Year: 2008

Mostly-Full or Slightly-Empty

Last night we were driving back from San Francisco (details forthcoming) when we spotted the moon a few degrees above the horizon. This was around 7:30, so it was still before sunset, and the moon was rising. We noticed that the moon was not quite full, with a little bite taken out of it at the bottom.

We wondered whether the moon was nearly full, or just past full.

I said, “There has to be a way to figure this out logically.”

My Dad said that this is an empirical problem, so he was doubtful we could reason our way out of it.

I said, “Well, we know that on average there’s more than one full moon per month, and so we ought to be able to figure out from that whether the moon rises a little earlier each day, or a little later. And if we know that then we should be able to figure out whether it’s nearly full or just past full.” I decided that since there’s more than one full moon per month, that meant that the moon was rising a little earlier each day, and that meant that that moon was not quite full.

About 20 minutes later I said, “The moon looks a little more full to me now, so I think I’m right.” Much laughter ensued.

I think my reasoning was a little off, mainly because what I really need to know is whether the moon rises more than once per day, and using “full moons per month” as a proxy for that is not right, because they’re not the same thing. Indeed, since our months are somewhat based on the lunar cycle, “full moons per month” is a circular argument. Well, sort of.

But it turns out I was right anyway, since the full moon is tomorrow.

Which goes to show once again that it’s better to be lucky than good.

This Week’s Haul

  • Booster Gold #9, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
  • Clandestine #4 of 5, by Alan Davis & Mark Farmer (Marvel)
  • Guardians of the Galaxy #1, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
  • newuniversal: shockfront #1, by Warren Ellis, Steve Kurth & Andrew Hennessy (Marvel)
  • The Twelve #5 of 12, by J. Michael Straczynski, Chris Weston & Garry Leach (Marvel)
  • B.P.R.D.: 1946 #5 of 5, by Mike Mignola, Joshua Dysart & Paul Azaceta (Dark Horse)
  • Project Superpowers #3 of 6, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Carlos Paul (Dynamite)
  • Locke & Key #4 of 6, by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Guardians of the Galaxy #1 As much as I’ve enjoyed Abnett & Lanning’s work on the Annihilation and Nova books, I’m a little skeptical of Guardians of the Galaxy. Why? Well, the premise consists of throwing together a bunch of space-based heroes – who have almost nothing in common except that they’re space-based and came together during the recent crises – under a title which used to belong to a completely unrelated team. This screams “trademark protection” to me, and while I’m sure DnA are going to give it their best shot, I have a nagging cynicism that they were basically asked by Marvel to come up with a title which fit the bill.

With that bit of negativity out of the way, the first issue is pretty good. It features the usual trial-by-fire, also setting up what I presume will be a long-term foe for the group. There are some strong and volatile personalities in the group, which could be the fulcrum for making the book work: Peter Quill (Star Lord) is probably the most qualified to lead the team in a strategic sense, but his self-doubt and lack of powers might not make him the best candidate for keeping the people in line. Especially with members like Mantis who tend to quietly pursue their own agendas.

The book’s best hope, I think, is to either have a strong underlying plot, or to juggle the relationships among its characters in a delicate manner, the latter being the key to the success of Wolfman & Pérez’ New Teen Titans of years past. I think DnA could pull off either approach, but the book’s set-up will make it more of a challenge for them.

Fresh from his trial run on Nova, Paul Pelletier’s artwork is fine. Much better than the 3 issues from his brief run on Fantastic Four that I read, which looked like he was mailing it in (figuratively speaking). I’d appreciate a little more detail, but he’s certainly got the dynamic look down.

All-in-all, the first issue of Guardians is a little above average, but it will be the next 11 issues which really indicate whether it’s going to be a good one or not.

newuniversal: shockfront #1 I was surprised when newuniversal abruptly halted after 6 issues. Was it a mini-series, though it wasn’t marked as such? Did it not do well and was cancelled? Did Ellis just up and leave, since he recently said of work-for-hire projects, “It’s as simple as this — if I don’t own it, I’m not going to spend my life on it”?

Apparently none of the above, since Ellis is back with a new artist on a second series, which picks up only a little while after the first one left off. It continues his edgier riff on Marvel’s old New Universe characters, and this time he’s filling in some more of the backstory and adding some more structure to what the “white event” means, which I appreciate (I always appreciate structure).

Steve Kurth has a somewhat more traditional art style than did Salvador Larroca (the first series’ artist), but he’s still got the detail and semi-photorealistic layouts, so all in all I think he’s just as good as Larroca was. Of more interest will be to see where Ellis is going with this series. I’m still a little frustrated that the final issue of Planetary hasn’t come out, even though I know he can finish lengthy projects, as he did with Transmetropolitan. So I hope newuniversal doesn’t end prematurely in the middle of the story.

Visitor and Visitation

A busy few days. But when aren’t they?

Wednesday I went to gaming. Lots of people are going lately, since Susan is expecting her and Subrata‘s first child any day now. Maybe any minute now. And when that happens, I expect we don’t have regular gaming for months. Who knows how long? So I stuck around until after 10, and we played two games, both of which I finished second in. Which seemed perfect, since it seems like I usually finish second. 🙂

Wednesday night also marked the first night of my vacation, since Thursday afternoon my Dad flew into town for a week of mayhem. Well, really a week of driving around the area and seeing the sights and hanging out and talking.

Unfortunately (not that this is his fault) his arrival coincided with a heat wave which spent Thursday breaking heat records around the region. It broke 100 degrees in my city, and was uncomfortably warm until at least 8 pm. Ugh. We sat inside and tried to stay cool in my non-air-conditioned house, in which the temperature got up into the 80s even in the relatively cool downstairs. But eventually it did cool down. I was glad not to feel obligated to participate in Bike to Work Day – brutal!

Fortunately other things – like his flight – went smoothly. It’s been about 4 years since Dad last visited, so it’s good to have him out again.

Today was still very warm, although not as bad. We drove over the hills to Half Moon Bay and had brunch at the Main Street Grill, and walked around downtown. Then we bought some bottles of water and drove to a nearby beach where we walked along the lovely path atop the bluffs overlooking the beaches. There was a nice breeze, the waves were crashing loudly into the shore, and there were lots of people and wildflowers to watch as we went along.

Then we drove south along the coast, stopping at the Pigeon Point Lighthouse, and then at the Año Nuevo State Natural Reserve, where we walked out a mile and a half to see the elephant seals who were nesting and lying in the sun along the beach. I’ve been there before, but not in nearly ten years. They’re pretty neat to see, but the hike out is moderately difficult, especially getting over the sand dunes at the far end of the trail. We made it, though, and learned a lot from the docents positioned by the lions. But we were beat when we got back to the car.

We drove back via Santa Cruz, where we stopped briefly at the lighthouse. It was a lot cooler in Santa Cruz than it had been farther north. We also watched surfers who seemed to be having an especially good batch of waves to ride – at least, compared to what I’ve seen other times I’ve been there.

We met up with Debbi and had dinne at The Counter, and came home to cooler weather, opening up the windows to get the house cooled down. As I write this, it’s down in the 70s outside, and it feels like the worst of the heat has passed.

Which is good, since it will be much easier to enjoy the weekend if we’re not trying to duck into air conditioning at every opportunity!

Michael Swanwick: The Iron Dragon’s Daughter

The Iron Dragon's Daughter
The Iron Dragon’s
Daughter

I’d owned this book for a while, but I’d rather burned out on Michael Swanwick by the time I bought it. Although he’s wonderful with imagery, I sometimes find his plots and characters to be lacking, and I couldn’t get into Stations of the Tide at all, even though it won the Nebula Award. However, I read a couple of excerpts of his new novel, The Dragons of Babel in Asimov’s and I enjoyed them a lot. Then I learned that it takes place in the same world as The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and I had to go back and read that one before tackling the newer novel.

The central conceit of the world in the novel is it’s a fantasy world filled with all the traditional elves and dwarves and goblins and dragons, but that the fairy tale stories written about those creatures took place centuries ago, and in the present day this world has gone through its own industrial revolution, and today there are cities and weapons and schools and other trapping of our own modern culture, with magic and fantastic creatures integrated right into it.

The story’s heroine is Jane, a human girl among fantastic creatures, regarded as an oddity in a world that’s full of them. The novel opens with her working as a slave in a factory which builds iron dragons – sentient, flying tanks. Jane is on the edge of adolescence, and is starting to form thoughts of her own independence, although she’s somewhat behind her peers in this respect: Her friend Rooster is the nominal leader of the child workers at the factory, and has been trying to figure out how to escape or at least how to deal with some of their tormentors among the management for a long time. Other workers are happy merely to rise in the ranks among their own. Following one of Rooster’s plans, Jane gets singled out by the plant manager to do a favor for a high elf lady in the area, which leaves her ostracized by her peers. But she also is contacted by an old, forgotten dragon, number 7332, who has been imprisoned at the factory and also wishes to escape. Together they manage to achieve this goal.

The novel is told in several parts, although they’re not declared as such, but there are jumps between the major sections of story. Jane and the dragon settle near a town where Jane enrolls in high school, and the dragon goes quiescent. Jane isn’t a very good student, but aspires to become an alchemist. She also makes new friends of varying quality, and becomes involved in some local elvish customs. The last part of the novel sees Jane attending college and finding that pieces of her life seem to recreate themselves in her new environments with new players each time. She becomes more confident and gains more skills over time, and learns what 7332’s ultimate goals are for her, which are played out in the novel’s climax.

Swanwick’s novels always have a dreamlike quality to them, and Daughter certainly has that. There are even hints that it might all actually be a dream, but Swanwick is too crafty to come out and say that, and he leaves it up to the reader. This results in some allusions to the relationship between our world and Jane’s which I thought felt out-of-place in the novel. I’d have preferred that it have been played with the world it portrays being exactly what it appears, as I think the ambiguity adds nothing to the tale.

The story is of course a coming-of-age story, with Jane growing from an oppressed wallflower to a strong-willed and angry young woman, upset at how her being a human has left her in this second-class position (even though it confers a few advantages on her, too; for instance, some magical constructs work on magical creatures, but not on her). She’s a slightly pathetic character at the start, a little cowardly in her oppression, but with some inner strengths. These strengths come out over time as she stands up to increasingly more important and powerful people in pursuit of what she wants: A life of her own following her dreams. She has several romances with men who are all similar in some key ways, finds some friends and allies, as well as some adversaries. But she always seems to ultimately feel alone, and consequently she always has a certain kinship with 7332, despite the dragon’s frustrating and mercurial nature.

As much as I enjoyed Jane’s journey, I found its ending disappointing since it undercut a lot of her hard work in a relatively brief moment of emotion and show of force. For me the setting was the star of the book: While some commentary I’ve read about Daughter describes it as a melding of science fiction and fantasy, or an subversion of fantasy, I saw it more as applying some science fictional principles to a traditional fantasy setting: After all, there’s nothing that says that such a world couldn’t develop advanced science right alongside its impossible elements. Swanwick parcels out the interactions of these two slices of his world in small bits, and often subtly or obliquely; no wizards driving automobiles here, but characters considering the underlying principles of magic, or the haughty elves effectively forming the ruling caste of an economy driven by the creation of wealth. It’s a rich backdrop and there’s so much more that could be done with it – but Swanwick does quite a bit with it here in the service of the core story.

So yes, I was disappointed with the ending, and I wished Swanwick had chosen a course more in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel. However, it was still a fun journey, and it’s whetted my appetite for reading The Dragons of Babel in its entirety.

Back to the Nerd Farm

Cow-orker K came back to work today from vacation. I ended up having lunch with her team since my usual lunch partners didn’t show up until after I’d already sat down.

At one point I said to her, “So you’re back at the nerd farm.”

“Yes I am,” she replied.

“Well,” I mused, “I guess technically we’re all fully grown-up nerds, so it’s not really a ‘farm’.”

Of course, we may be grown up, but that doesn’t mean we’re mature!

This Week’s Haul

  • Countdown to Mystery #7 of 8, by Matthew Sturges, Chad Hardin, Dan Green, Walden Wong & Wayne Faucher, and Steve Gerber, Adam Beechen & Justiniano (DC)
  • Metal Men #8 of 8, by Duncan Rouleau (DC)
  • Avengers/Invaders #1 of 12, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Steve Sadowski (Marvel)
  • Nova #13, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Wellington Alves & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
  • The Boys #18, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
Metal Men #8 I feel like I should have enjoyed Metal Men a lot more than I did.

For one thing, Duncan Rouleau’s art is dynamic and imaginative, with a style not quite like anyone else I’ve seen in comics these days. The story is one of loyalty and redemption, and has a heavy time travel element. What’s not to like?

Well, the story’s also told in 19 small chapters, taking place early in the Metal Men’s career, and at several different points later on. And it’s extremely hard to follow. In addition to the cast of seven Metal Men, plus their creator, Will Magnus, the Metal Men switch bodies at some points, and they have substantially different physical appearances in different time periods. I found it to be too much effort for too little reward to try to fit all the pieces together; I would have been happier with a more linear story with a few flashbacks.

Plus there are several other mad scientists running around, and a host of other unrelated robots, for a cast of characters too large to really work. The story tries to focus on our hero Will, but it keeps drifting around and never really finds its emotional center. The conclusion made very little sense to me, but honestly I’d given up trying to figure out what the heck was going on by then.

The story is credited to Rouleau “based on ideas by Grant Morrison”, and edited by Eddie Berganza. I don’t know whether Morrison provided a story outline that was simply too ambitious, or if Rouleau bit off more than he could chew, or if Berganza should have reined him in and just didn’t, but one or more of these guys ended up making a muddle of what should have been a straightforward and fun story. It’s too bad, because it started off with a lot of promise, but just never found its footing.

Avengers/Invaders #1 Hey look, it’s yet another Alex Ross project mining the bygone days of superheroes! Avengers/Invaders sees the Invaders – Marvel’s retconned team of World War II heroes – being shunted to the present day, post-Civil War, where they’ll encounter the Avengers, especially Iron Man, still haunted by Captain America’s death. Cap, of course, is one of the Invaders. And at least two others – Bucky and the Sub-Mariner – are also still alive in the present day. Which could make for an interesting time.

Unfortunately the Ross/Krueger-written books suffer the same problem that J. Michael Straczynski’s books do: Too much reflection and dialogue, and not enough actually going on. This issue is at least focused on two different fights, one in World War II and one in the present day, which is a promising start. I bet it ends up feeling like a story that could have been told in 4 issues rather than 12, though. But it already looks better than Project Superpowers (not exactly a ringing endorsement).

Steve Sadowski’s pencils are solid, as always, but the guy could really use an inker who can bring some subtlety to his linework. I’m not sure if he inked himself here, or if the art was reproduced from his pencils, but the lines are so heavy the art sometimes looks like it was etched in wood.

Nova #13 As usual, it’s Nova to the rescue this week. Nova arrives at a world being devoured by Galactus, too late to try to save it from its fate, but in time to try to help evacuate its population. Some psionic entity has also shown up to sow chaos in the middle of the larger panic for its own unknown reasons. And to top it off Nova has to face down Galactus anyway, since he’s interfering with the evacuation (possibly without his own knowledge), which means the Silver Surfer gets involved. Yaybo!

Abnett & Lanning are at the top of their game here, with some witty dialogue as well as a good feel for Nova’s position. Meanwhile Willington Alves returns on pencils. He’s not Sean Chen, but I like his layouts and his use of shadows. Overall I like his work better than Paul Pelletier’s (who I guess is moving to Guardians of the Galaxy in the wake of Annihilation Conquest).

Overall, yet another nifty issue of Marvel’s best title. I hope the second year of Nova sees him establish himself with his own storylines and personal odysseys separate from the “event” crossover series. The book’s got too much promise to be slaved to editorial dictate.

The Scanner Blues

A few months ago I took the plunge and upgraded our desktop computer at home to Leopard. After all, I’d been running it both at work and on both of our laptops, and it seemed fine. Okay, I’d had to update some freeware and shareware, but that’s to be expected. I should probably update them more than once every 3 years anyway. 🙂

Well, it went smoothly, except for one problem: I can’t get my scanner to work under Leopard. Which is a bummer, since I use the scanner to scan book and comic covers for this journal, album art for my iTunes library, and also to scan items I put up for sale on eBay.

I have a Canon CanoScan LiDE 80, which was reasonably inexpensive and (more importantly) small and flat, but with a decent-sized platen for scanning. It’s worked well for several years, on both Panther and Tiger. But on Leopard it doesn’t work at all.

My first problem is that I use the version of Adobe Photoshop Elements that came with the scanner, which means that it’s now quite old, and won’t even launch on Leopard. If this were the worst problem, it would be surmountable; I could try to figure out Image Capture, which comes with Mac OS X, or I could try to use GraphicConverter or buy a copy of VueScan. Or heck, I could just buy the newest version of Photoshop Elements.

The larger problem is that the LiDE 80 doesn’t seem to be supported on Leopard, and in fact Canon seems to do a poor job of updating their drivers – the most recent drivers for this scanner were posted on 10/4/2007, which was shortly before Leopard was released. So I infer that they haven’t really been updated to work with Leopard. And n matter what I try, I haven’t been able to get them to work, even using the TWAIN driver, as other applications don’t seem to recognize Canon’s TWAIN driver. (The drivers also appear to be available only for PowerPC machines, which is fine for my desktop machine, since it is such a machine, but I’d like to buy an Intel-based Mac sometime soon, and that will pretty much hose it.) Someone recommended I check out SANE to see if they have a driver for it, but they don’t; apparently the scanner uses a “backend” which SANE doesn’t yet support. Alas.

It appears that other people have had the same problem, but I haven’t found a concrete solution. This thread has a lot of discussion about the issue, and some people seem to have gotten it to work, but others have not. I’m one of the “have not” people. On the other hand, one person was able to get it to work with VueScan, which I haven’t tried. (Although since VueScan seems to have a free trial, perhaps I should.)

So anyway, my solution to all this was to realize yesterday: Hey, I bought a second internal hard drive for the desktop machine a while back! So I partitioned that drive and installed Tiger on one partition, brought it up to date, and then installed the Canon software along with Photoshop Elements. Sure enough, the scanner works great in that environment. So at least that gives me a solution for the short term.

The longer term will involve buying a new computer, and then probably a new scanner. It seems that Epson has been releasing new drivers for Leopard, so I might give them a try, perhaps the V200 Photo. I’m certainly more inclined to buy a scanner from someone who appears to be actively supporting the platform.

If anyone has any advice or suggestions on what to get, I’d appreciate it.

Of course, I’ve needed to buy a new stereo receiver for months, and haven’t gotten around to that, so who knows when I’ll get to doing all this? (Then again, I installed Tiger on a new partition on a whim last night, so it could happen at any time…)

Debbi’s Birthday Weekend

Busy weekend!

Friday Subrata and I got together to play Friday Night Magic. Meanwhile our partners Debbi and Susan got together to do Friday night scrapbooking at a store they discovered. We each had a good time, and although Subrata and I went to Game Kastle, which started its game about an hour later than where we’ve been going to play before, we didn’t finish a lot later than they did, so it all worked out well.

Friday was the release day for the new Magic expansion, Shadowmoor, which is the complementary set to the previous block, Lorwyn. Rather than having interactions among creatures in a tribe (elves, goblins, etc.), this block involves colors which work closely together. That gives it a different dynamic in draft, since the “hybrid” color mana costs mean you can play more cards that come your way than in other blocks.

I had a pretty good draft putting together a green-red deck which had a few good tricks but basically came down to putting big creatures in play before my opponents could deal with them. I won my first match handily, lost my second match by a very thin margin, and got crushed in my third. So not too bad a showing. My third opponent isn’t impressed with the set, feeling that it’s a set which plays slowly at first, but then a single card can win the game for either player if they get lucky. To some extent this is always true in Magic, but it does seem like the power curve leaps rather suddenly at a certain point. On the other hand, I enjoy creature-based decks, so the slow progress early in a game suits me okay. I’ll have to play more to see what I think about it. It does feel like the set is very light on creature removal, though, which might make red-black the color combo of choice.

Saturday was a day of running around doing errands, followed by going to an engagement party for our friends Josh and Lisa. Some friends of theirs put together a very nice party at their house, and many friends of each showed up. Josh has been one of the more avid boardgamers at Subrata’s weekly session since he started coming a couple of years ago, so there were several people Debbi and I knew there. It was a fun time, at least until my cold meds started wearing off around 8 and I started wearing down.

(I can’t wait to shake this cold. I’m slowly getting better, and not really wiped out by it by the end of every day, but it’s sill a drag, sniffling and coughing.)

And last but by no means least, today it’s Debbi’s birthday!

I’d been teasing her all week about the presents I’d bought for her, all the while hoping that I’d actually get them in time, since I’m becoming the world’s worst procrastinator when it comes to buying presents. However, I’d come up with a couple of neat gift ideas, and hoped to pull it off.

Fortunately, I was able to make time to go by Lisa’s Tea Treasures on Thursday morning and picked up a nice English-style tea pot for her, since she’d talked about getting one so she could make larger pots of tea. (Lisa’s Tea came at Susan’s recommendation, for which I thank her since otherwise I had little idea of where to go!) And my order for Corner Gas seasons one and two on DVD arrived from Amazon Canada on Friday afternoon, somewhat to my surprise since they’d just shipped earlier in the week. Corner Gas is Debbi’s favorite show these days, and we watch it most nights on TV. A lot of its humor is based on wordplay, which means I enjoy it a lot more than most sitcoms.

Anyway, somehow I’d managed to not give her any hints about it all about them and she was completely surprised! And loved them all! Yay!

In the afternoon we had a small group of people over for grillables and cake to celebrate, keeping it small to not drive ourselves nuts with preparation. (I still drove myself nuts by insisting on mopping the tile floors this morning, but that’s my problem.) We had a fun time, and our friends Lisa and Michel brought their infant daughter over, which especially amused the cats, since Newton had no idea what to make of this not-a-lot-larger-than-he-is human sitting in the carrier on the floor. Isabella also was fascinated when I brought out the radio-controlled helicopter later on.

It all went smoothly, and after people left we had a quiet dinner, and of course some cake and tea and watched tonight’s Corner Gas.

Happy birthday, Deb! I’m glad you had a good one.

This Week’s Haul

  • DC Universe 0, by Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, George Pérez, Doug Mahnke, Tony Daniel, Ivan Reis, Aaron Lopresti, Philip Tan, Ed Benes, Carlos Pacheco, J.G. Jones, Scott Koblish, Christian Alamy, Oclair Albert, Matt Ryan, Jeff de los Santos & Jesus Merino (DC)
  • Action Comics #864, by Geoff Johns, Joe Prado & Jon Sibal (DC)
  • Legion of Super-Heroes #41, by Jim Shooter, Aaron Lopresti & Matt Ryan (DC)
  • Ex Machina #36, by Brian K. Vaughan, Tony Harris & Jim Clark (DC/Wildstorm)
  • Glamourpuss #1, by Dave Sim (Aardvark-Vanaheim)
DC Universe 0 DC Universe 0 is the prologue to the upcoming Final Crisis, and is – sorta – the bridge from Countdown to that series. But I think Valerie D’Orazio is right when she says it’s really an ad: It’s a 50-cent advertisement for upcoming storylines in the DC universe, such as Final Crisis, “Batman R.I.P.”, and stuff I care about even less (and honestly my level of caring about those two stories isn’t very high).

This comic is basically a series of vignettes each illustrated by a different art team, with a disembodied narrator sorta tying it all together (but not really). So there’s not really a story here, just the hints of several different stories. The art is generally strong, but of course it changes every few pages. The overarching portent is that evil is somehow on the verge of winning the day over good, a notion which hearkens back to Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing, but which is too abstract to have any meaning to me as a reader.

Overall this issue feels completely unnecessary. In years gone by, other writers might have managed to cover this ground in 2 or 3 pages, but DC seems bent on drawing things out as long as possible these days. So we end up with stuff like this, which seems destined for the recycle bin.

Action Comics #864 Despite its problems, I enjoyed “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” enough to keep buying Action Comics for a little while, although promos for upcoming issues make me worry that it’s going to be one big event after another, which will probably drive me away.

Anyway, this issue is also a sort of introduction to Final Crisis, specifically a lead-in to the Legion of Three Worlds mini-series, which intrigues me since I’m a longtime Legion fan, having read all three of the Legions which will be involved in that series. This issue opens with Batman visiting Superman’s Fortress, where Superman is talking with Lightning Man from the Legion, reminiscing about old times. Batman and Lightning Lad get on like oil and water, especially once the bodies of two Legionnaires – who were killed in Countdown – turn up. We also briefly visit with the JSA’s Starman, who’s also a former Legionnaire.

The more I read of Geoff Johns’ writing, the more it seems like its hallmark is putting in as many nifty ideas as he can come up with – especially of the “mining DC’s past” variety – but not really plumbing any of them in depth. Mark Waid went further with the “Batman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” idea in one issue of The Brave and the Bold than Johns does here. Really, one could probably do a good 6-issue story with such an idea. So this issue ends up feeling like no less an advertisement for an upcoming series than did DC Universe 0, which is too bad, because even as a bridge between two Superman arcs, this could have been a much more insightful story than it was.

It was better than DC Universe 0, though, if for no other reason than the scene in which Lightning Man wonders aloud how Batman would have turned out had the Legion contacted him in addition to Superman back when they were teenagers.

Glamourpuss #1 For those who don’t know, Dave Sim is the creator/writer/artist of Cerebus, the longest-running self-published comic book in history. Originally a parody of Conan the Barbarian, Cerebus evolved to parody many aspects of popular culture, and later became a platform from which Sim proclaimed his social and political opinions at great length. The pros and cons of Cerebus are outside the scope of this review, but in short I’ll say that it produced what I think is one of the ten best graphic novels I’ve ever read (Jaka’s Story), and a whole lot of near-unreadable claptrap.

Glamourpuss is Sim’s first comic since Cerebus ended its 300-issue run in 2004.

And it is, frankly, a really bad one.

Sim is still an excellent artist: He reproduces a variety of glamour magazine photos in linework, and also reproduces many panels from the comic strip Rip Kirby. Even if the work isn’t original, it’s still impressive in its attention to detail. Sim can really draw.

Unfortunately, this is a comic book without a story. Rather than assembling a story to which he can apply his prodigious artistic skills, Sim strings together a series of unrelated panels and adds text which is nothing more than a monologue in which he discusses his intention to do a book of “cute teenaged girls in his best Al Williamson photo-realism style”, and goes on to talk at some length about his love for Alex Raymond’s and John Prentice’s art on Rip Kirby.

And boy, I couldn’t care less.

I have some interest in the analysis of comic art, to be sure, but this is little more than navel-gazing; a couple of cheap gags, but otherwise nothing really entertaining. I’d much rather read a prose piece about the strip with some key illustrations, with more historical context about Raymond, Prentice, and the strip itself. But Sim’s thoughts about his admirations for the artists and his striving to emulate them are not worth three dollars, or even the time it took to read this issue.

I keep wondering who exactly Sim’s target audience for this series is, or how long he expects it to keep going. I even wonder if he’s chuckling to himself as having ‘put one over’ on his readership. Probably not. I think this is a perfectly earnest effort to express his admiration for this art style, to have some fun flexing his artistic muscles, and figuring that there are a few thousand people out there who will find it all as interesting as he does.

And he might be right, but I’m not one of those people, and I won’t be back for a second issue (though Jog apparently will be).