In the Immortal Words of the Joker in the first Tim Burton Batman movie, "I'm glad you're dead! Hee hee hee hee! I'm glad he's dead!" Jesse Walker's Hit&Run item about the general lack of notice to the death last week of former Georgia governor Lester Maddox brought this quotation fit on.

I actually remember Lester Maddox appearing on the TV news once when I was a kid. It was actually a broadcast of one of his campaign commercials, in which he pronounced that "The only reason the [bad word] want civil rights is because the [bad word] want our white women!" This was in the early seventies, and I remember wondering, in my naive youth, well, what the hell anyone was doing saying something like that in the seventies. Nobody would like talk like that. Eventually I got out more. But I think Maddox had already hit his high water mark regardless.

As a right winger I have something of a high threshold when it comes to other people's prejudice. I figure most everybody in the world, of whatever hue and creed, has their tics. But decent people keep it to themselves - not everybody makes a hobby of their bigotries, let alone, like Lester Maddox, a career. If it turns out Lester Maddox renounced the vicious programmatic racism of his youth, and middle age, and early dotage when I wasn't looking, I'll take the Joker's words back, otherwise, hee hee hee, I'm glad he's dead.

Technical Query - I'm pretty sure, based on reading the entrails of my referrer logs, that someone has syndicated this site to LiveJournal. By coincidence, I got a query from a reader asking permission to do this very thing. I figure if it's been done I can save her the trouble, right? Or do I just no - hang on. I was about to ask if I just don't understand LiveJournal, which is a question I already know the answer to - no I don't. So, please tell me if my pal can make use of a preexisting syndication "feed" or whatever you LJ people call it. If you have yourself syndicated UO that would be even better.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - If I lean way back on the scale, I can get it all the way up to 169 pounds before I fall off. Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering has officially defined my waist as a circumference passing through my belly button. That metric comes in at 33.5". The weight in particular looks like a big drop from last week's 173, but the 173 was part of an uptick anyhow, and I'd been down around 171 in various unofficial measurements within the last month. (I don't do the Hacker's Diet weighted average thing, but I take unofficial scale readings throughout the week as a sanity check against the official Sunday measurements. For the waist we have no true comparison since the measurement standard is new.

Anyway, I'll confess to being pretty darn pleased. In 1987 I weighed 170 pounds, according to my doctor's records. This is the first time since then. I played with the Halls BMI Calculator and determined that I'm kind of average weight for twenty-year-olds as tall as I am. I'm also greedy. I still have not a "six-pack" but more of a two-pack. I can easily identify another five pounds of flab that needs to go. And if the pattern holds, I'll plateau here in the 170-pound range for a few weeks.

But enough about me. Let's talk about you, or anyway, your letters. Jean Lansford writes:

BTW, I'm one of those people who lost a lot of weight on the old WW plan and then gained it back. Not by going off the plan, but by switching to the new Points plan when they introduced it. When my pre-paid weeks ran out, I decided I didn't need to pay them to help me gain weight. *rolls eyes*

I thought it was Jean, but apparently not, who wrote that she found it almost impossible to get enough protien on Weight Watchers without going over her point allotment. Mrs. Offering has started WW, and begins her exercise regimen tonight, so the protien situation will bear watching. Mrs. O will try Bill Phillips' "Body-for-Life" weight and aerobic plans, but finds his list of permitted foods unappealing. (Phillips is also all about pushing his EAS Myoplex products, but remember, you are a customer, and that means deciding what not to buy into and to buy.)

This week's topic: How to go off Atkins. First, why you might want to: because you just can't stand the food any more; because your LDL cholesterol isn't improving enough; because your maintenence-level carb intake is too close to induction-level. I'm convinced that Atkins got a lot right, and I wouldn't have lost fifty pounds if his program hadn't gotten me started. He's right about the metabolic evils of processed sugars and starches; the centrality of exercise; the goodness of fiber and the merits of vitamins. That said, he was militantly agnostic about fat type, and I've come to accept the "good fats/bad fats" distinction. (Your low-fat gurus got this completely wrong too, from the other end. You could argue that they got the fat-v.-carbs question more wrong than Atkins did.) Some people's metabolism is such that, even on Atkins maintenance, they need to keep their "net carbs" under 30 a day or so to avoid weight gain. That really may be too low. And maybe you just want a freakin' fajita now and then. (I scarfed down about a half can of Pringles at gaming Wednesday night. That's not the same as scarfing down a half can every day.)

Regardless of the various reasons why, evidence suggests that people do feel compelled to go off Atkins, for whatever reason. So how to avoid the upswing on the diet yo-yo?

Fellow Atkins veteran Patrick Nielsen Hayden's experience tracks mine:

It's been some weeks since I was on the Atkins diet in any meaningful sense. And yet, in that time, my weight appears to have been stable -- and down 35 pounds from when I started Atkins many months ago.

Probably because, in fact, although I'm no longer doing Atkins, I've continued to avoid massive single-meal carb loads, and I've cut sweetened soft drinks out of my diet entirely. And although the weather hasn't been great for it, I do try to commute to work on my bike--five miles, door to door--whenever I can. (My answer to the question "Do you have an exercise machine?" is "Actually, I have two. One runs from Boerum Avenue to Park Row, and the other connects Flatbush Avenue to Canal Street...")

I probably need to take up some new regimens of both diet and exercise, but I agree with you that the "you'll just gain it all back" canard mostly serves to discourage people from small-scale effective action. I'm not doing Atkins at this point, but I give it tons of credit for breaking my addiction to huge doses of carbohydrates and getting me back to eating reaonable portion sizes. These days, when I do indulge in pounding down too many carbs, I immediately feel bloated, which is a fine discouragement from doing it again any time soon.

In line with what Patrick said, here's Jim's Plan for a Graceful Post-Atkins Landing:

1. Free days. Take one day a week where you allow yourself to indulge in whatever cravings you have. Free days may even help you lose weight. How? They convince your body it's not really starving, and it doesn't have to go into shutdown mode.

2. Exercise! Apart from any weight loss and body-shaping goals you still have, you need to push your metabolism to the point where you can metabolize upwards of 50g of net carbs a day.

3. Portion Control. Start paying attention to the "Serving Size" line on nutrition labels. You miss that one and none of the rest of the numbers mean anything. For things without labels, assume a "portion" is about the size of your fist or what will fit in your cupped palm. (A cupped palmful of shelled nuts is a good match for the one-ounce serving size on the can.) Once you're off Atkins and eating more fruit and whole grains and occasional bad-carb treats, you can't eat the whole T-bone any more. Chances are that during Atkins you've found yourself eating less at one sitting anyway, but now is the time to be conscious of it. Portion control goes hand in hand with

4. Eat often. I eat five times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a morning and afternoon snack. I'm still trying to lose weight, so my portion allotment runs as follows: 2-1-2-1-3, sometimes 2-1-3-1-3 or 2-1-2-2-3. Every session includes some fat and protien.

5. Fat-shifting. I have no reason to believe you should really restrict your total fat intake to 25-35 grams a day or whatever. But you should try to get more fats from nuts, oils and fish and less from beef. Those one-portion snacks of mine are almost always nuts. And I don't stint the (low-sugar) salad dressing either.

6. Consider Calories. Heresy! Anyway, I'm not talking about counting calories. A portion (as we've defined it) of most anything will probably fall somewhere in the 100-300 calorie range. A pound is 3500 calories. If during weight loss, I'm dropping an average of a pound a week over time, that means I'm running a 3500/7=500 calorie/day deficit. That means that when I want to maintain weight, I can increase my food intake by two or three portions per day. More than that and I'll probably start to gain, depending on the state of my exercise regimen.

7. Keep your good habits. If you're like me, you eat more real vegetables (the kind that don't get renamed "freedom fries" during jingoistic spasms) under Atkins than you ever did before. Keep it up! You went off Atkins most likely to get more variety in your carb intake, I realize, but your base should still be leafy greens and yellow-to-red fibrous veggies. Along with the fruits and - god help you - breads, make sure you get 2-3 servings every day of something your mother and the FDA would count as a vegetable.

That's what I've figured out so far. Picking up some unused weight plates from my sister and brother-in-law so I can try the leg extension attachment to my bench. Fortnightly Fitness Fun once again gets jiggered around - I'm lifting weights two weeks in a row. My back is healing, but I want to give it more recovery time. Next week I'll be on vacation, and I sure can't take my bench and such with me, but a mountain lake will be perfect for lots of Heavyhands work.

On the Move - Walter in Denver has a new URL and a new design - meaning, he's given up one of the two worst Blogger templates for a functional Movable Type template.

Dr. Frank has moved too, to his own domain.

Four-Color Hell is a new group comics blog. There's rather more fretting about whether a given comic or company is politically correct than I find enjoyable, but there's some good stuff, and the question of politics and comics merits some serious consideration. (Politically correct not from a tedious academic-left perspective but from a "lethal center" - neoliberal, neolibertarian, neoconservative - one.)

Vox Pop - "Occupation Forces Halt Elections Throughout Iraq" notes the Washington Post:

"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."

Happy Birthday to the Littlest Offering! who turned three yesterday, which occasion has taken time that might otherwise have been spent blogging.

A Fanboy's Public Service Announcements - Remember how burned you felt by the Planetary/JLA story a few months ago? Six bucks and an hour of your life down the drain. How the only good thing about it was that picture of Clark Kent in a trench coat hovering over Bruce Wayne's balcony. How it wasn't really Planetary in the story at all, but just some people who looked like them? Remember how you couldn't figure out what the hell was happening at the end of the story - like, for instance, how Diana Prince ever beat Jakita Wagner? How - horrors! - it wasn't John Cassiday drawing it? I feel your pain because it was my own. However.

Do not not not not NOT let that experience stop you from picking up the new Planetary/Batman crossover, "Night on Earth," which rocks every conceivable way there is to rock. None of the baleful qualities of Planetary/JLA attach to this story. John Cassiday draws it. It's a real Planetary story. Heck, if DC hadn't bought Wildstorm they'd probably have done it anyway with the usual serial-number effacing on the Batman homage. It's a real Batman story - in fact, it's a lot them . . . Most of all, it's a real good story. Heck, Mrs. Offering ripped right through it, with pleasure, despite never having read Planetary before nor having thought much about Batman since that awful third movie.

UPDATE: Also, Marvel has released teaser art and actual information about Neil Gaiman's upcoming miniseries, 1602, at a joint Gaiman/Marvel press conference. (Thanks to Jesse Walker for the head's up.)

Also, Dirk Deppey has part two of his response to my response, including his response to my response to his response of yesterday. He talks a lot about the Francine Pascal model, distinguishing "original creator farms out work-for-hire to contractors/employees" from "corporation farms out work-for-hire to contractors/employees," his theory being that

I would assume that she has provided a "writer's bible" explaining the core concepts of the series and oversees the writing process, offering quality control to ensure that the end result stays harmoniously in line with what has come before. In short, as the ultimate owner of the work in question, I would hazard to guess that she has an obvious stake in maintaining the intergity of the line, and exercises it out of a desire to maintain the momentum generated by prior works. While there may be other fingers hired to write some (or many) of her stories for her, in the end, the buck surely stops with Francine Pascal.

I, uh, never expected to encounter the words "Sweet Valley High" and "integrity" in such close proximity, so this colloquy has already proved its merit.

The fact remains, however, that even in the case of Francine Pascal, there is an original mind behind the project, one motivated by the self-interest of a creator who wishes to see her creation continue to bear fruit, and who understands that what her readers want is a continuation and fruition of the core concept. I would argue that this is not only a powerful motivation, but also a better mechanism for success than the pure work-for-hire system as demonstrated by Marvel. A company like Marvel, with its rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model, is simply less adept at maintaining such a creative engine than a single driving mind.

And he may be right. It seems pretty easy to me to imagine all the things that could go wrong with the "Francine model" - including creator loses all but fiduciary interest in her work; creator feels the call of other projects and leaves her baby in the care of "rotating editors and many-thumbs-in-the-pudding creative model." This may have happened with Sweet Valley High, if you believe this former ghost writer's account in the Baltimore City Paper:

Without getting into the loftier question of how much freedom any writer has--unless I'm being annoying--I always answer that everything save the actual writing of the book is done by committee. The plot is decided by meeting; the title gets brainstormed at meetings (I liked Surface Tension, which justly lost to Say It to My Face); and new and old characters spring to life over jelly beans around the office. What the writer gets is a skeletal plot line--anything from a Zen-koan-like list of actions to a Jamesian exegeses detailing each chapter--which he or she (mostly she, as far as I know) then returns, suitably fleshed out, pruned, or padded, to the packager for approval.

The author of the article, Lizzie Skurnick, describes a " creator, Francine Pascal (please don't sue me), who lives it up in Paris off the skin of all of our typing fingers." (Speaking of pitfalls in the "creator-owned/production-farmed" model, at one point in his item, Dirk refers to Howard Chaykin's creation, American Flagg. But we all remember how the quality of Flagg fell off when Chaykin turned his series over to Steven Grant and Joe Staton.)

Also, concentrating completely on the actual existence of Francine Pascal, however peripheral she may now be to SVH and its spinoffs, leaves Dirk Deppey little room to discuss purer instances of the "house name/packager" phenomenon. For instance, this discussion thread has a reprint of a Writer's Digest article on packaging that notes that, while Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys were long the property of the Stratemeyer Syndicate and under the direction of Edward Stratemeyer, who came up with the series ideas, for at least some of that time, "Packager Mega-Books was responsible for the new Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books from 1986-1997." All those Franklin W. Dixons and Carolyn Keenes had plenty of rotating editors and clueless corporate masters to report to also. Bill Sherman also noted the prevalence of work-for-hire in men's series adventure books. We can add textbooks and many popular lifestyle and reference works to the list. (Sunset, Time-Life, Ortho etc.)

And there's Roswell High. Author Melinda Metz notes

That probably sounds confusing, and the way I ended up writing the Roswell High books is a little unusual. First of all, the initial concept for the series came from the publisher--Pocket Books. They asked a book packager--17th Street Productions--to develop the idea further. Probably now you're wondering what a book packager is. It's a company that supplies edited manuscripts and sometimes covers to a book publisher. Packagers are mainly used for book series. 17th Street Productions, for example, also handles the Sweet Valley High series, the Thoroughbreds series, the Countdown series, and the Fearless series, among others.

So anyway, once the people at 17th Street Productions came up with the character descriptions and basic plot arcs for the series, they started looking for a writer. All of us hoping to be considered wrote a sample. I was actually the second choice. The first choice writer dropped out to pursue another project.

That's the pure form of the corporate ownership model. I suspect that the creator-run apprentice shop may actually be a surer road to quality, but it's not the only publishing model out there and it has its own pitfalls. I believe my original claim, "publishing is rife with work-for-hire," still stands.

Finally, apologies to Dirk for misinterpreting his point about the growth of the manga business.

The Trouble with the Trouble with the Tr - Ah, Forget It - Dirk Deppey responds to the critics of his essay, "The Trouble with Marvel." I want to stress that I have no quibble with this part:

The most thoughtful and on-target response to the article came from weblogger Jim Henley, who turns out to have had prior experience in the bookstore trade himself.

Hey, right on, Dirk! Say it with me, True Believers, MAKE MINE UNQUALIFIED OFFERINGS!

Anyway, here was my item.

Now where were we? Oh yeah - Dirk's item is just part one, mostly covering Marvel's bookstore market share. It's actually hard to find any areas of genuine mutual disagreement in this part, though I think I have a minor math bone to pick with him on a side issue. To wit, I noted Marvel's six-fold bookstore sales increase in one year and, in the course of calling that very good, averred that it was unlikely that "the more mature manga bookstore business increased sixfold between 2001-2002." Dirk basically says it's likely that it did. But I think, mathematically, we can demonstrate its impossibility.

Say you have a massive, $100 graphic novel market. In Year One, The Stodgy Superhero Company gets $3 of those hundred dollars, and Big Manga, by Dirk's own estimate, gets $50.

In Year Two, The SSC's sales increase six-fold, to $18.

If Big Manga's sales increase six-fold, they are now at $300. That means the graphic novel market must now be at least $318. That's a jump of 318% for the market as a whole in one year, minimum. For it to be only 318%, every other purveyor of graphic novels must disappear from every shelf in America. If we assume that Everybody Else has flat sales, then their $47 in Year One is $47 in Year Two. $318 + $47 = $365. So now the market has increased 365% (Aren't round numbers wonderful?)

But we know from Dirk's original article that the graphic novel market as a whole grew "only" 33% from Year One to Year Two. (And by the way, that is damned impressive growth. That is the kind of jump that makes book retailer eyes light up. It jumps right out at you when you're paging through your sales-by-subject report, believe me.)

So it's just plain impossible for Big Manga's sales to have increased sixfold. Damned if I can remember what that does to my original point, though. I took my nighttime pill for my back trouble already. So let me just say that if you have any interest in the comics biz at all, and Marvel Comics in particular, that Dirk Deppey's response item is well worth your time. If you don't have any interest, you might develop some if you read it. The series will continue tomorrow, with a promised discussion of "the connection between creator-ownership and bookstore sales."

By the way: I note that on the Amazon Top 25 Graphic Novel Bestseller list, that DC's Kingdom Come ranks higher than two X-men books, Watchmen is at number 4 after all these years and one of the "graphic novels" ahead of it doesn't count, and the only Daredevil book on the list is the legendary Miller-Mazzuchelli story arc, Born Again. It looks like Quality Will Out after all, maybe.

Also, 10 of the Top 25 are superhero-related. 3 are reallly collections of newspaper cartoons and one, by Alice McDermott, seems to be one of those novels with no graphics at all. (And - ahem - one of the titles is by Fantagraphics.)

That said, it's striking that the top title is a (topical) memoir, and two of Slave Labor's books are outperforming most of the superhero titles.

Taking One for the Team - Of all the justly-pleased bloggers writing about the Supreme Court decision to strike down Texas' anti-sodomy law, John Cole seems to be having the best time.

Isn't it Funny How Power Drifts to the Same Places - New entries from Salam Pax. I'll have more to say in the next day or two. Everything Salam writes is vital and has been for some time. Scroll up from the linked item for more. On the "what did I tell you people?" front, this:

From that incident and until today things have been moving in a downward spiral. The “coalition forces” don’t feel safe and we don’t feel safe either. You can see the distrust in their eyes and the way they hold these big guns towards you when you move close to a check point. And if you ever drive beside a convoy don’t look out your window they would be having their guns pointed at you, aimed right between your eyes.

We are looking at a genuine tragedy in the making. More on that too.

In a Newspaper Hat Franklin Harris reviews the Hulk movie in his weekly Pulp Culture column.

Reading Around - Tacitus gets blogger fatigue syndrome - with a bonus fanboy reference in the title. I wish, unironically, I could be as unsure as he describes himself.

Arthur Silber indicts pro-intervention Objectivists and libertarians for abetting a program that must lead to the opposite of liberty, or justice for all, for that matter. Excerpt:

I will modify my earlier comments only to the extent of this minor change . . . : these "compassionate conservatives," with their calls for "sacrifice" for the "greater good," and their demands that your money and your property and your life be used for their schemes, which now include curing every problem over the breadth of the entire globe, do not represent specifically "the leading edge of Nazism" -- but they do represent the leading edge of fascism. We are headed, and have been headed for quite some time, toward a mongrel fascist-socialist state -- but the major emphasis is on the fascist element.

My only quibble with this is that fascism is already mongrel-socialism.

And on Planet Swank, Gregory Harris finds one more practical problem with Remote Control War Against Individual Enemies:

And it's funny that the Administration was sooooooo concerned about tipping "sources and methods" during the runup to its coveted war, but is perfectly willing to do so in near-miss attacks. Every time Saddam or bin Laden survive one of these, it not only enhances their reputation among forces unfriendly to the US, but also gives them valuable experience in eluding capture in the future.

This is true if any of these attacks are actual near-misses. The other theory, that they are publicity stunts timed to buck up homefront morale, becomes harder to dismiss as the pattern continues. Just last week two things happened: 1) the "Trailers of Mass Destruction" story went sour; 2) days later, it was announced that troops found Mukhbarat files that may pertain to Iraqi special weapons programs. How? From what period? Army spokesmen didn't say. But they were calling in people who could actually understand the documents to figure that stuff out.

Then of course we had the latest "we may have killed Saddam story a few days after that.

Of course, if the various publicised "we think we got hims" are not near misses - if they bear no geographical or temporal relation to the actual physical presence of Saddam or Osama or Fu Manchu, that too tells our antagonists something valuable - we have no idea where the hell they are.

Irony is not Dead - I just got unsolicited mass e-mail promoting an anti-spam program.

Convoy - From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Some U.S. officials described the attack as having been in the same category as the March 19 and April 7 attacks on compounds where Saddam and his sons were believed to be hiding. U.S. intelligence analysts now believe Saddam and his sons probably survived both those attacks.

A senior administration official described the intelligence that led to Wednesday's attack as a good lead. But another administration official said, "I have no information that leads us to believe we got Saddam." And one military officer said intelligence reports that Saddam or his sons might have been in the convoy may have been based more on hope than evidence.

Said one military official: "There might be people crossing their fingers, but it's just like a year ago, when they were crossing their fingers" in the hopes of capturing Osama bin Laden, who still is believed alive after 21 months in which he has been the target of an intense U.S. manhunt.

Have We Met the Enemy? - For months I've rued the practical problems of what we might call the American Way of Remote Control War Against Individual Enemies - here in the context of various strikes in the general vicinity (possibly) of Osama bin Laden, and here in the matter of various strikes more or less on the same country last known to harbor Ali Hassan al-Majid:

f we're going to make war on individuals, as we increasingly seem to do, we ought to consider doing it in such a way that we know whether or not we actually got them.

In the wake of the "desert caravan" story, it's no longer just the practical problems that bother me.

U.S. officials backed away from their initial assessments of whether the attack early Thursday near the village of Dhib killed top officials in the former Iraqi government, saying they had picked up no indications since the attack that Saddam Hussein or his sons, Uday and Qusay, had been in the convoy.

says the Washington Post. The attack was the usual missile strike from a distance on a convoy of trucks in a village along a smuggling route to Syria. (What do they smuggle? Cattle that they'll admit to, and who knows whatever else.) Okay, we don't know if Saddam or the beast children were anywhere near the place. So what do we know?

At about 1:30 a.m., as the four trucks burned, the first of about five missiles struck Hamad's brick house, he said. Although everyone was sleeping outside, debris killed his sister-in-law, 20-year-old Hakima Khalil, and her daughter, Maha. Khalil's husband, Mohammed, was wounded in the foot. Hamad, his 24-year-old brother Mahmoud and his mother, Rasmiya Mishaal, 62, were also hurt. Mahmoud suffered the severest injuries, with deep cuts to his back and face.

After the attack began, villagers said cries pierced the air. Some contended that cluster bombs were used. Other villagers insisted that was wrong, that it was heavy machine-gun fire. They said they were saved by fleeing their homes. "When they hit Ahmed's house, it was like an alarm," said a neighbor, Mohammed Naim, 29. "Everybody ran away from their homes."

By the time the barrage ended, four houses were destroyed, along with two storage shacks, residents said. Villagers sitting in the hospital listed their losses like an insurance claim: three pickups, three tractors, one truck and 13 heads of sheep.

Maha was one year old.

MSNBC reports

A senior Pentagon official told NBC News on Sunday that there were indications that Saddam or his sons, Odai or Qusai, were in the convoy, but defense officials said Monday that they had no specifics on who was in the convoy and that they had no evidence it included Saddam or his sons. U.S. forces planned to conduct DNA testing on remains of some of the dead, the officials said.

Bruce Rolston suspects that the Pentagon got taken in by rivals of this particular group of smugglers or this village, as has happened many times in Afghanistan. MSNBC says that the US was "Working partly on information from the highest Iraqi captured so far, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti." I don't know which explanation is how true.

But I do know that we're doing too much of this. Blow it up first, then see if the corpses are the specific people you were aiming for.

The special commando team, known as Task Force 20, was joined in the convoy operation by an AC-130 gunship and other air support that attacked the vehicles along a known escape and smuggling route near the western city of Qaim, an official told the Associated Press.

The New York Times says it was a Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile. Bomb first, swab later. It reduces the risk to American infantrymen at a known cost in lives of innocent foreigners. No surrounding the convoy and demanding surrender, no up close and personal. Hit them with a Hellfire or a helicopter autocannon. Act on "intelligence" that you lack the knowledge and experience to vet. Pick through the cinders to see how you did.

This is wrong. It is the callous policy of an evil government. This was not a wartime operation to capture a strategic crossroads. This was, supposedly, an effort to detain specific fugitives in a country where "major combat operations have ended." In that context it is not moral to kill strangers because one or two of them might be in your deck of cards. Too often now our government behaves as if what we can do and what we are justified in doing are the same thing. They are not.

Bad Blogger, No Biscuit - Sorry! The weekend will be held over another day while I get around to Southern Cone Mail. And everything else. But my grilled spicy-crust tuna steaks turned out pretty darn well!

On the Other Hand - Hulk movie-wise, Bill Sherman has the case against. Do I agree? Nah. But he writes from a clueful perspective.

On the other other hand, Peter David, who knows from the Hulk, likes it.

. . . A Mighty Raging Fury - I liked the Hulk movie. (I ducked out to see it last night.) I wondered before seeing it if various complaints from mainstream reviewers weren't wrongheaded, and came away convinced that they were. For instance, Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post mutters that "later, in a strangely tone-deaf sequence, he fights the U.S. military." Ann, two things:

1. If we're going to insist as a nation on having new wars every couple of years until the end of time, these coincidences are going to happen.

2. Hulk stories have involved him fighting the US military for 40 years now, and that military was involved in a war, Vietnam, for much of the Hulk's first decade as a character.

The whole "Hulk versus the military" angle may be the part that the movie gets most right. Along with Iron Man, the Hulk was the Silver Age Marvel hero most caught up in the ethos of the Cold War. Many of Hulk's early foes were monstrous Soviet agents. Nuclear testing, the military-industrial complex, love versus duty, Child of the Atom, all that stuff was as Hulk as Hulk gets. It's to Ang Lee and writer James Schamus's credit that they figure out a way to get that era into a 2003 Hulk's story somehow. The movie is full of striking shots of a military base abandoned after a nuclear mishap instigated by Bruce "Hulk" Banner's father, the location from which the four principle characters spring.

Ah yes, Banner's father. He's very much not canon. But he completes a symmetry the movie needs - Bruce Banner; his father David; Betty Ross, Bruce's quondam love; and her father, General "Thunderbolt" Ross. Of these characters, we might say that Betty is not a monster, her father is but a sometime monster, Bruce's father a monster in human form (at first) and Bruce - well, we know about him.

The writers and Sam Elliott do wonders for the General. He's very much the ramrod, and a cog in a dark, dark machine. ("I know you people think you've got a weapon on your hands," Betty tells him after Bruce has been captured, "or he'd be dead already.") But he's got shading. There are things he doesn't get and can't express, but you can see him, on some level, realizing this. Elliott is easily the best antagonist in the recent run of Marvel movies.

The movie creators greatly improve Betty Ross over the comics version by making her a scientist alongside Banner - I'm darned if I can remember what Betty did exactly, in the early comics, aside from worry about Bruce - and his long-lost neighbor from that abandoned base. (Abandoned above-ground, I mean . . . ) They, smartly, cast her to strongly resemble the woman who plays Bruce's also long-lost mother.

Then there's Nick Nolte as Bruce's - here we go again - long-lost father, David Banner. Note to the uncultured: THE Hulk was always Bruce Banner. I have no idea why the producers of that TV show changed his name. But my purist sensibilities were so offended that I never watched it.

Oh, we have to talk about purism too. But first Bruce's dad. He's a mad scientist, the mirror image of Betty's too-sane father. This mad scientist lives in a shotgun shack where he experiments on what he has to hand, which is how Hulk comes to battle a ferocious mutated poodle. Not a miniature poodle. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. The freelancing Nolte provides a saving complication of what might otherwise be a too-neat-even-for-me dichotomy between "good" anarchy, represented by the Hulk, and "bad" order, represented by General Ross and the people who give him his orders, whom Eisenhower warned us about in his Farewell Address. Nolte gets some good lines, some functional lines and some not-so-good lines. I've been a Nolte fan for decades and decades now so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask, but I think he does a pretty good job with the part. (Sam Elliott gets the edge, though.)

Purism, comics and movies. Things are different these days than they might have been. Those of us who love comics have a necessarily different relation to continuity than we had a couple of decades ago. After all the major-company restarts and Ultimizing and Year Zeroes and Year Ones and Elseworlds and Kingdom Come and Earth X and Homages and adventures in pastiche and everything else, we pretty much realize that new eras and new media are going to mean new details on our old stories. If we're lucky, as we largely have been lately, a movie will get the essence of beloved characters right and even fix the things we ourselves would want to fix. There's not a frame of Spider-man that doesn't utterly partake of the spirit of the comics character. The movie X-men are THE X-men, for all that the details of their history have been cut up and re-pasted. The later Batman movies screw the pooch on fidelity to spirit, but everyone agrees the first one was true to the vision of Bob Kane, Bill Finger and even Frank Miller. The second film has its detractors, but I consider it a perfect melding of Batman's Expressionist roots and the early-90s preoccupation with family dysfunction. Even Daredevil, a movie which had its problems, captured much of the character's essence.

The thing that sets apart even the faithful superhero movie adaptations from their comic-book sources is the movies' concern with the dramatic unities. A movie, even one the producers expect to generate sequels, is a thing entire in a way that one installment of an ongoing monthly periodical is not. So the movies tighten things up. The movie Kingpin turns out to have killed Matt Murdock's dad, while the comic book Kingpin simply got hijacked by Frank Miller from Spiderman because Daredevil lacked any good villains of his own. The movie Spiderman and Green Goblin come into being practically the same day. "You made me, I made you," complains the movie Joker to the movie Batman.

Thus Bruce Banner's father. He completes a set of parents and children, and answers the question, "So why would there dwell, within Bruce Banner in particular, a mighty raging fury?" The answer is a bit 90s, but it'll do. And thus the movie's version of the old Marvel villain, the Absorbing Man (never named). Thus Betty and Bruce and David and Thunderbolt Ross all growing up on that desert base, the one we keep returning to.

The other big change is making Hulk - big. Like 15 feet tall. Fanboys, superannuated, lapsed or otherwise, know Hulk to be somewhere between 7 and 8 feet tall. Fifteen feet is a lot. It takes a little getting used to. But it made sense when it came time for Hulk to pick up a tank - had I been watching a smaller figure I'd have had uncomfortable thoughts about leverage and such.

So purism-wise, let's run down the checklist:

o Military-industrial complex - check.
o Smashing up tanks and stuff - check.
o Spawn of the Cold War - check.
o Tortured romance - check.
o Because of the military-industrial complex - check.
o Betty's family problems - check.
o Because of the military-industrial complex - check.
o "Shockwave strikes" by Hulk against the ground - check.
o Military firepower vividly fearsome but not unambiguously evil - check.
o Nuclear explosions - check, twice.
o Huge leaps across western desert - check.
o Hulk says "Puny Human" - check, once.

I don't class Hulk with the superhero-film masterpieces (Batman and Unbreakable if you're wondering, with Spider-man a near-masterpiece). But I liked it. And the stuff I didn't like so much while I was watching it faded almost as soon as I left the theater, leaving a fuller satisfaction.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 173 pounds, waist just south of 34", to the extent I know where my waist is. Darn it, I feel thinner! This despite the prednisone and not one, but two lunches (one on the company dime) at the legendary Jerry's Seafood in Lanham this week. (The first was a my Father's Day meal with Mrs. Offering. Don't let anyone tell you that two people can't get a good lunch for eighty dollars!)

I'm inclined to put this week's zero net change in weight down to some muscle gain, since the waist shrank - even with the limits of fuzzy measurements - and I just subjectively look more muscular. Still, I'm disappointed to have hit another weight plateau. Maybe the last ten pounds really are the hardest.

My mother formally gave up SuperSlow weight training this week. I'm not altogether happy with the decision, but am refraining from second-guessing. She has neuropathy in her feet and says the leg press in particular has given her terrible pain. My sister continues her program at the same facility. For my part, I find that slow-cadence dumbbell squats particularly give me almost debilitating DOMS (delayed-onset muscle soreness) for as many as four days after my workout. On the other hand, I have, and I say this with a certain amount of reluctant, unabashed smug self-satisfaction, pretty darn good legs for a 42-year-old man now. Tomorrow is weight training day, then I'll be back to Heavyhands for the two weeks beginning next Sunday - we're off on vacation the week after Independence Day and it's a lot easier to pack one set of five-pound dumbbells than five sets ranging from 20 to 40 pounds.

After vacation, I may switch weight-training protocols as an experiment, going to a more traditional program so I can work out twice a week and do cardio every week instead of every other week. Then again, I may not. This was a Heavyhands week, using both three and five-pound dumbbells. I was able to do an entire forty-minute session with the five-pounders yesterday, pumping high. I never got to the five-pounders in my previous incarnations as a Heavyhands devotee. I suspect this shows the value of mixing in traditional weight training with Heavyhands. I should admit that I work in intervals of pump&run now, despite my previously dismissive comments about running. I do 120 paces at a time, pumping the dumbbells, to get my heart rate up and work my hamstrings and buttockals. As of yesterday, my routine mixes

o 480 paces of pump&run in 120-pace increments
o 480 paces of duckwalking with side raises in 120-pace increments
o pump&walk to level III (head-high) in 120-pace increments
o pump&walk long lever (arms extended) in 120-pace increments
o overhead presses in 120-pace increments
o chest flyes in 120-pace increments

These last two become hard toward the end and I switch to 60-pace increments. The hardest things on the list aerobically are pump&run and duckwallking with side-raises. So I cycle through the other things to warm up and come down from those two, e.g.

1. Pump&walk
2. Overhead presses
3. Pump&walk long lever
4. Chest flyes
5. Pump&run
6. Pump&walk
7. Overhead presses
8. Pump&walk long lever
9. Chest flyes
10. Duckwalk with side raises
o repeat

Two to four of those is a workout. The other thing one would add is double ski-poling, but I've avoided it while my back heals.

Politics of food department. Liberal blogger Seth D. Michaels picked up the discussion and made some interesting points about the connection between obesity and poverty:

See, people who are in poverty are subject to a number of factors that contrbute to obesity:
-inconsistent eating schedules, including periods of feast and famine that lead the body to adapt by storing fat. This is especially true of people on food stamps or other food aid, who frequently run low on food at different times during the month.
-a lack of exercise, particularly for people who live in urban environments or crowded trailers.
-a lack of regular preventative medical attention, including information of maintaing proper diet and exercise.
-and most importantly, healthy food is more expensive and time-consuming to prepare.

These are some excellent points, though I would note, having gone to the mall yesterday, that this nation's obesity problem extends well beyond the poor. Seth, by the way, gets major points for using the original Unqualified Offerings Blogger template.

In other fitness blogs. Jeremy Scharlack has indeed caught up with me, weight-wise. But hey, he's shorter than I am! (I deduce this based on his weight at the time of his "before" pictures.) He also makes the best case yet for using exercise machines at health clubs:

I want to add that working out on machines is nice because you can carefully pace yourself and listen to music while you are exercising. It is also where most of the truly attractive women are.

Via the same item, I learn that for $2.95 I could read a New York Times article arguing that " people on Atkins tend to gain their weight back quickly. But then it goes on to say how people on any diet tend to gain their weight back, so who knows." I've gotten the oral version of this claim before, once from someone who had lost dozens and dozens of pounds on Weight Watchers and then gained them all back and more when she went off it. Yes, if you go back to drinking quarts worth of soda every day, making french fries and baked goods a staple, consuming multiple pizzas and just generally not being on Atkins or whatever diet, and give up exercise, you'll get fat again. It's how you got fat the first time, after all. Why shouldn't it work twice? That's why Atkins and other diets have a lifetime maintenance phase.

Jonathan Hendry e-mails that if you're interested in joining a gym, ask at work to see if they have discount arrangements with anyone. A lot of companies have them, but they won't necessarily be in published Human Resources material. As for home exercise equipment, he allows that

they seem to get dated really quickly, and eventually they look kinda goofy and tacky sitting in the den. There's a fad or trend aspect, where a particular machine is the popular gadget at one point, but a few years later it's as dated and ignored as an old Mr. Microphone or infinity light from Spencers.

Plus, they get laundry draped all over them.

Avram Grumer continues to push his Heavyhands effort with longer sets of each calesthenic. I believe that sports columnist/king-of-all-media Tony Kornheiser may be doing Heavyhands now too, since in the segments I hear lately the e-mailers keep ribbing him about "working out with one-pound weights." Hey, e-mailers, it works, you know?

Mary Kay Kare e-mails that "research" indicates that Type II diabetes may not be caused by obesity but rather that both may be caused by insulin resistance. She's trying to get more details for me. That still leaves the question of what causes insulin resistance, though.

And that's all for this week.

Ain't the the Truth

So what we have here in reality is a struggle over the size and role of Government, with both sides unwilling to make their cases on the merits or demerits of what Government can or might do. Instead we get these flaky, insincere arguments about deficits.

Max Sawicky on our phony politics. There's more. Read it.

There's Your Trouble - Zack of Procrastination was kind enough to cite my item, "Return to the Southern Cone," on the District Court of Appeals decision the other day. There followed a fascinating if brief discussion in the comments section among three of my favorite people in the blogosphere - Zack himself, Jonathan Edelstein of HeadHeeb, and al-Muhajaba. The three zero in on the distinction between "checks and balances" and "separation of powers," which I'd been too inclined to lump together. Their thesis: the Constitution erred by relying too much on the latter and not enough on the former. The thread is very much worth your time.

UPDATE: I'll have a mailbag roundup on "Return to the Southern Cone" this weekend.

Blogwatch Auxiliary - Some fun things to read:

Jesse Walker has a whole series of items on his current Italian trip. Wonderful stuff.

Franklin Harris says "everything negative you've read online is false" - not about everything, but about the Hulk movie. Also a bunch of great political posts to go with the pop culture stuff.

Virginia Postrel explains why frivolous lawsuits suck and responds to a review.

Tacitus, in the comments to a post of the other day, includes a brief list of Shooter-era Marvel glories by Meryl Yourish that's pretty unassailable, and a longer one by Chris Puzak that I can't get behind. Also, American women and children sacrificed on the altar of Saudi-US relations.

Pandagon wonders why National Review just can't stop talking about gay marriage. Years ago, during Hunt vs. Helms, John Shelton Reed in Chronicles explained how Hunt could beat Jesse Helms. You couldn't do it by arguing that Helms was the devil, but you could do it by making him a figure of fun. Start a whispering campaign, Reed said, something like this: "You know, Jesse's been up in Washington a long time now. And he's always talking about homosexuals. I mean, what kind of man talks about homosexuals all th time? Also, fun with Florida electioneering.

Cattalarchy on bad laws and stupid police and mean neighbors.

Heinleinblog is not by Robert Heinlein, cause Heinlein's dead. If it were GeneWolfblog, and Gene Wolfe were dead, that might not be a problem. But it is what it is: lots of Heinlein related news, links and opinion, including a link to another sf-inflected James Pinkerton column and news on various Heinlein movie deals in the works.

Second Time, Still Not Farce Yet - "Does any of this sound familiar?" Gene Healy asks:

I felt like a knight in shining armor. It was marvelous. "Cheers!" "Nice to see you!" "Hello soldier!" Kids were following you everywhere... Six o clock in the morning and you'd have full breakfast. They'd be out there with trays.

That's from Behind the Mask: The IRA and Sinn Fein, by Peter Taylor, discussing the very early days of the British Army's arrival in Belfast in 1969. Apparently nobody told Gene that history began in 1938 and ended in 1945.

Get Out - There's a contingent of my colleagues at Stand Down, mostly from the left side, who view their mission now as demanding that the Bush Administration follow through on its promises to rebuild Iraq and make it a better place. They should read this set of interviews with American soliders in the London Evening Standard.

No good can come of this. Yes, if we "abandon" Iraq we will bear a heavy responsibility for starting something and not following through. It will damage such prestige as we still enjoy. Many critics who criticized our decision to intervene will criticize our decision to stop intervening. I fear for Salam and G., and the Salams I don't know who will be at greater risk than ever.

But one has a responsibility to recognize when means can be matched to ends and when they can't. To persist in the structurally impossible is not just greater folly than "abandoning" an impossible task - it is a greater sin. The first sin in this case was the hubris of the hawks. They will bear the primary responsibility for either the mess we leave behind or the mess we persist in creating. As a nation, we will have the responsibility of learning from their folly.

On whether the war was one worth fighting, Sgt Meadows said: "I don't care about Iraq one way or the other. I couldn't care less. [Saddam] could still be in power and, to me, it wasn't worth leaving my family for; for getting shot at and almost dying two or three times, there's nothing worth that to me." Even though no Iraqis were involved, and there is no proof Saddam was behind it, the attack on the World Trade Center provides Cpl Richardson and many others with the justification for invading Iraq.

"There's a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar [flak jacket]. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and, now, it's our turn.' I don't want to say payback but, you know, it's pretty much payback."

There is so much wrong with this last part it makes me too sad to discuss it in detail. But the practical point is no "reconstruction" can come out of this. Nor from this:

The inability to unwind outside their camps or interact with Iraqis in a non-military setting has added to soldiers' frustration, several said. Soldiers are prohibited from leaving their compounds without a weapon, body armor and a specific mission. Although they are encouraged to talk to Iraqis while on patrol, they have been urged not to eat local food, and alcohol consumption is prohibited by a general order applying to all military personnel in Iraq.

If you persisted in having people step off the edge of a skyscraper to fulfill your promise of teaching people to walk along a sunbeam to its source, you would not merit praise for making sure you keep your promise, neither from the walkers nor the pedestrians below.

UPDATE: Pandagon links to the same set of interviews in the London Evening Standard, stressing the "US troops kill civilians" aspect. In the comments section, Tacitus takes him to task for, first, scanting the fact that much of the "killing civilians" material in the article is actually about US troops in combat with real honest-to-god enemies in civilian garb - that is, people who really are trying to kill them. Plainly, much though not all of the accounts date from the period of the war rather than the ex-war. Tacitus has a very good point here, which is why my discussion does not stress the "troops kill civilians" aspect. I think Tacitus overreaches with his second criticism, which is that we shouldn't pay attention to the article at all, because it appears in the Standard/Mirror.

If it were to turn out that these interviews were faked, that would invalidate them. And its fair to say that the Standard's headline, subhead and some of the body text interpret what the soldiers have to say on the slant. But assuming that these interviews with American soldiers took place, and that the soldiers said what they said, the interviews help illustrate the mindset of troops in Iraq, which is not bloodthirsty bestialism but frustration, anger and a deep, deep weariness. As one report among many, it's useful as an insight into the crooked timber of humanity from which the US hopes to make a straight Iraq.

UPDATE UPDATE: Reader Stephen Bryant points out that the Standard and Mirror are not the same paper at all.

The papers do not share a publisher or a political outlook. The Mirror is "left of centre" while the Standard is "right", usually offering a toned-down-for-metropolitan-consumption version of its sister paper's, the Daily Mail's, hysteria over asylum seekers, the EU, gays etc. If both papers agreed on a story I'd tend to believe it.

It turns out that what threw me off was that Jesse linked to a Mirror article that included some of the same quotes as the longer Standard piece. The Mirror item is by Naveed Raja references the Standard article by Bob Graham as the source. The Age (Australia) and Agence France-Press pick up the story from the Standard.

Doctor, Doctor! It Hurts When I Do This! - Laugh bitterly, I mean:

Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry is quoted in June 16 & 23 issue of The New Yorker as saying, "The Bush Administration agenda isn't conservative Republicanism, and it's not radical Republicanism--it's extreme libertarianism."

Sorry - it's too many kinds of bitterly funny!

(Report via Hit and Run.)

A Fanboy's Mail and linkbacks. No, we're not all comics all the time around here now. If you're reading from the top there's plenty of bitching about politics after this item. But like I said before, comics bloggers get nice e-mails. So let's open some.

Mary Kay Kare quotes Dirk Deppey on Trouble ("I've had a chance to read the first issue, and frankly I couldn't shake the impression that I was about to watch Archie and Veronica fuck.") and responds

But you know, he says that like it's a bad thing!

Michael Croft begins his e-mail, frighteningly, with

I've got one of those in my closet.

Meaning, a copy of Dazzler #1. He wants to end the Silver Age with the start of the short-lived James Bondesque "mod Wonder Woman" in 1968. Me, I can't see it. He continues

And I keep wanting to do something with the DC "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in your era-set, but I don't see how to fit it in. It's the end-point of a model of how all the DC characters fit together that started in 1961 with "Flash of Two Worlds".

Which is true. But it's hard to see Crisis as heralding a change in comics as a whole, and a lot easier to see it as an expression of the "warm market" focus of the Bubble Age as a whole.

The thing is, those milestones and seminal events may be personal. Is 1986 important because of Watchmen and Crisis, or is it important to me because I went to college and started reading comics again?

No, it's not just you. It's Watchmen and Dark Knight and Batman: Year One and Swamp Thing. It was a genuine Annus Mirabilus - we were just lucky to be reading comics again. In his kind citation of last night's "ages of comics" item, Franklin Harris avers that " some of the independent publishers, now long gone, who helped make the early Bubble Age a high point of comic book diversity and creativity." I completely agree. I am fonder of no comics than the ones that constitute the high points of that era. I didn't choose the name as a denigration. Bubbles after all, though fragile, can be things of great beauty. I still miss the damn dot-com boom!

Michael again:

And I want to explore the black and white/indy stuff from the mid 80s. The things I found interesting in that period weren't underground, just small press. Tales of the Beanworld. The original TMNT (the early black and white version that was a parody of Kitty Pride, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., not the later versions that were parodies of themselves). Paul Chadwick's Concrete. Matt Wagner's Mage, Alan Moore's Watchmen. When did authors become valued? How did that affect the bubble? Were these guys better or just treated better? Should I stop asking you and go read Scott McCloud?

If you do, Michael, tell me what he says. I'm particularly fascinated by the "When did authors become valued" question. During the Brass Age (I ain't giving up, dammit), comics collectors and apologists mostly spoke up for the virtues of the art. Many would tell you that they didn't think much of the writing.

Even then, writers had some value in the industry, which was why Brass Age DC hired away Marvel writers when they could, same way AFC teams of the 1990s hired San Francisco 49er assistant coaches. When Frank Miller started scripting Daredevil he became the first "good" writer in mainstream comics, meaning by the standards of actual books, meaning, he was the first to underplay dialogue. He was superhero comics' Dashiell Hammett. Once America saw Alan Moore it became impossible not to value writers. Despite my antipathy for him - talk about not underplaying dialogue - Chris Claremont probably deserves credit for proving that a writer's name could sell books.

Jeremy Osner writes

I would point out that if my memory serves, the trade-paperback Cerebusses and Love & Rocketses were available at Comics & Comix (Berkeley, CA) in the mid-80's -- could the availability of trade-paperback collections of DC and Marvel titles in the "Bubble Age" be seen as a response to this?

Also -- is EC part of the "Golden Age"? I don't really know anything about EC except that I loved the reprints of their thriller comics and that they had a really "old" feel to them. I'm guessing 1930's? And that they live on as a no-longer-recognizable MAD Magazine.

I don't really know anything about EC either, except that they were much-admired, came out in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and did much to rouse the ire of Frederick Wertham and the loathsome Senator Estes Kefauver.

Kefauver, by the way, is fondly remembered by many for his "racket committee" hearings. But Robert Lacey in Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life, does a pretty thorough demolition of that committee's work.

Reader Henry wonders about the unexplained acronym, "SWAG." That's Silly Wild-Ass Guess. An important concept to those of us in telecom.

Hesiod e-mails the scurrilous claim that I neglected to mention Nexus among the Bubble Age's glories. Au Contraire, Hesiod! Check again. And yes, it was there last night. He also offers a link to this actually clueful Hulk article by the Post's Joel Achenbach. But then he writes

I think I'd start one of the "Ages" on the date the Direct Sales market took off.

Note to self: write shorter articles next time, or come up with better typography for section breaks. Alternative theory: Hesiod's peripheral vision, on detecting mention of Dazzler #1, yanked his gaze right past the offending paragraph where the Bubble Age starts on the date the Direct Sales market takes off. Recalling his favorite Bubble Age titles, his story ends sadly:

Then, I went to college, and discovered drinking games, after bars and college women.

I've never really thought about collecting or even reading any of the new stuff.

The good news is that, while college women lose interest in one after a couple of decades, the comics will still be waiting!

And Bruce Baugh writes

My college friend Jim Drew, later a staple of rec.arts.comics.*, offered the term Plutonium Age for comics starting around the time of Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars #N - toxic, heavy, and prone to exploding on a moment's notice.

On the blogback front, we covered Franklin's comments on the Bubble Age. And on the What Am I, Chopped Liver? front, Bill Sherman comments on Dirk Deppey's "Trouble with Marvel" essay and cites "plenty of thoughtful responses by bloggers" who are not me.

I'm a little blog fish in a big comics blog pond. Sherman's item is good, though, and doesn't take nearly as long to read as mine does.

Spree Graphs, The Encore - Charles Moose has resigned as Montgomery County Chief of Police so he can publish and promote his book, How I Happened to be Standing Around Looking Important When Vicious Killers Were Caught Despite the Best Efforts of Law Enforcement.

Bring Them Here and Let Them Take Their Chances - "You got to remember that if Washington, D.C., were the size of Baghdad, we would be having something like 215 murders a month. There's going to be violence in a big city."

Your quote of the day from, who else? Donald Rumsfeld.

Mission Accomplished - I run an official semi-comics weblog, per Journalista's sidebar. Early indicators: lots more e-mail!

I'd like to thank the members of the academy . . .

Why Are We in Azerbaijan? - Well, what's the alternative? Base our troops here??

There You Go Again - "The Bush administration ruled today that United States computer chip makers and catfish farmers were subjected to unfair foreign competition and ordered stiff tariffs on imports of South Korean computer chips and Vietnamese catfish." (Per the New York Times. Link via every other libertarian blogger out there.) I recall Dave Barry defining "unfair foreign competition" once as "competition involving foreigners."

Sure am glad the Republican Party's dedication to economic freedom makes it worth putting up with their impulses to social control!

Notes from an Ex-War - Salam Pax, who very much wants the United States to succeed in its reconstruction of Iraq, explains what's going wrong so far. Excerpt:

What I want to say is that these attacks might be sporadic and unorganized; but they do what the Ba’athists want to do, creating a very tough situation for the American administration to do anything good or to keep their promises, changing people's sentiments. adding more heat to a summer which is too hot already.

On the other side of the world, neohawk Fred Kaplan of Slate interviews an influential retired US general - Kaplan identifies him as " a major influence" in fostering the evolution of the US Army into "a more agile fighting force" - about ending wars and our lack of attention to the problem. The General, Huba Wass de Czege, faults the structure of the military's wargames, among other things:

This is unfortunate, he went on, because, important though it is to understand the early stages of a military campaign, "it is just as important to know how to follow through to the resolution of such conflicts." He added that, if the game managers did follow through the next time they play, they would learn that they—and, by extension, U.S. military commanders generally—have underestimated "the difficulties of 'regime change' and the magnitude of the effort required to achieve strategic objectives."

Meanwhile, in Washington, Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz comes right out and says, "There's a guerilla war but we can win it."

Meanwhile, in London, the rockribbed Daily Telegraph has a story about British frustration with proconsul Bremer.

"We are facing an almost complete inability to engage with what needs to be done and to bring to bear sufficient resources to make a difference," he said.

The official added that a dangerous gulf was opening up between the expectations of the Iraqi people and what the coalition was realistically able to deliver. The growing dissatisfaction among ordinary Iraqis - intensified by the temper-fraying heat of a Baghdad summer - is easily discernible on the streets of the capital.

As 10 local builders used shovels and wheelbarrows to repair the Baghdad police station, residents outside demanded to know when they would see more Iraqi police on the streets.

Some April salaries remain unpaid and the electricity supply remains extremely unreliable.

The heavy-handed presence of American soldiers and, perhaps more importantly, the lack of any visible Iraqi partnership in Government is further fuelling resentment.

Link via Josh Buermann. Salam's item notes that the electricity situation has gotten worse recently.

Lack of visible Iraqi partnership goes to more than any arrogance on Bremer's part: "[Held over Iraqi ministry officials] demand written authority to do the tiniest thing, as a consequence of living under Saddam," says the Telegraph's source.

What's going on? Nothing mysterious. Salam, describing the aftermath of a recent running firefight:

Think of it for a moment. If I wanted to instigate anti-american sentiments in a neighborhood which was until now indifferent towards the Americans what would be the best thing to do?

I would find a way to get the Americans to do bad things in that neighborhood, for example shoot indiscriminately at houses and shops . . . make them go on house to house searches, tie up the men and put sacks on their heads and scare all the children. this would tilt your American-o-meter from the “I-don’t-really-care” position to the “what-the-fuck-do-they-think-they-are-doing?” position.

Which is nothing but classic guerilla war strategy. Force the dominant power to alienate himself from the locals. Polarize the situation into "us" and "them." Rely on the essential conservatism of the planet to remind your countrymen that they're not from around here.

A Fanboy's Notes: What Age Is That Comic? - We have good terms for a handful of ages of comics. We know the Golden Age began in 1939 and the Silver Age in 1956. This latter can be precisely dated to the appearance of the modern (Barry Allen) Flash in Showcase #4. When eras end seems to be trickier. One history site assigns 1969 as the end of the Silver Age, though it gives no real basis. That site lumps everything after 1969 into the "post-Silver Age." Surely we can do better than that, and many historians have identified a "Bronze Age" roughly contiguous with the 1970s. (For a more exact parallel with the Greeks we might prefer the Brass Age. It fits.) This interesting academic paper dates the end of the Silver Age to Jack Kirby's departure from Marvel and return to DC, which I think gets it exactly right. The author, Peter M. Coogan, notes that Age-dating tends to be superhero-centric and to scant underground comics. It might be nice to find a way around that. He agrees that there was a Bronze Age, which he wants to end with the publication of Teen Titans #26.

That's too superhero-centric for my liking. And Coogan too can identify but a single age, which he calls Baroque, since then. I think we can be more precise than that, too.

I'll happily defer to others on the dating of the Golden Age and assent entirely to starting the Silver Age with Showcase #4 (origin of the new Flash). After that, here's my potted history. My focus will be less on identifying any given creative shift than structural changes in the industry:

Silver Age - 1956-1970. Characterised by several strains of creative ferment, the very different styles of Julius Schwartz's modernization of DC's old characters and the Stan Lee-directed creation of the universe of characters at Marvel. (I would, by the way, endorse Dirk Deppey's assertion that "Stan Lee's big innovation has always struck me as introducing two-dimensionality into a previously one-dimensional genre," I just don't think that was a minor innovation.) A third strain was the underground movement, about which I know only enough to recognize its importance to the medium. We can identify cross-influences: Lee's program was inconceivable except in the context of Schwartz's - the prose matter in his Origins of Marvel Comics explicitly acknowledged the various ways in which he was responding to DC's commercial pressure and sending up DC's esthetic tropes. Toward the end of the Silver Age, DC seemed to react to the commercial success of Marvel's "heroes with hangups" formula by changing their own approach Marvelward. I can't prove it, but I'd want to claim that the influence of the free-ranging undergrounds has an influence on the more direct engagement with "the 60s" in late-decade Marvel.

Bronze Age - 1970-1981. Jack Kirby parts bitterly from Marvel Comics. Stan Lee stops writing. DC fires much of its staff and hires as many Marvel people as it can get. (Gerry Conway and Steve Englehart are prime examples.) With Kirby gone and Lee away from his typewriter, Marvel needs a bunch of new creators, many of whom they get from DC. The 1960s end and the underground runs on fumes. Their fortunes decline with the disappearance of the head shops that sold them. Sales decline, the majors try everything from horror to martial arts to gin them back up. Books go bimonthly and die. Prices rise and page counts dwindle. At one point, Marvel is down to 17 story pages in an issue. Warner and Marvel both run extensive lines of black-and-white newsstand magazines, mostly science fiction and horror, plus licensed products like Planet of the Apes and Conan. Sales continue to decline no matter what they try, which makes you wonder how a supposed distaste for superheroes on the part of the general public could be responsible. As the era goes on, the stylistic distinction between Marvel and DC's superhero books virtually disappears - though diehard Marvel fans, assured by their monthly Bullpen Bulletins that they needn't bother reading any other company's comics, continue to believe otherwise.

Bubble Age - 1981-1993. The beginning and end of the Bubble Age (my term) can be dated precisely. The era begins, drat the luck, with the release of Dazzler #1, featuring an X-men-connected disco queen mutant who who fights crime by absorbing sound energy and retransmitting it as light. The concept is not better than it sounds. The book had no particular artistic merit. But its commercial importance was overriding, and the artistic consequences were enormous.

Dazzler #1 is the first title to be released to comic book specialty stores only, with no newsstand distribution. It sells 428,000 copies, nonreturnable, and a cash cow is born. New companies spring up to milk it. Many of them offer creators better terms than they can get from Marvel or DC. Many of these companies owe more to the underground movement than to the newsstand giants. All of them are taking advantage of an infrastructure of outlets full of people predisposed to buy comics. DC, shocked to be Number Two, tries harder. They get the best mainstream writers and produce, in a few short years, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, the Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing, the John Byrne revamp of Superman and Neil Gaiman's hidden-world fantasy, Sandman, which starts as a horror book but becomes much more. Fantagraphics brings out Love and Rockets; Dave Sim self-publishes Cerebus, which during this period rails against what Sim sees as the creative sterility of the Marvel-DC mainstream while depending on it utterly for satiric source material. Marvel hits a lot of artistic lows - Secret Wars I and II; the "New Universe" debacle; the decline of the "anti-mutant hysteria" trope into less an allegory for societal prejudice than an apocalyptic version of its readers' adolescent persecution complexes; the nerveless reversal of the decision to formally identify the then-popular mutant hero Northstar as gay. (Marvel announced that there was "no homosexuality in the Marvel universe.) Nevertheless, the company produced Frank Miller's two legendary runs on Daredevil and, um, Power Pack was actually pretty good.

Creator's rights become a major issue. Marvel spends years holding Jack Kirby's physical artwork hostage until he signs an agreement not to sue them for ownership of the characters he helped create in the 1960s. The independents mostly offer better rates and ownership terms than the Big Two, impelling both DC and Marvel to start creator-owned "mature readers" lines. As the period goes on, the superhero-oriented independents fall foul of a central problem - all of the good ideas for superheroes are already taken. DNAgents, Nexus, Badger, the Elementals, Ms. Mystic - some of them are well-done but none of them light the mass mind on fire the way earlier heroes did.

All the publishers, major, mid-major and independent are chasing the direct-market dollar, whether with superheroes or switch-hitting rocket mechanics or barbarian aardvarks. Multiple covers, company-wide crossover maxi-series, "seven-year itch" miniseries, the gimmicks just won't quit. But the money runs out with the Implosion of 1993. The bubble bursts. Soon Wall Street maneuverings and mismanagement have bankrupted Marvel and distributors set upon each other in a cannibalistic frenzy. The direct market survives, but as a thing of twilight.

The Amber Age - ? - present. This age too is characterized primarily be a change in channels, especially a shift in the center of gravity from comic-book specialty shops and monthly pamphlets to bookstores and trade paperbacks (and hardcovers). This is a very hard age to pick a start for if you want to avoid overlaps. Two obvious candidates for beginning this age are Warner/Random House's publication of the collected Dark Knight miniseries as a bookstore paperback, and Pantheon/Random House's publication of Art Spiegelman's biographical Maus, both in 1986. (Spiegelman's magazine RAW had anticipated the Bubble Age by a couple of years too.) Even the first reprint volume of Sandman, Preludes and Nocturnes, comes out in 1991. But the bookstore shelves don't become a focus of the comics business until later in the 1990s, by which point Tower is carrying the collected editions of Love & Rockets and Cerebus, these last previously sold only by mail-order. The Amber Age can't really begin until a nationwide infrastructure of big-box book "superstores" exists to support it.

Whenever it begins, the Amber Age is characterized by a new interest in durability. Simply put, quality has a longer shelf-life than trash. The dominant physical package becomes the softcover reprint of previously-published periodicals. This drives a stake through the heart of the back-issue collectibles market, which must look like quite the bearable death to the major publishers. A copy of last year's Spiderman that a shop sells for six dollars makes Marvel no money at all. A copy of a book containing six issues of last year's Spiderman that sells for fifteen bucks makes it as much as five dollars (as a SWAG).

On the superhero comics front, the Amber Age is characterized by a mood of twilight retrospect. The audience is older, narrower and more deeply-schooled in the canon. The most successful and highly praised new work rests on a foundation of pastiche, satire and long looks over the genre's shoulder. Viz. DC's Kingdom Come, Marvel's Earth X, Wildstorm's Authority and Planetary, ABC's Promethea and Marvel's entire "Ultimate" line. The dominant story rhythm changes to fit the new medium. With an eye on reprint collection, the 5-6 or 12 part series supplants the 3-issue continuing storyline of the Bronze Age and the single-issue norm of DC's Silver Age output. You want to sell people a book, a coherent tale that will fit and fill a fifteen-dollar volume.

Meanwhile, the non-superhero independents shout "I'm free!" of a distribution channel (the direct market) that made them possible but never quite took to them. Titles like Ghost World and Love & Rockets can now find their audience.

Manga publishers actually lead the way in showing the viability of the bookstore market. This phenomenon is so important that someone who actually knows something should talk about it. Some of the most popular manga characters, like Sailor Moon, are superheroes. Just thought I'd mention it.

UPDATE: Much of my thinking about the Bubble Age was influenced by Stuart Moore's column series, A Thousand Flowers. Link rot prevents my leading you to the column where he discussed Dazzler #1 and its kickstarting of the direct market. He did not name the age or altogether distinguish it from what came after.

Exactly - In her I'm finally adding Julian Sanchez to my blogroll item, Avedon Carol writes:

But here is a point libertarians and liberals can certainly agree on: If the social and business environment contains no criticism of socially noxious activity by businesses, those socially noxious activities will increasingly become more common, more accepted, and ultimately they may even be enforced by law. So whether or not you think the force of law should be used to, for example, eliminate racist practices, you are under no obligation to refrain from criticizing a company whose practices are racist. You still have to talk up the kind of society you want to have.

Yes. More than ever.

Steroidblogging - I was going to toss out some more comics items. But you know what? Fuck it. Go read Arthur Silber explain why he's getting so angry.

Return to the Southern Cone - The DC Court of Appeals has ruled 2-1 that the the government may withhold

. . . the names and other details about hundreds of foreigners detained in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The powerful decision was deferential to the Bush administration's arguments over continued threats to America from terrorists.

I can't find the full opinion at any of the top law blogs (come on, guys!), but here's what David B. Sentelle is quoted as writing in his majority opinion:

"America faces an enemy just as real as its former Cold War foes, with capabilities beyond the capacity of the judiciary to explore," wrote U.S. Circuit Judge David B. Sentelle. He said judges are "in an extremely poor position to second-guess the executive's judgment in this area of national security."

For those of you reading these words I have one request:

COULD I GET A LITTLE ALARMISM HERE, PLEASE?????

What has the appeals court authorized?

Secret detentions.

Please say those words aloud. "Secret detentions." Now use them in a sentence:

The US government engages in the practice of secret detentions.

The US government has broadly asserted its right to engage in the practice of secret detentions.

A federal appeals court has affirmed that the US government may engage in secret detentions.

Here's a more complex sentence, for the bonus section: There is nothing in the logic of Judge David Sentelle's affirming opinion that the United States government may engage in secret detentions that would limit the practice to illegal aliens, naturalized aliens or foreign visitors to our shores. And another: With its decision allowing the US government to engage in the practice of secret detentions, a federal appeals court has left citizen and non-citizen alike at the mercy of federal discretion.

Secret arrests obviously require arrestees. There is a term for these people, ready for use:

The Disappeared. Desaparecidos in the original, though we will likely want to learn the arabic term. (Another sentence while we're practicing: The Mothers of the Plaza probably never dreamed that their group would one day be the model for American families coping with the US government's secret detentions of their loved ones. Keep this one handy.)

Aw Jim, not more of that doom and gloom talk! You extremists and your slippery slopes! It's just a few hundred guys, most of them foreign, including a couple of people who roomed with hijackers or were carrying around maps of the world trade centers and jihadist literature. This is just not that big a deal. Do you know anybody who's been detained! No. Nor are you likely too. I liked your blog a lot better when you were reasonable.

Gee, so did I. Get me a reasonable country back and we can all chill out.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The question is not "Do terrorists deserve the same rights as ordinary criminals?" The question is "Are terrorist suspects terrorists?" That's exactly congruent with the question "Are criminal suspects criminals?" We have centuries of experience on what can go wrong trying to answer that question, and developed an elaborate system of rights and procedures to minimize the potential for disaster - depriving the innocent of the liberty, property and even lives. We know that politicians, bureaucrats, law enforcement agents and intelligence operatives are human and fallible - that such people have lied, bungled, covered up lies and bungling, been gripped by a fever of wrongheaded enthusiasm and arrogance. From LA to Tulia to Boston, these human actions have devastated innocent people, in the case of Tulia an entire innocent town. We can be absolutely sure that terrorism investigations will lead to similar incidents and likely already have.

In the cases of Tulia and Boston, proceedings were public enough that the malfeasances came to light (eventually). The appeals court says the only light shining on terrorism cases will be the interrogator's.

This is wrong. This is not about how many or where from. It is about whether, in an case and the answer of any decent country is no, never. And until and unless the full Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court reverse this decision, we are every one of us naked to the threat. If we endorse this - if we even stand for it - were are worse than a nation of cowards. We are a nation of pussies. Annie Hall and the spider all over again, with the executive branch as Alvie Singer.

America, we only get so many more chances after this: Have some freakin' self-respect. At least try to toughen up a little. That goes for you insecure judges, you feckless Democratic politicians whose biggest worry is not the Argentining of America but the thought that someone, somewhere might get a lower tax bill, you journalists hyping every whispered threat to sell papers, you self-appointed geniuses running the national security organs who can't possibly misjudge anything because you hold all the right opinions.

It was a really bad day, all right? Thousands died. Decent people who did nothing to deserve their fate. It was awful, just awful. Hate and scorn are the only emotions appropriate for the perpretrators, grief for the victims. But we cannot let ourselves be ruled by fear for the rest of our lives. It is not manly. It is not womanly. You would insist that your child face such fear down. Life is so much easier for the brave, let alone more dignified. Live and die like human beings or live and die like whipped dogs. We have that choice. We are making that choice, and at almost every juncture, making it wrong.

UPDATE: It turns out that TalkLeft had a link to the full text of the appeals court decision. I certainly consider TalkLeft one of the top law blogs, and I actually checked TalkLeft before writing. Apparently I just suck at finding links.

UPDATE UPDATE: In the full text, Judge Santelle notes that the detainees in question had access to lawyers and to the courts. I haven't yet found a section where he explains why the court's deference to the executive on national security measures would not also lead the court to defer to the executive should it decide to deny counsel or a trial. Still reading.

Note to Readers - If for some strange reason you don't want to read 3,000 words on the comic book business, just skip the item below.

A Fanboy's Notes: The Trouble with Trouble - Dirk Deppey, Official Blogger to the Comics Journal, produced a fascinating five-part essay on Marvel Comics' financial and marketing situation, with particular attention to the forthcoming series, Trouble, Marvel's first return to teen romance comics since, I believe, the days of Millie the Model. Dirk is a sharp guy for someone who blogs under his porn star name, and you should read the essay. You should read anyone who can come up with a line like

I've had a chance to read the first issue, and frankly I couldn't shake the impression that I was about to watch Archie and Veronica fuck.

Stipulate that Dirk Deppey knows much more about the comic book business than I do, and much of what I know I learned reading his weblog. And let me make clear, once again, that I admire much of his essay and profited by reading it. Because the way these things work is, we concentrate on the parts we didn't think were so hot.

His thesis is that "Marvel's engaged in something of a balancing act, here." It wants to ramp up its bookstore business, but because the needs of that market are different from those of the comic book specialty stores that generate the bulk of its income, it risks alienating specialty store retailers. It's business practices - chiefly its insistence on work-for-hire, where creators get no ownership stake in their creations - are different from the mainstream of the publishing business. Marvel's bankruptcy debt, though, essentially requires it to keep to work-for-hire, because it needs 100% of its licensing revenues to pay down the last $180 million by the end of this decade. Its prospects for success in bookstores are hampered by the reading public's distaste for superheroes, which has been the bulk of the company's product for 40 years, but steps to broaden its product line alienate the superannuated fanboys running the Direct Market. What's more, the Marvel is getting "the kind of vicious thrashing the company hasn't seen since it first went head-to-head against DC in the early 1960s" by the big manga publishers, Tokyopop and Viz.

That looks like a lot of theses, but it's a long article, and Deppey tries to tie them all together, chiefly to show that Marvel's problematic stance on creator's rights well-nigh dooms it to bookstore failure.

Deppey can be pretty good on the problems of the Direct Market and its cluelessness about the broader world. (Trouble's first-issue cover is a photo shot of two young girls in bikinis. Deppey notes that Direct-Market consternation about this "pornographic" sales pitch rests on a misunderstanding: "In a bookstore market . . . the cover is entirely unexceptional if your target audience is twelve-year-old girls.") When he tries to discuss the esthetics of superhero comics it can remind one of dogs explaining color. And in places, I can't shake the feeling that his project is to somehow discover that esthetic complaints are financial ones - that what he doesn't like about Marvel's products must betoken objective, monetary weakness.

Along the way, we get a lot of Glass Half Empty, for instance, here:

$100 million in graphic novels were sold last year, a 33% increase over sales for 2001. Furthermore, it estimates that 2002 sales were evenly divided between the Direct Market and the bookstore trade. While ICv2 is predicting 2003 sales to increase by 20% this year, it is also predicting that the majority of that increase will occur in bookstores rather than comics shops; this despite a current sluggishness in much of the book market.

Which brings us to Marvel Comics. Like virtually every other major comics publisher, Marvel has seen sales in the bookstore market rise. According to the company's 10-K report for 2002, mass market sales reached $7.0 million in 2002, a considerable jump from just $1.1 million in 2001. With this figure in hand, a little creative deduction can explain away the company's desire to make further inroads into the bookstore market. As just noted, the GN market was worth $100 million last year, with half of it in bookstore sales. Of that $50 million, Marvel was therefore able to capture just 14% of the market in 2002. For a company used to dominating the sales arena to the extent Marvel has -- it's generally agreed that Marvel held 41% of the Direct Market last year -- that 14% must look like one piss-poor market share.

Maybe it does. But my initial reaction to this passage was the same one Neilalien had. (He published his reaction several hours earlier than I did, though.) A 636% increase in sales in a single year? Whoah!

I don't know the comics business all that well. But I worked in the book business for 14 years, and let me tell you, a 636% increase is jump-for-joy success. And we're talking about a very immature market here, one to which Marvel is something of a late entrant. As for market share, let's ask Windows calculator what's going on. $100 million sales in 2002, representing a 33% increase over 2001. That puts 2001 graphic novel sales at $75 million.

We must now make a simplifying assumption that could be wrong. Deppey tells us bookstores accounted for half of all graphic novel sales in 2002. Our simplifying assumption, likely a bad one, is that bookstores accounted for half of all graphic novel sales in 2001 too. Marvel's market share goes in one year from 1.1/37.5 (2001) to 7.0/50 (2002) - that is, from 3% to 14%. That's a hell of a jump.

Why is our assumption probably a bad one, and how can we find something negative to say about a six-fold sales jump in a single year? Our assumption is probably bad because it's unlikely all publishers did as well. In particular, it's unlikely that the more mature manga bookstore business increased sixfold between 2001-2002. And it's unlikely DC's business was quite as large, because of the negative thing we'll find to say.

Simply: Marvel's bookstore sales performance must be heavily tied to its recent string of movie successes. I visit big-box bookstores a lot, and they've had prominent tie-in displays for all the recent movies. You see a six-fold increase in sales over one year and you're seeing successful endcap displays as much as turn in the backstock. So Marvel's bookstore success is not, so far, a phenomenon independent of its movie success. If the movies start bombing, bookstore sales will level off or even tank, depending.

We'll have to come back to the movies for a couple of other reasons, but the big question is whether Marvel is riding a superhero movie "fad," or whether they're benefitting from a superhero movie trend. I suspect it may be the latter, that special effects technology has improved and producers' approach to the material as smartened to the point where superheroes are becoming simply one more viable kind of action-adventure film. But let's not go there yet.

My market share point is simply that you don't have to postulate that Marvel's zeal for the bookstores is driven by negatives - getting a "vigorous thrashing" from the Big Eyes Small Mouth crowd and trying to find a new oasis before the direct market dries up. You can as easily say that Marvel has had a taste of bookstore success and wants more yet. I'm quite sure both the negative and positive motivations come into play.

I think Deppey also makes too much of the book business's hostility to "work for hire."

In the booksellers market, work-for-hire carries an air of sleaze wisely relegated to disposable romance novels and fly-by-night publishers -- and well it should.

This is true as far as it goes. As Patrick Nielsen Hayden (whose blogosphere ecosystem ranking is shooting up with every item tonight) put it in response to my inquiry

[It's] a true statement about the culture of trade book publishing and selling, no matter what arrangements some members of that culture get up to in the dark.

He also, it should be noted, praises Deppey's essay as "a good piece."

But what do some members of that culture get up to in the dark, and what does it have to do with Trouble, the teen romance comic? Quite a lot, and quite a lot. Because teen romance books are rife with work-for-hire. The proper comparison for Trouble is not the works of Judy Blume but of "Francine Pascal."

"Francine Pascal" is a lot of people, all of whom are the authors of the Sweet Valley High series. Through the mid-nineties at least, SVH ruled teen girl book sales. The business model for Sweet Valley High and what Patrick calls "extruded-product series" could be likened to comic books without pictures - a new, numbered "issue" every month, spinoffs and tie-ins, by various writers and generally owned not by the authors but by a "packager." Here's how the system works, from the author page of Penelope Neri:

This fall, she created her second teen book line, Diamond Head High, which focuses on six kids at a performing arts high school who form one of the hottest musical acts on the Islands. For this series, Penelope will be writing the first book and then serving in an editorial capacity, supervising a staff of writers under the P.J. Neri name, much like the way the bestselling Sweet Valley High books are produced under the Francine Pascal moniker. “I’m a little nervous, since this is my first time serving as an editor, but I’m very excited.” The Diamond Head High series is catered to girls 11 and up and both they and the Chillers are published by local Bess Press, a small Hawaiian publisher.

I don't know whether Penelope Neri will own any share of the rights to Diamond High School, but we can be quite sure that her "staff of writers" will not. The same obtains for the big boys' adventure series (I have an e-mail from a writer who has "been Victor W. Appleton." Add "Franklin W. Dixon" and "Carolyn Keen" to the lists. "R.L. Stine" of Goosbumps fame seems to be a real person, but it's not clear that the one "R.L. Stine" who has written all of the Goosebumps books that have come out in the last ten years. The real Stine may also have a share of ownership in the Goosebumps packager, Parachute Properties.) As Patrick put it

Correct. The Wheel of Time belongs to Robert Jordan exactly the same way that V belongs to Thomas Pynchon. And the extruded-product series you're talking about belong to the people who write as "Franklin W. Dixon" about as much as Joe Fill-in Inker owns the X-Men.

Upshot: despite how publishing industry people feel about work-for-hire, they engage in quite a lot of it in certain sectors of the business, including the one that most matches Marvel's placement of Trouble. Marvel's terms are even, appalling as they are, an improvement on the kids-romance-series norm - writer Mark Millar, artist Terry Dodson, the inker, colorist and letterer will all get their own names listed in the credits. That's better than any Victor W. Appleton has gotten.

Trouble may or may not succeed, and I have no reason to doubt Deppey's judgment that "Millar's work reads like its job is to produce a hit comic which leads to bigger paychecks on better projects." But has he read a Sweet Valley High or Mary Kate and Ashley story? If Trouble tanks, it won't be because Marvel's ownership practices or the series' literary merits are out of step with the part of the book business Marvel is trying to enter with it.

-

We can be sure that Trouble represents an attempt to open new markets and find new audiences, true also to an extent for the "hybrids" of the new Tsunami line. I'm less sure than Deppey that that's their only viable path, certainly not one they need or even should follow exclusively, because I'm less convinced than Deppey that Marvel faces a generalized antipathy to superheroes in the public at large.

X-men, Spider-man and X2 played to huge, mainstream audiences and made Marvel and the producers tons and tons of money. Marvel experienced that six-fold jump in bookstore sales before Trouble or Tsunami or any other attempt to branch out into new material - that six-million dollar one-year increase was in sales of its bread-and-butter product, costumed heroic adventure. Go to your local Borders or B&N and see what Marvel has on the shelves.

Marvel and Hollywood did not get rich off 330,000 fanboys seeing three movies ten times apiece. These movies pulled in millions of non-comics readers. For that matter, the early Batman and Superman movies were huge successes too. It was only as those series declined in quality that they dogged financially. That's why I say I don't think we're seeing a fad. We have a decades-long record that indicates that good superhero movies make money. And bad superhero movies don't. What a shock.

But it pretty much kills the antipathy to superheroes is a stumbling block to Marvel's bookstore fortunes theory.

Marvel actually has two bookstore strategies to pursue. Trouble is part of the "new audience" approach. But they have an entire other option and it's the one that gave them that six-fold jump - the renewable audience approach. The renewable audience is not so much the 330,000 active direct-market customers. It's all the people who have been part of that audience in the past, an audience that, stretching back over the decades, is easily ten times that large. The renewable audience used to read superhero comics and liked them. If you can get them back in some fashion, you can make quite a lot of money.

I say this as a member of the renewable audience. I mostly gave up comics for about a decade. It was the Spiderman movie (and the Justice League cartoon, which I started watching with my son) that made me first stop off at the graphic novel racks in the bookstores and then start venturing regularly into comics shops. While a minority of the monthly titles I buy are superhero comics, I pick up Daredevil, Ultimates and Fantastic Four regularly, among others, follow Ultimate Spiderman and New X-men in the trade reprints and have bought way too many reprint collections. Reprint collections are a boon to the adult reader. There is a high opportunity cost in reentering monthly periodical readership - you have no idea which of the current writers is any good, who has had their continuity restarted, why Green Lantern looks so much younger, you name it. Much easier to pick up Fables and Queen & Country. (And don't think I don't . . . ) Reprints in book form let you browse, find what you like and then read it all at once.

But can the renewable audience be viable? Didn't most of them give up superhero comics because they "grew out of them?" My short answer in this long item is Yes, it can be viable, and sort of No, they didn't grow out of them. Exactly. To the extent that we did, many of us can grow back in again. Let's say that there are qualities to both superhero comics and the superhero comics business that impell most readers to gafiate. I talked about some of these in my discussion of the Spiderman movie. (See the "Against Continuity" section.)

But the fannish term "gafiate" has always had the unspoken suffix "for awhile" attached to it. In SF fandom, the tradition of gafiating includes the tradition of returning from gafiation. The problem for the comics business is that it's been hard to reach the ex-reader. Ex-readers don't go to comics shops, and comics shops have been the only place to find comics lately.

Until graphic novels got into bookstores. Ex-readers do go to bookstores. And there they are. Ohmigod! Jack Kirby's New Gods! The Kree-Skrull War! They've got like all the Frank Miller Daredevils in three books! Some new stuff too - what's that weird outfit Wolverine is wearing?

Talk about Trouble.

There are actual (god help us) synergies between Marvel's licensing strategy and its pitch for the renewable market. The movies drive the bookstore displays that capture the attention of the renewable, who come into the store primed by the movies. It works. It may work better than Trouble.

It would not surprise me in the least if I got tired of superhero comics again, maybe comics altogether. Nor would it surprise me if, some time after that, I came back to the medium again. Hell, I've done it five times already, if my recollection is correct. Marvel and DC will continue, like the Democrats and Republicans, to be the Evil Party and Stupid Party of the business, sometimes changing places. They'll continue to do plenty to drive existing readers away, as Marvel drove me away in the 80s with their business practices (and the baleful quality of the Shooter-DeFalco era) and DC drove me away with one Summer Maxi-Crossover too many. The smaller, newer superhero companies will continue to rely heavily on DC/Marvel pastiche and homage.

As Neilalien says, Marvel "can be an evil little company." It's one I have a lot of problems with still, and a lot of lingering resentments from times even worse than the present. Dirk Deppey has put together a good brief on the things that could go wrong for it. But factors he scants or misconstrues mean that Marvel's practical situation is much better than his essay suggests.

More Blogs About Building Some Food - While we're talking about fat as a political issue, I've added some important updates to the political discussion in Sunday's fitness item. Thanks to Kevin Maroney and Patrick Nielsen Hayden for prodding.

Death and Snaxes - One day after yesterday's politics of American body mass discussion in the Weekly Fitness Item, Newsweek runs a Gersh Kuntzman column in favor of a New York state senator's proposal for "a 1 percent tax on junk food to create a pool of money to fight the epidemic of child obesity." It's a damn good thing the Prednisone hasn't kicked in yet.

Let us start with the topic sentence's claim that the tax will "create a pool of money to fight the epidemic of child obesity." We can be sure that, as with cigarette taxes, gas taxes and other behavior-mod penalties, the thoroughly fungible money collected will end up simply swelling the coffers, to be used for various purposes. We can be sure that 1 percent will not have any appreciable deterrent effect on anyone's actual spending and consumption. We can not be sure that the State of New York or any other government body can do much about childhood obesity one way or the other. Kuntzman is just, somehow, sure that if "a pool of money" exist, it shall foster beneficial results. Yah.

Okay, dog bites man, New York newspaper columnist expresses liberal opinion. We haven't got a real shocker here. We do have an awful lot of cheek, though. Kuntzman:

Of course, the attack on Ortiz’s “fat tax” is disingenuous. We already have special taxes on cigarettes and alcohol in hopes of discouraging widespread use of these deadly substances. Yet only a fringe group of militant anti-tax Libertarians (hey, some of my best friends are militant anti-tax Libertarians, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think they’re wackos) would fail to see their value.

Gee Mr. Kuntzman. I don't think that much of you either.

Here's the thing: one big reason a "fringe group of militant anti-tax Libertarians" - and hey, at least we're not prone to multiple redundancies - opposed special taxes on cigarettes and alcohol is that we foresaw the Kuntzman's of the world arguing that we should expand the principle to all the other putative harms people risk with certain lifestyle choices. We don't despise sin taxes just because they are taxes - we despise them because we do not accept the State as our Mom and Dad. The principle undergirding them is totalitarian even if the expression of that principle is, comparatively, mild. What is that principle? Simple:

Everything is our business.

Rick "man on dog" Santorum would quite agree. And the least you can say about junk food is that it is not more dangerous than, oh, unprotected anal sex with casual acquaintances. Keep in mind that I'm okay with the latter. People like Santorum keep me out of the Republican Party. And people like "New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, the Brooklyn Democrat who floated the tax idea," keep me away from the Democrats. Kuntzman, Ortiz' admirer, gives us a perfect expression of Democratic Santorumism:

After all, the annual health-care costs associated with tobacco, according to the CDC, is $75 billion, compared with the $117 billion for obesity. To steal the Daily News’s “us” and “them” rhetoric, the only reason “they” want to go after “your” Twinkie is because “your” obesity is costing “our” system billions of dollars a year.

As Jacob Sullum noted in regards to this very issue, the argument proves too much, "nearly everything we do carries some risk of injury or disease," including all the things Senator Santorum doesn't like. Since government is so large and its subventions reach so many parts of "our" system, there can be literally nothing that government does not theoretically have a right to regulate. People scoff at "slippery slopes," but when you're actually on one - from recreational drugs to tobacco to guns to food - one should do less scoffing and more scrambling the hell back up.

The food tax is a vital test of seriousness for the Democratic Party, since it tends to be liberal, activist circles that get enthused about the idea. We need to see some prominent Dems laugh this idea down. My Orifice, My Right! must be their rallying cry, no matter the orifice, or they're no alternative to the Republicans.

It Was Fun While It Lasted II - Now it's Arthur Silber who is Not Happy about how the ex-war in Iraq is going, nor with the hawks who got us there. Not happy at all.