Blog Bits: Batmania, Baseball, Burgundy

Sorry about the lack of posting. Real life has taken me by the upper lip and pulled me around something fierce. Actual important crap, serious events concerning life, death, and finances have kept me from blogging.

I must say, I much prefer four-color comic book DRAMA! to the real thing. My everyday life plays much better as light comedy than heavy drama.

Plus a spate of long-assed workdays lately haven't helped the noble cause of blog blather. Ugh.

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For the three or four of you who actually read 'em, the next two entries in "The Champions Project" are just about ready.

Mephisto will be played pretty straight. I'm gunning for coherency and a sustained mood, neither of which is my strong suit. We'll see.

The mood of The Reject is best summed up by the first story's title: "City of Lights, City of Bees!"

In said story, I promise you Paris, a Nazi made of bees, Karkas (that big red dude on the right) wearing a moustache while being interviewed on French television, and a robot Tyrannosaurus Rex destroying the Hotel de Ville with his sonic breath.

It's time to Bring the Wacky.

Putting up first drafts of writing projects is more nerve-wracking than I expected. Even glancing at the bits later, I can see weak spots, dropped subplots, and outright holes. I comfort myself by saying I would fix it in rewrite, if I were rewriting anything.

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For your viewing pleasure, here's a picture of Batman and his Evil Universe Counterpart, Cody.

In the picture, Bats is demonstrating to Cody the value of stuffing the secret compartment of one's belt buckle with a survival kit. If you look closely, you can see it holds a Swiss Army knife, food for three days, a rebreather, a signal flare, novelty prophylactics, a pad of sticky notes, a Svengali deck of trick cards, an English-to-Basque dictionary, all six of the starting lineup of the 1979 Philadelphia Flyers, a surface-to-air missile, and a quarter for phone calls.

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Essential Thor Volume 1 is boring and silly. Essential Thor Volume 2 is kickass.

Volume 2 shows Kirby gone wild. (Thankfully, his shirt stayed on. Perhaps had we offered him more beads?) He unleashed the crazed mythological imagery that he later brought to his Fourth World books. The stories in Volume 2 grew away from the series' earlier approach of "man acts as pagan god" and its repetitive plot hinge: "must...regain hammer...before sixty seconds...elapse!"

Instead, Kirby shifted the focus of the series to the world of Asgard and all manner of things divine. The comics revel in the grand sweep and strange feel of Norse myths.

Ya know, the only other period of Thor's history that was kickass was the Simonson period, when Walt took the same angle.

I'm just sayin'.

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A blog I greatly enjoy is "Management by Baseball." Jeff Angus uses baseball to explain business ideas, and makes a lot of sense. If nothing else, one's success or failure is pretty obvious in baseball, making it an excellent source for seeing what works and what doesn't.

Angus uses a term (which I think he coined, but I'm not sure) that could be well-applied to fanboy discourse. When writing about managers who refuse to change because "it's always been done like X in the past," folks who hate anything different, he refers to them as "bitgods." It's an acronym for "Back In The Good Old Days."

Granted, I'm a fan of old-school comics, but bitgods drive me freakin' nuts. Ever forward, ya bastids.

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Several of Steve Ditko's later creations had secret identities as television newsmen: the Question, the Creeper, Shag... He seemed to love the idea of the noble and dogged crusader who would dig for the truth and then broadcast it to all. Plus stomp hippies. Ditko's heroes loved to stomp on hippies.

Then there's the great fictional anchorman of our times, Ron Burgundy. Burgundy, ably played by Will Ferrell, was a great newsman and a fine human being. Plus his apartment smells of rich mahogany.

You can see where I'm going with this, can't you.

Oh yes. And it's so very right.

The Question, starring Will Ferrell.

"You stay classy, Hub City."

It could work...the crackpot "objectivist" philosophy Ditko infused into the character...the "faceless man" jokes his mask would inspire...the warped conspiracy theories...

Vic Sage, crusading reporter and self-appointed "Last Honest Man" declares war on the underworld of Hub City, convinced that an alliance of hippies and traitors are poisoning hair products and using the Mafia to distribute their foul chemicals. During his hippie-stomping activities, he trips across an actual criminal conspiracy, though he can't tell nor can he understand it...

Yes...it could work...