Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Superman Annual #4 (June 1992)

All the cool kids are getting Eclipsed.

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Superman Annual #4 (June 1992)
By Dan Vado, Scott Benefiel, Trevor Scott, Albert De Guzman, and Matt Hollingsworth
Cover by Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti
Edited by Dan Thorsland and Mike Carlin

The Cover!
I'm trying not to focus on Lois Lane's boob but as you can see by the way I began by mentioning Lois Lane's boob, I've already lost the battle. The male gaze more effectively possesses the mind of a man than one of Eclipso's Black Diamonds. At least I'm able to embrace it whereas many angry men want to believe the modern world will crucify them if they acknowledge their own lust and horniness. And judging by Lois's line of sight, she's currently captured by the Female Gaze as she stares straight down Superman's cock outline in his tight spandex Kryptonian briefs. Or is that still the male gaze since a male, Joe Quesada, drew this and thought, "If I were Lois Lane, I'd be thinking about sucking off Superman's steel beam right now." Which is less "horny" and more "gross" because he just drew Lois beating the shit out of Superman and he thinks she's thinking about fucking him right after? No wait. I'm thinking he's thinking that which means I'm more gross than horny. Whoops! Maybe I should stop exposing my true inner self on the Internet by writing pretend comic book reviews? Naw. What else am I going to do with the rest of my life which turned out to be way, way longer than I originally thought it would be. It's like, "Enough already!", amirite?

One more question about the cover which will probably be answered when I read the comic book so just regard most of this as a psychic form of physical masturbation. I'm asking the question for my own pleasure, I mean. "Why is Lois Lane beating up Superman after becoming Eclipsed?" It's been established that after a person is possessed by Eclipso, the God of Vengeance, they must destroy the thing that made them so angry. So what did Superman do to Lois? Not washing dishes, my man? Poor quality control in the bedroom? Did she find his Kryptonian Playboys and the red sun fleshlight in his Fortress of Solitude's Fortress of Solitude (the bathroom)? Boy howdy do I hope these questions are answered in this comic book and that the answer is that last one I suggested!

The Story So Far
Eclipso continues to sit on his moon toilet talking to Valor while his Black Diamonds scattered all over the Earth do all of the work. He doesn't have much more of a plan than "I hope some super heroes get really angry after finding and picking up one of the thousand shards of my original Black Diamond prison!" Currently he has control of Valor, Starman, The Creeper, and maybe Star Sapphire and Hal Jordan? I read that Annual so long ago that I can't remember who was still possessed when it ended.

No.

The Story!
Superman has failed to locate Eclipso because, well, he's not Batman and did Batman do it in Detective Comics? No, he fucking didn't. Although Superman, being able to fly into space and think about flying into space and having the moon be a territory within his reach that he must think about on occasion, should think, "Where would I put my base of operations if I were a being whose entire identity was based around how the moon blocks out the sun?" It's not like it's the most complicated riddle in the world. So instead of searching for Eclipso so he can attack him at the source, Superman flies around Metropolis looking for a couple of Black Diamonds that may or may not be there. Somehow he lucks onto the one person in the city who has a Black Diamond sitting in their pocket. Not because the guy is angry and smashing downtown Metropolis but because he's holding a gun to a woman's head and ranting like a paranoid schizophrenic. Superman doesn't know the guy has a Black Diamond but Bruce Gordon runs up, panting and sweating from his long sprint from Gotham, to tell Superman that the man has a Black Diamond. Bruce Gordon knows because he's got a device that can find Black Diamonds when they're in use or when the plot needs him to know where they are.

Why am I suddenly thinking about my first junior high school crush?

Bruce Gordon believes this man having the Black Diamond was an intricate trap by Eclipso to catch Superman. That's even more paranoid thinking than the guy holding the woman hostage screaming about needing a ship to go into space and fight an alien demon. Mostly because that guy's talking about Eclipso which is actually happening and Bruce Gordon's theory relies on the Black Diamonds having way more control over their own destiny than "being found in a gutter" or whatever. I guess once a person is possessed they become Eclipso on Earth which means he can use them to sort of get Superman's attention and then he can try to shove the Black Diamond up Superman's ass or however he means to possess him. So, okay, now that I've given it a little more thought, maybe Bruce Gordon isn't totally nuts. Also he's the foremost expert on Eclipso so maybe I should be trusting the experts, even if they're a fictional comic book character currently being written by Dan Vado. I should but it's hard. Where did I leave my hammer?

Superman beats up another of Eclipso's manifestations while Bruce Gordon bathes it in sunlight. Afterward, he questions the man who brought the Black Diamond to his city.

There you go! He's on the moon! Go get his ass!

Crater Bay? Was that a popular location in the DC Universe in 1992? Or is this just a city used in this story as a clue to Eclipso's location? Whatever its origin, Lois Lane is on the case! She's off to investigate the strange goings on in Crater Bay. I bet she runs into a bunch of fish looking motherfuckers who drive her insane.

No, wait, she's actually investigating a possible case of corporate corruption and illegal dumping of toxic chemicals. She also outs herself as a white supremacist.

What else could she mean by "one of the last bastions of real America"?

So fucking sick of this "common sense" idea that "the real America" lies in the exact place and time after the indigenous peoples have been run off, killed, and exiled but before the Civil Rights act and brown foreigners began coming to share the American dream. As if rural means anything at all. Or fucking "Heartland". Don't fucking mistake the metaphorical, bullshit meaning of that word for the literal reason it was coined: the area known as the heartland is simply center mass in the country. I wish the ass were thought of as the central component of the human body so we could just start calling the flyover states the Assland. Not that I think the people living there are ass (I mean, sure, some of them (maybe a lot of them!)) but it's better to be the butt of a joke than be raised up on some kind of white supremacist pedestal because of the word heart coinciding with a place where a bunch of dumb people think mostly white people reside. I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, for a few years and if it weren't for the humidity and the Huskers fans, I might still live there yet. Summer lightning storms? Yes please. Lightning bugs?! Hallelujah! Blizzards that trap you at your married friends' house so that their four year old son could tell you about how, when he was in his mommy's tummy, he wanted to be a girl? Fantastic! His father's look every single day after that as he tried to process it? Priceless!

Lois Lane finds her reception in Crater Bay to be slightly chillier than she's normally received even in places that don't want journalists poking around.

Then why is he fucking running the inn?!

The angry old man is actually Eclipsed Starman in disguise because Starman can apparently change shape which is why Eclipso's so happy to have him. Now this is an obvious Superman trap! I knew trusting the expert was the right thing to do even if I really, really, really, really didn't want to and also because I despise him and his stupid Commissioner Batman name.

Eclipso, pissed off at everything (which is why he wants to destroy everything. He kind of has to because everything is what made him so mad), monologues a little more information about his plans (unless it's not a monologue when you're kind of talking to the alien in a coma and/or trance floating nearby). Crater Bay is the headquarters for his secret possessing Superman headquarters. The people of Crater Bay network with other possessed people around the world to distribute Black Diamonds to where Eclipso can manipulate leaders, heroes, and even the economy (probably. Maybe he doesn't care about money so much). See? The name of the town is a clue to is location! What an idiot. If I lived in a crater on the moon, I would name my Earth city base of operations, Venusville. It's like how my banking password is "IVENEVERSUCKEDADICKBEFORE".

An Eclipso monster confronts Superman, Bruce Gordon, and Mona (and Mona's amazing ass) on the road to Crater Bay and Superman has to smash the creature into a greenhouse that uses solar power to heat the place. It destroys the creature whose soul goes screaming to the moon.

So let me get this straight: any power generated from the sun can destroy Eclipso. Solar Lance toys. A flashlight powered by solar energy. Batteries charged by solar panels. If this is the case, can't anything destroy Eclipso since the source of all power on Earth — all of it! — comes from the sun? Couldn't Superman just smash a tree into Eclipso? Throw coal at him? How many degrees of separation must there be between "direct solar energy" and pretty much anything on Earth before it has no effect on Eclipso? Isn't he just basically safe from, um, rocks?

The fight destroys Gordon's Black Diamond Detector and almost destroys his Solar Flashlight. That just means it broke but he fixed it but it's also probably down to a negligible charge. Superman will probably have to defeat Eclipsed Lois Lane by spunking on her. "Gordon! Mona! Hold Lois down so I can titty fuck her! My semen's loaded with yellow sun juice and a facial seems like just the cure!"

The developer whose wife is being held hostage by Eclipso so that he'll help lure Superman into town spends all night trying to get Lois angry so she'll turn be Eclipsed. He spills two cups of coffee on her and tries to put his hands on her to sop up the spilled beverage but none of it gets her needle moving. No, to get her angry, things have to be personal.

Oh, of course! Condescension's the thing! That's so Lois.

So Superman kills Lois and saves the day. Next annual!

The Ranking!
Okay, maybe Lois Lane wasn't killed. Who can tell? Somebody would have to finish reading this comic book and did you know? It's 60 pages long! DC knows the kind of stupid dumb idiots who read comic books, right? They expect us to read sixty whole pages in one sitting?! Fucking hell. It's just too much. I can't do it. I won't do it! Unless the next page I read expresses how Woke Lois Lane is, I'm just not going to continue and assume she died. Or should I assume she was cured by that facial idea? Hmm. I wonder if I can commission Scott Benefiel to draw that scene so I can staple it into my Annual?

Yield means Yield, you cretin!

Okay fine! I'll finish! I hope Lois goes off on how terrible Reagan was after she's cured!

The story simply ends when the sun rises. Superman does the thing where he distracts the vampires and/or trolls and/or Eclipsos so that they lose track of time and get destroyed by the rising sun. But Mona winds up Eclipsed and hides in the houses in Crater Bay with all the rest of the Eclipsed inhabitants. Superman decides he'll have to come back with some "Marvel"ous help to save the residents later. He still doesn't even contemplate checking out the moon. Maybe he's decided that guy who wasn't actually crazy was crazy in just that one small detail of Eclipso living on the moon?

For some reason, I didn't find this issue as good as Detective Comics Annual #5. Come to think of it, I haven't read any comic book as good as that one. And yet why am I having trouble remembering any of it?

We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider (2012)

I return to certain authors not because of the stories they tell but because of the way they tell them. Time after time, I'll pick up, yet again, a story I've never completely finished by H.P. Lovecraft simply to revel in his use of words — words I would bet never existed before he put them to paper — to construct fabulous, unrealistic buildings where I eventually become lost, not in his story, but in my own imagination as it begins to build some story inspired by the feeling of Lovecraft's lyrical constructions and I'm forced to, once again, put the story down. Or maybe I'm in the mood for the complete reverse of Lovecraft, and I'll pick up Vonnegut where every word he uses to convey his thoughts are words I use on a daily basis and yet I'm left flabbergasted that I've never used them in such gut punching, scalp-peeled-back ways. Steinbeck lets me see through the eyes of so many fully fleshed characters which nobody but a genius could have built up from nothing but a couple dozen letters and on old typewriter. And Nabokov — f'ing Nabakov — makes dance words which I was sorely convinced were the homeliest of wallflowers.

Twice in my life, I've read authors who caused me to throw out something I was writing because they simply had done it better in storytelling ways I didn't know were possible: Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. I'm not pretending that I was writing those books exactly! But they took major elements and themes that I had been working on and made them stories whereas mine were half-assed, in-your-early-20s intellectual pap. Still, I didn't think, "I want to write like these guys," because it was their stories and not their way of writing with which I fell in love. But Tim Kreider, since the first time I heard him read one of his essays (and not when I first was introduced to his cartoons many years earlier by the Non-Certified Spouse), I truly envied. Kreider eloquently expresses tragically apparent parts of ourselves that have broken and may never be fixed. He does so in ways that leave the reader in tears born of pain and joy and the recognition that we all suffer the same tribulations. Reading a Kreider essay doesn't simply make me think, "This guy has lived!" We've all lived. What Kreider's essays make me think is, "This guy has lived and he's really thought a lot about that." It's impressive because not a lot of us do that.

The two things I'm most envious about Kreider are his humor and his earnestness. He sees things not how they really are but how he sees himself thinking they really are. What I mean to say, in a convoluted and terribly written way, is that he knows he's flawed and he knows he's biased and he points it out right up front and then he gets on with it with a shrug of the shoulders and a tilt of the head that says, "Yeah but what can you do?"

It's the earnestness of Kreider that I find important. It's the part of my self that I'm missing and I know I'm missing and, well, I just get on with it. If I can't be earnest at least I can be so cynical and full of bullshit that I can at least be honest from my duck blind. You can't tell I'm peppering you with earnestness and truth when it's mixed in with pure unadulterated B.S. and obviously flagrant exaggerations. But Tim Kreider doesn't need the camouflage and I love him for it.

In his introductory essay in We Learn Nothing, "Reprieve," he writes of his near death experience: "Not for one passing moment did it occur to me to imagine that God Must Have Spared My Life for Some Purpose. Even if I'd been the type who was prone to such silly notions, I would've been rudely disabused of it by the heavy-handed coincidence of the Oklahoma City bombing occurring on the same day I spent in a coma. If there is some divine plan that requires my survival and the deaths of all those children in day care, I respectfully decline to participate. Not to turn up my nose at luck; it's better to be lucky than just about anything else in life. And if you're reading this now you're among the lucky too." It's beautiful and powerful not because it's so honest and earnest and sincere and all those other things I cannot seem to be; it's powerful because while he's expressing a personal anecdote and belief, he's belittling and minimizing the argument of miracles and blessings and the narcissism which causes people to believe an almighty omnipotent and eternal being somehow has a plan for little old them. It's the most elegant take-down I've ever seen and I don't watch wrestling.

In his essay, "Escape from Pony Island," (which is the first essay I ever heard him read out loud at the Hawthorne Powell's Books) he says, "Ken often said of himself that he was essentially libertarian in his outlook, but Harold and I suspected that, like many libertarians, he was an authoritarian at heart." See? He just says what we all know is true and he makes it effortless and if you're libertarian, you're not reading this sentence because you already dramatically shut your laptop closed in disgust and then looked off in the distance impersonating Jim from The Office except you don't have a camera crew to capture the moment.

I truly love Tim Kreider and I wish I were his friend. Mostly because he and his friends seem to do a lot of day drinking and people watching and take a lot of trips and don't seem to actually do anything laborious.

In his penultimate essay, Sister World, Tim Kreider looked me deep in the eyes and whispered, "You're missing a critical part of your brain." I don't mind that I'm missing them though because Tim expresses them well enough that I know I'm missing them. I don't know if the essay brought me to tears because it brings everybody to tears or because I was left broken and longing for the ability to dive into messy and potentially uncomfortable situations. Or maybe I was just happy to experience his feelings because there's no way I'd want more family. Ugh! Ptui! Those shows where people meet long lost family members seem like a nightmare to me! Oh! So maybe that's why I was crying! Because Kreider's family reunion was terrifying!

I'll leave you with one more example of Kreider's earnestness: "Once, over beers, I was clumsily trying to tell Amy how grateful I was that she and her sister had been so accepting of me, when they could as easily have been indifferent or jealous or hostile. She said simply, 'You're family.' I felt whatever's the opposite of heartbroken."

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Detective Comics Annual #5 (June 1992)

If you want to destroy Batman's sweater. . .

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Detective Comics Annual #5 (June 1992)
By Alan Grant, John Wagner, Tom Mandrake, Jan Duursema, Rick Magyar, Bill Oakley, Adrienne Roy
Cover by Sam Keith
Edited by Denny O'Neil

The Cover!
I'm not going to give Sam Keith a hard time about this cover because, I mean, it's fucking great. Did you look at it? Do you have eyeballs? Does your brain function? I suppose I could criticize Keith's vision of how clothing tears and comes apart but that would be an assumption on my part that Batman's costume isn't made of steel wool. And even if I was going to be an uptight prick and moan about the weird curly pasta threads hanging down from Batman's torn shirt, I'd only be doing Keith a disfavor in that I'm ignoring his (as far as I can tell) realistic gun. Did anybody ever think to show John Romita Jr. this cover (or, I don't know, an actual gun)? If I wanted to be a useless, whiny, piece of shit comic book reader, I could ask how the fuck this has anything to do with Eclipso? Oh, sure, there's a moon in the background and you usually (although not always) need the moon for an eclipse. I mean I don't know what those "not always" moments might be. Like, say, Galactus is fucking Venus or something and his great ass blocks out the sun. But I guess, technically, that's a moon as well. And also Galactus doesn't live in the DC Universe. So pretend I said The Authority's Carrier was fucking a space whale and got between the sun and the Earth. So, anyway, that's my ignorance exposed! But I'm telling you, why would I want to criticize this fucking cover? I love it! I bet if this hadn't been an Eclipso tie-in issue, I'd have picked it up anyway. I would have been all, "Hey Brent! Did you see this cover? I didn't know Batman's costume was made of steel wool and pasta noodles! And I think that's Tiny Toons Joker guest starring! That's a weird looking gun though." (Up until 1992, I'd only ever seen guns drawn by John Romita Jr.)

The Story So Far!
Eclipso has eclipsed Valor, Starman, The Creeper, and Star Sapphire. Am I missing any? I don't remember and I'm not bothering to check. Let's see if Batman falls to lovely purple diamonds! I mean Black Diamonds (but they're really purple). I bet Catwoman loses her shit (and not in the appropriate litter box receptacle (Goddammit I think I just developed a new kink)).

The Story
The issue begins with totally legit business-puppet Scarface re-opening his club, The Ventriloquist's Club, while Batman hassles him and his guests by just making himself obvious up on the nearby street buildings. He's purposefully swinging past streetlights so that his scary and terrifying shadow passes across the front of the club and mumbling to himself, "That'll strike terror in the hearts of these people just trying to have a nice time at a totally legal club run by somebody who has served their time for the crimes they've committed but whom I don't like or trust."

I'd sue his ass for trying to tank my business.

Imagine suing Batman and then finding out in the discovery phase of your civil suit that he's Bruce Wayne. The amount of "Cha-Chings!" rattling around in your head would probably send you straight to Arkham.

I don't know anything about law and law terms so I probably got the lingo wrong and I'm not bothering to check but you probably understood what I meant.

Batman ignores the club full of Gotham's most wanted criminals because he's got a robbery to stop down at the Old Egyptian Goods Shoppe. The criminals try to flee in their truck which is, you know, truck-sized. It's drawn truck-sized. I saw it with my own eyes over multiple pages that it was truck-sized. And then when Batman goes to stop them (by making the truck crash which obviously kills the men in the cab because they're criminals and they don't wear seatbelts), the truck becomes a fucking Mini Cooper.

I'm less concerned about the dead criminals than I am about Tom Mandrake's ability to pass off that panel as professional work.

At least I know what Tom Mandrake thinks of me early into the comic book so I won't feel bad at all when I trash all of his actually adequate and not-bad-to-look-at pencils. You don't declare I'm a stupid idiot that will accept any old shit you draw and expect me to act politely about it! If by the end of the book we don't find out that Batman was sipping on some Gingold earlier which is how he reached the steering wheel from outside the passenger door, I'm going to carve Tom Mandrake's name onto the skin of the yearly goat I sacrifice to Baphomet to curse those who have done me ill.

While Batman's engaged in M.C. Escher crime fighting, Scarface busies himself with insulting every major mafia boss in Gotham at his new club. Most of his insults have to do with plastic surgery gone wrong. Look, he's a little thug who shoots a gun, not a comedy writer. Somehow he (and the guy with his hand up his ass) survives the gig, probably because the mob bosses are using all of their brain power trying to figure out what Scarface's scheme is. I'm using all of my brain power trying to figure out what Eclipso's scheme is. Maybe he won't show up in this comic book at all since Batman doesn't have any super powers. Why would Eclipso want to possess him?

Oh no! A threat from a normal criminal who apparently wears his seatbelt while he crimes.

Batman ignores the threat because is any threat actually a threat to Batman? I bet he doesn't even hear the guy because he's too busy trying to figure out how to defeat Superman if he ever winds up mind-controlled or how to fuck Catwoman if she ever winds up mind-controlled. He does notice a Black Diamond earring on the ground near the crash after the cops have gathered up the loot and the criminals and left the scene to go enjoy some paperwork. They'll especially love the extra paperwork they'll be doing later since they just left the smashed truck and didn't cordon off the crime scene. You might be thinking, "How do you know they didn't do any of that? Maybe Al, John, and Tom just decided not to show all the boring procedural work, you fucking douchebag?" Well, they do show us because Batman calls for the cops to stop and take the Black Diamond for evidence but they've already left. And this is the scene as Batman leaves.

The cops: "Enh, leave it. It'll make a great artificial reef when the sea levels rise."

Oh! I didn't mention that tonight, this very night that Scarsfaceman and his fister are eavesdropping on all the good Gotham mafia goss while they serve them tons of free drinks and Batman has found some jewelry that hopefully Tim Drake won't think was a loving present from his second father . . . this night is the anniversary of Babs being shot in the back by the Joker and definitely not raped at all because when has, um, Alan Moore ever, um, written a . . . you know what? She was probably raped. But nobody needs to dwell on that because she's dealing with it in the best way she knows how: help a government black ops organization break tons of laws all over the world and kill loads of people labeled as enemies of the United States. Even in 1992, we understood that the best time to label a person an enemy of the United States was after you've killed them so they can't say on the record, "What the fuck are you talking about? I don't even think of the United States! Like that scene in the elevator in Mad Men that will be written in twenty years or something!" Just like everything else he claims he invented because he knows nobody will fucking say to his face, "You're a delusional narcissist who lies about everything and doesn't actually know any Goddamn facts at all," Trump didn't invent the state killing civilians and then dragging their names through the mud. That's a time honored American tradition that they stole from Great Britain who stole it from, I don't know, The Romans or Christians.

Anyway, The Joker will be broken out of Arkham on this auspicious anniversary by Scarsfaceman because The Joker, supposedly, knows where 25 million dollars has been stashed. At least that's what one of the crime guys thinks because he was a henchman for The Joker and somehow survived the job and is also incredibly credulous if he thinks The Joker actually gives a shit about money.

Cue Tim Drake snooping around the Batcave.

Bruce Gordon shows up because he's tracked a Black Diamond to Gotham. In a previous issue, he mentioned he could only track them while they're in use. The one Batman found is currently safe but there were two others in the loot from the robbery earlier. Those are in the hands of the police and there's nobody angrier than a cop who was just, in his own eyes, disrespected. That means there's probably an Eclipso or two smashing up the evidence room right now.

Commissioner Gordon finds the two gems still on an Egyptian statue. I was trying to give Grant and company the benefit of the doubt for breaking an rule established in an earlier annual. If Bruce Gordon can track the Black Diamonds while they're not active, this whole series is going to get pretty boring. The whole set-up is simply to get Commissioner Gordon's hands on one so that he'll be so angry at The Joker that he'll turn into Eclipso and strip The Joker naked and take loads of photos and also shoot him in the spine and probably almost certainly doesn't at all in any way, shape, or form rape him. That's probably what happens. I can just stop reading now, right?

Of course it's happening! You forgot to tell them the most important rule: don't get angry around the Black Diamonds!

Gordon's Eclipso manifestation, a massive twenty-foot tall monster with huge teeth and claws, smashes its way out of the police precinct and heads for the toy warehouse where the cops have surrounded The Joker and Scarsfaceman's gang. When it gets there, it immediately kills at least three cops which means Commissioner Gordon is a cop killer. Although I think the Comics Code Authority jerks demanded a later panel to make sure Gordon's hands were clean of any cop blood:

I mean, it is a miracle because I saw the way Tom Mandrake drew them all being gutted. But then I also learned not to believe that hack on page three.

While giving chase, Batman drops and breaks Bruce Gordon's solar light gun. That means he can't stop Eclipso now! Except we, the readers, know that some of the toys in The Joker's warehouse are lightsaber knock-offs called "solar lances". Well, they have "solar" in the name so they must have the same power as the sun, right? Not just shitty light enabled by two 'D' batteries.

During the fight, Batman crashes into a crate of solar lances where he reads the label: "Powered by the sun." Well, that's all well and good if only the toy hadn't been stashed in a crate for the last number of years and it was now currently night and there's no way the stupid thing would be charged.

Wait a second. I think I see my problem with this comic book. It can be sorted out with a hammer and three hard whacks to the back of my head. *whack whack whack* Ah! That's better. I'm now dumb enough to enjoy a comic book again!

Batman picks up a Solar Lance which, having been charged by the sun, has the power to defeat Eclipso. So like something out of one of the two good Star Wars movies, Batman strikes Eclipso down!

Jim had to help for psychological health reasons. This was him dealing with his anger at Alan Moore.

Scarface and The Ventriloquist are arrested after everything calms down but The Joker manages to escape in a cloud of smoke, ninja style. An editor's note says that his story will be continued in Robin Annual #1 because of course Tim Drake found that Black Diamond Batman left lying around and was all, "Stupid teenager problems. I hate everybody!" Which will mean he'll have to kill everybody once he Eclipses. The main Eclipso story will continue in Superman Annual #4.

The Ranking!
That was fucking awesome, man! Incredible! What art! What story! And that part where Batman reaches in the truck window to steer the criminals into a streetlight? Phenomenal! The twist ending with the lightsabers? Genius! And I'm all on pins and needles about The Joker escaping! At least I think that's why I'm feeling pins and needles everywhere. Where'd all this blood come from? Whose hammer is that? I think I'm going to go lie down for a spell.

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)

I finished re-reading this a couple of weeks ago and then set it down and forgot that I had read it because I was just relieved to have finally gotten through it again. The main thing I learned from re-reading The Lord of the Rings is that reading it once in one lifetime is enough. That's a tough lesson to have to learn in a finite lifetime! If I had children, "Only read The Lord of the Rings once in your life, and maybe zero times even," is the first thing I'd add to my list "Advice for Making My Child's Life Better (None of Which They'll Probably Take, the Ingrates)."

This might be a spoiler if you're a two year old with a Goodreads account but the One Ring is destroyed in this book by Chapter Three of Book Six (the Second Book in The Return of the King. Does that mean the trilogy is actually a sexology? I don't know. What am I? A person who can do math and knows words too?). That means there's something like seven chapters left! And one of those chapters involves a marriage! A MARRIAGE?! Between Aragorn and Arwen even! Which I'm supposed to believe is a happy ending? I guess the text doesn't definitively say Aragorn is gay but you don't go to the extremes that man was going to to avoid marrying a hot elf woman if you're into the ladies!

I suppose trudging through even more chapters about resting and traveling and singing is worth it to get to the most gruesome and bloody murder in the entire series. If only Peter Jackson had had the guts to film the Scouring of the Shire and the murder of Saruman. His throat being slit wide and the spray of blood splashing over the faces of the horrified Hobbits! I bet Ralph Bakshi would have done that scene right! But no! Instead Rankin and Bass screw it up and leave it out as well!

When I was younger, my favorite part of the book was when Éowyn kills the king of the Ringwraiths. I was all, "Ha ha! Because the prophecy said no man! But she wasn't a man! Ha ha! Stupid prophets! What a great twist!" But now I read it and I think, "Stupid prophets. This is why we, as a society, should try to encourage gender neutral terms and pronouns! So that if I ever become the lord of the dead and the lost King of Angmar, I certainly don't want to be killed because some jerk didn't account for half of the people who might kill me!"

In The Two Towers, my favorite characters were Treebeard and Gollum. In this book, my favorite characters were Pippin and Merry. Merry and Pippin are like a couple who decided to open up their marriage. First Merry is jealous of Pippin having gone to the big city, probably banging loads of studs, while he's stuck trying to get into the pants of a prudish horse king. Then later, Pippin is super jealous of Merry banging the hottest stud in Mordor and he's all, "Oh no! I'll never bang anybody as hot! But I've got to go and try!" But then Gimli is all, "You two are perfect together! Stop this nonsense! Never forget that troll I had to pull you out from under, Pippin!" And then Frodo is all, "At least your ex didn't throw your fleshlight into a volcano."

I highly doubt I'm going to read The Sillymarillion next.

The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

I think the "two towers" referenced in the title are the two characters who carry the weight of this entire book: Treebeard and Gollum. At least that's what I think as an adult. When I first read this as a twelve-year old, I had no idea what towers were being referenced. Now, don't jump to the conclusion that I was a complete dimwit! It was obvious Orthanc was one of them! It's the most towery tower ever to appear in fantasy fiction. But what was the other one? Minas Morgul? Barad-dûr? The watchtower atop Cirith Ungol?

I know a lot of you are shaking your head and making "Pshaw!" noises at me and snorting, "It was obviously Barad-dûr, you stupid twit." But would you stake your nerdy life on that?!

Hmm, maybe you would. I bet there's a letter that J.R.R. Tolkien penned to some second cousin that was all, "It should be clear to everybody that the towers I was talking about were Orthanc and Barad-dûr. Only stupid dumb 12-year old twits who couldn't even tell the difference between Saruman and Sauron wouldn't understand that!"

Yeah, yeah. I was somewhat confused by those two wizards! I didn't say I was zero percent dimwit at twelve! But seriously, Tolkien had to pick two names that were that similar?! He was absolutely taking the piss.

Anyway, the tracking of the hobbits is boring. The Riders of Rohan are the worst characters of any book I've ever read (and I've read most of the Xanth books). Frodo might as well be a straw effigy with a ring tied to it. And Sam is just a bitter, thwarted cook. Gollum and Treebeard are the only interesting parts of this book.

Although I suppose the Battle of Helm's Deep was exciting because I was really wrapped up in whether the Elf character or the Dwarf character would murder more orcs than the other. You probably think the Elf would run away with that one because he could kill so many with arrows before one orc even got near the dwarf's axe but you would be surprised at how easy it is for a writer to pretend that wasn't the case at all and the dwarf actually could win that contest. So unbelievable.

Hopefully when I get around to reading the Sillymarillion, it explains what happened to the Entwives. If that mystery is never revealed, I suppose the next book I'm going to read is a Ouija board as I summon the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien to explain his damned self.

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954)

This book is like The Seven Samurai except there are nine of them and they aren't samurai and they're defending the entire world instead of just a village. This is the book that introduced everybody in the Sixties to the idea of Lembas wafers and probably hobbits and almost certainly balrogs. It probably also made a lot of people cognizant of the amount of hair on their toes. I hardly have any and I always felt ashamed that I wasn't more hobbit-like, even if I walk about a mile every morning to get coffee and tea while barefoot.

I think Popeye's biscuits are probably what Lembas wafers tasted like and I also think the movie The Hangover was based on this book.

If you like books about traveling through exotic locations that are entirely fictional while an elf and a dwarf become the closest of friends, this is the book for you!

Spoiler: Some people think this is a book about how even the smallest and seemingly most inconsequential people can do extraordinarily good things to change the world while potentially sacrificing everything. But I think it's a tragic love story between a misshapen bug-eyed monster and a ring. How come nobody's written a musical from Gollum's point of view yet? I suppose it's because he's already too sympathetic. Better to write stories about characters who are so bad that you would be praised for your hot take showing how they're actually sympathetic characters caught up in a terrible world who maybe made bad decisions because of the way other people treated them. Or to show how a monster is just, you know, protecting his mom from a bunch of drunk jerks constantly partying at their log cabin.

Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea: The Newsletter #20 (Third Week of April 2018)

E!TACT! #20
Black Lightning: Cold, Dead Hands #6, Batman: White Knight #7, Justice League #42, Batman #44, The Curse of Brimstone #1, The Immortal Men #1, Grunion Guy's Musical Corner of Music Reviews, What Am I Currently Reading?, and Letters to Me!
By Grunion Guy


Comic Book Reviews!

Black Lightning: Cold, Dead Hands #6
By Isabella, Henry, Guichet, and Pantazis

Rating: With this issue, any continuity fans who were wondering if DC Comics Presents #16 was still in continuity have got their answer. Yes it is! I'm just going to use the scientific method and assume that every issue of DC Comics Presents has been returned to continuity since one has.

You might not find it surprising that I failed science. I certainly found it surprising that I couldn't cite comic books as proofs of my answers on tests. My physics teacher found it surprising that I couldn't tell the difference between reality and fantasy. I don't know why he was so surprised. One day for class, we went to the amusement park Great America to test physics theorems. So I was supposed to believe that everything in the park was regulated by physical laws but not believe that Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck were real? I had my picture taken with both of them! How was that not worth an A?!

Oh yeah. This comic is all about getting along with each other or something. Parts of it are based on The Twilight Zone episode where all the neighbors become paranoid and begin accusing each other of being aliens. I guess the lesson is not to listen to your gut instincts and your intuition because those things are ruled by superstition, paranoia, and systemic racism.


Batman: White Knight #7
By Murphy and Hollingsworth

Rating: After reading the first issue of this series, I thought, "Haven't we seen this multiple times already? Casting the villain as the hero who really shows Batman how to save Gotham?" So I started reading this encased in a hard, protective layer of cynicism. And yet it still somehow managed to break through that enamel and I've mostly enjoyed the story. Especially this issue.

In this issue, we learn that The Joker never killed Jason Todd. But Todd, completely broken by The Joker, believing his life was ruined by Batman, pretends to be dead after The Joker releases him. This is a way better version of Jason Todd's reappearance in the DC Universe. I especially like that Jason Todd has been convinced by The Joker that Bruce used and manipulated him. It gives Jason Todd a real reason to be hurt and angry at Batman, as opposed to the overly melodramatic teenage reason that everybody accepts: that Jason Todd is hurt and angry that Batman didn't avenge his death by killing Joker. I'm going to simply cut out the canonical part of the Jason Todd story that I don't like and replace it with this bit. How does one go about doing that? Home brain surgery couldn't be that hard, right?

The other part I really loved was Bruce's discussion with Dick and Babs about why he does what he does. It's always nice when a writer thinks up a better way to look at a character instead of relying on tons of past writers who simply accepted the traditional version. And it's not like Murphy's version changes Batman's motives much at all. Batman simply twists the perception of why he does what he does so that it's not contextualized by past events but based upon a vision of a better future.

Don't get me wrong, though. My cynicism continues to control most of my brain's functions. I'm still annoyed by yet another story where the big twist surprise is that Batman and The Joker team up to save the day (and right on top of Metal's version of this story too! Sheesh. Don't editors at DC talk with each other?).


Justice League #42
By Priest and Woods

Rating: The Justice League continues to learn that justice is much tougher to accomplish when Priest controls the narrative. The team has had debates like this before where Superman says, "We must stop all war and killing everywhere!" and Batman says, "We can't do that, you dum-dum Kryptonian!" and then Wonder Woman is all, "Bruce is right. We can't interfere in geopolitical whateverisms!" Then Superman says, "Oh poo," and kicks a rock so hard it kills a dictator of a small fake European country which causes a massive war where millions of people are killed in the subsequent conflict to exterminate half the population of the country who just happened to have the wrong common ancestor. Then Superman is all, "Oh. I get it now! Whoops!"

Luckily, Deathstork arrives on the scene to administer the justice that the Justice League can't administer because they all have to listen to Batman for some reason. By the end of this story arc, I'm guessing it'll answer the question as to why Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman have never grabbed Deathstork by the scruff and tossed him in jail. It's because they know they need somebody who doesn't mind killing when killing needs to be done. Plus it has to be somebody that they pretend they can't stand and also whom they pretend they can't catch. "Oh no," cries Batman over his tea as he reads the paper, "It looks like Deathstork was in Gotham killing those bad guys whose lawyer just lawyered them out of jail. If only you'd have told me about Slade being in town, Alfred. I could have stopped this!" Then Alfred winks at Bruce and Bruce winks back and they enjoy some nice waffles with homemade butter.


Batman #44
By King, Janin, Jones, Chung, and Bellaire

Catwoman shops for a wedding gown this issue. My guess is Tom King was at a bar sitting across from Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV fawning over each other. Eventually one of them broke eye contact (probably Snyder because Tynion IV's gaze can get unnecessarily probing) and glanced over at Tom King. Scott said, "We were just daring each other to write a story that readers should hate but we do it in such a way that they'll wind up loving it. I'm going to write a whole epic story where Plastic Man saves the day. James is going to write a story about a pansexual misogynist gender fluid monster from Pluto who attacks Earth in an attempt to get Pluto's status as a planet reinstated. It will mostly feature Batman being lectured by a bunch of young people. What about you?"

Tom King sucked on his hot dog for a long minute before saying, "I'll write an issue that's just Catwoman picking out a wedding dress." Scott's eyebrow shot up. He knocked James's hand away from his crotch as he asked, "And you think you can get Batman fan's to rave about it?"

Tom King tapped his hot dog on the bar, knocking loose the long line of ash that had accumulated over the long expanse of time he spent thinking about Scott's question. He took another sultry drag off his hot dog before saying, "Rave about it? They're going to fucking lose their minds over it." Tom winked ambiguously before stubbing out his hot dog and getting up from the bar. James Tynion IV watched him closely before turning back to Scott.

"So do you think he meant they'll lose their minds in a good way?" James reached out with a kerchief to wipe some mustard off the corner of Scott's lip. Scott thanked him before saying, "When has a Batman fan ever lost his mind in a good way? They're going to fucking hate it."

Rating: This was the best issue of Batman ever! You should seen the wedding dress Catwoman eventually picked out! She's going to look spectacular! There was also some writing crap about how characters change over the years but they don't really change unless they do really change but in ways that we don't notice since it takes so long for them to change and we, as fans, are too busy to notice because we're arguing about their costume changes.


The Curse of Brimstone #1
By Tan, Jordan, and Beredo

Rating: I hated this comic book from page one when it began "Everything burns." Because everything doesn't burn, Mr. Justin Jordan. The truth is that everything eventually stops burning. It's more true to say, "Everything freezes." At least on a cosmically ending note. Because it's more true than "Everything burns." Look, we all know everything isn't going to burn. I mean, a lot of stuff will as every sun in every solar system expands to consume most of the planets orbiting the star. But it won't expand enough to burn all of the planets! Unless all stars go nova when they die (which might be a thing smart people know for sure without checking up on Wikipedia. I suppose I could check and seem like a smart person but I'd rather not spend that time just to look up a simple fact all fifth graders know) and they consume everything everywhere. Maybe just before everything freezes, everything burns?

You know what? None of that even matters because I lied. I didn't hate this book from page one. I hated this book from the moment I picked it up off the shelf at the comic book store and thought, "Why am I buying this garbage?"

Oh! I just realized I was mistaken again! I didn't hate this comic book from the moment I knew I was going to buy it. I hated myself at that moment!

These new comics from the pages of Metal (and how they're supposed to be from that story, I still don't know) have been billed as comic books by the greatest artists working for DC Comics. You can tell that's true because these comics list the artist first in the credits. That's why I found it so surprising that the art in this comic book was terrible. I hated it more than I hated myself two weeks ago when I purchased this book. I suppose the argument can (and will) be made that the style fits the story. But I don't have time to be smart about stuff. I only have time to indulge my id. My ego and superego can go fuck each other.

The only good character in this comic book is killed within the first few pages. That's when I stopped reading because I had decided he was the protagonist. I don't care what happens to the rest of the small town characters just struggling to make ends meet while forces they have no control over threaten to destroy their humanity. I read enough of those stories in The New York Times.

In the end, the actual protagonist is somebody I have no sympathy for. He wants his small town that grew up around the coal industry to still exist in the same way it did before the coal was gone. He both wants his sister and himself to be able to leave the town but hates that everybody is leaving the town. He can't accept change unless that change means he's getting his. So he makes a deal with the devil to put himself in a position to help people. As if he couldn't have done that without the devil's special Brimstone powers. My guess is he'll eventually learn his lesson and use the powers to fight against the devil while using his normal abilities to help revitalize the town and help the old townsfolk who have no recourse but to stay in the dying, dead-end little town. I just won't be reading this comic book long enough to find out if that's what happens. I don't even know why I read this issue.


The Immortal Men #1
By Tynion IV, Lee, Benjamin, Williams, Friend, and Sinclair

Everything I said about hating myself for buying The Curse of Brimstone #1 goes triple for buying this book. But if I didn't buy this book, how was I going to finish the poster that comes on the backside of the fold-out cover?! Not that I can finish it anyway since I apparently didn't hate myself enough the week Silencer #1 came out. What was going on that day that I allowed myself to not buy a shitty comic book? I probably ate some vegetables that morning.

If you love comics about a chosen one who also happens to be a young person, you should pick up a dozen copies of this book. The young chosen one seems even more special since he's being hunted by all the world's immortals. Apparently their power and experience can't save the world. What they need is a fresh perspective! They need the wisdom of youth! The world is doomed unless young Caden Park can say, "But seriously, guys!" after which he'll proceed to youthsplain his plan to save the world. That plan will be full of heart which the immortals don't have enough of, being that they're old people who have constantly gotten everything wrong and that's why the kids must save the world.

Rating: Look, I knew I was going to hate this book when I saw Tynion IV's name on the cover so I can't pretend that the following is an unbiased review: this book was terrible. I've also admitted over and over again that I don't like Jim Lee's scribbled faces art, no matter how often DC tries to convince me that he's the greatest artist of all time. The only reason I bought this book is because I like Vandal Savage. But then I realized that I almost certainly won't like the character when he's written by Tynion. So not only will I not be purchasing The Immortal Men #2, I am going to discretely sneak this copy of #1 back on the shelves at my local comic book store. Reverse-shoplifting isn't a crime, right?

Grunion Guy's Musical Corner of Music Reviews!

Rain by Concrete Blonde
Does nobody care about regulating the power that musicians have to control and contort our emotions?! If hypnotism were real, I'm certain they wouldn't allow hypnotists twenty-four hour access to our minds via radio so that we all wind up acting like chickens. And yet musicians are allowed to manipulate our emotions on a near constant basis? It's insanity! I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if every song out there was uplifting bubble gum pop that simply perks you up or makes you smile. But what about songs like this one? How is it legal to musically recreate a loneliness and heartbreak so bleak that you want to kill yourself?! And has anybody done a study on how many mass killings were perpetrated by somebody who just heard a Rammstein song?
Grade: A.

Hang Wire by The Pixies
I came to The Pixies too late in life to really love them. I feel like they distilled the confused anger of a growing teen into potent two and a half minute doses. Maybe they were what I needed to break out of the years I spent crushing on someone not interested in me. Instead, fucking Robert Smith and The Cure coddled my pain and heartbreak and told me to live there, forever. Fucking assholes.
Grade: C.

Prettiest Cop on the Block by Alice Cooper
This song is from one of the albums that nobody ever talks about, Special Forces. It belongs to that run of late seventies, early eighties albums where Alice tried to incorporate a bit of new wave and punk into his sound. He was always a bit of a chameleon, tailoring many of his albums to the sound of the day. By the name of the song, you might guess that it's about a cross-dressing man in a role society often thinks of as masculine. What you might not guess, if you don't know a lot about Alice Cooper, is that he has a number of songs along this theme. He also has a song about an ex-football playing construction worker who loves Hollywood and dresses like a woman and a song about a transvestite truck driver (but then who doesn't have one of those? Weird Al has one too! And probably The Doors, right?). I like the driving bass line on this song but overall it's a bit of a dud. It's no surprise that most of Alice's late seventies songs aren't often played on the radio.
Grade: C-.

Interchangeable Knife by Electric Six
Sometimes I find myself thinking, "I don't have a headache and I really want one." On those days, I'm lucky to be an owner of this song! That might sound like a positive but it was actually a criticism couched in positive language! I'm a sneaky mother fapper! Although if you don't mind the headache from the first thirty seconds of this song, it slides into a sort of disco slash rave slash gay hiphop thing that won't cure the headache the first part gave you but might get you accidentally dancing. "Accidentally dancing" is the only way to describe how I dance.

It's not like the rhythm of the song changes at the thirty second mark. It's just that it sounds like somebody realized they were recording inside of a giant metal pan and quickly ushered the band outside of the pan to finish the song. They probably should have just rerecorded the first bit because now I have a fucking headache.
Grade: C+ (Lose the first thirty seconds and it's a solid B).

Been Down by Blue October
I suppose if I had to choose a song that gives me a headache and a song that makes me kill myself, I'd choose the headache. Of course when I'm down and out suffering from a migraine (which I just dealt with over the last 24 hours for the first time in a quite awhile, so I'm speaking from recent experience), I spend most of that time wishing I was dead. So maybe I'm wrong about choosing the headache and I'd rather listen to this song.

Actually, I would rather listen to this song because I love the way it sounds. If you can ignore the lyrics where the guy is telling the person he loves that she should understand why he's a big asshole, it might even make you feel good! I would probably sing this song at Karaoke but I still haven't found a place that has it. On the plus side, the new Karaoke place I'll be going to next seems to list "Hate Me" as one of their tracks! Maybe I'll record myself singing that so everybody can watch it and think, "What the fuck is going on here?"
Grade: A-.

This part isn't a review but it's still part of the musical corner! I still own the first mix tape I ever made (and it still plays (and I still have a vehicle with a tape deck!)). The first song on the tape is "Hello" by Lionel Richie which is a total stalker song and a weird way to begin a tape which was directly meant for a specific person although I never gave her the tape. So basically it begins, "Hey! I want to tell you that I love you! Now here are a bunch of other songs about how much I want to touch you!" The final song on the tape is "Like China" by Phil Collins which is a song about how careful Phil is going to be fucking the girl for her first time. So that's like not at all a weird song to stick on a mix tape for the girl you're crushing on, right? "Hello! I love you! Now we're going to fuck and I'll be super careful because I'm pretending it's your first time even though I'm sure it's not but it is my first time so I'm going to be really bad at it. Please love me anyway!"

What Am I Currently Reading?!

I just finished rereading Koji Suzuki's horror novel Ring. The reason I reread it is that, years after reading it, Powell's finally had a copy of the sequel, Spiral. Ring was a quick read so I knew I could breeze through it in a few days so the events would be fresh in my mind upon reading the sequel. It's a good thing I reread it because I certainly forgot a few major points, like how Sadako never actually crawled out of television sets like in the movie and how she had testicles and smallpox. The book was written in 1992 but seems to be commenting on modern Internet meme culture. I get that memes are just thought viruses and Ring's main plot point is that Sadako and Smallpox have a thought virus baby to enact vengeance on all the terrible people of the world (which are all the people). Maybe Koji had recently read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene which inspired this novel. Asakawa, the main character in the book, relies on a book about viruses and mankind to figure out how to break Sadako's curse (or, more accurately, to keep it going). Plus he and his cohort, Ryuji, discuss how viruses could be genes that have escaped our DNA to become free wheeling hippy genomes camping out on whatever gene couch will have them. Apparently there's a brand new fourth book in the series. My guess is that it will absolutely deal with the curse traveling along Internet memes.

Ring is one of those books I'd recommend for long flights. It's an easy read that holds your attention the entire way through. But if you're a young person who hates free speech, nazis, rape, and blunt assumptions of traditional gender based on sexual organs, you might have a couple of issues with this book. Those issues won't have anything to do with free speech or nazis though! You just have to wade through one main character occasionally bragging about raping women. But at least by the end, he gets his! That's a spoiler so try not to remember that if you're going to read this book. Also, it's unclear by the end whether or not he's actually ever raped anybody. I suppose that's not really the point though. The fact that he thinks he can make friends by admitting to having raped people probably makes him unlikable. You might also not like the main character since he knows about Ryuji's rapes since high school and has never turned him in nor stopped hanging out with him. Boy, if only I could have read this book in 1992 when everybody was totally cool with rape so that I wouldn't feel these conflicted feelings about the protagonist and his rapey friend.

The gender stuff just gets weird but I understand why Koji put it in there. He needed Sadako to think of herself as female so that she could long for a baby but also needed her to physically be male so that she couldn't have that baby. So Koji gave her Testicular Feminization Syndrome. It's almost as weird a beat as when the kids in It have a gang bang in the sewer so that they can lose their innocence and escape It's world. Sometimes writers shouldn't be allowed to come up with their own plot points.

I'm also up to Ogre, Ogre in my trudgingly trudging reread of Anthony's Xanth novels. I have to read them so I can finally discover what color her panties were in The Color of Her Panties which is where I stopped reading them because I couldn't be seen reading a book called The Color of Her Panties in high school! At least not if I wanted to get laid in high school! Not that I ever got laid in high school! But that certainly wouldn't have helped! Or maybe it would have? I bet some horny Xanth loving nerd girl would have totally been all, "Oh, you're into panties, are you?" Then I would have learned what finger banging was!

Letters to Me!

Anonymous Writes: (In response to me telling him, "You leave the worst comments! I can't believe how badly you misunderstand Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea!") What's to misunderstand? It still doesn't change the fact about Lobo becoming the very thing he was supposed to condemn even before The New 52. Even worse, you are a reviewer who lets mediocre/below mediocre crap like the Rebirth Justice League of America get a pass all because it features a character you like.

My Reply: Oh man, Cullen Bunn...I mean Anonymous! You're so close to understanding the blog! But you're unable to realize the joke is the thing you describe because you always have to be the smartest guy in the room, don't you? I rarely quote people (unless I'm misquoting Shakespeare and attributing the quote to Yogi Bear) but I think this calls for a Patton Oswalt quote: "You will miss everything cool and die angry."

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KB Writes: (In response to me writing, "Most Americans think Bon Jovi was a huge punchline to the joke of '80s rock music.") 'Lost Highway' is my go-to song when it feels like life has stopped shitting on me and I can finally breathe again. I'm not necessarily about Bon Jovi all the time, but he has his moments.

My Reply: I don't know that song. I guess I don't know much Bon Jovi after Slippery When Wet. But I should rectify that because I know why Bon Jovi has been so successful for so long. You've seen his smile, right? That smile is his music. Sure, some of his songs shouldn't be sung with that smile. But deep down, we all love Bon Jovi because you know he's going to treat you like his best friend even if he just met you. Unless you just fucked his wife or daughter or Richie, of course. Then he'll probably be all, "Say goodbye to yesterday, bitch!" After which he'll get his ass kicked by you because — let's face it — we all know Jovi can't fight.

I found it interesting but not surprising that under the Wikipedia entry for Jovi's album, "Lost Highway," they listed his genre as "country rock." I bet my fifteen year old self would have been all, "You take that back! Jovi don't country rock! Jovi just rocks! 'Love is a social disease yeah yeah yeah!'" Then whoever just told my fifteen year old self that Jovi was country would be all, "Dude. Stop headbanging in my face. Your leather fringes almost put my eye out." But my forty-six year old self is all, "Oh yeah. I guess Jovi found his true calling after the Young Guns II soundtrack. Totally country rock."

What I'm trying to say is that I'd probably suck Jon's dick if he asked. Just to see that smile.

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KB Writes: (In response to me writing, "We also learn how Lister became a crew member and that his breaking of quarantine by smuggling the cat on board was done on purpose so he could be in stasis for the entire trip back to Earth.") Blasphemy! Cloister the Stupid was trying to protect The Holy Mother Frankenstein, not exploit her and possibly leave her to starve. What are you, one of the orange-hat wearers?"

My Reply: He didn't leave her to starve! He made sure she'd be locked safely away in the ventilation system where nobody would find her and where she'd have plenty of opportunities for stealing food from cargo. And that's not my orange-hat wearing speculation. It's all written down in perfectly serviceable smells in the holy book, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers. You should try not to be so brainwashed.

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KB Writes: (In response to me writing, "I hate when people equate Jesus Christ Superstar with Godspell.") Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not equating the two at all! JCS good, GS bad. "Godspell" is way too precious and is an excuse for theater majors to embarrass themselves in a setting where nobody's allowed to mock them because that would be blasphemy. (And yet Jesus as a clown is neither blasphemy nor grounds for action from the Siegel and Shuster estates.)

My Reply: This is why I hate communicating on the Internet and why I have a rule of only responding to comments on my blog once (occasionally twice, if I'm feeling sassy and up to the mind-numbing drain of a discussion with an absolute moron (not that you, KB, are a moron! At least not an absolute one!)). Don't get ME wrong! I never thought you were equating Jesus Christ Superstar with Godspell! How could this conversation gone so far off the rails?!

Anyway, I do like your definition of Godspell.

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KB Writes: Boy wouldn't Superman feel stupid if he'd wiped out his powers "just in case", and then a meteor wiped out Metropolis.

My Reply: I guess that's why he never takes Batman seriously when Batman is all, "You're too powerful. You should cancel yourself." Superman is smart!

This doesn't remind me at all but I'm terrible at segues, I had a dream last week where my high school English teacher, Mr. Borror, was holding a class where we were discussing Jesus Christ Superstar and some poems I can't remember (Dammit! If I were better at segues, I would have introduced this during the replies about Jesus Christ Superstar! So dumb!). One of the people in the class was you, KB. I was really terrible at explicating the poem and couldn't even, in the dream, remember what it was about. So instead I decided to say some nice things about Mr. Borror and the people in the class. I said this about you, KB: "He's said some really sweet things in his emails." So there you go! Even my subconscious likes you! I think that means we're real boys now! I mean real friends!

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Anyway, that's all for now! I can't remember my sign off. I'm terrible at consistency. I think it had something to do with calling everybody twats or losers or something. Bye!