Dear Steve Jobs

Dear Steve Jobs

May 14

To: sjobs@apple.com
From: matt@alertnerd.com
Subj: Urgent iPad Question

Hi Steve–I’m a hard-working, geeky American who has two kids (one in diapers), a mortgage, student loans–you know how it is.

I am obsessed with the iPad; I believe it truly is the future of computing and I know it will enhance my life, my hobbies, and my creative efforts.

Can you just send me an iPad? I have no reason to believe you will, nor do I honestly believe you should, but I believe there are no such things as stupid questions. (Although asking the CEO of Apple to send me a free product for no reason is as close to stupid as it gets, I admit. Good thing I’m not proud.)

Regardless, thanks for the iPhone, and the iPod, and all the other amazing products you and your company have created. I heart them.

Best,
Matt Springer

Lost 6.15 "Across The Sea"

Lost 6.15 "Across The Sea"

May 14

Last time on LOST:

Sawyer deduces that the Smoke Monster is weak against water, is wrong.
Kate gets shot; the bullet is the most character development she has had to date.
Jack – really bad at keeping an eye on his stuff.
Sayid: “I’ve decided I’m good toda-” BOOM!
Jin and Sun – Reunited and the pressure at this depth is uncomfortable.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to reconcile CJ Cregg’s role in LOST with her history on The Island. As best as I can figure, she crashed on the Island en route to Africa to oversee her charitable work with Hollis. This happened during the crazy time travel period chronicled in Season 5, and while the 815ers were bouncing to the 50s and the 70s and the whenevers, CJ wound up hundreds of years ago. Like people do.

All that Latin that she’s talking? Ronny Jordan lyrics.

Or maybe it happened another way.

Let’s talk about answers.

Any answer that we get about LOST, as the Woman so succinctly points out, will only lead to more questions. Ultimately, any answers that we’ll accept are going to be the ones we discover for ourselves.  The theorizing and the scrutinizing is as much of a part of the experience of the show as the watching of it.  In fact, there’s something to be said for the metacontext of lies, fakeouts and unanswered questions slowly turning a man bitter and evil, yes? Maybe? Is that reaching too far?

But in lieu of such ruminating, let’s turn our laser focus to the real mystery at the heart of the island – bad parenting, and maybe, in a macro sense, poor sharing/people skills in general (I mean, the Woman does just up and bash Claudia’s head in, and I’ve always been led to believe that that’s a bad behavior). Do any of these people have a good relationship with their parents? No? Is that why Jacob chose them, in an effort to work through his ‘I know you’re an evil witch lady who murdered my mom but I love you anyway because I’m codependent and a bit of a douchebag and I will gladly commend my twin brother to a fate worse than death for killing you after you slaughtered a whole mess of innocent people and wow it’s all like what is good and what is evil really because he just wanted to see the world and now he’s like some murderous fucking fog monster bro and I’m ridiculously smug about it when you’d think that maybe just maybe I’d be like a little guilty or have some kind of remorse instead of sitting on a log and talking about magic wine and shit but hey I’m Jacob what did you expect want to hang out in my magic lighthouse or play Othello in my secret wonder cave’ thing?’ Fuck you, Jacob.

World's Most Forgetful

World's Most Forgetful

May 13

Like Tony Stark as the events of “World’s Most Wanted” unfold, I have a terrible memory.

It sucks. What sucks worse is KNOWING I have a terrible memory. I’m not talking about forgetting phone numbers or the birthdays of my kids. I’m talking about life events, big and small, that just pass through my brain like emotional dialysis. I have two kids, a great wife, all of whom I adore; they’re constantly doing amazing things, and I can hang onto so few of them. I don’t know why; maybe it’s the complete lyrics of Elvis Costello eating up valuable brain cells.

I videotape and photograph, but it’s a double-edged sword. Half the time, I feel bad because I’m not “living the moment” when I’m behind the video camera. The other half of the time, I feel desperate because I’m convinced that if I’m NOT filming or snapping, I’ll never really recall these moments at all.

I read through Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s “World’s Most Wanted” arc in the Invincible Iron Man Omnibus hardcover and it snapped me up and yanked me to the ending. I got a little swept away, the way you do with any smart action-adventure story. I tapped my feet to the beats of the plot until the last chorus was sung and I closed the book and I was sated.

A day or two later, I found myself thinking back to the key emotional beats. Especially that heartbreaking “who’s Happy?” Watching the world’s smartest man become stupid was tough because it was the kind of sci-fi plot twist that any writer would kill to create–a clever-as-hell concept that also bites hard into an emotional truth.

None of us want to lose our memories; they are our idenitites, our friends and family, our selves. But we do lose them, even if we don’t want to. In some ways, we can’t help it. Time and whiskey kill brain cells; people shuffle off the stage and others take their place. You may even have watched a friend or family member succumb to diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s that literally dismantle your memories against your will.

Tony Stark’s plight tapped into my own fear of losing memories; when he couldn’t remember one of his best friends or even how to operate a screwdriver, I felt a pang of recognition and fear. For me, it elevated a fun action-adventure romp into deep, insightful science fiction.

Life In Ivy Town

Life In Ivy Town

May 12

At the beginning of Justice League: Cry For Justice, the James Robinson-penned miniseries that features Hal Jordan torturing people, Ollie Queen stabbing a villain with an arrow “for justice” and the murder of an eight year old girl  as the emotional payoff for said villain leaving a star-shaped crater in the middle of the DCU’s Star City, The Atom (Ray Palmer, the classic Silver Age hero) teamed up briefly with The Atom (Ryan Choi, who replaced Palmer as DC’s shrinking superman after his retirement following Identity Crisis). In that scene, Palmer tells Choi that he wants him to continue being the Atom, that there is room enough for two men sharing the mantle. There is, after all, room for several thousand Green Lanterns, including four from Earth that currently coexist together. There are two Flashes, too and at one point two Nightwings and two Flamebirds.

Apparently, Ray Palmer was mistaken. Less than a month after the official announcement of an Atom backup feature in Adventure Comics by Jeff Lemire and Mahmud Asrar (accompanied by a tour around the comics Internet in which Lemire played coy about Choi’s fate beyond confirming that he would not appear in the story), Ryan Choi found himself on the wrong side of Slade Wilson and his new team of villainous Titans and got himself killed.  Well, it wasn’t exactly Ryan’s call. It was Eric Wallace’s. Or Dan Didio’s.

DC should not surprise me anymore, and yet it does.

I’m not going to start screaming that DC is racist (though plenty of people have pointed out the White Lantern and White Power Rings that come out of Blackest Night) – I think that it’s an unfortunate side effect of the current editorial mood and not a witch hunt against characters of color (created after 1986).  That mood is represented by a spiral of diminishing returns, each banking that the death of a niche character will spike fan interest/outrage* without driving off readers the way a substantial permanent change might.   So we’ll sacrifice the Chinese Atom, because he could never sell 30,000 copies a month, and in the process overlook that a vast library of characters is what makes a shared universe feel populated. Every cheap death squanders that library.  Like those maniacs on fringe talk radio who rant about peak oil, we fans are becoming more and more acutely aware that DC can’t sustain itself forever on what it’s got left from 50 years ago.

The question, whether it’s at a convention or in a comic shop or on your friend’s back porch, comes up more than occasionally: why haven’t we had an iconic new character in the past twenty years – maybe even since Giant-Size X-Men #1 – or possibly, as an outlier, since Booster Gold. The answer is that nobody’s giving these characters a chance**, and nobody is clamoring to put them in front of an audience that might love them.

Comics have never not had their creativity driven by short-impact sales goals, but to see it done so wastefully is saddening.

I liked Ryan Choi. I own every appearance of the character. I enjoyed the way his brilliance was counterbalanced by his naivete and enthusiasm for his superhero lifestyle – the sense of joy he had that couldn’t help but be transferred to the reader. His romantic relationship with Giganta was as surprisingly touching as it was hilarious (and humanizing to Giganta). He was an Asian character that wasn’t a martial arts master.  Ryan Choi’s stint as the Atom was the first time I cared about the Atom name in at least 20 years.

You know what? Fuck Ray Palmer. I admire Jeff Lemire and Mahmud Asrar as creators and normally, I’d be a fan of their work no matter who it featured, but I’m not going to buy it. I’m not adding Adventure Comics back to my pull list. I won’t be buying any collected editions of Ray Palmer’s adventures. Fuck Ray Palmer. This is not some outraged fanboy stamping his feet and threatening to quit DC forever – this is me making a focused promise to vote against regression and senseless death with my wallet.  I urge you to do the same.

*my professional opinion is that sentiment analysis is important in marketing; DC Comics clearly disagrees with me.

** Where ‘chance’ is not defined as a series that doesn’t feature popular talent and is isolated from the current metaplot. Why did Booster Gold stick? It wasn’t because of his ongoing – it was because he was in the Justice League and had an ongoing and was visible in a noteworthy way during his era’s biggest event – the death of Superman. Why did Wolverine stick? Just because he was mysterious? Try because he was in one of the most popular books of the early 80s. Because he was on merchandise and in house ads and it took a few years of exposure to make it work. DC Comics gave Ryan Choi even less of a chance than they gave the Kate Spencer Manhunter.

Second Thoughts

Second Thoughts

May 12

The Second Coming crossover event currently running through Uncanny X-Men, X-Men Legacy, New Mutants, and X-Force reaches its midpoint this week. The story centers on Hope, the so-called ‘mutant messiah’ as she returns to the present day after being raised in the bleak, post-apocalyptic future by her guardian Cable, who is himself the time-tossed son of Cyclops and his wife Maddy Pryor (the psychotic evil clone of Jean Grey created by Mister Sinister who turned into some kind of crazy witch called the Goblin Queen and hooked up with Cyclops’ brother after he ditched her and his infant son to be with his resurrected ex* who later attempted to seduce an alternate-universe version of her own son**), and the X-Men’s struggle against the forces determined to stop her from laying her messianic mojo on Marvel’s merry mutants.

So, at the halfway point, where are we? Hope has made it to Utopia, the island fortress of the X-Men, but not before Nightcrawler (and Ariel and, apparently, Vanisher) gave their lives, Magik got sent to Hell and Karma lost a leg.  The legion of resurrected former X-Men villains led by the half genocidal-robot-from-the-present/half genocidal-robot-from-the-future Bastion (aka Bad 90s Concept #54) seems to be targeting teleporters (despite some messy scripting in X-Force #26 where Bastion initially ignores Nightcrawler as not being as high-priority a target as Rogue) and former Hellfire Club member Donald Pierce is free on Utopia and clearly looking to explode some of the X-Men’s stuff.  Team Evil hasn’t been unscathed, though, even if they do have the upper hand at the moment. Archangel bisected anti-mutant religious leader William Stryker (the Marvel Universe version of those Westboro assholes) in a shower of gore that discriminating readers have come to expect from the members of X-Force, while Cameron Hodge (leader of the battlesuited terrorist group The Right) was taken out by the New Mutants’ Warlock.

As an outspoken fan of X-Men crossover events (I love Inferno and Messiah CompleX), I’m still up in the air about Second Coming.  In a landscape where the X-Men’s biggest antagonists right now have been off-the-radar threats or their own internal bickering, the sudden prominence of Bastion’s conspiracy (which has been running through X-Force from the beginning and has never bled into the other books prior to the ramp up to Second Coming) seems kind of random and off-putting and almost punishes the readers of the other books for not wanting to pay attention to the book where all the X-Men with knives and/or claws trudge through graphic violence and teenage girl chainsaw torture.

Ostensibly, this is the story of the return of the Phoenix. At least, that’s what all the clues in the marketing materials and the cute convention  panel answers have been telling us. That’s a cosmic scale story, by its very definition. It is not dead bad guys from the 80s and 90s getting their gangs back together and facing off one by one against Cyclops and Wolverine over a girl. That’s River City Ransom.

"The Purifiers' Turf"

For a story that is supposed to be about Hope Summers, we’ve seen her do precious little except for drool over hair care products, sulk and bravely but ineffectually assault Bastion with a steel pipe. Other than her status as the only mutant born since the Scarlet Witch’s Decimation of the mutant populace at the end of House of M, there is nothing noteworthy about Hope save for Scott’s belief that redheaded girls have magical powers.  Wolverine is right; she’d better be worth it.

As the reader, we don’t know if she is or not.  Nor do we really know what the stakes are (and don’t give me ‘survival’; I’m ready for an X-Men story that isn’t just about the mutants’ fight to survive their genetic obsolescence and a villain with a plan that’s not ‘kill the mutants’). In fact, you might have noticed that Second Coming is re-serving the same story as Messiah CompleX – Cable trying to keep Hope safe, the X-Men trying to find them, random villains teaming up to take them down, Wolverine and his crack team of violent sociopaths crossing the line in order to serve the greater good.  Except three years ago it had more immediacy and more impact. So far, Second Coming feels silly and bombastic, and I hope that I turn out to be wrong about it.

Have you been keeping up with Second Coming? Am I wrong? Do you love it? Don’t you just wish they’d bring Jean back already? Let us know in the comments.

*The first case of what the kids now call “resurrexting”
** I’ll admit that I’m fuzzy on the events of X-Man, but this actually happened, right? Or is this fanfic?

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