comics

Monday various

  • Roger Ebert on The Green Hornet:

    Casting about for something to praise, I recalled that I heard a strange and unique sound for the first time, a high-pitched whooshing scream, but I don’t think Gondry can claim it, because it came from the hand dryers in the nearby men’s room.

  • At first I thought it was like that urban legend about the ghost on the set of Three Men and a Baby, but apparently this one’s true: Han Solo does appear in many, if not all, episodes of Firefly.

    If you’re wondering, Mal shot first.

  • Alex Beam of the Boston Globe wonders — or maybe wondered back in November when I first saw this link — are new translations necessary? It’s an interesting question, but there’s no mention of instances when newer translations get things right, or make necessary corrections, or significantly change our understanding of a text. Proust’s famous novel is better translated as In Search of Lost Time, for instance, and newer translations of Camus’ The Stranger have called into question earlier readings of its famous opening lines.

    So, short answer? Yeah, I think they’re still necessary. [via]

  • Speaking of translations, the surprisingly intriguing story of why Uncle Scrooge McDuck is called “Dagobert” in Germany. [via]
  • And finally….

    The Justice League, re-imagined as a 1977 punk rock movie, based on an art challenge posed by Warren Ellis and by the exceptionally talented Annie Wu.

Tuesday various

Monday various

  • Caitlin R. Kiernan on coincidence:

    Coincidence is a constantly occurring phenomenon with a bad rap. Lots of people treat it’s like a dirty word, or something rationalists invoke simply to dispel so-called supernatural events. And yet, an almost infinite number of events coincide during any every nanosecond of the cosmos’ existence. We only get freaked out and belligerent over the one’s we notice, the ones we need (for whatever reason) to invest with some special significance. Co-occurrence should not be taken for correlation any more than correlation should be mistaken for causation.

    • Although you have to admit, with all the weird news of Arkansas recently, it’s tempting to look for correlations and common causes.

  • Theodora Goss raises an interesting question — namely, does fantasy writing, with its made-up languages and grammars, present unique challenges for copyeditors?
  • Peter David on why Aquaman is actually cool.
  • David Forbes re-examines Frank Herbert’s Dune. It’s fascinating, not least of all for its glimpse at the original edition’s semi-ridiculous back cover copy:

    A page of medieval history? Not quite. Duke Leto Atreides is moving from a planet, which he owns, to another planet, which he has been given in exchange. The Emperor, Shaddam IV, is Emperor of the known Universe, not a country. And Duke Leto’s son, Paul, is not a normal noble heir. In fact, he is so little normal in any way that he happens to be possible key to all human rule, power and indeed knowledge! [via]

  • And finally, a fascinating look at Yogi Bear — and there’s a phrase I never thought I’d write — as District 9:

    Yogi Bear is not a kids’ movie. It is a bleak futurist parable about humanity’s inability to accept a non-human sapience. It is also about a bear who wears a hat. [via]

Sunday pancakes

An uneventful and rainy day here in New York, punctuated only by a trip out to Huntington for my semi-regular writing group. My prompt this week, such as it was, was a recipe for a high-rising pancake in GQ. This wasn’t exactly my choice, but we draw inspiration where we can. Not so sure about this piece — I had fun writing it, and I think these exercises are good crafting skills regardless, but it’s not something I see much hope for developing. It’s a silly little disposable semi-story, and as such I have no problem posting it here:

“The High-Rise Pancake”

So this was it. They were kicking Jerry out of the architectural program, and he would be lucky if he didn’t lose his scholarship and get booted from State altogether.

Designing an apartment complex that resembled a pancake, complete with a light, fluffy interior to a butter- and syrup-coated exterior, probably hadn’t been his smartest move ever. But was it really his fault that the griddle had malfunctioned, then exploded, in class? It was just a short circuit and a splash or two of buttermilk batter; no permanent damage had been done. Imagine if he had followed his original model’s design specs and included blueberries!

But according to his professor, Jerry didn’t take his studies seriously, and this was just the final straw in a long line of…well, many other straws. Enough straw, perhaps, to build that cabana shaped like a giant straw hat that Jerry had designed for the first midterm. His professor had called that impractical, too, however, and she certainly hadn’t appreciated the coconut rum and orchid leis he had unsuccessfully tried to distribute in class.

“It’s all about setting a mood!” he had insisted.

“You can’t drink in class and your building has no doors,” his professor countered.

And so that was that. No one in the degree program had any appreciation of art, of whimsy, of the avant-garde. You couldn’t make a building look like a pancake, or a hat, or even a eighteen-foot-tall Scarlett Johansson — both for anatomical and legal reasons, apparently. The only thing the dean and his subordinates cared about was practicality, efficiency — dull, dry buildings no better or different than the dull, dry buildings already all over campus.

“Maybe you should move into the art department or something,” his advisor suggested.

“My scholarship won’t pay for that,” Jerry said.

“Son, you convinced the scholarship board you had some talent for architecture. Either they like you a lot or they’re clinically insane. Convincing them their money and your time are better applied somewhere else should be easy by comparison.”

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t want to live in a giant pancake?”

The “ending” is more than a little rushed — enough that it deserves those air-quotes — but again, I had fun. Oh, and yeah, Scarlett Johansson was on the GQ cover. Again, we just go where the muse decides to lead us.

Do you think there are Marvel vs. DC arguments in the Johansson/Reynolds household, with the former playing Black Widow in Iron Man 2 and the latter soon to be Green Lantern on screen? I’m sure there must be, right?

Monday various