Eleven Names

Black Lanterns and Overkill

2010-02-07T18:33:00.004-05:00

My pen name in Overkill was Charles Victor Szasz. It's nuts to type it this many times in an article. Anyway. I submitted this elsewhere and apparently, it didn't take. Here's something about the Question #37.

Go Saints!

I got excited from the first five words: Charles Victor Szasz of Earth.

During a DC Universe-wide event (Something big happens in the fictional universe, to which the monthly series respond and draw upon) Blackest Night, the main artist took some time off and in the place of the main story, 10 cancelled series were brought back for a one-off issue tying into the event.

One of those was the Question, a little known monthly series active in the 80s, starring a C-list hero called the Question. It ran for 36 issues and ended there, influencing most of today's top writers and hadn't been touched since. (The characters were used elsewhere, but not in their own ongoing monthly series.) The series itself was a mix of Mike Royko and Batman, a 200-level philosophy final and Zen Bhudduism that congealed around Charles Victor Szasz, a TV news anchor who went out crusading as the vigilante without a face, the Question, at night.

It ended with him leaving the city because he was too attached to the city and to his lover there to be the Question without emotional pain.

The big event in universe to thank for the one-shot, Blackest Night, is about zombies. Evil zombies feeding off of the emotions for the person, if I had to be specific. In universe, Szasz is dead from lung cancer and his protege, Renee Montoya, is the current Question.

The issue's storyline goes like this: By an incredibly loose definition of a comic book reanimation, Szasz is back as a Black Lantern and it's up to Aristotle Rodor (mentor), Renee and Lady Shiva (kung-fu master, hyper violent) to beat Black Lantern Szasz.

Trouble is, they can't.

Past this point are spoilers, by the way.

The way this is dealt with is what sells me on the book. They don't defeat Black Lantern Szasz in combat. The vision of the Black Lanterns only extends to beings with emotions they can feel. A person who has no emotions will disappear and that's what the group does. They let go of their feelings towards Szasz and Black Lantern Szasz can't see them, so he walks out into the rain.

In short: Szasz had to let go to truly become the Question and his friends had to let go of their feelings for Szasz to survive. If you're aware of the history, it's a callback and if not, it's a unique piece of the larger Blackest Night mystery revealed. This issue, #37, has many different weights on it and shoulders them all. It's one part resolution for the lingering memories of Szasz and one part Blackest Night puzzle piece, set up and done in a way that is reminiscent of the series from years ago.

The issue was done the right way, with the original artist and writer coming back, even titling the issue One More Question. Shame that there's only the one.

Keep On Dancing, Right As the Curtain Is Closing

2010-01-18T16:57:00.010-05:00

I wrote this listening to the new Felix Culpa record, available January 24th (also my birthday) from Youth Conspiracy Records. It's pretty long (out of the 66 minutes, they could have cut anywhere from seven to 10 minutes), but it's all an intense ride. I suggest you buy it.

The title comes from the Bane song End With An Ellipsis, a song about the vocalist seeing the end coming for his band, but not wanting to go sadly. Anyway, the meat of this is about S.W.O.R.D., an ongoing from Marvel that just this week made its way to the "buy me" pile, got cancelled. At least it's in good company, though, with Doctor Voodoo, Captain Britain and MI:13 and the Immortal Iron Fist.

S.W.O.R.D. got cancelled at issue #5 (cover left) due to poor sales, which everyone with a functioning brain saw coming. Everyone on the series saw that coming and it was even written as if it would end at issue #5, according to writer Kieron Gillen, (lover of obscure British pop) known also for Phonogram, a comic I enjoy quite a bit.

It's a shame, because it's a neat little spinoff comic focusing on different characters in the Marvel Universe with a tangential relation to established franchises (X-Men). I picked up issue #3 last week and while I found Beast a little bit too whip-smart and it took getting used seeing Beast look more like a horse, I warmed up to it quickly.

Gillen posits two explanations:

1. New ongoings in a shitty economy are extremely risky. (true)

2. The first two issues are ordered before anyone has read the first one so the new series might be on grounds to be cancelled before anyone has the opportunity to buy a single issue. A crazy systemic problem with comics. (true)

Quoted by CBR's Robot 6, Gillen said "It was already on unsteady ground before anyone had even read the thing."

And as soon as I read that, my mind goes to another recent launch: Batwoman. Both are spinoffs of established series (S.W.O.R.D. has X-Men and Batwoman has Batman) but their launches couldn't be more different.

Consider: Batwoman's stories have appeared in Detective Comics, 52 and Final Crisis (52 and Final Crisis being DC events) and the talk only now is coming to her own ongoing. S.W.O.R.D. (created by Joss Whedon during his Astonishing X-Men run in 2004) was thrown into its own ongoing with no lead up or introduction to the characters outside of Secret Invasion, an event from two years ago before the launch of S.W.O.R.D.

The artist on Batwoman is the stupid talented J.H. Williams III, narrowly losing to the guy drawing Blackest Night (46% to 54%) as the artist of the year in a Newsarama poll, but winning the cover of the year with his work on Detective 855 (see right). J.H. also did Promethea with Alan Moore, which also had amazing layouts. Also! Take a look at those colors. Dave Stewart (the colorist) deserves some serious kudos. Suffice to say the art team on S.W.O.R.D. doesn't have that pedigree.

I'm not sure Gillen is in the same league as Rucka, but I buy Gillen's books more frequently than I do Rucka's, so the kangaroo court of my mind has a sizable pro-Gillen bias.

The connection to the X-Men is Beast, which could have been reinforced a little bit more. What's Nightcrawler doing these days? He would fit note-perfect in an ongoing about aliens, earth and alienation. It's Beast, Abagail Brand and "everyone's favorite paper pusher" as the front and center players from the Marvel Universe.

The short version of all this is: based on this criteria, my guess is S.W.O.R.D. just didn't have the editorial backing that Batwoman did. If you want people to buy another new book, then you have to have Things Happen in the book, but also, you have to put your top-tier people on it. The new book needs to be a must-read. S.W.O.R.D. wasn't positioned as a book that's must-read. It's cool if it is read.

I want to come back to Gillen McKelvie's quote: "It was on unsteady ground before anyone had even read the thing." Marvel, I think, didn't take enough steps to compensate for the unsteadiness of the new ground and combine that with the viciousness of a market that's already hurting from an economic collapse and S.W.O.R.D.'s numbers were limited, in this case, from the start.

Of course, that's not to say S.W.O.R.D. was boring. Far from it. The first issue I picked up, ,#3, had a spectacular visual for a cover (see below), Beast being an incorrigible badass, a firebreathing dragon and xenophobia.

You've got a tiny dragon pointing guns with three barrels at you and not just that, but a shotgun and an assault rifle strapped to his back. Awwwww! S.W.O.R.D. will be missed for that reason, for its ability to blend being cute and intelligent. But hey. It's fun and it's got two issues left.

Like Conan, S.W.O.R.D. got screwed, but at least there's a trade in the future. That said, there's a fun feeling to buying the remaining issues of a cult-classic series that's walking dead. You were in before people realized it was so cool, so even if it's gonna end, pick up the issues.

Like many of Mr. Gillen's favorite artists, his work was under-appreciated the first time around and would gain significance only after the band's finished. For his first unique Marvel ongoing, it seems appropriate S.W.O.R.D. ends the same way.

The Fear The Fear The Fear

2010-01-12T10:59:00.000-05:00

It's been an entire twelve days since the last post. Two weeks have happened, basically. In that time, I've been listening to the Steal non-stop. They're a raucous hardcore band that sounds like the first time you went downhill on your bike as fast as you could.

Go download all their records on their official website. The title is also the title of a Defiance, Ohio record, who are nowhere near as good as the Steal, but the title's stuck with me for years. Marathon #5 before the end of this month. And now, for a drastic change in tone.

Al-Qai'da's attack on Christmas doesn't register much with me. One, I didn't know it happened until a couple days later. There's been a lot of talk about how he evaded American security apparatus, but let's be honest: he got on a plane in Europe and came into America that way. Would New York airport security have caught him, I don't know. There's a lot of fear going around that something "could have" happened and that Al-Qai'da still has a lot of pull.

Let's examine what happened. Al-Qai'da attacks usually are redundant. By that I mean, if one plan goes down, there's still another one in place. 9/11 is an example. One plane failed. Three didn't. In this case, there was one (and only one) person, using the same method the shoe bomber did, which also failed.

The suicide bomber didn't even commit suicide. What he did manage to get past non-American airport security was incendiary, not explosive. (It burned as opposed to blow up.) I'm inclined to believe that's a victory. Al-Qai'da is also known for having camps devoted to these kind of activities, so they had to know that this device was improvised and "hoping for the best".

Fareed Zakaria puts it better: On Christmas a Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan.

That's worrisome, but not terrifying. America is not some kind of fortress and even if it was, it wouldn't be America. America was not founded on the idea to keep foreigners and "dangerous types" out. It is meant to be a place with open arms. Those that would trade liberty for security deserve neither, Franklin said. It's worth repeating.

A young Al-Qai'da affiliate (think of the terror organization like a franchise) literally threw something together that didn't work the first time around, failed on putting an explosive on an airplane and they still managed to freak out the American public.

The fear currently going isn't logical. The evidence doesn't bear it out. There's a terrorist incident, speaking roughly, every 16.5 million departures, Nate Silver tells us. It is significantly more dangerous to take a car to wherever you're going. Those who practice suicide terror want us to be very afraid. Killing tons of people is a bonus, but the point is to strike fear a mass audience. And, like a charm, we're all very, very afraid. That's why Al Qai'da celebrated it.

And that's why I'm not at all hopeful about the war on terror.

2010

2010-01-01T05:23:00.006-05:00

Well, it's just past five in the morning and I'm awake and relatively clear-headed for some awful reason, so I might as well.

This, then, is 2010, the year when everything changes. (I've just made that up. Or, more likely, someone else made that up and I've just made it up again.) From the perspective of about an hour and a half of consciousness: it's not bad. The eggs are quite good, and going back to sleep will be lovely. I feel hopeful for the rest of the year.

And it's not hard to being feeling a bit of hope right now, not least because 2009 is, to slip into the parlance of the times, finally fucking dead in the ground, and we can get on with it. The 'it' is, I believe, living and growing and loving and pushing ourselves to do more and better.

2009! It wasn't the best year for me, but it certainly wasn't the worst. I've had major accomplishments and fuck-ups, but a lot of my friends have had it really bad. Things haven't gone right, and people and institutions were, and still are in some cases, collapsing all around us. There is fear and unease in the air, and the change promised us seems less real every day.

Winter showed up late this year, or maybe never left at all: if you think of centuries as having seasons, of hundred year cycles of growth, abundance, harvest and decay, or perhaps sleep, then we''re somewhere in February of the new century, marching on through the slush and ice.

On this scale, I've been in winter for my entire adult life. The whole world has. We've just come through the coldest, hardest part of winter: January into February, when trees explode and every living thing barely clings to life, when your breath freezes in your lungs and your face goes numb the second you step outside.

We're tired, but we aren't exhausted. And ahead--past the groaning ice--is the coming Spring. It's not quite here yet, and we're going to have to work hard to make it through, but on this day especially, you can feel that it might be true, that we are perched at the beginning of a new century, waiting to rise up out of the snow.

There is, of course, no reason to think about centuries having seasons. I've just been playing the oldest trick in the book on you, and myself: telling you a pretty story about how the sun is going to come back and there will be deer and blackberries and warm summer light again, here, in the dark and the cold and the ice. It's the oldest holiday tradition. Singing to keep the dark at bay.

But the sun does come back, and the world can get better. Spring is the sweetest season. Let's bring it.

December Wolves: Whys and Wherefores

2009-12-31T23:22:00.003-05:00

Title is stolen from the final trade paperback of Y: The Last Man. The ending caught me by surprise, but it was sweet nonetheless. I'm going over everything I did and didn't do with the December Wolves project. Consider it the pre-post-mortem.

The fact that I'm even doing this shows just how disorganized and uncommitted to the project I am when it was easy to be organized and committed to the project. I have 14 updates in the hole by 10:16 and I'm pumping out the final one less than 100 minutes before time is up. It's disappointing. But. We're here, so let's go over what went well and what went so horrifyingly wrong.

The comic book reviews/deconstructions/thoughts went well, I think. I'm no stranger to criticism, so that was a little bit in my comfort zone, but having to push myself to be critical of something completely different is a good exercise, intellectually. I had to think differently about how I looked at a piece of consumable media. Also, the YouTube experiment was fun.

With that, I also had to think differently about how my language needed work but also how to keep the viewer's attention. Without putting too much effort into video-blogging, putting together the YouTube clips sucked away a whole bunch of my time. My skills are very rudimentary, but thanks to intuitive and user-friendly software, I dived in and put something together. Ideally, I'd like them to be shorter, since six minutes plus is a long time to stare at anything without it being broken up somehow, but again that's a matter of time.

Time, not surprisingly, is something I didn't use well. Whether it was starting at eight or nine on the second day with a germ of an idea or completely missing a foundational aspect of the hate for Twilight's vampire resurgences, in a lot of cases, I didn't marshal my time effectively. I spent hours staring at the screen whether it was watching YouTube or other videos, but by the end of the night, felt like I was a good two thirds done, but too tired to continue, so I put up the update, promising I'll swing harder next time.

Usually, I didn't. Going back to that Twilight post, I felt like I should have been a lot more specific in my judgment about it and wasn't. And yes, I know with the internet I can go and change it and no one's gonna know, but it's cheating. I wrote what I wrote and published what I published. Maybe I'll add some clearly labeled edit markers. But that's in the future. The Phonogram video feels like I was just going DUDE A COMIC ABOUT MUSIC THAT'S TOTALLY AWESOMESAUCE. But then again, it's been 6, 7 days since I published it, so I hope history is kinder to it than I am now.

There was also some difficulty with the software, specifically in how it warped photos. One day it worked on a sliding scale so that I could perfectly scale it down to the pixel, how big I wanted the image to be. One day, (you can guess which one by the size and placement of the images) it just plopped the image down in the window with no ability to control size whatsoever. That can also be changed in the future.

I'm taking away from this project that I need to invest more time at the front end and stop, cold turkey, putting things off until I have a night clear. Maybe if it's as simple as 15 minutes, every 2 hours, write something in the box and see what happens, the posts will improve. But, I need to learn and master that discipline.

I don't think December Wolves failed, as a concept. As a project, I know it didn't, because there's 15 updates on the 31st. But only under a limited view did it succeed. I did put up 15 original posts in 31 days. And it was grueling, but only in spots and it could have been easier on me. My choices led me to do the December Wolves project. But I also made the choices of dicking around on YouTube or Giant Bomb when I could have been synthesizing my ideas better, writing, or editing what I already written.

We'll see what launches in 2010. I'm thinking one post every three days, but that's only a thought, I can't be held to it and the usual. Perhaps 2010 will be the year of discipline. But now, I'm going to ring in 2010 by going to sleep. May your intoxication be long and your hangovers brief. I'm out.

December Wolves: I Ain't Thinking Of Slowing Down

2009-12-31T22:55:00.005-05:00

Well, the year is almost up and I was concerned that I wasn't going to be able to make it to an internet portal to make good on my 15 by the 31st promise. With just one more to go and two hours to complete a look back, I think I can do it.

The title comes from the new Defeater record called Lost Ground. It's about a young African American soldier, before during and after World War II. It comes from the first song, called the Red, White and Blues. The narrator is spending his last night in town before deployment, goes to the cemetery to say goodbye to his mother, who was recently laid to rest and spends the rest of the time in the tavern drinking whiskey. He tells the bartender to keep pouring him shots, he's not slowing down.

So, five more things below. Happy New Year.

11. Having Seventy Times Seven sung for me in GFC. It felt really good to have a song played for me, at random. Seventy Times Seven being a Brand New song I never thought I'd hear live feels even better. It felt like a reward. In a strange way, from a group of people that I realized I intersected with but didn't know I made that kind of impact on. That realization, coupled with live music just made me smile at the end of the final semester. I felt satisfied.

12. Penny Bar. Despite my fear/avoidance around alcohol, it's nice to settle into a local bar and for 2009, the Penny Bar was it. Less a place than the people and the experiences inside it, the Penny Bar was an oasis of intoxication, available at a bargain basement price. Much of the rest is noise, blurs of Yuengling and generic, well-intentioned tomfoolery. One can't curse, which sounds bad, until you realize it weeds out the bad apples. Best drawback ever.

13. The End of a Year interview. The End of a Year Self Defense Family Force Five Iron Frenzy Band (okay, it's just End of a Year and they're changing their name to Self Defense Family, but work with me here...) is a group I only recently got into. They do some pretty hilarious youtube videos that I saw got almost no hits. I liked the cut of their jib, and finally sent some questions over to the band. I was expecting it to be in text format, but it turned out the guys went ahead and did it in the YouTube format. Hilariously, I was expected to be a chick, have Daisy Dukes and be attractive. That didn't work out well.

The questions were answered with unflinching honesty, with the self-deprecation and oddly specific answers. Also, they said nice things about me. There's nothing like hearing people you respect say good things about you to make you feel like you've made a couple good decisions in your life.

14. Joining Issue Oriented, the Millionaires post. I've been a fan of Ronen Kauffman's former band Zombie Apocalypse for a long time and I've also enjoyed the podcast he runs, Issue Oriented. So, when I got the text message saying "would you be interested in doing some blogging for us" I said yes before I could stop to say no. That's pretty cool. But what's even cooler is seeing something on the internet you know is wrong, saying it's wrong and actually realizing that after you wrote it you're still right and on the moral high ground.

Punk rock has seen worse than Millionaires and it will see worse than them in short order, I promise.

15. Gen Con. And internet on the megabus to GenCon. There aren't that many times when I feel like I'm in the definitive future. One time this year, stood out and that was going to Gen Con. Gen Con itself was three days, four nights of nerdery and alcohol, so that was pretty cool, but I really felt like I was in the future when I was getting internet access on my laptop while I was on the bus, in the middle of Indiana.

I'll repeat that. I had reliable internet access on a moving bus in the middle of Indiana. That's a huge step forward. Throw that in with finding out there was a cover of Bad Religion's 21st Century Digital Boy by Groove Coverage (oddly appropriate, right?) and by the end of the trip, I had a new song on my iPod, downloaded while I was on a moving bus just felt too cool for words.

December Wolves: All I Know Is I Hope That We're Better Than That

2009-12-31T01:34:00.002-05:00

The title comes from an ALL song called Better Than That. This post is obviously based on the fact that I'm not.

Okay. Jersey Shore.

First. I'm not Italian in any kind of meaningful quantity, so the use of guido as a term of endearment and solidarity is intriguing. I mean, the people (who are only a little bit older than me) are dumb enough to have no idea of the history of the word, but hey. It's their history and not mine.

Second. Seriously, these kids are dumb and self-absorbed.

Third. If I was being plied with vaguely attractive women, literally gallons of alcohol and a boring job (working at a tshirt store) with my crazy roomates, would I act that stupid? I've done really dumb shit when I was drinking. This is the time for them to do idiotic things. I did very dumb things this year and the difference between them and me is that I didn't have an MTV camera crew following me, I didn't spend an hour on my hair, I don't work out an eighth as much as they do. If i was there, what would I do? I'm not sure. I would probably have a complete mental break within two weeks after I realize that I am being watched as I urinate.

I mean, I read Hellboy books (the Library editions of them, anyway). I could fill a row of shelves with the books I own. My life would not be terribly interesting to film. But hell. These kids doesn't seem so bad. No, wait, I take that back. they do. They seem kind of stir-crazy, honestly. And when you add stir-craziness to a group of kids that never really grew up, it's not a good scene.

There's the Real World staples:
+The haughty, bitchy alpha girl that thrives on discord and assault.
+Dumb mooks of guys who make up for brains with brawn and chiseled bodies.
+One slightly self-aware girl.
+One completely pants-on-head crazy guy who gives himself a nickname.

Yeah, I'm going to have to back away from this now on the idea that I read books. Pretty much obsessively. All of that said, though. I'm scared of falling into the "well, thank God I'm not like them" trap. But really, I'm not quite as self-absorbed as those people, I hope, but I can sink to the same levels as them. I'm not as shallow, I hope, but then again, I've looked down girl's shirts and stared at butts. They're just being more straightforward and honest about it.

I just hope there's a difference between them and me that is more than one of degree, but that hope doesn't make it so.

Okay. Karl Rove.

I was excited when I heard that Karl Rove got a divorce. I shouldn't be. He hasn't done anything to me personally. He's good at what he does and what he does isn't nice. Okay, I'm being glib

again. But mostly, I disagree with the policies he proposed and the way he went about his business. Outing a CIA agent because her husband hammered the administration in a New York Times op-ed crosses the line.

But which line? I don't wish him dead. I just wish him out of his comfortable job. I wish him stop being so smug. I wish his life is harder, but intruding into his personal life seems like I'm going a bit far, even for a person whose actions I despise. And if I hate him this much then what's wrong with hoping his personal life disintegrates for everything he's done? I know the answer to that question, of course, because for whatever reason, I view the personal sphere as something sacred.

Then, he puts out a statement saying that he wants other people to respect his privacy. A call for privacy from a guy who sold out an undercover agent's identity for payback. Man, I want the jackals to hound him. I want some CNN 3 ring circus shit around his home and personal sphere. But no matter how poetic the justice sounds, it still doesn't feel like justice. It doesn't feel right. I want some blood from Rove for all he's done, but like this, it isn't justice. It's revenge. Justice is that the trail of evidence clearly and unambiguously catches up to Rove in a way that buries his political career.

I'll say this: Karl Rove, if you read this, I'm sorry for being happy that you got divorced. And I don't hope that there's a media circus around your divorce, but if there is, I'm not going to move to stop it or defend you, even with the slim patina of humanity.

What kills me is that it's probably more than you deserve.

December Wolves: This Is What You Wanted

2009-12-30T21:54:00.000-05:00

I came home exhausted from work and I want nothing more than to fall face first onto the bed 3 feet from me. It was mostly because I stayed up way too late last night to get different done. I made a statement, though, that I ought to stand by. Then again, I made it on Twitter, so I have to live up to it.

This is what I want. I want to write. But to get there, I have to do it for free. Often. So here I am. It's more the often. Without a deadline, I can pick endlessly at what I've already written instead of actually writing. So this one is about Christmas. It's a big enterprise (but not too big) in the household I'm in. And every year, it's the same deal. Christmas comes and I know that I have ironclad obligations to my parents.

And after a couple decades, that gets repetitive. I get annoyed, because it's so same-y. Year in, year out. Big dinner at home Christmas Eve, big dinner elsewhere Christmas Day. The Good Clothes. The Tree. The Stockings. Oh, God, The Presents. So, How Are You Doing This Year? The Tradition.

It's grating. But then, I hear that a couple friends of mine have lived without it and they actually find it cool that my family has traditions. And, since my parents are never gonna read this, I can say it: After hearing this, I almost kind of agree with them. Okay, yes, tradition and I have a pretty fractured relationship these days. And yes, it's inconvenient around the Christmas holiday to set a certain amount of daily real estate aside for something that only happens once a year and for a select group of people. But hey: This thing has been happening for more than two decades now so the fact that it goes on by its own inertia is pretty cool. On some level, that's what this website set out to be.

But the tradition in this case isn't cool because it's still around. There are plenty of things that are still around that are terrible. It allows friends to have something ironclad to gather around that's positive and is a safe space. And as I'm getting older (it being relative), I realize I want that more and more. Gifts or toys (books excepted, of course, because they're manna from heaven) are nice, but that's what I want more than anything: A chance to see my friends.

It's taken me a lot of nights of troubled sleep to realize that. And tomorrow, I will go to sleep in the same building as my grandparents and extended family. Yes, New Year's Eve will not be exciting, but it will be with the ones I love and now, I realize how valuable of a gift that is.

December Wolves: The Everything Else List Round 2

2009-12-30T00:01:00.006-05:00

More lists. I don't know if this is my price for lazing about on this stuff, but ending the wolves with lists feels somewhat defeating. Never fear, though. There's at least four more posts left and there's one non-list post in the can. Fifteen was the number I said I'd make and fifteen will be the number by 31st, whether by hook or crook.

I'll push the fear out of the way.

6. The way Kristian from Crime In Stereo's eyes lit up when he talked about his new record, I Was Describing You To Someone. Every band says their new record is their best before its been released, but the way Kristian seemed stoked about it (outside of the Metro) is something it's hard to find a parallel for. They clearly want these songs to be heard, blasted and compared explicitly to their previous material. That's rare and frankly magical.

7. Hearing and believing I'm an inspiration to other people. Hearing that those people believe my writing is "inspiring, interesting and intelligent" is very, very flattering, but even more flattering is that my writing inspired other people to write. Those words still make me blush a unflattering red.

8. Auto-Tune the News. I'm of a single mind on Auto-Tune the News. It has the emotional weight of a carrot, the depth of a dog's water dish and the nutritional value of a Slurpee. Then again, it's a full pop song about the month's news, fed through a vocoder and even had T-Pain guest on a song. From that perspective, it's a neat snippet of 2009. Yes, people mistake it for saying something politically, but you shouldn't hold that against the show.

9. Beating the final mission of Starcraft: Brood War without cheat codes. I've said repeatedly that Starcraft is a defining moment in my childhood and continuing growth, so putting the entire single player campaign to rest is a real accomplishment. I probably sunk an entire day into beating this mission with all the re-starts and save states, but frankly, I just ended up outlasting the computer and using the cheats of a walkthrough and constantly saving my progress.

It went like this: Take out the nuclear Terrans (with their fucking siege tanks) as fast as humanly possible, assimilate their base. Defend my base. Build up my force. Break off pieces of Battlecruiser/Valkyrie Terrans. Defend my base. Build up my force. Break off another piece of B/V Terran territory. Assimilate base. Defend my base. Rinse, repeat.

By the time I got around to the Protoss that had unfettered access to the bottom half of the map (and attacked me throughout the mission), it had run out of resources in its own base and it hadn't expanded. It's not quite the same as beating a human player, but the payoff of destroying three forces dead set on my destruction, that started off with nuclear weapons, Battlecruisers and a half-started 'Toss tech tree is still sweet.

10. Obama being sworn in. I cried and nearly ran out of my Oral Presentation class to make sure I caught whatever was left of the swearing in. Our long national nightmare was over, I texted. Finally, the feckless, thuggish era of Bush was done. And it hasn't been sunshine, gumdrops, rainbows and Candyland since, but that day, I felt hopeful and inspired. Yes, I would rather be lead by a President that got out of college and chose to do community organizing instead of a guy who coasted around on Daddy's money and ran businesses into the ground. I would rather have my country lead by a guy who taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago for a decade than a guy who couldn't be bothered to look into the details of his decisions.

Let me hedge my bets just a little. He's continuing some of the Bush policies that I find repugnant. Then again, Al-Qai'da tried to attack us Christmas Day and should have succeeded. Oddly enough, the reason why they didn't succeed was because what they got on the plane was incendiary than explosive and the passengers (!!) put it out. But then again, Al-Qai'da attacks are usually redundant, so there should have been someone else on that plane that had a bomb, but apparently, there wasn't. Strange. Suicide terror is crazy.

The short version is this: I sleep better knowing Obama is at the desk and not Bush and that inauguration was the day when it first felt real.

December Wolves: the Everything Else List

2009-12-28T01:40:00.000-05:00

For my other website, every year I do an end of year recap which includes a list of the CDs I enjoyed the most. In 2006 and 2007, it was a huge, sprawling, all-consuming thing that took up a couple weeks of my free time since I had to put everything down that I thought was important in there.

It ended up being 20+ pages on Word. 2008, I stepped back from that, but it was still a pretty long document and involved a week or so of prep and writing. This year, my list was done in sporadic, quixotic bursts, avoiding a numerical list while maintaining a year-end favorite (in this case, P.O.S.' Never Better) that I think is roughly 2,000 words and not nearly as many pages in a word doc. I think it communicates everything essential.

The list itself is little more than a time-capsule and a specific imprint of what I was listening to this year, warts and "terrible choices" and all. The music list hasn't gone up yet and I'm jonesing to get a year-end something out before 2010 hits. An idea struck me walking outside and suddenly another member of the pack is ready for it's close up. Here's a different time capsule for Eleven Names: The Everything Else list.

Since pastepunk is awesome and I already covered the recorded music I listened to, I had other, non-musical experiences that were great, but didn't fit the bill of the first list, the Everything Else list is a list of everything else I enjoyed, or a list of cool experiences, media and so on. It will continue through the 31st.

1. Batman and Robin. Grant Morrison doing Batman is one way I described it to the ARGO kids, but the title of the comic tells you exactly what it's about, even if it requires a little bit of deconstruction. The comic is about legacies of Batman and Robin and the people behind the cowl. The current Batman was previously a Robin. He is training a new Robin, the test-tube baby of Batman, while fighting another former Robin who

has turned into a villain.

All of this is happening while the upcoming plotline is that the new Batman is trying to revive the old Batman. It's about growing up, coming to grips with the new responsibilities with the hope that the actual Batman comes back soon. The new Robin (the test-tube baby) is precocious enough to believe that he ought to be Batman, so the current Batman (former Robin) is trying to hold it all together.

2. Graduating college. I have a nice plaque. Okay, but no seriously, it's an accomplishment that I'm proud of. At the very least, it's provided the spark of creativity for a good third of my posts here.

3. The ARGO column. I wrote a sweet column about growing out of college gracefully. It's one of the things that I go back to and sometimes think I'm a good writer or I'm at least making something universal personal and location specific. The fact that it resonated with people who weren't in the club was something that I worked very hard on and to have the audience recognize that was and is very reassuring.

4. Meeting Jordan. After three or four years of helping Jordan out with it, I managed to hop on a drive to D.C. for the sole and express purpose of meeting up with him. I've never met Adam or Aubin or Brian from punknews, so I've always felt like there was something missing from the last three, four years of our collaborations, so finally meeting him felt awesome and a capstone on an incredible academic ride.

5. End of college radio show. It's an excuse to play all my favorite songs that don't have vulgarities and giving two endings. This two endings part is incredibly important.

The first being the appropriate "things change, it's scary but we move on" song, sung by Vienna Teng, an attractive woman, playing the piano. It's a lullaby for a child being scared by the rain. Note perfect. The actual ending, a little more...ragged.

The first track was John Coulton's Still Alive, a little ARGO hoorah, which I'm sure you know and if you don't know it, learn.

The second was Thunder In the Night Forever by Planes Mistaken For Stars. It is the sonic embodiment of this picture. It is about taking the fight of your expression to the billboards and ideologies that have gouged your eyes and ruined your friends lives with velvet-lined promises of fame, purity and higher callings. The subtitle is We Ride to Fight! and it reflects its performers, a dirty, beautiful song. I think I like women like Planes songs, breathtakingly intelligent, frighteningly powerful and with a pretty edge and this song is one of Planes' defining works.

The third was Bane's Ante Up, a song with an opening drum tattoo made for the purpose of engender stage dives. It is a song about understanding that you have made mistakes and bad things have happened, but you have to get up and put yourself forward in a way that leaves you totally vulnerable and with all your chips in the balance.

Heavy-hearted hymns are my thing, and it's Bane that finds the light at the end of the tunnel without neglecting the fact that it's dark in that tunnel. What's the point of writing about overcoming if the hurdles aren't that high and you aren't stabbed during the marathon?

December Wolves: Phonogram

2009-12-25T01:04:00.004-05:00

More rough edits on a comic book. Recorded on Christmas morning, so merry Christmas, belatedly. I'm wearing a Crime In Stereo shirt. Expect more updates, a deluge of them, before the 31st.

December Wolves/Marathon: This Is Probably About You (4 of 13)

2009-12-21T02:33:00.006-05:00

Fourth in the Marathon series. Fourth on the record. This one and Jolly Roger hit a little too close to home, so I usually ended up skipping them, which was a mistake. The song, Don't Ask If This Is About You, is about the narrator going to a party, looking for a night or two of physical intimacy to get him through a rough period in his life.

Sound familiar?

Additionally, I'm way behind on December Wolves. Again. But, I got a kick in my ass in the form of an email and this came out of it. Number five, based on Home Is Where The Van Is, should be much easier, but then again, I said that about number four and it took me the better part of two months to come up with what's in front of you.

I guess I thought I'd write this about ex-girlfriends. Somehow, getting all of those emotions off my chest again I think would be easier. I have to admit things I've admitted before. But now, I just have to admit I'm an interloper at a college where I'm taking a class. Christ. I'm going to a nominally Catholic school and taking His name in vain there seemed appropriate. I have to admit that my plans aren't coming together quite as nicely as I'd like and I...I've...

I've checked out of college.

So, what am I doing going to the anime organization and thinking about hitting on these girls? I don't know if I've really checked out. I'd like to say I have, but it's not all that clear. I would like my life to be comfortable and one of those ways is college. But I feel skeezy, and even when I contribute something to that club, I still feel like a lecher, like it's their thing and I'm shoehorning myself into it.

I know what I need is a relationship and what I want, which is closer to my grasp, so I believe, is physical contact period. It's what I see in Don't Ask If This Is About You. There's a line, "sorry, I don't mean to be so old and drunk." It sums up perfectly my self-loathing feelings hanging around the kids I don't know watching anime. In short, the creepy old man.

I don't want to get too fatalistic, though. It might confirm a couple popular theories about me, spread by girls I have been linked with. I have nothing to prove to any of them. Not a single sexual partner. I have tried and failed. I have slept alone and I have slept with them. I've been scared of at least one and I've never woke up so refreshed when I opened my eyes and saw another one was still there.

And yes, while I'm coming close to a line, I'll say this: There will be no regurgitating of private, privileged information here. My feelings, though, are fair game. Theirs, less so. Less tellingly, if you want "the stories", you can go look for the entry where I am so paranoid, I see my ex-girlfriend's concern about me and dexterity with navigating gossip as the Russian mercenaries patrolling the newly captured Big Shell in Metal Gear Solid 2.

Shit gets unreal.

But where I'm breaking from the song is this: I'm willing to wait. I'm not taking anyone out I don't want to. There was a year (this one) where I looked for a year of "just getting me by" romantically. It didn't work. I was so fucking stupid. I a) didn't get laid that often and even if I did, b) it just reinforced how much sex and feelings are mixed up for me. I felt like an outsider in the anime group even when I was legitimately trying to be a part of it without the onus of boning.

I wanted someone to hold me to get me through. I was looking for that "just" moment. Maybe I'm being overly critical of myself. It wouldn't be the first time, certainly. But in "looking for someone to touch tonight", I allowed myself to disbelieve what a wise Italian woman told me. I let people down. I don't want to be leant a blanket by anyone I don't want to sleep with for months to come. I'll be alright. I can hold myself.

I have my own parallels. Specifically, Daredevil. He got fed up with corruption in NYC, pushed all his friends away, fought off 100 Yakuza stooges for three minutes until the FBI arrived and then he disappeared. His soon to be wife left him, serving him with an annulment and his life spiraled even further out of control. Black Widow (attractive Russian secret agent lady, redhead) showed up in his house, because her cover got broken and despite the near constant flirting from her, they didn't have sex. Why? He hadn't signed the annulment yet and he didn't ask his girlfriend to marry him under false pretenses.

If you're willing to swallow the pill of monogamy intellectually (which you don't have to), that kind of decision and control takes backbone. If not, well, you've probably stopped reading a while ago. I hope I can face the future with that kind of commitment and resolve. I'll let the future come when I wake up. But for now, no one's holding me when I sleep and the difference between 2009 and now is I'm choosing it this way. Breathe in. Breathe out. Survive. Now, to grit my teeth and make it through the year. Alternatively: Be awesome.

I think I'll choose awesome.

December Wolves:We Are So Fucking Witty

2009-12-16T00:32:00.004-05:00

Fuck nostalgia. I am alive in this moment and no other. Now, excuse me while I update my facebook status with that. This is another blog about how stupid and short-sighted I am.

Congratulations on complaining about reposting on a useless facebook group.

Really, I was moments away from commenting that on a thread but luckily, I realized I had nothing to say except berate other people on a thread for berating other people. Realizing this, I felt like a real winner.

It goes like this. One of the people is super catty about making sure there aren't reposts in a Facebook group with over 9000 pictures on it. So, she and this other guy (both friends of Eleven Names, by the way) constantly post on the thread that the picture is already here. Infuriatingly, they don't provide links. It's frustrating to have someone tell you it's already there and not have the courtesy of showing where.

But yes. Posting on a facebook thread and being smug about how people are wasting their time seems lie a bad way to go about the business of the entertainment in my life. It's not like I'm contributing anything. Snark is a vessel for showing how intelligent you believe yourself to be. And in a conversation where people are already getting out of hand, it's unwise.

Beyond that, it's more embarrassing for me that I was actively searching for that thread so I could look smarter. I had to look for that picture at work and then type something into that little text box and look for a way to put those people down. I should be bigger than that. I've been on the internet for a good decade of my life now and I'm reinforcing this tendency for replies and attention?

I'm a college graduate, man. I'm too old for shit like this. But I'm not, really, am I?

I want other people to see how intelligent I am, damn it! I want to be recognized, by the universe at large, I suppose. I reinforce this dumb cycle of hate with everyone "in before Person X says Y" or every witty comment I feel compelled to make. I know it's a larger part of the game of top dog, but for whatever reason, I'm hesitant to walk away from it. (I mean, I just love Courage Wolf!) It's one way of staying in touch. But reading it I just feel like I'm done.

That's it. Simply fed up and tired. This feeling might pass in the morning. I hope it does, but if I take nothing else from it, I guess I'm just going to try to leave positive messages or none at all. Hey, that sounds kind of familiar. What's old is new.

(And no, I'm not going to end the blog on that note. I've done that too many times before and by now that's one of my tropes. The other, in case you're wondering, is trying to connect myself to a larger idea.) Life is short and I should have better things to do than prance around on the internet showing off my presumed plumage. And if I don't, frankly, I ought to shut up and create them. So I'm going to go do that.

December Wolves: Avarice Wolf

2009-12-15T12:25:00.000-05:00

I don't know what happened. I thought I had a weekend to catch up and even get ahead on this promise and I couldn't find anything I wanted to write about. There's something about Jersey Shore in the archive, but it feels kind of toothless and it wasn't really begging to be written. I came back to a couple paragraphs I wrote after playing Borderlands with a very important friend of mine and it ended up going to an interesting place.

I mean, okay, self-flagellation on here isn't really a surprise. But I'd like to think I'm actually learning and this is proof of it. Anyway, have you heard of Courage Wolf? The title is a reverent nod of the head.

I'd like to confirm that Borderlands has reached Diablo 2 levels of addictiveness. A good friend of mine and I started playing at about 9:30 p.m. and didn't stop until 4:30 a.m. a couple weeks ago and that's an invigorating feeling that I haven't had in a very long time.

The alcohol didn't hurt. I've written a lot about my feelings around alcohol, but it felt right here. Here the alcohol was used as celebrating something, my friend being back from another college semester.

Borderlands is very, very addictive. Very, very fun. I don't care what the metacritic score is. It does what it does very well and even miles removed from the ability to play it, I'm still jonesing for the "shoot enemies and guns come out" mechanic, as popularized by Diablo 2. But I don't think I'll play it any time soon.

My computer can't run it and the cheapest console that can run it costs $200. Which means, I'm looking at $250 (at the very least, and that's not including the 10% tax that brings the purchase up to $275 , which means it's closer to $300 than I'd like.) Now all that said, I could ask for a PS3 for Christmas, but what's holding me back is the backlog of PS2 games I still haven't gotten through. Looking back on what I wrote around consumable media last Christmas, I think I'm in danger of losing that important "I've got what I've got and I'll get around to new stuff when I'm done with the old stuff" perspective that I had before.

Let me go down the list of things I haven't finished or gotten to that I wrote about in that post last year:

Videogames:

+Killzone and Odin Sphere (right) have been beaten. Odin Sphere I made sure I beat in the true ending way so there was no bullshit and I could say I was finished and didn't have to replay the game. In Killzone, I don't think there's different endings, so I feel like I got the core message of that game. The core message being shoot things that are hard to kill.

+Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 haven't been beaten. The difference between then and now is that I'm starting to play God of War 2 again and am a couple hours further than I was at the end of the school year.

Books:

+The War Within and But Is It Art have been finished. The War Within was pretty much devoured and imbibed in January, and But Is It Art was gifted to a friend's girlfriend who is currently a

n art major. So they're consumed and thought about and dispensed with, until I come back to them. (Which I don't, but that's another subject for writing. Do I really go through my "library"? I've got shelves of books, but I don't really pick through them, I look for something new.)

+The End of Faith, The Mystery of Capital and The Arab Predicament are all cluttering up a "I SWEAR I WILL GET TO THESE" shelf. The End Of Faith is one of those books that I feel uncomfortable even picking up since apparently atheism is getting pretty douchebaggy and I am nominally Catholic. But I bought it, so I ought to read it. The Mystery of Capital I haven't even seriously started. I'm maybe 10 pages into it. It's very far down on the list, behind oh God everything else. The Arab Predicament, I think I'm half finished with but have put down and now can't find in the web of music, other books and games that I need to finish.

+The Essential Rumi, however, is in my work satchel, so I'm three quarters finished with that and it's a peculiar book with wonderful poems about getting drunk and loving God and loving women and are you going to drink that wine, because if you're not, I will. It's a breath of fresh air. Hella refreshing.

(Yes, I used the phrase hella refreshing. I make squishy noises with the English language.)

Phew.

After all that, I'm still very far behind and that's from this time last year.

I have all these things to get through before I even begin to think about new games and books. My parents don't know what to get me for Christmas, and guess what I want: More books! I have lots of them and I am slowly finding the time to read them. But what I really want for Christmas is the ability to look forward in my life without losing sight of the great things I have in front of me.

Borderlands, then, is representative of all the things that are new and shiny in front of me and (as Visa and Chase are trying to point out) I can totally kind of afford them. I recognize that there is something inside me, whether native or not, I don't know, but certainly cultivated, that I want new things. Because the old things won't do. The graphics on the PS2 aren't as good as the PS3 graphics. I like David Aja's art more than I like Mike Mignola's on Hellboy, even in the library form, or whatever the excuse this week is.

Borderlands is indicative of moving towards the altar of moar (if I can blaspheme to have religious and 4chan imagery working side by side) and I'm ashamed to admit, I thought I wrote pretty definitively about that last year. I will get to Borderlands when I get to Borderlands. I will get to the Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus over Christmas, because that's at least one indulgence I'm allowing myself. But I'm taking everything else slow. No rest for the wicked, remember?

December Wolves: Let Me Get This Straight

2009-12-11T22:58:00.000-05:00

I know there's been a lot of comic book posts recently. One is because they're a big new status quo to talk about that can be done easily and they're done in a serialized format so it's easy to keep track of them and there's an entire month between issues to bounce ideas around.

So I'm going back to the world of politics, because that's...something I feel like I've neglected. I think it's just because these kind of posts are harder because I feel compelled to look for links as evidence. Or maybe I'm just tired and making excuses. Comics are new and shiny. Politics less so.

It's about Obama. It's about the expectations for Obama. It's about what the story about him is versus what he's actually doing. It's about everyone projecting something on Obama.

The Obama presidency is not producing rainbows and sunshine fast enough for the American people, so there's a bunch of douchebags running around asking where's the change. They don't take into account that the GOP, since being run out of office, has been blocking pretty much anything. How Bush got so much done was he helped guide the Republican Party towards ideological purity in this sad case, literally.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have to fix the economy, while being held to "fiscally responsible" budgets by a bunch of Republicans who spent money in the last eight years like it was going out of style. It's frustrating. The Republican suggestions to help pay down the debt and stimulate sales were more tax cuts. My response is: "cute, but no."

Obama was the candidate of change, not the candidate of pixie dust and hundred dollar bills growing on trees. Obama was the candidate of hope, not the candidate of telling the Blue Dog Democrats to shut the fuck up and vote the party line. It's frustrating that the narrative around Obama's candidacy was that he came in on wings of bullshit and promised a magic wand to fix America's problems in a way no one would disagree with.

This is not to say Democrats have been faultless. Pelosi rides into office citing ethical responsibility then looks the other way while Murtha and Rangel (Rangel was the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and Murtha was known widely as one of the most corrupt Senators around.) stuff their faces AND it comes out that Pelosi knew about the torture after she claimed what the CIA was doing was news to her. Let me repeat that faster, the new Speaker of the House lied on a core issue to her continued campaigning, which focused on ethical leadership.

This is not a little white lie. This is a lie about one of the bona fides. This is exactly the kind of behavior that Pelosi railed against the Republicans for and got into office on. While I'm railing against the Democrats, I'll pause here and say Keith Olbermann is a loudmouth toolbox, just as skeezy as the commentators he spews against. He may use bigger words, but the message is the same: EVIL. WRONG. RAGE.

Let me go back to those douchebags, though. It hasn't even been a year since Obama took office and already he's been called a magic negro, had policies that haven't even been voted on yet compared to Hitler's gas chambers and his eligibility to be president has been questioned based on gossip that sounds like it came straight from 4chan. And the worst part? All of those have been presided over by the Republican hierarchy. The "magic negro" song was made by Huckabee's national campaign manager who was, at the time, a frontrunner for the RNC chair, the gas chamber bit has been fanned by Michele Bachmann and Karl Rove, and the birth certificate bit...well, just Google GOP + birth certificate.

These people put too much on Obama, whether it's Democrats or Republicans. He's a liberal guy who is president in a country where the districts are gerrymandered, except for the ones that aren't, so there's a permanently entrenched groups of Senators/Representatives because they choose the boundaries of what districts they represent. And that's why the moderates are so scared, because they actually have a meaningful fight for their seats.

It's not like the people that disagreed with Obama went away after Obama was elected, for heaven's sake. These inspirational figures are supposed to be inspiring, not superhuman. They're supposed to make other people rise above. He doesn't make all the problems go away by existing as President. These figures are human. They make mistakes and they're subject to the whims of the American people. When was this forgotten?

I don't normally go for rant posts, but something about the righteousness of the groups arrayed against Obama mixed with their profound ignorance of what's actually written on the Constitution gets under my skin. No, tyranny is not people you don't agree with being in charge. Tyranny is a gun barrel in your mouth, a soldier living in your house and the people who disagree with the way things are going being disappeared after they register anything publicly.

(In short, ask any woman working minimum wage in Juarez.)

Ultimately, the person most at fault is myself. I'll explain: It's dishonest. It's politics. When did I, of all people, forget this?

December Wolves: Yes, Zach, I'm A Prude

2009-12-08T23:57:00.001-05:00

I've felt for a while now (40 hours) that White Boys On A Stage (Scumbag Reprise) would be an awesome song title, and since I don't have a band, I'll just use it here eventually. This one's about female characters in comics and what I contribute to if or when I choose to buy them. The title is me acknowledging the obvious.

I want to believe I'm clean on this one, but I'm not so sure.

All of this has been said before, over and over.

There's a new article that's making the rounds on iO9 on the old question of whether comic books have an anti-female agenda. It's got Freudian symbolism and an entirely too-reductive view of major flashpoints of Marvel history, so it's not like they're going for the win here. But that wasn't made me think.

Can female-centered comics sustain a meaningful audience without an assload of corporate backing or fanservice? Answer: No. Then again, can non-core titles survive without an assload of corporate backing and wacky bullshit? Unlikely. (See also: Iron Fist, Steel, Captain Britain, the Question, Catwoman or Luke Cage.) Also: Doesn't the dearth of Wolverine/X-Men titles Marvel puts out pretty much keep the lights on? Answer: Yes, writing books using characters the marketplace is interested in makes money.

Quickly, let's review female-centered comics I might be interested in. (From a major publisher, of course. Independent comics are a whole other cup of tea. I have a vague understanding of two universes. I will travel to others soon.)

I'm not buying Gotham City Sirens because I'm not sure what the fuck is going on with Paul Dini. Dini is not a dumb writer. He knows how to do female characters, as seen on his work in the animated Batman series. I had high hopes but the covers were pretty fanservice tops and I had no idea what was going on. Therefore, I didn't keep reading, which ended up being a good thing. Apparently #5 had Poison Ivy gave a cactus an orgasm and that's when I walk away.

Detective Comics (grandfathered in because of Batwoman) (do you see what I did there?) I buy the day it comes out. I am a good consumer, letting DC know that if they keep Greg Rucka writing a female character that's not bait for kidnapping or LOOK HUGE BOOBS and drawn by one of the most talented and imaginative artists in the medium, it will move units.

There's also Batgirl (right), which features Oracle and has a teenage girl putting on a costume with a bat on it and oh God, is this another high school "how am I going to divide up my time" comic? Maybe, not quite? There's an interesting B story about franchising a superhero name, which might be metacommentary on the universe the characters are set in, so this one seems inconsistent but worth keeping an eye on.

Cinderella I buy day and date. Am good consumer, especially because I talk about it publicly and keep the word of mouth going. I'm not entirely sure what to think about her open-shirted-ness for the first 10 pages. It seems just on the edge of plausible but possibly gratuitous. Then again, this is comics. She's not leaning down to pick something up on a panel, so it's a victory, just not a moral one.

Psylocke. I haven't read it or bought it. The covers are mad fanservice-y (see immediate right) and I feel awkward picking it up. Again, I don't want to support the trend of female characters in a thong or nonsense clothes, but the ongoing should be interesting. Female psychic ninja who'se British dumped into an Asian body. Given that the X-Men started out as an extremely political racial allegory, this title could be developed into some cool post-colonial stories. Put Fraction on it and the possibilities are endless. But it's only been two issues.

Ms. Marvel (getting canceled at issue #50, three issues away.) I'm late to this and I'm not sure if I should feel bad about that, but the Spiderman date issue was fun while not being unintelligent and the characters related to each other believably. Also, she's not fat, she just doesn't look like she has an unsuperheroic eating disorder. Go die.

Wonder Woman, the flagship DC character, should be a no-brainer, but honestly, I don't know where to begin with her. Start at the beginning, douchebag, is one answer, but I have trouble going back to the old drawing style. I'm a fan of color. I like Greg Rucka, so perhaps it would behoove me to pick up his Wonder Woman run and see where it goes.

I already buy two of these books, though. Is that enough? I have a limited amount of money and comics for me are not things I require to live and since I have not yet turned into a profitable enterprise, I'm loath to part with my hard earned money for something that I'm not reasonably sure about. I mean, hell, I still haven't picked up the new Lawrence Arms seven inch yet. But, if I want female ongoings that don't make me exasperated, then one of the best ways is to get into them when they're nascent.

I'm dancing around the question: Ought I to subsidize the books even when their quality hasn't been proven? It feels strange to be saying that explicitly. Look at Immortal Iron Fist. The main character was an Avenger and before that was in Daredevil and was a white dude doing white dude things, punching obviously bad people, getting laid and stopping HYDRA. That didn't last past the number 27, though if you throw in the one shots and Immortal Weapons issues, breaks 35. That comic was proven quality, even when Brubaker/Fraction left it and it got 11 issues.

I have other comics I can spend my money on items that I will actually enjoy, so I can vote with my dollar, but I'm not sure what my vote of no confidence in these series means to those publishers. Does buying Cinderella and Batwoman send a message to publishers that at least one segment of the marketplace will stand a female-fronted superhero book without fanservice being an integral portion of the ongoing, or just that the marketplace will tolerate spinoffs?

Does one person make much of a difference? Word of mouth helps, certainly. Can I reasonably stomach the parts that are meant to create and nurture a fanbase while the writers get their sea legs? Or, are these ongoings doomed to a small run to begin with and we ought to take what we can get? 20,000 people bought Iron Fist and Captain Britain at the end of their runs, so one person, numerically, shouldn't make a difference. That's a cop out, though.

It's a way to avoid saying the things that ought to be said. I'm not going to confuse that with talking shit on publishers, but I will say that if there is an ongoing with a female character I'm interested in (from a major publisher) that doesn't treat me and my pocketbook like a 15 year old kid, I will buy it as reliably, if not more so, as the other comics books I buy regularly.

I don't know if that's a major statement, enlightened self-interest or equal-ist. But it's what I've got and what I, as an attractive target audience (see left) am willing to commit to. And that might be the major statement in this piece.

December Wolves: From Fabletown With Love

2009-12-06T22:53:00.003-05:00

Nothing was coming yesterday or today and I'd bought Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #2 of 6 with the purpose of reviewing it for that other place which I don't currently want to name a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately, by the time their schedule and mine coincided, the review wouldn't be timely, so here is my "exclusive" review of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love #2 of 6.

This marks the first time cutting and pasting portions of multiple takes were made in one of these videos. Yep. Cutting edge of technology there. If you're wondering what the design of the shirt is, it's a Converge shirt, with art by their vocalist, Jake Bannon.

December Wolves: Not Howling At The New Moon

2009-12-04T23:14:00.005-05:00

Not much to say about this one. I don't hate Twilight and that's not damning with faint praise. I just haven't been around it, so the information about it seems fresh and peculiar. Plus, we've all been young and liked bad things in retrospect.

I saw a magazine cover that said Twilight must die. I disagree.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but I mean it. Hearing about vampires right out of an Abercrombie ad does not annoy or phase me. I do not go into a frothing rage over the Twilight series and given that I've LARPed using a Vampire: the Masquerade setting, I'd like to think I have some cachet when I say these things.

It's for a couple reasons.

One. I've organized my life in such a manner that I avoid a lot of infotainment being paraded as news, so I'm not remotely fed up with the apparent ubiquity of the off-brand vampire series.

But, because I specifically avoid being innundated with news I don't care about, I'm not annoyed at "emo vampires." Speaking of which, I am convinced motherfuckers using the word emo have no fucking idea what it means and the ought to shut their goddamn mouths. The movies, at best are checkered and are full of Young Attractive People, who are apparently making the Hollywood rounds like every other batch of starlets before them. But if your world is under siege by news of shit you don't care about, the most recent of which being emo vampires, perhaps you ought to move away from that world.

(My life is also not structured so much that a dubiously authentic take on vampires insults me, either.)

For heaven's sake, guys. It's not like pop culture was terribly interesting before Twilight showed up and sucked the fun out of it. "Lady" Gaga can only be in the news so often.

My interaction with Twilight and its fanbase is minimal, by design. Therefore, when I hear it being discussed, it's something that still has a bit of freshness. The good vampires shine in the daylight, like glitter? Okay. It sounds like Magical Love Gentleman took a tragic turn, but whatever.

Two. It's an introduction for young people to reading. I'm a pretty voracious reader, but my infatuation started with Asterix and those sappy teen Jedi books. The good of kids still getting excited about books, in this case is far more powerful to me than the ubiquity of Twilight related merchandise.

Three. It's an introduction for young people to vampires. Who knows how many people will pick up a Buffy DVD or watch an episode on Hulu (Shit guys, do you think it's a coincidence that Hulu is broadcasting the whole series, one season at a time right the fuck now?) OR pick up a more "core" vampire book? These things can't be discounted. Truth is, we all have to start somewhere and for most of us, our introductions were just as gloriously terrible, if not more so.

In this case, this is their time to get intrigued and learn more, if they so choose. For the people who are "supposed" to know better, I don't know what to tell you. There are worse things to enjoy, secretly.

Four. I've heard the books are terrible from people I trust so it's not like I'm going into this expecting a great book and getting disappointed. I'm not horrified that the series itself plays fast and loose with the core concepts of vampires while retaining the parts it likes.

Vampire lore (like fiction generally) is pretty incestuous. White Wolf may complain, but they stole from Anne Rice, who was cribbing off of Bram Stoker, who may have just been rewriting the rougher stories he heard about Vlad the Impaler, mixed with his own imagination while a lot of people in Dublin had leprosy.

Also, Countess Bathory. Holy shit, Countess Bathory. Just click the link and you'll see why I'm at a loss for words there.

Twilight's a bad book series (but not the worst thing to happen ever) that for reasons that baffle me is huge. It's annoying for now, but if in five or six years we see a sustained interest in Buffy, Dracula and non-mainstream modes of communication then I think all the glittery teens are worth it.

December Wolves: Thoughts on Detective Comics #859

2009-12-02T22:31:00.005-05:00

I said yesterday I was doing 15 posts in December, and here's the first of those 15. I've settled on the name December Wolves for the feature, because wolves roam in packs (there's a number of these updates coming down the pike) and also because one of the composers for d-beat overlords Trap Them, Brian Izzi, was previously in a band called December Wolves.

(Obviously, the Trap Them reference came to my mind first and I realized it was perfect, but probably needed further justification.) Since this is a detail oriented post, there's obvious spoilers, so if you're planning on being surprised by this Detective Comics run, you may want to move along now.

It's the details in Detective Comics #859 that make the issue sing.

This arc focuses on the path of Kate Kane to Batwoman. The first scene is set in West Point, where Kate is acquitting herself well and digging into the surroundings. She's the brigade XO and at the head of her class. She also happens to be kissing girls.

The West Point part showcases Kate's backbone, so you know how this going to end. And you'd be right. She gets kicked out of West Point. But how Rucka takes the reader there is not what you'd expect. I should have noticed it the first ten times I read the issue, but I wasn't focusing on the masthead. It lists another name, aside from the people in DC working on the comic. There's a special consultant on the issue. Daniel Choi.

That name should be vaguely familiar.

It's familiar because he's a discharged Arab linguist and Iraq War combat veteran for, yes, being gay. The masthead reads "Special Thanks to 1LT Daniel Choi (USMA 2003) For His Generous Assistance In Research For This Issue". And when viewed through this lens, the West Point portion comes into focus.

Every person granted a speaking role in West Point is viewed sympathetically. The commanding officer is trying to do Kate a solid. He's offering her an out, by taking her under his protection (by virtue of her exemplary service and his fondness for her parents) and using his fiat to kill the investigation. The other woman is never heard from again. There's no "this is why the poilcy is wrong" scene. There isn't preaching. The closest it comes is the look of disappointment on Kate's face when she does what she has to do.

(Also, I think Lt. Choi just joined the DCU, since the cadet that tells Kate the commanding officer wants to see her has a last name of Choi and Kate refers to him as Dan. I will see if I can get Rucka to confirm this.)

In her reply, she shows the backbone and purpose that will serve her as Batwoman, but also how much she truly believes in the community she's about to be kicked out of unceremoniously. Her reply is that if she said it was a joke or a misunderstanding, she'd be lying and cadets are trained not to do that or allow is to happen around them, so she refuses to say it.

She then goes the step further, saying directly to her superior officer that she's gay. She refuses the offer to hide under her CO's auspices, however well meaning and self-sacrificing it was and quits the service, just before graduation.

She wasn't just measuring up to the Army here, Rucka was showing us her measurements to wear a bat-symbol on her chest. Okay, she has the conviction.

But that only gets her so far, and as her proud father notes, that's not real far.

She is restless and has sex with the woman who would be the Question. (Note to Overkill readers: Mantle-passing is all part of the superhero genre. The previous Question died of lung cancer.)

Most stunning is her transformative experience with Batman. Or, perhaps not so transformative. He simply picks her up after she successfully fends off a mugger, yelling "Don't you know? I'm not a victim. I'm a soldier, god damn it!" What's worth mentioning is that Batman doesn't save her from shit. Bruce simply offers his hand after he surprises her so much that she loses her balance.

He just offers his hand. It's that act of kindness, but not much more. Batman doesn't even set the wheels in motion, he just kicks the machine to get it working. It's not so much an empowerment story via Batman, but just that Batman is a catalyst. That's what makes the story special. Batman didn't train her. There's no taking her under his wing. She's been trained. She knows what to do. She knows how to organize herself and she's doing it herself.

Next, I'll talk about the art, briefly, because it's pretty silly I think, to spend a lot of space describing what's going on when you can just look at it. I'll point a few things out and have that be the end of it.

J.H. Williams' III art leaps off the page, but again, it's the details. The panels on top of the page (below) are of the overarching story, but they're also done as Batman symbols, which is cool. But what takes it from cool to "I never thought of it, that's awesome" is the breaks between panels, starting off in red and ending up in purple, starting straight and veering off course, reacting to to the story it (literally!) delineates.

The rest of the issue is done in a muted, but warm tone which fits the backward looking nature of the run well, but isn't as interesting, since it's set in straight forward panel stuff. It's not as visually compelling. In these pages reproduced here, there's a lot visually going on, but it can immediately be made sense of.

The final touch is this: Batman, when he's shown in the flashback, is done in the modern style. I would say it's a hint at what's to come, but the character's name is Batwoman, so you know what's going to happen.

It's a great single issue not just because all the pieces themselves are good, but when they're put together, the attention to detail, both on the art and story side stand out. True, Rucka could just turn in the narrative equivalent of narrating Mr. Williams' pretty pictures, but Batwoman here is having her character defined as something textured, layered, distinct and very different from Bruce Wayne.

Batman with tits, she is not.

The art's fresh and the writing's fantastic. Last time I checked, this is why people buy comic books.

Farewell

2009-12-01T00:12:00.001-05:00

I haven't updated Eleven Names is a minute, so this is as good a reason as any. This was going into Overkill number seven, but apparently, they care, very much, about deadlines. The upshot is now that you get read the Overkill-quality piece without having to wait for the printshop and I can put in hyperlinks or make the piece as long, rambling and confessional as I want without worrying that I'm sharing too much.

Truth be told, I was uncomfortable admitting this much in Overkill, so it's probably for the better that I didn't get comfortable enough with the piece until after the deadline...

I miss GFC coffee. That's the topic Katrina picked for me, so here I am. Since graduation, I've had a lot of other coffee. The best, so far, is Starbucks. Potentially blasphemous, but it's true. For me, anyway. I don't know what makes GFC coffee so memorable. I'm tempted to say that it's the high quality beans, the blender or whatever the thing that turns the beans and hot water into coffee is called.

Maybe it's the cute baristas. But if that was true, then that would put tons of points into local coffee houses across Chicago, where any 20 something woman with thick glasses and a tired smile slings cups.

Maybe it's the hot chocolate mix that goes into 97% of the cups I pour myself. Almost certainly, the hot chocolate mix is the ingredient that makes coffee tolerable for me. And because of it, I can stomach the bitterness of coffee. I can ingest another drug. Maybe it's the whole straight-edge thing, that like Catholicism, never really goes away. It informs everything I see. It's a lens.

So. GFC coffee. What is it about the coffee that makes me think about it and miss it more than the Creative Crust or cookies from the Artist's Cup? This sounds like a copout, but I think it's all of these things and the clientele. I don't think of GFC coffee as the thing I pay $1.50 for, I think of GFC coffee as the atmosphere, the moments where I sip my coffee and curl up around it, move my nose towards the rim and drinks in the smell, the fumes clearing out my sinuses. GFC coffee is the pillows within arm's reach and talking to my friends.

GFC coffee is the smile on my face or the indignation on reading something in the New York Times that is Very Wrong And Ought To Be Recorded Somewhere.

And yet, I don't feel the same way about alcohol, yet I associate it with many of the same things. I associate it with the camraderie in the Penny Bar, the things it is unwise to tell my parents and the ancient, powerful urge to sing whenever I hear Sweet Caroline, even through the ringtone of the bitchy secretary in the office. The cute girls that seem to get cuter when Yuengling is consumed and everyone's hair is let down. Speaking of which, if anyone knows Bets...

In other news: These good feelings are all things I think about when I think of beer. And I know it's a lie.

I know that the only thing alcohol does is it makes me happier and then makes me feel everything 10 times more. I associate the alcohol with walking home alone, depressed and hopeless. I want to kiss girls, but (as Jawbreaker might say) I end up kissing the bottle.

So anyway. I'm drinking a beer at 8 p.m. in my parents apartment.

And if you want to know what being a graduate is like in these times: For me, it's not having a job, going through internships bleakly, kicking myself for not biting the bullet and going to the office and asking them for help with the next stage in the game of my life.

I need help is one of the hardest sentences in any language.

So here I am, putting my hands on a bottle of wine my parents own and when they're gone I'm wondering what I do with it. My fingers curl around the bottleneck, feeling the imitation wax around the bottle. It's red wine. Sophisticated, according to at least one ex-girlfriend. The more or less official drink of the World/Inferno Friendship Society and France. It's for lovers, lushes and "creative types." It is the closest thing that I have access to that can act as a muse.

The reflection of a writer/artist in alcohol is one of the most common romantic depictions of the type, for good reason. It exists because it's one of the ways to get out of your own head and be creative. It's traditional. It's easy. It works.

Plus, I'm no fun. There are glaciers warmer than me. I get more fun and ideas flow easier when liquor is involved. I get creative and less restrained. Besides, no is limiting, by its very nature.

I drum on the bottle with my index and middle finger. The wine glasses are just a counter top away. There's something to celebrate, right? Mom and Dad are in Hawaii, in advance of an anniversary that's a real milestone in anyone's life. Hell. This anniversary predates my life.

Relax, I tell myself. Just a little something. I'll write better. I sigh and understand, in an instant.

I already know what I do. I take my hands off the bottle, not because it's the right thing to do, but because I know where it leads and I don't have anywhere to walk to. It's no good for me. I have no one to walk home to. No cheerful roomates. My friends aren't a five minute walk away and always up here. There's not a couch to play Star Fox 64 on until I dry out.

There is no one a short walk away to air grievances with and I'm keeping company with a dark, quiet apartment. There is no point in escaping this way. I'll just come out of it realizing I'm alone in my parents' house. I haven't touched my Playstation in....months, now. My escapism currently is Hellboy and Immortal Iron Fist comics. They're fun. The secret about comic books is this: They're short stories for everyone. The suffocating pretense that usually goes with short story collections isn't there.

Also, the pictures are pretty.

The Immortal Iron Fist (left) is about family, in a roundabout way. Sure, there's kung-fu, HYDRA and mysticism, but it's about the friends who would go to the end of the earth for you and the ancient obligations that take you there. There's also a battle, in which the people the main character (Danny Rand) fought against join him to protect their home from destruction.

Comic books are also fun to read on the bus because it lets you know what people think of you immediately. Pulling out an issue on the ride home, the response is either a cautious interest, because they don't want other people to know, or never looking at you again.

I'm getting more used to the stares and the "I thought he was cute, but" sighs now.

It's a mouthful, but I'm told the kids want to see melodrama and I'm scared I'm just giving them what they want. I'm scared, like Tim Kasher, that I'm simply returning to writing about pain and bad things because it's easier than writing about other subjects and that melodrama is what brings people's (let's not mince words, your) attention.

This post is penance enough for admitting I am not a superhero, I think. The acknowledgment of my failures only goes so far before it turns into masochism and with all the pessimism here, I wonder if I'm still on the right side of the line. I know what it takes and I know that if I push myself, I've got it. The difference between hard and impossible, well, you know...

But, sometimes there's moments of clarity and joy in the post-graduate life. I got a text message out of the blue from one of my old roomates, now a sophomore, who says he's found an academic subject he's actually interested in, which is something that frightened him last year. This made my night. It made me smile.

I'm not in college any more and I don't want to be back in college. I'd like to be among my friends, who are in the area, which is an important distinction. I want to see them. I want to see what they're doing now and not have the pall of trying to get another grip on something that's gone.

As attractive as nostalgia is, I don't want to spend that time with those friends reliving the old days. I want to see what they're doing now, in this very moment. I want to be a part of that and not spend my time in a land filled with "remember when?"

And that's why I like GFC coffee so fondly. I remember it likely better than it tasted at the time, but whatever. I like GFC coffee because it represents a period of time, no longer than one hundred and forty seconds, that all I focused on was the warmth of the coffee next to my frigid body and frozen psyche.

But that's not really a note to end this on. Life is awesome. Really. I don't know exactly what's coming and that's exciting, I think. After a summer of being afraid of the future, the winter doesn't feel so bad. Looking back on it, it seems people like my writing when I'm truly engaged in what I'm writing about. That's a feeling I want to have. It's productive, but also affirming and uplifting.

Yes, I publish a lot, according to some people, but ultimately not enough for me. I ought to be updating every goddamn day. So, I'll make this announcement: Eleven Names (that is to say, me) is going on a spree in December. 15 (full length) posts by midnight New Year's Eve. There will not be fake "I've had this one done and have been waiting to publish it for months" posts. Just from now till December 31st, I'm going to write a lot. Starting today, I'm writing the column I've always wanted to have.

If I can do that, then I catapult from there to a regular posting schedule, I'm sure. And by the end of it, I'll really need some GFC coffee.

Eleven Names Strides Boldly Into 2008.

2009-11-27T21:43:00.005-05:00

This is me talking about comics with a camera recording it. There should probably be a script. There isn't. I should probably think about lighting. I didn't. I just went out (well, went in) and did. One of the things two writers said was important was having a real deadline and coming back out there swinging next time.

I promise I'll come out swinging next time. Whether there will be a script or not, I don't know. The one on the top has lesser production values, that is to say, I was using a point and shoot camera bought in 2005 to record the video. The one on bottom was done with the video camera in my laptop and thus has much higher quality in terms of visuals. That said, I didn't do as many takes, so it's not as cogently voiced as the first.

There will be more of these in the future. I can't be more specific because I can't see in the future and my physical writing about comics is for the moment, promised elsewhere that insists on things like content exclusivity. The beat goes on. This is just a way to keep that beat going at a faster pace.

Marathon: Pernicious Parting Gifts (3 of 13)

2009-10-31T14:17:00.005-04:00

I finally think I have somewhere to go with this one. I was reading a thread on Facebook that grew out of a bunch of ex-Eleven Names (Thomas, Cathleen) people talking about how, looking back, Disney movies were steeped in some pretty backward and scary thinking. The heroes, looking back, aren't so heroic and have been lionized in a way that obscures what they're doing.

The villains, more and more, start to look like they're the ones being wronged. The princesses have less and less control and are acting in ways that aren't so rebellious. And while I feel mad snarky (can I copyright that phrase?) watching the same people talk about "society" who criticize me listening to punk rock, I feel like..maybe Disney's the one getting the bum rap here.

Maybe we're putting too much on the back of something that's designed to give youngsters a primer on how to act in the culture we've created.

Also, I used the word youngsters. I'm proud of myself.

Then again, this kind of stuff is pernicious precisely because it comes under the radar and because it gets passed off as reasonable and normal. It's only by looking into it that we see what's going on under the surface. And it's that questioning that leads me to track three on the Marathon record, Some Lovely Parting Gifts, a song about all the lies taught as lessons to us, which lead to bad ways of thinking. All the things that taught us to think straight, of which Disney had to be one.

First, I'm not sure what I took from the Disney movies I saw as a child. I was influenced by other things also. I was influenced by books, video games and other movies, I think. So my learning doesn't stop with them. Im also unclear on the idea that kids took anything more from Disney than "other people say these things are good, so do good things," which is a lesson that's significantly larger than Disney.

That said, there's a good chance a number of early Disney movies are trojan horses bringing in other ideas with them that we don't recognize.

All of that says, those are still the tools that taught us to "think" straight. What did we win as a result of playing Disney's game?

And, is it fair or reasonable to ask Disney to create something that's meant to inspire people to do more when they're younger than 14? If, after you saw some Disney programming, did you as a child continue to absorb media? Books? Movies? Games? Did you fling yourself down that path as a result of seeing something there? I can only speak for myself, and while I don't remember Disney movies well, I know I watched a couple and I took a lot from them. Is it because I'm white, male and straight? Possibly? I don't know.

This begs the question: What did you (or I) do after we consumed Disney media? Did seeing Disney media lead you to consume more and more media until you learned things were not as pretty as they seemed? In other words: Did a Disney film or TV show foster a life-long love for things that have expanded your mind? Do they get credit for that? Do they deserve credit (for better or worse) for beyond that? Perhaps not, but that doesn't absolve them of the responsibilitiy to write something that's centered more carefully now. A lot of their now "classic" material was written sixty or seventy years ago so it's long since time to write different stories, more inclusive ones.

We grow, I think, when we're brought face to face with what came before and realized how far it is from what we believed. We change. We see more things. Those are the powerful moments in our lives, I think. It's only when we look into the mirror and realize, with horror the things that lurk behind what we took for granted that we grow.

We learn more sophisticated lessons as we get older. Life gets complicated and messy.

I don't want to say Disney is a necessary evil. But if it wasn't called Disney, it'd be called something else and be close enough to the same thing: Teaching kids the wrong right ways to go about living their lives.

In Some Lovely Parting Gifts, the focus is on the instruction of students and classrooms.

Disney is emblematic of the stains left on our psyches from childhood. They're a cheap tool to help kids make sense of the world around them. These tools leave impressions that looking at the Disney princesses reveal. We learn that the world is vast and frightening. In those moments of realization, we reach out for something. The song itself finds a kid running into a broom closet with words he's supposed memorize. I infer that to mean that he recognizes something is Very Wrong, but can't vocalize quite what it is yet.

Black mortarboard, a wooden ruler, and papers marked with A's The tools that taught me to think straight
In some schools, thinking the right way is done with carrots. In others, it's done with sticks. The A's, for thinking the same way as the teacher are the carrots. The wooden ruler (used in Catholic schools to beat pupils) are the sticks. Disney is a carrot. Cool things happen to people that do "good" actions.

We learn from Disney's instruction how to behave on a basic level. Some of these behavior patterns are unhealthy. Many of the lessons are suspect. But we get rewarded for them all the same. Our reward doesn't come in confetti falling and a game show host, but the rewards come all the same. Sometimes, it's getting into a conversation with someone that you have no affiliation with otherwise. It's a "oh, you watched Disney movies as a kid, too?"

Disney might be one of the grinning showmen in the center of Some Lovely Parting Gifts, the man who'se eyes we ought to watch. Are the eyes twinkling? If they are, do we even know what that means?

Remember when I talked about other things in the culture that surrounds us reinforcing what we've learned from Disney? Marathon has a line about that, too. Letters validate the tests numbers to see who'se the best.

To go pop culture on you: Twilight's a book series where the main character is being stalked by someone who is literally hundreds of years older than her and hangs around a high school. And this is romantic and not worthy of a restraining order and To Catch A Predator. Frankly, I view this is a particularly post-Disney story. If you want a story that justifies this kind of fantastical romance, look at Beauty and the Beast. The Beast is a semi-abusive misanthrope, to use Thomas' words.

The two stories share a basic premise: An innocent woman gets caught in the spell of a potential lover that while perhaps honestly loving her exhibits characteristics that have the potential for violent, non-proportionate response to "things that could make them angry."

Beast's behavior is being smoothed over by larger social forces calling it part of love. While the concern and desire to care for the partner may be authentic, the potential for spousal abuse remains and it's whitewashed.

We grow and we learn. In both cases, (whether it's the Facebook comment tree or Some Lovely Parting Gifts OR re-viewing Twilight or Disney) there's a bit of the horror of realization. I'm not sure I'm horrified. I just knew this before.

Strangely enough, I'm left with an appropriate pithy parting sentence: What's old is new.

It's Shxt Like This That Distances Me From Comics

2009-10-29T13:26:00.001-04:00

I know this isn't Marathon #3.

I wanted to write something that wasn't pastepunk stuff and the Marathon pieces take a lot out of me. It's something to knock out the cobwebs and get me off my intellectual butt. This is about...Necrosha. Necrosha is a story about reanimating the dead that got published today that isn't called Blackest Night.

There's a preview page of the Necrosha one-shot in the X-Men universe (from Marvel Comics) which took me out of the world the authors had created and brought me back, kicking and screaming to this one.

It's a shot of Selene, the Black Queen, an X-Men villianess. She's an important member of the Hellfire Club's inner circle and she's a powerful character. She's a 15,000 year old psychic vampire, for heaven's sake. She can grind people to dust with her mind or dominate them to her will. This is a woman with considerable powers and prowess of her own.

She's teaming up with some other death related villains to launch an attack on the X-Men, because she believes she can ascend to godhood for no adequately explored reason, but do villains really need reasons? Answer: No. It's usually better if they don't.

And yet, she's dressed up like an bondage model. That breaks the fiction for me. That pulls me out of the narrative. I don't feel like a reader when I see that. I feel like a target audience. I feel like I'm being titillated, insulted and kept on a leash to make sure I'm paying attention. Take a look at it yourself.

I feel like I'm being reminded that these designs are made to influence buyers. And yes, I know that her costume is based on an older costume, which is just as flattering. But this is 2009. We've learned, right? We don't have dress up the women in those kinds of outfits to get readers to understand the woman is meant to be alluring, destructive and nefarious. It's an image thing. It's her image. It's the image Marvel wants her to have.

The problem is that there's another image and that's Marvel's image of the buyers of which I am one. (That said, all of this could also be said for DC, at random, I could show you Green Lantern Corps #35, but that's tangential.) I recognize that this is an old argument. I recognize I'm profoundly new to this criticism that's been going on for a while now.

It's hard for me to believe that a woman who is 15,000 years old chooses to dress that scantily in on a cold night. I mean, okay, she's a vampire. That requires an abbreviated wardrobe, I grant, but the bondage theme is the straw (or tail) that broke the camel's back.

Maybe I'm just roid-raging. I felt like a kid again and the experience wasn't pleasant. For all the time I've invested in my understanding, all the different perspectives I've tried to wrap my mind around and all the fighting I've done with how I'm supposed to act, pages like this remind me that I'm still just viewed as a person to be insulted with "sultry" women.

I don't believe I'm unique in that I'm college graduate reading comics and am willing to try new universes and characters. Maybe I am. I'm going outside to take a walk and figure out how deeply I feel about this.

It makes me feel powerless and reminds me of the production of comics. The big fear in my mind is that I'm just naive. That of course these comics are aimed at dudes (used colloquially) that define the lowest common denominator. That the patina of storytelling is just that. That I'm putting too much intellectually on something that was never meant to carry it.

Maybe this feeling of being taken advantage of is in my head. I hope it is, but frankly, I never should have left the story in the first place and the fact that even after typing through this, the original problem still remains is the troubling part.

Issue Re-Oriented: I've Got a Chronic Defect In My Head.

2009-10-12T01:21:00.001-04:00

This is a new feature for a new year. I wrote a couple things for a fantastic website called Issue Oriented and I don't think it would hurt to reprint them here. This, the first of three, so far, is about identity politics, but in layman's terms: being a dude in the crowd and looking down the shirt of a female performer.

I may think too much. Or maybe not, but I don't know if that's for me to decide.

There's no dignified way to say this: I was looking down Sandra Malak's corset.

A bit of background, you say? Here we go. I was watching the World/Inferno Friendship Society (Check episode 20) perform in the Pittsburgh area earlier in 2009. Jack Terricloth and Co. were very clearly having a lot of fun, as the venue (Mr. Smalls) afforded them a rather sizable stage. About a third of the way through, I noticed, that the bassist (Mrs? Ms? Etc? Malak) of the nattily dressed band (guitarist Lucky Strano, excepted, who is contractually obligated to have a Disfear shirt on) was wearing a corset.

This is the World/Inferno Friendship Society, a raucously anachronistic band. Not a surprise, given that the men were wearing suits and ties. (And I mean real suits and ties, not a "punked out" skinny black tie.) I noticed it when she leaning down to yell the words back at the audience and my eyes slipped.

I looked down her corset.

My first reaction, aside from the neurological wiring, was "hey, that's a rather nice view".

My second reaction was "I shouldn't be doing this".

Here, now is the issue of identity politics.

(If now, you're thinking, James, this is a World/Inferno show, you're probably thinking too hard about this. Additionally, if you're thinking too hard at an Inferno show, you're dangerously close to missing the point. And you're probably right. But, on off chance I'm not thinking too hard, I continue.)

Of course, I wasn't thinking in those terms at the time. I was thinking about it in words a little more down to earth, like respect.

The voices in my head went like this:

My first question was: Am I respecting her as a member of World/Inferno and as a performer? She's playing, right now, music I like, in a band I'm pretty fond of. Choosing and I use that word carefully, since I had control of my body and my mind, does the performer a disservice. My gut check was swift and decisive. Really? A disservice? This is a grown-ass woman in a band who'se major themes tend to revolve around debauchery, alcoholism, drug abuse, dancing and chasing girls. I mean, the band is not Escape The Fate, by any means, but let's be honest: Ambiguity, allure and intrigue are three of the cards World/Inferno has been playing for a long time.

Okay, okay, but what the hell does drug use and alcoholism have to do with the possible objectification you may have engaged yourself in, I thought. Also, what about the themes of solidarity, status quo subversion and dissent generally? Those don't fit as easily into your casting of World/Inferno as a quote unquote crazy rock band.

The counter argument came pretty naturally. Point taken. That said, objectification? You peeked down her corset maybe five times over the course of an hour and a half, which she wore onstage, in a public place, where she knew she was going to be viewed. (This is distinct from the "she was asking for it" argument.) She's older than you, so odds are pretty good this is something she's thought about before, so saying she wouldn't know theoretically insults her intelligence. Also, you tended to avoid looking at her as soon as you realized what was up. Saying that you objectified her is hard to sustain on that basis. More to the point, do "serious" performers have to be without attractive hooks? Must performers be viewed without sexual appeal? That's a pretty white/protestant view of musicians and performers, isn't it?

Touche. Jack was making a big show out of the slit that broke his pants, terribly close to his crotch. And I acknowledge that viewing a performer as a person outside of gender or sexuality contributes to the current status quo. But, consider your epistemic position. You're a young white person watching a female onstage for pleasure. You, of all people, need to pay attention to those boundaries.

How was I looking at her, I thought? I was looking at her as the bass player in World/Inferno Friendship Society (a band who'se four studio full lengths I own, 3 on CD, 1 on vinyl) who made a choice in her wardrobe which possibly affords audience members a view of her cleavage, which may be more or less important to particular people in the crowd. Male gaze aside, this is a band that pays very close attention to how they look. It's reasonable for me to look, they want that attention and that's how they choose, gig in and gig out, to get it. It's likely part of an exaggerated, but calculated onstage persona, which, odds are, loosely match their offstage personalities. How they look is a huge part of their presentation. She's also a woman in a rock band, who wants have fun making music and make money. I'm a male fan. Do the math. That entire band plays up how they dress as part of their act, which, *gasp*, can be usefully monetized.

That said, I'm not sure I can prove any of that.

If you mean find a quote on the internet where she or someone from the band says, yeah we dress up because it's fun for us, it's a neat little shtick and it makes money, I haven't looked, so let's say no. But, I don't think the point can be usefully avoided. I'm at a concert, situated as a white male, watching a group of performers who are like me and it's reasonable to ask, I think, to what extent physical attractiveness plays a role in that performance. Dan Yemin takes off his shirt at Paint it Black shows, Trent Reznor has a fondness for tight black tshirts and (much love and respect for both bands) while I'm not quite the target audience, if I don't mind it there, why should I mind it here?

That said, I'm not sure those are equivocal. There's a power imbalance that you're not taking into account.

Bullshit and yeah, there's a power imbalance, it's not just that she appears to be female and I appear to be male, but that I'm a fan and she's a part of the band. Not everything can be reduced simply to white male dominance and a gaze from the relative safety of the crowd. It goes with the territory. It's more complicated and more nuanced than that, I think. Are we being used?

No, we're not being used, in that she's probably not thinking or vocalizing, "you know, I want the fans to pay attention to my breasts so they'll buy more tshirts." That doesn't make it okay and really, dude, you're impugning her integrity.

Okay. But more than that, am I over thinking this? Could I just be looking at an attractive woman onstage, that being the end of it and making the preceding pages an exercise in pretense and intellectual masturbation, like the guy in Propaghandi's Ladies Nite In Loserville?

Look over there! There's a cute girl 20 feet to our left. They're playing Brother Of the Mayor Of Bridgewater. We ought to dance with her.

Yes, we should.

And really, I got to feel uncomfortable around a different girl and that settled that argument for that night. But looking back on it, that doesn't end this questioning in my head. I don't have any answers, but maybe a couple provisional suggestions. (I find it kind of silly to be attempting to offer answers to the question it took me a couple pages to even get to and is still consuming me.)

1) Don't gawk.
2) Don't be a dick.
3) Really. That's all I've got.

Don't gawk is pretty obvious. That part really is about respect. Don't be a dick is a related point, which is don't take advantage of the exposure during the concert. My thoughts really come down to respect and being contrite. If I’m right, or at least looking in the right direction, then the “answer” is thinking of other people and looking beyond yourself, which is one of the big important lessons I should have internalized from punk years ago.

I guess there’s still more learning to do.

Marathon: I Don't Have A D&D Problem (2 of 13)

2009-10-07T01:32:00.000-04:00

Here is #2 in the 13 part series. You can listen to I Don't Have A Dancing Problem here. It's been a while since the last one, but life interferes.

I Don't Have A Dancing Problem is the song, and it's a midtempo song that usually picks up for the chorus ("fuck this, I'm going dancing") about doing something you enjoy despite what other people may see, say and think.

This song is about dancing and the thrill of letting go for a couple hours. The closest parallel I have is Dungeons and Dragons.

Both of them are done usually in low-light with some pretense of keeping it quiet, since the disapproving eyes are everywhere, if they knew what you were doing, as if there's better things to do. Much of person to person dancing, as I hear secondhand, is about the improvisation of two people, physically. D&D is also about improvisation, but it's mental. It's all held together by the Dungeon Master, but it's done in concert with the other actors (the other people at the table.)

The similarities...well, there's been days when I've lived for the end of the classes or beginning of the night when I'd get to play, throw dice and inhabit a world of the DM's making. It got to the point where I was doing my character sheet in a blacked out room with the lights off during one of my science classes.

From there, it spiraled. I'd do it in my spare time, between going to punk rock shows, writing for the other websites in my life and eventually it became a central part of my socializing activities. The hook was simple, I and a group of people I knew helped flesh out the DM's imagination and become entwined in the story he (and once, she) wanted to tell.

I began to mark my weekdays not by how close they were to weekends, but their proximity to D&D games. Unlike weekends, which had the unfortunate side effect of happening in a life that I had to put up with every day, the hours which I played D&D were a glorious escape into our rich fantasy lives. It's the fact that this is not a one-person thing, but something shared which makes it special. Yes, I can exist in a fiction, but when it's shared by a group, it makes it more precious.

(Yes, rich fantasy lives. This was last edited a month ago. A ghost in the machine, or memorializing its exorcism? Even I don't know.)

D&D was/is my escape, a covenant with strangers and their personas which may or may not be like the people outside the floor or table. They're both noisy social activities that are hard to coordinate for large groups of people.

"I'm not down with twelve steps unless you're showing me new moves," Aaron sings in the middle of the song, and I agree with him. There's a huge social stigma around D&D and it's one of those things that people have asked "Really really?" and I say yes. For better or for worse, I'm resistant to the view of Dungeons and Dragons as something that is supposed to ruin me. I don't want to get better or do more grownup things, like get drunk in public and hoot around women.

I tried my hardest to tell my parents that if they were going to get magazines at about 1/3rd the cost, I'd like to add Fast Company and GQ to the list and I couldn't do it with a straight face. (I opted for Wired and Mother Jones instead.) I'm not growing out of this.

I don't think I'm going for anyone's idea of a normal life. D&D is a symptom of this decision, but I've been strung up for all my life and now I finally feel relaxed in it. Whatever I make of my life next is my own work, leaving my fingerprint, my way.

Let's roll the dice.