boom in young adult literature in recent years. His Dark Materials, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and of course Harry Potter have essentially reinvigorated the entire book industry and created a generation of readers. It’s shocking to me that a leading retailer in comics is telling us that it may well be in our own interest to ignore a comparable surge in legitimate interest in this art form.

8) As for the anecdotal evidence Hibbs cites that says manga sales are akin to periodical sales, well, this hardly merits a response (beyond “oh yeah? Well, I have anecdotal evidence that says they’re NOT! So there!”). But it strikes me as being an unmistakeable product of supeherocentricity. I suppose the logic is this: Since many manga series end at some point, after that ending no one’s interested in buying the books anymore. On the other hand, superhero series go on and on and on forever, meaning that there’s always a new audience getting into new issues of the series and tracking down old collections. But what real relationship is there between the ongoing Daredevil series, say, and the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkewicz collections focused on that character? Do current issues of Superman fuel purchases of John Byrne’s Man of Steel? Moreover, Maus and From Hell and Watchmen have been “over” as series for years and years now, yet people are still buying them. Hell, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and The Lord of the Rings have been “over” for years, and people are still buying them. Ditto Cheers, Monty Python, The Family Guy, Buffy, etc., and yet people are still buying their DVD collections. The point is, manga is a periodical only in terms of its publishing schedule. The information contained in manga does not rely on timeliness for its impact–it’s storytelling, like any other comic. As long as people are able to take a look at the book and say “hmm, that looks interesting,” people will buy that book. I’m sure sales are better when the books first come out–for this we should stop the presses? This is true for nearly everything at this point in this front-loaded entertainment-industry world. Anecdotal evidence from comics retailers about their audience–not exactly indicative of the rest of the world, in case you hadn’t gathered–is insufficent to write off an entire nation’s comics output as, basically, a temporary sales blip, or a flash in the pan.

Whoa.

If you’ve followed the comics blogosphere at all (and presumably you have, or you wouldn’t be here), you’ve seen first-hand how influential, invigorating and inspiring the work of Dirk Deppey has been to those of us following in his footsteps. (Or toiling in his shadow. Or picking at his leftovers. Hey, whatever works.) I’ve said repeatedly that it took Dirk’s relentless and comprehensive blogging to give the comicsphere a focal point, and enable it to reach the level it’s at today. I’ve got no idea what things will be like without a daily visit to Journalista to tie the whole enterprise together, but I’m sure we’ll be the poorer for his absence. Free speech issues here and abroad; editorial cartoon kerfuffles; mainstream-media successes and disasters; manga and its discontents; the bookstores and the direct market; legends and up-and-comers; the Big Five and the SPX set; brilliant and thought-provoking reporting and op-ed pieces; the desire, and the talent, to give comics the journalism it deserves–such was the beat of Dirk Deppey, blogger. He’ll be missed.

The only consolation is that now the most prestigious comics magazine in the country will be in his eminently capable hands.

But for that to happen, Milo George had to be fired, and that’s a bad thing. Milo and I have had our differences over the past few years: As a young upstart making my bones on the Journal’s message board, I found his rhetoric unnecessarily confrontational, occasionally dismissive, and sometimes downright abusive–which was a shame, since it reflected public perception of the magazine all too well. But in time I got to know Milo pretty well. As he explained his decisions and policies to me, I grew to like and respect him and his work more and more. I should have known this might be the case, though, considering I enjoyed the hell out of every issue I bought during his reign. Even where I still disagreed with his approach or vision for the magazine, I appreciated his passion for the medium and his desire to produce the best magazine possible despite an array of uncontrollable and adverse conditions. He tended to be on the right side of Comics Journal conflicts, and I think that the issues produced during his tenure will serve as a testament to this for a long time to come.

I hope that Dirk will be able to build on Milo’s successes, and that he’ll be given the freedom to change what needs changing (and there’s still quite a bit of that). I’ve got a lot of confidence that he will, of course–he’s one of us.

Good luck, fellas!

Do Josh Marshall and his big-media counterparts have any idea what a bunch of petty buffoons they look like pecking away at the “Bush in the National Guard” story day after day after tedious day? Hint: As much of a bunch of petty buffoons as the people now going after John Kerry for being “inconsistent” about Vietnam, or for being in a photograph with Jane Fonda, or whatever.

There are several offensive things about the way both sides are now gleefully rehashing Vietnam, the most offensive being that we are currently at war, for Christ’s sake. That’s an order of magnitude more important than endlessly battling over the fact that–shock! horror!–two guys may have behaved in a way that would indicate they were less than enthusiastic about the Vietnam War 35 years ago.

It’s also offensive that people are still behaving as though there was a right and a wrong side to that war and the culture war it engendered. Look, it was a difficult time. I wasn’t even there and I could tell you that. Provided you weren’t giving aid and comfort to the enemy, or conversely deliberately mowing down civilians, I pass no judgements on your conduct way back then. Everyone did what they felt they had to do. If in your heart you felt it was your duty to go and to fight, good. If in your heart you felt it was your duty to protest, good. If in your heart you felt you didn’t really want to do either, good. If you used your connections to get you out of the issue entirely, good. If you told the draft board you were physically unfit and spent the next few years skiing, good. If you went to fight and won a ton of medals and then came home and told people the whole thing was a disaster, good. If you went to college in England and thanked your local government in writing for getting you out of the draft, good. If you went and fought and came home and thought you were doing something good for America and the world, good.

Obviously, in a perfect world, the people and armed forces of the United States would have enthusiastically supported a popular democratic resistance to a Communist invasion and guerilla insurgency, and defeated it, and Vietnam wouldn’t have to have suffered under Communism for decades. But neither the people nor the military were supporting the war, and the regime we were fighting on behalf of was not democratic, and the Vietnamese people (in the main) supported the Communists, and in response we blew the hell not just out of North and South Vietnam but every other country on that peninsula. In the present time, ignoring the horrible fate of that country following the Communist victory is a mistake. But so is recharacterizing the War as some sort of noble struggle for truth, justice, and the American way, all of which were in incredibly short supply during the length of the conflict. The war was not fought in such a way that it was a clear-cut battle between totalitarianism (them) and freedom (us)–it was more like a battle between improbably popular but self-evidently murderous and eventually disastrous totalitarianism (them) and well-intentioned but mendacious and horribly executed and eventually deliberately destructive rule by force (us). The fact is that as far as everyday people are concerned, I can understand nearly any viewpoint espoused or tactic taken by American citizens during that time, with only a very few exceptions. It was complex, extremely complex. And more importantly, it’s now over. Let it be over.

And what makes this even more offensive is that the Left has suddenly “discovered” its admiration for military service and begun making hay out of draft-dodging accusations. The hypocrisy is simply breathtaking, considering how they (rightly) defended former President Clinton and former fruntrunner Dean by saying that such accusations were stupid, pointless, divisive, and wrong. (For evidence, look at how stupid the Republicans look for calling Kerry a pinko due to his anti-war activities pre- and post- his tour of duty.) In fact, this is the kind of thing that has led me to refer to the Left as “they” rather than “we,” which not three years ago I would have said, and proudly.

I’m just sick of schadenfreude trumping integrity and ethics in politics. Any kind of attack is unfair, until attacking the other side in that manner will score you some points, at which point anything goes. Whether it’s Vietnam, or affairs, or the way opponents of the Drug War fell all over themselves saying Rush Limbaugh should have the book thrown at him, we’re embarrassing ourselves, and we’ve got bigger things to worry about.

Enough, enough, enough.

My computer melted down the other day. It’s okay now. I’ll be back shortly.

Remember how I just said that the Bush Administration is pitting liberal hawks’ liberalism against their hawkishness?

“BUSH TO DEFINE MARRIAGE: President to endorse constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.”

“Lawmakers who want to appear to be tough on broadcast smut aired on TV and radio also are likely to push for amendments to Upton’s bill. There is talk of amendments that would bring cable programming into the broadcast indecency rubric…” (talk which FCC chairman Michael Powell just echoed during his address to the Senate hearing committee.)

Had enough yet?

The Dark Knight Returns continues its turn in the blogosphere spotlight. Here’s Dave Intermittent arguing that in DKR (and in the Sin City books), Frank Miller boils his characters down to their essence and then blows that essence up to gigantic proportions. (Sounds about right; and it’s always nice to find another unabashed Miller fan.)

And here’s Steven Berg (again), talking about how only those characters who refuse to judge Batman are allowed to judge Batman, and how Batman’s rogues gallery serve as catalysts for narrative crises in the novel. I’d like to see him flesh these ideas out a bit more (what are the differences between the crises that Two-Face, the Mutant Leader, the Joker, and Superman engender?), but I’m intrigued thus far.

Why have so many people who might reasonably have been expected to support President Bush in the next election suddenly wavered, and even turned against him altogether?

Partially, this is because the Democrats have rejected their rejectionists and selected John Kerry as Bush’s opponent. Kerry, whatever his faults, gives the appearance of being a candidate you can take seriously on national security and foreign policy issues (Bush’s big strong points), which is more than you could say for Howard Dean. (Whether or not Kerry actually can be taken seriously may well be a whole ‘nother story, but still.) Another factor is the relentless “where are the WMDs?” questioning, which of course ignores the forest for the trees, but still (rightly) puts a big chink in the President’s foreign-policy armor.

But the real culprit, I think, was the disastrous State of the Union address. The amazing thing about the upcoming election is that I think it would have been relatively easy for Bush to actually secure the vote of myself and others like me, and he blew it in a big way. The SOTU was a tipping point for liberal hawks–the point at which we realized that for all our hawkishness, we’re still liberals, and the President is not. Ditto for libertarian hawks. Ditto for fiscally conservative hawks. The SOTU essentially caused a lot of Bush’s ersatz supporters to pit one aspect of their political personality against the other, which was the LAST thing he should have wanted to do with it. Because the fact is, we’ve all spent a lifetime being the first half of our respective “_____ hawk” equations, and for the most part have only been the second half since Sept. 11, 2001. The first half has a big advantage in that regard.

But does the second half outweigh everything else? That’s the question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now.

I realize we’re all incredibly busy pursuing the important issues–for example, the shocking news that a certain National Guardsman may not have been so enthusiastic during his Vietnam-era term of service–but I thought I might want to take a moment and point out this whole pesky nuclear proliferation thing.

You see, when we invaded Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein–which of course we shouldn’t have done; after all, there are a lot of “bad guys” in the world, and where are the weapons?–we convinced Moammar Gaddafi that pursuing nuclear weapons wasn’t in his best interest. So he announced to the world he had been doing so and invited us to inspect the dismantling of his programs. Which led us to discover that Pakistan had been conducting a nuclear arms bazaar for several years now. They sold nuclear technology and plans to Libya, North Korea, and Iran, and attempted to do so with Iraq (whaddya know!), Syria, and probably other countries. Companies from Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, South Africa, Japan, Germany, and Italy were involved at one stage or another. Pakistani President Musharraf has denied that any terrorist groups were similarly approached or involved, even while he pardoned Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who did all the peddling. Reports suggest that U.S. forces have secretly secured all Pakistani nuclear technology and sites–that is, the ones that are still in Pakistan.

Anyway, I know it’s really, really important to make fun of the blundering neocons, and to hold the administration personally responsible for believing the outlandish notion that maybe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, so carry on with that, but I thought the fact that an international nuclear-weapon proliferation conspiracy has been discovered because of our intervention in Iraq might bear mentioning.

I know, I know. Where are my priorities?

Look out, ol’ Johnny is back! Johnny Bacardi has declared an end to his self-imposed exile from the blogosphere and returns to form with a series of posts on the Justin-Janet fiasco, the Beatles, some movies he’s seen recently, and oh yeah, comics galore. Start at the link above and scroll up. Welcome back, Johnny–you’re one of my favorites!

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Brown conquers the comics blogosphere! (I’m fond of exclamation points today!) His self-parody minicomic Be a Man gets rave reviews from Bill Sherman, Big Sunny D, and even J.B. neophyte Dirk Deppey. Having had more than my fill of minimalist autobio cartoonists, it took me a good long time to give Brown’s work a shot. But boy, was I ever glad I finally did. Brown comes across as a sensitive artist type who’ll be the best boyfriend ever if you let him–but, get this, he actually seems genuine! It’s not just a pose he’s adopted to pull birds, which is the sense I get from other cartoonists working in this genre. Moreover, he doesn’t have that cloying, cutesy self-involvement that mars the work of some of his compatriots. Though I haven’t yet read the book, I imagine that Be a Man, like his other gag-strip minis, is evidence of that. Brown enthusiastically mocks his own sad-sack schtick, something that those who take their Sensitive Artiste personae way too seriously are unable to do.

(I also think that the enthusiasm with which Be a Man has been greeted should serve as an example to altcomix publishers that yes, it is worth releasing your Serious Artists’ goofy stuff. Fantagraphics in particular may want to rethink their publishing strategy for not-so-funny-animal artist Jason, whose hilarious gag comics may offset the tragedy fatigue his serious comics might engender in their readers….)

Speaking of hilarious, check out David Fiore‘s simulated interview with Craig Thompson. Hysterical, Dave, but shouldn’t you have thrown the word “antinomian” in there somewhere?

And speaking of Fiore, Eve Tushnet cops to a DFCR (David Fiore Comprehension Rate) of about 50%. She also links to more Watchmenblogging, this time a piece focusing on the formal rigorousness of the novel, by Commonplace Book.

Kevin Melrose reports (courtesy of subscription site Variety) that X-Men director Bryan Singer will be co-writing Ultimate X-Men at some point soon. I’m glad. Singer is good people, and my experience with him and other people on the X-film production team has me convinced that they really do care about the characters and the concept. They ought to be a good fit with Ultimate, the most high-octane of the X-books.

Finally, I just want to say that my handy new copy of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund’s newsletter, Busted! (the Fall 2003 issue, out just in time for Valetine’s Day), has all sorts of valuable information on the fight for the First Amendment. The Child Online Protection Act, the Jesus Castillo case, Tony Twist v. Todd McFarlane, Fox News v. Al Franken, the Winters Brothers v. DC Comics, John Ashcroft v. fucking–it’s all there. Wait. What’s that you say? You’re not already a member? Well, why not?

(They publish a list of members, you know. So I know which of you aren’t on there. Punks.)

(or: Light of my life, clogger of my inbox.)

Today I got spam from one “Dolores Hays.” Okay, so they misspelled the last name, but still, what is up with all this literary-themed junk email lately?

On both Imus this morning and his own show this evening, I listened to Chris Matthews hold forth on how The American People want an actual soldier for a wartime president.

In other news, I am currently reading about four-term president and wheelchair jockey Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who I believe may have won a couple of re-elections during a large conflict of some kind.

David Fiore (official “Man of the Hour” here at ADDTF) really liked my interview with Craig Thompson, to the point where he’s now interested in picking up Thompson’s book Blankets. Both of these reactions make me very happy. So I feel I owe it to Dave to clarify my thoughts on serialization in general and the mooted serialization of Blankets in particular. David said

My only quibble with the interview Sean–I know you agree with Craig that “self-contained” is usually better than seriality (endless or otherwise), but it would have been interesting to see how the man would’ve responded to a little devil’s advocacy on that issue!

I think what Dave’s got in mind here is my reaction to his claim that the best art works like ongoing Big Two superhero titles–as I put it then, “never-ending, closure-free, static characters, obsessively concerned with minute variations on a very limited number of themes, and without an author to speak of.” It seemed to me then, and still does now, that asserting that such works are superior to traditional (or, really, even most non-traditional) narratives relies on a good many faulty premises and leads inevitably to a faulty conclusion. But what I was talking about in my interview with Thompson was, quite simply, specific to Thompson’s work on Blankets.

Thompson told me that many of his fellow cartoonists advised him to release this 570-page work in multiple installments. Having read such smaller chunks of the book in the various online previews that had been made available in the run-up to the book’s release and being extremely underwhelmed by them, I felt that this would have been a disastrous strategy. Not because of any inherent problem with serialization–as long as there’s a completed structure to be arrived at somewhere, I don’t really care how you publish a given work, most of the time; my famous problems with “floppies” stem mainly from logistical and public-image concerns, not from a belief that the serialization of a graphic novel is Always Bad. No, I felt this way because of a problem with the material–i.e. it simply read much better as a whole than as discreet subsections. Individual passages that at first seemed twee or self-involved subsequently blossomed, when taken in all together, into a compelling narrative of the loss of a young man’s ability to idealize. When I cited Dave Cooper’s Ripple to support my argument, again, my problem wasn’t with serialization per se, but with how serializing his book led to unfulfillable audience expectations and undermined a narrative strategy that would have worked well had the book been presented in its complete form all at once.

In the end this, like so many other questions of sequential-art aesthetics and mechanics, falls under Collins’s Law. Question: Do serialized comics suck? Answer: Not the ones where the serialization works!

David Fiore finishes up his Watchmen blogging in the ridiculously high style to which we have become accustomed:

I prefer to think of Rorschach as Peter Parker, frozen in one of those lonely tableaux that conclude many of the Ditko ASM’s[…] imagine if no new “surprises” awaited that character, just an endless stroll through that same moody panel… that’s Rorschach!

and

The Nite Owl/Silk Spectre aspect of this book is an “empowerment fantasy” (and I’m really not a fan of those), but the point is that it’s a good empowerment fantasy–Moore is saying: “look, these people are doing wonderful things for their community and they’re gonna fuck each other as soon as they’re done. They aren’t even gonna wait for the owl-plane to land.”[…]Dan and Laurie just get off on “making a difference”, and this is made crystal clear in the wonderful bk 7 fire-rescue, which actually does give us something like that “lost innocence of the silver age” that we hear tell of…

Wow. I really can’t begin to describe how impressed I am with David’s work on this book over the last week or so. Every day he showed something about these characters that was completely unexpected, yet there all along, if we’d known where (or how) to look. Kudos, David! (BTW, David has now begun blogging Grant Morrison’s Animal Man. I haven’t read the series, so I’ll probably stay away for fear of spoilers, but if you’re familiar with it, my guess is this series of posts will be a goldmine for you.)

But just when you thought it was safe to go on the Internet without reading involved and fascinating analyses of seminal superhero graphic novels from the 1980s, Steven Berg at Peiratikos has started blogging the other side of the coin, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns! His first post, besides providing a terrific one-stop shopping list of all the Watchmenblogging done since Eve Tushnet started it all a few weeks ago, focuses on politics and psychology, and the impotence of both against Batman. The gist, I think, is that by the end of the book Batman has been freed from both–his secret identity “dead,” his superhero-warrior persona completely dominant, the outside world no longer has any hold over him whatsoever–he is at long last no longer conflicted but “at peace with himself.” (Interesting, then, that so many pointed to the lack of character reversals in The Dark Knight Strikes Again as a fault of that sequel, when it really is perfectly in line with the trajectory established in DKR. By the end of DKR Batman is freed from all external concerns–why should he be conflicted anymore?) Steven pays particular attention to the way that Batman’s detractors asssume Batman is completely accountable for his own actions, while utilizing pop psychology to explain and excuse the actions of even his most murderous enemies:

Dr. Bartholomew Wolper gives us Batman as

Can someone please tell these penguins that when they made the choice to become homosexuals, they helped to undermine the sacred committed relationships between men penguins and women penguins that have been a cornerstone of penguin civilization for centuries?

I just wish the headline had run “Gay Penguins Make Homophobes Look Even Stupider Than Usual.”

I don’t handle stressing out my cat very well. When we first brought her home from the shelter she brought a nasty case of both the sniffles and conjunctivitis home with her, and when we had to grab her and stick her in the closet so we’d have easy access to her when applying her medicine in the future, she ran all around the apartment letting out the most pathetic yowl. Remember how Luke Skywalker sounded after Darth Vader cut his hand off and then told him he was his father? She sounded like that. So as my wife and father-in-law continued to give chase, I screamed “YOU’RE KILLING HER!” Yes, I am still embarrassed, and thanks for asking. I try to fob it off by saying that I was paraphrasing Walter Sobczak from Lebowksi–“You’re killing your father, Larry”–but no one ever believes me.

Anyway, today I had to bring miss Lucy to the vet to get her claws trimmed. It’s easier to bring her there and have them do it than for us to try and do it ourselves at this point–she really hates being held, so rather than have her squirm and scratch and probably get injured while we try to do it, we let the pros handle it, and they’ve said she’s super well-behaved during the process so we don’t even feel all that bad about it. Well, today was the first time I had to rustle her up and stick her in the carry crate by myself, and I felt like an abusive father. Once she caught on to what was happening, she started with that heartbreaking “raaooohhhhwwww” again. Oh Lord, I don’t have the stomach for that! And when I finally got ahold of her, she just held onto the sheets of our bed for dear life (easy to do for her, considering her claws needed clipping), then sort of gave up and went limp. Poor baby.

The story has a happy ending, at least–the trimming itself took no time at all, and the vet tech said (once again) that Lucy was so good, so pretty, and so soft. That’s my girl!

(Hey, the Missus isn’t the only one who can write about our cat!)

Big announcement for ADDTF today–my brand-new RSS feed is up and running! I don’t have an RSS reader myself, but I’m supposed to give you high-tech types this link, and I guess you can do the rest. (The link is now in the blogroll over to your left, too.)

Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat: Now in syndication!

I just got a spam message with the subject heading “Use HGH to lose weight while you sleep . .. .. mhucyqhish468353959951423”. Okay, fine, nothing unusual there. But the sender? “Saruman 1726.”

If Saruman actually existed in 21st-century America, do you have any doubt he’d be spamming like there was no tomorrow?