Greatest Comics Characters Ever Part II: 10-5

Part 1 of this list can be found here.

10. Green Arrow

There’s such a thing as being the right character at the right time.

Take for instance my least favorite superteam of all time, the Justice League of America. In the early days, the Justice League members were all identical alpha male, confident chisel-jawed father figures. They had the exact same personality. In fact, in early JLA comics, you can rearrange the word bubbles so that they connect to different characters, and nobody would even notice. Imagine doing the same thing for the Fantastic Four, with Reed getting Ben’s dialogue and Sue talking with Johnny’s voice!

The single most irritating thing about the JLA was that all of its members were right, all the frickin’ time. Their view was always presented to the audience as the ‘correct’ one.

Now, into all this comes Green Arrow – particularly when Len Wein was writing JLA. He had a personality: he was loudmouthed, impulsive, hotheaded, opinionated, and prone to alienating other people. He played Dr. McCoy to a room full of Spocks. He was actually allowed to be wrong. What an absolute breath of fresh air. He changed the chemical equation of the entire JLA, and made it more of a real superteam as opposed to just a gimmick book.

BEST STORY: As much as I enjoyed Maggin’s run with Ollie, for all of the above reasons, I have to give this to Green Arrow’s memorable JLA stories, particularly under Len Wein. In fact, if you go through all the really memorable JLA stories, developments or subplots, they all somehow involve Green Arrow: the story where Black Canary chooses to stay on Earth-1 because she fell in love with Green Arrow; the Hawkman and Green Arrow repartee, introduced by Len Wein, which reached a crescendo with the Englehart issue where the two actually went out drinking together (and walked back drunk together – take that, comics code!).

WORST STORY: I hate to say this, because I liked it, but as important as Green Lantern/Green Arrow was, it really wasn’t that significant to comics history and its importance is overstated. The only reason anyone found it historically significant and shocking was because it was a book published by stodgy old DC (which, as we all know, stands for “Dad’s Comics”). If it came out at Marvel around the same time, nobody would have cared, because in 1972 Marvel did stories like that all the time.

9. Super-Skrull

One of the great hidden surprises awaiting those that delve deeply into the Marvel Universe, is the unexpected complexity of the character of Super-Skrull. The Super-Skrull is an example of how there’s a difference between being an enemy, as opposed to a villain.

When we’re first introduced to the Super-Skrull by Stan Lee and Kirby in early Fantastic Four, the Super-Skrull was an arrogant warrior from a technologically superior civilization. It’s only later that he acquired more of a character.

The Super-Skrull is a little like Colin Powell, or the antagonist Samurai in the Kurosawa movie The Hidden Fortress: a good soldier that obeys orders, who is loyal to treacherous and petty people that are unworthy of that loyalty. Because he’s a person with a lot of integrity, he concentrates on his duty and is unaware that people above him despise him and are jealous of him.

The Super-Skrull was always about the Skrullian equivalent of Mom, Apple Pie, and the picket fence in the suburbs: he had a wife, and various children and was apparently something of a good father.

BEST STORY: The single greatest I can think of was Young Avengers #7-12. (CAUTION: Spoilers!) The young Hulkling was revealed to have been the son of the Skrull Princess Anelle, who was in love with the Kree Captain Marvel. At first it was believed that the Super-Skrull was there to capture the Hulkling for the Kree, but it is later revealed that Super-Skrull is actually there to protect him from both the Kree and Skrulls. It was Super-Skrull, who by impersonating Captain Marvel allowed him to escape from the Skrull Throneworld – though he refused to go with him and Anelle as he was a soldier and it was his duty to remain. The Super-Skrull took an oath to protect the young lad, as he did when he was born.

WORST STORY: At first I’d say the John Byrne Alpha Flight (!) story where the Super-Skrull gets space-cancer (I’m serious!), but even if the Super-Skrull was shown as an uncomplicated shade of evil black, at least he was played as appropriately frightening, unconquerable and grandiose. To be frank, Super-Skrull has been in more bad stories than good ones.

8. Steve Rogers

I say “Steve Rogers” instead of Captain America, because what is interesting about him isn’t his costume or powers, but who he is as a person: a sometimes flawed figure, a man of flesh and blood that has to live up to the awesome responsibility of being a living legend. He’s a larger than life, unconquerable leader with infinite experience and resolve…but only when everyone else is watching. When he’s by himself, he questions his actions, and is at times a very lonely, flawed, and dysfunctional person.

Captain America isn’t a shallow superpatriot as pop culture labels him. He was created at a time when the American dream, the American promise was threatened to be destroyed by outside forces (namely World War II). This means that after that conflict he’s had a much harder time because the country isn’t united anymore. What does it mean to be Captain America, a symbol for America?

BEST STORY: The single greatest Captain America story, the one that cuts right to the heart of his character, is the Englehart “Man Without a Country.” When cynics say that superheroes never really grow and change as characters, I’d point to this story to refute them: Steve Rogers was different at the start of the story than at the end. Like the political movie Bob Roberts, “Man Without A Country” is about how America can be manipulated and misled politically by slick ad campaigns and publicity, a foe that Captain America is totally unequipped to fight, as he believes his record stands on its own. The one person that an honest man can’t really fight are liars. When Captain America discovers the head of the campaign to discredit him was a highly placed member of Washington (supposedly, Nixon) Captain America realizes how much America has changed and gone wrong, and rejects his role as standing in for America. In the final note, Captain America realizes that his role as Captain America is to protect America from all enemies – including domestic ones, that he stands for a vision of America instead of any specific government, and vows to be more aware from now on. “Man Without a Country” starts off with supervillains with ray guns, which makes the immersion into the real-life spirit of Watergate all the more shocking and surprising.

WORST STORY: Though it gave us the gift of Arnim Zola, it was really an unpleasant shock to go from Englehart’s Captain America stories, which explored how complicated he was as a character, to the rah-rah mindlessness and dumb action plots of the Jack Kirby Captain America, which could have been written for any other character and been the same. Brimming to the gills with excruciating dialogue, appalling out of character behaviors, and just plain weird nonsense like the Doughboy, these stories explain why in the seventies, Kirby was known as “Jack the Hack.”

7. The Black Panther

Cryptic, poker-faced, and always with a plan, the Panther is so supercompetent that he’s one of the few fictional characters where I find myself wishing I was him (along with Robert E. Howard’s puritan hero Solomon Kane). Dignified and regal, he speaks softly and never raises his voice. The Panther is a strong-willed, idealistic ruler, and for that reason he alienates nearly everyone because he insists on doing things his own way.

A lot has been made of the fact that the Panther is a black superhero, but unlike other black characters, like Luke Cage or Black Lightning, who appeal to black comic book readers out of identification with their experience, the solution to making the Panther interesting to a wider audience was to make him so darn cool that his appeal transcended race.

BEST STORY: Hands down, Christopher Priest’s run on Black Panther in the 1990s. These stories took the Panther seriously as a competent, intense strategist and superwarrior. They had the genius idea of making the Panther seem cryptic and remote by having the narrating character be the Panther’s CIA liason, an Alex P. Keaton-type young Republican that was the world’s whitest white guy. People read that book just to see what Everett K. Ross would say about it. A special mention should go to Jungle Action stories by Don MacGregor, which actually explored the Panther and his world for the first time and gave him the chops to be the kind of guy that can carry a book by himself.

(Incidentally, I’ve always wondered why Christopher Priest’s team book, the Crew, didn’t work out. I’ve come to the conclusion it was sold all wrong: because of the name, and because it’s Priest, it was labeled a “street” book, and if you’re not cool, coolness is a very threatening thing.)

WORST STORY: This particular dishonor has to go to the Jack Kirby issues of Black Panther. The Black Panther is a guest-star in his own stories, pushed aside in favor of dubious Kirby concepts that had nothing to do with the hero, like a secret society of evil collectors and the usual 1920s lost race business with a Samurai city with the secret of eternal life. Move along, nothing to see here. Everything about Reginald Hudlin’s Panther is insufferable. It’s also interesting to note that the Panther is wasted in the context of the Avengers. I can’t think of a single story where he did something something cool. I suppose it may be because the Panther is both a scientist and engineer as well as a costumed athlete. In the first, he’s on the team with characters like Hank Pym and Iron Man, and so he was never allowed to be distinctive with that skill suite…and the Avengers are choked to the gills with costumed athletes (Captain America, Hawkeye) so he was never allowed to be distinctive that way either.

6. The Joker

Lots of villains, like Magneto, Namor and Doctor Doom, are dramatic and powerful because their motives are easily understood and they are compelling because of their ability to create sympathy as well as revulsion.

The Joker is the exact opposite: he’s frightening and terrible because he’s absolutely crackers and his crimes only make sense to himself. He’s extremely remote from the audience and becomes very frightening for that reason. His sense of humor is psychotic and violent: he paint smiley faces on rocket-propelled grenades and uses joy buzzers that use murderous amounts of current. He becomes terrifying because of his irrational unpredictability.

The Joker is a master strategist just because of his insane randomness. Many of his stories are rather like Fu Manchu mysteries in that they involve Batman racing, in an almost futile manner, to stop a crime the Joker has announced.

BEST STORY: Steve Englehart’s “The Laughing Fish” is the blueprint for most modern Joker stories, including the Dark Knight movie. In it, the Joker figures if he puts his face on fish, he can patent them and get a cut of fish profits. When the Joker’s claim is refused because fish are a natural resource and can’t be copyrighted, he goes on a rampage and vows to kill unimportant clerks at the patent office.

WORST STORY: The Joker is an extraordinary character, but he is just plain overused. Any appearance where he’s just plain superfluous should go here.

More to come! Stay tuned for 5-1!

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

As a student of education and a former teacher, I frequently read children's books to understand them and their content.

...at least that's what I tell people that see me reading something like Phillip Pullman's I Was A Rat! at Starbucks. The truth is, I read them because I actually like young adult series.

I've always struggled to articulate exactly why I liked the young adult series Percy Jackson and the Olympians better than Harry Potter, and I didn't understand why until I saw the movie, and it left out everything that made PJ&O unique.

I really, really, really hate to be that guy that complains about how the book was better...since I love movies and I look forward to movie adaptations, so I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt. But I think it's appropriate in this case.

The truth is, it's painfully obvious Percy Jackson is based on the blueprint of Harry Potter. The difference is that the author of Percy Jackson, Rick Riordan, a western and mystery novelist, was already really experienced and came to write a Potter-esque series very much as his own man, with his own perspective.

(A caveat here: I read only the first two Harry Potter books on a flight to Athens. Amazingly, I have trouble remembering concrete things about them!)


The major difference between Percy Jackson and the Olympians and Harry Potter is in the villains. My biggest problem with Harry Potter is that your initial impression of every character turns out to ultimately be the correct one. Someone introduced as an evil asshole remains an evil asshole.

One of the most complicated and interesting characters in Percy Jackson and the Olympians is Clarisse - a major character that was cut out of the movie entirely - and not just in that her scenes were cut, but that her role was given to other characters. We're introduced to Clarisse as Percy's rival at camp. She wears flannel, loves to armwrestle boys, and listens to speed metal at a loud volume. She's a bully and a brute with a sadistic streak.

Later on, we learn that Clarisse is the daughter of Ares, god of war - and he was physically abusive, insanely exacting as to what kind of toughness and strength he expected from his children, and withheld love unless his children were successful. Suddenly, Clarisse went from being a bully you hated to being a person. You understood why she was the way she was, and she became complex and sympathetic. Clarisse was by far my favorite character in the series for that reason.

Likewise, Hades, god of the underworld, was presented as a very interesting character. He was creepy and weird, but was not evil: he was a very overworked person who was very good at a job that he hates. The story leads you to believe that Hades is responsible for the theft of Zeus's master bolt so as to cause war between Zeus and Poseidon. In the book, it is something of a surprise to see Hades wasn't responsible. The film version portrays Hades as a straight-up villain - which not only eliminates one of the strongest unexpected reversals of the story, but also paints a complex character a deep shade of black.

That leads me to the greatest problem with the movie version: the plot went on these weird, un-needed divergences.

When the film versions of intricately plotted books like James Clavell's Tai-Pan or Herbert's Dune cut out side plots or side characters, you're inclined to give the film version some slack because of how complicated and hard to film the book is. Likewise, with superhero movies, it's understandable if changes are made to the original comic book story because of how hard it is to streamline a character's history into something with an information density as low as a movie.

This is the exact opposite situation of The Lightning Thief, a book that has an extremely clear, linear, easy to follow, impossible to screw up "A then B then C then D" plot. Translating this plot to screen ought to have been a cinch.

Amazingly, they screwed up the absolutely easiest thing about bringing a book like The Lightning Thief to screen: the progression of events in the story, how one event leads to another - the plot, in other words. I still can't believe it!

In the book, Percy Jackson is believed to have stolen Zeus's lightning bolt (a weapon with the power of hundreds of hydrogen bombs) on behalf of his father, who turns out to be Poseidon, who is Zeus's brother and rival. To clear his name and prevent universal armageddon that would destroy Western Civilization, Percy Jackson has to head to the underworld (hidden, amusingly enough, under Los Angeles) in order to get the bolt back from Hades. Because Zeus hates Percy and believes he's the thief, flying is an extremely unwise course of action, so Percy and his sidekicks have to hoof it across country in road-trip fashion, where they run into dangers and monsters all over America.

What is so unclear about this story, that there needs to be this weird detour with magical power pearls and the goddess Persephone?

The second characteristic that I believe separates Percy Jackson and the Olympians from Harry Potter is the irreverent sense of humor, this weird juxtaposition between Ancient Greek and modern things. There was really only one scene in the movie that actually captured the humor of the books: Percy Jackson has to kill Medusa by looking at her reflection on the back of an iPod. In the books, Harpies are described as "bird women with faces like evil cafeteria ladies." The summer camp director was a punished Dionysos, who was portrayed as a Hawaiian shirt wearing sleazeball. The humor wasn't there in the movie...it was all played so straight.

A lot of the humor in the book series came from "Star Trek Three" jokes. By that I mean, in Star Trek, to remind you that you were in the future, they list two ordinary things and a third weird one. For instance, "Great scientists like Newton, Einstein, and Surak." Or "Evil tyrants like Napoleon, Hitler, and Khan Singh." The central idea behind the world of Percy Jackson and the Olympians is that, as Western Civilization never died, the gods of Greece present at its birth never did either, and so they follow the West wherever it goes. As, like it or not, America is the center of the Western World right now, the gods live in the United States - Mt. Olympus is the 500th Floor of the Empire State Building. Because of this unbroken chain of mythic heroes to the present, a lot of humor comes from "Star Trek Three" jokes. As in, "there have been lots of female heroes, like Atalanta, Medea, and Harriet Tubman."

Something wildly imaginative as Camp Half-Blood felt cheap and small. In the books it was wondrous and weird, a summer camp with orange t-shirts that you practiced riding winged horses and climbed a wall that periodically sprayed lava down at you, where if you were caught late at night, the harpies would devour you alive. Here, it felt small and very Greco-Roman: people wear cheeseball leather armor right out of a Sam Raimi series. I can understand why they didn't devote any screen-time to background characters like Silena Beauregard, Ethan Nakamura, the Stoll Brothers or Charlie Beckendorf...but not even to put them in the background was typical of a bigger problem, how small and unambitious the world of the adaptation felt. The movie feels cheap and low-budget.

What I find surprising is that the story was made self-contained, like they knew they weren't going to make much money and get a sequel. This results in the removal of very important plot details: the search for the vanished god Pan, and shockingly of all...the central villain of the entire series (the Titan God Kronos, Lord of Time) wasn't even mentioned in the movie. In fact, they deliberately rewrote the story to exclude him entirely. I couldn't even believe it, that's like doing a Harry Potter movie without mentioning Voldemort.

One of the most astonishing things that was eliminated was the prophecy: by age 16, one of the children of the Big Three gods (Zeus, Poseidon and Hades) would make a choice to end or continue the reign of the gods, and for this reason, all three refused to have any more mortal children. This is a shocking omission because it explains why Percy Jackson was the obvious suspect as the Lightning Thief. As it is, the finished film never explains why Percy was even suspected at all, and it unintentionally makes Zeus look Ivan-the-Terrible style paranoid.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a book report on Julie of the Wolves. The amazing part is, I had only read half of the book. So, while writing the book report, I decided to make up the entire back half of the plot. The amazing thing was, I actually got an A! Now that I've experienced education from the other side, I understand why: reading 120 identical book reports is a recipe for a nervous breakdown, so if it looks right and is from a known smart kid, there's no need to scrutinize it that heavily if the first few pages look right. (I take my job seriously, so I don't do this. But I can see why others would.)

The movie version of Percy Jackson, ultimately, feels a lot like my sixth grade book report. It feels like they read half of the book and made up the entire second half. For this reason, things that only have a payoff in the end are omitted entirely or used in bizarre ways, like the flying shoes.

I suppose I should end by saying what they did right. The first was the character of Percy Jackson himself. The actor was spot-on as Percy Jackson, a sarcastic chronic underachiever, underdog and outsider. Percy Jackson himself is yet another reason I like this book better than Harry Potter: he felt a lot like real kids, a dyslexic ADHD sufferer labeled a troublemaker, who is easily given up on by teachers that just don't care. The second thing I liked was the casting choice of Sean Bean as Zeus. He was awesome as ever - he plays and approaches scenes in a way that means asking, "how can I do this differently?" For instance, in the scene where he threatens Poseidon with war in the beginning, he plays Zeus as vulnerable and afraid instead of with braggadocio and godly overconfidence.

Avatar, Fringe, and the Pulps

“Do not duplicate the masters, but seek what they sought.”

- Basho

My review of both "Avatar" and "Fringe" is linked by a single thread: if something was truly done in the true style and spirit of pulp fiction, it would be absolutely unrecognizable as “pulp” unless you really look deeply.

Things that duplicate the accoutrements of pulp – slouched fedoras, wisecracking private dicks, leggy dames, (and on the pulp science fiction side of the fence) water-cooler robots, Ming the Merciless style bwa-ha-ha Saturday afternoon serial foes, (and on the hero pulp side of the fence) over the top doomsday devices and square jawed he-men – if these were done today they’d be camp, a joke…it would compromise the very sincerity, the very real seriousness that is the strongest element of the true pulps. Something that takes pulp seriously wouldn’t have these elements, so it would be hard to identify them as truly in the pulp spirit.

Here’s the extraordinary thing about pulps I don’t think people realize: 1) they were very state of the art to the point where viewing the most crucial thing about them as period anachronisms does them a disservice; and 2) unlike with the comics, there was an emphasis on plausibility. Doc Savage’s world was exaggerated and “bigger than life,” but most of his stories could have really happened. It’s easy to get a cheap chuckle out of the sheer ludicrousness Doc Savage defeating a polar bear with his bare fists (at least if you hear about it out of context), and forget that The Polar Treasure actually explained how he could do it in a way that made me go, “a-ha! That…actually makes sense. That could happen in real life.” What’s more, it’s worth pointing out that all of Doc Savage’s gadgets…all of them…either existed at the time the stories were written, or came into existence 10-20 years later. I minored in Geology, and after reading “The Man Who Shook the Earth,” I really wonder why that earthshaking device didn’t work in reality.

Even the Shadow, easily the most over the top and weird of the pulp heroes, had extremely subtle, muted abilities, to the point that (and I know how this flies in the face of common wisdom but I’m being dead serious here) I have never been entirely, 100% convinced that the Shadow even had any real powers at all. Some of his abilities were pretty weird, but the most interesting thing about the Shadow is how opaque he is to the reader, and so this gives everything he does some ambiguity. Ordinary hypnotism, gadgetry, sleight of hand and stage magic may do just as well to explain his headscratching feats. After all, there are some people that think David Blaine and Houdini had real powers.

This is why I think a lot of efforts to reproduce the pulps have been monstrously insincere. Too much attention has been paid to making worlds that look like Frank R. Paul Amazing Stories covers, and too little attention has been paid to the crucial fact that what was important here wasn’t the design sense, but that people actually thought this is what the future would really be like. Wouldn’t it be more in the spirit of the science fiction pulps and their sense of wonder to try to honestly conjecture what the future would really be like based on state of the art information we have now, and it would violate their spirit to just copy the pulps’ outdated penis-rocket designs for nostalgia purposes?

A while back, I was a member of an internet forum about Pre-Crisis Superman comics, a character that I have always been a fan of. Here’s the link, since they were cool enough to link to my blog. The major reason I eventually stopped posting there was because of the creeping realization that what defined Pre-Crisis Superman for these people wasn’t a certain style of storytelling, characterization or continuity, but superficial, nostalgic irrelevancies – unimportant and at times embarrassing elements they defend to the death. Why? Because for them, Superman is in fact, all about the wrapping paper, not the package: Super-Pets, and goofy duels between Superman and Hercules for the hand of Lois Lane.

(Dave - I know you read this, and I don't mean you, because of your capacity for critical thinking.)

I didn’t get the appeal of barely-there non-elements like Beppo the Super-Monkey, embraced by others for the same smarmy reason fans of the 80s decade get misty-eyed about the “Superbowl Shuffle,” so consequently there was an extremely unfair attitude that I failed the purity test and therefore did not "really" like Pre-Crisis Superman. (That, and the fact I'm really not crazy about Al Plastino.) What I think was wonderful about the first Superman film, and what made it so groundbreaking, is that that movie was totally convinced it could happen. The first line in the film was, intentionally, “this is no fantasy.” The tagline was “You will believe a man can fly.”

Incidentally, I also expect to have someone say that since I don't care for rockets shaped like dicks or Ming the Merciless, that I'm not a "real" pulp science fiction fan either.

With the science fiction pulps, only the bad stories were formulaic. When we think of pulp science fiction, we think of the same wish-fulfillment John Carter of Mars/Flash Gordon story over and over. In fact, the science fiction pulps were very innovative and unpredictable. Take A. Bertram Chandler’s “Giant Killer,” published in 1945. You don’t realize at first that the story is told from the perspective of rats inside a spaceship that have acquired intelligence. Then you have arguably the greatest novel of the Golden Age, Jack Williamson’s “Humanoids,” which is all the more frightening because the evil robots actually win in the end – no comfortable, cheeseball Hollywood victory here. My favorite science fiction novel of all time, A. E. van Vogt’s 1940 “Slan,” did have a lot in common with the traditional yarn about the Wesley Crusher-esque boy genius that saved the day with gadgets, but it is still read today because it is an anti-prejudice story told from the perspective of a persecuted outsider. Who the hell today reads formulaic tripe like Gernsback’s “Ralph 124C41+?” Even the Lensmen, at one point considered the greatest science fiction serial of all time, have been mostly forgotten!

The ultimate point here is this: if the pulp spirit is innovation, wouldn’t it (ironically) kill that spirit, to try and excruciatingly duplicate the typical pulp clichés like the wisecracking two-fisted scientist and the breathtakingly beautiful native Chieftain’s Daughter?

Here’s the thing I think needs to be remembered about things that drew on the movie serials: Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark were actually nothing at all like the Saturday afternoon serials. They made an effort to create unique and fleshed out characters, tell unique stories, and they strove to be unpredictable as much as possible. The Star Wars universe was made with the thought it could actually exist. They were hardly throwback or “retro” projects. There was a sincerity behind them that wasn’t found in other serial-inspired work, and there is a reason “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” is nowhere near as beloved as “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Nostalgia is the enemy of real creativity.

All of this (finally!) brings me to Avatar and Fringe.

“Fringe” is a pulp series and nobody even knows it – it eschews the fedoras for the things that actually made the pulps “pulp.” The first episode begins with a horrifying and mysteriously unexplained infection on an airplane that turns people into fleshless skeletons. This, by the way, is the beginning of something like 30 Doc Savage novels. Fringe is about G-Men, the most pulp of all professions, who investigate cases of science misuse so lurid and horrific I keep expecting the Spider to pop up somewhere. “Fringe” goes for bleeding-edge science developments to justify their unusual cases, another example of the pulp era’s main tools to suspend disbelief: cutting-edge technology and the appeal to plausibility. One of the main characters is a mad scientist, another pulp staple, but in the tradition of the pulps, who tried to be innovative, the series shows what a real-life mad scientist would actually be like.

“Avatar” excited me because James Cameron obviously read the same science fiction I did and was inspired by very much the same things. This is John Carter of Mars, but a story that ditched the reactionary and backward attitudes and actually embraced a conscience. It embraced scientific plausibility and actually gave an explanation for why giant flying monsters are possible (short answer: low gravity and a thick atmosphere) and created a realistic ecosystem. It’s the smartest science movie since “Jurassic Park.” The irony here is that when they actually do make “John Carter of Mars,” people are going to say what a rip off it is of Avatar!

At the end of the day, the pulp tradition is alive and well: not as fossilized and ossified “retro” or nostalgic material, but as a living, breathing thing that continually adapts and changes to its environment and context. Changing to one’s environment doesn’t destroy pulp: it IS pulp and always has been.

Candlelit Vigils, "Help For Haiti"

On the FIU campus Wednesday night there was a candlelit vigil and rally for the charity "Help for Haiti," to show our solidarity with the victims of this horrific disaster and collect canned foods and other things. This makes sense, since this state has the highest percentage of Haitian-born and Haitian-American students.

There was a part where a lot of students were asked to come up and give their stories about what happened, which really puts a human face on a numbing statistic like an estimated 150,000 person death toll. For instance, lots of students came up and talked about people in their immediate families that had suffered. One young man talked about his cousin, a pretty 19 year old girl, that lost both of her legs. Another mentioned how his sister wept because it had been two days since she last heard from her fiancee, who was now considered legally dead.

There were many stories of survival, too. One girl talked about how terrified she was to have seen the president's house collapse, because her mother was a teacher only three blocks away. Apparently the mother was lucky enough to survive, but over 250 students and teachers in the school were crushed to death.

One of the funnier parts of the candle-lit vigil was a Colombian speaker that looked a little like a Latin American version of the Nazi villain from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and dressed like him too, tiny glasses and hat and all. The Haitian students were delighted to hear this unlikely person bust into the most perfect Creole, since apparently the Colombian lived in Haiti for a couple years. I only know enough French to figure out he said something about how great Haitian food is.

Through it all, I was amazed to find that not a single person there of Haitian descent gave into despair. Even those that talked about the horrifying losses of their loved ones talked about how they refused to consider the country wrecked or licked, that they had the whole human race's fundamental goodness on their side. By contrast, a few days after 9/11, I was in a delirious, fearful daze, as were most people I knew.

To see them this upbeat and unconquered so soon after a disaster on a much more horrifying scale was an incredibly admirable sight. I was very, very proud of the Haitian people that night.

The single most moving thing of the entire night was one girl that started to sing Amazing Grace (there were a lot of religious songs and spirituals, which have the usual effect of making me enormously uncomfortable). Halfway through the song, she started to break down and cry and couldn't continue.

Then, spontaneously, everyone in attendance (myself included) started to sing the rest of the song together in unison.

If you've got anything to give, please, try these charities:

http://clintonbushhaitifund.org/

American Red Cross Disaster Relief

Doctors Without Borders

Hope for Haiti

FIU For Haiti

Count Danté, "The Deadliest Man Alive"

Here's an ad from one of my martial arts comic books. If anything in this world is a responsible course of action, it would be teaching kids that like superheroes THE WORLD'S MOST DEADLY FIGHTING ART.

But let the ad speak for itself:

Yes, this is the DEADLIEST and most TERRIFYING fighting art known to man—and WITHOUT EQUAL. Its MAIMING, MUTILATING, DISFIGURING, PARALYZING and CRIPPLING techniques are known by only a few people in the world. An expert at DIM MAK could easily kill many Judo, Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, and Gung Fu experts at one time with only finger-tip pressure using his murderous POISON HAND WEAPONS. Instructing you step by step thru each move in this manual is none other than COUNT DANTE—“THE DEADLIEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED.” (THE CROWN PRINCE OF DEATH.)

Not to mention that "The Black Dragon Fighting Society brings you the forbidden secrets of Dim Mak "The Death Touch" in this exclusive book!"

Count Juan Rafael Danté promoted himself heavily in ads in the back of comics as "The Deadliest Man Alive." Nothing like giving yourself a nickname. Best of all? If you send away for the course, you get a free membership card in the Black Dragon Society!

As a final bit of trivia, supposedly the asshole sensei villain in the first Karate Kid movie was based on Count Danté.

Oreo Barbie

I for one, love the Oreo Barbie doll for the multiple levels of unintentional humor, especially since most black Barbies always look like shallow upper-middle-class, materialism-minded BAPs anyway.

For a bit of background: a Caucasian Barbie was sold as a tie-in promotion to Oreo cookies (these crosspromotions are relatively common - remember Pepsi Optimus Prime?), and it sold so well that they decided to do a black version of the same doll. And apparently nobody stood up and said this was the most terrible idea in history.

I swear, Mattel must have the most hilariously clueless people on the face of the earth, like every level is staffed and headed by Larry David. It's like almost everything they do ends up either unintentionally offensive or a camp classic, like the George Michael looking "earring Ken" that is a top seller in the gay community. This sort of thing keeps on happening over and over, mostly when they try to make an effort to be "understanding." For instance, remember Barbie's friend Share-A-Smile Becky, a doll that had a pink wheelchair? The best part was that Share-A-Smile Becky's wheelchair didn't fit inside Barbie's dream house.

I had a friend that did a semester of study at the Mattel accounting office, and those of us in my college clique were thrilled to hear his stories about that workplace. The company that make Barbie really does have a hilariously reactionary, regressive and paranoid corporate culture. The office is like a throwback to the 1950s: it has a fully stocked bar, and sexual harassment was rampant. Minorities aren't exactly overrepresented, either...this is one of those situations where if only one black person had pointed out that a black Oreo Cookie Barbie was a terrible idea, the idea might have stopped before it got too out of hand.

Coming out of this climate, it's no surprise they keep on putting their foot in their mouths.

Places Where Liberals Are Wrong

Though I make no secret of the way I vote, there are some places where the Left is in the wrong.

Israel

Israel is a Western-style democracy with no official religion (check the constitution, it's there) populated by the most persecuted minority in human history, who finally have a homeland to protect themselves from future genocides. Israel is absolutely morally superior to the theocratic oligarchies that perpetuate themselves and distract from domestic problems by creating a scapegoat in Israel. There isn't a moral equivalency between Israel and its Arab foes.

One of the great flaws in thinking is the "Moderator Fallacy." That is, marriage counselors often operate from the assumption that if a couple is having a disagreement, both must be at least to blame and the truth is somewhere in the middle. In reality, with most personal disagreements and disputes, usually one person is 80% to 100% responsible.

Israel is one of the great success stories in human history. They quite literally made the desert bloom. To be fair, Israel is not a perfect society by any means...the power over which non-secular authorities have powers in specific, limited spheres is shocking, for example, the way clerics have power over a social function like marriage. Likewise, Israel's Arab minority are often discriminated against and used for cheap labor. But these social problems do not legitimize the right of Israel to exist any more than the US's social problems delegitimize us.

Gun Control

Obviously the United States is a violent society, but the truth is, guns aren't the problem and removing guns won't cure the problem.

The problem with the United States is that we are a society of fear and anxiety. I am offended by violent crime as much as anyone else, and by terrorism and random shootings, but the idea we are living in an exaggerated state of danger that requires firearms or at least a pair of trusty Nunchaku constantly is just insane. Why do people feel the need to own or carry firearms? As someone that worked for the public High Schools for at least a year as a math instructor in what could be considered a lower socioeconomic area, I never was robbed or stabbed. And frankly, if nobody wants to stab a math teacher...things are probably pretty safe for everyone else! Americans - especially suburban white Americans - are just not aware of the reality of this experience.

I had something of an ephiphany when I understood the difference between conservative television figureheads Bill O'Reilly and Glen Beck. O'Reilly is the sort of person that conservatives respond to when they're in power: swaggering, domaneering, authoritarian. Beck is the sort of person conservatives are when outside of power: panicky, terrified, prone to overreaction and seeing conspiracies absolutely everywhere. No wonder there are guns everywhere: the right's gone into "Glen Beck mode."

The point is, this is a problem so deep in the American psyche that restricting or legislating guns just won't solve.

2009: Year In Review

This was an especially productive year for me in several ways, which is interesting.

There were a few setbacks - for instance, the Peace Corps were entirely too full. It's strange because the week I was told this, I watched a TV news report in Gainesville how, with the current recession, the number of applications for the Peace Corps among young professionals had jumped by 60% in the past months. I damn near had a heart attack!

But that was short lived, as it always pays to have a backup plan: my application to graduate school at Florida State came through over the summer. (That reminds me, I have to swap out the buttons...)

I'm right now in my second semester getting a Masters of Information Science with a concentration in Web Design and Database Management. I may, after giving the matter some thought, switch to the School Librarian track, to create some synergy with my educational certification.

In further news, I am proud to announce that I have lost, at present, over 45 pounds since August. As an undergraduate and in the working world, I did gain some weight...a result of bad sleep schedules and studying and so on. But now that I'm a little freer now, I've been able to exercise and cook for myself and enjoy salads.

One of my resolutions was to get under 200 pounds again by the end of the year, which was achieved recently (not so bad for a 5'11" guy like me). This is just the beginning of course.

Finally, my good friend Mark Romero and I have been talking about writing some open license adventure books for his roleplaying game company, Fahrenheit Games. I actually am not entirely sure what I can say here, except keep watch!

There's something else on the horizon...something big...but no need to jinx it by mentioning it here early. Stay tuned!

2009 Year in Pictures

This one's from Halloween, where, as always, I went as Galileo. My posse at the time, which included Brian Sippin (now there's a name that turns up in Google!) and Mel Austin headed to Cocowalk around midnight. When Florida sinks into the sea in the future, we'll always be able to say we saw Miami at the height of its Romanesque debaucheries.


This is from Amy and Mark Romero's engagement party in the middle of December. People of our generation are already starting to get married. Now there's a scary thought...


Would you let these people run your country?

Where there's a whip, there's a way

I've been rereading "Lord of the Rings" over the past week or so, and something occurred to me that I don't think anybody else has ever talked about. I had just finished the chapter at the beginning of "The Two Towers" were Merry and Pippin were taken prisoner by the mixed band of Isengard and Mordor Orcs.

To me at least, the Orcs are easily the most likeable race on Middle-Earth. Their dialogue is snappy, punchy and to the point, and they have a lot of humor. When the Orcs complain about having to move through sunlight, their leader urges them with, "oh, don't worry, you'll move fast enough with me behind you." There's another sequence where one of them asks if they should stop to rest while in the territory of the Riders of Rohan, and one of them says, "Oh, of course! Then let's invite those cursed horse-boys to a picnic afterward, while we're at it?"

After all the rhymed poetry and poncy speeches...someone actually used sarcasm in "Lord of the Rings!" It was such a breath of fresh air. Maybe the reason I respond so well to the Orcs is because they sound so American. It's interesting how in Hollywood, an English accent adds to your villainy, whereas Brits make their evil forces sound and talk like Yanks.

Anyway, it's hard not to find amusing a song like "Where there's a whip, there's a way."



The Orcs are tough, skinny and capable of sudden, stabby violence for very little reason. They remind me a little of the Nazi villains from "Inglorious Basterds," who were werewolves in human form.


Incidentally, speaking of Rohan, you know who Peter Jackson originally wanted for Eowyn? Allison Doody, best known as the Nazi double-agent from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. If you were to ask me what her nationality is, the list would be very, very, very long before it gets anywhere near Irish.

I don't know the circumstances, but shoot...if you look like that, and you can't get a part as a Scandinavian warrior princess, it's time to give up acting forever.

The one and only thing that I think Peter Jackson's otherwise extraordinary film version did wrong was that it explicitly made a character as grandiose and terrible as Saruman a mere puppet of Sauron. Saruman and Isengard was more like a very dangerous third factor at play, a second deadly enemy that wanted the power of the Ring for himself, who, perhaps because the characters actually interacted with him, was actually a more dangerous and interesting figure than even the otherwise dull Big Bad Sauron himself. Saruman was the closest these movies got to a "Doctor Doom."

As a consequence, some scenes just don't make sense. For instance, in the book version of Fellowship, when Saruman offers to use the One Ring together with Gandalf, that "together we can be the Lords of the Ring," Gandalf rebuffs him by saying "there can be only one Lord of the Rings, and he would not share power" (referring to the innate evil, jealousy and corruption of the Ring that makes it impossible for more than one to possess it).

Steve Gerber Loves Cubans

The only time most North Americans think about Cubans or Cuban Americans is if they like cigars or baseball, so it's something of a rarity to see Miami or Cuban culture portrayed in the broader culture...usually by Miami novelists like Dave Barry (who has a Cuban wife) or Carl Hiaasen. Hiaasen must look so weird and surrealistic to people from other parts of the country, but yes, Miami really is like that. I think that may be why film versions of Hiaasen's stuff are such creative disasters, notably Striptease.

I am constantly surprised by Dave Barry's national popularity, especially since his humor is of such a local character that I have trouble understanding why other people "get it."

It's even more fascinating to see Miami and Cuban-Americans in adventure comics. The one and only exception is Steve Gerber, who if his work is anything to go by, is as interested in Cuban culture as much as Englehart was interested in Native American stuff.

Steve Gerber created El Gato, the mind-control villain of Omega the Unknown #4-5, as a brujo of Santeria - explicitly stated in those very terms. Gerber didn't exactly do his homework on Santeria: for instance, brujo is a term most Santeria practicioners consider denigrating, though it may be possible El Gato called himself that out of self-conscious irony. Likewise, animal totemism is as out of place in Santeria as Norse runes are. Black cats are traditionally used for sacrifice to the Orishas, though, which is why a lot of civic ordinances in (where else?) Hialeah had to be removed to make it possible. Jesus Christ, only in Hialeah.

It's worth noting that this is light-years ahead of how embarassingly Hollywood Gerber portrayed Voodoo in Tales of the Zombie.

When Gerber, arguably adventure comics's greatest writer alongside Englehart, died painfully and senselessly last year, no one mentioned that Gerber created superhero comics's first and to date only mainstream Cuban-American superhero, Poison, in Web of Spider Man Annual #4.

Poison was one of those supernatural horror characters Gerber loved to write, ever since his time on Man-Thing. If the two Steves had a weakness, it was their embarassing fascination with the supernatural, something more obvious with Englehart than Gerber. Stainless was fascinated by acid, astrology, and Native Americans to the point it verged on sheer Cherhonkeeism.

To Gerber's credit, Poison made a superpower as traditional as flying seem new: she didn't soar or swoop but instead eerily levitated while standing up, Exorcist-style.

Poison's origin was that she was in the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, immortalized by Brian de Palma's Scarface. Amusingly, she was rescued at sea when her boat sank in a way that was creepily reminiscent of the weird folklore that later came up around Elian Gonzalez, who was saved by either the Orisha Yemaya-Olokun, or dolphins, or both.

She is also one of the few single mother heroines I can think of, the other being the title hero's girlfriend in Star-Brand. I was always amused that this bit of male chauvanism was never pointed out by the always-wrong "grrrrls" at Women in Refrigerators, the absence of single mothers. Ask any guy you like: the one great unjust prejudice in the dating world isn't against age or weight but against women that already have kids.

Poison showed up in a Web of Spider-Man annual set in Miami, during the eighties, the cocaine cowboy days when this sleazy, corrupt, decadent and compelling town brought in a trillion dollars of drug money...yes, you read that right, a trillion, not a typo. The villain of the piece was a grotesque Miami druglord called the Slug, who was so fat that he executed people by choking them in the folds of his body.

The Female of the Species is Worse Than the Male

When it comes to science fiction fans, the female of the species is far more irritating than the male, and the website Fandom Secrets proves it.

Visit it here. Work-unsafe and sanity-unsafe.

From the sexual fixation with Doctor Who and Heath Ledger's Joker, the worst element has to be the hot man-on-man action. Not because gay stuff is icky, but because of the irritating insistence on out of character pairings.

As weird as fanboys can be sometimes, at least most will admit to wanting a good old fashoined shag with Jessica Rabbit or Talia from Batman comics. Fangirls, though? They're often too hypocritical to admit sexual desire. The way they idealize their objects of affection to a crazy degree gets under my skin. I had the experience of meeting one girl that insisted that "Jason Behr from Roswell doesn't smoke!" (He does.)

If you've ever been a guy that wanted a girl that could talk with you about Dungeons and Dragons, Tron, or the collected works of L. Sprague de Camp, this sort of website will sharply disabuse you of that notion forever. "Fandom Secrets" performs the valid public service of scaring men straight into (once again) dating shallow, bosomy blondes that like John Hughes movies.

I will admit, there is one that actually did catch my eye as being quite wonderful and charming:

Science Fiction Roundup: Eando Binder's Adam Link Stories

Asimov has the bad luck of two works that have titles similar to others: John W. Campbell wrote his story "Nightfall" years before Asimov, and the title for Asimov's anthology of robot stories was chosen by a publisher in 1950, unaware that a work had already been written with that title back in 1939 by the Binder brothers, Earl and Otto. The name they used together was the essence of compromise: a solution that leaves no one happy that results in an extremely fake-sounding name.

"I. ROBOT" is an illustration of two things:

1) Yes, there were differences between the "scientifiction" pulps, which were not all a giant undifferentiated mass of robots and rayguns as people unaware of science fiction seem to think;

2) In every brother writing team, there was always one with the disproportionate part of the talent, that carried their collaborations.

The three short stories that make up the I, ROBOT collections were written just before the 1939 cutoff point of the collaboration between the brothers, where Otto took over writing full time and Earl became his literary agent.

The story is extraordinary for its time as it has a robot as a main character as opposed to just a monster or wisecracking sidekick.The titular character Adam Link is a robot built by a scientist and like van Vogt's Slan, the theme of the stories is prejudice. Adam Link terrifies his creator's housekeeper the instant she got sight of him, and after his creator is killed by accident by a falling object, she assumes Adam Link is responsible. Adam flees for his life, a murder rap on his head and armed gunmen on his trail. When they see the "monster," they shoot to kill. They murder Dr. Link's dog, which provokes Adam and makes him use his great strength. Adam starts to discover the hysterical prejudice against him when he finds the scientist's copy of Frankenstein, which was hidden away from him.

Of course, it doesn't end there: Adam gets his day in court, naturally, where in shades of Data in "Measure of a Man," argues for his sentience and status as a living being. (This short story, "The Trial of Adam Link" was incidentally, modified to be an episode of the Outer Limits.)

Like the Slans or perhaps the X-Men, Adam Link is strange but special, an angry, misunderstood outsider. What I think is especially interesting about the Adam Link stories was that Adam Link was in fact, very frightening. Every time the story makes you get on Adam Link's side and tut-tut the people in Binder's stories for being hysterically afraid of a robot, Adam Link does something shockingly savage and with incredible strength that shows just how frightening a machine with his physical power would be. There is nothing similar in the Binder brothers' stories to the Three Laws of Robotics, and Adam Link is capable of murder, something he debated many times to preserve his liberty. In short, even though you were on Adam's side you were never really comfortable around him.

It's easy to blame Otto Binder becoming the sole writer for the subsequent post-1940 decline of the Adam Link stories...and I will! Just take a look at these b-movie titles:

Adam Link, Champion Athlete
Adam Link, Robot Detective
Adam Link Saves the World

...and it just gets worse from there. I never thought I'd get nostalgic for Breastica, Amazon from the Naked Future.

The younger Binder brother, Otto, when working alone, gave Adam Link a wife and family. Adam's wife's name was - and prepare to be totally blindsided here - Eve. The absolute worst was Adam Link Goes to War, which features Adam against the Sirius Confederation. It's a commonality of writers hacking out material that they turn what ought to be a great premise into a dull one. Just like ERB turned the unbelievably cool-sounding Tarzan and the Leopard Men into a stale story involving the antics of a funny monkey mistaken for a god, Adam Link Goes to War was a concept that was unfuckupable: just have Adam Link flip tanks over, baby! And what's more, there's some juicy potential inner conflict there with Adam as well: Adam is a pacifist, but are there circumstances where it is moral to wage war and take life?

The defining angst and alienation of Adam Link was replaced by goofy gimmickry, robot kids, and a robot dog (which makes as much sense as it sounds like it does), and it's no coincidence that this creaky, sitcom means of creating "zany" plots ("Who ever heard of a robot playing soccer?" Oh, Otto, you nut, you) began as soon as Earl left to become Otto's literary agent, which is like George Harrison and John Lennon leaving the Beatles to design the band's posters. Incidentally, Otto Binder would, two decades later, export this hideous model of a superhero family over to Superman and ruin him for an entire generation, before Julie Schwartz came on and his stable of competent writers treated the humiliating Weisenger Era as an aberrant hallucination.

The first work I ever read by Binder were several fill-in stories during the exemplary Jim Shooter and Curt Swan run on Adventure Comics. More than anything else, the younger Binder brother struck me as...well, sad. The contrast could not have been greater between Jim Shooter's rebellious, characterization-centered stories with huge stakes and the often trivial, irrelevant stories Binder told. The shocking part is that Binder was just doing what he always was doing - there's little difference between "The Eight Legged Legionnaire" and the stuff he did in the forties, when he had a top-selling comic. It was comics that changed, not Binder.

God, must it have been tough to have been utterly overshadowed by a fourteen year old kid like Jim Shooter! For this reason any feeling I have toward Otto's lesser Adam Link stories are tempered by pity and sympathy: Otto Binder was, towards the end, a sad old man that time passed by.

As easy as it is to blame Otto Binder for the terribleness of the later Adam Link stories, it has to be remembered he had an editor to satisfy who may partially bear the blame for them.

Amazing Stories, where all the Adam Link pulps were published, was the first scientifiction pulp magazine, created by Hugo Gernsback all the way back in 1926. However, by 1938 it had been bought by the Ziff Davis publishing company, who put Raymond Palmer, a diminutive hunchback, in the editor's chair.

Whereas John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction explored the human stories behind science and ushered in one of its peak periods, for the majority of SF's "golden age," Amazing Stories was downright peripheral, a holdover from a time when science fiction was about "sex and shooting," with lurid, naked covers. Few of the stories originally in Amazing Stories are reprinted today.

It's often forgotten, but Space Opera was originally a derogatory label, meant to distinguish the Campbell type science fiction from the Palmer type.

It was in this magazine that the Adam Link stories were originally published. So maybe it's editorial tinkering that led to the shark-jump.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Piltdown Man

A while back, I said that the magical view of the process of reason and investigation in Sherlock Holmes stories, were intimately connected to Sir Arthur’s own personal irrationality and incredulity, which led him to be suckered by one spiritualist after another.

Perhaps it comes from growing up in the photoshop generation, but I find it hard to believe anyone was ever convinced by something as silly as the Fairy pictures.

But if a few scientists and historians are right, Sir Arthur’s crimes against rationality may go a lot deeper than even I suspected. There is a hypothesis that Sir Arthur played a role in, and perhaps even masterminded one of the greatest scientific frauds in history!

The case of Piltdown Man is a great example of the self-correcting nature of science, in that a cunning fraud was eventually exposed. It’s also comforting proof that even experts can be bamboozled by a con-game. The reason Piltdown Man was as successful as it was, was because it gave paleoanthropologists exactly what they wanted (a humanlike skull with an apelike lower face) so they were all the more likely to fall for it because they wanted it to be true. Boule, for instance, theorized that a large braincase came before the loss of apelike dentition and jaws, so Piltdown Man met expectations perfectly.

In short, “Piltdown Man” was a skull of a prehuman discovered in 1916 at the Piltdown quarry that pushed a lot of smug self-congratulatory buttons because of the idea that the missing link might have been English (take that, France!). The fossil was everything scientists expected and then some: a human brain and noble brow with an apelike jaw. As the picture of human evolutionary history became more complete with the 1924 discovery of Australiopithecus Afarensis by Raymond Dart and more fragments of “Java Man” (Homo erectus) were found, Piltdown Man was pushed to one side, ignored, and thought by most reputable scientists to be a forgery after only a few years of its discovery. Eventually, Potassium-Argon dating resolved the matter for good and found that Piltdown was the skull of a normal human with the altered, filed jaw of an Orangutan, both of which were only a few decades old.

Boy, it must really have stuck in the English’s craw during those heady nationalist days: all the prehuman fossil remains were found in places like France, the Pyrenees, Austria, and Germany.

It also helped to sell the hoax that, at least in the 1920s, the picture of human evolution was woefully incomplete. As Creationists (another group of professional bullshit peddlers) would later discover, the secret to selling your weak scam is to lunge on an area that science knows very little about and make outrageous claims about it, like the idea the Cambrian fossil explosion was miraculous and happened overnight. Likewise, Piltdown Man is another example of two other all-too-familiar bane to science: a sensationalist-seeking and scientifically illiterate press that overhypes and misrepresents a discovery, which results in an end-run around the traditional system of peer review.

A few scientists (like a John Winslow article in Science magazine) have floated the hypothesis that Sir Arthur played a role in the Piltdown Man fraud. He certainly had a motive: he was extremely bitter about science debunking his favorite psychic, and he often railed about how the scientific establishment didn’t know as much as they think they did, and pretty soon someone would show them up.

It helps that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the next door neighbor of Charles Dawson, the discoverer of Piltdown Man. And the very year that Piltdown Man was discovered, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Lost World, which contains a scene of scientists leaving a prank faked fossil for others to find. What’s more, Doyle was one of the few people in Britain that could have obtained a 500-600 year old Orangutan jawbone, and a few months prior to the discovery, Doyle’s personal museum had received an extensive gift of fossils from Malaysia.

Personally, I always found the idea Doyle pulled Piltdown Man to be an interesting idea, but the thought that anyone other than Charles Dawson did it was something of a stretch. It's hard to imagine even a single other suspect. In real life, as opposed to Sherlock Holmes stories, the person that did it is usually the MOST likely to have done so in almost all cases.

Star Trek: A Second Look

It occurs to me that the praise I heaped on the most recent Star Trek film was a little lavish, and that was due to my enthusiasm and excitement at seeing Star Trek on the big screen again. Likewise, I tend to like almost every movie the first time I see it. Like little kids, I’m just so darn thrilled to be at the movies that I like everything the first time I see it.

Because it was Star Trek, and because it was J.J. Abrams, who did incredible work with Lost and Cloverfield, I am a little embarrassed to say that, prior to ever seeing the film, I wanted to like it. At some level, I had an emotional investment in liking the film.

Now that the hoopla and excitement surrounding the film has gone away, and it seems Star Trek is back and here to stay, my personal enthusiasm has dimmed and I can look at the film a lot more objectively. First, let me be as clear as possible: the Star Trek movie wasn’t bad at all. It wasn’t a terrible film outright the way, say, Star Trek V was. I would not, however, call Star Trek one of the best of the Trek movies, and I’d put it in the same category as the “middle” Star Trek movies, like Star Trek III.


Incidentally, this is pretty similar to my reaction on seeing The Incredibles for the first time. I went into the theater wanting to like it. In fact, a few months after the movie came out, there was a list I wrote of all-time great superhero movies, and I very comfortably posted The Incredibles at the top of that list. Nowadays, of course, I’m a lot harder on the Incredibles and the flaws of that film are apparent to me. For example, I don’t find the main character, Mr. Incredible sympathetic because almost all of his problems are his own fault, of his own making. Consequently, moments based around sympathy for the character ring very, very hollow, like when Mr. Incredible believes his family was destroyed on a plane. And who’s fault was that, you ass? You lied to them for months and placed them in a lethal situation for a reason as selfish and childish as the desire to continue playing “Cowboys and Indians.”

As for Star Trek, there were some flaws, some of which were very, very large.

The biggest is the lack of an internal conflict. I remember when I saw Star Trek: First Contact, and as enjoyable a film as that was at times, it didn’t feel like a Next Generation film. The sight of Data and Picard packing giant laser rifles to blast Borg felt very wrong and out of character. All that movie needed to feel more wrong would be Picard strutting away in slow motion from an explosion. First Contact was all external and the internal conflict was something of an afterthought.

Regrettably, the newest film is very much like that. Watching Star Trek again, I realized I kept on waiting and waiting to learn what this movie was really about. A villain shows up and blows up planets and the crew must stop them. Is that it? Really?

The most troubling manifestation of this bigger problem, the lack of an inner conflict or character development, is shown with Captain Kirk. Kirk is the exact same character at the beginning of the film as he is at the end. He doesn’t grow, change or assume responsibility. When I first saw the film, the scene with Kirk stealing a car made him look like a rebel and a thrillseeker. I thought the reason this scene was included was because later on in the film we would see Kirk change into the person of responsibility that we know him to be. But alas, the movie didn’t go there.

The movie’s emphasis on action resulted in gratuitous scenes that just made no sense. For instance, the scene where they had to parachute to the mining drill. I understand the drill jams transporters, but why attack it with an away team at all? Couldn’t the Enterprise have just blasted the drill, as it ultimately ended up doing in the film’s last act?

Also, watching the Kobiyashi Maru was not as interesting as hearing about it. You never got the feeling this was a matter of pride for Kirk. In fact, he was just eating an apple casually.



The biggest, most major flaw was the villain, Nero. When I heard about him, I thought it was an exciting idea. Usually when we encounter Romulan villains, as in TNG, they are members of the secret police or military (the distinction between the two is vague, which tells you something about the Romulans right there) and Romulan stories tend to be games of chess, with move and countermove against a subtle, cryptic enemy that very seldom show their face (as seen in the three definitive Romulan episodes, “The Mind’s Eye,” “The Enemy,” and “The Defector”). The idea of a “working class” Romulan is just something we’ve never seen before.

But Nero’s motives are unclear and confusing. He destroys Vulcan and tries to destroy Earth for no good reason that I can detect. The destruction of Romulus was an accident, and Spock was trying to HELP the Romulans, so I don’t understand the bitterness toward the Federation, who weren’t even involved. The idea of Nero just waiting around for 25 years for Spock to show up from the time hole doesn’t ring true to me either. For one thing, what reason would they even have to think that Spock survived?

My mentor, novelist John Dufresne, often urged me to improve with this criticism: “Son, where’s the characterization? Is it out the window? Where? Cause it sure ain’t here!” I ask that of Nero. Where’s the characterization? Is it in the window? As I said, his motives don’t make any sense and he’s such a flimsy character.

(And this is such a minor fan complaint, but if Nero had a mining ship, why is it there were no Remans, the master miners of the Romulan Empire, on board? In fact, after seeing the deliberately dark interiors, I expected to see at least one or two.)

Finally, Simon Pegg’s Scotty got on my nerves. The standout member of the cast was Karl Urban as McCoy, who was just about perfect. But Simon Pegg’s Scotty was so different from the original, so obviously “movie comic relief” that he felt like a totally different character. Uhura was given a meatier role, but at least she was still recognizably Uhura.

I don’t like to go after techie scientific errors, but this one is a such a biggie I can’t wrap my head around it: Red Matter. I don’t understand how it works. Sometimes it destroys planets, but other times it creates portals to allow time travel, and it’s not clear when it does one, or when it does the other.

All in all, I hope this article, together with my previous one, give a more balanced view of a movie that was overall, not bad. It could have been a heck of a lot better, and hopefully all the errors that I have with this film will be fixed in the inevitable sequel.

Toffee is her name...

"Toffee was enough to make any man dizzy--without seeing her through X-ray eyes!"

A dull ad exec's literal "dream girl" who emerged from his subconscious full-grown and sprang to life, the various sexy and comedic Toffee short stories published in the sf pulp IMAGINATIVE TALES got the cover far more often than the works by writers like Ed Hamilton and even the Grandmaster himself, Robert Anton Heinlein.

More often, the Toffee stories were a type of "spicy" comedy, with clever rapid-fire dialogue and a type of ribald, daring humor. Surprisingly, they hold up well even today and still crackle with a breezy kind of sexy, playful fun. The wit of the Toffee stories is a credit to the diversity of the material published in science fiction mags. Read the complete collection of all eleven Toffee stories here on Google Books.

For FREE. Sure, you have to tolerate the occasional missing page, but man, I am really loving this Google Books service. Now dozens of full texts chock full of discredited 19th Century Hollow Earth theories are lovingly available to the approximately three people that will read them, of whom I am one. You know, I remember out of sheer boredom I wrote my name, full address (at the time) and dozens on dozens of analytical notes all over a "Lost Race" text, a 1978 reprint of a 1904 book called "Cast Away At the Pole." Periodically when visiting my library I go to see if anyone's written "back" in the book. So far, no dice.


The Toffee stories are worth reading for the main character, one of the more interesting science fiction women until the coming of Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon and Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars. Toffee was a brassy, wild, fun redhead, that lives life with gusto with an extroverted personality, playfully exhibitionistic, flirtatious with nearly every male she meets, but also incredibly vain and adores being the center of attention. She had a sweet disposition, until she was provoked and a scrappy temper emerges. She was willful, defiant and thoroughly endearing.

Best of all, Toffee was unpredictable. It was impossible to guess what wild thing she would do next. More than anyone else, she reminds me of "It Girl" Clara Bow. Still pictures never did justice to her energy and boldness, how she would just do things like jump on top of her boss's desk and lay herself out against it in the middle of an office scene, and it was obvious her behavior was just as much of a surprise to the other actors as it was to the audience.



Toffee came from the subconscious of the world's most uptight man, and seemed to live for getting him into trouble. She was living, walking trouble, and seemed custom-made to boldly upset conventions in what always seemed like an era as stiff, conformist and uptight as the main character. Toffee appears when needed and disappears only when her purpose is accomplished, which often ends with the main character going to prison or various patience-trying comical misunderstandings.

Toffee was (and I hate to use this term), feisty. When a nurse gets a little grabby, she actually bites him.

"You bit me!" The Intern wailed. "You bet I did! And next time you come groping around where I'm dressing with those great hammy paws of yours, I'll gnaw 'em off clear to the elbows!"
This was, naturally, after Toffee did one of her favorite activities, changing clothes in a public space. When Toffee got stares and was told she was indecent, she laughed and said, "Yes, I know!"

More than anything, the Toffee stories, like the television series Mad Men, features the go-go world of the fifties, back when Americans still had balls. Every office had a fully stocked bar and sexual harassment was rampant.This was the era of grotesque sloth like the three-martini lunch. The Toffee stories just took it for granted that a boss ought to have an affair with his attractive female secretary. In general, reading these office-humor centered stories feels often like visiting another planet. A cooler planet.

A.E. van Vogt's Slan

What's incredible about van Vogt's Slan is that unlike almost every single other work written during science fiction's golden age, it is still read (and cared about) today and periodically discovered by new fans. Take for instance Slan's page on Television Tropes and Idioms, or the fact that the basic plot of Slan was borrowed by the recent film, Ultraviolet with Mila Jovovich. In fact, while watching Ultraviolet, friends were astonished that I could make predictions about the events of the story. How did I know? "Well, that's what Slan did."

What's even more sensational is the fan-support that exists online. Check out the near encyclopedia-complete guide, "Slanology," available online from an eager-beaver fan who put an impressive amount of work into it, including detailed analysis of the Slan world, history and technology.

Part of the reason Slan is still read today is that it isn't about any of the other silly themes of the Golden Age. It isn't about a monster of some kind, like Theodore Sturgeon's Killdozer! It isn't about a Heinlein or DC Comics style cigar-chomping badass father figure that solves his problems with a dubious engineering concept.

Slan is a story about prejudice. In the distant future, Slans emerge, a race of humans with tendrils on the foreheads with greater intelligence and telepathic powers, who are hunted and pursued by normal humans. The book opens up with a young Slan child, Jommy Cross, who watches as his parents are murdered by the secret police. Jommy Cross has to grow up alone.

The most fascinating part about Slan is the world background. Unlike other novelists, van Vogt doesn't lay it out flat before the reader, but there are conflicting tales, outright lies and propaganda, and Jommy has to discover it all for himself. Part of the reason Slans are so hated is because of the widespread belief among humans they capture human babies, for instance, which Jommy refuses to accept as true. There were also rumors of human/Slan wars that ended in human victory, but the true history of the world is entirely unknown to the characters, who have to unravel it for themselves.

There's one great reason to read A.E. van Vogt's Slan, and that's for it's villain, the absolute dictator of earth, Kier Gray, easily one of the greatest villains in all of science fiction. I don't feel this character receives enough respect. Since when does any review of Slan ever spare any praise for what an extraordinary creation Kier Gray is? It is true that Kier Gray is the reason to read this book, just like Captain Nemo is the reason to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

A magnetic, awe-inspiring and tigerish man of obvious and keen intelligence and animal magnetism, Kier Gray is a master tactician and thinker that is almost always several steps ahead of everyone else, with contingencies in case things go wrong, as well as a master manipulator and orator. Kier Gray operates mentally at almost a totally different level than anyone else in the series. While many of his underlings engage in unthinking anti-Slan prejudices, these attitudes are far too petty for a pragmatist who thinks big-picture like Gray. At one point, he wonders what it would be like to have a few Slan scientists on his side. Unlike the others in earth's government, who believe their own propaganda thickheadedly, Gray has a more realistic view, that most likely the Slans will win in the conflict unless they get a leg up.

When the aptly named chief of his secret police, John Petty, shows ambitions to take over, Kier laughs off his plan. "He is only feared. I am both worshiped and feared." The sequence in Chapter 3 where Kier Gray prevents a coup to dethrone him is one of the most awe-inspiring sequences.

Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that, found among A.E. van Vogt's papers, there was actually an outline for a sequel to Slan, known as Slan Hunter. If ever there was a standalone novel crying out for a sequel, it would be Slan. Personally, I'd prefer to think of Slan's sequel as one of the great unfinished science fiction novels ever written, including the last of E.E. Smith's Lensman books. Supposedly, Robert A. Heinlein, who near-worshipped Smith, knew all about the last Lensman book, but refused to give details even after his friend's death because "it was his story to tell, not mine."


Nonetheless, after the mania that were the posthumous Herbert Dune prequels, a publisher with half a brain, when hearing about the story did a ca-ching ca-ching cash register sound and rustled up some ghost writer to actually create Slan Hunter, an unmade sequel to one of the most famous science fiction novels ever written. The story actually has an air of tragedy, as van Vogt actually contracted Alzheimer's and couldn't finish it.

To my great astonishment, I didn't absolutely hate Slan Hunter, as it had a few great twists, like having a character be a woman that gives birth to a Slan baby, who goes on the run to protect it. But there was so much there that I didn't like. Kier Gray was easily overthrown, and it seemed as if everyone's IQ dropped substantially. John Petty the Slan Hunter was a vicious bigot, but he was nonetheless competent and brainy...in this novel, he needed very basic things explained to him. And there were elementary details about the world that were changed, like the notion of Kier Gray, instead of being a ruthless dictator, was a democratically elected president. (WTF?).