Fear of Committing

Archer used to be one of my favorite TV shows.  It was a fun blend of action and crude humor.  At its core the show was a spoof of spy movies/shows.  The semi-titular character was super-spy Sterling Archer.  He had the ladies man part of being a super-spy down, but not necessarily the other parts, though he usually did get the mission done in a half-assed fashion with plenty of collateral damage.

While there were plenty of spy-type missions a lot of it was also an office comedy with a whole cast of characters:  His mother, the head of the agency; Cheryl, the crazy secretary; Pam, the gossipy head of HR; Cyril the accountant; Krieger the demented scientist; and Lana, the other main agent who Sterling had a fling with, though at the start of the series she’s with Cyril.

The first 4 seasons kept to this premise.  Then creator Adam Reed decided to literally blow it all up when the FBI raids the agency and they go on the run with a literal ton of cocaine they try to sell.  Part of this was motivated by some real world awkwardness in that the agency was called ISIS and then all the sudden a real terrorist group called ISIS came on the scene.  This “Vice” season was pretty lame as they make bumbling attempts to first sell the cocaine and then some weapons.

Season 6 got back on track as the unnamed agency was now a contractor for the CIA.  It was fine until Reed again decided to blow it all up (less literally) and have them lose their contract with the CIA.  So in Season 7 they open a detective agency in LA.  It was meh, but there was potential.  Except at the end of the season Archer is shot and winds up face down in a pool.

The next season starts off with him in a coma.  The entire season then is an 8-episode coma fantasy set in a 40s noir version of LA.  And I think, well OK one wasted season is fine, but he’s going to wake up and we’ll get back to business, right?  Nope.  Season 9 is another coma fantasy, this time on “Danger Island” involving Nazis, cannibals, and the search for an idol.  As an additional screw you to fans there’s nothing at all set in the actual universe of the show.  Well, OK, you’ve had 2 coma fantasy seasons but with one season left you’re going to get back to reality, right?  Nope.  The next season is set in space in an Alien-type ship.

Watching “Danger Island” on Hulu recently, it occurred to me that Adam Reed had a fear of committing to his own characters.  The characters he created.  Through most of the first seven seasons the characters developed back stories and new relationships.  Archer hooked up with Lana and got her pregnant with a daughter they decide to raise together, though they don’t get married.

With these coma fantasies it seems like Reed deciding he didn’t want to take the next steps with Archer and Lana especially, so to run out his contract he’ll just do these fantasy seasons.  That way he doesn’t have to worry about developing characters anymore because none of it matters.  You don’t have to worry characterization or consistency or growth if you’re going to reboot every season.

It is the ultimate cop-out and screw you to the fans.  It’s even worse than the recent “wedding” of Batman and Catwoman that was set up for over a year only to have her leave him at the altar.  It’s saying, I don’t want to think about what’s next for Archer, Lana, and their daughter--or any of the others--but I signed a contract with FX, so fuck it I’ll just make three seasons that don’t matter and then I’ll be done.

In which case, like I said about that fake wedding, why set something up for almost 18 months to cop out at the end?  Why did you build these characters and relationships for 7 years only to cop out at the end?

A lot of mush heads on critique groups like to talk about how their character came to life and won’t do what he/she tells him/her to do.  Which is utter bullshit.  You’re the author so of course a character will do what you tell him/her to do.  It’s just that when you do so it might not make sense to you.

It seems something like that happened with this show.  At the outset Reed might have wanted just a silly spy spoof but then inadvertently he wound up creating all of these flawed, three-dimensional characters.  He just wanted to have fun making dick and fart jokes and sometimes blowing shit up; he didn’t want to deal with issues like child-rearing or how Archer and Lana can continue their dangerous occupation while they have a child.  Or how Archer can commit to a family instead of getting drunk and fucking everything with tits.  Whoa, man, that’s way too heavy!  So let’s just quit.  But I have three seasons left on the contract, so, hey coma fantasies!  That’ll be fun and there are no consequences for the characters.

It’s a perfect solution--except for people who were actually invested in the show and its characters.  We’re left with 24 hollow, soulless parody episodes.  Hooray?  The only good thing is they cut the seasons down from 13 to 10 to now only 8 episodes so at least there’s not much of this shit to deal with.  It took only 3/12 hours to binge “Danger Island” on Hulu, so there’s not much of a time investment anymore.

Unfortunately now there’s no hope at all that the show will ever get back to form and deal with the issues raised.  Which is great if you’re the creator afraid to commit to your own creations, but it sucks for everyone else.

The lesson for writers should be obvious:  you have to commit!  Or at least have the balls to kill your characters off if you don’t want to commit to them.  Don’t leave them on life support for three fucking years, toying with your audience.  Or you probably won’t have an audience for long.

Fete the Rich

However long ago from when this posts, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was indicted for going to some sleazy massage parlor to get a “happy ending” from sex workers.  What the incident showed more than anything is our love affair with the rich and famous that makes us give them the benefit of the doubt even when they don’t deserve it.

Of course Trump said it was all a lie and blah blah blah birds of a feather flock together so of course one sex offender will defend another.  More disturbing was the mainstream media response, or lack thereof in many cases.  A Boston Globe article talked about how this might tarnish his image.  Because clearly his image is what’s important here, not the fact that he was using essentially sex slaves.  This is the paper that broke the Catholic priest scandal as depicted in Spotlight and now they’re glossing over sex abuse accusations just because it’s a rich guy in their backyard.  Things really changed in about 20 years.

There was a sports site article with a headline saying the sex workers probably weren’t trafficked.  Oh, well, that makes it OK then.  It’s fine and dandy to utilize sex workers so long as they weren’t human trafficked.  So it’s OK if I go down to Detroit and pick up a couple of hookers then, right?  So long as they weren’t human trafficked into the country it’s totally cool!

On social media there were people saying, What’s the big deal, it’s a misdemeanor?!  Oh, sure, getting a happy ending from a sex worker and jaywalking, same deal.  And since he owns a football team you get those who worry more about what will happen to their team now.

It’s not just Kraft.  We saw plenty of this in the 2016 election.  Especially Evangelical “Christians” for Trump.  Sure he lies constantly, curses, cheated on his wives, and sexually harassed women but so what?  If he gets elected women won’t be able to have abortions and gays won’t be able to exist!  That’s way more important than morality, right?  Republicans, phony Christians, and Russian bots came up with one excuse after another.  It’s “locker room talk.”  It’s “alternative facts.”  “He was just joking.”  And of course the favorite, “What about [Hillary, Bill, Obama, my neighbor’s dog’s uncle’s roommate…]?”

There were actually people on Facebook (Russian bots probably) who’d say if you complained about Trump, “Well he’s rich and you’re not so he must be smarter than you.”  That’s the core of the issue.  If someone is rich, we assume they’re smarter and better than us poor slobs.  I mean they must be or they wouldn’t be rich!  Never mind the dumb things they say and do; they’re rich so they must be good.  And of course if you’re famous to boot that’s even better.

We’ve seen it before where if a celebrity commits a crime like a DUI they get a slap on the wrist.  Where you or I would get thrown in jail for 3-5 years (or probation for that long at best), they get 60 days of rehab.  In Kraft’s case if you or I got a happy ending from a sleazy massage parlor we’d be labeled sex offenders and spend the rest of our days having to state that to neighbors and not being allowed to live near schools and so forth.  But he’s rich and famous so he’ll get a slap on the wrist, probably a fine that for your or I would be the equivalent of $5.  Maybe the judge will tell him he’s been a naughty boy and he shouldn’t do it again.  But then if the judge is up for re-election, maybe not even that.

Not just the “justice” system but our whole society is geared to favor the rich and famous.  If you see someone in ragged clothes with dirty skin, you’d think that person is bad news.  They’re probably a criminal or crazy or a crazy criminal!  They’re probably lazy and dumb, because why else would they be in dirty rags?  Whereas if you see someone in an expensive suit stepping out of a limo, you assume that person is smart and successful.

Our infatuation with the rich can be seen on all those reality shows like the Kardashians and whatnot.  It can be read in books like the collected works of Bret Easton Ellis.  And think about it, who are some of our favorite superheroes?  Batman and Iron Man, whose secret identities are rich guys. 

It’s almost feudal the way we worship those who have more money.  Make way, make way, it’s the lord of the manor come to bless us with his presence!  But when you don’t hold these “elites” to the same standards, it invites massive corruption.  Eventually, though, people get enough of it like in France and Russia and a lesser extent America when it broke away from the British.  Or like in Rome someone from outside takes down the system.

Will we finally reach the point where we stop fawning over rich scumbags and making excuses for them?  Only time will tell.

Luthor, Dark Savior

Yesterday I posted some random thoughts on the best and worst Lex Luthors and who I think should be the next movie Luthor.  As often happens then I started to think of a harebrained movie idea.  Actually two of them.

My first thought was, since they're slapping together that Joker thing with Joaquin Phoenix and without Batman why couldn't they make a Luthor movie without Superman?  And then I remembered a couple of books I read.  One was Luthor by Brian Azzarello that traces Luthor's life story and features Superman floating outside a window and not saying anything.  The other was Paul Cornell's run on Action Comics that focused on Luthor searching for a black power ring that would give him power over life and death.  That also didn't feature Superman much if at all.  So obviously it can be done.

The two ideas would actually start out the same and then diverge.  Now, going on my thought of making the next Luthor a black guy basically think about if Tony Stark had grown up a poor black kid in a bad neighborhood.  Like, say, Detroit.

So the opening scene we see this little boy like 10-12 and he's running through a rundown neighborhood (like, say, Detroit) and being pursued by a bunch of older boys.  He winds up in an alley where the old kids confront him and call him names and stuff.  One kid takes his backpack and there's some weird device in it.  The older kids ask him what it does and he cautions them not to turn it on.  But of course one does and immediately gets electrocuted.  The boy uses a remote in his pocket to turn it off and pick the thing up and then asks the others if they want to be next.  No one does so they take off running.

Cut to a big lecture hall many years later where a now-grown Lex Luthor is explaining that he's never liked bullies and now you have the biggest bully ever in this "Superman."  (You don't have to actually show Superman's face, just some blurred images of the suit and cape.)  And so LexCorp has evened the playing field...

Big reveal then of a hideous Superman clone (Bizarro).  Lex has his pet demonstrate his strength and speed and freeze breath.  But eventually like the ED-209 in Robocop, Bizarro starts going out of control, throwing people around and stuff.  (Maybe worse if it's an R-rating, but just broken bones in a PG-13 film.)  Lex finally uses a remote to trigger some explosives in the monster's neck to kill it.  (Or again less gory if it's PG-13.)

And now is where the two ideas diverge.

Idea 1:  Brainiac Lives

After the disastrous meeting, Lex goes to his lab to try to figure out what went wrong with the clone.  While he's there, he gets a call from his space research team that they're picking up a weak signal in space.  It soon becomes clear there's an object coming down in some remote place.  Lex has his security people stifle any news of this to the media so he can hopefully get there first.

He then goes to his private plane where his assistant is waiting.  His assistant LOIS, an android who looks like Lois Lane.  The LOIS should be an acronym standing for something like Living Operational Information System.  (The android Lois idea comes from the Black Ring story.)  They fly out to some tropical jungle, where LOIS carves a route and demonstrates her skills on a few of the local animals.

They eventually come to a crashed spaceship.  LOIS and a few security people go in first, though Lex insists on coming close behind so he doesn't miss anything.  There are scribbles of alien languages and artifacts and stuff like that.

As they're exploring they're assaulted by some big ass alien monster.  LOIS shows off her guns (like Gatling guns built into her body) to take the thing down.  There are a few other dead aliens too.  None of them who look human like a certain Kryptonian.

Lex is drawn to the ship's nerve center which is a big, fancy computer.  He figures out how to disconnect the central unit to take it with them back to Metropolis.  He leaves some security people to watch the wreck so they can salvage more of it later.  There are some government flunkies who ask about what happened at the meeting and then about the wreck, but he gets rid of them with a mixture of bribery, flattery, and threats.

Lex holes himself up in his lab again, only now it's to study the computer from the ship.  Once he gets it powered on, he finds a log of all its travels to various worlds in the galaxy--including Krypton.  Lex starts to realize just how ancient and deadly this thing is.  (Which a sane person would turn it off and smash it to pieces, but he sees an opportunity for knowledge and power beyond comprehension.)

LOIS comes back later to check on him and says that they've begun salvaging the ship and so far there's no interference from any big blue boy scout.  Lex barely acknowledges this and then triggers something in the computer so that a green face comes up and identifies itself as Brainiac.  (Maybe that's an acronym too.  Or something that sounds like "Brainiac" but is an alien word.)  Lex starts to ask it what it was doing and how it ended up here and it says that it was on a mission to preserve all the cultures of the universe when there was some disaster (meteor shower, storm, malfunction?) that caused it to crash and now it needs to continue its mission.

Lex isn't interested in its mission so much as using its knowledge to advance his agenda.  He browses some of the technology Brainiac has encountered that's millions of light years from anything even he dreamed possible.  But when he gets to the Kryptonian section he starts to recognize the similarities between that stuff and the man flying through Earth's skies.  And so he starts looking into technologies that could be used against Superman.

Over the next few days Lex is hard at work in the lab.  Brainiac pesters him about continuing its mission but Lex blows it off.  What's it going to do, right?  Well we see (but Lex doesn't because it's when he's asleep or not around) that Brainiac is assimilating technology around it, including LOIS.

Lex calls another meeting a few days later to demonstrate his latest big thing.  Some really advanced weapons and shit.  Like before everything is going pretty well--until Brainiac takes control of the whole building.  When Lex tries to override, Brainiac sics LOIS on him.  Lex runs for his life but not being an idiot he has an escape plan for an emergency like this.

He winds up going down in the sewers and ending up in his old neighborhood.  Then we reveal the other half of that first scene.  Young Lex went home triumphant only to find his mother's apartment burglarized and her dead.  Shortly thereafter he had to go live with an aunt.  Again he feels like he's lost everything but like then he's not going to give up.

Like Tony Stark in the cave, Lex gets to work on a suit of armor in some old dump where he used to work.  (This would be a good place to work in a cameo by John Henry--Steel--as someone Lex knows from the old neighborhood who's also into science and engineering.)  What Lex comes up with would be a primitive version of the Rebirth "Superman" armor he wore for a while:

Meanwhile Superman has shown up at LexCorp's headquarters but the building's systems have stopped him cold.  (And again we don't really need to see his face; some grainy news footage would suffice.)  So this looks like a job for Lex Luthor!

In his new armor Lex goes back to the headquarters and starts to take on the defenses.  He has to take down LOIS and then confront Brainiac's central core, which has turned Lex's lab into something like the crashed ship's control center.  Brainiac congratulates Lex's determination but says what a fool he is to have come in that armor.

Brainiac assimilates the primitive systems of the armor but then realizes too late that the armor's systems were a Trojan horse.  Lex encoded a virus into them that is attacking Brainiac.  The more advanced Brainiac could fend it off, but the virus gives Lex the time he needs to deactivate Brainiac and the rest of the building's systems.

And so Lex has saved the world where Superman failed.  Saved it from himself really, but who's counting?  At the end Lex is confronted by journalists (maybe the real Lois Lane) and gives them some fiction to put him in a good light.  Then to set up a sequel we reveal that Lex still has some of the technology from Brainiac.

And now Idea 2:  Hope

So we pick up after the disastrous meeting where Bizarro beat up and/or killed a bunch of people.  Lex goes to his office and calls his top scientist onto the carpet.  She is a woman we'll just call Dr. Jones for now.  Dr. Jones has MS or Parkinson's or cerebral palsy or something like that necessitating her to use crutches to get around.  Seeing her, he can't bring himself to fire her.  He tells her in no uncertain terms to find out what went wrong or else she won't be so lucky the next time.  She absorbs the abuse and maybe dishes a little back at him, which he secretly admires.

After a late night of working, he's getting in his limo and sees Dr. Jones hobbling along.  It's much too late to get a cab and so he offers to give her a ride.  They talk a little about his growing up in a bad neighborhood and making something of himself and her losing the full use of her legs and yet still making something of herself.  They don't kiss, but there is romance in the air.

A couple of days later Lex has to brush off some government flunkies like in the first idea.  Then he gets a call from Dr. Jones and goes to visit her in the lab.  She's done a complete coding of Bizarro's DNA and identified a few sections where the cloning failed.  she's also identified some of the genes that gave him superpowers.  Lex sees the potential of this right away.  If they could recreate those genes and plant them in someone he or she could have superpowers!  And it could probably also cure diseases, like MS or Parkinson's or cerebral palsy.

Lex and Dr. Jones begin working on this project and spending a lot of time together in the lab.  They share dinner together and talk and bond.  Lex has never really been in love but now finds himself falling for Dr. Jones.

When they run some successful experiments on rats in the lab, Lex and Dr. Jones make out.  (If it's PG-13 then it's just kissing but if it's an R rating then they could actually fuck.)  Not for purely altruistic reasons, Lex encourages Dr. Jones to try the gene therapy on herself.

At first not a lot happens, but slowly she starts to build up strength until not only doesn't she need crutches but she can lift a car over her head like a certain other person famously did.  Soon she's developing super speed, hearing, X-ray vision, and heat vision or freeze breath or whatever.  She and Lex are out to celebrate when they see a mugging and Dr. Jones breaks it up.

It's fairly easy then for Lex to encourage her to don a costume and adopt a new identity:  Hope.  Soon she starts doing all the stuff Superman does:  break up robberies, rescue people from burning buildings, and get cats out of trees.  With his media connections, Lex makes sure everything she does is getting plenty of exposure too.  Now you see the dark side of this, right?  He's making Superman yesterday's news for a superhero he controls.

Everything's going great, right?  But then all the sudden Hope is trying to rescue something when her powers fail.  Someone is killed and she's hurt.  In the lab Lex examines her and administers another dose of the gene therapy.  Hope soon has her powers back, but when Lex meets her as Dr. Jones, she's acting differently.  A waiter brings her the wrong thing or spills something and she nearly breaks his neck.  Lex wants to examine her, but she refuses.

Over the next few days, Hope starts going off the rails until she starts raging through downtown Metropolis.  And again in some grainy news footage we might see that not even Superman can stop her!

Lex decides he has to take this into his own hands.  He gets into some Kryptonite-powered armor he developed to fight Big Blue that looks sort of like this:

With that on he goes out to confront Hope.  He gets a couple of shots in but she generally kicks his ass.  She finally gets him down and tears away most of the armor.  Battered and bloody, Lex tells her to go ahead and kill him.  He'd rather she did than watch her continue devolving into a monster.  She balks at delivering the killing blow and gives Lex a chance to inject her with a special sedative to knock her out.

Later, Lex goes to visit Dr. Jones in the secure facility she was put in.  Her superpowers are all gone now and she's back on crutches.  He thanks her for taking the blame for the experiment, not mentioning to the cops how he helped her with it.  And he promises that he's still doing everything he can to find a cure for her.  They share a tender moment and then Lex leaves.  As he's leaving he sees Superman up in the sky and promises himself this isn't over.

[Luthor creating a new superhero to upstage Superman has been done in the comics before though I don't remember which specific ones who wrote them.]

So there you go.  Two more great ideas that will go unused while DC/WB continues fumbling around with their "cinematic universe."  Put me in charge and we'd already have a half-dozen hit movies!  Or they'd be bankrupt.  Probably that.

Random Thoughts on Ranking Luthors

I read this article on the Geek Twins the other day comparing the various TV/movie Lex Luthors.  I had a lot of thoughts on it so I decided to write a blog entry instead of just a comment on the site.

First off, I think any sane person would agree with the Geek Twins' assessment that Jesse Eisenberg was the worst Luthor ever.  I mean come on, what a shit character he was.  Was he supposed to be autistic or something?  Eisenberg seemed to think he was playing Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory combined with his Zuckerberg in The Social Network.  Ugh.  Really brought down the movie.  And his plan was so dumb.  I'm going to piss off Bruce Wayne and then hopefully he'll want to kill Superman, who I'll blackmail into fighting him while I finish my Doomsday monster who'll rampage around destroying stuff for...reasons.  Then I'll contact Steppenwolf to tell him Earth is ripe for the taking.  And...what was the endgame?  Did he have any control of Doomsday or any way to stop him?  And what was the point of talking to Steppenwolf?  (Which we see in the Ultimate version or deleted scenes--or both.)  I hate this alien Superman so I'll serve up Earth on a silver platter to a brutal alien warlord.  Um...what?

And that stupid thing with getting his hair cut in prison.  It's prison, not the army!  They don't give prisoners haircuts unless you have lice or maybe if you have a nasty word carved in your hair or something.  I've spent a lot of time on this already but really, his character just sucked.

The next picks were from the old Superboy TV show in the late 80s.  I remember seeing that show on like Saturday afternoons or whenever.  And I remember how they switched actors.  It was pretty weird.  I mean typically if you replace actors (like they did with Superboy) you want to get someone pretty similar, not 20 years older.

I haven't seen the old Atom Man vs Superman movie or the 90s Lois and Clark show so I really have no comment on those.  I thought Kevin Spacey's Luthor was pretty good, but it would have been better if they'd made him more like Michael Rosenbaum's Smallville version that was based on the 80s comic reboot.  Trying to recreate the campy Gene Hackman version (only actually bald this time) was pretty lame.

Which really I hated Hackman's Luthor.  It probably wasn't as bad when I first saw it as a kid, but it doesn't age real well.  Rewatching Superman II a couple of months ago didn't really dissuade me in that thinking at all.  It's so campy and there's the fact he's not even bald, which was a central thing about the character.  I mean it'd be like if an actor says, "I'll play Captain Hook but not with a hook hand."  Or like having Dr. Doom without the armor in most of the Fantastic Four movies.  Why don't you have Dr. Octopus with only 2 arms or the Vulture with no wings?

I really liked the Smallville version.  At least the first few seasons there wasn't any cartoonish supervillainery.  He wasn't even a bad guy, just a rich guy with a troubled family history and a freak accident that caused him to lose his hair.  His dad left him in the rinky-dink town of Smallville basically to keep him out of the way and there was always his dad's shadow looming over him.  I remember in one episode they flashed back to one childhood birthday party and there was all this food and balloons and stuff and no one showed up because losing his hair and being super rich in the small town made him an outsider.  He was a complex character, unlike most of the other versions.  The Eisenberg version tried to incorporate a little of the conflict with his dad in his ramblings about that painting, but it didn't work nearly as well.

Looking at the list, it occurred to me that all of the actors were white.  and then I thought, Why not a black guy?  Sure the "SJW" crowd would complain like they always do, but black guys look so much better bald than white guys.  And since I'm a bald white guy I think I'm an authority.  I mean just looking at that list most of the actors either didn't go bald or it looked fake.  There aren't many white guys who can pull it off.  Patrick Stewart is one.  Jason Statham.  Bruce Willis, I guess.  There are a lot more badass bald black guys:  Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix movies, Michael Clarke Duncan in Daredevil, Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley in Space Jam, Shaq in Steel.  It's no contest!

That's the direction they should go the next time they're looking for a movie Luthor.  Idris Elba would be great but then I think he'd be great in most anything:  James Bond, Batman, Luthor, whatever.  He's awesome.  Samuel L Jackson or Laurence Fishburne would be good too.  Will Smith, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, they're all good proven actors.  If you want to go younger you could get someone like Mahershala Ali, Jamie Foxx, Michael B Jordan, Donald Glover, or Daniel Kaluuya.  Any of them would be great and I doubt they'd put up much fuss about going bald either.  And they'd look cool, not fake.  I'm just saying.

But if you insist on a white guy my pick would be Corey Stoll.  He already played an evil businessman/scientist in Ant-Man and he's naturally bald.  So there.

Tomorrow I'm going to share not one but two potential Luthor movie ideas.

Future Past Imperfect

One of the annoying things when I watch Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville is all the 20th Century references.  Like the Kermit the Frog on his desk.  Or in one episode when he and a girlfriend watch The King and I (the Yul Brynar version) and later listened to Billy Joel.  In one episode he tells the first officer’s boyfriend that her favorite band is Journey.  In another episode they watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and in another Singing in the Rain.  The first officer designed a whole simulation on the holodeck to look like 1940s America.

Before you pile on, it’s not just The Orville.  The Star Trek shows have done that plenty.  In the original series they went to a Nazi planet, a gangster planet, a Roman planet, and back in time to the “present” of the 1960s.  And of course the famous “City on the Edge of Forever” where they went back to the 1930s.  In Next Generation Picard had his noir detective character Dixon Hill.  Data played Sherlock Holmes.  The crew played poker against Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, etc.  In DS9 Sisko had a baseball on his desk.  In Voyager they went back to the “present” of the 1990s at one point.  And of course there was Star Trek IV, a whole movie set around going back in time to 1980s San Francisco.

It happens in books too.  There was one book I really hated and part of it was it’s the 25th Century and on this planet a gateway to Hell was opened and all these evil people were coming out to possess people.  Among them were Nazis.  I have no love for Nazis, but that would be like 500 years in the past; maybe the author could have focused on more current villains?

In a Tweet MacFarlane defended the Billy Joel in the show by saying that most attempts to make “future” music suck.  Which is probably true.  And if you think about it even music like the cantina band in Star Wars (yes I know it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but shut up) was based on Earth music.  The music in Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi even more so.

There is of course a practical element to this.  To invent new instruments and such would be time-consuming and costly.  Licensing some Billy Joel or showtunes is a lot more cost-effective.  Making video clips of “future” movies or TV shows would likewise be costly and time-consuming.  It’s much cheaper to just license an old movie.  It’s the same reason that in most movies and TV shows if they’re watching TV it’s some really ancient cartoon no self-respecting kid would be watching in real life because that shit is pretty much public domain so you can pick up a DVD at a dollar store and plug in a clip.

On shows like Star Trek it is much more cost-effective to shoot on a backlot made up like the 20s or 30s or 40s than to create a whole new futuristic city.  Chances are that already existed so all you had to do was rent the space for a few days.  It saves a lot of money.

Also another part of it is that most people know what Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or The King and I or Singing in the Rain or Billy Joel are.  If you created some new show or movie or music, the audience wouldn’t know what it was.  There would be no emotional connection to it.

And yet I can’t help thinking a big part of it is also a lack of imagination.  It’s hard enough to imagine one future society without trying to imagine all the incremental changes to get to that point.  If I were to imagine life in 2100 I’d probably be spectacularly wrong, as wrong as someone in 1900 trying to imagine 2019.  (Where are our jetpacks and moon colonies?!)  It’d be much harder to imagine 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, 2070, 2080, and 2090 to feed into that.  Plenty of awful movies and TV shows got the future wrong (you should see 1980-ish’s The Apple’s depiction of “1994” and be very glad it never happened) but even good shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone often got it wrong.  I think by now we’re pretty much living in the same time as The Jetsons but no flying cars or cities in the sky.  I suppose some people can have robots to clean and stuff.

This is why prequels like the Star Wars ones or Star Trek Enterprise/Discovery have problems with how everything looks better than it does in the original.  It’s almost impossible from the 21st Century to design a “past” that would dovetail smoothly with sets from the 60s and 70s.  In the case of Star Trek, sets and costumes that were made on the cheap back in 1966.  (Especially the Klingons.)  It would look utterly ridiculous to have that same 1960s look in 2019.  It’s not just the technology but the costumes, hairstyles, and so on.  It’s really hard to be living in 2019 and try to work backwards from what someone did in 1966 or 1977.  It’s far easier to design it around what you have available in the present.

Writers have it a little easier in that we don’t have to actually create sets, costumes, etc.  We can just make shit up.  Yet it’s still hard for sci-fi writers to not work in references to the 20th Century or earlier because as I said earlier it’s something the audience will know and be able to connect with.  Despite that it’s ludicrous and more than a little arrogant to think people will give a shit about 20th Century American culture in the 23rd or 24th Century.  I mean how much do you care about the 17th or 18th Century culture?  Sure there are things that survive like Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven but unless you’re going to a costume party you’re not going to wear one of those big puffy Elizabethan collars or powdered wigs or shit like that.  You probably aren’t going to listen to harpsichord music or the drinking songs of the time.  Most of that shit gets forgotten except by a few historians or anthropologists.  Just like most of our culture will probably be forgotten in time.

That includes all of my books, I’m sure.  So there’s no need for me to write for the 23rd Century when I barely have a 21st Century audience.

A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal

I'm pretty sure I already revealed the theme months and months ago.  In 2017 I did Transformers and in 2018 I did GI JOE, so I figured in 2019, why not do another of my favorite cartoon shows with toys:  Robotech.

I first saw the show on the local UHF station that in a year or so would become home to an experimental new network:  Fox.  They showed it at like 6am or so, which was about the only good thing about having to get up early for the bus to school.

The interesting thing about the series is it was actually 3 Japanese series that American producers redubbed and strung together into an epic saga.

The first part was called Super Dimensional Fortress Macross in Japan.  The second part was called Southern Cross or something.  And the third part was called Genesis Climber Mospeada.

While I watched the show when I was a kid, it was reading the books in the 90s that really rekindled my interest in it.  The books, originally published by Del Rey starting in the late 80s, aren't written all that great but when you're 14-15 that doesn't really matter all that much.

The good things about the books are first they can fill in gaps in the TV series.  Since it was spliced from 3 different shows the transitions aren't all that smooth.  The books help to knit everything together and to add some shading to what is on the screen.  A whole series of books (The Sentinels) was supposed to be a follow-up TV show but was never made so the books (and maybe comics) are the only way you can experience those.  Since the shows were dubbed from the Japanese versions, the dialogue in the books can sound a little more natural than it does on the screen where sometimes the delivery might sound too fast or slow or forced to replace the Japanese words.

So a lot of what I'm going to talk about in the A to Z entries comes from the books, not the TV shows.

Since you haven't read those books or probably watched the TV shows in a long time, if ever, let me start by breaking down the basic story line for you.

First Generation (Super Dimensional Fortress Macross)  Books 1-6, 19:

A long time ago, in this galaxy, an alien scientist named Zor discovered a powerful energy called Protoculture.  He took it back home to Tirol, where the leaders there used it to gain ultimate power.  They soon started to called themselves the Robotech Masters.

The Masters used Protoculture for the creation of ships and battle machines (mecha) operated by an army of giant clones called the Zentraedi.  They conquered a bunch of planets and were seemingly unbeatable.

Except the residents of the planet where Zor discovered Protoculture--slug-like creatures called the Invid--didn't take kindly to having their planet exploited.  They raised their own fleet and army of mecha to fight the Zentraedi.

Aghast at what he'd wrought, Zor loaded the one-of-a-kind Protoculture matrix on his super-dimensional fortress.  Guided by a vision, he sent the ship to a placid blue planet:  Earth.

In the year 1999, Earth was in a constant state of war.  It was called the Global Civil War, though basically it was World War III.  Things were pretty bleak, with nuclear war seeming inevitable.  Then the giant spaceship crashes on a tiny Pacific island called Macross.

A team explores the ship to find the corpses of giant aliens and a warning about them and the Invid.  So Earth unites under a new world government and begins refurbishing the ship.  Earth scientists also start building new mecha to fight the alien menace.

But no aliens show up for 10 years.  On the day the fortress, christened Super Dimensional Fortress 1 (SDF-1), is ready to go online, the Zentraedi war fleet arrives near the moon.  They begin sending down forces to capture the SDF-1.  There's a battle and the captain of the SDF-1 decides to "fold" away from Earth.

The fold goes wrong and the ship jumps all the way to Pluto, which was a planet at the time of the show and books. The ship begins making its way back to Earth but it doesn't take the Zentraedi long to catch up and attack them.

With millions of ships the Zentraedi could easily overwhelm the humans but they want the ship intact so they don't press the advantage.  There are a few minor engagements before the SDF-1 gets back to Earth.  But Earth doesn't want them around since the Zentraedi have no interest in the planet.  The SDF-1 goes back into space for a little while, but ultimately they return to Earth and this time land in the ocean.

When the Robotech Masters created the Zentraedi, they made them without a lot of basic emotions like love.  The Zentraedi didn't have families or children or any of that.  Males and females had little contact with each other.  So it turns out humans have a secret weapon:  music, movies, and kissing!  As the Zentraedi soak in human culture, they start to defect to the SDF-1.

Ultimately the Zentraedi leader, Dolza, decides to bring his massive flagship and war fleet to destroy the Zentraedi who have had contact with humans.  Those Zentraedi join with the SDF-1 to fight Dolza.  But first, Dolza's fleet razes most of Earth.

With a little trickery, the humans and their Zentraedi allies get into the enemy flagship and blow it up, taking out most of the enemy.  Then the badly damaged SDF-1 returns to Earth for good.

Earth is badly scarred from the "Rain of Death" with most major cities being wiped out and crashed Zentraedi ships all over.  Besides the humans in the SDF-1, there are also the surviving Zentraedi now living on the planet.

But for most Zentraedi adjusting to a human life is all but impossible since they were bred for war.  One of the former Zentraedi leaders, Khyron the Backstabber, recruits disaffected Zentraedi to fight the humans.  After his plans are thwarted, Khyron crashes his ship into the SDF-1 and its sister SDF-2, destroying both.

Construction of an SDF-3 soon begins.  The ship is to undertake a mission to Tirol to offer an olive branch to the Robotech Masters.  But things are still unsettled on Earth.  A new, xenophobic government called the Army of the Southern Cross is rising while the Zentraedi launch terrorist attacks on human targets.  The Zentraedi are soon put down and the SDF-3 leaves for its mission with pretty much all the main characters from this series to explain why they aren't in the second series.

Second Generation (The Masters Saga):  Books 20, 7-9, 21:

With the SDF-3 gone, the Army of the Southern Cross is soon in charge of Earth.  About 15 years
later, the Robotech Masters show up with ships and mecha of their own to look for the lost Protoculture matrix.

There's fighting in space and on the ground, with things not going great for Earth.  But the Masters are running out of Protoculture and getting increasingly desperate.  Inside the ruins of the SDF-1, the Protoculture matrix begins letting out spores that start growing into the Flower of Life.

The Masters have lost the Protoculture matrix and soon are all dead.  Hooray, right?  Nope.  The growth of the Flowers calls out to the Invid, drawing them to Earth.

In the meantime, a human ship shows up over Earth claiming to be from the Robotech Expeditionary Force, which was the name for the SDF-3 mission.  Dana Sterling and her platoon steal the ship to go to Tirol and find her parents.

The Sentinels:  Books 13-17

While Earth is reorganizing under the Army of the Southern Cross, the SDF-3 appears at Tirol 10 years after the Robotech Masters have left for Earth.  The SDF-3 is damaged, its fold engines useless to leave the Robotech Expeditionary Force stranded.  They set up camp on Tirol to get their bearings after driving off the Invid there.  Soon they're hailed by a group of aliens calling itself the Sentinels that are fighting the Invid, who have enslaved their planets.

Some of the REF, led by Admiral Rick Hunter, go to help the Sentinels take back their worlds.  The fight goes across four planets before they get to the Invid homeworld of Optera and finally defeat the Invid--or half the Invid.

Third Generation (New Generation): Books 10-12

Earth is licking its wound after the Robotech Masters when the Invid regis and her army shows up.  The Invid easily defeat the remnants of the Southern Cross and begin setting up hives to grow and harvest the Flowers of Life.

Meanwhile, having defeated the Invid on the other side of the galaxy, the Robotech Expeditionary Force turns its attention to defeating the Invid on Earth.  Scott Bernard is part of the first armada sent to retake the planet.  But the invasion is a debacle and Scott finds himself marooned in South America.

Undaunted, he gathers a ragtag group of freedom fighters to head north to "Reflex Point," which is about where Indianapolis used to be. After a long journey, the irregulars make it to Reflex Point about the same time as a second wave of the REF shows up.

The Invid regis is convinced to leave Earth.  She gathers up all the Invid in a symphony of light that destroys the REF fleet as it leaves.

At last Earth is free!  But there's still one last loose end...

The End of the Circle, Book 18:

The SDF-3 has disappeared!  It folded with the rest of the REF fleet but instead of going to Earth it wound up stranded in another dimension.  Pretty much all the main characters from all three series are brought together to explore this dimension and find a way out.  Which they do with help from the Invid regis and the thought-to-be-lost fold engines of the SDF-1.

The SDF-3 returns to Earth to find the planet healing and having moved on from Protoculture.  And so everyone can go on with their lives.  Hooray!

The first series is probably the most popular of the three.  It's the longest and most iconic in terms of books, comics, video games, and other merchandising.  The second series gets kind of short shrift as it has to follow up the iconic first series and set up the third series.  A lot of it doesn't make all that much sense on its own, so the Japanese version is probably better.  The third series is good in that it doesn't have to insert a bunch of blather about a Protoculture Matrix, so in a way it might be the purest of the three.  And except for the beginning and end it's mostly focused on smaller fight scenes, not massive space battles.

The A to Z entries in April will fill in more of the story--mostly the characters and equipment.  So strap in and get ready!

Al Bundy, Patron Saint of MAGA Hatters

The other day I talked about King of the Hill and the Republican Party.  Also recently Hulu added all 11 seasons of Married With Children.  That was a show that in the mid-80s blazed the trail for Roseanne, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and right up to Modern Family, which also stars Ed O’Neill.

Married With Children focused on the low-income, dysfunctional Bundy family.  Patriarch Al Bundy was a former high school football star (he scored four touchdowns in a single game!) who married his high school “sweetheart” Peg and they had two kids:  the blonde bimbo Kelly and the perverted loser Bud.  What the show did was take the old All in the Family formula and amp up the bickering and bantering and add a lot of crass potty humor.  It was the first real hit for the upstart Fox network and is still probably their longest-running live action scripted show.  Honestly, I can't think of another Fox live-action scripted show that had 11 seasons consecutively.  I mean I think they recently added a season to the X-Files so it might have technically gotten there, but I don't consider it really the same.  What other ones might have gone that long:  90210 or Melrose Place?  (And I said live action and scripted so not The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Idol, Cops, or America's Most Wanted.)

Watching it in modern times you can see the similarities between Al and the stereotypical MAGA hat wearing guy.  He’s a poor blue-collar slob but thinks he’s superior to most everyone.  Doesn’t like foreigners.  Doesn’t really like gays.  Doesn’t like women unless they’ve got big hooters and are showing them off.  Especially doesn’t like “political correctness” espoused by his yuppie neighbor Marcy.  And he’s got a big mouth that’s not afraid to say all those things.  It’s not hard to imagine him wearing a MAGA hat and shouting about building a wall.

The only real differences are that Al didn’t have a bunch of guns and like Dale of King of the Hill he wasn’t really openly racist.  Misogynist, hell yes.  Xenophobic, definitely.  But not racist.  In fact in the last few seasons they added a black co-worker for him to be friends with.  I guess in the 80s/90s it was OK to hate women, foreigners, and gays but not people of color.  Make of that what you will.

You might wonder then why I even watch the show.  Why not?  I used to watch The Simpsons and Family Guy all the time and this is basically a live action cartoon.  And I’m poor and my luck usually seems on par with the Bundys.  I think the “Bundy Curse” is pretty much a real thing for people like me:  if you have any good luck, you’ll get an even greater amount of bad luck to cancel it out.  So if something good happens, watch out!  But I’m probably more like Bud than Al, the slightly more evolved caveman. Lol

Anyway, if your MAGA hat friends have streaming, tell them to watch this show because they’ll probably enjoy it.

A fun thing about watching this show now is there were a lot of people with bit parts who went on to do better things.  If you watch you’ll see actors like Paulie Shore, Tiffany Amber-Thiesen, Joey Lauren Adams, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jane Lynch, Jerry Springer, Bill Maher, Armin Shimmerman (Quark of DS9), Casper van Dien, and even Homer Simpson himself Dan Castellaneta.  (There are more I can’t remember.)  Though perhaps the most interesting one was they actually had one of those tacky episodes to set up a spinoff that would have starred Matt LeBlanc.  It’s funny to think had that spinoff been greenlit and lasted a couple of seasons, someone else probably would have been saying, “How you doin’?” to women on Friends.  Maybe we'd have been spared Joey.

A while back when I had basic cable I watched one of those E! True Hollywood Stories about this show and I’m pretty sure it said originally the role of Peg was supposed to go to Roseanne Barr but then she wound up with her own show on ABC instead.  Another Fun Fact is there was one episode “The Period Show” Fox wouldn’t air because it dealt with Peg, Kelly, and Marcy all getting their period at the same time while they were with their husbands and Bud in a cabin in the woods.  For all the crude humor and that’s where they drew the line?  It’s weird.  But you can watch it now on streaming.

(Sorry, this was kind of a thin premise for an entry.)

King of the Hill Illustrates the Fall of the GOP

I was excited last fall when Hulu finally added Fox’s King of the Hill to their service.  Except for a few episodes on Adult Swim, I hadn’t seen that show pretty much since it ended in 2010.  I always liked it, especially when it came after The Simpsons because it was a good complement to that show because unlike Family Guy it wasn’t the same show with slightly different animation and a lot of asides.

The show centered around Hank Hill, who lived in the small Texas city of Arlen with his wife Peggy and 12/13-year-old son Bobby.  (He started as 12 and then eventually he was 13.)  Unlike Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, Hank wasn’t a blundering oaf; he was a fairly normal blue-collar guy who sold propane and propane accessories.  He was obsessive about propane, grilling, and caring for his lawn.  Most of the time (starting in the credits) he’d be drinking beer in an alley with his friends Bill, Dale, and Boomhauer.

Hank was basically the Republican ideal:  patriotic, hard-working, middle-class, white, conservative, Christian, male.  He has a pick-up truck and a hunting rifle but not a bunch of guns.  But the things he wasn’t:  racist, homophobic, and fear-mongering.  Not that he had a lot of black or gay friends (when a Laotian family moves in, he and his friends ask the patriarch of the family:  are you Chinese or Japanese?) but he wasn’t burning crosses in their yards or petitioning the government to drive them out of town.  Casual racism/homophobia at most. 

Contrast that with his friend Dale who isn’t racist or homophobic but is a big time conspiracy nut and gun nut.  And he loves wearing hats to cover his baldness.  If you added some racism and homophobia, Dale could trade that orange hat in for a MAGA hat.

Watching the show in 2018, you can see a Before-and-After of the Republican Party.  Hank is what the GOP was until Rush, Newt, Fox “News,” Karl Rove, Bush/Cheney, Sarah Palin, and ultimately Donald Trump drove it ever farther right.  The GOP in 2019 looks a lot more like Dale than Hank.  Which is sad because when King of the Hill aired Dale was supposed to be a nut, a doofus who never even figured out his wife had been cheating on him for about 15 years (even getting knocked up by the Native American guy) and now he’s mainstream.  He’s the one at the Trump rallies chanting “Build the Wall!” and threatening journalists.

Doubly sad because Hank’s Republican Party wasn’t all that bad.  It disagreed with the liberals but it was at least sane and mostly reasonable.  It was willing to find compromise.  We could have differences and still be friends at the end of the day.  Back in those days you actually had the feeling of a real choice.

But then it all changed when W Bush lied us into a costly war and everything became win at any cost, no matter how you have to lie and cheat to get there.  The environment that caused the most recent government shutdown and Trump’s bogus “national emergency” is a product of that.

A problem I think is a lot of people still think the GOP candidates they’re voting for are part of that Hank Hill version of the party.  They haven’t realized yet that the Dales are running the show now and that 30% is bringing the rest of us along for the ride.  By the time they do wake up to reality, it’ll probably be too late.

Shock and Awful Storytelling

It's TV Week!  All the entries this week have something to do with TV shows.  You've been warned.

TV shows, especially network shows, typically bring out the big guns in November, February, and May for “sweeps.”  That’s when ratings are measured or whatever to determine whether a show will be picked up or cancelled. 

Having missed November, it’s no surprise that Fox’s The Orville had to pull some literal big guns out in February.  The science officer Isaac was a cybernetic being from a mysterious advanced race known as the Kaylon.  He was supposedly on the ship to determine whether the Kaylons would join the Federation, er, Union.

A couple of the best episodes of the series had the unemotional “robot” bonding with the doctor and her two young sons.  In the first episode the four of them are stranded on a remote planet and have to work together to survive.  In another Isaac and Dr. Finn embark upon a relationship, which included Isaac taking on a human body in the holodeck thing so they could have sex.

About two weeks after that episode, Isaac abruptly deactivates.  The crew takes him back to his homeworld for repairs.  While there they uncover billions of corpses under the planet and learn the dirty secret of the Kaylon:  they overthrew the biological organisms who constructed them and then slaughtered every living thing on the planet. 

(As an aside, why would the corpses still be there centuries later?  Obviously the Kaylon have the technology to incinerate the bodies entirely.  You could say that they want to keep them there as a reminder, but they’re robots, they don’t forget shit!  Every Kaylon has the memory of all that stuff so why would they need tangible proof?  It’s so damned convenient they left that stuff for the Orville crew to find.)

Isaac’s true mission then was to determine whether the Kaylon should kill all humans.  To which the answer is yes.  So they capture the crew and commandeer the ship to head to Earth with a dozen huge space gun things in tow that looked like enlarged versions of the reactor Iron Man used to power his armor.

This first episode really annoyed me because it undid all the character building of those other episodes.  None of that meant anything, apparently, because now he’s a bad guy and it was all an act.  And even if it wasn’t, how do you come back after your people killed like a dozen innocent crewmembers?

Up to that point I’d watched all the episodes on Hulu but I decided that next week to watch it live on Fox.  It was...meh.  There was a big space battle that was pretty cool.  Other than that, it wasn’t great.  Isaac turns on his people in the most cliched way possible:  the head bad guy takes Dr. Finn’s youngest son captive and tells Isaac to kill him.  This is so pathetically cliche that cartoons like Transformers and GI Joe did it back in the 80s.  Of course Isaac isn’t going to kill the kid!  Instead he kills all his people on the ship.  As I Tweeted, what’s next, having a bad guy incriminate himself by talking into a hot mic?  I mean while we’re using up age-old cliches.

The battle against the Kaylon is turned when the enemy Krill show up with a fleet.  Which would have been great if they hadn’t telegraphed that so far in advance.  Two officers from the Orville snuck away to meet with the Krill and were followed by a Kaylon gun thing that attacked the Krill and thus obviously the Krill were going to help fight the Kaylon then.  Duh.  It wasn’t exactly Han Solo coming back to shoot Darth Vader’s TIE fighter so Luke could blow up the Death Star.

At the end Isaac is abandoned by his people but is given refuge on the Orville.  Which is something Deep Space Nine did like 20+ years ago.  Odo, the shapeshifting head of security, found out his people had a beef against the “solids” and were going to use their clone army and fleet to kill and enslave all the solids.  At one point when Odo refused to join them he was banished and made solid for a time.

Which the issue with this show for me is that when it does character-driven episodes it’s pretty good, but when it tries to do bigger episodes it winds up regurgitating Star Trek scripts.  Not just these episodes but there was one at the beginning of the year where they make first contact with a planet governed by astrology and so locks up a couple of the crew because they were born under a bad sign.  (Why lock them up and not simply banish them?  Oh, right, because that would be a very short episode.)  The first contact gone wrong thing had probably been done 50 times on the various Trek series over the last 50+ years.  At that point the show feels like a really expensive cosplay, which is annoying.

Anyway, because they needed a big shock story for an attempted ratings grab they basically fucked up the evolution of Isaac’s character.  But in the end they just fell back to cliches and warmed-over Star Trek material.  If you’re going to ruin one of your better stories at least do it in the service of a decent story.  I’m just saying.

Comics Small & Big

First off, for a few months Tony Laplume has been doing his own DC-inspired comics series:  Crisis Weekly.  The concept is sort of like in the mid-2000s when DC did the weekly series 52 that focused on a year without the Big Three:  Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

In this case each week Tony has a new 8-page(ish) script posted on one of his blogs.  The story involves Man-Bats (lots of Man-Bats) and White Martians and of course Batman because he’s everywhere.  While there is eventually Batman most of it focuses on lesser known characters like Bloodwynd, Firehawk, and El Dorado, whom you might remember from Superfriends when they added some diversity to the lineup with El Dorado, Samurai, and Black Vulcan.  Better known characters like Martian Manhunter, Guy Gardner, and did I mention Batman(?) also show up.  And there are some new characters too.  And Man-Bats.  Lots of Man-Bats.

Most of what I liked is the focus on those lesser characters.  It reminded me of why I liked the Transformers More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light series in that it gave a chance for forgotten or seemingly insignificant characters to shine.

Speaking of, I enjoy reading Arion’s blog that largely focuses on comics, though other times movies too.  Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed because he reads and talks about all these indie series while I mostly stick to the mainstream titles.

There were a lot of sales at the end/beginning of the year so I decided to get a couple of the indie comics Arion recommended to broaden my horizons a little.

Highest House:  In a fantasy kingdom I guess based on the 16th Century Balkans from what Goodreads says, a boy named Moth is sold into slavery by his mom.  She tries to sell his sister but she's going blind so they won't buy her.  

Moth is taken to "Highest House" the colossal palace of one of the major houses in the kingdom.  It's kind of like King's Landing in Game of Thrones.  Moth is chosen to help a woman work on the many roofs of the place.  But soon in his dreams he starts hearing the voice of a mysterious being known as Obsidian that wants to make a bargain with Moth:  it'll give him whatever he wants if he helps to free it.  Eventually Moth agrees on the condition that Obsidian give him knowledge, heal his sister's eyes, and free the slaves.  But Obsidian can't do all of that directly.

Moth eventually meets the daughter of the lord of the house and instantly gets a crush on her.  When he saves her life, he's offered freedom, but refuses it because then he'd have to leave Obsidian before he could get what he wants.  The daughter has a secret that when Moth discovers it, she agrees to help him learn to read so he won't spill the beans.

The end of the first six issues has Moth going back to his home as the lord wants his help as a guide.  They seek out someone making something unheard of:  paper money!  The paper money could take away the lord's power with his control of steel that's used as currency so he wants to get rid of it, but Moth convinces him that controlling the paper money would be more useful.

Writer Mike Carey creates a fascinating world that has its own history and rules.  While most of it is medieval like GOT there is also magic, though not many people know how to use it anymore.  Moth is a really well-developed character.  He's not a flawless hero; he does save the lord's daughter and later the whole household, but he's not above making the bargain with Obsidian to get what he wants, even after he knows Obsidian is probably not a benevolent entity.  He gains freedom for the roofer but only because he wants to stay so Obsidian can fulfill the bargain.

Obsidian is often sarcastic and funny so it's kind of easy to forget that he's probably a monster.  Most of the other main characters all have flaws and quirks to keep them from being cliches or archetypes.  Whenever Part 2 comes out I'll have to read it to find out what's next for Moth and Obsidian.

Young Protectors:  This was one of those Kickstarter success stories where they wanted $13,000 to make a collected volume of the webcomic and wound up getting 10 times the amount asked for!  Mainstream comics have in the last 15 years or so ushered in a few homosexual characters like Batwoman, Earth 2 Green Lantern, and the X-Men’s Iceman, but it’s still not something widespread.  Even then it’s just kind of a side thing while they’re fighting supervillains and space monsters or whatever.

The main driving force of Young Protectors is the homosexual relationship between a young hero (Red Hot) and a supervillain (Annihilator).  Red Hot in his secret identity ventures into a gay bar only to come out and find Annihilator there to blackmail him into a kiss.  Red Hot finds he likes this kiss and so he and Annihilator see each other again, going on a date in Hong Kong that’s broken up by some vigilantes.  So there’s still some comic book action but the relationship is the main thing as I said.

There are a couple of side issues that were mostly included thanks to the Kickstarter.  One is a good illustration of Rule 34:  if it’s on the Internet there’s porn for it.  Red Hot and his teammates are on the web when they find a bunch of gay porn starring them!  There’s also the secret origin for the mysterious Spooky Jones and Commander, the team’s leader.

For an indie Kickstartered thing the artwork is actually really good.  Probably because it’s drawn by someone who also did work for Marvel and DC on some of their bigger titles.  So you’re not really seeing a drop in quality from the big boys.

While I was searching for indie titles I noticed one written by Bill Corbett called Super Powered Revenge Christmas.  I wondered:  is that the same Bill Corbett who was on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and does the Rifftrax movies I watch obsessively on Pluto TV?

And yes, it is.  This comic was actually adapted from a stage play, though I think this format works better because it’s about a comic.  The framing device is that it’s Christmas Eve and a comics writer and his wife who draws his comics go into a bar and challenge the patrons to decide how their book should end.

The book is like if the story of Christmas were a superhero comic.  All of the characters come from popular culture only with a superhero twist.  The Red Avenger is a warrior from another planet who’s been sent to Earth to find a protect a Chosen One.  He wears red fur and startles enemies with his fearsome battlecry:  Ho, Ho, Ho!  He finds a mutant bipedal deer that shoots lasers from his nose.  More nebulous is a woman with the power to control ice and snow who’s loosely based on Frosty the Snowman.  They meet a superpowered couple named Joe and Mary who are about to have a special baby.  Opposing them are the evil Mr. S(crooge), Mr. P(otter), and Mr. G(rinch).  (Joe, Mary, and Potter are all based loosely on characters from It’s A Wonderful Life, though Joe’s name in that movie was George and he didn’t have superpowers--Obviously.)

Eventually we get to the writer’s ending, which is grim and gritty in the tradition of more recent comics.  Whereas his wife’s ending is far happier.  Guess which one people prefer?

It was a really fun comic to read even in January and there were good messages about comics and creating stories in general.  Basically not everything needs to be “edgy.”  Like Christmas stories.  But isn’t this practicing what it preaches against then?  Error, Error, Paradox, Does Not Compute…

I don’t know if Dynamite is a small enough publisher to include on this part of the list, but what the hell.

Many years ago Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame wrote the series Marvel Zombies.  Wow, what a stretch, right?  It spawned some sequels and such but the Marvel/Dynamite spinoff Marvel Zombies vs Army of Darkness pits the zombie superheroes against their greatest foe:  Bruce Campbell!  Ash from the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies is somehow summoned into the Marvel Zombie universe as the infection is spreading.  He teams with little known heroine Dazzler and they escape zombies to get to Dr. Doom in Latveria, where he has a book that might help.  A lot of mayhem ensues.  It’s a fun miniseries that while it has different writers than either original series manages to capture their essence.

Another Dynamite spinoff crossover thing was Darkman vs Army of Darkness.  I’m a huge fan of the Darkman movies so I wanted to read this for a while.  Darkman was a scientist who after being assaulted by gangsters in his lab was badly burned but also lost the ability to feel pain and gained greater physical strength.  He can create masks of people with fake skin that lasts for exactly 99 minutes in the daylight before it melts.

Darkman’s former girlfriend Julie and a colleague find a mysterious book and it possesses Julie and starts creating an army of the dead, including Darkman’s arch-nemesis Robert G Durant.  Julie’s colleague and Darkman inadvertently read a page from the book and it summons Ash.  He teams with Darkman so they can whoop on the zombies while trying not to kill Julie.

Another fun series that I wished was longer than 4 issues.  The art is decent, managing to capture the look of the characters, though Durant maybe doesn’t quite look like Larry Drake.  As a Fun Fact, in the original Darkman movie the “final shemp” or the disguise Darkman wears to escape from Julie into a crowd, was played by Bruce Campbell.  So he technically was both Darkman and Ash.

Neither of these Dynamite series were on Comixology or Kindle so I had to buy them in paper.  The Marvel Zombies one I got in a really nice hardcover while the Darkman one was in paperback.  The seller claimed it was new but the cover of paperback came unglued from the spine before I started reading!  Kind of lame.

Of course I also read plenty of mainstream comics because I’m not some fancy comics connoisseur—I don’t even know how to spell it.

Comixology, where I read most online comics, recently added DC comics to their Unlimited Netflix-ish program.  Some of these comics were also added to Amazon Prime Reading so if you have a Prime account you can read them free.  They were mostly the first volume of Rebirth titles.  I already read the Batman one but there were others.

Superman Rebirth, Vol 1:  There’s a new old Superman in town.  After the New 52 Superman dies, the Superman from the 90s shows up along with his wife Lois and their son Jon.  Their son is starting to get powers and so Superman helps him learn how to use them.  A relatively straightforward training mission to rescue a submarine gets more complicated when they run into the Eradicator (one of the Reign of the Supermen Supermen) who wants to kill Jon to “purify” the Kryptonian bloodline.  Mayhem ensues! (3/5)

Justice League Rebirth, Vol 1:  Yeah, I have no idea what the hell was going on.  A lot of weird monsters from space gathering to sing a song that would destroy existence (or something) and bombs of some sort buried inside the Earth’s mantle that the new old Superman has to destroy.  It made as much sense as Scott Snyder’s idiotic Dark Nights Metal and probably his recent run on the Justice League title. Besides new old Superman, Green Lanterns Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz join the team to replace Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern. (1/5)

Aquaman Rebirth, Vol 1:  Aquaman and Mera are trying to create an Atlantean embassy on land to end hostilities between Atlantis and the surface world, but Black Manta of course messes that up.  Aquaman allows himself to be arrested but when his people come to rescue him, he has to break out to stop them.  Meanwhile Black Manta is broken out by a terrorist group and quickly takes it over.  It was good but it's one of those that in the long run probably got overridden. (3/5)

Teen Titans Rebirth, Vol 1:  Damian Wayne (son of the Batman) recruits Starfire, Raven, Beast Boy, and Kid Flash (black Wally West, not white Wally West) to fight his cousin and some teenaged assassins trained by Ra’s al Guhl.  Damian has to learn to play nice and the others have to learn to be a team…until the lineup was changed yet again. (2/5)

Doom Patrol, Vol 1:  Crawling From the Wreckage:  Though they call it a Volume 1 it’s really issues 19-24, the start of Grant Morrison’s run on the title in the late 80s.  A new team of weird heroes is formed to fight some weird villains like “Scissormen” who come from an imaginary world to destroy reality and “God” who previously visited Earth as Jack the Ripper.  It’s a good setup for what gets a lot weirder in future volumes I’m sure.  They probably put this on Amazon Prime because the new TV series is airing on DC Universe.  Anyway, it was interesting that the Scissormen thing was sort of retooled by Morrison in his series The Multiversity in that something fictional was creating havoc and threatening to destroy reality. (2.5/5)

Speaking of…

The Multiversity:  Some evil force is destroying some of the worlds of the Multiverse and so heroes are gathered from the various worlds to stop it.  Or something.  There were a bunch of spin-offs involving some of these worlds.  Pax Americana was sort of if Morrison had written Watchmen.  The Mastermen was about a world where Superman was raised by the Nazis so it’s sort of a Man in the High Castle thing.  Thunderworld Adventures focuses on Shazam (Captain Marvel) and company.  Another one focused on children of superheroes in a world where all crime had been eliminated by Kryptonian technology so mostly the “heroes” are reality TV stars or gather to reminisce about the good old days.  Some of these didn’t seem to matter that much to the end.  But then this whole series didn’t wind up mattering that much in general. (2/5)

Batman, Rebirth, Vol 8:  This was the first volume after the non-wedding between Batman and Catwoman.  Bruce Wayne bribes his way onto a jury deliberating a case involving Mr. Freeze because he thinks that Freeze was set up, someone planting evidence for Batman to find to make it look like Freeze did it.  Later KGBeast targets Nightwing and Batman tracks him down in Siberia.  It was ironic in the first arc Bruce was worried Batman was going too far and losing control and then…he loses control and goes too far against KGBeast.  Lesson learned! (2.5/5)  (It occurred to me recently that what King is doing is pretty much what Grant Morrison did on his run culminating with Batman RIP and to maybe a lesser extent what Scott Snyder did in Batman Eternal:  a bad guy is destroying Batman and Bruce Wayne to break him mentally.  In Morrison's run Bruce was set up with Jezebel Jett, who broke his heart similarly to what Catwoman did in King's run.  I'm just saying.)

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe…Again [sigh]:  In the original DKMU, it was pretty straightforward:  Deadpool snapped and killed everyone.  This time around writer Cullen Bunn provides a little more depth to the story.  Like in Old Man Logan where we learn Wolverine killed the X-Men because Mysterio made him think they were bad guys, Deadpool thinks he’s killing bad guys when really he’s killing good guys.  And then he’s turned against the bad guys controlling him:  Red Skull, Dr. Doom, Magneto, etc.  The art has a wide range of styles as what Deadpool thinks he sees is rendered in a variety of different ways, sometimes overly cartoony or in one case it mimics the 80s Hostess ads in Marvel books.  It’s definitely better than the original DKMU, though the problem is there are so many heroes that you can’t really do elaborate kills for most of them in 5 issues or so.  It’s still fun but not as fun as my favorite where Deadpool went around killing all the great characters of literature.

Hawkeye vs Deadpool:  The title is a misnomer as they don't fight each other except for a few pages near the end when Hawkeye is mind-controlled.  It's a fun story where Deadpool, Hawkeye, and Lady Hawkeye (Kate Bishop) team up to stop Black Cat and a rogue scientist from brainwashing people and uncovering SHIELD agents' real identities. (3/5)

JSA Vol 11:  The Signal:  I bought this in paperback at Ollie's pretty much at random, which turned out to be a problem because I had no idea what was happening.  Hal Jordan's cousin Airwave starts going crazy and so they fly off into space and...that was it for that.  Most of it was about a war in the Fifth Dimension which made little sense to me.  The best part was a side issue about Stargirl who this summer will have her own show on DC Universe.  The story is about her relationship with her father and stepfather.  But the art was nice, especially the Alex Ross-ish covers. (2/5)