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.

This is your Blog. On Drugs. It's a week-long race between the Prednisone and the muscle relaxant to determine whether I launch into tirades or just kind of mellow out. After noting the Prednisone prescription in yesterday's fitness item, I got an e-mail from Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who writes

As I probably don't need to tell you, watch it with that stuff. The last time they gave it to me, I spent a week at work turning into The Incredible Hulk. Which is all right as far as it goes, but you do wind up with a lot of wreckage. (To say nothing of a closet full of purple pants.)

Prednisone definitely has this effect on me if I'm on it for any appreciable length of time. This go-round I'm on a six-day dosepak where I step down 4mg each day. With any luck, the muscle relaxants will mean I'm at worst enraged but limp.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 173 pounds, 34-something waist. We report, you deride. Whence comes the extra pound compared to last week? The usual possible reasons, plus - Mrs. Offering rearranged some things in the bathroom. That means I now step on our sad old scale on a different spot on the floor, and that's probably enough right there.

The uptick coincides with an inflection point in my attitude. This week for the first time I became less impressed with the 40-odd pounds I've lost than annoyed with the ten or so pounds yet to go. I look at the remaining flab around the hauncheps, the dimpling along my hips, the spare (tricycle!) tire hiding 2/3 of my incipient six-pack and, like the parents of a 30-year-old who never moved out, think, What? Are you still here?

But enough about me - nah, I take that back. I'm starting to take steroids. Ha! Don't look at me like that, loyal reader! Not that way - I suffered my first real weight-training injury. Bad form on a dumbbell squat and *YANG!* in my lower back. My doctor is pretty sure it's a torn muscle rather than a disk problem or pinched nerve, and he gave me prednisone and a couple of other things to take. Prednisone makes me pig out and kill people so by next week's fitness item I'll likely be a 180-pound widower on his way to jail. I'll probably start damning people to hell again like the other week.

The nice thing about lifting weights only every other week is that you get plenty of time to recover from injuries when they do occur. And I was able to do 40 minutes of Heavyhands on schedule this morning with the five-pounders.

Jessica Grieves e-mails to speak up for "those awful cardio machines you seem to hate."

I actually LOVE using the elliptical trainer. I can knock out 45 minutes on a high resistance and still think it is fun! I do strength training three days a week with a 10 minute warm-up on the treadmill and 30 minutes of light cardio on a variety of machines. On the opposite days I will do 10 minute warmup on the treadmill plus 45 minutes on the elliptical. I occasionally cross train by swimming or using a stationary bike. Several nights a week I’ll add a 3 mile walk with my husband.

We have a professional model Tanita scale which is great for watching my fat drop! It is nice to be able to see the fat free mass increasing and the fat mass decreasing. It does estimate your BMR and mine right now is just under 1600 calories (that’s just to be still and breathing) so I’m probably close to 2500-3000 calories a day once my workouts and just daily movements are included.

I should make clear that my complaints with exercise machines are twain:

1. Most of them don't work your upper body. (I believe that is untrue of elliptical trainers, though from what I can tell the range of upper body motion is narrow.)

2. They cost a boatload of money. Thousands to buy, or hundreds and hundreds in membership fees to join a gym. And health club memberships at least used to be famous for being impossible to get out of once you'd signed up. I know people who kept getting their credit cards or checking accounts hit for years after they had cancelled their memberships, despite repeated attempts to straighten the issue out.

The Unqualified Fitness Program's bedrock principle is:

You can get fit cheap yourself. I've come to view a decent bench as a necessity. (Mine still cost less than $100 at Galyans.) But you should be able to get the weights, bench, even shoes you need, combined, for much less than $500. You should be able to get started for less than $200. Hell, with a one-pound set of dumbbells and a pair of sneakers you can do your first month of Heavyhands training, and you probably own sneakers.

WE INTERRUPT THIS ITEM with a message for the two, count 'em, two people I observed doing Heavyhands in Montgomery County the last two days: Higher! Range of motion! It's not that they were simply carrying the weights, like some people. Still, the man was moving his two-pounders in front of him between the top of his hips and his nippular region, an area barely larger than a Major League Umpire's personal strike zone, and the lady was pumping her weights from thigh high to about stomach high. I think that might actually be the unofficial strike zone these days. As Clarence Bass put it, the key to Heavyhands success is to "Act Boldly."

Now where were we? Oh yes, politics and fat. And this gets back to my DIY principle. Last week, I linked approvingly to a personal essay on weight loss by Glenn McDonald. I said then and repeat now that it's a pretty good essay, and I agree with most of it. However, I'd disagree, in a qualified way, with this part:

1. You are not a customer.

I am not selling you anything. Many individual people are not trying to sell you anything. Most corporate forces are trying to sell you something. If you are overweight, it is probably, in whole or in part, because you have been sold too many things. You must not allow this to happen. Food companies exist to sell you more food, even though both of you know this is not what you need. Do not allow them to make poor eating decisions for you, and refuse to support companies that exist for this purpose. Do not buy self-destructive body-image illusions, do not buy a lack of self-respect. And if you are overweight and wish not to be, know that improvement is not an act of consumption, either. Ignore the diet industry, which has no more concern for your health than the food industry it is supposedly counterposed against (except they're more often synonymous). Biology trumps commerce. Be an organism, not a buyer.

This befits a man whose introductory page notes that he is against "uncheck market economies." Needless to say, the very thought of an unchecked market economy makes me fairly swoon with longing. So my first principle would be rather different:

You are a customer. So shop smart.

A glory of humanity is that we get to participate in economies more than predation chains. A lot of the stuff that food companies exist to sell you is quite yummy - like the vanilla-bean cheesecake I had with Father's Day dinner at the Cheesecake Factory tonight. Mm!

Now I split that piece of cheesecake with Mrs. Offering. And it was the first one I'd had since our anniversary in mid-April. I may not have another piece the rest of the summer. Why? Because I like not weighing 220 pounds more than I like cheesecake. There are a lot of people within driving distance of White Flint Mall. If none of them eat cheesecake more than once every couple of months, the restaurant would still do quite nicely for itself. There exist people - we call them "young" - who can eat most anything they want without gaining weight. Hang on. That was me. Twenty years ago. I can't think of a good reason to crimp the fun of all the Young Jims out there for the sake of Middle Aged Jim.

Some people would rather be fat and eat what they want than be thin and live longer. That was Late Youth Jim. Dumbshit. But what are you going to do with those people?

If you hit the Cheesecake Factory every week, or every night, and balloon accordingly, then you have bought too many things. If you're going to bind over the blame for your extra slices of dessert to the evil corporation selling it to you, what other of your responsibilities are you going to bind over to them? Your finances? Your love life? Because I gotta tell you, the people working at the Cheesecake Factory seemed nice enough, but that doesn't mean I want to appoint them my guardian.

You are a customer, and as a customer you must purchase, in coin or opportunity costs, that which will provide you with the best balance of satisfactions - emotional, ethical, financial, medical, esthetic.

Related issue: it is certainly true that you mustn't trust corporations. You mustn't trust the government either. But you can't necessarily trust "individuals" because "Many individual people are not trying to sell you anything." This is a paradox of anti-market thinking. People accuse market liberals of only caring about money, only judging things on the basis of what sells, reducing everything to a commodity and so on. And then they construe economy as nothing more than monetary exchange.

But enthusiasm is the most precious coin of all, persuasion is its transaction and nothing can be so dangerous as an individual in the grip of invidious enthusiasm. A lot of us would far rather have agreement than cash. (We start weblogs!) And we can be very, very wrong about the things we try to "sell" you.

Trust yourself - insofar as you put an effort into it. You are a customer. Comparison-shop ideas from the fitness industry, the diet industry, the public health bureaucracy and cranks on the web. Become capable of arriving at a reasoned judgment on the strains of the cacophony.

The alternative is to embarrass yourself, to publically declare, I am an infantile personality incapable of taking responsibility for my own actions! as "public interest" attorney John Banzhaf and his restaurant-suing clients do. A sane society would laugh such lawsuits out of court. As a compromise, we could allow them to proceed if the attorneys and plaintiffs agreed to wear footie pajamas and visibly teethe in court.

Jacob Sullum concludes his recent essay on the politics of America's weight problem thusly:

. . . at the University of Chicago, economist Tomas Philipson, put weight trends in perspective by showing that Americans have been getting fatter for at least a century because of technological changes that have made food cheaper and work less strenuous. Those changes come with a cost, but on balance they have been tremendously beneficial. "We are better off being fatter and richer," Philipson said. "I would not want to go back."

Hell yes. You think it's hard to decide not to eat so much? Try humanity's much more durable problem instead - try "deciding to eat more" when there's no fucking food to be had! THAT is what "unchecked market economies" - actually, heavily checked, but we do what we can - have delivered us from. It's much easier to Put the Fork Down (as my mom's trainer puts it) when your plate is full than to find much use for your fork when your plate is empty.

It's even an open question whether our health problem is fat as such, or indolence. In "Time for Tubby Bye-Bye?" Ronald Bailey notes

Gaesser, the rail-thin author of Big Fat Lies: The Truth about Your Weight and Your Health, asserted that the "health risks of being fat have been exaggerated, and the health benefits of weight loss have been overstated." He countered Hu's statistics with data from the Cooper Aerobics Center showing that "obese men who are fit have the same risk of mortality as men with normal weight and less risk than do lean men." The health problem is not fat, it's lack of exercise. Gaesser argued that people can obtain most health benefits from exercising rather than losing fat, and cited data showing that it's easier to stick with an exercise program than a diet. His slogan is, "It's easier move more than to eat less."

I would add that it's easier to move more if you eat less. You can do more in the way of exercise as you get thinner.

In other fitness blog news, Radley Balko finally posts about his diet and exercise. He includes the non sequiter about "muscle weighing more than fat." Muscle is more dense than fat, which means that if you have equivalent volumes of fat and muscle, the volume of muscle will weigh more. Since I know of no combination of diet and exercise that produces a volume of muscle equal to the volume of fat lost, the relative densities seem irrelevant. Let's say muscle was exactly as dense as fat. If I am dieting and lifting weights in that alternate world, I am still shedding fat and adding muscle. The fact that I am adding some volume of muscle still tends to increase my weight. The fact that I am shedding fat still tends to decrease it. I'm still lighter than I would have been because of the diet and heavier than I would have been because of the weight training. More or less. You further complicate things by realizing that, were Radley not lifting weights, his diet would be causing him to lose muscle volume along with his fat loss. And since muscle is more dense than fat that means, um, something.

Congrats to Radley on his success so far, though!

UPDATE: An e-mail from Kevin Maroney makes clear that I seriously misimplied something above. When I call Late Youth Jim a "dumbshit" as one of those who "would rather be fat and eat what they want than be thin and live longer" I fail to make clear additional particulars about Late Youth Jim, and that makes it look like I'm deprecating more people than I mean to. LYJ was a dumbshit for some very specific reasons: Offering Boy and the Littlest Offering chief among them. I have two young children and longstanding issues with hypertension and cholesterol levels. We have some adult-onset diabetes in my family. As recently as last October I could be sitting in my cube at work and hear my heart beating. I was, in short, cruising for an early death, a death that would severely harm those I love. On top of that, I really didn't feel so good about myself. You could argue that this was because I bought into some Lookist hegemony, and fine, but I felt bad being obese and weak, and knowing that my company was going under, I didn't want to be a middle-aged fat guy looking for work in a down economy.

Now there are people to whom few of the above conditions apply, who love their food and hate their exercise, and most of all have reckoned what the do and don't owe the people in their lives as far as longevity and function. Such people who "would rather be fat and eat what they want than be thin and live longer" are not dumbshits. For my part, the very thought of Type II Diabetes scared me straight - more than the prospect of a heart attack or stroke. But that's my calculation, and other people may have good reason to feel less at risk. A central tenet of libertarianism is a modesty about knowing what's good for other people. That's the point I meant to make and obfuscated with a casual dig at myself.

UPDATE II: Patrick Nielsen Hayden e-mails:

No doubt it's because as a (music sting here) liberal I fail to share some all-important assumptions, but although I read the political section of your fat essay three times, I still can't see how you've made the case that Glenn McDonald's point #1 is tantamount to a declaration that one is "an infantile personality incapable of taking responsibility," etc. It seems to me that McDonald is simply dealing out a piece of advice that I imagine most libertarians agree with: "don't be a mark."

I agree with most of this. I think McDonald is a little over the top in his apportioning responsibility for individual eating decisions to large corporations, but nothing in his article suggests that he favors suing candy makers or hamburger stands or hitting them with punitive taxation. Those people (Banzhaf's Army, we'll call them), were the chief objects of my "infantile personality" ire. Ironically, anyone heeding McDonald's injunction not to support companies that sell unhealthy packaged food would be nothing but the market in action, individuals expressing their values through their commerce. "Don't be a mark," indeed - be a customer.