A Joker wallpaper, 1440×900. You knew it was coming, right? Click to enlarge. The picture is from one of the high-definition trailers. I could have just grabbed the image, added a drop shadow, and called it a day, but that would have been lazy. Instead, I decided to torture myself by filling the letterbox with that rather fantastic shirt the Joker wears under his jacket. Man, that’s a great shirt. The individual patterns come to you courtesy of Squidfingers.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll start by outlining the handful couple of things I didn’t like about The Dark Knight. One, Christian Bale’s raspy Batman Voice drives me completely insane. It destroys Bale’s ability to imbue the costume with any emotion and makes him sound as if he’s constantly on the verge of coughing up his own larynx. Two, Bale apparently spent months in martial arts training, but as with almost all American films, the hand-to-hand combat is cut up too close and too fast for that effort to be appreciated. Three, there is no three.¹

The Dark Knight is one of the best movies I have ever seen, period. There’s no need to qualify it, to restrict that superlative to the comic book category, but I think it’s fair to say that in regards to the genre, The Dark Knight has changed everything. The bar has been raised unfathomably high. Ever since X-Men rescued us from the unwatchable Schumacher Batman sequels, every superhero movie has tried to emulate Bryan Singer’s take on the genre: respectful, slightly mature, and undeniably sleek. The Dark Knight breaks away from this and stomps into uncharted territory. It eschews Singer’s polish and instead maintains a sharper edge. It makes Iron Man look like a Saturday morning cartoon, and you have to wonder if the reviews would have been so positive if Iron Man had premiered after The Dark Knight.

With Ledger’s dark, daring portrayal of the Joker as its lens, The Dark Knight can offer a truly great examination of good, evil, and social justice. Heath Ledger’s Joker is a nonstop nightmare. He is a terrorist, anarchist, and sociopath who wins again and again because he recognizes that the world is chaos, and he knows how to manipulate that madness. This is the Joker presented in his most gritty, most believable form. Where Jack Nicholson was a caricature of suave, Ledger taps the charisma of Charles Manson. No poison-spitting flowers, no laughing gas, no razor-sharp playing cards. This Joker needs nothing but gasoline, dynamite, and human nature to play his games. He is completely horrifying and completely believable.

Which brings me, at last, to the real point of today’s post. Does Heath Ledger deserve an Oscar? I think the answer is yes. His performance in this movie is brilliant. Cliches like “scene stealing” do not do it justice. When he’s on screen, you can’t tear your eyes off him, and when he’s off screen, everyone’s still thinking about him.

Now, as far as Oscar odds go, he’s got a few marks against him. For one, he’s dead. There have only been seven posthumous Oscar nominations in the history of the awards, not all of them winners. If you want an eerily direct comparison, check out James Dean, who was nominated posthumously—twice, no less, for Giant and East of Eden—and lost on both counts. Secondly, this is a superhero movie, and they never seem to grab awards beyond the technical categories.² However, Ledger also has a few things in his favor. He was well-liked in the industry and was quite clearly a rising star, taken before his time. His performance in The Dark Knight is undeniably brilliant, at least as riveting as Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood and about ten times as frightening. Lastly, there was his performance in Brokeback Mountain. He lost the Oscar to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, but Ledger’s performance was certainly Oscar-worthy. A lot of people were angry about Brokeback Mountain’s loss of the Best Picture award to Crash, and this may be the Academy’s opportunity to make amends. It’s all politics anyway, right?

To close, I’d like to excerpt the New Yorker’s surprisingly negative review. David Denby says, “The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax.” Huh? Seriously, Dave, were you watching the same movie that I was? It’s all about contrast. The Joker’s anarchy versus Batman’s code of honor, love versus duty, Harvey Dent’s knight in shining armor image versus Batman’s Dark Knight, petty criminals versus real, destructive evil, chaos versus order. It’s all there, and it’s all done beautifully.

1. Although, as a 2.5, I can’t believe this movie is rated PG-13. Arbitrary. ∧
2. I’m not counting The Lord of the Rings because that’s “high fantasy,” and moreover, it is typically placed in the great cannon of mainstream modern literature, unlike most comic books, unfortunately. ∧

I saw both Hellboy II: The Golden Army and Hancock this week. Here’s the one-sentence review that magically applies to both of them: Man, I can’t wait for The Dark Night. Elaboration: I am so excited. Very upset by the prospect of not seeing the movie this weekend due to admittedly more important life events.

And, if you crave slightly more detail:

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

The Hellboy movies are in many ways typical summer popcorn affairs, but Guillermo Del Toro’s vision pushes the franchise just a little bit farther than you might expect. Mixed in with the big explosions and undead Nazis is a story about making your own path in life, birthrights be damned.¹ It’s not exactly the Illiad, but it’s not exactly Disaster Movie, either.

I really respect Guillermo Del Toro’s vision, and I mean that literally. He goes out of his way to use practical effects—actors in latex suits, elaborate puppets, and real sets—wherever possible, resorting to CGI only when absolutely necessary. This gives the world an earthy, solid feeling, something that pure CGI still can’t quite capture. Actors can really, actually look at the thing they’re supposed to be talking to, and it makes a noticeable difference in the performances. Hellboy’s “Death”, the strange, captivating creature pictured above, wouldn’t necessarily have looked better coming out of a computer, and on some Uncanny Valley level you know that the thing was physically in the room. It makes the scene that much scarier. Guillermo Del Toro is the kind of director who isn’t afraid to put a 58 year-old character actor in the lead role of a major summer movie. His attention to detail and artistic commitment push Hellboy just enough to be something better, something that stands out as worth seeing.

Hancock

In many ways the complete opposite of Hellboy. It’s got the Big Movie Star in the lead and flashy special effects, but it actively avoids trying too hard for anything. It’s not a bad movie, per se, just a surprisingly mundane one. You sit through it, basically approve of the experience, and then leave. The movie starts interestingly enough (I mean, come on, Hancock is basically a derelict Superman), but he starts turning over new leaves pretty quickly and things just sputter out from there. They can dress Will Smith in ratty clothes and a week’s worth of stubble and somehow he still feels like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. He’s too inherently clean-cut to pull off the film’s most interesting angle. Jason Bateman is awfully good in it, though. Give him a starring role already.

1. A completely unintentional pun that somehow survived three revisions of that paragraph, I swear. ∧

Like many a young dork of my generation, I owe a great debt to Nick at Nite. It allowed me to see all the best shows of yesteryear without having to watch the crap that undoubtedly surrounded them during their original broadcasts. Imagine some parallel universe where you get to watch House without suffering through the indignity of acknowledging The War at Home’s existence. That is what Nick at Nite offered me, and that is where I first saw the original Get Smart. I’m sure that if I watched it as an adult I’d be better able to appreciate the Cold War jabs, and probably marvel at a certain degree of sexism.² In my youth, however, I saw only the slapstick, the funny accents, and the insane gadgets (the Cone of Silence, a phone that is a shoe, and whatever else they came up with that week).

This is not to say that the show didn’t have its nuances. Get Smart taught me that there was such a thing as comedic timing, and that if you had it, if you were really precise about it and said something in exactly the right way at exactly the right moment, you could magically make normal into funny. Yes, Max would accidentally slam his head into a piece of exposed pipe just overhead, and that was cute, but it was his restrained suffering after the fact, the quiet struggle to hold it together and appear competent, that was truly funny. “I meant to do that!”

Suffice to say that Steve Carell is the perfect heir to Don Adams’s legacy. If you are cool enough to have been a fan of his since The Daily Show,³ you know that he is the sort of man who can make the word “okay” funny. No, really. There is a scene in Get Smart where he makes the word “okay” funny. You’ll know it when you see it.

In the wrong hands, this version of Maxwell Smart could have been boring, unlikable, and unfunny, but luckily, we have Steve Carell. I can’t picture anyone but Steve Carell in the lead role, to be honest. It’s not just the vague resemblance to Adams, which a lot of the weirder reviews point to with inexplicable disdain. It’s the attitude. It’s the perfect delivery and the tenderness and vulnerability that rest just below Maxwell Smart’s confident exterior.

As for the rest, Anne Hathaway, Alan Arkin, Dwayne Johnson, and Terence Stamp are all, you know, fine, but they’re really just props to move Carell along. My only real complaint is that, this being a summer flick, it inevitably comes down to a dramatic race to stop a nuclear bomb. I would have rather seen the climax take the form of a battle of wits between Max and Siegfried, but I suppose you can’t have everything. This one is definitely worth seeing in the theaters.

1. More than the average person, but less than a crazy person. ∧
2. The original Agent 86 was an incompetent man who routinely fell into his victories, while Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) did all the heavy lifting. It makes no that she’d be the perpetual second banana, especially in today’s gender conscious society. ∧
3. Which I am. Incidentally, have you seen the interviews he does when he comes back as a guest to promote a new movie? They are hilarious. ∧

No, seriously. Apple sold a million of those things, in one weekend. In the space of a year, they’ve become a kind of telecommunications Chernabog, ruling in imposing majesty from atop a Bald Mountain of discarded RAZRs and Blackberries. Or something. It’s a mental image I have, okay?

Now consider the LG Dare, a knock-off so blatant that you can practically smell the toner fluid. It tries desperately to be an iPhone, doesn’t even get halfway there, and as a final insult to your intelligence, isn’t appreciably cheaper. As a consumer, why would you be tempted to buy this? As a company, how could LG possibly think that this would give Apple any measure of competition?

If I want an iPhone, then congratulations, I’m going to buy an iPhone, not some cheap (in the metaphoric, not monetary, sense) pretender. The thing is, I don’t want an iPhone. I don’t need or want a single device that does a dozen different things, no matter if it does them all perfectly. I’m just not in the market for an iPhone, at least not for the foreseeable future. This, people, is where LG, Nokia, and Motorala can reclaim the market.

Give me a phone, pure and uncomplicated. A small, thin, attractive device. Let if flip open to reveal a large, crisp screen and sturdy, fumble-proof buttons. Empower it only to handle phone calls and text messages. Make its Address Book a joy to look at, with clean typography and smart design. Make it indestructible. Make the battery last a long, long time. Make it in six different colors. Make it out of metal, or plastic, but not some bastard plastic that pretends to be metal.

Give it no camera. Give it no bluetooth. Give it no MEdia browser, or a browser of any kind. No video, no voice recognition, no calendar, no music store. No games, no chat client, no calculator. Keep the alarm clock, because we are not morning people.

In other words, give me just a phone. Bestow upon this phone the absolute bare minimum feature set. The pressure to add, to cram new features and functionality into the case, is gone. Revel in it. Concentrate on perfecting every aspect of the device. Make it something I’d want to use, something I’d want to look at. Fashionable, even. Then sell it to me for fifty bucks, tops. Don’t even bother with rebates, just call a spade a spade.

If you don’t think people will go for a fifty dollar stripped-down device, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. Cheap, focused devices that favor attention to detail over feature completeness (or over-completeness) are doing pretty well nowadays. The Flip, for instance. You wouldn’t think people would want a camcorder like that, but then, thirteen percent of the market inside of a year is pretty good growth, right? Right.

See, I don’t need much from my phone. I don’t need it to take pictures of substandard quality. I certainly don’t need it to play “My Humps” every time a call comes in. Just make it small, slim, and perfect for doing two things. Fully embrace the psychosis, and show me the kind of attention to detail that compels Steve Jobs to put fake screws on his laptops for symmetry. I’ll buy one, and I’ll bet a lot of other people will, too.

Instead, I thought I’d indulge in a more technical matter.²  You may have noticed the footnotes in this week’s posts. Herein lies my recipe.

The Reasoning

Sometimes you’ve got to go off on a tangent and it just doesn’t fit anywhere. It’s too big for parentheses but too small for its own post. Enter footnotes, the Goldilocks’s Porridge of tangential writing, used since the dawn of time by the world’s finest writers.³

In a printed book, maintaining the context between the body text and the footnote is as easy as making a saccade.⁴ On the web, footnotes present a unique challenge. Javascript can be employed to make footnotes appear and disappear in situ⁵, or the footnote number can be given a plain rollover state that reveals more text. These solutions each have their pitfalls. Javascript can be the ruin of you in different browsers. Search engines are often blind to rollover states, to say nothing of the lack of cutting and pasting. There are a few Wordpress plugins that promise to make footnotes easy for you, but I decided against these.⁶ They require specialized markup. The plugin may pick it up and format it nicely, but if I ever switch to a different plugin or a different blogging platform, the special markup will simply become a mess in my posts.

Instead, I opted to steal Hans John Gruber’s method. Let’s be honest, the man has this thing down.⁷ His footnotes require no Javascript nor exotic markup, just a willingness to insert some simple HTML by hand and add a dash of style.

Doing your footnotes by hand has several advantages. For one, you have total control over how things look. Secondly, even when totally stripped⁸ of the stylesheet, things should degrade nicely into plain links and lists. Third, and most importantly, because the method requires some manual effort, it reduces the temptation to shove a ton of footnotes into every post.⁹

The Recipe

The whole process can be divided into two parts: the Easy Part, and the Hard Part.¹⁰

Start with the easy part. You’ll need to define some new CSS rules so that your footnotes look good and proper. You’ll be enclosing your footnote numbers in the highly appropriate superscript tag, which gets most of the job done. Unfortunately, this often screws with your line height, so a little CSS rule is needed to keep everything in line:

sup {
    font-size: 0.75em;
    line-height: 0.5em
}

Then you’ll need to define a style for the footnotes themselves. Footnotes are most commonly presented as a numbered list, and luckily enough, HTML has had that one covered since, like, 1978.¹¹ Just make sure that you designate it with a special class, something clever like:

ol.footnote

I’ll leave the individual stylistic choices up to you, but remember that less is usually more.¹² It’s also handy to have a small symbol at the end of each footnote that will return the reader to an appropriate place in the body text. There are many candidates to choose from, some popular ones being: ↩ ↵ ⇑ ↑ ∧, or you could get fancy and use an image.¹³ Up to you.

So, write your post as usual,¹⁴ enclosing any footnote numbers in the superscript tag. At the end of your post, insert your special ordered list and write the footnotes. This has been the Easy Part.

The Hard Part¹⁵ is making everything link together. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up. Say you have your list of footnotes:

<ol class="footnotes">
    <li>This is a footnote. ∧ </li>
    <li>This too! ∧ </li>
</ol>

What we want to do is give each individual list item a unique identifier. This will act as an anchor for the footnote links in the main text. Thus:

<ol class="footnotes">
    <li id="07112008-1">This is a footnote. ∧ </li>
    <li id="07112008-2">This too! ∧ </li>
</ol>

Likewise, in the body of the text, each superscript tag goes from:

<sup>1</sup>

To:

<sup id="07112008-1r">1</sup>

Note that identifiers in the body text have an “r” at the end, designating a “return” link.¹⁶

Now all you have to do is point your links to the right identifiers. Footnote numbers point to the footnote list:

<sup id="07112008-1r"><a href=#07112008-1>1</a></sup>

While the return links in the footnote list point back up to the body text:

<ol class="footnotes">
    <li id="07112008-1">This is a footnote. <a href=#07112008-1r">∧</a> </li>
    <li id=07112008-2">This too! <a href=#07112008-2r">∧</a> </li>
</ol>

Et voila¹⁷, gorgeous footnotes.¹⁸

1. Even people who have never heard of it. It’s that good. ∧
2. Cool people, you may leave. ∧
3. Oliver Sacks, I’m looking squarely at you. ∧
4. French for “jump.” ∧
5. Latin for “I would like to sound smarter.” ∧
6. Because I loathe modernity. Seriously. You haven’t had food until you’ve had it from an ice box. ∧
7. One day, he will count to three. There will not be a four. ∧
8. Scandalous! ∧
9. Except this one! ∧
10. Which is really not very hard. ∧
11. See, there, I exaggerated for comedic effect. ∧
12. Except when it’s not, as is the case with explosives and zombies. ∧
13. Like some kind of high-falootin’ college graduate. ∧
14. Taking extra care to make sure it doesn’t totally suck. ∧
15. Again, not very hard. ∧
16. Or whatever you’d prefer, but “-GoBackToWhereYouCameFrom” is lengthy. ∧
17. French for, “Look what I did!” ∧
18. Congratulations, you survived. ∧

Reading a comic by blowing through 94 of its issues in three weeks gives one an unusual perspective on the work as a whole. You’re more forgiving of the occasional bad issue. You can appreciate a writer’s narrative in total. Patterns emerge. You begin to notice things about how the characters are used, and how they change over time (or don’t).

Then you reflect. You write about how Marvel impacted your childhood; you write about Gay Colossus. Inevitably, without even really meaning to, you think about Wolverine. Then the thought becomes obvious: Marvel loves Wolverine more than any other character it has ever created, ever.¹

While gorging my mind on Ultimate X-Men, I couldn’t help but notice the sheer number of Wolverine glory shots. It seems like every issue has at least one pose of him with teeth grit, claws out, ready to lunge into battle. In group shots Wolverine is almost always the front-most figure, hunched in a menacing stance and eager to do some slashing. Out of 94 issues, Wolverine appears on 35 of the covers.² Cyclops, the purported battle general, mind you, just barely makes it to 20.

Marvel’s obsession is understandable. Wolverine is one of their best characters. He has a layered, often conflicted personality, a legitimately mysterious origin story, awesome powers, and body language that leaps off the page the way no psychic bubble ever will. A lot of great stories have come from Wolverine over the years, and it’s easy to see why it’s so hard for Marvel to resist going back to the well.

But, Marvel, you must stop. For the love of God, control yourself. You are addicted to Wolverine, and it’s time for an intervention. Cool it with this Wolverine business.³

Just how popular is Wolverine? I was ready to mount my own investigation, using my Powers of Internet to determine just how many of Marvel’s many X-Men offshoots have featured him. As usual, Wikipedia ruins the suspense:

“Wolverine is the only X-Men character to be included in every media adaptation of the X-Men franchise, including film, television, computer and video games.”

This to say nothing of the comics that are based exclusively around his character, the feature-length origin story currently in production (starring Hugh Jackman), and an upcoming X-Men cartoon entitled Wolverine and the X-Men. That’s right, he now gets top billing over the group that spawned him.

Wolverine’s domination of the X-Men has come at a price. His powers, for instance. Wolverine’s powers and abilities are traditionally limited to rapid wound regeneration (the much-abused “mutant healing factor”), the claws, an indestructible, adamantium-plated skeleton, and heightened senses. As time goes on, these abilities become more and more exaggerated. His adamantium skull conveniently protects his brain from all harm while the rest of his body can simply recover from anything else, including burns from orbital re-entry. Apocalypse rips Wolverine’s arm clean off at the shoulder and it barely slows him down. He’s sent to kill an unfortunate young mutant whose power instantly and horrifically poisons everyone around him, and Wolverine doesn’t so much as cough (actually a great issue, notwithstanding the gripe about Wolverine’s complete immunity). When Nightcrawler abducts Dazzler and returns to Xavier’s mansion for food, it takes Xavier and Wolverine all of three seconds to sense the truth–Xavier because he is psychic, Wolverine because he picked up Dazzler’s scent. For those of you keeping score, this gives Wolverine intuitive powers to match the world’s most powerful telepath. In essence, Wolverine now suffers from Superman’s main problem: nothing is a real threat. Presumably he could be drowned or completely incinerated, but I’ve never seen it. Decapitation might work, but who knows how potent that mutant bone marrow really is?

Problems with the powers, and how those powers are used, lead to problems with the character. Wolverine throws himself into the fight with reckless abandon not because he’s reckless, but because he knows he’s essentially invincible. You can’t maintain a reputation as a risky loose cannon when there’s never a real risk. At the same time, his increasingly large leadership role moves him ever farther from the dark, murderous past that defined his character. The longer he stays with the X-Men, the more he becomes their Joey Fatone, claiming to be a bad-boy with nothing to back it up. There’s one moment in Ultimate X-Men⁴ where Wolverine does something truly, horribly evil—the kind of thing that leaves you with your mouth hanging open in amazement—and it did more for his persona in one panel than a dozen empty lines about how your constant talking is making his knuckles itch.

While we’re here, there’s no denying that Wolverine has gotten prettier as time has worn on. His squat, slightly ugly frame used to be part of the character, if I’m not mistaken, but now Hugh Jackman has clearly had his influence. By the way, have you read about the increasing incidence of body dysmorphia among men? Have a look at the future. Jesus.

Other characters suffer mightily for Wolverine’s increased power and appeal. Case in point? X-Men 3. The climax comes when Wolverine single-handedly faces down the cosmically powerful Phoenix. Forget the fact that there is absolutely no way that Wolverine could handle the Phoenix on his own, and that this flies in the face of 30 years of comic book precedent. In order to guarantee a one-on-one battle, both Professor Xavier and Cyclops had to be incinerated early in the film. The tragedy is that these are the only two people—Xavier the father figure and Cyclops the love of her life—who have half a prayer of appealing to the remnants of Jean Grey’s humanity, which often made for some of the most powerful moments in the comics. Instead, you’re treated to five minutes of Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen staring and grunting at each other, before Wolverine staggers his way up to to Phoenix and pops his claws through her chest.

As writers continue to go out of their way to make Wolverine even cooler, everyone else gets the shaft. When Colossus finally gets some real attention it practically destroys his character (or literally destroys him, thanks, Legacy Virus!). And Cyclops! Poor, poor Cyclops! Supposedly he’s the leader of the X-Men, a brilliant tactician with one of the best mutant powers in existence. You’d never know it from the way his character gets treated. He gets pegged as the “boy scout” of the group, solely so that Wolverine can act as the alluring other man for Jean Grey. The mistake being made over and over is that there is nothing boring or boy scout about Cyclops’s character. Super-powerful lasers pour out of him every time he opens his eyes. Unable to control this—either due to brain damage or a psychological issue, depending on who you’re reading—Cyclops overcompensates by disciplining his life in every other conceivable way. Where’s the issue where he finally gets impatient and nails some overconfident supervillain to a wall with a crimson energy beam?⁵ Where’s the issue where he storms out on Xavier and rediscovers himself on his own terms? For that matter, where’s the issue where Wolverine’s recklessness finally backfires?

It’s never fun when one character gets all the glory. It gets tiresome when he never seems to make a real mistake. His fights are worthless if there’s never a direct threat. I, like many, have always enjoyed Wolverine. I mean, black ops mutant killing machine or not, he’s awfully likable. I just wonder how long that affection can last under the weight of constant exposure and limitless power.

1. Ever! ∧
2. 36 if you count the cover with Cable, who in this instance is Wolverine from a future timeline. ∧
3. But, business being the optimal word here, I doubt you will. ∧
4. Issue #29. ∧
5. We’re getting there. When Wolverine does that previously mentioned horrible thing, he does it to Cyclops, and it does great things for his character. Likewise, the only thing I like about the recent Banshee story arc is the slight change to Cyclops’s origins. On the day his powers manifested, he accidentally evaporated his foster parents. ∧

Whedon is always careful to write the characters appropriately. In every line of dialog, in every interaction, the personalities behind the superpowers bleed through. Emma Frost never lets her guard down, always throwing up a wall of arrogance and superiority, especially when she’s around Kitty Pride. Beast might threaten to eat you, but he’ll do it with a dash of intellectual shame. Since Astonishing X-Men represented my first foray into mainstream comics in a long time, I’d forgotten how rare that kind of subtlety is.

So, the writing in Ultimate X-Men isn’t as good. It would be fair to call some of it bad. The comic also “youngs up” the X-Men, putting them in their mid to late teens. This is an unnecessary contrivance that I found annoying even when I was a teenager myself. Aside from claiming that the X-Men are now teenagers, you’d be hard-pressed to find any real evidence of it. They attend school in name only and grapple with the same Earth-shatteringly dangerous missions and personal problems that their adult counterparts do. The only character who legitimately feels like a teenager is Iceman. I’m willing to admit that it works for him.

Ultimate X-Men isn’t perfect, but it’s an entertaining read, and every so often there’s a twist or a new interpretation of an old story that makes you glad to be reading comics. Rewriting Colossus as gay, for example. He’s the hulking fellow made of nearly indestructible organic steel pictured at left, for those who don’t follow these kinds of things. Prior to this, the only gay mutant of any real importance was Northstar, who debuted in 1979, didn’t get a back story until 1983, and didn’t come out until 1992. Northstar was always vaguely effeminate and had elfin, pointed ears, at least until recently. The original plan was to have his character die of AIDS shortly after coming out (hooray?), but this was ultimately scrapped. Instead, it was implied that Northstar was dying in our world because he was actually a creature from another world, literally a homesick fairy.

Contrast this with Colossus, whose power is that he has incredible physical strength. He’s the kind of person who can crack continents when angry, and in general he is unambiguously awesome. He has a long history in the X-Men Universe and nothing about him reads as stereotypically gay. Ultimate X-Men’s treatment of his sexuality is daring in conception, but it errs on the side of extreme subtlety in execution. By and large it is a non-issue, which says something about today’s social climate. When Northstar came out in 1992, he promptly adopted a young girl who had contracted HIV in the womb, only to have her succumb to the disease shortly thereafter. In 1992 this was the socially conscious thing to do, though it seems a bit much now. Ultimate X-Men takes the quiet road with Colossus, hinting at his sexuality for a long time before outting him, then hooking him up in a healthy relationship with (of course) Northstar. He also deals with homophobia from a close friend:  Nightcrawler, of all people.

If anything, Colossus’s sexuality is a little too subtle. Romance boils hot and strong among the X-Men, and the Ultimate version is no exception. Jean Grey and Cyclops, Jean Grey and Wolverine, Beast and Storm, Storm and Wolverine, Rogue and Iceman, Iceman and Kitty Pryde, Rogue and Gambit, then Iceman and Rogue again, Dazzler and Angel, Dazzler and Nightcrawler (kind of). Even the stately Professor Xavier is a player, leaving a trail of relationships with Moira MacTaggart, Mystique, and Emma Frost in his wake. He even confessed to having feelings for (take a guess!) Jean Grey. Amidst all this craziness, Colossus merely came close to admitting he had feelings for Wolverine, before eventually holding hands with Northstar.

Ultimate X-Men has been fun, but the most recent issues—which focus on a drug called Banshee—have been monumentally stupid, specifically for what’s being done to Colossus. Banshee vastly enhances a mutant’s powers, and we learn about it when a seriously doped up version of Alpha Flight swoops in from Canada to abduct Northstar. Desperate to get Northstar back, Colossus accidentally reveals to Jean that he’s been using Banshee for years. Without it, he doesn’t have super strength, and can barely lift his steel arms once he transforms.¹ Never mind that the existence of Banshee has never been mentioned or even implied prior to this story. The writers can’t seem to decide if it’s Mutant Growth Hormone, Mutant Heroin, or some strange combination of the two. Moreover, it is wildly unlikely that Colossus could have been adequately juiced up for every fight, which often take the X-Men by surprise. How, exactly, did he keep this a secret from not one, but two of the world’s most powerful psychics? Why in God’s name would you take one of the coolest, most straightforward mutants and turn him into a roid-powered steel paperweight? Colossus has never been much of a talker and a lot of his character comes from his physicality, which the Banshee revelation thoroughly ruins.

Not all is lost, however. The identity of Colossus’s dealer is completely obscured, but the writers still went through the trouble of putting him on-page while Colossus pays for more Banshee. Throughout the transaction, no hint is given as to who the dealer is (he’s never on camera), and he vanishes without a trace the instant he has his money. Why bother writing the scene at all? Couldn’t Colossus just have shown up with more Banshee, the deal implied to have happened earlier? This is Extremely Suspicious. Combine this with the recent revelation that Wolverine has screened positive for Banshee, having used it at some point in his unremembered past, and it appears that Things May Not Be What They Seem. I hold out hope that Banshee turns out to be a placebo, or a psychic hallucination, or something, anything other than what it appears to be right now.

In the next exciting issue: Wolverine!!! For real this time!

1. You could make that case that this is inconsistent with what we know about Colossus’s powers. He transforms into an “organic steel” substance, and it’s supposed to be more or less unique in all the universe. Presumably Colossus’s super strength is a property of the steel itself, as opposed to his mutation. Then again, one shouldn’t debate physics in a world where a man can shoot inexhaustible death rays from his eyes. ∧

I haven’t dived this deep into the Marvel Universe since I was eleven, maybe twelve years old. My introduction to the X-Men came courtesy of my uncle. Like my grandfather (his father), my uncle is a pack rat. While my grandfather held onto tax returns from 1970 and newspaper clippings that were probably printed along with a Gutenberg Bible, my uncle was a quintessential comic book collector. At some point in 1992, the bulk of his collection ended up in my parents’ basement while he moved his family to Long Island. He had everything worth owning, including original copies of the Dark Phoenix Saga. Naturally, I was told that if I so much as thought about these comics too hard, let alone touch them, they could incur damage, but this did get me interested enough to track down some trade paperback versions.

As it happened, FOX began airing the immensely successful X-Men animated series that same year. My friends and I were taken by Storm (one). It was a real Beast of an obsession (two!), as if we had Nightcrawlers scampering over our meninges, inducing a brain fever (too much?).

Considering what a huge dork I was am, and considering that I had recently been granted an immensely generous four dollar weekly allowance, things could have gotten ugly fast. Luckily, my group tended to stay away from the actual X-Men comics. This was the early 90s, and it was a definite low point in the quality of comic books. Long-running titles were atrociously written, incomprehensible to new readers, or trying way too hard to reach out.

Instead, my friends and I found an outlet for the mutant craze at a local indoor flea market. My memory has shattered this place into just a handful of surviving fragments. There was a Goth Magic Shoppe near what I thought of as the front entrance, which sold incense, henna tattoos, and crystal figurines of gryphons and wizards. There was a guy who could airbrush just about anything onto a white Hanes t-shirt. This was also the place where I picked up a pair of sunglasses tinted an obscene shade of red, so that I could pretend to be Cyclops. Finally, there were the comic book guys, and if memory serves (which, granted, it often does not), they made Comic Book Guy look eerily accurate.

This being a flea market, the comic book guys dabbled in other items as well. I yawned when they tried to pitch me (hah! wait for it!) baseball cards (see??). Baseball cards were already in decline, and even though my dad had proudly collected, sleeved, and boxed entire seasons’ worth of NHL Upper Deck trading cards, the interest was not exactly genetic.

I’d like to pause now to relate a small epiphany I just had regarding my father. I had always assumed that I got my dork powers from my mother’s side of the family. This is where the comic book collecting uncle resides, and combined with my mother’s line-quotingly strong devotion to the original Star Trek, it seemed only logical (stop me before I kill again!) that the genes came from her. Now I’m confronted with the memory of my father collecting trading cards, and not baseball cards, like a normal human being, but hockey cards. As if he was some kind of Canadian. Apparently my father is also a huge dork, just one that obsesses over sports instead of superheroes.

In a calculated effort to separate a twelve year-old from his allowance, the comic book guys trotted out packs of Marvel Masterpieces¹. These were trading cards that depicted the Marvel Universe’s greatest heroes and most notorious villains in stunning detail. It seems almost criminal that there was never a card for Professor Xavier, but I suppose it’s hard to do a good action shot of a wheelchair.

It’s difficult to say why I liked the cards so much. The art is the main feature, and I’m pleased to see that it holds up well with the passage of time, for the most part. Take this rendition of Nightcrawler, for instance. It’s ethereal, almost Impressionist, and a fitting artistic choice for a man who can vanish in a BAMF of smoke and instantly reappear somewhere else. Unlike most of what the comic conglomerates put out in the early 90s, these showed real care and attention to detail. You could say they were items of quality. You could also say that these were the first real commodities that me and my friends purchased independently, and in trading them amongst ourselves, we got our first taste of power, leverage, and value. “Value,” is, of course, a highly subjective term. Outside our little bubble, the cards were not worth the paper they were printed on, literally. These trading cards would lead almost directly to an extended addiction to Magic: the Gathering, which, beyond the cool art, also came with a game. It also came with industry-sponsored magazines² that listed the current market value of the cards, which pretty much ruined the fun for everyone.

I thought I had left this life behind me. I thought I had graduated from Xavier’s School For Gifted Youngsters, aside from the occasional Hugh Jackman-laiden Hollywood iteration. Apparently I was wrong. It’s extremely easy to be drawn back to this world. Comics (and things inspired by comics) represent a series of moments reduced to their bare essentials. The beauty of it is that you can add whatever you want into the gaps between the panels. At twenty-six, you can take the bones of Joss Whedon’s excellent (as always) writing and add any number of complex social subtexts into the book. At eleven, you do something arguably much more important. You add yourself.

In the next exciting issue: Wolverine!!!

1. I have to be honest with you, I didn’t actually remember that they were called Marvel Masterpieces. All I remembered was that I had a small collection of Marvel trading cards. Googling “marvel trading cards” got me close, but I knew that wasn’t quite right. I eventually remembered that one of the fancier cards (a Dyna-Etched rendition) was for a guy I had never heard of, and it seemed like a waste of highly advanced hologram technology. The guy was named Meanstreak, and I’ll bet you’ve never heard of him either. This at last gave me the clue I needed. I knew I was looking at the right set of cards when I saw that colorful rendition of Beast moving through a laser grid, above. That’s the craziest thing about living in 2008. Combine a murky smear of memory with Google, Wikipedia, and flickr, and suddenly you’re omniscient. ∧
2. In my brain’s continuing efforts to freak me out, I distinctly remember owning the exact issue featured in the Wikipedia entry. ∧

A new wallpaper! Click the image above to download a 1440×900 version. I know that Jon Hicks pretty much has the design market cornered on overlapping circles, but I couldn’t resist.

The explosion of circles and the broken vertical lines were generated using Context Free Art, which I found via the online implementation, which I found via Hans John Gruber. God bless our glorious, golden age of hyperlinks, because creating those circles and dashes in Photoshop or Illustrator by hand would’ve taken me hours. In Context Free Art they took minutes. I suppose I could have gotten clever with dynamic brushes, but it still would’ve been immensely time consuming to get the variations right. In Context Free Art it was just a matter of setting up a few lines of code and pressing Render until I got something I liked. Then off we go to Photoshop to apply what I like to think of as a mid-90s muted color scheme.

As Raskin points out, the whole thing is reminiscent of the ancient Turtle Graphics system, which was designed to teach kids about programming languages. This is harder than it sounds. At their cores, computers are nothing but glorified calculators (more accurately, glorified abacuses). As such, computers are fundamentally boring. Kids are often presented with a thrilling mathscape, and told to program over the course of a week what their pocket calculators could do in seconds. On the other hand, if the teacher gets too ambitious it can feel like you’re being asked to increase the amount of justice in the universe. With a FOR loop.

Enter Turtle Graphics, which for my money has the best programming metaphor ever conceived. Rather than adding numbers, you’re drawing pictures. How are you drawing? Why, there’s a little turtle on the screen who is eager to follow your instructions. Wherever the turtle goes, it draws a line, and from there the possibilities are endless. All the problems of learning about computer programming are solved. Abstraction is reduced to near zero, as you can see the results of your program line by line. It’s not math, it’s art, and at the end of the day you get something that you can print out and magnetize to the fridge.

I must have been in middle school when our Computers teacher introduced us to the turtle. Within ten minutes we had learned how to draw a square. It was just matter of telling the turtle to move forward, turn 90 degrees, and then move forward some more.

forward 50 right 90
forward 50 right 90
forward 50 right 90
forward 50 right 90

Then we learned the shortcut.

repeat 4 [forward 50 right 90]

Since most of us had taken Geometry, it was an easy step up to more complicated shapes.

repeat 6 [forward 50 right 60]

Now I was staring proudly at a blue hexagon. My blue hexagon. For someone with no innate talent for pencils and paper, the geometrically perfect image on the screen was like a revelation. Maybe I could be good at this, I thought.

“Alright, class, five bonus points on Friday’s quiz to the first person who can draw me a circle.”

We all sat there, stumped. To draw a shape, you started with the number of sides. We all got that. Circles, however, do not have sides or angles. They were a smooth mystery. What do circles have? I thought. If I were trying to go all the way around a circle, how would I…

And then came one of those bursts of insight that is so satisfying you’ll remember it fourteen years later.

Degrees. Circles have degrees.

repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]

And that’s how you get a turtle to draw a large, graceful arc on the screen, with the end meeting the start. I got my five bonus points and called it a day.

Turtle Graphics led to Mac Paint, then Paint, then Visual Reality, and ultimately, inevitably, Photoshop. Context Free Art is to my 2008 what Turtle Graphics was to my 1994. It’s little wonder that I like it so much. I expect to mess around with this thing a lot before I’m through with it.