Is this what he saved those mean girls from?
Category: Entertainment
Amazonia and the Flash
I’ve been slowly working my way through the Comic Cavalcade Archives. I’m determined to read the whole thing, but I have to take it in small doses. Partly the target audience is much younger than me, partly the storytelling (and art) I’m used to is much different, and of course partly it’s a very different time. It was the middle of World War II, and half the stories involved fighting Nazi spies or, in some cases, wreaking havoc in Germany itself. (The Ghost Patrol should have been able to take Hitler out on their own, but they seemed more interested in sabotage and practical jokes.) The original setup for Wonder Woman was that she left Paradise Island to help America defeat the Axis!
The Golden-Age Flash hunt continues. I’m now up to three issues of All-Flash with an issue of Flash Comics on its way. So far I’ve discovered that the Turtle didn’t have a costume the first time he appeared. He was just a guy in a green suit who used slowness against a guy who was used to moving fast. Next up: the original Thorn. I’ve bid on a lot of eBay auctions, expecting to win only a fraction of them. Everywhere else I look online, people are selling collector-grade books at much higher prices. I just want to read the original stories, write down who appears, and scan the occasional panel that I’m going to clean up anyway.
Amazon has finally put a discount on the Golden Age Flash Archives vol.2, so I’ve pre-ordered it.
Bacchanalia Supplies
It appears to be an energy drink, which is kind of ironic, considering how closely Bacchus was associated with wine. On the other hand, his followers would work themselves into a frenzy.
A word of advice: If any Maenads drop by with a few cans of this stuff, run. They may look cute, but they’ll tear you apart.
Her Factory
The Leather Factory sign was missing a few letters one night:
So whose factory is it, exactly? She Who Must Be Obeyed? Can guys even buy stuff there?
Infinite Crisis as Metafiction
I read Infinite Crisis #2 today, and everything—including DC’s turn toward the dark over the past few years—is starting to make sense. Infinite Crisis isn’t just following up on plotlines from Crisis on Infinite Earths, it’s actually making a statement about the past 20 years of comics.
Potential spoilers ahead! Continue reading
Uh, that’s a negative
The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:
It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!
On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.
The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.
As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.
I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.
Holy Ozone!
A recent post on What Were They Thinking? reminded me of a panel from the original Teen Titans series. In it, Robin and Wonder Girl have just been gassed and tossed out of an airplane, waking up in mid-air.
Yes, Robin once uttered the words, “Holy ozone!” And, like the “holey rusted metal,” the words proved accurate in an entirely different way. This was Teen Titans #7 (1967), the issue which introduced the Mad Mod. (Think of him as Austin Powers as a villain.)
Who knew comics could be so prophetic? 😉