Radiant Comics

As I was painting the other day I had the TV on. I had my own little film noir festival: “The Maltese Falcon”, “Double Indemnity”, and “The Wrong Man”. As is my habit I mostly listened to them. After all I can’t paint and watch a movie at the same time. I have seen all of these movies before so there are no real surprises but my ear caught something this time that I had not noticed before. It was a phrase used in “The Maltese Falcon” and then repeated in “Double Indemnity”. One character looks at another who is quite disheveled and says, “You look all in”. Having seen both movies before I certainly heard the phrase but never noticed it.

With Texas Hold ‘Em poker being played on TV all of the time I’ve heard the phrase “all in” a million times in the last year or two. It is when a player bets all the chips he has left on a single hand. The phrase pops up all the time in pop culture now to signify that a person is committed one hundred percent. That is probably why I payed attention when I heard something similar in these two movies. Yet the meaning was quite different.

A quick internet search of the phrase “You look all in” brings up a bunch of books in which the phrase is used. Some are period pieces and some are contemporary. Is it really that common? Are people saying it all the time but just not around me? Is it regional and I’m not in that region? Was it common in the 40s and 50s but not now? Where does the phrase come from? You look all in. All in what?

One of my favorite regional phrases I heard when I was a freshman in college back in the fall of 1984. I was going to school in Sullivan County NY and a lot of the students were from the Binghamton area. I began to notice a strange phrase popping up. It was in any normal situation where you agree with some one. The first person says, “I like chocolate” and the second replies, “So do I”. That is unless you come from ol’ Bingy. Then instead of saying “So do I” you say “So don’t I”.

This is how the conversation went:
Me: “I like chocolate”.
Him: “So don’t I”
Me not understanding: “You don’t like chocolate”?
Him not understanding: “What do you mean? I like chocolate”.
Me: “But you just said ‘So don’t I'”.
Him: “Yeah, so don’t I”.

It was like the old “Who’s on first routine”. To his ear “So do I” and “So don’t I” were they exact same thing. I even repeated both phrases and to him there was no distinction between them. I also heard several other people from the Binghamton area say the same thing. But not all of them. The English language is a funny thing.

Thanks to the joys of the internet search (I refuse to use Google as a verb I don’t want my speech to be branded) I looked up that funny phrase and found it is native to around Boston and Central NY. No one seems to know exactly why.

I was reading my copy of The Teen Titans Archive #1 when I can across that lovely panel. Let me give you the story. The Titans want to get on the good side of a gang of teenage dropouts so they disguise themselves and befriend the gang so they can kick the asses of another rival gang and then reveal themselves to the original gang and get some info. Pretty complicated but it is the disguises that kill me.

On the right is Aqualad. He costume has no mask so he didn’t bother to wear one to disguise himself? Huh? His disguise is no disguise? They either ran out of masks or said, “Eh, no one knows who you are anyway.”

Second from the right is Wondergirl. Her costume also has no mask so she doesn’t disguise her face but she does wear a blond wig. I guess she expects people to say, “Wow, is that Wondergirl? No Wondergirl in not blonde. It must be some one else kicking our buts with her super strength.”

The two on the right are the real geniuses. Kid Flash and Robin. Both of their costumes have masks. No one would recognize their actual faces and they could just wear no mask at all and be incognito but that might blow their secret identities. So what to they do? They wear full face masks over their masks that they already have on. That way they can have a reveal and still be masked. Briliiant. The Sixties could really give us some absurd comics.

I am a fan of cereal. Not so much the sugar cereals but they make good desserts. Cheerios and Wheaties are my favorites. Shredded wheat is good too and I like the sugar version, Frosted Mini Wheats, as a snack. But this week I ran into the single worst cereal ever: Strawberry Frosted Mini Wheats. They have been putting out some flavored FMW for a little while now. I tried the Vanilla Creme ones and they were okay. So the strawberry ones were on sale so I gave them a try. The flavor wasn’t too bad: that artificial strawberry taste we all know. But then I noticed something odd. Whatever chemical flavoring they used was filling up my sinuses. It was like chemical warfare from my cereal. It was mildly painful and made it tough to breath through my nose. Absolutely crazy but stay away from the strawberry FMW. You’ve been warned.

I just watched the much praised movie “Crash” that came out last year. It was okay. Parts of it were really good but the lesson I learned from it was that everyone in L.A. is a bigoted, selfish, asshole, jerk, son of a bitch. And they weren’t all that interesting being that they were all the same. Not one person in the movie would I want to hang out with.

I also just discovered ACEO or Art Card Editions and Originals. That’s where artists make baseball card size paintings and trade them or sell them for a tenner or so. Pass art out to the masses. I’ve always liked to make small paintings as well as large. Now I need someone to trade with.

Apples, I need some more apples. That is my last thought for the day.

I was an X-Files fan. But the X-Files was one of those shows that ended so badly that I forgot it used to be a good show. For the first time in a decade I am watching season one. It is entertaining me as I ride the boring stationary bike (a real bike ride is so much more fun).

Not only had I forgotten how good a show it was but I think it is a better show the second time around. That is because the I never liked the big over all alien conspiracy part of the show. I found it impossible to pay attention to. The problem with big conspiracy shows is that they can’t actually leave enough clues so for the viewer to figure out what is going on. They want the show to keep going on and on because it is their job to make TV shows. So in the X-Files there were layer upon layer of clues and false clues and whatever they felt like writing in. My brain just turned off during the conspiracy stuff and turned back on for the monster of the week adventure part.

Producers of shows like this going back to Kolchak The Night Stalker have always said, “Well we didn’t want to turn it into a ‘Monster of the Week” show. To which I have always asked (since the interviewer never does), “Why not?”. If you are going to do a show about monsters, aliens and things that go bump in the night it seems logical to me to have a monster every week. What is the point of a monster hunting show with no monsters? I don’t give a crap about a monster hunter’s personal life. I don’t care if they feel good or bad about hunting monsters. I just want a good story told well. But anyway, back to the X-files.

A funny thing happened around season six or so; (my memory is fuzzy but it was after that bad movie they made) they revealed the conspiracy. It was anti-climatic at that point being that I hadn’t cared about the conspiracy in years but now in watching season one over again I don’t have to ignore those parts. Knowing the answer I can now appreciate that part of the story line and enjoy trying to figure out which clues were real and which weren’t. And trying to tell if the writers even knew. Knowing the answer actually helps the show. It doesn’t detract from it. So check out the X-Files again and you will be pleasantly surprised that it holds up well.

P.S. “Lost” is a show that is currently like the X-Files was. It is a good show but they will never give anyone enough clues to figure out what is really going on (if the writers even know) because then people will stop watching it. As Josh Whedon said, “TV is about questions; Movies are about answers.” And “Supernatural” is a good monster of the week show.

Well I tried. I worked up my sense of childish wonder and planned on going to my first comic con in about six or seven years. I had been getting e-mails from WizardWorld (though their name isn’t actually on the con) for about a month to buy advance tickets but I knew better than that. I don’t know how it is with comic cons around the country but my experience with the ones in NYC is that they will take your money and run. No advance tickets for me because too many things can go wrong (and have) and they will already have your money. Plus I still would have to pick up my tickets at the box office and have to wait in line to get them.

My buddy John came down from the northlands to pick me up and we drove into the big city. An uneventful drive and a price jacked parking lot latter we were hitting the Javitz Center. The show started at 11:00 AM and it was 1:00 PM when we arrived. There was a long line of people on the outside of the Center but about 6 out of 10 of them were female so we knew that couldn’t be the comic con line. John asked a woman with a comic con badge where the line was. That is when we found out that the fire marshal threatened to close them down and there were no more tickets being sold for that day. Wonderful.

This wasn’t even my first fire marshal comic con closing. Back in the early 90’s when they held conventions at one of those big NYC hotels I was at two in a row that the marshals shut down. But I was already inside those ones. I’m not sure if the fire marshal closings were what directly lead to the end of the big NYC comic cons but that is what I heard back in the day. It couldn’t have helped anyway.

We walked aimlessly away from the Javitz Center and got on the blower and tell our friend Ed what had happened. He was supposed to meet us at the con. Ed had purchased his ticket earlier that week at Midtown comics and was anxious to see if they would let him in.

For consolation John and I headed off to a nearby comic shop; Jim Hanley’s Universe. So did a lot of people who couldn’t get into the con because they were crowded and we stayed only briefly.

Next we wandered midtown until we hit the NY public library (the famous one with the lions out front) and saw they had a show of maps. The map show was good. It was free too.

Then we waited for Ed. As disappointed as John and I were with the day Ed was even more so. He had already paid for his $25 ticket. He met us on the library steps and told us how they wouldn’t let him in nor would they give him his money back. He was told it was a five hour wait to get in. This was at 1:30 PM for a show that ended at 7:00 PM. Do the math. They were willing to take his ticket and mail him a refund but this is NYC the rip off capital of the country so he wasn’t falling for that one. Midtown Comics, the place he purchased the ticket from, was Ed’s next destination. They just didn’t care there either. 25 bucks down the crapper.

The pain didn’t end there. We decided to go see a movie. There was nothing out that any of us really wanted to see so we just picked one starting soon. I don’t go to the movies very often so this might not be that bold a statement but it was the worst movie I have ever sat through in a theatre. It was “The New World” and it was long, boring, pointless and ugly. Stay away. I came out of there with a headache.

To end on a positive note I had some good pizza afterwards. Of course that was after I got home so there was no reason to actually hit NYC that day. Uh-oh, I think I lost my positive note. Maybe I’ll try again in 6 or 7 more years.

Would Superman’s preference for women with the initials LL (Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lori Lemaris) be considered a fetish? Does he go to websites dedicated to LL girls? Is he just not attracted to women without those initials? Does love at first sight exist for him or is it love at first learning her name? Chime in.