J.J. Abrams is producing a Micronauts movie

It's official: geeks now rule the entire world.

J.J. Abrams is in talks with Hasbro to make a "Micronauts" movie, and he's bringing with him the writers from the likeable "Zombieland."

Was something like that even thinkable so much as five years ago?

By the way, that nerd-hating Brit Warren Ellis used to slam superhardcore fans of comics by saying "the reason us big time comic creators never listen to you is because all you do is talk about how you want the Micronauts back."

Well, who's laughing now, you limey beardo?

Ellis used the example of the Micronauts – the nerdiest property imaginable – to point out how hardcore nerd fans only like what they're comfortable with, and never support new ideas. I've always found this case to be meaningless because it's possible a clever redoing of an old property can have tons in the way of creativity and novelty, but an "original concept" that isn't all that original can have absolutely no creativity, soul or heart in it whatsoever.

Ellis made his case in 2001 or so, when Micronauts, like Tron, was a punchline: a forgotten eighties property beloved only by the most hardcore nerds.

How things have changed in the past few years. Tron received a big-budget sequel that did relatively well, and comic book movies, which previously worked by ditching the high-concept stuff cowardly studio heads feel turns off the Joe Sixpacks and Jane Wineboxes, have instead embraced the stuff ultra-hardcore fans love: genre-bending worldbuilding and continuity nods.

Maybe I'm gloating a little. Well, I can't stand Warren Ellis and others who demean the hardcore nerd fan audience in favor of "newbies," and besides, one of the great things about being ahead of the curve is you get to brag a little when everybody else catches up.

As for the Micronauts movie, I'm excited as hell if this happens...even if it does mean, if it's based on the Hasbro property, that Bug, Arcturus Rann, and Marionette are going to be absent, as will the cameo by the Marvel Universe's Psycho-Man, who was a major villain of the series.

If the movie has the robot Biotron, serpent-tanks and Baron Karza transforming into a rocket centaur….baby, I'm there on a bear.

Micronauts was an imaginative and impossible to dislike Star Wars-esque space opera property about a "microverse" inside an atom conquered by a black-armor wearing malevolent scientist named Baron Karza with an alternate mode as a cyborg centaur, and the rebel heroes on the run who oppose him. The heroes include Arcturus Rann, a Buck Rogers-esque space explorer unfrozen after a thousand years; Marionette, a princess who survived by pretending to be a robot, Prince Acroyear, an ultra-strong prince of a proud, martial warrior-race who never removes his helmet and armor, Bug, a fighter, crowd-pleasing wiseass and master thief from an insect race with cool bug powers (I'm sure the fact Bill Mantlo is well known as a Spider-Man writer is entirely a coincidence), and Microtron, an R2-D2 esque feisty, courageous "cute robot" who finds himself in the midst of battles saying "this is no place for a little robot!"

The "hook" is that when entering our world from the Microverse, the Micronauts are several inches tall…the size of their action figures.

The series has a lot of cool science fiction ideas and visuals. The planet of the Acroyears is a living rock-world, and Bug has a bug girlfriend who shouldn't be sexy…but thanks to Howard Chaykin, totally is!

My favorite character is probably everybody else's favorite, too: Bug, a cutpurse, cocky wiseass insectoid who was a former gang-leader on his bug home planet. The best story of the series comes when Bug returns to his homeworld and leads his gang against his own crooked father who took over in his place, and then urges his gang against their planet's colonial garrison. A lot of women have told me they think Bug has a lot of sex appeal, in the same "unusual" way Nightcrawler has a lot of female fans.

With a lot of stories about an evil, tyrannical empire, I always wondered what could possibly compel anyone to become their cannon-fodder, disposable stormtroopers who's lives are basically meat for the grinder. Here in Micronauts, there actually is an explanation. The villainous scientist Baron Karza achieved power over society by inventing cloning and organ transplant technology to keep people young, healthy and immortal (at the expense of the body parts of others). In other words, becoming a soldier of his is an easy way to achieve immortality.

There was one element of the original Micronauts series I think is deeply relevant in the age of Occupy Wall Street and the protests of the 99% who can't get by: the wealthy and elite supported Baron Karza and in return lived a parasitic existence, kept immortal and young by literally stealing the body parts of the poor.

See that? Damn, not even Sergei Eisenstein got that hardcore.

It helps, by the way, that Bill Mantlo had a social conscience became an attorney and public defender for the Legal Aid Society, which provides legal counsel for the indigent and homeless. A good counterpoint to many comic authors, who, just like science fiction writers, tend to favor a self-absorbed Heinlein-esque libertarianism.

I've often wondered why vampires have become so popular and their portrayal so alluring and sympathetic since at least the mid-1980s, and the answer occurs to me: since the rise of the "greed is good" Reagan eighties, our sympathies have first and foremost been with predators.

One of my favorite bits was how Mike Golden, without consulting anybody, actually created an entire alphabet for the Micronauts comics.

Bill Mantlo loved Micronauts and its concepts enough he took its ideas and applied them elsewhere. For instance, Peter Parker once assumed the Captain Universe identity.

By the way, I always wondered if the race of Acroyears inspired the Mandalorians in the Star Wars expanded universe. Sure, the Acroyears are hardly the first proud warrior race ever, but they certainly are the first proud warrior race to wear distinctive and individualized armor and helmets and never show their faces. The Acroyears first appeared in 1978, two years before Boba Fett's first appearance. Hmmm...!

If so, that would be hilariously karmic because of numerous accusations of plagiarism levied against Bill Mantlo over the years, including his theft of a Harlan Ellison "Outer Limits" story. According to legend, Jim Shooter prevented a lawsuit by merely giving Ellison a lifetime subscription to all Marvel comics instead. The accusation was also made that Mantlo borrowed from an in-production graphic novel about the Hulk which would debut a background with Bruce Banner's abusive childhood resulting in pent-up rage issues. Mantlo took that background and beat its debut to the punch in issues of the regular comic. In fairness to Mantlo, he might have seen the photostats for the graphic novel and just figured that was the new continuity and status quo.

Likewise, Micronauts is very similar to Star Wars, but that's so ridiculously obvious I don't need to say it. Arcturus Rann's background in particular as a space explorer in suspended animation for a thousand years whose voyage was superseded by faster than light travel discovered in the interim, reminds me of Steve Gerber's Vance Astro in Guardians of the Galaxy. In fact, there couldn't be a character with more Gerber-esque, trademark poignancy.

My Branch of the Wold-Newton Tree

I have a pretty distinct physical feature: a superfluous third nipple.

I don't have any other relatives with it I know of, and I didn't think about it much, until I received a weird request for an interview by Phillip Jose Farmer in 2007, a couple years before his death. PJF wanted to ask me some questions about family history.

This surprised me because #1) I'm not the family historian, #2) my father is, and he's a better known public figure. It only occurred to me later that PJF would get in touch with me first because I sent him some fan mail.

Man, what a thrill, and surprise, to have the macho post-pulpster author of "Riverworld" in my apartment!

I told Farmer how, as a kid, I read "Venus on the Half-Shell." My favorite scene was where, trapped in a Cairo museum in an upended sarcophagus after a flood that kills mankind, the hero is forced to feed the penis of the mummy of Ramses II to his dog in order to survive. Ever since then, I've always speculated what mummy flesh tastes like. I've come to the conclusion it's like a really dry, excessively spiced beef jerky.

At first I wondered if PJF meant to ask me about my distant relative, Lisandro Perez, who was the first Secretary of the Treasury of the Cuban Republic. But no…PJF was trying to compile a timeline of the real people whose identities were obfuscated by fiction. Previously, he'd connected the backstory of fictional characters like Tarzan, Doc Savage, Fu Manchu, James Bond and Sherlock Holmes together in something he called the "Wold-Newton Tree."

The first question he asked me was about a great-uncle, Hector Francisco Perez. I was unfamiliar with the name, until I remembered my father mentioned a "Tío Paco" a couple times. My grandfather was one of ten children – five of which migrated to the United States after the Cuban Revolution, one of whom went to Spain, and four who stayed in Cuba.

According to Dad, he barely remembered his Tío Paco, who was one of the youngest of that generation, because like my great-Uncle Rubén, he got along badly with his father (my great-grandfather) who was a notoriously serious, authoritarian man from an authoritarian, serious generation: a circus and tobacco company owner.

According to all accounts, there were very serious rumors about why Tío Paco ran away, including that he shot a policeman.

Dad only met Tío Paco once, when he came to visit the family in the city of Miami for a brief time in the early sixties because of his job: teaching trick shooting to a wealthy expatriate Latvian. According to Dad, Tío Paco talked about how he did more than that on occasion, killing on command, and even passed on to his employer his own unsettling habit of shooting through the right eye. This was the way where Tío Paco killed a policeman, his first and most meaningful murder in Trieste, Hungary.

The early sixties meeting in Miami was extremely disturbing, but not an extraordinary one in a family of crazy people. And anyway, it was well known in the family Tío Paco did work for the Batista Regime and later for Castro, and had unwholesome Mafia connections. This background is relatively common to people who were unfortunate enough to grow up in interesting times, and anyway, when it comes to the Mafia most Cubans and Cuban-Americans at the very least know a guy who knows a guy.

That was all Dad knew, though it seems PJF put together some of the pieces together.

"Hector Francisco Perez," according to Philip Jose Farmer, was the real name of the Cuban assassin author Ian Fleming later fictionalized as "Francisco Scaramanga," also called the "Man With the Golden Gun."

Even more incredibly, Farmer turned up proof the "Man With the Golden Gun" appeared once before in Ian Fleming's James Bond stories. On that previous occasion, he was under a cover identity incorporating his real name, as the hired assassin Hector Gonzales in the short story "For Your Eyes Only." There, Hector Gonzales was the killer who, under orders from von Hammerstein, murdered the Havelocks. James Bond did shoot Gonzales, but under the chaos of the shootout Hector's death was never definitively confirmed.

An innately vengeful person good at keeping grudges, but unsure which MI-6 agent shot him during the Batista years, Hector Francisco Perez took special relish in killing every double-0 agent he would later come across just in case it might have been the man who shot him in Vermont.

Based on what I told him from family history, PJF put together one later occasion where "Hector Francisco Perez" just missed interacting with the famous 007. The "wealthy Latvian expatriate" he worked for in Miami was Auric Goldfinger, who "Scaramanga" taught in shooting. Hector Perez and Goldfinger first met through the Spangled Mob, who were, at the time, assisting Goldfinger with Operation Grandslam and who also regularly made use of Hector's assassination skills.

It was from "Scaramanga" Goldfinger later picked up his distinctive means of execution: shooting through the right eye (the way Scaramanga performed his first kill). In turn, it was from Goldfinger "Scaramanga" picked up his trademark gold bullets. The gold-plated firearm, incidentally, was a gift from Goldfinger to his shooting instructor.

Additionally, I speculated that Tío Paco's strong Catholic streak might have come from his sister (my great-aunt) who was a Catholic Nun in Cuba.

Here's another interesting coincidence I only discovered later: my friend Alex Niquette in Vermont lives by Echo Lake…at the very property owned by the Havelocks prior to their murder at the hands of "Hector Gonzales."

All of this was a lot to take in, and I thanked PJF both for his enlightening visit and the fiction he produced over the years.

I thought a lot about that meeting in the weeks to come. I'd never considered owning a gun before that meeting, for instance. I didn't worry about personal protection much, and I don't hunt either...mostly because I hate nature and don't like being anywhere near it. Right after that meeting, I felt the urge to get one.

And holding and shooting a gun...well, it just felt right, somehow, that's all.

The misplaced criticisms of minority characters in historical movies

It seems every time historical fiction attempts to show a different era of the past with the occasional minority here or there, a segment of the population labels this as just inappropriately or inaccurately reflecting our modern society, instead of those of the past.

Over 10,000 Mexican-American troops fought in the Civil War, on both the Northern and Southern side. One Latino made it to the rank of Colonel in a CSA Texas cavalry regiment, Col. Santos Benavides - who, incidentally, remained undefeated in battle.

I would love to see a Civil War film that features Mexican and Tejano fighters on both sides particularly in the Western theater, but if a historically accurate movie like that ever came out, it would be denounced as "PC grandstanding" by many historically ignorant critics unaware of the lengthy presence of Latinos in the United States (it seems like many just started noticing Latinos existed here in the 'states in something like 2007 despite being one of the most historically established national groups).

This is my general point: the presence of minorities in historical films is not historical inaccuracy. It was their absence in movies of the past that was inaccurate. Today's movies, for the most part, are getting it right and it's movies in the past that whitewashed and ignored minorities, like old Westerns, which were the less historically correct depictions. Black cowboys and cowpunchers were normal in many places and it was Hollywood that overlooked them for generations.



Recently "The Shakespeare Code" was a Doctor Who episode set in London in the 1590s which featured black extras. Predictably enough, this prompted an outcry. However many black slaves and descendants of slaves were living in London in that era, to the point where Queen Victoria wrote a letter to the mayor of London in 1596 where she expelled slave descended blacks from England, with "there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie." 

This criticism is a little weirder when applied to adventure and science fiction movies. Captain America's handpicked Howling Commandos struck a lot of people as unrealistic because it had a black guy in the era of the segregated armed forces, and a Japanese-American. In the words of Mike Stoklasa, "shouldn't he be in an internment camp?"

I'm sure the notion a Japanese-American couldn't be a vet in the European theater must come as something of a surprise to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, aka the Buddhaheads, with their gutsy patois motto, "Go For Broke!" You know, the 442nd Combat Regiment, the most highly decorated regiment in the entire history of the armed forces, including 21 Congressional Medals of Honor?

In the circumstances of the movie, the black guy (Gabe Jones) was a prisoner at a POW labor camp. As the Howling Commandos are an eccentric, unconventional team made of people Captain America trusts as opposed to a traditional armed forces unit, not only is this criticism unbelievably petty, but totally unfounded in the internal logic of the movie.

(Also, it's worth pointing out Peggy Carter, Cap's tough girlfriend, was not a Howling Commando and was a more historically accurate intelligence and scientific officer in a noncombat position.)

The expedition in Atlantis: the Lost Empire were specialists collected together by an eccentric, weirdo millionaire who was crackpot enough to look for Atlantis. Is it really that unbelievable the group he selected would break a few social conventions? After all, Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, another group formed together by an awesome, eccentric rich weirdo, featured black boxers and other crazy characters.

Bear in mind I am not saying there are no such things as slip-ups, because sometimes historical fiction, without meaning to, can reflect our own society instead of those of the past. For instance, a friend of mine remembers a few detective stories written in the past few years features a female police officer in the 1920s. Women cops are such a part of our world it seems unbelievable there was a time when there weren't any.

Why do so many people instinctively rebel against portrayals of minorities in historical fiction even when that portrayal has a grounded historical basis? The easy answer is a kind of subtle bigotry, but I don't think that's it at all. Rather, it can be found in the way the history of minority groups is taught, as a story about the fight against poverty and oppression, instead of as a story of achievement.

The strange case of Elizabeth Brady Cabot Winslow, Part II

You might remember me discussing the strange case of Boston Brahmin genius and model turned tragically mentally ill woman all the way back here. Since then, there have been several new revelations.

What interested me about this unusual internet phenomenon was how specific she got, all of which were details that could be double-checked and examined more closely.

 There's a single brief, glib line in the "Crimes and Malice" section of her lengthy resume/rant, that goes as follows:

C 1974 Seth Baker in New York City in a financially ruinous, devastating, severely damaging theft for me stole a very valuable irreplaceable heirloom from me.

Special thanks to blog reader Mike Justice for bringing the following news article to my attention, from the New York Times,  June 26, 1974:

Unlike the rants of other homeless, not only are her claims based on something, but the reality is typically more interesting the more you examine. For instance, on her site, she didn't mention Seth Baker "took the heirloom from her" by spending the night with her at an upscale hotel. Though she did mention Seth Baker as an "international playboy." Now there's an upscale job I haven't heard about in a while.

In addition, Liz Winslow claimed to have been a model, and recently, the Wilhelmina agency uploaded online their back catalog of model cards. There were even some for a Liz Cabot Winslow, which coincides to the year with when she said she worked as a model for Wilhelmina.

And some of the shots are really glam. All I have to say is...woof! Ah, if only I was an international playboy in 1974...

In addition, a passport collector has in his possession the passport belonging to Ms. Cabot Winslow's father, Colonel Hugh Whitaker Winslow, who was nothing short of an interesting and extraordinary man in his own right. Check it out!

The WNBA really is as bad as everybody says

Though ordinarily my mockery is merciless and without pity...to be honest, I feel terrible, and a little guilty too, in laughing at the WNBA.

Why? Because they're underdogs: unappreciated, ignored athletes working for very little money and attention, and it's natural to root for the underdogs to succeed and prove everybody wrong.

It doesn't hurt that the two groups that goof on and snigger at the WNBA are two of the most insufferable kinds of jerks: an unholy coalition of stand-up comedians and male chauvinist types.

It kills me to say it, but those jerks are absolutely and totally right.

Take a look at this clip reel of the 10 best WNBA moments of the year. At first I thought the clips were making fun of the WNBA, but this is actually a real highlight film from the WNBA itself.

If you want to skip to the end, go to #2 and #1.

#2 is the third slam-dunk in WNBA history – the first being in 2002, five years after the league was founded, and the second in 2008. By that logic, the next one will be three years from now. This one I have trouble believing, since most guys that are six feet tall can jump high enough to make a dunk, and most of these gals are six-foot and above. King James dunks more in one game than the WNBA's entire history.

As depressing as that sounds, #1 takes the absolute cake.

The single best play of the year was a depressingly basic reverse-layup any high school team player can do. The over-reliance on the unbelievably rudimentary layup inspires the WNBA's nickname, the LDL League: Lesbians Doing Layups.

The WNBA is such a fertile and obvious target that even the obtuse "mind" of nitwit Family Guy creator Seth McIdiot picked up on it as a subject for parody.

On related news, Gina Carano is getting a movie, finally. She's like the reverse-WNBA. On the one hand she's a really good martial artist and Thai kickboxer; when tested she hit with 650 psi and out of 14 fights, won 12, lost 1 (that one being relatively recently) and another was considered a draw by decision. She's got some glamour, but at least we don't have to be subjected to the indignity of pretending some supermodel like space-cadet Milla Jovovich is an asskicker. Gina's basically what Black Canary would be if Black Canary was a real person. It'd be great to see an action movie with a woman who is actually a very gifted physical athlete.

Wait...why are you considered a good guy, again?

There's a category of hero in the Marvel Universe who have no redeeming characteristics whatsoever, yet we're told over and over they're good guys – despite the fact they have a clear, real history of actual villainy and no real heroic characteristics.

To be clear as possible: I am not talking about "cool jerk" characters who end up extremely likable because they're badasses that don't take guff and they play dirty, like Wolverine or especially U.S. Agent. Likewise, I'm not some Spanish Inquisition lunatic (the type Superboy-Prime was created to parody) who thinks anyone who so much as uses bad language is a bad person forever.

I'm not saying every character needs to be the same to be considered a hero…but at least give us something, anything, to make a hero someone you can root for.

Remember this moment from the Bloodstone Hunt storyline? Arguing U.S. Agent's not as cool as other heroes because he's got a lot of swagger and doesn't behave himself is a little like arguing Vincent Vega from "Pulp Fiction" was the cooler of the two hitmen because he was more polite.

Besides J. Jonah Jameson, John Walker Lyndh may be the only conservative Republican in the entire Marvel Universe, a guy who, unlike the typically rebellious Marvel heroes, was a patriot of the "love it or leave it" variety who had more in common with Oliver North than Steve Rogers, a guy who was totally okay with being a full-time civil service agent of the government.

Then again…and here's my point…U.S. Agent is a guy who occasionally shows signs he can be redeemed, some of the other people I've mentioned haven't. Take Spectacular Spider-Man 137, where the Latin American assassin Tarantula was trying to kill politically inconvenient asylum seekers in the United States with the consent of the U.S. Government. Good old U.S. Agent showed he had something of a glimmer of a conscience and helped Spider-Man against orders to stop the Tarantula.

Besides, U.S. Agent brought a lot to West Coast Avengers, a book referred to as the "Wackos" because unlike the east coast team they were, like their leader Hawkeye, wilder, prouder and more unorthodox. U.S. Agent was the "heavy" who was all for following the rules, which made him personally unlikeable, but meant he brought a lot to group dynamic and reminded us that Hawkeye only learned how to "turn off" his brashness because of the responsibility of leadership.

Moondragon

Defined by her baldness and desire to have sex with Quasar and the Mighty Thor because they were the only guys good enough for a true goddess like herself, Moondragon's massive sense of superiority, haughtiness and arrogance alienated everyone she met. The primary characteristics defining Moondragon's interactions is a haughty disdain for most of the earthbound Avengers, intrusion on their private thoughts, and her revulsion with human sensuality.

Moondragon was also "religious" and raised by monks, and she had all of the vices but none of the virtues of religious people: a simultaneously depraved and sexually repressed egotist who is sanctimonious but without compassion.

On first joining the team, Moondragon's first acts were to try to undermine Thor's status on the team by wondering why a god like that palled around with lesser beings…an action typical of her winning personality.

Moondragon is, in a historical footnote, the first Avenger to actually turn evil: in Avengers 219-220, she used her mental powers to enslave an entire planet.

Let that sink in: Moondragon was actually the villain of an entire story-arc where she used her mind powers to enslave an entire planet "for the greater good," and then betrayed and lied to her former Avengers team-mates when they came poking around. She then used her powers to make Thor love her and then set him against his friends.



What's more, she even attacked her own father when he realized the full extent of her plans and influence, and she used lethal force and killed him (it didn't take, but that's not the point). The full scope of her intentions beyond Ba-Bani was not known, but she and the mind controlled Thor used creepy language like "bringing order to the universe."

How is it possible after a morality-horizon crossing event like that Moondragon can be taken seriously as a superhero? It absolutely shocks me how much effort has been spent in Solo Avengers and elsewhere trying to "redeem" her.

A lot of time and effort was spent rehabilitating Wanda Maximoff to a whole generation that knows her only as the psycho bitch who pulled "no more mutants," but Wanda was a beloved character that was one of the mainstays and longest serving of the Avengers. On the other hand, I've never met a Moondragon fan in my entire life.

I understand they tried to say the devil made her do it, but when they pulled the "devil made him do it" card when Iron Man had the Kree Supreme Intelligence executed after Operation Galactic Storm, it made sense as that was obviously a real lapse and really unusual, out of character action for Tony. Yet Moondragon betraying her team-mates, and using her mind powers to take over a planet because she knows better was perfectly in character: arrogant, snotty, with an elitist view of her own importance over lesser mortals.

The only other character I can think of where so much effort was expended on explaining away evil actions was Hal Jordan. In fact, I wonder if the "dragon of the Moon spirit made Heather conquer the planet Ba-Banis" explanation in Solo Avengers might have been the inspiration for the Yellow Fear Monster.

I can't think of a single other Avenger that everyone on the team hated - even the otherwise alienating U.S. Agent earned Captain America and "bleedin' heart" Hawkeye's respect eventually. The other Avengers feel the same way about her that the audience does. The single most shocking thing about Moondragon's turn to evil in Avengers 219 -220 is that nobody, except Thor and her father, were all that shocked or surprised...and how none of her former teammates really were choked up or conflicted at all about having to slug her, either.

Oh yeah, and Moondragon is apparently gay now, a fate usually reserved for unimportant, minor-league, unimportant X-Men supporting cast members like Richter, Karma and Shatterstar…despite the fact that 1) Moondragon was revolted by sexuality, and 2) most of her master plans involved getting laid with Quasar or Mighty Thor. As nonsensical as that gay revelation sounds, it basically means Moondragon will never go full villain now as she ought…because how would it look if one of the few Marvel homos is a bad guy?

It is for this reason the now badly "Flanderized" out-and-proud Northstar will never be an interesting or edgy character ever again. The whole point of Northstar is that he was a pompous, pretentious guy who had an intriguing political past as a former Quebecois nationalist-separatist – a terroristic past Northstar was utterly unrepentant about.

Now the only thing anybody knows about someone as cool as Northstar is that he's gay – an incidental and minor element of the character – especially since Northstar had been around for a decade as a regular part of a team book before he outed himself. Northstar is a jerk, but a cool likeable jerk who you love to hate. How does it look if the one well-known Marvel gay character is a jerk…even if that's kind of the whole point? Not looking bad in the press trumps consistent characterization, I guess.

Juggernaut

There are some bad guys it's impossible to accept they'd ever reform because they don't have any redeeming characteristics or glimmer of a conscience. Crossbones is evil trash, the Red Skull is a depraved sociopath megalomaniac, and Viper/Madame Hydra is a cold, casually murderous nihilist and terrorist.

Juggernaut is one of those villains. A brutish criminal who happens to be totally unstoppable, Juggernaut is a mean, dumb thug and bully who worships power and does what he feels like: in his mind everybody else is a "pencilnecked geek" and "twerp."

Juggernaut made for a good protagonist during the "8th Day" storyline because unlike the other avatars of the Octessence for whatever reason his original human personality was dominant. He was a goon, but he was a normal person that wasn't a crazy fanatic.

Chuck Austen, that human disaster area, seriously wanted us to believe the Juggernaut would stay a good guy…because he made friends with some mutant kid that thinks he's cool? That's absolutely unbelievable. The only way that story could have been more emotionally manipulative was if it involved cute kittens, good hearted blue collar people, and possibly Forrest Gump.

Of all the low points of his Marianas Trench-like X-Men run, Chuck Austen's "Juggernaut befriends a little kid which makes him turn good" was not the worst, but it definitely was the sloppiest and most sentimental. The X-Writers have for the most part collectively agreed to never discuss anything from his run again, so why is it the Juggernaut reforms bit of crap is still sticking around? And it gets worse: Juggernaut has thus far been in more superteams than any other X-Character other than Wolverine, including not only the X-Men but the renewed Excalibur and Luke Cage incarnation of Thunderbolts.

There are so many villains in the Marvel Universe who have redeeming characteristics and who could possibly reform, that I have no idea why Juggernaut was the one who got this plot, other than the subhuman hominid Chuck Austen fails at everything from writing to walking erect. Batroc the Leaper would be a great choice to reform: a man of honor with lines he would not cross, he once helped Captain America against Mister Hyde when it was obvious Mr. Hyde would have destroyed Manhattan, and once saved Steve Rogers when he was outnumbered and attacked by sharks, for instance.

Sunfire

Wasn't Sunfire raised by an arch-fascist who never forgot Japan's loss in World War II and trained his son to bitterly continue the struggle against his American enemies? I mean, wouldn't that basically make Sunfire a Japanese version of the second Baron Zemo?

Sunfire's major role in stories tends to be abandoning fellow heroes in deadly situations with a forced apology because his responsibilities to Japan outweigh trying to help them fight for their lives.

Macho, proud, arrogant, prejudiced, inflexibly traditionalist, cynical, easily insulted, vengeful and woman-hating, if there's a single redeeming characteristic there that justifies his consideration as a hero, I'd love to hear about it, yet this guy shows up every so often in the X-Books because people remember his short-lived appearance in Giant-Sized X-Men #1. It says something that even among the many snarly, short tempered characters in that book like Wolverine and Thunderbird, Sunfire was distinguished enough to be the only one that couldn't even complete the mission. That's like winning the chode Olympics!

Namor is an arrogant, proud guy who has a legit grudge that leads him to be prejudiced against outsiders, but Namor is occasionally very courageous, fights fair, and has a tremendous personal dignity, regality and other traits that make him a compelling and fascinating antihero. And every so often Namor fought alongside the good guys and been instrumental to their victories over enemies like Doctor Doom and Magneto, whereas every word from Sunfire tends to be "I am sorry, because of my duty to Japan you're on your own."

Look, Marvel – Sunfire's a dick. Why not just admit he's kind of a bad guy? He's basically a mutant version of every single jerk Asian Dad.

Sunfire is an especially tragic victim of the Marvel sliding timescale, since his origin is that he was born a mutant as a result of his parents getting rads thanks to Hiroshima, which caused illnesses that eventually killed them and filled Sunfire with wrath at Americans and Westerners. In the mid to late 1960s, he'd be about college age, the same as the original X-Men...but a lot of time has passed since then. Unlike Baron Zemo II, who kept young as a result of his father's Chemical X, there has, as of yet, been no explanation for Sunfire's longevity.

Sunfire can be born later, even as late as the 1970s assuming his parents were younger than supposed and had children late - and Hiroshima could still have cut their lives tragically short. After all, contrary to Hollywood voodoo science, most people exposed to huge amounts of radiation don't die right away. Some can live for decades before developing serious and lethal illnesses.

Review: Olaf Stapledon's "Last and First Men"

A lot of people have criticized Stapledon's "Last and First Men" for having no characters, but that doesn't mean it has no characterization, because his characterization is of entire races and peoples. That's the ambitious sweep of Last and First Men, which gives us the entirety of human history, over 2 billion years worth.

Robert Bloch once described horror as a kind of mystery story where God is the detective. If that's true, then "Last and First Men" is a tragedy where the main character is the entire human race. Not just one human race, but several: in the enormous span of time the book glibly and speedily covers, the human race assumes many weird forms, some naturally evolved, but others as the products of genetic engineering (though that term is never used) by the previous race.

Here's my favorite part of the story, and it is not only one of the high points of the book but also typical of its storytelling, and based on this you can determine for yourself if the book is for you.

After the destruction of the earth and mankind moves to Venus, the Seventh Men develop, a carefree, child-like race of graceful fliers with arms that have batlike wings. Of all the races of humans, the Seventh Men emerge as the most sympathetic: the most content, pleasant-spirited…no matter what terror happened, the sheer exultation of flight made them forget their troubles.

After thousands of years, because of an environmental problem, many Seventh Men are born without wings. This crippled race are sent to do hard work, but as they're of a race psychologically made for flight, the flightless crippled race were bitter, angry sorts cooped in labs incapable of happiness, a race of miserly industrialists who clutter up every inch of watery Venus's land space with their factories, who over time vow to eliminate flight as a pointless, dead-end future.

The final conflict is an awful genocide, with the carefree flying men mowed down as they futiley attempt to escape enemies in speedier airplanes with machine guns. The last of the Flying Men were a slave race to jealous masters who ordered all winged infants destroyed.

The defiant rebellion of the last Flying Men ended in tragedy, as related here:

Their leaders, conferring together, saw clearly that the day of Flying Man was done, and that it would be more fitting for a high-souled race to die at once than to drag on in subjection to contemptuous masters. They therefore ordered the population to take part in an act of racial suicide that should at least make death a noble gesture of freedom. The people received the message while they were resting on the stony moorland. A wail of sorrow broke from them. It was checked by the speaker, who bade them strive to see, even on the ground, the beauty of the thing that was to be done. They could not see it; but they knew that if they had the strength to take wing again they would see it clearly, almost as soon as their tired muscles bore them aloft. There was no time to waste, for many were already faint with hunger, and anxious lest they should fail to rise. At the appointed signal the whole population rose into the air with a deep roar of wings. Sorrow was left behind. Even the children, when their mothers explained what was to be done, accepted their fate with zest; though, had they learned of it on the ground, they would have been terror-stricken. The company now flew steadily west, forming themselves into a double file many miles long. The cone of a volcano appeared over the horizon, and rose as they approached. The leaders pressed on towards its ruddy smoke plume; and unflinchingly, couple by couple, the whole multitude darted into its fiery breath and vanished. So ended the career of Flying Man.

In the middle of all this there are some outright fantastic bits of imagery, like for instance, an era when a subspecies of man devolve into baboons, or a weird speciation on the high-gravity of Neptune which forces men to all fours, one primitive race of quadrupedal men who have tusks and another quadruped human race hunts them to extinction for their ivory. The most nightmarish were the Fourth Men, a race of superintelligent, immortal and terrifyingly unsentimental, coldblooded and casually genocidal brains the size of Volkswagens.

Because there are different human species, and the book takes a lengthy "God's-Eye-View," the book does not concern itself with even the character of individual civilizations, but rather the character of entire races.

For instance, the God's Eye View reduces the history of our own race, the First Men, into a story about the conflict between our brutal, animal nature and our better and more civilized instincts. Just when one is about to be prominent, some accident of history results in the other side of our nature taking over.

The person giving us this story is a being of tremendous intellect billions of years in the future. I was absolutely dreading this, because an author's true philosophical and personal views are ironically, never more on display when they try to write a person above human understanding giving a comment on modern times – these beings may be above human limits in thinking, but their writers sure aren't. That is, 19th Century novels with characters of this type always come off laughable because their "like unto an amoeba" beings are still tight-assed 19th Century people to the eyes of modern readers.

In fact, it's often difficult to read for this reason, of all things…the Bible…and not come away with the idea that God is a cruel and vindictive bully. But then, what do you expect from Bronze Age nomadic cultures?

In "Last and First Men," sometimes this perspective works and sometimes it doesn't. It was written at an interesting time in history, when the Western neurosis about sex was obvious for what it was and actually could be talked about. A gigantic world war between France and Britain for instance, began again when a beautiful young Princess was the victim of an airplane accident, which brought from the British a cry for revenge against the totally innocent French. In essence, the sensationalist press used sexual imagery to create fear and a desire for aggression and revenge, in much the same way "missing white women" are overhyped in Fox News and other media.

The idea this kind of primitive sexual fascination is a really a primeval rage trigger-instinct would never have occurred to a Victorian mind, and is often invisible to easily provoked people today; it does sound like an observation a more intelligent being from the distant future would make.

Then again, there was the usual Brit science fiction stuff about how a world dominated by Americans (by 1932 a foregone conclusion) would be awful, cultureless and money-mad. This is a British Isles prejudice as petty as their nursery-hatred of Catholics, which I can't imagine any superior mind from the future ever subscribing to – it's bleed over into the character from the author, the literary equivalent of spotting a zipper in a monster movie.

Judging by the writings of their intellectual class across the political spectrum from Tory V.S. Naipaul or liberal Roy Arundhati to C.S. Lewis (whose petty fixations and snipings at the American education system prove what I've always thought: he was an innovative storyteller but a very limited mind), no other nation hates America more, and yet no other nation is considered a close American bosom buddy despite the fact the Brits had one of the evilest empires in history, invented the concentration camp (what, you think it was the Germans?), and in their front and center writings available in public for anyone to read, hate us like poison actively to this day in a way that makes the endearingly contrarian French mind's prejudices look downright innocent in comparison. Maybe those limey bastards are right: Americans don't really read much, or else we'd know how much they loathe us.

On the other hand, a few other details are so forward thinking it's almost shocking to imagine this book was written in 1932. For instance, the ultimate disaster that destroys our technical civilization is the end of fossil fuels. Also, he laughed at the idea World War I would be the "war to end all wars," and even called it one of the least destructive of the later conflicts, put forth a scenario where Americans and Chinese dueled over world influence, and in the days before the atomic bomb, put forth the idea of a superweapon that would destroy all mankind. And all that's in the early chapters dealing with us, the First Men.

Some of the alien-minded human races in the distant future had incredibly inhuman cultures and thought-processes. For instance, the Second Men were doomed by a sort of existential crisis and lack of confidence that honestly, I actually don't even understand.

The most fascinating of the human species - other than the childlike Flying Men and their tragic final fate at the hands of their more pragmatic, industrialist-minded yet bitter and envious brethren – was possibly the Eighteenth Men, or the Last Men, who look not like one race, but many, and have an incredible diversity of appearance.

We are both more human and more animal. The primitive explorer might be more readily impressed by our animality than our humanity, so much of our humanity would lie beyond his grasp. He would perhaps at first regard us as a degraded type. He would call us faun-like, and in particular cases, ape-like, bear-like, ox-like, marsupial, or elephantine.

Moreover, if our observer were himself at all sensitive to facial expression, he would come to recognize in every one of our innumerable physiognomic types an indescribable but distinctively human look, the visible sign of that inward and spiritual grace which is not wholly absent from his own species. He would perhaps say, "These men that are beasts are surely gods also." He would be reminded of those old Egyptian deities with animal heads.

I wonder if the idea of the Last Men possibly inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's the Inhumans from Fantastic Four. After all, both read widely and it is possible to see a lot of early 20th Century science fiction influences in them.

Like John Carter of Mars, this 1932 novel is a book of incredible influence to early generations of science fiction writers and is due anyday to be rediscovered. Though some could be accused of missing the point, like C.S. Lewis, who loved this book but felt the need to talk back to it with "Out of the Silent Planet." Lewis even called the book Satanic – a laughably embarrassing insult for a 20th Century person to slug, right up there with accusing someone of being a witch.

In a part of the book that Lewis did not like, the Fifth Men – a race of moral and intellectual supermen – discover the earth will be rendered uninhabitable, and so they construct a plan to move to Venus. The trouble is that Venus already has an aquatic intelligent inhabited race who fight against the human attempt to make it habitable, as that would be the death of them. Therefore, in a choice prompted by survival, the extremely moral Fifth Men are responsible for the crime of exterminating an entire intelligent race, a black deed that weighs on their guilty consciences.

It was an awful situation – extermination or survival - especially for a race as enlightened as the Fifth Men, and a crime that Stapledon presents without judgment or comment. It was far from presented to the audience as a "correct" course of action, but a bad situation. Nowhere in the book was it presented as a "good" thing to do.

This is a common mistake made by people that choose to police our culture who have no understanding of how art works. They're so used to moral judgment they assume that merely by having something in a story the creators must be in favor of it. A story with violence? They must be gorehounds. A story with rape? The creators must be sickos that like violence against women!

I'm looking squarely at you, Gail Simone. You have great storytelling gifts and your comics are a delight, but your "Women in Refrigerators" site (to which I am not linking because that site does not deserve even any miniscule traffic I can create) is pointlessly incendiary, and presented out of context, all this so-called violence is as meaningless as mentioning the existence of violence or sex in movies. Context tells us whether sex is drama or pornography.

C.S. Lewis was against genocide motivated by greed, eh? Well, I'm sure he had plenty to say, then, about the artificial famines created in India which killed millions in times of plenty to drive up the cost of British grain, or the entire history of abused Ireland, or the hundreds of thousands of Dinka killed to clear settler rights in Kenya, right? No? Didn't say a peep? Well, that's the Brits for you – buttinsky critics of every empire except their own, which ironically (or perhaps predictably) is the worst one of all.

In Out of the Silent Planet, an overly ambitious scientist wants to save the human race by killing all the Martians and settling humans on Mars. The book portrays him as not a very nice person and tries to condemn this viewpoint – except it's not one that Stapledon had!

Sheesh, Lou. You gotta read what the guy says. And that's advice for everybody else. This book is definitely worth reading.