Category: Entertainment

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Bart as Impulse in 'Justice'With Bart Allen returning to Smallville tonight—alongside Cyborg, Green Arrow, and Aquaman—I find myself wondering about the best way to hang onto just a few episodes. Last night I went looking for my tape of “Run,” the first episode in which he appeared, and I couldn’t find it.

I have no interest in buying full seasons of Smallville, but I’d like to have copies of the two episodes with Bart (partly for character research, partly for completism). Warner Bros. has no reason to release individual episode DVDs, but downloadable episodes (as in iTunes) might be an option.

Another possibility: themed collections. There have been enough episodes guest-starring other DC heroes that WB could do something similar to Buffy‘s Slayer Collection, or The Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” set. A single disc featuring, let’s say, the Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman episodes (Green Arrow might need his own disc), followed by tonight’s big team-up, “Justice.”

Hey, I’d buy it.

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2007 looks to be a good year for fantasy adaptations, at least of books I’ve read. What I’ve seen of Stardust (Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess) looks great. I’m psyched up for His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass (Phillip Pullman)—and I’ve got to say I’m glad they’re doing each book as its own movie, instead of trying to condense the whole trilogy. And Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling, as if you didn’t know) looks promising as well, though most of the Harry Potter films have suffered from condensing too much.

I’m a little more apprehensive about The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper), mainly because the IMDB page says they plan to start early this year, but the Los Angeles Times has it down for a September release. For the record, I do think this is the one to start with, not Over Sea, Under Stone, because as I recall it has a much greater sense of tension, which will translate better to screen. Plus it provides more of an introduction to the world and the conflict, since Will is dropped right in the middle of it, while I remember the other book being set more solidly in the “real” world. The Drews don’t get involved as deeply until later.

On a related note, I don’t think I’m in the target audience for The Number 23. We saw the trailer for it on Friday when we saw Pan’s Labyrinth (which is quite good, BTW), and I could not stop laughing. Not because of Jim Carrey, but because of the premise. Perhaps it comes from reading the Illuminatus! trilogy. There’s a great sequence in the book where one of the characters is starting to look for certain numbers, including 23, in everything. Of course, since he’s human, he finds them, using ever more convoluted arithmetic to prove that they’re significant. While reading Illuminatus!, I looked up stuff on synchronicity and found the tech term for this tendency to see connections where none exist: apophenia. And here I’m watching this preview, and there’s a sequence in which the lead character starts finding the number 23 in everything, using ever more convoluted arithmetic…. I don’t think I could take the premise seriously enough to get into the movie.

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[Flash Logo]A post on the Comic Bloc Forums the other day made me think about the question: Which Flash had the longest solo career?

It depends on how you measure it. The original Flash, Jay Garrick, has of course been around the longest: 1940–today. He’s got more than 65 years on his successors. But a more useful question is: How long was each Flash around before DC replaced him as “the” Flash?

The easiest measurement: years in publication.

Name Start End Span
Jay Garrick 1940 – 1951 11 years*
Barry Allen 1956 – 1986 30 years
Wally West 1986 – 2006 20 years
Bart Allen 2006 just starting

Barry is the clear winner by this measure, at three times Jay’s career, and 1½ times Wally’s.

But what about sheer number of comics**? Continue reading →

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Figured what the heck. I’m now on ComicSpace.

Because I need yet another site to suck up all my time.

It’s being described as MySpace for comics people—creators, fans, reviewers, etc.—though the feature set is pretty sparse right now. I’ve resisted MySpace itself partly because of a somewhat adversarial relationship with the site*, partly because I can’t stand looking at most MySpace pages, and partly because my friends are all on LiveJournal, so there’s really no compelling reason for me to go there.

And yet I’ve got profiles at LiveJournal, Slashdot, Opera, WordPress, Spread Firefox… Even eBay is adding blogging capabilities. Maybe I should bite the bullet and sign up for a Blogger account too. At least then I’ll be able to comment on Crimson Lightning.

*The culture at MySpace seems to encourage hotlinking images without asking. I’m still a writer at heart, so I consider the commentary to be as important as the images or more… and it really annoys me when people en masse just embed the images on their own site. Though I suppose it’s not as bad as the occasional “geniuses” on other forums who will hotlink an 800×600 or bigger photograph as their avatar, even though it only displays at 80×80. Damn kids, get off my lawn!

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They say that the Southern California car culture is isolating. It’s hard to argue with that, when everyone’s shut up in their own little boxes. But today, on my way to work (delayed a bit on account of dentist), I was listening to KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic and stopped at a traffic signal. They were playing a live version of Elvis Costello’s “Allison.” I looked in my rear view mirror, and realized that the driver behind me was singing along to the same song. Even though it only went one way—she had no way of knowing I was listening to the same music—it was still a moment of connection through shared experience.

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