Paging Dr. Benway

Comic book writers, if you're looking for topical villains, and I mean bad ones, look no further than a story that broke in today's New York Times and spread everywhere. A leaked Red Cross report detailed coercion "tantamount to torture" in the US prison at Guantanamo and introduced us to some sweethearts named Biscuit:

...[S]ome doctors and other medical workers at Guantánamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said.

American torture doctors.

Yanks Dodge Bullet?

Pedro is a step closer to becoming a Met.

The Greatest 1940s Super-HeroComic Book Panel Of All:

Via Pure Excitement Comics, a discontinued web anthology of public domain comics--oops, I mean classic sequential literature. If you--like me--love this sort of thing, check out what's left of the project before it vanishes. Danger: click only on issues 1, 3 and 37 & up. The other links are fruitless, unless you're looking for the slowest and most annoying pop-up ads in the world.

Holiday Gift Idea

"...And if he throws at your head, I want you to charge the mound and bust that little sonofabitch right in the nuts... What? Hey, I admit it. I get pretty intense coaching these games."

Thanks For The Wild TurkeyAnd The Passenger Pigeons

Americans looking for words to recite over dinner's fragrant carcass tomorrow might consider A Thanksgiving Prayer by William S. Burroughs.

Kelly and I are off to her homeland--the desert city of Wenatchee, WA--where I intend to give thanks for beer, Shaun Of The Dead, and basketball violence. Happy Thanksgiving.

Q: How Long Are You? A: About 45 Seconds.

Richard D. Allen's Seven Questions For The Guitar Solo From "Stairway To Heaven", at McSweeneys.

NBC, 8:00

MATERNITY FEAR FACTOR: All of the bug-eating, neck-snapping, flesh-burning stunts you love--with a twist! These players are pregnant!

Seed Of Chucky

"As I watched him carrying the turkey tray on television, I started picturing him in a display box." Via Today In Iraq.

Dinks

The Rumsfeld Diet

From today's Washington Post, Children Pay Cost Of Iraq's Chaos:

Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago... The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from "wasting," a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

Blogging While Drunk?

iT's temprting... but I wo'nt do it. I'd just steedr you worng.

Nice

Hello, can you see me? is "a group moblog event, sharing the lives of 24 people over 48 hours in new york city... nov 19, friday nov 20, saturday." In other words, these people are using mobile devices to take photos and instantly publish them on the site. So it's like being in NYC RIGHT NOW!! sort of.

Gross

Viva Morrissey!

Posted yesterday at filter-mag.com:

In a rare performance on The Late Show with David Letterman, dressed in traditional Catholic priest regalia, consisting of a black suit, white collar and cross necklace, Morrissey and his bandmates, adorned in Jobraith t-shirts, an homage to the troubled 1970s homosexual wannabe rockstar, introduced the crowd to a live rendition of "First of the Gang to Die" from Morrissey's most successful album to date You Are the Quarry. Upon completion of the song, Morrissey made the sign of the cross across his body before the cameras cut away from the unusually dressed crooner. Dave graciously, although confusedly, greeted Moz with a "Thanks, Father."

I saw it, and it was a beautifully confusing dig. People who want to be offended probably couldn't say why.

I've been known to use Morrissey's early lyrics as horoscopes--if I'm going to be superstitious, I want to be as irrational about it as possible--by dialing up the Random Smiths Lyric Generator. I stopped after about the hundredth bleak message. What did I expect?

WHEW!

(Advertisement)

I have a story in the Wildstorm Winter Special, now on sale. It's about Apollo and Midnighter, the gay couple in the super-hero team The Authority. I wrote it three years ago, forgot about it, and now it's out. I was a little scared to read it, but it turned out well, largely because of some beautiful, dramatic art by Cary Nord and colorist Dave Stewart. I wrote a few jokes into it, as I always do, and Cary delivered them perfectly deadpan. And he made the sad parts sadder. He can really put subtle emotion across; that's a rare talent in comics.

I also have some Bart Simpson stories coming up; I'll let you know when they come out. And a super-hero project that looks like a done deal.

"Look at these different places around the world where there's been tremendous death and destruction because killers kill."—George W. Bush, 1/29/04

Go to Fallujah In Pictures to see what it looks like when we "liberate" and "secure" a city. The person behind the site is collecting Fallujah pictures from all over the web because "i believe the american people are decent and not without humanity. they have not seen what is being done in their name. maybe we don't live in a world that can do without war. i do know that people need to know what war means before they decide."

Over at The Guardian, novelist Haifa Zangana describes the "terrorists" and "foreign fighters" we went to Fallujah to kill:

Most fighters in Iraq are Iraqis who are outraged to see their country's resources robbed while they live in slums, drink water mixed with sewage and have no say in the political process. Nineteen months after 'liberation' they can see how little the liberators have done to ease their suffering. No wonder an increasing number of Iraqis are either joining or supporting the resistance, realising that, as in the past, they must fight on their own.

BRONX BABYLON

Click pix for stories.
The Yankees (and the religious) are (clearly) all over the tabloids today. Which story is more upsetting? Easy. Some "self-proclaimed minister" may have tapes of Yankee fave Gary Sheffield's "gospel-singer wife, another woman and R&B star R. Kelly" (wording: NY Post), but I have worse pictures of Steinbrenner's hot prospect Pedro with septuagenarian Don Zimmer.

Because Life Isn’t All Cheney And Rumsfeld

"The Man Who Married Lois Lane!"
"The Invasion Of The Super-Ants!"
"The Halloween Pranks Of The Bizarro Supermen!"
"The Invader From Earth!"
“Lois Lane’s Revenge On Superman!"
"The Human Porcupine!"
"The Colossus Of Gotham City!"
"The Eighth Wonder Of Space!"
"Batman And Robin, Medieval Bandits!"
All rights reserved by DC Comics.

These are all from 1960-ish, a pretty good time for covers. Big empty spaces; rock-solid logos, each one an arch over a gateway to somewhere awesome. Very tall tales told with perfectly straight faces. Censorship was heavy, so they had to grab people with outlandish ideas which, lacking the timeless pull of sex and violence, sure look stupid today (although there is a pleasant hint of scandal about "The Man Who Married Lois Lane!"). The non-Batman ones were pencilled by Superman's primary artist for 25 years and a very nice man: the late Curt Swan.

You can look at about a trillion more covers at the astonishing Grand Comic Book Database.

They Hate Us Because We Love Freedom

The Secret Service investigated a Colorado band for wanting to play a Bob Dylan song, Masters Of War, at their high school talent show. In viewing the song as a possible threat against President Bush, who is unnamed in the 41-year old lyric, the Service seems to be admitting that it describes him well enough. So... Go, Secret Service! Good luck in the purges! (Via Metafilter)

SuperFrankenstein Still Can't Watch TV

Enterprise
The Daily Show
Mad TV
I'm A Celebrity - Get Me Out Of Here!
And of course...
The Biggest Loser

SuperFrankenstein Is Preoccupied With Thoughts Of Lisa Marie Presley & Her Comeback Quest

Zippy The Pinhead comics set in Seattle, Syracuse, NYC and maybe your town.

SuperFrankenstein Loves This Track

Hey Now Now by The Cloud Room.

If Everyone Is SuperFrankenstein, Then No One Is SuperFrankenstein

Slightly updated. Yesterday we went to see The Incredibles. No, not those Incredibles. Fun, witty, handsome, exciting... this movie is, for me, like looking in a mirror. But its theme--somehow linked to the world's weirdest argument for tort reform--seems to be summed up when the villain says something like, "If everyone is super, then no one is super!" Which I don't get. If everyone were rich, wouldn't everyone still be rich? I guess the rich don't think so. Somehow, the super-people in the Incredibles universe, good guys and bad, spend most of the movie feeling wronged, angry and frustrated. Is anything less appealing than the rage of the uptrodden? Maybe this is all just a back-door way of getting us to believe that if everyone is merchandising The Incredibles, then no one is merchandising the Incredibles (via Waxy.)

Of course, the the movie makes its biggest news with the return, at last, of the flying buzz saw.

SuperFrankenstein Would Be Psyched

...to belong to the Democratic Party envisioned this week by the editors of The Stranger. "It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America... We're going to demand that the Democrats focus on building their party in the cities while at the same time advancing a smart urban-growth agenda that builds the cities themselves. The more attractive we make the cities--politically, aesthetically, socially--the more residents and voters cities will attract, gradually increasing the electoral clout of liberals and progressives. For Democrats, party building and city building is the same thing."

SuperFrankenstein Is Spending The Day In 1966

Batman In Color

SuperFrankenstein Can't Even Watch TV

Desperate Housewives
Arrested Development
Smallville
Still Standing
My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss

SuperFrankenstein Doesn't Seem Angry

Compared to this eloquent Northeasterner (courtesy of Stuart).

SuperFrankenstein Is Safe

"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft, 11/9/04

SuperFrankenstein Is Sorry

Wow. Slept on yesterday's post and woke up laughing. "Poor me! Bush and the Red Sox won!" Self-pitying song lyrics. Time-wasting links. A schoolkid could have written it. All that's missing is a moody photo of me and a teddy bear. It's hard enough to be a teen-ager; imagine sustaining it for this many decades.

So I take it all back. Everything's fine. And don't worry about Iraq. Help has arrived.

So let's relax. Put on a record.

SuperFrankenstein Is Way Down Now

Can't shake anything off. George W. Bush is President-Elect. The Boston Red Sox are World Champions.

From Way Down Now, by the great Karl (World Party) Wallinger:

The clocks will all run backwards
All the sheep will have two heads
And Thursday night and Friday
Will be on Tuesday night instead...
There's breeding in the sewers
And the rats are on their way
They're clouding up the images of perfect day
And I know I'm not alone
And I know I'm not alone
And I know I'm not alone
ANYTHING BUT THIS

Nothing to say about The Leader Of The Free World that you can't read in a million other places. So here's my view of the Red Sox.

In slightly better news, that Hart Seely is at it again.

Reading:
The Picture Of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde
We 3 By Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Watching:
The Return Of Chandu Starring Bela Lugosi as the good guy, yet.

Song Of The Moment:
Chris Michaels By The Fiery Furnaces (Hear the opening)

Quote:
"Boston is too racist for me. I couldn't play there."
-- Barry Bonds, 6/17/04