King Arthur, Iron Man, and Brooks Brothers, by Dennis O’Neil
To…oh, say, King Arthur, if he ever existed, you would have superpowers. I mean, look at you. You can travel 100 miles an hour (but that red light flashing in your rearview mirror can’t be good) and you can cause a blank pane of glass to light up and show you what’s happening on he other side of the world, or what happened last week, or both, and you can twist your wrist and cause flame to appear atop that table-thing in the kitchen, with no protracted fussing with flint and stone… To Arthur, it would appear that you’re employing magic.
Living when he did, Art never read another Arthur’s observation that any form of technology sufficiently advanced would appear to be magic, at least to lumps like us. (I refer to Arthur C. Clarke, but you knew that…) So Arthur, (the king, not the science fiction writer) might watch you doing your stuff and conclude that you must be magic and because you’re magic you must be special. He wouldn’t know that you bought your powers, at a discount, at that big, ugly mall about a mile west on the freeway.
Remember, he had a special sword, Excalibur, and he had it because he deserved to have it. And so it was with other talismans, amulets, and assorted weapons and mystic hoo-haws that super good guys got hold of during their adventures down through the ages.
Which brings us to Tony Stark.
Last Thursday, Alex Rodriguez signed a 10-year contract in excess of a quarter billion dollars that allows him to continue working for the New York Yankees, a team about which, in the interest of full disclosure, I couldn’t care less. A couple hours later, the government indicted San Francisco Giants player Barry Bonds for lying to a grand jury.
It’s the lull before the holiday week, as we recover from being jam-packed and roasted at The NYC National convention. Most of the table talk in The Big Apple centered on how life was or will be affected by the WGA strike. Still, we managed to dig up a few nuggets of interest:
When I was attempting to explain the joys to be found in a good kung-fu film in my Martial Arts Movie books, I suggested that the exhilaration of a great wushu battle is only really comparable to the delights of a good movie musical. Both feature operatic emotions with balletic energy. I was reminded of that comparison when watching Hairspray, one of my three favorite summer o’07 films (Ratatouille and Superbad were the others). I admired it so much I even included it in my Inside Kung-Fu magazine media column (after all, the word “kung-fu” actually means “hard work”).
