A couple of interesting links to the near past.

The first is a rendering of three major internet properties, if they existed in 1995 – YouTube, Google and Facebook.  Thanks to Rhizome for pointing it out.

The second is no speculation at all – it’s the original home pages of 9 major internet properties, via Mashable.  If nothing else, for all those who have redesigned their own websites more than once, or who think the design of their start-up’s website is sub-par, it should make you feel a lot better about yourself.  Do not despair – the sensibilities and possibilities of web design change constantly; internet stardom is just a CSS update away…

Click here to view the embedded video.

and

Click here to view the embedded video.

(because LCD Soundsystem videos & detergent advertising are part of the ever growing robot Venn diagram.)

When I was a little girl, we had branded versions of the Internet.  Some people had AOL, some had Prodigy, some had CompuServe. A few people had MSN (sorry, little joke there).   The Internet, it seemed, came on CDs.  Bear with me – this is complicated: You used these CDs to install software; and when you double-clicked on the icon on your desktop, it would begin the process of dialing up the world wide web, or at least a proprietary part of it.

The brand we bought into was Prodigy.  It had Zagat ratings, Consumer Reports articles, news, e-mail – it was a portal pioneer.  This was 1989 or so, and it seemed super awesome, and almost nobody else I knew had anything like it.

We also spent about as much time at Egghead Software stores as other people spent at Blockbuster Video. Just about any time we went to Fred Meyer, we had to cross the parking lot to the mall behind it, the one with the Honey Baked Ham, and a bunch of random little shops. Because there was software there – there might be clip art we didn’t have, or font sets, or games, and we needed to see.

Oh, how many times did I inspect the box of Leisure Suit Larry, raising one eyebrow at the 8-bit image of him in a hot-tub with some bikini-clad babes?  I was certain something pornographic lay within that box, my parents seemed to regard it as a tacky joke that they were in on, and it never did make it up to the counter.

I remember my brother’s love of games like Monkey Island, or MYST; my parents addiction to Sim City (mine, too).  Later, there would be The 7th Guest, and Riven.  But somewhere in the middle of all this, there was a game that was just for me. It was called “Laura Bow in The Dagger of Amon Ra” and it was pretty much awesome.

The Dagger of Amon Ra is set in New York City in 1926; you are Laura Bow (yes, it’s supposed to sound like Clara Bow), and you have just graduated from Tulane, moved to the big city, and got a job at a big newspaper. You’re given your first assignment: cover a fete at the local museum for the opening of a new Egyptian exhibit.

You think it’s a Mickey Mouse assignment, that it’s beneath you; you are a young person who thinks rather highly of yourself.  But when you arrive at the museum, someone is killed, and the guests are locked inside the museum – everyone is a suspect.

As party guests die, one by one, you must solve all these crimes before the perps escape, or you die too.

I liked this game – a lot. Murder, mystery, intrigue, and an intrepid girl reporter who must solve the crime in a race against death.  For a kid who’d spent a summer reading every Agatha Christie paperback in her mother’s arsenal, a female character under 70 was a gift.

But as it turned out, a gift from a wrathful god.

Scene by scene, you collected information and evidence, interacted with other characters and the environment and tried to, well beat the Reaper.  It was a much tougher game than I was used to (with the exception of “The Fabulous Wanda and the Secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything“).  Somehow, and I’m not sure who suggested it first, I started looking around on Prodigy to see if there were hints on how to get from one scene to the next.  Eventually I found a Sierra chat room where people were posting comments and questions about this specific game. It didn’t take long to find some incredibly detailed and useful walk-throughs that helped me get through the level without giving everything away.

So I started printing those puppies out and using them as scripts for my game play.  Soon enough, I’d made it through to the end of the game. In fact, the last levels really seemed to fly by, and I felt so successful.  I also felt rather crafty – that I’d found some of these ‘cheat codes’ or something that my brother was always talking about.  That I was pretty much a hard core gamer.

But then we came to the end, and something happened that I wasn’t expecting.

The game suddenly resembled a routine that was commonplace in our household: my mother would be talking and my dad and his ADHD would drift away. My mother would pause or ask a question and wait for my father to say something; he would say nothing or just murmur a sound of assent.  My mother would say, “You weren’t listening.” My dad would say, “Yes, I was.” Mom: “What did I just say?” Dad: <crickets>.

The game would ask you a series of questions, in the form of a police report, to force you to prove you’d actually solved the mystery.  I had no idea what the answer to most of those questions were because the walkthroughs skipped a lot of the environment and character interactions, just showing you where the ‘door’ to the next scene was.  I figured the questions were a mere formality and that it didn’t matter, because I’d made it out of the museum alive.

But getting the answers wrong means humiliation – the Coroner scolds you, your newspaper fires you and blames the unsolved crime on your bungling as a reporter. The fates of all the characters, many of whom commit suicide over the incident if they weren’t killed in the course of the game play, scroll before you.  The final scene is of you, asleep in your one-room apartment; a figure creeps in, approaches your bed, and then pulls out a tommy gun and sprays you with gunfire. You die, a spatter of red pixels on the low-resolution screen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I remember feeling horrified. I hadn’t just failed at the game, I’d paid the ultimate price for it.  This seemed hardly fair – I was only doing what the guy who wrote the walkthroughs said you should do.

I don’t believe I ever returned to the game. I felt that what was done, was done. Laura Bow was dead; and I wasn’t welcome in her world. To this day I am haunted by the image of being gunned down in my sleep, even though I’m no redhead, this isn’t 1926, and I don’t live on the Lower East Side.

Now, when I play, I chase down every lead, inspect every shining object or errant laptop or seemingly unnecessary room.

And this is how I got into trouble again…

I recently began to play Red Dead Redemption.  After years of not playing video games, I returned with three versions of Call of Duty (Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, and Call of Duty). After completing them all, and then 007: Blood Stone, I decided to take up RDD.

Much has been written about the sweeping, epic scenery of an imagined American West in RDR; of its expansive story and seemingly infinite game play; of the moral quandaries of a hero with a questionable past. It is beautiful. It can also be lonesome, and even boring, as you ride from one end of the territory to another, for seemingly no reason at all.

After coming from games with clear missions and perspectives as first person shooters, RDR was disorienting. What was I supposed to do? Why did I seem to have so much damn time on my hands? Wasn’t I supposed to get those bad guys that used to be my friends or something? How do you know when you’re winning?

It took me a while to get the hang of riding the horse, of driving the carriage, of shooting old, non-automatic guns in the dark. I’d been skipping ahead, clearly deviating from what was the intended routine – too purpose-driven.  I’d been wandering around, hunting down men with bounties on their head, mostly to no effect, and was getting tired.  One night, in Armadillo, I wandered up and down the thoroughfare trying to figure out where I might lay my head. I heard a noise out behind a building in a livery yard. I hopped the fence and somehow landed on the back porch of the building.

And this was where things got surreal.  Under a wide open night sky, by moonlight, I could see my character atop that horse – I think I’d stolen it early on, and it had eventually grown to trust me enough not to throw me when I needed to get up to a proper gallop.  But the horse was doing something I’d never seen it do before – it was running, in place.  It was stuck on that porch. I zoomed around madly, trying to find the offending block or trap; there was nothing.  I tried to go forward, to back up, to turn; nothing.  I dismounted the horse, and to my surprise found this was an option.  I walked around the yard trying to find some way to dislodge my horse, still running in place, desperate to be free.

I stood some distance from the horse, watching it go crazy, and then had an epiphany – I’ll whistle.  The horse always comes when I whistle.  No such luck, the horse just picked up speed, but remained stuck on that porch, her hooves hitting wooden boards, over and over again.

I hopped the fence again and ran out onto the thoroughfare and whistled again.  Nothing.  I could faintly hear her hoofbeats again, but she never approached.  I ran down the road to the empty sherriff’s office and whistled and waited.  Nothing, no sound, no horse.  I ran back to the livery yard, and as I approached it, I could hear her hoofbeats growing louder.  She’d heard me, she wanted to run to me, she just couldn’t get there.

I started to become distraught.  The more I stared at this surreal creature, running and snorting in place, stuck on the porch, in the livery yard, within the game, the sadder I got.  I counted my money to see if I had enough for a new horse.  No.  I went back out onto the thoroughfare in hopes of stealing another horse, not having to look at this one anymore, to worry about what would become of it, going mad as it tried to escape. There were no horses around, at least none without drunken owners on or very near them, and I didn’t want to get into a gunfight when technically I already had a horse.

I wandered into the saloon and had a shot of what I figure was whiskey.  I hoped I might pass the time, but after a shot or two, I wandered back outside and it was still night.  I returned to the livery yard, and there was the horse, still running, still stuck.  I walked up to the horse, pulled out my pistol and shot her in the head.

50 honor points were deducted from my profile. My shame had a price on it.  And while I felt terrible, especially while I was skinning the horse and cutting out flesh to sell at the general store in hopes of raising enough money to get another horse; I also felt that it was the only humane thing to do.  This horse was stuck in video game purgatory.  An endless lifetime of running in place, trapped behind a livery, trying to get to the only owner it had every known.  This was no life for a virtual horse, no life at all.  It was the only thing to do, after all; put that horse down and then put it to productive use.  In some respects, I told myself, I’d done right by that horse.

But now I was as stuck as the horse had been.  No horse, miles from my rented room; how was I going to get home?  I decided to try to raise some cash, and headed back to the saloon and a back room poker game.  But I’m no card player, so I had no idea what I was doing most of the time. While I lucked out and didn’t lose all my money, I also didn’t make any.  I bowed out of the game and headed back out to the bar.

A seeming miracle had occurred.  It was now morning, the sun was up, I had horse meat and skin in my satchel to sell to the owner of the general store.  And a drunk had left his horse tied up to the hitching post in front of the saloon, right there in what was now broad daylight.  So I liberated that horse, and rode back to my rented room; slightly richer for money, slightly poorer for honor, and now making do with a new horse to whom I vowed not to become too attached.

So here’s the thing. There are a lot of silly phrases that internet hipsters love to use, but there’s one that I see on twitter almost constantly.  ”I, for one, welcome our [robot/zombie/Chinese/hacker/Google/etc.] overlords.”

It’s clever. No, really. It is.

But I think it’s helping to seed the completely unwarranted fear of and hostility towards robots.  For example, Dodge offers us a darker interpretation of the Jetsons’ assembly-line wake-up routine:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m sensing some hostility toward Honda’s ASIMO.

Or this, under the headline “Countdown to Robot Takeover: They Can Play Pool Now”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Come on, gents. Somebody has to be good at pool.

Or what about this headline, “Robot Waiters Will Kill Us All”

The day that robots will discover intelligence and kill us all just got a little closer. Dalu Rebot, a new restaurant in China, uses two robot receptionists to greet their patrons and six robot waiters to shuttle food to and from the table. The bots are not totally lifelike – they have to follow a set path to serve food and drinks, and they won’t tell you about the off-off Broadway musical they’re starring in. More robots are planned – it’s only a matter of time before they invade our shores. Is anyone freaked out by how much that one on the bike looks like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man?

I don’t think we have to worry that robot receptionists and waiters greeting us and serving us food will be a precursor to the robot apocalypse.  First things first – they’ll learn to expel fluids into your food.

But then, from time to time, there is the modernist’s lament – that people are failing to accept the inevitable. That they are not being faithful toadies to the whims of technologists; that they are resisting Skynet; that they’re too damn sensitive to the Uncanny Valley. Well. Whatever.

Actually, no.  Not ‘whatever’. There’s something about this article about the need for carer robots in Japan as the population ages without a younger generation and the traditionally strong family ties to care for them.  The heartless automatons here aren’t the robots, which are only trying to run their still limited programs.  The heartless automatons are, weirdly enough, the burdensome elderly, who refuse to accept these well-meaning carer robots. (Or at least, might refuse to – the article doesn’t actually suggest they won’t.)

Anyway. Robot overlords, or enslaved robots living in some kind of morbid Ishiguro plot. I, for one, welcome them all.

When The X-Files first came on the air, my then-boyfriend was a fanatic.  In truth, he was an enormous lover of television – he’d have ER viewing parties (perhaps because he sort of resembled Anthony Edwards, and what 20-something dude wouldn’t love the implied-blowjob-in-the-shower scene from Season 1?).  On Fridays he would get out of work earlier than usual – he tended to want or get the closing shift at the bar – come over to my place and we’d order Chinese food and watch The X-Files.  So romantic.

In fairness, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Ned & Stacey were also shows we watched together (though he called the latter “Sid & Nancy“).  Basically, the dude liked to watch a lot of television, not all of it good.

So The X-Files became something of a ritual.  And at the time it was groundbreaking television, combining police procedural with science fiction, developing season-long, and series-long story arcs.  The “Monsters-of-the-week” broke up the Mytharc stories, exploring mutants, secret technology, and horror/occult themes. As most people are no doubt aware, [if you have never watched television, then SPOILER ALERT] the Mytharc originated with the abduction of Agent Fox Mulder‘s sister, Samantha, and culminates in a government conspiracy, led by a group of mysterious men sometimes referred to as the Consortium, to cover up the coming colonization of Earth by extraterrestrials.  Part of this mythology includes the sacrifice of children by the Consortium to the Colonists, the abduction of women (including Mulder’s partner Agent Dana Scully), and experimentation with alien-human hybrid DNA.

And if I ever wondered just how nerdy I could get, I think those last two sentences say everything that needs to be said.  Sigh.

Okay, so what’s my point? The X-Files has been off the air now for eight years. What can be said about this show? I think, perhaps, nothing new.  There is plenty of fan-fiction and analysis of the themes, science and philosophical implications of the show available from both fans and scholars.

When The X-Files first aired, I found the Mytharc to be both dull and frustrating.  The agents never seemed to get closer to the so-called truth, the elements of the Mytharc only got more complicated, and I discovered that I much preferred the guy made out of cancer, or the town of witches, or the one with Charles Nelson Reilly.  I found the Mytharc boring and felt it got in the way of the fun episodes.

But on second viewing, the monsters-of-the-week feel like a distraction from the important stuff.  17 years after the show began, I want to believe – I want to understand the conspiracy, track the Mytharc, understand what the Consortium is trying to do, who the Colonists are, who the good guys and the bad guys are.  I don’t care if Scully & Mulder get it on; I want to know what happened to Samantha, where Scully was taken, and so on.

The show banks on post-WWII American paranoia and ambition – a shadow government importing Axis power scientists to experiment on humans and aliens alike.  Smoke-filled rooms (smoke courtesy of Morley cigarettes and the Cigarette Smoking Man) and vague proclamations, hidden vaults of evidence and medical files, conspiracy nuts who are good with computers intercepting data… I love all of it.  The show seems to suggest that most of the American government is black budget funded, buried in obscure sub-committees and managed by the military and private contractors. Oh, hahhahaha, so naive.

To be sure, there are elements of these characters, Scully and Mulder, that drive me crazy.  They never take evidence with them; the evidence is always destroyed the moment they leave the room.  Mulder believes in everything mainstream science seems to contradict; Scully believes only in already established science and concludes “there is no such thing…” as, well, just about everything Mulder believes in.  The truth is not somewhere in the middle; the truth, it seems, is capable of encompassing both versions: the readily available government conspiracies, the humdrum cover-ups of ill-conceived social and medical experiments, the simple espionage – all of that can live, in this Mytharc, comfortably alongside something larger, something literally out of this world.

That, I suppose is the genius of the writing behind the show – that there are lies we are willing to believe, and lies we refuse to believe, and worse, truths we refuse to believe.  Hitler’s Big Lie, has a corollary – the Big Truth.  The Big Lie is the lie so big no one would believe that anyone could make up such a thing, and the bigger it is, the more prone people are to believe it.  The Big Lie is so powerful that even when it is debunked, traces of it remain.

The Big Truth on the other hand, is so enormous and fantastic that it is impossible to comprehend in its entirety.  Its enormity makes it necessary to believe rather than know. Every hint at an element of the Big Truth is easily dismissed out of hand as a fantasy, a fairy tale conspiracy theorists tell their children when they tuck them in at night.  In The X-Files’ universe, Scully is willing to believe at first, then work to debunk, the Big Lie; she often distracts Mulder by pulling him into confronting the Big Lie. But what Mulder is interested in is the Big Truth.  And as it turns out, the Big Lie, as enormous and pervasive as it might be, is much easier to deconstruct, than the Big Truth is to construct.

And that is what makes it so damned interesting.  The X-Files give you bits and pieces of the Big Truth, assembles parts of it for you, permits other parts to dissemble under the pressure of competing narratives, lets other parts dissipate entirely, and never gives you anything really conclusive.  It tests your faith, your willingness to believe in the Big Truth without all the proof.  Which of course, you’d have to be crazy, or Fox Mulder, to do.

It would be easy to draw parallels between the Big Truth and religion, wouldn’t it?  I’m not going to do that (even if the show did by returning Scully to her faith), because they are not the same.  The concept of a universal, all-encompassing power balancing the scales of good and evil, creating life and taking it away, performing miracles and making some feel fear and awe, others feel love and forgiveness… this is an easy story to believe. It’s also an easy story to disbelieve.  One death in the family, one ‘Act of God’ drowning or collapsing a poverty-stricken city, one or more waves of genocide and war… these pieces of ‘evidence’ are equal in their power to prove or disprove the existence of a God.

It’s easy for the casual viewer of The X-Files to borrow this construct in examining the Mytharc. But the story Chris Carter and his team provided us had, at its heart, a much more challenging premise:  that all of these things, awe and fear, love and forgiveness, death and disaster, genocide and war, are the acts of men acting in their limited perceptions of their own self-interest.  They included in this men from other worlds, but even the Colonists were, after all, just men.  And because Shakespeare is always laughing at us, the phrase that popped into my head just now is, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”  Yeah, I am a nerd.

As promised, Chester, I continued my progress through the early issues of The Fantastic Four.  There are now so many villains on the canvas that I wonder if Jack Kirby might have considered pointillism:

Nevermind the details! We just need lots of 'em!

I have thus far met the following characters:

• The Skrulls from Outer Space
• The Miracle Man
• Namor the Sub-Mariner
• Doctor Doom

I have experienced the flashback retelling of how The Fantastic Four got to be so fantastic at least twice. I am growing numb to The Thing constantly gnashing his teeth and rending sack cloth and furniture over his ugliness and inhumanity.  Sue Storm has been taken hostage three times and asked to sacrifice herself as a ‘bride’ to Namor (which she seemed all too ready to do), yet saves the others with amazing feats of heroism, such as pressing a ‘secret’ button. Bickering when there is nothing else to do is becoming a cliche, even to the characters themselves.  The readiness of ordnance depots and spaceports is trying even my best Cold War imagination.  In other words, Chester, I fear I may be getting a bit bored.

Thematically, the center of this comic remains the notion of celebrity.  These Fantastic Four are famous, but not well known, which seems like a peculiar problem, but one with which a modern reader in the age of micro-celebrity (see, Gawker, TMZ, Jersey Shore) as well as self-ascribed fameballs, media whores and starfuckers can no doubt identify. Were all these villains simply lying dormant, waiting for a worthy foe?  Why hadn’t they run amok before the arrival/creation of The Fantastic Four?  What were they waiting for??? Ferchrissakes, the Sub-Mariner was living in a flophouse on the Bowery, plunged into obscurity by the bomb, and his own irrelevance. A good shave and a dunk in the sea was all it took to whet his appetite for vengeance… against the entire human race.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  The most important lesson that can be learned from these issues is the critical importance of a rocket pack.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With a jet pack you can escape the Fantastic Four; you can also impersonate the Human Torch. The versatility of the device is something I was not previously aware of; and am grateful to Lee and Kirby for bringing it to my attention.  I now have plans for Friday.

Diabolical? Perhaps. Really smart? No. Not really.

The Skrulls from Outer Space

I’m not going to lie to you, Chester. I find the Skrulls really fascinating.  For starters, they are shapeshifters. Shapeshifting on its own is an interesting device – it can be voluntary or involuntary, the product of an ill-advised wish, a form of trickery or disguise, a demonstration of oneness with nature or the universe, a form of sorcery, and so on.  Whether it is voluntary or not is often the more important aspect of shapeshifting.  And for the Skrulls, or at least some of them, their ability to change their shape is initially used as a disguise for the purposes of framing the Fantastic Four, but in the end is a possible opportunity for positive and permanent change.  They would like to be, they say, anything but Skrulls.  A self-loathing species of alien, desperate for escape into some other form – a form that will offer them contentment and peace.

This is also where Lee & Kirby seem to start getting a little meta.  Mr. Fantastic (who is forever having little insights that he fails to share with the group) has guessed that the Skrulls aren’t very bright.  Posing as Skrulls posing as the Fantastic Four, they ride a water tower (oh yeah, that got a laugh out of me! A rocketship hiding in plain sight as a water tower – sheer brilliance) up to the mother ship where they inform the leader of the Skrull invasion that it will be impossible to conquer Earth, due to the unstoppable monsters, giant insects, and fantastical weapons Earthlings possess and command. And we, the faithful readers chuckle as we realize that Mr. Fantastic is showing them clipped images from Strange Tales and Journey into Mystery, two other comics published by Marvel.

This nod to the comic fan/slightly insidery joke continues:  the introduction (or more accurately, the reintroduction) of the Sub-Mariner coincides with the Human Torch coming across a Golden Age comic featuring the character he is about to discover in a hotel on the Bowery.  The Sub-Mariner seems to have been Marvel’s first super-hero (and evidently the first comic anti-hero); in a call-back to the original Human Torch, also a star of the Golden Age, it is the Torch who ‘rediscovers’ this first hero. Oh what a small world! What a wonderful coincidence! The Human Torch reads a comic book, shaves a guy’s face and discovers the star of that same comic. If it isn’t kismet, well I don’t know what to call it.

And then again, in Issue #5, as the Four engage in their usual bickering, the Torch is reading the first Incredible Hulk comic, and uses it to mock The Thing.  Oh, such cross promotion!  Even better, they never really weigh in on whether these comics are fictional or not – in the Marvel universe, it seems, comics are another source of news, chronicling the adventures of all the amazing humanoids running around making the world safe for Democracy.  It reminds me somewhat of the dime novels written by Buffalo Bill Cody, about Buffalo Bill Cody.

Let's do miracles! No, let's do crime!

The Miracle Man

The Miracle Man is curious.  Here he is able to perform all these miraculous feats.  Here he is performing them in a kind of Vaudeville routine.  Here he outs the Fantastic Four. And here he decides that the time has come to do crime.

I once sat with friends, bored at work, trying to figure out how best to pass the time.  My friend Michelle suggested, “Let’s do crime!” and we began to hatch sinister plots against members of another department; we would kidnap them, hold them for ransom, steal their staplers, and so on.  In the end this seemed like a lot of work, and frankly I think we were a bit shocked at our willingness to do crime and the personal nature of the crimes we wanted to commit.  Michelle redirected the discussion with a much more interesting idea, “Let’s do miracles!” Sadly, The Miracle Man seems to have chosen the opposite path…

But wait! Does he really perform miracles, or is it all in our minds? Once again, Mr. Fantastic strikes upon a moment of insight, while the Torch accidentally stumbles on a solution.  The Miracle Man, we learn, has not really performed miraculous acts; no, he is simply capable of mass hypnosis.  The Miracle Man is a kind of Rasputin, and Mr. Fantastic should know – he hypnotized the Skrulls at the end of Issue #2.  The Miracle Man’s considerable skill as a hypnotist is undone, one supposes only temporarily, by a great flash of light emitted by the ever-evolving Human Torch. What, no safe word?

The lamest relaunch of a brand ever.

Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner

So here’s my thing, Chester. I think the Sub-Mariner is a little bit emo.  I also think Sue Storm has a bit of a thing for him.  Though I have never seen nor read any of the properties of the Twilight franchise, I get the definite sense of a star-crossed couple mumbling at each other – though perhaps on a pier instead of in a forest.  I don’t care for it.  It sounds like a mumblecore hit, though.

Anyway, blah blah blah, amnesia, yada yada, bombed my home, meh meh meh, find my people, flibbidy-flobbedy, get revenge zzzzzzzz.

Doctor Doom, a.k.a. Viktor von Doom. Yep.

Doctor Doom

The small world of Marvel keeps getting smaller.  Now, somebody Mr. Fantastic taught or went to college with or something is running amok.  He’s thought through almost everything and the Four seem to passively go along with it just to see how it turns out.

Doom demands Sue Storm as a hostage. She goes. Then Doom uses her to lure the Four to rescue her/subject themselves to more of his dastardliness. Right about here I thought, this is pretty lame, guys.  What villain says, “Hey I need to take one of your people hostage so I can blackmail you into doing what I want to do.” And what superheroes say, “Yep, sounds good. Here she is”?

Also, what kind of net electrocutes The Thing when he touches it, but serves as a handy climbing aid for Sue Storm? Let’s get the tech straight, shall we?

This issue plays a little bit like one of those episodes of Star Trek where the away mission is to the shoot-out at the OK Corral.  I mean, Blackbeard had gems enchanted by Merlin? What?

And The Thing was Blackbeard? The Four seem really excited by the fact that The Thing is stealing his own stuff.  So we’re in some time travel loop that would usually require Doc Brown to draw a diagram for Marty McFly?  But it’s only 1961! I didn’t think we started drawing diagrams until 1985!  Next issue I’m going to see that the Fantasticar is starting to look like a DeLorean!  Why am I so vexed?!

Perhaps I’m a little vexed because Mr. Fantastic is all too amused by his little loophole (“We said we’d bring him the chest, not the contents within! Mwa-hahaha!”), and the rest are getting their minds blown by the fact that The Thing was Blackbeard, and I’m getting bored of The Thing just wanting to belong.

I’m also vexed because this one seemed like an excuse: an excuse to introduce somebody called Doctor Doom, a mad scientist bent on manipulating the Four into doing his quixotic bidding.  His use of them seems to stem mainly from the fact that they are the Fantastic Four.  Their fame and status is enough; his prior experience with Mr. Fantastic may have something to do with it, but we wouldn’t really know that yet.  The task he charges them with he could just as easily have picked up a sea captain for, but no. And yet again, we are left wondering what he would have done with the booty had he got it… but wait! The gems, capable of endowing their possessors with the ability to control the world, are at the bottom of the sea, where that bitchy merman will surely find them!

I think it’s clear that I have no future in recaps.

Oh right! Him!

But those are the villains for us to play with.  Sub-mariner will one day reconcile with the Four, no doubt.  His complaint is a legitimate one, after all.  The Miracle Man might be back, but I can’t see why – we all know his secret, so whatevs.  Doctor Doom and the Skrulls are sure to be recurring characters – and of course let’s not forget Mole Man.

Collect All Four!

There are a few moments in reading these four issues where I began to see the marketing genius of Lee and Kirby.  One is the reference, already noted, to other comic books by Marvel.  Another is in the pin-up pages offered at the end of these issues, featuring each of the Fantastic Four. A third is the diagram of the Fantastic Four’s headquarters:

Save This for Future Reference

Giving the Four gadgets, a high-tech Manhattan high-rise lair, and a well-thought out system for doing everything from launching a rocket to running some sort of consultancy from their Map room, conference room, and projection room… is too clever by half.

The fourth thing I noticed were words printed on the margins of certain issues asking, “What is the Hulk?”  A teaser campaign embedded in another comic.  That’s called free advertising, friends.  And it’s genius.  Now, not only am I wondering what the Hulk is, I’m expecting to see it mentioned in the Fantastic Four … and it is.  What a pay-off! I want to spend the 12 cents to get a copy of the first issue!  (Actually I already have that one and think I might want to talk about it next).

Finally, there are what I will call the footnotes.  I think you, Chester, have another word for them.  These are little asterisks in the dialogue corresponding to a note from the editor pointing the reader to another issue in which whatever the dialogue is referencing originally occurred.  On my iPad, I want to be able to click on that footnote and be linked to the previous issue, or to the click to buy screen. The layers and call-backs to previous adventures are part of the charm of long-term storytelling, and I’m ready for them to be all interactive and shit. Imagine having to go to a drug store or book store in order to find those previous issues! How quaint.  Now I just beam them down from the interdome.

Finally, The Thing

Most of this post has been devoted to the introduction of new villains.  But I think it is safe to say that The Thing is his own worst enemy.  He is emotional, aggressive, self-aggrandizing, petulant and prone to hysteria.  My sincerest hope is that as he figures out how to control whether he is in the form of The Thing or Ben Grimm (a second dose of cosmic rays having temporarily restored him to his original rugged good looks), he will also learn how to control his outbursts.  Otherwise, I just don’t know how Mr. Fantastic and Sue will keep up with all the furniture repair.

I’m nothing if not timely.

Last week saw a minor controversy over the Wonder Woman redesign. First, the coverage: you’d expect the webular geekahedron to have an opinion, and Slate is fairly eclectic in its coverage, but why is the Wall Street Journal weighing in?

And of course there’s the new costume itself. Basically, she’s out of the beachwear and into some pants. Not exactly groundbreaking. At the end of the day you still have an example of the attitude toward women for which comics is justly infamous: hot chicks in painted-on get-ups out of adolescent bedroom fantasies.

As an utterly unreformed adolescent fantasist I’m cool with that, but let’s not pretend that this is some leap forward for either the character or comics. Wonder Woman is still drawn in proportions so rare as to perhaps be unknown in the natural world. She’s still wearing the tightest possible outfit, an outfit so revealing that it’s in danger of reducing her to a silhouette of the male concept of physical femininity, rather than one of the most powerful heroes in the DCU.

And the jacket, dear God, the jacket! Wonder Woman should be many things: tough, smart, witty (occasionally even funny), and yes, sexy. But she should never never be sassy. And that is one sassy jacket. You know who else wears that style jacket? Hannah fucking Montana. ‘Nuff said.

In fact, the redesign of the costume can be seen as a betrayal of Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston’s vision for the character. Marston, with the help and inspiration of his wife, Elizabeth, explicitly set out to conceive a character that would be a counterpoint to the overwhelmingly male perspective in the comics of the 40s. The character would be compassionate and battle evil in a non-violent manner. She wouldn’t punch people out. She carried a lasso rather than a gun, a lasso that not only restrains instead of harms, but which forced the captive to confront the Truth. Her bracelets were defensive, deflecting the bullets of criminals in harmless directions, often followed up with a throw of her tiara to disarm the villains.

Most daringly, she would challenge the concept of demure womanhood. She would be assertive, even (especially!) when it came to sexuality. It’s important to remember at this point that “assertive” does not mean “provocative.” Marston was definitely trying to provoke, but in that thoughtful, scholarly way that seeks to foment some critical reflection. Within the pages, however, Wonder Woman was not trying to be provocative. That is, she was not engaged in a display meant to entice or tease.

Marston was perhaps the first to employ stripper logic, that idea that a woman has a right to her sex and can express it however she sees fit. At the time it was certainly novel and probably actually empowering. Wonder Woman wore that skimpy, sexy one-piece because she was simply unafraid to be a woman. And as we know, one of the great things about the ladies is their prerogative to bring the hotness.

Covering her up while leaving her totally revealed is at best a misunderstanding of the character. However, combined with the “new, dark origin” (almost always a bad sign for a character in comicdom) I think we can conclude that this isn’t naiveté, but cynical calculation.

Of course this whole post is only an excuse for me to comment on this great quote from WSJ.com’s Austin Grossman, which is spot-on:

“Can I just say that Jim Lee was an odd choice for this? He was one of the Marvel artists who broke away to form Image Comics in 1992, and helped defined a popular comics style which is still one of the worst things ever to happen in the visual representation of women, ever.”

Hear, hear. Lee formed Image with, among others, Rob Liefeld, Todd MacFarlane and Erik Larson. Their drawings are an affront not just to women (for instance, here’s how Leifeld thinks women should be drawn) but to comics as a whole (here’s his Captain America). When we get to 90s comics, I will go out of my way to hate these awful, awful artists, these anti-Kirbys.

Shit, I didn’t think they made soap boxes this tall. Hey, can one of you come help me down?

As you know, Chester, I’ve been mainly reading these comic books on my iPad. I have three apps I use, Comics by ComiXology, the Marvel app, and the DC Comics app (though this one, I must report, has not been used, yet). And while you are providing a valuable service to the nerd community, and especially to me, in educating us on the ways these works came to be, the significance of the process and the form, I feel that we should pause to discuss the differences between reading a comic book on a device like the iPad versus reading a printed comic.

To do this, sadly, we have to go back to when I was about 7 or 8. I might have been older than that, but I really don’t think so. Older than that and my brother would have been reading comic books, but at this particular moment in time, a trip to a Payless Drug Store (acquired and now known in my hometown as Rite-Aid), I did as you once did, and convinced my mother to let me have a comic book. I honestly don’t recall my brother being there, which suggests he was riding in the shopping cart.

I was a voracious reader. My parents assured this by reading to me every night, acting out characters with accents and inflection, bringing real drama to the nightly storytime. My mother would sometimes kick me out into the damp June days of Portland summers, exasperated, “Why don’t you go outside!?” I was the only girl in the neighborhood my age, you see, at least within walking distance, so going outside often meant doing loop-de-loops on my banana-seat bike through the empty driveways of the houses on our cul-de-sac.

Most days I would take a book with me, out into the summer sun-breaks and intermittent drizzling rain. I’d climb a tree, scaling a pitchy conifer, and rest in a nook reading The Prince and the Pauper or The Count of Monte Cristo or The Cask of Amontillado. (I had a set of children’s abridged classics.)

Other days, I’d wind up laying on the long lawn of the Harrington’s house, as my little brother played with the two boys there, reading books, and catching the caterpillars they’d drop on the fields nearby each summer. Those caterpillars would curl up in your hand, all fuzzy and striped. They were adorable, and they’d shit in your palm, too.

So take me into a store, and I’d read everything in sight. I would say I was an easy kid to have along for a shopping trip, except that sometimes I would get all caught up in whatever I was reading at one of those circular book or magazine racks, the rickety wire ones that would sort of sway as you spun them around. My mother would be three aisles away before I would notice she had gone, and then would, sometimes in a bit of a panic, run to find her.

One day, late in the afternoon, I spotted a comic book. I’m almost certain it was Batman. The original Batman television series was on in syndication, as was Wonder Woman, on the local non-network station, KPTV-12. I loved Wonder Woman. That’s a post for another day, however. Anyway, I figured, Batman is Batman. I picked it up, flicked through it a bit, and tossed it in the cart. My mother, like yours, didn’t object, and off we went…

To dinner. I would read through dinner, not all the time, but whenever the conversation turned to Mom and Dad stuff, I’d usually have a book at the ready. So at this particular dinner, which in my head was at Red Robin, but might not have been, I pulled out the comic book. I read through it and quickly realized that this was not written for me, a 7 or 8 year old girl.

Reading it made me feel slightly sick to my stomach. It was dark, it was sinister, people were in agony, good guys were not prevailing, horrible tortures were being inflicted, even something vaguely sexual was transpiring. I didn’t understand much of it, but I worried that this was a huge mistake, that I shouldn’t read this sort of thing anymore, and that I would probably have nightmares – something I already suffered from on a regular basis. Waking up screaming, as one of my parents stood in the doorway, saying something in soothing, if slightly impatient tones, to get me to calm down and go back to sleep.

My other memory of it is that it was slightly confusing to read. I wasn’t quite sure which panel followed the one that came before. I wasn’t always able to keep track of who was thinking or speaking, and when it was the narrator (a role I understood because I was frequently given the role of Narrator in school plays and performances – I generally thought this was boring and meant I was boring; my parents thought this was fantastic and meant that I could read better than the other kids. I suspect we were both right.)

Fast forward, if you will, Chester, to the present day. In the interim, I have rarely read a comic book. I was always quite certain that the Archie comics some of the girls and boys read when I was in elementary school were not real comics. But I didn’t go back to reading them myself. And as we got older, comic books were something that only boys did, and eventually, only geeky boys did. I was already destined for a Liz Lemon future at that point, wearing thick glasses, having a pixie haircut that struck the little girls in my age cohort with their long permed tresses as a boy’s ‘do, reading Asimov short stories and memorizing most of Star Wars… so I didn’t need any help in seeming geeky. My place in that world was secure.

But here we are, and it’s 2010, and I bought me an iPad. One of the first apps I downloaded was Comics by Comixology. Why? Why would a 33 year old woman buy a comic book app when the last time she really read a comic book was sometime in the early 1980s?

Well, I’ll tell you why.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Dust to Dust was released just before my iPad purchase. And this blog is about robots. And I really enjoyed and was creeped out by Bladerunner. And I have a great admiration for Philip K. Dick, though I do not know anything about him. So right away I knew I needed to read this prequel comic, and that as soon as my iPad arrived, I would. I would read the hell out of that comic.

And this is when you began to make fun of me. The only thing I could do was charge you with being the Pat Morita to my Ralph Macchio. And you, fool that you are, accepted.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So here I am, reading comics on my iPad. I mentioned this the other night to Ed Muscle. Ed confessed that he, despite having illustrated and co-written a comic strip about Chester A. Jackson, III and Horace Pleak!, was not much of a comic book reader. He told me that he had a hard time figuring out how to navigate from panel to panel. I told him what I’d said to you about how intuitive I found the first issue of The Fantastic Four, but I also realized that the iPad offers a feature that a print reader is expected to possess in his or her brains: Guided View. As you tap the screen to flip from page to page, you can double-tap on a panel and it will move to a guided read, panel by panel, through the comic. The feature is beautiful, and looks amazing, since the resolution is so high. (It is worth noting, though anyone reading comics on the iPad or iPhone knows this, that both the Marvel app and the DC Comics app were made by Comixology).

Now, Guided View is beautiful. But I don’t personally use it. I hold my iPad in portrait mode, and I read a comic book as God and Stan Lee intended – page by page, figuring out for myself how to get through each panel, taking in the whole page as a single work. In some respects I think of it as how I watch movies on a DVD player: I don’t click through, chapter by chapter, I let it play from start to finish. It is also how I listen to most of my music – the whole album, not a playlist, or jumping from track to track. Playlists are for the gym.

So now I virtually turn the pages, and I read the first issues of Silver Age Marvel comics, and I occasionally glance over at the hard copies of The Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1. I haven’t started reading them yet. But they’ll be perfect for a sunny day in the park: no screen glare.

Great Caeser’s ghost! You really decided to let loose on me with that big blunderbuss of a brain of yours, didn’t you? You bring up far too many things for me to address at once, so I’m going to start wherever I can get a handhold, get as far as I can, and then demand that you show some restraint in future.

The art is wonderful. Jack Kirby came up with the playbook for a generation of superhero comic artists. In fact, Kirby’s approach became the house style for Marvel, and new artists were given a Kirby primer to copy so as to inculcate them with the proper way to draw.

As you know, I’m no comics historian, but I feel that a part of the success of the art is due to some standardization in the business in the era. Comics was clearly a viable, if somewhat turbulent, business. To be sure this started in the Golden Age, but I feel that in the 60s comics began to get into its own groove.

Going back to the newspaper strip era, I think there was a lot more pressure on individual creators, upon whom fell the entire burden of authorship: they drew, wrote and edited everything, often on a punishing weekly schedule. To be sure, comics isn’t ditch-digging, and the more successful creators occasionally hired out one side — either the art or the scripting — but anyone who works creatively can understand the pressure of making material that quickly, mostly alone, in an endeavour that will be sized up for its entertainment value in a glance. Ask the staff at SNL. Every week of the season they fall some measure short of awesome.

The pace was just as grueling for the comics business; the deadlines might have been monthly, but the amount of work had increased from four panels to 24 pages. Artists and writers were usually at work on multiple titles simultaneously. For instance, Kirby routinely drew for 12 or 13 hours a day.

On the other hand, the craft had developed from the toil of the lone artist to what I consider the more artisanal environment of the workshop. If you look at the first page of your comics, you’ll see a nearly cinematic list of credits: editor, writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist. In other words, the labor had been segmented. It was almost Adam Smith’s pin factory, but with the flourishes of imagination. Where do you think Warhol got the inspiration for The Factory? He began as an illustrator and was surely exposed to similar conditions. All he did was add some urine to the inks, and about twenty-five percent more workplace nudity.

This evolution in work style, inherited from the Golden Age and refined in the Silver, allowed for a couple of important developments. First, it made the workload manageable, and allowed for the prodigious output of these great, great artists. Teams like Kirby and Lee could hash out storylines, then Lee could type away while Kirby got to his drafting table. Although Kirby famously preferred to ink his own pencils, most artists kicked their pages down the line to the inker, inkers (when they weren’t letterers, too) kicked to letterers or colorists. All the while the writers are writing and revising. I believe that process was also strengthened by the fact that even if a certain member of the line was overloaded, someone else could step in with their contribution, meaning that progress could always be made. (I confess to a shallow understanding of the process. I don’t really know what the standard procedure was or is.) At any rate, high-quality work was turned out quickly and reliably.

Second, and to invoke Smith again, it seems to me that this method engendered a greater creative dynamism than before. My recall is sketchy, but I think Smith identifies two basic economies, the industrial and the agricultural, and finds the industrial to be superior. He gives the privilege to an industrial attitude toward production because it encourages skill to finds its place, and because it demands improvement.

The farmer is a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. If he’s mending the harnesses when the cows begin to calve, he’s got to choose which is more important and ignore the rest. The pin factory manager can decide which worker is best on the wire cutter and which worker is best at affixing the pin heads and put them in those positions. The manager also has a greater freedom to look for ways to improve the manner of production, and a responsibility to do so.

I imagine Marvel in the 60s as cramped sweaty offices, walk-ups in the middle floors of Manhattan high-rises that in summer have metal-bladed fans working on the sills of open windows. Everybody is damp from perspiration and they’ve rolled their stained cuffs up their shirtsleeves to their biceps. It smells a bit musty and the floors under the drafting tables are littered with bits of India rubber from their erasers and splatters of ink from their wells. The sounds are keystrokes on the typewriter and the bell-ringers of rotary phones and some light swearing under the breath. It’s much more pin factory than farm. And it’s glorious.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My points for this second item being two, and thus: The art is so fucking great because master craftsmen were in place at each stage of the process. If you had an eye for characters and action, you drew; if you were a magician with colors, you colored. And if you had taken some typing classes, you wrote. (Ha! More on that in a later post.) Also, I believe that this was a sort of peerage, which gave it a wonderful creative tension. Like an Arthurian Round Table, there were some Firsts among the Peers, by which I mean the writer (e.g. Lee) and the drafting penciler (e.g. Kirby). But the others were not without input. My impression is that there was, within limits, autonomy at each step. Colorists were told the color of the Thing or Sue Storm’s dress, but they could figure out how orange the Thing was or what hue of blue to use for the dress. Inkers added some dimension to the drawing. Fashioning the narrative involved give-and-take. Basically, because the room was full of outstanding pros, each played that much better.

Third, and with blessed finality, this was a craftsman’s workshop. In the workshop is the timed-honored tradition of the master-apprentice relationship. No one shows up at Marvel to be a letterer or a proof-reader. People show up to be the next Jack Kirby or Stan Lee. If you get in the door, and you have some talent, and you work hard, you can climb the ladder from letter to inker to drawing and you can go from proof-reading to writing to editing. It’s a great way to train more artists, to provide stylistic continuity and to encourage progress.

Briefly, better technology also played a role. The photography was better, the presses were better, the paper was better, the technique was better. I think that this allowed greater fidelity (what ended up on the page was more accurately what the artists intended, particularly color-wise) and more options to the artists (as reproduction improved, they could try more things on the page). Of course, there were still limits, which will be evident when we get around to the Hulk and why, exactly, he’s green.

Dear Andrew,

It has begun. In preparation for a week’s travel, I downloaded a few vintage comics (1960s vintage origin stories for The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and The Amazing Spider-man), and some more recent stuff (Sandman and Planetary).

Yesterday, I boarded the Acela at Penn Station and began the trek to Our Nation’s Capital, to visit the old gang, from our Commiehater days, including some of the young ‘uns, the ones I didn’t really know, but will no doubt live up to the considerably high bar you and I once helped to establish, as Epitome of Clarence Thomas Tokenism and Plenipotentiary of All Knowledge, respectively.

I also hope to witness some “Beautiful in their Patriotic Splendor” sky explosions. Perhaps also a marching band. You know, Andy, I am so grateful to Thomas Jefferson for changing his mind and deciding to make us citizens instead of subjects. I think it makes the day that much more worth the expense to the District, which, by the way, still does not get a proper vote! Oh, irony.

To help me get over the infuriating gauntlet of the Citibank customer service call (which ended in what the kids today call “epic fail”), I decided to cozy up to my iPad and begin the homework for what I ardently hope will be an Occasional Series, that I am calling “Comic Dialogue”. So, bear with me as I parse the mysteries of The Fantastic Four, Issue 1 (1961).

First I want to start by talking a bit about the design and aesthetic of the thing. The panels are brilliantly designed and pretty complex, as the story goes back and forth between flashback and the present, quick memory montages are meant to provide the explanations for How Things Got This Way, and the omniscient narrator guides us through these temporal shifts. Frankly, it started to remind me of the fifth season of LOST the way we kept going back and forth between origin stories not only for our Fantastic Four but also for our villain, the Mole Man.

Other things I loved: aesthetically Susan Storm is so fashionably dressed! All the ladies are! I want their wardrobes, or for Mad Men’s fourth season to begin, whichever happens first. And the “extras”, peripheral lookers-on in shock and awe over the destruction wrought, to be honest, by both the FF (especially that Human Torch! So reckless!) and the Mole Man’s minions, are consistently cast in technicolor shadows, sometimes red, sometimes purple, forever shrouded in the radiated penumbra of these many mutants.

So anyway, I think it’s awfully pretty.

But I do have some questions…

First, these folks are all involved in some sort of space program, and seem awfully convinced that if they don’t launch on Tuesday, the Russkies are going up on Wednesday. How do they know? Or is it just emblematic of Cold War fervor and paranoia, the race to beat the Commies at all costs? And how have these four, evidently scientists and aviators, come to be so caught up in the frenzy? But are these folks as qualified as we are meant to believe?

It struck me as odd: Susan Storm is the focal point of this group – the team is made up of her kid brother, her boyfriend, and a jilted suitor. Is she the force behind this project, the Spinal Tap Girlfriend of the space program?

There are clearly some very urgent concerns about “cosmic rays”, yet they are explained as mere rays of light. How is it that a t-shirt and some Baby Banana Boat protects me from turning invisible (though to be fair, I remain at least translucent), while the hull of a space-worthy (with, no less, an auto-pilot that safely navigates the ship back to Earth) rocketship is unable to prevent four totally different outcomes: invisibility, flames, stretchiness, and unattractive super-strength?

I mean, why do the rays affect people differently? One supposes that the cosmic rays are amplifying elements of the Four’s respective personalities. Reed is slippery and charismatic, Susan is recessive and goes along with the group, Ben is aggressive, and Johnny is impulsive and reckless… Therefore…

Perhaps it’s all a bit too on the nose, eh?

Beyond that I have to ask, only the one guard at the spaceport just outside of town? Were there budget cuts? Could I, in this Great Recession, just hop the fence of my local spaceport (I believe it’s in Queens) and take whatever they’ve got parked there for a little joy ride? I think I might like to do some space doughnuts!

But beyond that, if this is (and they don’t say so explicitly, but if it is) a government space program, how do the Four keep their mutation away from prying G-men? And why don’t the authorities know about the signal? Why keep this amazing development, this incredible discovery about the effects of cosmic rays, from the military and government? One assumes that they are very much on the DL, since the governor calls in the National Guard to shoot down the Human Torch. But why does Mr. Fabulous (seriously, is Susan his beard?) lead the team into private enterprise as Humanity Savers instead of teaming up with the military to defend freedom? Where is their patriotism?

It also seems that Ben (The Thing) is the only one permanently stuck in his new form, which seems rather cruel; I mean, how does Ben Grimm get around undetected? It’s clear that clothes shopping is a unique form of torture that affects him, but not Susan, Johnny or Reed, whose clothes apparently adapt with the rest of their powers. I’m confused.

Anyway.

Meanwhile, the Mole Man is running amok. He seems to be stealing or destroying nuclear plants, but why? He lives in a cave full of diamonds, that require mortals (even cosmic-ray-mutant mortals!) to wear protective clothing. What’s all that about? And where do these crazy monsters come from?

This is not as interesting to the writers & illustrators, however, as the question of the relative fame of these evil-doers. We’re to accept that nobody knows about the Fantastic Four, despite a flare gun summoning them by name/gang sign. But we’re also to believe that people know about Monster Island, and should have heard of the Mole Man. It would seem that Mole Man’s primary motivation is fame, which of course is a familiar trope when it comes to comic book villains (at least the ones I’ve seen in movies), and also explains why they don’t bother to hint at what the nuclear plants and diamonds are for.

I’m left wanting more – and this may seem odd, given how hard the omniscient narrator is working – narrative!

Okay, I think that’s all. Looking forward to Issue 2, as I’m almost certain it will resolve all my major plot and character questions, right?

This morning I downloaded The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man, Sandman, and Planetary. I am ready for a week of travel!

And this afternoon my friend dubbed my dress The Comic Book Dress. Abstractly I can see why, but what it means is that I need a proper comic book dress, one that says, “Pow!” and stuff on it.

Turns out, back in the 80s Nicole Miller had a similar thought. Check this out!

And try not to think of television’s Blossom.