We the Robots

While I’m on the topic of cool new webcomics, do go check out We The Robots.

Portal a Feminist Game?

This link’s a bit old, but I just love the Freudian theory here. Heroine Sheik makes the case that Portal is a feminist/lesbian game:

We’re dealing with a reshaping of a highly masculine genre, the FPS. If that itself weren’t “queering” enough, there’s the whole holes issue. We’ve talked before about how the guns in first-person shooters act as phallic avatars—that is, as penises. But in a world of women, this gun doesn’t shoot bullets. It shoots orifices. Openings. Fine, vaginas. Vaginas you, a female character, have to enter/exit to solve puzzles. I don’t say this often, and almost never with so much support and enthusiasm, but that is so gay.

Stuff like this makes me so damn thankful I went to a liberal arts college.

The Superest

This might be the Link of the Month: The Superest. Artists Kevin Cornell and Matthew Sutter compete in a continually running game of My Team, Your Team. The rules are simple: Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat. Not only are the strip ideas mighty clever, the site itself is very nicely designed.

Update

A little background from Cornell, based on an idea from here.

See also: Layer Tennis.

Thanksgiving and Christmas Shopping

People tend to act like each year’s Christmas shopping season is the Worst One Yet, with America eternally in danger of dropping off a cliff into Total Commercialism. It’s an easy news story to write I guess. Pretend that this year it’s really bad and ignore that you wrote the same thing last year, but in fact it’s always been the case that Thanksgiving signaled the start of the Christmas shopping season, and stores have always tried to move that date up earlier in the year. From the FDR Presidential Library’s website, The Year We Had Two Thanksgivings:

At the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, Thanksgiving was not a fixed holiday; it was up to the President to issue a Thanksgiving Proclamation to announce what date the holiday would fall on. However, Thanksgiving was always the last Thursday in November because that was the day President Abraham Lincoln observed the holiday when he declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863. Franklin Roosevelt continued that tradition, but he soon found that tradition was difficult to keep in extreme circumstances such as the Great Depression. His first Thanksgiving in office, 1933, fell on November 30th, the last day of the month, because November had five Thursdays that year. Since statistics showed that most people did not do their Christmas shopping until after Thanksgiving, business leaders feared they would lose money, especially during the Depression, because there were only 24 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They asked Franklin Roosevelt to make Thanksgiving one week earlier. President Roosevelt ignored those concerns in 1933, but when Thanksgiving once again threatened to fall on the last day of November in 1939, FDR reconsidered the request and moved the date of Thanksgiving up one week. Thanksgiving 1939 would be held, President Roosevelt proclaimed, on November 23rd and not November 30th.

More stuff, including scans of primary sources, in the link.

20 Great Halloween Stories

Defective Yeti offers a list of twenty great Halloween stories. Of them, I’ve read only four: The Lottery, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Yellow Wallpaper. Humbling. I thought when it came to short fiction I was pretty well read.

Twin Peaks and My So-Called Life

There’s a new boxed set of Twin Peaks out on DVD. I already have both seasons, but this is the one to get if you don’t.

The Washington Post has a review of the set. It includes the original pilot for the first time in American release, which is important as the European version contains spoilers in the form of extra footage incorporated from later episodes in a bizarre attempt to make the pilot a self-contained movie. Here’s the best resource about the series I’ve found online, which helps explain some of the mythology in the series. Many people consider season two to be far inferior to earlier episodes. Either you’ve built up a love of the characters and you’ll enjoy it, or you can stop watching after episode 16. Personally I love it all the way through. Also, the movie, Fire Walk with Me, should only be watched once after you’ve finished the whole series.

Speaking of new releases of DVDs I already own, there’s a new collection of My So-Called Life out which includes a book with essays about the series by series creator Winnie Holzman as well as Joss Whedon, Janeane Garofalo, and Michele Byers. Here’s IGN’s review of the DVD.

Mac tip: scroll arrows at both ends of scroll bars

Open up Terminal (in Applications/Utilties) and type this in:

defaults write "Apple Global Domain" AppleScrollBarVariant DoubleBoth

It’ll place a pair of up/down buttons at both ends of your scroll bars, instead of just at one end.

Leopard vs. DivX

I encountered a small hiccup while upgrading to Mac OS 10.5: when I first started up after the upgrade, the Finder wouldn’t launch. Other programs would run, but I couldn’t get to my desktop or navigate to any files. Turns out that DivX was to blame. If you’re upgrading, delete your DivX player first and the file in /Library/Application Support. If you’ve already upgraded and the Finder just gives you a beachball, you can do a few things:

1. If you have another Mac and a Firewire cable handy, plug them together and reboot the affected Mac while holding T. This will restart the computer and mount its hard drive on your other Mac. Open up the disk and go to /Library/Application Support. Delete DivXNetworks or rename it DivXNetworks.prev. Unplug the Firewire cable, reboot your Mac, and you should be set.
2. If you don’t have another Mac, you’ll have to use the Terminal, which might be hard to get to without the Finder. If you already have it in your Dock or have it in a Stack you can just launch it. Otherwise, you might need to wait for Spotlight to index your drive, then search for “Terminal” and run it from there. Once in Terminal, type:

sudo mv "/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks" "/Library/Application Support/DivXNetworks.prev"

Then right-click/ctrl-click on the Finder and tell it to relaunch.

More info in this support thread.

Will Wright on Wii, PS3, XBOX 360

Will Wright, speaking about “next generation” gaming consoles:

Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I’ve seen is the Wii—the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement. Bu tht eWii [sic] feels like a major jump—not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that’s happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.

More in the short interview with Guardian Unlimited.

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Crohn's Disease

So there’s this thing called 24 Hour Comics Day that’s been going on for a few years. It’s like a Case Day, except instead of drinking 24 beers in a day, cartoonists draw a full 24-page comic in one day. Tom Humberstone’s entry this year is amazing. It’s about his daily battle with Crohn’s Disease. Check out Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Crohn’s Disease.

Pushing Daisies Extended

Pushing Daisies has received a full season order from ABC. It is, by leaps and bounds, by favorite new show of the season. I’m liking Journeyman, but Daisies is just so bizarre and whimsical. Two weeks ago it featured a mass grave for crash test dummies, last week a Chinese swordfighter with a southern drawl, and this week a musical number set to They Might Be Giants. Bestill my heart.

Pre-Calvin & Hobbes Bill Watterson Art

A neat collection of pre-Calvin & Hobbes Bill Watterson strips. See also: Bill Watterson’s Rarest.

Apple Removing AirDisk Time Machine Backups

Ars Technica reports that Apple has removed all mention of wireless backup support from their page on Time Machine. It used to read:

Effortless meets wireless.

With a hard disk connected to your AirPort Extreme Base Station, all the Macs in your house can use Time Machine to back up wirelessly. Simply select your AirPort Disk as the backup disk for each computer and the whole family can enjoy the benefits of Time Machine.

This is a shame. This is one of the things about 10.5 that I was thinking was going to be very neat. If you have a desktop computer, it’s easy to plug in an external drive for backups, but with a laptop, not as much. You have to plug it into the drive every once and a while and leave it awake so that it can run the backup, which eliminates the entire “set it and forget it” convenience that Time Machine was supposed to deliver. Reportedly wireless syncing was working in earlier builds, so it’s likely that Apple yanked the feature because it wasn’t working reliably. Posters on the Apple support boards think that a firmware update to the AirPort Extreme base stations will be able to make it work again. Until then I guess I’ll put off buying a backup drive.

Update

Walt Mossberg’s Wall Street Journal review states: While Time Machine can perform backups over a network, the backup destination can only be a hard disk connected to a Mac running Leopard. So if I plug a drive into my iMac, a MacBook on my wireless network can backup to it, but not if the drive is plugged right into the router? Or maybe I’m reading it wrong.

Update 2

So here’s the deal, apparently: AirDisk syncing doesn’t work. Apple made a few file system changes under 10.5 for Time Machine, so it’s possible that an update to the AirPort Extreme stations will fix this, but for now, you can’t do it. You can, however, plug an external drive into one of your computers, set it to share over your network in System Preferences, and then tell other machines to use that drive for Time Machine. Performance is probably slow, but once your initial backup finishes it won’t be syncing a whole lot of data with the periodic backups.

Google Adds IMAP Access to Gmail

After lagging behind Yahoo!, Google has added IMAP support to Gmail. This means that if you want to read your mail using a client like Thunderbird, Apple’s Mail, or MobileMail on the iPhone, any messages that you read on the client will be marked as read on Gmail’s web interface. It was annoying previously that whenever I opened up my email on my iPhone, all the mail that I’d already read during the day would pop up as new. Here’s the announcement from Google, and here’s a list of instructions on how to set it up. The iPhone gets its own page, and a video showing you how to set it up. There’s also a page explaining how they’ve translated Gmail’s Labels to IMAP folders. I don’t use labels too much—my mail needs are pretty simple—but this is a big deal because Gmail lets you apply multiple labels to the same message, while most mail systems tend to only allow a message be in one folder.

You can check to see if your account has had IMAP access turned on yet by going to Settings → Forwarding and POP. If it has a section for IMAP access, you’re set. If not, you’ll have to wait until Gmail upgrades your account. It doesn’t seem that Google Apps accounts have been upgraded. Mine hasn’t at least.

Update

Seems Google Apps accounts are being upgraded, too, so I’ll just have to wait until mine gets switched on. Also, you can reportedly use this to upload old mail to Gmail, if you have any stuff sitting around from other accounts.

Update 2

Here’s the post on the Gmail blog.

Update 3

My account’s active now. Here are some tips on how to set up your Drafts, Sent, and Trash folders to sync back to Gmail from Mail and MobileMail.

Lost Girls German Translation

Publisher Top Shelf has revealed that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay. I like the words she used. She didn’t, as has been reported, say that he is gay. She said she thought of him as gay. There’s a distinction there. After The Deathly Hallows came out she gave out a few ideas of what “happened” to the characters after the story ended. The thing is, she didn’t write them into the story, just like Dumbledore’s sexuality. Whatever happens between and after the pages is still open for you to read and imagine whatever you want. An aspect of postmodernism states that literary analysis goes beyond even the intentions of the author himself. Such-and-such is what she thinks happened to the characters, but by not writing it into canon she’s saying that your imagination is just as good as hers.

What's Wrong with The Office

Slate asks What’s wrong with _The Office, and correctly, I think, points to the hour-long format of the first few weeks. I’ve said this before, but comedy should be very compressed. Write an hour’s worth of jokes and then throw out the least funny half. A joke a minute is always preferable to one every other minute, or even a funny one and then a not funny one. The writing staff could easily be saving some of these subplots and germinating them into entire episodes. _Slate is dead wrong, though, in saying:

PB&J are a disappointment for those of us who saw the couple as a worthy successor to Ross and Rachel, NBC’s will-they-or-won’t-they couple of yore.

Friends was a great sitcom, but it’s as typical a sitcom as you can get. The Office is not a traditional sitcom. It has no laugh track, no three camera setup, and few easy double entendre jokes. The original BBC Office did the will-they-won’t-they plot perfectly with Tim and Dawn, and then wisely got them together after twelve episodes. Hollywood has a hard time grasping the concept that couples can be funny, too—and bad writing hasn’t helped over the years—but if any show can find humor in a steady couple, it’s The Office. They’re already doing it with Michael and Jan’s bizarre relationship.

On the topic, Rolling Stone provides a list of The 25 Greatest Moments from _The Office_. Good stuff, but 1) 25 moments? The show’s only been on three years, and the first season was a shortie; and 2) Dear God, they broke a “top 25” list down into five separate pages?

Holy Moley

Wow. Who knew?

COMIC URBAN LEGEND: Captain Marvel created and popularized the phrase, “Holy moley!”

STATUS: Apparently True

Interesting.

Should Generals Resign if Bush Orders an Attack on Iran?

Slate asks, Should generals resign if Bush orders an attack on Iran? It’s a thoughtful piece that goes into what options high-ranking officers really have if faced with terribly inadvisable orders. But it forgets the larger issue: Bush shouldn’t have the authority to attack Iran. That power—the power to declare war—rests with congress, per Article I Section 8 of the Constitution. Whether congress has the backbone to assert this against the president, or course, remains to be seen (or hopefully doesn’t). Certainly they didn’t when we invaded Iraq.

20 Hottest Women of the 90s

I link to this list not because I agree with all of the choices on it, nor because I feel my readers need me to pick out lists of hot girls, but because it’s interesting to see the legacy of the 90s begin to form. The 80s get Michael Jackson, Michael J. Fox, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Grunge is assured to be remembered as a big part of the 90s, but what else is going to make the cut? Anyway: The 20 Hottest Women of the 90’s.

Missing Page in 52 Week 18

I’ve been re-reading 52 over the past few weeks. Highlight so far:

My wife, who’s that chimp in the detective hat on the cover?

Me: Oh, that’s Detective Chimp.

God bless them for bringing back that ridiculous character in Day of Vengeance.

Anyway, there’s a page missing from Week 18, which came out in a recent interview with Greg Rucka (via LitG). Page five was yanked because it was too sexually explicit. In the story, Renee Montoya has had a bit of a relapse. As the series started she had left the Gotham City police force following the murder of her partner, and was spending most of her time drunk and reeling from her decision not to shoot the murderer. Last issue she had to shoot a suicide bomber, so she’s dealing with the conflicted feelings of guilt for killing a would-be mass murderer. So she’s gotten very, very drunk and picked up some girl in Kahndaq. (Despite not speaking the language. I guess they have easy-to-find lesbian bars?) Here is the inked page that was removed:

Click to embiggen. Slightly NSFW.

You can read the script for that page in this document, which I’ll excerpt here:

One: Caption (Vic): …and she’s defaulted to her standard coping mechanisms as a result.

Zalika: [Arabic]

Montoya (drunk): Okay, I’m drunk and all but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t English…

Two: Caption (Montoya): Irony is the universe’s way of saying you’re its bitch.

Zalika: [Arabic]

Montoya (drunk): Got no idea what y’just said, baby, but I love the way you say it.

Three: Caption (Montoya): I mean, what else can it be?

Zalika: [Arabic]

Caption (Montoya): Why else do the wrong people always end up dead?

Four: Caption (Montoya): I can kill a fourteen-year-old girl…

Zalika: [Arabic]

Caption (Montoya): …I can’t kill the bastard who murdered Crispus—

After this, sunlight bursts in, due to the fact that Black Adam has just crashed through the wall on the next page, which was published.

None of this is that crucial to the story. It flows fine with the page omitted, but that’s what was supposed to be there.

Two great resources, incidentally, if you’re reading 52, are JG Jones 52 Cover Blog, in which the cover artist shares his sketches and process for every cover, and Douglas Wolk’s 52 Pickup. It was written as the series was released, so some of it is guesswork, but there are lots of good references and annotations.

Release Date for Mac OS 10.5

Apple has officially announced that Mac OS 10.5 will be coming out on Friday, October 26. Here’s a list of 300 new features to be found in the upgrade. They’re also offering free delivery if you pre-order, and guaranteed delivery on the 26th. AppleInsider has been running a nice series on some of the new features that will be introduced. See: Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Finder, Dock, Spaces, and Time Machine, among others.

Don't Provide Your Email Password to Another Service

There’s a feature on some websites you might have seen recently. They offer to import your address book from a webmail service like Gmail and check to see which of your friends are already using their service. (Some will even spam your friends who aren’t without asking you, but that’s the subject for a whole different article on best practices.) This feature—asking for your Gmail, Hotmail, etc. password to check your address book—has become common practice on a lot of social network sites, and this is a very bad thing.

Don’t give out your email password to any third-party service, just like you wouldn’t ever give out your ATM PIN. It’s a bad idea, and it’s inappropriate of them to be asking for it. They’re asking you to trust their privacy policy, and they’re probably a new small company with no reputation you can look into. But even Facebook does this. With the login and password to your email account, any unscrupulous person with access to that data can very easily steal your identify by using the “I forgot my password” link on any other website where you have an account, quite possibly including your bank.

A new technology called OAuth has just made some news which will allow websites to share information like online address book contents without the need to swap passwords back and forth. This is exactly what’s needed, but it will take time for many services to evaluate and implement. Six Apart’s David Recordon wrote a good piece explaining OAuth. In the meantime, make it a practice never to type in your Gmail password anywhere but a Google site.

A Brief History of Captain America's Costume

Upon yesterday’s unveiling of the new Captain America’s costume, I remarked that most of the great iconic superhero costumes belong to DC. While Marvel has lots of great characters, few of them display the same design flair found in DC characters like Superman, Batman, Hawkman, The Flash, or Green Lantern. Primary colors, chest symbols. These are the staples of superhero costume design. None of the X-Men, in my opinion, have this sort of classic image. Spider-Man does, The Incredible Hulk, with his bare chest and purple pants does, and Captain America does. Designed by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in 1941, Captain America’s look has remained virtually unchanged ever since (though Steve Rogers has at times worn other costumes). The stars and stripes perfectly capture who he is.

Original Design

Here’s the “Cap punches Hitler” Jack Kirby cover to Captain America 1, courtesy Wikipedia:

Over time his mask grew into a cowl covering his neck, and the shield went from triangle to circle. Here’s Kirby’s famous cover to Avengers 4 (IBID):

John Cassaday’s cover to Captain America volume 4 number 1 plays up the “iconic” take (IBID):

One interesting thing I learned recently about Cap’s costume comes from Marvel editor Tom Brevoort. Stan Lee had a rule regarding how it was drawn:

The stripe directly below the center star on Captain Ameica’s [sic] costume is red. This was the way Cap’s costume was approached for the longest time— though, again, certain artists in recent years have done it differently. Similarly, Captain America was the one Marvel character who possessed a cleft chin.

Cassaday breaks that rule above.

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Ultimate Captain America

In March 2002, Marvel launched a book called The Ultimates. Part of their new “Ultimate” line, it featured a re-imagining of the Avengers, now cast as a government-sponsored superteam designed to combat the rising threat of supervillainy. Ultimate Captain America is here depicted as more of a soldier than a superhero. He’s often seen carrying a gun and substitutes his mask for a helmet. Designed by Bryan Hitch, his costume has a kevlar look to it rather than the chainmail design, his belt includes pouches for weapons and supplies, his boots are no longer cuffed, and his mask doesn’t have wings on it. Here’s Hitch’s cover to The Ultimates 11:

Ultimate Cap is sometimes drawn wearing olive drab pants instead of his combat uniform.

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The New Captain America

Captain America volume 5, written by Ed Brubaker and penciled by Steve Epting, has been one of the finest runs on the series in its 65 year history. This series featured the shocking death of Steve Rogers in number 25. Since then, the book has followed Cap’s supporting cast as they investigate and deal with his death. In 34, a new character will take up the mantle, wearing a new costume designed by Alex Ross. Brubaker hasn’t said who it will be, but the look of the costume portends a rougher, more militant Cap, possibly similar to the version seen in The Ultimates. The new version incorporates a chrome finish, lots of black, and adds a triangular motif to the character’s chest reminiscent of the original shield carried by Rogers. Here is Ross’s cover to Captain America 34, from Marvel’s PR site:

And here is the cover to the same issue drawn by regular series artist Epting:

Here are some sketches by Ross:

It’s actually a pretty good design, but it feels like pulling on the Lone Ranger’s mask, the original Kirby/Simon costume being so perfect. The bright top set against the dark bottom is a striking contrast, but could end up looking top-heavy. We’ll have to see how it looks in the book to really be able to tell. I do like the visual of this new Cap with a pistol in one hand and a shield in the other. There’s some stuff from Brubaker and Ross in the above-linked article on Marvel.com, and Newsarama has posted an interview as well.

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Bucky Barnes

Captain America, in his World War II stories, had a sidekick named Bucky Barnes. Bucky’s costume is no where near as memorable as his mentor’s, but it was a nice contrast to Cap’s, using blue and red but containing no white nor any symbols. Bucky didn’t appear much after the mid-50s, and in Avengers it was announced retroactively that he had been killed at the end of WWII. Sixty- five years later it would inspire one of Marvel’s best new character designs, and Bucky himself would be brought back to life. Here is the classic Bucky, as drawn by Eric Wright on the cover of the Captain America 65th Anniversary Special (via Wikipedia):

Brubaker and Epting brought Bucky back to life as the Winter Soldier a few years ago, revealed to have been brainwashed and forced to work as an assassin since his apparent death. His look isn’t anything terribly fresh, but he’s designed to look badass and stealthy, and the design accomplishes this nicely. He retains the domino mask from his original outfit, picks up a bionic arm with a Russian star on it, and carries large rifles (IBID):

In 2005, to great confusion from the fans, Marvel announced a new titled called Young Avengers. It seemed to be a very DC Comics idea: a team of seeming sidekicks dressed like established characters. In execution, however, defied expectations and was one of Marvel’s best books of the year. Patriot, the leader of the group, appeared to be styled after Captain America and Bucky Barnes, though his actual origin is tied to the Truth: Red, White, and Black miniseries which revealed that the US Army had experimented on black soldiers before turning Steve Rogers into Captain America. Patriot is the grandson of the only surviving member of these experiments. Here Jim Cheung’s cover to Young Avengers Special 1:

I absolutely love Cheung’s design. Patriot’s costume invokes some of Bucky’s image, namely the jacket and domino mask, but has an embossed diamond pattern that recalls the chainmail on Captain America’s uniform. Patriot carries Captain America’s original shield, and also uses throwing stars. Sadly writer Allan Heinberg has been too busy with his day job writing television to do another run on Young Avengers.

New Costume for Captain America

Marvel has unveiled a new costume for Captain America designed by Alex Ross, set to debut in number 34. It will be someone new wearing the costume. An easy guess would be Bucky Barnes, but I’m kind of hoping for a new character entirely, Kyle Rayner style. As for the costume, I’m not wild about it. The black fits the darker concept of him carrying a gun like a soldier, but Captain America’s costume was one of the truly great, iconic costumes, most of which are worn by DC characters. I’m very glad he kept the round shield, but I wouldn’t have been sad to see the cuffed boots go.

Here’s an interview with designed Alex Ross and Cap writer Ed Brubaker.

Comcast TiVo part 500

Reuters reports that, though behind schedule, Comcast customers will be able to get boxes running TiVo software any time now. My hope is that in another year or two I’ll be able to rent a dual-tuner HDTV box from Comcast, rather than buy a box from TiVo and pay them for monthly service on top of my cable bill. Until then, I’m sticking to my standard TV setup.

New York Film Festival Panel About Superheroes

The New Yorker Festival hosted a panel this week about Superheroes, featuring Mike Mignola, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Kring, and Grant Morrison. Comic Book Resources has a writeup of the discussion. Interesting tidbits: Morrison is working on a second volume of Seaguy, seemingly despite initial word from Vertigo that it didn’t sell well enough to merit a sequel. Kring said, which I’d heard before, that he’s mostly intentionally ignorant of superhero comics so that Heroes wouldn’t be derivative. This is, I think, a huge mistake. It’s what makes Heroes a failing attempt to do what it’s trying to do. It needn’t make any reference at all to comics, but it misses opportunities all over the place that it wouldn’t in more informed hands.

RSS Feed for Exploding Dog

explodingdog seems to have recently added an RSS feed. fantastic

Telegraph Interview With Alan Moore About Lost Girls

The Telegraph’s Susanna Clarke interviews Alan Moore about Lost Girls, which I’m currently re-reading, and magic and a few other things.

Faith's Surname

Faith’s surname on Buffy is “Lehane”. It was never used on the series, but Whedon had to make it up for merchandising. Also, “five by five” is an expression used over radio to indicate that the message is “loud and clear”. The first number, on a scale of one to five, represents signal strength; the second: signal clarity.

Michael Turner's Cover to Fantastic Four 550

Compare:

Tom Brevoort, recounting a rule Stan Lee had at Marvel:

Reed doesn’t stretch his neck. This one’s been largely abandoned over the last ten years, but it was a guiding principle for Mister Fantastic for decades. As a more serious, intellectually-minded individual than other stretchy heroes such as Plastic Man or the Elongated Man, it was felt that having Reed stretch his neck (or his eyeballs, or his ears, etc.) would look too undignified.

Michael Turner’s eyesore cover to Fantastic Four 550.

Teaser Trailer for Wall-E

Pixar’s put out a teaser trailer for Wall-E, their summer 2008 release.

Flex Mentallo

In 1996, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely published a four-issue spin-off of the acclaimed Doom Patrol called Flex Mentallo. The issues have never been reprinted and haven’t been collected in a trade paperback. You can find them for sale on eBay and on 4 Color Heroes, but it’ll cost you $50-$100 for the whole series. As such, I’ve never read it, but everything I’ve heard about the book has convinced me that it’s the finest work from one of the best writer/artist teams working today. Of Flex Mentallo, Bill Reed says, I avow the series to be the greatest comic book ever made—the holy grail of the medium.

Describing what it’s about is, I understand, a rather tricky enterprise. Every description I’ve read takes up many printed pages, and that’s just summarizing the key plot points and how they inform the greater points Morrison is trying to make. Greg Burgas writes about it at length at Comic Book Resources, but beware of spoilers. More from the same site here. If you do find a copy, Jason Craft did a finely detailed set of annotations. Anyway, the premise is that Flex Mentallo is a comic book character (in the comic) who learns that all comic book characters used to in fact be real but, to avoid a villain, created a new world in which they were fictitious, which is our real world. As you can guess, there’s a ton of post-modern stuff going on their, with a mixing of mediums and questions about authorial intent, imagined worlds, and so forth. Each issue is based on a different era of comics, with a cover parodying that era, from the Golden Age to the Silver Age to the grim and gritty 80s to the conclusion, Morrison’s thesis on where the medium is (or should be) headed.

Flex himself is a simulacrum of Charles Atlas, “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man”, a body-builder who founded his own gym and fitness program in the 20s. He’d run ads in comic books selling his workout program, promising to help weak boys bulk up so they could get girls. Gene Kannenberg Jr. wrote a piece for MSNBC about these called The Ad That Made an Icon Out of Mac, in which he discusses why they were so effective and how widely known and parodied they become. Atlas’s website has a collection of the classic ads.

There’s little doubt that Flex’s physique and leopard-print briefs come directly from Atlas’s own physical appearance, and his origin, printed in an issue of Doom Patrol, is a direct parody of “Mac” from the most famous of the cartoons. This likeness lead to a lawsuit by Charles Atlas’s company. The case was thrown out, on the basis that the Flex Mentallo is a valid First Amendment-protected parody, but my understanding (though I can find no source for it), is that a settlement between the two companies exists such that DC will give a portion of any of Flex’s proceeds to Charles Atlas. Because of the legal issue, DC has never reprinted the book.

There is hope, fortunately. DC has solicited a publication of the last volume of Morrison’s Doom Patrol, showing at least some interest in completing their collections of Morrison’s earlier work for the company, to go along with the Animal Man trades already out. I gather that a Flex trade would have to sell pretty well to make enough money for DC after their payout to Atlas. Rumor is that if Doom Patrol proves successful and demonstrates an interest in Morrison’s stuff, DC will reprint Flex Mentallo, but of course that’s not an official stance. In the meantime, you can read Morrison and Quitely’s current project, the excellent All Star Superman, or dine on some ultra-violence with 2004’s We3.