He Sees You When You're Sleeping...

He came, soaring gracefully, from the North...an almost imperceptible blur of blue and scarlet knifing through the brisk winter's air.

A child, being half-dragged and half-carried by his preoccupied mother, spied the fleeting blur as it whizzed past a crowded shopping mall parking lot. "Mama!" he cried incredulously scanning the heavens for another glimpse of the bright night traveler. "Didja see him?!?"

"See who?" The boy’s mother said absently as she fumbled around in her purse for her car keys.

"I saw him! Up there!" The boy said, wide-eyed and giddy, pointing to the sky.

His mother opened the car door and stuffed her purchases into the back seat. "That's nice, honey," she said as she lifted him into the passenger seat and secured him with the seat belt. "You can tell me all about it later."

She went around and got into the driver's seat. She started the engine and looked back for a chance to pull out. "Right now we've got to hurry home and get everything ready for the big day..."

The boy sighed dejectedly. "Okay, Mama. But I really did see him...flying over the city..."

The woman, warmed by a sudden realization, smiled. "Oh..." She turned and took his face gently into her hands. "Well of course you saw him flying over the city, Michael...it is Christmas Eve after all and that's exactly where he belongs on this night of nights."

She kissed his forehead and then turned back to drive. Michael smiled and pressed his face to the window searching the dark skies for the traveler as the car pulled out into traffic for the short ride to the warmth of home.

The blur came to rest upon the top of the tallest building in the city. The blur became a man...a tall and powerful man...his burnished red boots softly crunching the fresh snow on the roof.

He looked out over the festive, dancing lights of the city...of his city. (He paused and smiled at that thought knowing full well that all the cities of the fragile blue Earth were his cities...so many responsibilities, all freely accepted.)

His kind, knowing eyes grew softly opaque and, randomly, the lives of some of the citizens of the city were fleetingly known to him: shoppers scurrying through the stores one final time...parents cursing and laughing and cursing again as they struggle to assemble magical wonders with only perseverance and arcane instructions to guide them...children sleeping and trying to sleep and pretending to sleep with visions of reindeer dancing in their minds...the faithful gathered in the myriad houses of God reaffirming their continuing gratitude for His gifts.

He saw them all...heard them all...discreetly glancing past each life but feeling that much more content and reassured for having shared even a fleeting instant with each of them.

The twinkle returned to his eyes as his field of vision contracted. It was a good night, he thought, a soft and peaceful night.

His thoughts drifted to his mother...the warm and wise woman who had taken an orphaned child as her own and raised him with all the love her abundant heart had to give. She was, he was certain, fussing with pies or some such at that very moment.

A glance across the miles confirmed this almost instantly. His father and his wife were trimming the stately tree in the living room...his father was telling a story with uncustomary animation (no doubt an embarrassing tale from his son's childhood) and his lady love was laughing that magical laugh of hers.

The crowning star was waiting patiently in its padded box for the tall man's arrival (that he would place the star was lifelong tradition...his father would have it no other way.)

The tall man smiled and drew a measure of bracing air into his mighty lungs. And then, with nary an afterthought, he leapt boldly into the night, his great scarlet cloak billowing gracefully behind him. He cruised slowly, silently, around the city once more chuckling warmly whenever the inevitable "Look! Up in the sky!" reached his all-hearing ears.

"Merry Christmas, Metropolis," he murmured affectionately as he turned towards the west and flew, straight and true, to the comforting warmth and love of his boyhood home and another blessed Christmas with the most important people in his life.

(for Kal)

The Captain and the Kid

Okay, I am here to confess that when I was a boy I played with dolls. Well actually I only played with one doll (I’d like to call it an “action figure” but that term hadn’t yet come into vogue back in long ago youth) and that doll was, of course, Captain Action.

G.I. Joe never interested me but I loved the idea of Captain Action the first time I saw a commercial on one long lost Saturday morning. The good Captain was not only a hero in his own right but he could become other heroes…Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, Aquaman, Captain America, Flash Gordon…simply by switching into different costumes and masks (all sold separately, of course.)

I can only remember two times in my childhood where I actively hounded my poor mother for a specific Christmas gift (I would hint strongly at other times…) once was in my teen years when I just had to have the four-LP set of Chicago at Carnegie Hall (Chicago was a relatively cool band before they let Peter Cetera turn them into the schmaltz factory they were during the 80’s) and the other time was when I was 10 and I just had to have Captain Action.

Mom came through.

I got the main Captain doll…sweet!...and the Superman and Aquaman accessory costumes and I was one happy camper. Never got Action Boy…he seemed a bit lame to me for some reason…but I loved the Captain.

I even bought the 5-issue Captain Action comic book series that DC put out (great Gil Kane and Wally Wood art with stories by Jim Shooter…I still have them, yellowed and dog-eared, in a box somewhere in the garage) though the adventures I came up with on my own seemed a hundred times more interesting.

I’m not sure why I thought of Captain Action today but the memory still warms the imaginative little boy who still dwells somewhere deep inside the cynically optimistic soul of the old man I am today :-)

O Captain, My Captain?

This then is the new Captain America. He doesn't debut until January's Captain America #34 so we won't be sure who is in this shiny uniform (designed by Alex Ross) until then. Bucky Barnes...the Winter Soldier...seems the most likely candidate but we shall see.

The pistol and the knife make it unlikely that it is a resurrected Steve Rogers in the red, white, and blue (and black) togs but, again, we shall see.

Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting have made Captain America an enormously entertaining book even after they killed off the title character (the post-death cast...including The Winter Soldier, The Falcon, Sharon Carter, the Black Widow, Tony Stark, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury...has picked up the slack admirably) so I'm in for the long haul (though I am still hoping and expecting that Steve Rogers will return to the book and the uniform at some point in the future.)

...instant karma's gonna get you, gonna knock you about the head...

Sometimes I’m a petty, petty man.

Ever since they firmly established Iron Man as the deacon of super-dickery during Civil War (yes, I know that ol’ Tony has been campaigning for that title for a long time but his manipulative, duplicitous, and smug actions during CW sealed the deal for him in my mind) I’ve been waiting for him to get a little karma slapped upside his arrogant head.

Asked and answered :-) First, he had his ass handed to him by the Hulk and now (I’m not sure where the new Thor series falls in regards to World War Hulk continuity) he got himself a serious beat down from an unamused thunder god in Thor #3 (our recently revived pal Thor apparently not being at all happy that Stark stole his genetic material and used it to co-create the Thor clone that killed Goliath…go figure.)

I presume that Marvel will at some point set about to rehabilitate the image of the comic book Iron Man/Tony Stark (especially with the movie coming out next year)…though they’ll have a long way to go to get me to see the character as likeable again…but for now I’m jazzed to see Shellhead get punked as hard and as often as possible.

Like I said, sometimes I’m a petty, petty man :-)

Gonna Wait 'til the Midnight(er) Hour...

I’m of the opinion that had The Authority ended when Warren Ellis decided to leave it would be regarded with the reverence given to super-hero comics like Watchmen. It was an absurdly over-the-top, cheeky, cynical, audacious, and fun send up of the conventions of super-hero groups with the team…all ridiculously powerful and full of hubris and snappy quips…battling a mad scientist with an army of supermen, an invasion from another dimension, and, ultimately, “God”. The 12 issues of The Authority (following the lead-in from the old Stormwatch series) were pure, almost perfect pop insanity.

But The Authority was a hot commodity at the time and DC/Wildstorm was not going to let it just go after Ellis left. Unfortunately, every writer who has followed has beaten the concept to death, making The Authority pedestrian and…worst of all…dull. But then once you’ve beaten “God” how much juice can you get from smacking around analogues of the Avengers or even becoming temporary totalitarian rulers of the world?

Of all of the Authority members the one who I found most dull was the Midnighter who became a surly joke…the gay (the seemingly insecure writers after Ellis seemed to need to keep that at the fore as one of his most important character traits…Ellis presented the relationship between the Midnighter and Apollo with respectful subtlety while the writers who followed him treated it with self-conscious oafishness which included every opponent the Authority faced firing off homophobic jibes) Batman/Punisher analogue who likes hurting people and who can kill you in one zillion ways before you can blink an eyelid (or something like that.)

I gave up on The Authority a while back so I was kinda of surprised when I decided to give the Midnighter solo series a try. But I’m glad I did. In the first few issues…a odd, amusing time-travel story involving an attempt to assassinate Hitler…Garth Ennis brought some much needed humanity, humor, and reflection to the character.

Keith Giffen has taken up the reins as the new regular writer starting with issue #10 where a victim was so afraid of the Midnighter that she threw herself out of a window. “You killed God”, the girl said after the Midnighter had brutally dispatched her captors. The Midnighter, shaken to his core, reflected on what he was and then he sat off a mission to discover the man he used to be.

Giffen gives him an assistant to play off and delves into his prickly relationship with his adoptive daughter before sending the Midnighter off to a seemingly normal…but frighteningly abnormal…town that may or may not be where he came from before being brainwashed and turned into a killing machine. At the same time, Giffen doesn’t soft-pedal what the character is as evidenced by his brusque dispatching of a computer nerd/pedophile he drafts to help him in his quest to rediscover his original identity.

In his first two issues, Giffen makes the Midnighter more interesting than he’s been in quite a while while not scrimping on the action. The book is further enhanced by the sterling storytelling of artist Chris Sprouse (in #10) and ChrisCross (in #11).

Midnighter is a comic worth checking out…and who’da thought that :-)

Benny Goodman - All The Cats Join In

Cool tune and cute animation.

A Comicbook Orange: Green Lantern, Thor, Olivier Copiel