Spamjacked Again

Hey all, if you receive a zipped file from the kfmonkey@gmail.com address anytime in the next day, do NOT open it. Delete it straight away. I noticed hijinks and some unfamiliar addresses dumped into my contact list. I've changed the password, etc. But eyes open.

Blue Beetle Q&A

First off, Majiksthe, I'm flattered, but when I did stand-up I was nowhere in Colbert's league or style -- hell, it was nothing like my comedic writing on this blog. I didn't externalize anger well. I'm much angrier now. DJ McCarthey, he did anger well. I saw him make hecklers cry. Hell, I once saw him threaten to put a cigarette out in the eye of a five year old. To be fair, the kid really had it coming.

Okay, now that we're two in, gone to a third printing on #1 and a second printing on #2 and we can finally drop the whole Ted Kord thing, I thought it would be a good time to answer a few questions in the email bag and forums. Let's dig in:

When's Ted Kord coming back?

Jesus.

So Jaime was gone for a whole year?

Yes. The timetable is roughly:

-- Jaime finds scarab.
-- That night, Scarab grafts itself to Jaime's spine.
-- Jaime has a bad day seeing things, meets Eyeless Chick (named Probe)
-- The next day, Damper and Probe scan Jaime; Probe drops from "scarab feedback"
-- The Posse goes to kick Jaime's ass.
--The Armor manifests, completely stunning/dazing Jaime within and kicking the Posse's ass.
-- Jaime, exhausted from his first transformation and barely remembering any of it, collapses into bed.
-- That night, Booster Gold shows up and "recruits" Jaime with promises of Jesus Juice, pornography, and the DNS for the webcam in the Birds of Prey sauna.
-- Uncle Booster takes him to the Batcave. At the arrival of another lanky teenager in Batman's life, Tim Drake goes into a sulk.
-- Everybody zips off into space. The Scarab recognizes what a threat Brother Eye is and decides to help out. Then, for some unknown reason (although it seems concerned about the Green Lanterns), the Scarab makes Jaime "disappear."
-- ONE YEAR LATER Jaime crash-lands in the desert near home. Guy Gardner detects his presence and is almost overwhlemed by the hostility of his Ring's reaction. Guy eventually calms down and buggers off.
-- With the help of a Friendly Redneck, Jaime reaches home -- to discover that he has, indeed, been gone for a year.

Wow, that is t3h suck for Jaime.

Annnnnd the last thing Jaime remembers is fading out of view in Infinite Crisis ... then whammo, back on Earth. Would you feel abandoned by the underwear-perverts who hauled you into space and then apparently forgot about you? Well, Jaime does. This will create issues with the rest of the DCU.

Why did Guy Gardner freak out at Blue Beetle, and why did the other Green Lanterns react all edgy but not attack him?

Remember, the Rings' powers are manifestations of the Lanterns' will and therefore their personalities and even their emotional states. Hal and Stewart have different levels of willpower, and different emotional relationships with the old Blue Beetle. Guy comes back to Earth after a year, he's still wracked about Ted, and his willpower's ... different. The Rings reacted to BB, and each guy was in a different state of vulnerability at he time.

Why do the Rings react to the Scarab? Boy that's a good question. I hope Giffen tells me before it becomes the focus for a huge crossover event and we have to wing it.

So Blue Beetle will be part of a huge crossover soon?

No, that's one of the reasons we're in El Paso. In order to read Blue Beetle you have to be passingly familiar with the rest of the DC Universe, but don't need to read any of the other books. The entire timetable up top is just as effectively: "Jaime found a rock. It was a magic scarab that gave him super-powers. He disappeared into Space for a while fighting with other superheroes, and now he's back with no idea of how to handle any of it." You'll figure out the rest as you go.

I like the friends and family. Whe are you going to start killing them?

Bad things will happen. So will good things. But be assured, family and friends will be around for a long time. Most of them.

Nextwave rocks!

I know.

I don't like the Posse from #2 as the first villains in the Rogue's Gallery!

You fell for that? Keep reading.

Was that fat dude's super-power acid sweat?

Blame Giff. He spends all day coming up with bodily-fluid oriented meta-powers. Sometimes, he sends me e-mails that make the Baby Jesus cry.

How come the Scarab didn't do that for Dan Garrett and Ted Kord?

Keeeeeep reading. And it did for Dan Garrett ... kinda.

Is Jaime gay?

No. He watched a lot of Project Runway, but it was mostly because his Mom was hooked and he thought the craftmanship going into the clothier trade was fascinating. No shame in that.

That last line of #2 "It's ONE YEAR LATER". That sucked.

Artistic license. Quit your bitching. That's classic Kirby-style declamation there, mister.

I think Jaime should join the Teen Titans!

That's nice, but Jaime has to go to school. He'd like to go to college. If he hung out at the Teen Titans headquarters, he would be Captain Buzzkill, with the studying and the telling Deathstroke's daughter the whole "Let's just be friends" speech and the like. Seriously, are those kids going to vocational school or anything like that? Learn a trade.

Is Jaime's Dad walking with a cane now?

Good catch. Yes. A lot can happen in a year.

That language the Scarab talks in: is that Atlantean?

... Suuuuuuure. If that makes you happy. But it's not relevant. (Let Geoff Johns deal with tying up those loose ends that ten years from now.)

Did Jaime age in that year? Does he have scarabs in places he didn't have scarabs before?

No, he did not age. He did, however ... change.

Why El Paso?

Their Chamber of Commerce made a helluva presentation. A Duke Cunningham style presentation, if you catch my drift.

Seriously, if you're set in Gotham or Metropolis, you have a lot of baggage to deal with. El Paso is cool, it's multi-ethnic (and I'm sorry if you think we're pandering, but I for one am sick of the superhero universe still being made up of clones of the 1940's Protestant white dudes. It's the 21st Century, suck it up. See here for further thoughts), it has some interesting geographic quirks ... watch, El Paso will soon be the cool alternative DCU hang-out spot. Fire will be buying a little Sedona-like cottage there. Nobody cares about your "friendship" with Ice in El Paso.

I like the cliff-hanger style endings.

Good. That is Keith's rule. "Every issue, a fight and a whammy."

I hate, HATE the flashback structure!! You think you're soooo cool, and it's PRETENTIOUS!!!!

It is indeed avant-garde. I personally have only seen it used successfully in the French indie hit LOST, appearing every week on primetime television watched and enjoyed by 15 million viewers. Seriously, let it go.

That said, the flashbacks are gone as of issue #3. Back to your linear narrative, prole.

What's coming up?

In #3, Jaime deals with the fallout from his sudden disappearance and year-long absence, oblivious that somebody has come to town on the trail of "... blue."

For #4, Jaime begins asking a lot of the same questions the readers are. He has a chat with a representative of the mainstream DCU. It does not go well. Somebody decides to "test" Jaime. That goes less well.

In #5, the Phantom Stranger swings by, just in time to witness Jaime's introduction to the crime world in his little corner of the DCU -- unaware that these events are tied into the troubles he's already experienced in previous issues.

In #6, Jaime uses his brain, puts the pieces together, decides to help some unlikely new friends and learns the value of a secret identity.

From then on, we're off on the extended, multi-year arc Giffen has already mapped out. Or at least, he claims he's mapped it out. When he says that Joan Hilty stops crying for a while, so I'm not going to stop him.

Are these questions real?

They are now. They have been observed, and therefore their probability sphere has collapsed into a single reality.

I don't get that.

Neither do I, to tell you the truth. Come to Earth-2 Comics on Free Comic Book Day, get your books signed by myself and the BOOM! folk, and we'll puzzle it out.

Oh, and ask something interesting in the comments, and I'll answer in an edited version of this post.

(UPDATE -- all joking aside, those are the real questions in the mailag, including the gay one. And the flashback hate mail. The Nextwave bit was tagged on to one of the other questions, but I consider it fair game)

Silent Hill

Huh. Fulci. I'll be damned.

Why Tell the Jokes?

So, you've got a bunch of responses saying that either a.) Colbert bombed or b.) Colbert "crossed the line." (Thanks Fox!)

A quick explanation is in order. At some point -- a crucial point in a young comic's life -- one realizes that the response of the audience just doesn't matter. I am exaggerating only slightly. But somewhere out there on the road you have that one miserable show, using all the material you used for every other show, and you realize that audience feedback is critically important, but it is not defining. A MONTH of bad shows is a different animal altogether, but I trust you see my point.

In various circumstances as a road comic, I have seen every comic you can imagine, at some point or another, suck it. Hard. Seinfeld, Leno, Belzer, Ellen*, Ray Romano, pick 'em. Sometimes you just don't gel with an audience, but at that point you've been doing it long enough not to suddenly think the five years of good shows were somehow flukes.

But I have seen plenty of people "bomb" who left me breathless with the genius of their writing. Larry David, who a fair number of even the conservative culture mavens love, was notorious for his spellbinding nightclub routines that comics standing in the back of the room marvelled at but audiences hated. Garry Shandling famously worked open-mike nights for something like SEVEN YEARS before he was able to meld his brilliant writing with something audiences could relate to.

If Colbert "bombed", it was because the audience didn't like him. And you know what -- they WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO. We have been treated to toothless feel-good comedy for so long, we have forgotten what the court jester's job was: he was the only guy who could mock the King. And, seeing as we now have a President who acts like a King, it's only fitting that Colbert revive the tradition in its truest form. If I remember correctly, the toady court followers were also fair game for the Jester, and we could hardly call the modern media anything less these days, can we?

As for Colbert crossing the line -- how? Did he make remarks about the President's wife? About his children? His sex life? His draft dodging, his drinking and drug use before he found the Lord? No. Every joke used a well-known fact of public-record. Does anyone deny the poll numbers cited? Does anyone deny that the government response to previous crisises have been deficient? Does anyone deny that Administration officials outed Valerie Plame (hell, even the Administration officials now have to rely on he idea it was accidental)? Does anyone deny that the Administration has actively opposed global warming discussions? Listen -- if the President could do a long routine about not finding WMD's and laughing about it, while US soldiers died in the resultant war ... then to be frank I think he set the bar. Oddly, I think that if Colbert had done the routine the President did a couple years ago, THAT would have been crossing the line for me.

If his sin was incivility, then what the audience/bookers were looking for wasn't comedy. Comedy is by its nature uncivil. Comedy is, in both linguistic structure and overall psychological impact, hostile. Sometimes overtly, often not. But there is no such thing as a joke structured like: "You know what makes me happy? Yeah, that same thing that makes everybody else happy. (sigh)" There is no laugh there.

I hate to play into the stereotype of all comics being angry, but at the very least we are all in some small way sociopathic. We do not process emotions and emotional context like other people. At the same time some civilized part of me was horrified by the first 9/11 joke I heard, some other part of my brain was impressed by its structure and transgressive nature. I'm not particularly pround of that, but it was as reflexive as a musician hearing a song he hates, but instinctively picking out what key it's in.

I told a United 93/RV joke today. The part of my brain my parents raised smacked me in the back of the head. The part of me that was on the road for 12 years quietly regretted that I could only ever say it in the presence of other comedians, because it was such a clean little bit of construction. You may not have to be angry to be a comic -- but to varying degrees you do have to stop being bound by 99.99999% of the population's definition of "polite."

All comedy is based on revealing a truth, sometimes so minor as to seem inconsequential, but a generally unobserved truth nonetheless. Sometimes the truth is a monstrous truth -- and many times comics shy away from that monstrous truth, unwilling to deal with the fallout from being its bearer. But the ones who embrace that mission -- Bruce, Carlin, Richard goddam Pryor, Bill Hicks ("Your child is not special", jesus the stones that took) -- they transcend.

One of the insanely annoying phrases lefties overuse is "Speaking truth to power." Well, kids, you know what? Standing three feet from the most powerful man in the world and poking fun at his public foibles, telling your audience that they are cowards by doing nothing more than pointing out the truth of their actions -- THAT'S speaking truth to power. Mutter to yourselves all you want, civilians. Colbert, that night, became one of the stories comics will trade for literally decades to come. Young comics will learn it from old comics. Audiences come and go. We honor our own.

"Poor Vaughn Meader", bitches. Poor. Vaughn. Meader.








* Ellen was, as a road comic, one of the best joke writers of the last thirty years. Seriously, her socio-political fame has completely eclipsed that legacy. She was technically ... blinding.