The Rome News Tribune (via JK Parkin at Newsarama) reports that the Gordon Lee case has been postponed yet again. Judge Larry Salmon, who is presiding over the case, is sick. A new start date for the trial has not been set.
Any minute now, Galactus will just show up and interrupt the hearing.
First, the consumer report: LoserPalooza is a treasury-sized collection, which means it’s larger and more expensive than the usual run of comic-strip collections, and also that it collects strips from two previous smaller collections. In this case, LoserPalooza has the comics from Say Cheezy and Scrum Bums. LoserPalooza does have the Sunday strips in color, though, so it’s not entirely twice-baked beans. (It’s also rarely clear whether a strip is being reprinted in its entirety to begin with, or if all of the strips from the smaller collections make it into the Treasuries; specifically, it’s not clear in this case.)
Get Fuzzy is one of the most successful new strips of the past decade, and possibly the most successful strip launch since Dilbert in 1989. (The competition includes strips like Pickles, Baby Blues, and Adam @ Home, which aren’t as edgy as Get Fuzzy and so are probably in more papers daily. On the other hand, Get Fuzzy seems to be one of the most successful comics when it comes to selling reprint collections, so it’s hard to tell which strip actually makes the most money or has the most readers.) In any case, it’s still fairly young, for a daily newspaper strip, and it’s grown to a lot of papers pretty quickly.
As the characters note in a storyline mid-way through this book, Get Fuzzy could be seen as a Bizarro-world version of Garfield. A man of indeterminate age (Rob Wilco) lives with a cat (Bucky) and a dog (Satchel), and funny stuff ensues. Except, in Get Fuzzy, we don’t identify with the cat – Bucky is clearly insane (as all cats are). Satchel is lovable but dim, also like most dogs. And Rob isn’t quite as much of a loser as Jon Arbuckle. Well, he is a vegan rugby fan who hasn’t had a date in years, does something unspecified involving crunching numbers, and roots for the Red Sox – so maybe I should say that he’s a more realistic loser than Jon is. Get Fuzzy doesn’t have the ground-into-the-turf running jokes Garfield does – and I hope it won’t, even if it runs for thirty years – but it’s vastly younger than Garfield is, and hasn’t had time to get stale.
Via the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: The eyes of the comics, publishing, and Free Expression communities are focused on Rome, GA as the trial of Gordon Lee begins this morning.
Mr. Lee will stand trial for two misdemeanor counts of distributing harmful to minors material, and faces penalties of up to a year and prison and $1,000 in fines for each count if convicted. Lee’s day in court comes after nearly three years of legal proceedings arising from the Halloween 2004 distribution of Alternative Comics #2, a Free Comic Book Day sampler which featured an excerpt from the critically acclaimed graphic novel The Salon that depicted Pablo Picasso in the nude, and was allegedly handed to a minor. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has spent $80,000 on Lee’s defense since taking the case in early 2005, and anticipates this week’s trial to cost another $20,000.
Lee’s case is also being closely watched by the mainstream media for its implications on Free Expression. In the past week, stories have appeared on NPR’s Morning Edition, CourtTV, and New York Magazine, joining profiles from venues including The New York Times, The Book Standard, and Publishers Weekly.
"This case has broad consequences for all retailers of First Amendment protected material," says CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein. "If Gordon is found guilty, it would establish a precedent that makes the seller of any book, magazine, or film depicting non-sexual nudity vulnerable to a similar prosecution in the State of Georgia." He adds, " We’re confident that Gordon is not guilty of the charges he’s accused of, and that the work in question comes nowhere near the threshold the law requires to deem a work harmful to minors."
"It’s appalling that these charges were brought in the first place," Brownstein says. "It’s outrageous that it’s taken nearly three years, a complete change of facts by the prosecution midstream, and tens of thousands of dollars for Gordon to get his day in court. Now that we’re here, we have every confidence in our legal team of Alan Begner, Cory Begner, and Paul Cadle to wage the best defense on Gordon’s behalf. We couldn’t have done it without the overwhelming support of the comics community, whose contributions have ensured that we are able to fight back."
For a detailed summary of the case and its developments, please see Gordon Lee: The Road to Trial
To make a tax-deductible contribution to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, please visit their donations page.
One of the side effects of "the internets" making the world a more accessible place for many of us is how it’s fueled my desire for travel. But in truth, that was probably kindled when I was but a wee babe and my parents decided to drive across the country and back — pretty ambitious considering my mom was pregnant at the time. I’m told my 1-year-old self experienced all sorts of national historic sites and sights, none of which I remember of course, but enough of it probably seeped into my subconscious and stuck that the idea of Going Places has appealed to me ever since.
I was pretty fortunate when I was a teenager, in that my family had both means and relatives overseas. We made a pilgrimage in 1973 to Israel and then Romania. I was so proud of going to a country with a foreign language that I was studying at the time! I’ve never liked the stereotype of the Ugly American, and so I remain determined never to travel to a country where I can’t speak the dominant language. Which lets out most of them, I fear, but to me it’s just plain common courtesy. And common sense; I have no right to complain about people living (and especially running businesses) in the US who don’t converse at all in English if I refuse or am unable to converse in the prevailing tongue of my destination of choice. Israel was to be my Big Test to see how well I did in Hebrew. Imagine my frustration when, to a person, everyone I encountered heard my American accent and immediately switched to speaking English.
My mom went me one better — she spoke Yiddish both in Israel and Romania, and everyone with whom we had lengthy conversations could communicate with her in the "Jewish Esperanto," including my dad’s Romanian relatives. I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of Yiddish, which I really thought I’d catch onto when we were kids as it was what Mom and Dad spoke when they didn’t want us kids to know what they were saying; but even being in the German Honor Society in college (Yiddish has more German words in it than just about anything else) didn’t really help. And my Romanian was pretty bad too, sad considering it’s a Romance language and has a lot of the same words and grammatical rules as Spanish and French, with which I had a passing acquaintance in high school and college. I miss those days when I was around 20 or so and majoring in linguistics and could passably get by in about five languages; nowadays I’d need massive Berlitz-type refresher courses to retrieve even a tenth of the knowledge I used to possess.
But I digress. The thing I remember most about Romania — still under the yoke of Ceausescu at the time — was that I almost got arrested at the airport.
The Big ComicMix Broadcast is back home and raring to dive into all the new comics & DVDs for the week, plus we give you some news on the future of Spawn, DC’s new Shazam! for kids, cheaper game systems, and new anime on TV. Then there’s another Free Comic Day for Marvel– this time at the baseball parks– and do you remember the hits of the group "Magic Circle"? You do — trust us!!
Come on, let’s get started — PRESS THE BUTTON!
Yes, the title is “Shenanigans,” with quotation marks already in place. No, I don’t know why. It’s not a direct quote, there’s no place named Shenanigans in the story, and it doesn’t seem to be an ironic “air-quote,” either. (There’s more than one bar in this book that could easily have been named Shenanigans, but none of them actually are.) It’s just an annoying, unnecessary tic.
“Shenanigans” is pleasant but unexceptional, a frothy romantic comedy that I suspect started off as a screenplay and probably would have worked better in filmed form. It takes place in St. Louis, where our creepy main character, Holden, gets kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment at Christmas-time for obsessively playing videogames instead of going out to dinner with her. I’m not sure how old he is; he seems to be a student, but we really don’t get a sense of his normal day-to-day life or a solid idea of what he does for a living. The one thing we see him doing seems like a college work-study program: teaching kids to play hockey. Although…he does seem to sponge off the women in his life, which may be a clue as to his lifestyle.
Holden meets a young woman named Casey, and moves in with her that night. (Help me out here: is that as weird and unrealistic as I think it is, or are twenty-somethings really that friendly these days?) They also sleep in the same bed the night they meet, but don’t have sex, which is just a bizarre combination, especially since the story takes pains to point out that they didn’t have sex. Between the scenes that we see, they drift into something like a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship (except for the fact that he’s sponging off her as he did with his last girlfriend), and presumably they start having sex at some point…though the story doesn’t feel the need to explain that point.
Then the story finally starts: Casey has been working as a waitress, but decides to start tutoring college students in math instead. Her qualifications: she’s really really good at mental arithmetic, and she’s totally hot. (No, seriously. There’s no sign that she has a math degree, or anything of that nature. So she seems to be coaching college students in, at best, high-school algebra. My opinion of the fine colleges of St. Louis is still diving as I type this.) Since she’s totally hot, all of her clients are horndog young men who think they’re going to score with her, so her tutoring sessions consist mostly of her edging away from them. She doesn’t seem to realize this, which I suppose makes her some sort of idiot savant…or maybe not a savant. Speaking of not realizing things, her advertisements are clearly based on those for prostitutes, which Holden instantly realized (well, he would, wouldn’t he?), but Casey just doesn’t see.
Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Spoiler alert! Danger Will Robinson! Alarums and excursions! Better watch out, better not cry, better not pout…Beware! Mayday! Here there be dragons! Detour, there’s a muddy road ahead…
Okay, enough of that.
What I’m warning you about is the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum, now playing at a multiplex near you, recipient of good reviews, maker of serious bucks and, in the opinion of residents of this house, a pretty good popcorn flick.
Via Warren Ellis and Newsarama: Mike Wieringo, the artist well known for drawing Flash, Robin, Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, Sensational Spider-Man, Adventures of Superman, Fantastic Four, and the co-creator of Tellos and Impulse, suffered a fatal heart attack on Sunday.
Everybody in the comics industry is shocked and saddened at his sudden passing, including collaborators Peter David and Todd Dezago.
We’ll post more details about services and the like as we get them.
UPDATE 8:57 PM EDT: More kind words from Mark Waid and Karl Kesel.
Graeme McMillan of The Savage Critics discovers the single best panel of the week (see above) and reviews Batman #667. No, seriously – does anyone else think that looks like Halloween about three doors down from stately Wayne Manor?
Newsarama has two sets of pictures from Wizard World Chicago – mostly of people in costumes, natch.
Ain’t It Cool News reads the current script for the Thor movie, and likes it.
Your sign of the apocalypse of the day: bikini-clad stormtroopers. (Insert your own “Aren’t you too…to be a stormtrooper” joke here.)
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing reviews the graphic novel Giant Robot Warriors by Stuart Moore and Ryan Kelly.
The Toronto Star reviews Warren Ellis’s novel Crooked Little Vein.
Movies Online interviews someone they called “Neil Gaimon” about the movie “StarDust.” I wonder if they asked him about his comics series Snadman, or his young readers novel Caroline? (And is he any relation to Charles Dickkens, the well-known Dutch author?)
Comics Reporter interviews Doug TenNapel, cartoonist of Black Cherry.
Greg Hatcher of Comics Should Be Good wants to write about the “Entwistles of comics.”
Neth Space reviews the new anthology The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.
The UK SF Book News Network talked to Chris Robertson about his new novel, Set the Seas on Fire.
Yatterings reviews InterWorld, the new novel for young readers by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves.
John Scalzi of Ficlets interviews David Anthony Durham, author of Acacia.
In its original Italian form, Notes for a War Story
It’s set in an unnamed European country, during an unnamed conflict among unspecified groups, in the vaguely recent past. All the non-specificity is meant to give it an aura of timelessness, or of dislocation, or something like that, but it left this reader feeling as if I were wandering about in a fog. Compared to the specificity and closely-observed detail of a book like Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde
The plot follows three young men – Giuliano, Christian, and Little Killer – who are scavenging in a region of small villages being bombed by enemy forces. They’re not in the armed forces, and they never encounter anything like regular armed forces, not even as much as seeing a bomber in the sky. They’re supposedly in the middle of a war, but they are actually seen in a mostly-depopulated landscape, drifting into gangsterhood.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
January 20, 2023
The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
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