Texts considered: The X-Men #9-10 (1965), an ad from the reprint of issue nine in Annual #1 (1970), "Heroes" (2006-2007)
Well, these were a bit of a let down. I know that I've been raised in a very different comic culture, but why didn't Stan and Jack ever consider multi-issue arcs for some of these stories? I really figured that the whole "Lucifer" subplot would take a lot longer to be resolved - maybe even have some drama - but here it is, all complete. For now...
Well, there's the minor beef out of the way. Quite quickly, issue nine sees the X-Men fight the Avengers off so that Professor X can defeat Lucifer (who is not Beelzebub), and issue ten sees the X-Men travel to what will most likely become the Savage Land (a prehistoric oasis in the middle of Antarctica) and meet Ka-zar (a Tarzan knock-off, for those who don't know) and his feline life partner Zabu.
The closest thing to anything military-industrial complex-y here is the "thermal bomb" ("Large enough to blow up a continent!") which has been attuned to Lucifer's heartbeat so that Professor X can't just kill him. (Seriously - how often does Professor X just kill people, even those who crippled him? He even lets Lucifer go at the end. The worst he did to Magneto was shut his brain down after he stole Wolverine's adamantium.) Oddly, the bomb's targeted at Antarctica - which would make the world's oceans into "montrous, deadly, cascading mountains of water, destroying all in their path" - rather than set to home in on Lucifer's last signal so that his killer can also be destroyed, but I suppose everyone has to suffer if a super-villain dies. Besides, he's just off in the Balkans anyhow. Oh, and the explorers that Ka-zar encounters at the start of issue ten are heavily armed, though a quick check of wikipedia tells us that military personnel and equipment can be used in the neutral Antarctic for the purposes of exploration. (Were they armed with tommy guns in case of tapdancing penguins? I sure would be.)
(I do have to wonder at the "artificial dust devil" that Lucifer employs to trap Professor X, though. It just seems odd and unlikely. Yes, I do realize that I'm reading a comic with a winged teen and an ice-man. Anyhow, I know that I've now two entries for an anthology of literary discussions of dust devils.)
In terms of science, the main option is all the archaeological delights in the Savage Land, but not much is made of it. There's sabre-toothed tigers and mammoths and tyrannosaurs and eohippi (or whatever the plural of eohippus is), but that's about it. Hank is impressed, Warren wants to shoot B-movies with no need for an effects budget, and Scott is stoic.
Also, I'll have to check wikipedia later for how long it took Sam and Diane to become a couple. After just ten issues of unrequited whatever between Scott and Jean I'm already laughing at most thought bubbles: "Is that the normal concern of a leader for an ally...or do I detect another note in his voice? ...One that I've been longing to hear?" "When she stands this close to me, I forget everything but my desire to reach out...to embrace her!" "If only I could comfort you with my arms... my lips...but I know I mustn't! As our acting leader, you've no time for thoughts of... romance!" (At least there's not a lot of bold lettering in their thoughts. Poor Professor X, especially considering his feelings back in issue three. No wonder he went nuts. At least the other guys in the team have given up on her.)
Musical ads alert: in issue nine, there's three calls for poems and only two opportunities for musical instruction, and in issue ten, there's just two calls for poems. I suppose my previous speculation about the rise of singer-songwriter comic book readers was deeply unfounded. I wonder how Joe Satriani managed it, then...
(Issue number nine was reprinted as part of the first X-Men annual and it featured a Columbia House ad. Twelve albums for just $3.98! There's a lot less canon there than I'd have hoped.)
Other ads: well, the Merry Marvel Marching Society finally makes an appearance in the pages of a comic. It's just a dollar for various cards, stickers, and a button. Radio-television electronics make an appearance in ads - my fave is a two dollar screen overlay that transforms a black and white television into a color television. Since Time told me yesterday that all the networks went color at this time, this makes a lot of sense. (I'm still waiting for the cardboard submarines that Dave Barry bought as a college student to be advertised.) There's also high school equivalency programs which join the mechanic programs that we've already seen. Oh, and I forgot to mention the various cartooning and drawing schools that have been advertised, too.
There's still ads for rockets. I really should order one of those sometime.
As for the letters, some discouraging words are finally heard. In issue ten, a student of psychology who dabbles in parapsychology (did she sue the Ghostbusters people later?) huffily notes that it's "psychokinesis" or "P.K." rather than "telekinesis" which Marvel Girl employs. (Stan Lee employs something called "sarcasm" for his reply here.) More effectively, someone takes issue with the house bluster of Marvel and the overworked artists who aren't able to produce the art that they're capable of. (Actually, that probably should have been "Art.") Not only that, he also talks about how the art's "now unpleasing to the discerning comic book fan" but closes by saying that he enjoys these books. (Stan calmly declines to argue and says that the letterwriter's entitled to his "own bonehead opinion" and that they never expressly said that they had more talent than other comic book publishers. Maybe they had some pride, but not that much...)
A science fiction fan - of Arthur C. Clark [sic], Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, and Damon Knight - also chimes in this issue. A solemn oath to no longer read comics had been made two years previously, but Fantastic Four had changed everything for him. He also notes that he's entering the University of Vermont as a freshman, "so [he's] not a kid any more. Marvel Comics are great reading material. They are well written, well drawn, and even believable. The X-Men as super mutants are nothing more than a logical deduction on the part of your staff." I suppose this guy went on to get his dissertation in genetics and supervise the work of Mohinder's father in "Heroes."
Oh, and people are still angry about Iceman's lack of boots. Considering that when I was in my undergrad I had to contend with an X-Men whose mutant power was his matter-devouring digestive system which had separated itself from his body into two maggot-shaped symbiotic creatures, I don't have much sympathy. Kids those days...
Given all the letters about freeing Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch from the Evil Mutants, it's not terribly surprising that they'll end up in the Avengers before long. And uniform critiques are rising, too.
***
As for "Heroes," a few weeks' worth of catchup viewing finally got me through the first season. It's kinda odd to consider that this superhero show was one of the few survivors form this season - especially considering that "Studio 60" was so touted and had such a solid pilot - but it was fun to watch. Considering how Marvelesque it all was, it's not surprising that there was a Stan Lee cameo, too - though only one line. No one's running around in tights yet and everything's reasonably acceptable so far. I will be interested in the next season, that's for sure. It's no "Buffy," but it's pretty decent.
The lack of origin stories is a little odd, but I suppose they don't entirely know yet. It seems that most of the powers of the youngest heroes are likely ones that they were born with, but it remains to be seen how their parents received theirs. Very few powers are anything particularly new, or even beyond the realm of the X-Men (flight is still a pretty awesome and lame solitary power, no matter how you slice it - and at least they acknowledge that). But it's probably for the best that they've not yet given us an origin story - a little mystery goes a long way. In a way, that's probably one of the blessings and faults of this research - it's hard to look for anything new or different when you already know the general story arc.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The Beast as a Beat
Texts considered: The X-Men #7-8, Time 26 December 1969.
There's fewer issues considered today for two simple reasons. The first is the undeniable joy of seeing Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake spend 10 panels in a beat bar in Greenwich Village, while the second is the awesome spectacle of Time's final issue of the 1960s (as most people count a decade, anyway. Me and Al Franken will maintain that a year that ends with a 1 must always be the first of a decade... but that's a posting for a different sort of blog).
Anyhow: issues seven and eight aren't particularly notable for canon or plot or, well, much of anything beyond what I'm looking for in these issues. Simply, seven sees the Blob briefly team up with the Evil Mutants (not yet the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) and eight sees Hank McCoy briefly leave the team and then return to help them deal with the challenge of Unus, the Untouchable. (Insert jokes about him not being hugged enough here.) The Blob returns to the circus at the end of the former, while Unus is blackmailed into renouncing a life of crime. (Spoiler alert - if such a thing is possible for 40+ year old texts: the Beast creates a device which amplifies Unus's power so that he cannot touch anything, even food. Given the choice between neutrality and starvation, Unus goes sort-of-good.) The setting for neither fight is particularly notable, and there's little science to point to, let alone military-industrial complex fun. (Well, there are torpedoes that Magneto sends chasing after the X-Men, but for all the damage that they do they could just as easily be flying manatees.)
Oh, and issue seven sees Professor X leave the team under the leadership of Cyclops while he goes a-questing. Issue eight indicates that the villain he pursues - deep underneath the Balkans, naturally - is Lucifer. I shudder to think what this villain will be once we find out. Reading various appearances of Diablo in contemporaneous Fantastic Four issues makes me wonder how many more satanic figures there are to come - and makes me hope that most of them, or at least Mephisto, are kept within the pages of Doctor Strange.
So: outside of the Beast as a beat, what else is there of note? Well, when Magneto tries to convince the Blob to join forces with him, he imprisons the bally in an animal cage. Filled with righteous indignation - or simply the spirit of "we've not yet had an action scene in this issue" - the barker solemnly intones "I don't know what your game is, Mac, but if it's a fight you want, you came to the right place!!" and then yells - in red, hand-drawn block letters, no less, so we know it's on now - "HEY, RUBE!" What makes this fantastic is the narrator's text which follows: "Seconds later, in answer to the time-honored carny battle cry, a group of husky roustabouts charge the mighty mutant!" (I now know what my first filk album will be titled, anyway.)
Things move along once the Blob's catapulted backwards and has his memory restored by a jolt to the head. Actually, it's funnier than that - the mental blocks that Professor X put on him have apparently been jarred loose by that collision. (I suppose that the brain is a curious machine which we still don't understand, but that's a ham-fisted metaphor if ever I read one. Oh wait...)
The other oddity is that the Beast, once he departs from the team in the next issue, decides to join professional wrestling and make his fortune. He's only been gone a week, and yet he's already exploded "on the T.V. screens throughout the nation! He soon becomes a top-draw wrestling villain", which leads the Beast to muse - as he's led to the ring in cage accompanied by at least six safari-style characters - that "At the rate I'm going, as a pro wrestler I'll be a millionaire in a year!"
There's a few problems I have with this. First, this is Hank McCoy - there's no way that he would employ both a contraction and an abbreviation in the same sentence. (Yes, space is tight in that word balloon, but still...) Second, what is it with Marvel heroes and professional wrestling? (I'm looking at you, Spidey.) I'm not looking forward to finding some rare issue of Iron Man where he fights Bruno Sammartino or to a very special Avengers where Andre the Giant helps them fight Immortus. (And I'm trying to forget all the ridiculousness of Unlimited Class Wrestling in Captain America in the 80s.) Third, I suppose that I shouldn't question Hank's mathematical abilities - if he only had his allowance the week before and now was making three times as much, then he could well expect that things will increase at that rate - but it seems that wrestling's pretty darned lucrative yet open to any yahoo who happens to stop by.
But the great part of these issues has got to be the slice of bohemian New York that Hank and Bobby experience in issue seven. Naturally, there are a lot of beats with berets, cigarette holders, and turtlenecks to be seen, plus lots of sunglasses worn indoors and drippy, drippy candles. There's a jazz combo - "so far out that they'll be fired if anyone can understand the melody!", Bobby exclaims - which appears to feature a baritone saxophone, an oboe, and a mariachi-sized guitar, and there's also a "zen" poet doing a reading. Informed that it's poetry, Hank quips, "I assumed he was checking a housewife's shopping list aloud!" and is then informed that it is a shopping list - "That what makes him a genius!" (Naturally, someone yells out "Go cat, go!" I would likely have inverted the bold font for that sentence, but what do I know? I just blog about this stuff.)
Bobby's a little distressed that Hank's having such a rough time - "The trouble with you... is that you can't understand anybody who doesn't use ten-syllable words!" - but Hank's just uncomfortable because of the shoes he's wearing. The shoes go - the blonde at his table is pretty sure no one will notice in this place, but such is not to be.
"Say! Dig that crazzzy paperweight!" a turtleneck-clad passerby comments, while a trio at another table enumerates the possibilities for such feet - "They should be immortalized on canvas!" "Wait till Bernard sees them! He'll write a new poem immediately!" "This could start a whole new cult--we'll call ourselves barefoot beats!" Unfortunately, the first option is not seized upon (after all, we've all seen Hank's feet again and again), but at least the beats decide to hail him as their leader - the "king of the barefoot beats!" (But I'm relieved to not encounter the poetry.) Free coffee is offered to everyone as Hank is carried off on their shoulders ("I appreciate the accolades," Hank states plainly, "but I think you're all totally bereft of sanity!"), while Bobby tries to hit on the waitress, Zelda. (Bobby is written to be pretty goofy with the ladies, I suppose: "Y'know, if you twist my arm, I think I could learn to like you!"
Fortunately, the Angel sounds the alert and saves Hank from a fate worse than... well, it's pretty odd, anyhow. Someone's painted red-lined eyes on the soles of Hank's feet (but not a mouth) though very little else has happened so far. Hank makes his verbose pre-exit declaration - "I thought I was inexorably trapped here!" - which befuddles the hipster over his shoulder, and then leaves with an acrobatic multi-bounce departure. "That wasn't too wise," the Angel notes. "Someone might suspect your secret identity after a stunt like that!" "Not in that place," the Beast confidently replies. "Those far-out characters wouldn't be inclined to suspect anything unless it were normal!"
Two things come to mind after this exchange. One, I suppose you don't really need gritty discussions of the perils of drug abuse in this panel for Hank's point that the beats would not be reliable witnesses to be accepted. Two, you really have to wonder why the X-Men didn't all move to Greenwich Village if the hipsters there were so readily willing to accept offbeat characters. (Given Hank's intelligence and affinity for literate people, it's especially odd in light of his decision to become a professional wrestler in the next issue.) Still, the world is probably a happier place for not having issues of Bobby Drake's poetry readings interrupted by rogue caricatures of Jules Pfeiffer rampaging by, let alone having to rescue Hank McCoy or Henry Pym from yet another LSD tycoon who needs a new chemist.
Ad alerts: the most fun is the ad for "yubiwaza" in issue seven. (To see it in all its glory, the blog greeklish has a post which discusses it and includes a scan. Naturally, something this offbeat had to be googled, and it also turned up a bio for a character from the Tick - Paul the Samurai, a third degree fuschia belt yubiwaza warrior.)
Also of note is the shift in classified-style ads which appealed to readers who were poets or aspiring songwriters. Issue seven featured three ads which solicited poem submissions (so that they could be set to music) or song ideas and one ad from Boston's Ace Publishing which promised to teach you how to write and sell songs. There's also a classified ad - much larger - which promised "a new world of adventure - as exciting as the space age" through model rocketry. (The biggest ad was for baseball equipment, though.) Only two ads asked for poem submissions and song ideas in the next issue, though - Ace's ad is joined by "Guitarist Ed Sale's" money-back guaranteed seven-day guitar course. It's certainly not the target of this research - and it's only two issues rather than a meticulously charted trend - but I wouldn't be surprised if there's more emphasis on singer-songwriterly ads instead of calls for song ideas and poems as the issues move along.
Oh, and a letter in the seventh says that people should stop talking about Beatlemania and instead focus on Marvelmania. (The letters are almost relentlessly upbeat, positive, and so thesaurus-belabored as to give you sugar shock. Oddly, a few seem to think that Iceman looks strange without his boots. Really, there's little to report in the letters so far. Alas.)
There's the usual body-building ads, cover splashes for other Marvel titles, and a few education or business opportunity bits. One gets a rather odd sense of 1964 society from the juvenile entrepreneurship jobs - were there lots of door-to-door shoe salesmen to be had? (You did get your free selling outfit when you joined the Mason Shoe Company, but this almost makes pets.com sound stable.) There's also the option to become a Grit salesman. (I wasn't impressed when Richie Rich tried to get me to become a Grit salesman, and I'm not about to listen to some plain-o ad in X-Men.) And there's various ads for becoming an electronics repairman or an auto mechanic - training in your own home! I'm pretty sure that's not the training that Hank used to defeat Unus, but there's still quite a few issues to go. All I know is I want the same program that Doctor Doom used - I put my faith in despotic cartoon experts, after all.
***
The real fun of the last bit has been packing and weeding through boxes. (Moving, moving - now my parents are joining the fun and my old stuff's gotta get packed up.) In a box with my yearbooks and various photo albums, I found a variety of early-70s Time issues - and the 26 December 1969 issue. The cover's missing, but there's a list of major accomplishments of the various departments which the magazine covered then - Film, Music, Theatre, Books, and so on. The popular music list is pretty unsurprising (though it doesn't have Abbey Road) with the Beatles, Coltrane, Davis, Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Aretha Franklin, and Cash all listed. Press notes include mentions of the LA Free Press and the death of the Saturday Evening Post (and that the subscription numbers for Playboy rose from 1 million to 5 million over the course of the decade). Naturally, there's no mention of hockey on the sports list.
But there's plenty of countercultural events memorialized in these lists (and some preparation for a retconned death of counterculture via the first disco in Manhattan in 1961). The "modern living" section notes Timothy Leary, the first hippie "be-in" in San Francisco, and Woodstock, while the environment section mentions Rachel Carson. But most of the key events are on the education page.
The education section's notes open with the "First Negro student sit-in at Greensboro, N.C. lunch counters, 1960", moves through integration and the acceleration of curriculum reform by Educational Services, Inc., and mentions Clark Kerr's "multiversity" and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (which "certifies an old philosopher for the New Left, 1964"). Notes are made of "mass arrests at Berkeley (1964) [which] prefigure later campus revolts at Columbia and San Francisco State (1968), Harvard and Cornell (1969)" and of the "first teach-ins and draft card burnings [which] dramatize student reaction to Viet Nam War, 1965." (There's also note of Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and of the Supreme Court's order that southern universities desegregate.) I was nagged by the notion that something important was missing, and then remembered - Kent State was in Spring of 1970. That certainly changes the spin a little. (But I learned about Kent State from an issue of GI Joe that made fun of yuppies so now I don't even know where to stand on this one.)
Other than a shout-out to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - my fave of the plays listed - and to the note which accompanies The Graduate - that it "alerts film makers to the news that more than 60% of their audience is 30 or under" - the major categories of note which remain are in art and in television. Lichtenstein's comic-strip images are named as part of pop-art's arrival in 1962. Actually, that's about it for art -given the parameters I'm running with - though I should note that Buckminster Fuller's Expo '67 edifice is also mentioned.
The last note for television would make an excellent Marvel Team-Up - hero x and hero y have to deal with "Vice President Agnew attacks the networks, 1969"! - but most of the others are still worthwhile or curious.. Yes, there's men on the moon and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, but there's also instant replay for sports and "A black, Bill Cosby, co-stars in NBC series I Spy." Sure, there's the Kennedy-Nixon debate and Newton Minow's "vast wasteland speech," but there's also "all network shows are now broadcast in color, 1967." (Someone'll inevitably tell me that the switch to HDTV has nothing on the shift to color, I'm sure.) From the distance of 38 years, though, I'm trying to decide which of the last two events wins out - Viet Nam War brought directly into the living room or the announcement of the invention of Electronic Video Recording. (Yes, probably the broadcast of the war, if only for the way that it helped along the culture wars - but given current war rhetoric, I'd imagine that a video iPod would probably be much more impressive to a time-traveling 1960s astronaut than current reports from Iraq.)
Anyhow, that's just a quick flavor of this issue. I suppose I shouldn't be suprised that Marvel Pop-Art productions didn't get posted as either books or art achievements (actually, there were no lists for books of the decade), but it would have been interesting.
There's fewer issues considered today for two simple reasons. The first is the undeniable joy of seeing Hank McCoy and Bobby Drake spend 10 panels in a beat bar in Greenwich Village, while the second is the awesome spectacle of Time's final issue of the 1960s (as most people count a decade, anyway. Me and Al Franken will maintain that a year that ends with a 1 must always be the first of a decade... but that's a posting for a different sort of blog).
Anyhow: issues seven and eight aren't particularly notable for canon or plot or, well, much of anything beyond what I'm looking for in these issues. Simply, seven sees the Blob briefly team up with the Evil Mutants (not yet the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants) and eight sees Hank McCoy briefly leave the team and then return to help them deal with the challenge of Unus, the Untouchable. (Insert jokes about him not being hugged enough here.) The Blob returns to the circus at the end of the former, while Unus is blackmailed into renouncing a life of crime. (Spoiler alert - if such a thing is possible for 40+ year old texts: the Beast creates a device which amplifies Unus's power so that he cannot touch anything, even food. Given the choice between neutrality and starvation, Unus goes sort-of-good.) The setting for neither fight is particularly notable, and there's little science to point to, let alone military-industrial complex fun. (Well, there are torpedoes that Magneto sends chasing after the X-Men, but for all the damage that they do they could just as easily be flying manatees.)
Oh, and issue seven sees Professor X leave the team under the leadership of Cyclops while he goes a-questing. Issue eight indicates that the villain he pursues - deep underneath the Balkans, naturally - is Lucifer. I shudder to think what this villain will be once we find out. Reading various appearances of Diablo in contemporaneous Fantastic Four issues makes me wonder how many more satanic figures there are to come - and makes me hope that most of them, or at least Mephisto, are kept within the pages of Doctor Strange.
So: outside of the Beast as a beat, what else is there of note? Well, when Magneto tries to convince the Blob to join forces with him, he imprisons the bally in an animal cage. Filled with righteous indignation - or simply the spirit of "we've not yet had an action scene in this issue" - the barker solemnly intones "I don't know what your game is, Mac, but if it's a fight you want, you came to the right place!!" and then yells - in red, hand-drawn block letters, no less, so we know it's on now - "HEY, RUBE!" What makes this fantastic is the narrator's text which follows: "Seconds later, in answer to the time-honored carny battle cry, a group of husky roustabouts charge the mighty mutant!" (I now know what my first filk album will be titled, anyway.)
Things move along once the Blob's catapulted backwards and has his memory restored by a jolt to the head. Actually, it's funnier than that - the mental blocks that Professor X put on him have apparently been jarred loose by that collision. (I suppose that the brain is a curious machine which we still don't understand, but that's a ham-fisted metaphor if ever I read one. Oh wait...)
The other oddity is that the Beast, once he departs from the team in the next issue, decides to join professional wrestling and make his fortune. He's only been gone a week, and yet he's already exploded "on the T.V. screens throughout the nation! He soon becomes a top-draw wrestling villain", which leads the Beast to muse - as he's led to the ring in cage accompanied by at least six safari-style characters - that "At the rate I'm going, as a pro wrestler I'll be a millionaire in a year!"
There's a few problems I have with this. First, this is Hank McCoy - there's no way that he would employ both a contraction and an abbreviation in the same sentence. (Yes, space is tight in that word balloon, but still...) Second, what is it with Marvel heroes and professional wrestling? (I'm looking at you, Spidey.) I'm not looking forward to finding some rare issue of Iron Man where he fights Bruno Sammartino or to a very special Avengers where Andre the Giant helps them fight Immortus. (And I'm trying to forget all the ridiculousness of Unlimited Class Wrestling in Captain America in the 80s.) Third, I suppose that I shouldn't question Hank's mathematical abilities - if he only had his allowance the week before and now was making three times as much, then he could well expect that things will increase at that rate - but it seems that wrestling's pretty darned lucrative yet open to any yahoo who happens to stop by.
But the great part of these issues has got to be the slice of bohemian New York that Hank and Bobby experience in issue seven. Naturally, there are a lot of beats with berets, cigarette holders, and turtlenecks to be seen, plus lots of sunglasses worn indoors and drippy, drippy candles. There's a jazz combo - "so far out that they'll be fired if anyone can understand the melody!", Bobby exclaims - which appears to feature a baritone saxophone, an oboe, and a mariachi-sized guitar, and there's also a "zen" poet doing a reading. Informed that it's poetry, Hank quips, "I assumed he was checking a housewife's shopping list aloud!" and is then informed that it is a shopping list - "That what makes him a genius!" (Naturally, someone yells out "Go cat, go!" I would likely have inverted the bold font for that sentence, but what do I know? I just blog about this stuff.)
Bobby's a little distressed that Hank's having such a rough time - "The trouble with you... is that you can't understand anybody who doesn't use ten-syllable words!" - but Hank's just uncomfortable because of the shoes he's wearing. The shoes go - the blonde at his table is pretty sure no one will notice in this place, but such is not to be.
"Say! Dig that crazzzy paperweight!" a turtleneck-clad passerby comments, while a trio at another table enumerates the possibilities for such feet - "They should be immortalized on canvas!" "Wait till Bernard sees them! He'll write a new poem immediately!" "This could start a whole new cult--we'll call ourselves barefoot beats!" Unfortunately, the first option is not seized upon (after all, we've all seen Hank's feet again and again), but at least the beats decide to hail him as their leader - the "king of the barefoot beats!" (But I'm relieved to not encounter the poetry.) Free coffee is offered to everyone as Hank is carried off on their shoulders ("I appreciate the accolades," Hank states plainly, "but I think you're all totally bereft of sanity!"), while Bobby tries to hit on the waitress, Zelda. (Bobby is written to be pretty goofy with the ladies, I suppose: "Y'know, if you twist my arm, I think I could learn to like you!"
Fortunately, the Angel sounds the alert and saves Hank from a fate worse than... well, it's pretty odd, anyhow. Someone's painted red-lined eyes on the soles of Hank's feet (but not a mouth) though very little else has happened so far. Hank makes his verbose pre-exit declaration - "I thought I was inexorably trapped here!" - which befuddles the hipster over his shoulder, and then leaves with an acrobatic multi-bounce departure. "That wasn't too wise," the Angel notes. "Someone might suspect your secret identity after a stunt like that!" "Not in that place," the Beast confidently replies. "Those far-out characters wouldn't be inclined to suspect anything unless it were normal!"
Two things come to mind after this exchange. One, I suppose you don't really need gritty discussions of the perils of drug abuse in this panel for Hank's point that the beats would not be reliable witnesses to be accepted. Two, you really have to wonder why the X-Men didn't all move to Greenwich Village if the hipsters there were so readily willing to accept offbeat characters. (Given Hank's intelligence and affinity for literate people, it's especially odd in light of his decision to become a professional wrestler in the next issue.) Still, the world is probably a happier place for not having issues of Bobby Drake's poetry readings interrupted by rogue caricatures of Jules Pfeiffer rampaging by, let alone having to rescue Hank McCoy or Henry Pym from yet another LSD tycoon who needs a new chemist.
Ad alerts: the most fun is the ad for "yubiwaza" in issue seven. (To see it in all its glory, the blog greeklish has a post which discusses it and includes a scan. Naturally, something this offbeat had to be googled, and it also turned up a bio for a character from the Tick - Paul the Samurai, a third degree fuschia belt yubiwaza warrior.)
Also of note is the shift in classified-style ads which appealed to readers who were poets or aspiring songwriters. Issue seven featured three ads which solicited poem submissions (so that they could be set to music) or song ideas and one ad from Boston's Ace Publishing which promised to teach you how to write and sell songs. There's also a classified ad - much larger - which promised "a new world of adventure - as exciting as the space age" through model rocketry. (The biggest ad was for baseball equipment, though.) Only two ads asked for poem submissions and song ideas in the next issue, though - Ace's ad is joined by "Guitarist Ed Sale's" money-back guaranteed seven-day guitar course. It's certainly not the target of this research - and it's only two issues rather than a meticulously charted trend - but I wouldn't be surprised if there's more emphasis on singer-songwriterly ads instead of calls for song ideas and poems as the issues move along.
Oh, and a letter in the seventh says that people should stop talking about Beatlemania and instead focus on Marvelmania. (The letters are almost relentlessly upbeat, positive, and so thesaurus-belabored as to give you sugar shock. Oddly, a few seem to think that Iceman looks strange without his boots. Really, there's little to report in the letters so far. Alas.)
There's the usual body-building ads, cover splashes for other Marvel titles, and a few education or business opportunity bits. One gets a rather odd sense of 1964 society from the juvenile entrepreneurship jobs - were there lots of door-to-door shoe salesmen to be had? (You did get your free selling outfit when you joined the Mason Shoe Company, but this almost makes pets.com sound stable.) There's also the option to become a Grit salesman. (I wasn't impressed when Richie Rich tried to get me to become a Grit salesman, and I'm not about to listen to some plain-o ad in X-Men.) And there's various ads for becoming an electronics repairman or an auto mechanic - training in your own home! I'm pretty sure that's not the training that Hank used to defeat Unus, but there's still quite a few issues to go. All I know is I want the same program that Doctor Doom used - I put my faith in despotic cartoon experts, after all.
***
The real fun of the last bit has been packing and weeding through boxes. (Moving, moving - now my parents are joining the fun and my old stuff's gotta get packed up.) In a box with my yearbooks and various photo albums, I found a variety of early-70s Time issues - and the 26 December 1969 issue. The cover's missing, but there's a list of major accomplishments of the various departments which the magazine covered then - Film, Music, Theatre, Books, and so on. The popular music list is pretty unsurprising (though it doesn't have Abbey Road) with the Beatles, Coltrane, Davis, Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Aretha Franklin, and Cash all listed. Press notes include mentions of the LA Free Press and the death of the Saturday Evening Post (and that the subscription numbers for Playboy rose from 1 million to 5 million over the course of the decade). Naturally, there's no mention of hockey on the sports list.
But there's plenty of countercultural events memorialized in these lists (and some preparation for a retconned death of counterculture via the first disco in Manhattan in 1961). The "modern living" section notes Timothy Leary, the first hippie "be-in" in San Francisco, and Woodstock, while the environment section mentions Rachel Carson. But most of the key events are on the education page.
The education section's notes open with the "First Negro student sit-in at Greensboro, N.C. lunch counters, 1960", moves through integration and the acceleration of curriculum reform by Educational Services, Inc., and mentions Clark Kerr's "multiversity" and Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (which "certifies an old philosopher for the New Left, 1964"). Notes are made of "mass arrests at Berkeley (1964) [which] prefigure later campus revolts at Columbia and San Francisco State (1968), Harvard and Cornell (1969)" and of the "first teach-ins and draft card burnings [which] dramatize student reaction to Viet Nam War, 1965." (There's also note of Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and of the Supreme Court's order that southern universities desegregate.) I was nagged by the notion that something important was missing, and then remembered - Kent State was in Spring of 1970. That certainly changes the spin a little. (But I learned about Kent State from an issue of GI Joe that made fun of yuppies so now I don't even know where to stand on this one.)
Other than a shout-out to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - my fave of the plays listed - and to the note which accompanies The Graduate - that it "alerts film makers to the news that more than 60% of their audience is 30 or under" - the major categories of note which remain are in art and in television. Lichtenstein's comic-strip images are named as part of pop-art's arrival in 1962. Actually, that's about it for art -given the parameters I'm running with - though I should note that Buckminster Fuller's Expo '67 edifice is also mentioned.
The last note for television would make an excellent Marvel Team-Up - hero x and hero y have to deal with "Vice President Agnew attacks the networks, 1969"! - but most of the others are still worthwhile or curious.. Yes, there's men on the moon and Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald, but there's also instant replay for sports and "A black, Bill Cosby, co-stars in NBC series I Spy." Sure, there's the Kennedy-Nixon debate and Newton Minow's "vast wasteland speech," but there's also "all network shows are now broadcast in color, 1967." (Someone'll inevitably tell me that the switch to HDTV has nothing on the shift to color, I'm sure.) From the distance of 38 years, though, I'm trying to decide which of the last two events wins out - Viet Nam War brought directly into the living room or the announcement of the invention of Electronic Video Recording. (Yes, probably the broadcast of the war, if only for the way that it helped along the culture wars - but given current war rhetoric, I'd imagine that a video iPod would probably be much more impressive to a time-traveling 1960s astronaut than current reports from Iraq.)
Anyhow, that's just a quick flavor of this issue. I suppose I shouldn't be suprised that Marvel Pop-Art productions didn't get posted as either books or art achievements (actually, there were no lists for books of the decade), but it would have been interesting.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Did Jean Grey Have An Extra Power? Seriously?
Texts considered today: The X-Men 1-6 (1963-4)
Before someone clamors forth to declare that the comic in question is The Uncanny X-Men, I'll admit that even I had to pause and check the comics out again to make sure. As I thought I'd remembered, it's not until the series took off in the seventies that the "Uncanny" was added (and then not even to the front page - at least, not as far as a cursory examination of the covers revealed).
Anyhow, with such geekiness aside, it's time to consider what sorts of things are presented to the reader in these comics.
First off, it's painfully obvious that these are very pre-"Women's Lib" stories. Jean Grey/Marvel Girl is given a lot of attention when she first arrives at Westchester - so much so that's it's kind of a relief to know that she'll end up with Scott Summers /Cyclops eventually. Other than the fact that Bobby Drake/Iceman is pretty much the bratty little brother of the team at this point, the reader's presented with a wealthy playboy Warren Worthington III/Angel and a not-so-verbose-and-brilliant Hank McCoy/Beast trying to catch her eye.
There's even the one panel where Charles Xavier/Professor X smolders with an inappropriate lust for his only female student (the last panel on the fourth page of issue #3) - wrong not only because he's in a position of authority but also because it was used to help Rob Liefeld disasterously reboot Captain America. [That's a personal aside, I suppose.] Anyhow, it seems clear that Jean Grey temporarily had some sort of power to make the male characters around her behave most inappropriately. (I'm sure there's a fanfic somewhere where someone comments that "it looks like he was poured into that uniform!" - the opposite of what Iceman exclaims (while Jean Grey thinks that the designer could give Dior a run for his money) - but I'm really not looking for links for that.)
Second, there's a fair bit of military-industrial complex detail added to many of these stories. Magneto, after all, first tries to make his mark in issue #1 by humilating humankind's efforts to launch "the mightiest rocket of all" and forces it to fall into the sea. A red-hatted NASA official notes that "every phase of the launching was A-okay! There can only be one explanation... the bird was tampered with!" (The Daily Globe newspaper on the next page notes that "Sixth Top Secret Lauch Fails At Sea! Phantom Saboteur Strikes Again!", which seems to indicate that the American military also needed to work on its counterintelligence or public relations at this time, not just the issue of rocketry.) In issue #4, Magneto steals an "old ex-convoy freighter with the cannons on the deck" - surprisingly chintzy for a guy who was trashing rockets just a few issues before - but by issue #5, Magneto's already a space power with his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants set up in an asteroid with magnetically powered capsules.
The Vanisher, on the other hand, aspired to the theft and ransom of defense plans from "inside the mighty Pentagon building" in the second issue. (Fun with exposition: "Let's review those continental defense plans again, Hendershoot!" "Yes sir, General! We can't be too careful of our procedures!" I'll admit that this is excellent economy in storytelling, but it still makes me laugh. Hendershoot, on the other hand, is a great name that should be used more often - like Rowsdower.) Luckily, Professor X has a contact in the Department of Special Affairs at the FBI who puts a McDonnell XV-1 Convertiplane at the X-Men's disposal to ferry them down to Washington. They fail at first, and the Vanisher demands ten million dollars, tax-free or else he`ll turn the plans over to the communists (would supervillains behind the Iron Curtain have paid the tax?).
Third, science gets name-dropped whenever necessary (like Galileo dropped the orange). When Mr. and Mrs. Grey visit the Mansion, she mentions that she was "so impressed to learn that some of your courses are classified top secret by the government," and he speculates that "perhaps they're teaching a special secret science course! Oh, well, I suppose we'll find out some day!" [Oh, the foreshadowing! And the use of exclamation points!] It's an easy explanation for these minor characters to use, and certainly as valid a reason as any for the government to be involved in the education of minors. It will be interesting to see how this government-mutant relationship will change in the comics, though there's already some hint of anti-X-Men public feeling in other issues - though only because they initially failed to thwart the Vanisher and hide their identities. Given the fact that only Marvel Girl appears to have a family in these issues it's somewhat odd that they worry about their alter egos, but I suppose that these crazy teenagers wanted to have some privacy.
One has to wonder what sort of sense of time - or the nature of mutation which informed Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work here - but they do have Professor X note in the first issue that he "was born of parents who had worked on the first A-bomb project! Like yourselves, I am a mutant - possibly the first such mutant!" Now, this is a fine timeline for the current movie incarnation of the X-Men, but this either means that there was a super-secret early atomic bomb project in the 1920s (since Professor X has to have a fair number of years on his charges), that the Professor was changed by the radiation around him during youth and is instead an altered human, or else that he's incredibly young and his feelings for Jean Grey are much less skeezy. (Or that Stan Lee set up a future retcon from the get-go.) Regardless, this gave Professor X a sterling science background and provided Marvel with the key genesis story for the mutants.
As for the other issues - issue #3 introduces the Blob and features his attempted invasion of the school with the rest of the circus. [Seriously.] Issue #6 was the third in a row with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and featured the attempt by both sides to recruit Namor, the Sub-Mariner to their teams. Professor X is scientifically-minded enough to allow that Namor may be the first mutant, but neither side is terribly successful. It's odd to see how the early Magneto is presented, though: I don't think I saw him fly much, his bloodthirstiness seems to be a work in progress, he is somehow able to project his essence in a somewhat telepathic manner, and he actually relies on devices and weapons. The devices make some sense - those that amplify his power, anyhow - but the weapons are just odd. (And he thinks that they'll impress Namor, too, which is just funny.)
Also, letters pages aren't introduced until the fifth issue. So far, there's been little of note in them (a couple asking about origin stories, someone asking that Iceman be renamed Kid Kold, a few who've learned how to write in the lofty prose of Stan Lee) but it will be interesting to see how they evolve - and when critical letters will arrive. (The closest so far is the complaint that the covers are cluttered with "sayings such as, '...a book-length classic of the incredible! ...never have you read a tale like this! ...'" which drew the reply "Never have we read a letter like yours, Kathie! Surprise followed spectacular surprise! Can we help it if we're cornballs?")
So far, there's been a reasonable amount of noteworthy content - albeit not necessarily all intended for final use in the dissertation. I'm intrigued to see where this all ends up, but it's been so long since I last read new comics that I've grown accustomed to the fast-forward rate at which I could re-read the titles of my youth. (And, other than Fantastic Four #21-40, I've never read much of the Stan Lee-penned style of comics. That's part of the legacy of art-heavy comics of the 1990s, I suppose.)
A note on the source: I've been able to find the "40 Years of the X-Men" DVD-ROM by GIT Corp. (The link to the website has been erratic; here's an example of it on ebay.) It's pretty good so far, though it doesn't feature early-'90s edition of X-Men that Jim Lee started.)
Before someone clamors forth to declare that the comic in question is The Uncanny X-Men, I'll admit that even I had to pause and check the comics out again to make sure. As I thought I'd remembered, it's not until the series took off in the seventies that the "Uncanny" was added (and then not even to the front page - at least, not as far as a cursory examination of the covers revealed).
Anyhow, with such geekiness aside, it's time to consider what sorts of things are presented to the reader in these comics.
First off, it's painfully obvious that these are very pre-"Women's Lib" stories. Jean Grey/Marvel Girl is given a lot of attention when she first arrives at Westchester - so much so that's it's kind of a relief to know that she'll end up with Scott Summers /Cyclops eventually. Other than the fact that Bobby Drake/Iceman is pretty much the bratty little brother of the team at this point, the reader's presented with a wealthy playboy Warren Worthington III/Angel and a not-so-verbose-and-brilliant Hank McCoy/Beast trying to catch her eye.
There's even the one panel where Charles Xavier/Professor X smolders with an inappropriate lust for his only female student (the last panel on the fourth page of issue #3) - wrong not only because he's in a position of authority but also because it was used to help Rob Liefeld disasterously reboot Captain America. [That's a personal aside, I suppose.] Anyhow, it seems clear that Jean Grey temporarily had some sort of power to make the male characters around her behave most inappropriately. (I'm sure there's a fanfic somewhere where someone comments that "it looks like he was poured into that uniform!" - the opposite of what Iceman exclaims (while Jean Grey thinks that the designer could give Dior a run for his money) - but I'm really not looking for links for that.)
Second, there's a fair bit of military-industrial complex detail added to many of these stories. Magneto, after all, first tries to make his mark in issue #1 by humilating humankind's efforts to launch "the mightiest rocket of all" and forces it to fall into the sea. A red-hatted NASA official notes that "every phase of the launching was A-okay! There can only be one explanation... the bird was tampered with!" (The Daily Globe newspaper on the next page notes that "Sixth Top Secret Lauch Fails At Sea! Phantom Saboteur Strikes Again!", which seems to indicate that the American military also needed to work on its counterintelligence or public relations at this time, not just the issue of rocketry.) In issue #4, Magneto steals an "old ex-convoy freighter with the cannons on the deck" - surprisingly chintzy for a guy who was trashing rockets just a few issues before - but by issue #5, Magneto's already a space power with his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants set up in an asteroid with magnetically powered capsules.
The Vanisher, on the other hand, aspired to the theft and ransom of defense plans from "inside the mighty Pentagon building" in the second issue. (Fun with exposition: "Let's review those continental defense plans again, Hendershoot!" "Yes sir, General! We can't be too careful of our procedures!" I'll admit that this is excellent economy in storytelling, but it still makes me laugh. Hendershoot, on the other hand, is a great name that should be used more often - like Rowsdower.) Luckily, Professor X has a contact in the Department of Special Affairs at the FBI who puts a McDonnell XV-1 Convertiplane at the X-Men's disposal to ferry them down to Washington. They fail at first, and the Vanisher demands ten million dollars, tax-free or else he`ll turn the plans over to the communists (would supervillains behind the Iron Curtain have paid the tax?).
Third, science gets name-dropped whenever necessary (like Galileo dropped the orange). When Mr. and Mrs. Grey visit the Mansion, she mentions that she was "so impressed to learn that some of your courses are classified top secret by the government," and he speculates that "perhaps they're teaching a special secret science course! Oh, well, I suppose we'll find out some day!" [Oh, the foreshadowing! And the use of exclamation points!] It's an easy explanation for these minor characters to use, and certainly as valid a reason as any for the government to be involved in the education of minors. It will be interesting to see how this government-mutant relationship will change in the comics, though there's already some hint of anti-X-Men public feeling in other issues - though only because they initially failed to thwart the Vanisher and hide their identities. Given the fact that only Marvel Girl appears to have a family in these issues it's somewhat odd that they worry about their alter egos, but I suppose that these crazy teenagers wanted to have some privacy.
One has to wonder what sort of sense of time - or the nature of mutation which informed Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's work here - but they do have Professor X note in the first issue that he "was born of parents who had worked on the first A-bomb project! Like yourselves, I am a mutant - possibly the first such mutant!" Now, this is a fine timeline for the current movie incarnation of the X-Men, but this either means that there was a super-secret early atomic bomb project in the 1920s (since Professor X has to have a fair number of years on his charges), that the Professor was changed by the radiation around him during youth and is instead an altered human, or else that he's incredibly young and his feelings for Jean Grey are much less skeezy. (Or that Stan Lee set up a future retcon from the get-go.) Regardless, this gave Professor X a sterling science background and provided Marvel with the key genesis story for the mutants.
As for the other issues - issue #3 introduces the Blob and features his attempted invasion of the school with the rest of the circus. [Seriously.] Issue #6 was the third in a row with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and featured the attempt by both sides to recruit Namor, the Sub-Mariner to their teams. Professor X is scientifically-minded enough to allow that Namor may be the first mutant, but neither side is terribly successful. It's odd to see how the early Magneto is presented, though: I don't think I saw him fly much, his bloodthirstiness seems to be a work in progress, he is somehow able to project his essence in a somewhat telepathic manner, and he actually relies on devices and weapons. The devices make some sense - those that amplify his power, anyhow - but the weapons are just odd. (And he thinks that they'll impress Namor, too, which is just funny.)
Also, letters pages aren't introduced until the fifth issue. So far, there's been little of note in them (a couple asking about origin stories, someone asking that Iceman be renamed Kid Kold, a few who've learned how to write in the lofty prose of Stan Lee) but it will be interesting to see how they evolve - and when critical letters will arrive. (The closest so far is the complaint that the covers are cluttered with "sayings such as, '...a book-length classic of the incredible! ...never have you read a tale like this! ...'" which drew the reply "Never have we read a letter like yours, Kathie! Surprise followed spectacular surprise! Can we help it if we're cornballs?")
So far, there's been a reasonable amount of noteworthy content - albeit not necessarily all intended for final use in the dissertation. I'm intrigued to see where this all ends up, but it's been so long since I last read new comics that I've grown accustomed to the fast-forward rate at which I could re-read the titles of my youth. (And, other than Fantastic Four #21-40, I've never read much of the Stan Lee-penned style of comics. That's part of the legacy of art-heavy comics of the 1990s, I suppose.)
A note on the source: I've been able to find the "40 Years of the X-Men" DVD-ROM by GIT Corp. (The link to the website has been erratic; here's an example of it on ebay.) It's pretty good so far, though it doesn't feature early-'90s edition of X-Men that Jim Lee started.)
Remember, remember, the seventh of the... er... Heinlein?
Just for the record, my lucky number's 13.
Maybe this'll just be a chattier warm-up than intended, but it's quite interesting to see the hoopla around 7/7/7. There's been a few reports over the years about these sorts of triple-threat dates (I think I read that next year's 8/8/8 will be bigger for marriages, but hey) but it seems that it's also a day for centennials. The Globe and Mail reported today that it's Freida Kahlo's, but the one that I had in mind was Robert A. Heinlein's - since he's a major portion of the dissertation as it's been designed.
Oddly, my recon trips to the used bookstores in Vernon have revealed very little of note for used Heinlein. (One book with three novels, but none that really stood out as key Heinlein.) There's been lots of Asimov (not necessarily those which are needed, though I suppose that the first Foundation trilogy's pretty essential in spite of pre-dating 1957) and even a fair amount of Dune and its sequels to be had, but fairly little Heinlein.
As I've been told by some who love the guy - Adam, I'm looking at you - that he's contributed plenty to the development of SF and to thought about what our futures will be. And I've read Larry Niven's take on the importance of Heinlein for the development of the genre (or the lack of development of the American military-industrial complex, take your pick). But I've read precious little of his stuff. I may have inadvertently read one of his short stories without knowing it, but the only title I can recall reading is his Have Spacesuit, Will Travel for English 8. Heck, I haven't even seen Starship Troopers (though I have seen the end of it several times on network television, I suppose).
But any plans to watch that movie or to read something of his have been shelved, since I'd forgotten that today was the day to watch Transformers with my brother. Having been fortified by several somewhat approving reviews - and an ever-fun Anthony Lane review - I'm actually somewhat looking forward to it. Anyone who knows me well knows that's high praise indeed for a Bay film. And considering that I'm investigating the civic impulses of my parents' generation's science fictional pop culture as preparation for an eventual study of the (more?) militaristic impulses of my own childhood, it should be fun to see how mine is repackaged for this next generation. (Now that I write this, I'd really rather see how Transformers would be repackaged for Heinlein's generation - or for my parents' generation - but I shudder to think of the steampunk Transformers that someone's undoubtedly created...)
Postscript: Well, that certainly was a Michael Bay movie.
There were a few times where I couldn't help but think, "That's some pretty good narrative editing right there" - such as when the Air Force was prepping their strike on Scorpinox in the Qatar desert, regardless of how common a filmic trope that sort of sequence may be - and many, many times when I couldn't help but think, "Does the editor know or care what sort of movie is being made here?" As others have noted, the film has a solid hour-long homage to '80s comedies built into it which was either tedious or superfluous.
[Spoiler: also, there's something pretty creepy about having Witwicky and his love interest gettin' it on on the hood of Bumblebee at the end - after they've fought and won and all that. On top of that, you have the rest of the Autobots idling around while Optimus Prime's voiceover intones, "We live among its people now in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting, protecting." Watching over them in secret? So... they're just voyeurs now?]
Still, it was pretty good popcorn fare (even though the popcorn was terrible) and it'll make fantastic MST3K-style fodder soon enough.
Much, much better was "Ratatouille" - the first Pixar movie I've seen in the theatres since "Finding Nemo." Actually, I still haven't watched "The Incredibles" or "Cars," though I'm only interested in the former. Out of all the characters in the two films, the rat protagonist here was easily the most human. That's one which is pretty close to "Monsters, Inc." for me.
Maybe this'll just be a chattier warm-up than intended, but it's quite interesting to see the hoopla around 7/7/7. There's been a few reports over the years about these sorts of triple-threat dates (I think I read that next year's 8/8/8 will be bigger for marriages, but hey) but it seems that it's also a day for centennials. The Globe and Mail reported today that it's Freida Kahlo's, but the one that I had in mind was Robert A. Heinlein's - since he's a major portion of the dissertation as it's been designed.
Oddly, my recon trips to the used bookstores in Vernon have revealed very little of note for used Heinlein. (One book with three novels, but none that really stood out as key Heinlein.) There's been lots of Asimov (not necessarily those which are needed, though I suppose that the first Foundation trilogy's pretty essential in spite of pre-dating 1957) and even a fair amount of Dune and its sequels to be had, but fairly little Heinlein.
As I've been told by some who love the guy - Adam, I'm looking at you - that he's contributed plenty to the development of SF and to thought about what our futures will be. And I've read Larry Niven's take on the importance of Heinlein for the development of the genre (or the lack of development of the American military-industrial complex, take your pick). But I've read precious little of his stuff. I may have inadvertently read one of his short stories without knowing it, but the only title I can recall reading is his Have Spacesuit, Will Travel for English 8. Heck, I haven't even seen Starship Troopers (though I have seen the end of it several times on network television, I suppose).
But any plans to watch that movie or to read something of his have been shelved, since I'd forgotten that today was the day to watch Transformers with my brother. Having been fortified by several somewhat approving reviews - and an ever-fun Anthony Lane review - I'm actually somewhat looking forward to it. Anyone who knows me well knows that's high praise indeed for a Bay film. And considering that I'm investigating the civic impulses of my parents' generation's science fictional pop culture as preparation for an eventual study of the (more?) militaristic impulses of my own childhood, it should be fun to see how mine is repackaged for this next generation. (Now that I write this, I'd really rather see how Transformers would be repackaged for Heinlein's generation - or for my parents' generation - but I shudder to think of the steampunk Transformers that someone's undoubtedly created...)
Postscript: Well, that certainly was a Michael Bay movie.
There were a few times where I couldn't help but think, "That's some pretty good narrative editing right there" - such as when the Air Force was prepping their strike on Scorpinox in the Qatar desert, regardless of how common a filmic trope that sort of sequence may be - and many, many times when I couldn't help but think, "Does the editor know or care what sort of movie is being made here?" As others have noted, the film has a solid hour-long homage to '80s comedies built into it which was either tedious or superfluous.
[Spoiler: also, there's something pretty creepy about having Witwicky and his love interest gettin' it on on the hood of Bumblebee at the end - after they've fought and won and all that. On top of that, you have the rest of the Autobots idling around while Optimus Prime's voiceover intones, "We live among its people now in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting, protecting." Watching over them in secret? So... they're just voyeurs now?]
Still, it was pretty good popcorn fare (even though the popcorn was terrible) and it'll make fantastic MST3K-style fodder soon enough.
Much, much better was "Ratatouille" - the first Pixar movie I've seen in the theatres since "Finding Nemo." Actually, I still haven't watched "The Incredibles" or "Cars," though I'm only interested in the former. Out of all the characters in the two films, the rat protagonist here was easily the most human. That's one which is pretty close to "Monsters, Inc." for me.
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