Of course, if they were doing some random DC hero I'd never heard of, I don't know if that would be enough to keep me reading. I'm not a big reader of super hero comics in general, and my understanding of DC comics in particular is filtered heavily through the WB animated Batman, Superman, and Justice League series. As a consequence, I was really pleased to see that Gotham Central was slated to be a police procedural set in, well, Gotham. I'm a big fan of the larger comics companies spreading into a broader range of mainstream genres, and even a title that is nominally set in the DC universe has a lot of room to have its own identity.

Gotham Central tells the story of Gotham's Major Crimes Unit, a sort of "homicide, kidnapping, and other bad stuff" unit that is distinct in Gotham's police force by dint of being largely noncorrupt (this is one of the major problem areas you already hit in portraying police in Gotham -- in some Batman titles, they are nearly universally corrupt, and in other conceptions, they are entirely ethical -- I think GC hits a nice middle ground here). Their stories do dip heavily into the realm of supervillains and how a police force interacts with a super-vigilante on their turf, so it's not strict police procedural by any means, but at the same time, the series has a nice, real-world verisimilitude going on, and I end up buying into the protagonists' responses to what's going on around them. The characterization and storytelling are both quite strong, which is what I've come to expect from both Brubaker and Rucka.

At the same time, GC suffers from being placed in Batman's world. In particular, the series faces the same problem that Batman and other super-titles face in general -- the good guys are forced to be truly stupid from time to time. This isn't Dark Knight where supervillains and novel and no one's dealt with the Joker before. When a cop in GC decides to roll up his sleeves and "teach the Joker a lesson" I instantly checked out of the story. Of course the Joker is going to overpower him. Of course the Joker is going to grab the cop's gun and kill a lot of people. It's the unwelcome heroic parallel to easily-escaped supervillain death traps. The other major related issue is being stuck with "big events." Stupid Gotham earthquake storyline? Check. Stupid "final night" storyline? Check. And so forth. I just try to read around these things (and for the most part, that works well enough).

On the whole, I recommend the five available Gotham Central volumes. They are:

Volume 1: In the Line of Duty
Volume 2: Half a Life
Volume 3: Unresolved Targets
Volume 4: The Quick and the Dead
Volume 5: Dead Robin

I saw this at the San Francisco Film Society's 3rd SF International Film Festival. The trailer should give you a feel for the movie. I think it was impressively done, covering its topic thoughtfully and carefully.

Here's the official Waltz with Bashir site.

m IDed it as Sukiyaki, groaning about having to play a song he'd been forced to practice as a kid.

But that's not where I knew it from.

I remembered it as part of a song that Eric played for me on his Walkman before class in fifth grade, before repeating the whole thing back to me -- he'd been listening to it over and over. And, well, I remembered it as a hip hop song. Vaguely recalling that Snoop Dogg covered it a bit more recently, a bit of looking around found it for me:

That would be La Di Da Di by Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, a classic and oft-covered hip hop number from the mid 80s. While I generally recall the rise of Run-D.M.C. and how entertained we all were by the lyrics to "You Be Illin", La Di Da Di was the first hip hop song I really consciously heard (I think I was incidentally exposed to the Sugar Hill Gang, but I actually learned many of the lyrics to La Di Da Di).

Apparently these days you won't find a version of La Di Da Di with the Sukiyaki sample in the middle because masters Rick and Fresh didn't actually ask for permission when they used it. Oops. As it may be, the version I included above is the canonical one, and is pretty much what I heard on Eric's tape player back in the day.

I don't play FF-style games, mind you. I watch littlestar play them, lose track of what's going on as I wander into and out of contact with the game, then read summaries and find the plots just plain old goofy.

I just read Crisis on Infinite Earths.

It was sitting there in the used book store, where I have a giant pile of credit. I picked up Crisis and American Virgin as I was curious about both.

When Crisis rolled around initially, I wasn't really a reader of DC comics. I was pretty firmly stuck in with the X-Men and G.I. Joe, and read nothing else. My closest contact with Crisis was when I picked up issue 12 of Secret Wars. That's pretty tangential, since Secret Wars was, I've been told, Marvel's attempt to have a similar cross-cutting, all-encompassing comic event in the vein of Crisis.

The goal behind Crisis was pretty solid. DC found itself with a messy complex of older and more recent continuities. While I'm a strong advocate for simply pressing the giant reset button rather than trying to find and "in story" way to fix continuity issues, at the time the idea of actually making it a grand event was reasonably novel and decent. It gave you time to pay proper attention to fans of some of the continuities you'd be removing, effectively "honoring" the characters they loved by writing their removal into the story.

That said, and without meaning any disrespect to Marv Wolfman because it was 1985 and comics were written that way, the overall story reminded me every step of the way of those overly convoluted, hard to follow, hard to swallow plots from Final Fantasy and its computer RPG brethren. Much like the various FF games, the core concept is solid, but the final execution is needlessly labyrinthine. In both cases, I find myself saying, "Really?" rather more often than I'd really like.

It also doesn't help that DC of the time was rife with goofy names. Monitor? Good name. The world-destroying, event-causing enemy being the Anti-Monitor? No. Psycho Pirate?

Psycho Pirate?

So, I didn't find the story all that engaging overall. Some of that comes down to writing that fits its era -- much like the Chris Claremont X-Men dialogue that I loved as a kid but can barely read now -- but a lot of it also comes down to a plot that was oddly overdone for the key story elements it was trying to hit.

Of course, if I were a long-time DC comics fan in 1985, I might well have been completely rapt.

Opening this weekend, starring the talented Jimmy Tsai, and directed by the talented Jessica Yu.

Interview with Jessica Yu

Interview with Jimmy

I first met Jimmy back in college, as part of the UC Martial Arts Program. I'm not at all surprised to see him showing up as a writer and actor on such a cool-looking movie.

A logline is the single-sentence blerb that sells a passing audience -- be it people reading TV Guide or a movie producer -- on the concept of your movie.

You can submit up to two entries, each a single logline at sixty words or fewer. The first prize is a professional query letter critique, a phone call to discuss the critique and a plan to get published, and copies of the 2009 Guide to Literary Agents and 2009 Writer's Market.

Sounds like fun. The deadline is the end of August.

If you haven't seen it, Garfield Minus Garfield is Dan Walsh's remix of Jim Davis's comic that removes the strip's namesake from the strip (as well as Odie and almost everyone else), leaving simply Jon Arbuckle and his lonely observations about life. Here's the NYT quote:

[the strips] “create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle…Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.”

Naturally, this is a huge copyright violation, but apparently Jim Davis also thinks it's pretty funny, so Random House -- the publisher of normal Garfield books -- will publish a book showing in parallel a series of G-m-G strips and their unmodified sources.

Pretty cool. We'll give Jim Davis the final word:

Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.’ It would have been funnier.”

The signing line was already closed when we arrived, most likely filled by people who had failed to line up two hours in advance (!) to get into the panel. Even some of those who were turned away from the panel didn't make it into the line. littlestar was initially disappointed, but we hung around the booth anyway, diving in for pictures every so often, until WB and convention security flushed people away from the signing area (and then repeating this cycle several times for the next hour). Following the one-hour signing period, Lee Pace came over to the waiting crowd of people who hadn't made it into the line, said hello, posed for some pictures, and signed some things despite being told not to.

The Daisies crowd was then ushered upstairs for a series of interviews and a bit of general taking in of the convention floor from above.

After the interviews, Lee came down into the crowd again at a fan's request, signing some more things and hanging out as long as his handlers would let him, before the whole group was ushered off one final time.

You can check out the rest of the signing photoset by clicking here.

The full cast showed up, along with show creator Bryan Fuller and executive producer Barry Sonnenfeld. This post is mainly meant to link over to my extensive Flickr photoset from the panel. Some highlights:

All the major stars, along with two executive producers and the show's creator.

Lee Pace and Anna Friel being embarrassed by Barry Sonnenfeld as he tells the story of how they talked a director into letting them play the kinetic (and potentially calamitous, in context) card game Snap during an establishing shot for an episode.

Kristin Chenoweth singing part of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" at a fan's request. She must be primarily made of lungs, because her voice is amazing and HUGE.

Bryan Fuller answering a question. The majority of audience questions came to Bryan, often from fans of his earlier shows such as Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me.

Also, Chi McBride is a very, very funny man.

Lee Pace explains that acting roles do affect you emotionally, and that's one reason he likes Pushing Daisies so much -- he goes home happy. Throughout the panel, people emphasized that a core concept of the show is that you're just happy to be watching it.

This was a fun panel, filled with people who seem to be happy to be working together and working on the show.

3187030..3187611
/gene="mpt70"
/locus_tag="Rv2875"
/function="NOT REALLY KNOWN."

Someone at the Sanger Institute has a sense of humor, I think.

(For a little more information, the product of this gene is a protein known as Mpt70. Although the function of Mpt70 is unknown, it is an immunogenic protein, meaning that your immune system kicks up a fuss when exposed to it. This usually means it does something important, so we can be assured that people are studying it.)

Click here for the Comic Con site.

Despite the blow out on four days and Saturday, the other days remain relatively open. None of them have hit the halfway mark, although Friday is approaching it.

The real question for this year is if the Exhibit Hall will be hideous on Saturday, or if, like last year, the major shows in Hall H will siphon enough people off to make the Saturday experience altogether more peaceful than the Thursday crush.

(As in, no more of them are available.)

You can still buy the individual one-day passes. If you were to buy all four days this way, it would currently run you $110.

That said, the individual passes for Saturday are nearly sold out.

You can read more at the San Diego Comic Con site.

It's a terrible, terrible film.

Visually beautiful, yet terrible. Our consensus description is "A poor man's Forrest Gump done through the filter of High School Musical."

You can read an interesting, pre-release view of the mess that led to this cinematic disaster in this LA Weekly piece.

It's as if the point of the movie were to take each Beatles song individually out into a field and kill it. It's bizarre.

So yeah, we weren't fond of it.