Nicotine Fiend

Thanks for the advice, folks. The sense of the feedback I'm getting is that I should prioritize prose over comic strips, and I find that very helpful and even a little validiting.

SO I WENT AHEAD AND DREW THAT COMIC ANYWAY

(clickmic for comic.)

I must admit that this one was a lot of fun.

So I have some notes for a prose piece and sketches for a new comic sitting on my desk. Guess I'll start fiddling with them both and see which captures my interest, although I'm still feeling a bias towards writing.

Qomics Quandary

(Thumbnail! Clicky.)

It's been a couple of months since I've done any comics, and I've got a bunch of scripts backlogged. Last night I sat down and started on a new strip.

I'm not sure I'm going to finish it. Looks like we've finally arrived at the crossroads.

Question: should I keep making comics?

I mean, I could be writing instead (blog posts, short fiction, long fiction, etc.) and at the moment it's not like I'm suffering from any shortage of ideas. If I work on comic strips for two or three hours a night, that's two or three hours that I'm not writing.

This wouldn't be a concern if: 

1.) It didn't take me such a bloody long time to make a comic strip. I've never timed myself because I truly don't want to know.

2.) For all the time it takes, my comic strips still look. . .unimpressive. I won't deny there's a charm to them, but something so visually underwhelming shouldn't take so fucking long to make. There are too many other people who can produce better-looking work at a much faster rate than me. It is disheartening.

3.) Drawing will probably never be something at which I excel, but I know I can write better than most people, and my development as an author still hasn't peaked. If I'm going to invest time and energy into cultivating a talent, shouldn't I choose the one with the most potential for growth?

4.) I might be mistaken, but I would like to think that my prose has a greater likelihood of getting under readers' skins and into their heads than my comic strips. We return to the time factor. I could spend twenty hours writing and drawing a comic strip that somebody reads in twenty seconds and chuckles at mildly. Or I could spend thirty hours writing and polishing a fiction piece that takes somebody five to fifteen minutes to read and rattles them and makes them think. (Again, I've never timed myself. Just throwing numbers out there.)

A thought that gives me pause: a comic strip might elicit (say) fifty chuckles, while a prose piece would only get the wheels turning in only three or four different heads. Comics are more widely read and circulated; they're easier to read, process, and appreciate.

But then again:

X.) It's been years since 8 Easy Bits. How many people are still with me, anyway?

Y.) The webcomics game is about frequency. If I can't update once a week, I probably can't expect to draw in readers who will come back. Maintaining a regular update schedule for the amount of time necessary to get into readers' RSS feeds is a commitment I'm not sure I'm willing to make, because:

Z.) Lately I've been having more fun writing than drawing. Maybe that's because I don't know how to use Illustrator and I'm so maladroit with a tablet. For all my griping about writing and editing, I almost always have a worse time drawing and shopping.

Or should I just shut up and finish that comic strip I already got started on?

Requesting guidance, please.

Another Pre-Solstice Status Update

(Image appropriated from APOD.)

Oh, right. I'm still alive, and I still have this "web log" that needs to be updated.

Well -- I did say I would be updating the comics page instead of blogging for a while, giving me the time to work on some longer-term writing projects, didn't I?

What this actually means is that I'm spending my after-work time drawing and 'shopping instead to finalize the two-month backlog I wanted. I always, always, always forget how long it takes me to make these fucking things. (This one in particular was like the bloody Shawshank Redemption.)

So the novella and novel that still need to be proofed and edited still await my attention, and here I am drawing comic strips about vomit jokes.

THESE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE THEY THE BEST I COULD DO?

It's hard for me to feel content with anything this time of the year. I don't think I can be blamed for this. Nor do I think I can be blamed for wanting to launch Mariah Carey and every trace of her recording career into the fucking sun.

Oh, at any rate: the last two comic strips are here and here. A new one will be posted on Thursday. These are exciting times!

Ponies, Plato, Plutocracies

Not much prepped this week. I've been too busy drawing ponies.

Also, I've recently started posting comics again.

I've got a bunch of stuff backlogged and will be posting a new one every ten days (roughly), which will amount to about four months of regular updates. If I'm able to draw more comics between now and then (these things are never certain), we'll keep running. If not, we'll just wait another six months, eight months, or however long it takes to build up another queue.

I thought it would be fun to roll out this shindig with a couple of 8 Easy Bits strips, just for old times' sake. I don't know why I figured the Author should have discovered the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic phenomenon since we last saw him; but from there it does seem more predictably within his character that he should be inordinately inspired by his arrival at this brave new continent in his (severely skewed) intellectual world and determine to make it the subject of his latest opus.

I rather like how the scruff (a touch originally added by Mr. Wolff in one of the later strips) and unkempt hair has increasingly become the norm for the character. I like how the bastard is still evolving, even though he's still far from ever getting his shit together. (I think he's somehow becoming even crazier.) And I really like how he's still interesting (at least to me, anyway) even when the subject of his escapades isn't the fact that he inhabits a world where human beings and video game characters rub elbows on the sidewalks and supermarkets.

So yeah, the pony comic took much longer to make than I'll ever admit, and I have nothing but my own OCD to blame for it. The lessons here are that I should a.) estimate realistically how long a project should take, b.) making sure to account for my being batshit crazy about details. (I can point to more than a dozen things about the strip that I don't like, but for the sake of my own sanity I'm letting them be.)

Confession time: Greekdropping gennaion psuedos wasn't actually spontaneous, and was preceded by a Google search for "plato republic lie" and a click on the Wikipedia entry for "Noble Lie." I recalled the basic concept from an early book in the Republic, but needed a memory refresher. The Republic is a pretty dense slab of text, after all.

In the smallest of nutshells: having already established that his ideal state would need to have three basic classes of citizens (rulers, warriors, artisans), Plato (speaking through Socrates) says it will be necessary to foster upon the state's children the idea that, although the Earth fashioned them all, it mixed some of the clay with gold, some with silver, and some with bronze, corresponding to which of the three social strata they are more or less destined to inhabit. It's ordained, it's out of everyone's hands, and each citizen will have to accept his lot in life. It's not true (obviously), but Plato nonetheless asserts that this one "noble lie" will be necessary to preserve the state's cohesion.

A reader has already joked about the bluntness of the strip's "message," and I guess that's fair -- but really, I was less interested in making a point than in taking something absolutely innocent and delightful and warping it into something joyless and awful ("for the lulz," as they say). If I was really serious about preaching, I wouldn't have ended the thing with a sharp veer into a gag about horse assholes.

But yeah, sure -- I did a little thinking about noble lies while shopping the thing, and wondered if it mightn't be the case that every society is constructed atop one fundamental fib or another. So -- what about the United States?

The big American lie (or one of the big ones) is the one about Freedom. America is a free country. Americans are free people. Americans are freer than other people because America is the most free country of all countries. George W. Bush's and the Tea Pary's rhetoric could be pared down to FREEDOM FREEDOM FREEDOM MURICKA and lose little in the abridging. Americans scream and shout and beat their breasts and rub dust in their hair whenever they perceive some politician, law, or court ruling as "threatening our freedom."

First of all: the very concept of freedom is probably bullshit.

Second: off the cuff, I'd say that yes, United States citizens do have fewer sanctions on speaking and expressing themselves in ways that could be construed as offensive, controversial, unpatriotic, etc. than those of many other nations. This is an excellent thing. We are permitted to talk the talk. But many, many citizens are severely constrained to the extent to which they can walk the walk.

We're all of us placed inside the labyrinth of our civilization, and some people are immensely better-equipped to navigate it than others. When the structure of the labyrinth is determined mostly by economic forces, citizens in stronger economic positions can move about it more easily. Perhaps the more accurate metaphor would be to say that these people are capable of walking over or just passing through the same walls restricting the movements of their neighbors.

But I feel this analogy is hackneyed and you already know where we're going. But why not: when you have more money, you have more "freedom." People born into wealth are more likely to retain wealth. Those with a lot of wealth are more likely to acquire more wealth. Those born into poverty are more likely to remain in poverty. The nation's wealth is increasingly concentrating in the upper stratum; the wide majority of citizens is finding more and more walls shooting up out of the ground to block their progress.

Even if we imagine that freedom isn't a fallacy, the American version of it doesn't sound very much like freedom at all. Not when citizens' actions are restricted by their personal wealth; especially not when that factor is usually dependent simply on the economic circumstances into which they were born. But the noble lie of the Land of the Free is accepted as fact, and people in the lower classes rage against legislation that would likely benefit them on the grounds that "it hurts our freedom."


Incidentally, I just read an excellent GQ piece in which the author reports his investigative comparison between six Americans, each representing one of six basic economic blocs (from someone who lives on $200 a week to someone who lives on $625,000 a week). On the fifth rung of six he meets a man named Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon.com whose taxable income is now $10 million on a bad year. Mr. Hanauer speaks of his own conception of the American noble lie:

There's something unusual about Nick. For a multimillionaire, he doesn't have your average multimillionaire view. In fact, he's come to believe that the system he benefits so richly from is built on nonsense — specifically, the idea that "the markets are perfectly efficient and allocate benefits and burdens perfectly efficiently, based on talent and merit. So by that definition, the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor. We believe this because we have an almost insanely powerful need to self-justify."

And the biggest nonsense of all, he says, "is the idea that because the rich are the smartest, and because we're the job creators, the richer we get, the better it is for everyone. So taxes on the rich should be very, very low because we're essentially the center of the economic universe, the font of productivity." Nick pauses. "If there were a shred of truth to the claim that the rich are our nation's job creators, then given how rich the rich have gotten, America should be drowning in jobs!"

Well.

To conclude on a cheerier note, my friend Jason is fiercely lobbying to have this made into a T-shirt:

Any creative ponypeople want to give her a name?

EDIT: Spyda K might have nailed it with "Nickie Fits."

Busy, so Bullets

• I don't know why I draw comics; it's such an inefficient use of my time. Oh, a gag! I'll think. I should make a comic about it! This will occur in the span of about five minutes: inspiration, idea, formulation. The process of writing, boarding, penciling, scanning, shopping, assembling, and polishing a comic page can take ten to twenty hours, and by then the joke never seems as funny as it did. Then a dozen people spend a minute looking at it, punch a new URL into their browser, and forget about it after four or five clicks.
  
  I am a masochist.
  
  I'm gonna be updating the comics page on a regular basis for a few months, and wanted to kick things off with something special. The next time I decide to do anything special, somebody needs to deliver a mild corrective shock to my genitals. This has become way more involved than it needs or deserves to be, and I'll be relieved if I can wrap it up by this time next week.
  
  
  
• Source of anxiety: the looming possibility that budget cuts will cost me my position and my room at this place. I'm blanching at the prospect of throwing myself at the mercy of the job and housing markets all at once, but it might be unavoidable. Philadelphia isn't that expensive a place to live -- but finding a job that can pay for rent/utilities/food without exhausting me and destroying my will to write/draw/live likely won't be easy.
  
  Just for kicks, I opened up Craigslist Philadelphia and browsed their Writing/Editing section. It's always laugh: 30% or so full-time copywriting/editing gigs at pharmaceutical companies (requirements: three years' full-time experience in a copywriting/editing gig at a pharmaceutical company) and 70% hey write blog posts for my web startup for free, please.
  
  What a lousy time to be a writer. Today you're simply expected to be cool with just giving your work away in exchange for "experience" and "exposure" --  airy pseudo-currencies which might maybe perhaps possibly someday help keep a roof over your head, but until then remain worthless. And evidently a lot of writers think this is a fair trade. After all, if there was a shortage of people willing to sell their labor for nothing, you might see people raising their asking price.
  
  When you sell yourself short, it's not only your own value that depreciates.
  
  (No, The Zeroes isn't selling enough copies to pay my bills. Thanks for asking. Also, stop fucking asking. It's not funny.)

• Greater source of anxiety: what happens when I slow down?
  
  When will I slow down?
  
  Am I slowing down?

And the beat goes on. . . .

Busy -- which means this will once again be something of a status report and an effort to sort out for myself all the nonsense I've got going on. In addition to everything else I got myself talked into taking an intensive course in permaculture that occupied 26 hours of my time last week is demanding 30 hours of my time this week. The whole thing culminates with some sort of design project, and I seem to have elected to draw up (and maybe build) a chicken tractor.

Education is tiring.

So, what's on my plate for the next few weeks?

1.) Book. You see that little panel off to the right? The one that says "check out my book?" Right now my primary focus is figuring out how to get more people to do that. I'm sending out emails. I'm trying to find some events I can attend where I can place it in the hands of willing readers. At this point I'll give anything a shot.

If you've already read and enjoyed The Zeroes, why not tell your friends about it? Or better yet, why not leave a review on its Amazon page? Think about it: would you be willing to pick up a book you've never really heard of by an author with whom you have little to no familiarity unless other people had good things to say about him? A few more reviews would really help me out.

2.) I've written a short story designed to worm its way into one of those literary magazines you keep seeing in your English professors' offices. Guess I'll need to send that one out sooner that later. Pitch letters are a pain in the ass to write.

3.) Comics. I know I keep saying this, but Comics over Easy is going to start getting updated soon, and I've hopefully got enough backlogged material to keep it going for a few months. It's kicking off with a couple of strips starring a certain delusional redheaded eccentric, and it'll have the usual "cube" strips you've come to expect. And I'll also be debuting a new comic I've drawn on and off since last summer, but never really posted anywhere. It's apparently good enough that it already has a few fans, and one of them actually made a little felt pin representing one of the main characters:

What a cutie! The little fang was an especially nice touch, if you ask me. (Thanks, Michelle!)

4.) Short novel. Rough draft is at about 85%. This is gonna be a weird one. It's either going to be really effective and really unnerving...or just weird. I guess I can't fault myself for not trying anything different, though.

5.) Wait. Wasn't I supposed to write something about EarthBound?

I suppose it's time to look up chicken tractor designs. Or find people who should be sent advance copies of The Zeroes. Or compose pitch letters for the short story. Or move towards wrapping up the short novel draft. Or sort through my EarthBound screenies and try to remember what I had to say about them.

Or, hell -- maybe I should just get some sleep.

"Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding."

-- Abraham Kaplan

The media scintillates with stories about the (somewhat belated) backlash to Trayvon Martin's murder. Editorial cartoonists are taking this as another opportunity to point out that this is what happens when we have lax gun control laws and a cavalier "we mustn't let the bastard get away" attitude.

Even though the analogy in the last post might not be somewhat disproportionate, I find myself returning to it -- especially when we're hearing reports that both the CIA and Mossad agree that evidence of Iranian intent to build nuclear weapons is somewhat much less than conclusive.

Shoot and then justify. Bomb first and sift through the rubble for evidence of probable cause later.

Would it be in poor taste to suggest a thematic parallel between Trayvon Martin's pointless murder by a paranoid, gun-toting vigilante asshole and the hundred thousand-something Iraqi civilians killed since the United States invaded, citing WMD reports coming from unreliable intelligence? Both suggest a gross deficiency of character in the culture.

Keeping the neighborhood safe. That's all we was ever doing.

* * *

You'll notice I've put up some ads on the sidebar. I don't like looking at them either, but Paddy needs a new Wacom tablet. Realistically, they'll probably only amount to change, but as I've said before, I'm not in any position to pass up extra income, no matter how piddling. (Of course, there is a difference between piddling and nonexistent. We'll see if they stay up.)

Iranian Nukes & American Guns

I read a lot of editorial cartoons; over the past few years they've become an essential part of my morning "news and comics" routine. While I do enjoy reading all the preach-to-the-choir strips by progressive and liberal cartoonists, I often find it just as informative and enriching reading cartoons by artist on the other side of the aisle, which provide a valuable glimpse into the mind of the modern American conservative. For the most part, they're a daily collection of straw men, disproportionate metaphors, and crass caricatures employed to explain and justify the politics of fear, prejudice, oligarchy, dogma, and willful ignorance. (Many of them can be found collected by patriot Philip Pangrac on a Tumblr page which he has aptly titled "Shittiest Editorial Cartoon of the Moment.")

Lately I've had the displeasure of watching conservative cartoonists' "IRAN HAS NUKES AND WE MUST ATTACK IRAN" strips practically develop into their own genre. (Mr. Pangrac is collecting these separately over here.) This stuff is bad for my nerves, and I suspect that's precisely the cartoonists' intent. (It's called "fearmongering.") But I'm much less afraid of Iran maybe perhaps trying to possibly build a nuclear bomb than I am of the prospect of the United States getting embroiled in yet another war in the Middle East because a bunch of right-wingers on either side of the Atlantic are afraid of everyone else in the world.

Actually, what strikes me as especially odd about these cartoons -- and the right-wing efforts to goad the United States into another foreign policy catastrophe -- is that those in this country who vociferate loudest about the unacceptability of an Iranian nuclear program tend to be the same folks who think gun control laws are an abomination.

I wonder: Are these two stances logically consistent?

Whenever some nutjob walks into a public place and shoots a bunch of people, you can always expect Second Amendment partisans to posit that it might have been prevented if more armed citizens were on the scene. When they say this, they don't necessarily mean that the most plausible contingency would be a firefight in which the shooter got killed before he could squeeze off any more rounds; rather, they usually argue that someone would be much more reluctant to take out his divorce on the McDonald's breakfast line with a Glock if he could expect to find all his potential victims packing heat. Good sense, responsibility, and the threat of punishment regulate everybody's behavior, and there are fewer gun deaths despite there being more guns, runs their line of reasoning.

So how is demanding that Iran shouldn't be allowed to possess nuclear weapons reconcilable with this principle?

The world's a dangerous place, after all; plenty of nations are packing atom bombs. Why wouldn't Iran wish for the most powerful defense possible, especially when it's cultivated some seriously bad relationships with a pair of militaristic states with a history of aggression and intimidation? Putting aside geopolitical ramifications for a moment, isn't a nation entitled to protect itself with a deterrent proportional to the weapons with which its enemies might threaten it? How many ground wars, do you suppose, have been ruled out because of the threat of nuclear retaliation?

The Cold War mathematics of nuclear proliferation and M.A.D. bear a striking similarity to the arguments of the gun lobby, do they not?

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- but Iran is a crazy theocratic place run by crazy religious zealous who don't care if they all get burnt to cinders as long as Israel gets destroyed in the process. Somehow I don't think that's the case. If the Iranian regime was really that irrationally, obsessively, irresistibly compelled to attack Israel in spite of all consequences, one would think they'd be going at it already, nukes or no nukes. Why aren't they? Ah, right -- because they know their enemies would blow them back to the bronze age in retaliation. See? They're already demonstrating that they're not insane. (And as I understand it, that is the minimum requirement for gun ownership in the NRA's ideal America.)

Ad hominem: what members I've seen or met of America's most zealous Second Amendment proponents display an aberrance of behavior on par with your average crazy person or religious radical, and they unnerve me just as much.

If Glenn Beck is correct and the right to bear arms is endowed upon us by our capital-g God, doesn't that mean that the Iranians also have the right to build weapons to protect themselves from some very well-armed people down the lane who really don't like them? Couldn't we safely presume that if (and yes, it's still an "if") the Iranian regime is developing nuclear weapons, they would cite as their motivation the need for a defensive deterrent? (Well, part of their motivation, anyway -- the leverage that comes with being a nuclear-armed state has got to be pretty appealing. It could help explain why the United States built more warheads that it could ever conceivably use and why Israel built its bombs in secret, and doesn't seem that concerned with denying their existence.)

Again: for the moment I'm not interested in foreign policy particulars or solutions, but in consistency of principles. It's strange to assert a Creator-endowed right to bear arms in one breath, and then immediately stress the urgency of lobbing ordnance at a nation before it can arm itself with the same weapons we have. Do we really believe the freedom to arm ourselves is somehow exclusive to us (and our friends) because of a backwards sense of national exceptionalism or the belief that we're the favorite people of our favorite deity?

And why do claims like these only sound offensive and unreasonable to Americans when it's someone from another nation making them? 

*Comic at top by Sakai. Further citation details unavailable.

Cubehead Classix

For those of you arriving here from the 8easybits.net URL, welcome! If you're just tuning in, the reason you're here is because I accidentally nuked the .sql engine of the 8EB site during a host/domain transfer and don't know how to fix it.

But I have some good news: a new comics site is underway. From the beginning (before the ill-starred host transfer), the plan was to build a brand new site to host my brand new comics, which would be kept separate from the 8 Easy Bits archives. Although a full 50% of the scheme ended in total disaster, the second half of the project remains in progress. I'm going ahead and transferring most of the comics I've drawn since 2008 (or so) to the new site as originally intended, but this means that a whole lot of "Cube" archives get excluded, and they've got nowhere to go without the old 8 Easy Bits page.

And that's why I'm posting them here!

Well, that's one of the reasons. The other is that I've been so busy elsewhere I haven't had an opportunity (or the remaining psychic reserves) to compose a fully-baked update for this week. (Incidentally, these comics were first conceived to fulfill just such a demand.)

But man...this stuff is ancient. The very first ones date back to when I was twenty, which was eight years ago. Going through these now, I can see why some webcomic artists have deliberately erased or hidden the archives of their earliest work. While it might offer the longtime reader a moment of nostalgic comfort, revisiting really old material can be, for its author/artist, an embarrassing march down Memory Lane (which intersects with I Used To Really Suck At This Avenue and God What A Loser I Was Boulevard). Be warned: if you haven't read these before (or at least not recently), a lot of them are pret-t-t-y bad.

But it does go to show: we've come a long, long way together, haven't we? You have to praise me like you should.

And while we're at it, here are a few more oldies but goodies:

Oh man -- I'd nearly forgotten this one, which dates back to the first semester of my junior year at college (late 2004). For the sake of disclosure, the strip's inclusion is the reason I've tagged this post with a "marijuana" label. Kids, pay attention -- the preceding comic has been a dark portrait of cannabis consumption's effects upon the inexperienced and developing brain. (For your own safety, please just stick to safe, legal binge drinking.)

Of site crashings and book trashings

Two items on tonight's agenda.

If you got redirected here via 8easybits.net, this probably isn't what you were expecting (or wanting) to see. An explanation is in order!

About a month ago I got it in my head to transfer 8easybits.net to a different host. Transferring all the files seemed to go off without a hitch, but we hit a bit of a snag during the domain transfer -- which is why the site was down completely for a few days there. I ironed everything out with the new host, changed the DNS whatchacallems, and naïvely dared to hope that would be it, and everything would be up and running like it was on the old host.

Oops!

Something evidently went very, very wrong during the transfer. The site's engine is busted and I don't know how to fix it. The content is backed up in at least two different places, so there is no need to worry about any comics being lost. (The commentary might be another story, but I'm trying not to worry myself with more than one thing at a time.) But the borked CUSP setup is so obsolete that you can't even download it anymore, much less find a readme file -- not that I'd be able to make much use of it, anyway. I wasn't the person who set everything up to begin with, and I have absolutely no conception of how SQL or PHP is supposed to work. Unless somebody with a functional knowledge of this stuff feels like doing some pro-bono work for the sake of preserving history, 8easybits.net as we've known it for the past seven years is probably a memory.

So why did you change hosts to begin with, genius? you ask. First of all, the host I was using before kept upping its rates, and my income isn't exactly keeping pace. Secondly, I've been working on putting together a new comics site under a new domain. My plan was to use the new site for all the new comics, but to keep the complete 8EB archives in the same place for anyone to browse whenever they wished.

Again: oops.

Looks like we're stalled out for the time being. I'll probably rig up an archives page with some blog software at some point, but that will have to take a backseat to everything else I have planned. 8easybits.net will link to this (updated bi-weekly, usually!) blog until the new comics page is set up, which should be whenever I have a sufficient backlog to maintain a strict, once-per-seven-days update schedule for a three-month period. Until then, I'm afraid our soirees are restricted to the present format. (And do note that this is no longer the latest entry. Click the "Beyond Easy" banner up top to teleport your browser to the most recent update.)

I'm awfully sorry about this. And I'd also like to say that if you're still coming back to reread 8 Easy Bits from time to time, thank you very much -- I think that's really cool.

Moving on, then, to item two!

And now for the bad news.

The night raid on Occupy Wall Street's Zucotti Park camp put me in a really foul mood, which didn't get much better as more details kept coming in. What outraged and frightened me more than anything else were reports that the NYPD tore down the famous People's Library and threw the entire 5,000 book collection into a garbage truck. I felt as though a weight had been removed from my chest when word came in that the news of the library's destruction was premature.

Unfortunately, it seems that the report of the premature report was, in fact, premature.

When members of the encampment visited the garage on 57th Street to retrieve the books, they found the vast bulk of the collection missing. Much of what remains is damaged or practically destroyed -- almost as though it had been fished out of a garbage truck at the last minute.

So it would seem that that big rant I had prepared for Tuesday's update and then scrapped still applies. Jesus H. Christ. I would feel nothing but absolute, unalloyed horror at the NYPD's actions if the idiocy they've demonstrated weren't so confounding as to almost seem comical.

The kneejerk liberal reaction to events of this kind is to cry (or type, preferably in caps) police state, fascist pigs, etc., etc. Usually, I find this sort of epithet-hurling unhelpful, even when there is a grain (or a heap) of truth to the claims. But when city police go ahead and toss five-thousand-plus library books (and make no mistake -- even if it was not housed in a permanent structure or publicly funded, this was a library) into the back of a garbage truck, it takes more restraint than I possess to refrain from entertaining recollections of the world's Nazis, Maoists, Red Khmers, and every other representative of the elemental belligerence, intolerance, and ignorance that has been pissing on civilization like a territorial mutt in a flower garden since the torches were put to Alexandria.

Okay, so maybe it isn't very funny at all -- not even in a dark kind of way. But Bloomberg's bumbling attempt at a cover-up is freaking hilarious.

The announcement that the books were safe came from the Twitter account of Bloomberg's office. Why was the announcement necessary? Well, despite the NYPD's best efforts at a media blackout, news from the ground spread quickly via Twitter. When demonstrators tweeted about the loss of the library, major news outlets seized upon the story. (After all, government-sanctioned destruction of books is something that tends to strike at the public's nerves.) Bloomberg's office quickly claimed the library was intact in order to prevent the aforementioned Nazi parallels from drawing themselves.

When Bloomberg's office announced that the book were safe, a many of us (including myself) took them at their word. Why not? Given that the news of the library's destruction was aggressively put into circulation by the protestors themselves (and subsequently seized upon and propagated by mainstream news outlets), surely Bloomberg's office wouldn't be stupid enough to serve up a baldfaced lie about the status of the books and not anticipate the same people calling them on it, right? I mean, that's the kind of trick only a really, truly, profoundly, astonishingly, blitheringly dumb person would expect to work.

Almost as dumb, at any rate, as Bloomberg's responding to Thursday's demonstrations by insisting that the real story was that the turnout was lower than anticipated -- which is not only another blatant lie, but practically a challenge directed toward the demonstrators. It's the sort of thing a carnival clown shouts at people in line at the dunking booth in order to get them pissed off and ready to go.

Maybe Olbermann is right. Maybe Bloomberg is Occupy's man on the inside. Ever since Tuesday, he's done the movement nothing but favors, disguising them as antagonism. It has to be intentional. The three-term mayor of New York City cannot actually be this stupid, can he...?

Lazy 9/19 update

I wish I could find my hardcover Rogues' Revenge collection. Definitely not the deepest comic on the shelves (I hesitate to even call it a "graphic novel"), but it's just so much fun to look at.

I don't have much else to share this afternoon. It's my birthday and I'm treating myself to a nap. I've added nine new commentary blurbs to the 8EB archives (starting with page #75), if anyone cares to look.

Sleeping now.

So Long, Secret Six (part two)

Picking up from where we left off last time, here's the second half of prime cuts from the recently-canceled Secret Six comic book series. (We'll get back to the headier math/science/literature stuff soon, I swear.) 

10.) The Six Vs. The Society

Long story short: during Villains United (written/released as a component the Countdown to Infinite Crisis crossover pile event), a core group of major DC villains is consolidating virtually every single costumed badguy on the planet into a single organization. A figure named Mockingbird blackmails a crew of six rogue villains into running covert operations against the Society.

In the second issue of Villains United, the Secret Six is ambushed by an arm of the Society in a lovely two page splash that establishes two prevalent recurring motifs we see throughout the series:

(1) Gangs of obscure (and often silly) DC villains throwing down with other obscure (and often silly) DC villains.

(2) The Secret Six finding themselves outnumbered, overpowered, and totally screwed.

Click the image to see a larger version. It's too pretty to be shrunk down or cropped to a 400-pixel width.

9.) Bane Meets Liana

Bane takes his self-assumed role as Scandal's adopted father very seriously. But this is hardly unusual; Bane takes everything very seriously.

Sometime after the death of her teammate/girlfriend Knockout, Scandal begins dating a very nice stripper named Liana (who looks just enough like Knockout to make you wonder if Simone ever had some sort of Jean Grey/Madelyne Pryor plan in mind). During her first vist to the Six's abode, Liana is received at the door by Bane.

Remember that time when you took your high school crush out on a date? Remember when her father came down to size you up and have a few words with you in confidence while your date was still upstairs getting ready?

Imagine how much more frightening and awkward this would be if your date's father was the guy who put Batman in a wheelchair.

Scandal comes downstairs and bails out a very relieved Liana just as Bane presents her with a pen and pad and asks that she make a list of all her previous sexual partners and any known diseases.

Later on, Liana warms up to Bane and sets him up with one of her coworkers. We're treated to scenes of The Man Who Broke the Bat wearing street clothes and taking a peppy young woman to the county fair, and (with a single particularly glaring exception) Simone keeps Bane completely true to character. (This is what is known as "development." Geoff Johns should remember to try it more often.)

8.) Scandal's upbringing

By the time the number of issues in the regular series hits the double digits, we begin to suspect that Scandal might be the only member on the team who's at all okay.Catman likes to get buck naked and hang out with lions on the African savanna for months on end. Bane is a drug addict with a dangerously obsessive personality. Deadshot is a borderline sociopath who shoots people. Jeanette gets turned on when Deadshot shoots people. Ragdoll is Ragdoll. Compared with the outright lunacy of her teammates, Scandal's daddy issues seem pretty tame.

We might think this before we get our one flashback to her childhood. On her ninth birthday, her father brings Scandal outside and threatens to have her mother killed unless she performs a task for him:

Scandal gets beaten by men with sticks for a few minutes. Vandal calls off his goons and presents his daughter with a gift and some fatherly guidance.

7.) "How'm I gonna watch Avatar now?"

I can't deny being a DC Comics geek, but I'm not nearly enough of one to have read anything about King Shark prior to his appearances in the Secret Six volumes. As far as I can tell, he was introduced as a major villain in the first issue of the 1990s Superboy series, and was intended to be:

A. The son of a Hawaiian shark god
B. A major threat
C. Taken seriously

When he begins appearing in Secret Six, he is not taken seriously. He gets stomped by Solomon Grundy. Jeanette beats him up. Ragdoll gouges his eye out.

Simone reinvents King Shark by focusing exclusively on a single aspect of his character: his sharkness. King Shark is a shark. He loves being a shark. In fact, he's so happy about being a shark that nothing ever puts him in a bad mood.

One of the worst things about the timing of Secret Six's cancellation is that we only get two (very small) story-arcs featuring King Shark as an official member of the team. Drag.

6.) The Secret Six Vs. Wonder Woman

The Secret Six is tough, but still pretty low-caliber on the DCU power scale. When an angry Wonder Woman shows up to pick a fight, the team just stands there. They already know they're beaten.

Deadshot tries shooting her, just for the hell of it. Wonder Woman does that bullet-deflecting thing with her bracelets and floors him. Jeanette, the one member of the team with super-strength, tries her luck as well. She does better than Deadshot, but that's not saying much.

Meanwhile, the male members of the team stand at a relatively safe distance and gawk at the catfight in which none of them are even remotely equipped to participate.

(For the record, Batman has never directly beaten Wonder Woman one-on-one, but his plan for dealing with her worked pretty damn well. See: Tower of Babel.)

5.) "This is fucked up, right?"

The bromance between Catman and Deadshot is a lot of fun to read. The reasons why they get along are surprisingly complex, but in a nutshell: Deadshot, the self-loathing assassin, likes having a buddy who still possesses some shred of decency; Catman, who would like to be one of the heroes but is too much of a villain, can relate to Deadshot's killer instinct.

What makes their friendship especially cute is their mutual reluctance to admit how much they enjoy each other's company. Catman sometimes shows it, but Deadshot usually just makes fun of Catman and threatens to shoot him.

There's a very nicely-done moment in the Cats in the Cradle arc when the team arrives on the scene after Catman has taken out the first of the thugs responsible for kidnapping Thomas Blake, Jr.

Deadshot is so shocked that he accidentally slips up and refers to Catman by the affectionate diminutive of his first name -- but then quickly remembers himself in front of his teammates and quickly (and conspicuously) corrects himself. Aww.

4.) The Mad Hatter Vs. The Doom Patrol

Whether because of an editorial mandate or Simone's caprices, the Secret Six squares off against the Doom Patrol (another superhero/superfreak team) in the Six Degrees of Devestation miniseries. I'm a bit more inclined to suspect the hand of the editors, since the meeting between the teams seems a tad shoehorned into the story. But it's not a total waste of time, as it gives the Six's newest member -- Gotham City's own Mad Hatter -- a chance to show his stuff. So far, the Hatter has done nothing but waddle around like a homeless midget and spout Lewis Carroll quotes. He's a late arrival to the fight, but singlehandedly turns the tide by using his Jedi mind tricks to convince the Doom Patrol to kick their own asses.

Did you know the Hatter could do this? I thought he could only control people when they were wearing his hats, but whatever. This is neat too.

3.) "Don't ever fuck with The Wall."

While the two opposing Secret Six teams are trying to kill each other in Skataris, their respective government handlers duke it out in Washington. Katarina Armstrong (a.k.a. Spy Smasher), who controls Bane's team, challenges Amanda Waller (who controls Scandal's team) for her unspoken title of Government Spook Queen.

Armstrong apparently psyches out The Wall and sends her off on a phony trail, then coerces a federal agent into planting bogus evidence implicating Waller of treason in the Pentagon's computer system. Waller suddenly materializes in Armstrong's office, shoots her accomplice in the head, and offers Armstrong some advice.

Man. No wonder Deadshot's scared of her.

2.) The Parademon's Sacrifice

During the team's earliest days as a blackmailed sextet of anti-Society kamikazes, one of its original members was a Parademon. For any non-geeks in attendance, a Parademon is a grunt trooper from the planet Apokolips. 99.9% percent of the time, Parademons don't get to talk, have names, or do much of anything but get their asses stomped by Superman. Having a nameless Parademon appear on a DC superteam is about as strange a thing as a character called "Stormtrooper" playing a major role in some Star Wars Expanded Universe story about the New Sith (or whatever).

The Parademon and Ragdoll shared a special (and very strange) relationship. The Parademon, having been born into slavery on a hellish planet where there's no such thing as laughter, mistakenly takes Ragdoll to be a clown and treats him with the deep, obsequious respect he believes is due to a brilliant artist. Though Ragdoll keeps insisting he isn't a clown, he enjoys the Parademon's company because he doesn't notice or care what a depraved weirdo he is.

During the Six's hopeless final stand against the Society, the Parademon blows himself up to give Ragdoll a (very small) chance at escaping.

Minutes later, Vandal Savage intervenes to have the strike against the Six called off. The Parademon's sacrifice buys the team just enough time to save themselves from getting slaughtered. A grateful Ragdoll kneels beside the dying Parademon.

What a strange and moving comic book moment.

Afterwards, Ragdoll has Parademon's body stuffed and placed in his bedroom. On repeated occasions he refers to it as his best friend and regularly carries out conversations with it. (Very strange, but not quite so moving. Dammit, Ragdoll.)

1.) Bane Vs. Junior

I changed my mind on this one, but let me tell you about my original choice.

Like that of any one-hit wonder, Bane's career as a supervillain is defined by only one thing: he's the guy who beat Batman (once).

That's a hard act to top. In the years following the Knightfall arc, Bane hasn't done much. He's already beaten Batman, so that's off the table. Every other big name superhero he could fight has superpowers; Bane might be smart as Batman and twice as strong, but he wouldn't stand a chance against Superman or the Flash. Usually, he just pops up out of nowhere to break some D-list hero or villain over his knee and blurt out some idiotic one-liner like "I AM BANE. I BREAK PEOPLE." It always fails to impress, and that's probably why DC's editors said "sure, why not?" when Simone asked if she could draft Bane into the Secret Six.

Simone is a smarter and better writer than most of the comic book hacks who have passed Bane back and forth in the years since Knightfall, and realizes that the "Bane is really strong and he beat Batman once" shtick had worn thin ages ago. Thus, the character's finest moment in Secret Six occurs when he's at the mercy of someone else's brutality.

First, a comic book history lesson. In the Knightfall storyline, Bane breaks open Arkham Asylum and arms the inmates. All of a sudden, just about every costumed criminal Batman has ever put away is on the loose and packing heat. Batman runs himself ragged trying to chase them all down and bring them back in. Over the next few weeks, Bane lurks in the background and keeps track of Batman -- observing his movements, watching him fight, learning how he thinks, and deducing his secret identity as Bruce Wayne. At the end of the storyline, Bane confronts an exhausted Batman in his own home, and cripples him after a short and very one-sided fight. It's really the only time that Batman has completely and indisputably lost to one of his enemies.

Knightfall isn't so much about Batman's defeat as about his heroism and superhuman force of will. By pushing Batman to his absolute limit, Bane demonstrates just how far Batman's limits actually are. Bane has to systematically take Batman apart because that's really the only way Batman can be defeated -- and it takes a long time. When Bane appears in the Batcave juiced up on the Venom steroid and ready to fight, Batman hasn't slept in days, has at least a few broken bones, and is probably bleeding internally -- and he still hurls himself at Bane, even though he's barely capable of even throwing a punch. Bane tenderizes him a while, then gets him in a hold and shout something like, "beg for mercy! Scream my name!"

"Go back to hell," says Batman, and passes out. Next comes that immortal splash page.

So: Bane wipes the floor with Batman, but in the process, he shows how much of a bad ass Batman really is.

In Secret Six, Bane demonstrates the profundity of his own mettle by standing on the receiving end of a pile of bricks and a monstrous crime boss with a mean throwing arm.

Junior gets the jump on Bane, subdues him, and drags him to an empty construction site. The rest of the Six have escaped, and they have Junior's "Get Out of Hell Free" card and the woman who stole it with them.

Bane says nothing. Like Batman, he refuses to be beaten, even when completely helpless against his foe.

That was what I was going to name as Secret Six's best moment -- but then I wondered if I mightn't be overthinking it.

1.) Bane Rides a Dinosaur

Yeah, that's right. On the cover of issue #27, Bane rides a fucking Tyrannosaurus. Is an explanation even necessary?

Truly, this is what comic books are all about.

Godspeed, Secret Six.