A tale of two reviews

SuperComicFunTime really did not like QUANTUM MORTIS A Man Disrupted #1:

Quantum Mortis: The Actionless Comic
This book is not a good book. It is action-less, motionless, and for the most part, people-less. The book is divided into two chapters. The first chapter is mostly some guy named Tower flying around and talking to his computer until he lands the ship and talks to a green space monkey that spouts gibberish into a translating device.

Then chapter 2 starts and we still don’t have our second character for a few more pages. Tower pops a space Tic Tac and we get a pin-up entrance for Hildreth the civilian space detective.

Then both characters are seemingly attacked by word bubbles until their magic space technology identifies the body as an exiled royal from another planet. We get a nice splash page giving the history of the exiled royal’s family. Then the book ends.

It’s not fun. I didn’t learn anything. I don’t care what happens next. It’s bad. The whole 29 pages should be summarized in a page or two while giving us character development. Don’t spend money on this like I did.

On the other hand, Harry liked it a lot.

Great job craftmanship restored
This is a very well done animation of the book .the quantum mortis series is top notch story telling . I read them as fast as I could. The art while having a distinctly retro feel adds to the story without overwhelming it. Knowing what comes next in no way detracts from enjoying the artist’s perspective of the story because he is staying true to the heart of it. The illustrations of hildy and tower actually bring out the romantic understory without taking away from the plot. It is great to see craftsmanship restored to graphic novels. Very few English ones approach the Japanese masters. Letting the art add to the story instead of being pictures without purpose. Well done.

To put it in perspective, there is another first issue of a comic where virtually nothing happens, although for 40 pages instead of 28. A guy is in a cage. For decades. Nothing happens except for people actually falling asleep – now there is a fitting metaphor, right? There is no action except for an occult ceremony that doesn’t even involve a dead goat or a naked woman until the guy in the cage escapes off-camera, so we still haven’t seen anything happen until one of the guys who took part in the ceremony falls asleep and has a dream. The end.

How absolutely horrible, right? How action-less, motion-less, and literally people-less, as the guy in the cage was not a normal human being. Clearly no one ever bought or read or liked that particular comic, right?  Well, no, because that’s all that happens in the first issue of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, which happens to be one of the most well-regarded comics series ever written.

Now, I wonder if there might be anything we can glean from these two extremely divergent reactions to the same comic. Why does SuperComicFunTime hate QM:AMD so much while Harry likes it so much? Perhaps their reviews of other products unrelated to Quantum Mortis might give us a clue. Here are a pair of five-star reviews for other products they liked. Guess which review was written by whom?

Review of Avengers #219: By Divine Right
This comic is AWESOME! I got it in a box of comics I opened about three weeks ago. OMG! I was so stoked when I saw Jim Shooter was the writer! Janet Van Dyne loses her clothes early on and soon, cosmic hijinks ensue.

Review of A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
I immediately recognized the writer’s talent, the characterizations and plot integrate seamlessly and while the ending is surprising and a little bit disappointing the journey is absolutely worth the time. I can’t remember such good prose, and by a non-native English speaker. 

Different audiences, different tastes. SuperFunComic’s perspective isn’t wrong, it’s just different. I have no doubt that he would be as bored by Murakami as he was by QM-AMD #1. As far as I am concerned, the only relevant question is which market is more interesting to us as a publisher? And since the top-selling comic of 2016 was Big Trouble in Little China/Escape From New York which sold 421,625 units while Murakami’s books sell in the millions, well, I am confident that we are making the right choice.

Divisional Sunday

I have to admit, I did not think the Eagles would pull it together well enough to beat the Falcons. Discuss amongst yourselves. And Skol Vikings!

Hollywood values: the dam cracks

Eliza Dushku accuses Joel Kramer of sexually assaulting her at the age of 12:

Eliza Dushku has accused stunt coordinator Joel Kramer of molesting her when she was 12 years old. Kramer has denied the allegations. Her account, posted early Saturday morning, comes in the wake of the continuing #metoo movement and the launch of the Time’s Up campaign to combat sexual harassment and assault.

In a Facebook post, Dushku wrote that she was assaulted while working with Kramer on the 1994 James Cameron film “True Lies.”  According to her post, Kramer molested her in a Miami hotel room, where he “laid me down on the bed, wrapped me with his gigantic writhing body, and rubbed all over me.” Kramer would have been 36 at the time.

Dushku alleges that he “methodically built my and my parents’ trust, for months grooming me,” and told her parent that he would take her for a swim in the hotel’s pool. Instead, her took her to his hotel room, where he “disappeared in the bathroom and emerged, naked, bearing nothing but a small hand towel held flimsy at his mid-section.”

Kramer told Variety Saturday morning that Dushku’s allegations were “absolutely not true.” According to Kramer, Dushku swam in the hotel pool with him and other members of the stunt crew, including Dushku’s stunt double. Afterwards, he took her to her first ever sushi meal, and then took her home.

Crazy Days and Nights has been hinting at this for a while. Reese Witherspoon has made similar allegations of an attack by a producer when she was underage, although she has not yet named the individual responsible. The Hollywood Values dam hasn’t crumbled yet, but the cracks are spreading.

I observe that Kramer’s suggestion that Dushku is making up the allegations because “she may have had a crush on him” is classic pedophile deflection. As I have personally witnessed in court, pedos frequently resort to the “she came on to me” defense.

Years ago, my friends and I nearly got kicked out of a courtroom when a clean-cut, harmless little defendant who looked like Michael J. Fox, right down to the feathered hair and the brown corduroy sports coat with leather elbow pads, was on the stand and was asked by the judge if he had any mitigating facts to offer for his behavior in what, as far as we understood, was a date rape case. (We were there for a traffic offense and had come in towards the end of the hearing.) The defendant pointed out that he had not been the aggressor, that the alleged victim had come on to him, and that in fact he had been asleep when she jumped into his bed and woke him up by tickling him.

To be honest, we felt that this was a pretty compelling defense until the judge said, “Mr. So-and-so, she was FIVE YEARS OLD!” This was so shocking and unexpected that we all burst out laughing, thereby causing the security guards to give us a stern warning. Needless to say, the “she came on to me” defense was not a success then, and I very much doubt it will be in Mr. Kramer’s case.

State employee screws up, Trump to blame

Americans are so not ready for actual war that involves them actually being attacked, as opposed to an accidental false warning. And remember, no matter who screws up, the God-Emperor is responsible.

Approx. 8.05am: A routine internal test during a shift change was initiated. This was a test that involved the Emergency Alert System, the Wireless Emergency Alert, but no warning sirens.

8.07am: A warning was erroneously triggered statewide by an employee at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA).

8.10am: State Adjutant Maj. Gen. Joe Logan validated with the US Pacific Command that there was no missile launch.

Honolulu Police Department notified of the false alarm by HI-EMA.

8.13am: State Warning Point issues a cancellation of the Civil Danger Warning Message. This would have prevented the initial alert from being rebroadcast to phones that may not have received it yet. For instance, if a phone was not on at 8.07am, it would not receive the alert later on.

8.20am: HI-EMA issues public notification of cancellation via their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

8.24am: Governor Ige retweets HI-EMA’s cancellation notice.

8.30am: Governor posts cancellation notification to his Facebook page.

8.45am: After getting authorization from FEMA Integral Public Alert and Warning System, HI-EMA issued a ‘Civil Emergency Message’ remotely, cancelling the false alert.

The Russians must be laughing so hard that vodka is coming out of their noses. So, this is what the great dumbing down looks like.

Allahpundit explains the two primary conspiracy theory explanations:

Minor: It was a hack but will be played off as an error by emergency warning services.
Major: There was a missile, we shot it down, and now it’s all being played off as a false alarm.

Given that the West Coast is clearly under the threat of imminent attack, I expect Michelle Malkin has already concluded that the only rational response is the immediate internment of all Koreans and Korean-Americans.

Ye cats….

Steve Sailer observes that the civic nationalists really are as dumb as they appear.

They Really Do Believe Emma Lazarus’s Poem Is “The Foundational Principle of Our Country”

Well, you certainly can’t claim that the country doesn’t deserve its fate. Especially the country that was founded in 1883. I don’t think you have to be pig-ignorant to be a civic nationalist, but it observably helps.

Divisional Saturday

Things would appear to be shaping up very nicely for a pro-Vikings narrative for once. Of course, we’ll need a Falcons win to set up for a REVENGE FOR 1998 storyline.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Mailvox: the more things change

Actually, some things never change. A reader shares an apt quote from Livy.

Ancus…raised fresh troops and marched to the Latin town of Politorium, which he took by assault.  The inhabitants he transferred bodily to Rome; former kings had increased the size of Rome by the absorption of conquered peoples; so the policy was not without precedent. The Palatine hill was where the Romans first settled; on one side of it were the Capitol and Citadel, subsequently occupied by the Sabines; and on the other lay the Caelian hill, occupied by the Albans; the Aventine was assigned to the new comers, and they were joined soon after  by others from the captured towns of Tellenae and Ficana….

One result of these enormous additions to the population was an increase in certain criminal activities, the dividing line between right and wrong becoming somewhat blurred.
– Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1.33

Keep in mind this was more akin to the American importation of the Irish, which had similar consequences.

Jack and the bullshit artist

Despite having been threatened by an unlikely beating at the hands of his corpse and being more than a little dubious about his war stories, I find that I rather like the aspects of Jack Kirby that are revealed by this extensive interview. I particularly liked the way he took on Jimmy Olsen, the worst-performing comic in the DC catalog, rather than the Superman comic that was offered to him, simply because he knew that doing so would be a better way of proving himself.

And frankly, it strikes me as more than a little fitting that Stan Lee will exit this Earth under a cloud of disgrace, given the fact that he appears to have pulled off one of the great con jobs of the 20th century:

GROTH: At the risk of sounding partisan, let me ask you this: every time I read something by Stan or see Stan speak publicly, I’m struck by how obvious a bullshit artist he is. Was he always that way?

ROZ KIRBY: Yeah.

KIRBY: Yes. Yes, I knew Stan when he was a young boy.

ROZ KIRBY: He was Mr. Personality. That’s what he was.

KIRBY: If you ever get to talk with Joe Simon, Simon will tell you exactly what the hell Stan Lee was. He was just a little wise guy, and he came from a family that was upper-middle class, and he could do whatever he liked. He could say whatever he liked. I’ll be frank with you. We considered him a pain in the ass. He grew up to be exactly what we considered him.

Let’s face it, America can’t say that Jack Kirby didn’t warn them.

“Stan Lee was a pest.” You don’t say.

That’s the idea, sport

As I have repeatedly noted, Trump is proving himself to be a much better president – a much better CONSERVATIVE president – than the great Ronald Reagan himself:

The Environmental Protection Agency is on track to slash 47{4bbad798630efc4433864d09618c79dc37ec93bd369a8697e8847adaf672eacc} of its total staff by the end of President Trump’s first term, according to a report in the Washington Examiner. After just one year, EPA chief Scott Pruitt has reduced his staff to levels unseen since the Reagan administration. If just those federal employees set to retire by 2021 do indeed leave, Pruitt will have cut more than 7,000 bureaucrats.

“We’re proud to report that we’re reducing the size of government, protecting taxpayer dollars, and staying true to our core mission of protecting the environment,” Pruitt boasted. Meanwhile, other federal agencies have followed suit after President Trump’s January 2017 hiring freeze hit large swaths of the executive branch. Trump’s order stated, “No vacant positions existing at noon on January 22, 2017, may be filled, and no new positions may be created, except in limited circumstances,” including those pertaining to national security. Although the freeze technically lifted in the spring, most agencies have continued to abide by its guidelines. The last president to enact a major federal hiring freeze was Ronald Reagan.

With the exception of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Interior, all Cabinet departments by September had fewer permanent staff than the day Trump took office. In addition, Trump’s proposed spending cuts triggered a spending slowdown across agencies despite the absence of a 2017 budget from Congress.

Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union representing 150,000 federal workers at over 30 agencies laments, “Morale has never been lower. Government is making itself a lot less attractive as an employer.”

Reagan laid off the air traffic controllers. Trump has already halved the size of the EPA and is slashing the payrolls at dozens of other agencies. There is no comparison.

Mailvox: up your game, people

JF writes about the declining quality of the comments here:

Over the years that I have been reading your blog, I haven’t always agreed with everything you say, but I always find that it challenges my thinking about the world. I traditionally have enjoyed the comment section, also. However; over the last year, after reading the post I find myself doing a quick skim through the comments to see who is actually posting to see if it is worth following the discussion.

A number of the commenters who brought thoughtful, funny, and intelligent views seem to have moved on or only comment sporadically now. This has left the comments section to become filled with more midwit posturing and monomania that derails conversation (such as “muh purity”). I don’t know what the solution is, or if it even needs one.

If I am out of line, just let me know. Either way, I’ll continue to read.

He’s not out of line, he’s absolutely right. Now, it’s important to keep in mind that this is a natural consequence of the blog readership having grown from 3,000 pageviews a day to 105,582 pageviews a day. The early readers tended to be highly intelligent outliers, almost all of whom were WorldNetDaily readers and familiar with a wide range of political subjects and authors. They were not monomaniacs and they had the ability to intelligently discuss a wide range of subjects as well as an interest in doing so.

Now we’ve got everything from Disney shills to commenters who see a nefarious Jewish hand at work in the fact that they ran out of skim milk this morning. I don’t follow every discussion in the comments myself.

Now, this doesn’t really matter all that much because the blog does not exist for the sake of the comments. The comments are mostly there as a requested courtesy for the readers and the posts of most interest to me seldom receive anywhere near the most comments. That’s fine, because things are what they are, not what we might wish them to be. But if you’re a commenter, perhaps it might matter to you that people notice the fact that you don’t have much to say and you say the same thing over and over again.

(Which, of course, you could say is true of some of my posts on certain subjects, but then, history keeps happening and you can’t say I don’t manage to throw the occasional curveball on even the oldest chestnuts.)

The moderators do a pretty good job of blocking the trolls and neutralizing the shills, but they can’t make people smarter, give them a broader perspective, or make them better-read or more interesting. That’s something every commenter will have to do for himself. So, perhaps you might want to think about this and put a little more thought into your next comment. Or perhaps you’ll just blurt out the same damn thing you’ve already posted here to no noticeable effect on 27 previous occasions.

It’s up to you. Just don’t think the readers don’t notice… and remember that there are more than a thousand of them for every one of you. Also, drop the posturing. If you feel the need to strike poses and posture, just get your own blog. Or a mirror. If you find that you’re about to make your third heated comment in another tedious pose-off with another commenter that everyone else is ignoring, just walk away from the keyboard. Believe me, no one – NO ONE AT ALL – is interested in those ridiculous arguments that never resolve anything.

We could, of course, turn on the feature that limits comments to members of the blog, which would permit the moderates and me to eliminate the shills, the trolls, and the tedious. In the past, I’ve resisted doing so in the interest of maximizing the range of the discourse, but if we’ve now reached the point of the tragedy of the commons, perhaps it is time to consider doing so. Then again, informing Google whose comments I permit here might be unwise, in light of recent revelations about the converged tech giant. Feel free to share your opinion.