I take the good with the bad together - I can't love people in slices.

If you'll forgive the incestuous plugging of another blogger's posts, Colin Smith has written a Dear John letter to Mark Miller's writing over on the Too Busy Thinking About My Comics blog, mirroring sentiments of my own about Clint #11 that began with Kick Ass 2 and continued into the appalling Officer Downe, a strip about which I cannot decide if it's a genius-level homage and distillation of the willful stupidity and desperation that typified Clint honcho Mark Millar's earliest 2000ad work, or if it simply is just a waste of time even to apply reason to its critical appraisal.
I think the watershed moment for me in Clint #11 came a few pages before the rape scene that's gotten Colin's dander up (possibly because rape can be survived and sexualised depictions of even teenaged females are nothing new in comics and stitching that onto the cynical violence of the rest of Kick Ass 2 is just an inevitable progression), specifically when several children are gunned down, although I get the notion in me that Millar has been trying to figure out how to do a Dunblaine cash-in for a while now and I'm happy for him that he's finally found a way to infuriate grieving families in a manner that allows him to be paid for doing so.
It's only a shame that there hasn't been a timely school shooting somewhere to help him promote the magazine further.

Just on the off chance, I have made a will. I've left everything to my cats

FLYING VISIT.

Let's just go home and discuss this in therapy like normal people

Watching: Hart of Dixie, which is one of my favorites of the new season openers by dint of being hilariously terrible as few tv programmes are since Smallville rode off into the sunset. Remember that Michael J Fox movie Doc Hollywood? Of course you don't, nobody watched anything Fox made after Back to the Future and rightly so, but how about that opening episode of Northern Exposure where it explained about the doctor being stuck in the town being a fish out of water each week? There's probably loads of examples of doctory fish out of big city waters out there, but those are the ones that I can recall and you probably don't need much explaining beyond that anyway. The big city doctor fish basically comes to a southern town and looks down on the locals for wearing jeans while also trying to get big city coffee and freaking out about the countryside having wildlife in it - it's basically the plot to the Hannah Montanna movie, which I assume you haven't watched unless you have kids, are a kid, are a gay man, are a sex register signatory, or are from Venus and watched it as part of your xenoanthropological study of humankind's weaknesses in preparation for the Day Which Comes in which fire shall fall from the sky like rain and the weak shall be expunged so the strong may serve our glorious lizard masters, and having watched the Hannah Montanna Movie and thought it was alright, that day should probably come sooner rather than later but nonetheless Hannah Montanna is the analogue to which I have briefly committed. Anyway, doctory fish woman doesn't get along well in her new surroundings and then delivers a baby and things get better. It's dreadful and I hope it remains so, that I might continue to enjoy it.
NCIS: Los Angeles is an enjoyable panto if you don't want to engage your brain much during viewing, so it's basically an alternative to listening to classical music while you work. this week someone utters the line "he died in recovery" so I think they should probably rename it. Apart from that, I enjoy seeing Linda Hunt gainfully employed, though my main pleasure is derived from the amazingly terrible dialog because "don't hate the player, hate the game" will never get old coming from middle aged white actors. Never.
X-Men: The Return - the latest anime outing for Marvel's catalog of characters, and equally generic and dull as their Wolverine and Iron Man anime outings. Don't get me wrong, they're perfectly alright cartoons, but they're slower and less inventive than the 1990s Marvel cartoons based on the same characters which - while not great - were still bright and eventful and went out of their way to try and entertain you rather than trying really hard to reinforce that these bright and colorful characters are really serious business now even though they are starring in a fucking cartoon about immortal wolf men with metal skelingtons who fight robot zombie samurais. This is the flipside of making cartoons for older viewers - cartoons that are apologist for being cartoons and for being about comic book characters, so everyone looks glum and wears long jackets and American voice talent tries to make directly-translated speech sound something remotely like a human being talking and the end result, even based on some of the ideas from Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, is drab and unconvincing. It also suffers from a bugbear of mine - shitty theme music. It's often overlooked that the theme tune is an integral part of a show's branding, and the Japanese have long known that it's also what gets kids all hopped up and ready for the show itself, hence their condensing of themes and imagery into the opening titles, or having a really pumped-up theme to get the kids hopping around like loons even before the flashing lights activates their epilepsy. It sets the tone for what will follow, and the Marvel anime offerings have generic, pointless and unexciting themes that anyone could have run up with some pretty basic music software.
X-Men: The Return is not great.

dragging you down to my level and then winning through experience

No long-winded sermons about sci-fi shows today - which I'm sure is a great disappointment to us all - but I should probably mention that I have a strip appearing in the Accent UK Predators anthology, which I keep forgetting about for some reason.
There's a review over HERE if you're so inclined to check out a podcast done in silly accents, though me and Lee get off quite lightly for doing fourth wall-wobbling stuff, which I gather is either loved or hated in comics. Got some other stuff that's appearing in the near-ish future I should get round to whoring, too, like that Zarjaz strip in which I drawed the ABC Warriors and somehow forgot to include guns in the artwork. One day I shall look back on that and laugh, but the way I picture that happening is me wandering around an irradiated wasteland trying to explain to mutant children what computers, comics, or oil were and gradually going more and more insane until I turn into the kind of gnarly-toothed hairball that gets shot by Mad Max while he's on his way to somewhere interesting.

I am going to rescue the babies from the fire. ONLY THE BABIES.

Only a flying visit to the blog - posting terribly late. Back to regular long-winded service tomorrow, I do hope!

TTFN.

The only reason a man should dance is if someone is shooting at his feet

Whoopsy daisy. Someone's been forgetting to update the blog.

Watching...
Hmmm. A few thoughts on Terra Nova, and why is will fail, even though it doesn't have to:

Back when Deep Space Nine finished, senior DS9 writer Ron Moore moved onto Star Trek: Voyager as a staffer, where he found himself butting heads with Voyager head honcho (and later Terra Nova producer) Brannon Braga when Moore decided that a show in its sixth year could afford to grow its characters and mythology and submitted plots for episodes like Survival Instinct and Barge of the Dead, which expanded upon what you could and couldn't do with a 'regular' Trek series by positing heroes as wilful murderers or giving them trips to the actual literal hell and then telling you - the viewer - "fuck yeah, that totally happened."

Moore wanted the show to explore the possibilities that each and every character brought to a supposedly infinite universe of diversity and storytelling possibilities but was stymied by Braga who wanted - bluntly - exactly the same thing, week in, week out because that was what a Star trek audience expected from Star Trek Voyager, and the sad thing is that both men were right - Moore was absolutely correct in saying that there were more stories to be told than were being told within the format, but Braga also had a point in that at that point Voyager's viewers already knew what they were getting and kept tuning in anyway, even if it was for yet another story about Seven of Nine's massive tits wondering about this human emotion we call love, and if you start throwing stories at them about Janeway getting addicted to space drugs to keep her edge or Tuvok having to rape someone every seven years, you might scare off a steady crowd of people who are quite happy with the same homogenised episodic formula plots and stiff period-piece writing style.

Braga knew - or perhaps he was just an intransigent bugger, I can't say for certain but let's give the benefit of the doubt here - that Voyager had to be a certain way because it was the third spin-off of a show that was made a certain way for a certain audience in all its spin-off incarnations, but this also made its future one of diminishing returns because any audience that specific and that narrow could only ever shrink over time to the point it could no longer justify the cost of making a show each week, and with Star Trek: Enterprise (also produced by Braga), this was proven to be the case. Moore, on the other hand, went on to have a significant role in making Battlestar Galactica, a great series that nonetheless lost its way terribly and became a dull parody not only of itself but of regressive sci-fi cliche and bore us a finale that almost beautifully snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by reducing a storyline that was already a Terminator rip-off to a Creationist analogue where everyone throws away any semblance of technology - even the shovels they might now need since their fate is to poo in the woods - because... eh. Cortez or something.

Braga was right about season six of Voyager, but unfortunately for him, season six of Voyager was back in 1999, twelve years ago, and sci-fi has moved on. I don't just mean we've had the paradigm shift in how stories are told and to whom that came with Battlestar's earlier seasons, I mean the lowest forms of sci-fi from Power Rangers to Transformers to Stargate SG1 to Warehouse 13 to Haven are shot through with a genre awareness where characters acknowledge their crazy situations and the similarities to plots from movies or tv shows, or have been saturated with enough sci-fi concepts via popular culture to hazard a guess as to how they'll resolve whatever faintly familiar conundrum they find themselves faced with, or at least how to break down their situation into digestible form for their thick-as-pigshit buddies who just want to shoot anything they can't fuck because that did fine for Captain Kirk.

Terra Nova has no genre-aware characters. There is no lampshade-hanging here, no characters pointing out where they've seen the plot to episode 4 before, or pointing out how paradoxes work so their quest to colonise Earth's distant past is thus doomed to failure - they just act as if everyhing is new even though it's old as the hills and cartoons like Kim Possible and Totally Spies - which are both aimed at girls under the age of 13 - have done these plots to death already and so 13 year old girls in these shows would be aware of these genre cliches even before you get to 18 years and over males at whom sci-fi is aimed rather squarely who most likely would know a sci-fi plot or two. Does anyone at any point make a Jurassic Park reference, even in the meta sense as an acknowledgement to Terra Nova producer Steven Spielberg? They do not.

These are therefore not people as we know them and we have no reason to invest in them as they are relics from the storytelling past even though we know this is a show being made right now. We expect at the very least an awareness from them even if we don't actually expect the show to be any good in terms of writing, effects or acting, which it is not, and yet while the show is regressive and doomed to fail because it is not being made ten years ago, there is no reason it couldn't succeed in its own little niche - if only for a while - catering to a smaller audience of sci-fi enthusiasts rather than the pansexual fans of of teen angst and family values bullshit they seem to be aiming at so far - no less than two teenage romance plots run in the foreground while two of the main characters are happily married and woefully uninteresting, so who is supposed to be watching this? At least aimed at sci-fi audiences specifically it could boast that its demographic was teenage and twentysomething males, yet it does not know who it is aiming at and that is why it will fail. Braga once knew the audience he was making these shows for, but seems to have forgotten.



I also watched 2 Broke Girls, which was sadly not pornography as I had hoped. It's crude, not particularly amusing and some of the jokes center around an Asian guy who's one pair of bottle-bottom glasses and a set of buck teeth away from a Jerry Lewis homage.
I expected more from you, America...

He's a gay ultra conservative. Says he's a member of the Herbal Tea Party.

Watching: Transformers Prime, and when all is said and done, that was a fun series if you can get past it being Transformers, which some cannot, as Transformers is one of those franchises - alongside Star Wars and Star Trek - that brings out the sniffy elitism from some quarters of geekdom that admittedly holds more water in the wake of three shitty, shitty films, but I get by with it just fine on account of it being a sound high concept premise for a franchise. The most recent toon had its ups and downs but was a pretty decent show with a good stab at portraying Transformers as an alien form of life rather than just big stompy robots, with planet-sized transforming robot Unicron getting the best makeover this time out when reinvented as The Space Devil, who - after being "cast out" and drifting through space long enough for a planet to form around him and make his waking up a dashed inconvenience for anything unfortunate enough to have evolved on his now green and blue surface, is just the kind of apocalyptic demon you need to cap off your series about ginormous aliens twatting each other in the face with helicopters full of angry soldiers. Not sure about the pseudo-Gladiator/Spartacus riff that reared its head in relation to what the cast got up to billions of years ago, but all told, I enjoyed it even when sober - praise from Caesar indeed.
Revenge - being an update of the Count of Monte Cristo, but with a teenage girl in high society. Sigh.
I was not sure about yet another glossy tv show centered on the one percent of America's population that has wealth, but then: "revenge is a dish best served cold - but it can be AS WARM AS SOUP". Yes, that is an actual line from the show. And they mean it.

Brain farts: Batman Year One (2011)

I recall seeing a poor high school production of the Crucible and what I took from it was that whatever the quality of the individual production, there's no denying the quality of the original work - that will always shine through. So too with the animated adaptation of the last truly great Frank Miller comic, Batman: year One, an origin so definitive that DC have only retconned it three times.

Telling the tale of Bruce Wayne's return to Gotham after his 'travels in the Orient' and subsequent invention of his masked alter-ego, BYO is a great comic book, but it is also a lousy movie. It just does not work, being too literal in some places and too liberal in others when it comes to adapting the source material, with scenes that take up a page in the comic here taking up mere seconds of screentime, characters evilly grinning at the end of dialog so as to give the animators something to do regardless of what this does to the screen presence of the character in question, and on one occasion a character having dialog in the film who didn't speak at all in the comic - the young lady who speaks no English who is on-panel when Jim Gordon interviews Bruce Wayne to discredit him as being Batman is here revealed through her words with Bruce to have been paid five grand to say nothing during the interview - and all this actually adds to the story is that Bruce Wayne likes to pay women to tell people that he is definately not Batman, which to me is a remarkably short-term outlook for someone who plans on people not knowing that he is Batman.

Batman's voice actor is just not suited to the role at all, although Batman here is less than the presence that he is in the comic thanks to the way he's animated. He's also not in it much, and it's hard to see who the story is focused upon, it just has snapshots of different characters over the course of what feels like a few weeks or so rather than a year. Why is Catwoman in this story, for instance? Her plot goes nowhere and adds nothing to the larger story - whatever that might be.

To be honest, I'm not sure this particular story could ever have been a good film as it's been stripmined for ideas by Batman Begins and the cartoon shows so there are no real surprises to be had, and rather than being slavish to the original it might have been better to expand the material and make something more suited to this medium rather than sticking exactly to a script that works - admittedly very well - in another.

As I said about high school productions, the quality of the source shines through even bad adaptations and we can assume that this holds true even across different mediums, but I certainly wouldn't recommend this to anyone. It's too close to the original story to be interesting to comics fans and too basic as an animation to be of interest to cartoon lovers, it is simply - at best - a workmanlike adaptation that for some reason now exists.

just because your hands will be staying above the waist doesn't mean mine have to

Odd moment today while watching the latest Power Rangers: thought to myself "this is quite awful compared to previous iterations" like this was actually any kind of criticism that could be applied to Power Rangers in any form ever. They are all terrible, I admit, but I do have a soft spot for RPM, where the human race has been all but wiped out by a sentient computer virus and the last few thousand humans are killed off in weekly attacks by bizarre monsters who slowly erode the humans' dwindling resources while the back story of each cast member unfolds across the series in non-linear flashbacks that intertwine with each other in subtle ways that aren't fully realised even by the series finale that - against all saturday morning tv show logic - doesn't have a time-travel loophole that undoes the genocide and the deaths of cast members and/or their families like it never happened, it just has the evil computer get smashed and the humans get to rebuild their race on an irradiated graveyard full of wandering psychopaths and malfunctioning leaderless killing machines and everyone acts like this is the greatest thing ever rather than a prelude to an era of unfettered rape and cannibalism.

I prefer to use my infinite imagination cause I ain't got no damn money

Watching: Unforgettable, a show in which character A tells character B what character B used to do for a living, or what character B was doing last week, or how character B feels about stuff. There is a lot of exposition in this, but then it is a first episode so I suppose it might just be a matter of getting this out of the way now rather than how the writers intend to conduct themselves in future. The main character has a photographic memory and this allows her to rewatch events as if they were a music video, with lots of slow motion, meaningful close-ups and warbling soundtrack, and apparantly it's based on a series of books called "The Rememberer", which I fear takes it all a step too far towards being something the Simpsons would do as a satire on bad television rather than an objectively good idea for a series being made in a year beginning with a 2. I've seen worse, I guess, but this is no recommendation at all as I actively seek out terrible television.
Raising Hope, which is what the production team - sans Jason Lee - made after My Name Is Earl finished. It's not as good as My Name Is Earl, but then it's not as terrible as Memphis Beat, either, which is what Jason Lee made after MNIE. Memphis Beat is a dreadful cop show, made all the worse for Lee massacring Elvis songs and the cast acting like he is not doing so because acting, that's why. Shoulda got someone in to dub that shit in post, but for some reason they did not and it's toe-curling. Raising Hope is alright, I guess, but a little unfocused, being at its best when it's a sprawling ensemble piece about a poverty-line community rather than when it's a pratfall-heavy sitcom about a dullard young man trying to be a single dad. It passes the time.
Speaking of bad cover versions, though, I have been watching my way through the CSIs from the first season onwards and gradually taking in the spin-offs as they turn up, CSI begetting CSI Miami and CSI Miami begatting CSI New York, and on the surface each is a logical progression from the originating series by giving the audience more of the same kind of thing but with a different cast and setting, justifying making a separate series rather than the commissioning networks just doubling the number of episodes they order from the production company, and yet there is a problem...
You see, I started watching CSI in all its forms only with the the last two tv seasons for reasons I can't recall but which likely center on my belief that if I'm going to continue slagging off the shows and their audience I should be armed with enough knowledge to at least make me an informed elitist, and while each spin-off has a distinct identity on the starting blocks - particularly CSI New York's monolithic and foreboding skyscrapers shot with blue filters and scored with a soundtrack that makes it seem like you're looking at the desolate wastelands of Mordor - eventually they all ran together to become an indistinguishable neon blur, with the current season of CSI New York serving up a slice of bad tv that even I balked at swallowing, with the New York punk scene represented by a long haired twentysomething blond doing an appalling cover of Blitzkrieg Bop whilst showing her punk credentials by citing the Ramones as being the first "real" punk band. I have four words to say to this kind of thing, CSI New York, and that's "fuck off" twice.
There's this bit where the cast were doing investigations in a tattoo parlor and the shots were not only framed around a woman's very large breasts, but the set designers had obviously asked that on the wall be mounted a 'chopper' - a motorbike with customised parts beloved of the biking communities who are often the lifeblood of tattoo parlors - and the people who made the set mounted a chopper bicycle, as beloved of 8 year old girls. Now, I'm not saying this was shoddy research, I'm just saying that if there is a subculture of tattooed 8 year old girls who stab people at Rolling Stones concerts, there's probably a better story to be told there than one involving a tv writer's view of 'punk' that clearly extends no further than the music, clothes and hair of Avril Lavigne. Man, but it is bad television, topped off with 911 references and a lighters in the air final scene that had me in fits. I don't know what to make of it - on the one hand it's appalling to the point it's funny, but on the other you get the impression if you told those involved that this was why you enjoyed it, they'd take the huff or give you a slap in the beak.

I can see the deadly hamburger has done its evil work

Watching:
Covert Affairs, a glossy take on Alias, which was already glossy. I cannot say if having a vagina helps to watch it, but I get the impression that this is where the makers are coming from with it. It's really dumb, though, and I've always got the impression that women can take really dumb shit at face value if it's happening in a Malibu fashion agency or or a really well-off suburb full of big-tittied blondes, yet faced with a story set in the world of international espionage they err towards wanting a bit more logic, therefore I have no idea who Covert Affairs is aimed at. It's managed two seasons so far, mind, so someone knows what they're doing. I like Peter gallagher usually, but in this he's wasted as I'm not sure what we're meant to make of his character. Or the Indian bloke's character. Or the deaf bloke's character.
Eh.
Adventure Time With Finn and Jake. I have no idea what to make of this - I like it, but it's baffling. Who is this aimed at? Are those references to 8-bit videogames or just stylistic choices by the music department? Do kids like this? I like this.
Twentysomething - Melbourne-based comedy about the bull-headed and obnoxious Jess and her sexless friendship with the dim but gentle Josh as they tackle a quarter life crisis brought about by their constant drinking and lack of ambition. You might think twentysomething is too young to be having these kinds of identity crises, but after being forced to add my nephew and niece on Facebook I did find them talking to their mates and posting stuff like "wasn't it great back when we were all in the same science class? Them were the days" which I find slightly more disturbing than the thought of them exchanging pictures with Miguel who is quote-unquote twelve years old and wants to meet up, so twentysomething is probably late for this kind of self-evaluation. It's the usual squirm-inducing type of comedy derived from embarrassment and misfortune that seems to have done well by Ricky Gervaise, so worth checking out if you like that kind of thing.
Modern Family - which is not very popular over here, but is doing fine over there. A bit more cloying and saccharine than the preceding seasons, but still quite funny.
The Playboy Club - a period-set drama about chicks dressed like bunnies because this for some reason arouses men in the nineteen fifties. I have no idea why.
It's trashy, certainly, and that will buy my attention to at least episode four, but not entirely convincing in its period trappings and not a patch on the likes of Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men.
Pan Am - another period-set trashy drama, this time about air stewardesses in the titular airline (now a train freight company) circa 1963, when stuff happened in Cuba and whatever. Or something, I'm not sure, my mind really wandered during this and there was this whole plotline about someone at a wedding or getting married in the near future and I was lost at some point. maybe it improves after an episode or two.

With a woman helping them, the Dynamic Duo could give us some trouble

I was surprised I wasn't the only person over twenty down to see the Batman Live show at the Odyssey, but there were actually loads of child-less couples at it, too, and I was even stuck directly behind a pair that were busy canoodling during the lulls and at least one woman a few rows down who got far too excited during the fights.
It was a great laugh, the biggest cheers of the evening being for the magic tricks incorporated into the act, the kiss between Batman and Catwoman, Alfred announcing he was a British army officer, and the kid who shouted "the name's crap, it should be Nightwing!" after Robin announces his superhero name, because you're not a real batnerd unless you pick a continuity fight with a 12 million dollar stage production.
And this:

made me sad. Sad and aroused.
Anyway, I may not have been the only dude there, but I daresay I was the only one who made a weekend of it and man, but Belfast sure is one spendy student-infested hole these days. Did Cafe Nero buy shares in the city or something? I think they should, seeing as how they occupy enough of it.

But enough of that - I hope your weekend has kept you well and I shall see you tomorrow when we all get back to the grindstone.

You're gonna look pretty funny tryin' to eat corn on the cob with no FUCKIN' TEETH

Charles Napier
April 12 1936 – October 5 2011
Beginning with the dreadful Deep Space, a sci-fi action movie I nonetheless enjoyed if only for the scene where he seduces his co-star by playing sexy bagpipes, but where he also wrestled with a rubber monster back when such things were not post-production CGI but full body costume for some unfortunate and nameless stunt actor, Charles Napier registered on my nerd radar.
He was the voice of an angry redneck general in the Bruce Timm Superman cartoon, played an angry redneck general in Star Trek: DS9, a retired redneck general in the truncated teen wangstathon Roswell - Napier was a regular in my kind of tv and movies and once I knew he was there I started retroactively spotting him everywhere - as a space-hippy in the original Star Trek, the redneck who threatens John Belushi with impromptu dentistry in The Blues Brothers, the desk jockey who sells out the title character in Rambo: First Blood Part 2, the judge in Tom Hanks courtroom drama Philadelphia... oh, and some Russ Meyer movies, too. If you like that sort of thing.
I always liked to see Napier onscreen, to hear that distinctive voice of his even behind animated characters, full of gravitas and a hint of menace - he was a presence as a well as a prolific character actor and I will miss having him around as part of the landscape.

revolution starts you call me and I'll be right down front showing you how it's done - until then you need to shut the fuck up when folks is talkin

Watching: Baa Baa Black Sheep, a WW2-set tv show about the exploits of a fighter squadron in the Pacific. I'm quite enjoying it, but wondering how I fell into watching it given I usually like stuff with spaceships or people in expensive clothes smoldering at each other in large offices. Seem to have a lot of war films under my belt this last few weeks, and my bath-time reading seems to be Run Silent, Run Deep, a manly novel about sailors on a sub over the course of the war as they deal with an infamous Japanese skipper, and yet my final issues of Darkhawk remain untouched in the meanwhile. I have basically gone weird is what I am saying.

Well this is gonna end in hillbilly rape...

Been checking out the new 52 from DC comics - or rather I've been checking out the tremendous amount of online bitching about it - and I have to say I find a lot of the criticisms confusing as they seem to have assumed that the books would be different even though they're made by the same creators, the same editors, the same ideas men, published by the same company, distributed in the same manner, aimed at the same audience, and so of course Grant Morrison is still writing great Superman comics, and of course Starfire is still a sex object because why bother developing female characters as anything else and hey of course DC's first black superheroine is a stripper and there is no correlation between these two things at all and it's probably the fans' fault somehow yet again since the books are still stuck on squick like fanfiction sex scenes and dudes getting their faces cut off and it was the fans' fault the books were failing when this same old nonsense was trotted out before and certainly not in any way the end result of an office where female employees are dragged to strip clubs for 'power lunches' with the very very manly alpha male men. GRRRR. Wall Street was a super movie, wasn't it? That's how real men roll.

I think the collective internet is more pissed that it got suckered into believing that there was going to be a paradigm shift in how DC did business even though there hadn't actually been any kind of management reshuffle to suggest this would ever be the case, but the sad fact is that these books are no worse than what DC was putting out before, they are just as bad and no more than that and if you liked what they were doing before you probably like what they're doing now, too. Some of it, anyway - they're still employing Grant Morrison and Gail Simone, after all.

This was never "make or break" for DC, it was just another summer event where DC shifted a lot of #1 issues and stuck to its audience of compulsive buyers and conventioneering yes-men who don't want change or they'd have stopped buying superhero comics ten years ago - this was always going to be more of the same and I don't know why my beloved and eternally cynical internet thought otherwise even for a moment. Personally, I liked that Batman where Joker got his face sliced off and Batman saved a little girl from nasty people. It was gritty and people knew their place: behind Batman or on the end of his knuckles. Things asploded, too. Always a bonus.

Watched some Family Guy, too. Man, what the fuck is it with that show?

You're acting like a little schoolgirl. And not in a hot way.