Why, Lois, Me? Superman? It Is To Laugh.

One of my favorite blog is Say It Backwards, which is a loving serving of Superman with a dollop of Silver Age wackiness. You know, giant gorillas with Kryptonite eyes, Superman robots with flags in their hands to signal when they're damaged, Terra-Man, and stuff like that. The blog has taken a substantial drop in quality, though, by letting me write a guest post. The post, entitled Superman Taught Me How to Lie, is up right now.

It's true, Superman did teach me the art of super-obfuscation. The years of protecting his identity have been an object lesson in how to color the truth. I particularly focus on Action Comics #457, which is one on the seminal super-liar seminars.

Thomas, the Guy in Charge of the Blog, is a very nice guy who I know through e-mail. When Safari has a number next to his RSS feed, it's always a spot of joy in my browser. He was also kind enough to say this about Love and Capes...

"It really is a great comic, fun with superheroes without having fun at their expense. And the art's just brilliant. It's like Bruce Timm, Ty Templeton's Adventures style and Tex Avery's respective works had a beautiful love child."

That made my day.

And Goofing Off is Half the Battle

I should be working right now. It's one of those days where I don't feel driven to do the work I'm supposed to, so I'm playing around with something else. Hopefully it'll act as a warm-up and I'll be able to draw the three other illos on my drawing table.

The guys on the always-excellent podcast Comic Pants did a program on the GI Joe comic. I was a Joe fan in the Eighties, and have mentioned how the famous silent issue of GI Joe managed to inspire my Raider series. I haven't read the book since then, and maybe it doesn't hold up, but I think it was that perfect combination of solid writing and solid storytelling that combine to make a project stronger than the whole. And Larry Hama deserves a lot of credit for wrangling a toy franchise into a darned interesting comic book, and writing something that, while it wasn't necessarily the real military, certainly felt like it. I think the big words crowd would call it verisimilitude.

My favorite character of the original set was Flash, the Laser Rifle Trooper. I dressed as him for Halloween one year, my Dad making a kick-butt costume, including a laser rifle that lit up. So, I decided to try another all-digital piece featuring Sgt. Anthony S. Gambello, and yes, I had to look that up.

And, if you get the chance, take their geektastic GI Joe Mission Challenge, where you get the opportunity to send a team of Joes to attack Cobra. Yo Joe!

You Can See Right Through Me

This is so cool. It won't be so cool to everybody, but to the right people, this is gonna be great.

I had to buy a new DVD player. My old one, a Christmas present from my brother David, finally gave up the ghost. So I started looking around for another one. I found this one. I'm sure there are others like it, but I just set mine up and I thought it was pretty cool. So why am I throwing the "cool" around? Because it's got a free hack to make it Region Free, listed right on its Amazon page.

I've got some specialized tastes in TV and movies. I love British stuff, like Doctor Who and Hustle. Both are great shows, and available on America TV and DVD. There are a few shows that I'm big fans of, or would like to be big fans of, like Life on Mars, Spaced and Jeckyll, that aren't availble in these United States. Worse yet, there are some American shows that aren't available over here at all. And, since DVDs are region-encoded, meaning that DVD players are coded for the region you live in, that becomes diffcult. A British DVD won't play in an American DVD player.

It was the Sci-Fi Channel show, and big favorite of mine, The Invisible Man that started me on this crusade. I love this series, as did a couple of friends of mine. I wanted to get the series as a present for them, but even if I could get the DVD, it wouldn't play. I looked into a bunch of solutions, and then found out about region-free DVD players that would play discs from anywhere. So now, it means that I can buy the Invisible Man DVD from Amazon.co.uk and play it over here. It doesn't help my friends, of course, but they can come over and watch it if they want. Or they could get their own.

Anyway, I'm a little stoked. It's going to take a little effort to not start strafing the Amazon.uk catalog. And, sure, shipping's a little bit of a hassle, but since The Invisible Man came out on DVD in 2004 or so, and there are still no plans to release it in the US, for the right stuff, it's worth it.

Now if only Now and Again would come out on DVD.

The Night the Lights Went Out at 30 Rock

I really don't want to work today. Maybe it's the change in weather, or the void that is having Love and Capes done, or even the time change. But it's taking effort to be at the drawing table today. And, given that I've been lured over here to post a blog, obviously that effort is faltering.

Anyway, I'm going to create a new category here on the Thom Zahler Weblog… randomness. Every once in a while I see a link or a story I want to comment on, and I just needed a place to put such things. I won't go overboard with it, think of it as a place to vent about things.

Things like last night's Football Night in America. It's NBC's pre-game/halftime/post-game show. I watched some of it during the Cowboys/Eagles game. (The Cowboys won, which is good, as the Eagles are an evil, soulless blight on the NFL. But, Dallas is my adopted home team and the Eagles are a hated enemy, so I may be biased.) But I don't want to comment on the game. I want to comment on NBC/Universal's "Universal is Green" week which caused them to do their show in the dark!

Yeah, to show their environmentalism, they did the show in the dark. Well, except for a couple of carbon-spewing candles and three or four huge plasma screens with the sponsors' logos. Cris Collinsworth had to read his notes by a flashlight. It was one of the silliest things I've ever seen. And the stupidest. They were talking about how much of a benefit not running the lights was, while NBC's Rockefeller Center's well-lit, water wasting fountain was performing non-stop in the background.

When I saw it, I thought it was an Saturday Night Live skit. Heck, next week's SNL would probably make fun of it, except for the Writers' Strike.

Look, I've got no problems with conservation. I'm not going to get overly political, but I think most people like the idea of conserving resources. They may disagree about how much good it does, or to what lengths we should go to conserve, but the underlying principal is a good one. Hey, if you can make me a car that looks and runs the same as the one I have, but uses a third less gasoline, I can't imagine anyone, left, right or otherwise who wouldn't think that was a good thing.

I do have a problem with silly symbolism. The NFL guys doing their show in the dark just looked stupid. Do it with the lights at half-power and say how much even that little saves, donate that week's salary to some green cause, drink free trade coffee out of your NBC licensed mugs.

Instead, they gave us the symbolism of cutting their nose off to spite their face. Personally, I recommend they show much they can keep from polluting the atmosphere and the airwaves by dumping Keith Olbermann. But that's just me.