I Wanna Get Married (to a Jealous, Two-Timing Louse)

In honor of Black Canary's assumed impending nuptials to Green Arrow, I've put together a little photo montage set to music, on the off-chance I'm invited to any of the pre-marriage events and can give Dinah a gift. Please sing along in your head as you read, if you know the song.

Music and Lyrics by Nellie McKay

"I wanna get married
Yes, I need a spouse

I want a nice Leave it to Beaverish
Golden retriever and a little white house

I wanna get married
I need to cook meals

I wanna pack you cute little lunches
For my Brady bunches
Then read Danielle Steele

I wanna escape
This rat race I've created

I'm feelin' enervated

I don't care if I make it
I just want to bake a sugar cake for you
To take to work in the morn

And I'll stay home cleaning the dishes
And keeping your wishes all warm

I wanna get married
That's why I was born

I wanna partake in bake sales for the classroom

I wanna hear the sweet tune
Of Sally's little vroom-vroom
As she zooms around my broom

As I exhume the gloom
Of my shallow life

I wanna be simple and honest and dimpled
'cause I am your wife

I will never tarry

I'm not even torn

I wanna get married
That's why I was born"

Best wishes, Dinah! (You will sure need them.)

Request for Space Picture Book Ideas

Medium Raggirl is four years old, and moving into a space-phase. Her current favorites are If You Decide To Go To The Moon, which is wonderful, but more a fictional how-to, than a story book, and also Cops and Robots, which is well below her reading comprehension level, but she loves the Backyardigans TV Show, and reading the book is usually just a pre-cursor to extended play-acting in which we are evil robots running away from the space cops.

My problem is that I have been unable to find anything else in the "Kids in Space Picture Book" genre. This is the blurb for the perfect book for Medium Raggirl:

"A girl blasts off to the moon, where she discovers that the satellite has been taken over by evil robot dinosaurs! Using her cunning and her mad science kit, the girl manages to tame the lunar robot dinosaurs, and takes up a career riding them in her new lunar robot dinosaur rodeo."

Unfortunately, this book appears to not exists. Or really, anything similar. It would be a shame to make her wait until she is ready for "Chapter Books," especially since that would mean my reading the same two books to her for the next year!

Any ideas are appreciated.

Super Stripper

Yes, I can see no way to avoid the conclusion that Superman is the stripper popping out of the cake at Black Canary's bachelorette party. This, of course, raises the important issue of what, exactly, constitutes the skill of "Super Stripping"?

The answer, after some thought, is obvious.

Superman's skill is that it is actually more revealing the more clothes he puts ON! I mean, picture it . . . The girls are all cheering as Kal slowly puts on a grey business suit, hooting and hollering as he slowly ties the tie (double windsor, of course), . . . and everyone is on their feet screaming as the glasses come out!

Now THAT'S a strip-tease I'd pay to see.

The 52 Love Triangle: The Search for Ray Palmer

Kalinara is very excited about Kyle Rayner, Donna Troy, and Jason Todd starring in the "Search for Ray Palmer" mini-series. While I agree with all of the points she makes, and would add that I think it would be really fun for Kyle to get repeatedly marginalized by the other two because, "You've never been dead, so you wouldn't know. . ." there was one part I don't agree with. She says,

"The potential love triangle element would be amusing too."

It was exactly the potential love triangle that made me cringe. In my mind, I can't help but compare this trio to the "Space Heroes" from 52 and Countdown to Adventure. In case your memory doesn't extend back to last month, that threesome was Starfire, who was historically played as a "sex kitten" type character, paired with Buddy Baker and Adam Strange, who just happened to be the two most happily married in the entire DCU. And what happens? Three people stranded alone for a year, and not a single "relationship" subplot. No one is even thinking that one of the happy Dads will cheat, and they just go have adventures with Lobo and Lady Styx. It completely rehabilitated Starfire for me, because she was allowed to just be a hero for year, without being a "girlfriend" or "lover" also.



My fear is that putting Donna Troy into a group with two eligible, swinging singles will have exactly the opposite effect, and by the time the trio find Ray Palmer, they will have to use his scientific expertise to develop an impromptu DNA test to determine who the father is.

Stupid Questions #6

Who are the 33,000 people who are buying Justice League -- but not Justice Society -- during their crossover? Are some of them among the 11,000 people who are buying Outsiders, but not Checkmate during their crossover?

When these people purchase books, do they often choose to read only the odd-numbered chapters?

When a book you buy has a clearly labelled crossover, do you ever choose not to buy the half of the story that is in the other book? If so, does the story still make sense?

Interview with Me -- #2

Kalinara asks:


1. Is Nightwing in Outsiders an idiot, or just misunderstood?

Nightwing from the Outsiders is clearly an idiot, as he is only able to keep a single thought in his head at a time. In the early issues, that thought was, "This is a job, not a family." That led him to leave the team. (This, from the guy who successfully led the Justice League in Obsidian Age!) Next, it was "We are dead." That one should have been easy, but nope. Now, it is "I must save my team!" whether it be from Checkmate, Egg Fu, or whomever.

It's like Nightwing is in an improv comedy troupe, where an audience member yells out a motivation -- ("You think your mother is a duck!") -- and you have to incorporate that into every move you make. Except without the comedy.

2. If you had Nemesis's disguise tricks, who would you impersonate and what would you do?

I'd probably keep impersonating whomever was walking twenty feet ahead of me, so that the people walking in the other direction would start getting inexplicable cases of deja vu.


3. Do you miss Steve Trevor as much as I do?

It depends which Steve Trevor. Not the silly Golden Age "Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane in Pants." Not the post-Crisis "Elder Statesman in Love with Etta." There was probably an interim Steve in there who was worth missing, but I haven't read enough Silver/Bronze Age Wonder Woman to form an attachment to him. I definitely approve of the "Wonder Woman's Guy Sidekick" role, but Nemesis has been sufficiently ass-kicking that I haven't felt the loss on that front.

4. If you could make one new superhero, who would you make?

Superhero comics would be the perfect medium for exploring Trans-sexuals. Coming up the back story for literally being a "Man Trapped In a Woman's Body" or vice versa is ridiculously easy. And yet, I don't think it has even been done right or well. To take a current superhero -- what if Kendra is killed at the end of her book and her soul gets re-re-incarnated into a male body? What does Carter do? What does Ken(dra) do?

My "new" superhero would be any existing superhero who is in a committed relationship, who suddenly becomes "reborn" into another body. Heck, I wouldn't even mind if it turned Obsidian into a straight woman!

5. Bolts or nuts?

I prefer wing-nuts, because you can usually spin them around so easily.

MEME RULES:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions. (They probably won't be the same ones you see above!)

3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Interview With Me #1 -- Ami

Ami asks five questions:

1. How would you coordinate the heroes when the Amazons Attack? :o

Well, I would start out by locking Diana and Hippolyta in a room (or maybe their own pocket dimension) and not letting them out until some sort of familial breakthrough was made, so they couldn't have seventeen three-line conversations that never get anywhere over the course of three issues.

Next, I'd get Supernova (if he still exists) to use that people-beamer thing he used to get everyone the heck out of Metropolis to get everyone the heck out of Washington D.C.

Having now saved all the civilians, all males from the Bat-Family would be dispatch to stand guard at every building that was at least ten times as high as it is wide, as apparently phallic structures are the primary targets here.

Superman would use his Super-hearing to figure out what quadrant of the city an Amazon most recently yelled "Attack!" in, and send reinforcements there.

I don't think any other heroes will be needed, because I figure Nemesis could just impersonate them as the need arose.

2. Is there a hero that you dislike that would surprise ppl (by your choice)? :O

Power Girl. Well, maybe "dislike" is too strong. She just never inspired me.


3. What's your favourite TV show? :D

Since you didn't specify current or past, I'm going to go with "Northern Exposure." I own all 6 Seasons on DVD, and its the only show that long that I own all of. I wrote about my love for it here.

4. What's your favourite guilty pleasure XD

If it is pleasurable, and doesn't hurt anyone else, I don't see why I should feel guilty it! However, I perhaps have a surprising passion for Mexican food.

5. If you could live in any sort of residence (condo, house, mansion, castle, yacht, etc) where would you live? :D

I don't know. Does the mansion come with Alfred, or do I have to do my own vacuuming? Assuming the residence doesn't come with lots of extra wealth, probably a large condo (I don't like having to be responsible for my own repairs!) but it would be located on a floating city, suspended above the earth by a bouquet of multi-colored balloons, so that it could be a condo-over-New-York one day and a condo-over-San-Francisco the next.

MEME RULES:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."

2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions. (They probably won't be the same ones you see above!)

3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.

4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.

5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Sleez, Still-borns, and Mr. Pink (Countdown #46)

So, Countdown #46 managed to hit all of my hot buttons at once.

1. The return of Sleez. I don't know what else he's been doing -- from the implications of the text, he was creating some Lois/Jimmy porn. I didn't read about that -- only the Superman/Barda porn from Action #593.



Yuck. While I am convinced that Superman would be very bad in bed -- even outside of mind control -- this is really a level of yuck I didn't want to consider. I was therefore not too upset to see his fried by forced unknown.

2. And what's yuckier than mind-controlled Superman sex? Why, Dead Babies, of course! Next, Black Mary fights some sort of demon made up entirely of still-born babies who had been trapped inside of a piece of the Rock of Eternity. My memory was theat all the pieces of rock had been collected back in Day of Vengeance, but I could be mis-remembering. Anyway, very few things will get me to stop watching/ reading faster than Dead Babies (see, for example, Battlestar Galactica, which I turned off on the pilot's first commercial break, never to re-view.)



Anyway, this scene was just kind of confusing, and I wasn't as viscerally effected as I usually am by this sort of junk. Offensiveness has been saved solely by being poorly executed.

3. Okay, this one is just kind of weird. The Rogues are in a restaurant having a conversation about capitalism and waitress/customer relations and whether "the customer is always right" that so obviously reads like a scene cut from the restaurant scene is Reservoir Dogs where the criminals discussing the Ethics of Tipping Waitresses that I can't believe it wasn't an intentional homage/ rip-off.

Anyway, the Pied Piper here takes on the overly-erudite role of Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi). Get it? Pink, because he's gay? Ha ha? . . . No? Ok.


[(left to right) Mirror Master, Heat Wave, Captain Cold, Trickster, The Top, Weather Wizard, and Pied Piper.]

Okay, I know I'm probably going to keep buying Countdown no matter how annoying it gets, but this one was pretty darned annoying.

Completing the Circle: Trying to Figure Out Supergirl #18

I could talk about the actual plot, which would just be depressing, since it would mean admitted that the majority of the last few issues were totally wasted. Instead, I will merely point out:



Richard Pryor tries to kill Superman in Superman III.



Midriff Supergirl learns from her father that she must kill Superman somewhere around Supergirl #16.




Belly-Covered Supergirl decides she must kill Midriff Supergirl in Supergirl #18. But who is she really? The Real Supergirl? An imposter? The answer, if you look closely, is obvious.



She is clearly Rain Pryor, daughter of Richard Pryor, in a blonde wig. And thus the cycle of killing is closed.