Lock Up Your Blogrolls! - It's time for Blogarama V! Enjoy hilariously in-group sourcing at the Rendezvous Lounge on 18th Street in Adams Morgan, Thursday October 23rd at 7pm. You don't have to be part of the in-crowd to come. You don't have to be a libertarian to come. You don't even have to be a blogger to come. Just get down there and party with the prolix.
It's not just me saying this stuff. It's a real party. Will Wilkinson will even sleep on your couch.
Fair and Balanced Sidebar Update - Another month has gone by. The old New Crew links have been flushed through to other parts of the blogroll, depending, and a new New Crew has been installed. These are a dozen bloggers, not previously blogrolled here, that I think are worth your time. Some of them, like Walter in Denver and Greg Greene, are way past due for linkspace here. Others, like Dave Fiore of Motime Like the Present and John Jakala of Groteque Anatomy, are actually newish bloggers. This month I was interested in adding some intelligent hawks and conservatives for variety, thus we welcome Daniel W. Drezner, Tom Maguire of Just One Minute and My Stupid Dog. Not to be confused with The Talking Dog, who is excitable, sure, but not dumb. Rafe Colburn is one of blogging's Grand Old Men; the Modulator an eclectic political blogger; and Bruce Baugh a fanboy intellectual of renown. Walter in Denver is your source for drug war outrages and western politics commentary; Fiore and Jakala strong additions to the blogspace at the intersection of comics and literature. Dan Scheltema of dislogue doesn't seem to cover comics, but is terrific on books and, you know, life. Greg Greene manages to be a committed liberal and a shrewd political observer.
Other site changes: "Team Comics/Comix" has been renamed "Comics & Culture." That lets me sneak Aaron Haspel further up the sidebar. Plus, what I like about my favorite comics bloggers is the way they connect their interest in comics, and the esthetics of comics, with their interest in other modes of expression. (You know, like books and such.)
The tiny new "I'm a Joiner" site includes the group blogs I belong to.
Next month, another New Crew. Way it works is, as I'm surfing, something convinces me that I should be linking someone, and I add them to the Next New Crew section of the sidebar. When I hit a dozen, I've got the next batch.
We Get Letters and we are determined to process them more quickly now that we have a shiny new in-box (in Mozilla Thunderbird).
On the reenactment front, Steve Cook sends a link to the "London Riot Re-enactment Society," which, but I suppose you've already guessed this part, "will stage re-enactments of noted riots from London's history, with some attempt at historical accuracy."
I think we can all agree that that is just too frickin' cool. Don't miss the crucial link, Which riots? And my blogchild, Michael Croft of Ones and Zeros, informs me of the English Civil War Society of America
On another front, reader Lon sends two Alan Moore-related links, an interview with Comic Book Artist about the Watchmen/Charlton connection, and the great lost Twilight proposal for DC, a company-wide crossover that would have resolved continuity issues without destroying the company's multiverse. I haven't had time to read the Twilight proposal yet, but I did read the interview, and this passage in particular stuck out:They do, in fact, do naval as well as Colonial and ECW. At least one of these units is based out of Ellicott City, MD...
The Society also regularly works with the replica of Captain Henry Hudson's 1609 ship Halve Maen (Half Moon), performing exciting landings and battle engagements as Dutch soldiers, upon land and water, for the education and entertainment of thousands of spectators.
I'd say that Moore is only partially right here. The problem is not so much that he and his followers imbued the superhero story with too much meaning, it is that post-Watchmen writers mistook one particular complex of meanings for all the possible ones, and made cliches of them in jig time. Simply put, they mistook darkness for depth. (As I've observed before in this context, Mr. Frost could have told them differently.) Wile E. Coyote not infrequently fell into the same error.And also, there did seem to be a rash of quite heavy, frankly depressing and overtly pretentious super-hero comics that came out in the wake of Watchmen, and I felt to some degree responsible for bringing in a fairly morbid Dark Age. Perhaps I over-burdened the super-hero, made it carry a lot more meaning than the form was ever designed for. So, for a while, I went off to do stuff that was very non-super-hero, and going into other areas I was interested in.
This is threatening to turn into my Where the DC Renaissance Went Wrong item, but for now I'll just mention that Sandman got better as it became less of a horror book. (Okay, Sean, that's the best I can do re this month's theme!)
All Governments Are Gangs as Arthur Silber reminds us. As a political extremist, I tend to think of the Republican and Democratic parties less as exponents of ideologies than as constituent service organizations - the Chamber of Commerce, defense contractors and low-church adherants over here; public employees and recipients of transfer payments over there. Our elections have all the philosophical moment of Lions versus Kiwanis. Or maybe, in light of Arthur's item, Jets versus Sharks.
That Word, Senor. I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means. - My Stupid Dog explains what is and isn't "deregulation."
News You Can Use - Do you keep getting abducted by aliens over and over again? These people know just how to stop it. Not a spoof site, so far as I can tell.
Mail Reenactors - Kevin Carson of the Mutualist writes
Interesting! Michael himself plays a Communist - his 19th-century civilian ID is that of an immigrant German red. Perhaps said civilian simply intends, like Communists everywhere, to have his party take over whatever movement he is in.While I enjoyed your reenactor buddy Michael's email, I take violent exception to one statement in it: his equation of the International Working Men's Association with the "Communist Party." Both the First and Second Internationals included a wide variety of workers' movements. The First included a large segment of Proudhonians, among others; the Second IWMA included a number of individualist anarchists in the U.S., including Benjamin Tucker (no one's idea of a communist).
And from Jonathan Pearse, the sole Samizdata contributor who still speaks to me:
That would be very cool. However, I think it would inescapably be a lot like work. Keeping a vintage ship afloat and ambulatory is quite a bit more involved than marching around a field somewhere. Add in the need to actually maneuver the ships and fire guns and you're into an impressive undertaking.I liked the long email you reproduced about the hobby of military re-enactment. Funnily enough, back here in Britain, you may have heard of our "Sealed Knot" society, which stages re-enactments of the battles of the English Civil War of the 1640s, such as the Battle of Naseby, with folk dressed as Cromwell's Parliamentarian forces against King Charles' Cavaliers. I would imagine the kit costs a lot of money, since the soldiers often wear metal armour on their upper bodies, metal helmets, as well as period-piece muskets, pikes, swords, and so forth. There certainly seems to be lots of interest in historical dramas and the associated costumes at the moment, both on TV and in the movies, shown by films like Gladiator (great early battle scene) or the British television dramas, "Sharpe" and "Hornblower".
However, I am not sure how easy or difficult it is now to stage such events in Britain since even dummy firearms and rifles may be affected by our idiotic gun laws, which as you may have noted, have been such a great success in Britain,,,er, whatever.
My fantasy - re-stage the Battle of Trafalgar with about 25 men o' war on each side, say in the Mediterranean. Lots of cannons and grog rations all round.
All the more reason to do it, of course.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Like I'm ever right about these, but I at plan to offer
Captain America Calling
Where the DC Renaissance Went Wrong
A Plame Game update
A Bureaucrat Reads the Iraqi Reconstruction Bill (permission pending)
I also plan to start wall-to-wall non-stop coverage of the California recall election from now until - what? It's over? Oh.
Imitation Tech Blog Item - Mozilla Thunderbird has much better filters and rules than I thought it did when I wrote about it last week. I'm giving it an extended workout, and have it sending all my mailing list mail to different folders, keeping my in-box manageable. (My correspondents know, to my chagrin, how appalling my in-box is.) It's better on that front than Opera's M2, which doesn't recognize mail from Costello-L as listmail and lacks, in the current version, any way to set it manually.
I'd like to dump Outlook Express for security reasons. Damn if it doesn't have a couple of usability advantages over Thunderbird, though. For instance, to file a read e-mail in Outlook, a toolbar icon drops down not just a complete folder tree, but a top-level list of the last half-dozen or so folders in which I've filed mail - much quicker than Thunderbird's toolbar option, which requires you to navigate the whole folder structure. I imagine Thunderbird will get there, but it's tedious in the meantime.
Hold That Thought - Eve also works to improve my Blogosphere Ecosystem rating by responding to my various arguments of the other week on same-sex marriage. Responding voluminously. Eve! How about a "here are the links in order" post so your loyal readers can better navigate the channels of your thought? I love blogs, needless to say, but scrolling up a lot of items while reading down long ones can be hard.
I haven't had the chance to read them yet. I can't even figure out how Eve had the chance to write all that. The arguments are definitely fresher and more carefully considered than what you find at NRO, though, that much is clear. Start (for the time being) at the top of her site and work down.
Dust Off the M-Word, Fanboys! - Eve Tushnet has a damn-near magisterial mini-essay about superhero conventions, and how they might be used the way Shakespeare used the conventions of the revenge tragedy in Hamlet - sneakily:
This can be a problem not just in comic books but in postmodern works generally. The author apes the forms of a genre story, demonstrating that genre stories can be silly and - well, it stops there. And so what? It's the difference between early Twin Peaks and later Twin Peaks. Both were, among other things, about the ways that thrillers defer, distract and dissemble. But early Twin Peaks - meaning, through the resolution of Laura Palmer's murder - also condescended to scare the living fuck out of you now and then. The show functioned on Eve's levels one and two. (I am not presently prepared to claim that Twin Peaks had anything to say about the Human Condition, even at its best.) In subsequent episodes Lynch and Co. simply jerked our chains without even the courtesy of an actual walk in the park to go with it. The show became pure level two, suitable only for recent postgraduates going through a phase. (One in which they could imagine that it was other people's chains being jerked, not their own, even though they were the only ones still watching.)There are countless levels to Hamlet; here are three: revenge tragedy, commentary on revenge tragedies, commentary on characteristic difficulties of human existence. If Hamlet were just a revision or satire or takedown of an Elizabethan dramatic genre, we wouldn't care too much today. Similarly, there have been scores of attempts to Hamlet-ize superhero conventions, but most of them end up just being comics about comics, and really, what's the point? I want to do something that works on all three levels, but mostly the first (basic story) and third (human condition).
Read Eve's essay in conjunction with Sean Collins' comments about "Superman versus Moby Dick," which I quoted earlier. I think argument also points up a danger in Dirk Deppey's precept that
You can get stories that imagine that once they've acknowledg[ed] the absurdity of the core concepts" they've done enough, and can congratulate themselves on their fine work of acknowledgement.I simply don't think that the superhero genre can withstand the scrutiny inherent in stories that attempt stark realism without acknowledging the absurdity of the core concepts.
UPDATE: Doh! Forgot the link. Thanks to Dirk Deppey for pointing it out.
Everybody Needs a Hobby - My poet/reenactor buddy Michael sent this great e-mail expanding, correcting and qualifying what I had to say about my first-hand impressions of Civil War reenacting as a hobby. I'm running it essentially whole, because it's so good. If you edit a magazine and would like to pay Michael good money to write about the hobby for you, drop me a line and I'll put you in touch.
Michael writes:
I've enjoyed UO's take on reenacting. But to clarify a couple of points, the Brady Sharp Shooters were the 11th company of the 16th Michigan, which arrived in DC after the first battle of Bull Run, and then served through the rest of the war with the Army of Potomac and were in at the end at Appomattox.
If you've seen the movie "Gettysburg" you'll remember the Chamberlain character indicating to his men (the 20th Maine) that they were it -- the end of the Union line, and had no one on their left. In fact they had Brady's, and Berdans (1st US) Sharpshooters, and a couple of other light companies from Vincent's Brigade guarding their flank and shooting up the Johnnies as they attacked Little Round Top.
The reason you thought Connecticut is probably because Josh and I were talking about this weekend's event, at Harrison's Landing, where we'll be falling in with other "authentic" reenactors to portray the 10th Connecticut on the Petersburg front.
As for the cost of an "authentic" kit, your estimate made me curious, so I toted it up:
Forage Cap from quality maker: $95
Sack Coat and Trowsers from historic clothier: $300
"Federal Issue" wool flannel shirt: $100, on sale
Canton flannel drawers: $55
Woolen knit stockings: $30
Jefferson bootees: $120
Leather accoutrements (waist belt and buckle, cartridge box with sling and plates, cap box: $200
1861 Springfield rifle-musket, with sling, quality bayonet, and 2 rivet scabbard: $600
Haversack: $50
Canteen with proper cover and strap: $50
Canteen half (plate), utensils, tin cup: $40
Reproduction issue blanket: $125
Rubber blanket: $40
Shelter half: $100
Knapsack: $125, on sale
Actual 1860s reading glasses and pressed paper case: $70
Wallet, stationery, comb, bank notes, enlistment papers: maybe $50
International Workingmen's Association (i.e., Communist Party) membership card: free to citizensThe chance to chant "Fredericksburg!" at the wall on Cemetery Ridge: Pricele... well, $2,150
As we said on the march, most who really get into it will, over the years, continue to spend more. On the other hand, one can buy used or lower quality "sutler row" items and cut these costs about in half, and probably the great majority of reenactors do.
Also, nearly every unit can draw on stocks of surplus clothing and equipment to outfit recruits. Most give their new guys a year or two to procure the basic outfit, sometimes longer. Brady's has members who have attended intermittently for several years without buying anything, or anything much.
Because Josh and I and some of the others in Brady's like to go to some of the more intense events where people really care about whether or not your coat is correctly made of the right fabric, we've gone a bit further than most. In my case I've probably spent a total of $3,500 to $4,000, including the above, two additional rifles (a target rifle with a barrel-length scope and a Sharps 1859 Infantry Rifle), a Confederate uniform and accoutrements, a greatcoat, a Hardee uniform hat, domet flannel "issue" and cotton civilian shirts, cotton stockings, and other items, all on top of my sutler row starter kit (coat, trowsers, wool stockings, and boots), and not including the pens, ink, inkwells, and other items I've picked up for my impression of a company and regimental clerk.
Ammunition runs about $7 for a 1 lb. can of black powder (good for maybe 120 blank cartridges), and $7-8 for a tin of 200 percussion caps.
Of course, it's not uncommon for "mainstream" reenactors to spend much less on the basic uniform and equipment, but then more than make up for it by procuring elaborate wall tents, lanterns, iron cookware, cots, camp furniture, and other fripperies.
In all cases, the ostensible justification for this shameless outlay is that, on some levels, reenacting is little different from most other middle-class American leisure activities: skiing, hiking, biking, boating, and golf all have significant entry costs and offer endless opportunities to spend more. For reenacting there's some compensation in the idea of a higher civic purpose ("honoring the sacrifice of the boys of '61," "teaching people about their history," etc.), hands-on historic research, the high resale value of better quality items, and the low cost of actual events (registration for most events runs from $5 to $25, sometimes including food).
Add in the fantasy and little theater aspects and you have a very compelling hobby. Add in the communal aspects -- all you have to do to be accepted is show up and play by the rules -- and standards for achievement that are far more objective than any you are likely to encounter in most day jobs (is your musket clean? do you know the drill?), and addiction becomes understandable. Well, to us, anyway.
For me, it's also provided the opportunity to meet a wide range of people that I would not ordinarily encounter in the halls of the bureaucracy. It's been refreshing to be around folks who know how to take care of themselves in the woods, enjoy singing around campfires, drive trucks, and do not habitually spend their days writing memos about circulars affecting a particular regulation or legislative initiative. I also like the fact that, unlike wannabe literati, no one hopes to be remembered by posterity as one of the leading figures the 21st century in their field.
Dottie says it's made me a better person. I don't want to think about what that says about me before, but it does make me even happier to be a soldier of the republic -- a soldier who doesn't hurt anyone, and gets to go home and take a shower after every battle.
The Meaning of "Life" - and "Life" - Ogged at Unfogged picks up yesterday's item about the distinction between life and liberty and runs with it, in the direction of the Farsi distinction between life and life. Very much worth reading. You should believe me even though the item says nice things about me.
Right from the Beginning - At gaming tonight it developed that fully half of our foursome, comics readers all, Watchmen readers too, did not know that Alan Moore's initial proposal for what became Watchmen used the Charlton heroes. Thinking of last night's item on John Byrne's aversions, I crowed, "I was even more correct than I thought!" RGB Bill felt that claim was damn near logically impossible.
There's your Trouble, the Continuing Series - In a political item, Sean Collins offers the following response to my Saturday musings about libertarianism, Democrats and Republicans:
This is a basic and important error. No, the salient threat to your liberty is not terrorism. Terrorism is a threat to our lives, not our liberties. Osama bin Laden and his ilk can not take away a single freedom - we can only do that ourselves. Say you believe that al Qaeda really does want to impose the Caliphate on the United States. Well, they can't. A free and mighty people simply can't be imposed on that way. Simply decide you would rather die free than live enslaved and no ragamuffin "army" of religious malcontents can dictate our political and cultural destiny.On a related topic (though he'll insist they aren't), Jim Henley makes some good points about how the Bush administration is super-un-conservative in the big-government sense of the word, but then says that "the national greatness types, and the Administration whose foreign and 'defense' policy they drive, are the salient threat to liberty in America today." And here I thought the salient threat to liberty in America today was, y'know, terrorism.
It occurs to me that this is yet another problem with accepting the idea of a tradeoff between liberty and security. Every time Bush and Ashcroft evoke fear to justify new domestic security legislation, every time Bush and Rumsfeld conjure some new bogyman from a two-bit thug with a palace, they weaken the country's anti-tyranny immune system by insinuating that life is more important than liberty. Get people to believe that hard enough and you have established the preconditions for the Caliphate, the Soviet or the Bund.
Lincoln said
Every word remains true today. We might only add that a slow-motion suicide by VICTORY Acts and imperial overstretch could mean it falls to some foreign power to deliver the mercy shot.No foreign power or combination of foreign powers could by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up from among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.
You Captain America Placeholder Item - Today's reading comes from Sean Collins, Dirk Deppey and Johnny Bacardi. Sermon in a day or two.
Today's Proposition comes from Sean T. Collins, who writes:
I suspect I'd agree with this five days out of seven. The point he goes on to make, the overriding importance of execution rather than any particular collection of tropes in play, I'd agree with at least as often.In other words, using [giant alien starfish] Starro the Conqueror isn't any more or less silly than, say, having a guy wage a decades-long oceans-wide vendetta against a white sperm whale, and then actually having the guy find the whale and get killed by it.
Can We Still Be Friends? - How times change! While searching the archives for my "Democratic platform," I discovered that I once wrote this:
So, for old time's sake, what could the President do to get himself back on my good side, me being influential and all. Specifically, what could he do to convince me that sane libertarians should support his reelection, with votes if they're inclined or just warm wishes. Let's see:I have a mild personal fondness for Dubya, or the image of him . . .
1. Clean house. Dump Cheney for Chuck Hagel. Sweep out Rumsfeld and the latter-day Best and the Brightest at Defense. Fire whoever betrayed Valerie Plame. Send Ashcroft back to Missouri and have him take USA-PATRIOT Act author Viet Dinh with him. All of the above are make-or-break.
2. Drop efforts to kill the PATRIOT Act sunset provisions. Abort the VICTORY Act. Fast-track the Iraqi transition. A big reason for dumping Cheney and the aviary (hawks) in step one was to clarify that Iraq is not a stepping stone to further wars and we are not staying forever. That done, I can be more patient about withdrawing from Iraq, but we should still get out expeditiously - it's not our country, we don't understand it and we can't and shouldn't run it for them.
3. Cut spending! Offering Boy and The Littlest Offering are going to need enough disposable income to support Mom and Dad in our dotage. I can't have the President funding current accounts out of their future earnings the way he's fixing to do.
4. Tariffs and farm subsidies. Kill all the ones you proposed. Say sorry, you have no idea what came over you. Invite the leaders who walked out of Cancun to the White House. Announce that helping them open up their economies will strike a blow against terrorism. Everything else does.
5. The Real Federalism Initiative: Announce that you'll veto interference with state prerogatives on marriage laws. Turn drug policy over to the states - it's street crime or pharmacy licensing, one way or the other. Announce that you'd like abortion to become a state issue again too - a safe proposal since there's no chance of it happening.
6. Kill corporate welfare, increase the personal exemption to its 1948 level in current dollars. Yeah, this was on my Democratic platform too. You can't blame a guy for trying.
7. Announce an intention to trim the Federal Register by a third. Promise that you'll put former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson in charge of the commission to choose regulations to wipe out.
I could come up with more, but one through five are already more than I could hope for (but not less than I need).
Once More Into the Breach - Noah Shachtman has the best article yet in the growing genre of "libertarian disenchantment with the Republican Party," on the American Prospect's website. Least supportable assertion: that I am "influential." But in addition to spelling my name right and reproducing my quotes accurately, the article also has almost all the necessary qualifiers and captures the key issues. He stresses the centrality of the war, but makes clear that there's more to it than the war.
Glenn Reynolds says this too, in response to Shachtman's article. It goes well beyond the war, and probably beyond the Administration too. The condemnations of libertarianism in establishment conservative media like the Weekly Standard and NRO play their role.
Did Howard Dean secretly pay Rep. Patrick Kennedy to attack him for insufficient devotion to gun control? Because he should have. The issue has proven a loser at the polls, and there's nothing that says Red State Vote Pickup quite like being attacked by a Kennedy over guns.
Check out the Hit&Run comments thread on the Shachtman article for some good discussion, and also some, well, illuminating discussion. There are good and bad arguments on the question of whether libertarians should split with the Republican Party and whether they should support whichever Democratic nominee - two separate issues. I was never a "lesser of two evils" libertarian, so my answers to the two questions tend to be Yes, and No. I do believe, most days, that LOTE libertarians should withhold their votes from Dubya in 2004, because the Repubs are no longer the lesser of two evils.
I tend to hold with Reason commenter Jack:
Mind you, I've been following that strategy for two elections now and Utopia has not arrived. But the Democrats won't nominate a genuine peace candidate, and I lack the robust faith of some of my liberal readers that simply replacing the current President with a Democrat will solve "our" problems.Call me crazy, but I think the best strategy is for lower-case libertarians to vote for the Libertarian party candidate. Neither major party cares who its voters *are*, as long as they do, in fact, vote for their candidates. Both sides will simply look at their voters as supporting the totality of their platform. Not-voting as a form of protest is irrelevant, since politicians don't actually care about voter turnout, no matter how much the media cries about it. (And don't kid yourself that if only the turnout is lowered far enough it will discredit the government. The Denver school board had an election a few years ago with a turnout of only 8% and I haven't noticed any letters to the editor claiming that the school board lacks legitimacy.)
The most successful reshaping of American politics in the last 20 years came in 1992, when Ross Perot put the deficit on the public's radar and torpedo'ed Bush the Elder's candidacy. Libertarian concerns will start getting taken seriously when one party notices that Libertarian candidates are consistently collecting more votes than the margin of defeat between the major party candidates.
I laid out my "Democratic" platform months ago; I should do a Republican one.
So You Know - Scrupulous conservative blogger LT Smash of The Indepundit is back. You may recall his excellent sniper spree coverage of last year. He got called away by other responsibilities for quite awhile, but he's blogging again.
Mind You - Watchmen is not above criticism. One of these days I'll get around to it. I really wanted to talk about Captain America, darnit, until I got $#^^%#) distracted!
Comics Blogging - Via ADD, you can go through the looking glass into a world where Watchmen should never have been written. The Dark Knight Returns, neither - according to cartoonist John Byrne and his loyal minions. How long does it take to dismantle what initially appears to be a sensical, if not sensible, argument? Not long. Byrne says "all-ages" books should never become "mature readers books" - meaning, really, that all-ages characters should never feature in mature-readers stories. This is the rap he pins on DKR, and Watchmen too.
Now, you may have trouble remembering all those lovable Rorschach stories from your childhood, on account of the fact that they didn't exist. As every aging fanboy and comics historian knows, while the Watchmen heroes were based on the Charlton licenses DC acquired in the early 1980s, DC had Moore swap out the actual Charlton heroes from his original proposal - so that DC could continue to use the Charlton heroes (pretty much in "for all ages" books"). Watchmen came out, featuring no Charlton heroes, at a premium price point, in comics shops only. It reached the wider public in the form of a pricey (for kids) trade paperback. Byrne's response to this objection?
Let's talk about how stupid this is for a moment. Byrne's claim is that, because the knowledgeable fan could trace the lineage of the Watchmen characters back to the Charlton heroes, that they somehow really were the Charlton heroes and should fall under his rule that characters that began life in all-ages stories should never appear in mature-readers stories. Hm. The idea is not to mess with the younger audience that expects to be able to appreciate the stories of their favorite heroes on their level, and not to mess with their muggle parents expecting the heroes their kids have been reading about to appear only in stories fit for their kids to read.. . . this must be some new usage of the word "new" with which I was not previously familiar.
Thing is, the kids in question - if they saw Watchmen at all - were not going to think, Cool! They're my favorite Charlton heroes with the serial numbers filed off! Dad, can I buy this one with the smiley button sluicing down a river of blood? It's got a leftist's horrified reimagining of The Question, who's like, the only two-fisted crimefighter out there who knows that A is A! Can I, dad? Huh? Huh? The Charlton heroes were not that popular in the first place, which is a big reason why Charlton went out of business and DC was able to buy the trademarks. You had to be a certain age, with a certain devotion to the hobby, to know or learn that the Watchmen were modeled on the Charlton stable - you had, pretty much, to follow the pre-internet fan press. This already puts you in late teens or early adulthood. The gum-cracking casual schoolboy reader of John Byrne (and Dirk Deppey's) dreams was never going to make the connection, and thus was never going to be misled. Hell, just this month I had to do an internet search when I couldn't remember who Ozymandias was supposed to be. (Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt. Did I ever read a Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt comic? No. Did I even know Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt existed? No. Did the Beav, who loved Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt because - well, who the hell knows why? - see Ozymandias while flipping through an issue of Watchmen and think, Can't fool me! He may be named after some poem from school, but that's my Peter!) No.
That's the practicalities of the audience - no one was going to be confused. Now the esthetic realities.
Moore and Gibbons changed the names.
Moore and Gibbons changed the costume designs.
Moore and Gibbons changed the personalities.
Moore and Gibbons changed the continuity.
What are you left with? An interesting bit of comics trivia about the genesis of the series. And that's it. You don't understand Watchmen less or better knowing that somewhere behind it lay a proposal for the Question, Blue Beetle, Sarge Steel, Nightshade and Captain Atom. Nothing in the story fails to make sense without that knowledge that becomes clear once it's acquired. It lacks the allusive importance of knowing who Planetary's Doc Brass really is. You've missed something if you don't get the references in Planetary or Astro City. Recognizing the Charlton ancestors of the Watchmen is immaterial to understanding that story.
Byrne eventually gives the game away by saying that superhero stories should stay in their "nitch." The difference between him and, say, Dirk Deppey, is that Dirk regrets the influence that Dark Knight and Watchmen had on mainline superhero comics, but not Dark Knight and Watchmen themselves. (As I understand his argument.) What we have here is a bunch of old farts complaining about how things sure have changed. The minor irony is that they blame another bunch of old farts for this, but since I have a dog in that fight, I'm not going to push that angle.
Man, that Byrne sure could draw though. I think he was my favorite artist for awhile in the late 1970s, when he was doing Iron Fist and X-men.
A Fanboy's Notes - Also from Bruce Baugh, news that the new edition of the Gamma World RPG will be out shortly. I got to see this in manuscript, and it's a remarkable achievement - older gamers will find a cleaned up presentation and system update that nevertheless captures the spirit of the game you remember. I would say that it does for GW what Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition did for D&D: revivifies it. It's a nostalgia fest, true, but not only a nostalgia fest. Bruce and his team can be proud. I was particularly impressed with the GM section by longtime Usenet presence, Lizard.
Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 163 pounds, 32.5" waist. New lows in each metric. And this was the week I took off - didn't lift weights or aerobicize at all. I walked about 6 miles during lunch breaks, but that doesn't count as real exercise. I also ate a fair amount this week, too.
So is that the secret, eat more and exercise less? Nah. Over the long term, a calorie deficit or surfeit determines whether you lose or gain. On the level of a single day or week, it doesn't. My middle-aged bod really needed the rest, but I have to get back to work tomorrow. I may start resting one week out of every four or eight, though.
Why it's good to get in shape. Because you never know when a hurricane will strike! I spent two hours this afternoon splitting firewood that was, pre-Isabel, my tree and my neighbor's tree. If Isabel had hit last fall, the cleanup would have defeated me. I might have even suffered a coronary.
In other fitness blogs. From Bruce Baugh, something I did not know:
Bruce explains what that means for him, given his immune-system problems, and how he's managing the difficulty.[F]at stores (among other things) whatever allergens and miscellaneous toxins were floating around in the body at the time the fat was laid down, and when the fat's burned off, all that stuff gets released.
In other other fitness blogs. Nothin'. I think some folks have fallen off the wagon.