iZombie

This adaptation of a comic book smooshes up a number of zombie elements, probably the most interesting of which is the intelligent zombie trying to fit into the world of warmies & balancing her divergent interests. It's on the CW so you know it will be good. No, seriously, since it doesn't have love lorn vampires, it might actually be fun. It does appear to have about every other damn cliche going on.
Debuts March 17

Super Assholes

So, a salesman was decompressing on the patio of a bar in a skyscraper in Chicago when this guy comes up to him, drink in hand, and strikes up a conversation with the salesman.
Guy - "hi, you from out of town?"
Salesman - "yeh, from Milwaukee. I'm here to see a client."
Guy - "Nice town, spent a month there one week"
Salesman - "uh, yeh…"
Guy - "y'know, this is kind of unique but, because of the updraft here, you can jump off the patio and the wind will catch you and bring you right back up."
Salesman - "heh, yeah, man, I'm not that drunk…"
Guy - "no, really, it's pretty fun. Here, hold my drink for a minute."
Salesman - "what? NO, don't do it!!"
The guy proceeds to climb over the railing & hop off the patio.
The salesman rushed to the railing & watched the guy's fall slow down & then stop & then he started to rise - coming back up to the patio and getting deposited on the patio.
The salesman stared in disbelief as he handed the guy his drink.
Guy - "dude, it's exhilarating, you should try it"
Salesman - "oh man, they're not going to believe this back home!"
The salesman went over the railing & off the patio, pulling out his iPhone to take a selfie of himself flying around Chicago.
He plummeted down & down & hit the roof of a car, crushing the roof & killing the people in the car.
The guy looked down over the railing & laughed at the carnage, horror & panic. Then he strolled over to the bar to get another drink.
Bartender - "Superman, you are a real asshole when you get drunk.."

In Defense of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. wishing they had had a V8A lot of people are ragging on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as an abysmal failure. While I don't think it's fantastic I do like it. Folks want it to be in the middle of the Marvel Universe, but
S.H.I.E.L.D. was always a huge global intelligence agency with many facets. Originally the comic book only focussed on the top dogs, kinda like Star Trek TOS. The enemies were usually cold war types like The Yellow Claw who could work today very nicely. This series focusses on a particular group within the organisation.
People dissatisfied with the series seem to want everything NOW. Go watch a Resident Evil movie for that. For a long running series to make it, it has to pace itself. Dark Angel was a good example of pacing going too fast (as well as boxing in the plot). OTOH, Firefly was a good example of the public's (and the bean counters) microscopic attention spans.
The thing is there's a lot to explore in the Marvel / S.H.I.E.L.D. universe.
Marvel will likely use this vehicle to promote their movies & other products in the future. Recent plots have referenced Asgard in conjunction with the recent release of the latest Thor movie. Fair Sif is slated for an appearance soon.
With new Avengers, X-Men, Spiderman, Ant Man, Captain America, and maybe a Doctor Strange with Johnny Depp heading for the big screen, there's lots of opportunity for the show to have crossovers. There's also a Daredevil series for TV in the works.
Daredevil will probably suck, however having MaTT Murdock provide counsel for or to sue the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. could be fun.
FWIW, the series was only slated for half a season but the network has picked up the second half.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Ohio State Assemblyman Louis Terhar has proposed legislation to advance secrecy in state business in an effort to "ensure public transparency". Terhar, is of course, the spouse of the state education board president who was recently outed for posting fallacious memes on faceBook like a drunken teenager. He was appointed to the seat of disgraced Assemblyman Robert Mecklenborg, who resigned after being arrested in Indiana for driving drunk & stoked to the gills with viagra using an invalid driver's license & in the company of a 20 something 'showgirl'. He hails from Green Township, long known for scandals ranging from HUD manipulation to the board of trustees bending over backwards & breaking their own rules to give patronage jobs to spouses of top Hamilton County GOP officials. Terhar was officially elected after his district was radically Gerrymandered redrawn. Coming from such a culture of corruption, Terhar's Orwellian logic makes perfect sense.
He is circulating a proposal to make it harder to find out about applicants for state jobs. He wants to conceal the details concerning people who would be paid with taxpayer money to attract "the best & brightest". Hiding the sub par qualifications of Jennifer Triantafilou would have saved Green Township a lot of problems. Covering up Robert Mecklenborg's arrest could have saved the leach face. I doubt Terhar would take a Dumbocrats word for it that no shenanigans would go on behind closed doors. No matter how well intentioned he is, and I doubt he is, our government needs to be transparent & his attempts at surreptitiousness should be aborted.

Fishwarp story here

NPR Discusses Fantasy World BuildingSaladin Ahmed talks about the popularity of fantasy world building & cites The Hobbit books at length.
This is what Stan Lee did with Marvel Comics (among other things) that catapulted Marvel sales over DC's in the 60s. DC figured it out & did the same, of course, later. It also explains the popularity of Fox News, I guess.
So, what I don't understand is, why the heck doesn't television do this? Once in a while there is a crossover but establishing a real universe where characters of one show are aware of characters & events in other shows & crossovers are more frequent and season finales are so interconnected the viewer HAS to keep the dial on ONE channel?
They'd clean up.

BATMAN @ WPAFB
The Batcave is in Dayton? Whuldathunkit?
This is pretty cool because what BATMAN produces is a lot like what Batman uses in the comics.
Check out Dayton Daily Noose, BATMAN labs makes gear that helps warfighters

BARSOOM !

I have accepted the fact that Hollywood is incapable of original thought. Remakes of remakes of adaptations seems to be the best they can do. That they don't even pick good crap to adapt.....
Hugo Chavez bringing up the topic of life on Mars on World Water Day made me think of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter on Mars pulp series & why the hell doesn't anybody do that on film (or pixels).
Lo & behold! A film adaptation is due in 2012 which will mark the 100th anniversary of the character's introduction to the pulp world.
It will probably suck but you would need today's special effects tech to do the story.

HT to The Pagan Temple for Chavez' latest lunacy.

To Sequel or not to Sequel
Is there really any need to tap into the Blade Runner universe again? Seems like a fairly generic thing if you just go off of the time period created by Philip K. Dick & Ridley Scott. If you drag characters out of the original story it would just be kind of sucky.
Anyway, that's what Alcon Entertainment wants to do. I say, save your money & make something on your own. Or try another franchise. Grendel is screaming for movie adaptations & could cover any number of worlds or settings.

Guardian story here.

Filling Voids

For Christmas, my nephew gave me the Weapon Brown comics. Weapon Brown is a satire pitting Peanuts characters against themselves & other comic strip characters in a dark, bleak post apocalyptic world. Picture Dilbert's boss garroting Mr Dithers, Peppermint Patty running a brothel & Charlie Brown, doomed to failure as a bitter cyborg bounty hunter.....
I don't read comics much anymore. Gave up on newspaper strips long long ago. When I moved from Springfield the Cincinnati papers didn't carry the strips I had followed my whole life & it was just too late to get into Rex Morgan & that hag, Mary Worth when I craved Dick Tracy & Bringing Up Father.
When I was a fully functioning human being with massive disposable income I was an avid comic book fan. Comic books are soap operas usually told on a monthly basis. Comic books are released on a weekly basis. I usually bought 10 - 15 comics a week. This meant that I had, at any given time, 40 - 50 long term plot lines banging around my head. When finding comics and poring over them got too difficult, I gave up.
I watch a bit of serialized TV. Supernatural is about the only current soap opera type series I watch. After that, I get series on DVD from mail order subscription service (Schlockbluster).
There's not as many storylines to be had & corporate TV, created by committees and accountants don't come near the creativity of the more monarchial comic book creators.
There are real live cartoon characters with their own ongoing soap operas to follow like Tom Luken, Chris Smitherman, Michelle Bachman, Alex Jones & Barry O. It's kind of scary that they are in real life and that some people actually consider them inspiring but people followed the Star Wars "force" and, if mainstream America saw the dedication of some of the fans of Grendel, they would be very very afraid.
So, thanks, Ted, for making me all depressed & nostalgic on a cold dreary winter day...
LOL

Top 10 Robo-Cyborg-Android Chicks

Because chicks that whir, click, buzz, beep & clank are just HOT!
If I really thought about it I would probably re-order these listings. If I was a Forbes editor I would throw darts in the dark.
#10

Tekla
Tekla from the Mainframe animated series Shadow Raiders Played a main role in the first episode & spent most of the rest of the series lying around circling the drain.



#9

Jocasta
Jocasta was created by Ultron who was created by Hank Pym (Goliath / Ant Man) using Janet van Dyne's (The Wasp & Hank Pym's wife) brain waves to be used to attack Pym. Pym re-programmed her & brought her back to life & she joined The Avengers only to turn on them when Ultron triggered her old programming with a remote control and and and
She was a Marvel character, what can I say?
I love the riveted garter!



#8

The Bionic Woman
The original - Lindsay Wagner. With her bionic legs & arm she could easily lift a small car. So why didn't her non bionic spine snap like a twig? Praise Wolverton.



#7

Motoko Kusanagi
From Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2, Motoko has to wrestle with her mechanical & personal sides while running around shooting bad guys and jumping off skyscrapers in teeming Japanese metropolises. YAY!



#6

The Mudd Twins
Harcourt Fenton Mudd lands on a planet full of androids & creates Alices 1-250 & 250 - 500 played by twins Alyce anh Rhae Andrece.



#5

Aphrodite IX
Aphrodite IX is an android hit woman who isn't too keen on her job & wrestles with her mechanical & personal sides while running around killing people & jumping through windows & such.



#4

7 of 9
The Borg chick who gets adopted by The Voyager crew & gradually becomes a regular Jane. While the Borg mantra was, "Resistance is futile", 7's was "I will not comply".



#3

The Machine Girl
The Machine Girl gets beaten and mutilated after her brother is killed by a gang & garage mechanics fit her up with a prosthetic gatling gun for her amputated forearm. Talk about lemonade outta lemons.



#2

Parody
The mother of all hot robot chicks, Rotwang globbed the features of Maria on her & messed her all up. Trivia tid - the actress who played Maria also played the robot.



#1

The Borg Queen
OK, I'll admit it, the whole cyborg / zombie thing just really works for me. Add in the interchangeable parts & it's like George Romero meets Eli Whitney.
And of course I have to tip my hat to all of H.R. Giger's crazy ass alien zombie robo mamas and Sorayama's scrawny chrome gynoids, too.

Bad Luck Wind Been Blowing On My Back

I like Samuel L. Jackson but, somehow, I just don't think he's really right. Still - beats the hell out of pretty boy David Hasselhoff.
Anyway, this 2 page spread was fairly typical of Jim Steranko's breakthrough work around 1967.
In this scene a group of politicians, military brass & other representatives of military industrial complex gather to see a LMD (Life Model Decoy) go through the paces in a S.H.I.E.L.D. equivalent of a "Danger Room" but, of course, the LMD is actually Colonel Nick Fury who has had his vocal cords paralyzed so he can impersonate an LMD whose purpose is to impersonate people and.....

Ohio SB 243

Thoth


Ohio Senate Bill 243 proposes ban on human-animal hybridizations.
Why?
Steve Buehrer (R Delta), introduced the legislation originally in a broad way that made no distinction between therapy for serious illness & handicaps and super hero breeding.
The use of these "hybrids" is due to the shortage of donated human eggs in doing "stem-cell" research that can help people with any number of crippling health problems. For more on the background, check out BioNews.
The bill has passed the Senate & is going to the House.
As a comic book / science fiction fan, my first thoughts are of characters like Spider-Man, who not a hybrid at birth, gained spider like powers after being bitten by a radio-active spider. One of my favorite characters along this line was Oedi, the cat man from the Dreadstar comics. A far off galactic empire created a race of cat men to blend the ferocious fighting skills, coordination & hunting ability of a cat with a human who could fit the uniform. The result? A race of hybrids who liked to sleep a lot. They later found that the beings could farm pretty well, too. Oedi's combat skills didn't manifest til the galactic empire slaughtered his wife.
How would our society deal with a culture of "sub-human" human constructs? This is famously explored in Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner.
Currently, most plans for these hybrids are to make therapeutic goo.
Try as I might, the only arguments I can find in favor of this legislation always grind down to religionist opinion. It invariably winds up with quoting Christian scripture & frequently citations of Ohio being a Christian state.
Ohio's Christian Taliban set is tittering with glee at the thought of kneecapping scientific & medical progress.
In pre-Christian days people had gods who were part goat, bull, elephant, ibis, jackal... Ma'at had wings. It differentiated them from the gods. There have been any number of hybrid creatures like centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, flying dragons & such frequently tasked with protecting us.

Ganesha


In Christian thought it is believed that God made man in his image. Hence the human form is something kind of sacred. It's this differentiation from other species that gave the Christian domain over everything else. You can see how this belief could be skewed to give European Christians dominion over sub-Saharan Africans, Indians & Asians practicing their own religions. You can see how it could lead to denying inter-racial marriage with a mindset that inter-racial = inter-species. Couple that with the concept of these sub-species being "soulless" & you got a real recipe for, well, everything bad in modern western civilization.
Do we need to perpetuate this?
If the Republicans who support this legislation were real libertarian, free marketers they would condemn it in a minute. What about the jobs that will be lost by hamstringing our research industry? Unfortunately, when sex is involved these clowns do a 180 & go all Stalin Hitler Taliban on us. Do we want these people legislating along religious lines and leave a group of people handicapped by disease only to then label them a burden on society and bemoan the tax dollars spent on warehousing them? Think they won't eventually come up with a Final Solution?
This is wrong headed and un-American legislation.
~ cheap shots deleted ~

Go on, you know you want to !
"SCARIEST living sensation of the CENTURY! An ABSOLUTE "MUST" if you get your kicks from the STRANGE and MYSTERIOUS' See 2 eerie botanical MONSTERS in 6 glowing colors, actually GROW real green "hair"!"
"In ADDITION to these TWO HAIR RAISING MONSTERS, we will send you a fantastic "ASTRONARIUM" greenhouse! This professional piece of equipment is disguised to look like a spooky SPACE GROTTO or CAVE, complete with 3-D spacemen figure: Looks JUST LIKE the SURFACE OF ANOTHER PLANET! Inside this Astronarium is a CONCEALED HYDROPONIC TANK"
"You ALSO get a CRYSTAL PLASlIC HYDRO-ABSORPTION UNIT which completes the CAPILLARY CYCLE OF LIFE which begins as soon as you plant a MONSTER!"

The Legacy

Springfield News Sun writer, Andrew McGinn, has published a graphic novel (big comic book) called The Legacy. The story lampoons the dry & sterile newspaper comics pages.
Kinda sounds like a good reason to not make a cartoon character a vampire.....
LeStat meets Maus?
whatever, Noose Son story here.

Is Monica Crowley Dawn ?

As far as I know the two have never been seen together. Joseph Michael Linsner and Crowley were both "born" in 1968. Coincidence ?
Monica Crowley and Dawn look similar. They part their hair on different sides & Crowley's mascara doesn't run like Dawn's.
Crowley has admitted to hiding the possible truth of her relation to the famous occultist, Aleister Crowley to Stephen Colbert on Halloween night no less.
In 1989 when Dawn was "born", Crowley claims to have been writing fan letters to disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon - a story so fantastic that it's incredulity isn't even questioned. Could it actually be that she had taken to her great grandfather's occult teachings, donned lingerie with skull pattern lace and, from hell, invaded Joseph Michael Linsner's dreams ?
Does Crowley's insistence on the rebith of a conservative Republican party not fit in line with the plot of this story? Does it not fit with her great grandfather's alchemical beliefs ?
Crowley has yet to confirm or deny the fact that she is a supernatural comic book character. She continually avoids the issue by talking about politics. Eventually McLaughlin will live up to his "hard hitting" reputation & corner Crowley on this issue.
I'll be waiting & watching.

Capitalizing on Our Comic Book Heritage

When asked why one would take a train between Clevo & Porkopolis & how would the line pay for itself, proponents say nothing pays for itself an opponents wail and compete to imagine greater and greater numbers for costs. Proponents cite sports & entertinment as reasons for travel, opponents curmudgeonly dismiss such prattle. If we play on our comic book heritage, we can create reasons to utilize the line and, perhaps, get corporate subsidies.
Cincinnati's Union Terminal, as most of you know, was based on the Justice League's Hall of Justice. Here, the League (Superfriends) plotted out their New World Order under illegal alien, Kal El (Superman). To the north, sunny Cleveland was the hometown of the 2 nerds who created Superman. Seems to me we could have memorials to the comic book characters in the corresponding stations & dedicate one of the trains to the DC characters. We could paint the cars bright primary colors & the conductors could wear super hero outfits. We could call that train The 3CDC. ok, maybe that name is in use.....
A room at Union Terminal with bronze statues of the League could greet travelers to the Queen City. We could hang some cables from the ceiling & tell people they hold Wonder Woman's invisible airplane. The cafeteria could sell sandwiches with names like The Manhunter. They could run Lenten specials on The Aquaman. The news stand could sell Time magazine & DC comics. A statue of a kid reading The Black Freighter could be placed nearby. News stand sales would be astronomical as people realize the scenic void between Washington Courthouse & Kent.
Cleveland could build a glass pyramid or something in honor of Joe & Jerry.

"It's not about where you were born. Or what powers you have. Or what you wear on your chest. ... It's about what you do... It's about action."
~Superman

Why I Like Comics

Slogging through Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis, this panel caught my eyeball. This is just the kind of graphic representation comics lend themselves to.

In Principle: The Unchecked Premise
For all you "Randians Without a Comic Book", here's a 4 page story by Steve Ditko.
Link
While I think the piece comes from a fairly paranoid, insular & impotent mindset (much like Peter Parker's (well, before he was bitten by a radioactive spider)), it is still an excellent example of the comic book format for making a political point.

Time Trouble

For your Sunday comics enjoyment, here is the rare Time Trouble comic by Minneapolis based cartoonist, animator, musician and scholar - Richard Gatten.
Time_Trouble.pdf

Frisch's is aiming for a younger customer base. Apparently their old customer base is dying from hypertension, diabetes, and other ailments. No, actually, they are probably pretty well preserved. Eating there every day might wind up saving money on embalming costs down the road.
One of the things I always loved about Big Boy was The Adventures of Big Boy Comics. The food is fine, this is where the chain should be looking to update their clientele.
The comic would feature a couple stories featuring Big Boy, Dolly and the pup, Nugget, some puzzles, games, jokes (so bad they were good (especially while stoned)), craft projects and a kids menu. The stories usually had some educational tidbit or focussed on some morality issue.
The concept was born in 1956 and creative chores were handled by Timely (which later became Marvel) comics with Stan Le and Bill Everett. I guess this made Big Boy a part of the Gay/Jewish Conspiracy.
riiiiiight......
Tying the comic to a website would be a good idea. They have a "Kids Corner", but there is room for a lot more integration. They have interviews, nowadays, with the likes of Brittney Spears and SpongeBob Squarepants. No reason they couldn't be expanding that to more serious people like Christine Todd Whitman. There would be less likelihood of the interviewee going haywire, like Spears.
More science and introductions to foreign language would be nice. Assuming the kid who is into comics would be into manga, an introduction to Japanese would fir real well.
Posting music files on heir website, allowing kids to manipulate ad jingles in software like GarageBand would be pretty cool.
They used to hook up pen pals. Heck, they could do that with a web based message board.
Anyway, suckin' the kids in should be a major goal. After that, the grown ups like the tradition.
Now if they could just bring back the car hop service, complete with clumsy waitresses who spill your milkshake all over the windshield of your car. Seriously, kids love that kind of thing.

Fishwrap story here (for now).