Four Nerds

Kust finished watching the DVD -- Every minute of this show is hilarious. I didn't htink the MArtin Short episode was all that and a bag of chips, but David Cross playing Mrs.Featherbottom and his unwavering commitment to the "role" is sheer brilliance.

Also, check out his little rant on the bloopers reel calling out FOX marketing on its piss poor promotion (PPP) of the show.

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PPP - I'm adding it to the book of L33T /\/\aRk=t1/\/g sp33k

When I got back into comic collecting in 2001, I had one mission. Fill in the holes on my X-Men comics pronto and forsake all other books. Well, I'm a retard!

What happened in the time when I quit comics (93') and my return almost a decade later, was a shift in power. A shift in the raw creative juices that fuel these stories of the fantastic.

When I left comics in 93' Marvel was king. Sure they had lost some of their superstars to this new upstart company called "Image". But, by that time most people realized Liefeld actually sucked and Jim Lee needed to let his ego simmer down. And by 93' most people were starting to realize that Image was only that, an Image.

DC was doing OK killing off and maiming its main characters, but we all knew that these supposed "life altering" events for batman and Superman would be transitory at best. At their worst they would just be marketing vehicles. I'll let the 12 polybagged white and black (each) issues of Superman sitting in my basement be the judge on this one.

Marvel truly reigned supreme. The stories were real without being disturbing like Vertigo comics. And thanks to Liefeld jumping ship the books actually started to have backgrounds in the art again (my biggest complaint against the man, I defy you to find a background in his panels).

I loved the X-Men of this time period. So it only made sense that when I got back into comics that these would be the books I would hunt down to get me up to speed as to what was going down during my seven+ year hiatus.

And the books were good. Not fantastic, but quality.

What I didn't realize until the whole "Infinite Crisis' thing started a few months ago was that the power of creativity had shifted back to DC.

I recently picked up the relaunch of JLA in TPB format from the mid-90's and it is AMAZING. Now, of course I shouldn't be surprised since it is Grant Morrison doing the storytelling on these books. But when did DC grow-up? I initially thought it was a recent phenomenon with writers like Geoff Johns joining the stable, but I was wrong. It looks as if DC has been solid for quite some time now.

I've always had a soft-spot for the Justice League. I loved Keith Giffen's work on the book back in the late 80's. The books were superhero books in only the loosest sense of the term. This wasn't a Justice League of the universe's greatest heroes, but rather all of the B and C list characters that no one wanted to admit existed. The types of characters that result from a night of heavy bong hits - Booster Gold: Man of the 25th century - Guy Gardner: The horny, crass, obnoxious and annoying Green Lantern, Maxwell Lord: Super billionaire who bought a superhero team. Giffen's writing can best be described as sarcasm injected with a heavy dose of irony. Brilliant, I recommend any of his books.


But the JLA trades I picked up from the mid 90's are grittier and dirtier. They are the original DC characters, but they are real, fallible, yet still untouchable. Just ask for the fist JLA trade at Comics and Whore. You won't be disappointed.

My wife sends me articles every day at lunch. Sort of her own little Drudge report.

Well today she sent me this story based on a sex offender who 20 years ago did some bad diddling and now finds himself a Father with his younger wife (yes, he is part of the “old Dad” phenomenon). Now, social services and the legal system want to take that child away.

This got me to thinking. Our justice system has become a hypocrisy wrapped in shroud of misinterpretations.

Personally, I think child sex offenders should have their balls cut off (or vagina sewn shut). All sex offenders are awful, but I hope anyone who abuses a child in any way has their own seat in hell waiting for them.

But but but…that is not how our legal system was designed to operate. Good, bad or indifferent our legal system is based on the idea of redemption. I have to wonder if the politicians that signed into effect legislation like “Megan’s Law” ever took a political science class. If we are going to forever mark these people, why have them serve any jail time at all? With legislation like Megan’s Law and this recent case, we are telling these people that there debt will never be paid.

If we truly feel this way let’s just kill these fuckers at sentencing. Save the taxpayers money and put everyone’s conscience at ease. Because obviously they will never be able to lead a normal life. So then what is the point of letting them pretend that their lives are normal?

I think that it can pretty much go without saying that American Dad, Seth MacFarlane's follow up to the Family Guy, pretty much blows. I have given it a try, and it pains me to watch.

However, the other night I was flipping through the channels and happened across an episode. I had been seeing commercials for this episode all week, in which the American Dad is having trouble dealing with the fact that his son is a geek. Anyway, I tuned in at the middle of the episode. The dad and the son were at a Sci Fi convention, and the geeks were after them for some reason. The crowd was turning ugly, and closing in on our heroes.

The crowd parts (think the basket chase scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and instead of a swordsman, it was The Star Wars Kid. That's right, The Star Wars Kid, hero to geeks and fanboys across the globe.

I completely lost it. This was the type of humor that made The Family Guy great. Not just pop culture references, but the most obscure references that only geeks like us would get. Brilliant.

Now if they could just get rid of 99% of the characters from American Dad, they might actually have something.

Pulling myself out of the vacum of new television shows for some webby pontificating.

I'll be spending the beginning of next month at Vertex Exchange 2005, presenting on "Blogs in Corporate America". I have a feeling most people registered for this class just so they can figure out what their kids are up to.

When not preparing for the left coast, I have been engrossed in the greatest graphic novel to bitch slap my imagination since Watchmen; Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczyinski. Before anyone comic purist crawls up my ass, "No, I am not endorsing Dynamic Forces with this link, in fact I think they smother the life out of comic collecting with their impenetrable bagging system. It was just the first hit on Google."

What I like about JMS is that he writes utilizing one of Franklin Covey's tenants of business success - Begin with the end in mind.

As he showed us with Babylon 5, JMS isn't concerned with milking a dead cow by making a series stretch out indefinitely. He writes in arcs, huge enormous arcs, but arcs none the less. Babylon 5 was intended to be a 5 year program and that's exactly what it was.

Rising Stars was intended to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Unlike Superman and Batman these characters don't live forever, they are extrodinary but they are mortal. In my opinion that raises the stakes and my interest level. Very few books walk you through a character's entire life. Rising Stars walks you through the entire life of 113 of the most extrodinary people this world has ever seen.