Beetle Bailey is a well-known anachronism, its characters stuck in sort of slightly post-WWII time warp boot camp, with all the familiar Hollywood stereotypical characters, the hapless protagonist Beetle and his antagonist, Sarge, the bookworm, Plato, the lothario, Killer, the kiss ass Lieutenant, the out-of-touch General, and so on. And there’s the ignorant country bumpkin, Zero, the butt of many jokes because he takes everything literally, not knowing any better, or maybe because he’s simply stupid.
While it’s a popular strip, it’s also lame, or maybe it’s popular because it’s lame. Nevertheless, I remember one strip from many years ago that reached some sort of (possibly accidental) transcendence.
The guys are all ragging on Zero, as usual, including Sarge. Suddenly, Zero bursts out, “Hey Sarge! Are you fat, or what?”
There follows a momentary stunned silence, and Zero cracks up. “Ha!” he says. “I turned the tables on you there, boy! Ol’ Zero doesn’t do it often, but sometimes he gets a real zinger off. Ha, ha! Bet you never saw that one coming, did you, Sarge?” Or words to that effect.
And with each self-congratulatory remark, a few more of the guys leave, until finally, Sarge is also gone, leaving Zero all alone, still with a self-satisfied grin on his face. He turns and faces out at the reader and says, “They really hate it when you turn the tables on them.”
I view the entire thing as a sort of Zen fable. Did he “turn the tables on them?” Well, no, not in the sense of actually making a clever remark at their expense. So the ending is ironic; the joke is still on Zero.
Except, no, it isn’t. Many of the jokes at his expense are really no more clever than his. Moreover, they did leave the room when confronted with…what? Joyful innocence? Impenetrable obliviousness? The Fool, in the archetypical sense?
Hard to say, really. But Zero turned what was supposed to be his own humiliation into something else, and he did it by virtue of the very qualities that were the object of derision. It’s hard to see that as anything other than poetic justice.
Because we really do hate it when you turn the tables on us.
Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label comic books. Show all posts
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Sunday, October 14, 2007
The Heat Death of Science Fiction
I haven't yet read all the stories in Helix #6, nor even properly digested the ones I have read, but I'm going to go on a bit about John Barnes' essay, "Reading for the Undead." In it, Barnes suggests that genres tend to last about 70 years, vaguely about three generations, and he describes the dynamics of the origin, development, and final flowering of a genre, until it becomes, in his phrasing "undead," a fixture on the cultural landscape that still moves from time to time, but which isn't growing, breaking new ground, or even becoming more artistically interesting, because all the tropes have been explored and exploited, to become merely familiar.
The "70 year lifetime of a genre" caught my attention right away, because my friend Dave Stout has been saying that for quite a while, and he derived the time span from pondering the history "picaresque novel," which had a lifespan of about 70 years. So we've been talking from time to time about the nature of genre lifespans for quite a while around our house.
I myself tend to use more of a combustion metaphor, with a genre beginning from kindling, moving to tender, then burning up most of the available fuel. So my word for the phenomenon that Barnes describes as "undead" is "banked." That's less provocative, but then, Barnes has more reason (and greater stature) to be provocative than I do.
But there are exceptions that test the rule ("test" being the original meaning of "prove"), and it's instructive to look at a few of them.
The "puzzle" form of the detective story, discounting Poe, can be dated from Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes had a number of well-know imitators. Eventually, many of the tropes became codified in the "drawing room mystery," where all the suspects eventually wind up in the drawing room and the Great Detective explains to one and all whodunit. A period of 70 years from 1887, and the 70 year rule would place its death somewhere around 1960. Agatha Christie was still wringing the last few drops out of the handkerchief at that time, but it's true that the drawing room mystery was largely a banked fire—at least in its literary incarnation.
But as a pop culture artifact, we had yet to see Columbo, MacMillan and Wife, Murder, She Wrote, and Monk, to say nothing of the other various lesser cop shows, detective shows, etc.
Literary snark would now claim that this is further proof, not just of Barnes' concept, but of his terminology. What can be a better indication of "undead" than TV Zombieland? Moreover movie and TV tie-in books will tend to crowd out any valid attempts to revive the literary genre, something that has indeed occurred in science fiction, where Star Trek and Star Wars novels routinely outsell the "serious stuff."
Something very similar happened to the Western. Born in the Dime Novel era, circa 1875, the climax practitioner, Zane Grey, died in 1939. But 1950s television was dominated by Westerns, just as motion pictures had been dominated by the genre just a few years before. Then, practically in a puff of smoke, the genre evaporated, almost vanishing from pop culture entirely (Heaven's Gate certainly helped remove it from the motion picture landscape), leaving only Louis L'Amour to tend to the embers, and the occasional Silverado homage, and Rustler's Rhapsody spoof to hold the motion picture fort.
But notice that I wrote "puzzle form" of the detective story up above. The drawing room mystery was still going strong when the "hard-boiled detective" came on the scene, and while a Black Mask story might very well feature a puzzle mystery, and even, occasionally a gather-all-the-suspects-into-a-room scene, those were not the dominating tropes. For hard-boiled detectives, it was the action, the social commentary, the atmosphere, and a different blend of characters than you find in the drawing room,
Then hard-boiled got even darker, tougher, and noir came along, a bank shot off of motion pictures, where B movies were cranked out of the studios aging black and white units, quickly written, even more quickly filmed, and verging on experimental in their art direction. Cue the cigarettes, the gunfire, and black, black blood. On the literary side, the original paperback novel was invented, and suddenly Mickey Spillane was the best selling novelist in the English language.
In the 1960s, the spy novel broke out of its genre and became a fad, and anyone who missed the connection between hard-boiled noir and the nihilistic secret agent was simply not paying attention (Spillane paid attention; he began writing spy novels). The fad finally culminated in parodies of spoofs of satires, like Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. A plethora of parodies is often the signal of the end of a fad; genres tend to go less willingly.
The spy novel is usually considered to have originated in the early 20th Century. By the 70 year rule, the spy fad of the 1960s was its swan song. But the Cold War was still in operation, and the spy novel refused to bank down. It also gave rise to the "techno-thriller" which often used spy novel tropes.
Back at the detective novel, after noir came the procedural, whose origin is usually dated from the post-WWII period, i.e. a similar time frame to noir. The 70 year rule would suggest that we are now seeing the final flowering of both, unless noir is just a refinement of hard-boiled, in which case it's dead already. That would mean that I'm hauling two dead genres with Dark Underbelly.
So now let's consider a sci-fi subgenre: superheroes.
The superhero comic has dominated that field for quite a while, being the almost the sole reason for comics to exist as a medium for a considerable period, say from 1960 to 1990, barring the brief explosion of the Undergrounds. Moreover, Odd John and Gladiator notwithstanding, the superhero originated as much in comics as in science fiction, with Superman and Slan being approximately contemporaneous, 1938 and 1940, respectively. Intriguingly, Superman's creators, Siegel and Schuster wrote a fanzine story in the early 1930's, entitled "The Coming of the Superman," featuring a Slan-like (telepathic mind control) character.
The 70 year rule would suggest that superheroes are nearing the end of their run, which may be true, given the ongoing colonization of television and motion pictures by the genre. But notice that the superhero genre began as a sub-genre of science fiction. SF conventions used to be where comics fans could meet; now Comicon attendees vastly outnumber Worldcon attendees. Moreover, gamers are the real growth demographic.
But let's not forget the external dynamics here. Comic books are a natural precursor to motion pictures and television because of basic mechanics: a comic book is substantially like a story board. By contrast, novels are dreadful movie precursors, because a novel is much too long a form to translate to the screen. The amount of story in an average movie is approximated by a novella. Even given that most novels these days are at least 50% padding, there is still a mismatch. By contrast, game-based movies tend to be heavy on the glitz of special effects and martial arts choreography, but the stories tend to suck.
The short story itself had an economic lifetime of close to genre length (by "economic lifetime," I mean that the time given to writing a short story paid its own way, so that it was actually possible to make a living as a writer of short stories). But the short story flowered because a combination of the pulp magazine (the low end, with a low sales price) and the mass circulation magazine (the high end, with a heavy advertising base). Both markets sputtered and largely died in the 1950s, owing to external forces (television sucking away the mass advertising dollar and the death of the pulp magazine distribution network). The short story form is hardly dead, or even undead, but it's no longer a paying proposition. If the venues came back, there would be plenty of both readers and writers, but lack of venues is due to a different market dynamic than a loss of readership.
All of this may seem a bit far a field from science fiction as such, but it's worth noting, as a friend of mine recently said, that the "science fiction" section of his local bookstore is still growing. Part of that may be simple book bloat, but I rather suspect that it's because other genres are encroaching. Epic fantasy was revived after decades of ember tending by writers like Fritz Leiber and Henry Kuttner, but The Lord of the Rings and the Frazetta Conan put it back on the shelves and fired up the genre. Can we count on 70 years of elves and magic starting from 1965? If not, then who originates, Howard or Lord Dunsany?
Similarly, vampires, werewolves, urban and gothic horror, all seem to be churning right along, yet there was a time when such stories had to masquerade as science fiction to find an audience. Now it's often the other way around.
What we may in fact be witnessing is the great hybridization of fiction. Something similar has been underway in music; it's not uncommon to hear a fugue riff in a hip-hop number, or a salsa variation of a hot jazz piece. Similarly, most literary fiction now has a pop culture awareness, so a showdown with ray guns becomes just another bit of wallpaper.
A genre is a literary form where the willing suspension of disbelief is aided by an appeal to the conventions and tropes of the genre itself. When categories break down, the number of unacceptable things declines, while at the same time, the opportunities for theft, er, I mean, "influences" or "homage" or "pastiche" increase. Ultimately the real question is the same as it always was.
"How can I make money off of this?" –Jim Turner, "The Brain that Wouldn't Go Away"
Helix is at:
http://www.helixsf.com/index.htm
Be nice. Toss some money in the tip jar.
The "70 year lifetime of a genre" caught my attention right away, because my friend Dave Stout has been saying that for quite a while, and he derived the time span from pondering the history "picaresque novel," which had a lifespan of about 70 years. So we've been talking from time to time about the nature of genre lifespans for quite a while around our house.
I myself tend to use more of a combustion metaphor, with a genre beginning from kindling, moving to tender, then burning up most of the available fuel. So my word for the phenomenon that Barnes describes as "undead" is "banked." That's less provocative, but then, Barnes has more reason (and greater stature) to be provocative than I do.
But there are exceptions that test the rule ("test" being the original meaning of "prove"), and it's instructive to look at a few of them.
The "puzzle" form of the detective story, discounting Poe, can be dated from Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes had a number of well-know imitators. Eventually, many of the tropes became codified in the "drawing room mystery," where all the suspects eventually wind up in the drawing room and the Great Detective explains to one and all whodunit. A period of 70 years from 1887, and the 70 year rule would place its death somewhere around 1960. Agatha Christie was still wringing the last few drops out of the handkerchief at that time, but it's true that the drawing room mystery was largely a banked fire—at least in its literary incarnation.
But as a pop culture artifact, we had yet to see Columbo, MacMillan and Wife, Murder, She Wrote, and Monk, to say nothing of the other various lesser cop shows, detective shows, etc.
Literary snark would now claim that this is further proof, not just of Barnes' concept, but of his terminology. What can be a better indication of "undead" than TV Zombieland? Moreover movie and TV tie-in books will tend to crowd out any valid attempts to revive the literary genre, something that has indeed occurred in science fiction, where Star Trek and Star Wars novels routinely outsell the "serious stuff."
Something very similar happened to the Western. Born in the Dime Novel era, circa 1875, the climax practitioner, Zane Grey, died in 1939. But 1950s television was dominated by Westerns, just as motion pictures had been dominated by the genre just a few years before. Then, practically in a puff of smoke, the genre evaporated, almost vanishing from pop culture entirely (Heaven's Gate certainly helped remove it from the motion picture landscape), leaving only Louis L'Amour to tend to the embers, and the occasional Silverado homage, and Rustler's Rhapsody spoof to hold the motion picture fort.
But notice that I wrote "puzzle form" of the detective story up above. The drawing room mystery was still going strong when the "hard-boiled detective" came on the scene, and while a Black Mask story might very well feature a puzzle mystery, and even, occasionally a gather-all-the-suspects-into-a-room scene, those were not the dominating tropes. For hard-boiled detectives, it was the action, the social commentary, the atmosphere, and a different blend of characters than you find in the drawing room,
Then hard-boiled got even darker, tougher, and noir came along, a bank shot off of motion pictures, where B movies were cranked out of the studios aging black and white units, quickly written, even more quickly filmed, and verging on experimental in their art direction. Cue the cigarettes, the gunfire, and black, black blood. On the literary side, the original paperback novel was invented, and suddenly Mickey Spillane was the best selling novelist in the English language.
In the 1960s, the spy novel broke out of its genre and became a fad, and anyone who missed the connection between hard-boiled noir and the nihilistic secret agent was simply not paying attention (Spillane paid attention; he began writing spy novels). The fad finally culminated in parodies of spoofs of satires, like Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. A plethora of parodies is often the signal of the end of a fad; genres tend to go less willingly.
The spy novel is usually considered to have originated in the early 20th Century. By the 70 year rule, the spy fad of the 1960s was its swan song. But the Cold War was still in operation, and the spy novel refused to bank down. It also gave rise to the "techno-thriller" which often used spy novel tropes.
Back at the detective novel, after noir came the procedural, whose origin is usually dated from the post-WWII period, i.e. a similar time frame to noir. The 70 year rule would suggest that we are now seeing the final flowering of both, unless noir is just a refinement of hard-boiled, in which case it's dead already. That would mean that I'm hauling two dead genres with Dark Underbelly.
So now let's consider a sci-fi subgenre: superheroes.
The superhero comic has dominated that field for quite a while, being the almost the sole reason for comics to exist as a medium for a considerable period, say from 1960 to 1990, barring the brief explosion of the Undergrounds. Moreover, Odd John and Gladiator notwithstanding, the superhero originated as much in comics as in science fiction, with Superman and Slan being approximately contemporaneous, 1938 and 1940, respectively. Intriguingly, Superman's creators, Siegel and Schuster wrote a fanzine story in the early 1930's, entitled "The Coming of the Superman," featuring a Slan-like (telepathic mind control) character.
The 70 year rule would suggest that superheroes are nearing the end of their run, which may be true, given the ongoing colonization of television and motion pictures by the genre. But notice that the superhero genre began as a sub-genre of science fiction. SF conventions used to be where comics fans could meet; now Comicon attendees vastly outnumber Worldcon attendees. Moreover, gamers are the real growth demographic.
But let's not forget the external dynamics here. Comic books are a natural precursor to motion pictures and television because of basic mechanics: a comic book is substantially like a story board. By contrast, novels are dreadful movie precursors, because a novel is much too long a form to translate to the screen. The amount of story in an average movie is approximated by a novella. Even given that most novels these days are at least 50% padding, there is still a mismatch. By contrast, game-based movies tend to be heavy on the glitz of special effects and martial arts choreography, but the stories tend to suck.
The short story itself had an economic lifetime of close to genre length (by "economic lifetime," I mean that the time given to writing a short story paid its own way, so that it was actually possible to make a living as a writer of short stories). But the short story flowered because a combination of the pulp magazine (the low end, with a low sales price) and the mass circulation magazine (the high end, with a heavy advertising base). Both markets sputtered and largely died in the 1950s, owing to external forces (television sucking away the mass advertising dollar and the death of the pulp magazine distribution network). The short story form is hardly dead, or even undead, but it's no longer a paying proposition. If the venues came back, there would be plenty of both readers and writers, but lack of venues is due to a different market dynamic than a loss of readership.
All of this may seem a bit far a field from science fiction as such, but it's worth noting, as a friend of mine recently said, that the "science fiction" section of his local bookstore is still growing. Part of that may be simple book bloat, but I rather suspect that it's because other genres are encroaching. Epic fantasy was revived after decades of ember tending by writers like Fritz Leiber and Henry Kuttner, but The Lord of the Rings and the Frazetta Conan put it back on the shelves and fired up the genre. Can we count on 70 years of elves and magic starting from 1965? If not, then who originates, Howard or Lord Dunsany?
Similarly, vampires, werewolves, urban and gothic horror, all seem to be churning right along, yet there was a time when such stories had to masquerade as science fiction to find an audience. Now it's often the other way around.
What we may in fact be witnessing is the great hybridization of fiction. Something similar has been underway in music; it's not uncommon to hear a fugue riff in a hip-hop number, or a salsa variation of a hot jazz piece. Similarly, most literary fiction now has a pop culture awareness, so a showdown with ray guns becomes just another bit of wallpaper.
A genre is a literary form where the willing suspension of disbelief is aided by an appeal to the conventions and tropes of the genre itself. When categories break down, the number of unacceptable things declines, while at the same time, the opportunities for theft, er, I mean, "influences" or "homage" or "pastiche" increase. Ultimately the real question is the same as it always was.
"How can I make money off of this?" –Jim Turner, "The Brain that Wouldn't Go Away"
Helix is at:
http://www.helixsf.com/index.htm
Be nice. Toss some money in the tip jar.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Superpowerful
[Being a continuation of a tangent begun on WAAGNFNP]
In The Deerslayer, one of the Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumppo, as part of a marksmanship competition, puts a musketball into the bullseye hole left by a previous contestant. Moreover, he knows he's done it, and tells the judges to dig both balls out of the wooden target, which they do.
The feat itself is possible, just as a hole-in-one in golf is possible, but it can't really be a product of marksmanship, as muskets simply aren't that accurate. Moreover, the calling of the shot is similar to calling a hole-in-one for a green that is not within sight. I mean, unrifled firearms are really inaccurate, and simply hitting a target at a distance is a challenge.
The story got used later in a (probably fake) "autobiography" of Davy Crockett, and was in one of the episodes in the Disney Davy Crockett series that sparked the Crockett craze in the mid-1950s (I had a coonskin cap, as did almost all my friends). Of course the tale itself has echoes of the "splitting an arrow with an arrow" stories of Robin Hood and practically every other legendary archer.
Anecdotes easily morph into tall tales, and heroes evolve into Heroes, as the barely plausible slips over the line from improbable into the impossible. Eventually Achilles becomes invulnerable (save for his heel), St. George slays a dragon, and Pecos Bill rides a tornado.
Odysseus, nevertheless, remains identifiably human through the Odyssey (albeit with the occasional godly assistance in stringing a bow), but Hercules is a demi-god, able to shoulder Atlas' burden for a while, kill the hydra, and "change the course of mighty rivers" to clean out the Aegean Stables.
And so we come to the comic book superhero.
In The Deerslayer, one of the Leatherstocking Tales, by James Fenimore Cooper, Natty Bumppo, as part of a marksmanship competition, puts a musketball into the bullseye hole left by a previous contestant. Moreover, he knows he's done it, and tells the judges to dig both balls out of the wooden target, which they do.
The feat itself is possible, just as a hole-in-one in golf is possible, but it can't really be a product of marksmanship, as muskets simply aren't that accurate. Moreover, the calling of the shot is similar to calling a hole-in-one for a green that is not within sight. I mean, unrifled firearms are really inaccurate, and simply hitting a target at a distance is a challenge.
The story got used later in a (probably fake) "autobiography" of Davy Crockett, and was in one of the episodes in the Disney Davy Crockett series that sparked the Crockett craze in the mid-1950s (I had a coonskin cap, as did almost all my friends). Of course the tale itself has echoes of the "splitting an arrow with an arrow" stories of Robin Hood and practically every other legendary archer.
Anecdotes easily morph into tall tales, and heroes evolve into Heroes, as the barely plausible slips over the line from improbable into the impossible. Eventually Achilles becomes invulnerable (save for his heel), St. George slays a dragon, and Pecos Bill rides a tornado.
Odysseus, nevertheless, remains identifiably human through the Odyssey (albeit with the occasional godly assistance in stringing a bow), but Hercules is a demi-god, able to shoulder Atlas' burden for a while, kill the hydra, and "change the course of mighty rivers" to clean out the Aegean Stables.
And so we come to the comic book superhero.
Yes, it’s SUPERMAN, strange visitor from another planet, with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men! Superman, who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for Truth, Justice and the American Way!
Superman began as "merely" superhuman, able to lift motorcars, bend steel, survive bullets, and leap over buildings. But his powers ramped up continually, and additional powers kept getting added to the mix, x-ray vision, super speed, heat vision, supersensitive hearing, breath that could blow out fires or freeze a lake solid in seconds. Plus, he could really fly, not just over buildings, but into space, and fast enough to travel in time. By the 1950s, Mort Weisinger's Superman was lighting dead stars with his heat vision.
So they gave him vulnerabilities, like kryptonite and magic. He had to keep his Superman identity secret, otherwise his "friends" would be in danger, somehow, from his "enemies," who were sometimes just criminals who kept trying to rob banks in the face of a guy who could destroy the world if he so chose.
Not that he would ever do so, of course, because of that "truth, justice, and the American Way," thing. It's just not the American Way to destroy the world.
So the middle period Superman stories tended to be about Lois Lane trying yet again to prove that Clark Kent was Superman (The Comics Code forbade the tactic of just hopping into bed with Clark, which brings up the interesting question of whether old Supes would pretend to be a poor lover to throw her off the track, or if, in fact, he would be a poor lover. These are the questions that fan boys ponder). Or the stories involved Lex Luthor finding some new thing that he hadn't put kryptonite in before. Or Superman had to trick Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his name backwards again. Or Superman's powers would become somehow unmanageable, usually due to red kryptonite.
Occasionally, some Kryptonian criminal would escape from the phantom zone. Those, plus the citizens of the bottled city of Kandor were the only survivors of Krypton. The Kandorians had Brainiac to thank for their survival, so apart from Supergirl and Krypto the Superdog, the only other Kryptonian survivors were either criminals or the victims of a criminal. The death of Krypton was nothing if not ironic.
They ramped old Supe's powers down a bit after that, so he could at least have adversaries that he could fight without planetary destruction being the logical result. But even now, there are only occasional stories about some of the aspects of the limitations of power.
One is that while Superman may be more powerful than anyone, he isn't ubiquitous. Even at super speed there are limitations on how quickly he can get a distress call (one of the original reasons for his newspaper reporter identity), and how to triage the crises that present themselves. There was an episode of Lois and Clark, the television series with Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain where Lois got Superman's powers and almost broke down under the sheer responsibility of it all. What was never made clear in that episode is that Clark/Superman had long ago had to come to terms with a simple fact: any downtime he took probably cost lives. In the time he spent having a cup of coffee, there were probably dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people dying that he might have saved.
In one of Kurt Busiak's Astro City comics, this is made clear by showing a day in the life of The Samaritan, the Astro City version of Superman. It's a day sliced into microseconds, with barely enough time for a semblance of life between the duties of saving the days of others. It's reminiscent of my favorite Superman story from the 1950s, entitled "All the Troubles of the World" that ends with a party at Clark Kent's apartment building. He's surreptitiously helped practically every person there at one point or another, and everyone is happy except for him. He's thinking something like, "Mrs. Jenkins is 4B is having troubles paying the rent this month, but she's too proud to ask anyone for help. I've got to find some way to get the money to her without her knowing where it's from." And another person is thinking, "Everyone here seems to be having a good time except for that poor Mr. Kent. Sometimes it seems like he's carrying all the troubles of the world on his shoulders."
In one of Eliot S! Maggin's Superman novels, he has the Man of Steel grappling with the idea of "moral hazard." An LPG terminal in Metropolis explodes and while he's dealing with it, Superman is thinking that this is one of the problems of having Superman in the world: that people do dangerous and reckless things because they know that Superman is around to protect them from the consequences of their actions. That marvelous irony, that we know that in a world without Superman people still do such dangerous and reckless things, is one of the best criticisms of the idea of moral hazard that I've ever seen.
But the greatest downside to extreme power has rarely been explored in comics. Yes, occasionally there is a nod to "power corrupts" but seldom is it noted that power corrupts not just its possessor, but also those around him. And power also is a magnet for corruption. I can think of almost no stories that deal with the idea of Superman being tricked into using his powers for immoral purposes.
There was a story some while back where someone sets up a situation that should have resulted in Clark Kent doing a reportorial expose, a noble plan that was wrecked because Superman decided to get personally involved (the original manipulator was unaware that Clark is Superman). So a small part of a much larger corruption was taken down by Superman, but the big fish were lost, because Superman himself has no legal standing, and only the law—and exposure—can really deal with large criminal organizations.
The larger issue of just how much trust should be placed in iconic "heroes" wielding superpowers is beginning to float to the surface in comics generally, however. The "grim and gritty" explorations of the id was a feature of comics in the mid-1980s, but the newer versions are more numerous and more varied, even in Superman, who seems to be currently dealing with a magical time-traveling fellow who believes that, unless the world can be made to distrust Superman, Armageddon will surely follow. Another theme that has occasionally surfaced is that the super-heroes do not, and cannot afford to, entirely trust each other. Each one of them has been either out of control or under malevolent control at some point, so many of them have contingency plans against such rogue events. Batman in particular had a file on how to defeat every one of the other members of The Justice League, just in case, including a kryptonite ring for use against Superman. Lex Luthor had a kryptonite ring for a while as well, but it gave him cancer as I recall.
Over in the Marvel Universe, or at least a variation of it, The Ultimates, the message is even more overtly political, with the other countries in the world ganging up to counter the U.S. monopoly on super-powered beings. War becomes the inevitable result. And I'm told that Spiderman once told Mary Jane that every superhero had a plan of attack against every other superhero, just in case.
Popular culture is never "mere entertainment." At the end of the day, "a movie is just a movie" and "a comic book is just a comic book," still mean that both show the fantasies that people want to believe in, or are afraid might be true.
The United States currently spends more on its military than the rest of the world's countries put together, although that figure is a little tricky, since the U.S. does not have anywhere near that kind of superiority in men-at-arms. Still, everyone knows that we have the military might to bring down any other government (though not necessarily replace it). We could destroy civilization and perhaps humanity with an unbridled nuclear tantrum.
One thing that the Clinton Presidency made clear was that there now exists a political faction in the U.S. that holds any President who is not part of the Conservative Movement to be illegitimate, and subject to extra-legal attempts to bring him down. One thing that the Bush Presidency has shown is the danger of having a President who is a committed Movement Conservative, willing to use that old pulp trope: "bend the rules in order to get the job done."
The rest of the world now knows pretty well that "truth, justice, and the American Way," have become empty phrases. The Superpower is under malevolent mind control, or worse. Perhaps sanity will return. But if it doesn't, the real question is, is Batman still holding onto that kryptonite ring, or would it be, in the end, Lex Luthor who does the deed?
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Superfast
I remember a sequence in The Flash comics from only a few years ago. This would be the Wally West Flash, after the Barry Allen Flash had, um, "merged with the speed force," which is to say, died, albeit a comic book death (and they seem to be about to bring him back). He was Saving the Universe when it happened, so it would have been unseemly to bring him back too quickly.
Live fast, resurrect slow, that's Barry Allen.
Anyway, the gag, to use a movie stunt term, involved Wally West sitting in a movie theater with his girlfriend when suddenly everything freezes. Everyone is a statue; it's dead quiet, and the movie is stuck on a single frame. Wally thinks, "What the hell?" then he notices a slight pressure on the back of his neck. It's a bullet; someone has tried to shoot him, but as soon as it entered his "speed force aura" his body switched to super speed and there you are.
The speed force aura is also what keeps his clothes and skin from being burned off when he's moving really fast, and also allows him to pick things (and people) up and carry them without them also suffering death by super speed. Very useful, that speed force aura.
In Justice League Unlimited, the cartoon series, the Flash is always getting hit or even knocked unconscious by folks that really should never be able to lay a finger on him. That's a failure of writing, of course. The movie theater gag did kick it up a notch; traditionally the Flash had to "get up to speed" as it were, so there was a window of opportunity for the bad guys to get him. (Phil Foglio once told me about a character he'd invented—but has never actually used, unfortunately—called "Tube Man": very powerful but who takes several minutes to warm up). But the JLU stuff sometimes has The Flash taken out while he's running, and that's just lame. You might be able to hit him with something that moves at the speed of light, although tracking him should still be an issue, but otherwise, the whole point of the Flash is that he's faster than anyone or anything else.
The Flash can be, but usually isn't, a vehicle for philosophical ruminations on the nature of time and humanity's relationship to it. As the Jay Garrick Flash said once, the point of being The Flash is that there are always enough hours in the day. Need to learn some branch of case law? Done in fifteen minutes. Build a house? A minute and thirty seconds. Study for that calculus test? Do it while everyone else is walking to class.
But it's a lonely time there in the speed force. Apart from the occasional carrying of the fair damsel away from the exploding bomb, The Flash is doing his job in a world of statues, reminiscent of the Arthur C. Clarke story, "All the Time in the World.
There have been variations of the super speed power that had more of a downside (though none greater than the Clarke story, I think). In Wally Wood's T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, the character Lightning was using up his actual lifespan while doing his super speedster act, so he was aging more rapidly than his compatriots. The same was true for those under the influence of "tempus fugit" pills in Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. (Aside: there was also an episode of the 1960 television show The Man and the Challenge that involved a drug that hyperaccelerated reaction times. I'm only scratching a trivia itch with this tidbit).
The potential for loneliness inherent in the character of The Flash is interesting, and it's also interesting to wonder if that aspect of it has influenced the way that The Flash has been incarnated over the years. There have been more versions of The Flash, more different people carrying on the tradition, than any other character in DC Comics, (excepting Green Lantern, who became part of a universe-spanning Corps). Moreover, Flash's tend to get married. I doubt that the writers were consciously making the contrast between the need for companionship and the loneliness of the Power, but the writing is often smarter than the writer, and I speak from experience.
My friend Ben Sano also notes the interesting contrast between The Flash and one of his most formidable foes, Vandal Savage. Savage is immortal (though they've screwed around with that recently, and not to the character's improvement), so he has the complementary power to The Flash: they both have all the time they need. Savage, of course, has seldom been written well; over the centuries, his tactics should depend heavily on waiting out the opposition and, perhaps, compound interest. On the other hand, part of his deal is that he is a savage, having been born something like 50,000 years ago.
The time available to either The Flash or Vandal Savage (one compressed, one extended) also allows an examination of the some of the same issues raised in some variations of Supersmart. They had essentially unlimited time for learning, but learning, per se, does not equate to intelligence, insight, or judgment. The Flash may have "lived" the equivalent of many centuries while in the speed force, but can still be socially awkward, because little of it was in interaction with other people. Vandal Savage may have lived for 50,000 years, but he's never going to stare at the equations of atomic state transitions and invent the laser. The extra time can only be spent on the things you can do, not those things you can't.
Still, there are so many possibilities that never get explored, because there are only so many hours in the day. Except for The Flash.
What, did you think this essay was going to be about femto-second laser pulses?
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Battle Babes and Warrior Women
Emma Peel first appeared on The Avengers TV series in November, 1965, in the U.K. This was followed quickly by the series’ appearance on ABC television in the spring of 1966. 1965 also marked the appearance of the first Modesty Blaise novel, in both the U.K. and the U.S. The Modesty Blaise movie appeared soon afterwards (1966), but it was a severe disappointment to Modesty Blaise fans (and there were a lot of us, very quickly), because the movie played the whole thing for laughs.
You can stretch both the Modesty Blaise and The Avengers chronology of the “battle babe” back three years, to 1962, when the MB comic strip first appeared, and when Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman), showed up in The Avengers. Honor Blackman, of course, later became Pussy Galore, in Goldfinger, first knocking 007 on his ass, then succumbing to some combination of judo and masculinity to give up her lesbian ways for some Bonded sex. Clearly something was going on in the adolescent male libido in the mid-1960s, that had been submerged in popular culture during the 1950s.
The transformation of Wonder Woman from the 1940s version to the 1950s version may hold a few clues on the submergence. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist and consultant to D.C. comics. Marston instilled some overtly Freudian themes in the original Wonder Woman, including the trope that her wrist bands were needed to keep her from going berserk. The strong bondage elements in the 1940s Wonder Woman comics were an obvious target for Frederic Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent and the Kefauver hearings that made such effective use of Wertham’s work. The result was a drastic taming of the content of Wonder Woman, muting her dominance and amplifying her love of Steve Trevor to effectively become the reality that the previous bondage symbolism had only alluded to.
Supergirl appeared in 1959, and her initial fortunes are perhaps all-too-emblemic of the times. Here she was, the only other survivor of a destroyed world, and what does her cousin do to her? He sticks her in an orphanage and keeps her identity and very existence a secret. She also undergoes Superman’s trick-her-to-teach-her-a-lesson ordeal only slightly less often than Lois Lane. It’s not that surprising when she falls in love with her horse (who turns into a handsome man when a comet comes by). Who else does she have?
But something was obviously brewing underground, tamped down by the happy-suburban-housewife weight of the 50s, and the eruption found all sorts of vents in the 1960s. Sue Storm went from having just the power to make herself invisible to tossing around force field projectiles in only a couple of years. Modesty Blaise escapes from her prison camp, and Emma Peel takes up espionage as a hobby.
There’s a direct line of succession from Modesty Blaise to “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In fact, the connection is through a single comics writer, Chris Claremont, writer of the X-Men for 16 years. Claremont set out to write strong female characters into the book, and one of his first actions was to model the origin of Ororo/Storm after that of Modesty Blaise. Kitty Pride also stands out as an exemplar of teenage supergirl, having the ability to walk through walls. In general, if the hallmark of pulp fiction is that, when the action shows you send a man through the door with a gun, Claremont would have the person be a woman, still with guns blazing, but maybe even coming through the wall, rather than through the door.
Joss Whedon, creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly” has spoken of his lifelong love of comics, and credits Kitty Pride as a model for his strong teenage characters, as well as the Dark Phoenix saga for informing the “Dark Willow” arc in the sixth season of Buffy. In “Firefly”, the character of Zoe, a former soldier, is referred to by her husband as a “Warrior Woman,” (along with an indication as to how this makes her good in bed). Whedon is currently writing an X-Men comic for Marvel, and has been announced as doing a Wonder Woman movie.
The incidence of the battle babe in popular culture went from a nadir the 1950s, to the torrent seen in the last decade, but what do we make of it? On the one hand, it appears to be the male adolescent version of the “enforced seduction” archetype in gothic romances; a strong character of the opposite sex takes a great deal of anxiety out of the process. The reader/viewer can assume a passive role, while all of the initiative is taken by the strong Other.
The flip side is that one cannot really come on too strong with a battle babe. If she doesn’t like what you’re doing or saying, she’ll just kick your ass, without bothering with any legal stuff. If she does like what you’re doing, she’ll still kick your ass, but you’ll wind up having sex with her (“When did the building fall down?” asks Buffy after her first time with Spike). For confused men who claim to not knowing the difference between compliments and harassment, the simplicity of the arrangement is appealing.
Whatever the deeper reasons, it’s pretty obvious that “nice girls” don’t become warrior women, and that the adolescent male would rather have someone other than a “nice girl” to fantasize about. Given the popularity of many of these icons with adolescent females, it remains to be seen just how many of the boys will grow up to deal with the reality that the fantasies can create.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The Neutron Dance
[Crossposted from We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party]
So I had this little essay entitled, “The Neutron Dance,” because I’m a fan of both neutrons and The Pointer Sisters (June Pointer RIP, 11 April, 2006) and I sent it to the Minister of Justice as part of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party’s ongoing campaign for a Free Nuclear Zone.
Or something like that. And there’s the rub. Because the Minister of Justice responded by asking me to make some changes, give some context perhaps, add some background and “say a little something about where you’re going with it and why we should care.”
Fair enough, albeit with a soupçon of “are you really sure you want to get me started?” Because I can go meta in six different directions before breakfast and twelve after lunch, to say nothing of übernerd posturing, name dropping, and doing my little Smartest Guy in the Room dance at the drop of a hat.
One tempting tangent is the fact that when I was a lad, the universe was protons, neutrons, and electrons to make stuff with, and photons to make it glow. Sure, there were these cool things called “neutrinos” that had been predicted in 1930 and not actually seen until 1955 and the discoverers were lucky they were young and long-lived, because they didn’t get their Nobels until 40 years later, a full 7 years after the later discovery of the mu neutrino, there’s no justice in the world, I’m just sayin’.
There were also, when I was a lad, these things called “mesons” which are pronounced meh-son, mee-son, or even may-son, provided you want to make puns like “meson jar” or “Meson-Dixon Line.” But those were primarily good for getting funding for particle accelerators and shooting down giant birds from outer space.
But soon the particle accelerator guys got enough money to create something called The Standard Model which they insist is close to a Theory of Everything, (ToE) if by “everything” you mean “a few dozen particles and physical constants.” I mean, I’ve checked, and there is not one word in String Theory, or any of the other proposed ToEs that explains who put the bop in the bop she bop, or even where babies come from.
That is how Fundamentalism works in science, but that is a different rant, and besides, not having a Fundamentalist explanation for where babies come from is a plus, not a minus, at least in my book.
The thing is, again when I was a lad, a scientist was someone in a white lab coat staring at a bunch of beakers and test tubes. There was a periodic table on the wall, we were up to about 100 elements, and it was pretty clear that there weren’t too many more on the way, because the ones above about 95-96 were so radioactive and short-lived that you had to get them from the particle accelerator to the chem lab by motorcycle, maybe with a police escort or something, and that was all very cool, too. And the whole damn periodic table was just protons, neutrons and electrons, as I said before. You also had your three kinds of nuclear radiation, alpha, beta, and gamma (the latter being good for turning your skin green and making you very strong when angry), though being precocious, I learned about weird things like k-capture, spontaneous fission, and positron emission before I was even a teenager, little did I know.
So scientific fundamentalism moved past the “merely” subatomic particles, but the big three, the p, n, and e, are still the basis for both chemistry and nuclear chemistry, and those are, in my estimation, a much bigger deal than quarks, gluons, color, charm, and super-symmetry. And for the nuclear stuff, it’s really all about the neutron, first created in the laboratory in 1930, then they had three years thinking it was some weird sort of gamma ray. Then in 1934 Enrico Fermi whammed some of them into uranium and nobody figured out what that did until 1938, when, on the run from the Nazis, Lise Meitner
convinced her nephew Otto Robert Frisch that the damn uranium was splitting into lighter elements, and releasing one godawful amount of energy in the process.
So there’s that. The sheer romance of the thing. Plus the whole tech thing is so wet dreamy; Freeman Dyson called the hydrogen bomb, the Super, “technically sweet,” but the fact is that the whole magilla is technically sweet, from the film badges to the nuclear power subs carrying nuclear tipped MIRVs. And just look at the last few minutes of Dr. Strangelove sometime and try to deny that the nukes aren’t beautiful. The Giant Nuclear Fireball is one mother set of headlights and you can’t blame any deer that’s caught in the tracks.
So I write about neutrons for the same reason any fan boy writes about whether The Hulk could beat Superman or whether he could survive a three-way with Modesty Blaise and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s just what we do.
The Neutron Dance
There are two main natural sources of neutrons in the terrestrial environment, spallation by cosmic rays, and spontaneous fission, primarily of uranium238. In the former, a cosmic ray of sufficient energy kicks a neutron out of some atom it encounters, while with the latter, a U238 nucleus splits, rather than just emitting an alpha particle.
There are two main sources of the universe’s supply of neutrons. One is the proton-proton fusion reaction, a very slow reaction, since it is basically the inverse of beta decay, and is mediated by the weak force:
P + P -> D + positron + neutrino
This reaction takes place in the center of the sun; the deuterium produced fuses rapidly to helium through some intermediary reactions that sometimes have neutrons as products. However, any neutrons that are produced remain at the center of the sun, since they almost immediately combine with protons to form more deuterium (D). Besides, the core of the sun is too dense for anything but neutrinos to escape (what happens at the center of the sun stays at the center of the sun).
Neutrons are also produced in older stars by the Carbon/Nitrogen/Oxygen (CNO) cycle:
12C + 1H -> 13N
13N -> 13C + positron + neutrino
13C + 1H -> 14N
14N + 1H -> 15O
15O -> 15N + positron + neutrino
15N + 1H -> 12C + 4He
The neutrons so produced are always bound and never exist as free particles.
The Big Bang produced a certain amount of D and He (plus very small quantities of Li and Be), which implies that there is also a cosmic background of neutrinos, but the implied energy of those particles (about 2 Kelvin) is undetectable by current methods. The neutrons in all elements other than those formed in the Big Bang are created in stars, and all elements heavier than iron are formed in supernovae explosions. Nuclear power from fission is in essence a fossil fuel; it’s just that it’s a remnant of a supernova blast.
Neutrons have different effects on matter depending upon their energy. Most of the neutrons we have to work with are from nuclear fission, and start with a “fission spectrum” of energy. For uranium235, the fission spectrum median is about 1.5 Mev, and the mean is about 2 Mev, reflecting the skewed nature of the spectrum. (For plutonium239, these numbers are slightly higher). The spectrum peaks at about half an Mev (500 Kev) for both isotopes, and the highest energy neutrons are about 10 Mev.
An Mev is 1.6 millionth of an erg, and an erg is 1 ten millionth of a joule (a watt-sec). So an Mev is an extremely small packet of energy, except that in this case it’s associated with an even smaller amount of matter. Matter whose atoms have an average energy of 1 Mev has a temperature of 11 billion degrees.
The term “fast neutron” is pretty loose; often it is used to simply distinguish between slow, “thermal neutrons” and those that haven’t been thermalized (moderated to thermal energies). Even for thermal neutrons, however, there are plenty of quibbles and distinctions, since there are “cold” and “hot” thermal neutrons, and those with energies between 1 Kev and 1 Mev are sometimes called “intermediate.”
Even within the fission spectrum there are distinctions, since isotopes like U238 will fission if the neutron hitting it is fast enough. In fact, fast neutron fission has been observed all the way down into the stable isotope range (e.g. bismuth), albeit with _very_ fast neutrons (>100 Mev). A certain amount of power reactor fission is, in fact, fast fission of U238. However, U238 itself cannot sustain a chain reaction, because inelastic scattering by U238 slows neutrons, in competition with fast fission. The slowing (moderation) of neutrons puts them into resonance regions of the U238 capture spectrum, and they then get absorbed, forming U239, which decays to Np239, then to Pu239. This represents “breeding” and a significant portion of normal reactor power production does come from fission of the internally bred Pu239.
The easiest fusion reaction to initiate is the tritium-deuterium reaction, which produces a neutron of 14.6 Mev. A neutron of that energy will fission U238 at an almost 100% efficiency, leading to a fission event having an energy of around 200 Mev, an order of magnitude increase. Moreover, such fission events produce an enhancement of almost a factor of 2 in fission neutron production when compared to normal fission spectrum neutron fission, leading to a longer fission chain.
Any fusion technology will invariably work first on the T-D reaction, and such fusion will always have a higher energy output if used in a “fusion/fission” reactor, where the fast neutrons then are used to fission natural uranium. Moreover, the F/F reactor can be made sub-critical, since the fusion reactions supply the control factor that is usually accomplished by the delayed neutrons from fission. Such reactors can also be run at a higher breeding efficiency, because some of the control factors (such as the use of oxide fuel to assist the “Doppler broadening” of neutron resonance capture), could be dispensed with.
Similar arguments can be made for “accelerator driven” reactor technology, where a high-current, high-energy proton beam is used to spallate fast neutrons from lead or bismuth, also serving as a controlled neutron source.
Finally, most thermonuclear bombs use the fusion/fission effect to amplify yield. Since most of the energy in a thermonuclear fusion burn comes off as fast neutrons, the yield can be significantly boosted if one uses a uranium tamper and bomb casing. The amplification isn’t the order-of-magnitude increase implied by the above calculation, because some moderation occurs from the scattering that is enhanced by the extreme compression of a thermonuclear detonation, and also because 100% capture of the fast neutrons would require a prohibitively thick bomb casing.
The most powerful bomb ever detonated was roughly 50 megatons, testing in Siberia in 1961.
It was tested with a non-fissile tamper and bomb casing, so it did not use fissile materials to increase the yield; this made it one of the “cleanest” bombs ever tested.
If fissile materials had been used (and the bomb was designed for those as well), it would have exceeded 100 megatons in yield, with an enormous amount of fission product fallout.
Update: Pronoun Problems Leading to Further Speculations
"Aha! Pronoun problems. It's not `shoot you, shoot you', it's `shoot me, shoot me'. So, go ahead, shoot ME, shoot ME (BLAM)... You're Despicable" -- Daffy Duck
So I write about neutrons for the same reason any fan boy writes about whether The Hulk could beat Superman or whether he could survive a three-way with Modesty Blaise and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s just what we do. – From the ex post facto Forward to the Neutron Dance, by James Killus
What I’d meant to say was that a fanboy such as myself might speculate as to whether he himself could survive a three-way with Blaise and Buffy. But we had ourselves an antecedent problem, in that it’s trivially easy to think that the “he” in the above quote referred to The Hulk. This led to some confusion in a conversation with The Wife, then enlightenment. We pick up the conversation in mid-stream, during enlightenment:
“But The Hulk could survive a Modesty and Buffy three-way?”
“Oh, sure. Even when Peter David had him back to being the Gray-Skinned Hulk for a while. He wasn’t as strong as the green-skinned guy, but he was still plenty strong. He also probably had more interest in sex during that phase of it, though from what I’ve heard, he’s lately gotten smarter and he had an alien lover who got killed, and well, that exhausts my vague knowledge of the matter. I haven’t been following the Marvel Universe for a long time.”
“How about Superman?”
“Survival wouldn’t be an issue. Getting him into a three-way would be the issue. He’s brave, strong, and pure, and he’s married to Lois still, I think. Fan boys like to imagine him with Wonder Woman, as I understand it. If Wonder Woman kept to Marston’s original conception, she’d be the one for the three-way, but they don’t writer her much like that anymore. She did have a fling with Batman, as I recall. Or maybe it was with Bruce Wayne. They’re sometimes hard to keep separate.”
“So could Batman survive Modesty and Buffy? Or Wonder Woman and Buffy?”
“I think it depends on whether or not he gets to keep his utility belt.”
“That makes sense. Like Iron Man could survive, but Tony Stark wouldn’t.”
“That’s sad, isn’t it?”
“How about Spiderman?”
“I’m pretty sure Spiderman could survive the three-way. It’s the explaining to Mary Jane afterwards that would do him in.”
"Ah, that’s Peter Parker in a nutshell, isn’t it?”
[note: some comments interpolated to the point of invention]
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