The Killing Joke

I am clearly not the first person to draw the parallel between a certain recently terminated real-world supervillain and a certain archetypal/unkillable comic book supervillain. (Nor did I ever put much thought into the blockbuster movie that made much of that parallel.) But hey, here's the first visual that looked blog-worthy in a search that yielded 993,000 results as of tonight:



(There was also this, for instance, and I expect a lot more in the days ahead.)

In other semi-breaking news, I gotta say recent events do make this development in superhero land seem even more provocative. What both of these stories make me think about is a soundbite from Martin Luther King that has been floating around Facebook all day today:

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."

But enough seriousness for now. Let's get back to horniness, shall we? You already know I am a bigger Batfan than Superfan, but allow me to linger on this tasty bit of hand-drawn manmeat before I disappear back into the shadows for an unspecified amount of time, as I am wont to do:

Bad boys, bad boys ...

When you watch this video (which I found at Boing Boing tonight), you're supposed to keep your eye on the suspect, who eats what is believed to be the ransom note for a bank robbery around 19 seconds in. MY eyes were solidly with the cops. Yum!

Don't ask, he won't tell

Remember, boys and girls: Do NOT ask a cop this question:



It was Officer Hub who tipped me off to the site Things Not to Ask a Cop. The clip-art gent you see above appears in every installment, much like the characterless characters from the much-loved and much-missed (by me, anyway) Get Your War On webcomic.

When I first checked out Things Not to Ask, I automatically assumed it was the work of a cop or maybe a cop spouse. But the more I looked over the identical-looking single-panel comics, the more I started to wonder. Let's just say if an actual officer of the law is coming up with stuff like this, he or she (no, definitely He) surely won't keep his job very long.

Out of the comics & onto the streets

Finally got around to reading "The Legend of Master Legend," Joshua Bearman's "epic tale" of self-created real-life superheroes from the Dec. 25, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone. As Bearman noted in BoingBoing back when the story first ran ,

[T]he narrative at Boing Boing (and in the wider world) about real life superheroes has mostly been bemusement at the weirdos in spandex. That was my perception of the world when I started reporting. But this is [a?] most serious look at what it actually means that people are doing this, and having found Master Legend and spent a lot of time with him, I realize that what he's doing is strange, yes, but also strangely sympathetic.

Sure enough, while there's a tongue-in-cheek quality to the story, you do get the sense that our narrator believes there is more to ML and colleagues like these and these than an easy punchline. Here's a bit from the end of the piece:

This may be the real reason Master Legend inhabits a never-ending comic book in his mind, assigning everyone a character in the grand narrative. ... [T]he reality of Master Legend, a guy who has no job and lives in a run-down house in a crummy neighborhood in Orlando, is transmuted via secret decoder ring into an everlasting tale of heroic outsiders, overcoming the odds and vanquishing enemies. To the outside world, this makes Master Legend seem like a lunatic. But to the people around him, he is the charismatic center of an inviting universe. ... Being a Real Life Superhero means that Master Legend can get in his Nissan pickup and call it the Battle Truck. He can tape together a potato gun and call it the Master Blaster. He can stand in the porch light of a disintegrating clapboard house, a beer in his hand, and behold a glorious clandestine citadel. And who are we to tell him otherwise?

Who, indeed?

BONUS! Actual comments from and flame wars between some of the heroes in Bearman's tale here and on page 1 of the online version of the story.
EXTRA BONUS! Deleted material from the original story here.

Meanwhile, back in the real (?) world ...

I must admit, I'm disheartened by the recent murder of two policemen by the so-called "Real IRA" (brilliant name, btw, which has now inserted itself sans quotation marks into coverage of the story, thus lending legitimacy to a splinter group that doesn't appear to deserve any). It seemed for so long lately like Northern Ireland was a workable, inspirational example of actual change in a situation that had been deadlocked for decades, if not centuries--a case for diplomacy and compromise as an end to violence. (I thought it was a very smart move, a few years ago, when reps from Ireland tried to lend their experience to participants in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, not that it appears to have done much good.) This NPR interview with BBC correspondent Audrey Carville struck me, as an outsider, as a very good analysis of the situation--the economic context in which the incident took place, the ironies involved (like the image of a former IRA leader now working with the same British police whose murders he once plotted), and just what is at stake right now. I try very hard to keep an open mind to every side of a story, particularly those that unfold on the other side of the world from me, but this feels to me like a pretty clearcut case of a small minority doing everything it can to undo years of hard work for the sheer hell of it.

On a lighter note, we have "Eye-borg," the superhero-ish moniker of filmmaker Rob Spence, a self-described Six Million Dollar Man fan who is outfitting his empty eye socket with a camera. The first interview I heard with him (which I can't find at the moment) explicitly raised the possibility that he could use his new "superpower" for good or for evil. And at Spence's website, you'll find the following video intro; note the many references to Luke Skywalker, Neo, and other fictional precedents:


EYEBORG-- The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

Maybe Eye-borg can lend his services to "the Troubles."

No shit, Sherlock

Lots of recent odds and ends, connections between which I largely leave to you:

1. An episode of the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge devoted to Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives. For the record, I admit to a mild Holmes fetish, particularly when he is portrayed by Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone, and particularly in the WWII-era Rathbone films like SH and the Woman in Green and Dressed to Kill. The real reason I like that series--films in which Holmes is moved into the present day, surely to the horror of true A. C. Doyle fans--is that they are lower than the "real" stories on detective work and higher on, you guessed it, delightfully kinky deathtraps. In many of them (I think there are at least four made back-to-back in the mid-1940s) Moriarty gets to be a Joker-style archnemesis bent on our hero's demise, more overtly than in the canonical novels and tales.

2. Another public radio show, RadioLab, recently rebroadcast an episode devoted to the subject of morality. This summary lays out the terrain:

we’ll explore where our sense of right and wrong come from. We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade.

3. And speaking of morality (see, these items are connected after all!), here's a nice piece on the demise of (and ethics of) the pirated-comic-panels extravaganza Scans Daily from Johnny Bacardi. I admit it--I visited often (though never daily) in search of images that floated my bat-boat. But apparently I didn't check it that often, or I would have known that SD was no more. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

4. Finally, a link that has nothing to do with morality, but if I don't post it now I'll forget about it: Bat-Blog tipped me off to a Flash animation of Batman's utility belt. Here's a direct link to the project, which was originally intended for tech geeks and vanilla-flavored comics fanboys, but I say, bring on the belt-fetishists, too!

I assure you, the animated version is more fun than this mere frame grab:

"I'm just a kid trying to make a difference"

News quiz:

1. Is the self-description in the subject line a quote from
a. the anonymous 14-year-old boy who spent 5 hours in uniform (sans badge and gun) on patrol with the Chicago police department, or
b. the 15-year-old Southern California boy who has become an international phenomenon with his "no-cussing" campaign?

2. Which of the above two were you more like in your mid-teens?
3. Which one of the two would you rather have a conversation with today?

The real answer to #1, and my personal answers to #2 and 3, are in the comments. Feel free to leave your own, as well.

As a reward--or possible punishment--for your score, here's the "Don't Cuss" music video:



Shit yeah!

Catch-up, continued: The (mostly) Bat Edition

More stuff that's been clogging the batcomputer waiting for me to mention it here. I've got plenty, on all sorts of topics, so here's a bunch that's specifically bat-centric (with one exception) ...

•Let's begin by watching the single hottest sequence from the whole of the legendary Animated Series (thanks as always, Anonymous Donor!):



•Hot off the press (at least more so than any of the following items), reports of a real-life Batman in the U.K.

•In the interest of balance, however, behold a naughty real-life Captain America. (Fans of unmasking and/or heroes in handcuffs will want to catch the video footage from jail of the bad good-guy being booked.)

•Arkham After Midnight: Riddle Me Deadly, an interesting fan film experiment combining found bat-footage from various sources to create a faux silent film. One Arkham inmate after another finds a parallel from silent classics, and the result suggests that Batman has a lot more in common with German Expressionism and surrealism (among other things) than you might guess; it's also considerably meatier--and more ominous--than the actual bat-serials it samples.

•A now-old (Batman Begins-era) but still functional guide to "How the Batsuit Works," in the tradition of those techno-fetishistic geek guides to the blueprints of the Enterprise, Millenium Falcon, etc. Only difference is, this one's something I've been fetishizing myself for four decades and counting.

•In a related vein, a catalog of "the Great Batman Equipment Archive."

•From 2005, the answer to the question all America has asked at least once: "Is Batman Nuts?"

•Bat-bloggery from ...
Again with the Comics
I Found All Six (Slylock Fox in da house!)
Blockade Boy (RIP)

•More YouTube fun to wrap up this installment:

"Our past belongs to us; we can change it if we want."

So says Mia Farrow's character at a critical moment in Be Kind Rewind. (Spoiler alert: It arrives two thirds of the way into the movie, and there's no way to make the point I want to make without revealing at least a little of the final third, so you may want to skip the rest of this post if you enjoy surprises.)



As a big fan of Michel Gondry's earlier films and music videos, I'd been meaning to see this 2008 feature during its brief run in theaters, despite the mediocre-to-bad reviews I'd read, but I never quite got around to it until now. I fully understand the poor reception, even from fellow lovers of Eternal Sunshine and The Science of Sleep (for the record, I even love Human Nature, which nobody seems to like). Throughout its first two acts, I kept thinking Rewind was his worst film, marred by a farfetched/downright silly premise and a gratingly generic performance by Jack Black. (The best thing on the DVD is not the movie, but an accompanying short, "Passaic Mosaic," which makes a beautiful if unspoken case for BWR as the missing link between Gondry's surreal features and his otherwise utterly uncharacteristic documentary/concert film, Dave Chapelle's Block Party.)

If you're familiar with Rewind, here's the high-concept part you know: Black's character becomes magnetized and erases all the stock in the last shop in Passaic, NJ (if not America) that still rents VHS tapes, which leads him and clerk Mos Def to shoot amateur remakes of each one. (This practice is called "sweding" in the movie, but they're basically fanfilms.) A wacky enough idea, I suppose, and the best bits are in the official trailer. But it all seemed beneath the talents of Gondry, one of the most imaginative writer/directors around. It also begs two questions: What about DVDs? and Isn't this whole thing a massive violation of copyright? Question #1 is dismissed in five seconds, but the second one proves a doozy. To make matters worse, our heroes learn that one of the major subthemes of the story has been completely fabricated. Fortunately, there's an entire third act not really hinted at in the trailer.

That's when things get interesting--and Gondryesque. Farrow's character states the premise pretty directly in the line above. What began as two guys covering up an accident evolves into a communitywide art project. I'll spare you further details, but it's interesting that the major studio's lawyers are the bad guys (way to stick it to the Man, New Line!) and that the entire film is a defense of fans' rights to retell and extend their favorite corporate fictions. I'd suggest, in the spirit of sweding, that you could even tweak Farrow's line to read "Our fantasies belong to us; we can refine them however we like." There's an intriguing invitation in the final credits directing us to the official website to see the "sweded" films excerpted in the movie, but that site has disappeared and there's no trace of them on the one that remains to plug the DVD. (I kinda wonder if maybe actual copyright lawyers made them go away.) However, you can see a few examples on this YouTube channel.

And if those aren't enough, check out this handy list of Sweded films made for a contest including a parody of Batman Begins featuring a rather fetching Bruce Wayne/Bat.

While I was out ... summer reading

A while back I picked up used copies of the trade paperback versions of a couple of Bat stories I knew from way back, though when they first appeared in comic book form I'd only read portions of them. I freely admit my initial interest in both was purely prurient, but as is so often the case, when I actually paid attention to the storylines I was intrigued.



Or, in its more recent but equally studly edition:



Batman: Tales of the Demon collects Dennis O'Neil's first 11 stories about R'as al Ghul. RAG is a character that I've generally found more interesting in the classic animated series and the 2005 movie than in the comics, but come on, this is the storyline that includes the images that made me gay and the single hottest comic book cover of my adolescence.

O'Neil, writing in a 1991 afterword, apologizes for the whiz-bang nature of the dialogue and faux-Marvel-isms of the narration, and seems very upset about a certain plot inconsistency, but that's hardly my concern. These stories come from the heyday of late 70s/early 80s bat-beefcake, so the musculature is always gloriously pronounced and our hero is constantly getting bonked on the head so that he can lie prone on the floor for several panels an issue. Hooray! As a side bonus, we get to see the origins of Bats' "Matches Malone" alter ego, and O'Neil rightly notes that these stories marked an important part of the character's evolution out of 60s camp and into 90s gloom. But really now: shirts come off (a lot), cowls get lifted, and it's all good, people. It's allllll goooooood.

Here's a lengthy review by "the Masked Bookwyrm," someone who clearly knows and thinks (and cares) a lot more about this kind of thing than I do.

Before we leave RAG for another late-era supervillain, let's savor the animated incarnation I was just talking about, shall we? (There's a good chance I've already posted this clip, because I've been saving it for this purpose for at least two years, but the initial tunic-removal scene bears repeating.)





Batman: The Cult. I know, I know, we're really not supposed to like this thing, because it's ultracynical and hyperviolent and cryptofascist, and all of that is true, but come on, how could I pass up a cover image like this?



To be honest, I lost interest after the second of four parts when this initially came out, but boy, that first issue was hot: Batman bound, broken, on his damn knees before his captor... Need I go on? Years later, I read an interview with Frank Miller about the thing; Miller hated it for all the reasons cited above plus the fact that the premise and even the panel structure owed so much to Dark Knight Returns, but as a BDSM stroke book, issue one is nearly unparalleled in mainstream comics.

I was amused to read writer Jim Starlin's explanation that ubervillain Deacon Blackfire was loosely inspired by the hypocritical right-wing demagogues of the Culture Wars of the late 80s (including the now freshly deceased Jesse Helms), because that certainly doesn't come through in the text. But no matter: Like the RAG story cycle, this makes an interesting pop culture lens on the issues of its time, both inside and outside the comics universe.

Once again, here's the Bookwyrm's take.

(PS. Between my last post here and this one, I caught a good-sized chunk of Skidoo on late-night TV. I'd heard for years about this legendary Hollywood-hippie-era bad-acid-trip of a movie, but had no idea its eclectic cast reunited Frank Gorshin, Cesar Romero, and Burgess Meredith--all directed by Mr. Freeze himself, Otto Preminger!)

Check out that bat-crotch!

From Bat-Blog, a link to a political ad campaign in Brussels depicting superheroes as various minorities. Interesting concept, but I'm a little too distracted by this blind Batman's bunching briefs. Can I get an "amen"?!

Update:The point of the ad campaign was to encourage voters to think about, say, blind people as capable of holding higher office--and, irony of ironies, I posted the above image shortly before New York state got its first sight-impaired, African American governor. Of course, mentioning that here only forces me to admit that if I were really serious about this blog's stated theme, I'd be waxing eloquent on the whole Eliot Spitzer saga, and I just don't have the time or energy to do so. But come on! The man who until about a week ago was frequently portrayed as practically a real-life superhero (or at least the new Eliot Ness, as we were often reminded) falls from grace into utter villainy? A saga worthy of Marvel comics! (Good thing I'm a DC guy from way back, and thus less interested in moral ambiguities than rippling muscles.)

Sympathy for the Devil

Tonight's interview with Stanford Psychology professor (emeritus) Philip Zimbardo on The Colbert Report reminds me that maybe one day I should actually read his latest book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, if I ever want to think seriously about the notion of "heroes" and "villains."

I meant to write about Zimbardo here when I first watched this recent documentary about his infamous Stanford Prison Experiments among other "Human Behavior Experiments" demonstrating how ordinary people can be prompted to do extraordinarily awful things to each other. Never quite got around to that--but it turns out those two programs are merely the tip of the media iceberg. (Lots more TV and print appearances are catalogued here.)

I see, too, that Zimbardo is quite the master packager of himself--in addition to the site for the book, he's got a snazzy little home page and another devoted to the prison experiments, complete with slide show and discussion points. One such note does a nice job of decoding one of my favorite bits of police fetishism: "Consider the police procedures which make arrestees feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized. Note that this policeman is wearing sunglasses just like those we had our 'guards' wear and as did the head of the National Guards at Attica Prison during its bloody 1971 riot!"

I confess

I could swear I've written about the documentary Confessions of a Superhero here already, but I'll be damned if I want to track down the post to be sure. Still haven't seen it, but this intriguing review of the film reminds me it's out there, and on DVD now to boot.

Crystal meth, mob ties, incarceration...

... and that's just Batman.

(Pssst: more nice photos and some video clips on the official site; see link above.)

Holy secret identity!

This episode of This American Life about a man who completely reinvented his life at least nine times would be interesting enough even if one of those lives did not include providing the voice of Batman in a series of record albums in the early 70s (which I swear I've heard). It's a wild story, and I guarantee you'll never hear that booming voice again without thinking of the Caped Crusader as a pot-smoking, child-terrorizing, gray-flannel-suit-wearing, failed-movie-star Christian fundamentalist.

PS. Special bonus discovered while trying in vain to find an image of the album art: this and several other lengthy essays on 60s-era Batman from the site Captain Comics.

Superman in the news

Dear lord, am I ever slacking on the blog front these days! I have no seasonal disorders to blame at the moment, just an overfull schedule that I will ... one day ... discuss here.

But I could delay blgging no longer when I was driving home a moment ago and heard a radio report on recent sightings of a flying, blue-suited Superman in Romania. (No surprise, the flying part interests me way less than the shiny blue tights, red boots, and red cape.)

That, in turn, reminded me that I never got around to sharing an item that my cyberpal Wwuf passed along ages ago, about a former Army drill sargeant who forced his male trainees to dress like the Man of Steel and perform sexual acts.

To-do list:
1. Join the Army
2. Get stationed in Romania.

Oh, and:
3. Update blog more often.

Crimewave

I"m almost positive it's a rebroadcast, and I may even have written about it here before, but the most recent episode of This American Life, titled "Allure of Crime," is pretty interesting.

In the world of heroes and villains, I'm usually far more turned on by the heroes--the only way I can ever be bothered to watch a cop show is for the cops, and I've always longed for more attention to Batman/less to his foes in the recent movies--but it's true that the bad guys' stories are more interesting than the good guys. Me, I had no idea that that sweet Julia Sweeney, she of Saturday Night Live and God Said, "Ha!" fame, had stolen over 10 thousand bucks in her misguided youth, or that even sweeter widows were leading such active social lives as senior-citizen shoplifters. What's most disarming about the interview subjects on the show is how nonchalant they are about their criminal activities. No angst, just matter-of-fact observations about how good it feels to do very bad things. (But, uh, isn't that the definition of a sociopath?)

Make it work, slave

Been home sick all week, which has meant lots of sleeping, not much bat-activity, and a HUGE amount of television, including two mini-marathons of season two of Project Runway. Okay, I know what you're saying: "All well and good, Batfan60, but what does this have to do with the stated mission of your blog?" It's true, Runway is simply not about cops or costumed crimefighters--well, unless you count the passing mention of superhero-themed lingerie in one episode, but the proposed relaunch of Underoos for adult women (emblazoned with words like "BAM!" and "POW!" on the crotch) did not make it too far.

No, the thing about the show that I want to mention here is the strong undercurrent of SM in pretty much every episode. In the fantasy dynamic of the series--a multicultural dream world that seems to consist entirely of heterosexual women and gay men--everything revolves around dominance and submission. Sure, the contestants are competing against each other, which involves the usual amount of reality-tv gameplaying, but more interesting is the way they have to answer each week to dominatrix Heidi Klum, prissy taskmaster Tim Gunn, and a revolving panel of hard-to-please celebrity judges. At the same time, each contestant has an accompanying "muse"/model, and these lovely ladies are at the very bottom of the pecking order, who suffer the injustice of being traded in slave-auction-style rituals. (We hear them speak when they're kicked off the show, or--very rarely--when they get up the nerve to complain to their Masters about some especially uncomfortable or humiliating outfit.) Much of the show is devoted to people getting chewed out by their superiors, their faces charged with silent shame or suppressed rage. All that's missing is the "sir, yes sir."

I've come to detest 98% of the "reality" shows that have sprung up in the wake of the first season of Survivor ( a show I did think was amazing for its time), but this one really is pretty addictive. Of course, it helps that I find a lot of the male cast members fairly sexy in one way or another (including the aforementioned Tim), but the appeal is greater than mere cuteness. The kinky dimension doesn't hurt, either.

Bonus TV talk: As I type this, Bravo is airing what I assume is one of many endless rebroadcasts of its 3-part Ultimate Super Heroes, Villains, and Vixens mini-series, narrated by Adam West himself. Not very informative (Stan Lee saying what he always says, plenty of clips for recent movies spun off from DC and Marvel characters, and lots of those ubiquitous talking-head interviews with people who do nothing but provide commentaries like this for cable channels), but it's yet another pleasant distraction from sniffling and sneezing. If you've ever wanted to know what Dee Snider has to say about Batman, now's your chance.

Next up: the Winter Olympics, every lycra-lover's dream. 400+ hours of luge and "skeleton" suits. Hallelujah!

Jack U Off

Not since the Oliver North hearings have I been this turned on by a real-life creepy political bad guy. (Okay, so there's my thing for Ari Fleischer, but he wasn't really the bad guy so much as the mouthpiece for the bad guy.) It's true: I have the hots for Jack Abramoff.

I love that trenchcoat, and I'm nuts about this shot of him in a full beard. Or (in case you don't want to bother clicking the links) this one, which is not as cute as the other one, but will do in a pinch:



Just thought I'd share. After all, that's what blogging is for, ain't it? If you can't anonymously confess embarrassing attractions to objectionable individuals, why bother, right?

The imagination of disaster: 3 (The real and the fantastic)

The Hub and I finally made it to Fantastic Four tonight. Both of us were mighty glad we waited till it was at the cheap joint. As H said, "The only good thing about that movie was the costumes." And, yes, it was mighty refreshing to see spandex-clad superheroes actually clad in spandex, or something resembling it (though I also enjoyed the shots of bare-chested Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans).

But this isn't really a post about the movie; it's really a post about what was on the TV in the Mexican restaurant where we ate before the movie: an episode of America's Most Wanted about the "Erie Collar Bomber" who snapped an explosive device on a pizza delivery guy and ordered him to rob a bank, back in 2003. Amazingly enough, I don't recall hearing anything about the case at the time, though the Hub did. (Well, he is in law enforcement.) We couldn't make out most of the narrative over the Mexi-muzak in the restaurant, but we pieced together as much as possible, and then I looked up more online on the way to the movie.

Suffice to say that Fantastic Four could not possibly compete with the Pizza Bomber when it comes to mind-blowing adventure--spandex or no spandex. Turns out several people at the time of the crime in question (like this one and several of these) had the same thought I did: that this whole thing is straight out of a comic book. Joker? Riddler? Clock King? The Puzzler? Could be just about any of 'em...

For the record, the collar bomber/pizza bomber saga also reminds me of this almost equally bizarre (and equally comic-book-like) saga of an online gaming guy and the artists who essentially stalked him as an art project. Once again, an "innocent" bystander is plucked out of his daily routine and plunged into a surreal adventure involving false pretenses, clues, challenges, and the like--only this time the game is not a deadly one (and the "victim" lives to tell the tale in his own words, too).

I find both of these strange tales utterly fascinating, in much the same way that my own bat-adventures with the Monk and various other quasi-fictional but still-real characters blur the lines between fantasy and something more tangible. (Inevitable disclaimer: just as I don't want to end up the prey of a cannibal, I am not interested in tangling with actual master criminals, either.)

Could it be that, as real life feels more and more scripted and predictable, deviations from that script--deviations that resemble actual comic-book-movie scripts--are what keep us going?

The imagination of disaster: 1

Like many of you, I spent most of last week glued to the tv and heart-rending websites like this one absorbing all I can about the catastrophe in New Orleans. That city will always occupy a special place in my heart, and everything feels even more (sur)real because for several years the Hub and I headed down there on Labor Day weekend for Southern Decadence. (BTW, you'll be intrigued to learn that the rain of destruction visited upon that poor city is actually God's punishment for Decadence, according to this fucked-up web page. On the bright side, it seems a dozen or so Quarter residents held the parade after all.)

Any time something globally awful happens (9/11, the tsunami disaster, etc.), it seems trivial, if not downright offensive, to continue talking about superheroes. On the other hand, I can't help finding comic-book parallels to real-life events as a way to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible. Such events aren't really "unimaginable," given how vividly they have been imagined in horror and fantasy fiction for decades. Osama bin Laden is nothing if not a member of the Legion of Doom, and the horrors of New Orleans (flooding, looting, fires, mass casualties, the apparent neglect of the federal government) keep bringing me back to the earthquake that turned Gotham City into a lawless zone a couple of years back during that whole "No Man's Land" saga that I didn't really follow too closely.

In other words, fictional worlds give us ways to envision disasters in the real one. "It's just like a movie" has been the recurring response to both 9/11 and Katrina. I have more to say about this, but I'll save it for a future post.