17 December 1997: Earth's Mightiest Heroes

Wednesday, 17 December 1997:

Earth's Mightiest Heroes

All I can say about the "Hungarian" style of naming variables in a computer program is: Why did we ever invent type-checking compilers if we're going to force programmers to duplicate that effort with extra keystrokes?

I did indeed finish Inherit The Stars last night. Fun book, but a little less substantive than I'd remembered. I then had a dream during the night involving being on a huge starship which crashed, and having to try to get it working again; surely due to the influence of the book. Next up is George R. R. Martin's The Armageddon Rag.

Tonight's comic book haul was pretty neat, unexpectedly so. A big part of the reason is that Marvel Comics has gotten a little sense in them and hired some honest-to-gosh writers and artists to do some of their re-launched titles. I talked about Iron Man last week; this week featured the second issue of Captain America, which is sharply written by Mark Waid with a sense of grim humor. I'm not the biggest fan of Ron Garvey's art, but at least he has a good sense of anatomy and movement, which is more than I can say for many Marvel artists these days.

Kurt Busiek is writing both Iron Man and The Avengers, the latter of which debuted this week with very, very nice art by George Perez (hope he sticks with it for a while!). Perez broke into comics on Avengers - about 20 years ago, I believe - and he still does "team titles" better than almost anyone. Busiek's story is a little cheesy, bringing back every living Avenger and sending them off on a desperate mission involving Thor's fellow gods, but I expect Busiek will find his groove soon enough. He's a good writer. Avengers is sort of like Justice League in that it needs to have a few of the heavy hitters around to really work. This issue focuses on the team's core members, and is the better for it.

Yes, it's so easy for me to fall back into the habit of being a superhero fanboy. Just give me something good, guys, and I'll buy it. Problem is there hasn't been much in the genre that's any good in this decade.

I also picked up the collection of Mike Grell's Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, which features lavish, gorgeous artwork, and helped spearhead the trend towards portraying heroes as humans rather than icons. It is, by turns, rough, humorous, gritty, amorous, frustrating, and noble. Worth buying.

The downside to tonight is that the hamburger meat I defrosted didn't fully defrost (nope, I don't own a microwave), so I was stuck for dinner. Being too lazy to cook something else, I resorted to yogurt and peanut butter (no, not together). But hey, if that's the worst thing that happened, then what am I complaining about?

My Christmas tree looks real nice, too!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)