Cleansed Palate or Fearful Symmetry
Well, my contract has come to a close after six months–a little earlier than predicted, but certainly not unexpectedly.
I have to say that this was a nice cooling-off period–a professional sorbet–but now it’s time to find a real writing job.
(Fearful Symmetry: Does working with shelving always herald a change of employer?)
Ritualized Tuesdays
This was a good night for gamer’s epiphanies and nostalgia. The games themselves were almost of secondary importance.
Jon played his Freedom’s Key/Cannon deck against my refurbished Gosse deck. I had swapped out the extra Swordsman cards and some damage prevention for extra sources of sailing and, more importantly, I added dueling cards, which would allow me to target untapped characters bearing two or more attachments to single combat. These cards are generally useful against any sort of deck, but they were essential against Jon’s deck, which had lots of sailing (to cancel my boarding attempts), and lots of cannon attachments attached to the same character (the better to blase me with). While there were certainly more specific counter cards I could have included in the Gosse deck, that simply would have been base and classless, and would just have cluttered my deck when I played against other decks.
I like my Gosse deck. I’m almost as happy with that that as I am which my Corsairs/Khered-din deck.
Which of course means that it’s time to try something new. I also brought a new Montaigne fast cannon deck. Well, it’s more than fast cannon, it’s supposed to be all-cannon, and it’s supposed to react to other ships invading my sea. Jon played an El Vago deck, using cards from the final basic set and expansion, which I’ve thus far shunned because I didn’t like the graphical redesign of those cards (thought I can see how they’re cheaper to print than the earlier sets). He ground my ship into a fine paste with a boarding attack from a super-Allende, and the loss was instructive.
But the interesting part of the loss was when I realized how many standard cards had been changed in the final basic set. One of the reasons 7th Sea failed as a game was the decision by Alderac to publish a 600-odd card third basic set, called Iron Shadow, which added cards and reprinted most of the other cards in the game, with slight alterations to the text and art. I didn’t realize that some of these changes weren’t so slight. In fact, they were sufficient to make me consider the cards completely anew. It’s much the same comparing cards from the basic sets of Legend of the Burning Sands and cards from the Awakenings edition–the differences are enough to make you reconsider which cards go in the deck.
So here’s a conundrum, do I play the cards as written, or do I try to remember what the newest version of the cards say? Alderac games follow the Most Recent Printing rule, but almost everything has been replaced? Do I content myself to playing pre-Iron Shadow decks, or do I try to remember how every single card has changed?
Well, in Burning Sands, I’ve decided to simply play the cards as printed, and ignore the reprinted cards. I’ll probably do the same with 7th Sea, and just take my lumps during matches against Iron Shadow decks…and marvel at how the cards have changed.
After 7th Sea and a dinner break, Bill left (curse those eggs!), Dave, Chris and Cecil played a game of Magic, and Ramsay thrashed me at Warlord. He played my Black Tom deck, and I played Slayer, and it ended very badly for me both times. After that, we turned to watch the Magic game, and caught a wave of nostalgia. I saw cards that I owned and enjoyed six years ago, and immediately regretted parting with them. I was tempted to run back to eBay [grin].
I had traded in most of my collection of rare cards for Middle Earth CCG booster packs, keeping only those cards necessary for my favourite decks: an attacking wall deck, and a poison deck. Yes, in Magic, as in other CCGs, I lost most of my games, but I had fun confounding my opponents.
I looked at some of Bill’s new cards, from the most recent expansions, and didn’t recognize the game any more. The power curve had grown to such an extent, and the rules have been changed so significantly, that Magic might as well be a completely different game altogether.
Occasionally, I play a few games of Ice Age-era Magic with Scott and Ramsay, for old times’ sake.
When the Magic game ended, Dave and I had what seems to be our weekly Slayer vs. Terror Warlords match. In the first game, I drew a bad set of cards, and a rough bit of die-rolling, and lost the game within five minutes. The second game, however, lasted much longer, Slayer managed to equip both Tomes, Barakiel, the Rod of Shattering, the Rod of Roaring Flames, and Dave had a terrible run of die-rolling. I never managed to play a Run on my Slayer’s Tome, and Dave even disintegrated my Tome, but that didn’t really matter. Not only did Slayer not take a wound, but he killed a Terror of Condor Pass and a Blackwind! Whoo-hoo!
(Or, more appropriately, mOOt! mOOt!)
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault
Talking about Michel Foucault’s writing feels like a lucid dream–you’re just on the cusp of control and consciousness, about to steady the sensation that “something matters” and “EVERYTHING is connected”, but then you’re startled the enormity of your anticipated discovery, and you lose your focus. When you try to describe the sensation to others, you realize that you really have no idea what happened at all.
Of course, Foucault doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, either, and that gives me some comfort. His writing uses a rhetoric of very slow dialectic, where concepts and objects have no proper terms–only a trio of metaphors, and concepts are craft whole out of abstraction, yet fail when they’re exposed to the least questioning, and where the deeper meaning of things are shown to be simply the inverse of what they appear to be.
He may not describe a looking-glass world, but he is describing a dream realm, and it makes for interesting reading. Foucault doesn’t write about “things”, he writes about structures and relationships and a grammar of power, but the importance of his work lies not in the conclusions, but rather in the strategies he uses in reaching and expressing them.
Writing about Foucault forces you to write like Foucault. He has created a metalanguage which, in turn, enforces a syntax of power. You either “get” Foucault, or you’re adrift in a sea of signs that structures that you fail to recognize. Only the initiate, the true devotees of Foucault, can master the abstruse, mystic syntax, pierce the veils of convention and historical ignorance which support the structures and relationships that control us, and approach, however indirectly, a true sense of the workings of the world.
(See, I’m doing it myself. I don’t know how I would have survived my Master’s degree without writing in that style.)
Ostensibly, this book is a study of the development of the prison as a penal institution, but such a strict factual focus is misleading. Foucault uses penal theory and legal codes as a framework for a larger discussion about authority, and the assessment/enforcement of social norms and deviations. To this end, he traces a continuum from the public tortures and executions that characterized absolute monarchies and the secret prisons and near-constant observation and evaluation that characterize the prison in modern democracies. Foucault makes the telling point that the earlier form of punishment were actual punishments, whereas the term spend in prison is more concerned with discipline rather than punishment–the bad can be trained to be good if they knew they were being watched and evaluated at all times.
Under the absolute monarchy, the public execution is a pageant of the monarch’s power, and an exercise in terror. The monarch owned all, made all the laws, and transgressions of the law were symbols of an attack upon the monarch. Of course, these laws could be enforced at the whim of the monarch, and could so be disregarded by the general population. There was no real public condemnation of an illegal act by the community, because the community, taken as a group of individuals, was set against the monarch’s laws. There was a greater tolerance for illegality when, effectively, only one person–the monarch–was both the victim and the judge.
The torture and execution was essentially a duel between the monarch’s power and the criminal. Eventually, the criminal succumbs to the monarch, and the two are reconciled with the monarch’s death. This is a legal system of secrecy, brutality, and inquisition–there i no necessary component of truth or justice.
Over time, however, the relationship between the government and the community changed. Under democracies, the people are considered to hold the power of law, and transgressions of the law are transgressions against the community. Of course, the criminal is also a member of the community, and so is entitled to rights and protections afforded by the community for its members. This is the conundrum of the modern legal/penal system. The crime and the criminal cannot be punished with the same arbitrary abandon as was possible under the absolute monarchy. Under the democracy, not only must the punishment fit the crime, it must also fit the criminal, and yet allow the criminal to return to society at the end of the punishment.
Resolving these paradoxical requirements of specificity and survivability led to shift in penal theory away from punishment towards discipline; away from the gallows to the prison. Time, rather than torture, is the currency of punishment, because all criminals are equally affected by the deprivation of their liberty, and the amount of time served can be tailored to suit the severity of the single crime. Of course, this requires the legal system to do more than simply assess the crime and mete out the punishment–now it much strive to understand and interpret both crime and criminal, and achieve the same sort of public reconciliation that once took place during public torture (and, given the nature of the publicity surrounding certain trials, this is an astute observation). Once this interpretation is complete, then the punishment is a formality, and takes place out of the public view. The very fact of their punishment is sufficient public deterrent under this system–not the sight of the punishment itself.
In a way, however, the criminal never leaves the public view. Foucault uses Jeremy Bentham’s model of the Panopticon–a prison where all prisoners can be seen at all times, without ever seeing each other–to inform the discussions about society and punishment through the rest of the book. Prisoners must be the worse for their stay in prison, they must be redeemed in a manner in keeping with the public conciliation of their trial. This requires constant training and evaluation and enforcement by trained experts. Effectively, the prisoners find themselves under a regime as autocratic as any absolute monarchy. The prisoners are regimented, organized, disciplined, and exist in hierarchy according to their crime and the state of their rehabilitation, whereas, before their incarceration, they existed freely, without observation.
Or did they? Foucault spends the latter third of the book illustrating how the prison actually embodies the disciplinary techniques used in schools, which have replaced the autocratic master-apprentice structure, cloisters, barracks, and hospitals. Existing within a community entails constant observation, and deviations from the discipline of the community are noted. Seen from this perspective, the prison is simply a stronger manifestation of the community desire to enforce discipline among its ranks.
In this age of time cards, surveillance cameras in the workplace, employee evaluations, and Gantt charts, I can’t say that Foucault is wrong in his assessment, only because I can’t be sure that this is what he’s said. But I have a feeling that he may be right.
And then I’ll wake up.
Weekend Roundup
It’s the little things that do you in, you know. It’s always the pebble that starts the avalanche.
Friday: “Where are my books?” Dina had the afternoon off, and she went shopping at IKEA. Alone, and unsupervised, and when I came home and saw some her acquisitions, I realized that we were more perfectly suited for each other than ever.
What convinced me? Well, it wasn’t the hassock (though we needed one), nor was it it the magazine rack for the bathroom or the pot lid rack for the kitchen (though they were both the same metal frame)…no, what did it for me were the empty cardboard boxes. She didn’t need ‘em, but she wanted them.
I, too, have an unbridled love for boxes and storage devices, as anyone who’s seen my card/comics/toy/office collections knows. In fact, one of my last eBay purchases was a set of custom storage boxes for the Legend of the Five Rings card game (even though I don’t play that game much). She told me I was crazy then.
I told her she was crazy on Friday afternoon. I was smiling the whole time.
(They’re very nice boxes.)
Elizabeth witnessed the whole exchange, and was mightily amused. After I helped Dina assemble the boxes, we wandered merrily off to the red Star of India, and enjoyed a very cool and pleasant evening of spicy food. Yum!
Over coffees at home, we spoke about books, and the conversation turned to Vonnegut. Elizabeth was curious about some titles, and I wanted to loan them to her, but I couldn’t easily find them. You see, our bookshelves are a jumble of unsorted books, and have been for the better part of six months. Eventually, I found three of the four books in question. Dina, with her eagle eyes, found the fourth.
This was the pebble.
Saturday: “There are my books! And there! And there! Don’t trip over them!” After a leisurely breakfast, I put down my cup of coffee, looked up from my chair in the TV room, and said “Today’s the day that I’m going to reorganize the bookshelves.”
Dina said “OK.”
That was the avalanche.
I had a simple scheme. I wanted to sort the books loosely by genre (reference, textbooks, non-fiction, fantasy, sci-fi), and, within each genre, by reputation and author (the Robert A. Heinleins, for example, went on the inaccessible top shelf, and were legal targets for double-stacking, whereas the Guy Gavriel Kay and Iain (M.) Banks stayed on the accessible middle shelves). I had the additional stipulation that the hardcovers had to go on the sturdier shelves, I wanted to put my trade and prestige format comics on the bookshelves instead of in the office bookcase, I wanted to sort the magazines that were floating around the apartment, and Dina wanted me to keep her literary theory and German dictionaries together.
Sorting the magazines, the fantasy/sci-fi, reference, lit theory, and other books was fairly simple. Everything went into the office, and I mucked about and produced some tolerably-organized bookshelves. I was pleased.
The remaining books went into the TV room, and there I lost all sense of direction. The first thing I did was put books by the same author together, so that if I were to look for a specific Vonnegut, I knew there was a Vonnegut section, but there weren’t that many duplicate authors (though Dina has an impressive Findley and Irving collection), which left quite a jumble of novels, plays, mythologies, and odd non-fiction books. First, I tried sorting the books by publisher, hoping to set aside the novels purchased for lectures apart from the novels purchased for pleasure: if the publisher was New Canadian Library, Penguin, or Oxford World Classics, the book went in one stack.
That was a dumb way to sort the books. Honestly, I might as well have sorted the books by colour.
Then, with Dina’s help and advice, I loosely sorted the books by nationality: English lit, Canadian Lit, American Lit, but I still wanted to divide the books according to the textbook/fun book division, and it interfered with the sorting process, and then there were the multicultural literatures–is Rohinton Mistry better filed under Indian Lit or Canadian Lit?–and other minutiae. Oh, it’s a terrible thing to be caught in the throes of conflicting taxonomies.
No, really.
At around eight o’clock, I gave up, and popped the books which covered the floor back up on the shelves. There wasn’t quite enough room, so I shuttled the English Lit textbooks from the TV room to the office, and created some more space. There was a little more order than before, but not quite enough to suit my ambitions.
I don’t know what I expected. Dina and I have roughly the same amount of books, which means that we probably have 1500 volumes or so, and only 30 duplicates. Any organizational effort is bound to be iterative, and I got a lot further than I imagined.
I also stirred up an unhealthy amount of dust. Achoo!
Sunday: “We need more shelves…” Sunday morning, I woke up, and sorted some more books. And that was pretty much the last thing I did all day. I lounged. I loafed. I napped. I brought a couple of boxes down to the basement, and I made some challa in the bread machine, but that wasn’t much. Dina joined me in idling until about three in the afternoon, when the bug of shelving inspiration nipped her and she decided to go and buy some nice shelves for the bedroom.
This is a big concession on her part, because she’s always spoken about her desire for an uncluttered bedroom, and I’ve always appreciated having bookshelves and a TV and other bedroom clutter. Well, we still don’t have a TV, but we need storage space for assorted knick-knackery, so Dina bought some nice beveled shelves, and set about painting them on the back deck.
I watched her, hummed the Trading Spaces theme, and got supper underway.
The shelves still need a couple of coats, and we need some swankier brackets, but we’re well on our way to having the storage and display space that we’ve been looking for.
When it became too dark to paint, we went to the living room and watched High Fidelity and laughed and groaned in all the appropriate places.
While I watched the movie, I looked around the living room for likely shelf locations.
Our shelving needs are nearly infinite [grin].
My, How Time Flies…
It’s been a year since I hosted the 2001 Middle-Earth CCG World Championships. I met the stand-out players of the game, and then promptly stopped playing.
Middle-Earth burnout, I guess. I’m happy to have taken a break. I’ve learned many new and interesting games.
But now might be a good time to take my Fallen-Alatar deck out of cold storage.
Blogger Misbehaviour
Not only is Blogger Pro refusing to update my archives to suit a new template, but I think it’s also eaten one of my posts from six months ago!
grr…
Four Years and 200 Feedback: An eBay Review
Well, that was fun. I had promised myself that I would stop placing orders on eBay as soon as I hit a feedback rating of 200. This doesn’t mean that I’ve only had 200 transactions, just that 200 unique eBay users have left positive feedback after buying from or, more likely, selling to me.
I first learned about eBay from MC’s friend, Dave. He would shop for CDs and rock memorabilia. I took a look at his loot, looked at his site, and was instantly hooked. After all, this was my heyday of CCG collecting (which may come as a surprise to current readers of this blog). I used to buy and trade through newsgroups, but that method was slow. eBay was efficient, and the selection was vast. Things that I never imagined finding were available at prices I never saw in stores–for good, and for ill.
The first phase of my eBay experience was practical–I completed my play sets for the CCGs I was currently collecting/playing (Middle-Earth, Netrunner, X-Files, Skybox Star Trek).
The second phase of my eBay experience was experimental–I set myself goals for collecting CCG items: I wanted a full set of CCG guidebooks, even for games I wasn’t playing; two-player starter kits for all manner of CCGs, so I could better learn those games I had yet to start playing; promo decks from CCGs, so I could have a sense of what it was like to start at the beginning; boxed sets, so I had the coolest storage facilities; and CCG sets that popular opinion maintained were difficult to assemble (Kult, Heresy, and Dune). Essentially, I set certain goals for myself.
The third phase of my eBay experience was nostalgic–I decided that I wanted to reassemble the set of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons handbooks, modules, and resources, from the Elric/Cthulhu edition of the Deities & Demigods sourcebook to the Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module to the Rogues Gallery to the Player Character Permanent Record. But I wanted more than what I used to have as a twelve-year-old: I wanted the full set I could never afford. And I have it, for what that’s worth. After that mission, I then sought out copies of the other RPGs I owned/wanted. Aside from a specific Top Secret module (“Ace of Clubs”, I think it’s called), I have everything.
The fourth phase of my eBay experience was a completist fervor–I started buying new cards games just because of the bulk discounts (some games are now among my favourites, like Legend of the Burning Sands; others I still haven’t touched, such as Blood Wars); I started buying complete sets of games that I thought I ought to own, in anticipation of future nostalgia (sets of Magic: the Gathering, from Revised through Alliances, with a dash of Unglued; the complete Decipher Star Wars series; the complete Decipher Star Trek set; Rage; and Jyhad); RPG sourcebooks for modern games (most of the Alderac line, plus TSR’s d20 prototype, Alternity), and rare editions (Dune, by Last Unicorn Games, the 20th Anniversary edition of Call of Cthulhu, and the leather-bound edition of Legend of the Five Rings); comics that I wanted to own; and I dabbled with collecting rare Tolkien-themed boardgames from Iron Crown Enterprises.
I’ve also bought some really dumb things on eBay over the years. Every once in a while I look at them, laugh, and console myself that at least they were cheap.
Of course, I haven’t used eBay solely for feeding my addictive personality. When money’s been tight, or I wanted to finance a larger purchase, I haven’t been reluctant to sell items from my collection on eBay. Even accounting for the various service fees charged to the seller, I’ve made a tidy little profit on those items I’ve sold. Only once have I sold something, only to return to eBay and buy another copy–only at a slight markup. But that’s the worst I’ve been.
I noticed that my feedback rating was on pace to hit 200 at around the same time that I was due to remove the last of the continuing series from my comics reserve list, so I set that arbitrary deadline of 200. Once I hit that number, I stop using eBay to buy. Whatever bids are in the pipeline stay, naturally, but I don’t go shopping. I’ll only use eBay for selling, in case I score another ultra-rare in a booster, or need to clear space in my gaming closet.
Did I spend a lot of money? Certainly. Did I spend too much money? Possibly–after all, I used eBay as a tool to further my hobby, and all hobbies tend to be expensive. I shudder to think what I would have spent if I golfed.
Of course, I’m not giving up on those hobbies, and I certainly haven’t run out of things I could start buying– I’m just removing a constant source of temptation.
Magnus: Robot Fighter – Invasion
Hindsight is perfect, of course, and so, while re-reading the issues contained in this trade paperback, I saw evidence of the pleasures and perils that characterized Valiant comics. I saw the strong writing, tight continuity, and sensible marketing that helpd the company succeed, but I also saw examples of the economic and creative pressures the company faced and would eventually crumble beneath.
These were the most exciting comics in my collection. Magnus has just abdicated his official duties in the Steel Nation storyline, and is at loose ends. Fortunately, an ambassador from Japan seeks out his services to assist with their own freewill robot problem. There’s one siginificant difference: that robot is Japan herself, and she has her own designated protector, Rai. Whereas NorthAm developed a society based on billions of individual robots and servants governed by a central computer, Japan’s central computer gained free will and served the people of Japan through infrastructure rather than individual servants. Japan is essentially covered by an enormous robot created out of interconnected buildings and industrial complexes. The Japanese ambassador represents a humanist government-in-exile, who are determined to destroy the central computer–named Grandmother–and restore human government.
Grandmother resists these revolutionary overtures, and defends herself against other threats to her benign rule by creating Rai. a family of martial arts experts who are able to create energy weapons. The energy, along with the responsibility and the office, are passed down from father to son (and presumably never to daughter, though there’s no real reason for that). We’re first introduced to the old Rai, who wants nothing more than to retire, but his heir is reluctant to abandon his wife and infant boy. Eventually, Rai agrees to fulfill his responsibilities, but wants to leave his son behind. As he bids his son farewell, his wife reveals herself to be a revolutionary, and attacks him. Rai runs to Grandmother with his son in hand, but it was never his intention to turn his son over for a lifetime of training. Unfortunately, they’re both set on that path.
Rai’s first day on the job doesn’t go very well: the revolutionaries infect Grandmother with a virus. Magnus’ visit to Japan doesn’t go well either: Solar, Man of the Atom, visits Magnus and warns him that Grandmother is Earth’s only defense against an alien invasion force, and Magnus learns that the revolutionaries are being helped by those same aliens–and these aliens don’t want to free the Japanese nation from Grandmother, they want to destroy Japan.
Rai and Magnus inevitably fight over the course of these revelations, and even afterwards, when they have different priorities.
Grandmother learns of the threat and, in a sequence lifted straight out of anime, she transforms herself from an island nation into a giant robot dragon, launches herself into space, and fights advance force. Solar provides additional support, and then destroys himself in order to destroy the bulk of the invading armada. Unfortunately, the dragon-Japan is too damaged to return to Earth, so it remains in orbit as a second moon. Grandmother also abdicates, returning control of the government to the revolutionaries who wanted it so badly (there are extenuating circumstances that make this abdication less villanous than it appears). Magnus returns to NorthAm, and Rai stays in Japan, forever the servant of his nation.
Now, here’s the good: The Rai issues were drawn by David Lapham, a skilled artist who is currently self-publishing Stray Bullets, a crime series. His early art is among the strongest that Valiant had to offer. These four issues were published as flip-books, an old publishing format used with dime novels and early comics, which served a nostalgic function while allowing the writer to create a complex story using parallel plotlines. This method prefigured what Jim Shooter would attempt with Unity. The story introduced Solar, a character based in the continuity’s past, which emphasized Valiant’s strong sense of continuity, along with the spider-aliens and the X-O armor, to be later featured in X-O Manowar. This marked Valiant’s habit of introducing characters and concepts in ongoing titles, meaning that every issue potentially held clues to the unfolding of the Valiant continuity, and consequently had value as a collectible. Solar would get his own title a month after his introduction. This tightly-woven continuity made the entire comics universe feel like a single, sweeping novel, which had never been attempted before on such an elaborate scale. Sure, Jim Shooter had tried much the same thing with the New Universe concept at Marvel in 1987, but with Valiant, he finally got it right.
He never did again.
And here’s the bad: the Magnus portion of the storyline isn’t terribly well-drawn. In fact, it’s drawn by Jim Shooter himself, working under the pseudonym of Paul Creddick. According to interviews, Valiant didn’t have enough staff in the early days to draw all their books, so Jim had to pull double-duty. This is part of the reason why the early Valiant books had a certain simple house style of art that suited the early material well, but which fared poorly during the McFarlane/Lee/Quesada hyper-detailed and exaggerated art style published by Image and Marvel. The other problem is that it’s obvious that Jim Shooter is overworked. Yes, he can create the characters and ground them thoroughly, but he doesn’t necessarily have a plan for their future development, and the writers who pick up the characters later don’t have much of an idea about how to build on their foundation. When Rai gets his own title, he spends his time fighting a crime syndicate, which is fairly unworthy of his introduction in Invasion, and Magnus just returns to NorthAm to resume a life of wandering, foeless and despondent. Sure, the next three issues were amusing, as an old Magnus villain returned, but it’s as if the character was best served by Steel Nation.
Everthing picked up with Unity.
Soon thereafter, Jim Shooter is ousted from Valiant Comics, and the entire line loses its way for a while.Some interesting work is done with Magnus and Rai thanks to the ever-capable John Ostrander, Harbinger does well thanks to David Lapham and Maurice Fontenot, and Shadowman lives up to its potential thanks to Bob Hall, but the other titles sort of …dwindle. Eventually, all the titles when through a series of revamps and re-imaginings, but they all failed. I like to think that it was because the revamped titles have
Now, Shadowman and Turok are unrecognizable video games. Unity 2000, which was supposed to revive the Valiant characters, was never completed. I hear rumours that Magnus and Solar are coming back to comics. For the fourth time.
I’m not interested. I have Steel Nation. I have Invasion. I have Alpha and Omega. I have Second Death. I have Unity.
Fifteen Years of Comics
Now that I’ve updated my inventory, and have only 25 or so more comics left to purchase through my reserve list, I thought I’d write up a thumbnail overview of my collection.
These rankings don’t apply to all of comics that I’ve read over the past fifteen years or so–only to those I own.
Favoured
Continuing Series / Runs
- Aquaman (Peter David run)–He’s not a super-hero; he’s a king. Peter David returns Aquaman to Atlantean mythology; and since David created most of that mythology himself, it’s a perfect fit.
- Archer and Armstrong #0-12 (Barry Windsor-Smith)–A buddy comedy featuring Archer, a ressurected ascetic, and Armstrong, an immortal drunkard. They’re on the run from the centuries-old cult who wants Armstrong dead.
- Avengers (Busiek Run)–after nearly ten years of third-string heroes, Busiek brings back the classic team, and then puts them through their paces. The Kang War lasted too long, but concluded with the finest single issue in the run.
- Blood Syndicate–They’re not a team; they’re a gang. Their secrets all end in sorrow.
- Fantastic Four (Simonson Run)–Walter Simonson brings the FF face to face against dinosaurs, a parallel Earth where Stalin wears a battlesuit, returns Benjamin Grimm to his rocky form, and writes the single best Doctor Doom issue I’ve ever read.
- Harbinger #0-25–Peter Stanchek leads a team of misfit mutants are on the run from Harbinger, a corporation headed by the most powerful mutant on Earth. Peter is the second most powerful, and the whole tone of the series changes once you read issue #0.
- Hitman #1-34–Mischevious superhero fun from Garth Ennis. I mean, if you had X-ray vision and telepathy, wouldn’t you want to hang around Catwoman? It eventually devolves into the usual Ennis “friends above all” machismo, but until then, it’s just an impertinent romp.
- Hulk (Peter David, pre-Marvel Edge)–Bruce Banner is smart, but weak. The Green Hulk is strong, but dumb. The Gray Hulk is just mean. Peter David applies a little Freud, and brings all their strengths into one character. It’s unlike any other Hulk story.
- JLA (Grant Morrison)–They’re not a team; they’re a pantheon. Grant Morrison writes the adventures of the reconstituted Justice League of America as if their home base was Mount Olympus. Breathtaking hubris.
- Kurt Busiek’s Astro City–This is one comic fan’s paean to the entire notion of superhero universes, as seen by the ordinary people who live alongside the heroes. Issue #1/2, offered as a promotional item, contains the single best cross-galaxy time travel cataclysm ever described, because it focuses on the aftermath.
- Magnus: Robot Fighter–Jim Shooter reinvented this character and took him to his logical limits, but couldn’t sustain him beyond them. Overall, an excellent sci-fi adventure series.
- Martian Manhunter–This is one of the steadiest, most overlooked characters in the DC universe. John Ostrander give the character a future where the character’s greatness is fulfilled.
- New Warriors (Forever Yesterday storyline)–This is the first parallel-universe story I read. The New Warriors find themselves in a world where Egypt is the center of the civilized world, and nothing is exactly the same.
- Sensational She-Hulk (Byrne’s first run, Gerber’s run)–What do you do with a preposterous character like the She-Hulk? Feature her in a satire about comics, of course!
- Shadowman (Bob Hall run)–At first, Shadowman was just a logo in seach of an identity. Bob Hall gave him a rich, voodoo-inspired reason for existing, and a worthy foe in Master Darque.This isn’t a videogame.
- Solar: Man of the Atom #1-10–Jim Shooter reinvents a bad sci-fi hero into a character that has invented his own superhero universe! The character crumbled under the weight of its conceit with later writers, but he was gripping at the start.
- Starman–A superhero series about family and adulthood. Stellar stuff.
- Thor (Simonson Run)–A series for the twelve year-old in all of us. This is the standard for Ragnarok.
- Xombi–A destiny of magic and weirdness cannot interfere with your real life.
Limited Series
- League of Extraordinary Gentlemen–I’m sure penny dreadfuls had their own fans, too.
- 1963–Alan Moore recreates the Marvel universe by mixing 1993 irony with 1963 glee. If only Jim Lee had gotten around to drawing the final issue.
- Atlantis Chronicles–Peter David restores wonder to Atlantis, and sets the stage for the his work on Aquaman.
- Avengers Forever–Not only can Kurt Busiek work with the Avengers of today, he can even craft an exciting story featuring the Avengers from across all time. And, it features Kang!
- Daredevil: The Man Without Fear–Frank Miller and John Romita Jr. craft the definitive origin of Daredevil’s motivations.
- Infinity Gauntlet–A mad god has acquired unlimited power. The heroes of Earth have assembled to stop him. It’s simple, and it works.
- JLA: The Nail–Alan Davis imagines a JLA, and a world, without Superman.
- Kingdom Come–Alex Ross and Mark Waid imagine the dark future and redemption of the DCU superheroes.
- Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe–How could I not love this? Histories of all the Marvel characters, along with pseudo-scientific technical sketches!
- OMAC–The One Man Army Corps is one of Jack Kirby’s odder creations, but John Byrne crafts a compelling time travel thriller out of that debris.
- Preacher: Saint of Killers–How do you like your cowboys? I like mine Unforgiven.
- Starman: The Shade–Jack Knight’s shadowy double fights a single family across two centuries. It’s a story that lends depth to the Shade’s charismatic credibility.
Company Crossovers/Annual Events
- Acts of Vengeance–The Marvel supervillains agree that they can’t beat their own nemeses, so they switch.
- Amalgam–DC and Marvel decide to merge their heroes. Captain American and Superman becomes Super-Soldier. The Joker and Sabretooth becomes the Jackal. It’s exciting fanboy stuff.
- DC One Million–imagine the DC heroes from the future…from the one millionth issue of their comics, to be precise. Some of the heroes are well-conceived, some are simply terrible, but the heroes have switches places with their temporal counterparts, and the Tyrant Sun wants to kill the original Superman. The supervillain of the future is an artificial sun! Now that’s ambitious.
- Tangent–Dan Jurgens’ pet project: create a new universe of super-heroes based on nothing more than the names of existing super-heroes. The first series was truly different, but the second series began to revert to established patterns.
- Unity–This is the high-water mark for Valiant comics. Jim Shooter makes certain we understand how the present and future are inevitably connected.
- Worlds Collide–The Milestone universe crosses over with the Superman titles. The story is a critique of comics fans and continuity, and it’s just funny reading “Hey Superman! Your momma know you left the house lookin’ like Clark Kent?” “How do they know?”
Hardcovers / Trades
- 100 Bullets–A crime series and a conspiracy theory–what’s not to love?
- Batman: The Dark Knight Returns–This is Batman taken to one psychotic, dystopian extreme, and features the best Superman vs. Batman fight you’ll ever read.
- From Hell–This is a brutal, beautiful novel about how society needs to give crime meaning, among other things.
- Golden Age–James Robinson doesn’t reinvent the Golden Age of superheroes as restore them to their previous style, but with stronger materials.
- Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits–If reading about how John Constantine beats cancer by selling his soul to three separate devils doesn’t put a swagger in your step, nothing will.
- Lone Wolf and Cub–This is like finding the template for all modern action comics.
- Marvels–Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross rewrite the Marvel universe from the perspective of a photojournalist. This restores the sense of scale and wonder to these events.
- Metropol–Ted McKeever has strange dreams for the future of humanity.
- Powers–This is a crime series set in a city filled with superheroes.
- Ring of the Nibelung–P. Craig Russell has masterfully transposed the opera to the comics panel.
- Sandman–Neil Gaiman rewrites Shakespeare through the fable of despondent King of Dreams.
- Swamp Thing: Saga–Alan Moore demonstrates how far comics concepts can be rewritten. This audacity is often imitated, but rarely matched.
- V for Vendetta–A technical problem in introducing anarchy in a totalitarian future. Comics are restricted by grids and printed words, but Alan Moore makes the story leap off the page.
- Watchmen–Alan Moore goes further with simple heroes than he did with Swamp Thing.
Disdained
It hasn’t all been good.
Continuing Series/Runs
I’ve picked up more dud single issues than I care to recall. Here are some of my repeat blunders.
- Bloodshot–A mob hitman turned into a superhero thanks to nanomachines? What was I thinking?
- Fate–Dr. Fate crossed with the Punisher? What was I thinking?
- Guardians of the GalaxyThe heroes of Marvel’s far-future? It started out pretty well, until I saw the intergalactic version of Ghost Rider, and Wolverine’s daughter. What was I thinking?
- Secret Weapons–This is a team-up book for the Valiant heroes, except that all those heroes already had their own books, and it was fairly simple to keep up with them all. An unecessary title.
- Speedball: The Masked Marvel–Steve Ditko wanted to recreate the crazy energy of Spider-Man with Speedball–a teen who bounces. You heard me. He failed. Fortunately, Fabien Nicieza succeeded in New Warriors.
- X-Force–Forgive me, I too was swayed by the big guns, big ideas, and poor anatomical artwork of Rob Liefeld. What was I thinking?
Limited Series
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Haunted–The dialogue fits, but the characters should actually look like the characters!
- Deathwish–Another hyper-violent vigilante merges uncomfortably with the writer’s own memories of sex-reassignment surgery.
- Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold–Pretentious claptrap in the worst Vertigo style. The Rebecca Guay art is nice, though.
- Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters–Mike Grell read Frank Miller and Alan Moore and saw only violence and not art. This series is unnecessary.
- Magnus vs. Nexus–Maybe I don’t get Nexus as a character.
- Nevada–Stever Gerber writes a story about personal freedom, a Vegas showgirl, aliens, and a pet ostrich. It attempts to be satire, but he had much better luck with Sensational She-Hulk.
- New Mutants: Fallen Angels–Talking lobsters!
- Pride and Joy–Garth Ennis owes Quentin Tarantino money. And I want a refund.
- She-Hulk: Ceremony–A sad story about pseudo-Native American magic and the redeeming power of love. Featuring butterflies and a Lady Bic razor.
- Thor: Godstorm–I don’t have anything against Steve Rude, honest, but I can’t figure out why this series of Thor-across-the-ages stories had to be published.
- Trenchcoat Brigade–See my comments on Destiny, without the redeeming quality of the art.
Company Crossovers/Annual Events
- Armageddon 2001–The idea was good: one hero would turn into an evil despot. The only question was who. Unfortnately, they made a terrible choice.
- Death of Superman/Funeral for a Friend/Superman Reborn–Ugh! Superman is killed by a created introduced especially for that purpose, and then reincarnated in four different bodies. Yes, it boosted sales, but at the cost of credibility (though it’s not as bad as turning Superman into a figure of blue and red lightning, like they did later.)
- Final Night–The sun goes out. Harrumpf.
- Infinity War–Jim Starlin couldn’t leave a good thing alone. After the heroes face Thanos, they eventually have to face their own evil twins. This plot is redeemed only by the panel that reveals that Thanos and his evil twin are exactly the same in every respect.
- Secret Wars II–An omnipotent energy being wants to learn what it’s like to be human. Hasn’t this been done on Star Trek?
- Zero Hour–DC tries to reset their continuity for the second time by actually destroying the universe and starting anew with another Big Bang. This is actually a plot development from Armageddon 2001.
Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America, by James William Gibson
The title of this book is intriguing, but misleading. Where I expected a treatise on the semiotics of violence in American culture and a discussion of those features of violence that are specific to the post-Vietnam era, the book instead offers a study of the poetics of mid-Eighties action films (such as Predator), action novels such as the Mack Bolan , apocalyptic novels, mercenary-for-hire advertisements in Soldier of Fortune magazine, gun conventions, and paintball games. In short, it’s a self-limiting study of paramilitary culture.
Gibson claims that paramilitary culture developed in response to the US failure in Vietnam and to the social changes brought about by feminist and civil rights movements. All of the sudden, good ol’ boys sought refuge in their guns and their fantasies of sacrificing themselves while single-handedly righting all the wrongs of their world. These are the fantasies of action flicks and dime novels. Gibson starts the argument off with a bang by comparing paramilitary literature with the literature of the Freikorps–German WWI vets who refused to accept the Armistice. The parallels between the two literatures, with the idealized hero and sacrifice, are strongly indicated. That’s a bit of history I don’t want to see repeated.
As a literary and cultural critic, Gibson does a good job at tracing the means of expression used in paramilitary fiction and embodied in simulation activities–what Gibson calls “theme parks”–such as survivalist conventions and paintball games. In all these activities, the participants strive for authenticity, to differentiate themselves from poseurs and wannabes who are just playing dress-up. Of course, the most authentic are ultimately the most clownish, because they’re too wrapped up in their fantasies to recognize the real world. After all, no one can wield two Magnum .357s simultaneously–it’s make-believe to suppose you can.
And then there are the dangerous ones, who’ve taken up their sexy, dangerous automatic rifles and use them in public. This book was published in 1994, so Gibson can’t describe the later paramilitary-inspired atrocities, but he can cite enough of them to convincingly argue that mass murder–as opposed to serial murder–is a phenomenon of the post-Vietnam era and glorified in its action-movie art. Gibson raises the inevitable question of art imitating life imitating art.
Had he written this book a little later, he could have included Timothy McVeigh’s startling admission that he became a bomber because of one paramilitary/apocalyptic novel (The Turner Diaries), and that he would have become a sniper had he read a different novel.
Had he written this book a little later, Gibson might have been able to make an interesting study of how the values and poetics of paramilitary culture have crossed over into the general culture–the features of what he treats as a comical and frightening and dangerous subculture, the language of the lone soldier on the frontier, destroying his enemies with overkill, have now found their way into the language of business, in journalism, and milder forms of entertainment. Culture is seen in terms of conflict and battle rather than reasoned discussion. Gibson introduces this notion in a chapter on gun control legislation, when he points out that the gun control lobby uses the exact same paramilitary language and imagery as the National Rifle Association. And now, business leaders (mis)quote from Sun Tzu’s Art of War during shareholder meetings…
…which leads to me wonder if these ideas of manhood and violence as found in paramilitary culture are really as pervasive and modern as Gibson intimates. He gives no real suggestion of how these “warrior dreams” function away from the movie screen or paintball field, how people come to accept, express, resist, subvert them, how they differ from the warrior dreams of other times and cultures, or how they thrive within the larger culture. The study of American post-Vietnam paramilitary culture is interesting, but it feels more like reconnaissance than analysis.