waste of tape

Well, I wasn’t going to post today, but I will because Rira and Jonas are fucking whiners, and since I had no intention of writing anything, you will get half-formed rambles and stuff about comic books.  That’s right, comic books.  How you like them apples? 

We’ve got this dining room in my building at work that’s actually…well…fine, I suppose, and given my penchant for bitching and moaning, that’s high praise. It’s on the 16^th floor w/a water view, so on a nice summer day, it’s absolutely gorgeous. The food situation is balls to the wall nutso—full buffet, salad bar, sandwich bar, pizza, grill, baked potato bar, dessert, etc. Oh, and it’s a buffet, so it’s all you can eat, which, right, thanks, like this city needs to be any fatter.  It’s like half the population has a pillow shoved up under their skin—and don’t give me that face, it’s fucking true, and I don’t really wonder why when for 7 dollars, you can get all you can eat meat, you know what I’m saying?  My work husband (who is actually quite trim) and I (who could stand to lose a couple) have created several gut-busting recipes up at the Sugar Maple.  His specialty is the Mega Meaty Boy:  you pile a bun up with one hamburger patty, one turkey burger, and a sampling of all the deli meat from the sandwich bar.  Oh, and bacon.  Healthy.  While delicious, the Mega Meaty Boy is a little too intense for me, so I generally opt for *my* specialty:  Super Mecha Nacho Fries.  I take garlic fries and cover them with that toxic yellow melted cheese gunk, green onions, jalapenos, chicken, ground beef, tomatoes, sour cream, shredded cheese and ranch dressing.  You heard me.   You eat some of that and I guarantee you will sound like you’re in food porn. Which I’ve seen on crazyshit.com and which I don’t really get. I mean, it’s really messy. I can’t figure out how people get turned on when they’re getting blueberry pie all over the couch. You know that’s going to stain!

Anyway.  It’s really quiet around the office today, so I’ve been using that time to misuse the scanner and upload pics of various issues of Robin and Teen Titans to help illustrate some of the points I have brought up with Jonas in our now epic gmail conversation about our relative nerdery and various bagging, boarding and boxing tendencies. Yes, by the way, I am an adult who reads comic books. At this point, I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to. Sure, I could cut myself off from most of them, but there’s no way I could give up Robin cold turkey. I’ve been reading that fucking title for sixteen years. SIXTEEN YEARS. That’s almost two-thirds of my life! I’ve been reading that series for almost as long as I have had a youngest brother!  21 Jump Street was still on the air when I started reading Robin!  Newsies hadn’t come out yet!  I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHO CHRISTIAN BALE WAS!!!  Oh, the humanity.

Long-running titles are like soap operas for geeks—40 years from now, I’ll be lounging on a day bed in a housecoat, eating cherry cordials, leafing through the latest issue of Detective Comics and telling my husband I’m too busy with “my stories” to get up. Those fat cats at DC and Marvel are sneaky bastards—they pull you into their tangled web of nerdosity and keep you there for lyfe. This is how it happened to me: I pull A Death in The Family off the Graphic Novel shelves at the Hawai’i State Library. Read a few DC issues, voila—witness the introduction of Tim Drake and his assumption of the Robin mantle. Idly pick up the first annual and then the limited series, Joker’s Wild, in which Tim is revealed to be a big old role-playing game loving dork (!canon!) in an ass-whupping, bow staff-wielding, split-kicking body AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAND I was hooked.

So, Tim “Dungeon Master” Drake is awesome and sure, he has his own book, but he’s also still Batman’s partner and a major figure in Batman, Detective Comics and all the other eleventy-billion Batman titles there are, not to mention the other members of the Bat-Clan like Mulletwing and Batgirl and I’m not even going to touch limited series and one-shots. Now here’s the motherfucking rub (and also, the sheer, evil brilliance of companies like DC): their characters exist in the same universe and therefore, can pop up in other titles whenever the powers that be deem it necessary. Robin, Impulse and Superboy team up in Young Justice and later in the third version of the New Teen Titans—which means more series to buy, PLUS all of the guest appearances and DCU events like Infinite Crisis and 52. This would be like is all NBC shows existed on the same plane of reality and Sawyer has flashbacks of him and Peter Petrelli hanging out on a rooftop with the Donnelleys while Snow Patrol plays in the background! MAD GENIUS! Of course some obsessive-compulsive chump like me is going to be all “omgtimdrakeisinthreepanelsinthisissuemustbuyimmediatelyormyfragileuniversewillcollapse!!!”  Fuckers!  It’s like they KNOW me or something!

Speaking of, I’ve been TiVo’ing Teen Titans for awhile and I kept catching the teaser for the show directly after it…what I have come to know as the awesomest cartoon of all (barring Voltron, naturally): Ben 10! Our young hero, the spunky, spiky-haired Ben Tennyson is on an apparently never-ending road trip with his cousin, Gwen, and their grandfather. Ben recently came into possession of the Omnitrix, an alien device that allows him, with the turn of a dial, to transform into one of 10 freakish alien life forms. The Tennyson family encounters all manner of villain who they defeat through a combination of Ben’s transformation, Gwen’s book smarts and Grandpa’s down home wisdom. Ben 10! Cool concept. Also? Ben 10’s nemesis? Kevin 11, this total emo kid who absorbed the powers of the Omnitrix and can transform as well. KEVIN ELEVEN. I can’t say it out loud without giggling. Kevin 11!

They should make a Young Justice cartoon.  I’d totally watch/become crazy-obsessed with it.  I mean, I know I haven’t had entirely good things to say about Superboy and all.  For example, how it’s a totally ridiculous character construct and what the hell kind of costume is a tee-shirt and jeans and if he’s cloned out of Superman and Lex Luthor, theoretically, he got the Y-chromosome from one and the X-chromosome from the other, so which one’s the mom?  And also, doesn’t that make it totally canon that Lex and Clark have a love child?  Doesn’t it?  Well, truth is, I actually like Superboy. He’s just such a big, dumb well-meaning jock.  Plus, he watches the DCU equivalent of Buffy, Wendy The Werewolf Stalker and, incidentally, makes the same case about that show as I make about Buffy. And also? He totally hates that stupid dog, Krypto. Every time they’re in the same panel, you can tell he’s thinking “There’s gonna be Kryptonite in your puppy chow if you don’t shut the fuck up, mutt.”  Amen, Kon-El. And RIP, btw. And RIP Bart Conner too.

Seriously, what’s up with that? The DCUTPTB are systematically killing everyone that Tim Drake loves: Mom, Dad, Girlfriend, Best Friend, 2^nd Best Friend—is this a conspiracy to make him all emo, or what? Or to slowly drive him crazy so he goes all darkside (not Darkseid)?  I mean, he’s clearly already crazy—he’s down in his Mad Scientist Lab trying to re-clone Kon-El.  Infinitely more troubling, he turned down a naked, willing Ravager? And THEN, he kicked Jason Todd in the junk!  Okay, wait, that’s a totally rational impulse.  Heh, check out the squiggly lines of pain and anger radiating out of his head.  Priceless.  I would buy an entire issue devoted to various and sundry characters kicking Jason Todd in the nuts, but the other stuff?  Shenanigans!  Robin needs Superboy!  And Impulse! Tim thinks that Batman needs a Robin to keep from getting all grim and gritty, but he really means “lonely and even crazier than usual.” Tim needed Kon and Bart for that exact reason—they keep him from being a paranoid, creepy lunatic stalker (well, from being a total paranoid, creepy lunatic stalker, at any rate) and he keeps them from being buffoons (well, from being total buffoons, at any rate)  Neither Tim nor Kon would say this, of course, because they are dudes.  Bart would have said it, because he was raised in virtual reality without the socialization that makes guys repress their totally non-sexual guy love.