The Tease of Things I Don't Need

I'm not even keeping up with the odd-numbered days now.

It's simply been another busy week and there's much more left of it.

Concerning Chewie

The search continues to find a home for Chewie, a roughly 45 lb Chow-mix about to be unceremoniously evicted from his Central Florida home. Tomorrow will be one week since the papers were served, declaring that they had one week to find him a new home or have him taken away. The search continues.

If you have a possible lead on helping out, click on the website link above or just contact Darren at docnebula01@juno.com.

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I'm excited by an announcement regarding cloned human embryos and embryonic stem cell harvesting, and hope that the Bush administration and its Bible-thumping wing doesn't muck around with it this time. As things stand the research climate's gotten so chilly here in the US that I've come to expect any such announcements to be coming from other parts of the world. So it is that seeing this latest is happening largely in South Korea wasn't a huge surprise. Banning these techniques when it applies to full-scale cloning of human beings is one thing - the state of the art remains too crude, and genetic defects appear to be a persistent problem - but developing colonies of cells to the degree that they produce viable embryonic cells should be encouraged, not criminalized.

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Blue-Eyed Bill of Goods?

In just over two months I'll turn 43, and despite having revisited the matter periodically no fewer than four times in the past 20 years, I'm still of the opinion that Frank Sinatra's talent was 90% brilliant self-promotion. Divorce him from the mystique, be it of the early teen idol through his Rat Pack peak of influence and beyond, and we're left with a voice that is adequate - appealing even - but is hardly worthy of the status he's been given by so many.

Of late I've come to suspect that he's one of those touchstones that later generations have slavishly bowed to as someone from before their time that they can praise so as to be regarded as being worthy of their musical aficionado badges. Many of these twenty- and thirty-somethings also appear to have raised the schlock of 1950s American culture up onto a pedestal, choosing to foolishly see it as a clearer, simpler, black and white time with lots of flash and style, betraying an ignorance that I hope they'll live long enough to be embarrassed by. I suppose no era is nostalgia-proof. Thirty or more years from now there'll be people looking back with misty eyes on our current decade with a wistful sigh, declaring it an era of distinct moral clarity and patriotic fervor, forgetting that such simplicity is almost always a matter of parochialism.

Back to Francis Albert, he has a small catalogue of songs I actually enjoy listening to, but most of my respect for the man comes from truly doing it, as his signature song alludes, his way. That he went so far and built so much of not merely a reputation but a mystique is an amazing accomplishment for someone whose voice and musical talent strikes me as being pleasant but so limited.

If you're either happy to have seen something from a kindred spirit or find my lack of taste and sophistication to be unbelievably abysmal, feel free to leave me a comment.

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Legends #104 is in the works, with a target mailing date of this Saturday. (That website's obviously in need of some cleaning, but it's there for some basic info and as a contact point, so it serves.) Weekdays simply don't work for me getting an issue together, so I aim for a one-week turnaround. It's a bi-monthly, so we have some wiggle room. Zines inevitably roll in a few days late, too, and I've been guilty of running late enough times as a member that I can't find it in myself to be a deadline Nazi with respect to what's essentially a comics club in print form. Today's mail should see the last, straggling zine arrive.

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Finally, speaking of comic books, my push towards trades and hardcover collections, and away from folded, side-stapled comics, has pushed to a point where the only mainstream (from my perspective that still means DC and Marvel) comics I'm buying in that form are Captain Marvel, The Pulse, and JSA. Everything else from those two publishers I'm either skipping outright or waiting for collected versions.

(Captain Marvel and The Pulse get my support because they both deserve it and need it; okay, I'm jumping the gun on the latter, but this is the continuation of a recently-ended series called Alias, so I'm fairly sure I'll like it as much. JSA gets it because it's consistently been the best spot for me to get a monthly fix of DC superheroes that's both forward-looking but deeply rooted in legacies and the importance of the characters' histories.)

This is staggeringly different from my buying habits for most of the years I've been reading and collecting comics. My standard pull list, once upon a time, was approaching 50 titles.

The industry's changed, though. The shredder it went through primarily in the late 1980s through early mid-1990s (an induced speculation boom based on "hot" artists, primarily) ratcheted up financial expectations and then saw everything collapse as the pyramid scheme went bust.

Everything became negotiable, people from outside the comics industry, frequently "bottom line" sorts and media-grabbing hucksters have reshuffled affairs to an extent that so many long-time favorite characters may as well be considered dead.

Flavor of the month creative teams are given carte blanche by "editors" whose talents seem better suited to hookers and airline hostesses - find the big name "talent", make them as comfortable as possible, and tell them that everything they do is oh so wonderfully brilliant - and anyone who complains about the resulting raping and pillaging is labeled a whining fanboy by those who followed their favorite talents into their new playgrounds.

There are many fine talents working on mainstream comics I won't touch on principle. I won't contribute a cent to anything Marvel puts out under their Ultimate line simply because it's an attempt to relaunch all of their core characters (Spider-Man, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, X-Men, Daredevil, etc.) in a modern context. Yes, I've seen enough of some to know there's some fine work being done, and, yes, I could read them as alternate history versions (comics are thick with alternate universe stories), but I won't. Marvel Comics is a shell, virtually a memory. It has been eclipsed by Marvel Enterprises, who no longer see characters, but merely properties in need of maximum financial exploitation. The only elements they're truly interested in are those that can be trademarked, so they enthusiastically endorse boiling each down to those elements and letting whatever comes out of handing them over to the hot talent du jour become the potential subject of film or tv projects.

Yeesh. I'm ranting. I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to produce a sprawling, crawling page. Sometimes it can't be helped, though.

Back to the comics themselves, in whatever form I buy them, I place my orders every month with Westfield, and have them delivered to me twice monthly. It's neat, easy, and while even now I occasionally miss making a weekly trip to buy the latest comics, I know that that always led to too many impulse buys.

While I'm open to recommendations on the comics front, be aware that (as mentioned above) that recommendations for anything in the Ultimate line will be wasted keystrokes. I solidly enjoy the work of Brian Michael Bendis, for instance, and I know that the issues of Ultimates to date have at least looked beautiful and have a fun, modern sensibility to them -- and I know that the early issues of each are available in highly accessible trade editions. I'm simply not interested. I don't care if Alan Moore was writing them and Alex Ross was doing the artwork. They're not for me.

If you're wanting to push a mainstream miniseries of some stripe - say, 1602, JLA/Avengers or JSA: All-Stars - be aware that these and several others are cases where I'm waiting for the collected versions. I've grown patient about such things.

As for comics from other publishers, I'm always looking around. I'd start to go into a list of recent and current comics from outside the Big Two, but this piece has gone on long enough. I'll save that for another time. Any and all recommendations will be appreciated.