Assuming I’m not lying stranded in a snowdrift on the New jersey Turnpike, I’m going to be at Farpoint convention this weekend, doing a panel of movie previews with Bob Greenberger tomorrow at 10 AM.
We’ve got a lot of good stuff to show off, but here’s an exclusive look at the Ant-Man footage Paul Rudd will show on Conan O’Brien’s show. Enjoy!
By Mike Heneghan and Kody Peters. Hat tip to Dave Elliott for finding it.
In last week’s column, I raised the issue of how many women are invited guests at comic book conventions. As you can see, of the four shows I selected rather randomly (the criteria was that I wanted to go to them because I had heard good things), not a single show had a guest list that was more than ten percent female.
Was I being unfair? Should I be more systematic?
The short answer is, “Yes.” There are lots and lots of shows, and somewhere, there must be a few organized by people who want to celebrate the work of women as much as the work of men. More commercially, there must be some shows that want to attract convention-goers interested in comics that represent multiple points of view, because there is money to be made.
Let’s see now, where were we before we were interrupted?
Back in the Mesozoic Era, there was something called the print media. You remember the print media, don’t you? It was in all the papers. Well, one of the all the papers that print media printed in was Comics Buyer’s Guide; or CBG as those of us who didn’t want to type out Comics Buyer’s Guide all the time called it. CBG was a weekly trade paper about the comic-book industry. It wasn’t as big and important as Billboard or Variety or even as vital as that paper that gives positive reviews to every movie no matter how wretched, because studios have to get their pull quotes from somewhere. But CBG was ours and we loved it.
And I loved CBG more than most, because for over two decades I wrote a regular feature called “The Law Is a Ass” for it; a column that combined legal analysis and comic books.
Legal analysis and comic books? How did that unlikely combination come about? (more…)
Nadezhda is a stranger in a strange land; recruited young, she was extensively trained by the KGB and then partnered with a slightly older Mischa. Both are brought to America in the 1970s where they pretend to be a happily married couple running their own travel agency. The reality is that they are embedded espionage agents working near the nation’s capital, endangering our peace and prosperity.
Sleeper agents are nothing new to spy fiction or reality but what FX’s The Americans has done is humanize them so you’re actually rooting for the bad guys. By making it as much about the marriage as it is about spy craft, the show makers for arresting viewing. The Americans: The Complete First Season is now out on Blu-ray from 210th Century Home Entertainment and if you missed this last winter, now is a good time to check it out with the second season due to kick off on the 26th.
America fell in love with Keri Russell and her curly hair when J.J. Abrams introduced us to her on Felicity, where she was a shy and awkward ingénue and as she has aged, she has grown more beautiful and deeper in range as a performer. Her steely cool Elizabeth Jennings is the calculating, logical agent, making the tough decisions for the pair. She is now only now coming to love Mischa, having previously only allowed herself to be emotionally involved with Gregory Thomas, (Derek Luke), a black militant who has remain her key asset.
Mischa, played with verve by Matthew Rhys, an Aussie best known for his work on Brothers & Sisters, has come to enjoy the creature comforts offered by the enemy state. His Philip Jennings has longed for Elizabeth but is now forced to turn an FBI secretary Martha Hanson (Alison Wright) by romancing and marrying her. Meantime, he’s also developed a friendship with new neighbor Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) who just happens to be working on an FBI task force seeking Russian moles following Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 2579.
The show is about relationships, many of which parallel and intertwine as every couple faces marital strains with adultery an expected part of the job, although in Stan’s case, it happened by chance and has become a tool he and Russian agent Nina (Annet Mahendru). By far the most riveting of these storylines is the tense connection between Elizabeth and her handler Claudia (Margo Martindale) which is exceptionally well handled, notably in “Trust Me”.
The poor children, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati), have no clue their parents are Russian spies although Paige now knows something’s amiss, a thread that will no doubt play out next season.
Weaving in and around the latter years of the Cold War, the show is a snapshot of an America at the cusp of major technological changes. In fact, the state of the art spy gear is downright laughable today although the featurette “Ingenuity Over Technology” does a good job showing what they had to work with.
The thirteen episodes look and sound great. There’s a just-right number of extras including commentary for the season finale, “The Colonel”, from former CIA agent turned executive producer Joseph Weisberg, producer Joel Fields and actor Noah Emmerich. The background leading the series’ creation is covered in “Executive Order 2579: Exposing the Americans” while the many wigs and mustaches used to disguise the agents is given a nod in “Perfecting the Art of Espionage”. There are a handful of deleted scenes for several episodes and a fun Gag Reel.
I was surprised to learn that Talia has a sister. Understand, Talia and I go back a long way. I first encountered her in a script I was writing for Detective 411. I really didn’t know much about her, though I was probably aware that she had a father who would grab attention at some point. I didn’t come face-to-face with him until I looked at a copy of Batman 322.
His relationship to his daughter was open information from the beginning and when you think about it, his having progeny is a bit odd; his biggest concern is the destruction of the Earth’s ecosphere and that includes the problem of overpopulation. And although Ra’s al Ghul is something like 400 years old, I’m pretty sure that Talia is still a young woman – young by our standards, not just her father’s. So this man who thinks there are already too many people adds to the number? It doesn’t seem to parse.
But we should remember that Ra’s is a megalomaniacal sociopath. Such a man might feel that anything he does, including adding to a crisis by siring a child, is righteous because he does it. If you do it: bad. If he does it: bravo. Of course, he may have had a practical reason for becoming a parent: maybe he was looking for someone to take over the family business after he retired. (I suppose that when you pass 350 or so, you lose a step or two and begin to consider successors.) Or he might have been having trouble finding good help and decided to grow his own. Or maybe he planned to begin an al Ghul dynasty.
Well. maybe not an al Ghul dynasty. That’s not a name, that al Ghul. More like a title. According to the late Julius Schwartz, who contributed it, Ra’s al Ghul means something like “head of the demon.” Surely at some other time, he was called something else, perhaps with the title “doctor” prefacing it. He was a doctor, you know, and a scientist and perhaps a bit of a humanitarian in a country that has absolutely and vanished from history. Not a trace left. Nada. Zilch. (How, then, do I know about it? That would be telling.)
About that sister: her name is Nyssa al Ghul – she obviously doesn’t know that what she’s calling herself isn’t a name, unless she does know and is being a rebel. She showed up in a recent episode of a television presentation titled Arrow and proceeded to do some major ass-kicking. I don’t think she’s much like her sister. (Do they even have the same mother?) My Talia has pacifistic instincts that are unfortunately often obliterated by a slavish devotion to her father. A really expert therapist might do wonders for her. Nyssa, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy combat and to be very good at it. Though, I admit, we have barely met the woman and can’t really judge her motives.
I guess we should stay tuned.
Karen Green is developing the Columbia University comics archive from love, from vast knowledge, from the realization that it’s totally necessary and also totally cool. One of the Columbia Journalism School students decided to make her the subject of a video project, and this is the product.
Take a look at some of what she does and see original artwork from Wendy Pini and Al Jaffee, as well as the collection of Chris Claremont.
Like most people, my Twitter username isn’t my actual name. I have no compunction about identifying myself by my real name on Twitter, and would’ve taken @jenkrueger if it had been available when I signed up. But even as far back as my first tweet in August of 2008, scoring my real name as a handle wasn’t possible.
Last week, an article entitled How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username caught my eye because the title made me wonder how a Twitter handle could possibly be worth so much, and what exactly constitutes losing it. Don’t get me wrong about the first bit: I’m no stranger to the idea that certain domain names and usernames can have a monetary value beyond what amount, if any, the customer pays the service provider to register the account. Businesses that care about their brand (read: almost all businesses) want to have control over the web address and social media profiles bearing their name, both for the obvious utility it provides their company, and perhaps even more importantly, to prevent anyone else from having that control. In the hands of someone other than Coca-Cola, the domain cocacola.com is dangerous; the site could speak well of a Coke competitor, poorly of Coke, or of unrelated topics that don’t necessarily harm Coke’s brand yet dilute it by not helping it, either.
So a $50,000 Twitter username didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. It just seemed out of the realm of possibility today. Years ago, I’d heard of businesses offering upwards of $100,000 a pop to the enterprising early registrants of domains bearing the names of major companies. But the market for these transactions seemed to dry up fairly quickly as most businesses bought up their names. And since the value of a company owning its own name online became evident before social media became the behemoth chunk of the internet it is today, many businesses have been savvy enough to defensively grab usernames on burgeoning social networks over the past decade.
Every once in a while though, I still come across a story about someone that has managed to lay claim to a domain or username coveted by a company. But now these stories rarely end with a big payday. In 2010, Tumblr came under fire for turning over pitchfork.tumblr.com to Pitchfork magazine despite the fact that an individual had a personal blog at that address. Tumblr claimed the account had been dormant and the user hadn’t responded to an email inquiry about it. The user disputed these claims, but regardless of whether or not the account was wrongly released, there doesn’t seem to be any dispute over the fact that the incident began with Tumblr receiving a request for the URL directly from the magazine. It seems this bypassing of the account owner is the standard corporate play in these situations now, and whether or not a company can wrench a desired domain or username from someone else’s grasp is in the hands of the host of the desired site or service.
All these factors combined, then, made me assume the lost username in question was a company moniker acquired by corporate coercion after the account owner turned down a (rare by today’s standards) $50,000 offer for the handle. Then I read the article and was very surprised at how wrong both of my assumptions were. The lost username is @N, and its loss had nothing to do with a company. It was, for all intents and purposes, stolen by a hacker.
At first, I couldn’t reconcile this information about the target or the thief, but a few moments of mulling on social media made it click for me. Easy to remember and taking up the smallest possible amount of character real estate in tweets directed at them, short usernames are a virtual commodity on Twitter. Since there are only 26 possibilities for single character usernames, those are the most unique possible handles on the service. The incredibly vast internet user base today has combined with the exponentially expanding importance of online identity for individuals and companies alike to make uniqueness nearly priceless. When I look at it this way, I’m not at all surprised a hacker would want to seize one of the rarest usernames out there. Now I’m just surprised it isn’t happening more often.
Though I couldn’t get my real name as a Twitter handle, I see now that it must’ve been released and snagged by someone else shortly after I’d joined, as the inaugural tweets on my account and @jenkrueger’s are only 10 days apart. And since @jenkrueger’s only activity is that inaugural tweet in 2008 and a reply to another user six days later, I suppose I could email Twitter support to inquire about getting the username released to me. I could, but I won’t. After all, then I’d have to give up the Twitter name I’ve been using for the last few years, and I’d be seriously bummed out if someone else swooped in on it.
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
February 24, 2022
