You know, Arthur, when you spend two months riding around on a really big man, you start to learn a few things about yourself. You learn that it is a really great thing to stay on Earth and live in a place that has no arms or legs of its own. And most importantly, Arthur, you learn how to close your eyes and tell yourself that this just isn't happening to me. So. Did you miss me?
- Christopher McCulloch, (AKA Jackson Publick III) "Alone Together"
"Back from Outer Space"
It's been a while, hasn't it?
Since my last significant post, the Gulf of Mexico took a hell of beating from a natural disaster, I received my first (and quite possibly last) check from Marvel Comics, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court took a dirtnap, I completed all the story missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and found an apartment (one has nothing to do with the other), one of my favorite authors released a book about my favorite god, I rediscovered my passionate love for hating Christians, and I fell in love.
The world hasn't missed out on much from my lack of commentary about these events, as they happened, and your lives remain much as they would have been, I'm sure. I would have quoted Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back's rousing chorus of "Justice is dead! Or so Jay thinks!" to mourn the passing of Reinquist, but that's it.
Caleb and Kate kept telling me that I was in danger of losing my audience from the long absense -- which just proves that there are, in fact, people who take my blog more seriously than it deserves to be other than me.
So the question, of course, is why? Why haven't I updated in all this time? Was it because I was sick of blogging and needed a break? No. Blogging remains the highlight of my miserable life. Was it because I had nothing to say? No, because that's never stopped me before, has it?
The real reason might surprise you, but I doubt it. I doubt you'll be surprised by that or the fact that I have been writing entries fairly regularly all this time, but just haven't published them. But here goes:
My relative silence over the last 62 days has been a vain attempt on my part to give the opening quote I picked out at the end of July some real weight so that it'd resonate with you.
So. Did it work? Did you miss me?
"Ex Machina Vol. 2"
Nobody "tagged" me. Guess I'm not cool enough to get tagged. And I have too much dignity to beg to be tagged -- unlike some people I know -- so I'm just going to tag myself.
I've gotten used to doing a lot of things to myself.
Se7en Things I Plan to Do Before I Die
* Take as many as you fuckers with me as I can
* Get the hell out of Jersey
* See the northern lights
* Work with Caleb Prewitt on a major project
* Write an episode of a cartoon
* Finish that crappy screenplay
* See you topless
Se7en Things I Can Do
* Tell you in which season a particular storyarc or episode occurred in most of the TV shows I've watched -- Family Guy being an obvious exception
* Identify voiceover actors you don't care about
* Draw faceless stick figures that emote
* Fix most tiny glitches in your blog template
* A surprising amount of complex math for an English major
* Write better than you
* Quote Joe Kelly thoroughly and accurately
Se7en Things I Can't Do
* A pull up
* Convince anybody to return my calls
* Stand to see another "Spider-Man gets buried and remembers how much his family needs him to find the strength to lift the debris off of him a la Amazing Spider-Man #33" or "The Green Goblin tosses a woman off the George Washington Bridge so Peter gets a chance to relive the death of Gwen Stacy a la Amazing Spider-Man #121" scene in a comic.
* Sing
* Complete Scenes from the Next
* Hold my liquor
* Go home
Se7en Things That Attract Me To Comics
* It's the nexus point of all media -- the one medium that can be as literary as it is cinematic
* A nice quick read when you're in the mood for reading but don't want to get too invested
* Superhero archtypes are the closest thing to myths our post-modern world will produce
* It's an artform that still hasn't tapped the vastness of its potential
* Comic book readers get excited about comics in a way that people don't get excited about movies or books (except for Harry fucking Potter) or TV
* The conventions of mainstream superhero comics are a fertile playground for the imagination... in theory
* Spider-Man's pretty cool
Se7en Things I Say the Most
* "I hate my life/self... life/self..."
* "You're going to be fine, Kate."
* "You're going to be fine, Brent."
* "Jesus H. Crap!"
* "I'm not drunk."
* "Kill me. Please."
* "Sweet shit."
Se7en Celebrities You Dream About
* Gabrielle Union
* Kristen Bell
* Alexis Bledel
* Lisa Loeb
* Sara Tanaka
* Joan Cusack
* Tobey Maguire
(I can't put Tina Fey because Jeffries has Tina Fey issues and I don't want to hear about them anymore.)
"Is It Getting Heavy?"
I'm quite convinced that The Flaming Lip's 1996 album "The Soft Bulletin" is really an allegory for the history of the Marvel Age of Comics. "Two scientists are racing for the good of all mankind"? Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom perhaps? "Although they were sad they rescued everyone"? Hello Stan Lee's classic superhero characterization. And don't get me started on "The Spiderbite Song" or "Waitin' for a Superman".
Give it a listen while thumbing through a copy of Les Daniels' Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics. You'll see what I mean.
"Another Lost Blog Entry"
I was going to write an account of Kate's last trip to New York. What did we do? We went to Barnes and Noble so she could buy that new Harry Potter then we went to Wedding Crashers, she thought about buying some pants because her skirt was troublesome but didn't, blah blah blah BORING!
What was going to make this entry fun was that it was going to be almost entirely fictious. I was going to start off with this whole thing about how people always talk about New York like its an urban warzone that takes guts and guns to get through, and the crazy thing is that it's absolutely true and if the rest of the country had any idea what actually happened here, every bridge and tunnel into Manhattan would be dynamited and they'd make Chicago or Boston the new "cultural center of the world".
This would have been followed by complete and utter lies about me and Jeffries fighting off legions of Harry Potheads and vicious, roving street gangs of the all-too pretentious New York Literati. At one point, we would have been saved by the heroes of the FDNY, who'd brandish axes at these crazy freaking kids, and I'd have lost track of Kate when a taxi picks her up, but refuses to take me anywhere.
The true gem of all of this, I'm sure, would have been our trip on the subway. Instead of going with a lame and cliche society of mole people beneath the city, I was going to suggest to you that hippies have taken over the subway cars, creating mobile communes that snake through the underbelly of the city. We were going to get high and talk to people with names like Sunbeam St. Claire about deep philosophical issues on the "Freelove F Train to Forest Hills."
And of course, at one point, the train was going to start careening out of control, and I was going to stop it by shooting webs to the surrounding buildings, bringing us to a heart-wrenching stop at the end of the line.
(What? Don't look at me like that.)
And, since every decent blog entry needs at least one section that only makes sense to Caleb Prewitt, Kate and I were going to be at a bar in Queens when all of a sudden, Ben Affleck would throw Kevin James through the plate glass window and deliver an empassioned speech declaring himself the new King of Queens.
"Bus Married"
Under the right sort of circumstances, sitting next to somebody on the bus can be like a little slice of matrimony, and I remain intensely jealous of anybody who gets to sit next to somebody they know on the 167.
"Being There"
there is no sunken treasure rumored to be wrapped inside my ribs in a sea black with ink i am so out of tune with you don't know me, but i know you (you don't know me)you have no idea what i do (what i do)make you mine and see you swoon someday soon well alright that's quite alright i know you don't love me i know you don't love me anymore, alright i know you well i can't tell you anything you don't already know i keep on trying i should just let it go i keep on singing your eyes, they just roll it sounds like someone else's song from a long time ago how can i how can i give my love to you when i don't know what to do? this dreamer died when his dreams died too but i don't really mind if i dream about you i can't say what any of that means why would you wanna live in this world? why wouldn't you wanna live in this world? wouldn't you want to live? when i get home i turn off the alarm i've checked the phone no messages on i play the ones from yesterday i play your song just to hear you say that you you're the lonely one he don't know what he's done just don't forget to say goodbye when he's gone
"Ziggy Stardust and the Daily Grind"
Crazy day at work. I stumbled upon the Fabled Hidden Coffee/Copy Room at the Heart of the 4th Floor. The legends are true: They never run out of the french roast coffee packets! Saw a girl my age walk by, too! Almost followed her to see if she was, in fact, from the Society of Hot Girls Secreted Away in the Far Reaches of the Office, but I only had my bowie knife (I named it Ziggy Stardust) with me, and I'm pretty sure you need a machete to cut through the vines out there.
I think I loaned my machete to The Adjectiveless Woman with No Nickname and she never returned it. Same with my tape dispenser.
Rumor has it that the girl who worked in my cubicle before me was carried off one idle Tuesday afternoon by a roving tribe of the Society of Hot Girls in one of their rare hunting raids. The Geek at the Center of the Office Social Structure says this was odd, as she only rated a 6 at best on the company-approved hotness scale. (I'm a 3. It's on my security ID. I don't think that's fair, though, because I hadn't gotten a haircut when they made this determination.)
Maybe one day I'll find them. Supposedly My Brother from Another Mother once went looking for them and disappeared for three weeks. When he came back, he didn't say anything, and now all he ever talks about is 24. Apparantly, he used to be quite the talker.
There's also supposed to be a vending machine on the third floor that sells cans of coke instead of the bottles we have up on the fourth, but I don't have third floor access, and have yet to develop a plan for stealing a key card or working the grate off of the vent over by my cubicle.
The daily grind's a bitch.
"Asking the Question"
"So... Where's your mother...?"
"My mom passed away many years ago."
"I meant your wiiiiife."
"Oh, I, umm... I'm not married."
"You have a girlfriend?"
"No. No, I don't. Never actually had..."
"That's not right. Everybody should have somebody they really really love. But you didn't? Never ever?"
"That's... not what I said."
"Well, if you did love someone, why didn't you tell her? It's a puzzle."
"It always has been."
- Rick Veitch, "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow"
"Do you know what apophenia is?"
"Apophenia - noun. The tendency to see connections where none exist. Did you come here just to make fun of my work?"
- Gail Simone, "Double Date"
Topically applied fluoride doesn't prevent tooth decay. It does render teeth visible to spy satellites.
There was a magic bullet. It was forged by Illuminati mystics to prevent us from learning the truth.
The plastic tips at the end of shoelaces are called aglettes. Their true purpose is sinister.
- Dwayne McDuffie, "Question Authority"
"So. You solve it yet?"
"Solve what?"
"The puzzle."
"I'm afraid all the pieces came out. I'm sorry. I'll buy you a new toy."
"Nooo. Not that. The puzzle about her. You know. The girl you love?"
"Oh. Umm... No. I don't expect I'll ever get to the heart of that one."
"But why not? You love her, right?"
"Yes. But for certain questions, sometimes the best answer... is no answer at all."
- Rick Veitch, "Falling in Place"
For a great many years, I have suspected that comic books and television shows and movies have been sending me messages or serving as signs meant to direct me in my day to day affairs. That it has all been part of a grander design.
That's crazy, right? Wrong, motherfucker.
Let me ask you this: Who signs Joe Kelly's paychecks? Who brought Ed back in reruns? Who had the power to release Lois and Clark Season One on DVD? Who created Felicity? Who gave Seth Cohen his own comic book? Who saw to it that Joey ended up with Pacey? Who killed Lawrence Tuttle?
DC Comics, the WB, Cartoon Network, TBS, the OC, New Line Cinema, HBO... All controlled in one way or another by Time Warner Corporation. It all comes back to them.
They're the reason my love life is a non-existent mess!
Why? What do they gain from all this? Who truly benefits? When did they decide to do this? Where does it end?
Those, my friends, are the questions.
"The Wind Beneath My Wings"
My mom and I used to sit around watching Wings back when it was on 24 times a day on USA.
There's this episode where Lowell asks the question, "Isn't that mordant and ironic?" though I can't remember the context.
I remember this specifically, because a few days later we were driving somewhere, and Mommy told me that she looked it up and mordant means bitingly sarcastic and isn't that cool?
I miss sitting around watching Wings with my mom more than Joe Kelly Deadpool.
"Fantasy Fantagraphics"
I've joined a comic rotisserie league. It's like fantasy football only it is, of course, comic book centered.
How it works is, you pick a team of writers and artists and they comprise your fantasy comic book company and depending on how they do in individual sales of actual books, this determines how well your company's doing.
I got everybody I really wanted from the draft. I am still going to lose. Here's why: I refused to pick creators that are actually popular and sure to sell books. I couldn't bring myself to put Bendis on my draft list. Instead, I picked the people I like. So, while I got my two top picks for writers, they're currently benched because neither Joe Kelly or Christopher Priest are currently producing any work.
That's because this isn't about victory for me. This is about being able to sit on the toilet and let my mind wander to a place where I can say to myself, "You know what? I think I'm going to put Kelly and Pascal Ferry on Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Oh. And I better look over Priest's Martian Manhunter script before I pass them on to Ryan Sook to pencil. Gotta do a better job of promoting those Slott books, too. Damn. Busy day ahead. Busy day indeed."
I mean, it beats sitting there wondering if the fact that I kind of enjoy pooping means I'm gay.
"Desperately Seeking Somebody"
Took a look at the personals at a couple of websites. More just to see who's out in the world than any serious intent to slip a few notches lower on the belt of pathetic desperation.
Here's what struck me as odd. In a lot of the MSN.com personals I read, these woman declared "I love life," and my immediate response was to wonder who the hell wants to hang around someone with that type of attitude? Is this the epitome of what guys are supposed to be looking for and I just don't know?
It's just that I have more of a love/hate relationship with life. I certainly think it's better than the alternative, and there are things about it that I think are awesome, but there's are also things that really suck. And I'm sorry, but I think any life view worth having contains these equal but opposite notions in some way.
Overly positive people annoy me.
Which I suppose is one of about 20 reasons these people would be disappointed if I answered their ads...
But let me ask you this? If you really love life, why the hell are you desperately seeking somebody via MSN personals?
"Nothern Sky"
Sometime freshman or sophomore year, most of my friends made these lists of things they wanted to do before they died. Okay, really it was just Kate and Erin, but what you have to understand about that time in my life is that these two women were basically the center of my universe -- so much so that by the time junior year came around and they were no longer in the dorm, I was so desperate to make friends I started my own renegade FIG and built an ill-advised intelligence network. (Apparantly, I just love telling this story.)
Anyhoozle, I've never made a list like that for the simple reason that there's no way I could write all that down and think of it as something to keep in the back of my mind. I'd feel a perverse need to do all of these things as soon as possible, and honestly, I don't think there's any need to add anymore pressure to the simple act of living, because there are times in which the challenge of getting from day to day seems particularly daunting in its own right.
If I did make such a list, however, the one item that I can say I'd definitely put on there is seeing the northern lights. Because setting my Windows Media Player display to Aurora just ain't doing it for me.
"Keep Your Old Love Letters?"
Um, people burn old love letters after they get married, right?
It's just that I've sent a lot of out there missives into the world, and I really hate the thought that they will one day be unearthed by past loves so they can giggle about them with their spouses.
Or maybe I'm just disturbed by the thought that all these girls who've grown up into women and wives and mothers will always be able to put me in these tiny bubbles where I will remain as unloved and unchanging as uni-ball ink on a page.
I am disappointed to admit that I am a man of words and not action. And as such, in so many ways, I'm nothing more than the things I've said and written, so I'm always leaving pieces of myself in the hands of strange people and I have no idea what they're going to do with them...
"Grey"
One of the things I miss most about college is walking to Mark Twain. My mother would find this odd, as this was her one concern about me living in McDavid. "There's no dining hall!" she'd inform me. "You're not going to want to walk to get food! You'll starve!"
And yet somehow, I persevered.
I liked the walk to the Twain because I like being in-between places. But mostly, it was a great chance to embarass roommates. During one trip back, I held my hand up the entire time, screaming at Justin to give me five. "Up here Smith! Up here! Come on, man! Don't leave me hanging! Up here!!!" I drove that kid outta FARC like it was my job. Oh, and there was the infamous Spider-Walk, which didn't drive Prewitt out of FARC, especially as he stuck it through for four years to my piddly three, but I'm sure it irked him at least a little.
Any time Caleb and I were walking to Twain on a grey, cloudy day, he'd always comment that he loved this type of weather. He considered this a perfect day. And I always thought that was just Caleb being Caleb, but it turns out he's right. Because I'm far more likely to walk the 30 blocks to work on the morning if it's a dreary grey day than if it's bright and sunny.
"Ziggy Stardust and the Coffee Bean-Counters"
Yesterday, My Favorite Co-worker and de facto tour guide into mystery took a personal day, so I spent half an hour wandering around the floor looking for this guy to whom I was charged with delivering some photocopies. I had to keep that fierce look on my face, because the people around the office can smell fear and if that happens, you'll most likely be pounced on by a mountain lion.
Today, when I went to the cafeteria, I was dismayed to find that there were no coffee packets. So I grabbed one of the little cream containers I horde from McDonalds, tied my trusty bowie knife, Ziggy Stardust, to my hip and went out in search of the Fabled Hidden Coffee/Copy Room at the Heart of the 4th Floor. I've been there before, of course, but rumor has it that through some strange mysticisim, it's never in the same place twice, and people have been lost searching for it and never seen again.
Just as I was about to set forth on my journey, I was greeted by a rare sight indeed -- a scout from the Society of Hot Girls Secreted Away in the Far Reaches of the Office. I found myself torn. What's more important? Following her to meet that legendary tribe of beautiful women or the curative properties of sweet, sweet java? In the end, I charged past her into the great unknown for want of a magic elixir. There would be plenty of time to find the Secret Society later, but only if I got some coffee right then and there.
In my wandering, I was seized and tortured for hours by the interns. Interns are ravenous beasts driven by fear and confusion. Honestly, I pity them. I understand the feeling. They're lost in a world they never made. Yet, it was only with a little regret that I plunged Ziggy Stardust into each and every one of their hearts and left them for the elevator vultures.
The rest of my journey went quite smoothly after that. Ziggy seemed to sing as I sliced through the dense foliage at the heart of the 4th floor. It was a song as old as the earth itself, of how my enchanted blade fought ancient alien monsters and cleaved them in twain, and thus Peter Parker and J'onn J'onzz were free once more to walk the earth.
I'm not sure, but I swear he was singing in Portugese...
"What if...?"
Marvel Comics used to publish a series called What If...? that told what are redundantly termed as "imaginary stories" that sought to explore continuity changes in Marvel Universe history, like, "What if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?" or "What if Captain America hadn't been discovered by the Avengers?"
I've been meaning to do a What If...? themed blog entry for quite some time. So here goes...
"What If... Clark had Gone to NYU?"
Without Justin Smith to ground and humble me early on in my Freshman year, my ego runs rampant and I steep myself deeper and deeper into my pretension. By the time I score an internship at Marvel in my sophomore year, I am under the impression that mainstream superhero comics are "beneath me", an attitude that eventually spreads to comics in general, effectively ending my stick-figure stories before they start getting almost readable. Instead, I spend my time writing painfully esoteric poetry and short stories, and when they're rejected by various lit mags, I grumble about the small minds of the so-called academics who run these things.
As for my social life, I come to college friendless and without Smith as my erstwhile conscience, I fall into drinking and drugs because I think that's the best way for me to gain acceptance. It works. I have drunken sex with some girl at a party in SoHo and pick up a venereal disease.
Moreover, I develop a serious cocaine addiction. I blow through my student loan, my grades start to slip, and I get kicked out of school in 2002. I return to Missouri to get straightened out, and Protestants get their grimy hooks into me during rehab, I start asking everybody if they've accepted Jesus as their personal savior.
Hopefully I snap out of it before I become a minister. If I do snap out of it, I start school again a year later, this time at Mizzou, and end up at the Fine Arts Residential College where I run afoul of an old co-worker from the library turned desk attendant named Caleb Prewitt. He asks me if I'm still into comics, and I say something bland about them being for kids and beneath me. I have similar encounters with Brent and Justin that lead me to the conclusion that the Midwest is a backwards cesspool, and I become determined to return to New York where everything makes sense.
"What If... Clark and Kate had Dated?"
We go on one date. I think it goes pretty well, but Jeffries is less than plused. I ask her if she wants to go out again, and she turns me down politely but firmly.
Unable to take a hint, I continue to pursue her.
It's pretty embarassing actually. I'm asking desk attendants for advice. Every spotlight, I'm up there reading bad poetry with pithy throwaway lines like "Why would a girl from the lone star state leave this star alone?" and trying to pretend it's not about Kate. I create a series of stick figure comics that are a highly derivative mix of Dawson's Creek and Garth Ennis comics.
She slowly starts to hate me.
Meanwhile, my friendship with Kate's friend Erin Tuttle is strained early on by the fact that all I ever seem to want to do is talk about Kate. Our friendship eventually evolves past the point where it's about Kate at all, and we get along smashingly for the most part. When asked about any romantic interest I may have in Erin, I am quite emphatic in my declaration that we're just friends.
As things between us get increasingly awkward, Kate tells her parents about "the crazy guy who can't take a hint." The Parents Jeffries end up disliking me quite a bit because of it, and I am never invited to The Fairlady. Any time I come up, Kev routinely comments that he "hates that Clark," and Barb always shakes her head in disapproval.
Things get particularly ugly sophomore year when Kate begins dating this guy I consider a total "knobhole" named Adam Henerey. Consequently, Seamus and Wilbur are never created, nor is Adam ever re-christened Hank. And there is no three month period in 2002 that I consider, "My Wacky Summer with Grain Alcohol".
Plus I never get that stupid Maneater column.
But you know what would be the most horrifying part of this backward alternate universe? I probably would have seen Titanic in a vain attempt to understand Kate better. Bleccch!
"What If... Clark Was Obsessed with Batman?"
Honestly, it's a miracle I'm not.
Before Spider-Man was a blip on my radar and Superman had been embraced then dismissed as a joke thanks to the later seasons of Lois & Clark, Batman: The Animated Series was the center of my universe. In fact, the first superhero comics I read were those collected in The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told which I borrowed from the Raytown Public Library a few years before I worked there.
For some reason, while I've always really really liked Batman, I never became so enamored with him that I related every life event to his adventures in some way, as I have with other comic book characters, like the aforementioned Friendly Neighborhood Web-Slinger ot Last Son of Krypton, or even the unmentioned Merc With a Mouth, Two-Fisted Monster Journalist, or King of the Wakandans.
But what if I did?
As you probably know, after I moved out of the dorm, I still visited fairly frequently, and Caleb's room was always the first place I went to. Well, every once in a while, he wouldn't be in his room, but would have foolishly left the door unlocked. And so, one of my favorite things to do was to go in there and turn the light off and just sit there and wait for him to show up so that I could startle him when he got back, whiling away the time by reading his comics in the dark.
If I had been obsessed with Batman when I got to college, I would have done this far more often... to everybody.
And my years as a desk attendant with access to everybody's keys and an application to the task bordering on the psychotic and completely unconcerned with keeping said desk gig would have made this endeavor appallingly easy.
A full-scale hard-on for the Dark Knight would have made me one crazy son of a bitch, let me tell you. I'd feel compelled to divide my time between coming off as a vapid playboy and being a grim avenger of the night that's quite curt with people and always trying to spook them. At least until the "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive" storyline started up, during which I would have probably left FARC and lived "on the lam", doing the grim avenger thing full time and living in a storage closet in Schurz for three months.
I'd have treated all of my roommates as butlers, and would constantly be trying to draft people into my Caped Crusade. So instead of having FIGlets, I would have had sidekicks. And honestly, can you see Jacobs wearing a domino mask? I can't.
During the height of my Black Panther obsession, I constructed an intelligence network, right? Well a Batman obsession would have been a lot like that, only I'd threaten people more frequently and with more than vague promises of being dropped off in a random cornfield in Pella, Iowa.
And I'd have clipped all manner of unnecessary equipment to my belt, and would probably throw my pic at everybody.
In short, it'd be a total pain in your ass. You would have been annoyed by the fact that every time you turned your back on me in a conversation, I'd try to slip away without you noticing. And my constant monologues about how I made a promise to protect this city, or that I haven't been a child since a pair of bullets shattered my innocence or whatever would have gotten older than the whole "with great power" claptrap in half the time.
But at least you wouldn't have to hear me bitch about girl problems. Because Batman doesn't have girl problems. Despite what you may think, he's not nearly as interested in seeing Selina Kyle naked as much as he wants to see her behind bars. The bit in Batman Forever where he almost gives up being Batman for Nicole Kidman? One of the 1,247 things wrong with that flick.
Batman's got more important things to do, although I think any casual DC fan remembers that odd six month period when he was making out with both Catwoman and Wonder Woman. Still, no way Bat-Clark -- or as I like to call him, The Clark Knight -- would have been mooning over chicks who wouldn't give him the time of day. None.
And let's just skip over the horrors of my life as a rabid Wolverine fan...
"Rush Hour in New York"
I love walking through the city on a Friday afternoon.
Do you know what the most important word in that sentence is? Walking.
Because what makes the Friday afternoon jaunt so enjoyable is looking at all the people stuck in gridlock and honking their horns in frustration. It's just one of those things you always hear about but don't figure will actually happen. Like people peeing on the subway, which thankfully, still hasn't happened.
I've just gotta get out. I've just gotta get out. I've just gotta get right out of here.
"It's Good to Be King"
I love cartoons.
If I was eleven, I'd feel no guilt about this, but we'll table that discussion for now.
There's a lot of debate in the animated circles. Should we classify shifting background cells to simulate walking as a technique or a cheat? Does Robot Chicken's stop motion animation really count as a cartoon? Should Adult Swim do a better job of balancing anime with American comedy? Is The Life and Times of Juniper Lee essentially the same show as American Dragon: Jake Long and if so, which is better? Family Guy or Simpsons? Futurama vs. Simpsons? How does George Newborn compare in his portrayal of Superman in Justice League (Unlimited) to Tim Daly's seminal work as the Man of Steel in Superman: The Animated Series? Is Lex Luthor black? Is Aqua Teen Hunger Force brilliant or non-sense? Is Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law a travesty to Hanna-Barbara's legacy, or a worthy send-up?
Believe it or not, I'm not the only person concerned with these probing questions. There are no easy answers here. Just a lot of conflicting opinions.
Now, let's pull back and ask a bigger question. What is the most important American animated series of the last ten years?
I've given this the usual amount of consideration (quantified as "way too much") and my answer may surprise you, and will certainly create a lot of consternation to anybody willing to give this a lot of thought. My answer is King of the Hill.
The Simpsons certainly deserves a vast amount of credit for its role in redefining American cartoon's importance in popular culture, and if the question was what is the most important American cartoon of the last twenty years, I'd place the crown on Homer's head. Family Guy is undoubtedly funnier and South Park more outrageous, but the more I think on this, the more important King of the Hill seems to me.
To be honest, it took me several years to really get King of the Hill. When it first started airing, I watched it because it was an animated series on FOX, and that's what I did in high school. But I remember being put off because I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to be rooting for Hank or not. I was expecting the usual liberal bias, and didn't understand why this Republican propane salesman didn't seem like more of a joke. Because while there certainly is a lot of fun at Hank's expense in the series, most of the time he seemed like a perfectly sensible guy in a world that was slowly going crazy.
So for a number of years, I just didn't watch the show. I was in college and -- surprisingly -- had other things to do. And it wasn't until I got exiled to the Garden State that I started watching the shows constant replays on FX, and a few years maturity and a slightly bigger worldview brought me to the realization that
King of the Hill is the most socially relevent animated series being produced today.
I was well on my way to this mode of thinking when Fox aired an episode entitled "A Rover Runs Through It" and everything crystalized for me. In the episode, the Hills travel to Montana where Hank's wife, Peggy, grew up on a cattle ranch. The specifics of the plot -- in which Peggy saves the ranch from Happy Days star, pop culture icon, and MacGyver producer Henry Winkler -- aren't important (though completely socially relevent) to my argument. It's Hank's subplot in the story that does it for me.
Hank comes to Montana and he's in hogheaven, because he thinks this is going to be his chance to live like a cowboy. Only when he gets to the airport rental car company, he's told that they don't have any pick-up trucks, so he gets a Range Rover, and when the Hills show up at the ranch, the cowhands take one look at his SUV and come to the conclusion that Hank's yuppie scum, which of course, couldn't be further from the truth.
They then proceed to mock him -- usually with the nickname "Hollywood" -- to the point where he finally gets fed up and says something that stands at the very heart of what makes this show so great. He says, "I'm so sick and tired of everybody's asinine opinions about me. I'm not some redneck hick and I'm not some slick Hollywood slackass. I'm something else entirely. I'm... I'm complicated."
This little declaration is of course met with barely checked chuckles and a "Whatever you say, Hollywood," from the cowboys -- which is part of what makes it perfect -- but personally, I looked at Hank with jaw-dropping awe.
I've told you before how troubled I am by the idea of Red and Blue America. I just can't shake this feeling that there is far more about us that unifies us than divides us, and as important as issues like abortion and gay marriage and wal-mart might appear to be, these probably don't form the line between good and evil like so many of us tend to think they do, and I think what tends to happen is that we exist in these pockets where everybody has basically the same beliefs as us about these issues and we develop this whole "us vs. them" mentality. This didn't really occur to me until I started working at The Ocho and I found myself surrounded by young Republicans and realized that none of them were complete douchebags, or if they were douchebags, it was for reasons in which their political beliefs had marginal involvement. Oddly enough, the biggest douchebag in the bunch was one of my most liberal coworkers.
My point being that there are good, hard-working and noble people in this country who voted for George Bush because they thought it was the right thing to do, and I think those people are represented pretty fairly in the characterization of Hank Hill. And I'm sure it could be argued that Hank is a fake cartoon version of this section of the American people, but what's ironic is that most of the people I know have a cartoon villain conception of conservatives.
I think King of the Hill could save the country if we'd only let it. It exists at the very nexus of Red and Blue America -- a place I like to think of us the Purple Passage. It's an artform that's become a forum for the left presenting a fair and balanced view of the right, kind of the flipside of if the 700 Club did a show lauding the Gay Rights Movement and entreating their viewers to pray for these brave individuals in their righteous campaign for equal rights.
Sure. South Park has brief moments like this just as Family Guy takes a fairly equal-opportunity attitude in its scattershot approach to comedy, but neither of these shows tackle the cultural issues of this country with as much humanity as KotH, which can discuss modern American immigration without dissolving into dick and fart jokes or obscure Herculoids references. And it's still funny. Look at the characterization of Peggy Hill and tell me this isn't comic genius.
It's the kind of subtle humor everybody claims to love about The Office that isn't so much subtle as it's done with British accents which is the epitome of cool reserve to the average American mindset, even if its nothing but straight-up sex jokes.
I'm not going to mention that King of the Hill executive producer Greg Daniels is also an exec producer on the NBC version of The Office as that's a whole different can of worms involving my odd view of TV programming... besides, last week I saw an episode of KotH that satirized our generation's concentrated and oftimes academic dissemination of popular culture that's really got me re-evaluating my priorities.
Nothing the Griffins have done have made me do that.
"No Pen is Mightier Than Ziggy Stardust"
Some idiot brought their kid to work today. I just had to save the little shit from a fucking jaguar. Like me and Ziggy don't have more important shit to do. Little bastard's lucky jaguar pelts are worth two boxes of pens or I probably wouldn't have bothered.
"Due South"
I thought I was in love once. And then later I thought maybe it was just an inner ear imbalance... We spent an evening snowed in on the side of a mountain watching the northern lights. It was probably the most dramatic moment of my life. But in the end I realized I'd learned two things. The first is... that it's easier to think you're in love than it is to accept that you're alone, and the second is that it's very easy to confuse love with subatomic particles bursting in the air. Well, I also learned that I should have my ears checked more regularly.
- Paul Haggis & Deborah Rennard, "An Invitation to Romance"
I used to want to be a mountie. The fact that you have to be Canadian-born to be one is one of the many reasons I now hate and mistrust our neighbor to the north.
For my birthday, my sister gave me Due South: Season One on DVD. This is something I never would have bought myself. I loved Due South when it first aired 10 years ago. I have it's entire second season on tape somewhere. But by the time it was in syndication on TNT, my interest had waned.
So of course, this is when Brent started watching the show. I've often joked that Brent is basically me on five year delay -- the irony of this, of course, being that Brent is 10-times more mature than me in all the ways that matter. This is a kid who's been desperate to accrue equity since he was 20. By the time I moved in with him, Jones had the first two seasons on Canadian import DVD's he tracked down on eBay.
Anyway, I got this DVD as a gift and eventually popped it in to watch the pilot -- which I'd never seen -- and saw that the creator/executive producer was Paul Haggis and finally remembered where I'd seen that name before. Paul Haggis created both Due South and another show for CBS which was more popular and exponentially worse, Walker, Texas Ranger. (Believe it or not, I have a cousin who was an extra on several episodes of this show... And Honley claims he saw Tobey Maguire on an episode.) So if Paul Haggis were to try to go on and do features, you'd expect him to churn out crap like Rush Hour or The Man. Instead he writes the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby and writes and directs Crash. My understanding is that he's also got a project in the works with Garden State wunderkind Zach Braff. From humble beginnings, you know?
And Haggis isn't the only current star to spin out of the simple tale of a mountie transplanted to Chicago while on the trail of his father's killers -- it's a long story that takes exactly two hours to tell. I remembered that Ryan Phillipe had been in an episode as the troubled son of an off-again on-again wheelman, but I was surprised to see Rino Romano as a pathologically lying witness years before he did the voices of both Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne -- in Spider-Man Unlimited (which, surprisingly, has very little in comon with the comic book of the same name) and The Batman -- as well as a few appearances as Wang, the Drip Den guy in the MTV Spider-Man series. Of course, the early work of an unknown voiceover guy paled in comparison to Mark Ruffalo's guest spot as a guy who tries to sell his baby to the mob. And here I thought You Can Count on Me made him a star...
Humble beginnings indeed. I think I need to pick up season two...
"Tell Everybody Waiting for Superman..."
As you know, I'm quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones on superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating. Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology is not only great, it's unique. Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic that Superman stands alone. Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S"; that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears -- the glasses, the business suit -- that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak, he's unsure of himself, he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
- Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill
I was watching the Superman movie on AMC the other day, and it got me thinking about a few things.
First off, in the culmination of his weird real estate scheme, Lex Luthor fires a missile at the San Andreas faultline to make all this worthless desert property he's bought ocean-front property and at the same time he fires another one at Hackensack, New Jersey, to keep Superman occupied.
As a kid, I always thought that Luthor singling out some random town in New Jersey was mean and proof positive that he was pure fucking evil. Now, at the age of 23, having spent a couple months working at the Target in Hackensack, Lex's actions seem like the only rational course of action to take. That line in the Clem Snide song, "a beautiful Hackensack night"? It's a fable. Hackensack sucks.
More importantly, my favorite moment in Superman is the very end of Lois's interview with the Man of Steel, and the last thing he says to her:
"Lois? I never lie."
He says it with such innocent earnestness that for a moment, as Superman flew off, I thought to myself that as impressive as flying and burning bullets out of the sky with your eyes and seeing through walls and bending steel in your barehands might be, perhaps this unwavering honesty was Superman's greatest ability. Withstanding the impact of bullets is one thing. Baring the entirety of your being -- never relenting to deception when it makes so many things easier -- is quite another.
This moment of awe ended fairly swiftly, however, as shortly after Superman's departure, Clark Kent appeared sheepishly at Lois' doorstep and invited her to get a burger with him in a manner I can only describe as nebbish. That's when I realized that Superman's whole goddamn life is just one motherfucking lie, and the fact that he told such a bald-faced falsehood about the depths of his honesty is something I find almost as confusing as the whole weird time travelling thing at the end of the movie.
That, plus he saves Hackensack from a well deserved smoking cratering doom. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Superman is a dick.
"Life is Like an Idiot Box of Chocolates"
I was jotting down some notes in the margin of the Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue when I realized something: I am more excited about TV this year than I have been in years and it's probably because I don't have a life anymore.
That, and a TiVo would be a good investment for this little black duck.
So, I've given this a lot of thought, and this is my new TV schedule...
Monday: Traditionally a tough night for TV. I used to watch Murphy Brown when I was young. After I stopped doing that, it seemed that there wasn't anything worth watching on Monday's. Sure, I watched Boston Public, but I didn't need to watch Boston Public like I needed to watch Boston Common.
That changed when I started watching Everwood a few years ago. Now that Everwood's moved to Thursday, I was worried we were looking at a return of the dark ages... until I heard they were moving Arrested Development, the Royal Tenenbaums of network television.
As it stands, my Monday schedule is...
8:00/7:00 Central: Arrested Development
8:30/7:30: How I Met Your Mother vs. Kitchen Confidential
(I watched HIMYM and enjoyed it enough to watch it next week. I taped Kitchen Confidential because I forgot to stop my Arrested Development tape, so I'll watch that and see what I think. The Geek at the Center of the Office Social Structure -- who is, of course, a raging TV junkie -- finds it interesting that both shows feature former Buffy cast members as well as former Freaks and Geeks.)
9:00/8:00: A repeat of Law and Order on TNT if it's got Jerry Orbach and Jesse Martin. Unless I get into Prison Break. L & O has become a staple for me since I moved out here, but I'll only watch the Orbach and Martin ones. I'm convinced my new found appreciation for him is what killed Jerry Orbach...
Tuesday: Tuesday tends to be my day for the highest quality of TV. Maybe not the night for my favorite shows as I'm one for guilty pleasures to be sure, but since Smallville moved from Tuesday two seasons back, this has been the night when the really good shows I watch that deserve Emmy nods -- like Scrubs and Gilmore Girls -- have been on. Whether that trend continues is determined on the quality of NBC's newcomers, as Tuesday's line up is...
8:00/7:00: Gilmore Girls I look forward to the return of Jess for November sweeps like crazy Christians await the second coming.
9:00/8:00: My Name is Earl - I'm pretty excited about this show. Even if the early reviews hadn't been positive, I'd be exicted. Jason Lee's my pick to portray Joe Kelly in a movie, so you know I love him.
9:30/8:30: The Office - I actually own the DVD for the American Office's first season. I like it. I like it a lot.
Sidenote on Supernatural: I gave this show a shot on it's premiere. It's fine. It's not great but it's not godawful -- at least not by WB standards -- and keep in mind, this is a network that axed Jack & Bobby after one season, but continues to air Charmed. If there was nothing else on, I'd probably continue to watch Supernatural. Smallville's first few episodes were absolutely terrible, but I continued to watch it because there was nothing else on... (plus my love for Superman). So, if not for Earl and The Office -- or if there was some chance the brothers might run into a young John Constantine or Stephen Strange in their travels -- I might actually watch this.
Then again, maybe not. The two stars have never wowed me before. In fact, I always kind of hated Dean on Gilmore Girls, and had no use for Jensen Ackles either on Dawson's or on Smallville. (But it always takes me a while to warm up to the non-continuity characters on Smallville. It took me four years to warm up to Chloe Sullivan, while Pete Ross got a free pass because he was from the comics.)
Wednesday: This is easily the most disappointing change-up I've seen in years. Wednesday used to be the greatest day for living. Not only were there new comics, but some of my favorite shows have been on on Wednesdays. Hell, Wednesday at 8/7 central used to be the greatest hour of TV contention for me. Dawson's vs. Ed. Ed vs. Smallville. What to do, what to do? Now. Nothing.
My understanding is that Lost is on, but I think I've been hardwired not to watch ABC since the heyday of TGIF, as I can't warm up to Alias or Desperate Housewives either.
Wednesday's sole salvation is Veronica Mars, which was once a Tuesday night casualty to Scrubs, but I caught up on it over the summer and now I'm kind of hooked.
And I guess it's kind of nice not to have anything at the 8/7 slot. Gives me a little more time to read my comics...
8:30/7:30: Yes, Dear (if I remember)
9:00/8:00: Veronica Mars
Thursday: I was kind of happy to see Dawson's Creek come to an end, and not just because I watched the last two seasons purely out of some sense of obligation, but because it finally let Ed stand out on its own without contention. Then they moved Smallville to Wednesday and I had a new battle all over again. So when Ed ended, I was able to take solice in the fact that Smallville got to stand alone, and that's why I was able to rest a little easier last season.
So of course, they moved Smallville to compete with The O.C. this year.
So it looks like I'll be taping one and watching the other. Standard Operating Procedure is to tape the show I like more and watch the other one, as the tape ensures I can watch it over again if I want/need to, plus I'm a pleasure delayer. So I'll be taping Smallville.
The O.C. premiered at the beginning of the month, while Smallville won't premiere until next week. O.C.'s had three free weeks to wow me and it hasn't pulled it off, which is disappointing as this is The O.C.'s third season, and in my opinion, 3rd seasons tend to be the best season of a show. First seasons always seem awkward once you get enough distance from them, and second seasons are for learning what not to do to mess up your dynamic, leaving third seasons to shine before the show starts to become a caricature of itself in its exhaustive exploration of its narrative tics in seasons four and onward.
And like I said, Smallville gets a free pass because of Superman. Plus, James Marsters' joining the cast. Spike becomes Brainiac. That's going to be interesting to see...
And I'll take an off week sometime to give Everybody Hates Chris a try. If this was on Monday or Wednesday, it'd be a lock.
8:00/7:00: Smallville vs. The O.C.
9:00/8:00: Everwood - This is subject to change depending on the strength of the first few episodes. I've somewhat lost my love for this show and waiting an hour to watch Smallville is one thing. Waiting two hours while I wade through a show that I thought was good for Monday night when nothing else is on is another.
Friday: If I was writing this last year, I wouldn't waste my time talking about Friday TV. But I didn't give this much thought to the Fall TV season last year because I had more going on in my life, which meant Friday night would have been busy anyway. As it stands now, I have no social life.
I spent the summer watching Monk on USA. New episodes won't begin until January, so in the meantime, who knows? There's Malcolm in the Middle and Bernie Mac, but Malcolm's clearly passed it's prime and I've never really gotten into Bernie, so maybe Friday will be a day for rentals or video games. Ultimate Spider-Man's coming out Tuesday, you know.
As far as possible dark horse TV highlights, there's an outside chance I could get into The Ghost Whisperer for no other reason than I think Jennifer Love Hewitt is hot.
Really depends on if I get Cinemax in my apartment.
Saturday: Saturday night is a lot like Saturday morning. It's all about the cartoons. Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans are staples of my TV regimen and the latest JLU had Hawkman and parallels to his return in the JSA comics, which I just happened to have read on loan from the Teaneck library the week before in a delicious bit of serendipity. Plus, I'm getting into Samurai Champloo, doubling the number of anime shows I consider remotely watchable.
Sunday: As you can see, The WB basically rules my TV week with NBC, FOX, and UPN tossing in token efforts. Well, while the WB has had a stake in every watchable weeknight of television at some point, it's never touched Sunday. No network has ever beaten the unquestioned ruler of Sunday night television. Even the final season of Six Feet Under got relegated to its Monday night reruns in the face of Sunday's true master: first run animation on Fox.
Fox has owned Sunday night in my heart for nearly a decade and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I even sat through The War at Home to get from The Simpons to Family Guy. There's just no beating it. And the final season of King of the Hill will have my undivided attention.
Fictional character Dick Solomon says something in an episode of Third Rock from the Sun that sums it up perfectly: God bless television.
"Catch 37"
You see, I write something like a Fall TV Preview and come to an inescapable conclusion: I really need a girlfriend.
I need a girlfriend, but not to complete me or make me happy or make me value love or any of that bullshit. I need a girlfriend so that I'm constantly forced to exist outside of my head and forced to interact with other human beings in meaningful ways so I can get some perspective. I need a girlfriend so that I don't have the time or inclination to go to these disturbing places.
The catch of course, is that I can't get a girlfriend because my life is all about intense contemplation of the mundane, and my life is about intense contemplation because I don't have a girlfriend and I can't have a girlfriend because, well, you know...
It's a hell of a catch that catch 37.
What's that Prewitt? Oh yes. You're quite right. It's the best catch they've got.
"I'm Never It"
I don't get tagged because it's obvious that you people look to me as a trendsetter. I'm expected to come up with these types of cool things, like quizzes on your minute personality traits with the promise of prizes and the like...
But I love these group things. Again, I think of the blog as a comic book, and stuff like this are big comic book crossovers. "Se7en" is my Villains United tie-in. This is my House of M issue...
"10 Years Ago"
Back from the crazy Montanan adventures of the Secret Origin of Clark, I wandered into a comic book store for the first time and changed my life forever, as what could have easily been a brief interest/hobby instead snowballed into a life's ambition.
Ten years since Spider-Man caught my interest. Ten years since I made the decision not to be a writer but to become a comic book writer. Ten years, man, ten!
"5 Years Ago"
Justin and I got back to good ol' Room 337 after some impromptu gathering with various dorm kids at which point he asked me, very politely mind you, not to make fun of him in front of the new people because they didn't really know him yet.
It was a hard and humbling moment. In high school I'd basically built my entire identity out of being this loud, obnoxious jerk, but things were going to have to change. I wore my glasses for the next month or two as a constant reminder of the type of person I needed to try to be (this made sense at the time). I don't know how successful I was.
I don't know if I really became I kinder, gentler person, but if there's any part of me as Clark that was any more likable than me as Lenar, it's secret origin is contained in a plea from my dearest friend.
"1 Year Ago"
Excellent question I don't have to go to great lengths to answer. Hop into the wayback machine, motherfucker!
Highlights include my complaining about how I still haven't heard back from Marvel about my writing sample, my unabashed hard-on for Erica Durance, my first mention of The Question, and of course, the words of Joe Kelly!
And you know, I kind of miss working at The Ocho...
"Yesterday"
I committed to an apartment in the basement of a private residence in Teaneck, New Jersey. There's still the credit check and lease processing song and dance, but it's basically just a lot of formality at this point.
Ironically, I was seriously considering taking a place in Hackensack for a while. This was, like, a day after I wrote that whole thing about how Superman's a dick for saving that hellhole.
"5 Snacks I Enjoy" or "Why I'm a Fatty"
* Little Debbie Brownies
* Hostess Cupcakes
* Junior Bacon Cheese Burger
* Ritz crackers
* Individual slices of swiss cheese
"5 Songs I Know All the Words Too"
* Ben Folds Five, "Evaporated"
* The Theme song to Bonkers
* 5th Dimension, "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine"
* Counting Crows, "Rain King"
* Billy Bragg & Wilco, "Another Man Done Gone"
"5 Things I'd Do With a Cool $100 Million"
* Buy comics
* Fund an animated project
* Horde the majority of it. Fuck charity. I'm rich, bitch. I'll buy my way into heaven like the Baptists
* Throw it around to attract loose women
* Pay Brent back... maybe
"5 Places I'd Run Away To"
* Pella, Iowa
* Metropolis, Illinois
* Great Falls, Montana
* Connecticut
* Raytown, Missouri
"5 Things I'd Never Wear"
* Sleeveless shirts
* That Krypto tee-shirt people really thought I'd like which I hate
* A backwards cap and a doo-rag
* Piercings of any kind
* A condom for any practical purposes that couldn't be handled with a wad of kleenex
"5 Favorite TV Shows"
* Smallville
* The Venture Bros.
* Gilmore Girls
* Justice League Unlimited
* King of the Hill
"5 Bad Habits"
* Procrastinating
* Carrying things just a little too far
* Unchecked spending
* Talking to myself
* Drunk dialing
"5 Biggest Joys"
* Drunk dialing
* Blogging
* Reading
* TV
* Anytime my cell phone rings
"5 Favorite Toys"
* Laptop Spider-Solitaire
* "Snakes" on my cellphone
* The weird little games I make for myself, like "Inappropriately Appropriate Soundtrack Songs for Real Life Events" i.e. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" for a 9/11 movie
* Your mind
* A yo-yo
"5 Fictional Characters I'd Have Coffee With"
* Lois Lane
* Mr. Nancy
* Leigh from Dear Mr. Henshaw and Strider
* Seth Cohen
* Jesus
"It's Lonely Out in Space"
Hey, I'm sorry, okay?
Look, I didn't know it was going to be a long, long time 'til touchdown brought me 'round again to find I'm not the man you think I am at home...
Oh no, no, no.
I'm a rocket man.
NEXT:
Speaking to Spiders
- Christopher McCulloch, (AKA Jackson Publick III) "Alone Together"
"Back from Outer Space"
It's been a while, hasn't it?
Since my last significant post, the Gulf of Mexico took a hell of beating from a natural disaster, I received my first (and quite possibly last) check from Marvel Comics, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court took a dirtnap, I completed all the story missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and found an apartment (one has nothing to do with the other), one of my favorite authors released a book about my favorite god, I rediscovered my passionate love for hating Christians, and I fell in love.
The world hasn't missed out on much from my lack of commentary about these events, as they happened, and your lives remain much as they would have been, I'm sure. I would have quoted Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back's rousing chorus of "Justice is dead! Or so Jay thinks!" to mourn the passing of Reinquist, but that's it.
Caleb and Kate kept telling me that I was in danger of losing my audience from the long absense -- which just proves that there are, in fact, people who take my blog more seriously than it deserves to be other than me.
So the question, of course, is why? Why haven't I updated in all this time? Was it because I was sick of blogging and needed a break? No. Blogging remains the highlight of my miserable life. Was it because I had nothing to say? No, because that's never stopped me before, has it?
The real reason might surprise you, but I doubt it. I doubt you'll be surprised by that or the fact that I have been writing entries fairly regularly all this time, but just haven't published them. But here goes:
My relative silence over the last 62 days has been a vain attempt on my part to give the opening quote I picked out at the end of July some real weight so that it'd resonate with you.
So. Did it work? Did you miss me?
"Ex Machina Vol. 2"
Nobody "tagged" me. Guess I'm not cool enough to get tagged. And I have too much dignity to beg to be tagged -- unlike some people I know -- so I'm just going to tag myself.
I've gotten used to doing a lot of things to myself.
Se7en Things I Plan to Do Before I Die
* Take as many as you fuckers with me as I can
* Get the hell out of Jersey
* See the northern lights
* Work with Caleb Prewitt on a major project
* Write an episode of a cartoon
* Finish that crappy screenplay
* See you topless
Se7en Things I Can Do
* Tell you in which season a particular storyarc or episode occurred in most of the TV shows I've watched -- Family Guy being an obvious exception
* Identify voiceover actors you don't care about
* Draw faceless stick figures that emote
* Fix most tiny glitches in your blog template
* A surprising amount of complex math for an English major
* Write better than you
* Quote Joe Kelly thoroughly and accurately
Se7en Things I Can't Do
* A pull up
* Convince anybody to return my calls
* Stand to see another "Spider-Man gets buried and remembers how much his family needs him to find the strength to lift the debris off of him a la Amazing Spider-Man #33" or "The Green Goblin tosses a woman off the George Washington Bridge so Peter gets a chance to relive the death of Gwen Stacy a la Amazing Spider-Man #121" scene in a comic.
* Sing
* Complete Scenes from the Next
* Hold my liquor
* Go home
Se7en Things That Attract Me To Comics
* It's the nexus point of all media -- the one medium that can be as literary as it is cinematic
* A nice quick read when you're in the mood for reading but don't want to get too invested
* Superhero archtypes are the closest thing to myths our post-modern world will produce
* It's an artform that still hasn't tapped the vastness of its potential
* Comic book readers get excited about comics in a way that people don't get excited about movies or books (except for Harry fucking Potter) or TV
* The conventions of mainstream superhero comics are a fertile playground for the imagination... in theory
* Spider-Man's pretty cool
Se7en Things I Say the Most
* "I hate my life/self... life/self..."
* "You're going to be fine, Kate."
* "You're going to be fine, Brent."
* "Jesus H. Crap!"
* "I'm not drunk."
* "Kill me. Please."
* "Sweet shit."
Se7en Celebrities You Dream About
* Gabrielle Union
* Kristen Bell
* Alexis Bledel
* Lisa Loeb
* Sara Tanaka
* Joan Cusack
* Tobey Maguire
(I can't put Tina Fey because Jeffries has Tina Fey issues and I don't want to hear about them anymore.)
"Is It Getting Heavy?"
I'm quite convinced that The Flaming Lip's 1996 album "The Soft Bulletin" is really an allegory for the history of the Marvel Age of Comics. "Two scientists are racing for the good of all mankind"? Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom perhaps? "Although they were sad they rescued everyone"? Hello Stan Lee's classic superhero characterization. And don't get me started on "The Spiderbite Song" or "Waitin' for a Superman".
Give it a listen while thumbing through a copy of Les Daniels' Marvel: Five Fabulous Decades of the World's Greatest Comics. You'll see what I mean.
"Another Lost Blog Entry"
I was going to write an account of Kate's last trip to New York. What did we do? We went to Barnes and Noble so she could buy that new Harry Potter then we went to Wedding Crashers, she thought about buying some pants because her skirt was troublesome but didn't, blah blah blah BORING!
What was going to make this entry fun was that it was going to be almost entirely fictious. I was going to start off with this whole thing about how people always talk about New York like its an urban warzone that takes guts and guns to get through, and the crazy thing is that it's absolutely true and if the rest of the country had any idea what actually happened here, every bridge and tunnel into Manhattan would be dynamited and they'd make Chicago or Boston the new "cultural center of the world".
This would have been followed by complete and utter lies about me and Jeffries fighting off legions of Harry Potheads and vicious, roving street gangs of the all-too pretentious New York Literati. At one point, we would have been saved by the heroes of the FDNY, who'd brandish axes at these crazy freaking kids, and I'd have lost track of Kate when a taxi picks her up, but refuses to take me anywhere.
The true gem of all of this, I'm sure, would have been our trip on the subway. Instead of going with a lame and cliche society of mole people beneath the city, I was going to suggest to you that hippies have taken over the subway cars, creating mobile communes that snake through the underbelly of the city. We were going to get high and talk to people with names like Sunbeam St. Claire about deep philosophical issues on the "Freelove F Train to Forest Hills."
And of course, at one point, the train was going to start careening out of control, and I was going to stop it by shooting webs to the surrounding buildings, bringing us to a heart-wrenching stop at the end of the line.
(What? Don't look at me like that.)
And, since every decent blog entry needs at least one section that only makes sense to Caleb Prewitt, Kate and I were going to be at a bar in Queens when all of a sudden, Ben Affleck would throw Kevin James through the plate glass window and deliver an empassioned speech declaring himself the new King of Queens.
"Bus Married"
Under the right sort of circumstances, sitting next to somebody on the bus can be like a little slice of matrimony, and I remain intensely jealous of anybody who gets to sit next to somebody they know on the 167.
"Being There"
there is no sunken treasure rumored to be wrapped inside my ribs in a sea black with ink i am so out of tune with you don't know me, but i know you (you don't know me)you have no idea what i do (what i do)make you mine and see you swoon someday soon well alright that's quite alright i know you don't love me i know you don't love me anymore, alright i know you well i can't tell you anything you don't already know i keep on trying i should just let it go i keep on singing your eyes, they just roll it sounds like someone else's song from a long time ago how can i how can i give my love to you when i don't know what to do? this dreamer died when his dreams died too but i don't really mind if i dream about you i can't say what any of that means why would you wanna live in this world? why wouldn't you wanna live in this world? wouldn't you want to live? when i get home i turn off the alarm i've checked the phone no messages on i play the ones from yesterday i play your song just to hear you say that you you're the lonely one he don't know what he's done just don't forget to say goodbye when he's gone"Ziggy Stardust and the Daily Grind"
Crazy day at work. I stumbled upon the Fabled Hidden Coffee/Copy Room at the Heart of the 4th Floor. The legends are true: They never run out of the french roast coffee packets! Saw a girl my age walk by, too! Almost followed her to see if she was, in fact, from the Society of Hot Girls Secreted Away in the Far Reaches of the Office, but I only had my bowie knife (I named it Ziggy Stardust) with me, and I'm pretty sure you need a machete to cut through the vines out there.
I think I loaned my machete to The Adjectiveless Woman with No Nickname and she never returned it. Same with my tape dispenser.
Rumor has it that the girl who worked in my cubicle before me was carried off one idle Tuesday afternoon by a roving tribe of the Society of Hot Girls in one of their rare hunting raids. The Geek at the Center of the Office Social Structure says this was odd, as she only rated a 6 at best on the company-approved hotness scale. (I'm a 3. It's on my security ID. I don't think that's fair, though, because I hadn't gotten a haircut when they made this determination.)
Maybe one day I'll find them. Supposedly My Brother from Another Mother once went looking for them and disappeared for three weeks. When he came back, he didn't say anything, and now all he ever talks about is 24. Apparantly, he used to be quite the talker.
There's also supposed to be a vending machine on the third floor that sells cans of coke instead of the bottles we have up on the fourth, but I don't have third floor access, and have yet to develop a plan for stealing a key card or working the grate off of the vent over by my cubicle.
The daily grind's a bitch.
"Asking the Question"
"So... Where's your mother...?"
"My mom passed away many years ago."
"I meant your wiiiiife."
"Oh, I, umm... I'm not married."
"You have a girlfriend?"
"No. No, I don't. Never actually had..."
"That's not right. Everybody should have somebody they really really love. But you didn't? Never ever?"
"That's... not what I said."
"Well, if you did love someone, why didn't you tell her? It's a puzzle."
"It always has been."
- Rick Veitch, "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow"
"Do you know what apophenia is?"
"Apophenia - noun. The tendency to see connections where none exist. Did you come here just to make fun of my work?"
- Gail Simone, "Double Date"
Topically applied fluoride doesn't prevent tooth decay. It does render teeth visible to spy satellites.
There was a magic bullet. It was forged by Illuminati mystics to prevent us from learning the truth.
The plastic tips at the end of shoelaces are called aglettes. Their true purpose is sinister.
- Dwayne McDuffie, "Question Authority"
"So. You solve it yet?"
"Solve what?"
"The puzzle."
"I'm afraid all the pieces came out. I'm sorry. I'll buy you a new toy."
"Nooo. Not that. The puzzle about her. You know. The girl you love?"
"Oh. Umm... No. I don't expect I'll ever get to the heart of that one."
"But why not? You love her, right?"
"Yes. But for certain questions, sometimes the best answer... is no answer at all."
- Rick Veitch, "Falling in Place"
For a great many years, I have suspected that comic books and television shows and movies have been sending me messages or serving as signs meant to direct me in my day to day affairs. That it has all been part of a grander design.
That's crazy, right? Wrong, motherfucker.
Let me ask you this: Who signs Joe Kelly's paychecks? Who brought Ed back in reruns? Who had the power to release Lois and Clark Season One on DVD? Who created Felicity? Who gave Seth Cohen his own comic book? Who saw to it that Joey ended up with Pacey? Who killed Lawrence Tuttle?
DC Comics, the WB, Cartoon Network, TBS, the OC, New Line Cinema, HBO... All controlled in one way or another by Time Warner Corporation. It all comes back to them.
They're the reason my love life is a non-existent mess!
Why? What do they gain from all this? Who truly benefits? When did they decide to do this? Where does it end?
Those, my friends, are the questions.
"The Wind Beneath My Wings"
My mom and I used to sit around watching Wings back when it was on 24 times a day on USA.
There's this episode where Lowell asks the question, "Isn't that mordant and ironic?" though I can't remember the context.
I remember this specifically, because a few days later we were driving somewhere, and Mommy told me that she looked it up and mordant means bitingly sarcastic and isn't that cool?
I miss sitting around watching Wings with my mom more than Joe Kelly Deadpool.
"Fantasy Fantagraphics"
I've joined a comic rotisserie league. It's like fantasy football only it is, of course, comic book centered.
How it works is, you pick a team of writers and artists and they comprise your fantasy comic book company and depending on how they do in individual sales of actual books, this determines how well your company's doing.
I got everybody I really wanted from the draft. I am still going to lose. Here's why: I refused to pick creators that are actually popular and sure to sell books. I couldn't bring myself to put Bendis on my draft list. Instead, I picked the people I like. So, while I got my two top picks for writers, they're currently benched because neither Joe Kelly or Christopher Priest are currently producing any work.
That's because this isn't about victory for me. This is about being able to sit on the toilet and let my mind wander to a place where I can say to myself, "You know what? I think I'm going to put Kelly and Pascal Ferry on Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Oh. And I better look over Priest's Martian Manhunter script before I pass them on to Ryan Sook to pencil. Gotta do a better job of promoting those Slott books, too. Damn. Busy day ahead. Busy day indeed."
I mean, it beats sitting there wondering if the fact that I kind of enjoy pooping means I'm gay.
"Desperately Seeking Somebody"
Took a look at the personals at a couple of websites. More just to see who's out in the world than any serious intent to slip a few notches lower on the belt of pathetic desperation.
Here's what struck me as odd. In a lot of the MSN.com personals I read, these woman declared "I love life," and my immediate response was to wonder who the hell wants to hang around someone with that type of attitude? Is this the epitome of what guys are supposed to be looking for and I just don't know?
It's just that I have more of a love/hate relationship with life. I certainly think it's better than the alternative, and there are things about it that I think are awesome, but there's are also things that really suck. And I'm sorry, but I think any life view worth having contains these equal but opposite notions in some way.
Overly positive people annoy me.
Which I suppose is one of about 20 reasons these people would be disappointed if I answered their ads...
But let me ask you this? If you really love life, why the hell are you desperately seeking somebody via MSN personals?
"Nothern Sky"
Sometime freshman or sophomore year, most of my friends made these lists of things they wanted to do before they died. Okay, really it was just Kate and Erin, but what you have to understand about that time in my life is that these two women were basically the center of my universe -- so much so that by the time junior year came around and they were no longer in the dorm, I was so desperate to make friends I started my own renegade FIG and built an ill-advised intelligence network. (Apparantly, I just love telling this story.)
Anyhoozle, I've never made a list like that for the simple reason that there's no way I could write all that down and think of it as something to keep in the back of my mind. I'd feel a perverse need to do all of these things as soon as possible, and honestly, I don't think there's any need to add anymore pressure to the simple act of living, because there are times in which the challenge of getting from day to day seems particularly daunting in its own right.
If I did make such a list, however, the one item that I can say I'd definitely put on there is seeing the northern lights. Because setting my Windows Media Player display to Aurora just ain't doing it for me.
"Keep Your Old Love Letters?"
Um, people burn old love letters after they get married, right?
It's just that I've sent a lot of out there missives into the world, and I really hate the thought that they will one day be unearthed by past loves so they can giggle about them with their spouses.
Or maybe I'm just disturbed by the thought that all these girls who've grown up into women and wives and mothers will always be able to put me in these tiny bubbles where I will remain as unloved and unchanging as uni-ball ink on a page.
I am disappointed to admit that I am a man of words and not action. And as such, in so many ways, I'm nothing more than the things I've said and written, so I'm always leaving pieces of myself in the hands of strange people and I have no idea what they're going to do with them...
"Grey"
One of the things I miss most about college is walking to Mark Twain. My mother would find this odd, as this was her one concern about me living in McDavid. "There's no dining hall!" she'd inform me. "You're not going to want to walk to get food! You'll starve!"
And yet somehow, I persevered.
I liked the walk to the Twain because I like being in-between places. But mostly, it was a great chance to embarass roommates. During one trip back, I held my hand up the entire time, screaming at Justin to give me five. "Up here Smith! Up here! Come on, man! Don't leave me hanging! Up here!!!" I drove that kid outta FARC like it was my job. Oh, and there was the infamous Spider-Walk, which didn't drive Prewitt out of FARC, especially as he stuck it through for four years to my piddly three, but I'm sure it irked him at least a little.
Any time Caleb and I were walking to Twain on a grey, cloudy day, he'd always comment that he loved this type of weather. He considered this a perfect day. And I always thought that was just Caleb being Caleb, but it turns out he's right. Because I'm far more likely to walk the 30 blocks to work on the morning if it's a dreary grey day than if it's bright and sunny.
"Ziggy Stardust and the Coffee Bean-Counters"
Yesterday, My Favorite Co-worker and de facto tour guide into mystery took a personal day, so I spent half an hour wandering around the floor looking for this guy to whom I was charged with delivering some photocopies. I had to keep that fierce look on my face, because the people around the office can smell fear and if that happens, you'll most likely be pounced on by a mountain lion.
Today, when I went to the cafeteria, I was dismayed to find that there were no coffee packets. So I grabbed one of the little cream containers I horde from McDonalds, tied my trusty bowie knife, Ziggy Stardust, to my hip and went out in search of the Fabled Hidden Coffee/Copy Room at the Heart of the 4th Floor. I've been there before, of course, but rumor has it that through some strange mysticisim, it's never in the same place twice, and people have been lost searching for it and never seen again.
Just as I was about to set forth on my journey, I was greeted by a rare sight indeed -- a scout from the Society of Hot Girls Secreted Away in the Far Reaches of the Office. I found myself torn. What's more important? Following her to meet that legendary tribe of beautiful women or the curative properties of sweet, sweet java? In the end, I charged past her into the great unknown for want of a magic elixir. There would be plenty of time to find the Secret Society later, but only if I got some coffee right then and there.
In my wandering, I was seized and tortured for hours by the interns. Interns are ravenous beasts driven by fear and confusion. Honestly, I pity them. I understand the feeling. They're lost in a world they never made. Yet, it was only with a little regret that I plunged Ziggy Stardust into each and every one of their hearts and left them for the elevator vultures.
The rest of my journey went quite smoothly after that. Ziggy seemed to sing as I sliced through the dense foliage at the heart of the 4th floor. It was a song as old as the earth itself, of how my enchanted blade fought ancient alien monsters and cleaved them in twain, and thus Peter Parker and J'onn J'onzz were free once more to walk the earth.
I'm not sure, but I swear he was singing in Portugese...
"What if...?"
Marvel Comics used to publish a series called What If...? that told what are redundantly termed as "imaginary stories" that sought to explore continuity changes in Marvel Universe history, like, "What if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?" or "What if Captain America hadn't been discovered by the Avengers?"
I've been meaning to do a What If...? themed blog entry for quite some time. So here goes...
"What If... Clark had Gone to NYU?"
Without Justin Smith to ground and humble me early on in my Freshman year, my ego runs rampant and I steep myself deeper and deeper into my pretension. By the time I score an internship at Marvel in my sophomore year, I am under the impression that mainstream superhero comics are "beneath me", an attitude that eventually spreads to comics in general, effectively ending my stick-figure stories before they start getting almost readable. Instead, I spend my time writing painfully esoteric poetry and short stories, and when they're rejected by various lit mags, I grumble about the small minds of the so-called academics who run these things.
As for my social life, I come to college friendless and without Smith as my erstwhile conscience, I fall into drinking and drugs because I think that's the best way for me to gain acceptance. It works. I have drunken sex with some girl at a party in SoHo and pick up a venereal disease.
Moreover, I develop a serious cocaine addiction. I blow through my student loan, my grades start to slip, and I get kicked out of school in 2002. I return to Missouri to get straightened out, and Protestants get their grimy hooks into me during rehab, I start asking everybody if they've accepted Jesus as their personal savior.
Hopefully I snap out of it before I become a minister. If I do snap out of it, I start school again a year later, this time at Mizzou, and end up at the Fine Arts Residential College where I run afoul of an old co-worker from the library turned desk attendant named Caleb Prewitt. He asks me if I'm still into comics, and I say something bland about them being for kids and beneath me. I have similar encounters with Brent and Justin that lead me to the conclusion that the Midwest is a backwards cesspool, and I become determined to return to New York where everything makes sense.
"What If... Clark and Kate had Dated?"
We go on one date. I think it goes pretty well, but Jeffries is less than plused. I ask her if she wants to go out again, and she turns me down politely but firmly.
Unable to take a hint, I continue to pursue her.
It's pretty embarassing actually. I'm asking desk attendants for advice. Every spotlight, I'm up there reading bad poetry with pithy throwaway lines like "Why would a girl from the lone star state leave this star alone?" and trying to pretend it's not about Kate. I create a series of stick figure comics that are a highly derivative mix of Dawson's Creek and Garth Ennis comics.
She slowly starts to hate me.
Meanwhile, my friendship with Kate's friend Erin Tuttle is strained early on by the fact that all I ever seem to want to do is talk about Kate. Our friendship eventually evolves past the point where it's about Kate at all, and we get along smashingly for the most part. When asked about any romantic interest I may have in Erin, I am quite emphatic in my declaration that we're just friends.
As things between us get increasingly awkward, Kate tells her parents about "the crazy guy who can't take a hint." The Parents Jeffries end up disliking me quite a bit because of it, and I am never invited to The Fairlady. Any time I come up, Kev routinely comments that he "hates that Clark," and Barb always shakes her head in disapproval.
Things get particularly ugly sophomore year when Kate begins dating this guy I consider a total "knobhole" named Adam Henerey. Consequently, Seamus and Wilbur are never created, nor is Adam ever re-christened Hank. And there is no three month period in 2002 that I consider, "My Wacky Summer with Grain Alcohol".
Plus I never get that stupid Maneater column.
But you know what would be the most horrifying part of this backward alternate universe? I probably would have seen Titanic in a vain attempt to understand Kate better. Bleccch!
"What If... Clark Was Obsessed with Batman?"
Honestly, it's a miracle I'm not.
Before Spider-Man was a blip on my radar and Superman had been embraced then dismissed as a joke thanks to the later seasons of Lois & Clark, Batman: The Animated Series was the center of my universe. In fact, the first superhero comics I read were those collected in The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told which I borrowed from the Raytown Public Library a few years before I worked there.
For some reason, while I've always really really liked Batman, I never became so enamored with him that I related every life event to his adventures in some way, as I have with other comic book characters, like the aforementioned Friendly Neighborhood Web-Slinger ot Last Son of Krypton, or even the unmentioned Merc With a Mouth, Two-Fisted Monster Journalist, or King of the Wakandans.
But what if I did?
As you probably know, after I moved out of the dorm, I still visited fairly frequently, and Caleb's room was always the first place I went to. Well, every once in a while, he wouldn't be in his room, but would have foolishly left the door unlocked. And so, one of my favorite things to do was to go in there and turn the light off and just sit there and wait for him to show up so that I could startle him when he got back, whiling away the time by reading his comics in the dark.
If I had been obsessed with Batman when I got to college, I would have done this far more often... to everybody.
And my years as a desk attendant with access to everybody's keys and an application to the task bordering on the psychotic and completely unconcerned with keeping said desk gig would have made this endeavor appallingly easy.
A full-scale hard-on for the Dark Knight would have made me one crazy son of a bitch, let me tell you. I'd feel compelled to divide my time between coming off as a vapid playboy and being a grim avenger of the night that's quite curt with people and always trying to spook them. At least until the "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive" storyline started up, during which I would have probably left FARC and lived "on the lam", doing the grim avenger thing full time and living in a storage closet in Schurz for three months.
I'd have treated all of my roommates as butlers, and would constantly be trying to draft people into my Caped Crusade. So instead of having FIGlets, I would have had sidekicks. And honestly, can you see Jacobs wearing a domino mask? I can't.
During the height of my Black Panther obsession, I constructed an intelligence network, right? Well a Batman obsession would have been a lot like that, only I'd threaten people more frequently and with more than vague promises of being dropped off in a random cornfield in Pella, Iowa.
And I'd have clipped all manner of unnecessary equipment to my belt, and would probably throw my pic at everybody.
In short, it'd be a total pain in your ass. You would have been annoyed by the fact that every time you turned your back on me in a conversation, I'd try to slip away without you noticing. And my constant monologues about how I made a promise to protect this city, or that I haven't been a child since a pair of bullets shattered my innocence or whatever would have gotten older than the whole "with great power" claptrap in half the time.
But at least you wouldn't have to hear me bitch about girl problems. Because Batman doesn't have girl problems. Despite what you may think, he's not nearly as interested in seeing Selina Kyle naked as much as he wants to see her behind bars. The bit in Batman Forever where he almost gives up being Batman for Nicole Kidman? One of the 1,247 things wrong with that flick.
Batman's got more important things to do, although I think any casual DC fan remembers that odd six month period when he was making out with both Catwoman and Wonder Woman. Still, no way Bat-Clark -- or as I like to call him, The Clark Knight -- would have been mooning over chicks who wouldn't give him the time of day. None.
And let's just skip over the horrors of my life as a rabid Wolverine fan...
"Rush Hour in New York"
I love walking through the city on a Friday afternoon.
Do you know what the most important word in that sentence is? Walking.
Because what makes the Friday afternoon jaunt so enjoyable is looking at all the people stuck in gridlock and honking their horns in frustration. It's just one of those things you always hear about but don't figure will actually happen. Like people peeing on the subway, which thankfully, still hasn't happened.
I've just gotta get out. I've just gotta get out. I've just gotta get right out of here.
"It's Good to Be King"
I love cartoons.
If I was eleven, I'd feel no guilt about this, but we'll table that discussion for now.
There's a lot of debate in the animated circles. Should we classify shifting background cells to simulate walking as a technique or a cheat? Does Robot Chicken's stop motion animation really count as a cartoon? Should Adult Swim do a better job of balancing anime with American comedy? Is The Life and Times of Juniper Lee essentially the same show as American Dragon: Jake Long and if so, which is better? Family Guy or Simpsons? Futurama vs. Simpsons? How does George Newborn compare in his portrayal of Superman in Justice League (Unlimited) to Tim Daly's seminal work as the Man of Steel in Superman: The Animated Series? Is Lex Luthor black? Is Aqua Teen Hunger Force brilliant or non-sense? Is Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law a travesty to Hanna-Barbara's legacy, or a worthy send-up?
Believe it or not, I'm not the only person concerned with these probing questions. There are no easy answers here. Just a lot of conflicting opinions.
Now, let's pull back and ask a bigger question. What is the most important American animated series of the last ten years?
I've given this the usual amount of consideration (quantified as "way too much") and my answer may surprise you, and will certainly create a lot of consternation to anybody willing to give this a lot of thought. My answer is King of the Hill.
The Simpsons certainly deserves a vast amount of credit for its role in redefining American cartoon's importance in popular culture, and if the question was what is the most important American cartoon of the last twenty years, I'd place the crown on Homer's head. Family Guy is undoubtedly funnier and South Park more outrageous, but the more I think on this, the more important King of the Hill seems to me.
To be honest, it took me several years to really get King of the Hill. When it first started airing, I watched it because it was an animated series on FOX, and that's what I did in high school. But I remember being put off because I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to be rooting for Hank or not. I was expecting the usual liberal bias, and didn't understand why this Republican propane salesman didn't seem like more of a joke. Because while there certainly is a lot of fun at Hank's expense in the series, most of the time he seemed like a perfectly sensible guy in a world that was slowly going crazy.
So for a number of years, I just didn't watch the show. I was in college and -- surprisingly -- had other things to do. And it wasn't until I got exiled to the Garden State that I started watching the shows constant replays on FX, and a few years maturity and a slightly bigger worldview brought me to the realization that
King of the Hill is the most socially relevent animated series being produced today.
I was well on my way to this mode of thinking when Fox aired an episode entitled "A Rover Runs Through It" and everything crystalized for me. In the episode, the Hills travel to Montana where Hank's wife, Peggy, grew up on a cattle ranch. The specifics of the plot -- in which Peggy saves the ranch from Happy Days star, pop culture icon, and MacGyver producer Henry Winkler -- aren't important (though completely socially relevent) to my argument. It's Hank's subplot in the story that does it for me.
Hank comes to Montana and he's in hogheaven, because he thinks this is going to be his chance to live like a cowboy. Only when he gets to the airport rental car company, he's told that they don't have any pick-up trucks, so he gets a Range Rover, and when the Hills show up at the ranch, the cowhands take one look at his SUV and come to the conclusion that Hank's yuppie scum, which of course, couldn't be further from the truth.
They then proceed to mock him -- usually with the nickname "Hollywood" -- to the point where he finally gets fed up and says something that stands at the very heart of what makes this show so great. He says, "I'm so sick and tired of everybody's asinine opinions about me. I'm not some redneck hick and I'm not some slick Hollywood slackass. I'm something else entirely. I'm... I'm complicated."
This little declaration is of course met with barely checked chuckles and a "Whatever you say, Hollywood," from the cowboys -- which is part of what makes it perfect -- but personally, I looked at Hank with jaw-dropping awe.
I've told you before how troubled I am by the idea of Red and Blue America. I just can't shake this feeling that there is far more about us that unifies us than divides us, and as important as issues like abortion and gay marriage and wal-mart might appear to be, these probably don't form the line between good and evil like so many of us tend to think they do, and I think what tends to happen is that we exist in these pockets where everybody has basically the same beliefs as us about these issues and we develop this whole "us vs. them" mentality. This didn't really occur to me until I started working at The Ocho and I found myself surrounded by young Republicans and realized that none of them were complete douchebags, or if they were douchebags, it was for reasons in which their political beliefs had marginal involvement. Oddly enough, the biggest douchebag in the bunch was one of my most liberal coworkers.
My point being that there are good, hard-working and noble people in this country who voted for George Bush because they thought it was the right thing to do, and I think those people are represented pretty fairly in the characterization of Hank Hill. And I'm sure it could be argued that Hank is a fake cartoon version of this section of the American people, but what's ironic is that most of the people I know have a cartoon villain conception of conservatives.
I think King of the Hill could save the country if we'd only let it. It exists at the very nexus of Red and Blue America -- a place I like to think of us the Purple Passage. It's an artform that's become a forum for the left presenting a fair and balanced view of the right, kind of the flipside of if the 700 Club did a show lauding the Gay Rights Movement and entreating their viewers to pray for these brave individuals in their righteous campaign for equal rights.
Sure. South Park has brief moments like this just as Family Guy takes a fairly equal-opportunity attitude in its scattershot approach to comedy, but neither of these shows tackle the cultural issues of this country with as much humanity as KotH, which can discuss modern American immigration without dissolving into dick and fart jokes or obscure Herculoids references. And it's still funny. Look at the characterization of Peggy Hill and tell me this isn't comic genius.
It's the kind of subtle humor everybody claims to love about The Office that isn't so much subtle as it's done with British accents which is the epitome of cool reserve to the average American mindset, even if its nothing but straight-up sex jokes.
I'm not going to mention that King of the Hill executive producer Greg Daniels is also an exec producer on the NBC version of The Office as that's a whole different can of worms involving my odd view of TV programming... besides, last week I saw an episode of KotH that satirized our generation's concentrated and oftimes academic dissemination of popular culture that's really got me re-evaluating my priorities.
Nothing the Griffins have done have made me do that.
"No Pen is Mightier Than Ziggy Stardust"
Some idiot brought their kid to work today. I just had to save the little shit from a fucking jaguar. Like me and Ziggy don't have more important shit to do. Little bastard's lucky jaguar pelts are worth two boxes of pens or I probably wouldn't have bothered.
"Due South"
I thought I was in love once. And then later I thought maybe it was just an inner ear imbalance... We spent an evening snowed in on the side of a mountain watching the northern lights. It was probably the most dramatic moment of my life. But in the end I realized I'd learned two things. The first is... that it's easier to think you're in love than it is to accept that you're alone, and the second is that it's very easy to confuse love with subatomic particles bursting in the air. Well, I also learned that I should have my ears checked more regularly.
- Paul Haggis & Deborah Rennard, "An Invitation to Romance"
I used to want to be a mountie. The fact that you have to be Canadian-born to be one is one of the many reasons I now hate and mistrust our neighbor to the north.
For my birthday, my sister gave me Due South: Season One on DVD. This is something I never would have bought myself. I loved Due South when it first aired 10 years ago. I have it's entire second season on tape somewhere. But by the time it was in syndication on TNT, my interest had waned.
So of course, this is when Brent started watching the show. I've often joked that Brent is basically me on five year delay -- the irony of this, of course, being that Brent is 10-times more mature than me in all the ways that matter. This is a kid who's been desperate to accrue equity since he was 20. By the time I moved in with him, Jones had the first two seasons on Canadian import DVD's he tracked down on eBay.
Anyway, I got this DVD as a gift and eventually popped it in to watch the pilot -- which I'd never seen -- and saw that the creator/executive producer was Paul Haggis and finally remembered where I'd seen that name before. Paul Haggis created both Due South and another show for CBS which was more popular and exponentially worse, Walker, Texas Ranger. (Believe it or not, I have a cousin who was an extra on several episodes of this show... And Honley claims he saw Tobey Maguire on an episode.) So if Paul Haggis were to try to go on and do features, you'd expect him to churn out crap like Rush Hour or The Man. Instead he writes the screenplay for Million Dollar Baby and writes and directs Crash. My understanding is that he's also got a project in the works with Garden State wunderkind Zach Braff. From humble beginnings, you know?
And Haggis isn't the only current star to spin out of the simple tale of a mountie transplanted to Chicago while on the trail of his father's killers -- it's a long story that takes exactly two hours to tell. I remembered that Ryan Phillipe had been in an episode as the troubled son of an off-again on-again wheelman, but I was surprised to see Rino Romano as a pathologically lying witness years before he did the voices of both Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne -- in Spider-Man Unlimited (which, surprisingly, has very little in comon with the comic book of the same name) and The Batman -- as well as a few appearances as Wang, the Drip Den guy in the MTV Spider-Man series. Of course, the early work of an unknown voiceover guy paled in comparison to Mark Ruffalo's guest spot as a guy who tries to sell his baby to the mob. And here I thought You Can Count on Me made him a star...
Humble beginnings indeed. I think I need to pick up season two...
"Tell Everybody Waiting for Superman..."
As you know, I'm quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones on superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating. Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology is not only great, it's unique. Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero and there's the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne. Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic that Superman stands alone. Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S"; that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears -- the glasses, the business suit -- that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak, he's unsure of himself, he's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
- Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill
I was watching the Superman movie on AMC the other day, and it got me thinking about a few things.
First off, in the culmination of his weird real estate scheme, Lex Luthor fires a missile at the San Andreas faultline to make all this worthless desert property he's bought ocean-front property and at the same time he fires another one at Hackensack, New Jersey, to keep Superman occupied.
As a kid, I always thought that Luthor singling out some random town in New Jersey was mean and proof positive that he was pure fucking evil. Now, at the age of 23, having spent a couple months working at the Target in Hackensack, Lex's actions seem like the only rational course of action to take. That line in the Clem Snide song, "a beautiful Hackensack night"? It's a fable. Hackensack sucks.
More importantly, my favorite moment in Superman is the very end of Lois's interview with the Man of Steel, and the last thing he says to her:
"Lois? I never lie."
He says it with such innocent earnestness that for a moment, as Superman flew off, I thought to myself that as impressive as flying and burning bullets out of the sky with your eyes and seeing through walls and bending steel in your barehands might be, perhaps this unwavering honesty was Superman's greatest ability. Withstanding the impact of bullets is one thing. Baring the entirety of your being -- never relenting to deception when it makes so many things easier -- is quite another.
This moment of awe ended fairly swiftly, however, as shortly after Superman's departure, Clark Kent appeared sheepishly at Lois' doorstep and invited her to get a burger with him in a manner I can only describe as nebbish. That's when I realized that Superman's whole goddamn life is just one motherfucking lie, and the fact that he told such a bald-faced falsehood about the depths of his honesty is something I find almost as confusing as the whole weird time travelling thing at the end of the movie.
That, plus he saves Hackensack from a well deserved smoking cratering doom. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Superman is a dick.
"Life is Like an Idiot Box of Chocolates"
I was jotting down some notes in the margin of the Entertainment Weekly fall TV preview issue when I realized something: I am more excited about TV this year than I have been in years and it's probably because I don't have a life anymore.
That, and a TiVo would be a good investment for this little black duck.
So, I've given this a lot of thought, and this is my new TV schedule...
Monday: Traditionally a tough night for TV. I used to watch Murphy Brown when I was young. After I stopped doing that, it seemed that there wasn't anything worth watching on Monday's. Sure, I watched Boston Public, but I didn't need to watch Boston Public like I needed to watch Boston Common.
That changed when I started watching Everwood a few years ago. Now that Everwood's moved to Thursday, I was worried we were looking at a return of the dark ages... until I heard they were moving Arrested Development, the Royal Tenenbaums of network television.
As it stands, my Monday schedule is...
8:00/7:00 Central: Arrested Development
8:30/7:30: How I Met Your Mother vs. Kitchen Confidential
(I watched HIMYM and enjoyed it enough to watch it next week. I taped Kitchen Confidential because I forgot to stop my Arrested Development tape, so I'll watch that and see what I think. The Geek at the Center of the Office Social Structure -- who is, of course, a raging TV junkie -- finds it interesting that both shows feature former Buffy cast members as well as former Freaks and Geeks.)
9:00/8:00: A repeat of Law and Order on TNT if it's got Jerry Orbach and Jesse Martin. Unless I get into Prison Break. L & O has become a staple for me since I moved out here, but I'll only watch the Orbach and Martin ones. I'm convinced my new found appreciation for him is what killed Jerry Orbach...
Tuesday: Tuesday tends to be my day for the highest quality of TV. Maybe not the night for my favorite shows as I'm one for guilty pleasures to be sure, but since Smallville moved from Tuesday two seasons back, this has been the night when the really good shows I watch that deserve Emmy nods -- like Scrubs and Gilmore Girls -- have been on. Whether that trend continues is determined on the quality of NBC's newcomers, as Tuesday's line up is...
8:00/7:00: Gilmore Girls I look forward to the return of Jess for November sweeps like crazy Christians await the second coming.
9:00/8:00: My Name is Earl - I'm pretty excited about this show. Even if the early reviews hadn't been positive, I'd be exicted. Jason Lee's my pick to portray Joe Kelly in a movie, so you know I love him.
9:30/8:30: The Office - I actually own the DVD for the American Office's first season. I like it. I like it a lot.
Sidenote on Supernatural: I gave this show a shot on it's premiere. It's fine. It's not great but it's not godawful -- at least not by WB standards -- and keep in mind, this is a network that axed Jack & Bobby after one season, but continues to air Charmed. If there was nothing else on, I'd probably continue to watch Supernatural. Smallville's first few episodes were absolutely terrible, but I continued to watch it because there was nothing else on... (plus my love for Superman). So, if not for Earl and The Office -- or if there was some chance the brothers might run into a young John Constantine or Stephen Strange in their travels -- I might actually watch this.
Then again, maybe not. The two stars have never wowed me before. In fact, I always kind of hated Dean on Gilmore Girls, and had no use for Jensen Ackles either on Dawson's or on Smallville. (But it always takes me a while to warm up to the non-continuity characters on Smallville. It took me four years to warm up to Chloe Sullivan, while Pete Ross got a free pass because he was from the comics.)
Wednesday: This is easily the most disappointing change-up I've seen in years. Wednesday used to be the greatest day for living. Not only were there new comics, but some of my favorite shows have been on on Wednesdays. Hell, Wednesday at 8/7 central used to be the greatest hour of TV contention for me. Dawson's vs. Ed. Ed vs. Smallville. What to do, what to do? Now. Nothing.
My understanding is that Lost is on, but I think I've been hardwired not to watch ABC since the heyday of TGIF, as I can't warm up to Alias or Desperate Housewives either.
Wednesday's sole salvation is Veronica Mars, which was once a Tuesday night casualty to Scrubs, but I caught up on it over the summer and now I'm kind of hooked.
And I guess it's kind of nice not to have anything at the 8/7 slot. Gives me a little more time to read my comics...
8:30/7:30: Yes, Dear (if I remember)
9:00/8:00: Veronica Mars
Thursday: I was kind of happy to see Dawson's Creek come to an end, and not just because I watched the last two seasons purely out of some sense of obligation, but because it finally let Ed stand out on its own without contention. Then they moved Smallville to Wednesday and I had a new battle all over again. So when Ed ended, I was able to take solice in the fact that Smallville got to stand alone, and that's why I was able to rest a little easier last season.
So of course, they moved Smallville to compete with The O.C. this year.
So it looks like I'll be taping one and watching the other. Standard Operating Procedure is to tape the show I like more and watch the other one, as the tape ensures I can watch it over again if I want/need to, plus I'm a pleasure delayer. So I'll be taping Smallville.
The O.C. premiered at the beginning of the month, while Smallville won't premiere until next week. O.C.'s had three free weeks to wow me and it hasn't pulled it off, which is disappointing as this is The O.C.'s third season, and in my opinion, 3rd seasons tend to be the best season of a show. First seasons always seem awkward once you get enough distance from them, and second seasons are for learning what not to do to mess up your dynamic, leaving third seasons to shine before the show starts to become a caricature of itself in its exhaustive exploration of its narrative tics in seasons four and onward.
And like I said, Smallville gets a free pass because of Superman. Plus, James Marsters' joining the cast. Spike becomes Brainiac. That's going to be interesting to see...
And I'll take an off week sometime to give Everybody Hates Chris a try. If this was on Monday or Wednesday, it'd be a lock.
8:00/7:00: Smallville vs. The O.C.
9:00/8:00: Everwood - This is subject to change depending on the strength of the first few episodes. I've somewhat lost my love for this show and waiting an hour to watch Smallville is one thing. Waiting two hours while I wade through a show that I thought was good for Monday night when nothing else is on is another.
Friday: If I was writing this last year, I wouldn't waste my time talking about Friday TV. But I didn't give this much thought to the Fall TV season last year because I had more going on in my life, which meant Friday night would have been busy anyway. As it stands now, I have no social life.
I spent the summer watching Monk on USA. New episodes won't begin until January, so in the meantime, who knows? There's Malcolm in the Middle and Bernie Mac, but Malcolm's clearly passed it's prime and I've never really gotten into Bernie, so maybe Friday will be a day for rentals or video games. Ultimate Spider-Man's coming out Tuesday, you know.
As far as possible dark horse TV highlights, there's an outside chance I could get into The Ghost Whisperer for no other reason than I think Jennifer Love Hewitt is hot.
Really depends on if I get Cinemax in my apartment.
Saturday: Saturday night is a lot like Saturday morning. It's all about the cartoons. Justice League Unlimited and Teen Titans are staples of my TV regimen and the latest JLU had Hawkman and parallels to his return in the JSA comics, which I just happened to have read on loan from the Teaneck library the week before in a delicious bit of serendipity. Plus, I'm getting into Samurai Champloo, doubling the number of anime shows I consider remotely watchable.
Sunday: As you can see, The WB basically rules my TV week with NBC, FOX, and UPN tossing in token efforts. Well, while the WB has had a stake in every watchable weeknight of television at some point, it's never touched Sunday. No network has ever beaten the unquestioned ruler of Sunday night television. Even the final season of Six Feet Under got relegated to its Monday night reruns in the face of Sunday's true master: first run animation on Fox.
Fox has owned Sunday night in my heart for nearly a decade and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I even sat through The War at Home to get from The Simpons to Family Guy. There's just no beating it. And the final season of King of the Hill will have my undivided attention.
Fictional character Dick Solomon says something in an episode of Third Rock from the Sun that sums it up perfectly: God bless television.
"Catch 37"
You see, I write something like a Fall TV Preview and come to an inescapable conclusion: I really need a girlfriend.
I need a girlfriend, but not to complete me or make me happy or make me value love or any of that bullshit. I need a girlfriend so that I'm constantly forced to exist outside of my head and forced to interact with other human beings in meaningful ways so I can get some perspective. I need a girlfriend so that I don't have the time or inclination to go to these disturbing places.
The catch of course, is that I can't get a girlfriend because my life is all about intense contemplation of the mundane, and my life is about intense contemplation because I don't have a girlfriend and I can't have a girlfriend because, well, you know...
It's a hell of a catch that catch 37.
What's that Prewitt? Oh yes. You're quite right. It's the best catch they've got.
"I'm Never It"
I don't get tagged because it's obvious that you people look to me as a trendsetter. I'm expected to come up with these types of cool things, like quizzes on your minute personality traits with the promise of prizes and the like...
But I love these group things. Again, I think of the blog as a comic book, and stuff like this are big comic book crossovers. "Se7en" is my Villains United tie-in. This is my House of M issue...
"10 Years Ago"
Back from the crazy Montanan adventures of the Secret Origin of Clark, I wandered into a comic book store for the first time and changed my life forever, as what could have easily been a brief interest/hobby instead snowballed into a life's ambition.
Ten years since Spider-Man caught my interest. Ten years since I made the decision not to be a writer but to become a comic book writer. Ten years, man, ten!
"5 Years Ago"
Justin and I got back to good ol' Room 337 after some impromptu gathering with various dorm kids at which point he asked me, very politely mind you, not to make fun of him in front of the new people because they didn't really know him yet.
It was a hard and humbling moment. In high school I'd basically built my entire identity out of being this loud, obnoxious jerk, but things were going to have to change. I wore my glasses for the next month or two as a constant reminder of the type of person I needed to try to be (this made sense at the time). I don't know how successful I was.
I don't know if I really became I kinder, gentler person, but if there's any part of me as Clark that was any more likable than me as Lenar, it's secret origin is contained in a plea from my dearest friend.
"1 Year Ago"
Excellent question I don't have to go to great lengths to answer. Hop into the wayback machine, motherfucker!
Highlights include my complaining about how I still haven't heard back from Marvel about my writing sample, my unabashed hard-on for Erica Durance, my first mention of The Question, and of course, the words of Joe Kelly!
And you know, I kind of miss working at The Ocho...
"Yesterday"
I committed to an apartment in the basement of a private residence in Teaneck, New Jersey. There's still the credit check and lease processing song and dance, but it's basically just a lot of formality at this point.
Ironically, I was seriously considering taking a place in Hackensack for a while. This was, like, a day after I wrote that whole thing about how Superman's a dick for saving that hellhole.
"5 Snacks I Enjoy" or "Why I'm a Fatty"
* Little Debbie Brownies
* Hostess Cupcakes
* Junior Bacon Cheese Burger
* Ritz crackers
* Individual slices of swiss cheese
"5 Songs I Know All the Words Too"
* Ben Folds Five, "Evaporated"
* The Theme song to Bonkers
* 5th Dimension, "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine"
* Counting Crows, "Rain King"
* Billy Bragg & Wilco, "Another Man Done Gone"
"5 Things I'd Do With a Cool $100 Million"
* Buy comics
* Fund an animated project
* Horde the majority of it. Fuck charity. I'm rich, bitch. I'll buy my way into heaven like the Baptists
* Throw it around to attract loose women
* Pay Brent back... maybe
"5 Places I'd Run Away To"
* Pella, Iowa
* Metropolis, Illinois
* Great Falls, Montana
* Connecticut
* Raytown, Missouri
"5 Things I'd Never Wear"
* Sleeveless shirts
* That Krypto tee-shirt people really thought I'd like which I hate
* A backwards cap and a doo-rag
* Piercings of any kind
* A condom for any practical purposes that couldn't be handled with a wad of kleenex
"5 Favorite TV Shows"
* Smallville
* The Venture Bros.
* Gilmore Girls
* Justice League Unlimited
* King of the Hill
"5 Bad Habits"
* Procrastinating
* Carrying things just a little too far
* Unchecked spending
* Talking to myself
* Drunk dialing
"5 Biggest Joys"
* Drunk dialing
* Blogging
* Reading
* TV
* Anytime my cell phone rings
"5 Favorite Toys"
* Laptop Spider-Solitaire
* "Snakes" on my cellphone
* The weird little games I make for myself, like "Inappropriately Appropriate Soundtrack Songs for Real Life Events" i.e. "Leaving on a Jet Plane" for a 9/11 movie
* Your mind
* A yo-yo
"5 Fictional Characters I'd Have Coffee With"
* Lois Lane
* Mr. Nancy
* Leigh from Dear Mr. Henshaw and Strider
* Seth Cohen
* Jesus
"It's Lonely Out in Space"
Hey, I'm sorry, okay?
Look, I didn't know it was going to be a long, long time 'til touchdown brought me 'round again to find I'm not the man you think I am at home...
Oh no, no, no.
I'm a rocket man.
NEXT:
Speaking to Spiders
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