The Strange Tales trade paperback is the result of a brilliant marketing gimmick: Marvel revived a classic title and under its banner invited many of the most popular indie comic book authors in the country to create very short stories featuring the company’s superheroes. As far as I can tell, they let the authors do whatever they wanted.

The results are about what I’d have expected. Authors I liked a lot from their other work produced the vignettes I liked the best here.

Peter Bagge’s Spider-Man stories alone are worth the cover price, for example: Spidey finds out his saintly uncle Ben was really just a petty crook, and in his disillusionment reads Ayn Rand and decides to use his great power selfishly. He becomes a corporate tycoon and spends his time tormenting JJ Jameson, now his underling.

By contrast, Johnny Ryan, author of Prison Pit, is exactly as puerile doing superheroes as he is in his own work.

Fortunately, there are a lot more good authors in the mix than bad ones. Tony Millionaire does Iron Man; James Kochalka does The Hulk (of course); Jason does Spider-Man; and Max Cannon does The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man.

A good gift book for someone who likes comics, especially if you’re not sure what type he or she prefers.

Preview here.

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As former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card educated us all when it came to the Iraq War, ”From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” That’s my excuse for falling silent, anyway: there hasn’t been anything new to review.

But we have hit the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and for that we get Dark Rain, set in New Orleans during the flood. It’s an edifying contrast with Sweets, which I panned not too long ago: it is possible use a caper plot and relatively stock characters to explore an interesting landscape and have the result turn out well. But you need to do the work to make the landscape vivid.

The caper is this: a couple of ex-cons team up to rob a bank in the middle of the flooded Ninth Ward. One is a greedy, weaselly former bank employee, the other an ex-paratrooper who just wants enough to settle his child-support debts. They’re in a race with the mercenaries of Dark Rain (i.e., Blackwater), and as they motorboat through New Orleans’ watery streets they interact with many of the disaster’s iconic scenes: People trapped and dehydrated on rooftops. Dead bodies face down in the floodwaters. The overpass from which some people were lifted by helicopter. The chaos and abandonment of the Superdome. The blockade on the bridge to Gretna.

They don’t just pass these incidents by in the background, either. The main characters, or at least characters who end up in the story, interact with each event. Think of it as the Titanic approach to storytelling: work a conventional plot into a well-known disaster and invite your audience to enter it through your characters.

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that Mat Johnson is sadly one of the few successful indie comic writers in America who writes about race and racism at all. It’s like him, Adrian Tomine, Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, and that’s about all I can think of. So check this out, and check out his earlier, really fantastic Incognegro.

Brief preview below the fold.

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The comic book (which I haven’t read — maybe Big Josh will weigh in) introduced a video-game world that the movie faithfully reproduces. Chyrons spring up around characters and props, placing them in context and giving the viewer vital information as if about an opponent. When Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) fights each of his girlfriend Ramona’s evil exes, the fights are riffs on Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter and other arcade games from the period just following Q*bert and the collapse of my own interest (I will whup you at Ms. Pac-Man, but little else).

In addition to the video game stylistics, the movie also employs comic book stylistics, which suffer in comparison to the former. No movie has played with comic book aesthetics better than American Splendor. Ang Lee’s Hulk gave it a try, but Harvey Pekar’s story benefited from having the form address the content — it is the story of a man who tells his own life in comics. In Scott Pilgrim, the form and experience of video games is native to the original story, which (like The Hulk) happened to be told in comic book form. So effects like having visible ‘D-D-D-D-D’s come out of Scott’s bass, or animating the exit wound when drummer Kim pantomimes shooting herself, add nothing but clutter.

The style of the film is exciting in other, more light-handed ways. Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) hopscotches through the first act, jumping from setting to setting while remaining in one linear conversation. I’ve seen it done before, but never so deftly or without care for suspension of disbelief, and it allows Scott’s world to be introduced visually without any expositional slowing.

Spoilers and gender politics-grumbling below the fold.

When Ramona Flowers comes to Toronto, Scott Pilgrim must win her heart. This does not prove difficult. Although he embarrasses himself in front of her twice and displays no real aptitude or personality, she consents to go out with him immediately. Then he must fight her seven evil exes.

It’s a credit to the film that a separate reality of these fights, which unfold a little like superhero fights but mostly like video-game battles, is never established. The fights don’t represent any other activity than themselves: they’re displays of video-game violence that end with the evil exes exploding into a rain of quarters.

Still, it’s impossible not to read the fights into our own reality, and what we know of Scott Pilgrim is this: he may be an adequate rock bassist; he’s a coward in relationships; he lives in a shared, barely furnished studio apartment. And he’s great at Dance Dance Revolution. There’s no reason to think that he’s physically capable of defending himself against Ramona’s exes, and there’s no reason to think he’s more stalwart, or soulful, or nimble of wit than they. And of course, the fights resemble nothing more than video games.

So the film’s plot is a kind of listless lad sexual wish-fulfillment: attractive strangers can be wooed and won by no exertion greater than really good videogame-playing. It’s Nice Guy apologetics (spoiler alert) in which if a girl tells you she’s getting back together with her slightly more alpha-male ex-boyfriend, it’s not likely to be her own feelings and emotions playing out, let alone something wrong with you — it’s her ex using a mind control device.

At The Awl, Mike Barthel suggests that this dynamic plays out more subtly in the comic books, and the movie makes a few gestures to tarnish the hero’s shining armor and to cast Ramona as something more than a blank trophy. But it never questions that he would win her without any sincere effort or emotional connection.

The romance at the spine of the story is hollow. But there’s so much else going on — in the visuals, in the pace, in the style, and in the comedy — that such a big complaint isn’t at all lethal.

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There’s nothing wrong with anonymity — in its place. For instance, many people engage in discourse and commerce on the Internet anonymously (assuming the websites they’re dealing with have any scruples) for sound personal reasons.

Michael Hiltzik, Trying to shed light on a shadowy figure in Proposition 23 battle, August 15, 2010

The L.A. Times has suspended Pulitzer-winning business columnist Michael Hiltzik without pay, and discontinued both his column and his weblog, in response to the news that Hiltzik used psuedonyms on his blog and elsewhere to comment on Times-related matters, including his own work.

Opinion L.A. (an latimes.com blog), Hiltzick Suspended, April 28, 2006

It’s a very good column. Hiltzick, probably my favorite L.A. Times columnist, is pushing to expose the donors who are hiding behind the “Adam Smith Foundation” in order to overturn California’s landmark greenhouse gas emissions control law, AB 32. Just… dude. Choose better examples.

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I can’t say right now whether the movie based on Morning Glories will be any good. But I can say, just based on the first issue (which sold out on its first day) that there will definitely be a movie. For all I know there may already be a deal in place; the new trend seems to be to make deals for movies and comics simultaneously.

Morning Glory Academy is basically the Bizarro version of Hogwarts or Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. It’s not clear from the pre-credit sequence—erm, opening pages—whether the children there are extraordinarily gifted in paranormal or merely normal ways. What we see is extreme facility with chemistry, gymnastics, and martial arts. But it is clear that the school is eeeeeeeeeviiiillll. A student tries to escape and the teachers let this ghost thing eat his brain. Or maybe his mind, since it just seems to be sticking a hand through his head.

Then the story steps back to focus on a new set of kids as they say goodbye to their families, some more dysfunctionally than others, and prepare to leave for Morning Glory for the first time. The rest of issue #1 deals with them settling in and making certain initial discoveries about the place, one of which is that it’s eeeeeeevil.

It’s totally entertaining and about an inch and a half deep. I’m fine with that.

One preview here. Another below the fold.

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Here’s how I imagine what Matt Kindt (author of 3 Story, among other books) did in writing Revolver. At least, when I’ve ended up with results similar, this is how I’ve gotten there.

He had a great concept. A series of terrorist attacks shakes America, with conventional, biological, and radiological bombs exploding in multiple cities at nearly the same time. Fleeing the newspaper offices where he works, Sam ends up in a car with Jan, his boss. He kills a man, the world is in flames.

And then he wakes up to his ordinary life with his girlfriend Maria, who wants to go shopping for a new table set. Jan treats him just as contemptuously as ever. He can’t figure out what’s happened to him until the clock hits 11:11 and he finds himself back in Armageddon.

So there’s the concept: every day, the main character switches back and forth from world to world, on the run with Jan in one, at home with Maria in the other. He begins to prefer the crisis world to the ordinary one, because there he feels like he’s doing something important every day.

I had a few geek-level sci-fi issues with this setup. Like, it established that his body isn’t the same between the two worlds. Injuries sustained in one don’t carry over to the other. So what happens to him in one world while he’s conscious in the other? Does he go limp? No one around comments on it if he does. Does his body keep performing tasks without his being aware of it? He never remarks on things being different from the way he left them so that too seems unlikely, and anyway it would raise more unanswered questions about the consciousness in charge when “he” is absent. Or does he somehow experience simultaneous events in alternating fashion?

Whatever. It’s basically a solid conceit.

Then Kindt had to find a plot to fill out the concept, give it the shape of a story. So he kept writing until he found one that fit well enough, retconned the beginning, and wrapped up the end. At least, as I say, that’s how I imagine it happened, because that’s how I’ve done it myself.

You end up with an antagonist introduced only midway through the book and an explanation for what’s going on that doesn’t fully track. (For example [SPOILER ALERT], the villain confesses to Sam that he’s caused all the chaos in the one world by exploiting knowledge gleaned in the other. That doesn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t the hard part of building a biological or radiological bomb no matter where you got the blueprint? And how is it easier to gain access to deadly secrets in one world rather than the other before the bombs go off?)

Oh well. A solid premise an an 80% satisfying resolution still puts Matt Kindt ahead of nine of ten other comic book authors out there, and makes the book worth buying.

Preview below the fold.

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Gov. Paterson said Tuesday the developers of the mosque near Ground Zero might consider moving the project – and even floated the idea of offering them state land.
…

Paterson said the anxiety felt by mosque opponents was “not without cause” and that New York still suffers from the Sept. 11 attacks.

Paterson stressed however that he has no objections to the proposed center, which houses a mosque, and that there is “no reason” why it should not be built.

Unacceptable. There is no legitimate “cause” for 9/11 victims to be upset here. Any equivocating on that point implies that there is a legitimate connection to be drawn between crazy terrorists and the world’s 1 billion Muslims, even if in the next breath you say the opposite explicitly.

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An old Scott Lemieux post provides a good summary of why, although this may be the case from time to time, progressive outcomes are rarely due to judicial review. Long excerpt below the fold.

Democracy is not at stake in discussions about judicial review. The answer to the question of whether judicial review is necessary for liberal democratic government is a clear, unequivocal “no.” Are the U.K., pre-1982 Canada or Australia less democratic than the United States? I sure don’t see it; if anything, in the same time period their human rights records are better. It’s worth remembering that the American South remained largely composed of apartheid police states for nearly a century after the Civil War, despite judicial review and a Constitution that guaranteed due process, equal protection, and voting rights. Ultimately, if a society is not committed to democracy, judicial review won’t stop the tide; if they are, judicial review is not necessary.

Earl Warren is dead. It’s worth remembering that the 5-liberal-votes majority of the Warren Court lasted from 1963-8, and also happened to coincide with arguably the most progressive legislative period in our history. Liberals have a tendency to regard this highly anomalous court as if it was typical. But, in fact, the Supreme Court has generally not been a progressive institution, and it won’t be again in the near future either. And on a related point:

The Court is not a reliable defender of powerless minorities. I don’t mean to pick on Armando again, but his claim that ‘[t]he Supreme Court of the United States has been the bulwark of the defense of citizens against the abuse of government” is quite problematic. Yes, there are some major exceptions: church and state, Brown, Roe, some of its criminal justice decisions (and, again, most of these came during a few years.) But you also–to pick a few obvious examples from many–have Dred Scott (African-American citizens cannot be citizens of the United States), The Civil Rights Cases (greasing the skids for Jim Crow by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875), Hammer v. Dagenhart (striking down a federal law banning the interstate shipment of goods made with child labor), Debs v. US (upholds the conviction of a labor leader given a long jail term for making a speech during WWI), Korematsu v. US (or, as Michelle Malkin calls it , “porn”), McCleskey v. Kemp (the death penalty is constitutional in application despite clear evidence of racial bias in sentencing), and on and on and on. The Court did nothing about the Alien and Sedition Acts, upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and segregation while striking down Reconstruction civil rights acts, did nothing about free speech violations during WWI, struck down lots of progressive economic regulation, did nothing about female disenfranchisement, and did little about the abuses of McCarthyism until McCarthy had been discredited. And then we have the comparative problem: if you have any evidence that the United States has a better human rights record than similar countries that don’t have judicial review, I’d like to see it.

I’ll be tearful with gratitude if the Roberts Court enshrines a right to marry free of gender discrimination. But the broader outlines of the courts and majoritarianism are worth keeping in mind.

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[M]arriage has always been understood, with very few exceptions, as the union of a man and a woman. This is true across time, across cultures, across religious traditions, etc. Does it really seem likely that this remarkable consensus is nothing but a nasty desire of one group to flaunt its privileged position over a minority? Is it really feasible that the world’s cultures all consulted about how to put down gay people and came up with marriage as the solution?

William Duncan, director of the Marriage Law Foundation, in National Review’s The Corner

It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of “sexual orientation.” The is not a development that would have been foreseen from the viewpoint of the fin de siècle itself[...].

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet

42. Same-sex love and intimacy are well-documented in human history. The concept of an identity based on object desire; that is, whether an individual desires a relationship with someone of the opposite sex (heterosexual), same sex (homosexual) or either sex (bisexual), developed in the late nineteenth century.

a.    Tr 531:25-533:24 (Chauncey: The categories of heterosexual and homosexual emerged in the late nineteenth century, although there were people at all time periods in American history whose primary erotic and emotional attractions were to people of the same sex.);

Judge Vaughn Walker in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger

This is a court ruling, not an academic seminar at Berkeley.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at The Corner

One of the most impressive and least discussed aspect of the ruling that has overturned Proposition 8 is its sense of history. The standard right-wing dismissal of gay marriage is that marriage has for millennia been an institution that joins a man and a woman, and that same-sex marriage hasn’t even been on the agenda of gay rights groups for very long. Even sympathetic critics see the place of marriage on the gay agenda as emerging “as if out of nowhere over just the past few years”, and not without reason.

The excerpt I pulled from the ruling is slightly misleading; for all the attention Perry vs. Schwarzenegger gives to the historical contingency of homosexuality, it gives much more to the evolving qualities of marriage. Racial restrictions and divorce laws loosen over time. Historian Nancy Cott testified about the laws of coverture and the ways in which “the wife was covered, in effect, by her husband’s legal and economic identity.”

“Chauncey” cited above refers to George Chauncey, who authored the amicus Historian’s Brief in Lawrence vs. Texas. There’s been much discussion about how the legal framework of Walker’s decision is aimed directly at Justice Kennedy, seen as the swing Supreme Court vote. Less has been made about the importance of the historical grounding to Kennedy; as Rick Perlstein wrote in an article about Chauncey, “the heart of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s new legal doctrine in the 6–3 decision [of Lawrence vs. Texas], ranging over some dozen paragraphs, is a virtual recapitulation of the Historian’s Brief arguments.”

It would be hard for the Supreme Court to allow a radical challenge to an eternal truth, and right-wing rhetoric like the reductio ad absurdum in the William Duncan quote depends on this. But the case has been carefully made that a century-long shift has led to an incontrovertible conclusion. The challenge no longer looks like a radical upset, but as a mostly typical (and slightly queer) American pattern of expansion of justice and liberty.

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Here’s to another year of humbuggery and wet blanketism, love and theft, the occasional great comment thread, and all the vampire dental anatomy the Internet needs. Thanks to our several faithful readers, and thank you Josh for having me aboard.

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