Commissioner Gordon Quote Of The Week

"Yes indeed, saints preserve us if the Caped Crusaders have gone crooked! Which, apparently, they have!"




Episode 90
"Caught In The Spider's Den"

I'm back. Sorry. It took me a couple of days to take care of some business that suddenly came up involving an alias of mine, Jeff Gannon. I think it's finally blown over and I can get back to:

The Threefold Mission Of SUPERFRANKENSTEIN
1) To laugh at the same comics everyone else has been ridiculing for 45 years.

2) To find ways to mention that Bush cronies, religious fundamentalists and corporate vampires still outrage me, in case you assume my opinions changed since yesterday.

3) To try to seem contemporary--like when your Dad praises "the hip-hop music"--by linking to some creepy website five minutes before you would have found it on your own.

So... apropos of 1), yesterday I found myself bantering with Mark Waid about Jack Kirby's cover of FANTASTIC FOUR #1:


This is one of the three most reprinted, swiped, traced and homaged covers in history. To comics fans, it's as familiar as Dave Barry's next punchline. So I practically got chest pains when Waid noticed something that I'd never seen, or heard mentioned, before. Hitting the very dregs of our decades-long conversation. we got down to Reed Richards' word balloon:

IT'LL TAKE MORE THAN ROPES TO KEEP MISTER FANTASTIC OUT OF ACTION!

And Waid said:

So... did the monster tie him up?

SUPER-EXILE

Like Superboy, SUPERFRANKENSTEIN no longer exists on earth until I get a significant amount of writing done. I'll be back in a couple of days. Until then, if you absolutely can't live without self-flattering opinions, geriatric cultural references and pointless internet time-wasters, I recommend Metafilter.

Flipping The Purple Bird

At The Nation, a typically excellent column from Naomi Klein on the Iraqi election:

The election results are in: Iraqis voted overwhelmingly to throw out the US-installed government of Iyad Allawi, who refused to ask the United States to leave. A decisive majority voted for the United Iraqi Alliance; the second plank in the UIA platform calls for "a timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq."

[...]

So will the people who got all choked up watching Iraqis flock to the polls support these democratically chosen demands? Please. "You don't set timetables," George W. Bush said four days after Iraqis voted for exactly that.

Mwah!

Valentine's Day is no longer just a commercial holiday; it's a civil rights anniversary:

For four weeks last winter, between Feb. 12 and March 11, about 4,000 same-sex couples obtained marriage licenses at [San Francisco's] city hall.

Happy Anniversary--to all.

Meanwhile, perhaps fearing that we'll inevitably celebrate 2/14 for all the right reasons, something called the Liberty Counsel is trying to turn V-Day into something called Day of Purity. Heh. Good luck.

This year--and by "this year" I mean today--you can download, print and give the Valentine that started all the trouble between Lisa and Ralph, thanks to Geoff Stearns at deconcept.

Write your own ©andy Hearts (well, pictures of candy hearts) at ©ryptogram...

...and at The ACME Heart Maker. This one allows only eight characters but, as you can see, it doesn't censor objectionable content.

CRIB OF STEEL

Superman again. I guess it's his week. From the very funny Superman's Fortress Of Solitude by Rick Stoeckel, at McSweeney's:

...He throws the crystal. It spins like a dagger, cutting the icy winds, until it lands with force and precision, sinking into the core of the area that will become the Fortress of Solitude. Now I wait, Superman thinks.

After several hours of standing and watching and witnessing nothing happening, Superman takes out the crystal's instruction booklet...

LEGO Fortress from Peter's LEGO web site. More pix there.

Commissioner Gordon Quote Of The Week

"Most true surfers are known as Duke, Skip, Rabbit, or Buzzy!"





Episode 104
"Surf's Up, Joker's Under"

Christmas With The Super-Heroes

3AM, Christmas Day 2004: Don costumes. Go to burger van. Encounter food shortage. Beat a man's face in. (I may have left a step or two out, glug-glug.)
[Thanks to The Mighty Layman.]

Thanks...

...to Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin and the temporarily grumpy Dorian's (postmodernbarney.com) for pluggin' ol' Supafrank. Confidential to Mike: watch who you're calling "esteemed."