Dave's Long Box

New blog! Same stale jokes! www.societyofdave.com is live!

2008-12-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

Come visit my new blog, The Society for the Advancement of Dave.

It's from the same people who brought you the award-winning Dave's Long Box - namely, me. We'll be chatting about comics, movies, books, how much I want to destroy Chris Sims, and anything pop cultural or otherwise that interests me - and hopefully you.

Hopefully you'll enjoy it. Stop by, kick your shoes off, and sit a spell. I promise to keep my hands to myself.

-Dave Campbell

Closing time!

2008-04-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

While all good things must come to an end, all lame things must end as well, so it is with a heavy heart that I am closing the doors on Dave’s Long Box.

As many of you know, I’m busy with my full-time job blogging for my corporate masters at Live From L.A. on ABC.com. The demands of my regular job, family, and my career as a nude model for macramé classes has really cut into my ability to update Dave’s Long Box as much as I’d like. Heck, even before I got the ABC gig things were starting to get slack around here. So instead of keeping this blog on life support and pain medication, I’ve decided to end things now before things get more pathetic than they already are. I have plans for another blog that I will unveil at the end of this post after making you read through all the people I want to thank.

It’s been a hell of a lot of fun and I have a lot of people to thank – so let’s get to it.

I first started blogging because of the example set forth by three guys: Graeme MacMillan of the dearly departed Fanboy Rampage, Mike Sterling of Mike Sterling’s Progressive Ruin, and the enigmatic Neilalien of, well… Neilalien. Their blogs couldn’t have been more different, but they were always well-written and thought provoking and offered up an example of how blogs could be a uniquely personal reflection of one’s passions. I want to thank you guys for inspiring Dave’s Long Box and for being so flat-out awesome. At the risk of sounding corny, your work has really made a positive impact on my life and I salute you, Ric Flair-style. Woo!

I also want to thank Kevin Church of Beaucoupkevin.com – where is that Norm Breyfoggle original art that you promised me, Church? Much thanks to “Bitter” Andrew of Armagideon Time, Dorian from Postmodernbarney, Bully the little stuffed bull, and the Legomancer himself Dave Lartigue – all masters of their craft. I also want to thank Ragnell from The Written World, Dr. Scott from Polite Dissent, Ken Lowery from Ringwood and kenlowery.com, and Metrokitty for being their rad selves. As far as group blogs go, big love for The Savage Critics, When Fangirls Attack, Blogzarro, Superfrankenstein, and the late Listen to Us, We’re Right, who usually were. Thanks and praise go to Scipio over at The Absorbascon and Big Monkey Comics for being such a swell guy and for keeping the Vibe love alive. Treacher, Jim: madman. I also want to thank Brian Cronin and Augie De Blieck – Jesus, this is like signing somebody’s high school yearbook, isn’t it? Also thanks go to Harvey B.R. Jerkwater and his lovely wife. I have lots of respect for Gorjus and the Prof over at Pretty Fakes, Greg Burgas at Delenda Est Carthago, the maniacs at The Indian Chief Blowers, creators of Laser Force, The League of Melbotis, Bahlactus for hosting Friday Night Fights, Yet Another Comics Blog, Marc Singer, Tom Foss over at The Fortress of Soliloquy, Dial B for Blog, Seven Hells! and Howling C urmudgeons. I would be remiss if I didn’t publicly declare my admiration for the work of Alan David Doane, Johnny Bacardi, Tom Spurgeon, David Fiore, Jog, Tim O’Neil, Tom the Dog, Shane Bailey, and Ian Brill. Big shout outs to Ed Cunard, Mark Hale over at Chaosmonkey, Jim McGrath, Dr. K, Benjamin Birdie of The Rack fame, and any other Dead Gopher that I have neglected to mention. Crap, can I even mention the Dead Gophers? I think I just broke a bylaw. Shit, I almost forgot! Thanks to the people who used to run the Comics Weblog Update-a-tron thing, whoever you are.

I’m kicking myself because I’ve probably forgotten some blogger that I really really like, and they’re going to be pissed at me forever. Let’s see, am I missing anybody…? Oh. Right.

Him.

One of the most enjoyable parts of running Dave's Long Box, aside from all the chicks, was my rivalry with Chris Sims of The Invincible Super-Blog. I hand over my sword and concede the field to Chris, who is a tremendous talent and a funny guy, but is a total cockhead. Kidding! Ha ha! Look for mighty things from Chris Sims in the future - he is going to be a fucking TITAN! Mark my words well.

Aside from blogging folk, I want to thank Dusty Abell and Robert Kirkman for the Invincible Handbook gig, which was fun. Thanks also to Gene Ha, who does a hilarious Alan Moore impression, Larry Young of AiT/Planetlar, who is a mensch, Jay Pinkerton, and Jeff Parker, who totally likes me better than Chris Sims so eat it Sims. Many thanks to Ernie Cline, the man who created Airwolf: the adjective. I also want to thank Josh Elder for the advice and the GCPD badge and Kevin Church for making me a hot reporter in Cover Girl. Many thanks to Craig Brasfield, Dave Guttierez, the fine folks at Cracked.com, Ted “Thunderbolt” Bramble, Mad Michael Moran over at the Times Online, and Kent Goodrich, my boss who let me present the SHIELD Career Power Seminar at work.

Finally I want to thank everybody who has ever read my humble blog and a double-thanks to anyone who has ever commented. A double-thanks with handshake to anyone who has commented 2-7 times, a hug for anyone who has commented 8-13 times, a 10-second French kiss to anyone who has commented 14-20 times… OK, you see where I’m going with this. FYI, at 40 comments you get maced in the face and at 50 you get a restraining order.

Anyway, thanks also to friends of Dave’s Long Box, including but not limited to my mom, Dan Coyle, Olav the Hairy, Chris Arndt, James Remar, Mike Hasselhoff, Summer & Virgil, Bill, Woody!,Drake Hogestyn, Konstantinos Stamoulis, Edward Liu, Gayest Neil, Dara, Kelvin Green, P-Tor, Mike Loughlin, Winterteeth, Cove West, Tom Bondurant, Roel Torres, MGK, Anonymous, McGone, Ric Flair, Rachelle, Koala Mentalla, Sallyp, Todd Fucking Kaneko, Chad Sexington, Oldsmoblogger, Ghostman, Martin Wisse, Haole, Beta Ray Steve, John the IG, Nimbus, Peter, Patrick, Bill Reed, Spencer Carnage, Benari, Woody, The Real Rick Jones, Jeff Easton, Dougbot, Sleestak, your mom, Sallyp, Greg, Brad Curran, Ted Nugent, Nshumate, Ted, Ian, RTO Trainer, Matt Murray, Gbob, and Mister Sinister.

Manly thanks also to Ken Christiansen of Bad Flip Productions and Rocket Bob Lindenmayer who helped me fight off a bear attack. I also want to thank Chava and Mimsy and my wife, who is Big Barda and Mary Jane all rolled into one package.

I'll be launching a new site shortly - I'll post the address as soon as it's up and running. My new site will be a little more expansive in terms of scope... meaning it will be an unfocused rambling mess. But we'll talk about that later. I hope you swing by and say hi once I'm open for business.

So, to wrap it up, thank you. Thanks for stopping by and digging through the ol' long box with me for the past few years. It's been a hell of a lot of fun.

--Dave Campbell

Stuff you should buy

2008-04-16T20:48:00.000-07:00

Occasionally I like to plug current comic book offerings, particularly when it might mean a royalty check for yours truly, so here is some stuff you should totally buy this week.

BATMAN STRIKES #44 by my homeboy Josh Elder. This is a good ol' fashioned all-ages team-up between the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel as they hunt a maniac who is carving up trans-gender hookers on the streets of Metropolis.

KIDDING!!! I kid. There isn't even one dead hooker in the comic, I swear. Buy two copies and give one to your nephew, it's good old fashioned comic book fun in the mighty DC manner, with solid art by Chris Jones. You might remember Josh Elder from his hilarious Mail Order Ninja comic - he's the Real Deal and is one of those writers who hasn't lost sight of the whole "comics can be fun" thing. Go check it out.

THE OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE INVINCIBLE UNIVERSE has now been collected in a slick trade paperback and is available for sale at Amazon. I highly recommend this as well because I wrote a lot of the entries and I think it's a neat homage to the old Mark Gruenwald era Marvel Handbooks. Plus, haven't you always wanted to know about Shrinking Ray's backstory? Sure you have.

If you didn't pick it up in the stores when it originally came out, you owe it to your country to buy the trade paperback today! Yes, regardless of what country you live in - unless it's I Hate Comics Land. If that's the case, %&*@ you, pal!

Next up: a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT that you won't like.

Super Skrull Place Holder!

2008-04-04T02:53:00.001-07:00

I didn't want anybody thinking I had really dedicated this site to James Remar, so I had to put up some comic related post. Since I'm totally lazy, err, I mean, totally busy, I'm opting for a picture of a Super Skrull statuette thingy.

What do you call these things anyway? Statues? Maquettes? 3-D Imaginings? Girl Repellant? I never know. All I know is that it's Super Skrull and I loves me the Super Skrull. Plus with Marvel's Secret Invasion upon us, many folks have Skrulls on their mind, so it seemed appropriate.

Hey, here's a little insider tip for ya: Super Skrull is really a Skrull. No shit.

Welcome to Dave's Shrine of Remar

2008-04-01T02:45:00.000-07:00

James Remar - Warriors, come out and plaaayyy...

2008-04-01T00:56:00.000-07:00

Certain films are so potent andcaptivating that they fuck up an entire generation of kids.

The Warriors is one of those movies for me. During the early years of cable TV my friends would stay up late and watch violent movies like The Warriors and then, full of adrenaline and unreleased agression, we'd sneak out and vandalize a golf course or something. Along with movies like Enter the Dragon, Escape from New York, Excalibur, Mad Max, and Death Race 2000, The Warriors is one of those movies that launched my lifelong love of genre entertainment.

It is also directly responsible for Young Dave and his friends getting their asses kicked by mean older kids - but that's a story for another day.

One of the things that made The Warriors so damn cool was Ajax, the brash gang member played by a young James Remar. Ajax is all bravado and bad attitude - he's sort of the Han Solo of the group, and Remar plays him with a perpetual scowl. Ajax would suck if he was just a blowhard, but as he repeatedly demonstrates, his mouth writes the checks and his fists cash 'em. Ajax is a total bad ass.

He gets to prove how awesome he is when The Warriors (fourof them anyway) get attacked by the Baseball Furies, a gang of creepy silent guys in baseball uniforms and KISS makeup. They're outnumbered, so The Warriors queue up the John Carpenter synth soundtrack and make a run for it. Ultimately it comes time to stop running and start kicking the living bejeesus out of the Baseball Furies, which Ajax does with verve and elan.

Hey kids! Dave's favorite James Remar line is at the 3:32 mark!

Truly The Warriors represents a bigone age of cinema, when you could build a movie around a slightly subversive central idea and a couple of decent analog fight scenes. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for The Warriors and its ilk, even if it was a bad influence and got me beat up. I don't blame James Remar, though. If anything, my relationship to The Warriors showed me that everyone takes a hit now and then. Sometimes you're the guy with the baseball bat, and sometimes you're the popsicle.

Thank you for that wisdom, Warriors. And thank you, James Remar.

My favorite James Remar quote

2008-04-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

It's a tough call, but I'm going to have to go with the obvious choice for Best James Remar Line Ever. It's from the 1979 film The Warriors, where James plays a gang member named Ajax who utters this witty bon mot to a baseball bat wielding foe:

"I'll shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle."

I'm not certain, but that may be my favorite line from any movie ever. The only problem with it is that it's very context-specific; it's not a line that you can quote in public with a reasonable chance of a) it being appropriate, and b) anyone knowing that you are indeed quoting James Remar in the first place. It's not like saying "Say hello to my little friend!" when you pick up a chicken skewer at a buffet table or "May the force be with you" before somebody does karaoke. These are movie quotes that people might actually know and that could be situationally appropriate.

But unless you're at a Little League game, there are very few scenarios in which you could say "I'll shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle" and have it make sense. Come to think of it, while it might make sense to say that at a Little League baseball game, it should probably be avoided.

Anyway, it's still the greatest James Remar line of all time, even if it's not that handy.

James Remar - Guest Star

2008-04-01T00:44:00.001-07:00

So the other day I was watching Eli Stone, a fine ABC television program that I enjoy viewing for my job, and lo and behold, there's James Remar. He played a ruthless real estate developer that was trying to evict a bunch of low-income people from their historic neighborhood. Did he succeed? Fuck yes he did! He's James Remar! Those poor people were thrown out on their asses. Nobody can go head-to-head with The Remar.

A quick look at James Remar's vast body of work will reveal the extent of TV work the man has done. The breadth and range of his work is impressive - you'd think that he would just be cast as cops or psychos, but no. Let's take a look at some highlights from James Remar's career.

Remar's most notable recent TV appearance was a recurring role as Harry Morgan on the Showtime series Dexter. His character recently died (ooops, SPOILER) but I'll bet you can still feel the lingering smell of awesome clinging to the Dexter soundstage.

Tough guy Remar has appeared on 7th Heaven, Walker Texas Ranger, and was a recurring guest star on Sex in the City, where he did not shoot or punch anybody even once.

For fans of genre TV shows, James Remar is representin'. He had a recurring role on the late, lamented Jericho, and he played opposite Richard Hatch on several episodes of Battlestar Galactica (the new series). Remar was also in the X-Files episode "Daemonicus."

So you see, James Remar has a little bit to offer everyone in the family. Watch a James Remar TV show today! Or so help me, he will totally shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle.

James Remar - Expository Cop

2008-04-01T00:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you need a cop in your movie who will deliver big chunks of expository dialog to the main character in order to keep the plot going. Folks often think of James Remar when it comes to casting that cop. Occasionally he might play a military guy, but the purpose of the role is always the same: human info dump.

Here's James Remar mocking Blade with another officer in Blade: Trinity. And you thought Ryan Reynolds was the best part of that movie? THINK AGAIN.

And here's James Remar as Uptight Agent giving a briefing in the fine film 2 Fast 2 Furious. "Use extreme caution, this man has been known to use rats and blow torches to torture people. Yes, rats and blow torches at the same time."

Here's James Remar playing Expository Cop on CSI: Miami. Sometimes your episode gets so fucked up that you have to bring in somebody to help explain the plot to the main characters. James Remar is that somebody.

James Remar - His greatest role?

2008-04-01T00:33:00.000-07:00

Among James Remar fans like myself a never-ending debate rages: what is James Remar's greatest role?

It usually boils down to two choices:

Albert Ganz, the maniacal escaped convict from 48 Hours...?

Or Rayden, the unnaturally pink martial arts wise man from Mortal Kombat: Annhilation...?

You make the call. What is James Remar's ultimate performance, his greatest role?

James Remar - Gesundheit!

2008-04-01T00:22:00.000-07:00

Hey, even James Remar has to sneeze now and then. Or have a stroke - it's hard to tell from this picture.

James Remar - voiceover master

2008-04-01T00:18:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of actors, James Remar picks up the occasional voice acting gig for animated projects. Remar enjoys the variety and change of pace that voice acting offers, but has been somewhat dismissive of animated programs in the past.

"They're basically for kids and stoners," Remar told Wizard magazine. "I mean, who watches cartoons? Little fuckin' kids and dopers, that's who. What magazine did you say you were from again?"*

James Remar has played Black Mask in the animated series The Batman.

James Remar also did the voice of Larousse in the Pixar film Ratatouille. Yeah, I don't remember which guy he was, either. I'll have to watch that movie again with a new Remarcentric mindset.

James Remar also did the voice of Carter Hall/Hawkman on the Justice League animated series. Suddenly Hawkman's looking a little bit cooler, isn't he? It's the Remar Touch - it's like Coolness Pixie Dust, Remar just sprinkles it around wherever he goes, making the world a little cooler.

*Oh, and I'm totally lying about that Wizard quote. James Remar loves cartoons. Really.

OMFG

2008-03-26T22:57:00.000-07:00

This rukes. It rules + it rocks = rukes.

(Thanks to Mike Sterling for sharing this with me. Mike also shared that he found the video while searching for hot thor video leather.)

Kung Food

2008-03-24T22:19:00.000-07:00

Check this out. My pal Ed Liu sent in these pictures of a fast-food chain in China called "Zhen Gongfu" or "Real Kung-fu" - with Bruce Lee in Game of Death as its mascot. That beats Ronald McDonald hands down.

I want these to come to the States so I too can enjoy real Kung Food.

"Don't think - eat."

EL CAZADOR Crossgen Comics

2008-03-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

I loves me the pirates, although I'm not 100% sure why.

Pirates - both historical and contemporary - are not really nice people. They're seafaring thieves, rapist, and murderers. I don't particularly dig that kind of person on land, so I'm not sure why a thieving rapist suddenly becomes cool when they get on a boat. It's the romance of the sea, I suppose.

That's what it comes down to, isn't it? People like me enjoy tales from the Golden Age of Piracy because we're insulated from the brutal truth by several centuries and a firewall of fanciful books and movies. The romance and glamour of piracy has superimposed itself over reality, until we're left with a collective image of the pirate in pop culture that is utterly divorced from historical accuracy. Kids dress up as pirates for Halloween, we have National Talk Like a Pirate Day, and the Pirates of The Carribean films were blockbuster hits.

It's inconvenient to contemplate what piracy really means, because that gets in the way of the iconography. Little kids who play pirates never say, "Avast, I'm going to rape all the women onboard this ship and torture this priest until you tell me where you've hidden the valuables!" Well, I hope they don't anyway. The Pirates movies embrace all the trappings and brand identity of 18th century pirates but coyly steer clear of the grim truth. For movies that are supposedly about pirates there are precious few instances of actual full-on piracy in them. I don't want to overthink this, but there's something a teensy bit dishonest about those movies.

Remember in the third movie, At World's End, when Keira Knightly's character tries to rally the pirates to fight with a rousing speech about freedom? If you stayed awake long enough to get to that point in the movie, you might have though, like me, "Yeah, freedom to rape, steal, and kill." Because that's really the core value of those movies - their freedom is dependant on someone else's misfortune.

When people think about pirates they just focus on the window dressing, the iconic trappings of piracy rather than actual act of piracy. The Jolly Roger, walking the plank, buried treasure, cutlasses, frigates bristling with cannon, peg legs, squawking parrots, eye patches, violent diarrhea brought on by poor nutrition, treasure maps, etc. Pirates are a glamorous remnant of a time when the world was vast and governments were small.

But make no mistake - pirates are still out there, glamour or not. The US Navy regularly skirmishes with brazen Somali pirates who raid shipping in fast boats, then retreat back to the African coast before they can get caught. Pirates routinely attack shipping in the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Nigeria, and ships in port at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The big game in modern piracy is in the target-rich Straits of Malacca. This narrow waterway near Malaysia is a superhighway for ships heading to East Asia or India, and it's surrounded by thousands of inlets and creeks that make perfect hiding places for pirates. In 2004, a full 40% of all reported pirate attacks took place in these waters, and despite increased patrols, the problem is still out of hand. Freighters and tankers who travel through the Straits at night do so at great peril - many of them rake the darkness with deck mounted spotlights and high powered firehoses in an attempt to keep raiders at bay.

Check out the International Chamber of Commerce's Piracy Reporting Center if you want a glimpse of the scope of the international piracy problem - they have piracy alerts and a weekly report on global pirate activity that will convince any skeptics that piracy isn't just a thing of the past. Plus, it makes for interesting reading.

So why aren't these modern pirates popular? They're practicing essentially the same craft that the buccaneers of the Carribean practiced centuries ago. Nobody romanticizes modern pirates, because they don't have the benefit of the brand identity their forefathers had - they're just violent thugs with AKs and RPGs in small watercraft. Nothing glamorous there.

Jeez, where am I going with all this? I don't know, I guess I just wanted to talk about pirates. Oh! Right: I'm here to talk about El Cazador, a now dead pirate comic from now dead Crossgen Comics.

El Cazador was a slickly produced swashbuckler by writer Chuck Dixon, master of he-man action, and artist Steve Epting, who I like to think of as a modern Gene Colan. It follows the adventures of Donessa Cinzia Elena Marie Esperanza Diego-Luis Hidalgo - or just "Becky" for short - as she makes the huge leap from being a victim of a pirate attack to a formidable, revenge-driven huntress of the high seas who kicks ass in her ship, ElCazador ("The Hunter").

They only put out six issues and a one-shot before the series and the company were cancelled, which is a pity. They just don't make pirate comics anymore, and El Cazador was a good one. Dixon tread the line between familiar romantic pirate elements and a grimmer, harsher, scuzzier reality. The pirates in this book looked and acted like they haven't washed or gone to church in decades.

Epting's art is fantastic and perfectly suited for this project. I compare him to Gene Colan because of his liberal use of deep shadows and black ink, and his deft brush work. At least, I think he uses a brush a lot of the time. Regardless of the technique, Epting's art really raises the quality of El Cazador and makes it a visually stunning comic packed full of salty atmosphere.

I believe El Cazador is collected in trade format. It's worth checking out, although the storyline ends prematurely and abruptly - just like many pirates.

One last thing. Here's a pirate map thingy I drew a little while back. Regular Dave's Long Box readers may know of my fondness for creating little cartoony maps, and it was only a matter of time before I did a pirate map. Click for a larger picture:

I'm not crazy about the coloring job I did on this one - those red parchment signs are hideous, and in the lower right hand corner? Those white things under the tree are supposed to be fireflies. Instead they look like Christmas lights. Oh, well. That's what I get for stealing my daughter's art supplies.

Wha--? Stealing markers from a little girl? That sounds positively... piratey.

My screaming starship

2008-03-20T06:26:00.000-07:00

Because I am easily amused...

2008-03-19T15:27:00.000-07:00

I thought THIS was the funniest thing I've seen all week, and I watched Penn Jilette on Dancing with the Stars this week. I recommend turning up your speakers to maximum volume before visiting this site - particularly if you're at work!

Oh, YTMND, what pleasure you have given me over the years. I only hope I can pull you from a flaming car accident to return the favor.

Thanks to King Superbad himself, Dusty Abell, for the heads-up.

Dave Stevens - RIP

2008-03-12T00:49:00.000-07:00

Man, say it ain't so! Artist Dave Stevens died yesterday, which totally sucks. This has been a bad month for geeks: Steve Gerber died, then Gary Gygax, and now Dave Stevens.
Stevens died on March 10 of leukemia.

I have been and am still a big fan of Dave's pinup work and his most famous creation, the neo-pulp hero The Rocketeer. I remember picking up the first Eclipse Rocketeer issue back in the day and being a little baffled. Was this some pulp hero that I had just never heard of? Was he a contemporary of The Shadow and Doc Savage that never reached the level of fame that his fictional peers did? The answer of course, was no. The Rocketeer was created by Stevens in the 80's as an homage to the rocket-pack wearing adventurers of serial fiction like Commando Cody. Stevens' Rocketeer is a beautifully drawn Valentine to a gee-whiz age of purehearted adventure. In lesser hands this material might have seemed the work of somebody who couldn't let go of his childhood fantasies, but Dave Stevens made it work, and his love for the source material was infectious. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who took a second look at those old Republic serials because of Dave Stevens, which is kind of a nice legacy.

I only wished that Stevens had created more Rocketeer comics; he only drew a handful of them. And now that he's passed away, that handful of comics is going to have to be enough.

Lame-ass villain #19: Metalhead

2008-03-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

Metalhead was a Batman villain that first appeared in Batman #486, where Batman beat the living crap out of him. A completely forgettable villain with a dumb gimmick, Metalhead has long since faded into the mists of comic book obscurity, and rightly so. Because he is lame.

First off, the guy's name is Metalhead. I think we can all agree that is stupid.

Second, Metalhead is called Metalhead because he wears a ski mask with nails sticking out of it. I gotta hand it to the guy, at least he's budget conscious. His whole outfit probably cost less than Slipknot's, and that is saying something.

Third, he has a spiky pony tail attached to his black ski mask that he whips people with. For some reason, that would seem cool in an old Shaw Bros kung fu movie, yet here it just seems lame.

Batman #486 features several scenes where Metalhead goes into sleazy underworld bars and whips people with his pony tail. That will teach them from playing Kylie Monogue on the jukebox when Metalhead is around.

Do none of the crooks in Gotham City carry handguns? Because you know who could easily beat Metalhead? The rarely seen villain Man With Gun.

...and we're back.

2008-02-29T18:34:00.000-08:00

Okay, after nearly a month of total radio silence I am going to attempt to blog once again here at the mighty but dormant Dave's Long Box.

My schedule has been quite mad recently and the new blogging gig at ABC.com is playing havoc with my circadian rhythm, but I'm getting used to it. I'm trying to set realistic expectations of myself, so I'm hoping to do at least three posts per week. I miss talking about comics and while having a blog can be kind of stressful and demanding, it's still fun - or at least it should be.

So let's begin again, shall we? Let's look into one another's eyes and renew our sacred blog vows and put the past behind us and look forward to a shining future together, you and I.

Hey, look! Bird poop! That's always good for a laugh.

Live from L.A. is now, um... live

2008-02-07T02:50:00.000-08:00

OK, so my new blog "Live from L.A." over at ABC.com is up and running. Come stop by and take a look, won't you? You should feel right at home - in my first week I managed to reference Thunderdome, Gary Busey, and Ted Nugent. And they haven't fired me yet!

Plus, come on: haven't you always really wondered what I thought of Supernanny and Cashmere Mafia? Hop over and have a cocktail power-up with Lucy Liu and the girls!

The Redundant Dialogue Files: "Attacking me!"

2008-02-03T09:29:00.001-08:00

OK, so maybe my first installment of The Redundant Dialogue Files wasn't the best example. Dave's Long Box reader Paul rightly pointed out that the dialogue in the first entry actually served a legitimate disambiguating purpose. Way to bring reason into the whole thing and spoil my fun, Paul!

So we'll try again - here's a panel from Wonder Woman (vol 1) #276, which I have discussed previously here. Yes, I know I'm kinda cheating by posting a panel I have previously featured, but that's the kind of guy I am - a big goddamn cheater.

The Redundant Dialogue Files: "Yeow! I slipped on the floor!"

2008-02-02T12:24:00.000-08:00

The wise Bill Reed reminded me of an amusing panel from The Mighty Thor #432 that I just had to scan.

This seems like a perfect time to start off a new recurring feature here at Dave's Long Box: The Redundant Dialogue Files, a celebration of comic book dialogue that needlessly explains what is made painfully obvious in the comic art itself.

During a battle with monstrous living statues, one of the stalwart cops from NYPD's Code: Blue anti-supervillain team slips on the floor. Perhaps the creative team felt that the art in the panel was ambiguous and needed further explanation - we may never know. But for whatever reason, the fallen trooper says: "Yeow! I slipped on the floor!" Thanks for the update, guy. Good thing he's wearing a helmet.

I'm not sure why, but I find this hilarious.

THE MIGHTY THOR #432 Marvel Comics, 1991

2008-01-30T16:52:00.000-08:00

The Mighty Thor #432 is, as the cover informs us, the 350th appearance of Thor, one of the greatest comic book characters ever made. EVER.

It's sort of a strange milestone, because it's not technically the 350th appearance of the character in print, it's the 350th comic book published by Marvel starring Thor. They're not counting the Thunder God's appearances in The Avengers or What If? or Godzilla or even in Fred Hembeck Destroys the Marvel Universe, so it's probably more like the 1,213th appearance of Thor. But really, who wants to tally all those comics up? Not I.

As you might imagine, an "anniversary" issue like this one has a certain musky nostalgic odor, a quality present in all the comics of the DeFalco/Frenz/Milgrom run on The Mighty Thor. These guys tried - and usually succeeded - to capture the pomp and majesty and epic scope of those early Thor issues they clearly loved. This particular creative team didn't just drink from the creative wellspring of the first Lee/Kirby Thor comics, they chugged it greedily from a beer bong. One could fault them for not taking the character in new directions, but I prefer to be gracious and think of this era of the comic as Thor Done Right. But then, I am old. Old and bald.

To be fair, writer Tom DeFalco, a Marvel Bullpen veteran, did have a slightly different take on the Thor paradigm. Instead of using Thor's traditional human alter-ego Dr. Donald Blake, DeFalco introduced Erik Masterson as the new human host of Asgardian godliness. In this issue, Masterson's scrappy little son Kevin is held hostage by Thor's evil half-brother Loki, the Norse god of mischief (I named one of my dogs Loki, BTW), which really pisses Thor off. The two mortal, er, immortal enemies face off in a New York skyscraper in a final duel that only one god is walking or flying away from. At least until Marvel brought Loki back, that is.

The big brother vs brother fight that takes up the entire issue is suitably operatic and grandiose. Loki and Thor are evenly matched, and both are experts at Shakespearian trash-talking. Loki relies on cunning, magic, and a total lack of scruples, while Thor relies on his ability to hit things really hard, including Loki's face (see greatest panel ever, right).

But Thor's no idiot, regardless of what people say. In the sequence below he exploits his bro's greed and power lust by tossing him mjolnir, his enchanted mallet. Of course, only the truly worthy can wield mjolnir, a fact that Loki forgets. He catches the hammer - and promptly plunges through thirty-odd stories of skyscraper.

Dumbass.

Thrown into the mix is Code: Blue, the NYPD's special anti-supervillain SWAT team who were regular supporting characters in the DeFalco/Frenz era. I loved these guys and have always been disappointed that they never caught on and became permanent fixtures of the Marvel Universe. Led by the stoic Lt. Marcus Stone, Code: Blue was a team of bad-ass misfits with names like Fireworks, Mad Dog, and Rigger. Maybe they were a little corny, but I'd pit Code: Blue against Hardcase and the Harriers any day of the week.

Here's the team leaping into action. Now either their SWAT van has a custom siren or they are all yelling "YA-HOO!!" as they bail out the back - I can't tell which. And look out, Lt. Stone! You're about to step on that very small woman and her very small car!

Incidentally, my wife and I often refer to toddler potty and poo incidents as Code: Yellow and Code: Brown. I don't even want to think what Code: Blue would denote.

Anyway, the happy-go-lucky cops remove young Kevin Masterson from harm's way so Thor can kick the shit out of his rival without stressing about the lil' youngster getting hit by a stray blast of Asgardian voodoo. The Code: Blue guys also attempt to arrest Loki, which doesn't go so well. I'm not sure what kind of procedures NYPD has for detaining evil Norse gods, but I imagine flexi-cuffs and a paddy wagon wouldn't be adequate.

Thor finally gets to cut loose, verbally and physically:

"I'd like to dedicate this act of violence to innocents everywhere - to children all around the world." Thor is a class act, I'm telling ya.

Long story short: Loki zaps one of the more expendable supporting characters, which is just one evil act too many for Thor. In defiance of some stupid Asgardian law, Thor sucks all the life energy out of Loki with mjolnir, killing him (for now.) For some reason, this upsets both Lt. Stone and Thor's dad Odin, although I can't imagine why. You'd think slaying the God of Evil would get him a pat on the back at least, but no.

After the dust clears, Thor and Stone have a heart-to-heart over some coffee outside the battle zone. "You did wrong, Thor!" Stone tells him. "No one should take the law into his own hands! Not even a thunder god!"

That's some bullshit right there. What charges would the District Attorney's office file against Thor, exactly? "Your honor, the accused um, he sucked the victim's soul into his magic hammer and the victim, um, exploded we believe. What kind of world do we live in if we allow people to blow up evil gods? The accused is a flight risk, literally, and we ask that bail be set at two million gold pieces."

In the end, Thor faces the justice of the gods and gets his own soul sucked out of him, or something. Because if there's one thing ancient Viking gods cannot condone, it's killing. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to me, either.

However! That doesn't diminish the awesomeness of Thor #432. Well, maybe a little. But as an added bonus, they reprint Journey into Mystery #83, by Stan and Jack, the first appearance of Thor. In this story, Stan Lee establishes the time-honored tradition of smack-talking that continues to this day in Thor comics:

"I have proven the power of the hammer and the might of the thunder god are invincible! Nothing can conquer Thor! Nothing!! "

Aye, verily.

My new gig

2008-01-28T06:44:00.000-08:00

Next week I begin working for my new Corporate Overlords, ABC television, and let me tell you, I'm pretty darn excited about the whole thing. I will be the resident blogger at ABC.com, commenting on ABC's prime-time programming on a little blog-within-a-huge-website called "Live from L.A." I'll post a link on the sidebar when the blog formally launches next week.

FAQ time!

Q: "Why is it called 'Live from L.A.', Dave? Don't you live in Seattle?"

A: Yes, but the servers are located in L.A. Okay, the servers are located in Burbank. Actually, I have no clue where the servers are located - they won't tell me. Besides, I could get fired at a moment's notice and be replaced by somebody from Nova Scotia, so ABC is playing it safe. Nobody wants to read a blog called "Live from Bainbridge Island" anyway.

Q: "Have you sold out, Dave?"
A: Yes, happily. Next question.

Q: "They're going to fire you, aren't they?"
A: After reading this, probably.

Q: "Are you shutting down Dave's Long Box?"

A: No, I'll still be updating Dave's Long Box every two months or so just like I'm doing now. Ha! My Corporate Masters have agreed to let me keep blogging, but since Disney owns ABC, I have to go back and retroactively edit all profanity and references to Power Girl. Ha ha! I kid. I can write whatever the heck I want, darn it. I have agreed not to appear nude on DLB, however.

Q: "Will they let you write whatever you want, or are you just a P.R. shill for The Man?"

A: I'm pretty much just a P.R. shill for The Man, yes. Actually, they've given me a free hand to write whatever I want pretty much, which includes being a smart ass. However, I unconditionally love every show on ABC already, so I see no problems. Why yes, I AM a huge Desperate Housewives fan - thank you for asking.

Q: "How did you get the job?"

A: I'm not sure, I think they have me confused with somebody else. They keep asking me to sing "Mack the Knife" so they may think I am this guy.

Q: "Who is going to win Dance War?"

A: Please. Bruno all the way.

Friday Night Fights: Batman vs Deacon Blackfire

2008-01-25T16:55:00.000-08:00

The mighty Bahlactus has spoken, and the word is: FIGHT!

For too long Dave's Long Box has sat out the fisticuffs of Bahlactus' Friday Night Fights, but no longer!

Images from Batman: The Cult #4 by Jim Starlin and Bernie Wrightson.

Lost in Translation: From Script to Page

2008-01-23T17:10:00.000-08:00

Mainstream comic books are rarely the product of one fertile imagination and talent. They are, to one degree or another, created by a team of motley individuals who band together for a common cause - much like the A-Team, but often much fatter.

Sure, you got your Matt Wagners and Erik Larsens out there* who have often single-handedly created entire comic books, doing all the writing, penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering themselves, but for the most part comics from the big publishers are produced by a team of creators who may never even meet each other face-to-face. A writer turns in his script, which is then passed on to a series of artists who pencil, ink, color, and letter the book, all under the all-knowing guidance of The Editor. (Editors have such important positions that their job title is capitalized, much like Realtors.)

The most crucial, fragile, and often dysfunctional relationship in this whole matrix is the creative bond between the writer and the penciler. These are the cats who are responsible for telling the actual story in the comic book, and if the two are not in simpatico, your comic book can get fucked up real bad.

A brief and likely unnecessary word on the process: These days, comic book writers create a detailed script for artists to illustrate. The script is broken down page by page and panel by panel, with dialogue and scene directions that describe the action. A good example of a standard format can be found here on the Dark Horse Comics website, but there is no real industry standard format.

The artist responsible for the pencils and layouts gets this script and then interprets it visually. If he or she is lucky, the writer doesn't get crazy with "camera directions" in the script and allows enough room for the artist to do what he or she theoretically does best, telling a story with pictures. Sometimes the writer and artist have a great relationship and work really well together, and sometimes they don't. And sometimes the artist just does whatever the hell they want regardless of what the damn script says.

I first noticed this disconnect in Batman: Year Two, a four-part series by writer Mike Barr that chronicles a young Batman's encounter with The Reaper, a spooky masked vigilante with no qualms about using his big-ass scythes on bad guys. The Reaper happens to be the father of a woman that Bruce Wayne has fallen in love with - how's that for shitty luck? Oh, umm, SPOILER! Sorry. Anyway, the first issue was drawn by Alan Davis, a modern legend and master of comic book art. For whatever reason, the rest of the series was drawn by this up-and-coming artist named Todd McFarlane. This pissed Young Dave off.

Despite being disappointed in the lack of Alan Davis Goodness for the rest of the storyline, it was interesting to see two different artists interpret different parts of the same script. Clearly Davis was the more accomplished sequential artist. Few living comic book artists could follow Alan Davis on a book and not suffer by comparison, and that was definitely the case with Year Two.

In the last chapter, drawn by McFarlane, Batman and The Reaper duel in a construction site under the moonlight, as superheroes often do. The climax of the story comes when Batman unmasks his foe and holy shit, it's his future father-in-law! But the big reveal is crammed into a few tiny panels at the bottom of a page. (see scan on left) A throw-away shot of Jim Gordon gets more page space than the climactic panel! Young Dave scratched his head, confused. How weird. Why would they jam this major story component into a few panels, almost as an afterthought.

The answer comes a few pages later, in a big full-page shot of Batman swinging over Gotham (see scan on right). Now here's my theory (and I could be totally wrong): McFarlane really wanted to end with a full-page shot of Batman, but it wasn't in Mike Barr's script. He's only got 22 pages to work with, so in order to make space for his pin-up shot he decides to move some other panels around. Maybe he draws the pages out of order, I don't know. But he gets in trouble and has to cram two pages worth of script into one page - and that one page just happens to be the most important page in the whole book. I could be totally off-base, but I would lay money that Barr's Year Two script didn't call for a pin-up page at the end and it was all McFarlane's doing. And as a result, what could have been a classic Batman comic is... not.

If anybody has insight into the making of Year Two, email me and let me know - if I'm mistaken I'll gladly eat my invisible hat and post a retraction of these slanderous lies.

Sure, there's got to be some give and take, some room for the artist to play around with the script. But it seems like the farther an artist deviates from the script, the more the story suffers.

Captain America and The Falcon is a good example. The kick-off storyline of this ill-fated title was written by Christopher Priest with Bart Sears on art. For whatever reason, Sears decided to get a little experimental and injected these huge pin-ups of Cap and Falcon as framing devices for the story panels. The result is an odd and unsatisfying read.

Take a look at a typical page:

Priest himself was baffled and kind of pissed about the end product, as he explains on his website:

"...Bart chose a page layout design that utterly confused even the most basic storytelling ... Ignoring instructions and warnings abut how important it was to keep the lines straight and clear, Bart chose to insert—for no apparent reason—poster-shot images of Captain America and the Falcon on most every page. Accommodating these required the other panels to be modified, reduced or eliminated altogether, making the pages very hard to follow. I wrote the thing and didn’t have an earthly clue what was going on."

Me either, Christopher.

Sometimes language differences between writer and artist(s) leads to disastrous and hilarious results, as in the case of Thor #499, The Worst Comic Book Ever Made Ever (which I discussed here and here.) The script, by one of my favorite writers Bill Messner-Loebs, is not great - and that's a nice way of saying it sucks. However, matters were made worse because the art chores were handled by an unknown number of Brazilian artists from Deodato Studios who didn't follow the not-great script very closely at all. Aside from the rushed art and hideous coloring, the costumes of certain characters change from panel to panel and a character who is supposed to get kidnapped in the beginning of the comic keeps popping up in the background of panels.

Here's a good example of what happens when a script truly gets lost in translation:

How exactly does Heimdall or whoever he is utter those lines when his mouth is gagged? Magic.

Sometimes even the most faithful interpretation of the writer's script can have unintended consequences, as in the case of New Avengers #35 by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Leinl Yu. This is the moderately infamous issue where superhero Tigra gets ambushed in her apartment and beaten by the demonic Hood while one of his cronies videotapes the attack. Some readers (and non-readers) were upset because they felt the scene had a creepy, sexualized subtext and many accused Bendis of misogyny. In response to some of the criticism, Bendis did an interview with Newsarama and posted a portion of his script so people could read how the scene was described. Check it out, it's interesting reading.

One of the things that made the scene particularly unpalatable for some was the panel above, where one of Tigra's breasts is popping out of her blouse as she's pistol-whipped. The juxtaposition of sex and violence in this panel in particular is a little creepy. But as you can read for yourself, Bendis' script doesn't call for breast-poppage or describe the beating in titillating terms - that's all a decision made by Yu, who interpreted the script.

I think it's fair to find the scene upsetting because Tigra's beating is videotaped and later shown to The Hood's crew as a morale booster - that alone is loaded with enough connotations to make it extra-creepy. Bendis wrote that scene. But you can't really blame Bendis if the art seems disturbingly lascivious - he didn't draw the thing and didn't ask that it be drawn that way.

Augie over at Comic Book Resources is running an excellent feature, a "commentary track" from comic book creators that offers a behind the scenes look at the creation of a particular issue. I particularly enjoyed this commentary track from writer Peter David about the first issue of his new Dark Horse comic The Scream.

In the piece, David details with a sort of bemused resignation the frustrating and inevitable changes to the story as defined in his script. It's pretty funny and very illuminating, because you get the impression from David's commentary that shit like this happens all the time in comics.

The artist who interpreted David's script happens to be Bart Sears, who I swear I'm not trying to pick on. Take a look at this page from The Scream:

Here's Peter David's SPOILERY explanation of how just a little change to one panel can completely derail the entire story:

"Here's the thing--the reader is supposed to believe that Danny has transformed into the Scream. Except he hasn't, because the Scream is actually an illusion that everyone else is seeing but actually isn't there. Unfortunately the effect is undercut by the fact that Danny is visibly lying there in the lower left. He shouldn't be, nor is there anything in the script that indicates he should be. If this series is collected in trade, I'd really like it if Dark Horse could go back in and remove Danny from the art in that page."

Let's face it: Comic books often suck or just make no damn sense. But the reason why a book sucks ass is not always obvious. Sometimes the art is horrible, or the script is hackneyed and unoriginal. But sometimes, through circumstances beyond the control of the writer, the comic that reaches the shelves is not quite what he or she had in mind - something just gets lost in translation.

*I know that a huge number of small press comics are the creations of a single dedicated individual, and I tip my invisible hat to them, but I'm limiting the discussion to mainstream spandex fly/hit/explode comics.

MARVEL KNIGHTS #3 Marvel Comics, 2000

2008-01-21T10:45:00.002-08:00

I've always enjoyed comics where The Punisher interacts with the rest of the costumed Marvel Universe. Usually The Punisher spends his nights aerating, defenestrating, and disintegrating street-level criminals, but on occasion he runs afoul or teams up with a superhero like Spider-Man or Daredevil. Because let's face it, The Punisher is sort of a superhero himself. Purists might take issue with that description, but the guy wears a spandex costume with a big skull logo. If you're wearing spandex with a logo, that makes you a superhero in my book - with the possible exception being Olympic downhill skiiers.

Sure, The Punisher would seem a little out of place teaming up with The Silver Surfer or (ugh) Quasar, but there are certain superheroes who gel nicely with the Man in Black. Therein lies the premise of Marvel Knights, the 2000 flagship title ofJoe Quesada's Marvel Knights imprint. This book and other MK titles like Daredevil sold very well - so well in fact that they gave Joey Q the keys to the proverbial kingdom and made him Marvel Editor-in-Chief, and then he totally fucked up Spider-Man and there was much vex and wroth in the land.

But we're not here to bitch about Spider-Man, much as I'd like to. Others have done so at greater length and more eloquently than I could. (Although what's up with the guy on YouTube who burned his copy of One More Day? Burning books is creepy, even comic books. You're not in good company if you burn books.)

Anyway, back to Marvel Knights. Chuck Dixon wrote this three-parter in which The Punisher assembles a gang of "do-gooders" to help him take down a mysterious new underworld menace in New York City. He ropes in Daredevil, The Black Widow, Motherfuckin' Shang-Chi, and Dagger (of Cloak & ...) to help him crush these new players in the NYC mob scene.

Turns out the bad guys are Asgardian monstroids led by Ulik the Troll, Thor's old sparring partner. The Punisher's ad hoc team quickly come to blow with these otherworldly creatures - and that means...

FU.

In this final issue of the storyline, the heroes have broken into three groups, more or less. The Punisher and his seemingly endless supply of weaponry take on Ulik in a suicidal battle before he can chop down a skyscraper with his bare hands. For reals, yo. Ulik is a Thor-level bad ass who can shrug off anything The Punisher can throw at him. Things don't look good for Frank Castle.

Meanwhile The Black Widow, Dagger, and Shang Chi defend a subway car from wave after wave of giant cockroach things. Oh, wait. That's Mimic. They defend a subway car from generic mindless Asgardian troll-things who all shop at the same tattered loincloth store. Things look bad for our heroes.

Here, the Widow supplies one of the civilians with a sidearm before the three heroes march out into the tunnel to bust some monster heads. The panels on this page overlay a big picture of The Black Widow in the background, but since I only scanned the bottom part of the page it looks a little odd: Panel 1, Panel 2, Panel 3, CLEAVAGE SHOT! You can't go wrong with out-of-context cleavage, no sir.

Unless I'm mistaken, there's a slight spelling error in the second panel, above. I think the phrase they were looking for was "repel boarders" and not "rebel boarders," unless The Widow is talking about Confederates in a hotel.

Moving on, Daredevil gets to the bottom of this whole Ulik Kraziness. The trolls are in town to recover a magic Asgardian horn, which an effete mobster has aquired as part of his art collection. I'm not sure what the signifigance of the horn is. Perhaps it contains the ashes of Waggy, Ulik's beloved and deceased troll dog. Regardless, Ulik is so pissed about the horn that he's willing to chop the whole frickin' building down. I'm not sure why he has to destroy the building to get the horn - Ulik has evidently never heard of elevators.

Thankfully, Daredevil kicks some mobster ass (off panel) and gets the horn just in time to stop The Punisher from getting crushed. Everybody's happy and goes on their merry way.

Inker Klaus Janson classes up the joint - it's great to see him drawing DD again. Dixon's Daredevil dialogue seemed out of character, but overall this first Marvel Knights arc was some decent plot-driven slugfest fun. It ends a little too abruptly, though - I would have liked to see a panel of misty-eyed Ulik hugging his horn and remembering better times when he frolicked in the spring meadows of Jotunheim with Waggy.

"Ulik will always love Waggy."

Sorry!

2008-01-21T10:45:00.001-08:00

OK, we're back.

Sorry about the month-long hiatus. I had to take a break for health and family reasons, plus I had a few paying writing gigs that took priority over non-paying blogging. I'll try to avoid such lengthy absences in the future and I appreciate everyone being so patient. Sorry pals!

Many thanks to the DLB reader who supplied me with exploding teeth Midgard Serpent action!

I come from the land of the ice and snow... to destroy your website

2007-12-24T12:21:00.000-08:00

THIS is the coolest thing ever. Or at least, the coolest thing I've seen today.

Net Disaster has a new Led Zeppelin option that allows you to crash giant rock and roll dirigibles into your favorite or most hated website.

Sometimes I love the Internet.

Thanks to Ragnell for pointing this out.

(I'm only a week behind with my posting! I will catch up with Real Time - this I swear!)

Captain Kirk, please... get some help.

2007-12-22T13:23:00.000-08:00

You ever have a friend who is just... different when he/she drinks? I'm not saying that Jim Kirk has a problem, it's just that I get uncomfortable around him when he drinks. So do my dogs.

Dave's Long Box reader Meng Mantasoot inspired this post when he coined the term "The Bill Shatner Beer Face" which is best described by Meng in his own words (or he'll sue me):

"... [it is] a Shatner Acting Technique™ I've dubbed The Bill Shatner BeerFace™, whereby Shatner acts as he has either never tasted alcohol before or that it is of some unbelievable proof and potency as to cause him to wince, then grimace, then look at the glass to make sure it's the same beverage he was sure he poured into the glass. Works with beer, wine, liquor, Romulan Ale, Saurian Brandy and even plain old water. He basically does it when drinking any beverage..."

All hail cover artist Jerome K Moore!

2007-12-21T22:45:00.000-08:00

I have sung the man's praises before, but I would be remiss if I let Star Trek, er, Week pass without mentioning artist Jerome Moore's fantastic covers.

More than once I have been persuaded into buying a Star Trek comic I might not normally get because of Moore's deft line work. And when I finished reading the hypothetical comic I would say, "That sucked!" But I still had that awesome cover, and nobody could take that away from me. Without getting stabbed anyway.

So here are a few moore covers (Did you catch that? That was a hilarious pun, FYI.) as well as some inked cover art that I stole from Moore's deviantART site.

Giant Ghost Head Spock disapproves of Kirk and McCoy's hurricane party.

Mmm... Suzy Plakson... If Moore would just draw me a Dr. Selar cover, I could die happy.

Tiny Chekov is trying to grab a little Vulcan boob. Naughty Tiny Chekov!

Cover for a Picard/Q slashfic, "We'll Always Have Paris... In the Butt."

"Spock... multiple Kirks... explain."

A little Star Trek chin music

2007-12-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

Dude, you do NOT SCREW with Gold Key Captain Kirk. He will beat your ass if you get sassy with him. Don't look for help from any of the Enterprise crew either, most likely they'll find the whole thing incredibly funny.

WHO'S WHO IN STAR TREK #1 DC Comics, 1986

2007-12-19T14:25:00.000-08:00

Look at that cover.

Howard Chaykin, am I right? I loves me that cover.

I am a total sucker for those compendium encyclopedia thingies that DC and Marvel publish like The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and (to a lesser extent) Who's Who in the DC Universe, so when DC put out a guide to their Star Trek comics, I was on that shit like yellow on corn, baby.

Who's Who in Star Trek follows the same template laid down by DC's regular Who's Who books; it has biographical/historical info on noteworthy Trek characters and creatures paired with graphics of wildly varying quality. On one page you'd get a killer illustration of Khan or The Horta by John Byrne and on the next page you'd get an entry for James Kirk that looks like it was drawn by a fifth-grader with his left hand. A blind fifth grader. With a withered, deformed hand. Such was the nature of all DC's Who's Who books - it was just one big smorgasbord of crap and quality art all smooshed together between two covers.

This particular Who's Who includes both people and aliens from the original series and first couple movies as well as lame-ass Star Trek comic book characters like Konom the Klingon pacifist and Bearclaw, the pastry chef on the Enterprise. When I first flipped through this book it challenged my smug sense of Trekkieness - who were these people? My God, were there actually episodes of Star Trek that I hadn't seen? Then I realized that they were just non-canon comic book characters and totally didn't count and I laughed and laughed and laughed. Phew.

The laughs kept coming as I flipped through some of the entries, which were graced with crude, rushed-looking art. Here's the Chekov entry, take a look:

OK, anchoring the piece we have an unsteady, full-color Pavel Chekov who is looking dangerously thin and perhaps a little drunk. Not everybody can pull off those pirate pants, can they? The collage-thing illustrates Chekov during three formative periods in his life:

1) Finally mastering "Axel's Theme" from Beverly Hills Cop on his Casio,

2) Experiencing a crippling "charley horse", and

3) Getting rounded up by security after a drunken night out on the town.

John Byrne, get on the mike and show us how it's done. Here's Byrne's Khan:

That's how you do it. That's a guy who understands composition, design, and perhaps most importantly, the purpose behind the illustrations for these entries in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I loves me the Who's Who for what it is - I just wish the art was consistent and halfway decent throughout the book. What's the point of getting John Byrne to do art if you've got Ted the Intern on the next page? At the bare minimum, recruit people who know how to put together an image - and that includes backgrounds. Some of the artists skimp a little on backgrounds (see Chekov, above) while others include background art that looks a lot like bathroom tiling or gingham.

Bonus points for Who's Who in Star Trek #1: they include an entry for Deltans, who sort of look like Cirque de Soleil performers with Alopecia. I just love the idea of Deltans and their Planet of Orgies. HOTTT.

Enough petty bitching, here's your Klingon Komedy for the day:

Why I Hate Gold Key Star Trek Comics

2007-12-18T13:39:00.000-08:00

Star Trek Week flows on like Big Daddy Kane as we take a look at my decades-old hatred of Gold Key comics, and Gold Key Star Trek comics in particular.

First, I must clarify: when I use the term "week" I don't mean an actual Earth week, I am using a lesser-known definition of "week." It's such a lesser-known definition that only I use it, actually. My "week" lasts from 8 to 12.5 days. I use the term "week" because Star Trek Nigh Fortnight just doesn't sound right to me.

OK, let's talk about Gold Key comics. I only read Gold Key comics on those long summer road trips from California to Saskatchewan, when my dad would buy my sister and me comic books from gas stations in order to keep us quiet. Usually I was rockin' the Batman or the Legion of Super Heroes in the back of the station wagon, but on occasion we'd be stuck in some wasteland far from civilization where the spinner racks were loaded with nothing but Gold Key comic books. As I mentioned previously, I would grudgingly accept the Gold Key comics because I feared the Mark V Backhand* - but I didn't like them.

Gold Key's Star Trek comics seemed like they were produced by bored hacks who had very little interest in the actual source material. They were sort of generic science fiction stories that just happened to be called Star Trek. Sometimes you wondered if the guys writing and drawing these things had actually seen the show, or if they were just working off a couple of dog-eared publicity photos for reference. Even Young Dave could tell these comics bore only a passing resemblance to the Star Trek TV show.

The Gold Key books often featured stories, aliens, and technology that was wildly inappropriate for Star Trek. Here's a taste; check out the giant space genie grabbing the Enterprise:

The artist mistakenly thinks the ship's nacelles are big rockets or something. Don't they know the Enterprise's nacelles house the warp coils??? Stupid Gold Key, ha ha!

OK, here's Baggy Pants Pistol Packin' Karate Spock busting a move:

Is that bearded guy slapping Spock's ass while he dances like a Russian? What the hell?

And the covers! I swear, often the only thing recognizably Star Trekky about the covers was the little photo inserts of Kirk and Spock. It's as if the folks at Gold Key knew that they were producing generic sci-fi and they desperately had to insert some visual branding to distinguish the comics.

Looking back at those painted Gold Key covers, I have to admit - they are pretty awesome. Gold Key's covers were like the last gasp of the old pulp sci-fi magazines. At the time I hated the painted look, vastly preferring the vibrant, lurid covers of Marvel and DC comics, but now I can appreciate them for their hacktacular radness. They weren't Star Trek, but they were something special.

You know, the more I think about it the more I realize that I don't actually hate the Gold Key Star Trek books. They were old-fashioned throwbacks to a less sophisticated age of print science fiction, when pulp tales of alien worlds and swashbuckling spacemen were churned out en masse by tired old men in horn-rimmed glasses. I just loathed them as a child, but Adult Dave can appreciate them for the harmless schlock that they are.

Plus - green haired Kirk. You have to love green haired Kirk.

OK, I've pretty much done a complete 180 and now no longer hate Gold Key Star Trek comics. I'm glad I could work out my feelings from them here with you today. I think I've learned a lot.

My thanks to Kevin Church for the Gold Key panel scans. I paid a heavy price for those images, but I suppose it was worth it.

And now, Spock freaking out on acid:

*Kidding! My father is a wonderful person.

Previously on Dave's Long Box...

2007-12-13T13:46:00.000-08:00

Given my affection for Star Trek I'm kind of surprised that I haven't done more posts about it. For the sake of delivering the full spectrum of Star Trek Week goodness, here are links to two previously published posts on the subject.

First, there is the legendary Star Trek/X-Men comic, which is both awesome and not very good. Wolverine does get the Vulcan Smackdown layeth upon his mutant ass, courtesy of Mr. Spock.

That's called "getting Spocked."

Next there is a little post from the F&*% Yeah Files where I sing the praises of the famous "Khaaaan!" scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, one of the greatest moments in Film History.

Ever.

According to a rumour I just made up, William Shatner is a hardcore method actor who really lives his roles. He prepared himself mentally for the emotional scene by meditating every night for a week on how much he hated beloved TV actor Tony Danza. When Shatner roars "Khaaan!" he's really summoning the focused totality of his Danza Hatred. Little trivia for you, there. It just makes the scene all the more powerful if you know that.

STAR TREK: The Orbs of Milos VI

2007-12-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

Star Trek Week continues! Here's a cute Lil' Star Trek mural thingy I did on a piece of comic book art paper. I occasionally do stuff like this or this or draw illustrated maps for my kids. Why? Because I am a geek. Some day I'll post more of this stuff. Anyway, I present for your pleasure or lack thereof... The Orbs of Milos VI!

And now, more Kooky Klingons:

STAR TREK #35 DC Comics, 1986

2007-12-11T06:06:00.000-08:00

It seems like every comic book publisher – from Gold Key to DC to Marvel to Malibu – has had a crack at Star Trek. The property has been licensed by Paramount to seemingly everybody but Broadsword Comics, but for various reasons such as editorial restrictions and cost, no single publisher has held on to Star Trek indefinitely.

Most of the Star Trek comics I own are from DC, although I think I still have some of those weird-ass Gold Key issues in a long box around here somewhere. I’ll be honest, Gold Key comics were never my first choice – on vacations my dad would stop for gas and we’d beg him for comics and sometimes he’d come back with Gold Key’s Star Trek or Dark Shadows or some shit. “It was all they had," my dad would say. "Be happy you got anything at all.” And then he would hit me. (Kidding! Hi Dad!)

But I digress. Star Trek #35 was the middle of a multi-part storyline written by Len Wein called “The Doomsday Bug." I think I had the Doomsday Bug the other week. This particular Doomsday Bug is a deadly zombie virus, however, and unlike my bug, this one doesn't involve diarrhea. The story revolves around an intergalactic incident caused by the pesky disease. Spock’s life hangs in the balance! Kirk defies orders yet again and gets into a pissing match with a Romulan commander! A plague ship full of Zombulans speeds deep into Romulan territory! Holy shit, dude!

The story is set some time between Star Trek II and III I think, and draws off the designs from those films. The Romulans were nowhere to be seen in the films, so DC got to sort of wing it and make up a new look for these classic bad guys. And by “new” I mean “goofy as hell.” The results were… well, check it out:

I chose this issue because I like the art by veteran penciller Gray Morrow – the characters look like the actors without seeming too heavily photo-referenced, a common pitfall of any Star Trek comic. Seriously, some Star Trek comics draw so heavily on photographs that they might as well just be fumetti. Not here - Morrow manages the tricky balancing act of drawing comic book characters based on real people while still adhering to comic book aesthetics. The coloring is a little washed out, but that might just be the aging twenty year old paper.

Morrow doesn't do so well with the starships, however. Check out the cover - the Romulan ships look OK I guess, but that's supposed to be the USS Excelsior in the center there. It doesn't look any better inside the book - I've included a picture of the movie version of the Excelsior and Star Trek #35's Pregnant Excelsior as a comparison/contrast exercise:

Apparently in space it's really important to have your ship's registry number in HUGE LETTERS on the saucer section for quick and easy identification by binoculars or something.

Aesthetic nitpicking aside, I enjoyed this storyline. It's the kind of Star Trek story I would write: lots of space battles, daring gambits, brinksmanship, and awkward dialogue. Writer Len Wein obviously has some love for Star Trek and its characters, although a couple things stand out.

First, this panel (below). What's wrong with this panel?

This is a pet peeve of mine. "To coin a phrase" means to create an entirely new saying, such as, "That's the cat's banjo!" There. I just coined a phrase. It does NOT mean to use an existing, established phrase. Come on, Kirk, get it right.

My other petty complaint concerns these two panels:

That just seems sort of patronizing to me. Oooh, Kirk is so enlightened that he's willing to turn over temporary command of the ship to - gasp! - a woman while Mr. Scott is in the bathroom. Don't strain anything patting yourself on the back, Starfleet. I understand that this is just Wein's way of saying that Uhura is a capable officer who is much more than just the Enterprise's switchboard operator, but I think the same message could have been conveyed by having Uhura just matter-of-factly taking command without making such a big deal out of it. It's the 24th century, you'd think they'd be well beyond silly 20th century gender politics.

Fun as it is to pick at goofy stuff in comic books, I really enjoyed the Doomsday Bug storyline when I was a youngster and enjoyed re-reading it today. You could do a lot worse in a Star Trek comic, and believe me, people have.

In closing, Star Trek #35 is the cat's banjo.

And now for Klingon Komedy.

Star Trek Week Begins!

2007-12-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

I've been feeling kinda Star Treky lately.

I am a big fan of Star Trek in all its many forms. I should qualify that: when I say "big fan of Star Trek" I am speaking in realtive terms, i.e., a big fan compared to normal people. I don't consider myself a Trekkie or a Trekker, I don't speak Klingon, I don't belong to an imaginary starship crew, I have never referred to Gene Rodenberry as "The Great Bird of the Galaxy," I don't dress up in costumes or tell the cashier at the supermarket to live long and prosper, and I don't own a fake bat'leth. I'm not even sure if that's how you spell bat'leth. You know what I'm talking about: that curvy scythe/sword thing Klingons use.

Anyway, although I have not devoted all or part of my life to Star Trek, I still consider myself a big Star Trek fan. The Wrath of Khan is one of my favorite movies of all time - I don't just think it's the best Star Trek movie, I think it's the Best Movie. I've read more than my share of Star Trek books, including those James Blish ones from back in the day.

And yes, I have a bunch of Star Trek comic books which I would like to talk about with you.

So come - join me this week as I look at the worlds of Star Trek through the lens of comic books! I know: through the lens of comic books? That makes no sense.

Added bonus: LOL Klingon screencaps! Everyone loves Klingons - only some p'tahks love them more than others...

Thor vs Superman - who ya got?

2007-12-04T07:34:00.000-08:00

I have a feeling that Thor could pretty much kick Superman’s ass.

Hear me out.

I will grant that Superman is stronger, faster, and more impervious to damage than Thor, to say nothing of his heat vision and minty fresh breath. But Thor has centuries of battle experience, a proverbial bag of weather and dimensional tricks, and a big fucking stone hammer. Plus, let’s face it – Thor is cooler.

I have nothing against Superman. I’m an American – I love Superman! If you don’t like Superman you are probably an al Qaeda operative or something. But come on: Thor. Thor, man! Thor is just cool as hell.

I’ve extolled the virtues of Marvel’s God o’ Thunder in my post “Thor: Smack Talker” which I recommend to anyone unfamiliar with the character or not prepared to acknowledge Thor’s supremacy. Go read it, I’ll wait.

Back? Good. Now tell me that Thor isn’t The Shit.

I can accept that the rather juvenile “THOR RULEZ SUPERMAN SUXXIT” argument isn’t really valid. That’s like saying a Star Destroyer could defeat the Next Generation Enterprise because it looks cooler. While that may be true, one has to be able to back up one’s statement with some sort of credible nerdy argument. For instance, a Star Destroyer would totally crush the Enterprise-D because it has all those TIE fighters and a million six laser cannon – it would just swarm over the Enterprise which can fire like, one phaser shot every five minutes or so and would be too preoccupied with trying to hail the Star Destroyer and make friends to put up much of a fight.

OK, let’s break down the argument for and against Thor kicking Superman’s ass:

Superman is stronger – No argument here, but he can’t be that much stronger. Pre-Crisis Superman could shift planetary orbits and all kinds of crazy shit, but once John Byrne relaunched him in Man of Steel, he’s considerably less powerful. Still, Superman beats Thor in arm wrestling. ADVANTAGE: SUPERMAN

Superman is faster – Since DC periodically makes Superman race The Flash and he can do tricks like catch bullets, I’ll give Superman the advantage here. However, DC writers routinely overlook his super speed so I don’t see why I shouldn’t as well. DRAW

Superman has heat vision, icy breath – Superman routinely forgets that he has these powers and would fail to use them effectively in a fight against Thor. Superman should write all his powers down on his forearm with permanent ink so he doesn’t forget. ADVANTAGE: THOR

Superman can fly – So can Thor! Ah, but Superman can fly on his own, whereas Thor flies by hurling his enchanted hammer Mjolnir through the air and holding on for dear life. Superman has to be faster and more maneuverable in mid-air than Thor. ADVANTAGE: SUPERMAN

Thor has more combat experience – First of all, he’s a Norse god. Vikings think he’s bad ass – that’s gotta count for something. Second, Thor has been alive for centuries, if not millennia. I’m sure he’s got Hammer Kata down to an art by now. Superman is in his mid-thirties and was raised in a quiet Kansas town. ADVANTAGE: THOR

Thor can control weather and shit – While I’m guessing that it would take more than a little gust of wind to blow Superman over, I’ll bet a bolt of Asgardian lightning would stagger him a little. Still, that wouldn’t make much of a difference in a fight. DRAW

Thor has a weapon – In a bar fight, who would you choose: Huge Dude or Slightly Less Huge Dude with a Hammer? I rest my case. Superman’s showing up empty handed to a mallet fight. ADVANTAGE: THOR

Thor is magic – Here’s the big kicker. Thor, but more specifically Thor’s hammer, is magical. Superman is vulnerable to three things: kryptonite, magic, and the cheese steak sandwiches they serve in the lobby deli of the Daily Planet. He can’t resist those things. Anyway, not only does Thor have a big frickin’ hammer, but it’s 100% Uru Magic, and it can shoot energy blasts. Forget about it. ADVANTAGE: THOR

As you can see, Thor edges out Superman in a combat situation. There are some mitigating factors – Has Thor been drinking? Would innocents be in danger from the fight? Has Superman had more than one cheese steak sandwich? But more often than not, the God of Thunder doth reign supreme over the Man of Tomorrow.

Aye, verily.

Black Belt Jones - a special DLB/ISB crossover!

2007-12-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

My bitter rival Chris Sims often disagree on Big Issues such as which one of us is more awesome, but if there's one thing we can agree on, it's that Gymkata is a fucking awesome movie.

Wait, actually there are TWO things we agree on: Jim Kelly's 1974 blaxploitation martial arts film Black Belt Jones is a near perfect film.

That's why we're calling a truce to celebrate the full-on radness that is BBJ. After you're done here, click on over to Chris's Invincible Super-Blog for Chris's review of this beautiful film that can build bridges between even the most intractable foes. Yes, such is the power of Black Belt Jones.

Like many a young lad, I thought Jim Kelly and John Saxon kicked serious ass in Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon. (Don't even get me started on John Saxon - that guy is 100% Man.) Sadly, Kelly gets his ass killed by the bad guy Han in a scene designed to illustrate how evil and formidable the aging villain is. Weak.

Young Dave always thought Jim Kelly kind of got screwed in that movie, so I was psyched when I discovered Black Belt Jones, a starring vehicle for Kelly that combined the best of both worlds: martial arts and blaxploitation. You can't go wrong with a combination like that. It's like combining a teen coming-of-age story with a cannibal movie - two great genres that were meant for each other. It was even directed by Robert Clouse, the same guy who directed Enter the Dragon! It HAD to be awesome.

Oh, and it is. Black Belt Jones pits our man BB against The Mob when they try to shut down Papa Byrd's inner city karate school. I know: isn't that the plot of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo? Pretty much, yes, but instead of putting on a show, BB saves the school by beating the living shit out of Whitey. Eat it, Whitey!

The movie coasts on Jim Kelly's easy charisma, huge 'fro, and his trademark ass-kicking style which features lots of back hand strikes punctuated by BB's deep "HOYYYYYY!!!!" battle cry.

Don't take my word for it, check out the brilliant opening credit sequence:

That's 100% American ass-kicking right there. If you mess with BB, he will beat the hell out of your crew and SHOOT YOU IN THE ASS.

Is it any wonder why Dave and Chris have called a temporary truce to the feud-that-will-only-end-when-one-of-us-is-dead-dead-dead to sing the praises of Black Belt Jones? Here's a transcript of a conversation between Mr. Sims and myself in The Neutral Zone:

Dave: So, Chris. We share some common interests and an intense rivalry, but will you admit in public that I turned you on to the wonder that is Black Belt Jones?
Chris: Are you asking me to admit in public that you turn me on, Dave?
Dave: Let me rephrase that so that it doesn't illicit the expected innuendo: I, Dave told you, Chris, to watch Black Belt Jones. Which makes me The Master.
Chris: Come on, Campbell! Everybody knows that Bruce Leroy is the Master! Besides, the truth is actually far more embarrassing.
Dave: Well, I'd argue that Lee Van Cleef is the One True Master, but that's neither here nor there. What "truth" are you referring to, young one?
Chris: The sad fact of the matter is, I first got a desire to watch Black Belt Jones from MAD TV.
Dave: Mad TV? Jesus, Sims. You are more dead to me than ever before.
Chris: I know, I know. But back when I was a teenager--which was when you were, what, in your early sixties?--they had a sketch where Dolemite and Black Belt Jones teamed up to make a new movie, and it ended with "You're pretty good fighter... for a badass mothertrucker." It was probably one of the three good sketches in the show's run, and since I was already a fan of Shaft from the life-changing experience of seeing it at fifteen, I immediately needed to see it. But yes, to be fair: You are the one who convinced me to finally get a copy.
Dave: So victory IS mine, in a manner of speaking. What was your favorite part of Black Belt Jones? I know it's hard to pick just one scene.
Chris: Could it be anything but "BATMAN, MOTHERFUCKER!"
Dave: Yeah, that's fucking awesome.
Chris: Although the army of swimsuit models on trampolines was pretty righteous, too.
Dave: You are correct. You may live another day, Sims.

Chris Sims speaks - with his fist!

IRON MAN #126 Marvel Comics, 1979

2007-11-21T12:25:00.000-08:00

Many fans, myself included, enjoy bitching about how Marvel has turned Iron Man into a total facist asshole ever since Civil War. How could they get the character so wrong, we ask? Most of us are just hoping he's a Skrull and everything will go back to normal and they'll let somebody like Adam Warren or Jeff Parker write Iron Man and everything will be fine and shhh it's OK to cry.

Since I feel passionate (in a smug, ironic way) about the proper characterization of Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, I decided to go back to those comics I remember and cherish from my youth. You know, the Dave Micheline/Bob Layton era of Iron Man when Tony Stark was a real hero. I found Iron Man #126, a fantastic issue in the Justin Hammer saga. It's written by Micheline with art by John Romita Jr. and inks by Layton. This is the Iron Man of my childhood! Noble, intelligent, cunning, brave...

Hey. What the HELL?!! This Iron Man is a dick, too!

Apparently I forgot that the Tony Stark of 1979 was a major league pimp with a fondness for whiskey sours, fighting dirty, gold chains, and reefer.

In this penultimate issue of the storyline we call in retrospect "Hammer Time," Stark is captured by his new enemy Justin Hammer, a Peter Cushing looking dude that always wears a smoking jacket. You know the type.

Anyway, Stark is kept apart from his armor for the whole issue, so he must use all his cunning and total lack of scruples to survive. I think Micheline was going for a ruthless, debonaire Bondian approach in his portrayal of Tony Stark, but he seems like a violent kung fu synthesis of Larry Dallas, the scuzzy neighbor on Three's Company, Matthew McConaughy's character in Dazed & Confused, and Eric Roberts in Star 80.

Here's Tony Stark sucker punching a guard just for the hell of it. It's been six hours since his last whiskey sour and he's gonna take it out on somebody, damn it.

Tony embodies that late 70's Marlboro Man swinger vibe that might seem cheesy and vaguely creepy to us now that we have a couple of decades of pop culture between us and Iron Man #126, but I assure you that look was very cool in the 70's. Tony Stark would have been a hairy-chested Golden God back in The Day, lord of the discotheque - now he looks like a sex offender who hangs out at truck stops.

One thing that is hilariously consistent - Tony Stark drinks like a fish. Here's a little flashback of Stark unwinding with his pal Mr. Jim Beam after a stressful day:

It's almost as if they're making fun of him, isn't it? Drinking is his second favorite indoor sport. I wonder what the first is? Probably air hockey.

Oh, wait - I think they mean f&%*ing.

Even when Stark is locked up on Hammer's floating estate, his first thought is booze, not escape. Hey, he thinks better after he's had a few, OK? Lay off, man - let's see you design a repulsor ray after swigging a 40 ouncer and a bottle of Nyquil. Here he is trying to talk a vogueing guard into bringing him some frickin' booze, fer Chrissake:

The guard denies his entirely reasonable request, which pisses Stark off to no end. That's when he starts to get all classist and demeaning and plans on showing this mere hourly employee who exactly he is dealing with:

Enraged that this lackey is refusing his request for booze, he lures the uneducated peasant into his room with the old fake hernia gag. "Guard, I have a painful hernia! Come look at it!" That shit works every time.

The guard enters, concerned about his prisoner's abdomenal well-being, and falls into trap #2, the old electrical appliance + pool of water gag. Stark's unique twist on this time-honored gag? That's not water, it's human urine!

That's right. Bring Papa Tony his drinky and nobody gets hurt, a'ight?

Stark does eventually escape from captivity even without his drink and searches for his Iron Man armor so he can turn the tables on Hammer and his small army of B-list villains. If he happens to find a wetbar or wine cellar before he finds his armor, that's OK, too. While hiding from Hammer's goons Stark does stumble across the aging crime lord's personal marijuana crop (left). It's strictly medicinal of course - help's with Hammer's arthritis.

After stuffing a couple of Hefty bags full of weed, Stark continues his search for his armor and maybe some rolling papers...

After a quick detour into a tool shed where he crafts an electric hookah out of a Chevy engine block, a propane tank, and a hair dryer, Stark finds his armor. Wow, he is so high right now. The suit, it looks so shiny... Man, he could go for a pint of Haagen Daaz ... His fingers feel tingly...

Finally at the every end of the comic, Tony Stark suits up and is ready to kick ass once again. Just in time, too, because Hammer's army of second-rate villains has been sent to hunt him down and crush him. Too late. My man Tony Stark has a serious buzz on, he's queued up some Blues Traveller on the suit's MP3 player and he is ready to trip out while he kick everyone's ass. Then it's ice cream time! (OK, no he doesn't really get stoned. That would be wrong. He just drinks.)

The last page is ten kinds of awesome, as Tony strikes a pose and delivers a rambling tough guy speech to the assembled squad of costumed losers:

It sounds best if you sing the last line: "Then I'm coming after you! LOOK OUT!"

OK, so my trip into yesteryear didn't yield any proof of classic Tony Stark's non-dickishness. But it did unearth an example of a smooth, casually cruel character with an unshakable sense of his own place in the world and precisely how awesome he is. I give 1979's Tony Stark zero points for heroic purity and 250 Caruso Points for sheer manly force of personality.

Out-of-Context X-Men Panel o' the Day

2007-11-21T12:21:00.000-08:00

Cyclops and Mr. Sinister exchange brutal bon mots in X-Factor #39.

Not cool: Stomach flu

2007-11-19T12:03:00.000-08:00

My apologies for the lack of posting - this time my entire family and everyone withing 50 meters of our house fell prey to some sort of hideous stomach flu nanovirus.

Seriously, the shit was nasty.

It started with my wee little toddler and then spread from there. Soon everyone was violently puking, including Trixie the dog, Po the cat, and General Chang the goldfish. You ever seen a goldfish vomit? Oh. Well, me too.

Anyway, now I'm back and - brace yourself - I am actually planning on doing a post about a comic book! I know, pretty wild stuff for a blog that is supposed to be about reviewing my old comic books. What can I say, sometimes it's hard to muster up the moral energy and courage needed to eviscerate a twenty year old issue of X-Men. Sometimes I just want to post about other crap and totally alienate my dwindling readership. Meanwhile, hungry young turks are out there beating me at the game! Of course, if the hungry young turk in question ever kisses a girl, I suspect his productivity will drop drastically.

OK, the puking and ass stuff are over! Now it is time to blog!

By the way, the stomach virus and me plunging my hand into a public toilet recently are completely unrelated events. Really.

Off-Topic: Which is less likely to fall into a toilet, an MP3 player or disc player?

2007-11-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

It's not unusual it happens every day

no matter what you say

you find it happens all the time

love will never do what you want it to

why can't this crazy love be mine

-Tom Jones

"It's Not Unusual"

Help me out here, people.

Some background: I still haven't gone digital. Instead of an MP3 player, I lug a cheap-ass disc player to work.

This morning I was on my way to work on the safe and efficient Washington State Ferry service and I had to go to the bathroom. Not to put too fine of a poitn on it, but I had to go #2. This is a relevant detail, I'm not telling you this to be gross or to conjure up an unwelcome mental image.

Anyway, I set the Discman behind me on the toilet and kept the headphones on, listening to Tom Jones as I did my business. There's nothing like a little Tom Jones in the john. Try it some time.

Anyway, when I had completed the transaction, I stood up - and the headphone chord yanked my disc player off the back of the toilet and right into the toilet bowl - before I had flushed, if you know what I mean. I screamed an obscenity, undoubtedly frightening the guy in the stall next to me, and quickly plunged my hand into the feculent water to fish out the now ruined and stinky Discman. I had to toss away the entire thing, disc and all, and wash my hands like, seven times. I don't know if I can ever listen to Tom Jones again.

I've been discussing this incident with anyone who will listen and I've gotten mixed responses:

a) Why are you telling me this? Get away from me, I don't even know you.

b) You should get an MP3 player, you're much less likely to drop it in the toilet.

c) Good thing it was just a cheap disc player - just think if that was an expensive iPod.

d) You put your hand in the toilet?

I ask you: what is the answer? Replace my disc player with another cheap disc player and be more careful around toilets in the future, or go digital and get a tiny little MP3 player that will fit in my pocket? I need your guidance, O Dave's Long Box reader.

The Deathstroke Theme Song - not OK with pets

2007-11-07T20:00:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about Deathstroke the Terminator lately. Just lying await at night, unable to sleep, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Deathstroke while Tangerine Dream music plays endlessly in my head. I have issues, what can I say?

Anyway, I've decided that Deathstroke needs a theme song - some short little ditty that plays when he strides into a room or busts through a skylight, guns blazing. I think it might sound a little something like this...

Shortly after my cat Po attacked me for waking her up, I tried the Deathstroke Theme on my dog Trixie, just to see what she thought...

Trixie savaged my left hand five seconds after that video was taken. Eleven stiches. Schipperkes are tough little sonsabitches, let me tell you.

It's hard living in a world of animals that don't appreciate my devotion to Deathstroke the Terminator. Damn, it's hard.

CRIMSON PLAGUE Image Comics, 2000

2007-11-05T08:17:00.000-08:00

Terror Week splatters you in womanly acid blood with this look at George Perez's gory, short-lived creator-owned sci-fi/horror comic Crimson Plague!

I have to be careful because my fingers find themselves wanting to type "Crimson Plaque," which would be a wholely different but equally disturbing comic. Floss and brush, kids! You don't want crimson plaque or ochre tartar, that's some nasty shit.

This comic, part of the creator-owned Gorilla Comics imprint published by Image Comics, only made it two issues, but the first issue is like, 64 pages for only a couple of bucks. I wonder how they made money off that one. George Perez, arguably one of the greatest comic book artists of ALL TIME, wrote and drew this ambitious but unwieldy tale of two women - DiNA Simmons (acid blood, red streaks in hair) and Shannon Lower (acid tongue, no pants on butt). One of the things that makes Crimson Plague noteworthy, aside from all the melting flesh and stuff, is that all the characters in the comic were modelled after real people that George Perez knows. This is both a good and bad thing, as we'll discuss shortly.

It's sort of difficult at first to figure out who the main characters are and what the main plot of Crimson Plague actually is, but after repeated readings I think I've got it figured out. Shannon Lower and a bunch of ragtag space marine types are dispatched to a lunar penal colony to rescue employees of the mutli-planetary corporation EcoTech from rebellious prisoner/miners. When they arrive, they find no survivors - just lots and lots of red goo that used to be human beings.

The shit is everywhere; it'll take more than a couple of Swiffers and a trash bag to clean this mess up.

Man, what a mess.

It turns out that most everyone has been killed after exposure to the acid blood of DiNA: Simmons, a foxy woman with a seriously dangerous physiology. Anything her blood touches dissolves into the aforementioned goo while screaming, "GAAAHHH! HELP MEEE!!!" Seriously, her blood is so nasty that the slightest drop will totally kill you within seconds in the most gruesome way possible. Beat that, Rage Virus!

Perez is famous for his ridiculously detailed art and Crimson Plague is no exception. He seems to really enjoy drawing people dissolving into red goo. Here's some poor mulleted bastard who makes the mistake of stabbing DiNA: Simmons in the gut. Bad call, dude:

Yikes.

So DiNA: Simmons (no idea why her name is spelled like that) is sort of the villain of the piece, a combo of Alien and Species. Shannon Lower is the protagonist, I guess, but that's only really evident in the second and final issue. She kind of gets lost in the crowd in the first issue, which is full to the point of gagging with minor characters. Since she gets about as much page space as everybody else, it's tough to figure out that she's supposed to be the focus of Perez's story. She ends up being the sole survivor when the Colonial Marines, er, I mean EcoTech soldiers she's with get slimed by DiNA.

Now that I think about it, the tip-off that Shannon is the main character is her introductory panel, in which she appears in her underwear. There's an alarm going off on her ship and she's got no time for pants! Pants? "Pants, HELL!"

I admire her spirit. There are some times when you just can't be bothered with trousers, like during an earthquake or at the swimming pool. I'm going to try that: next time the mail comes I'm just marching down there in my boxer briefs because damn it, there's a Bank of America bill and a J. Crew catalog just sitting out there exposed in my mail box! "Pants, hell! I've got to get that damn mail!"

I would have liked to have seen more Shannon in her underwear and more crimson goo, but alas, Crimson Plague never made it to issue three, because Gorilla Comics folded as quickly as they set up shop. Perez clearly had big plans for the series, because the first jumbo size issue is absolutely packed with exposition and characters. It's one big steaming info dump, really, with not a lot of narrative momentum. One gets the feeling that Perez would have hit his storytelling stride after a few issues, but we'll never know. As is, the first issue in particular is a busy mess, jumping around in time and location with abandon. A few narrative captions would have smoothed things out and made it an easier read.

I mentioned earlier that Perez based all of his characters on people in his life. Dina Simmons and Shannon Lower are real people, presumably without acid blood. That may explain why even the most incidental character gets a name in the book, so Perez can say, "See, Bob? You're the space janitor Max Mopup on page 13. You get killed on page 14, though. Sorry."

Perez is a fantastic artist, so all his characters look like real people instead of the usual default Square Jawed Guy template we get in many comics by lesser talents. The problem is, Perez is not as good of a casting director as he is an artist. Some of the characters just don't look like they fit their role.

It's like when you watch a low budget Canadian syndicated TV show and the cast just doesn't look right. You know what I mean? You can just tell - the guy on the screen doesn't look like an FBI agent or an immortal warrior, he looks like a truck driver. I just couldn't get past the "miscasting" in Crimson Plague. Lower and Simmons fit the bill, but some of the other characters just look sort of... normal. You know you're not looking at a galactic president, you're looking at the librarian at George Perez's local library.

All in all, despite a somewhat shaky start, I'm bummed that I don't get to find out where Perez was going with all this stuff, bummed that I don't getto see more people dissolve into piles of red goo, bummed that I will never find out the signifigance of the spelling of DiNA's name.

Oh, well. That's how things go during TERROR WEEK! (Now entering week 2, BTW)

P.S. I forgot to mention that I don't actually own Crimson Plague - Ian Brill lent them to me like, TWO YEARS AGO and I never gave them back. Sorry Ian! You can have them back now...

Terror Week presents: Eaters of Man!

2007-11-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

Terror Week lingers on after Halloween, like a fart at a Saturday night poker game. You just can't get rid of it, no matter how many windows you open. Such is the power of Terror Week here at Dave's Long Box.

Utter, bladder-voiding, sanity-shattering terror is part of the human condition, but such is the nature of civilized Western life that few of us are confronted with true terror on a daily basis - unless one happens to be an avid viewer of Nancy Grace on CNN. Those reading this blog were undoubtedly born in the 20th Century, the most violent 100 years of human existence, yet for those like myself fortunate enough to live in modern society, we have lived lives untouched by the specter of daily violence.

I am, of course, speaking in extremely general terms, but the sad fact is that the daily burden of fear on this planet is usually born by those in developing nations who live in poverty. These are the folks who have to stress about the air, food, and water they ingest killing them, or their children dying of preventable diseases, or about falling prey to criminals or soldiers or mines or unexploded bombs...

...or yes, getting eaten alive.

Previously I advanced my completely unproven and unsupported theory that all human terror stems from a biologically hardwired fear of saber tooth tigers. I stand by my hypothesis and I challenge anyone to prove me wrong (knowing that I will just delete any comments that contradict said theory because I am a dick). That's because for hundreds of thousands of years, animals have been stalking, killing, and eating humans. Even today man is on the menu with alarming frequency in poor rural areas on Earth.

Let's take crocodiles. There are two species of crocodile that regularly chow down on homo sapiens: Africa's Nile crocodile and the Asian saltwater crocodile. According to the Wikipedia entry (grain o' salt alert!), "The saltwater crocodile is one of the major animals involved in attacks on humans in Southeast Asia and Australia and is responsible for about 300 deaths annually." It is estimated that the Nile croc kills a couple hundred Africans and tourists each year. These numbers are wild approximations because of the lack of infrastructure and local government in many croc-heavy regions, to say nothing of civil war. But let's presume that at least 500 people get the chop every year from crocodiles.*

Chew on that for a minute.

Odds are pretty damn good that as you are reading this, some poor bastard is being digested inside a crocodile's belly or some unsuspecting person is walking too close to the edge of a river right now, unaware that death lurks unseen in the murky water mere yards away...

Crocodiles are opportunistic ambush predators, bursting from hiding when some animal enters their Kill Zone - anywhere near water. Again, Wikipedia: "As an ambush predator, it usually waits for its prey to get close to the water's edge before striking without warning and using its great strength to drag the animal back into the water. Most prey animals are killed by the huge jaw pressure of the crocodile, although some animals may be incidentally drowned."

The most famous and prolific Nile crocodile is Gustave, a monstrous 20+ foot beast that prowled Burundi's Rusizi River and Lake Tanganika. While Burundi's warlords have killed far more of their own people than Gustave could ever dream of, the jumbo croc is blamed for over 300 deaths over the years. This may be an exaggeration, but it's certainly possible. Gustave is so famous they even made a movie about him, Primeval, which I haven't actually seen.

The locals mistakenly believed Gustave had died of old age or finally got killed, as a confirmed sighting of the man-eater hadn't been reported in years. Likely the only ones who sighted Gustave didn't live to spread the news, because in April 2007 a huge croc with Gustave's trademark bullet-scarred noggin attacked some fishermen, eating one of them. It seems that Gustave is back and in full effect.

A 300 victim tally is impressive for any species, but pales in comparison to India's Panar leopard, which killed over 400 people around the turn of the century. Or how about the Champawat Tigress, the champion of all man-eaters with a documented 436 kills in Nepal and India's Kumoan region in the 19th century? Any way you cut it, that's a shitload of dead bodies. The Champawat Tigress was so feared that the Nepalese Army was assembled to drive it over the border into Kumoan, where it became the Indians' problem. Nice, huh?

Aside from staggering success at killing people, both the Panar Leopard and the Champawat Tigress had one thing in common: they met hot doom from the barrel of legendary hunter Jim Corbett. Nobody on Earth had more experience at tracking and killing man-eating cats as Corbett, a man who by all accounts was exceptionally skilled and possessing of iron nerves, keen eyesight, and a lot of luck. Guy had a face like a mutt, though. I guess God didn't roll triple sixes for every category when he was making this particular Ranger player character.

Corbett's books occupy an honored place in the Dave Campbell Library of Macho, particularly The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag, an account of Corbett's repeated attempts to end the career of the most famous man-eating cat in India.

This particular leopard preyed on pilgrims and villagers in a more densely populated area of India and as a result had a much bigger psychological impact than the Panar leopard. The official death count for the Rudraprayag leopard is around 125 victims, but Corbett himself says the cat killed "several hundred" Indians over the course of several years. The leopard was notorious for snatching people out of their homes without a sound and was thought by many locals to be some sort of evil spirit due to its uncanny knack for escape and evasion. It was like a Sith lord and a Predator and a ninja all wrapped up in one lean rosette skinned package.

Leopards, like crocodiles, are opportunistic killers - although humans aren't their natural prey, they're more than willing to sample the local bipeds if the conditions are right. By contrast, tigers and lions usually only turn to man-eating when they can't close the deal with their normal prey due to injury, illness, or infirmity.

Corbett believed that the Rudraprayag leopard probably developed a taste for humans during a period of plague and drought. The local Indians couldn't spare the wood to cremate their dead, so they put burning embers in the mouths of their dead and pitched them off a cliff. The leopard, it is theorized, discovered this stockpile of man flesh and decided that they were good eating. From that point forward, it was ON.

"[Leopards] drive tent-peg size fangs into your neck and rip open your
tender belly with windmilling rear claws while their foreclaws hold you in place
and they call you dirty names in leopardese."

The Rudraprayag leopard still carried on with eating its usual diet of goats and deer and whatnot, but the enterprising cat also killed and ate more than its share of women and children. Unlike crocodiles, whose Kill Zone covers the river/human interface, leopards have an unlimited Kill Zone - they can show up anywhere, and often do. They're practically invisible in the sun-dappled underbrush and are totally silent - until they spring into action. Then you are screwed. They drive tent-peg size fangs into your neck and rip open your tender belly with windmilling rear claws while their foreclaws hold you in place and they call you dirty names in leopardese.

Only two people were attacked by the Rudraprayag leopard and lived to tell about it. Everyone else died. Corbett tried everything to stop it, ranging from bear traps to tripwire shotgun traps to baiting the cat with live animals to lacing dead animals with poison. He was stalked and nearly killed on several occasions by his nemesis, and at one point Corbett had to take a vacation to get his jangled nerves together. All the while, the residents of the Rudraprayag region and the pilgrims who had to pass through lived in abject fear of this unkillable boogeyman.

Corbett ultimately sorted the Rudraprayag man-eater out, and the old cat measured a full seven foot and six inches. It had teeth worn from old age, a mouth blackened from ingesting the poison that could not kill it, and scars from various close calls and battles with other cats. It was an old leopard, but still magnificently powerful - it had taken down adult cows as well as full grown humans.

What about lions? Or tigers? Sharks? Jaguars? Already this post stretches too long to discuss any of these man-eaters at length. Sure, these animals don't hunt and eat humans by default, but each of them has been known to chow down on homo sapiens when the local conditions are right.

Let's just look briefly at lions. The most famous man-eating lions, the Tsavo lions, devoured up to 135 railway workers during the latter part of the 19th century before they were killed by Lt. Colonel JH Patterson. This man-eating team were dubbed The Ghost and The Darkness, and a mediocre film was made about them in 1996. After serving some time as Patterson's floor rugs, the lions are now on display at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. It's speculated that the natural food supply of the Tsavo lions may have dried up and the pair learned to appreciate human flesh by dining on the inadequately buried bodies of railway workers. Through trial and error they taught themselves how to hunt man.

The Tsavo lions were not anomalies, however. A pride of lions in Tanzania taught themselves how fun and easy it was to hunt people. Three generations of lions in the pride developed the skill and aptitude for man-eating, and ultimately the threat to the local populace was ended when the entire pride was wiped out.

Even today lions go after humans in Africa. According to researchers, "Between August 2002 and April 2004 a man-eating lion killed 35 people and injured at least nine in a 350 square kilometres area along the Rufiji River." It appears that Tanzania is still one big Kill Zone under the right circumstances. All it takes is one lion with a tooth ache or a festering thorn or the proper role model and the curtain lifts once again on the ages-old drama of man vs. scary animal.

There are some who may read this and feel uneasy with the idea of man killing animals under any circumstances or feel that the depiction of certain predators as man-eating monsters makes it that much easier to hunt and kill them. Fair enough. I for one think it's incredibly cool that there are still places on the planet where humans are not Lords of the Earth, where if you don't tread carefully you may end up getting eaten.

Of course, that's easy for me to say here in my warm home outside Seattle. I don't have to think twice when I go get food for my family or even step outside for a minute to look at the stars. It's an inescapable fact that for loads of people in the world, man-eating animals aren't some romantic notion but a very real part of their daily lives. Even today.

And that, my friends, is real TERROR! Believe it!

*I totally can't back this number up, it's just a rough estimate. Hey, if you want scientific accuracy you shouldn't be reading a blog.

Terror Week rolls on and on!

2007-10-30T14:11:00.000-07:00

I was bored in a meeting so I drew this absolutely terrifying picture. Beware to the trick-or-treaters who refuse to acknowledge the supremacy of Dr. Doom!

Horror with a heart - Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon

2007-10-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

I love horror movies, but it’s a sad fact that most of them suck wet ass. With the glut of “torture porn” movies and PG-13 jump-scare flicks targeted at 15-year old girls, it can be tough to find a halfway decent horror movie these days.

I enjoyed 30 Days of Night, although it shared the same flaws that its comic book source material had. (That aerial shot of the vampires running amok was pretty sweet, though, wasn’t it?) I’ve heard good things about the indy slasher movie Hatchet, which looks fun. But it’s rare to find a good scary flick anymore. You can imagine how pleased I was when I found a horror movie that I not only could tolerate, but genuinely loved.

Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is like a big blood drenched Valentine to all those slasher flicks that scared the shit out of me as a kid. It works as a horror movie, as a cultural satire, and as a comedy. It’s fantastic and you should stop reading this and put it at the top of your Netflix queue right now. I’ll wait.

Back? Good. You won’t regret it, I promise.

Behind the Mask begins as a mockumentary created by college student Taylor Gentry (Angela Goethals) and her crew that follows the training and planning of Leslie Vernon, an aspiring mass-murderer. In the universe of the film, slashers like Michael Meyers and Jason Voorhees are not only real, they are the subject of study and admiration for Vernon (Nathan Baesel), a chipper Prius-driving young man who is truly devoted to mastering his craft – his chosen trade just happens to be stalking and massacring teenagers.

Vernon explains in detail the tricks of the slasher trade and the meaning behind his impending slaughter of a virginal teen and her friends. It’s a clever and very funny deconstruction of the tropes of slasher movies, but you can tell that the filmmakers have a real affection for the source material. This is loving satire, not parody.

Nathan Baesel is pitch-perfect as Leslie Vernon, who carefully constructs a fake local mythology surrounding his slasher and meticulously prepares the haunted house and apple orchard which is the center of the fake folklore and hunting ground for the anticipated partying teenagers. He rigs the lights to a remote control so he can plunge the house into darkness, weakens the branches on trees so the kids can’t escape from the second floor, constructs secret passageways, sabotages a tool shed full of potentially defensive weaponry, nails the windows on the bottom floor shut, etc. – all while he talks about the benefits of cardio and the Jungian/Freudian symbolism of the bond between slasher and the virginal “survivor girl” who is the focus of his twisted attention. Leslie Vernon is hilarious and endearing and, much like the documentary crew, we’re drawn into his world and don’t really want him to stop.

Of course, there comes a point when Taylor and the film crew must decide whether to intervene, step away, or keep filming – and that’s when the mockumentary stops and the movie shifts gears and becomes a full-on horror movie. There’s an unexpected twist that makes complete sense and lots of mayhem, including a great kill where a victim’s heart is removed from his chest with a post-digging tool.

My only complaint about the third act of Behind the Mask is that it’s not scary enough. At this point in my life I may be immune to stuff like this, but I felt like director Scott Glosserman could have pumped up The Scary a little more.

Overall I thought it was fantastic and I think you will, too. The script is clever, the performances are spot-on, the concept is fantastic (and not as similar to the Belgian flick Man Bites Dog as it sounds), and most importantly, Behind the Mask’s heart is in the right place – lying on the ground next to a busted open sternum.

Terror Week: Horrifying Real Ghost Videos!

2007-10-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

Do you believe in ghosts?

Ever since my pal and I saw an eerie little girl with a red ball in the woods, I have... not really believed in ghosts. I mean, we thought she was a ghost at the time, but there is probably a rational and totally non-supernatural reason why a little girl with a red ball would be out in the woods by herself early one Sunday morning. The most plausible explanation would likely be the Hunter S. Thompsony activities my pal and I were up to the previous night, if you know what I mean.

My personal explanation for ghosts is sort of a half-baked theory about "psychic" energy and how powerful emotions can leave a lingering after-image in the physical world. It's more fun to think that ghosts are actual dead people, but that opens up a whole theological can o' worms that Agnostic Dave can't wrap his secular mind around.

But this is Terror Week, and for all purposes, ghost are real. I can prove it to you, I have it on video! Video never lies. Let's take a look at the three most horrifying real ghost videos on the Internet - they will make you believe.

Portuguese Hitchiking Phantom

Unless your rental car has ghost collision insurance, do not pick up hitchikers in Portugal. They will fuck your car up real bad.

Here's a looong video about three crazy kids who are driving around in the middle of the night and something terrible happens. Good thing one of them was filming the whole thing! While I appreciate the intent of the film makers in trying to capture the whole raw video cinema verite thing, I think they could have cut this video in half and still achieved the same effect. After five minutes of them driving around you just want the ghost to show up and kill them already!

Wait a second - am I saying this video is fake, as in fictional? Well, yes. Click here - my Portuguese is a little rusty, but the website basically says, "I hope you liked video of ghost that I am made, support donkeys by buying DVD for very green rapist man!" Like I said, my Portuguese is a little shaky.

Pontianak Attack!

Here's another TOTALLY REAL video of some soldiers in Singapore wigging out when they are confronted by a blurry thing that giggles like an anime schoolgirl. Is it a Pontianak, a blood sucking vampire woman? You make the call.

This video never fails to crack me up, because the guy's reaction to the evil female ghost is so heartfelt and profane. Warning: NSFW audio that will make you laugh.

"Welcome the dude who ain't the buyer of mugs."

Finally, a video that probably half of the online world has seen but I will share with you anyway. Be warned: it is TERRORFYING!

Brace yourself for an odyssey into TERROR!

2007-10-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

Halloween draws nigh, so I welcome you to Terror Week here at Dave's Long Box. Suit up, my friends, because like Donald Pleasance and Racquel Welch you and I are about to embark upon a Fantastic Voyage into the core of your reptilian brain to discover the Source of All Fear! (I'll be Racquel Welch in this metaphor if you don't mind.)

What is the Source of All Fear?

Sabertooth tigers.

Everything boils down to a fear of sabertooth tigers. Since the days when our primitive hominid ancestors tread the Earth, our brains have been hardwired to be afraid of sabertooth tigers, and possibly volcanoes. Everything boils down to that. Scared that the guy tailgating you might be a mass murderer? Your reptile brain really thinks he's a sabertooth tiger. Nervous about walking alone to your car in a big empty parking garage in the middle of the night? The primitive core of your mind thinks there may be tigers of the sabertooth variety about. Afraid of doing that big presentation at work? Actually, that's just you being a pussy.

Anyway, since Halloween is nearly upon us in the States (in Canada they have to wait until mid-November*) I thought it would be a good time to post about Scary Shit of the real and imagined kind.

The other week we had a big Fall windstorm here in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't so bad - last year's was way worse - but it was not a good day to be a commuter on the Washington State Ferry system, which I am. Here's a shot of one of the big-ass car ferries plowing through some heavy waves on Puget Sound. See that area that's underwater? That's the auto bay.

I usually walk on the ferries to get to work in Seattle, but occasionally I drive, and when I do I like to hang out in my car and listen to NPR and plot the demise of my foes. I'm just happy I wasn't on that boat at the time - that would have been TERRORFYING! Thanks to my dad for forwarding me that picture, BTW.

Each year I get a little more ambitious with the Halloween decorations around the house. It must run in the family, because my sister decorates the inside and outside of her house big time. Her house has more of a Martha Stewart vibe - lots of tasteful black swag and cornstalks and white pumpkins. Mine is more of a traditional homemade yard haunt, with cobwebs and black lights and a graveyard and spooky portraits - stuff like that.

I still haven't gotten around to creating some of my dream layouts that I've talked about in the past, like the Oprah Encounter yard haunt. However, this year I've created the Doom O' Lantern, the only pumpkin in my 'hood that honors Dr. Doom. Behold, and know fear:

Those who come to my house this Halloween must acknowledge Doom as their master or they don't get shit.

KIDS: Trick or treat!
ME: Oh, look at you guys! Let's see - we got a ninja, black costume Spider-Man, a fairy princess. Wow, you look great. One question before you get candy: is Doctor Doom your lord and master?
KIDS: No. Who's that?
ME: Out. All of you. Leave.
KIDS: Wh-what about candy?
ME: Doom does not reward the foolish and weak with candy. Get off my porch, now.
KIDS: You're mean!
ME: Hey, fuck you pal. Dr. Doom has kicked Spider-Man's ass I don't know how many times. Blow.
KIDS: B-but...
ME: I said "BLOW!"
KIDS: (crying, running)

That's how I roll on Halloween - deal with it.

OK, let's begin Terror Week! Let us do this thing!

SUPERMAN #9 DC Comics, 1987

2007-10-22T21:25:00.001-07:00

Look at that cover.

That is a SHOCKER of a comic book cover! Somebody needs to tell Superman that green eye shadow doesn't work with his outfit - I don't care if he's been hit with Joker venom or not, it just doesn't work. And those eyebrows! Damn. Somebody get the Queer Eye guys in here, 'cause Superman needs some manscaping, stat.

I am an unreserved fan of John Byrne's relaunch of the Superman books in the mid-Eighties. Byrne wrote and drew a completely revamped Superman with the ground-breaking mini-series Man of Steel, then followed up with a new Superman comic and a brand new Action Comics team-up title. Times were good for Superman fans.

In this issue, written and pencilled by Byrne with inks by Karl "Under Twelve Parsecs" Kessel, The Joker decides that Gotham isn't challenging enough so he comes to Metropolis to screw with Superman. That's just asking for trouble. But The Joker is crazy and ambitious, so it's understandable if not wise.

The story is short, but longer than you would think a Superman vs Joker match-up would run. I'd say it would last all of three panels under normal circumstances, but John Byrne uses The Riddler Factor to good effect here, postponing the inevitable and lopsided showdown between godlike alien being and skinny clown for as long as possible.

As stated elsewhere, The Riddler Factor is:

"...that combination of luck, moxie, and plot contrivance that allows lame
villains to survive when they are hopelessly outclassed by their superhero
opponents. "

The whole thing begins with a clone of Superman robbing the Metropolis Diamond exchange by getting all Jokery and releasing deadly green gas from his robot ears. Like so:

Turns out the Superman robot has a live thermonuclear bomb in its chest, which Superman takes care of by flying it into space, of course. That sort of begs the question: if The Joker has enough resources to build a nuclear bomb gas-spewing Superbot, why is he using it to rob jewelry stores? Because he's batshit insane, that's why.

Actually, the whole thing is part of a plot to screw with Superman. Because, as The Joker says, "Why not?" Oh, Joker, you so crazy!

One thing I am not crazy about is Byrne's take on the Clown Prince of Crime, The Joker. If memory serves, Byrne was just carrying over the Joker character design he used for the Legends mini-series. I'm a big fan of Legends, but that doesn't mean I like this look for the Joker. Check him out in this crappy scan which I swear I did not do at work:
The Joker looks creepy, but not in a scary psychopath way. It's more of a funhouse mirror kind of creepy.

Look at him. He's got David Byrne's puffy suit wardrobe, Karen Carpenter's diet plan, Donald Trump's eyebrows, George Washington's teeth, and Alien jaws. What the hell, man? I mean, clearly he's exagerrated for effect, but how does his mouth work? What would the Byrne Joker's skeleton look like, a Whitley Streiber alien? Hey, don't get me wrong, I think The Joker should be grotesque but I also think he should be recognizably human. Just a little nitpicking for you.

Minor quibbles aside, this issue was great. I'm a huge fan of Kessel's inks over Byrne's pencils and I thought this was just a great light-hearted done-in-one story.

This issue also features a fantastic Lex Luthor back-up story that deserves a post all its own.

In the short story, Lex stops his limo at a roadside diner for some bacon & eggs and a little casual, life-wrecking cruelty.

He picks a foxy married waitress named Jenny and offers her one million dollars if she'll jettison her life and come to Metropolis with him for one month. That's one million dollars for thirty days of sex with Luthor. I'd ask for two million. He tells the waitress he'll wait in his limo outside for ten minutes and then his offer will be off the table. Oh, BTW can he have his breakfast in a to-go container? KTHX

It is established that the waitress is married to a bit of a jerk, but the decision is gut-wrenching. Should she dump him and leave her simple life for a month of God-knows-what in Luthor's crib? Oh, what to do?

Of course, Lex drives off before the ten minutes have elapsed. In his limo he gloats, "Jenny Hubbard will never know what her final choice would have been. And that question will torment her for the rest of her meaningless life!" We learn that he does this stuff all the time.

I love that story! It should be called "Lex Luthor: Total Asshole."

From the Department of Corrections: NEWSFLASH - Deathstroke has ONE EYE!

2007-10-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed in my last post I talked a little bit about Deathstroke the Terminator, who I claim to be a "big fan" of. One could certainly question the depth of someone's devotion to Deathstroke if they were to write/utter the following statement:

I meant that he purposefully wears his one-eyed hood to handicap himself. Clearly that's not right. I mean, Deathstroke is wearing a frickin' eyepatch in the very issue I was writing about. I scanned the image above of shirtless, nippleless eye-patch wearing Deathstroke from the Turkish Bath scene in New Teen Titans #34. I'm telling you, those comic books had something for everybody.

Anyway, I feel shame so I had to you know, make a correction and shit. I mean, it's like, what was I thinking? Dude, he's Deathstroke - he has one eye. Like Nick Fury, his one eye thing is part of his schtick, his branding. Man, I'm slipping.

I don't know, I feel like an aging gunslinger or David Lee Roth or something. There's always some hot shit kid nipping at your heels, waiting for you to slip... And you always do...

NEW TEEN TITANS #34 DC Comics, 1983

2007-10-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

Forget about Trigon, the Wildebeest, and the Team Titans - The Judas Contract is the definitive New Teen Titans plot, the equivalent of the X-Men's Death of Phoenix storyline.

This particular issue, New Teen Titans #34, was the big reveal, the "holy shit!" issue where readers learned the shocking truth about Terra, the annoying buck-toothed heroine with the Prince Valiant haircut who was inducted into the ranks of the Titans - she was Amish! No, wait - she was a traitor, a mole planted on the Titans' by their mortal enemy Deathstroke the Terminator.

I love this storyline because I got to experience it in real time as it unfolded every month. I’ve already extolled the virtues of Marv Wolfman and George Perez’s densely packed, more superhero for your buck run on Titans and how the colorful and shiny cast of DC heroes was a perfect counter-balance to all the Marvel books I was getting at the time. I got hooked on the issue where the young heroes battle giant animated Hindu statues in the snow and had to get every issue thereafter.

Terra Markov was a brash heroine with a boulder/chip on her shoulder who could telekinetically manipulate rock and earth – the perfect character for artist George Perez, the master of drawing rubble. For several issues she bitched and whined and tried to worm her way on to the Titans roster, until she finally proves herself in a (staged) battle with Deathstroke in this issue.

I dig Terra's powers - they look great - but I'm not a huge fan of the character herself, and this issue just confirmed that Young Dave was right to not like her! Vindicated!

Anyway, after seemingly vanquishing Deathstroker (that's a dumb pun, not a typo), the rest of the Titans decide to invite Terra to join their special club.

The Titans were perhaps not the most sensitive peer group. Terra’s hard luck story about being raised by terrorists falls on deaf ears among the team, who each have traumatic histories that would put most people in therapy. Here they blow off Terra’s attempts at inducing sympathy:

“Big fucking deal, girl. I got all burnt and exploded and now look at me – I’m a goddamn robot. I’m all hideous and shit.”

“I sympathize, Terra, but my father is a demon lord and I occasionally grow extra eyes on my forehead and try to kill my friends. Beat that.”

“I’m a total fox, but I have like, twenty different origins and I’m in love with a red-haired loser with a beard. A beard.”

“I was a slave for years and I have no pupils. I also trip over my hair all the damn time. Then again, I'm stacked.”

“I have green skin and hair and have to wear this red and white outfit. Plus: no penis."

“Two Face killed my parents and I wear bikini bottoms. And I grew up in a cave full of goddamn bats and a psycho drill sergeant surrogate father who regularly thrust me into combat unarmed against people with guns. Every other night I got knocked out or tied up or strapped to a giant cue ball. So I ain’t trying to hear that shit you're talking.”

“I’m a Republican.”

Nope, not a lot of empathy for the buck-toothed rock girl in Titans Tower.

The other thing that this issue had going for it was Deathstroke the Terminator, one of the coolest villains ever, a man who dresses in blue and orange and somehow makes it work; a man with perfectly good eyesight who covers up one eye because it wouldn't be fair to his opponents if he used two; a man who sports a DC Beard (see Green Arrow, Warlord) when he's not in costume; a man with not one but three kick-ass names (Deathstroke/The Terminator/Slade); a man who uses 90% of his brain at all times because it wouldn't be sporting to use the full 100%. He is perhaps the most bad-ass villain in the DC Universe this side of Kobra - and he knows it.

At this point in the Titans Timeline he is just referred to as The Terminator. I'm not sure where he picked up the "Deathstroke" handle. Prison? Don't judge, man, we all do what we have to in order to survive.

Anyway, it turns out Deathstroke is the chief architect behind the whole Judas Contract plot, which doesn't really pan out in the end, but must have seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm just glad it was Deathstroke and not somebody lame like Clock King. I won't even mention his prison name.

Man, DC was firing on all cylinders in the Eighties. If you'll notice in the barcode box on the cover, they attempted a rebranding. They were "The New DC" and there was "no stopping them now!" I'm glad they settled on that slogan as opposed to some of their other attempts at hip, edgy branding:

Yeah, maybe a little too agressive...

The Flip Test

2007-10-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

One trick that overworked “readers” in Hollywood use to decide whether a script is worth checking out is the flip test. Goes like this: you start from the back of the script and flip forward, scanning the pages without actually reading the words in order to see if the script has a good balance of action and dialogue. Are there huge chunks of scene direction squatting like monoliths on the pages? Or endless long-winded passages of dialogue that straggle from one page to the next? If the screenplay doesn’t have a nice variety of direction and dialogue, it probably sucks and isn’t worth reading.

Does that seem fair? Maybe not, but if you had to read a million point six screenplays and write coverage reports for your producer bosses, you would probably think otherwise. From what I understand, the flip test is actually a pretty good way of determining whether your boss will want to read the damn thing. Remember, this is Hollywood we’re talking about. They’re interested in making money, not high art.

I’m working on a screenplay right now (one of the reasons I’m not posting a lot these days) and I keep the flip test in mind as I crank out the pages. Bear with me, I’m going somewhere with all this.

My number one job in writing the script is to entertain the person who is going to read it. A big part of that means to make it as easy as possible to read. If I’m writing a big action scene you can bet I’m not going to have huge blocks of unbroken text describing the action – it is death to read. You gotta break that shit up. Similarly, big dialogue scenes will be interspersed with scene direction to add more variety to the page – it just reads better.

I used to work in a comic book store back in The Day, but nowadays I’m just a consumer. I have X amount of time and Y amount of money to spend in a comic book store, and so I’ve started doing my own flip test on comics I think I might like to buy.

Sure, there are some books I will pick up just because certain writers or artists are involved, but lately I’ve been doing the flip test and it’s a surprisingly painless way of making comic buying decisions easy.

(Before you think I’m being callous or flippant, which I kinda am, I would remind you that we all do the flip test when we watch movie previews. In two and a half minutes you make up your mind whether you want to spend money on a flick or pass.)

I love Thor! Let’s check out the Straczynski/Copiel relaunch. Flip, flip, flip… Wait a second, where’s all the head-smashing? Maybe this is just a slow issue, let’s look at another one. Flip, flip, flip… OK, I’m just scanning this from back to front, but I see a lot of talky-talky and not a lot of hammer-to-skull. PASS.

That was easy.

New Avengers! Bendis’ Mamet-y dialogue and Leinil Yu’s vascular artwork. I haven’t picked this up in a while. Flip, flip, flip… Hey, this entire issue takes place during one plane ride? Hmm. What about this issue? Flip, flip, flip… Lots of talking, Wolverine gets shot in the crotch… Sorry, the talking to action ratio seems off. They must want me to wait for the trade. PASS.

OK, let’s give DC a chance. I haven’t picked up that Blue Beetle book yet. Flip, flip, flip… Looks kinda cute, lots of jumping and fighting. Flip, flip, flip… Hmm, there’s some talking and shit, too, so there must be a plot… Flip, flip, flip… Oooh, look, it’s Giganta! SOLD!

This may all seem very glib, but I guess I’m trying to make a point. I don’t want to buy an individual comic book that is really just a chapter in the inevitable trade paperback collection. I want to buy a comic, a 22 page floppy, that stands on its own. The entire industry seems to have drifted from producing comics as an end product towards producing comics that will be repackaged in a couple of months in trade form.

Well, fuck that.

I’m not saying you can’t publish a quiet issue or a ball-busting all-action issue of a certain comic. But if I’m browsing through my local comic shop and have ten minutes and twenty bucks to spend, you had better GRIP MY SHIT. Sorry, if I’ve never seen an issue of Ultimate Spidey before and I pick up 22 pages of Mary Jane and Peter talking on a bed? (I know I’ve used this example before, but Jesus, it still bugs me) I’m never going to buy your comic. I’m a consumer looking for a good comic in a crowded market place, and you blew it.

I don’t want to wait five issues for something exciting to happen in Thor. I don’t want to buy a chapter in your trade paperback. I want a fucking good comic NOW and if you can’t deliver, if your story telling strategy is to “pace for the trade” then you’ve lost me and my measly twenty bucks. Every issue is somebody’s first and somebody’s last, and unless you make EVERY ISSUE entertaining and gripping, forget it. You don’t deserve my cash.

You didn’t pass the flip test.

Off Topic: The Red Baron

2007-10-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

One of my pipe dreams was to write the definitive Red Baron screenplay, but dreams are made to be crushed and urinated upon, aren't they?

A German production of The Red Baron has been underway for years now and the film will finally be released in 2008. I'm a little bummed out because I have to put my dream of writing the Red Baron movie on my Shelf of Broken Dreams, right next to "marrying Linda Carter" and "driving a hovercraft to school." However, I must say the movie looks kick ass, if this effects reel is any indication:

I'm not sure why they have the Trans-Siberian Orchestra or whoever doing the music, but that looks pretty bad ass, doesn't it? I'll reserve final judgement because I've been burned before by WWI aviator flicks. I'm looking at you, Flyboys. Anybody see that? I hated that movie. I actually walked out of the theater with ten minutes left to go - me, who will watch and enjoy any old piece of crap movie. That's how insultingly bad Flyboys was.

Anyway, I'm cautiously optimistic and a little melancholy about The Red Baron. Sure, I didn't get to write the damn thing, but if anybody is going to do a good movie about Manfred von Richthofen, it would be German film makers. I'll gladly have my dreams gunned down by their twin Spandaus if they can just deliver and make a movie worthy of the Ace of Aces, the greatest combat flyer the world has ever seen.

Don't let me down, guys.

B-List Bad Guys From Back in the Day

2007-10-02T04:49:00.000-07:00

I like old shit; sue me.

Once it’s had a chance to dehydrate and season a little, old shit is easier to handle than new shit. With new shit you get so hung up on the smell that it’s hard to value the form and texture of the shit itself. Old shit has been sitting there for a while in the grass, waiting patiently for you to come along and appreciate it, or just step in it. Yep, I like old shit and so do folks like Alex Ross, Grant Morrison, and my dog Trixie.

Oh my God, what the fuck am I going on about? Way to stretch a metaphor to the point of breaking, Dave.

I was going somewhere with the old shit analogy. Just be thankful I stopped myself before I stopped talking about nutty old shit. I think my point was, it’s OK to like old stuff, provided nostalgia doesn’t blind you to the fact that new shit can be pretty good, too. Wallowing in old shit is insular and regressive and unsanitary – if you’re just listening to old Freedom Rock all the time you’ll never get exposed to all the awesome new rock out there.

Let’s abruptly segue away from the poo talk and chat about old school villains.

Man, they don’t make villains like they used to, do they? Sure, there are some exceptions – I thought Prometheus from JLA was pretty cool, and Bearded Dude from Brubaker’s Captain America run, and Cassandra Nova from X-Men was creepy as hell – but most of the heavyweight comic book bad guys were created in the last century. Let’s face it – Doom reigns supreme. How you gonna top that? (psst... click on the picture of Doom to find out what his favorite breakfast food is. Thanks to Dave Lartigue for the pic.)

I've always been a sucker for minor villains in pretty much any medium (e.g., my love note to Arnold Vosloo and his character Pik from Hard Target). The arch-villain's henchman in the Bond movies is often more interesting to me than the arch-villain himself. While you could argue that Kobra is not a minor villain, let's face it, he's not on the A-list. Anyway, after this lengthy and feculent preamble, let's look at some bad ass bad guys.

Deadline - In comic books, if you've got a good character design you're half way there. For whatever reason, Deadline really works for me. I dig his armor, his little Mister Miracle hover discs, and his "NO" logo. A super-tech assassin who can phase through walls, Deadline first appeared in the pages of Starman (the purple and yellow version of the character). Talk about the minor leagues, yeeesh. He's appeared in Aquaman and Flash and Suicide Squad, but has never really caught on with the general public. Except me - I think he's neat-o.

Black Manta - What a cool costume. This Aquaman villain has the distinction of being a member of the Legion of Doom on the SuperFriends cartoon, where I think he was just called "Manta." Black Manta has appeared in tons of comics, but never seems to get the respect he deserves - perhaps because his initials are B.M. I described Black Manta's most hilarious and noteworthy appearance right here, which should give you all the reasons you need to love him as much as I do.

Titanium Man - An armored relic of the Cold War, Titanium Man could have been called Iron Man's Whipping Boy with some accuracy. This Russian juggernaut of emerald evil has been around longer than I have, but my favorite incarnation was in the pages of the X-Men/Avengers mini-series, where it was revealed that the green giant was being piloted by the diminutive and encephalitic villain The Gremlin. That's like two awesome villains in one! I particularly dug Marc Silvestri's design of T-Man. As long as you look cool and act like you know what you're doing, people will like you. I will like you. Wolverine is not so sure, however.

Silver Banshee - Come on, give it to John Byrne - that is a fucking awesome character design. I get the impression that this Superman villainess was intended only for one storyline, but artists liked drawing her so much that she keeps popping up. Art Adams drew a particularly busty version of Silver Banshee on one cover, if I recall. She's dreamy, in a Halloween sort of way.

BTW, Rob Zombie wrote the song "Living Dead Girl" about her, no lie.*

Johnny Sorrow - Cool name? Check. Cool design? Check. Cool power? Oh, yeah.

Geoff Johns created a fake Golden Age back story for this JSA villain, whose interdimensional trip to Cthulhuland gave him a creepy power. If he takes off his mask and you see his "face," you totally die. How does he shave?

Oh. Right. No face.

Crossbones - He's the Anti-Cap, a dirty-fighting son of a bitch who can go toe-to-toe with his nemesis Captain America. No, I'm not talking about Batroc.

First introduced during Mark Gruenwald's legendary run on Cap, Crossbones has been used to good effect in recent years by writers who are as fond of the guy as I am. I think Kieron Dwyer came up with Crossbones' distinctive pro-wrestler/pirate aesthetic, which is part of his charm.

Kobra - The budget-rate Dr. Doom of the DC Universe, Kobra is my favorite B-list master villain. I love him so much I actually devoted an entire week to him. Check it out here, here, here, here, and here. Oh, and here. Here. Here. And here as well. And finally, here. Man, I had a lot to say about Lord Naga Naga. It's because there's so much to love.

OK, let's wrap this up. I think I'm going to have to do another one of these because I didn't even touch on Bolt, Merlyn, Marvel's Jack O'Lantern, or The Bros. Grimm. Next time, I guess. There's a lot of old shit out there...

*This is a lie.

Restaurant code violations, Batman-style

2007-09-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

Caveat venditor!

If Batman does not like the way you run your joint, he will shut you down, Dark Knight-style. In Gotham, restaurants, bars, and clubs that run afoul of local ordinances don't get cute little letter grades posted in their front window like they do in L.A.. No, if your tavern gets a "B" grade that means he shuts you down - with a BIG ASS STICK.

In Batman #400, Batman drops in on The Belly of the Whale, a quaint establishment on the Gotham waterfront with a colorful clientele. It's the only place on the East End that has Bludhaven Stout on tap due to an arrangement the proprietor made with some local criminal types. The Belly's local charms are lost on Batman, who finds the following violations:

establishment used as a front to push skag
no hot water
unclean food contact surfaces
illegal sub-lease to supervillain (The Riddler)
improper food temperatures

Wow. Five violations. That's when Batman puts away the baseball bat and picks up the oar.

After administering his fine/punishment, Batman advises the proprietor on the appropriate course of action to correct the five violations: "Just close." The merchant is free to disregard Batman's advice, but is cautioned that he will return within 24 hours for another inspection - with an even larger stick - perhaps a fence post wrapped in barbed wire.

And that my friends, is why it's safe to eat out in Gotham.

We're back and we're Cracked

2007-09-25T21:31:00.000-07:00

Eastbound and down, loaded up and truckin'
We gonna do what they say can't be done
We've got a long way to go and a short time to get there
I'm eastbound, just watch old Bandit run

-Eastbound and Down
by The Great Jerry Reed

OK, we're back.

The road trip east beyond the Rockies to pick up the Megaforce Destroyer was a success, but very grueling. Fortunately there were three of us, so we switched driving duties while the others caught what sleep they could. We pulled three all-nighters in various weather conditions and arrived back in Seattle totally bleary. Highlights included ghost towns, semi-ghost towns, Yellowstone, fall colors in the Jackson Hole area, a truck vs buffalo showdown (advantage: buffalo), a really mean thunderstorm, a flat tire, nearly running out of gas in the middle of Nowhere twice, evil waitresses, and a lengthy debate on the merits (or lack thereof) of adapting old cartoons and TV shows to film.

The highlight for me was a two-hour hellride in the dead of night along a remote highway in Wyoming that was boiling with animals, all of whom seemed intent on jumping in front of the truck while I drove. Seriously, I felt like one of the cars in Frogger. Every thirty seconds or so, jack rabbits, deer, antelope, or coyotes would loom up in the highbeam glare as they suicidally flung themselves in front of my vehicle. Judging by the amount of gore and carcasses on the road, other drivers had the same experience. Either that or I was following some kind of animal serial killer. That was some nerve-wracking shit. Oh, and I saw a UFO on that road.

But now I'm back and the moustache I had cultivated just for Wyoming has morphed into a big scuzzy growth of stubble that collects lint and scraps of food.

While I was gone the good folks at Cracked.com posted a few pieces I had written for them. The first, written with the Cracked staff, explores the philosophical musings of Wesley Snipes, who has much wisdom and head-kicking to offer us all.

The second piece examines the most disturbing and disturbed sidekicks in history. What force compels the craven bootlicking of Smithers, Renfield, or that guy from Morris Day & The Time who seems to exist only to hold up a mirror to Morris Day. I'm not speaking metaphorically, that's all he does.

So now that my annual road trip is out of the way and I've used up all my vacation time for the fiscal year, I can commence posting on a regular basis again.

No, really. I know you've heard it before baby, but I can change.

Once again, it is ON

2007-09-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

I was born a ramblin’ man, and I must listen to the call of the open road.

The spirit of the American highway sings to me, and she sounds a lot like the bombastic lead singer of Four Non-Blondes, wailing, “WHAT’S GOING ON?!!” I don’t know why the American highway sounds like that, and I kind of wish she didn’t, but I must heed the call regardless of how annoying it is.

As a North American, the need to go on a road trip is ingrained in my genetic code. In the New World we are all wanderers, only a generation or so removed from people who come from Someplace Else. The road trip is part of our identity and our culture, from the Conestoga wagons to Steinbeck to Easy Rider. Combine this deep urge to roam with our love of automobiles and crappy food and you have a powerful biological imperative that you can only ignore for so long. You turn to your buddy – you know, the one who understands – and all you have to say is: “Road trip.”

Once again I am teaming up with my pal Bob for our annual adventure. In years past we have launched a 300 mile boating expedition up bear-infested Lake Roosevelt and back, searched for a ghost town in a blizzard, traversed a burning mountain range, crawled through endless volcanic caves, snapped an axle high up in the Bitterroot Mountains, and made a pilgrimage to the fabled Ring of Fire train wreck.

This time: Megaforce.

Every decent road trip has to have a purpose, a goal that transforms the journey from a standard car vaction into a full-on quest. This year we’re traveling to Wyoming to pick up a Megaforce Destroyer – the dune buggy of the future!

Take a look at this clip – at about the fourteen second mark there’s a good shot of the dune buggy. It’s the one SHOOTING THE LASER!

OK, it’s actually just the fiberglass shell of the dune buggy of the future. But it's from Megaforce! Bob bought the actual Megaforce dune buggy shell on eBay and we’re going to pick that bad boy up and bring it back to Seattle, where Bob will bring it back to its former glory. Or so he tells me.

Bob and I are huge Megaforce fans – I’ve discussed at length why Megaforce is one of the greatest movies ever made HERE – so this is right up our alley.

As usual, Bob drives and I plan the route and navigate. This year I’ve picked a route that should take us through four ghost towns, a few abandoned mines, some old railroad tunnels, and a mountain backroad called "Deadman’s Road." I anticipate awesomeness.

Since we are heading east into the Old West, I have decided that I must grow a moustache (pictured). I just have to, it’s important. I know, I look like a date rapist. In retrospect, I should have started growing the ‘stache earlier, because it will not have reached Sam Elliot / Tom Selleck state by the time we start the trip. Maybe I should get a cowboy hat, that might make me look cooler.

Road Trip 2007 is ON. It’s on like the Wrath of Khan. We must live the Megaforce motto: "Deeds not words."

See y’all next week.

Nostalgiametrics: The Science of Today for Yesterday's Crap

2007-09-13T23:54:00.000-07:00

Have you ever watched a movie or TV show that you loved as a kid and just been shocked - shocked, I say! - by how crappy it was? Sadly, stuff that seemed great when you were a kid is often revealed to be utter shit, and that can be hard to take. Believe me, I know. I had a full-on existential meltdown when I realized that Charles in Charge was not the comedic masterpiece that I remembered. I was like, "What is truth if this is a lie?"

As a handsome man once said here:

"Nostalgia is deception wrapped in sentiment. Nostalgia is a ghostly lover dressed in a lovely, old-fashioned gown, who beckons you to dance with her, to make love to her… and then she turns into a hideous mummified ghoul who rips your throat out with her teeth and blood gushes and the screaming, my God, the screaming… That is nostalgia."*

Gosh, if only there were some way to scientifically determine whether or not say, an old network TV show sucked or not, so we could spare ourselves the pain and disillusionment...

Well now there is!

Introducing Nostalgiametrics: The Science of Today for Yesterday's Crap

Using the patented Nostalgiametric grading system, we can now quantify a show's suckiness or lack thereof. It's simple: just pick a favorite old TV show, run it through the Nostalgiametric Checklist to assign it quality points, and then add up the points to get your Nostalgiametric Quotient!

Here's the Nostalgiametric Checklist for One Hour Network Television Programs:

_______________________

The Main Guy(s)

Doesn't suck: +5 points (Incredible Hulk, Wild Wild West)
Is William Shatner: +5 points (T.J. Hooker, Star Trek)
Is a Woman: +3 points (Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman)
Superpowers: +3 points (Man from Atlantis, Greatest American Hero)
Ex-astronaut: +3 points (Buck Rogers, Six Million Dollar Man)
Ex-soldier: +2 points (Magnum P.I., BJ and the Bear)
Ex-convict: +2 points (Rockford Files)
Ex-cop: +2 points (Booker, Renegade)
Cop/agent: +2 points (Hunter, Martial Law)
Hot cop: +3 points (Miami Vice)
Private eye: +2 points (Spenser for Hire, Vegas)
Bounty hunter: +2 points (Renegade, The Fall Guy)
Can fly helicopter/plane/spaceship: +2 points (Matt Houston, Airwolf)
Mysterious loner who helps people in trouble: +2 points (Kung Fu, The Equalizer)
Occasionally shirtless: +1 point (Wild Wild West, Starsky & Hutch)
Always shirtless: +2 points (Magnum P.I., Man From Atlantis)
Hunted by somebody: +2 points (A-Team, Incredible Hulk)
Main character totally sucks: -5 points (Manimal, Automan)

Sidekick

Dog: +3 points (Tales of the Gold Monkey)
Monkey: +5 points (BJ and the Bear)
Hot chick: +3 points (Hunter)
Ernest Borgnine: +3 points (Airwolf)
Robot/alien: +3 points (Buck Rogers, Alien Nation)
Master of disguise: +2 points (Wild Wild West)
Punching bag/goon: +2 points (The Fall Guy, Walker Texas Ranger)
Dreamboat: +2 points (T.J. Hooker, JAG)
Comic relief: +2 points (Riptide, Fantasy Island)

Theme Song

Totally rules: +5 points (Magnum P.I., Six Million Dollar Man)
Sucks ass: -2 points (Manimal, Misfits of Science)
Written by Mike Post & Pete Carpenter: +5 points (Hill Street Blues, Rockford Files)
Spoken word intro: +3 points (A-Team, Charlie's Angels)
Sung by star of series: +3 points (Walker Texas Ranger, Fall Guy)
Title of show mentioned in song: +2 points (BJ and the Bear, Love Boat)
Gratuitous synthesizers: +2 points (The Equalizer, Airwolf)
Theme song sucks bad: -5 points (Misfits of Science, B.J. and the Bear)

The Cast

Lone wolf show: +3 points (Kung Fu, Incredible Hulk)
Buddy show: +5 points (Hunter, Cagney & Lacey)
Hero + posse show: +3 points (Walker Texas Ranger, T.J. Hooker)
Ensemble show: +2 points (Love Boat, SWAT)
Show named after buddies: +3 points (Starsky & Hutch, Tenspeed & Brownshoe)
Romantic tension: +3 points (Moonlighting, Hunter)
Old man buddy: +2 points (Hardcastle & McCormick, Jake & The Fat Man)
Attractive buddies: +2 points (Miami Vice, Charlie's Angels)
One attractive/one ugly buddy: -1 point (CHIPs)
Hot chick: +3 points (Dukes of Hazard, Buck Rogers)
Roddy McDowell: +2 points (Tales of the Gold Monkey)
Science guy/mechanic: +2 points (Street Hawk, Bionic Woman)
Patriarchal old dude: +2 points (Battlestar Galactica, Love Boat)
Frustrated police lieutenant: +2 points (Rockford Files, Starsky & Hutch)
Pilot: +2 points (Magnum P.I., 240 Robert)
Token old dude on posse: +2 points (Walker Texas Ranger, Matt Houston)
Major cast members replaced: -3 points (Airwolf, Dukes of Hazard)
Minor cast members replaced/added: -1 point (Airwolf, Knight Rider)
Hot chick added: +2 points (T.J. Hooker)

Transportation

Normal vehicle: +1 point (Rockford Files, Heart to Heart)
Boss vehicle: +3 points (Magnum P.I., A-Team)
Super boss vehicle: +5 points (Airwolf, Street Hawk)
Crazy ass stunts: +2 points (Fall Guy, Dukes of Hazard)
Vehicle talks: +2 points (Knight Rider)
Loaded with custom features: +2 points (Wild Wild West, Star Trek)
Vehicle has a name: +2 points (Battlestar Galactica, Hardcastle & McCormick)
Vehicle is frickin' huge: +2 points (Love Boat, Supertrain)
Vehicle blows shit up: +3 points (Airwolf, Buck Rogers)
More than one vehicle: +1 point for each extra vehicle (Miami Vice, Riptide)

Bonus features

Two fights + one chase per episode: +3 points (T.J. Hooker, Hunter)
Weapon/gadget created out of scratch each episode: +2 points (A-Team, MacGyver)
Characters often pose as exotic dancers: +3 points (T.J. Hooker)
Has spawned spin-off show: +2 point (Dukes of Hazard, B.J. and the Bear)
Is spin-off show: -1 point (Enos, Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo)
Shameless use of stock footage: -1 point (Airwolf)
Non-lethal gunplay: -2 points (A-Team)
Fights vampire at least once: +2 points (B.J. and the Bear, Starsky & Hutch, Buck Rogers)

_______________________

That's the basic Nostalgiametric Checklist for One Hour Network Television Programs. Now, let's add up all the points and see what your favorite show's Nostalgia Quotient is:

1-20 pts: Sucks ass. Try
to pretend it never existed - everyone else has.
21-25 pts: Some redeeming qualities. Watch it again after drinking a few beers.
26-30 pts: Halfway decent. Buy the DVD. Somebody out there has a website devoted to this show.
31-34 points: Kicks ass.
Begin letter writing campaign to network begging for the
show's return. Write fan-fiction or get a tattoo with the show logo.
35-40 points: Best show ever. Devote your life to this program and bludgeon anyone who speaks ill of it. Create a cult based on show. Name your children after characters on show.

Here are some examples for your reference:

Tales of the Gold Monkey - ABC's 1982 Raiders of the Lost rip-off starred Stephen Collins as Jake Cutter, a pilot/adventurer in pre-war South Pacific. Featured one-eyed dog and Roddy McDowell.

Airwolf

- Jan Michael-Vincent and Ernest Borgnine fly into danger and into our hearts in Airwolf, a super helicoppter. Extra points for awesome theme song, but loses points for replacing the entire cast for the last season. No Borgnine? No love.

T.J. Hooker

- William Shatner, Adrian Zmed, and Heather Locklear keep the streets of L.A. clean in this cop show. Shatner clung from every manner of speeding vehicle known to man, while Zmed and Locklear posed as exotic dancers on regular basis. Loses points for losing Zmed to Dance Fever.

*Wow, what kind of egomaniac quotes himself?

...aaand we're back.

2007-09-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

OK, we're back. At my place of work, we have to use up all our vacation time before the end of the fiscal year in October. As a result, half the corporate headquarters packs up and leaves in September to burn off those extra vacation hours, and I am no exception. What have I been doing? Nothin'.

However, at the end of the month my pal Bob and I have yet another Epic Quest planned that should meet or surpass the level of radness of all previous Epic Quests. And that's saying something, since last time we were almost killed by a bear. All I can say right now is that it involves ghost towns, slat flats, and the film Megaforce.

Attached is a clip from the 70's martial arts epic Crippled Masters. Thanks to pal Kevin for the link.

Did everyone see that Iron Man trailer? Did everyone FREAK OUT at its awesomeness? I know I did.

More soon.

Less Than Compelling Covers

2007-09-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

(Sorry I've been AWOL recently. I'm working on a big time-consuming project and frankly, even I get burnt-out writing about comics every now and then.)

Comic book covers are designed with one primary purpose in mind: to sell comic books. A cover can be a beautifully drawn masterpiece with holographic effects and 5 naked ladies - if it doesn't get somebody to stop, pick it up, and open the damn thing, the cover has not done its job.

Sometimes we forget this. After all, if you religously buy every issue of Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose **cough Chris Sims cough** then you're going to pick it up regardless of whether the cover blows or not. And when we get Tarot home and have mastur-- um, read it, we're just interested in whether the cover is pretty or not because we bought the damn thing already. But back in The Day, when comics were on spinner racks at 7-11, every cover was designed with commercial, not artistic demands in mind. It's why so many of those old Spider-Man comics from the 70s and 80s show Spider-Man getting his ass kicked or in some jeopardy. The kid browsing the racks would be all, "Holy shit! How's Spidey going to get out of this one? MUST BUY THIS!"

Which brings me to the point of this post. As I often do, I was digging through my back issues and I came across a couple of books with less than compelling covers. It was the cover to Aquaman #53 that did it for me. What about the cover to that comic would compel a casual browser to stop and pick it up? I still don't have an answer.

Take a look:

Pretty much the only thing commercially interesting about this cover is that it promises a guest appearance by Superman. Other than that... The cover asks the burning question: "Who's busier? Aquaman or Superman?" The answer: "Who gives a shit?"

Seriously, aside from the special guest star, why would anyone aside from an Aquaman completist pick this up? "Who is busier?" is not exactly what I would consider a raw, primal conflict. Let's see, Superman wakes up at 5:20, showers and shaves, grabs a bagel and catches the 6:15 train for downtown, arrives at work at 6:40, gets an Americano from the Starbucks in the Daily Planet lobby, has to wait for the damn elevator, gets to his desk at 6:50, checks his email for ten minutes before a 7:00 AM staff meeting, which he's 5 minutes late to because he has to save a drifting oil tanker off the Virginia coast... Let's see, Aquaman's tide clock wakes him at 6:30 SDT (surface dweller time), he hits snooze, wakes up at 7:00, has a breakfast of mussels and caviar while he checks the sports scores in the Tritonis Times, considers going back to bed or shaving... Yeah, Superman's busier. There, now you don't have to get that comic.

Here's a Gen13 cover that absolutely screams: "BUY THIS COMIC (and find out who wins the illegal iguana race)!" While the cover may accurately reflect the story inside, I ask you: is this a comic that demands your attention?

Again, iguana racing is not what I consider high drama. Let's ignore the fact that I actually purchased the comic, shall we?

Here's a Marvel UK comic, Death's Head II, that coasts on the old trick of just adding Wolverine or Spider-Man to a cover. Like most Marvel UK comics, Death's Head II sucked ass, so perhaps this lame cover is truth in advertising. But couldn't they have had Wolvie and 'Head actually doing something? Anything? Drinking tea? Bowling? Flying a kite together? Throw us a frickin' bone, Marvel UK - give us a reason to actually want to buy the book.

Finally, here's a continuity cocktail courtesy of crazy Roy Thomas - What If? vol 2 #36 - which poses the question that has been on fans' lips for decades: What if the Cosmic Avenger battled the Guardians of the Galaxy? Look, it's part 2 of 5. The question was so vast that it could not be contained in one, or two, or even four comics!

I gotta call bullshit on this one. The purpose of the What If? books was to explore paths not taken in familiar storylines. Some of the issues were kind of lame, sure, but at least they stuck to the central concept of the series. Asking what if the Cosmic Avenger battled the Guardians of the Galaxy is just cheating. Nobody aside from writer Roy Thomas knows or even cares who the Cosmic Avengers are. I can't imagine this thing was flying off the shelves.

You know, this was kinda fun. I'm going to have to look for more comics with less than compelling covers - books that lay untouched in comic stores because the covers send the clear message: DON'T BUY ME.

LOOK OUT!

2007-08-31T02:41:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven't posted in a while - let me make it up to you:

You gotta watch out, man! You could get kicked in the balls at any time! Just keeping you frosty.

Off Topic: Time Wasting

2007-08-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

DLB reader Philip turned me on to this old school Atari 2600 game label generator (which to be fair, he found over at Mike's) and now I've wasted a whole bunch of time screwing around. So, in lieu of actual content, you get this:

7 Easy Steps to Becoming an Unstoppable Killing Machine - FOR KIDS!

2007-08-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Congratulations, young apprentice! By spending a mere $50 (plus S&H) you have taken your first step on the path to Ultimate Martial Arts MASTERY!!!

If you are 12 or older and strictly adhere to my 7 Easy Steps to Becoming an Unstoppable Killing Machine, you will qualify to be a member of the Brown Dragon Society and will gain:

Self-confidence bordering on arrogance!

Total physical domination over any opponent – even your dad!

Mastery of your yang, the Brown Dragon Force within us all!

Special Brown Dragon Wig!

Privilege of wearing exclusive Brown Dragon Fightwear and Brown Dragon Accoutrements!

Come then my young one and climb the 7 Steps to Ultimate Martial Arts Supremacy.

Step 1. - Make Your Body Into a Thing Like Steel

The first step to Brown Dragon Ultimate Martial Arts Mastery is forging your soft flesh into an invincible suit of living armor, impervious to pain.

In ancient times, Brown Dragon apprentices would stand naked for days at a time atop a hot anvil while old women cursed them and beat their flesh with bamboo canes and spit mouthfuls of goat piss on to their welts.. We lost a lot of apprentices that way, but they were weak.

Unless you have access to a spiteful old crone and a goat, I recommend standing on an empty five-gallon paint bucket and flagellating yourself with a bike chain while listening to appropriate music ( such as Martial Arts Mood, the official Brown Dragon soundtrack, item #BD259 in our catalog). Do this every day after school for six weeks and you will become as hard and as rigid as a sword.

Step 2. Conquer the Brown Dragon Within

The cornerstone of Brown Dragon Ultimate Martial Arts is dominating and harnessing your inner Brown Dragon, the yang force within us all. Unless you can seize control and firmly grasp your yang, you will never become a True Master like me, Lord Xavier Hellfist.

Since ancient times, the Wise Men of the Orient have taught us about the Brown Dragon, the embodiment of the yang that lives coiled deep within each of us. The Brown Dragon is maculine, “dark” energy – destructive and stinky. To become unconquerable in battle, you must grapple with your yang, the Brown Dragon inside you.

The process is deceptively simple. Find a quiet, isolated place, like a garage or tool shed. Light some incense (Brown Dragon Scent, catalog item BD #239) or, if your parents won’t allow it, use some air freshener. Calm your mind. Breathe deeply. Imagine a doorway opening inside you. Invite the Brown Dragon in. Be polite. Then -- defeat it in Psychic Combat!

(NOTE: Failure at this stage may result in brain damage, dementia, or an inflammatory bowel disease. YOU MUST NOT FAIL! GRASP YOUR YANG SERPENT! DEFEAT THE BROWN DRAGON! BECOME THE BROWN DRAGON!)

Step 3. Ball Strike!

I, Xavier Hellfist, won the 1973 World Fighting Arts Championship with this simple but devastating groinal assault – the Ball Strike.

Developed in the 16th century by frisky Shaolin monks who were always rough housing and playfully striking one another’s privates, the Ball Strike has developed over time from an adolescent crotch punching game into an entire fighting discipline, barudo.

The Ball Strike is almost as potent as the Death Punch, but only works on non-neutered male opponents. Avoid using this technique when fighting women, eunechs, or very old men.

To practice barudo, you must have a suitable target. I recommend buying bull testes from your local butcher and double wrapping them in a plastic bag. Hang the bag at crotch level and you are ready to begin.

Visualize your clenched fist as a meteor rocketing down from space and into your opponent’s crotch. Summon the Brown Dragon force within… and then punch. Optional: scream “BALL STRIKE!” as you punch. This will have no effect against bull testes, but will startle a living opponent.

Practice this 1,001 times. When you have attained mastery, practice the Ball Strike using your knees, feet, and steak knives. You are now ready.

Step 4. Fight Dogs

It can be difficult for a young apprentice to find a challenging opponent to test your mastery of Brown Dragon Ultimate Martial Arts. In years past, students would be cast into pits with cobras, wild boars, or pandas to challenge their skills. Unless you live in an area with an abundance of bears, venomous snakes, or aggressive pigs, I recommend that you practice by battling dogs.

Find the meanest dog in your neighborhood and challenge it to one-on-one combat. Often the mere act of stepping into a mean dog’s territory is sufficient to initiate the duel, but you may have to slap the dog in the snout or throw a rock at it. The dog will attack, but your body is like steel and you can harness the Brown Dragon power to defeat it. If you find yourself seriously mauled or bitten, wait until the next day and repeat the process until your victory is complete. Then eat the dog’s liver.

Now you have tasted real combat – and dog liver.

Step 5. Weapons Mastery

Becoming an Unstoppable Killing Machine means not only forging your body into an Engine of Death, but also becoming adept at the various Brown Dragon martial arts weapons. We recommend purchasing one of the quality weapons from our catalog, like stick ($10.95 + S&H, item BD439) or numchuk ($59.95 + S&H, item BD4310) or combat tine ($14.95 + S&H, BD310) - each comes with the Xavier Hellfist seal of approval and a 6 page instruction booklet.

Step 6. Become the Night

Brown Dragon Martial Arts Masters use stealth as well as force. You must become the night by transforming yourself into a living shadow.

We recommend wearing black clothing (Brown Dragon Body Stocking, catalog item BD #212) and standing completely still in a dark garage for 4-6 hours. If somebody sees you, start the whole process again. At some point you will either pass out, wet your pants, or you will Become the Night.

Step 7. Death Punch

Based on dim mak, the fabled “death touch” of other lesser fighting arts, the Death Punch is 127% more deadly. Ask yourself: what sounds more hardcore, touching someone to death or punching them to death? Ah, you see now, apprentice.

Put simply, the Death Punch is a close-fisted strike that harnesses the power of the Brown Dragon in order to totally kill somebody. IMPORTANT: DO NOT ATTEMPT THE DEATH PUNCH UNLESS YOU HAVE CONQUERED THE BROWN DRAGON WITHIN. The goal is to seriously kill somebody else, not seriously hurt yourself.

In order to master the Death Punch, you will need to practice on something other than a human being. I recommend watermelons, canteloupe, or bowling balls. Mount your target on a post at about eye level. Summon your inner Brown Dragon – feel the power flow through you and into your fist. Then… STRIKE!!! As your fist launches like a missile towards the target, scream “DEATH PUNCH!” At the top of your lungs. If you have done it properly, you will kill the watermelon.

After you have killed 66 melons or bowling balls, you will be ready to test the Death Punch on a living target. Find an annoying brother or sister…

CONGRATULATIONS young master! You are now ready for induction into the ranks of the Brown Dragon Society. Please send $25 to our P.O. Box and you will receive your very own Certificate of Deadliness from Xavier Hellfist himself, PLUS our new catalog! Allow 2-4 weeks for shipping.

MAIL ORDER NINJA TokyoPop, 2006

2007-08-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

Either Mail Order Ninja writer Josh Elder and I share a love of the same things (ninja, cheap gags, harmlessly subversive humor) or TokyoPop shrunk down a team of former Cosmonauts and implanted them in my ear while I was sleeping to set up a tiny telepathic listening post in my frontal lobe so they could transmit my innermost fantasies back to their headquarters... and then they published this book. That is how much Mail Order Ninja speaks to me, that is how much Mail Order Ninja resonates with Inner Dave.

M.O.N. is a two-issue black and white paperback manga tale of a boy and his ninja from the folks at TokyoPop (am I doing their name right, with a capital T and a capital P?) that is the perfect gateway drug for young kids who aren't ready for La Blue Girl or Overfiend. Yet.

Kidding! There's not a randy tentacle in sight in this kid-friendly book, which deftly treads the narrow line between cute and cool. Writer Josh Elder and artist Erich Owens really strike the right tone with this book, which manages to be accessible to young readers without being patronizing. If there's one thing kids hate, it's material that talks down to them.

Young Timmy McAllister is a plucky little kid who has to deal with bullies, an obnoxiously rich social diva at his school, and a treacherous little sister. He loves his mom's chocolate chip pancakes and the manga Ninja Warrior Gunshyo above all things in life.

McAllister - who shares the same name as Lee Van Cleef's ninja character in the short-lived TV show The Master, BTW - enters the Ninja Warrior Gunshyo Giveaway in the fall Jacques Co. toy catalog, hoping to score a real live ninja of his own to play with. Yes, he wins the contest. It wouldn't be much of a comic book if he didn't.

That's the set-up. The first of two book just sort of playfully riffs on the central idea of "a boy and his ninja" and the second book features a battle against the aforementioned ultra-rich social diva and her own evil mail order ninja, who also happens to be the sworn enemy of Timmy's ninja. Elder and Owens cram the small pages with visual gags, sitcomy situations, and wry humor. If you don't like one joke, you just have to wait a panel or two before they serve up another.

My favorite bits in the book are the little biographical sidebars that they throw in for even the most minor characters, which are often hilarious. If Mail Order Ninja were a movie, it would be full of Trainspotting-style freeze frames with text for each character. The silent compliance of Jiro the ninja to Timmy's wishes is also pretty funny - he'll gamely play with Timmy up in his room because Timmy is his master, simple as that.

There's a multi-page ad for Jacques Co in the middle of the first book that still cracks me up. Jacques is a beret-wearing reformed arms dealer who decides to make ze children of ze world happy with ze toyz! His toyz are insanely dangerous - and therefore insanely popular.

Mail Order Ninja works on pretty much all levels for me - it speaks to the 13-year old boy inside me. No, I have not devoured a young boy, I'm speaking figuratively. The writing is fun but not pandering, and the art is expressive and, well, cute as hell. I expect great things from Josh Elder in particular, who is carving a strong career for himself as we speak. Yes, that's what that horrible nails-on-chalkboard sound is in the background, it's the sound of Elder carving.

I often hear people (such as myself) bitch about how tons of comics these days are just being written by aging fanboys for a shrinking market of other aging fanboys, with precious little material geared towards younger readers. Well shame on me if I can't sing the praises of a book that caters to a younger demographic without shutting the door on older readers. After all, those young readers will grow up to be the entitled aging fanboys of tomorrow. And isn't that what it's all about?

A goodbye to Mike Wieringo

2007-08-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

Newsarama reported that artist Mike Wieringo has died at the age of 44.

Mike Wieringo's credits include Robin, The Flash, X-Men, Fantastic Four, and his own comic creation Tellos. I loved Wieringo's animated-style art, which was characterized by clean lines, a strong sense of structure and form, and a playful energy and sense of fun. My favorite work of his was his run on The Flash - Wieringo drew neat speed effects and one bad ass Wally West. We need more artists like Mike Wieringo in comics, not fewer.

Thanks and goodbye from a long-time fan.

Haappy Birthday Youngster!

2007-08-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

Dave's Long Box gives a tip o' the hat and a jaunty salute to Chris Sims of The Invincible Super Blog, who on most days is my nemesis, the Sabretooth to my Wolverine. Today I'm burying the proverbial hatchet on account of it's the young fella's birthday, which means he can legally fornicate with womenfolk in South Carolina. Happy birthday you scrappy lil' rascal (ruffles Sims's hair playfully).

Dr. Slump will see you now, Sims!

Why you no post, Dave Campbell?

2007-08-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

Take your pick:

a) I have been having annoyingly mittent (as opposed to inermittent) outages of my Internet service this week, which, in the words of David Lo-Pan, "pisses me off to no end."

b) I just finished a marathon tour of the LiveJournal slashfic community.

c) I shaved my head and began mixing GIANT BEER BOTTLES and psychoactives (like the guy below) which is not a good idea.

Shameless self-promotion: TEMPLAR

2007-08-06T10:09:00.001-07:00

Do me a favor and go check out Templar, a comic book that I wrote and co-created with artist Ken Christiansen, who rules.

Templar is a five-issue comic book series full of automatic weaponry, zombies, fu, silver swords, werewolves, submarines, vampires, a demon, some blimps, and a commando assault on The Vatican. It's got everything you need in a comic, except tits. Sorry, no tits.

We decided to "publish" Templar online in this black and white ashcan format. Why?

Because we are pure of heart.

Take a look, won't you? Let me know what you think - unless you hate it, of course.

SUICIDE SQUAD #10 DC Comics, 1987

2007-08-05T00:08:00.000-07:00

"Damn! We in trouble now!"

That's Amanda Waller's honest and entirely accurate reaction in SS #10 when she finds out that the Batman has snuck into Belle Reve Prison, the secret HQ of the Suicide Squad. They couldn't say "Holy fucking shit, it's Batman!" in Code Approved books back then, but that in essence is what Mrs. Waller is saying.

In the aftermath of DC's Millenium crossover, which was as robotic and awkward as it's Manhunter villains, the Suicide Squad catches Batman's attention in a bad way. It seems Batman doesn't approve of the Squad making a mockery of the justice system by using incarcerated supervillains to do its dirty work, and then freeing the bad guys when their community service is done. In Batman's opinion, that's unethical, unconstitutional, and just uncool. So he disguises himself as a prisoner, gets transfered to Belle Reve Federal Prison in the swamps of Louisiana... and it's go time.

Batman fakes out the surveillance camera in his cell, breaks out, finds his costume (which he had mailed as a care package), sneaks into the command center, and downloads the files he needs on to a floppy disc. It was the Eighties, man. Even Batman was rocking the floppies.*

The Wall notices something is amiss and returns to the control room...

Batman is in the house!

Now that Batman has "gone noisy" it's time for him to break out of Belle Reve, and if that means beating up the entire prison population, so be it. He pummels a bunch of guards, incapacitates Duchess with some Batgas (thanks to Alfred's garlic lasagna), kicks a dog,** ducks a bullet and cold-cocks Deadshot, and beats the shit out of Col. Rick Flag for five minutes before somebody calls time out.

Time for the stand-off. On one side we have Batman, who is the best in the world at whatever he does. On the other side we have Duchess, Deadshot, an armed and pissed Amanda Waller, unconscious Rick Flag (off-panel) and the evening maintenance crew. Actually, that may be The Moustache Squad - khaki clad daredevils who battle mid-life crisis with ADVENTURE!*** That's a tough call; The Moustache Squad know how to handle themselves and they might tip the scales the Squad's way. Still, Batman is invincible and The Moustache Squad tire easily.

Waller wants the floppy disc with 100k of Squad secrets that Batman took. Batman declines; he knows Waller won't kill him in order to keep their secrets. Despite being surrounded by armed people in the middle of a locked-down maximum security prison, Batman weirdly seems to have the upper hand.

Then The Wall drops The Bomb. She says that she's got a nice set of fingerprints from the cell he was in as a fake prisoner, and unless he backs off she'll use all the intelligence assets at her disposal to find out his secret identity and blow his cover.

What can Batman do? He's screwed. That's what happens when you start Playin' the Wall, my caped friend. Batman gives Waller his floppy.**** He also gives her his word never to speak about their agreement or what he's learned there tonight. "I'll find another way of bringing you down," Batman says as he walks out, unhappy.

Where Duchess comes from, promises are as rare as daisies. She can't believe Waller's letting him go:

Boy, I bet Batman was really upset. That must have been kind of awkward for him just walking out of the prison like that after getting schooled by The Wall. There was a long walk of shame to the Batmobile on that day, brother.

Thus ends Suicide Squad Week! Thanks for coming everybody. Drive safe.

*I swear never to write or utter that sentence ever again.

** Kidding. Batman would never kick a dog.

*** Amusingly, two members of the Moustache Squad have no moustaches and one has a beard.

****I swear never to write or utter that sentence ever again.

Friday Night Fights: Total Makeover, Duchess-Style

2007-08-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

Bahlactus commands, and I obey: it's time for another Suicide Squad Week version of Friday Night Fights, the blog meme that asks: when is violence acceptable? Answer: Friday Night!

In Suicide Squad #18, Duchess, the butch beauty from Apokolips, goes up against The Jihad's Manticore II, who has a tail. Duchess likes the tail. She wants the tail. Duchess rips the tail off of Manticore's butt. She beats him with his own tail and spine. The end.

SUICIDE SQUAD #58 DC Comics, 1991

2007-08-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

"Welcome to the Suicide Squad, Grant Morrison! Hope you survive the experience!"

Yes, comic book rock star Grant Morrison himself appears in the pages of Suicide Squad #58. Writer John Ostrander and Kim Yale slipped Morrison into the Squad line-up - and promptly kill him off - in what is either sly mockery or affectionate piss-taking, or both.

In this comic, an obligatory tie-in to DC's 1991 War of the Gods crossover event, the sinister anti-hero Black Adam enlists the help of the Suicide Squad for an attack on a witch's island chock full of Uzi-toting Amazons and werewolves. I mean, even Black Adam needs help with shit like that.

Squad leader Amanda Waller assembles a small army of Squaddies and second stringers for the assualt, including "The Writer," a pale emo dude who can alter reality just by writing in his laptop. I don't know what version of FinalDraft he has, but I want it.

"The Writer" first appeared in the now famous Animal Man #26 (DC Comics, 1990) , written by Grant Morrison. At the end of his brilliant head-trip of a run on Animal Man, Morrison broke the fourth wall big time by introducing himself in the comic itself to Animal Man as his writer, his creator and ultimate adversary. It was a very well done issue with a surprising emotional resonance that transcended what could have just been a cheap Twilight Zoney storytelling gimmick.

Ostrander and Yale figured, hell, if Morrison appeared in an issue of Animal Man, then he's part of mainstream DC continuity, right? Fair game, right? In Animal Man #26, artist Chas Truog depicted Morrison / The Writer as a ghostly pale British mod, and Squad artist Geoff Isherwood follows form, although here The Writer is dressed in more practical field attire.

The Writer explains his situation to Firehawk and Silver Swan:

Once their ad hoc superhuman army is assembled, the Squad attacks Amazon Werewolf Island, no doubt to weave some plot point into the narrative tapestry that was War of the Gods, which they should have named Yaaawn! instead.

Our man Grant Morrison is doing pretty good, typing away on his metareality laptop and blowing people away just with the power of Story! Robert McKee would be stoked.

You may have seen this coming, but The Writer gets Writer's Block and then he gets Writer's Killed by a werewolf who has probably never even read The Invisibles and wouldn't appreciate good writing if he ate it. What kind of fucked up world do we live in, where a great writer like that can just get killed by an ignorant werewolf? It's depressing.

Maybe it's not a good-natured diss at G.M., maybe Ostrander & Yale are reminding us that the sensitive, the creative, the odd are always at the mercy of the brutal and the stupid.

I think we've all got some thinking to do, don't we? About how you picked on that one Debate Team guy in Jr High just because he was different and maybe he crapped his pants? Or perhaps you were like Grant Morrison getting attacked by werewolves? How does that feel? Talk about it, let it out.

Thank you, Suicide Squad. Thank you for taking us places in our heads we didn't even know we needed to go.

Top Ten Suicide Squad Lines, part 2

2007-07-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

Continuing the festivities of Suicide Squad Fortnight, let’s take a look at some of the best lines of dialogue ever printed in the pages of Suicide Squad, a comic that has yet to be surpassed in terms of awesomeness.

Fellow Squad enthusiast Brian Cronin over at Comics Should Be Good was kind enough to host Part One of the Top Ten Suicide Squad Lines, and now we finish our bloody work here with Part Two.

5. Deadshot doesn’t read minds

Deadshot, the Suicide Squad’s smugly deranged marksman, is literal to a fault. He’s like an evil genie that will twist the wording of your three wishes into curses if you’re not careful - an evil genie with guns.

Here's the set-up: In Suicide Squad #22, batshit crazy Rick Flag intends to kill a crooked US senator in order to keep the Squad secret. Waller orders the Squad to keep Flag from killing the senator using any means possible. When Deadshot catches up with Flag and his soon-to-be victim at the Lincoln Monument in D.C., he executes his orders to the letter – by killing the senator before Flag can! D’oh! Then Deadshot nearly lives up to his name by getting shot like, twelve times by police – APE POLICE!!!

No, that would be stupid.

Later in a hospital, Waller asks the miraculously not-dead Deadshot what the hell he was thinking.

Deadshot: Said to keep Flag from killing Cray… any means possible. Exact words.

Waller: I didn’t mean by killing him yourself!

Deadshot: Shoulda said so. I don’t read minds.

4. Friend or foe?

I like this simple Count Vertigo line from Suicide Squad #28, a chapter in The Janus Directive crossover. It’s just something the arrogant European noble would say, and it reminds me of Adam Ant. I love Adam Ant.

Anyway, during a big-ass battle, the Squad’s Count Vertigo flies up to lay a whammy on Peacemaker, who despite appearances to the contrary, is not wearing a bedpan on his head.

Peacemaker: Friend or foe?

Count Vertigo: Oh, foe. Definitely foe.

3. How zen

Aww, Bronze Tiger and Vixen used to be such a cute couple. It's too bad their lethal, paranoid work enviroment and his psychosis from years of assassin conditioning drove them apart. Nowadays there are treatment programs for ex-assassins, but back in the Eighties there wasn't a lot of professional help for guys like Bronze Tiger.

Anyway, before they broke up they were a handsome pair who would engage in playful banter whilst on deadly missions.

2. Deadshot totally believes you

In Suicide Squad #18, Task Force X battles a reformed Jihad in Manhattan, with bloody results. As in their previous encounter, the Squad wipes out the Jihad big time - meaning they totally murder them dead.

Deadshot goes up against Jaculi 2.o, an upgraded mini-skirted version of the original Jaculi. Deadshot shoots her in the knee, which slows her down considerably.

"Kill me American," she says. "Or I will come back for you."

Deadshot considers this for a moment. Then - and this is mean - he shoots her.

"I believe you," he says.

That is ice cold.

1. "Is there a plan or do we just shoot things at random?"

Be careful how you answer Deadshot's question because he will start shooting things at random if instructed to do so. That's just how he rolls.

Friday Night Fights: Granny vs The Wall

2007-07-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

It's a special Suicide Squad Week version of Friday Night Fights here at Dave's Long Box. Bahlactus has spoken and the word is: fight!

From Suicide Squad #35, I present a royal rumble on Apokalips between two she-beasts - Amanda "The Wall" Waller, extra-wide leader of Task Force X versus that girthsome gargoyle Granny Goodness, leader of the Female Furies!

Get it on!!!

SUICIDE SQUAD #2 DC Comics, 1987

2007-07-27T14:09:00.000-07:00

I thought I’d dig deep in the proverbial Long Box and do a post about the very first issues of the Suicide Squad, one of the greatest monthly books DC published in the Eighties. Or ever, for that matter. My love for the Suicide Squad is based on fact (i.e., it’s awesome) as well as blurry, uncritical nostalgia – unlike some properties from my childhood, the Suicide Squad holds up really well.

The first two issues of the Suicide Squad series were written by series creator John Ostrander, the Aaron Sorkin of Eighties DC Superhero Espionage Books, with pencils by Luke McDonnell and inks by superbad Karl Kesel. This storyline introduced a rival team, a group of terrorist supervillains known as The Jihad. Like the Squad, the membership of The Jihad rotated – mostly because the Squad keeps killing them.

This issue is no exception. The first issue was all build-up leading to this showdown with the Jihad on their home turf. Rick Flag and his bright yellow shirt lead the team in an assault on Jotunheim, the mountain headquarters of the Jihad in “Qurac” that looks like a big upside down wedding cake smashed into a cliff.

With the help of a double-agent on the Jihad, the Squad infiltrates Jotunheim just as Sheba, their Airwolfy gunship, starts blowing the hell out of the wedding cake. The Squad has a traitor of their own, ferreted out by Nemesis the master of disguise. There’s a lot of intrigue and shit.

There’s also a lot of violence. The team breaks off and hunts down the Jihad members. The Flash villain Capt. Boomerang has experience with super-speedsters, so he takes on the lightning quick Jaculi, who is not nearly fast enough to stay not-dead.

Boomerang may be a cowardly and morally bankrupt and sort of ridiculous, but he's also really dangerous, and Ostrander never forgot that. He was used for comic effect a lot, but every now and then Boomerang would do something completely evil and self serving. Capt. Boomerang is a total dick. What a great character.

Meanwhile, Bronze Tiger fights the Indian assassin Ravan and totally schools him, breaking the guy's back. Tiger was one of the few good guys on the Squad and was often used to keep the less trustworthy team members in line. Plus, he has a fabulous karate pimp outfit. You have to have confidence to wear an outfit like that.

This scene, where Tiger leaves Ravan with a broken back and refuses to kill him, sets in motion a rivalry between the two masters of fu that runs through the series. Ravan eventually gets a cybernetic spine and gets drafted into the Suicide Squad, where he's quite useful until he goes up against the master villain Kobra and gets killed big time.

Deadshot gets dropped off in the elevator shaft where the Jihad keeps The Manticore, a genetic terror with an organge Godzilla tail and David Lee Roth's hair. The super tough monster goes after Deadshot, who is just a dude with guns after all, right?

Deadshot hoses down the Manticore's face with some AP rounds and that's it for the guy with the tail. The Jihad liked The Manticore so much that they made another one - which the Squad killed, of course.

Suicide Squad #2 is densely written and drawn - you get a high plot-to-panel ratio that makes for a satisfying reading experience. Stuff happens. Ostrander's story is full of tough guy dialogue, double crosses, and narrow escapes. McDonnell was the Suicide Squad penciller forever, and I think his stuff is great when he's paired with the right inker. Fortunately, Karl Kesel is a fantastic inker.

I have fond memories of picking up this comic at my local comic store and reading it again and again. I'm happy to say that twenty years later this still seems like a good comic book to me. And that's why Suicide Squad is so awesome.

THE F*@% YEAH FILES #7: Deadshot in the Drop Zone

2007-07-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

Suicide Squad has had more than its share of "F*%$ Yeah" and "Holy Sh%t" moments, so it's tough to pick just one. But pick I shall.

Here's the scene: in Suicide Squad #54, part two of "The Dragon's Horde" storyline, a team of Squadies consisting of Count Vertigo, Deadshot, and the scary Russian superman Stalnoivolk are flying to Cambodia in a Blackhawk Express plane.

Stalnoivolk has been drafted by Squad leader Amanda "The Wall" Waller and is none too happy about taking a holiday in Cambodia. Thousands of feet above Southeast Asia, Stalnoivolk decides it's time to leave:

Stalnoivolk is tough as hell so he's not particularly worried about the fall. His rapid descent will give him the head-start needed to escape from his "comrades."

Count Vertigo, who can fly, is about to take off after their fugitive teammate, but he's not happy: "We are most aggrieved." Deadshot gets that psycho look in his eye - it's his job to look after the Russian. He grabs an extra chute, and jumps out of the plane.

Deadshot rockets down to Stalnoivolk, pulls a laser pistol, and the two of them have a mid-air standoff while the ground rushes up to meet them...

Is Deadshot going to go splat? Or is Stalnoivolk going to put on the parachute? F*%$ yeah he is!

Deadshot keeps the laser pointer on the Russian's forehead while they fall and forces him to put on the chute. Stalnoivolk's escape attempt is foiled; both of them pop their chutes and continue the job.

I loved that scene. It's a good piece of macho action, but it also shows the reader something about Deadshot as a character. Ever since the opening scene in Moonraker where Jaws and 007 fight in free fall I have been a sucker for mid-air action sequences. You may recall that a previous F*%$ Yeah File post also featured people jumping out of airplanes. There's just something about fightin' parachutists that just works for me.

Celine Dion! Give me a F*%$ Yeah, sister!

Squad Personal File: Col. Rick Flag

2007-07-25T00:04:00.000-07:00

Ahh, Rick Flag.

SUICIDE SQUAD WEEK continues with a look at the uptight field commander of the Suicide Squad. How uptight? We're talking Cyclops level. Flag is most famous for the hideous yellow shirt he insisted on wearing into combat. He was like Linus from Peanuts, only instead of a blanket Flag had his lucky shirt that made him feel safe - even when bad guys were shooting directly at his neon yellow center of mass.

It's funny that Rick Flag's name rhymes with "punching bag," because that's basically what he is - a superhero punching bag. Flag gets his ass handed to him in every other issue of Suicide Squad. There's just something about Flag, some je ne sais quoi that just makes people want to punch him directly in the face.

Batman wants to punch Rick Flag. In Suicide Squad #13, our team meets the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire era of the Justice League. Naturally, they fight. As per the rules, the two teams eventually realize they shouldn't be fighting and the declare a truce.

Except Batman, he's not done fighting. He wants to punch Rick Flag. Punch him dead.

I gotta hand it to Rick Flag, anybody that can go toe-to-toe with Batman for more than two panels is pretty bad ass. He even manages to chip the end off of one of Batman's ear things. Despite Rick Flag's pluck and spunkiness and chutzpah, he is fighting Batman - and that means he's going to the hospital.

While Flag bleeds and twitches on the floor, Batman turns and walks away, his victory somewhat diminished by the absence of one of his pointy ear things. Maybe there's a lesson there for all of us: Batman will hospitalize you if you touch his pointy ear things.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the shirt, or the weird stare, or his haircut, or his lack of respect for personal boundaries, or his braying donkey-like laugh -- whatever it is, people want to punch Rick Flag.

Pirates want to punch him:

I take back what I said about Flag being tough; it looks like he's getting his ass kicked by a salsa dance instructor. Just kidding! That's actually Mark Shaw (aka Manhunter) in his rakish Privateer identity, and he's a tough mother even with an eye patch and a puffy pirate shirt. He beats the living bejeesus out of Flag, who may have been drinking as well.

Flag sleeps there on the floor for the next six hours while people step over and around him. Never end your evening with shots of Jaegermeister and nitrous hits, my man. Also, don't fight pirates.

After a while, all that bludgeoning and punching that Rick Flag endured took its toll, and he went a little bit crazy. It went beyond wearing the day-glo shirt; Flag got really creepy and possessive with this girl Karen who worked in IT, and he murdered this one dude in order to keep his job. And frankly, his psychosis was affecting his performance at work.

Flag was last seen in Suicide Squad #26, invading a mountain fortress in "Qurac" on a literal suicide mission - but he was wearing a sensible black outfit, thank God. He was trying to dismantle a terrorist atomic bomb, but Flag's long time rival Rustam had other plans.

Plans that involve punching Rick Flag. And stabbing him. And maybe kissing him...

I won't tell you what happens next... but let's just say that we don't get to see the end of Rick Flag and Rustam's fight because an atomic bomb explodes and totally kills them.

It's a good thing, too, otherwise we would have had to watch Rustam kick Rick Flag's ass. I understand that somehow The Man in Yellow is coming back from the grave in the relaunch of Suicide Squad. If it involves Rick getting in brawls with anybody and everybody, I'm all for it.

Good old Rick Flag, obliging sparring partner to all comers in the DC Universe. I salute the sacrifice the man made to his cognitive abilities in order to keep me entertained.

I still love thee, Suicide Squad

2007-07-24T06:30:00.000-07:00

Man, I fucking love Suicide Squad.

It's got everything I like in comics and nothing I don't. It's satisfying, but doesn't fill me up and make me feel bloated. Plus, it tastes great.

I've posted about the Squad previously on Dave's Long Box, but I've never gone full-out and devoted an ENTIRE WEEK (more or less) to one of my favorite comic series of all time.

Previously I have discussed:

Slipknot, one of the lame and doomed villains that play the cannon fodder role in the Squad. Somebody give him a hand!
A bitchin' three part Squad storyline featuring everyone's 5th favorite DC villain: Kobra! One of the Squad goes head to head with Kobra in a battle to the death - and totally dies!
"How I love thee Suicide Squad" - a brief essay on why the Squad kicks so much ass.

For those of you unfamiliar with Suicide Squad, I will quote from a previous post:

"Suicide Squad was spawned from the 1987 mini-series Legends (which I will get around to reviewing/mocking at some point). Written exclusively by John Ostrander, the book had a consistent vision and “through-line” that you don’t see too much of anymore in today’s age of reboots and revamps.
I liked Suicide Squad because it had a (relatively) sophisticated and cynical approach to politics, crime, and punishment and often tread a moral grey area between the few “good guys” on the team and the “bad guys.” Plus, it was more hardcore and lethally violent than any other comic books, so it scored extra points with me. The Squad actually called Task Force X) was a group of incarcerated super-villains who would go on secret government missions to work off their sentences. They were based out of Belle Reve prison in the swamps of Louisiana, and went on all sorts of deadly assignments with explosive bracelets clamped to their wrists to keep them in line. [...]

The cast was made up of 2nd tier characters that were kind of disposable. Led by a hard-ass beaureaucrat named Amanda “The Wall” Waller, the Squad had a couple of good guys like Rick Flag, Nightshade, and Bronze Tiger, who were basically brought on to ride herd on a bunch of super-thugs. The main bad guys were Flash villain Captain Boomerang, a craven but devious Aussie; Batman villain Deadshot, a cold blooded sniper with a really cool but impractical costume; Duchess, an amnesiac villain from the planet Apokolips; Count Vertigo, a Euro-trash noble with “vertigo” powers; and Batman villain Poison Ivy, the poisonous plant chick. Other villains rotated in and out of the Squad like The Penguin, Captain Cold, and The Parasite, and a ton of other 3rd rate villains who were killed with impunity."

There, you should be roughly up to speed.

This week we'll take a look at some of my favorite issues of SS, spotlight some awesome and not-so-awesome characters, examine a truly F*$& Yeah moment in Squad history, mock Rick Flag, and generally just worship at the Altar of Ostrander. I'm stoked for the return of Suicide Squad to the DC Universe, so this seems like a good time for Suicide Squad Week.

Let us fucking do this thing!

Welcome to Suicide Squad Week

2007-07-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

To prove I have no dignity, here's an awkward VIDEO INTRO to our next theme week here at Dave's Long Box. Yes, this week we're going to lavish praise upon one of my favorite comic books of all time ever ever: Suicide Squad.

( Special thanks to my homey Brandon Mosby for shooting and cutting the video. )

Friday Night Fights: Neck Shrapnel!

2007-07-20T16:42:00.001-07:00

Opponents wrap chains around Luke Cage's neck at their peril.

In this scene from Cage #1, a villain whose name escapes me does just that. He also makes the mistake of referring to Luke Cage by a previous sobriquet, Power Man, which totally pisses him off. This must happen all the time to Sean Combs. "It's just Diddy now, man."

Cage inflates his incredible neck muscles so much that the chain not only breaks, it EXPLODES! That's a strong neck, am I right? That's a Henry Rollins neck right there.

Because Bahlactus demands it!

NOBLE CAUSES and DYNAMO 5 Image Comics

2007-07-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in posting, I was lazy/busy this week. Yes, busy and lazy at the same time - I am a human paradox machine! High Concept Week has dragged out over two whole Earth weeks, so I gotta wrap this shit up.

Writer Jay Faerber knows that if you want to be successful creating superhero comics outside the Big Two, you have to just go 100% high concept on everyone's ass. That's why Faerber has not one but two comics featured during High Concept Week; Noble Causes and Dynamo 5, both from Image Comics.

Let's start with Noble Causes. Here's the pitch: Ordinary bookseller Liz Donnelly marries into the Noble clan, a family of rich celebrity superheroes. She's immersed in a world of secrets, lies, ambition, and danger. It's a soap opera with superheroes! It's Dynasty meets the Fantastic Four! Or something, I don't know.

I've read three of Faerber's Noble Causes trades (available at Amazon) and I gotta say, he does a great job of unreeling dozens of parallel and interweaving storylines. The Noble family is full of scheming, beautiful people with super powers - except for Liz, our gateway character. When I first read Noble Causes I was sure that she would get killed off as soon as she hooked up with Race Noble, the superspeed stud. They meet cute, then start dating. She's doomed, right? She's going to end up in a fridge.

Not so much. *SPOILER* On their honeymoon in the South Pacific, Race gets killed in a random and Biblical way, and Liz is suddenly a widow... and a Noble.

Liz is actually kind of a cool character - she would have been played by Courtney Thorne Smith if Noble Causes was an early Nineties nighttime soap. She holds her own against her dangerously powerful and egocentric relatives and she sort of becomes the foundation of the series. Plus, she wears glasses - that's hot.

I enjoyed Noble Causes because when Faerber works in superhero or soap opera conventions like alternate universes and infidelity, the characters are so well defined that it's enjoyable to see them react the way they should. Do you know what I mean? Everyone's read a comic and thought, "Batman wouldn't gasp. Why do they have him gasping?" The reader knows how Batman or Wolverine would react, so it's fun to see them in parallel universes or have them get possessed and act out of character. Over time, Faerber has skillfully built up the Noble family as fleshed-out, familiar characters.

Noble Causes - it's not just high concept, it's high conept done well.

The same can be said about Dynamo 5, Faerber's newest book. It's in stores now and is definitely worth a look.

Here's how I previously described Dynamo 5:

"Dynamo 5 is the story of the teenage offspring of a big shot superhero with a Wilt Chamberlain-size libido and a Zeus-like proclivity for inseminating mortal women. Each bastard child of the (now deceased) hero inherits one of the hero’s many powers, i.e., super strength, eye beams, shape shifting, etc. and they band together to form a fledgling
super-team."

That about covers it. Dynamo 5 is fun pop art, with smooth colorful art, neat character designs, and some SHOCKING PLOT TWISTS!!! that I can't get into here. Plus - at the risk of sounding lecherous - it's got a cute super strong goth chick in a domino mask with a headband. That alone puts Dynamo 5 on my pull list.

POWERS Image Comics, 2000

2007-07-16T15:35:00.000-07:00

High Concept Week continues, proving that time is fluid and speed is my master! Let's do this BENDIS STYLE!

Powers is the Eisner-award winning series that made writer Brian Michael Bendis the comic book demigod that he is today. Nobody even says his full name now, it's just... Bendis. Like Cher. Or maybe Bendis! Like Charo!

Created by Bendis! and artist Michael Avon Oeming, Powers was originally published by Image Comics from 2000 to 2004, then moved to Marvel where it is today. To be honest I lost interest in the series after a few story arcs, but the first storyline, Who Killed Retro Girl?, is pure high concept comic book chocolatey goodness wrapped in gold foil with the words KICK ASS stamped on it.

Here’s the pitch: Detective Christian Walker and his new partner Deena Pilgrim are homicide cops with a tough job: they’ve got to find out who killed Retro Girl, a big-time super hero. In a city full of heroes, villains and freaks, aka “powers,” there’s no shortage of suspects…

The genre-mashing of Powers -- the mix of buddy-cop / murder mystery /superhero-- is what makes Powers high concept. The execution by Bendis and Oeming is what makes Powers work. Oeming's clean cartoony artwork and his Eisner Deco designs compliment Bendis' retro tough guy police story. The colors are pretty, too.

Powers is all about the dialogue and quirks of the characters and the unexpected but totally logical way they react to plot developments. This is what Bendis is famous for, the snappy banter stuff. One of the reasons I think Bendis is so successful is because his dialogue is really fun to read and he writes great sitcom-type scenes. I mean that in a positive way; Bendis knows his shit:

The core relationship in Powers is between Walker and his new partner, Deena Pilgrim, a chatty female detective with a tendency to kick in the crotch first and ask questions later. Walker is one of those wounded lone wolf types, and he's more than a little irritated by his new partner. Pilgrim and Walker have a nice dynamic that doesn't feel phony, with just the right hint of romantic tension.

I think Powers is Bendis at his best. (Well, his Spider-Man stuff is probably his best as well.) He and Oeming have created a unique, wry tone for their story and it works 99% of the time. For me, Powers works on just about every level - it's funny and chilling and stuffed full of interesting characters. His Detective Walker is great - a stoic, put-upon lug with a secret past.

As is always the case, high concept can be marred by lousy execution, but Bendis and Oeming nail it with the first Powers storyline. For me, the series can end right there - "Who Killed Retro Girl?" is the archetypal Powers story, it's the Powers movie.

Go check it out - you can pick up a nice trade paperback collection on Amazon. Whatever you might think of Bendis current work - even if you're still pissed that he killed Hawkeye - you owe it to yourself to check Powers out. It achieves something that modern comics sometimes fail to do - it entertains.

Friday Night Fights! Doomsday vs Harmless Woodland Creature

2007-07-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

It had to happen! Doomsday, the murderous monolith of mayhem, walking death, the creature that killed Superman versus the master of the forest, a curious deer. Who will come out on top?
One thing for sure - it's gonna be a fight!!!

The two opponents size each other up. The deer daintily approaches, silent and lightfooted, while Doomsday bulldozers through the forest, knocking over trees. The deer approaches, sniffs Doomsday...

Oh no! Doomsday strikes first with a deadly larynx crushing kung fu grip! What will the deer counter with? Nothing! The deer is out of tricks - and out of time!

That was a short but brutal fight. Tough call, but I'm going to have to give this one to Doomsday.

Head on over to Bahlactus's joint to see the other Friday Night Fight entries! (I know I'm late, but it's not even 9 PM on the Left Coast.)

LASER FORCE

2007-07-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

High Concept Week shines an annoying red laser pointer on Laser Force, a gripping video saga of a future that may come to pass -- unless you and I stop it.

Here's the high concept: In the future, Blaze Laserson and his elite combat team battle evil lasers.

That's it. That's all you need. Laser. Force. It's like killer gorillas, the movie writes itself.

Brought to you by the crack film production team at Indian Chief Blowers, Laser Force might at first glance look like a deliberately shoddy sci-fi video made by a bunch of foul-mouthed punks - and that would be exactly right. But the crisp dialogue, soul-rending character development, and raw man vs laser action scenes elevate Laser Force to another level.

Visit the Laser Force website or just check out the video here.

Laser Force.

If that shit isn't high concept I don't know what is. Prepare to be BLOWN AWAY.

SLEEPER Wildstorm Comics, 2003 - 2005

2007-07-12T16:45:00.000-07:00

High Concept Week rolls on like a futuristic inline skater in some crazy death sport with a look at one of my favorite comic book series ever: Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Sleeper.

Here's the high concept behind Sleeper: Holden Carver is a double agent, a mole planted deep inside the global criminal network of Tao, a ruthless mastermind. Carver really works for the director of the I/O spy agency, John Lynch, who is the only other person on the planet that knows he's a good guy. Unfortunately,Lynch goes into a coma and Carver is left out in the cold, alone among the enemy.

I tend to gush rhapsodically about certain comic books and defecate on others, but read these words and understand: Sleeper is fucking awesome.

In Sleeper, writer Brubaker and artist Phillips create the seedy underworld of the Wildstorm Universe, a collection of superhero intellectual properties like Gen-13 and WildCATS that Jim Lee took with him when he moved shop from Image to DC and created the Wildstorm imprint. Most of the characters have superpowers of some sort, but there are no capes or tights here - this is a hardcore crime/spy story that skirts around the edges of the superhero genre. It's full of violent people who swear a lot and do bad things to each other. While swearing. So of course, I love it.

It's all in the execution, though, isn't it? High concept films or books or comics can always suck if not handled properly. Anybody read Congo? See the movie? It's about killer gorillas. How can you mess that up? Killer. Gorillas. It's a two-word high concept. Everyone loves killer gorillas! Despite the presence of killer gorillas, the final product somehow turned out to be lame. Same with Planet of the Apes, the remake.

But enough about the gorillas.

Sean Phillips perfectly capture a high-tech film noir sensibility with Sleeper. His art is dark and moody and drenched in shadows, and his layouts are master examples of visual storytelling. Phillips created an interesting visual theme for Sleeper- his panels float over one or two background panels on the page, if that makes sense. Look, there's an example page over there. He never tilts the thick-bordered panels, which are always rectangular or square. The panels cascade across the page, guiding the reader's eye. The end result are elegantly designed panel layouts that read well and don't call attention to themselves. Phillips' layouts remind me of a really dynamic movie storyboard.

Brubaker writes tough guy dialogue that doesn't sound self-conscious and he keeps throwing sucker punch plot developments at you and Holden Carver. Our hero is forced to do terrible things to maintain his cover as a top operative in Tao's sinister organization - and he's more than capable of doing terrible things.

Carver is super bad, a former Black Ops commando leader who was given a strange superhuman power by an alien artifact. He can't feel anything, but his regenerating body absorbs pain and can transmit it to others via touch. If you shoot him, he'll absorb the energy of the bullet, then while he quickly heals, he'll take the bullet energy and turn it into a sizzling electrical blast and mess you up bad. Or he will jump through the air sideways firing two guns at you, riddling you with bullets. Carver trained at the John Woo Academy.

Tao has a few other lieutenants at Carver's level, including Miss Misery, a wicked evil assassin with a taste for pain. She derives pleasure and power from inflicting pain. Carver and Misery have a tumultuous and not entirely healthy relationship that plays heavily into the plot. She's super hot and totally evil and depraved. And he loves her.

Tao himself was a character who first appeared in the superhero book WildCATS back in 1995, when Alan Moore was writing the book, so think of him as an Alan Moore character. Tao stands for T.actical A.ugmented O.rganism, meaning he's a genetically engineered supergenius. He is diabolically evil and supernaturally smart, one of those Hannibal Lecter types that can talk you into shooting yourself. The reader is always wondering how much Tao knows and what he's going to do when he inevitably finds out Carver is a traitor. He's creepy.

The whole series is a densely plotted, pleasantly complicated, perfectly paced descent into a glamorous and seedy world of spies and criminals. It's like a cocktail made of a few James Bond movies, a couple Raymond Chandler novels, the Hong Kong films Infernal Affairs and The Killer, David Mamet himself, and maybe Scarface, Deep Cover, Ronin -- add in a high concept and some grenadine. If that's your drink, baby, you have to get Sleeper. There are four trade paperbacks, you can get them on Amazon.

You will email me and thank me and praise my wisdom.

High Concept Week Interlude: Rats!

2007-07-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Dave's Long Box readers may recall that I've posted in the past about my battle with vermin in and around Camp David. Previously I have resorted to lethal methods in tackling the mice that infested our kitchen -- I've even resorted to making an unholy alliance with Dr. Doom to destroy the rodent invaders:

(I also had a Captain Cold themed mouse trap with a drawing of the Flash villain urging mice to "chill," but it wasn't as cool as the Dr. Doom one.)

Some readers took issue with a) my partnership with Doom, and b) my lethal methods. P-Tor in particular eloquently argued for more humane means of eliminating those damn mice.

Well, now I've got rats in the garage. Big fucking Norway rats. You can hear them scurrying noisily around behind the paint cans and under the cabinets - they sound like invisible dwarves. They leave turds the size of deer droppings on my countertops. My daughter Ava saw one the other day when she was getting in the car, and she mistook it for a squirrel. I'd let my cat deal with them, but I'm afraid the rats would kill and eat her. My mouse traps are inadequate - they would just piss these gamma-irradiated monsters off and I'm afraid they would come for me and my family while we sleep. I need to get rid of these bastards or make them pay mortgage. Clearly I needed to get some spring-loaded bear traps or some terrible poison to get the job done.

Or so I thought. Then I took Ava to see Ratatouille.

It was her first movie theater experience, and at first she was a little overwhelmed by the digital sound system and the huge screen, but she enjoyed it. So did I; it's another quality Pixar movie with absolutely stunning animation. Ratatouille even has a F*%# Yeah moment - the climactic scene when sinister food critic Anton Ego finally tastes Remy the rat's cuisine is absolutely brilliant.

On the drive home Ava and I were talking about the movie and what parts we liked, what parts were scary, etc. I pulled into the garage, and my daughter says: "Dave, we have rats in our house, too, don't we?" Yes, she calls me Dave.

Well, crap.

Now I can't kill the hideous vermin that infest my garage. Now I'm going to have to buy little cages and humanely trap these little bastards.

You win, Pixar. You win, P-Tor and Ava. You win, tiny little Angel Dave on my left shoulder.

You live another day, Norway rats.