Reviews of trade paperbacks of comic books (mostly Marvel), along with a few other semi-relevant comments / reviews.

30 November 2009

An Excuse with a Brain in a Jar

I missed putting up a review Friday. You, the loyal reader, deserve a better excuse than “my personal life was crazy” or “I was crushed by the amount of work I had to do this week.” Frankly, you can get those kind of excuses anywhere, and we all know they’re lies, just excuses for being too lazy to put in the kind of quality work an unpaid “labor of love” deserves. So you get a better excuse. Like this one:

This is getting ridiculous.

I had this friend, Sebastian, who was a brain in a jar. I know what you’re thinking, but he was a pretty good guy despite his lack of a hole to pour alcohol into. He had this bad habit of incinerating his mind-controlled minions, though, for no other reason than he could. I mean, if he zapped them with that funky brain electricity that comes out of the tubes on top of the jar because, I don’t know, they were embezzling from him or being cruel to his cat or because he thought it was just funny, I could have taken that, but no … Sebastian did it just because he wanted to. Seemed like a good idea at the time, I suppose.

And then he’d go on and on about how brains in jars are superior life forms, how they don’t have to crap and they don’t waste water and they don’t have a large carbon footprint, and man, I just got fed up with it. So I told him brains in jars were not superior in every way.

He didn’t believe me.

So I said brains in jars couldn’t taste a steak or chocolate cake or smell a rose.

And he said he could, though his minions, experience everything us mobile units did — and experience it more often, because he could take in the sensory inputs from several units at one time.

And he didn’t have to sleep.

“Aha!” I shouted. “You never know dreams!”

I can experience my units’ dreams whenever I want — even the ones they forget. I could hear the smugness in his telepathic projections, and it was driving me nuts. I wanted nothing more to wipe the smirk off his … sulci, I guess.

“You can never have children,” I said.

Children are exercises in vanity that contribute in the Earth’s destruction — part of the human plague that is laying waste to the Earth.

“You want to lay waste the Earth,” I said. “Isn’t that a little hypocritical?”

Yeah. But I want to do it in an ecologically responsible way.

So I said, “You’ll never know the love of a woman.”

Again, minions — and what’s so important about the love being from a woman? Why not a man? Or a cow? Or a —

I cut him off before he could go in a irretrievably creepy direction. “You can’t feel the joy of athletic competition, or of physically accomplishing something that you knew was impossible but you did it anyway even though it took all your strength — ”

And when he broadcasted Minions into my brain, I reached over and poured a bottle of Budweiser into his brain jar.

And then —

Well, I can’t remember anything that’s happened from between then and finding myself in the middle of Spartanburg, S.C., yesterday, wearing a pair of pink stretch pants and a t-shirt that has a picture of the Confederate flag next to an equal sign and the word “HATE.” I seem to have quite a few more bruises and broken bones than I used to. I wonder if it had anything to do with our argument?

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21 November 2009

A Frozen Excuse

I missed putting up a review for three straight weeks. You, the loyal reader, deserve a better excuse than “my personal life was crazy” or “I was crushed by the amount of work I had to do this week.” Frankly, you can get those kind of excuses anywhere, and we all know they’re lies, just excuses for being too lazy to put in the kind of quality work an unpaid “labor of love” deserves. So you get a better excuse. Like this one:

There is a stereotype that Canadians are kind, polite people. That’s true, by and large. There’s also a stereotype that there is a sinister core to Canada, something hostile to America and freedom. And there’s some truth to that.

Not that it’s their fault; they’ve been pushed into it, by a sinister splinter of the Parti Québécois that plots not only the downfall of their neighbors and of Americans but of mankind entire. They have been subverted — some say corrupted, literally reshaped in body and soul — by eldritch ice magics. This magic comes from the most dangerous force on the continent: Santa and his elves.

Santa, whose dangerous omnipotence and time-manipulating capabilities should chill you to his core. His elves, who can make anything — including hideous manikins, mockeries of men who mock our forms by wearing haberdashery — using only snow and spells.

But they can’t stop the North Pole from melting. No, we’ve got them there, taking their frosty lairs from underneath them. But scientists — those stupid, blabbermouth scientists — have alerted them to the danger. And they’re planning to spread south.

Whether those poor Péquistes are their mindless puppets or their motivated underlings, hoping to take their place by Santa’s throne when the conquest is complete, no one knows. All we know is that they must be fought. And who is fighting them on the tundra? While America and other NATO nations are distracted by wars on terror, it falls to the First Nations people to stand between us and subjugation by someone even fatter than Americans.

They don’t do it because they like us. Frankly, they don’t — well, they don’t like you. (They think you smell funny and have a weird accent. Sorry.) But they know someone has to make the sacrifice, and they are the ones it has fallen to. So I’ve been spending this month aiding these brave, brave people who get offended if you ask about their summer igloos. Every November, they make a push to shove back Santa and his minions before they gain their greatest strength, when Santa receives his month — or more — of worship. That is when I make my trek north, to aid their fight. But every year, the advance stalls earlier; every year, Santa’s minions gain more ground. Santa is winning; the only question is whether he will break out of containment before the ice cap melts or whether his frozen kingdom will first slip into the Arctic Sea one tepid summer. It’s a close race.

I work mainly in logistics and supply. I cannot hope to match these people’s skill and bravery. My work is just a drop in an ocean. You probably do more to aid us every day when you let your car idle while waiting for your kid to get out of school. Keep up the good work!

They don’t ask for your tribute. They don’t even ask for your thanks. But when you look to the cold December sky and don’t see a venison propelled missile of death inbound, they ask to be remembered.

And I think that’s the least we can do.

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