tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62502690713854670042024-03-13T15:53:06.704-04:00Julian Perez Conquers the Universe!Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.comBlogger197125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-6744498879451627492014-10-08T00:09:00.000-04:002014-10-08T00:13:35.413-04:00Fantastic Four will be canceled next year<br />
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Fantastic Four, my favorite comic book of all time, is going to be canceled next year.<br />
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I feel...curiously calm. I should be more disappointed. After all, FF is the only book I had a subscription to for years. If anything lasts 50+ years, there are going to be highs and lows, but FF's worst ages are still readable and had interesting things going on. Contrast that to how there are years and years of Spider-Man that are just <i><b>unreadable. </b></i><br />
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With Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby discovered the formula for coca-cola. It's full of far-out outer space adventure, but it's characters are four wisecracking, normal, relatable people with a family bond, so we're drawn in and invested. It's cold and hot at the same time. FF has such a great core concept that I don't think it's possible to tell a bad Fantastic Four story, which is why it's earned my loyalty as a regular reader even when no-names were on the art and story chores. You can't screw up Fantastic Four.<br />
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It's tempting to cynically say that they'll be back soon. Heck, this reminds me of a joke: how many comic book writers does it take to change a lightbulb? 2. One to change it, and one to change it back six months later. But here's the truth: FF was once Marvel's flagship comic but it's not what it once was. The same inertia that makes it always readable also makes it undynamic, like relish or the Pittsburgh Pirates. FF does not have the same centrality to Marvel it once did.<br />
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Maybe my muted reaction is a sign I'm in the denial stage of grief, but here's the thing: Marvel will probably still have to publish Fantastic Four periodically. Trademark, unlike copyright, is "use it or lose it." And, moving onto the bargaining stage here, cancellation was the best thing to ever happen to Mighty Thor, who went from an also-there Avenger to being a central part of the MU, just because we didn't take him for granted.<br />
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No idle boast - Fantastic Four really was the World's Greatest Comics Magazine.Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-52266762748515072712014-09-30T21:11:00.000-04:002014-09-30T21:11:22.716-04:00If you want to read Guardians of the Galaxy, where should you start? Recommended reading list<br />
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People say, <i>"hey, Julian, I love the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and I'd love to read the comics. I'd like to get into that whole corner of Marvel Comics. Where should I start and what should I read?"</i><br />
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Well, as a public service, here's my somewhat complete list:<br />
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(Warning! Super-nerdy and HUGE list to follow.)<br />
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IRON MAN #55-56 (Starlin, 1973). An unlikely place to start, but it's got the introduction of Drax the Destroyer and Thanos, a great beginning for Marvel's "space/cosmic" corner. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Iron-Vol-Marvel-Essentials/dp/0785142541/">Reprinted in ESSENTIAL IRON MAN VOL. 3.</a><br />
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MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #4-5 (Gerber, 1974). Features the original version of the Guardians of the Galaxy teaming up with the Thing and Captain America to take down the reptile Badoon who conquered the solar system. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Marvel-Two---One-Comics/dp/0785117296/">Reprinted in ESSENTIAL MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE VOL. 1</a>.<br />
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CAPTAIN MARVEL #26-33 (Starlin, 1974), AVENGERS #125 (Englehart, 1974). The first Thanos War, maybe one of the biggest Avengers story to that point, where Thanos obtains the Cosmic Cube. All of the big space stories will follow the lead of this series. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Captain-Marvel-Vol-Essentials/dp/0785145362/">Reprinted in ESSENTIAL CAPTAIN MARVEL VOL. 2.</a><br />
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STRANGE TALES 178-181 (Starlin, 1975), and WARLOCK #9-15 (Starlin, 1975-1976).Adam Warlock in space vs. the Universal Church of Truth, an evil religion. Sarcastically known as the "Adventures of Adam Warlock, Space-Christ." Features the introduction of Gamora and Pip the Troll, who was kinda the Rocket Raccoon Mark I. Reprinted in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Warlock-Jim-Starlin-Complete-Collection/dp/0785188479/">WARLOCK BY JIM STARLIN: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION.</a><br />
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MARVEL PRESENTS #3-12 (Gerber, 1976-1977). Bingo! This is the right place to start when reading about the "classic era" 30th Century version of the Guardians of the Galaxy. A word of warning: it's a very melancholic, sad, trippy book where all the heroes are last survivors of their species. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Guardians-Galaxy-Tomorrows-Avengers-Vol-ebook/dp/B00FRP71QO/">Collected last year in the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY: TOMORROW'S AVENGERS for Kindle.</a><br />
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MARVEL PREVIEW #4 (Englehart, 1976), MARVEL PREVIEW 11, 14-15, 18 (Claremont, 1977). These are the earliest appearances of Star-Lord. Brace yourself, it’s VERY different, especially the first appearance, which had weird astrological concepts. Especially recommend 14-15, 18 due to the John Byrne art. These issues are super-rare and hard to find. Star Lord’s earliest appearances, thankfully, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Star-Lord-Guardian-Galaxy-Steve-Englehart/dp/0785154493/">are collected in STAR LORD: GUARDIAN OF THE GALAXY,</a> which only came out in July. I hear the movies will use a different origin than the one he receives here.<br />
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AVENGERS ANNUAL #7 (Starlin, 1977).Introduces the Infinity Gems and Thanos's desire to collect all of them. A great Avengers space epic in its own right. Easily available for a few bucks in back issue bins.<br />
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THOR ANNUAL #6 (1977), AVENGERS #159, 167-168, 170-177 (Shooter, 1978).The first big team up between the original Guardians of the Galaxy and the Avengers, the "Korvac Saga." A future Guardians/Avengers movie would logically follow this story. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Avengers-8-Jim-Shooter/dp/0785163220/">Reprinted in ESSENTIAL AVENGERS Vol. 8</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Avengers-Korvac-Saga-Roger-Stern/dp/0785162054/">AVENGERS: THE KORVAC SAGA.</a><br />
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INCREDIBLE HULK #271 (Mantlo, 1982). Good luck getting this one in comic form; ever since it was known to be Rocket Raccoon's first proper Marvel Universe appearance, it's been selling for hundreds of dollars. People love that little guy!<br />
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AVENGERS #257-260 (Stern, 1985). The first and most memorable of Nebula’s appearances, she showed up as a tyrannical, ice cold, evil-to-the-core queen of alien pirates who took over Thanos’sultra powerful starship. Yet another story arc you can get cheap in back issue form.<br />
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ROCKET RACCOON #1-4 (Mantlo, 1985). Guess who did the art on Rocket Raccoon's original miniseries? Mike Mignola...creator of Hellboy! This is the last time we see Rocket's rocket skates, though. Apparently, that's just TOO silly. This has Rocket as protector of the Keystone Quadrant along with his buddy Wal Russ and his raccoon girlfriend Lylla. I doubt you'll be able to get the original issues since the character became INSANELY popular, but luckily, there is a reprint paperback: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Raccoon-Guardian-Keystone-Quadrant/dp/0785155279/">ROCKET RACCOON: GUARDIAN OF THE KEYSTONE QUADRANT. </a><br />
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SENSATIONAL SHE-HULK #44-46 (Byrne, 1992).One of the rare appearances of Rocket Raccoon until the revival. She-Hulk was a comedy book prone to reviving weirdo obscuros, bad guys like Scragg: the Living Hill, the Toad Men, and Xemnu the Titan, not to mention using the continuity of horribly dated 70s space trucker comic US-1. So, Rocket Raccoon was a natural choice to show up. Dig into the back issues, you can get this one for cheap.<br />
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THANOS QUEST #1-2 (Starlin, 1990) and INFINITY GAUNTLET #1-6 (1991). If you can only read one of the two, personally, I prefer the StarlinThanos Quest mini: it’s a reminder why Thanos is the most terrifying guy in the Marvel Universe, and we get so very few villain-centered stories. INFINITY GAUNTLET puts the Marvel heroes, but especially the "space" guys like Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock, against a newly omnipotently powerful Thanos.<br />
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ADAM WARLOCK AND THE INFINITY WATCH #1-18 (Starlin, 1991-1992). Don’t tell me the Infinity Watch wasn’t the inspiration for the current Guardians of the Galaxy series. They have three out of their six members in common.<br />
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THANOS #7-12 (2004).The return of Star Lord to the Marvel Universe!And his first mysterious "death" cooperating with Thanos to imprison the evil lost Herald of Galactus, the Fallen One. This is also the story where Star Lord’s element guns and sentient ship were destroyed, a big part of the original version of the character, both of which haven’t been seen again.<br />
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DRAX THE DESTROYER #1-4 (2005). This series featured Drax the Destroyer acquiring the new red tattooed body seen in the first series.<br />
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ANNIHILATION: PROLOGUE One-Shot (Giffen, 2006), ANNIHILATION: NOVA #1-4, ANNIHILATION: SUPER-SKRULL #1-4, ANNIHILATION: SILVER SURFER #1-4, ANNIHILATION: RONIN #1-4, and ANNIHILATION #1-6 (Giffen, 2006). Annihilation was the big space-crossover that led to the more important sequel, Annihilation: Conquest and the Guardians of the Galaxy series. Good for background. The most important issues are Prologue, Nova, and the series itself. Like nearly all "event" stories, it’s better off reading it in collected form. I personally didn’t like this one as much as the sequel, CONQUEST. But it might be helpful to read to understand what’s going on in Conquest and Guardians.<br />
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ANNIHILATION: CONQUEST (Lanning, 2007). A sequel to Annihilation, it is this series that directly resulted in the new Guardians of the Galaxy series that was the foundation of the movie, and featured the first story of the team we call the Guardians today.<br />
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GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY (Lanning, 2008). This is the series that directly led to the movie – it’s worth noting it was canceled in 2010. Absolutely worth it for Paul Pelletier’s pencils. The comic’s plot threads continued in THE THANOS IMPERATIVE 1-6, which is by the original creative team in 2012, and can be thought of as a Guardians of the Galaxy reunion. THE THANOS IMPERATIVE individual volume collects all of them.<br />
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WAR OF KINGS (2009). Set in between the first Guardians of the Galaxy series and THANOS IMPERATIVE, War of Kings is one of the big space storylines and features the Guardians. It’s a headache to read in individual issues; the collections, available at many libraries, are much better.<br />
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AVENGERS ASSEMBLE #4-8 (Bendis, 2012). Star-Lord returns with the other Guardians in this comic series.<br />
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Moving on to the present day…<br />
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Ever since the movie, Marvel’s been racing to give people what they want with these new characters.<br />
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LEGENDARY STAR-LORD (2014). This series just started. It makes the Star Lord of the comics much more like the guy in the movies everybody liked.<br />
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GUARDIANS 3000 (2014). In case you were wondering if the 30th Century Guardians were forgotten in the blitz with the new guys, the answer is no. This series just started. Worth picking up if just for the Alex Ross cover.<br />
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There, I think I gave enough recommendations!</div>
Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-70072133863545263632014-01-18T11:22:00.001-05:002014-01-18T11:22:39.779-05:005 Things You Probably Didn't Know about Ancient Rome<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>5. There were as many lawyers in Rome as there are today.</b></span><br />
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The most interesting thing about reading Roman history is how weirdly familiar it all feels. The Roman court system was similar to today's: you got a summons to come to court, there were bailiffs, multiple levels of courts, if a verdict didn't go your way you could file an appeal to a higher court (which ended in the Emperor instead of a Supreme Court), and there were even lawyers.<br />
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Not only were there lawyers in Rome, some of them were even what we'd call "ambulance chasers," aided by the fact the Romans were the first civilization to invent the idea of the lawsuit. Lawyers in Rome drafted wills and needed to be on hand for contracts. Since most Roman lawyers were paid by the line, most really were blathery and wordy. Even the smallest village in Roman times had a lawyer.<br />
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Interestingly, their job seems very similar to today. Roman courts had cross-examination of witnesses, hearsay was rejected, proof in writing had greater weight over eyewitness testimony, and the burden of proof was on whoever was trying to make a claim.<br />
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Being a lawyer sometimes meant being a statesman, too. A famous Roman you've probably heard of, the articulate Cicero, was a lawyer by profession.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>4. The Emperor Pertinax's Guard, after murdering him, sold his throne in an auction to the highest bidder.</b></span><br />
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Ancient Roman Emperors kept their power by a simple rule: keep the armies on your side, and to <i>hell </i>with everybody else.<br />
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The Emperor Probus (predecessor of the famous Diocletian), for instance, to keep his Legions occupied, assigned them the sort of busywork you might expect a substitute teacher to give an badly behaving class, and for the same reason: to shut you up and keep you out of trouble. For instance, he ordered his soldiers to plant olive trees in the Sahara Desert. Overworked and upset about these petty indignities, when Probus said the Empire might be better off with volunteers instead of professional (well-paid) soldiers, it didn't take much for his own men to chase him to an empty tower and then stab him to death. Now, if only modern unions could pull off that kind of thing these days…!<br />
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The Praetorian Guard were a tremendously powerful faction in Rome, originally created by the Emperor Augustus as his personal "secret service" bodyguards. They were designed to do what modern day club bouncers do: block doorways, glower, and intimidate. But unlike the actual secret service, the Praetorian Guard had an awful lot of power over the Emperor for the simple and basic reason that if they weren't kept happy, when his back was turned, they had a lot of knives and could stab the Emperor with them.<br />
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This actually happened when the Praetorian Guard were annoyed by the Emperor Pertinax, who the Praetorian Guard stabbed repeatedly in 198 AD. The Praetorian Guard had no leaders, and were just an unruly mob, so they <i>decided to auction off the throne of Rome to anyone willing to pay them. </i><br />
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A rich, vain old man named Didus Julianus paid the Praetorian Guard to be Emperor after being convinced of it by his Mr. Smithers-like yes-men and lackeys. Didus Julianus paid a hefty amount to every single Praetorian Guardsman to do what Mitt Romney tried and failed to do: buy his way to the highest office in the world.<br />
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He had a party to celebrate becoming Emperor, but in the harsh light of day had a brutal panic attack: he had no allies anywhere, the people didn't support him because of the slimy way Didus got into office (would you?), the army generals didn't support him (I guess he should have paid them off, too) and on hearing what happened, the Senate sentenced him to death. His last words were, "but I didn't do anything!"<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>3. One Emperor was a crossdresser. </b></span><br />
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<i>I have to stop and emphasize here that I am not making any of this up. </i><br />
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Even by the standards of psychotic Roman Emperors, Elagabalus was a piece of work. Taking the throne at 14, he ruled for four years where he wore women's cosmetics including eye shadow, and tweezed his eyebrows. At night, he often went out to work as a prostitute on the streets of Rome, even catcalling passerbys.<br />
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He married a muscular blond slave who drove his chariot, Hierocles, and apparently, Elagabalus was the woman in the relationship. He used to say <i>"I am delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the Queen of Hierocles." </i><br />
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Elagabalus offered a huge sum of money to any physician or doctor in the Empire who could take off his penis and give him a functional vagina.<br />
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And to top it all off, Elagabalus was a religious nut, too. He replaced worship of Jupiter with a Babylonian mountain god called Elagabal, which comes from<i> Ilāh hag-Gabal</i>, a damn weird cult centered around touching a meteorite.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>2. Christianity was created by an act of "selling out."</b></span><br />
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In the beginning, in order to be a Christian, you had to be a Jew first.<br />
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Early Christianity was an odd sect of reform Judaism, allowing only Jews, requiring circumcision and obeying kosher dietary laws. When did that change? Partially it was the work of St. Paul, but the earliest, most severe break point was a gigantic act of selling out in 135 AD.<br />
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A couple years before, the last of Jewish self-rule was eliminated when the Romans, who as usual didn't mess around: they crushed the rebellion of Bar Kochba, a man who claimed he was the Messiah and even delusionally printed his own coins to that effect.<br />
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Note to future Messiahs: don't print your own coins saying the Kingdom of Heaven has come unless you're <i>absolutely sure.</i><br />
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With the end of military leader Bar Kochba, the political future of Jewish identity was a sinking star you'd be crazy to hitch your wagon to, especially for an up and coming new reform sect like Christianity drifting further away every day from its roots. On the other hand, the Roman world was looking more comfortable and hospitable, at its absolute high point under first class ruler Antoninus (one of the famous "5 Good Emperors," notable for their lack of insanity).<br />
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The break point came in 135 AD. The Emperor Hadrian built a city intended to be the new financial, Roman center of conquered Palestine right on Mount Sion, the Ælina Capitolina. The one rule was this: no Jews were allowed. Stop and think about that: Jerusalem was so totally destroyed by the Romans almost nothing was left, and no Jews were allowed on the new city built where it once stood. If this sort of thing keeps happening, I'm liable to start thinking the Jews can't buy a break.<br />
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In response to this "keep out" rule, the Nazarenes, who in truth were growing more different from the Jews every day, elected Marcus as a bishop – the first gentile to be Bishop of Jerusalem, who was either Italian or Latin, and Marcus persuaded the Nazarenes to give up the Mosaic law…all to buy entrance into Hadrian's business port! By the way, the office of the Bishop of Jerusalem continues in an unbroken line in today's Orthodox Church 2000 years later.<br />
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Not everybody agreed with the election of Marcus, though – they moved and became the Ebionites, one of the most eccentric groups of Christian-Jews. But all that notwithstanding, it was easily one of the most influential acts of selling out in world history.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">1. Rome was once seriously close to being beaten by a warrior-queen. </span></b><br />
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Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, was like a character out of a cheesy fantasy novel, except she <i>really lived</i>. She was so cool it's hard to believe she was a real person. She used to like to hunt with her men and officers, and could ride a horse, steer a chariot, throw a spear, and shoot a bow. She was described as darkskinned and dark-haired and was "more beautiful than Cleopatra," though unlike Cleopatra she was totally devoted to her husband and didn't sleep around.<br />
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Zenobia was not only warlike but literate: she spoke fluent Latin, Greek, Aramaic, and even Ancient Egyptian, and surrounded herself with poets and philosophers. Zenobia said she was descended from Cleopatra, a claim that's nowhere near as farfetched as it sounds, because Cleopatra's family tree (the Ptolemies) did have many eastern branches that survived.<br />
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In a detail that might just be too good to be true, it's reported she was Jewish through her mother – not only Jewish, but an early Christian back when it was hard to tell the two groups apart… a member of an obscure Eastern version of Christianity, Paulianists, who believed Jesus was born a mortal man but God later "adopted" him as His son. Even if she wasn't a Jewish Christian, Zenobia was shockingly Jew-friendly: Rabbis came to her court to speak.<br />
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Zenobia ruled Palmyra, a Greek-speaking Eastern trading center in modern Syria, big enough and rich enough and Eastern/foreign enough to be a legit contender as a rival to Rome. When the Romans were tied up with the Gauls on the other side of the world, Zenobia seized her chance and created a break-off "Palmyrene Empire," taking Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor. As all of Rome depended on Egyptian grain, this was a pretty serious threat to the entire Roman Empire: it meant Rome started to run out of food.<br />
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Unfortunately for Zenobia, the Roman Emperor at this time wasn't run by a teenage crossdresser, but Aurelian (the city of Orleans is named after him), a no-BS, serious fighting man who kept the Roman Empire from breaking up into three. He claimed a ghost appeared and told him to handle his enemies with kid gloves, which explains why, when Zenobia was inevitably captured, she wasn't put to death but instead lived out her life in a posh Italian villa comfortably, and her descendants were major historical and political figures.<br />
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That's <i>almost</i> enough to make up for the fact only one movie was ever made about her, the <i>Sign of the Gladiator</i>, a cheesy 60s peplum uplifted by the gorgeous Anita Ekberg in the title role (and featuring Chelo Alonso in a dance number, <a href="http://julianperezconquerstheuniverse.blogspot.com/2009/06/chelo-alonso-cuban-h-bomb.html">who I wrote about here</a>).<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-78800176956098466952014-01-06T17:37:00.000-05:002014-01-06T19:01:30.841-05:00Why Thanos is cooler than Darkseid<br />
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Both Thanos and Darkseid are craggy faced, megalomaniac outer space bad guys who are intergalactic menaces. The two characters are compared often, and to me, it's not even a contest: Thanos, the "Mad God," is the more frightening, the more intimidating, the more fearsome, the more complex, the more intriguing, and is featured in way better stories. And it doesn't surprise me in the<i> least</i> Thanos would make it to the big screen ahead of Darkseid.<br />
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Sure, Darkseid came first (but not by much), but as with everything in life, it's not who does it first, but who does it right.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Thanos has a more interesting motivation and origin.</span></b><br />
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Thanos is a nihilist in love with Death herself, who wants to give her the universe. Darkseid, on the other hand, wants to solve a math problem.<br />
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Beyond that, Thanos has a far more interesting psychology at work. He's terrifying for a reason Darkseid isn't. Darkseid is an authoritarian dictator who wants control. Thanos, on the other hand, has a cold, crystalline commitment to nihilism and death terrifying to any rational being. He commits genocide because he is philosophically opposed to life: he views it as a disease in a dead universe. He kills because death is beautiful, and life isn't worth living. Thanos tears out grass because its life is hideous to him; the ground would be more beautiful dead and cold. He wants to destroy life on Earth and other planets because our world is far worse off than quiet, crystalline, barren worlds like Mars, Mercury, and the Moon. Thanos proved his commitment to this idea in a cold, personal way: he killed his own mother.<br />
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In short, Thanos is terrifying because of the way he <i>thinks</i>, not just because he can shoot scary eye lasers.<br />
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Thanos's origin is eerie and poetic: Death appeared to Thanos as a young man, a woman so beautiful she made other women look like horrible hags. To win her over, Thanos wants to present the Universe as a gift to her. It's like something out of Herman Hesse or Ingmar Bergmann, magical realism you're not sure if it really happened or if what we just saw was a metaphor.<br />
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There's also an element of pathos in Thanos's motivation, too: no matter what he does to honor Death, she doesn't give him the time of day. Thus far, Death has never even spoken to him. No matter how many successes he has or how many triumphs he has. Even when Thanos tried to get over Death and form his own evil Pantheon of Gods in Avengers: Celestial Quest, you could tell he hadn't gotten over her and his behavior was upping the ante overcompensation.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Thanos has a sense of humor and dry wit. </b></span><br />
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Voltaire said, <i>"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."</i> Thanos is very much the same way: one of the most amusing things about the character is how his dry humor is wasted on people terrified of him.<br />
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For instance, remember in the Avengers movie when, after being told the Avengers "court death," he gave a wry, dark smile? Is it even <i>conceivable</i> for Darkseid to appreciate wit or wordplay like that?<br />
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Or, remember this interaction in Dan Slott's She-Hulk?<br />
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<i>"You're the Mad Titan. You bring death, pain, and destruction wherever you go."</i> </blockquote>
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<i>"I see my reputation precedes me."</i></blockquote>
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Thanos even got off a bit of sly mockery there due to his respect for his enemy, Captain Marvel.<br />
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Oh, that reminds me of the next point:<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Thanos had respect for his greatest enemies. </span></b><br />
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Even Doctor Doom, for all his nobility, thinks of Reed Richards as a less talented clown.<br />
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Thanos, on the other hand, appeared to Captain Marvel as he was dying from cancer to actually HELP him accept the inevitable, feel no fear, and pass into another world. He even showed up in Captain Marvel's mind to fight him, simply because he felt someone like Captain Marvel, dying of cancer, deserved to go down fighting. This wasn't some evil plan of his; Thanos showed up to ease Mar-Vell into dying at peace because <i>he wanted to help</i>.<br />
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So great was Thanos's respect for Captain Marvel, he was horrified to see Quasar become Mar-Vell's replacement and pretender, and beat him pretty brutally for it.<br />
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Likewise, Thanos helped his other great enemy, Adam Warlock in the Infinity Watch against the power of the Magus.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Thanos actually came much closer to winning. </b></span><br />
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Thanos is a much more effective villain because he not only obtained infinite power <i>once</i>, but <i>several times</i>. In the first Thanos War, he obtained the Cosmic Cube, and all of reality was his plaything. Not only that, but in the Infinity Gauntlet, he obtained the Infinity Gems. Among other things, he killed one out of every four life forms everywhere in the entire universe just to make a point (someone wished them back later, but what a gesture).<br />
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All this was not only in-continuity, but in some of Marvel's <i>most important stories</i>.<br />
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Darkseid on the other hand, only got his precious fucking math problem solved in alternate universes and possible futures. Remember Rock of Ages?<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Thanos is more terrifying and intimidating.</span></b><br />
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Perhaps because Thanos has a way higher success rate (and again, an origin that doesn't involve solving an evil math problem), Marvel treats Thanos the way Doctor Who treats the Daleks: they only come out when they aren't messing around. Thanos is never used gratuitously, and certainly isn't overused, something that can be said about Darkseid.<br />
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Perhaps because Thanos has a much more lively psychology than Darkseid, it's interesting to note it's implied part of the reason Thanos lost was because of his own inner doubt; he's uncomfortable with totally winning. In short, nobody really beats Thanos except Thanos.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Thanos is always drawn dynamically. Darkseid is always sitting in a chair. </b></span><br />
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<a href="http://darkseidchillingonacouch.tumblr.com/">There's a tumblr that's nothing but images of Darkseid chillaxing on a couch.</a><br />
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Why is that even a thing at all? I'm going to get into trouble for saying this, but it's absolutely true: Jack Kirby's art got lazier the instant he stopped working with a plotter. If you don't believe me, count the panels for yourself: the average issue of Fantastic Four had 33% more panels than the average Fourth World comic. Kirby's splash pages went from pop out action sequences, like in Fantastic Four:<br />
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...to scenes of people just chilling in rooms.<br />
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Thanos's poses, on the other hand, suggested confidence, megalomania, and arrogance. And Thanos certainly never stands around with his hands behind his back looking bored.<br />
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In the end, this crucial difference seems to summarize the distinction between the two characters. Thanos is a dynamic character with a vivid inner life and Darkseid does the same thing over and over. As a result of lessons he learned in battle with Akhenaten in Marvel's The End, Thanos found conquest and destruction inherently futile, a realization that's been with the character ever since, for example.<br />
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When asked who is more interesting, it's no contest.<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-12440539848321590072013-09-30T21:39:00.002-04:002013-09-30T21:43:50.158-04:00TV Review: "Agents of SHIELD"<br />
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I am <b><i>very </i></b>cynical about non-animated TV doing superhero comics correctly, and for a pretty good reason: it's never done superheroes correctly before.<br />
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Ever. No exceptions, no wiggle room. Every panel I've seen on superheroes on TV asks some variation on <i>"why can't they get it right?"</i> It's not just the limits of special effects, although limited special effects and budget do unquestionably play a role: remember George Reeves's door knocking? Rather, the problem is one of <i>attitude</i>. There's embarrassment of superheroes' high concept traits that reflects a kind of chickenshit, play it safe conservatism.<br />
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Arrow would be Exhibit A: a dead serious procedural where the hero doesn't wear a costume.<br />
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<i>Agents of SHIELD</i> is only superficially similar to Arrow, and may require me to re-evaluate the view TV doesn't get it. I had a list of reservations about this show a mile long. I was initially worried it would be a genre spy show that runs away from its comics origins. I was pleasantly surprised to see it didn't. I knew it would call back <i>Avengers</i> and the Marvel movies, but I didn't know it would THIS MUCH. The MacGuffin in the first act is leftover Chitauri tech from <i>Avengers </i>(yes, a big plot point in the series is alien superscience). Extremis from<i> Iron Man 3</i> is not only referenced, it's the center of the pilot's entire third act.<br />
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Best of all, the series captures the Marvel movie tone perfectly: wiseass, rapid fire pitter patter, based around self-awareness and funny timing. It's FUN and funny – something the trailers did not successfully get across. I give it the highest praise I can think of under the circumstances: it feels like a 45 minute Marvel movie.<br />
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As for playing it safe with high concept oddities…there was a goddamn flying car.<br />
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In addition to that, the greatest strength of SHIELD is it has a leading man, Agent Coulson, an unlikely wildly popular fan favorite character entirely because of the performance of Clark Gregg, who surprisingly, is more of a writer and director than an actor. In the age of the dark TV antihero, Agent Coulson is someone you instinctively trust, who, when given an "easy" way out of a problem (shooting and killing an innocent man to prevent an explosion), refuses to take it as it'd leave a child an orphan and instead chooses a third way. When confronted with a whistleblower, Agent Coulson's reaction is to bring them in and make them a part of the organization instead of cracking down and closing ranks.<br />
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When told all secret agent G-Men do is lie and make examples out of little guys that don't fall in line, he rebukes that idea to give a guy going through hard times a second chance. In an age when we're afraid of shadowy observers, I like that, at least Agent Coulson is there to lend a hand, and not place a boot to the throat. The show realizes some people are just creeped out by secret government surveillance and has to make the good guys people with integrity to earn our respect.<br />
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Agent Coulson reminds me of Captain Picard from <i>Star Trek: the Next Generation</i>. A leading man of integrity who refuses to accept the only way to solve problems is violence, who's most distinctive physical feature is his hairline, who somehow manages to be bigger than life and commanding despite being of medium height, and who has a dashing, action oriented second-in-command.<br />
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The sidekick is always created to be a foil for the main hero. If the hero is sophisticated, the sidekick is more "rough and tumble." If the hero is happy-go-lucky and carefree, his ally will be rocksteady and reliable. And in the case of this show, if Coulson is a nontraditional, outside the box thinker, his second in command is a more reactionary type who trusts a lot less.<br />
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This brings to mind maybe the biggest misstep of the pilot: the central intercharacter conflict is between a female whistleblower/hacker who hates secrecy and deceit, and a way more reactionary SHIELD agent. This is a great idea, because in the wake of domestic spying scandals along with the revelations of WikiLeaks and Snowden, a show about a heroic government agency designed to keep would be, well, <i>creepy</i>. The moral issues there have to be acknowledged.<br />
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It reminds me of how the biggest problem with the original 70s <i>Battlestar Galactica</i> is the conflict between civilian and military authority, with the noble military struggling against cowardly, treacherous civilian government, like something out of Riefenstahl's <i>Triumph of the Will</i>. So a character was added in the reboot (civilian president Laura Roslin) to do this complex conflict justice.<br />
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A whistleblower functioning as group conscience would be a great conflict and topical. Unfortunately, they sabotaged and underserved this conflict by making the hacker girl a cute, ditzy fangirl into the super business because she's a groupie. Imagine if someone smart, someone made of fire and steel, was cast in the role, someone like a young Sigourney Weaver or Michelle Forbes, who'd really fight against her reactionary SHIELD male counterpart! Of <i>all</i> the characters to not make a "Major Kira!" They neutered the central conflict by making She-Snowden into Doris Day.<br />
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The Moonlighting dynamic is cliché, but it's cliché for a reason: it <b><i>works</i></b>. But Moonlighting only worked because Bruce Willis was paired up with Sibyll Shepherd.<br />
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This is surprising because Joss Whedon, like Chris Claremont, has a rep for writing badass babes and warrior women. In the case of Whedon, I'm not certain this rep is deserved. Apart from the obvious exception of Buffy, his writing is overrepresented with vulnerable, wounded, "cute" everywomen in need of a hug. If Whedon really did deserve his rep as an amazon-lover, he'd have used Storm in his X-Men run instead of Kitty Pryde, who he made his POV and main character. Claremont, on the other hand, wrote the Invisible Woman and the Wasp like Storm. In the case of Agents of SHIELD, someone wrote what should have been Storm like the Wasp.<br />
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Apart from the whistleblower vs. secrecy conflict, the other big, topical idea in <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> is best personified by a hard on his luck single Dad. At the end, this Dad talks about a general feeling a lot of us have since the financial collapse of 2008: for the little guy willing to work hard, America doesn't live up to its end of the deal, and little guys are screwed and stepped on by the big guys. To even get by, you have to be a giant, super…and where does that leave the rest of us?<br />
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I was very worried <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> chose to make the show about nonpowered agent characters to "run away" from superheroes, but this assured me that they made this show from their point of view for a <b><i>reason</i></b>, to make a point: the little guy's eye view of the Marvel Universe, like something out of Busiek's Marvels or Astro City.<br />
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<i>Agents of SHIELD </i>deserves special praise for having a pretty realistic and up to date take on nerds, too. The traditional, Peter Parker style awkward nerd in glasses is not really in style thanks to geek-chic, and the latest reboot of Spider-Man reflected that, making him more an alienated loner and less the traditional nerd. The biochemist and engineer on this series are an equally up to date take on nerds. They remind me of all the people I used to see in my science classes and still see posting minutiae about cave snails and Florida orchids on my Facebook wall: not outwardly antisocial, but with bizarre interests that bore most people, and easily excitable by little, gross arcana.<br />
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The cast's "secret weapon" might be Ming-Na Wen. Yes, the mighty Mulan herself is on this show, and why that isn't a selling point I'll never know. She's silent, intense, clearly an experienced combat vet (no little girl, the actress is over 40), a crack pilot, and she gave a breathtaking smackdown with her spy fighting skills. The implication of the pilot is, she's a character very much like Garibaldi from <i>Babylon 5</i>: a chequered past, this is her last chance to make good. Like Garibaldi, I'm guessing her past involves alcoholism or PTSD.<br />
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<i>Agents of SHIELD</i> is so very Marvel: it's got the humorous, fun tone that made the Marvel movies infinitely more watchable than DC's dead-serious efforts (I admire the Nolan movies a lot more than I like them). It certainly isn't Arrow, afraid to use its universe and running away from wild things like costumes and boxing glove arrows. Heck, remember the single-Dad superhero? He didn't have a costume, but at least he acted like one: hell, he saved one more innocent citizen than Superman did in all of <i>Man of Steel</i>.<br />
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In short, it's a success…maybe one of the first decent attempts to translate comics to television. And I'll be watching this week, too.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Things to Ponder: </b></span><br />
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<li>How great is it they use the term "superhero?" Most shows run away from that term.</li>
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<li>Project: Pegasus apparently exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Does the Thing work there in between attempts to get his pro-wrestling career going? My Spidey-sense tells me this will be a plot point.</li>
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<li>All of us True Believers caught the reference to Forbush-Man, right? If not, turn in your Merry Marvel Marching Society card!</li>
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<li>Everyone caught how they slipped Journey into Mystery in dialogue, right? Before you think that's nothing special, that's<i><b> one</b></i> more fannish, Easter Egg reference than was in all of <i>Man of Steel</i>, that's for sure.</li>
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<ul>
<li>What gets everyone excited here are the hints there's more than there appears when it comes to Phil Coulson's mysterious resurrection. Here's a possibility a friend told me: what if Coulson is, and always has been, a SHIELD life model decoy? Explains why he seemed to be in several different places at once during the movies. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>This is a small nit, but couldn't they have used ONE canon SHIELD character as a regular on this show? Would it have been so hard to dig up Clay Quartermain, or Jimmy Woo, or Jasper Stiltwell, or the Contessa, or Bobbi Morse?</li>
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-60754576341456925732013-09-09T13:00:00.000-04:002013-09-11T11:01:51.495-04:00Review: E.E. Smith's Lensman Spin-Off Novel, "Masters of the Vortex"<br />
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Imagine if math whiz Nate Silver was the hero of the movie "Twister," and you've basically got the premise of E.E. Smith's Lensman spin-off novel "Masters of the Vortex."<br />
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Our nuclear engineer hero uses his math skills to ride out and destroy atomic vortexes, or swirling, constant atomic explosions that, in terms of natural disaster plausibility, only barely beat out "reverse meteors." In the pulp SF universe of the Lens, if you have a slide rule and some all-American gumption, there's no natural phenomena you can't lick!<br />
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To his unbelievable good fortune, "Storm" Cloud lives in the one science fiction setting ever where the ability to do math in your head superfast practically makes you a superhero and isn't rendered superfluous by computers: the Lensman universe, an interstellar civilization anachronistically based on vacuum tube electronics, where the writer's imagination could conceive of planet crushing superweapons and faster than light travel but not an integrating computer any smaller than several tons. Eventually, you realize when the book talks about a "master computer" it means a <b>person</b>.<br />
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"Storm" Cloud is not a Lensman himself, which I'm sure made E.E. Smith breathe a sigh of relief, considering how impossible it must have been to come up with challenges worthy of the most ludicrously supercompetent heroes in all of fiction. Imagine if MacGyver was a telepathic dragon and you start to get the idea.<br />
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"Storm" Cloud has a different superpower: <i>math</i>. For instance, he uses "statistical analysis" to predict criminal behavior and figure out the lair of drug dealers (Zwilniks), indicating that the Universe of the Lens might not have an internet, but it easily beats our world when it comes to applied sabermetrics. He also uses mathematics to take on the house at gambling: he's even able to figure out how to win when the dealer cheats and stacks the deck. Since the dealer always does it the same way, you can figure out the pattern.<br />
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When Cloud's family are killed by an atomic vortex, his character turns vaguely suicidal, and with the mania of a person with a death wish, he leaps to figure out the correct, ever changing way to make an atomic vortex go bust, figuring if he's wrong, he has nothing to lose. When he ends up figuring out the first ever way to destroy vortexes, he becomes an intergalactic celebrity and hero, and his life acquires a new purpose. Imagine if someone figures out a way to destroy hurricanes or tornadoes and you'd get the idea.<br />
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Soon, Dr. Cloud is joined by an eccentric crew of oddballs and misfits who assist him in his rocket in "Vortex Blasting," and with who Cloud discovers a new purpose. The fact our hero is recovering from the loss of his family and is depressed and borderline-suicidal is a new angle, one that gives this character an arc. After all, due to the death of his family, Cloud is a much bigger misfit than the Lensmen were.<br />
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This is also an interesting look at the much older E.E. Smith, returning to the Lensmen universe in 1960 after a pause of close to 15 years (he would tragically, die five years later). Middle aged family men are prone to two very dark fantasies: one is faking their own death successfully, and the other is having their family die in some accident, which makes them going off on some exciting new life away from them. I'm not saying they want their family to die, only that there's a longing for freedom.<br />
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Some history is in order, here: Smith wrote the short story that formed the kernel of this novel, "The Vortex Blaster," in 1941, in the magazine "Comet." The original short story from 1941, "The Vortex Blaster," is actually the opening few chapters in the novel, "Masters of the Vortex." Smith wrote a story in the Lensman universe (unlike Triplanetary, this one was always in the Universe of the Lens) as a favor to F. Orlin Tremaine, the pre-John W. Campbell editor of Astounding, an act of loyalty to help out Tremaine's new pulp mag "Comet." But since Smith was publishing the Lensman stories in Campbell's Astounding, he couldn't get a true Lensman story in "Comet," and only published a story in the Lensman universe. In 1960, Smith blew his short story up into a novel.<br />
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This makes sense. The Lensman Universe is big enough to have a thousand more stories inside of it.<br />
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That said, though Masters of the Vortex is a great new direction showing the more psychological SF of the year 1960, it's just plain GOOD to be back in the Lensman universe. I'd compare it to when Star Trek came back after years away in the new Trek movie. Hearing about Lensmen, speeders, tractors, dureum, Boskonians, Bergenholm drives, space axes (though the less superhuman and ordinary Cloud uses more of a "space-hatchet") fill you with the same charge as the familiar phasers, photon torpedoes, Klingons, and Starfleet Academy did when Trek returned.<br />
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There are even hints after all this time, Smith wants to play around and have fun with the conventions of the genre he helped create.<br />
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For instance, there's a subplot where Cloud, doing what engineer-scientists always seem to do in old space opera, comes to the rescue of an alien princess unjustly captured by a dictator, but it turns out the princess in need of rescue is not exactly in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold: she's a dome headed, elephant-legged creature. She might be called "elephant princess" and would be right at home beside the Adventure Time oddballs like Slime Princess and Hot Dog Princess.<br />
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Sooner or later, it was bound to happen: a space hero would rescue a princess who isn't exactly screwable. This kind of Princess rescue is nonetheless an important job for a wisecracking Anglo-Saxon addicted to cigarettes and alcohol who loves explaining things to others they already know.<br />
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Maybe because the Lensman books were a girl-free zone, Doc Smith overcorrects here, and the ratio of men to women in Storm Cloud's crew is like something out of a harem anime or She-Ra's planet Etheria. We see a lot of races only mentioned in dialogue in Lensman: the doctor is a mute, telepathic Manarkan with a legalistic worldview, the cook is a cute brick-pink Chickladorian, the linguist is Vesta the Vegian, a cat-girl who speaks 50 languages with a battle cry of "tails high, sisters!" and my favorite, the engineer, Tommie, a Tomingan, a race also called "squatties" for their heavy-gravity shortness and stout diesel truck builds; Tommy loses her temper and loves to smoke huge cigars.<br />
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The love story is basically an REO Speedwagon song: emotionally "damaged goods" people who learn to love again. One of the most amusing and revealing details about the time when it's written is that when it's revealed one of the female characters is over 30 and not married, the immediate question is, "what's wrong with her?"<br />
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The love interest is Dr. Joan Janowick, a 34-year old, a slightly chubby integrating computer engineer, cyberneticist, and telepath with a few streaks of gray. Dr. Janowick has a PhD in Cybernetics, and it took me a while to figure this out from context clues (just like when they say 'computer' in this story they mean a person), but in 1960 "cybernetics" didn't mean robot parts, but mathematical systems and patterns. Everyone is a mathematician in this story!<br />
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Cloud does have a power/competence gaining arc similar to the Lensmen, though, at a vastly reduced scale. At times, the Lensman novels feel like a Dungeons and Dragons game where the Game Master is way, way too liberal with the experience points and loot. Here, Cloud practices nonstop with his guns until he becomes a lightning quick draw. This is another sign of how, like Star Wars, the Lensman books were oddly Western-informed, with dive saloons and crusty meteor miners.<br />
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Some unique aspects of the Lens Galaxy were explored in this story. Language in the Lensman novels was a non-issue because of the Lens's universal translator ability. This is the first to tell us what language was like in the galaxy of the Lens, and…here's a surprise: the most widely used language in the galaxy is Galactic Spanish (or "Zpanidge," as aliens pronounce it), since the vowels are softer and it's more logical in grammar and spelling. Doesn't it just turn everything upside down when you find out everyone's been speaking Spanish all this time?<br />
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Spaceal, the universal pidgin lingua franca, is good for two things; engineering concepts and lewd swearing. It has to be experienced to be believed. It's somewhere between 60s Stan Lee teenager talk and a stroke:<br />
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<i>"Stacked? She's stacked like Gilroy's Tower, Buster – an honest to god DISH, believe me, and raring to go. We were on one of those long weekend jaunts around the system, one of those things things were apt to get off the green at times…"</i></blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Things to Ponder:</span></b><br />
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<li>Amazing Stories reference: one of the planets is named "Palmer III."</li>
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<li>Thing I will never get tired of: people adding emphasis by saying "…and you can check me to ten decimals on that!" A gorgeous or unique woman is called a "real prime number." Is everything math-centered in this civilization?</li>
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<li>What a relief it is none of the crowd-pleasing characters from the Lensmen books show up here. It'd feel like what it is, like when Ted Danson shows up on Frasier: "oh, hey! Nice spin-off you've got here…"</li>
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<li>The Lensman universe is a deeply problematic world in one way, because you have to really write around the "call the cops" problem: any scenario that can be solved by calling the cops. Multiply that usual issue in stories by a billion if it's the LENSMEN. </li>
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<li>If there's one thing I hate, it's grammar pedants. If there's another thing I hate, it's wrong grammar pedants. Believe it or not, there are some words with multiple correct plural forms; both "octopuses" and "octopi" are correct. So are "vortexes" and "vortices." The book prefers vortices, on the grounds that it's way less clear what they're talking about that way.</li>
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<li>There's one potentially very dark interpretation of the fact "Storm" Cloud, a scientist studying vortexes, had a family home that naturally attracted a vortex by its construction. Look, do I need to spell it out for you? Stormy had them killed! I can't possibly be the only one this thought ever occurred to, can I?</li>
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<li>Everyone knows that the original idea behind licensed Star Wars novel villain, the Saruman-like evil Jedi Master Joruus C'Baoth, is that he was originally going to be an evil clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi, but Lucasfilm nixed that idea as going too far. Is it possible D.D. Cloudd from the David Kyle Lensman novel "Lensman from Rigel" was originally going to be "Storm" Cloud from "Masters of the Vortex" finally having a proper team up with the 2nd Stage Lensmen heroes, but the idea was nixed at the last minute for licensing reasons? The characters of D.D. Cloudd and Neil Cloud are practically identical and have the exact same character arc: they are non-Lensed civilian science experts who work closely with the Galactic Patrol who went into their research because of a death of a family member that fills them with a self-destructive deathwish, which they overcome because they find a new meaning and purpose surrounded by other misfits.</li>
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<br />Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-48582165744501931142013-09-02T13:00:00.000-04:002013-09-02T13:00:03.826-04:00Millennium Comics' Doc Savage: the Manual of Bronze (1992)<br />
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Apart from the pun in the name, the Manual of Bronze is a slim below-comic sized volume, a totally unique object printed by Millennium Comics in 1992, during the brief time they had the Doc Savage comics license.<br />
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Millennium's work can be pointed out as the single most accurate interpretation of Doc ever, remembering details scattered through 150+ novels, like how Long Tom had a gold tooth that, whenever it was knocked out, he'd vow to get the guy responsible. Their comic adaptation of Repel (aka the "Deadly Dwarf") is one of the most artistically successful ever, and maybe one of the showiest, featuring Doc's archfoe, an evil gay millionaire midget who insists his henchmen walk around shirtless (yes, <i>really</i>).<br />
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The Manual of Bronze includes detailed character bios on Doc, the Gang, and a few selected villains (including the aforementioned Deadly Dwarf), and it's even a scrapbook of Doc Savage art by different artists, a prospect that must have been a lot more tantalizing before the invention of Google Image Search. My favorite is Adam Hughes, and here's why:<br />
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It's worth owning for no other reason than it's intimately researched and complete and shows diagrams of gadgets and equipment like Doc's Helldiver, the Fortress of Solitude, etc. I didn't care for the Supermachine Pistols' out-there design; since the machine pistol later on became a reality in the form of the uzi, wouldn't it stand to reason they'd look something like that, only with a curled magazine?<br />
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In any case, if you like to clip and save diagrams from comics about vehicles and gadgets (and I sure do), this is for you.<br />
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What's more, this is the only book of its kind thus far made for Doc Savage. Perhaps one day we'll get a more detailed illustrated reference. Until then, this one will have to do.<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-39047132479568524682013-08-28T13:00:00.000-04:002013-08-28T13:00:00.877-04:00Three Fan Theories for E.E. Smith's Lensman Novels<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The reason Doc Smith couldn't publish a sequel to "Children of the Lens" is because it had incest as a major plot point.</b></span><br />
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Children of the Lens was full of uncomfortably weird "huh?" moments that hint Kimball Kinnison's children, able to mind-merge and destined to replace the Arisians as Guardians of Civilization, have an incestuous relationship:<br />
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<i>The kids were special in another way, too, he [Kit] had noticed lately, without paying it any particular attention... They didn't feel like other girls. After dancing with one of them, other girls felt like robots made out of putty. Their flesh was different. It was firmer, finer, infinitely more responsive. Each individual cell seemed to be endowed with a flashing, sparkling life; a life which, interlinking with that of one of his own cells, made their bodies as intimately one as were their perfectly synchronized minds. </i></blockquote>
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<i>[Mentor] "Your lives will be immeasurably fuller, higher, greater than any heretofore known in this universe. As your capabilities increase, you will find that you will no longer care for the society of entities less capable than your own."</i></blockquote>
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Considering the Children are genetically perfect and arguably aren't even human anymore, this isn't as bizarre or offensive as it sounds.<br />
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Still, Heinlein, himself no stranger to incest-themed stories, wrote that Smith intended a continuation to Children of the Lens. In fact, there are even some textual clues in Children a sequel was planned: Christopher Kinnison delivers a flask of force, and it's not clear who finds it, and he states that Civilization is again threatened and that he is just a youth and not entirely up to the challenge.<br />
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Heinlein said in "Larger than Life" that Smith's Lensman sequel was "unpublishable" at the time. Could it have been because of incest-related themes?<br />
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The maddening thing is, we may never know. Smith told Heinlein what his Lensman sequel would be like, but we've never found even a manuscript or outline, and now both men are dead.<br />
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Like Heinlein said, "that's his story to tell. You must find your own."<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Clark Ashton Smith's "Vulthoom" is set in the Lensverse</b></span><br />
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Pulp aficionados love to go crazy and guess which stories cross over, and it helps that reoccurring tropes make a lot of pulp stories very similar (like how most pulp heroes have gray eyes…including Kimball Kinnison, incidentally). For instance, one of my favorite pulp interconnections is that the scarecrow-bodied geologist-archeologist explorer main character in Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" is really Johnny from Doc Savage.<br />
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"Vulthoom" is a science fiction horror story where the primary villain is a tremendously long-lived, mostly unseen, hideously different alien being who is considered the Martian devil. Vulthoom's <i>modus operandi</i> is to operate at the center of a conspiracy with humanoid servitors that never see him directly, who he manipulates by using their self-interest. He has tremendous mind powers and is capable of conjuring psychic illusions. What's more, his chief weapon is exotic Martian narcotics, which he distributes and uses to control others.<br />
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Doesn't this sound like Boskone's modus operandi to a T?<br />
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Vulthoom even has a secret base hidden deep underground below Mars (shades of Helmuth's base!), where he is constructing a fleet of interstellar warships unseen by law enforcement.<br />
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The Mars seen in Vulthoom is consistent/identical with what we know about Mars from Triplanetary: a long-time Earth ally with a tremendously long, unknown history, a dying ancient culture. Earthmen visit often, but we don't really understand the inscrutable Martians.<br />
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The Alhai, giant and monstrous with withered faces, are not exactly biologically similar to Martians in the Lensverse, but that's actually a <i>plot point</i>: in the story that they are bigger and genetically altered and even the main characters acknowledge they look nothing like normal Martians.<br />
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Oh, and by the way: the hotel where earthmen stay is called the Tellurian Hotel, incidentally, with Tellurian being the Lensverse name for Earthmen. <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Yes, women CAN use the Lens. </b></span><br />
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<i>"Your report is neither conclusive nor complete."</i><br />
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Sean Barrett, in GURPS Lensman, said flat-out that no humanoid female could use a Lens. He based this on Virgillia's speech in "First Lensman" for why she was rejected for a Lens.<br />
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One thing should be pointed out: Virgillia Simms' explanation for why she didn't get a Lens in "First Lensman" was her <i>interpretation</i> of what happened, not something she was repeating verbatim from Mentor.<br />
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Nevermind we SAW women use a Lens: Clarissa, in Second Stage Lensmen. In the David Kyle continuation novels, another woman becomes a Lensman: Lalla Kallatra. Kyle stated women could use the Lens, but they were rare to the point of being unheard of.<br />
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In short, there's no conclusive proof there are no women Lensmen, but we have several right in front of us. The belief they aren't is a "Black Swan" fallacy: because all of the swans we see so far are white, there can't be a black swan.<br />
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The belief women can't be Lensmen based on Virgillia's speech reminds me of how, for a long time, there was an attitude women couldn't be starship captains in Star Trek because of Janet Lester's belief in "Turnabout Intruder." Why are we accepting here at face value the point of view of a mentally disturbed, crazy person consumed by envy?<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-37720525974497283612013-08-22T13:00:00.000-04:002013-08-22T13:00:05.591-04:00Review: E.E. Smith's Lensman Series<div>
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<b><i>Quick!</i></b> What's the <i>one</i> thing you probably know about the Lensmen?<br />
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They inspired Green Lantern, right?<br />
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I <i>guarantee</i> it did. If Doc Savage, the Shadow, the Spider, and the Slans were the start point for, respectively, Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men, it's easy to see the Lensmen as the pulp magazine forebears of the Green Lanterns.<br />
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Like the Lanterns, they are space police, endowed with an unusual glowing instrumentality. They are assembled from dozens of bizarre alien races, united, despite their sometimes weird body shape and origin, by their incorruptibility, unbribeability, and tremendous competence. They were given their objects of power from a powerful, cold, and unknowable race billions of years ahead of our civilization.<br />
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The most elite members of a combination interstellar military and police, the Lensmen spend an unusually long time investigating piracy and narcotics (yes, that's right: in Lensman, drugs, right out of "Reefer Madness," are the "ultimate evil," on the level of a cheesy 80s "just say no" cartoon). These low-scale crimes are slowly revealed to be united in a multi-galaxy-spanning, Illuminati-like evil conspiracy with leaders that are hideously inhuman, a conflict that in the final stages, is revealed as nothing short of the battle for good against evil on a cosmic scale.<br />
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That's the keyword for Lensman: scale. It starts off so normal in Galactic Patrol, the first book, but the most memorable aspect of the Lensman novels is the way it keeps ludicrously upping the ante, especially in the increasingly wild technological arms race between heroes and villains. Technology takes wild galumphing leaps, not just from book to book but between the chapters. In that respect, Lensman is more realistic than the static technology levels of, say, Barsoom: any technological advantage is only temporary, and a big plot point is keeping any new weaponry, detection, or stealth technology a secret.<br />
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Over time, the good guys throw planets at the villains. Not kidding here, actual planets were used as gigantic kinetic kill weapons rocketed at the baddies. The solution to a killer hurled planet: turn an entire star into a vacuum tube to release solar blasts that level entire worlds. You don't even want to <i>know</i> what they're doing in the last book.<br />
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The personal power and competence of the Lensmen also grows with time. At the start of the first novel, the Lens is just a universal translator with its main purpose unclear. By the end of the first book, our Lensman hero is able to subtly perform mind control. By the end of the third book, there are psychic power battles with gigantic super-intellects where the mere reflection of mental blasts results in hundreds of people for miles around the site of battle dropping down dead. By the end of the final book, the millions of Lensmen all over the galaxy attempt a Lens-to-Lens mind-merge for a final battle.<br />
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Individually, the Lensmen are what Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon would be, if they had a Brock Samson level body count. Sure, the Lensmen are boy scouts…until the time comes to snap bones and stab people. It's always the <i>nice</i> guys, you know...<br />
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Shane Black described Doc Savage as Jimmy Stewart if he was a killer. That description was wildly off the mark for Doc, but it works just fine for the Lensmen. The Lensmen are already their own Venture Brothers or Team America parody. Like 24 or Starship Troopers, it's fertile ground for a biting satire that alternates between queasily uncomfortable and hilarious. Can you imagine what Robocop/Starship Troopers director Paul Verhoeven would do with this material?<br />
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One of the great Lensman parodies, Backstage Lensman, had this pitch-perfect line in it that summarized Lensman's casual collateral damage, which supposedly left E.E. Smith in stitches when he read the parody at a convention in the 1960s:<br />
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<i>"I got a line through Banjo Freeko, the planetary dictator, but only after I blew up the mining industry on his planet and killed a few thousand innocent people -- regretfully, of course. But I do that all the time. It revolts me, but I do it." </i></blockquote>
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Don't get the wrong idea, though. Our Lensman hero, Kimball Kinnison, is an engineer who saves the day with some odd new engineering concept and outsmarts equally baddies via very complicated strategies and long-cons. This is one of those stories I got the feeling the characters were smarter than me and one step ahead, instead of slowpokes figuring out what I've already pieced together. I can imagine the odd duck, nerdy, Jewish fans of the early days of SF seeing more of themselves in the Lensmen than their burly tormentors.<br />
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Here's another thing Lensman and Green Lantern have in common: though group shots might convince you otherwise, Lensman isn't an anthology piece, but has a clear-cut human point of view main character. Kimball Kinnison is a coffee achiever go-getter who graduated at the top of his class. Lensman Kimball speaks in a rapid-fire, pitter-patter quippy style of dialogue that might be called "Mid-Century American Wiseass," and is familiar to any reader of Marvel comics, detective or science fiction story from the 1930s to the 1960s.<br />
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Kinnison is a bigger than life, brawny, he-man adventurer that in terms of sheer competence would give Batman a run for his money: Kinnison is a tactician, strategist, and over the series, shows skill at disguise, fast-draw, engineering, and is a scrapper familiar with dirty bar fighting. After seeing Kinnison's cunning plans and then reading science fiction in the comic strips from the same era, like Flash Gordon, I understand what Michael Chabon was talking about when he said for a time, everyone in comics seemed vaguely retarded.<br />
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The prose style in Lensman has its strengths. At its best, it's visceral and exciting. At its worst, it's Gee-Whiz All-American YELLING AT THE TOP OF OUR LUNGS. There are some tremendously exciting moments right out of Edgar Rice Burroughs.<br />
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<i>Four squatly massive semi-portable projectors crashed down upon their magnetic clamps and in the fierce ardour of their beams the thick bulkhead before them ran the gamut of the spectrum and puffed outwards. Some score of defenders were revealed, likewise clad in armour, and battle again was joined. Explosive and solid bullets detonated against and ricocheted from that highly efficient armour, the beams of DeLameter hand-projectors splashed in torrents of man-made lightning off its protective fields of force. But that skirmish was soon over. The semi-portables, whose vast energies no ordinary personal armour could withstand, were brought up and clamped down; and in their holocaust of vibratory destruction all life vanished from the pirates' compartment.</i></blockquote>
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On the other hand, you have this:<br />
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<i>At the touch of those beams, light and delicate as they were, the relay clicked and the torpedoes let go. These frightful shells were so designed and so charged that one of them could demolish any inert structure known to man, so what of seven? </i> </blockquote>
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<i>There was an explosion to stagger the imagination and which much be left to the imagination, since no words in any language of the galaxy can describe it utterly!</i></blockquote>
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Doc Smith needs to be introduced to Elmore Leonard's rule: <i>"you should have no more than two or three exclamation points per 100,000 lines of prose."</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The first true Space Opera (we care about)</b></span><br />
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Though its star has certainly fallen from the lofty perch it previously occupied, in its day, Lensman was one of the unifying, foundational "shared touchstone" books behind early science fiction fandom. In a genre of fiction at the time defined by anthologies, it was a well-defined setting visited again and again with recognizable characters (Kimball Kinnison, Surgeon Lacy, Clarissa, Pilot Henderson, Tregonsee, the dragon-like Worsel), and recognizable technology (ultra-waves, inertialessness, etc), and consistent alien species (Chickladorians, Kalonians, Tomingans, Valerians). It had a characteristic of SF properties that get a strong sense of identification from fans: you could imagine or project yourself into it. There's a reason Star Trek, not the Twilight Zone, is the most emblematic series of 60s science fiction with the more crazy-devoted fandom: we care about recurring casts.<br />
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Lensman was an ambitious gamble, unique for its time, that paid off in a big way: it was designed from the outset to be told over multiple novels, in an era when pulp-paper magazines were read once and usually used immediately after as toilet paper and forgotten. ("Used as toilet paper" is<i> literal</i>, not metaphorical; that's part of the reason we still have so few pulp paper story magazines from the Depression around.)<br />
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Just like there's debate over who the first superhero is, it's not clear if Lensman was the first space opera adventure. Space Opera is a genre with extravagant, melodramatic, escapist adventure yarns set around freewheeling interstellar space travel, usually involving aliens, ray guns, rockets, and technology – what Brian Aldiss, in the sixties called "the good old stuff," the stuff Star Wars would attempt to recreate. Lensman, together with E.E. Smith's earlier effort, Skylark of Space, is to space opera what Superman is to the superheroes: maybe not the <i>first</i>, but the first to exist in the <i>modern form</i> we'd recognize today, with every element in place, and popular enough to be influential and set the standard.<br />
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Before E.E. Smith's Lensman and Skylark, most escapist SF adventure was often a "Planet" romance in the style of Burroughs's John Carter of Mars. Lensman was a clean break with the Burroughs style, just like Superman was clearly something different than just a repackaged pulp mag adventure hero.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Your Grandparents' Star Wars</b></span><br />
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Lensman is like Gil Evans's jazz: it's your grandparents' favorite thing that you've never heard of.<br />
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It's impossible to underestimate how big a deal Lensman was to SF's first and second generations, which makes the loss of its central position since the 1970s all the sadder. Depressing example: I tried googling "Tregonsee" (the placid, calm, unexcitable barrel-bodied Rigellian Second-Stage Lensman) and the top hit was for a commenter on Glen Beck websites. Which, to be as delicate as possible here, gives you a good sense of the demographic to which Lensman was important to (hint: the mean age of Fox News viewers is 65).<br />
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The first science fiction wargame ever designed was Lensman-themed.<br />
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People would cosplay as Kimball Kinnison to science fiction conventions before it was called "cosplay."<br />
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Lensman parodies, like Backstage Lensman, were widely circulated.<br />
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One of the oldest scence fiction conventions is named Boskone, a pun on BosCon (get it? It's in Boston.) Though it's very likely only a few remember what the name originally meant. Not to mention when a splinter group broke off due to drama, that con named itself Arisia…<br />
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Pre-Internet era, Xeroxed and manila envelope mailed Lensman fanfiction was everywhere, and in fact, some examples of Lensman fanfiction from the 1960s are,<a href="http://suburbanbanshee.net/fanfic/lensfic/"> surprisingly, still around and available to read. </a><br />
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Lensman got not one, but two continuation series by other writers, one by David Kyle in the early 1980s (at the height of the Star Wars phenom, when there was a space opera revival in pop culture and even "Planet-Smasher" Hamilton and Leigh Brackett were reprinted often), and another by William B. Ellern in the 1960s.<br />
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Filk, or folk-like songs sung at SF conventions, was written about the Lensmen, maybe the closest thing SF fandom has to true oral culture, like the surprisingly old and durable filthy rhymes we all said at summer camp ("I'm Popeye the Sailor Man/I live in a Garbage Can"). Here's a good one, dedicated to the jokey spaceman's god, Klono, the human Lensmen swear by ("Klono's carbduralloy claws! Klono's golden gills!"), sung to the tune of Old Time Religion:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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(Chorus): </div>
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<i>Give me that real old time religion</i></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Give me that real old time religion</i></div>
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<i>Give me that real old time religion</i></div>
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<i>It's good enough for me! </i></div>
</blockquote>
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<i>How the hell can Klono manage</i></div>
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<i>Not to do himself some damage?</i></div>
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<i>But with all those weird appendage-</i></div>
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<i>-es he's good enough for me!</i></div>
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(Chorus, repeat)</div>
</blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Still Unique After All These Years</span></b><br />
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The most striking thing about Lensman is, despite the fact it is genre-foundational, almost all of it still feels unique to today's readers. One of the biggest problems with Burroughs's John Carter of Mars/Barsoom is, since it was so early, so crucial to SF development, it's imagery and ideas have been so thoroughly strip mined by later works, to the point the original work feels, in retrospect, so very "familiar." That's part of the reason the John Carter movie didn't do so hot: it felt, ironically, derivative…despite the fact Edgar Rice Burroughs did it first!<br />
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The same is not true of Lensman. Despite being a genre start point, it still feels so unique.<br />
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The one place Lensman might strike a familiar chord in modern times is, it was the first science fiction adventure novel I can find that used space marines in strength-enhancing power armor. Heinlein in particular always worshipped Doc, said as much, and wrote something similar to this part of the series, with power armor heroes with board-and-storm tactics, an obscure novel nobody remembers today called <i>Starship Troopers</i>. Power armor troopers might just be one of the most familiar images in all of science fiction, but even here, Lensman adds some idiosyncratic twists: because of the tremendous durability of personal force screens that negate energy weaponry, combat is often fought brutally with space axes.<br />
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The Arisians, the Guardians of Civilization, are infinitely more cold, awe-inspiring, and all-around impressive than any of their imitators. No human being who sees them sees the same thing twice (some see them as monstrous dragons, others as wise old men, another as an amazon woman seven feet tall). The Arisians are anti-democratic, detached, and occasionally brutally callous: only big league stakes get their attention. ("Youth, your inexcusably muddy thinking got yourself into this situation. Get yourself out."). Their planet is an intergalactic mystery, and even Lensmen get a message of "…and STAY out." They're less like Green Lantern's Guardians and more like Babylon 5's mystery-race, the Vorlons, equal parts cryptic and creepy.<br />
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When the tremendously brilliant Helmuth, speaker for Boskone, ventures to Arisia to obtain the secret of the Lens, he is told this:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Inflated — overwhelmingly by your warped and perverted ideas, by your momentary success in dominating your handful of minions, tied to you by bonds of greed, of passion, and of crime, you come here to wrest from us the secret of the Lens, from us, a race as much abler than yours as we are older — a ratio of millions to one.</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"You consider yourself cold, hard, ruthless. Compared to me, you are weak, soft, tender, as helpless as a newborn child. That you may learn and appreciate that fact is one reason why you are living at this present moment. Your lesson will now begin."</i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>What is the Lens?</b></span><br />
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The quest to discover the true purpose of the Lens is the entire story of the Lensman series, much like how Philip Pullmann's "His Dark Materials" is all about the central mystery of Dust. What is it and what is it for? The answer is considerably more complex than it being a mere power object.<br />
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The marvelous thing about the Lens is this: since using the power of the Lens requires personal growth and awareness, it links the character development arc to the main "action" story. The only thing I can compare this to is how bending in the Last Airbender is linked to your temperament, your emotional and mental development, e.g. you can only Firebend if you have passion and a driving goal in your life, and if you lose your goal, you lose your powers; the Avatar in "Legend of Korra" couldn't airbend because she was strong willed and didn't have the ability to airbend until she learned to be more personally flexible.<br />
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Another example of a character arc of this kind where the physical action and character development are linked is the way two pilots are needed to drive a robot in Pacific Rim. Because the two have to mentally be in sync and share memories, in order to fight, they have to get through their psychological issues first.<br />
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In the very first Lensman novel, Galactic Patrol, we learn the Lens was given to the Patrol by ultra-powerful beings called the Arisians, once the problem of lawbreaking became an interstellar issue, needing a police/military force with interstellar, galactic jurisdiction to pursue escaping lawbreakers, who could always just flit over ("flit" is a bit of the 30's tinted space-slang here; prepare to get used to it) to another system to escape.<br />
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Here's a description:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The Lens is not really alive, as we understand the term. It is, however, endowed with a sort of pseudo-life, by virtue of which it gives off its strong, characteristically changing light as long as it is in metal-to-flesh circuit with the living mentality for which it was designed. Also be virtue of that pseudo-life, it acts as a telepath through which you may converse with other intelligences, even though they may possess no organs of speech or of hearing. </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"The Lens cannot be removed by anyone except its wearer without dismemberment; it glows as long as its rightful owner wears it; it ceases to glow in the instant of its owner's death and disintegrates shortly thereafter. Also - and here is the thing that renders completely impossible the impersonation of a Lensman - not only does the Lens not glow if worn by an impostor; but if a Lensman be taken alive and his Lens removed, that Lens kills in a space of seconds any living being who attempts to wear it. As long as it glows - as long as it is in circuit with its living owner - it is harmless; but in the dark condition its pseudo-life interferes so strongly with any life to which it is not attuned thta that life is destroyed forthwith."</i></blockquote>
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It's only given by Arisians to a tiny percentage of Galactic Patrolmen they know to be unbribable; making them interstellar "Untouchables." The first one we meet is our hero, Kimball Kinnison, a freshly minted Lieutenant Patrolman and Lensman. We discover the properties of the Lens as he does.<br />
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At first, Kimball believes the Lensmen are fighting an unusually intense and prolonged crime wave of piracy and narcotics. But eventually, his horizon broadens and he realizes there's a pyramid-like conspiracy at work: it's not just a gang of cutthroats, but an assault by a totally hostile culture, emphasizing hierarchy, intolerant of failure, with masters that rely on levels of secrecy and conspiracy, and each battle reveals another layer. It's not a crime wave, but a full scale war. As he realizes he's unequal to the task, he starts to realize the futility of the "arms race." The good guys create a stealth ship, the villains create better stealth electronics, and so on…and he realizes the only real long-term advantage Civilization (always in caps) has over Boskonia: the Lens.<br />
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That's when the big revelation is dropped: the Lens isn't just a telepathy augmentor or translator. It's something that is given to advance personal and mental development – in fact, at a certain point, the Lens only awakened telepathy in humans: it didn't give it to them at all. In Kinnison's case, it's pretty damn literal: he gets personal scope and range into what's going on…his telepathic powers acquire scope and range. It's no coincidence the Lens and Mentor open up new powers to Kinnison every time he learns something important, like when he's sent to the hospital after nearly dying and biting more than he can chew.<br />
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In other words, the Lens is necessary to grow, but it's a "Magic Feather." In many cases, we run into alien species, like the dragonlike Velantians, who are so formidable they make earthlings seem puny in every way. In the first books, Kimball Kinnison is the least powerful member of his gang: burly sergeant van Buskirk, a heavy gravity worlder with superstrength and the ability to jump 20 feet into the air on earth gravity has it in muscles, and Worsel is the better telepath.<br />
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But the Lens, and the aptly named chief of the alien Arisians, Mentor (again – this series is not big on subtlety) show Kinnison he's the exact right man for the job after all. The Valerians might be telepathic and be exploding flying tornado-snakes of death with a stinger tail, but Kinnison's will and stubbornness is what's needed: the Valerians have great minds but aren't big on tenacity or cussedness, and when introduced, are a slave race of telepathic conquerors.<br />
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There's a life lesson here: talent and genius will only get so far. Persistence and drive, though, can get you anywhere.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Technology and Science</span></b><br />
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For an adventure series, Lensman is surprisingly hard science. That's something that will come as a shock to anybody familiar with how fast and loose space opera can play, especially before the 1950s.<br />
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A lot of it feels like just plain showing off. E.E. Smith was proud of his PhD, and he should be...though it was in food chemistry specializing in donut mixes. In an era when being a science fiction pulp mag writer was a step above being a pornographer (but only barely), it must have been a treat for readers to have a "real" scientist.<br />
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There are paragraphs on paragraphs of engineering gobbledygook that could choke even the fifty buck word nonsense babbled on Star Trek Voyager, but even in the worst cases, there's just enough science to make it sound like an actual description and not like the characters spontaneously got Tourette Syndrome. (Supposedly, Smith merged real science with twaddle, and was impressed with fans who could tell which was which).<br />
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The trouble is, "hard, believable science and technology" for 1937 is almost intriguingly quaint and exotic. Just like everything else about the Lensmen, you'll either find it aggravating because it's so old-fashioned, or you'll find it terrific because it's so old fashioned. Imagine an entire interstellar capable civilization based around vacuum tube electronics. Integrating Computers are based around punch cards, weigh hundreds of tons, and require entire rivers for coolant.<br />
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My favorite detail? At one point, a new medical discovery is revealed to FINALLY, at long last, be a cure for polio!<br />
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Space was described as being filled with ether, or thick interstellar gas, one atom of hydrogen per centimeter (actually the density is far, far less than that, with an atom or charged proton of 1 x 10^-31), with space filled with this to the point spaceships had to be astrodynamic (hence football, sphere and cigar shapes), and were often steered and buffeted around. At one point, the good guys invent an antimatter weapon, the Negasphere. What's interesting is, it's closer to Dirac's original idea of what antimatter would be like, with weird properties like "anti-mass," so it inverts tractor beams: tractors push and pressors pull.<br />
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There's one very interesting theory in Lensman, which at one point went into cosmology. At the time, it was believed the only reason solar systems ever formed with planets was because of two stars passing closely to each other. Smith's explanation for how the galaxy of the Lens was filled with life? At some point, it ran into and collided with another galaxy, seeding both with life-giving star systems. Smith thought this through: one end of the galaxy's star systems are older than the other. The second galaxy, discovered in a later book, is utterly ruled by the Boskonia conspiracy. Smith identified the second galaxy as the Lundmark Galaxy, which is so astronomically unremarkable, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf%E2%80%93Lundmark%E2%80%93Melotte">half of its' Wikipedia entry is on its' role in the Lensman stories</a>.<br />
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If you're interested, <a href="http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=143122">this fascinatingly exhaustive thread</a> explains how science and technology works in the Lensman books.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Villains</b></span><br />
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Lensman might have some of the most clearly brilliant and hideously wicked villains in science fiction. The first and best was Helmuth, a ruthless blue-skinned pirate leader. He was so brilliant, like Sherlock Holmes, he could deduce what was truly going on based on a single out of place clue. I suspect Star Wars's Grand Admiral Thrawn, another cold, blue-skinned supergenius tactician, was based on him.<br />
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That's typical of Lensman, which has tremendous respect for its evil enemies; even the pus-brained, jailhouse evil trash and bar scum that make up the space pirates and drug dealers (<i>zwilniks</i>, yet another future slang word) are brave and fight to the death rather than beg for mercy. This is a characteristic of Smith's: his bad guys are evil, but shockingly competent and cool in their own way, like the cold, superintelligent, yet oddly honorable Nietzschean Überman Blackie DuQuesne from Skylark of Space.<br />
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The bad guys, originally criminals, have a technological advantage and the Patrol has to keep pace. This must have been very relevant in 1937, when Prohibition was a fresh memory. The Thompson submachine gun, a murderer's dream, was better than anything most police departments had, and most bootlegger speedboats and stock cars were easily able to outrace the police and Coast Guard.<br />
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The culture of Boskonia is hierarchical, with increasing levels of secrecy, impersonal rigidity, intolerance of failure, and the belief that the ends ultimately justify the means. Success alone determines right and wrong. At the upper levels, past the common drug dealer and Sydney Greenstreet lookalike bosses, the echelons of Boskonia are dominated by beings like the Eich and Onlonians, hideous, shadowy, supergenius and unknowable creatures that breathe freezing poison gases.<br />
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Heinlein and E. E. Smith were both right-wing…though of a smart, skeptical kind with respect for intellect that would be out of place in the modern Republican party of Jindal, Bachmann and Sarah Palin. Heinlein was always funny and charming, but Smith was, at times, more like getting cornered by your drunk Republican uncle at Thanksgiving, especially in works like Spacehounds of IPC where the villains are an evil union "who want to take care of their men from the cradle to the grave" (those bastards!).<br />
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I'm pleased to say other than the War on Drugs aspect of Lensman, with reefer dens so lurid as to be campy schlock, and the Geneva-convention free war of extermination (like all brutal violence, at first it's horrifying and then it becomes<i> hilarious</i>), Lensman is Doc Smith's most apolitical work.<br />
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The noticeable and unpleasant exception is the political corruption subplot in the prequel "First Lensman," which had a parody of Huey P. Long style leftist New Deal populism. It's about as tone deaf as you expect, like if the aforementioned drunk Republican uncle at Thanksgiving wrote a book. It's nowhere near as hilarious as the story in Little Orphan Annie where drama king Daddy Warbucks dies of cancer because FDR was re-elected (this really happened). Still, the only way it could feel more dated was if the Lensmen had to track down Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>For the Love of God, DO NOT Read Triplanetary First!</b></span><br />
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One of the things that has really damaged the Lensman series is how the numbering puts the prequel, Triplanetary, as the "first" Lensman book. It's nothing of the kind.<br />
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Triplanetary was originally a Smith novel written years before Lensman was even conceived, and it featured no Lensmen, no Galactic Patrol, no familiar technology of any kind (Bergenholm drives), and even uses technology that's deeply un-Lensman: robots, for example. The novel was rewritten to be a Lensman prequel as an attempt to repackage it with the Lensman name. Because it takes place chronologically first, the baffling decision is made to make it first, and it's a poor introduction to the Universe of the Lens or understanding what the Lensmen is all about.<br />
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The real story of Lensman begins in Book 3, Galactic Patrol, with the introduction of Kimball Kinnison and the gradual revelations about Boskone. People, reading a book series in chronological order is a bad idea. Worlds unfold, and decisions are made to introduce us to character traits and concepts deliberately.<br />
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This is also why it's a terrible idea to start reading Narnia with "The Magician's Nephew." Everything about the structure of "Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" is designed to introduce and unfold the world of Narnia and its crucial concepts; there's a big explanation for Aslan; Magician's Nephew takes him for granted so he has a lot less grandeur if you start there. Decisions are made on the basis that LWW would be read first.<br />
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"The Magician's Nephew" is a peripheral story. It's like reading "Jungle Tales of Tarzan" first just because it happens first, before the more crucial "Tarzan of the Apes" and "Return of Tarzan."<br />
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In conclusion, if you have to read the prequels Triplanetary and First Lensman at all, read it long after as a "bonus," explaining background.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Things to Ponder:</span></b><br />
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<ul>
<li>DeLameter ray guns "flashing man-made lightning" in Lensman are ludicrously potent, turning someone to superheated vapor, and a big chunk of the wall behind them, too. An antidote to how infuriating it is guns never hurt anyone on Star Trek: Voyager.</li>
</ul>
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<li>We get very little about how the average person goes about their business in the Universe of the Lens, but it seems one-man helicopters and autogyros in addition to automobiles are a personal form of transit.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>To my knowledge, no other science fiction universe uses Lensman's distinctive method of travel: the Bergenholm, inertialess drive, which reduces inertia to nothing, allowing near infinite acceleration. Since then, physics has disproven this idea, and...it's so distinctively <i>Lensman</i>-y nobody can use it. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>There was going to be a Lensman movie written by J. Michael Straczynski (as in <i>Babylon 5</i>), who was big enough of a superfan he wrote four draft scripts. Alas, Lensman is not a recognizable name anymore. The only reason Shane Black got Doc Savage made was, Black made the studio a mint for <i>Iron Man 3</i>.</li>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<a href="https://twitter.com/JulianLives">@JulianLives</a> Universal felt the Lensman name wasn't enough to merit the 100M it would cost to make it, so it ended up in limbo.<br />
— JMichael Straczynski (@straczynski) <a href="https://twitter.com/straczynski/statuses/369917550701727744">August 20, 2013</a></blockquote>
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-8331602421632390152013-08-12T14:00:00.000-04:002013-08-12T14:00:03.316-04:00Calling Captain Future: A Pulp Hero Who Skewed Young<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Edmond Hamilton's Captain Future, starting in 1940, was a product of his era: his stories skewed very, very young.<br />
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A decade earlier in the 30s, hero pulps had a target audience of two groups: working class men, and young kids. For that reason, the adventure stories, while "clean," had an element of lurid horror like the crime thrillers. Their composite audience resulted in a composite genre. The hero pulp magazines were undone in the 1940s when this audience fractured: the kids turned to comic books, and adults switched to "men's adventure" paperbacks and thrillers.<br />
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You can see the beginning of this fracture in Captain Future, who by 1940, was a latecomer to the pulp hero game.<br />
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Just like the history of movies of the 50s was competing and responding to the challenge of television, the history of pulp magazines in the 1940s was about responding to the comics.<br />
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There seemed to be three major responses:<br />
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<b><i>Turn pulp heroes into comic books and vice-versa.</i></b> A good example would be Sheena and Ka-Zar, who were originally magazine characters.<br />
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<b><i>Sarcastically dismiss comics and their "superheroes." </i></b>This reminds me of movies in 50s that called TV "the idiot's lantern." A big one was the Doc Savage mystery, the "Whisker of Hercules." It was a mean satire of superheroes, with a potion that gave bad guys Superman powers, only to have Doc Savage get the better of them. The potion turns out to make the superguys age and die superfast (Lester Dent felt comics were a fad, so this was a metaphor, too).<br />
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Captain Future is in the 3rd Category: <b><i>a pulp magazine hero designed to grab the "kid" audience moving to comics. </i></b><br />
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Captain Future is the hero pulps meeting comics halfway. It has the showy Flash Gordon science fiction, but next to pulp style mystery "reveal the bad guy's true identity" detective plots. Captain Future has superficially similar elements of Doc Savage updated to space: raised to be a scientific superman by a brain in a jar and two robots, who bicker among themselves like Doc's aides, Monk and Ham. Unlike Doc, though, but like Superman, he has a regular girlfriend (Joan Randall, planetary police agent) with a job that leads her to be kidnapped often and get right in the thick of the action, and like Batman, Captain Future has a chief of police who contacts him with a flare signal.<br />
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The fact a kid aimed pulp would be science fiction isn't surprising. The love of kids for science fiction, starting around ages 7-12, is almost inevitable according to developmental psychology. Just as teenagers' new moral reasoning abilities lead them to question authority and their parents in that stage of life, as soon as kids start to think hypothetically and reason systematically around 7-12, they start to imagine alternate scenarios and other worlds. Just like teenagers test their new moral reasoning, testing their new ability to think imaginatively leads to a psychological development stage where science fiction is important.<br />
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(It's also not hard to understand why the Human Torch is such a popular character among kids. Every kid goes through a stage where they're a pyro.)<br />
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It's also unsurprising Ed Hamilton would later on be one of the few pulp writers to transition to becoming a comic book plotter, writing Superman for a number of his most memorable years. Going from the same magazine that gave the world Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard to a hero pulp writer amusing the kiddies to comics writer might be one of the oddest trajectories ever.<br />
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Though it nowhere near got as lurid as some of the pulp mags aimed at working class adults, Ed Hamilton was a writer in Weird Tales, and occasionally some horror details slipped in. One of my favorites was an event right out of the movie Lifeforce, where Captain Future is driven to explore the wreck of a totally unknown spaceship, and discovers an octopoid-like alien race who were awakened to seek nutrients from blood. More like this, please!<br />
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Captain Future also has the usual hero pulp "figure out the identity of the mystery bad guy" plots. You'd think mystery wouldn't work in science fiction, but they do here, because all facts, including odd futuristic technological details, are presented to the reader fairly. The science in the stories is so good, it's shocking. In "Calling Captain Future," he figures out the black star headed toward the earth was an illusion, because its gravity didn't distort light around it, a "gravitational lensing" effect Einstein predicted, which is today something every physics student learns, but which was by then ultra-cutting edge.<br />
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As weird as Captain Future's origins are, Captain Future underwent a weird trajectory since. He was reprinted in the 60s thanks to the hunger of the paperback market. Doc Savage caught on thanks to punchy, dynamic Bama covers, but Cap's had the most ludicrously generic ones ever.<br />
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And it gets even weirder from there. Captain Future was one of two 40s American adventure SF series (the other being the Lensmen) who became, of all things, a Japanese anime. And here's the amazing part: the Captain Future anime? It was so faithful to the 40s pulp novels, it was shocking. The mystery plots were preserved more or less intact, the bickering between the robots, with the only changes were utterly predictable layups like changing locations in the Solar System to different worlds and giving his girlfriend more to do. I'd be inclined to rank it as the most faithful, accurate adaptation of any hero pulp, not that there's much competition there.<br />
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Finally, Captain Future is now best known as a hokey piece of pop art instead of an actual character, like the posters adorning the room of the characters in the Big Bang Theory, a sitcom that represents all that is mainstream and evil in the world of entertainment. Captain Future's giant poster hasn't led to a revival of the character, but has led to sales of Captain Future posters.<br />
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Captain Future is iconography now. For years, whenever I'd see a later parody of 50s space heroes, I'd see some muscular guy with an exaggerated chin, ray gun, finned costume, and with a personality based on Adam West's performance of Batman. I'm talking "The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space," Spaceman Spiff, and Buzz Lightyear. I'd see these guys and think, "what exactly IS it they're making fun of?" Real 50s science fiction didn't have heroes like that. It's making fun of something that never existed.<br />
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TV Tropes calls this a "Dead Unicorn Trope," something everyone thinks is a cliché and is frequently parodied, but never existed in a straight form. Examples include "the Butler did it" in mysteries, the idea of the mustached and black top hat stock silent film villain (who never actually existed in the silent era), and black and white color coded cowboy hats in Westerns. Superman movies have jokes about changing in a phone booth, when Superman never actually did that.<br />
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Real science fiction of the 1940s and 50s had heroes that were cigar-chomping, badass, wisecracking engineers who solved the problem with dubious engineering concepts. They usually talked more like Nick Fury than like Adam West as Batman. There were also a lot of young men who grow up over the course of the story (with science fiction of the 50s, it's always men). The young man on a journey to grow up and learn something is the central journey of all genre fiction, so why should SF be immune?<br />
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Captain Future might actually be the closest spoofs like Buzz Lightyear and Spaceman Spiff ever got to resembling a real science fiction hero of the past, and even he's <i>nowhere near </i>close.<br />
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A scientific wizard like Doc Savage, Captain Future is a surprisingly warm person, in contrast to the stoic, Vulcan-like Doc. He has a humanizing touch of real scientific curiosity, and at one point, boarded an unknown, scary and abandoned alien ship just to satisfy it. He also seems like a gifted diplomat, and it's rare to find an alien race that is genetically evil; most encounters with aliens are a misunderstanding solved via diplomacy. How very <i>Star Trek: the Next Generation!</i><br />
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The aides (Futuremen) are two robots, Otho (a plastic robot able to shapechange) and Grag (a metal superstrong robot), who bicker back and forth about who is more human. Since they act like assholes, I'd say they're both pretty human. Grag is huge and strong but childlike and has a cute pet Lunar mouse; Otho, the plastic one, is disagreeable and they hint he's a little on the bloodthirsty side. Both of them aren't as redundant as Doc Savage's aides because, after all, even if you're Doc Savage like Captain Future is, a superstrong invulnerable robot is still handy to have around.<br />
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My favorite of the Futuremen is definitely the Brain. A brain inside a jar who helped raise Captain Future, his sole remaining emotions are loyal and protective love for the baby he brought up. How endearing is it that the Brain still calls Captain Future "boy?" You get the feeling the Brain has Captain Future as his last remaining link to other people, and if that link was severed he would be a cold, disturbing, possibly villainous figure.<br />
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Captain Future's local Lois Lane equivalent is Joan Randall, and her defining characteristic is, she's a big Captain Future fangirl. Captain Future, after all, is his era's biggest celebrity. Every word out of her mouth is Captain Future will save me, Captain Future will stop you, etc. She does dangerous things just to be near him. The love she has for him comes off as the obsessive infatuation of a groupie.<br />
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For once, I can understand why the hero wouldn't pursue a relationship, and unlike Doc Savage, it's not because he only has sex once every seven years. As ego stroking (and <i>something else</i> stroking) as groupies can be, would you marry a groupie? Relationships have to be based on respecting the other person (impossible if they admire and debase yourself before you), and obsession isn't the same thing as love.<br />
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All the same, Joan Randall is loyal and doesn't lose faith in Captain Future. She seems even tempered, without the whiplash-like changes in mood that make Dejah Thoris and Jane beautiful but psychotic bitches.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Things to Ponder: </b></span><br />
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<ul>
<li>The Comet, (Captain Future's rocket) has the ability to disguise itself as a real comet, which sounds like the worst camouflage ever. I mean it, it's maybe the worst disguise in history. Once the "comet" slows down, speeds up, or CHANGES DIRECTION, the jig would be up. </li>
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<li>Captain Future's ring, with nine small gems around a single big one to represent the Solar System, has an atomic motor that keeps the 9 gems turning. Captain Future uses this tiny hidden atomic motor the same way Luke Skywalker uses the tiny battery hidden inside his robot hand: to get himself out of jams when he was captured and all his visible equipment taken away.</li>
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<li>Truly creepy moment: in the Sargasso of Space, Captain Future runs into the "an early earth exploration ship." Its' name? Pioneer. It'd be interesting if someone attempted to assemble a history of Captain Future's Solar System from hints dropped here and there. I'd do it, if I had access to more of these.</li>
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<li>Another creepy moment? At one point in the prison on Pluto's moon, Captain Future mentions the prison armory contains an "atomic bomb" that if blasted, would destroy everything. This was in 1940. </li>
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-27164131361552400042013-08-05T16:44:00.002-04:002013-08-06T00:48:07.047-04:00Comics Review - John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations<br />
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I've never liked Elseworlds.<br />
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They're like "What If?" without an understanding of what made "What If" work, namely, the entire fantasy of the story comes from <i>one divergence </i>from reality. An example of a good "What If?" premise would be, if Spider-Man had only been a couple seconds faster and managed to save Gwen Stacy on the George Washington Bridge, or if Professor X touched the Gem of Cytorrak in that temple in Korea instead of Cain Marko. We could see what happened after that one difference, so everything was extrapolated from that.<br />
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For instance, according to "What if Wonder Man had lived?" if Wonder Man had survived after Avengers #10, Swordsman would have backed out from the original Lethal Legion, fearing the Avengers' sheer power. The Mandarin would have killed him right there, before he met Mantis, meaning that the Celestial Madonna would never have had the protection of the Avengers.<br />
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See? It's that kind of continuity-driven stuff that made What If? fun to read for big Marvel nerds.<br />
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Heck, even the Imaginary Stories of the sixties worked because they were mostly just alternate futures assuming a shared background, like the legendary "Superman-Red, Superman-Blue" or "the Death of Superman." They were extrapolations with the same start point.<br />
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Elseworlds, on the other hand, usually violate the number one rule of alternate history fiction: more than one divergence from reality, what S.M. Stirling once called "alien space bat" stories. With so many divergences, or worse, an improbable divergence…screw it, there might as well be alien space bats in there, too. (Stirling's exact quote, who's meaning changed thanks to the telephone game, was: "the only way Operation Sea Lion would have worked is if the Nazis had alien space bats helping them.")<br />
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Example: Superman: Red Son has a great idea for a divergence: if Superman landed in Russia instead of America. But why would Superman landing in Russia make Batman Russian, too? Eduardo Barretto's Speeding Bullets had the same divergence as the Bruce (Superman) Wayne what-if backups. What if Superman's spaceship landed in Gotham and he was raised by the Waynes? Great idea, but why would Lex Luthor become the Joker? (Maybe alien space bats made Lex do it.)<br />
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In fact, Elseworlds were sometimes like those dumb episodes of the Simpsons where they redo Hamlet, only with Bart as Hamlet and Moe the Bartender as Claudius. It's usually either a straight up recasting, or slipping a hero into another story (as with Thomas's retelling of Fritz Lang, <i>Superman: Metropolis</i>) in a fanfiction-like way that doesn't comment on either.<br />
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Elseworlds are like poetry: probably a lot more fun to write than they are to read.<br />
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Despite all that, <i>Superman Batman – Generations</i> had a really irresistible concept: what if Superman and Batman aged in real time? Instead of always being in their mid-thirties and having their pasts roll up behind them, Batman and Superman showed up in 1939, aged in real time, got married, had children and successors that continued their fight.<br />
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Superman doesn't get older, but Clark Kent has to. Batman's successors, like Dick Grayson and eventually his own son, took a page out of the Phantom's playbook and pretend there's only been one Batman, to add to his aura of mystery. Some of Superman and Batman's older supporting cast die off, like Perry White, Commissioner Gordon, and Alfred. Alfred remains a presence in the books because he appears to Bruce Wayne as a ghost occasionally, continuing to serve after death.<br />
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The 1930s-set stories feature giant robots and autogyros, while the 1950s stories had some of the sillier aspects of comics at the time, like alien invasions and magical imps playing pranks. John Byrne, like me, can't commit to true silliness: his 50s comics feel more like Marvel monster comics, with a Twilight Zone style dark ending than like the game-playing in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. He makes only passing references to transformations to give a sense of place; his focus is on that era's space opera.<br />
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In the 1960s, the series touches on how the heroes faced Vietnam, with Superman's mortal son serving in the army. The issue set in the 70s were the high point, due to the appearance of big-league scary menaces, an era when comics stopped messing around: Ra's al-Ghul, and the supercomputer version of Brainiac. By the 1980s, when comics got moody, Batman started to wear spiky armor and had a hostile relationship with the police.<br />
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The lives of the two heroes intersect in many ways, like how Batman's son and Superman's daughter fall in love in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, Batman's son raises Superman's grandson. By the end, you need a flowchart, but aren't <i>all</i> families like that?<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">World's Finest Team</span></b><br />
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John Byrne, with Generations, is the first person to ever answer the question to my satisfaction why Superman and Batman, heroes who have different spheres of influence (Superman is science fiction, Batman is atmospheric horror and crime) team up regularly and are good friends. I mean, in story logic, why ARE they buddies, anyway? Pairing up the two always felt like what it is: a gimmicky marketing stunt pairing together two very different big heroes to double their money.<br />
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According to Generations, the two heroes are united by the fact they're first. They were the trendsetters in the early devil may care, rough and tumble world of early superheroes, where, back in the 30s, heroes still had balls and Superman interrogated people by throwing them off buildings. They set their own rules and everyone since followed them. They may have mellowed out later and behaved themselves, but they alone remember the early days when everything was new. As a consequence, their lives are intertwined.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Generations I is Luthor's Story</b></span><br />
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Unlike the sequels to Generations, the first Generations is made especially readable by the fact it isn't a series of vignettes with no payoff meant to show the passage of time. It's a single, central unified story told over a broad amount of time, featuring the revenge of Luthor, a crafty genius and manipulative liar who orchestrates tragedies designed to destroy Superman's family: fearsome, cunning schemes, like Iago from Othello. Since over time Batman and Superman's families intertwine more and more (e.g. Superman's daughter marries Batman's son), this means Batman comes into the mix as well in Luthor's plot.<br />
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Not a lot of reviews talk about how <i>Superman/Batman: Generations</i> is, basically, about Luthor, and how his crafty revenge plays out over decades.<br />
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What makes someone your greatest enemy? It's not power, because if it was, Brainiac would be Superman's greatest foe, not Luthor, an alien supercomputer with near infinite resources to draw on. No, the reason Luthor is Superman's greatest enemy is because he has the ability to get nasty and personal. He can wound Superman's emotions in a way a computer wouldn't understand or attempt. <br />
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(This is also, incidentally, why I suspect the Borg were seldom used as bad guys in Star Trek: despite the fact they're so powerful and threatening, they are so alien you can't interact with them on the personal level needed for regular stories.)<br />
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Luthor turned Superman's powerless son against him by lying to him since childhood, convincing him to try to murder his sister. He has assassins kill Superman's supporting cast, all while Superman was searching for Luthor, so Superman would carry guilt for not protecting them. Only when all this was done did Luthor intend to kill Superman by depowering him, then by placing his brain into Superman's body.<br />
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This is not the "good guy on the inside" Luthor seen in Maggin's novels, who never wants to harm innocent people in his crimes, where it's a real tragedy he turned to crime, and there's hope he can be redeemed. No, <i>this</i> Luthor is a true complete monster.<br />
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With the intriguing outlier of Doctor Doom, who was portrayed as oddly noble, classy and honorable, Byrne typically has evil with a capital E villains who are sheer acid inside.<br />
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<i>Superman/Batman: Generations </i>is so completely Luthor's story that even in death, he is victorious: Superman kills Luthor. It's an accident, but it's broadcast all over the world and made Superman look like a killer.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>"Well, It Doesn't Feel like an Elseworlds!"</b></span><br />
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The nicest thing I could say about Superman/Batman – Generations is, it doesn’t feel like an Elseworlds. It feels more like a particularly unusual and accurate adaptation into another medium. There was nothing about their characterizations that were changed for the sake of change; in Byrne's head, he's probably writing about the "real" Superman and Batman. It feels like a deliberately classic, "original recipe" take, like the intention behind the All-Star books. It's a characteristic of the best Elseworlds, like James Robinson's the Golden Age: they don't feel like Elseworlds.<br />
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This felt more like Superman than the Superman I've known in some time. This miniseries featured a Superman who was a gadgeteer-tinkerer, who in his spare time, builds robots. He also enjoys flying into space and battling alien invaders, and if he has a problem on earth he flies into space to see if aliens have figured it out. Byrne's predilection for science fiction, as a big fan of Star Trek, really helps him "get it" here. That's the closest take yet to how I envision the character.<br />
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I wasn't a huge fan of some of John Byrne's decisions in his Superman reboot <i>Man of Steel</i> back in '86, but he gets the classic, Schwartz-era incarnation. When doing <i>Man of Steel</i>, I think it went to John Byrne's head he was able to change things and go off-model, and he's even said as much. If he was placed to draw and script "classic model" Superman, he can do a decent job.<br />
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A lot of people blame Byrne for things he didn't do. He was accused of stripping Superman of a lot of imaginative baggage. Actually, the whole point of "Man of Steel" was, it was a skeleton framework, a story with many deliberate gaps set over the course of years. So if someone really, really wants to bring in Vartox or the Superman Robots, there's room in the back for it. (Byrne's Superman run was filled with traditionally weird Byrne tics that didn't help matters, like that unpleasant Metal Men team up where Superman tells them they're just robots and not real people at all.)<br />
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Likewise, the Batman here feels about<i> right</i>. Batman has a terrible problem, which is taking himself so goddamn seriously, to the point the imagination and adventure were stripped out. Batman, like the Shadow, always had some spooky classic horror movie/art deco atmosphere that made him cool, which made the Bride of Frankenstein and Universal inspired stylization of Tim Burton perfect for bringing him to screen.<br />
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It's unfortunate Batman is defined by the high-concept draining Nolan movies these days. I applaud them for being great films, but all the same, they're movies I RESPECT, but I don't LOVE them. Does that make sense?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Knightwing</b></span><br />
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Knightwing had to be my favorite new character in the series. Raised by Batman's son, he's secretly Superman's powerless grandson (a sign of how oddly incestuous and interconnected the Superman and Batman family tree became towards the end of the series).<br />
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He had a funny idea behind him: eventually, as time went on, sooner or later, one of the family members of the Batman of the 1980s-1990s would be a Stan Lee-written, Marvel Comics style hero, an acrobatic, bold costumed athlete like Hawkeye or Daredevil, who unlike the serious Superman and Batman, taunts his foes with smartaleck comments. Like Captain America and Daredevil (but unlike Batman), he fights mainly superpowered foes. He's the kind of character Crackerjack from Astro City was created to comment on.<br />
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If you called him a wiseass, he'd probably take it as a compliment. He talks in a normal way of speaking, unlike the "Great Scott! I've got to act fast!" way Bruce Campbell-chin heroes like Superman and Batman talk. Knightwing is more friendly, earnest, low-drama, subdued and likable compared to the comparatively high-strung Hawkeye or Daredevil, and you get the feeling that Knightwing, unlike Captain America, is a lot younger and isn't a macho, savvy guy who knows everything. He responds to the shocking discoveries around him with an Englehart-like "man, can you believe this shit?" that seems to be the ending of every Avengers story from the 1970s on.<br />
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In Generations II, we even learn Knightwing fell in love with a woman he sent to prison for 10 years. I ask you, could that type of coincidence-dependent yet emotion-wringing complication BE more Marvel?<br />
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Knightwing is a great character to end the first series on. His name wasn't chosen by accident. Originally, Nightwing was an identity used by Superman in the Bottled City of Kandor. Despite the fact Superman doesn't have any more powers than any other Kandorian, he can't ignore crime, so he created an identity inspired by Batman. Years later, Dick Grayson adopted the Nightwing identity full time. If the ending of the story was to be a merging or blending of the Superman and Batman line, this was a great place to start.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Mortality</span></b><br />
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Johnny Redbeard has a rep for being nuts, but he has an attitude to comics I agree with. He doesn't buy the cynicism death doesn't mean death as long as a character's face is used to sell beach towels. (Forget Ra's al-Ghul's Lazarus Pits. The secret to immortality is merchandizing.)<br />
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This all but makes it inevitable his best work would be on non-canon side projects where dead means dead and change means change without affecting profits from action figures and lunchboxes.<br />
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There's a notion of permanence that makes everything feel more real. When people die, they stay dead. And interestingly enough, Gold Kryptonite shows up in this series more often than regular green Kryptonite does.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Generations II – DVD Deleted Scenes/Extras</span></b><br />
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The world in Generations was interesting enough to want more. So, here comes Generations II. Unlike the first Generations, Generations II doesn't have the spine of a unifying central story. It's a collection of unrelated things that happened, which often have zero payoff.<br />
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What's the difference between a story and a bunch of things that happen? A story has unity. Things that appear have payoff later. A story has a unifying central theme (theme is just a fancy sounding term that means what the story is about, what it has to say, the thesis statement), one that achieves resolution at the end.<br />
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Generations II doesn't achieve any of those things. Set in and around the original story, it answers questions like whether or not the Dick Grayson sixties Batman had a Batgirl, and what Wonder Woman was doing all through the original Generations. It even takes care of unfinished business from the original, like making sure Alfred's ghost moves on to his eternal rest. In other words, it's not a story or even a sequel, it's a collection of the comic book equivalent of DVD deleted scenes and extras.<br />
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Despite it being a collection of events without payoff and not a real story, it's nonetheless interesting if you found the world of the original interesting. It gives more character development to characters given short shrift, like how moody and vengeful Batman's son got after his wife Superwoman died, and gave us more information on Knightwing.<br />
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In general, it's good supplementary material worth reading to fans of the original Generations....until the ending goes somewhere totally terrible.<br />
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Generations I had the occasional dumb ideas. The worst is that Bruce Wayne was Robin in his teenage years (say<i> what?</i>), but the really terrible stuff would have to wait until Generations II.<br />
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What comes next? Spoilers, but it's so dumb it should be spoiled:<br />
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<i>Bruce Wayne's parents knew about their fate, but went to their fate willingly, knowing their sacrifice would create the Batman.</i><br />
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In the annals of disastrously immoral choices insufferably presented to the reader as a "heroic sacrifice," this, far and away, takes the cake. It's right up there with One More Day and Spider-Man giving up his marriage in order to save his aunt's life. Martha and Thomas Wayne consigned themselves to death to leave their only child an orphan, angry and filled with grief his entire life? To do <i>what</i>? Create a superhero and prevent him from living a normal life? Does that sound selfless, for a parent to leave their child an orphan? Does that sound like a choice any parent would ever make?<br />
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If you have children, I ask…does that sound at all like the choice YOU would make? (I might be wrong here, but I understand John Byrne is not a parent, but is a step-parent.)<br />
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Does anyone like this idea? <b><i>Anyone?</i></b> I doubt the groveliest Byrne sycophant in the world, the biggest unhealthy lickspittle enabler in the delusional insulated bubble of the Byrne Robotics Forum, would look at that and say<i>, "wow, that's cool. It's like Byrne found a missing puzzle piece that makes everything we know fit retroactively. It makes the Waynes look so selfless!"</i> I can't even imagine even the wretches at Byrne Robotics defending this.<br />
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The amazing thing is, it's not even true. You don't even need the Waynes to die to make Batman, at least according to Alan Brennert in only one of the most famous and often reprinted stories ever.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">"You Didn't Say 'Simon Says!'" Morality</span></b><br />
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I don't think Byrne entirely understands the morality of honesty. A shocking number of plot points in this series involve villains forcing heroes to make promises, and then the good guys win by finding "fine print" ways to break their promises, like a scheming contract lawyer. I kept expecting Superman to tell Luthor, "ha ha, Lex, it doesn't count, because you didn't say Simon Says!"<br />
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It's a characteristic of moral midgets: they believe keeping your word, no matter what the cost, no matter how circumstances change, no matter what side effects happen, is the height of moral behavior. It isn't. One of Fritz Lang's best movies, "Kriemhild's Revenge," was about how, because of an oath and promise, the Nibelungs' closed ranks to protect a murderer from his just fate. The fact they protected a killer just because "they promised " wasn't presented as "honorable," but a pointless, thickheaded waste that led to everyone's death.<br />
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But, okay, let's agree for now it's important to keep a promise even if it's to a lowlife like Luthor and the Joker in a circumstance where he has your pregnant wife prisoner. Fine. Even if that's the case, how does that jibe with the "aha, you forgot to say I couldn't…" petty legalism Superman uses to "outsmart" bad guys?<br />
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How is playing "Simon Says" in any way moral behavior?<br />
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It's totally okay to lie to evil people to save lives, even if you're Captain America or Superman. Likewise, it's morally wrong to tell the truth if the consequences of that are way, way worse ethical breaches than just dishonesty.<br />
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Heck, there was one great Avengers story where competition junkie villain Imus Champion captures the Avengers and, unless they agree to face him on his terms, he'll unleash nuclear weapons to destroy innocent people? How did the Avengers save the day? Firestar used ants to get a message out to Hank Pym, who wrecked Imus Champion's equipment during the contest. Imus got angry that this wasn't either fair play or sporting because the Avengers called outside help instead of a fair contest, but the Avengers say, "we do whatever it takes to save lives."<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Generations III – Skip This One</span></b><br />
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Generations III tries to weave a story over a thousand years, but it ends with an enraging "it was all a dream" finale that meant the entire series didn't matter.<br />
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Because centuries of time pass between the stories, essentially, everything important that happens, happens in between and we hear about it in flashback.<br />
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Like all terrible stories DC did in the 2000s, it involves the New Gods in a central role. Guys, this stuff is just not that cool.<br />
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I've never read a story in my entire life, where, literally almost everything that happens just ends up not mattering. Superman having children with Beautiful Dreamer, who Darkseid kills and are never brought up again?<br />
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Nobody seemed to know why this series was <i>made</i>, so why should we come up with reasons it should be <i>read?</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Things to Ponder: </b></span><br />
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<li>Who the heck is Bruce Wayne's wife? The book never reveals, except we know it isn't Talia, because we see her when the story gets to the 1970s. </li>
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<li>Batman's 30th Century starship (Batmobile? Batship?) looks like a Romulan Bird-of-Prey. Maybe the Romulans do custom jobs.</li>
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<li>Batman's silver-streak hair is so cool looking, it should be his permanent look. </li>
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<li>Johnny Redbeard really dove in deep into his Silver Age Imaginary Story collection to bring up the scenarios here. Batman got permanent superpowers in Generations III, and the possibilitron in Generations II came from an actual story about a future predicting machine of Superman's invention. It's like a window into an alternate universe where people actually remembered these stories happened and used them. DC has long-term memory loss issues with their continuity, especially compared to Marvel. </li>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Final Thought</span></b></div>
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All in all, the first miniseries feels right because of one reason. It's amazing to forget Superman and Batman have been around for a really long time. Here's what the first Batmobile looked like. </div>
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-67632518202529392062013-07-25T10:00:00.000-04:002013-07-25T10:00:06.932-04:00Doc Savage's oft-misunderstood "Crime College"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Modern readers unanimously find Doc's Crime College pretty creepy and sinister. It's a place where bad guys either get an operation to remove their memories, or are retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly what the Crime College <i>did</i> wasn't that clear, and the hints varied on the novel). To modern eyes, the Crime College sounds like brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. It doesn't exactly help Doc keeps the place a secret.<br />
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Doc's Crime College crops up in other places in pop culture, never taken at face value, usually to talk about how disturbing the implications of it are. The B-Mod devices in "Squadron Supreme" were based on it, as was the memory wipe for criminals on <i>Babylon 5</i>. And the Crime College is immortalized in literature thanks to a mention in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."<br />
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I've always said the Crime College is the single most misunderstood element of the entire Doc Savage canon. It has to be understood in terms of the context it existed. In the 1930s, the Crime College seemed very modern; a humanitarian alternative to prison that emphasized true reform instead of punishment. There was a time when the brain, as an organ, wasn't all that understood and lobotomy seemed like a miracle cure for many disorders. Lobotomy was on the cutting edge (no pun intended), much like how we regard stem cell research today.<br />
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The Crime College seems like an extension of the rationalism of the Doc Savage stories, applied to behaviorism and ethics: criminal tendencies aren't due to "evil" or supernatural causes but bad upbringing and problems with the brain as an organ. Modern psychology bears this out: a good portion of violent criminals were abused as children, physically and sexually. This doesn't give them the right to harm innocent people – I'm just saying, it's very possible to create a very reasonable argument violent crime is solvable by psychological treatments. Could anything be more modernist?<br />
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What's more, the 1920s and 1930s were defined by the shellshocked attempt to understand the hideous human evil of World War I. The answer, by writers of pulp and horror fiction, was sometimes to say that normal people aren't capable of evil. There were a few stories by August Derleth in the 20s that explained the cause of World War I: an evil subrace of mankind living among us in secret that hated and sought our destruction.<br />
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Heck, maybe one of the most famous artists of the early 20th Century, Stanislav Szukalski, claimed that Communism, Facism, WWI and WWII were caused by a subrace of humans that bred with Yeti. He seriously believed this and he was NOT joking. Heck, he devoted a huge chunk of his obvious talent to showing evil people in history kind of look like Yeti if you squint hard enough.<br />
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And…c'mon, guys: you really think <i>Doc Savage</i> of all people, Abe Lincoln and Hippocrates in a ripped shirt, would actually lobotomize criminals? It's beyond his moral code. Something like that would make Doc, his world and heroism, look sinister and hypocritical.<br />
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I find the view the Crime College is some behavior modification to be untrue. It has to be understood in the context of its age: the belief in rational, compassionate, scientific reform methods that make prison and punitive methods obsolete, and a naïve attempt to understand human evil. I think we have to accept the Crime College at face value and not project suspicion on it..<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-68812657262701750272013-07-20T11:04:00.000-04:002013-07-20T11:04:00.740-04:00Doc Savage Reviews: the 1987-1990 DC Comics<br />
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The Doc Savage DC comics could have been a series like the Marvel comics adaptation before it in the 70s, which started off adapting famous Doc novels into comic form, and then told original stories in the same vein.They used this formula just fine with Conan the Barbarian, which started with adaptations and then told original stories.<br />
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But instead, under Dennis O'Neil and the Kuberts, DC decided to do something more bizarre and unique: they decided to have Doc and his allies age in real time, and advance the timeline to modern day. It was the exact same idea as John Byrne's <i>Superman/Batman: Generations</i> Elseworlds story, where the two famous heroes started in 1939, aged in real time, found wives, and had children and grandchildren who continued their legacies.<br />
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The end result is that Doc Savage acquired a dynamism that was really lacking in the novels, which had a status quo like a sitcom. In the O'Neil/Kubert mini, one of his Five was a traitor. Doc got married (Monk and Ham didn't, but I guess they didn't change that dumb law yet). Doc's grandson fought evil, as did Pat's granddaughter. And most importantly, new characters were added as allies…including a woman.<br />
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Not only did Denny decide to advance the timeline, he also decided to make another very surprising creative decision: he wanted to actively question and deal with some of the contradictions in Doc Savage, which the books themselves conspicuously overlooked.<br />
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For instance, Doc and his gang were staunch humanitarians, but how could they reconcile that with the fact they got into fights for fun and used heaping helpings of violence to solve their problems? A character of Doc Savage's grandson was added just to ask a pretty pointed question I've sometimes wondered: do Doc and the gang go on adventures out of a desire to help mankind...or because it's fun to beat people up? To his credit, Chip Savage isn’t just a buzzkill drag all the time. The story makes you respect him as a person of principle. He acts as the group conscience, and Doc listens to him and adjusts his strategies accordingly.<br />
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And then there was Doc's Crime College. Everyone who reads Doc today universally agrees the idea of a place where bad guys are either operated on to lose their memories, or retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly <i>what</i> the Crime College did was vague and the hints varied depending on the novel) is pretty creepy and sinister. To modern readers, the Crime College sounds like either brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. So, why not do a story that deals with that head on?<br />
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And then there was some of the implied attitudes of Doc and the group that would come into conflict with the modern world. For instance, the urge to protect women and keep them out of the group, and getting past national rivalries that were white-hot in Doc and the group's time. To that end, one of Doc's new allies was a Russian, and another was a woman.<br />
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In fact, that's a big problem with Doc's new allies, with the exception of Doc's grandson: they can be entirely encapsulated by single word. Hillbilly. Woman. Russian.<br />
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Finally, the book makes mention of the fact that it's kind of creepy how the aides do whatever Doc says and don't think for themselves. This is obviously due to their trust, but it is off-putting, and when confronted with that, Monk has a "blue-screen" moment.<br />
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In short, the book tries to be a more low-key version of Watchmen to Doc Savage. It was too "different."<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">The Doc Savage Family Tree</span></b><br />
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The decision to make Princess Monja from the Valley of the Vanished secretly Doc's wife was a no-brainer. Everyone seems to do that! It makes sense, though: she was one of the few women to show up more than once. She had a take charge attitude that marked her as different from the usual girl. Besides, it's interesting how PJF's speculations had more impact on the perception of the character than the actual content of the original novels did.<br />
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Besides, she kinda reminds people of Dejah Thoris from Barsoom, doesn't she?<br />
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This reminds me of nothing quite so much as how, in the 1960s, Superman had a lot of "Imaginary Stories" where he did things like get married, die, or reform Lex Luthor. Eventually, the same scenarios came up over and over to the point Imaginary Stories had a kind of weird counter-canon even the actual stories considered the default trajectory of events. Every Imaginary Story made practically the same assumptions, like Clark Kent would replace Perry White as editor of the Planet after Perry White retires. Rokyn was first mentioned in an Imaginary Story as the place the bottled city of Kandor was enlarged on, before Kandor was enlarged there in "reality."<br />
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Doc Savage's son with Monja was a neurotic who couldn't hope to live up to the standards of his legendary father, who ultimately lost his mind because he lived his life in a big shadow, and truthfully, was also a bit of a <i>dick</i>. Okay…does this remind anybody else of Dr. Venture from Venture Bros?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The SF Elements</b></span><br />
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Here's the first big problem: I don't think O'Neil quite understood a Doc Savage story was not quite the same thing as a Fantastic Four story.<br />
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His plots all seemed like they were originally meant for Fantastic Four: Doc Savage finds a crashed UFO (interesting, as Doc debunked UFOs in 1946, when they were called Foo Fighters), with a transporter that sends him away for years. In one story, new character Shoshonna Gold is revealed to be a psychic getting mental emanations from the Moon, where aliens are creating war waves. Doc has to head to the Moon in a rocketship to stop them. Along the way, a robot sentry left by the aliens tries to capture Doc's grandson (could that <i>be</i> more FF?).<br />
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That may work for an FF story, which was often about expeditions that find weird alien machines, and the solution is to the problem is figuring out the aliens don't understand humans or the damage they're doing. When the situation is explained, the aliens eventually leave, as they mean us no harm. But Doc Savage was about emphasizing plausibility. There are no real aliens or psychic powers, only mysteries with rational explanations.<br />
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The worldview of Doc Savage stories is fundamentally skeptical. Even the more far out things in Doc Savage usually were believable at the time of writing: in the 1930s, a dinosaur island was just at the limit of possibility, and based on sound real, current science about closed off/island ecosystems.<br />
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Unfortunately, the one place I would forgive a fantasy element – a cell treatment to keep Doc's gang in fighting trim – turned out to be a fake. This had the unfortunate side effect of leaving the original five mostly non-combatant. After fighting aliens on the moon making wars with mind waves, who dissolved when brought to earth…they pick THIS story to play the skeptic card?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Phase II – The Mike W. Barr Years</b></span><br />
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Mike W. Barr took over Doc Savage after Denny O'Neil left, which constituted a dramatic lurch in the direction of the series to something more traditional, eventually ending in exclusively "flashback" stories to the 1930s. If O'Neil's take is New Coke, then Mike W. Barr is Coke Classic.<br />
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I feel sorry for poor Mike W. Barr. You can tell the guy wanted to write Doc but was saddled with a vision he didn't quite understand. He's an old hero and SF pulp aficionado usually given the job of working on licensed properties. During his work on Green Lantern, he slipped in Lensman references, introducing characters named Arisia and Eddore.<br />
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I don't think Barr ever warmed up to O'Neil's unique take, and I can't help but feel he was baffled by the whole thing. First chance he got, Mike W. Barr brought back classic Doc Savage elements. He set a story around the Valley of the Vanished, and in what might be the high point of the comic, had John Sunlight return to life thanks to the formula in Resurrection Day.<br />
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John Sunlight's return in #11-14 is easily the best part of this series. It is identical to the only Conan the Barbarian novel written by the original author: "The Hour of the Dragon." It's about a conspiracy bringing a mummy back to life to use as their puppet, but the mummy turns out to be smarter and more manipulative than the people who wanted to use him, and turns the table on them, creating an even more threatening menace than before. It's a downright chilling moment to see the Devil Genghis restored.<br />
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Let me go out on a limb here: Mike W. Barr's "flashback" issues set in the 30s might just be the most faithful take on Doc Savage, including the PJF stuff.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Why did nobody like it? </b></span><br />
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Well, it didn't help it was introduced to the world by what might be the most misleading house ad ever:<br />
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In no sense is this ad true. Doc isn't a detective, he doesn't look different.<br />
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Personally, I didn't like these comics when I first read them. It was too different from what I was expecting, which was a more traditional Doc adaptation – something it only became near the end.<br />
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People usually read comic adaptations to recapture the enjoyment they had experiencing the original. This was a lot more important back in the day, when there was no VCR and movies infrequently played on television. Comics were how you got a "movie experience" when one wasn't playing. For instance, Bob Hope had a comic book that did well. It made sense to do one around Bob Hope, who had a reliable comic persona (an uncharitable person would say he played the same guy in every movie). The only modern comedian with a similar "brand" would be Adam Sandler. The comics replicated the experience of the usual Bob Hope movie, from his travel to his hound dog womanizing. In short, you read the comic version because you liked what it was based on and wanted to see some more.<br />
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That said, I liked it more on rereading it once I got over the experience of it being something totally different. It's like somebody handing you a coke and telling you it's a milkshake.<br />
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That said, I don't know if I'd really want to see any more in this timeline. None of the new characters are all that memorable, not Woman, Russian, or Hillbilly. The SF elements were so out of place I expected to see Kirby machines.<br />
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Worse, the O'Neil run didn't commit to its ideas, so it wasn't even a good Watchmen-like subversive take. If you're going to explore the morality of the Crime College, make a statement on it, instead of just using it as the backdrop to a thriller plot. That's the trouble with this incarnation of Doc Savage: it was too traditional to be subversive, and too subversive to be traditional. It had an identity crisis. The series toyed with some serious ideas but didn't commit to them. It figured just mentioning them is enough, and you've done your job. Monk is disturbed by the idea he might just be Doc's puppet? Have him change or make a decision about that, don't just have a scene where that's brought up!<br />
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The only interesting dynamic was Doc's pacifist son, but that's because he was the one subversive idea O'Neil gave some payoff.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Recommendation? </b></span><br />
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The O'Neil/Kubert tales are a misfire, but it misfires in a very unique way (this is the difference between a failure and a fiasco – a fiasco is failing with <i>style</i>). Recommended, if you're curious, but know what you're in for.<br />
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The Mike W. Barr stories come recommended. Especially the John Sunlight arc at #11-14, and the flashback story starting at #19.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Final Thoughts</b></span><br />
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<li>I understand coloring in four color "dot" printing is often imprecise…but why does Doc have the same skin color as Adam Warlock?</li>
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<li>I take it back, the Russian member of Doc's crew was pretty cool. He was a hairy weirdo, but he was a Doc Savage fanboy that wanted to be just like him. I find it hilarious that, like Rasputin, he's irresistible to women despite not getting a haircut or shaving. </li>
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<li>The later drawings, incidentally, come the closest to how I've always visualized the character in my head. </li>
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<li>The Air Lord arc starting in #18 is one of the few times Doc fights a true supervillain. Somehow, it feels right. </li>
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<br />Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-56845025740369755882013-07-13T07:19:00.000-04:002013-07-14T04:50:33.596-04:00Characters You Won't See in the Doc Savage Movie<span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Four Golden Boys (Funny, Don, Mental, Elmer)</b></span><br />
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"The Gold Ogre" was a totally weird Doc Savage novel where the main characters weren't Doc and the gang, but four scrappy mystery-solving teenagers clearly meant to be a "permanent" addition...who thankfully, we never heard from again.<br />
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Making Doc a guest-star in his own magazine who shows up midway through someone else's story, is exactly the kind of experiment you can do if you have a long lasting series, and one the series should have tried more, very much like that one novel written in the First Person.<br />
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The four mystery solving teenagers are basically the James Bond, Jr., Muppet Babies, or Tiny Toon Adventures versions of Doc and the Five, with brawny Don Worth as the Buster Bunny-like teen Doc Savage (Don, not Doc, get it?), "Funny" Tucker is the broadly drawn comic guy not unlike Monk in that he was both funny and fat, Mental, the erudite Johnny of the group who had the dignity and solemn gravitas of the original Doc that muscle boy Don Worth doesn't have, and Elmer Dexter, who had no clear 1:1 analogue in the five, but who had the five's sense of adventure, love of travel and dreamed of polar expeditions.<br />
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The four were placed in a mystery that involved murderous circus midgets, yet another Doc Savage mystery that involves killer circus freaks (see also: the Monsters). Basically, it's some high school lunkheads against the Murder Moppets from Venture Brothers.<br />
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As you might guess, the four new characters, added to an already crowded Doc Savage universe, were abandoned. They remind me of nobody quite so much as Captain Marvel's Lieutenant Marvels (Fat Marvel, Tall Marvel, and Hillbilly Marvel), a supposed "permanent addition" who lasted for one appearance and were utterly forgotten about afterward.<br />
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Side note: anybody who tells you the Super-Pets (except for Krypto), or the Lieutenant Marvels were a "major part" of their respective comics is flat out lying to you. Not honest error, but a deliberate misrepresentation, for the purpose of making these books sound sillier and more whimsical than they really were. (Ahem, Erik Larsen.) The Super-Pets barely showed up (and, other than Krypto, had exactly zero appearances after 1969). The Lieutenant Marvels only appeared once total in the entire Golden Age, and were only brought back in the 80s because superfan Roy Thomas remembered them.<br />
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The four amigos came about in a period in the Street & Smith hero pulps that saw the introduction of several new supporting cast members to once unshakably reliable, glacially unchanging mags. Heck, the cast of Grey's Anatomy changed more times in 7 years than either the Shadow OR Doc Savage did in the same time.<br />
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The most successful and enduring introduction in that period of experimentation was the Shadow's girlfriend, Margo Lane, brought into the pulps only a year after the Gold Ogre. Margo Lane might have been the first ever "continuity immigrant," like Harley Quinn: she was originally on the radio show, created because it was believed a male voice wouldn't be enough to contrast against the Shadow.<br />
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Notice that not a single one of the Four Golden Boys was a girl, though. Jeez, as if the world of Doc Savage wasn't a big enough sausage fest!<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>John Thunden from Fear Cay</b></span><br />
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John Thunden is a hearty 137 year old man who once punched Doc Savage in the face.<br />
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Of all the supreme scrappers set up from the get-go as a physical match for Doc Savage (Bruze, aka the Sargasso Ogre comes to mind), John Thunden might be the most unlikely.<br />
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The source of his tremendous vigor? He devoted himself to regular exercise and to eating syliphium, a plant that, in the Roman world, was used to treat impotence. Thankfully, we were spared the image of a 137 year old man going to the bone zone. The story leads us to believe that Syliphium might be the source of eternal life, but as this is a Doc Savage story, in the end it turns out Syliphium is just a vitamin rich superfood that kept Dan Thunden vigorous into his old age, and is as much a source of eternal life as yogurt and spinach are.<br />
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Giving a supporting cast member tremendous vigor due to the Roman world's equivalent of Viagra was an especially bizarre decision, but I strongly suspect they were silently hoping you didn't look it up for yourself. Doc Savage stories were well researched enough to be believable, but judging by moments like when Doc speaks the "native language" of Trinidad (which is ENGLISH), a lot of these stories work by Stephen Colbert's "truthiness." If something sounds right, it's more important than if it is right.<br />
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Also, John Thunden has an attractive daughter (of course he does). Though you'd imagine the daughter of a 137 year old man would be 100+ years old, you'd be wrong.<br />
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As awesome as Thunden would be in a feature film, I somehow doubt they'll go in that direction.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Lea Aster</b></span><br />
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Lea Aster is homely monkey-like chemist Monk's sexy secretary, taken prisoner back in "Land of Terror," and never mentioned ever again.<br />
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Monk brags about her as being a "honey," and a "real peach," which I'm guessing is Old Person for smokin'.<br />
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It's easy to imagine her leaving Monk's service after Land of Terror. Even if she didn't work for a horny monkeyman trying to play a game of grab-ass, she still is in danger of being attacked by ancient Mayans, archers dressed up in silver, trained panthers, and assorted Thousand-Headed Men.<br />
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Of all the characters on this list, I can see Lea Aster showing up in the movies more than the others (though the chances are still remote), simply because she gives the single most interesting of Doc's allies an inner life and a supporting cast independent of being Doc's buddy.<br />
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Well…kind of a harass-y inner life, left over from the Mad Men days when Americans still had balls and sexual harassment was rampant, seen as hilarious, and assumed to be built into the fabric of boss-secretary relationships. Just look at every 60s Playboy magazine humor cartoon.<br />
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Interestingly, Monk isn't the only hero to have a secretary who gets involved in the action. That would also include the <a href="http://julianperezconquerstheuniverse.blogspot.com/2011/05/heroes-that-worked-for-bad-guys.html">sinister Atlantis-seeking Doc Savage clone Sun Koh, published in Nazi Germany</a>. One of his allies was a badass old lady who had children who died in the Great War, and who kept a loaded machine gun under her desk.<br />
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You know, I have to get around to reviewing Land of Terror, because it was full of many attempts to give the aides inner personal lives independent of their work with Doc. The best example would be electronic expert Long Tom's tricked out supercar, which had an electrical antibug field several years before "bug zappers" became widespread. Long Tom always seemed like an interesting guy who was relegated to the background, much like many Star Wars characters who got an action figure: in "The Phantom City," we hear he had a personal museum of electronic gadgets taken from numerous battles.<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-38719309593844696522013-07-09T22:49:00.001-04:002013-07-09T22:49:29.615-04:00Doc Savage Reviews: "The Dagger in the Sky" (#82), aka Doc Savage vs. John Galt<br />
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"The Dagger in the Sky" eerily predicted the premise of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and argued against it. Seriously, Dagger in the Sky is so shockingly forward thinking in anticipating Libertarian fantasies, I wonder if Lester Dent had access to a time machine.<br />
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<i><b>Who is Doc Savage?</b></i><br />
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In some ways, Atlas Shrugged and the Doc Savage books are very similar. One is about a unrealistic super-rich hero adored by women with a childishly impractical personal ethos. The other, of course, are the Doc Savage books.<br />
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Dagger in the Sky is about scrapper supreme Doc Savage vs. a collection of greedy, callous super rich captains of industry who create a war in order to seize power in a small Latin country. Their ultimate goal is to create their own idealized ultra-capitalist libertarian utopia, free from taxation, labor unions, and government regulation. They choose to do this by exploiting legends of an ancient Inca stone possessed by the evil god Kukulcan, known to create a giant dagger in the sky that heralds a mysterious murder where a person vanishes utterly. Since this is a Doc Savage novel, it's not exactly a shock to say the dagger story isn't related to the Inca god of death, but is actually malarkey that will be debunked down the line.<br />
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With Doc Savage's selfless ethos, proto-libertarian types are a natural opponent for him. They respond to his heroism with head-shaking disdain. Most people respond incredulously to Doc's vow to battle evil in these stories; instead of being awed, most people cynically suspect he's too good to be true. This is something people forget when they say Doc was a sterling example of irony-free heroism; he was never any such thing. He was a light in the darkness.<br />
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Doc Savage and Atlas Shrugged are both teenage boy fantasies, but Doc Savage is a daydream that's harmless, normal, and wholesome, whereas Atlas Shrugged is damaging to society as a whole because of the belief there's something moral about selfishness, about "opting out." Who the heck doesn't daydream about being big and strong, having cool vehicles, going on crazy globetrotting adventures, and being desired by women? Likewise, it's usual for a teenage boy to go through a phase of development where Ayn Rand really speaks to us: in our immaturity, we think of ourselves as supermen, held back by a faceless orthodoxy designed to prop up the mediocre. No wonder many teenage boys go through an Ayn Rand phase! It's like the formula for coca-cola in teenage male brains: add equal parts distaste for society with rampant egotism.<br />
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The incredible and hard to believe thing is that despite the fact Knight in the Sky is a dead-on satire and critique of Atlas Shrugged, the similarities to Atlas Shrugged are entirely unintentional, since Knife in the Sky came first, published in 1939.<br />
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"Knife in the Sky" even argues against Atlas Shrugged's basic idea (rules to protect us from the predatory power of the rich hold society back), with the Galtians shown as pretty much what everyone expects them to be: selfish "Mr. Burns" style robber barons longing to create in isolation with their wealth and power a dog-eat-dog world because they want the "freedom" to loot and prey. It's not hard to understand why the Mr. Potters of the world hate regulation and trade unions…for the same reason crooks don't like cops.<br />
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Here are the villains laying bare their own scheme to Doc:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“Our motives for doing this, you may or may not know, are – well, they are idealistic…” “Idealistic?”</i></blockquote>
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<i>B.A. Arthur cleared his throat. “The world today is a turbulent, war-ridden place. In no country, no nation on the face of the earth, are property rights unhampered by taxation. I am an American citizen, for instance, and when I die, the United States government plans to take over half my fortune in inheritance taxes – which means they will take some seven hundred million dollars, in spite of all my lawyers can do to the contrary. Granting, of course, their taxation had not made me a pauper before then.”<br />B.A. Arthur scowled before he continued. “Government meddling – you find it everywhere. Take the New York Stock Exchange, for example – what do you find? Government regulation everywhere you turn. The banks? Deposit insurance – eating up the banker’s legitimate profit. Utilities? Government competition forcing rates down until return on capital is cut to a measly seven or eight percent.”<br />Doc Savage looked around the table and said, “The point is that you fellows – you very wealthy men – don’t like the way the world is today. That it?”<br />“Exactly”<br />“And you propose?”<br />“To take over the mountainous portion of Cristobal – a perfect place to live, if ever there was one on the face of this earth….”<br />“And then?”<br />“We will create a sanctuary for wealth,” B.A. Arthur said grimly. “There will be no income tax, no inheritance tax, no tax on any business enterprise of any size. There will be no regulations. Operating from such a country, we will soon make it the financial<br />center of the world.”<br />“What about the natives of Cristobal?”<br />“Oh, them? They will be shown their place.” B.A. Arthur suddenly pounded the table. “There will be none of this damned rights-of-labor stuff! No unions. The first time the fools go on strike, we’ll have them shot down. That’ll teach them!”<br />Doc Savage remained emotionless, asked, “And where do I come in?”<br />“We need brains. We might hire yours.”<br />“What makes you think I would work for you?”<br />“You’re one of those idiots who spends his time trying to make a better world, aren’t you? Well, we’re offering you the chance of your lifetime.”<br />Doc Savage shook his head.<br />“You won’t do it?” B.A. Arthur exploded. “But we’ve kept your friends alive solely in hopes of getting your good will in the end.”<br />“No.”<br />“And why not, you idiot?”<br />Doc said, with no noticeable excitement in his voice, “This whole setup is rather hideous. It’s selfish and ugly. It is simply a case of rich men – men more wealthy than anyone has a right to be – trying to keep their money and get more.”</i></blockquote>
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(Great example of Doc's almost Vulcan self-control and emotionlessness, incidentally.)<br />
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The ending of the story gives the captured Galtians an extra-ironic fate. Since it's possible for men of their wealth to escape regular trial, they're sent to Doc's "Crime College" to be retrained to be philanthropists and use their wealth for good deeds. Poetic justice...and a fate worse than death for any Randroid!<br />
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Maybe because Doc Savage started off as a medical doctor with a Hippocratic Oath, and also because he was the first hero with a humanitarian code against killing (one Superman borrowed, just like he borrowed the first name Clark and an arctic Fortress of Solitude), it shouldn't surprise us Dr. Clark Savage, Jr. had a more expansive, humanitarian view of his heroic mission than a lot of other heroes who exclusively focus on justice like the Shadow. Doc Savage was more about charity, and it's easy to think of him as a "bleedin' heart" type, especially in contrast to pulp peers like the scarily implacable Spider.<br />
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Even though Ayn Rand hadn't started writing that famous novel, the idea for it was probably around, in the ether. Just like the fact Edgar Rice Burroughs' critique of Communism in "A Princess of Mars" came five years before the Russian Revolution shouldn't surprise us. The ideas that gave rise to both Galt's Gulch and Soviet Russia were widely talked about. It shouldn't surprise us at all, actually. What should surprise us is that Atlas Shrugged fantasies are still read and talked about despite the fact Doc Savage brought up really obvious arguments against it before the book was even written!<br />
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I try not to discuss politics, but if a work is political, you have to discuss politics. It reminds me of a weird conversation about the John Carter of Mars books where I was told not to bring religion into it. Bring religion into Barsoom? Are you kidding? As if that was something I had to add! These stories are defined by the conflict against not one, but two races of false gods, where, over and over, any religion turns out to be a scam that's laughable when revealed, and any priest turns out to be a cynical con-artist. This isn't "interjecting religion into the discussion." This is talking about what's <i>there.</i> If you want to talk about attitudes toward religion in Burroughs' Gods of Mars…just give an accurate summary of the plot!<br />
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Other than the startling indictment of what today we call Randianism, the story has one other thing going for it: this story sets out to disprove, possibly in response to letters page critiques, that Doc was way too remote. In a rare moment, we get access to Doc's private thoughts and we learn he's terrified of becoming an emotionless machine. <i>"The scientists who trained him were afraid of him losing his human qualities. When a man's life is fantastic, he must guard against his own personality becoming strange."</i> Good advice, a shame Michael Jackson never listened to it. Doc attempts to get a vacation to connect with the average male. He even tries...eating food that doctors say is bad for you!<br />
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At one point, Doc even finds himself captured…because he was distracted thinking about a beautiful girl, showing that he avoids women not because he is inhumanly cold but because he <i>actually means it</i> with that "concern for a woman's safety in his line of work" spiel.<br />
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This story takes pains to emphasize that the Republic of Cristobal and Hispaniola are a fictional stand ins for real countries, and that the real formula that could be used for evil had to be redacted from the text. It's thanks to details like this that the perception came among fans that the Doc Savage stories were just reporting on real events with names changed, an idea PJF in particular ran with to make his Doc Savage: an Apocryphal Life.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Weird Doc Savage Skill:</b></span><br />
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During a stopover in Trinidad, Doc stops a black porter and "speaks to him in his native language." What a feat of linguistic polyglot prowess that is! Even more impressive when you consider the official language of Trinidad and Tobago is…<i>English!</i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Weird/Hilarious Sign This Was Written in the 1930s: </b></span><br />
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"Aërial" is spelled with umlauts every time.<br />
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In response to hearing about the Cristobal/Hispaniola conflict, Monk says, "I thought all the wars were in Europe and Asia." Are they ever. There's a reference to how it's illegal for studiously neutral Americans to ship arms to warring countries except via "cash and carry."<br />
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As always, what dates this story in time is what it <i>doesn't</i> mention. The fact Europe is in a horrific, inevitable war is something this story tiptoes around very conspicuously. Much like how Jane Austen's novels were set during the Napoleonic wars, and were so terrified of the French war machine, the novels avoid mentioning the growing Second World War to the point it becomes delusionally pathological.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Gadget of the Day:</b></span><br />
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Criminals respond with awe when the Hidalgo Trading Company's doors open automatically in response to Doc's car. "Radio controlled doors!" They say. This must have really blown people's minds in a world without garage door openers.<br />
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Doc Savage's flashlights are said to be crank-wound instead of battery powered. Again, impressive for 1939, but I personally have a crank powered radio and flashlight in event of hurricanes, and I don't even <i>fight</i> evil.<br />
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Doc and the gang have short-wave radios inside their cars. This is the first time the five's private vehicles were mentioned since Long Tom's car in "Land of Fear."<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Debunk of the Day (Spoilers):</b></span><br />
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Would I really shock you if I said the gigantic dagger shadow that appears in the sky isn't actually the work of an evil Incan death god, but is actually just a four-way dark smoke flare blasted into the sky? If I did shock you, congratulations on finishing your first-ever Doc Savage novel!</div>
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The mysterious disappearing black daggers were used as murder weapons, but were of a chemical that dissolves in air over time. </div>
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Finally, there was no Inca artifact or black rock at all; it was just a scheme by the Galt's Gulch gang to rattle the Indian-descended natives into revolt in order to seize power.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Things to Ponder: </b></span><br />
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<ul>
<li>One of the chapter titles of this book made me giggle: "The Queer Navy." </li>
<li>Of all the Docs I've read before 1944, this is more like a traditional mystery and less filled with action and fistfights, possibly a prototype for the detective thrillers Doc would have after 1944. </li>
<li>At the beginning of the book, the proto-libertarian crooks sneer at Doc's car for being an unimpressive little jalopy (at least on the outside). Goes to show an important characteristic of Doc lost in the showy, visual-obsessed comic and film adaptations: Doc emphasizes not attracting attention.</li>
<li>Doc Savage definitely got more polished as it went on, and 1939 might just have been the high point. It's weird to read a rough early Doc novel and then read a later one. In the early issues, Doc is more likely to show emotions, and calls his allies "brothers" and "you birds."</li>
<li>The story tells us Monk's reading of the newspaper only gets as far as the comics page. It's that kind of detail that makes Monk far and away my favorite of the aides: he's like a big kid.</li>
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<br />Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-36885094996807957582013-05-17T09:00:00.000-04:002013-05-17T09:00:10.079-04:00Doc Savage Reviews: The Man of Bronze (#1)<br />
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What strikes me about the first Doc Savage novel is this: how fully formed and complete the character is even at the very beginning.<br />
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Sure, Doc shows a little more emotion than we would later learn is normal, and he even killed someone, but nearly everything we associate with and define Doc Savage is here: his tremendous, Tarzan-like physicality, the way he does some little thing that seems unimportant at the time but later on turns out to crack the case, the bickering between Monk and Ham, Doc's lack of interest in women or romance. The plot of "Man of Bronze" is the same formula, already in place, as the archetypal Doc Save story: it starts in New York and ends in a journey to some exotic locale, a murder happens by some unknown supernatural means that later turns out to be perfectly explicable and altogether ordinary and rational, the main villain is a masked leader of a criminal gang who's identity is not revealed until the last page.<br />
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In fact, the first book is so similar to the rest, it's something of a disappointment. I was expecting something very much like the early episodes of Star Trek before the series took shape, where Spock smiles and is called a "Vulcanian," people wear wrong-colored shirts, the ray gun props look laughably out of Buck Rogers, and the ship's doctor is a different person.<br />
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Despite being the first Doc Savage story and the one where Doc acquired his tremendous wealth, he's still living in digs on the 86th Floor (how's the rent getting paid?), throws money around, and even destroys a plane merely to test a suspicion. Despite the fact Doc Savage hasn't even had any adventures yet and so shouldn't have a reputation, on his very first day on the job fighting evil, he has enough pull to keep newspapermen from reporting a mysterious death/suicide and could ask the army to lend him a specialty plane (and again, it's not clear why the army would listen to a private citizen).<br />
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It would actually not surprise me if it turns out the Doc Savage novels were written out of order, because except for the absence of pets like Chemistry and Habeas Corpus this could have been slipped into any point in Doc's history prior to 1944.<br />
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In addition to my reviews, I'll include identification of some things every Doc Savage story has. What the story ripped off (used humorously, not maliciously and to point to the genealogy of ideas – after all, nothing is ever 100% original), a weird/hilarious sign this was written in the 1930s, a weird Doc Savage skill he uses which is often never mentioned again (usually something bizarrely specific like his perfect handwriting, machine perfect telegraphy, epic skill with airplane skywriting, or ability to modulate his voice so he comes out clearer over a microphone).<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">What It Ripped Off: </span></b><br />
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<i>King Solomon's Mines.</i><br />
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Essentially, the plot of "The Man of Bronze" is similar to King Solomon's Mines. Doc Savage, hearing about his dead relative, goes to look for his lost treasure, which leads him to a lost city of Mayans, all the while curing a horrific red splotch plague. The villain, just like Gagool from King Solomon's Mines, is a horrifying sorcerer, the Winged Serpent, who turns out to be a faker with no power at all the heroes defeat by beating them at a "wizard contest" they win with trickery.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Weird/Hilarious Sign This Was Written in the 1930s: </span></b><br />
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The South American henchmen use machetes, which the novel stops to carefully explain is actually just a local name for a "corn knife."<br />
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I find that hilarious, since these days that kind of hacking cleaver is known as a machete (or for you CNN viewers, a panga, the weapon of choice of the Rwanda Tutsi genocide), and the term "corn knife" is totally unknown!<br />
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Also, there's this bizarre blurb inside the pages, reprinted in the copyright-violating Black Mask reprints (despite their illegality, the highest quality and reprint the original pulp mag's art).<br />
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I guess they slipped that in the first page to encourage people who leaf through these mags on the stand to actually buy it.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Weird Doc Savage Skill:</span></b><br />
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As this is the first story, this is the first time we ever hear Doc Savage's hair is waterproof, shedding water like a duck's back.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">Debunk of the Day (Spoilers):</span></b><br />
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The mysterious red splotch death plague of the story? It turns out to just be virulent parrot fever introduced to an Indian population that had never seen it before. Nothing supernatural about it, but surrounded by irrational fear and folklore – something to remember in this day of wild crazy panic over AIDS and swine flu.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Moments to Mention: </b></span><br />
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Doc shows surprising sympathy for native people, shocking for his era. You can chalk it down to flaming liberal (by the standards of his day) Lester Dent, from Missouri, who grew up around heroic Indian stories.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"But this land is all yours."</i> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"In the eyes of civilized law, probably so," Doc agreed. "But there's another way of looking at it. It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of a deal, you know."</i></blockquote>
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Doc Savage, like the "hip" Marvel heroes, always seemed more on the bleedin'-heart, humanitarian end of the political spectrum. He avoided killing and his stories expressed a sincere, idealistic belief reform is possible for hardened criminals.<br />
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There is an unintentionally creepy moment, in light of the modern anthrax scare, where Doc receives a red envelope covered in plague germs. That's the kind of specific murderous detail that makes me doubt the target audience of this were the young 'uns.<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-56510672833613466952013-05-09T14:18:00.000-04:002013-05-09T14:18:34.044-04:00Things to Keep In Mind When Doing a Doc Savage Movie<br />
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Yeah, I know, we've been hearing about a possible Doc Savage movie since 1996 (!) when Arnold Schwarzenegger was "hot" and up for the part. But this time, there are some reasons why a character like Doc Savage, who has fallen off the pop culture radar, might really get a film adaptation.<br />
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First, writer/director Shane Black (best known for the Lethal Weapon movies and for being the guy doing pussy jokes at the start of Predator –<i> really!</i>) just made Marvel 700 million in the first week for his baby, <i>Iron Man 3, </i>which he directed and wrote. He's "hot" and can do whatever he likes, and what he wants to do is Doc Savage.<br />
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Second, our film culture might just be at the point where a Doc movie is possible. If there's any time in history something as culty as a Doc Savage movie could actually happen, it'd be today in our WEIRD film climate where Disney pins its finances on a "Tron" sequel, and someone's remaking "Videodrome."<br />
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I'm not saying a Doc movie is impossible to get right. It is possible...but you have to tread very, very carefully and get what made the original stories unique.<br />
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Here's how to do it:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>1.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The keyword is "plausibility." </b></span><br />
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In the age when heroes like the Shadow had "powers" that left people scratching their heads, what made Doc Savage unique is that he got his abilities from very ordinary special training. With enough fanatic intensity, you too, could be a Renaissance Man like Doc Savage. All of his fantastic feats are laboriously explained, with an entirely ordinary cause that, like a magic trick, isn't so special when you just explain how it works.<br />
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His ability to hold his breath for long periods? He learned that from South Seas pearl divers who really can hold their breath for a very long time.<br />
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Doc Savage stories had some fanciful elements, like the lost island with prehistoric monsters from "Land of Terror," the hallucinogenic seaweed world of lost ships in the "Sargasso Ogre," or the white-haired gorillas in "The Phantom City." But the thing to remember is, even those exotic things were believed to be perfectly plausible to people in the 1930s. Today, they're seen as fanciful but back in the day, they were just at the cusp of possibility.<br />
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There is not a single piece of technology Doc Savage had in the 1930s that didn't actually exist then or wasn't at least on the drawing board at the time. He used infrared and night vision goggles, had a car with automatic transmission, a television closed-circuit camera system, and featured an uzi-like machine pistol. That's one way to predict the future, I guess: just use things that currently exist. In fact, if anything, it's kind of startling how un-miraculous Doc Savage's gizmos are, since most modern police departments have all of them.<br />
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The point is, Doc didn't exactly run around with phaser guns. Nothing bugs me more than when I see fan art by people that haven't read the books who draw Doc with some kind of particle or energy gun. I see this over and over and it makes me crazy. I suspect this is due to the fact that because of Doc Savage's role in pop culture history, more people have heard of him than have actually read him.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">2.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Debunk" the villain or mystery weapon at the end. </span></b><br />
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It astounds me to this day Doc Savage was never embraced by skeptics as their mascot hero.<br />
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Nearly always at the end of every Doc Savage story, the "hereto unexplained" and absolutely bizarre murder method that's the central mystery is debunked and turns out to be something quite ordinary. For instance, in "Fear Cay," Doc Savage and the gang are horrified to discover there's something on the island that turns people into flesh-dried skeletons. And what does this creepy way to die ultimately turn out to be? A swarm of giant carnivorous ants. "Repel" featured a "ray gun" that turns out to be a just a fake spotlight, intended to terrorize with unknown power, and the real cause of the destruction were explosives the gang planted ahead of time, to make everyone think the ray worked.<br />
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Remember the monstrous giants from the Thousand Headed Man? They turned out to just be really big fat guys with suits that have hundreds of faces on them.<br />
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Remember when the bad guys thought they found the fountain of youth in "Fear Cay?" Turns out the slyphium that "granted eternal life" was just a vitamin-rich superfood and it didn't allow immortality, though it helps people live a long time provided they get plenty of exercise, too. It's no more a secret of immortality than spinach or yogurt.<br />
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Doc Savage sticks pretty closely to the idea there are no "real" aliens, vampires, werewolves, or ghosts. Even Batman, another hero that prides himself on not straying too far into fantasy territory, solved hauntings and encountered sincere alien abduction victims. Not Doc. In a Doc Savage story, a ghost or alien is revealed to be a ruse, trick or hoax by the end. In fact, in one story, he solves the mystery of "Foo Fighters" (the World War II era name for UFOs).<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>3.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keep it humanitarian.</b></span><br />
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By the standards of pulp detectives, Doc Savage is an absolute bleeding heart philanthropist. Doc's "Thou Shalt Not Kill" code, weird and unique at the time, became the standard for Comics Code-era superhero adventures, and stands out even today as strange. If you're looking for something that makes Doc Savage unique, this is it.<br />
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Even in the early novels when they were still working out his code against killing and the use of knockout drug "mercy bullets," he still rescued a guilty criminal from an alligator instead of letting him be eaten.<br />
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Doc Savage is so keen to have the hero's hands be bloodless that bad guys, who deserve a horrible fate, usually have it be accidental, a misfire of a weapon they intended to kill others, what in the bombmaking world they call an "own goal."<br />
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People make a big deal out of Doc's brain surgery that makes a criminal forget their evil nature, and compare it to brainwashing. But just think how people in the 1930s must have seen it. At the time, when lobotomies were a new procedure and our understanding of the nature of evil was more innocent, this must have seemed tremendously humanitarian as an alternative to capital punishment, a way of straight up "curing" evil, the ultimate expression of a prison system based on reform and not punishment.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>4.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keep the "Doc Savage" plot. </b></span><br />
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Doc Savage stories are the ultimate "build your own mystery thriller" kit.<br />
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Like James Bond movies, Doc Savage plots are less individual stories and more gigantic Mad Libs. They can get repetitive when you read a bunch in one sitting, but they offer a pretty strong and recognizable skeleton for a single movie.<br />
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Doc Savage stories are centered around a mystery or unexplained event, like the glowing meteors that drive everyone who see them crazy in "Meteor Menace." The stories usually start somewhere ordinary like New York, and then go somewhere exotic, like Egypt or Indonesia. The ordinary starting point to the story makes the exotic setting at the end seem more exotic. Early on Doc Savage does something minor that no one pays attention to at the time, but later on this tiny little thing is revealed to crack the case. Finally, Doc Savage's enemy has a totally unknown identity, but is revealed to be someone from the start of the story given away by a small clue everybody missed but Doc Savage.<br />
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Usually at the halfway point, the bad guy plots to get Doc Savage into a lethal trap, which Doc Savage spots immediately and pretends to go along with to learn the villain's plan or fake his own death. Bad guys often try to frame Doc for murder, but this is optional. Finally, the bad guy creates a final trap, which he falls into and not Doc Savage, who reveals how the baddie's superweapon works.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">5.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don't assume you'll get a sequel. Because you might not.</span></b><br />
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Have everything you like about Doc Savage in the first movie. If you want Doc's female cousin Pat Savage, put her in the movie. By far the most aggravating thing about Green Lantern was the arrogant expectation of a sequel, to the point that movie felt like it was killing time and padded out (how'd that work out for you guys?).<br />
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Doc Savage isn't really traditional franchise material. He's based on source material I love, but the character has mostly fallen off the pop culture radar and doesn't have name recognition or a legion of fans like Superman and Batman. He reminds me of another character I like: John Carter of Mars. Like Doc, John Carter is tremendously significant to the history of adventure fiction, but all his rip-offs are more popular than he is.<br />
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Bottom line: it's far from divinely ordained this movie will be a success, so make this shot count.<br />
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Millions of asses are going to be put in seats for a Superman movie no matter what (even the much-maligned Superman Returns <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2006">was the #6 highest grossing movie of its year</a>), something not true of a Doc Savage movie. But Doc Savage, like John Carter of Mars, is a passion project with a tiny fanbase only possible because the stars are miraculously aligned by the success of Iron Man 3.<br />
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…And guys: put Pat in. She's a foxy girl men AND women would like, and she'd "work" on screen.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>6.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don't emphasize the backstory of Doc Savage.</b></span><br />
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An origin story is a waste of everyone's time, because this character doesn't have an origin story. Even the first Doc Savage story wasn't the first Doc Savage story!<br />
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Superman and Batman have dramatic origins you can build a film around. "Doc Savage Begins" is wasting everyone's time; it's a lose-lose situation, as the character has so little background you either have to make it up for the movie, or you have to do a story unlike the traditional Doc story and without the traditional Doc elements. In either case, you get a result so different it defeats the point of adapting Doc Savage in the first place.<br />
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Likewise, emphasizing on some aspect of Doc's psychology or delving into his backstory to explain why he is the way he is would be a mistake.<br />
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The one drag on the otherwise interesting John Carter was the emphasis on giving alpha dog John Carter some wounded sad hero backstory for an inappropriate arc where he learns to trust again.<br />
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Film makers have a tendency to overthink very straightforward characters.<br />
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Every movie needs an internal arc where the main character changes from the start to the end and realizes something important (yes, EVERY movie). But that has to be done very, very carefully and can't be invented from thin air.<br />
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Themes in Doc Stories a necessary internal arc could be made out of: brotherhood/friendship between men, learning the value of teamwork and group power.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">7.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Doc Savage doesn't have a girlfriend. </span></b><br />
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Doc Savage, when you think about him, is kind of a weird character who doesn't exactly lend himself to Hollywood, which needs warm, human leading men. Doc doesn't express strong emotion; he keeps even his own men in the dark about what he's thinking, and he's not interested in women or sex, which he finds a distraction. He's impassive, stoic, tight-lipped and monosyllabic. He never tells jokes or wisecracks, his only humor is a very dry kind so subtle you need a microscope to find it. He never threatens, never loses his temper, never yells. Doc has five allies, but because of his emotional distance, he doesn't really confide in any of them. He's more like a Vulcan than your average hot blooded earthman.<br />
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Hollywood has a tendency to squeeze a romance subplot into anything. Heck, even Kwai Chang Caine from TV's Kung Fu, a priest, got it on with a horny widow in the Old West he did odd jobs for, in a scenario that could only come from the weirdest ranch romance ever written.<br />
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This isn't to say there aren't any beautiful girls in Doc Savage stories. Beautiful girls are in Doc Savage stories all the time, but they're there so Doc can tell them "no." If you have to have a romance subplot, give it to one of the assistants.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>8.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Don't go crazy with the visuals. Doc Savage is not visual. </b></span><br />
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Here are some images from the interior of the Doc Savage magazine.<br />
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Notice there's no art deco, no <i>Sky Captain</i> style period stylization, no outrageous costumes or bright colors.<br />
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Doc Savage is not Dick Tracy or Batman, based on a stylized comic strip. Like James Bond, he doesn't wear flashy clothing. His vehicles are advanced, but only on the <b>inside</b>; outwardly, they are in non-flashy, non-attention getting vehicles designed to not attract attention (and sure as heck don't have his name decaled on them, by far the campiest detail of the George Pal movie, which drove George Pal to die of <i>shame</i>). His gadgets fit into his vest and clothes.<br />
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Don't get me wrong, Doc Savage is "period." Setting him in the 30s-40s is non-negotiable. But this is not the place to go wild with art direction.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>9.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Doc Savage is not a "kiddie-friendly" property. Keep the horror and death.</b></span><br />
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A characteristic of Doc Savage that marks his stories as very different from say, the more clean cut superheroes are the elements of horror, fear, suspense, and death.<br />
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"Fortress of Solitude" featured a gas that eats your eyes out from the inside, known as the popeyed death. In "Meteor Menace," those seeing the meteor were driven to permanent, feral insanity. "The Monsters" of the title were a creation of tension and suspense: you didn't even SEE the monsters themselves until two-thirds of the way through the story, building the suspense in an almost Jaws-like way. They weren't there for an exciting fight scene. The monsters were there to build fear and tension.<br />
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One of the most intriguing observations Watchmen made was the idea that the comic book heroes had purer lives, without the undercurrent of human Id found in the pulps: the darkness, sexuality, and horror.<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-77259314110453482892013-02-09T15:39:00.000-05:002013-02-09T15:39:42.191-05:00Why the American System of Government Is the Way It Is, and Why It Works<br />
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Politics are a little like tabletop game design. Never try to change a rule until you understand why it's there in the first place.<br />
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After every election, no matter what the year, there's always talk about two problems in the American system: a two-party system of "too-similar candidates that prevent anything from getting done," and how the Electoral College is a pointless barrier that should be scrapped and replaced with direct popular vote.<br />
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Both those things, two-party system and the Electoral College, exist for a very real reason: the American system of democracy is designed for stability and moderation.<br />
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As we've never had a totalitarian dictatorship, and the American system is the oldest democracy in the world, continuing uninterrupted for 236 years, it's obvious it succeeds at this job in a way you can't really argue with. In that same amount of time France, another affluent Western democracy culturally and financially comparable to the USA, had 5 constitutions.<br />
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The obvious critique here is a lack of self-awareness. Everybody thinks their culture has (for instance) the best attitude to sexuality and everyone else are either libertines/perverts on the one hand, or uptight prudes on the other. Ask the Red Chinese, and they'll tell you the Red Chinese system is the best for them. Nonetheless, I don't think enough people understand WHY the American system is set up this way enough to say why it should be changed.<br />
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Every election year someone yells the Electoral College needs to be scrapped, a barrier to direct popular voting that ensures only a minority of people in swing states actually matter.<br />
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But why do we have an electoral college at all?<br />
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In order to be President you have to have a majority of the Electoral College, right now 270. This is the major factor in why the American system only has two political parties, since it's nearly impossible to win a majority with three or more viable candidates.<br />
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This prevents situations in parliamentary systems like (for instance) Turkey, where one political party achieves a majority by 24% of the vote. By contrast, remember that even on his worst days at the end, the Nixon-level unpopular George W. Bush always had at least a 27% approval rating. It's hard to imagine a position so weird that it won't get a modest percentage of the vote.<br />
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Because a majority is needed, moderates win every time. If your goal is stability, moderate views aren't a bug, they're a feature. National politics has to be played "in the 30 yard lines," ignoring the fringes on either side. In short, politics becomes a game for pragmatists, moderates, and "grown-ups."<br />
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No single region, not even the South or Northeast, has enough electoral votes to reach 270. This means a candidate can't just do well in a single part of the country, but has to have broad appeal. This was a big issue especially in the era before Civil War, where different parts of the country had different markets, from the industrial and trade oriented Northeast to the rural, agrarian South.<br />
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"Swing states" have more power in our system for a reason: in order to be in play at all, they're typically a microcosm of the American system. Ohio, for instance, typically has a combination of rural, urban, immigrants, natives, the working class, with both farmers and agrarian interests and heavy industry.<br />
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And contrary to popular belief, the electoral system does make minority views more significant in a way that would not be possible in a winner-take-all national popular vote. The reason, both for good and for ill (mostly for ill) that Cuban-American exile lobbyists have such power over Cuba policy is because Florida is a swing state, and a community of about 500,000 does matter. The result is surreal local weirdness like Barry Obama, maybe the most powerful man in the world, eating at El Mago de la Frita on Calle Ocho.<br />
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Another advantage to the electoral system is it keeps votes compartmentalized. Florida in 2000 was bad enough. Can you imagine the chaos of a national recount?<br />
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Does the Electoral College system depress voter turnout in non-swing states? I don't care. Neither should anybody else, because democracy is only for those who choose to participate. No system should ever take into account meeting the needs of people who choose not to vote.<br />
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Here's a scenario for both Republicans and Democrats. Imagine we have a it's 1994, and the US has a parliamentary system. Republicans sweep elections on the "Contract With America" platform. Who becomes Prime Minister? Newt Gingrich. Or in 2006, when Democrats win back the House and Senate, the US head of state becomes Nancy Pelosi.<br />
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If you think it's a weakness that more fringe views can't achieve much in our system, just imagine what it would be like when the shoe is on the other foot and people on the fringe with views opposite from yours are voted into power.<br />
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Which brings me to the Third Party Candidates.<br />
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The greatest advertisement for the two-party system are the third party candidates. Marginal candidates typically are marginal for a reason.<br />
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But Julian, you say, aren't the two political parties<i> too </i>similar?<br />
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First, the two main political parties are not that similar at all. It's hard to imagine a third term for Bush would be exactly the same as what Barry Obama did. If it seems that way to you, there are two possibilities: 1) you're not very informed on the issues and the political positions of candidates, or 2) you're on the fringe.<br />
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That said, do I think the current American system is perfect? No, I don't. Because of their impact on fundraising, there is no reason presidential primaries should happen first in New Hampshire and Iowa. Primary systems work to the advantage of incumbents even at the best of times; David Wong once called them a game of "monkey shit dodgeball." It's not clear to me why these contests should be viewed as representative of voters as opposed to say, Virginia, Florida, or Ohio. The Florida primary moving up is a step in the right direction.<br />
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In conclusion, the Electoral College, together with the two-party system, are not flaws but consciously made decisions by a conservative system that values stability, which can be very, very frustrating to people both on the left and right who want to remake society. All successful changes, the ones that last, have been incremental, and in that sense the durable American system understands this.<br />
Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-84861490338984413352013-01-31T19:51:00.000-05:002013-01-31T20:00:48.155-05:00Casadastraphobia – the Fear of Being Sucked into the Sky, and How That Can Label You<br />
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Why are some people eccentric, nonconformist types?<br />
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A big answer, for a lot of human behavior, is labeling.<br />
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There was a great Bruce Coville (<i>My Teacher is an Alien</i>) kids' book called Space Brat, which had that as the theme. If you say someone's a "brat" over and over, how are they going to act? How are they going to think of themselves?<br />
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In "Space Brat," an alien kid in a very impersonal mechanistic society, at birth got a bit of egg behind an ear, which made him cry with irritation. As a result, a caretaker robot stamped BRAT on his forehead, and that stuck with him until he really did live up to it. Like all of Coville's work, it's heavy stuff for a kids' book with a silly name.<br />
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With that in mind, I think part of the reason (not the only one) I became an eccentric noncomformist is because I got that label due to lots of people around me not understanding my reactions, because I had a fear I didn't even know was a real thing: Casadastraphobia.<br />
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<b>Casadastraphobia is the fear of being sucked up into the sky. </b><br />
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Okay, done laughing? It's a variation on agoraphobia. It was much worse when I was a kid, where I often got extremely nervous looking up after a long time especially on clear days, but what's interesting is, I don't even have a severe case of it: some people can't even go out to open air spaces like football fields, and some are so terrified they can't even go outside for fear of being sucked into the sky. Compared that poor soul, I'm pretty functional with a high ability to "deal."<br />
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In the hopes of preserving my now forever shattered reputation as a rational, levelheaded "down to earth" (no pun intended) guy with the ability to deal, I should point out the last time I had a very serious attack of this, a few months ago at a MetroRail station on a disturbingly clear, cloudless day, I fought off my anxiety about the situation by reminding myself in the billions of years of earth's history gravity has never reversed itself, and indeed, that would go against all the laws of universal gravitation, where the force of gravity is proportional to the product of the two masses involved and inversely proportioned to the the square of the distance. If you think I kept my mind busy by doing the math for two diagrams attracting each other, you obviously know me very well, except who the hell can remember the gravitational constant off the top of their head, even physicists?<br />
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Moral of the story: if a fear is not rational, you can fight it with rationality.<br />
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At my elementary school's weekly open field assemblies, kids used to regularly get helium filled balloons on their birthdays. Being fumbly fingered kids, we sometimes let them go until they floated into the sky. And boy, would I ever freak out. Watching balloons disappear into the sky in an open field is terrible for someone afraid of getting sucked into the sky, so there's no surprise I'd have a pretty major freakout.<br />
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I got a reputation in the First Grade as "that kid who's scared of balloons." People in other grades and classes heard of me. I was labeled a "weirdo" for having an uncommonly known phobia. Eventually, I had to leave that school for a variety of reasons, but the one they gave my parents was along the lines of, "hey, it's not him, it's us."<br />
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It's funny how some things can stick with you. Recently, I was reading the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, maybe the funniest and most readable book ever written by a president. What's absolutely strange is, there was this weird interlude where he talks about how, with obvious pain, as a nine year old he was tricked into buying a blind horse and became the laughingstock of the town. Here was a man who won the Civil War, defeated Robert E. Lee, and became president of the United States...who was still thinking about how people laughed at him for buying a blind horse from a sharpie.<br />
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Learning about <i>casadastraphobia</i> was an incredibly liberating experience. It's always a source of relief and courage to learn something you've always dealt with you assume is unique to you, actually has a name, and is something other people have.<br />
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It's also a source of incredible anger, too. The first time anybody ever called me an "odd duck" was when I became "that kid who was scared of balloons." And if people call you a weirdo over and over, how are you going to act? How do you think about yourself?<br />
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In the meantime, I'll take the advice some wiseass gave a lady asking for tips on dealing with their Casadastraphobia:<br />
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<i>"Wear a ten gallon hat so you don't look up, and put glue on the soles of your shoes." </i></div>
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-82630414391308070822012-12-15T17:40:00.000-05:002012-12-15T17:40:35.214-05:00The 1988 Taito Arcade Game Version of Superman<div style="text-align: center;">
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Coming soon to a dive Italian take-out pizza and subs joint near you!<br />
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Isn't it enraging that the only good Superman game ever made was never, ever released for home consoles?<br />
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Not only that, it's the only Superman game ever made that used the trademark John Williams music from the movies. Just listen to it. There's even a hilariously "action-y" up-tempo version of the dopey love scene music on one stage.<br />
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Though it doesn't use any known Superman bad guys, it nonetheless feels like a Superman story: a fiendish green warlord leads a global alien invasion, one that apparently is only interested in attacking America's most scenic locations like the Las Vegas strip and San Francisco's Chinatown.<br />
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The aliens include a giant loincloth wearing Harryhausen cyclops,<br />
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Jumping bunny women;<br />
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Spider-monsters that trap you in a web;<br />
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Apparently the one thing the aliens all have in common is, when defeated they break up into the into the Outer Limits horizontal lines that Unicron used to create Galvatron.<br />
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So far, so good: you have a science fiction themed global alien menace, an element of travel. Everything you need for a good Superman game.<br />
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This looks like a job…for Superman! And <b>red</b> Superman!<br />
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Wait! Who the heck <i>is</i> this guy? Is this possibly a reference to Superman-Red and Superman-Blue, the Imaginary Story from 1967?<br />
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If so, kudos. But I doubt it, since it's traditional for beat 'em up games to have a co-op mode, with a second player created by a palette swap (see also: Double Dragon, Altered Beast).
The presence of a Red Superman may just be an especially chutzpah filled example of video game adaptations' greatest motto: <i>"to hell with it, nobody will notice." </i><br />
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This reminds me of how, when you were a kid, you'd play Superman on the playground and everybody wanted to be Superman. If Superman comics were like our playground games, there would be approximately 500 Supermans flying around out there arguing who hit who.<br />
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But it gets more interesting, because have a look:<br />
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Unused sprites left in the game show a second playable female character. Possibly Supergirl? There might have been an idea to make Player 2 Supergirl, but palette swaps were easier. And besides, in an era of zero female game characters, some chauvinistic boys might not have liked playing a girl - even Supergirl.<br />
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(FYI, or those unaware, it's actually easier to leave in unused or unfinished content in a game rather than eliminate it totally, because if you yank something out it might create problems with programming it's "attached" to. So it's usually easier to just block something out. But those who get their hands on the game code can sift through it line by line like bread crumbs and find all kinds of surprises. There are many interesting examples, like an unused, incomplete level in Sonic 3, or like the fact Legend of Zelda: the Ocarina of Time, a fantasy game, has a futuristic tiny starfighter Arwing from "Starfox" that was added in to test the flight physics.)<br />
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The game doesn't stiff you when it comes to Superman's powers, and doesn't cheaply dole them out in ways like putting them on limited uses, or linking them to power ups. It's possible to lift and throw cars, and the game is even built around the element of flight, with it going vertical instead of the weird 3-D perspective seen in brawler games like Double Dragon, which means your punches end up hitting only air because of an error in depth perception.<br />
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There are levels that become flying stages where you soar upwards, which is a downright revolutionary use of space in a genre defined by The Eternal Quest to Go Right. There are even some Gradius or Lifeforce style 2-D "schmup" stages where you blast enemies with laser vision.<br />
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The game is a lot like the movies in ways other than the music, especially in the sense that Superman, instead of having his traditional powers, is basically like a genie, given additional bizarre powers for budget reasons. In the movies he could appear in several places simultaneously, use telekinesis, throw his S-shield as a cellophane trap…not to mention "Great Wall of China Vision" from Superman IV.<br />
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In the tradition of the movies, Superman can apparently also either throw his fists (like Voltron?) or his fists can create charged up fireballs in the shape of a fist. Not entirely sure what's going on there.<br />
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In general, the game is worth trying if you can find a cabinet, even if it doesn't have any of the Superman enemies, supporting cast, or even Kryptonite, though the last one is annoyingly overused. The fact it is unavailable is a crime, and a sign of how totally possible it is to "lose" video game culture. Like movies in the silent era, they just weren't seen as important enough to preserve or keep in circulation.Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-11789835917692298542012-12-05T17:02:00.000-05:002012-12-05T17:02:35.015-05:00Explaining Fan Behavior: Why some things get devotion<br />
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Here's a question: why do some fictional worlds and properties attract incredibly devoted fans? I mean, some do, and others don't.<br />
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There are many, many reasons a fandom becomes big or assumes the form it ultimately does, including a combination of luck and visibility...although that's not <i>quite</i> what I asked. What is it about the properties <b>themselves</b>? What do they all have in common?<br />
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According to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Star-Trek-Real-Story/dp/0671896288">the unofficial history of Star Trek by Bob Justman</a>, the first Star Trek convention was far from a spontaneous gathering. It was run by Gene Roddenberry himself and he rustled people in from all over. In other words, part of the reason Trek fans are so big and organized is (partially) because of talented huckster Gene Roddenberry's talent for self-promotion.<br />
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Lord of the Rings was a low seller in a niche genre that didn't even have a name yet for an entire decade, released at the same time as now-forgotten Thomas Burnett Swann's Minotaur books or Mervyn Peake... until LotR was rediscovered by the 1960s counterculture. The hippies found the story's themes of hostility to modernism, love of nature, and longing for an imaginary past were all right up their style.<br />
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Star Wars had the good luck to be a big studio distributed movie, so millions of butts were going to be in chairs to watch it no matter what. But it success is not just because of that. Part of the reason it was a big hit, a phenom we're still talking about now, was it was the right story at the right time. The Western was now passé, previously the #1 action genre and the single greatest American source of stories about ourselves and our self-concept as a country, as well as our battles of good versus evil. The entire 1970s were filled with grim, adult, director driven movies. Star Wars was a battle of good versus evil not seen since Errol Flynn stopped swashbuckling, with fairytale characters like a wizard and pirate. It was, in short, the right kind of story at the right moment. <br />
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And on a lighter note, part of the reason furry fandom is so oddly sex crazed and gay friendly, is because the first furry conventions in the early 1980s were put together by a flamboyantly gay swinger/S&M lover who actually invited just released prisoners from jail to show up! This jailhouse gay and S&M attracted others into the same scene, repulsed others that didn't care for it, and in general set the tone for years later.<br />
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Okay, okay, back to my original question: why do some fictional worlds inspire so much devotion and others don't? What do they all have in common that get people to <i><b>still</b></i> think about them? After all, the hippies came and went, but Lord of the Rings is still around, and there are still kids in high schools today writing notes in Dwarf runes.<br />
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If you look at the really BIG fan groups out there, like Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, and the Marvel and DC Universes, you find that people are so obsessive about them because these worlds have built up enough detail that it's possible they're engrossing and "full" enough to capture the attention.<br />
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The more real a story feels, the more engaged you are. Just like significant descriptive details in a book bring a scene to life, the richer and more developed a world is, the more minutiae fans can collect like stamps, the more devoted your fans will be.<br />
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Here's a secret: hardcore fans like their world and devote so much time to it <b><i>because they think it's real. </i></b><br />
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…Okay, that's obviously not <i>literally</i> true, except for a tiny handful of seriously mentally ill people.<br />
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But really involving worlds and stories are set in places that make you FEEL like they're real, have verisimilitude, that the stories don't end the instant the book is closed or the movie ends. There's plenty going on to make you think about it later on, or talk about it with friends aneven have fights over nitpick details, and curiosity over some of its unexplained mysteries. This is why fictional worlds can be such an engrossing diversion. This is why people get very curious and so very passionate.<br />
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We fans do this not because we think the story is literally real, but because we like suspension of disbelief. Because when people tell us a story, we want to believe it. That's the difference between a liar and a storyteller: people are by default suspicious of liars, but want to believe a story.<br />
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This is also why adaptations can sometimes be frustrating for fans. Because we believe there is a reality behind these characters and worlds that do not vary or change. A reality that is independent of the free market, cultural, and business forces that take place in our own world.<br />
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Even disagreements and fights between fans are based on the idea characters are independent of us readers/viewers, solid and concrete. People have disagreements about whether Spider-Man would or wouldn't behave a certain way. This disagreement is only possible at all because everyone agrees there is a "correct" way for Spider-Man to act.<br />
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Okay, now, here, we've reached the first of definition of continuity:<br />
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<i>Continuity (or canon) is just another word for verisimilitude, a consistency that makes the world feel more real, by making the world feel as if it continues beyond the boundary of the specific narrow focus of any one single story.</i><br />
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An individual story, by definition, have a laser pinprick focus and economy. Stories can't be "about" everything. Look at a map of Middle Earth and see how much of the place our heroes actually DIDN'T go, even in a story as sprawling as Lord of the Rings.<br />
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The purpose of continuity and consistent canon is to dispel the artifice of stories, that a world is not just a series of empty plywood "Potemkin villages" that live when tourists pass by and are yanked down just behind us when we leave.<br />
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This is why Sherlock Holmes fans are so fascinated by the tantalizing hints Sir Conan Doyle dropped about cases only mentioned in passing we never got to actually read about. Because it implies Sherlock Holmes and Watson are alive, are doing things when we're not looking. They have a reality independent of what they're doing when the "camera" is on them.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">"It's just a story"</span></b><br />
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Contrary to popular belief, being a fan, even a detail oriented one, is a good thing for the same reason any hobby not pursued to the exclusion of responsibilities is a good thing: because you get out what you put in. Cool detachment eliminates the entire point of a whole story, where you want to be passionate and care about what's going on.<br />
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That's why I've always thought there's something oddly inhuman, so defeating to the entire purpose of fiction of any kind, with people who respond to certain kinds of criticisms with, <i>"who cares, it's just a story. Consistency doesn't matter because it's all fictional in the end."</i> It shows a kind of brutal cynicism I don't like, that whoever said it doesn't feel the world is real. It's all a put up job. If it isn't real, why get engrossed or involved?<br />
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<b><i>Why care?</i></b><br />
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I don't get that argument. If you don't care, why read a story at all? Why read a series long term?<br />
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This is also why fans find continuity glitches so galling. They tatter and undermine the suspension of disbelief fiction needs and imply something doesn't have verisimilitude. They create a "trust" issue.<br />
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This is also why fans are fascinated by cross-overs. The fact that Spider-Man can swing on the rooftops of Marvel Manhattan and cross paths with Daredevil going the other way makes the Marvel Universe feel more real.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Why Do Fans Like the Obscure?</b></span><br />
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This is also why fans get tickled pink when obscure characters and minutiae show up, why Star Trek fans smile a bit when a Next Generation episode mentions the Tholians in passing, or when people are delighted to see a minor character like Stingray or D-Man in the background of an Avengers mission.<br />
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Those of us that aren't children know, but only at an intellectual level, that stories aren't real, and are artifices with a very narrow focus, that the Tholians were just created to be bad guys for one episode way back when in the old show, and Stingray was an Avenger only used in one story that needed an underwater guy, and that a good portion of super-villains, especially unpopular ones, will never be seen much again after their first story.<br />
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Mentioning obscuros again dispels that artifice we're intellectually aware is there ("this is just a story"), and reminds us, to our joy, that the world is real, that these characters are still around and doing something even when we're not looking. The Tholians are out there, somewhere, up to mischief. Stingray can be called up at any time by the Avengers when needed.<br />
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In short, the world goes from something we like to something we <b><i>believe. </i></b><br />
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And that's the difference between just liking something, and being a fan.<br />
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Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-20997386626132392322012-07-21T22:20:00.000-04:002012-07-21T22:43:04.560-04:00How She-Hulk became the character we know her as today<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's interesting to read the David Anthony Kraft original, introductory Savage She-Hulk series, because the earliest take on the character is almost totally unrecognizable to how we know the character of She-Hulk today. When we think of She-Hulk, we see her as confident, exhibitionist, aggressive, lives-life-with-gusto, who loves getting attention and being superstrong, and despite her shocking giant size and green skin is endearingly <i>normal,</i> an everywoman doing things like watching TV in bunny slippers while eating cheesecake.<br />
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She-Hulk, at least as we know her today, has whacked-out outer space adventures featuring beloved, eccentric, weird Marvel comics obscuros like the Toad Men, Mahkizmo, the return of the Living Eraser, Xemnu the Titan ("I have no mouth and I am mean"), and bizarre supporting characters like the space diner from forgotten space-trucker series US-1 (like the gimmicky Matter-Eater Lad from Legion of Super-Heroes, mentioning and using the canon of US-1 <i>is the whole joke</i>).<br />
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With Shulkie there's always a sense of humor involved. When Steve Gerber's writing, it's the kind of surreal, occasionally dark comedy we associate with Howard the Duck (in fact, not only was Howard the Duck a side character, but so was Gerber's Dr. Bong).<br />
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With John Byrne, there's broad comic plots like how he-man woman hater Mahkizmo's sinister plot to kill the female population stops when someone explains to him where babies come from. Not to mention some clever fourth wall breaking sight gags.<br />
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(I always figured the "in-universe" explanation for Shulkie at times believing she's a comic character is, she has an extremely weird sense of humor and talks to herself sometimes.)<br />
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In fact, the earliest series featuring the character is almost shocking compared to the character we know today. The biggest difference between the modern take on She-Hulk, and the "savage" She Hulk is that in her early stories, She-Hulk is a really a mean, intimidating, impolite person, who is very intense and scares people like the gray "Mr. Fixit" version of the Hulk, and constantly has to struggle against her own terrible, savage temper. Her instinct is brutality, but unlike the Hulk, who's just a creature of rage, her emotions and brutal instincts are something she has control over and can resist.<br />
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Just look at the image at the corner of her comics. That's a scary Grace Jones face of a lady you wouldn't mess around with, and who certainly wouldn't wear bunny slippers while eating cheesecake.<br />
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The Savage She-Hulk, unlike the Hulk, has to remind herself that she's no killer, and that killing would make her as bad as the enemies she fights. This is an illuminating insight into Jennifer Walters' psychology because, as all Hulk fans know by now, the Hulk could never kill <i>because Bruce Banner could never kill</i>.<br />
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Another difference is, when She-Hulk sees the cops, she <i>runs away.</i> Like the original Hulk and to a lesser extent Spider-Man, she was misunderstood and framed as a murderer, and when people see her they figure she's up to no good.<br />
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If I were to go for a no-prize explanation for She-Hulk's transformation, it would be as she received her powers from a blood transfusion from the Hulk, her initial transformations were similar to the Hulk: defined by Bruce Banner's anger, outrage, and alienation.<br />
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Finally, to someone used to the surreal Gerber take on the character, or the fanciful early Marvel silver age-inspired Byrne years, it can be shocking to discover how downright<i> normal </i>the first She-Hulk book's plots are. She-Hulk has a Spider-Man style supporting cast of perfectly normal people, from her Dad the sherriff who believes the She-Hulk is a public menace, unaware the She-Hulk is her own daughter. The standout, at least to Gerber Man-Thing fans, is Richard Rory, a Roy Thomas look alike who is easily the most unlucky guy in the world. This lends credence to my idea, incidentally, that David Kraft was a Gerber disciple: notice how similar the Scorpio arc in <i>Defenders</i> #48-50 is to Gerber's preceding work.<br />
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Most of the stories are about the emotions of perfectly ordinary people like Gerber's <i>Man-Thing</i>, and with She-Hulk's tube-friendly law background playing a huge role and the absence of real super-villains, make me suspect the original Savage She-Hulk seriesmight have originally <span style="background-color: white;">been</span><span style="background-color: white;"> meant as a bionic-woman style television series instead of a comic book.</span><br />
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I wonder how the transformation of She-Hulk from Grace Jones "Ms. Hyde" to sex-bomb "everywoman" took place.<br />
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There are many examples of characters who get sexier, younger, and slimmer when nobody's watching (Miss Piggy and the Wicked Witch of the West come to mind), but what's unique about She-Hulk is what happened in popular culture between She-Hulk's first series in 1979, and what happened by the time she came back to her own series in the late-1980s: namely, the rise of female bodybuilding as a sport, advertised by very alluring cover girls, pushed by the Weiders as the "face" of a new industry like Rachel McLish and Gladys Portugues.<br />
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Ask most Baby Boomers about female bodybuilders and they'd probably tell you it isn't biologically possible. After all, Superman had both superstrength and a super-physique, whereas Supergirl was just superstrong.<br />
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In 1981, the same year the original version of She-Hulk was canceled, the Weiders started the first significant female bodybuilding contest, the Ms. Olympia. Bodybuilding as a sport exists as a promotional venture for the Weiders' fitness supplement and magazine empire, so the creation of female bodybuilding was an attempt to spread to a whole new "product demographic." Therefore, the women featured had to be glamorous, attractive girls…or else who'd want to be a bodybuilder and buy the Weiders' products?<br />
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Muscular women were <i>not</i> new (check out Abbye Stockton from the golden age of muscle beach!) but the importance of them as alluring cover model types <i>was</i> new. Bodybuilder Kike Elomaa, the only woman to ever beat Rachel McLish back in 1982, became a pop star in her native Finland and is currently a member of the Finnish Parliament. (I am NOT making that up.)<br />
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Female bodybuilders as models designed to sell the product of fitness came to a high point in the early to mid 1990s with Sharon Bruneau, a half-French, half-Canadian Indian who actually, literally <i>was</i> a former fashion model who switched to weightlifting for kicks.<br />
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Female bodybuilders were basically sex-sells advertisements for the Weider empire, and it's a funny thing about advertising: it creates demand where there wasn't any before. After all, the entire idea of halitosis was created to sell Listerine.<br />
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What was that line from Mad Men? <i>"What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons."</i><br />
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Come 1984, pro competitor Anita Gandol posed nude for Playboy magazine. The very year John Byrne brought back She-Hulk, 1989, the TV show American Gladiators debuted, and one of the selling points and most memorable trait were the foxy lady bodybuilders.<br />
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The fun, cheesecake-y <i>Marvel Swimsuit Illustrated</i> had a great text piece about Shulkie written just like a female bodybuilder physique piece in <i>Flex</i> or <i>Muscle & Fitness</i>.<br />
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And didn't anybody else notice most covers of Shulkie from 1981 on basically have her in a pose and build that looks like it was traced from a Rachel McLish magazine cover?<br />
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To be clear, in the telephone game that is superhero comics, no one single person is responsible for the change-over to the "funny exhibitionist" She-Hulk, which is my point: the change in thinking about the character was gradual as pop culture changed around them. Typically, Roger Stern gets credit in his Avengers run for the modern She-Hulk as a glamour gal who enjoys having superstrength and isn’t an antisocial outcast (a take Byrne and Gerber inherited and rolled with) but even by the end of the David Kraft version, She-Hulk did occasional things like have fun at the beach with her powers, and described being the She-Hulk as addicting.<br />
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In conclusion, the principal reason She-Hulk went from an intense and oddly Grace Jones-like asexual character to being a much more popular sex bomb over time was because after the original series ended, advertising forces made female bodybuilders attractive and glamorous figures in order to sell products, a marketing force for which Shulkie was an accidental beneficiary. For the first time ever, a character like She-Hulk could have sex appeal as a major part of her character.<br />
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The surest way to cure yourself of naivete is to read up on the history of marketing. Don't think you can be manipulated by advertising? Great. That just means you don't know how it works and can be played like a fiddle by it.Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-21465302491955173022012-06-24T00:19:00.001-04:002012-06-24T01:24:53.110-04:00File-Sharing as a Culture-Preserver: the case of the FASA Star Trek Combat Simulator<br />
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From the perspective of somebody with a background in digital archiving, copyright is a squatter's right, defined by the ability to deny content to others.<br />
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The overwhelming majority of works are not Harry Potter, still sold, published, and making money. Most materials under copyright are not reprinted, not available, not distributed, with the rights no longer belonging to those responsible for its creation. But if an archivist tried to digitize it and make any of it available to their patrons without permission…<i>wham! </i> Infringement lawsuit.<br />
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This is a real problem because of the paucity of the public domain, which as a result of lengthy copyright durations, excludes nearly the entire history of motion pictures and music; in other words, <i> the entire culture of the 20th Century. </i><br />
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The interests of digital archivists responsible for making information and materials available, and the interests of copyright holders, are directly at odds with each other.<br />
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This is very strange, because computer technology has advanced to the point that information and content are infinitely reproducible via computers. To use a Star Trek metaphor (both for accuracy and to get everybody in the right mood) a computer is like a food replicator. With enough power, it can make infinite copies.<br />
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To quote lawyer/advocate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen">Eben Moglen</a>, who may or may not have been a Star Trek fan:
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<i>"The great moral question of the twenty-first century is: If all knowledge, all culture, all art, all useful information, can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone — if everyone can have everything, everywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything?</i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
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If you could make lamb chops in endless numbers by the mere pressing of a button, there would be no moral argument for hunger ever, anywhere.</i><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></blockquote>
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I see no system of moral philosophy generated by the economy of the past that could evolve a principle to explain the moral legitimacy of denial in the presence of infinite profusion." </i></blockquote>
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"Copyright maximalists" who take the most extreme and controlling view of the function of copyright, try to phrase copyright as a moral issue, and make an overly simplistic comparison of copyright infringement to "stealing" a physical object, and argue that downloading is denying compensation to the creators.<br />
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This doesn't work because there's no 1:1 comparison between a downloaded copy and a lost sale. By that logic, a checked out library book equals a lost sale, and lending a book to a friend is a lost sale. Most of us discovered our favorite books not because we bought them outright but because someone lent them to us. In that sense, online copying serves the same function lending a book to a friend does: <i>discovery. </i><br />
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As Cory Doctorow put it: <i>the greatest enemy of creators isn't copying, but obscurity.</i><br />
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The "file sharing is stealing" argument gets even stranger when, in the case of some copywritten works, it makes you ask, <i>"stealing from <b>who?</b>" </i><br />
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A perfect example would be the FASA Star Trek Starfleet Tactical Combat Simulator game, made under license by the game company FASA, printed between 1981 and 1989. The STCS occupies a strange niche between wargame simulation, board game, and roleplaying game, where, on a hex map, players take the role of competing starships battling each other.<br />
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These days, not only does FASA no longer exist, but it lost the license to print Star Trek materials.
In other words, there is no way I could ever directly compensate the makers of the FASA Star Trek game, mostly because FASA ceased to exist. They no longer have the license and the materials are out of print. I could buy the game secondhand on ebay or find some dog-eared copy at an old game store, but in either case, FASA would receive no money for the same reason textbook publishers don't receive money for the sale of used books.<br />
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At the same time, I am very pleased to have found copies online of the FASA books and I have run the game with some friends and printed counters on a dry-erase hex grid. To put my discovery into context, keep in mind that I am not exactly this game's target audience. <span style="background-color: white;">As someone who was not alive when the game was originally published and in its heyday, I first discovered and picked up a copy of the rule set because it was </span><i style="background-color: white;">possible to do so online. </i><br />
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To my great delight, there are still some people keeping the Star Trek: Space Combat Simulation Game alive, almost entirely those who remember its heyday back in the 1980s. For instance, <a href="http://home.comcast.net/~ststcsolda/">visit this website for the Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator Database and Archive.</a>
The STCS archive explains its purpose like this:
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<i>Think of the STSTCSOLD&A as a nature preserve, designed to harbor a vanishing species of pencil and paper amusement. In a world now dominated by advanced computer games, the STSTCS is a beloved relic, akin to classic automobiles or vintage wine. In creating the OLD&A I am doing something similar to restoring a car, combining new parts with an old chassis, repainting the body panels and polishing the glass. As with most car restoration, the entire OLD&A project is a labour of affection, done solely for the sheer satisfaction of the thing. With my STSTCS game books slowly falling into shreds, I hope to preserve the essence of the STSTCS in a medium that cannot be dulled, dimmed, smudged, ripped, or otherwise folded and spindled by time. I also hope to bring a new generation of Trek fans into the Old World of gaming where mental activity, not processor speed, powers the action.</i></blockquote>
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When copywritten material is totally lost, you're not just losing the material, but the culture around that material begins to disappear.
Preserving materials is like preserving a culture. <i>Mystery Science Theater 3000</i> can't obtain the rights to reprint some of the movies they licensed to spoof, so a longstanding piece of advice by Mike Nelson to his fans is to "keep on circulating the tapes." It's copyright infringement, sure, but it keeps a huge chunk of a fandom alive and saved from total oblivion. There are hundreds of episodes of <i>Doctor Who</i> that were thoughtlessly erased by accident by the BBC in the 1960s, which are only preserved now because fans saw fit to audio record the episodes as they watched.<br />
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Despite all that, the STCS Archive keeps away the one thing that really would play a role in new players rediscovering the game, which allowed a person not present at its heyday to get involved and become an active participant in the community.<br />
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<blockquote>
<i>Sadly, the one item most fans want most is the one item I cannot provide. At least half of all the letters I get are from relatively new and/or returning Trek fans who are just finding out about the game, or are rediscovering the game after a long time away from it. In both cases, people are desperate to try and get their hands on the game rules themselves, either because they never owned a copy of the game or because they were foolish enough to get rid of the game at some point in the past. While I would love nothing more than to provide each and every fan with a verbatim transcript of the entire STSTCS rules book, it came to my attention in 2001 that a third party purchased the rights to the rule system that the STSTCS is based upon. This third party is jealously guarding these rules and has already contacted other, older STSTCS sites in an effort to get them to take down any and all portions of the rules that have been posted on the web. So far nobody has been hauled into court, but I don't want to be a trendsetter in this regard so I am steering clear of this known legal iceberg.</i></blockquote>
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That was written, by the way, in 2001, when FASA stopped printing and started licensing their intellectual properties (including famous pen and paper RPGs like <i>Shadowrun</i>). Since then, the company in question, which incidentally did not even create the rules and game system itself, has done absolutely nothing with the property. Does anyone still doubt me when I say copyright is at times a squatter's right?<br />
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This strategy is even more shortsighted when one considers that the future of any business model in the digital age is to directly create a personal relationship with fans, communicate with them, and give them a reason to buy. What possible reason could there be to get litigious with those who might be your greatest customers?<br />
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This is a shame, because if the FASA game was reprinted I would absolutely pay real money to buy a copy <i><b>now that I know it exists.</b></i> For one thing, rules are easier to consult at a gaming table if they're in printed book form, and it would be great to have "official" playtested game statistics to represent Next Generation and later era starships (due to the timeframe of FASA, only the original series is really well represented and detailed). Also, there haven't been any new FASA miniatures made since the 1980s, something people will pay for because there is a <i>real</i> scarcity, not an artificial one.<br />
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Because I got my hands on STCS files, a customer now exists in me (and my friends) that didn't exist before, and I am proud to talk about and promote the STCS.
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What does all of this mean for digital archivists and information science professionals? Only good things, if they understand their changing role and required skill set. Institutions, like academic libraries and historical databases, should stop thinking about building their "collections," considering the spread apart, decentralized nature of modern content on the internet, and instead emphasize the reference skills of their own IS professionals to get patrons in touch with what they want, wherever it is and wherever it can be found.</div>
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The end result of all this is that file-sharing can play a role in preserving culture from oblivion, and expose new audiences much more thoroughly than inflexible squatting can. Somewhere out there, the teenage or 20-something Star Trek fan who will end up becoming the biggest fan and ultimately paying customer for the FASA STCS is only a click away from having his mind blown.Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-83780183095279675232012-03-12T17:31:00.000-05:002012-03-12T17:31:39.552-05:00Julian Perez Goes to the Movies: "John Carter" Review<br />
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Short review: a good old fashioned swashbuckler movie with a lot of humor, but one that's dragged down by giving testosterone hero John Carter a "sad" backstory. Stay for Woola's cuteness, Dejah Thoris kicking butt, John Carter leaping, the flight scenes in 3-D, and the surprisingly warm father-daughter subplot. As far as a Burroughs adaptation goes it's very good but not perfect, but it's got everything your inner eleven year old wants: the coolest dog in the world, a four armed best buddy, and winning the hand of a gorgeous princess with swordfighting.<br />
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After a whole century without an adaptation...am I the only one bugged by how they chose to pronounce things? I always pronounced Issus as Aye-sus (same as Isis), and Dejah Thoris as DEE-juh Thor-Us.<br />
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Long review:<br />
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The movie's take on Dejah Thoris, the original work's greatest dragging liability, is a success. She had to be changed somehow and what they did worked.<br />
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Not only is the leggy, muscular, exotic, bronzed Lynn Collins a twelve year old boy's dream girl, she's also a scientist and a warrior, heroic and intelligent. She's a princess, but her princess persona is a put on she can slip on and off to cover her personal anxieties. Unlike other newly upgraded martial heroines, the story actually commits to her being a great fighter, and she plays a role in the end of the story and doesn't lose her martial skills when they're inconvenient to the plot (unlike Maid Marian in Prince of Thieves), and she actually wins fights (unlike Kate Beckinsale's fake action girl in Van Helsing).<br />
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She actually uses her great intelligence in several scenes to figure out Thern technology and translate inscriptions. She's less a movie girlfriend and more a Spock-like smart sidekick.<br />
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She's also a scientist and…well, ask yourself this. When was the last time in comics or pop culture you saw a FEMALE inventor or supergenius?<br />
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Making Dejah Thoris a supergenius is actually a pretty good substitution in the story. Previously, Dejah Thoris was captured all the time because she was the world's most beautiful woman and often did things that were self-destructive or moronically out of character, like suddenly insist she was going to marry Sab Than out of nowhere. If Dejah Thoris was a scientist on the verge of a great discovery, it makes sense villains trying to stifle that discovery would try to have her killed or captured.<br />
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By the way, when I first heard Dejah was going to be a scientist in the movie version, I was totally shocked because she was so useless. But actually, Dejah being a scientist is a pretty legit interpretation of what she was actually doing. Take this selection from Chapter X of "A Princess of Mars."<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>“What is your name?” asked Lorquas Ptomel, addressing the prisoner.</i> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>“Dejah Thoris, daughter of Mors Kajak of Helium.”</i> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>“And the nature of your expedition?” he continued.</i> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>“It was a purely scientific research party sent out by my father’s father, the Jeddak of Helium, to rechart the air currents, and to take atmospheric density tests,” replied the fair prisoner, in a low, well-modulated voice.</i> </span></blockquote>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">“We were unprepared for battle,” she continued, “as we were on a peaceful mission, as our banners and the colors of our craft denoted. The work we were doing was as much in your interests as in ours, for you know full well that were it not for our labors and the fruits of our scientific operations there would not be enough air or water on Mars to support a single human life. For ages we have maintained the air and water supply at practically the same point without an appreciable loss, and we have done this in the face of the brutal and ignorant interference of your green men."</span></i></blockquote>
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The idea she might be a scientist is a perfectly legitimate interpretation of these events, although most people figure Dejah was just there as a royal administrator.<br />
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Taylor Kitsch, surprisingly, did a good job as John Carter. He brought to the character a kind of Eastwood-esque serious manliness, and a very Southern chivalry that's the core of the character. He politely refers to everyone as either "sir" or "ma'am." Even the bad guys.<br />
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The scenes where John Carter jumps around like a rubber ball under low Martian gravity were really effective and infectiously exhilarating and fun.<br />
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One of the things I always thought was unique about John Carter of Mars is, John Carter goes native and adapts to Barsoom really fast, and because Mars is so darn cool, prefers to stay there rather than go back to boring old earth. I never understood why Dorothy Gale wanted to go back to drab, black and white Kansas when she was a universally beloved heroine in the much cooler fantasy world of Oz. To its credit, the movie gets this totally right: when John Carter is forced to leave Mars and the girl he loved we feel the wrenching pain as he returns to Earth a million miles away, never knowing if he'll ever return. The painful removal from Mars, something that later became the emotional core of the Adam Strange series, was perfectly captured here.<br />
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Unfortunately, Kitsch's solid performance is undercut somewhat by the fact the script "fixes" a problem: John Carter doesn't have an arc as a character. This "problem" is solved in the most hackneyed way possible: instead of making John Carter the testosterone-personified, energetic he-man hero we know he was, he's saddled with a "sad hero" backstory. Would I shock you if I told you there were lots of flashbacks to a lost family?<br />
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The idea John Carter was a bitter, cynical veteran who constantly insisted he shouldn't get involved and didn't want to go back to Earth chews up and wastes the movie's time, and doesn't play to Taylor Kitsch's strengths.<br />
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The movie's strongest and surprisingly emotional subplot is Tars Tarkas's father-daughter relationship with Sola, the only Martian female to know her real father and family. Tars Tarkas is protective of her, and love for her motivates everything he does. Since Sola knew love and family among otherwise loveless and unsentimental creatures like the Tharks, Sola stands out as a screwup who doesn't fit into society perfectly. This is the only time the otherwise drab "sad hero" backstory for John Carter is actually used to really good effect. Because he recognizes something of himself in the big Thark.<br />
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Woola of course, was downright perfect and steals every scene he's in…but that's obvious. You can tell the guy who did this movie also did Wall-E, because its best character is a silent little monster.<br />
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There was one moment in John Carter of Mars that got an ERB-fanboy charge of excitement out of me.<br />
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While in the wilderness, gentleman John Carter and his friends were chased by the hordes of Warhoon, a type of Green Martian more savage and ferocious than others of their kind. The creators of the movie totally nailed it. They looked the part: feral, cruel, covered in bones, scarred and fearsome. It was something I'd waited to see brought to life since I read the books as a Tarzan-loving kid. The presence of the hordes of Warhoon was an indulgence that, according to an interview, Andrew Stanton fought for, to the point he "traded off" an appearance by banths, saving the fierce, distinctive Martian lions for a sequel. <br />
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Strictly speaking, the presence of the hordes of Warhoon wasn't entirely necessary to the story, but it showed a fannish gusto to bring Barsoom to screen. I wish there had been more moments like that because there were so few. This was also why Green Lantern and Percy Jackson were such empty movies despite coming from such innovative source material: they saved everything interesting for the sequels, assuming they had all the time in the world.<br />
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The lesson here for future film-makers is, even when doing movies intended to be franchise starters, treat every movie like it was the last one. Because there's a heartbreaking chance it just might be.<br />
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It feels like a dick move to criticize a movie by mentioning all the things it didn't have, but was it impossible to show some people in the background playing Jetan? No reference to even the merest hints of the existence of the First Born, Kaldanes and the Okarians? No ulsios or soraks scuttling around in the background? A huge chunk of the movie was set around Zodanga. So, no background appearance by someone who is undisguisably Rapas the Ulsio, Zat Arras or Fal Sivas? Nobody swearing "by their first ancestor?" No shots of mastodon-like zitidars? (Thoats are the only beasts of burden used in the movie version of Barsoom.) No one person in the background in a diamond harness who might be a Gatholian? No dropped hints of a lost Ptarthian princess who would later be revealed as Thuvia in the next movie?<br />
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All this sounds fannish and nitpicky and I understand that. But I was under the impression from all the press materials I was going to get a movie by lifelong Barsoom fans bringing Barsoom to screen for the first time after literally an entire century of waiting, given gobs of money and freedom. I was expecting the Martian equivalent of the fan friendly, easter egg filled Marvel movies or Peter Jackson's accurate Lord of the Rings. I was led to believe, somewhat deceptively, I was going to get continuity porn instead of a sanitized Hollywood adaptation. If Stanton and Chabon and the rest really were the Barsoom aficionados they say they are, wouldn't they have known Helium's defining skyline and physical characteristic is it's defined by twin mile-high towers? If Barsoom is a world of eternal youth, why is it Dejah Thoris's grandfather Tardos Mors looked so visibly older than she did?<br />
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There was a scene in world-traveler John Carter's study filled with parts and objects from around the world…and they couldn't have crammed in a reference to Tarzan, La, Opar, or Caprona? At least the army situation room in Captain America has a map of Wakanda.<br />
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At least they used the Martian standards of measurements: xats, karads, and so on...and remembered Kaor, the Martian greeting, and that Earth and Venus were respectively called Jasoom and Cosoom. That was something!<br />
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The 2009 Star Trek had references to the Klingons, Rura Penthe, Cardassians (…surprisingly, since the Cardies were unknown in the original series era), Sulu fencing, the Vulcan mind-meld, an in-joke about redshirts dying, heck, there was even a tribble if you look hard enough – all of which was done without hampering the momentum of the movie. The Lord of the Rings movies were both simultaneously accessible and beloved by the couch potato idiots of the world, and by Tolkien fans for their accuracy and fan-friendly details (anyone else notice Galadriel wearing the ring Nenya?). When the android Human Torch showed up in Captain America, it drew gasps from the audience I watched the movie with.<br />
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The notion that something is either for the hardcore fans OR for a general audience is a false, nonexistent dilemma, and a sign of a limited thinker. A characteristic of the successful adaptation is how "full" they feel.<br />
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Maybe I'm spoiled rotten by the Marvel movies and by Lord of the Rings and so I expected something unfair from this movie. After all, the norm for adaptations of beloved geek properties is for them to be visibly made by people that just don't care.<br />
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There were some changes to the material in adaptation from the book to the movie, but like all the changes in the recent Star Trek movie, they were ones I saw happening when the movie was announced: there were three evil Green Martian chieftains, and so economy insisted they be reduced to just one, played wonderfully by Thomas Hayden Church.<br />
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A lot of people said that the new early appearance and prominence of the Therns was rewriting Burroughs's Mars mythology. It all made perfect sense to me, though. We learn in Warlord of Mars that the Therns, as a result of their false religion, come and go as they please on Barsoom, and after the destruction of their culture, Matai Shang, Hekkador and Father of the Therns, hid in the city of Kaol where their cult still had power.<br />
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The idea of the Holy Therns as a behind the scenes power cynically exploiting people and present at the beginning of the John Carter story was totally in character with the Therns' <i>modus operandi</i>. On the other hand it's unlikely there is going to be a race of Black Pirates (or the First Born), because Barsoom doesn't need two races of false gods.<br />
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At the same time, the Therns are able to shapeshift and have advanced science, something I wish they didn't have. The whole point of the Therns is that despite their claims of godhood, they are just a bunch of liars running a hustle and dodge on the entire rest of Barsoom; giving them superpowers kind of negates that idea.<br />
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The Therns here are totally bald, just like in the books. I missed the humanizing touch of vanity they had where they wore elaborate blonde wigs to disguise their baldness.<br />
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Making the Therns major baddies gives the movie a strong central villain, something not in the original novel, and more closely ties the Edgar Rice Burroughs finds the journal frame story into the rest of it. I'd count that as a success.<br />
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Zodanga is now a "predator city" on legs able to move around. I have to give the writers credit for this. It's the most Burroughs-esque idea Burroughs never had a colorful, exotic and improbable locale. And it led to a great flying scene that was the most successful use of 3-D in the movie.<br />
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I wish all I could do is just talk about the John Carter of Mars movie, but unfortunately movies don't happen in a vacuum.<br />
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A lot of Paleolithic movie critics and entertainment reporters raised in the days before nerds took over the world deeply resent the sudden dominance of genre fiction in pop culture and hate writing about science fiction, comic books, pulp novels and video games. Even so, the sheer disproportionate, fanged viciousness directed toward "John Carter" is shocking.<br />
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Because they hate writing about nerd stuff, many entertainment reporters take a jeering, cowardly, jackal-like glee in tearing down a member of the herd that looks weak and limping. Nobody can be crueler than the cowardly, thwarted, and passive-aggressive.<br />
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This is why I don't listen to people who say science fiction or the superhero movie "is dead." They write that not because they think it's true, but because they desperately wish it was.<br />
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The effect of all the rooting for John Carter to fail and pronouncing it a dead on arrival bomb leaves me angry, hurt and heartsick. Imagine there's this book series you've loved for a lifetime. Imagine there's a movie version coming out, and before it's even released, it's proclaimed a derivative waste nobody will like, with source material forgotten by time nobody remembers or cares about anymore. Taking a risk on believing in something you love is seen as a laughably foolhardy misstep that the studio in question will be punished for doing.<br />
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How do you respond to the jeering masses who think of something you love and believe in, as an irresponsible disaster bigger than Ishtar and Dune put together, one that the people of the world will reject? All of which are independent of the quality of the movie itself. It makes me angry just thinking about the injustice of it.<br />
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As for the quality of the movie? Definitely worth seeing. After all, John Carter of Mars adaptations don't come along every year - or every hundred years.<br />
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<br /></div>Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6250269071385467004.post-10803281869181927282012-01-28T03:13:00.000-05:002012-01-28T03:13:07.289-05:00The Trill would make great Star Trek bad guys<br />
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I always thought it was a mistake to make the Vulcans the heavies in <i>Enterprise</i>. The writers did it, I suspect, for the worst possible reason: rationalism is very threatening to a lot of people.<br />
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By that same token, you know one Star Trek race I suspect is either secretly evil and has potential to be a great bad guy race...or at the absolute <i>least</i>, is a concept with a real dark underside the series hasn't really explored yet?<br />
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The Trill.<br />
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Hear me out, here.<br />
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What was your first, visceral, initial reaction on hearing about the joined Trill race? Isn't the idea of surrendering a portion of your personality, memories and will to an immortal superintelligent parasite that lives inside of you, which needs you to get around, a little…well, <i>creepy</i>? We're told over and over by main characters like Dax and others about how being home to a symbiote is an honor over which there's a lot of competition, but isn't it entirely possible the initial, visceral reaction is correct?<br />
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Let me put it another way. Would <b>you</b> want to be a Trill host?<br />
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Trill society, as we discovered in the Deep Space Nine episode "Equilibrium," is fundamentally based on a <i>lie</i>, and a lie that as yet, <i>hasn't been exposed</i>. According to the Symbiosis Commission, only one in a thousand humanoid Trills is suitable for joining, and they're usually chosen from that race's overachievers and geniuses. Yet the truth, as discovered in "Equilibrium," is that over 50% of the humanoid Trill could work as hosts. In fact, in a pinch, when the Dax symbiote was near death, the eminently unsuitable Ezri, as the only humanoid Trill nearby, had to become joined after a 15 minute lecture by a non-Trill doctor.<br />
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What's more, Trill history suggests a furtive secretiveness that could suggest a malevolent purpose - or at the very least, they're not exactly totally honest with their allies. The Trill had contact with and knowledge of the Federation, yet the Federation had absolutely no idea the Trill were a joined race at all until Beverly Crusher had to save Odan, the first Trill we ever saw (that we know of) in "The Host."<br />
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Consider this: Dax was alive and kicking all throughout the history of the Federation, and in one funny moment she even implied she had sex with Doctor McCoy when he was a med school student. <i>"Well, he certainly had hands like a surgeon…" </i><br />
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Curzon Dax, at one point, was even the Federation ambassador to the Klingons.<br />
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Yet, the fact the Trill had a unique symbiotic relationship was totally unknown to a genius medical researcher like Beverly Crusher, who had a history of working with aliens. Odan himself in "The Host" only revealed it in a moment of absolute desperation when he was about to die. He didn't tell the Enterprise crew about it, and kept the matter a secret even though being a Trill was the explanation for a life-threatening condition (he couldn't be transported). In short, Odan kept being a Trill a secret for some unknown reason.<br />
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All this doesn't mean the Trill are evil, it does mean though, that the Trill have not entirely been forthcoming and honest all the time.<br />
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It may be possible we have encountered the Trill before TNG's "The Host." There was one eerie episode that stood out from the entire first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where evil insectoid, superintelligent worms able to bond with humanoids tried to take over Starfleet Command in secret.<br />
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This episode was all the more shocking because its scary resolution implied a follow-up that just never happened. We never got an explanation for who the parasites were, their ultimate goals, and what happened to them.<br />
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(In real life, this is because the original concept for the Borg were as insectoid hive-minders. Because the Borg became cybernetic for budget reasons, this original intro was unfortunately orphaned and forgotten.)<br />
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One of my favorite explanations for the insectoid parasites was they were advanced scouts for the Dominion.<br />
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Is it possible the possession aliens from "Conspiracy" were actually a version of Trill symbiotes?<br />
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Granted, the Puppet Master aliens are very different from the Trill, but then again the Trill have subraces. For instance, some die when beamed up and down, whereas Jadzia never had a problem.<br />
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The similarities between the Trill and the Conspiracy-aliens are numerous enough even non-Canon novels have mentioned this.<br />
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By the way, I did my best to avoid mentioning some of the key divergences between "The Host" Trill and DS9 Trill, because it was obvious in the TNG episode they were still trying to iron out the kinks of what the Trill are, including something that might be the strongest case for my "Trill are evil" argument: in "The Host," the Odan symbiont is the only thing responsible for the personality of the final being.<br />
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(This cool/rare image, by the way, is an early makeup test of Terry Farrell in "The Host" type TNG Trill makeup.)<br />
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Bear in mind I'm not saying all Trill are evil infiltrators or that Jadzia Dax was a sleeper agent or anything like that. I am saying as a whole, there's something kind of malevolent about the concept of the Trill that would lend themselves to being natural bad guys, and there is also a feeling we've never gotten the whole story.<br />
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And look at it this way: a future project that uses the Trills in a big way as heavies would be the greatest gift ever given to convention cosplay girls, who love the heck out of the Trill spot body makeup. </div>
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<br /></div>Julian Perezhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16276143599750947248noreply@blogger.com7