Sources say that among the First Lady's grievances are his waning attention to their marriage, his refusal to spend quality and intimate time with her, the nagging rumors over his relationship with (Secretary of State Condoleezza) Rice - and she's concerned that George is back on the bottle.Sounds like a bunch of Democrat talking points to me. Coincidence? Or did Globe time this story to drop a week before the midterm elections? Does Globe want America to win?
And I mean that in the absolute best possible way. Check out this interview where he talks about Iraq and ignorant Americans, and at the same time holds the (liberal) interviewer's feet to the fire for leading his answers too much. Sample quote: "I have the same view you do, the problem is that I do believe in being vaguely empirical."
• Lying about not knowing Jack Abramoff!
• Claiming, falsely, that he didn't have the authority to remove a racist campaign ad!
• Taking money from gay porn producers!
What will he do next???
(I actually know someone who went to college with old Ken, but I don't know if he'd want to be "outed." My friend, I mean, not Ken. Well, I don't know if Ken wants to be outed or not either, but that's another matter entirely.)
Mehlman!
Mehlman!
MEHLMAN!
UPDATE: If the first link doesn't work, try Seattle Channel.
Warning #1: I'm going to ratchet up the political stuff a little over the next week and a half. Warning #2: I've never posted YouTube links before. Fingers crossed.
The Republicans have been running a deliberately racist campaign against Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee. Here's the attack ad painting him (wholly without grounds) as an uppity whoremonger:
The ad was placed by the Republican National Committee. Bob Corker, Ford's opponent, immediately distanced himself from it -- while running a radio ad where jungle drums came up behind the mentions of Ford's name.
This is exactly what the Republican party is about these days, and it's got to be fought head-on. So Harold Ford did:
The above courtesy the essential Talking Points Memo.
The must-read comic of the season: the final issue of DC's SOLO, featuring the inimitable Brendan McCarthy .
I've posted two of the least strange images from the book. Also inside: Duke Hussy, The Flash: A Fragment, Slouch World, the new hero known as Johnny Sorrow, and much more.
I write two whole pages of political content in FIRESTORM #30...and I wind up in the middle of this.
It's my own fault.
Vote Democratic so I don't have to do this anymore.
I've been running around too much to be clever, so here are a few quick promo links.
I'm writing this year's PUNISHER X-MAS SPECIAL for Marvel Knights. It's probably the darkest comic I've ever written, but...heh heh... I gave him a "naughty" list. Art is by CP Smith, who did such an amazing job on our issue of WOLVERINE earlier this year.
And I've got a story in POSTCARDS, a fascinating anthology of short comics pieces all written around genuine, old-time postcards with weird messages on them. I was fortunate enough to snag Michael Gaydos (ALIAS) as my collaborator, and to all of our delight, he did the whole thing in a really striking greywash style. You can see his first page here .
Click and then tell me what you think!
Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez was a passenger in a private plane that overran a runway Friday in Burbank, Calif., just two days after pitcher Cory Lidle was killed in a plane accident in Manhattan.A-Rod's private jet overruns runway; Rodriguez unharmed
Kingdom Come, the forthcoming album by Jay-Z, drew inspiration from Kingdom Come, the smash graphic novel written by the Monster Force's own Mark Waid, engineer Young Guru told XXLmag.com.
The best thing that I can tell you that there’s a song called ‘Kingdom Come’ on the album, which is the title of the album. The way that record came about was from a good friend of mine from college, Lance Williams, he’s one of those dudes that can memorize, he knows how many mics every album ever got. We’re both comic book guys and we’re talking about Kingdom Come which is a comic book that came out about Superman. He was just like, ‘Isn’t it weird where hip-hop is at right now, it’s like Kingdom Come and Jay needs to be like Superman.’ I was like, ‘You’re right.’ I hadn’t read Kingdom Come in so long so I went out and bought it and read it. And I’m like ‘Oh shit! It’s parallel, it’s crazy.’ So I’m telling Jay the idea, I gave him the book and he got it. That’s why I love that song because one of the things that Superman doesn’t realize in the comic book is, not only how ill he is as a superhero but his influence on inspiring the rest of his peers that are superheroes. So when Superman jets and says, ‘Y’all shittin’ on me, y’all want the niggas that’s gon’ kill the people and I don’t kill my enemies, I catch ‘em and, cool y’all deal with ‘em. I’m good.” Wonder Woman comes and she’s like “It ain’t just you doing what you do but Green Lantern ain’t doing his thing no more, The Flash ain’t doing his thing, you’re the leader, you inspire them to keep going and doing what they do.” That’s where the parallel comes in. And Jay can take an idea and incorporate it into a song better than anybody that I know and when he finally vocalized it, I felt it was exactly what I was thinking about.That doesn't sound entirely accurate to me. Let's check it against my copy of the script:
KINGDOM COMEOK, my mistake.
By Mark Waid
PAGE ONE
PANEL ONE
Angle on Superman, flying over Metropolis.
SUPERMAN: Y'all shittin' on me, y'all want the niggas that's gon' kill the people and I don't kill my enemies, I catch 'em and, cool y'all deal with 'em.
SUPERMAN: I'm good.
FROM OFF: It ain't just you doing what you do --
PANEL TWO
Superman turns to see Wonder Woman arrowing toward him.
WONDER WOMAN: -- but Green Lantern ain't doing his thing no more, The Flash ain't doing his thing, you're the leader, you inspire them to keep going and doing what they do!
A new report from Human Rights Watch reveals that five U.S. state prison systems — Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota, and Utah — authorize the use of large unmuzzled dogs to terrify and even attack prisoners to extract them from their cells. According to Human Rights Watch, no other country in the world authorizes the use of dogs to attack prisoners who will not voluntarily leave their cells.Abu Ghraib at Home
Unbelievable. I know you're all expecting something ghoulish from me, so here goes. If you go to WFAN.com right now, before they take it down, you'll find a Real Player file of a Monday interview with Lidle. Mike and the Mad Dog had been ragging on the pitcher for publicly implying his manager cost them the series, and he called in, upset.
That's a quote from Thelonious Monk, whose birthday is today. Columbia University's WKCR is playing his music 'til (heh) 'Round Midnight. Don't let their pointy-headed pipe-sucking four-eyed tweed-jacket elbow-patch weird-beard four-eyed ivory-tower blowhard DJs put you off this guy's music. [Via Metafilter]
On second listen, don't go. Professor Poindexter McEgghead won't stop talking. You can sample some Monk mp3s here. Maybe it's stealing, but you can tell the judge that the dateless big-brains at Columbia University drove you to it.
This Wednesday: EARTHLIGHT, an original graphic novel by me and Chris Schons, hits comic shops. It tells the tale of 15-year-old Damon Cole, a newcomer to Earth's first moon colony, where his father is chief administrator and his mother is assigned to run the colony's first organized school. The colony is a dangerous place, vulnerable both to deadly accidents and to threats of terrorist attack -- which amplifies the usual teenage pressures until they explode violently.
Depending on my audience, I tend to describe EARTHLIGHT as as "Degrassi on the moon," "an updated Heinlein juvenile" or "a futuristic Afterschool Special with a really nasty twist." I'm very, very proud of it, and Chris's work brings both the characters and the tech vividly to life. You can read the first chapter here; more info here .
Also out this week: FIRESTORM THE NUCLEAR MAN #30, featuring Part Three of "In My Father's House." Twists and turns leading up to a big revelation, courtesy of me, Jamal Igle, Steve Sadowski, and Keith Champagne.
And finally: Jamal and I will be attending ICAF, the International Comic Arts Festival, this coming Saturday. We're doing a panel at 1:30 PM on the creation and production of a mainstream comic book, right before Phil Jimenez and Denny O'Neil speak about comics and politics. It's at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., it's open to the public, and it's free. Other weekend attractions include an evening with Jules Feiffer and a variety of academic papers on various comics-related subjects. More info at the link.
As always, for longer, wordier versions of these notices, you can sign up for my email newsletter at stuartcomics at mindspring.com . I promise no spam, no passing your address along, and no Mark Foley-style midnight emails. In the Monster Force, pages are treated with respect (before being consumed for nourishment, of course).
They get eliminated every year, but never in exciting contests with lots of crazy reversals back and forth. No, they always spend the whole elimination game slouching at the plate like idiots with droopy bats and tense expressions and you know by the second inning it's over.
Fuck the fucking Yankees fuck.
This happened in Philadelphia yesterday. The best symbol of the Iraq occupation I've seen yet.
For the writers out there: Here's a selection that made me laugh from a book I picked up in Austin, ARRIVE AT EASTERWINE by the late R.A. Lafferty. It's subtitled The Autobiography of a Ktistec Machine , and in this passage the super-computer narrator has decided to share his wisdom with the world:
I make up half a dozen short selections of my high thought, put them in fiction form, and send them off to human editors: of science-fiction magazines, of Bunny-Boy, the magazine of the Hippety-Hippeties; to other editors. These are all good selections…
What puzzles me, what curdles me, what loads my generators is that I get these things back quickly, and with little notes that make no sense whatsoever. “Not quite what we have in mind”; “misses the mark”; “due to our present over-stock” -- things like that. In my anger I write them all back furiously. “Not quite what you had in mind? Who asked you? It is what I had in mind or I wouldn’t have written it. Misses the mark? Move the mark then. Where this hits is where the mark should be. Listen, you, I have your person-precis before me. I see that you have talent only and no genius at all. Whose fault is it that you are overstocked? Am I responsible for your inventory control? I do not ask you to publish these things. I tell you to.”
Aloysius and Gregory laughed at me. Glasser said that he understood just how I felt. Well, I will adjust then, after my anger is spent. It should, of course, be the publishing world that makes adjustments to me, but I am large-hearted. Not so large-hearted, though, as I was before receiving these affronts.
©1971 R.A. Lafferty
I first read about this film about a month ago -- fittingly for the movie, I've forgotten where, but it was in some blog somewhere. Long story short: It's by Mike Judge of BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD fame, his first feature since the modern classic OFFICE SPACE . The studio has buried IDIOCRACY, releasing it in only a few cities -- not even in New York. So when my wife & I had reason to spend a few days in Austin, we decided we had to see it. As she said: "Dude made OFFICE SPACE." Case closed!
IDIOCRACY is a weird piece of work. The plot: Five hundred years from now, people have all gotten incredibly stupid because all the stupid people had lots of kids, while the smart people didn't. (SF fans will recognize this as, er, heavily inspired by C.M. Kornbluth's novella "The Marching Morons." ) Luke Wilson plays an ordinary guy who's put in suspended animation and wakes up to find that, by default, he's the smartest guy in the world.
Considering how farcical the movie is -- the most popular TV show of the time is called "Ow My Balls," for instance, and nearly every scene is a gag -- it's remarkably involving. A lot of the jokes are, uh, pretty stupid, but that's kind of the point. Luke Wilson's experiences with the idiots of the future is excruciating -- I really felt like I'd endured something by the end. It's also the kind of movie that will get funnier and funnier the more times you saw it, just like OFFICE SPACE. Even now, I'm laughing as I remember scenes that seemed kind of stupid in the theatre. And there's a closing "inspirational" speech that really works, in the way, say, TEAM AMERICA's fell flat.
So why is Fox burying this thing? I don't buy that it's too close a satire of our current administration -- IDIOCRACY is far too out-there for that. This article includes speculation that there's too much bathroom humor in it, but really it's pretty tame in that area. My guess is that Fox is afraid of the satirical "product placement" all through IDIOCRACY. In this future, Fuddrucker's restaurant has gone through several evolutions to become Buttfucker's, and Starbucks is a place where you get hand jobs. And not in a cute We-All-Love-Starbucks-Don't-We? way. It's just a nasty place where you get dirty hand jobs with your latte.
Of course, it's also the kind of movie you could see and walk out bewildered, thinking "That's not funny." But really, it is. If you get a chance, switch off "Ow My Balls" and give it a shot.
I read Criminal, Ed's new comic with the great artist Sean Phillips, and I liked it a lot. Noirish, convincing, with surprising characters (including one cruelly funny one) and clear & involving storytelling from Ed & Sean.
Alton Verm of Conroe, Texas, wants his daughter's school district to stop teaching Fahrenheit 451. It gets better: he filed his request--for a ban on a book about book-burning--during Banned Books Week. [Via]
The final 2006 regular season records of the two New York teams, who might end up facing each other in the World Series:
I can accept identical win-loss records, but home and away? Jesus.
