A digital copy of Astonishing X-Men #44 was provided for review by the author.

As a lifelong X-Men fan, I have learned that X-Men fans are, and this is putting it kindly, fickle. On top of this, they have an even more abusive relationship with continuity than most other fans of most other superhero comics – to the sensation of mattering that propels the die-hard shared universe fan through a story, even at times when their joy has abandoned them.

A book like Astonishing X-Men, with its formula of top-tier creative talent plus high-concept storytelling minus the shackles of strict continuity that bind the other books in the X-Office is always a challenge to fans. Even the much-lauded Joss Whedon/John Cassady epic that kicked the series off had its share of continuity-guardian detractors, though in the end it gave us a resurrected Colossus, an out-of-retirement Kitty Pryde, major supporting players like Danger and Armor and the definitive bible on how to write the Scott/Emma couple, all of which have mattered very heavily in the past few years of X-books.

There’s no arguing the ‘top-tier’ part of the Greg Pak/Mike McKone team-up that kicks off in Astonishing #44 – Pak’s long-form Hulk (and Hercules) story that just wrapped up in advance of the Aaron/Silvestri (and company) relaunch is already a modern classic and McKone’s fluid, emotive pencils made him a must-have for past projects like Exiles, Avengers Academy, Amazing Spider-Man and Teen Titans. In fact, I’ve been pining for Pak to write an ongoing X-Men series since his damn-near-perfect Phoenix: Endsong limited series six years ago.

Unfortunately McKone’s cover for Astonishing #44, depicting Cyclops sharing a passionate kiss with a mohawk-sporting Storm, seemed to signal that this was an out-of-continuity ‘imaginary story’ that would have little consequence. And yes, there is a bit of alternate timeline tomfoolery that leads up to that moment, but that isn’t an impediment to thoroughly enjoying an issue that is a fun, super-competent jumping on point.

Pak’s script may seem subdued at first blush, but perhaps only by comparison to the bombast and pomp of the other series from the X-office of late – nobody dies, nobody turns evil, nobody is resurrected and the status quo doesn’t seem to be forever altered. And, of course, the issue’s payoff (mutants in captivity used to power a city) sounds a lot like the logline of Mike Carey’s recent “Collision” arc in X-Men: Legacy (drawn by Clay Mann). Pak’s strength in this issue is in his characters – predominantly Cyclops – and in an accessible script that uses what it needs to from continuity while still respecting new readers. An early scene of Scott and Ororo sparring includes color commentary from the supporting cast that illuminates the action and serves to establish the theme – Cyclops’s emotional state is central to this story, as opposed to Kieron Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men where the mutant general is more closed-off. It seems at this early point like Pak’s story will deal with the consequences of Scott’s behavior elsewhere in addition to telling his own high concept action/sci-fi tale.

Mike McKone’s pencils shine here, especially when given the reins fully, as he is in a sequence when Storm and Cyclops combat a trio of Sentinel robots.

With all the hubbub around the other ‘Regenesis’ launches/new directions, it might be easy to miss Astonishing X-Men. It’s a title that’s shipped irregularly for much of its life, and it’s not being given the same level of promotion that some other books under the ‘Regenesis’ banner have been receiving. But Astonishing is a book that shouldn’t be missed lightly, as it has the makings of an iconic and emotional Cyclops story at its heart. I look forward to seeing where Pak and McKone go with it.

1. Every couple of years, a horror creator just flat-out impresses me. The wheel turns, you know, so they always disappoint me eventually, but right now, I am really a fan of Eric Heisserer. He Gets It. He understands the genre, not just in a ‘and then this happens, and then this happens way’, but he seems to understand Why horror tropes are horror tropes. That particular sensibility is displayed a lot more joyfully in Final Destination 5, but it’s also in this movie’s DNA. There is something here with the ‘black guy dies first’ thing that is handled with a bit of a smirk and a wink that I enjoyed quite a bit. Horror is a genre about building a tower of blocks and then knocking it over and Heisserer’s work that I’ve seen so far has featured fun and intricate block towers.

2. The prequel is amazingly faithful to the Carpenter film. So much so that its final shot is Carpenter’s opening shot (stay during the credits to see it). I basically watched the 2011 film back to back with the 1982 film yesterday. It bridges very well and doesn’t cheapen the main film.

3. Annalee Newitz complains about not knowing The Thing’s motivations in this one, and I think that it would be fair to say that ‘survive’ is its main motivation. The film shows us only the first day or two after the alien is revived, after all, and it’s likely disoriented. By the time it gets to Station 31, it’s had more time to strategize.

4. Has anyone considered whether or not the alien in the ice is the actual alien or just another imitated host? I think you could make a case for the former after a close watch of the prequel.

4a. I would definitely watch another prequel to this story set on an alien spaceship that ends up crashing into Antarctica 100,000 years ago.

5. Mary Elizabeth Winstead = The New Jaime Lee Curtis

I’ve been thinking about Occupy Wall Street quite a bit over the past three weeks. I’ve been avoiding writing a post about it because I don’t want to ramble on incessantly or get to the spot where I start digressing on a dozen angry tangents.

The most interesting thing about the movement – I think it’s a movement now – is the total lack of clarity with which the media reports and comments on it and, as a result, the populace misinterprets what is going on around the country right now. In the past twenty-four hours alone, I’ve heard that:

• President Obama has organized the protests (because he is evil and duplicitous and wants to shift blame for ruining America onto the major corporate banks, who are both some of his largest campaign contributors and the beneficiaries of in excess of one trillion dollars in ‘bailout’ money).
• “The Unions” have organized the protests (because unions are abusive organizations that care only about screwing their wealthy employers and protecting their own power, disregarding that despite the occasional petty and political acts of a relative few, an organization that protects workers’ rights is not a bad thing)
• That the protesters are violent, which is why the police need to mace and kettle and bludgeon all those people who appear to be demonstrating peaceably in accord with their first amendment rights (the same rights that Hank Williams Junior is claims to be denied by his corporate employer for equating the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler on national television)
• They have no organization (which might be the closest to truth that I’ve heard; even though it’s grown past its origins, it is an Anonymous op at its heart, and the hacktivist hive mind that comprises it is, as best as I can understand it, amorphous and actively chaotic, and this, along with the distinct possibility that the participants are, in some cases, trying to fuck with the media ‘for the lulz’, is the genesis of the frustrating ‘they don’t know what their message is’. It’s Anonymous, and you can claim whatever cause you want for your actions – they prefer it that way). I include this mostly to juxtapose it to this next point.
• This Anonymous person needs to step forward and provide some better leadership to his followers.
• It’s only a bunch of slackers who don’t think they should pay back their student loans/can’t read the language in a loan agreement (I’ve seen and heard a few talking heads try to birth this narrative; I think it has a decent chance of sticking because of its inherent anti-intellectualism. It’s true that a majority of the protesters support student loan forgiveness, but less from a place of personal responsibility than the crushing specter of debt that looms over college grads matriculating into the worst job market we’ve faced in decades after paying artificially high tuition rates assessed by schools who can in part justify their skyrocketing costs by acknowledging that the majority of the student body is already borrowing to afford their education. Student loans only have limited periods of deferment for unemployment available to their borrowers, and interest continues to accrue on some or most of that debt while the borrower is unable to pay; and that’s for federal loans – private loans offer much less borrower protection).
• The protesters share the same ideals as the Tea Party (I confess I am still scratching my head over this one).

By design or not, all the focus on the scattershot ‘demands’ of the protesters also distracts from a discussion about whether their splintered, myriad anger is justified.

At its core, the impetus of Occupy Wall Street is not the wealthy paying more taxes or student loans or LOLcats as much as it is a sense of anger at the practices and culture of the Too Big To Fail banks leading up to the economic collapse in 2008 and afterward, the incestuous relationship they have with the government that has allowed them to circumvent or remove regulatory roadblocks designed to prevent abhorrent and dishonest practices like credit default swaps or the scary, scary rape cave that commodity futures trading has become. These organizations and the sociopaths that staff them write billions of dollars in bonus checks despite having halved (or worse) nest eggs and pension funds and public funds placed into investments that were ‘safe’ and had good long-term growth potential. They are likely to settle out of court with the Attorneys General of the United States and pay back only a small fraction of what they are culpable for, an amount that is about equal to what one of those monster banks would make in one day of normal operations.

These are the companies that we were told, by politicians who get giant piles of money from those very companies, could not fail or things would get worse. That we needed to bail them out to maintain confidence in the economy, that confidence would lead to a resurgence and more job creation. None of that has happened; the only thing that has happened is that the corrupt bankers who essentially gamble with the middle class’s future have gotten richer because they have set themselves up a system that ensures that they are always paid whether they win or lose. That is a basic inequality and it has nothing to do with merit or American exceptionalism, and there is anger out on the streets because the people perceive that it is an inequality that will never be corrected. Meanwhile, there isn’t enough being done by anybody to make sure that the victims of the economy’s decline aren’t suffering. In fact, the victims are being told that it’s their own fault or that they deserve it. They are being mocked by the perpetrators of the scam (see the ‘We Are the 1%’ banners in Chicago). There are thousands and thousands of Americans taking to the streets because we live in an America that values corporate citizens above the flesh and blood ones.

Various accounts of the so-called Arab Spring that I’ve read have put forth that it wasn’t a need for democracy that sparked the demonstrations and uprisings, but hunger and desperation and forced inequality. Which is something to keep think about – when will you be hungry and desperate enough?

Let’s say that you have a skillet. You get some potatoes and you turn them into hash browns. Then you chunk up some Taylor ham or Canadian bacon. and throw that in the skillet.

Then throw a few eggs on top of it.

But Jeff, you’re saying, that’s basically just a frittata. And you’re right, because it is.

Until you pour pancake batter on top of it and toss it in the oven.

I imagine if you time this just right and pour the batter right before the top of the egg layer fully sets us, you will create a beautiful hybrid thing. And it will be too good to live – which is why you have to eat it.

I thought that Justice League #1 was not the sort of book that you’d want to use to wow new readers. But I’m not a new reader. I’m a very old reader, having read comics now for nearly 30 years (I started very young). I am not the target demo here, and frankly that’s as it should be.

With that in mind, I’m approaching various people I know who have a passing familiarity with superheroes but who don’t read superhero comics on a regular, monthly basis and I am going to ask them to read four single issue comic books. They are all issues that I like a great deal, with recognizable characters, and they all exist at different points in continuity.  They are:

Justice League #1 (2011)
X-Men: Scishm #3
Secret Avengers #16
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (2011)

These are all comics that you might see prominently featured if you walked into any comic shop this week. Two are brand-new, bottom-floor relaunches. One is the first issue of a new arc by a new creative team on an existing, albeit young, book. One is smack dab in the middle of a big event storyline built on decades of continuity. They are all, by my own estimation, good and enjoyable examples of comics. They are the books that a brand-new reader, if such a thing truly exists, might walk out of a shop with.

You’ll see the results starting next week.

There are maybe only four modern films that I have ever really enjoyed watching in 3D. Three of them have been horror films – My Bloody Valentine, Piranha 3D and now Final Destination 5. The opening credits alone speak to why that is – a cavalcade of sharp objects, fire and broken glass flying right at the audience’s collective face.  It’s a proof of concept statement, basically: Here is what you can expect from us over the next 90-and-change minutes. It delivers on its promise gleefully.

FD5 is a recovery for the series, a strong uptick from a lackluster fourth installment. Both darkly clever in its plotting and darkly comic in its execution, it is a horror film for fans that delight in watching the Rube Goldberg machinations of the fictional kills. The camera taunts you with, for instance, a rusty screw on a balance beam (as seen in the trailer). It places the gun on the table and you know with surety that it will fire by the end of the scene, but the scene keeps going on about its business. It is as blithely unaware that the screw is there as the audience is spring-loaded tense waiting for a wayward foot to land on it. When the trap does spring, it happens in a way you don’t expect – clever and bloody and oddly fun. This is how each scene unwinds alongside easter eggs for faithful series fans and gallows humor.  And the film is commendable for managing to keep its characters from wandering too far into the realm of cheap stereotype.

Perhaps most exciting for fans of the series, Final Destination 5 adds some new toys to the films’ mythology toy box that aren’t revealed to be a red herring or some elaborate antagonistic scheme on Death’s part. Unlike the fourth film, Death is not a manipulative prick – like the other films in the series, it’s an unwavering natural force with a wicked sense of irony.

Horror fans shouldn’t sit this one out. It might even be worth it to shell out for 3D.

Yesterday, I talked about Ernest Cline’s new novel, Ready Player One. I also had the opportunity to talk to the author about the book. I really appreciate his insights, though we will forever disagree about Krull (which I have not actually seen since I was six years old).

—–

Jeff Stolarcyk: Hi Ernest. Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Before we get started, I’d like to say that I loved the book; the last time I devoured a book so quickly, the word ‘Hallows’ was on the cover.

One of the running jokes throughout Ready Player One is a debate on the quality of Ladyhawke. This begs the question: whither Krull?

Ernest Cline: First, thank you for that huge compliment! I’m so glad you enjoyed the book.

As for Krull… it’s referenced on page 42. During the first debate about Ladyhawke, in fact. I’m sorry to say, it’s mentioned disparagingly. For me, Krull starts out bad, then it briefly crosses the border into so-bad-it’s-good territory, then it circles back around and drops anchor right in the middle of total crap town. Amazing production design, lame story. However, I did love the Krull arcade game. The Atari 2600 version was awesome, too. Also, I will concede that the Glaive was an extremely bad ass weapon (one I may have stolen for my high school AD&D character.)

JS: Geek culture has a unique, reference-driven patois that you capture pretty perfectly in the book, part Restoration-comedy-style capping and part symbology. I’d call it a kind of ‘Darmok’ language, but that in and of itself is a prime example of what I’m talking about. Did you worry at all about the accessibility of the book to non-geeks?

EC: Not really. I think you’re right – geek speak is sort of a symbolic, allegorical language, and that allows people to follow it. Even if they don’t get the exact reference, they can still infer your general meaning, just from the context. When I run across a reference to something unfamiliar in a book or movie, I usually just skim right over it. But sometimes I’ll go look it up online, if I’m really curious to understand its full meaning. Although, some early readers have told me they read my book with Wikipedia open, because they wanted to understand every single reference, because how the references relate directly to the story. I take that as a huge compliment.

I hope that the pop culture references in my book read like those moments when Indiana Jones starts referencing some ancient myth we’ve never heard of and don’t fully understand. We still get the general idea of what he’s talking about, while the story keeps right on moving.

JS: The major conflict of the Egg Hunt, the High Five versus IOI’s Sixers, seems like it’s emblematic of game development’s evolution from Adventure, which was just one guy, to something like L.A. Noire with its exhausting credits scroll and the new round of debate over devs’ working conditions in that corporate atmosphere. What do you think is the je ne sais quois that an indie game like Octodad or Sword & Sworcery has over, let’s say, a Modern Warfare?

EC: Well, I’ve never been a game developer, but I’m guessing that indie game design is similar to indie filmmaking. When you’re creating something out of love, and you don’t have to please anyone but yourself, that’s an environment where you can create something really unique and maybe even ground breaking. When you’re creating something for mass consumption, because you’re being paid to, and you take notes notes from a large corporation every step of the way, that’s an environment conducive to creating something big, loud, lame and forgettable. But sometimes we see amazing games/movies emerge from that environment, too, but it seems far more rare.

JS: Last winter, Harry Knowles, who is a friend of yours, touted Ready Player One as the kind of fandom apotheosis that Patton Oswalt called for in his now-infamous Wired column. Patton argues that a lack of scarcity is diluting our cultural identity, and I noticed that that’s something you pay a little attention to in Ready Player One. Do you think that the instant knowledge base that the proliferation of wikis, smartphones and the like empower us with is ultimately bad for us, from a critical thinking perspective?

EC: Patton is a genius, but I disagree with him on that point. Saying that “a lack of scarcity is diluting our cultural identity” is really just another way of saying “kids today have it too damn easy!”  And I’ve expressed that very same sentiment myself. But I also believe that knowledge is a good thing, and that the more knowledge we have, the better. And that definitely includes having constant access to every book, movie, TV show, cartoon, song, and piece of artwork that has ever been created.

In his Wired essay, Patton (half-jokingly) argued that this kind of unlimited access creates “weak otakus” – geeks who don’t appreciate anything, because they have unlimited access to everything. That’s where I think we seem to have a difference of opinion.

Patton, Harry, and I are all part of the first generation of film geeks to have access to a massive library of movies, thanks to advent of VCRs when we were very young. Because we grew up with access to thousands of flicks, did we appreciate them any less than we should have? I don’t believe I did. And I know Harry didn’t – that guy had access to a huge 16mm film archive at birth, and it made him the geek he is today.  I think all of that additional access to media and minutiae was good for us. We had a lot more material to inspire us while we were growing up. And I think it’ll be the same for the kids of the future, who will grow up with free access to “Everything That Ever Was, Available Forever.”  They’ll take it all in just like we did, zero in on the stuff they think is the coolest, and that will inspire them to create their own unique type of music, art, movie, or book. And it will be inspired by everything that has come before, and that’s what makes for great art. So says I.

JS: The ‘real world’ of Ready Player One is a pretty stark contrast to the Oasis, and so much of it seems scarily plausible. When you were writing, did you have any idea just how prescient the dystopia that you created would end up being? Re-reading the book as the debt ceiling brinksmanship was going on was kind of chilling.

EC: I wrote the book in decade following of 9/11, while Bush was in office and we were fighting two wars. Peak Oil and Global Warming were starting to loom large on the horizon.  So things already seemed pretty Dystopian. I just tried to extrapolate where current events might lead us in thirty years, if things continue to get steadily worse.

But I also try to remain optimistic about the future. You can never rule out human ingenuity. We have the unique ability to invent/discover amazing stuff that can change everything, right when our collective backs are to the wall.

JS: I know you recently worked on a few drafts of a screenplay for Ready Player One. What is the toughest part of adapting your own work, and conversely, the most rewarding part?

EC: The week after I handed in my final revision of the novel, I had to start writing on the screenplay, which felt like starting over at the beginning. The toughest part was making so many changes to the story, and having to leave so many other things out. Novels are structured and paced differently than movies, and you can do things in a novel that you can’t do in a movie – at least, not with paying millions of dollars in rights clearances.

I think the most rewarding part of writing the screenplay was working for Warner Bros., after growing up watching the studio’s movies and cartoons. There is nothing cooler than driving onto the Warner Bros. lot, passing that water tower where the Animaniacs live, and then realizing that you’re there for work. That was a dream come true.

JS: What’s next for you? After poetry, screenwriting and prose, what is your next frontier? Have you thought about trying comics?

EC: I would love to work on a comic book. And a video game. I’d like to try my hand at every geek vocation possible.
I’m currently working on a screenplay for a small movie that I want to direct. Once that’s finished, I might start on the next book. Or join a Ninja Academy. I’m still undecided.

JS: The Oasis seems to borrow elements from a lot of sources, but the general player community feels influenced by EVE Online. Can you tell me a little about your own personal experiences with the MMO genre? Did you have any specific games in mind as you were writing?

EC: My history with MMOs dates all the way back to text-based MUDs. I loved Ultima Online, but when EverQuest came out I became totally addicted for a few months. That was when I had to quit MMOs cold turkey – out of self-preservation. I tried Anarchy Online a few years later, but just to see how a sci-fi MMO was done.

I didn’t have any specific game in mind when I created the OASIS. I was just trying to envision to coolest possible evolution of the Internet, like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, but on a much grander scale, with elements of various video games and social networking sites thrown in.

JS: As a parent, do you every worry about how your child is going to respond to all your geekery? Are you afraid of rejection?

EC: My kid has nerd DNA on both sides, and at age three she’s already obsessed with Ultraman and Spectreman. I think I’m safe from her rejecting my geek nature. (But for how long?)

JS: Finally, do you still find the time to game, either tabletop or videogames? If so, what are you into right now?

EC: I still play Dungeons and Dragons whenever I’m back home in Ohio visiting my high school gaming pals. I’m actually going to GenCon with those guys later this week, and we’re going to run our classic “Highlander meets the Forgotten Realms” module there. It should be epic.

As for video games, I really love Valve’s stuff, especially Half-Life 2 and both Portal games. Left For Dead 2 is good for my soul. And I feed my Most Dangerous Game FPS addiction by logging on to Quakelive. But most of all, I love to fire up MAME and play one of the classics from my youth. Right now, I think I’ll go see if I can still beat Heavy Barrel on one credit.

—–

Ready Player One comes out on August 16. You can preorder it now on Amazon.com. You can read more about the author at his website and follow him on Twitter.

Note: A copy of Ready Player One was provided to the author for review.

The past decade has been the Age of the Geek – studios pander to the Comic-Con crowd, Internet buzz can destroy a movie’s opening weekend and nostalgia drives marketing. For every dyed-in-the-wool geek creator or personality, there’s at least two or three willing to take glamour shots of themselves licking a PlayStation while wearing a Red Lantern ring at a Jonathan Coulton concert. It’s easy to be skeptical of anything that tries to label itself ‘for nerds’ or ‘for geeks’ – those of us with long memories still remember when those words were pejoratives.  Too often the stuff they produce ‘for’ us is awash in high concepts, strained pop culture references and hyperactivity, none of which is anchored to a real story or real characters.

It’s easy to be burned by ‘entertainment for nerds’ and the real thing deserves to be lauded when it comes along.

Part Willy Wonka, part Say Anything… and part The Keep On the Borderlands, Ernest Cline‘s debut novel Ready Player One is an addictive mashup of nostalgia-powered science fiction, pulpy quest narrative and high-school coming of age narrative that transcends the mishmash of its parts. The subject matter is something that Cline, the screenwriter of 2009′s much-loved film Fanboys, knows something about, but can his first novel live up to his screenwriting? The answer is yes: Ready Player One is a fun, endearing debut novel.

Wade Watts lives in a near-future world gone to hell, where the class divide is a wide, bottomless chasm and megacorporations literally own their employees. To escape his dystopian trailer-park reality, he spends his time in The Oasis, an immersive, persistent massively multiplayer online environment used by most of the world’s population. In his free time, he’s a Gunter – part of an online subculture of hackers and gamers looking Halliday’s Easter Egg, the final bequest of The Oasis’s creator James Halliday. The first one to find the Egg stands to win billions of dollars and control over the future of The Oasis itself. Also in the hunt are Wade’s virtual best friend Aech, Art3mis, the girl of his dreams, and the corporate-sponsored Sixers, who want to sell the soul of his online world for windfall profits from restrictive microtransactions and subscription fees. The only problem? In the years since Halliday’s death, nobody has even found the first clue to the prize. Nobody until Wade Watts, that is.

A story that spans two worlds, virtual and real, can lead to a sprawling, complicated narrative (Tad Williams’ bloated if occasionally brilliant Otherland series takes a similar concept to Inception-esque heights), but Cline’s narrative is streamlined, straightforward and, with the exception of a few large expository infodumps in the early chapters, as kinetic as an amusement park ride. Most of Wade’s epic quest happens inside The Oasis, so the story never feels bogged down with ‘worlds-within-worlds’ acrobatics. Even the Oasis, despite its seemingly infinite number of in-game worlds, features only a handful of locations as important parts of the Egg Hunt, among them a Dungeons and Dragons module, a Blade Runner planet and a planet-sized vintage arcade among them. For the most part, Cline also eschews focusing overly hard on the technical side of things and spends more time showing us the relationships between the characters and Wade’s transition into adulthood. Grounding the story in online relationships is a move that makes Wade and Aech and Art3mis instantly more relatable. We aren’t living in their world, but we probably understand the nuances of having Internet friendships and romances.

Ready Player One reads like nothing quite as much as it does a John Hughes or early Cameron Crowe movie, the ones about charming outsider kids finding their dare-to-be-great moments. That’s no mistake, as Halliday’s quest – and Wade’s – is rooted in 80s nostalgia.

Beyond the 80s homages built into the plot and structure of the novel, Cline peppers Ready Player One with copious fandom references – from Star Wars to tokusatsu to Firefly and the full gamut in between. A weaker storyteller might try to use these to pander to its target demographic, to establish his bona fides to the audience by way of copious name dropping. Cline, on the other hand, uses each giant robot, each 80s movie quote and each classic video game to establish his characters more than he does himself, especially Halliday – a character who the audience really only knows through his own media consumption.

There are some clunky passages – Wade’s explanation of virtual public schools is a good example – but they tend to be a necessary evil of starting in media res in a futuristic setting. Cline’s dialogue, on the other hand, is as glib and snappy as a dialogue between impassioned nerds should be.

Ready Player One is compelling nerd literature and one hell of an 8-bit-inspired ride through my generation’s collective childhood. Like all good nerd lit, it remembers that nerds are people, too, and ends up telling a very human story about love, friendship, greed and obsession that anybody can read and love.

Bonus: Tomorrow, come back to read Jeff’s interview with Ready Player One’s author, Ernest Cline!

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling that we seem to share with less and less frequency is wonder.

There is a tension, when it comes to comics, between commercialization and myth.  Superheroes are, as so many people have pointed out so many times, our modern gods.  But they exist inside a medium that has always baldly run itself as a business, not an art or a faith. Every time that the grand myth of comics makes changes that serve the business of things, it breeds a dissonance that turns into dissatisfaction that, in the worst of cases, becomes betrayal. After all, if comics are our mythology, then it is surely just as jarring to discover that creators can’t understand Wonder Woman as it is to learn that God does not answer back. So we manage our expectations, and that’s the bane of wonder. Comics are a medium where we often tout that anything is possible, and that is what wonder is all about.

Captain America is an example of the sort of movie that can be made when you stop forcing concessions from wonder and just tell the story you know the myth deserves. The film watches like a macrocosm of Steve Rogers himself, internally and wholly noble and decent, always the film that its makers want it to be from start to stop without ever being grim and gritty or sexed up. It may not have the flying battle armor or the warring gods of the other Marvel movies, but that character it radiates is just as literally wonderful.

Just a few seats away from us in the theater, a man sat with his two young sons. All three were edge-of-your-seat engaged in the movie from start to stop but the youngest, who looked about six, shouted and whooped and cheered whenever it was appropriate. He was open to it; he didn’t know how to not be. When the Avengers teaser happened, the kid freaked out. That is the way I want to feel. That kid is my hero.

Longtime readers know that one of my guilty pleasures is the paranormal subculture – not ghosts and demons themselves, but the people that are completely convinced that they are real things that they can interact with and/or the people who live in that world solely to exploit the belief of the others.  I’ve written about my experiences with ghost hunters before, even.

Lately, I’ve taken to watching a lot of Ghost Adventures, which is far and away the most laughable show of its kind that has somehow been on the air for like five seasons. The deadly earnestness of the Paranormal State kids is endearing and they seem to know what they’re talking about, even if they are a bit too overdramatic (and the lead investigator does have a tendency to Schuester* a whole bunch of the cases they tackle), and the Ghost Hunters, as made-for-tv as they are purported to be, at least have an air of semi-professionalism about them.

The basic premise of Ghost Adventures, though it may attempt to tell you otherwise, is ‘what would happen if you put a bunch of douchebags who probably love getting bottle service in a haunted house and encouraged them to overact?’ The lead ‘investigator’, Zak, claims to have been possessed at least three times during the course of filming the show. At that point, if you have not just said ‘you know what? Forget this,’ you are either a bullshit artist or a lunatic. And Zak doesn’t look smart enough to be a lunatic.

All I know is that getting paid to stand in a dark room and yell at people who aren’t there sounds like a sweet gig. And I want in on it. So I’m preparing a few paranormal reality TV pitches for various cable channels who I am sure would love to give me a giant check like you see when someone gets a donation or whatever.  Or a regular sized check; just give me my ghost money, people.  One of these is bound to be television gold:

1. Ghost Remodelers – Three guys, a case of beer, some ghost hunting gear, a bunch of tools and a haunted house**. Locked in overnight, we’ll remodel a room while we look for evidence of the supernatural.

2. The Paranormal Pick-Up Artist -  Half medium. Half gigolo. All man. Ghosts need love too.

3. Ghost Kittens – No gear, no science, no investigations. Just a dozen kittens turned loose in a haunted location overnight. They are adorable and probably a little hyper…and ready to encounter the unknown!

4. 800 Pound Ghosts – Because Discovery Health really can’t help itself when it comes to shows about morbidly obese people.

5. Haunted Poker – Five ghosts. One game of high stakes poker. Millions of dollars. Guaranteed to be much less irritating than watching real people play poker.

What would your dream hour of paranormal programming be like?

*Schuester, v. – To insert oneself into another person’s drama and attempt to suborn said drama to their own ends.
** A Bunch of Tools and a Haunted House is a great name for one of these shows. That’s free for you to use.