The Invisible Library

Um, what?:

Seriously, Marvel, WHAT THE FUCK? At what point did Spider-Man having radioactive sperm ever seem like a good idea? At what point did anyone even think about Spider-Man having radioactive sperm? Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this ever saw print, I cannot believe that no-one at Marvel thought that having a comic where Spider-Man tells the corpse of his wife - because, yeah, I meant to say that, he’s talking to the corpse of his dead wife - that he killed her with his special radioactive spider-spunk was ANYTHING that should ever be allowed to appear in a comic. And that’s before you even get to the continuation of his admission: “Like a spider, crawling up inside your body and laying a thousand eggs of cancer… I killed you.”

I can’t really improve on “radioactive spider-spunk.” Wow.

Pulp Magazine Holdings Directory: Library Collections in North America and Europe by Jess Nevins.

I have his Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and it’s amazing. Can’t wait to get my hands on this one as well.

Via Warren Ellis.

Not content with moving Battlestar Galactica to Sunday Nights, SciFi has decided that what the world needs now is a reimagined Wizard of Oz:

The miniseries is a sometimes psychedelic, often twisted and always bizarre take on The Wizard of Oz. It centers on DG, a young woman plucked from her humdrum life and thrust into The Outer Zone (the O.Z.), a fantastical realm filled with wonder, but oppressed by dark magic. DG discovers her true identity, battles evil winged monkey-bats and attempts to fulfill her destiny. Her perilous journey begins on the fabled Old Road that leads to a wizard known as the Mystic Man. Along the way, she is joined by “Glitch,” an odd man missing half his brain; “Raw,” a quietly powerful wolverine-like creature longing for inner courage; and “Cain,” a heroic former policeman (known in the O.Z. as a “Tin Man”), who is seeking vengeance for his scarred heart. Ultimately, DG’s destiny leads her to a showdown with the wicked sorceress Azkadellia, whose ties to DG are closer than anyone could have imagined.

The first rule of reimagining a story is that the orignal needs to fall short of its potential. This can sometime be a hard thing to judge (I’m all in favor of a reimigined Star Trek, though I’m probably the only one) but messing with the Wizard of Oz is just asking for trouble. George Lucus re-imagining his own Star Wars movies type of trouble.

The Oz movie is a classic. It also happens to be one of the most tightly structured scripts around. The color transition, the pacing, the stylized acting all play into the fantasy of the concept. Plus and this is a biggie, the musical numbers help tell the story and move the plot forward in an economical way. Imagine each character having to monologue their missing-organ back stories. That would be the definition of tedious.

The new BSG works because the original series was, frankly, shallow and cliched. It has it’s diehard fans who don’t like the new show for going all dark and current and philosophical and real. Some people are happy with worn out cardboard and Star Wars rip offs. But the show simply didn’t live up to it’s potential. But That’s not the case here. If you have your doubts, rent Return to Oz sometime.

Ever wonder what it’d be like if Stan Lee and Jack Chick had collaborated on a tract? Wonder no more!

Adam Sternbergh has reached the same conclusion I did about shows like Lost:

Change the format, or at least reimagine it. When it so-called arc shows, we need something between a mini-series and an open-ended run. We need the TV equivalent of a novella: the limited-run show. Series driven by a central mystery (Twin Peaks, The X-Files) peter out precisely because they have indefinite life spans. The writers are forced to serve up red herrings until the shows choke on their own plot twists.

[…] Now let’s imagine an alternate reality in which, say, Lost was designed to run for only two seasons. Rather than getting an increasingly tedious shaggy-dog story, we’d get 48 episodes of tightly plotted, expertly interwoven suspense. Viewers would be both more willing to sign on at the beginning (knowing their investment will pay off) and more inclined to buy DVDs later (either as catch-up for newbies or as a satisfying boxed set). Sure, the show won’t syndicate well, but shows like Lost don’t syndicate well anyway. And the series finale would be huge—the kind of event TV network executives drool over.

Shows like Lost or The X-Files or Battlestar Galactica work because they are complex, challenging and, at their heart, have a mystery that can be solved. But it’s the refusal to solve anything that ultimately kills them. The X-Files should have ended in Season 5. They had a second chance in Season 7. When did it end? 3 years later with season 10, after replacing the main characters because the initial characters (and actors) that made the premise work were tired of never finding an answer. But the Executives and producers didn’t care. they just saw an opportunity to squeeze a few more bucks at the expense of the audience’s credulity. A mystery cannot go on forever. Stories need to end and in a timely manner.

Imagine if movies did the same thing. Indie never finds the Ark of the Covenant, just an endless parade of tombs and Nazis with increasingly ludicrous cliff hangers. The fellowship keeps walking up Mount Doom, but never gets to the top. There were people who complained that after the nine hours of the three movies, they just didn’t care anymore who won the blessed war or what happened to that damn hobbit and his ring. Now imagine that it kept going on for five more movies with no resolution.

This is what happened to the X-files and what is happening to Lost. They had a good idea but have let it flounder for too long. It no longer matters why the polar bear, or what the numbers mean. Two seasons equals roughly 20 hours (minus commercial breaks) of feignts, dodges and cliffhangers. That’s the equivalent of 10 movies. Imagine watching a 10 movie series and still having no idea what these people are doing or why any of this is happening. You wouldn’t because no studio in their right mind would green light a 10 picture series that never had even a momentary resolution.*

I’d really love to see the American networks switch to the BBC style of drama series. One season of 13 episodes to tell your story. if it’s popular, they’ll do another season, but each season has a story arc. Something is achieved in 13 episodes and it’s over, with a possibility of a continuation. Even the idea floated above, of a limit of two seasons, forces the writers to weed out the ideas that kinda work (but not really) and get to the stuff that shines. There’d be no silly one off episodes where everyone breaks into song. Just tight plotting and storytelling honed down to a razor’s edge.

For all the griping about Firefly being cancelled too soon, at least it didn’t peter out like Buffy did, turning to cheep gimmicks in season 7 to stay interesting. And my fondest hope is that Ronald Moore and the gang at Battlestar Galactica have an end planned for the rag tag fleet, and soon. I’d love it if they find Earth at the end of season 3, fight over it with the Cylons in season 4 and then call it the end. Because they have a wonderful, compelling drama with interesting characters, but if left to wander around the universe in their current state for five or six more seasons, the show will just become monotonous and uninteresting. And no one wants to see that.

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* I’m curious to see how many Spider Man films Sony will let Sam Raimi make. My guess is one more, but only if Spider Man 3 does really well.

I’ve mentioned before what a formative experience watching the original Star Trek with my father on sunday afternoons was so, I’ve been extremely interested in the news that, starting next week, Star Trek will be airing again, with spruced up theme music and effects. Take a look at the trailer. It looks amazing.

Despite making a Gazillion dollars, Superman Returns is apparently considered a flop. This is due mainly to the fact that it cost over 500 Bajillion dollars to make and market.

Warren Ellis sums it up:

SUPERMAN RETURNS conservatively cost $250 million to make. Probably the same again to promote. It took $21M this weekend, eaten alive by PIRATES. The studio gets about half the box office takings. In America, WB’s cumulative slice of SR’s takings amount to around $50M.

As Fraction said to me Sat night, producer Jon Peters is probably sleeping with a gun in his mouth.

Is it conceivable that something that took fifty-odd million in its first weekend could be a flop? I said of KING KONG that for that film’s budget, I could grow my own giant fucking monkey. $250 million puts you in spacelaunch-budget territory. For $250 million WB could’ve given Bryan Singer his own communications satellite and spent the change on a George Clooney movie. Or two Wes Anderson movies. It’s an astonishing volume of cash that, at this stage, they don’t have a prayer of making back worldwide or on DVD.

This is the absurdity of modern Hollywood; that taking more than the GNP of Luxembourg in a single weekend is not actually enough to put a movie in the black.

Maybe Hollywood should try things the Werner Herzog Way:

In Werner Herzog’s films, the main characters tend to be ambitious explorers who find themselves crashing in spectacular failure. Aguirre, the Wrath of God follows a 16th-century conquistador who sets out to find El Dorado, only to end up on a raft, demented and alone, adrift on a stagnant river. In the documentary Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell becomes so adept at cohabiting with wild grizzly bears that he comes to believe he’s one of them – until he gets eaten.

Now the maverick German director, who has made 52 films over a 44-year career, is launching The Wild Blue Yonder. The movie, which he describes as “science fiction fantasy,” tells the story of two interstellar voyages. The first is undertaken by an alien race fleeing a dying planet with hopes of colonizing Earth, the other by human astronauts who set out to explore the liquid world the aliens left behind.

Instead of spending millions on Spielberg-style effects, Herzog went low tech and high geek. He spliced together documentary footage from NASA and the National Science Foundation’s US Antarctic Program. He created “characters” from documentary-style scenes with actual physicists and astronauts. But this being a Herzog film, the lyrical images are tempered by characteristic pessimism. “The film ends our illusions about intergalactic travel,” Herzog says bluntly. “We will not do it. We cannot manage it. It’s just too far.”

As is probably to be expected, some Freepers are claiming Superman as their own, and all us Liberals can keep our dirty, sex having hands off. But is Superman a conservative crusader? Well, not likely. For one thing, his creators, Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster were two good Jewish Kids from New York City. And as we all know, nothing Conservative comes out of New york City. For another, Superman stared out fighting Evil Capitalists. Crooked mine owners. Slum lords. Anyone who was trying to pull one over on the common working man. He was a Depression-era hero for the people, and a bit of a malcontent as well. he didn’t become a boyscout or start fighting super-villains until well after WWII started.

As for the claims that Superman is just a thinly veiled Christ-figure, well, yes and no. While there may be a few similar details to the myth of Jesus, Superman’s story shares quite a few of the basic Savior Myth Archetypes:

A culture hero is a mythological hero specific to some group (cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, etc.) who changes the world through invention or discovery. A typical culture hero might be credited as the discoverer of fire, or agriculture, songs, tradition and religion, and is usually the most important legendary figure of a people, sometimes as the founder of its ruling dynasty. The hero is sometimes said to be still living, but is often instead a star, constellation or purely spiritual in nature

In fact, Superman actually has more in common with Herakles than any other Hero. The comparison to Jesus gets even thinner with the new movie, flirting dangerously close to Da Vinnci Code territory, if you try and follow that train of thought out literally (we can talk more about this in comments, you spoil sports).

So, I’m not buying Superman as ass whoopin Jesus, fighting for the rights of unborn fetuses, one Nation, Under Oil Companies, for just the rich and no one else. If you Freepers want to write that story, you’ll have to steal some lesser-know hero to do it.

Futurama will return to TV. Comedy Central has picked up the rights to air all the old episodes, plus new episodes to be created.

The second dumbest thing Fox ever did was cancel Futurama.* What did they think, that the Simpsons would last forever? It’s already lingered well past its sell-by date and should have gone into syndication immortality years ago. Perhaps once the Simpsons Movie comes along, they’ll le the show go off the air and save those of us who grew up with it the horror of watching it turn into a mediocre parody of itself. Futurama was going to be the inheritor of the Simpson’s genius. But Fox, never imaginative enough to look too hard into the future, couldn’t see that. luckily, the folks at Comedy Central can.

PZ Myers attempts to answer the age old question: just what kind of scientist is Batman anyway?

Be sure to read the comments.