Issue 45: Tournament of Villainy
By Rascal Stallion

Jason Voorhees vs General Zod

Name: Jason Voorhees		Name: Zod
Occupation: Unemployed	vs.	Occupation: General
Origin: Friday the 13th		Origin: Superman

Zod was flying across country when it suddenly became very important for him to find a bathroom in the immediate future. Using his super-vision he spotted a campground below him and swooped down to use the facilities.

Zod finished his business and went to wash his hands but his hygiene was interrupted when the door was kicked in. The empty doorway was quickly filled with the massive figure of Jason Voorhees, clad in his worksuit and wielding his trademark machete.

Zod looked at the intruder. “I will not tolerate being disturbed while using the restroom. Leave at once or I will be forced to destroy you.”

However, from Jason’s point of view, Zod was the intruder and he intended to deal with him swiftly. Jason lumbered towards the Kryptonian and heavily swung the machete. The machete struck Zod precisely where Jason intended but the results were far from what he expected. The blade struck Zod but found no give in his flesh. It reverberated in his hand fiercly.

Zod looked at his assailant, curious about why this creature showed no fear in his presence. Jason grabbed a mop from the corner and attacked again. He attempted to spear Zod with the handle but the wood simply shattered upon contact.

Zod was not amused and deemed it time to fight back. He clenched his fists together and swung them up into Jason’s chin. It was a mighty blow and sent him through the roof of the bathroom several stories into the air. Jason landed with a dull thud and remained motionless for quite some time.

Zod finished washing his hands and combed his hair in the mirror. As he walked out of the bathroom and readied himself to take flight once more he was shocked to see Voorhees rise and approach him again. Perhaps there was more to this opponent than he originally believed.

Jason swung a haymaker at Zod’s head and did nothing but shatter 6 bones in his hand upon contact. Zod punched back and sent his fist through Jason. While removing his fist from Jason’s chest cavity he gripped his lungs and removed them on the way out.

“I think you’ve had enough.” taunted Zod.

Jason waivered as he stood there, the gaping wound in his chest sucking air. Finally he fell but Zod was amused to see his heart was still beating. Placing a foot on Jason’s shoulder and gripping his head, Zod twisted and ripped Jason’s head from his body and threw it to the moon.

“Now, you’ve had enough… bitch.”

Back to tournament bracket

Issue 45: Sydney Brown's Sixty Seconds
By Sydney Brown

Sydney Brown’s Sixty Seconds

I haven’t written anything since NOVEMBER?!?!?!?

We have some catching up to do. I’ve been to the movies a lot. Here’s what I’ve seen:

There Will Be Blood (2007) Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano ***1/2

Day-Lewis is oil tycoon Daniel Plainview, a man whose only purpose in life is making money. The film looks at the building of his empire and the lives he crushes and the enemies he makes on the way to the top. Dano plays a young preacher who turns into a nemesis for Plainview leading to a finale that you will either love or hate, but you won’t soon forget. Incredible score, incredible acting, the film’s running time is its only quarrel as it seems to take quite a while to get to certain points. Entire first reel is done without dialogue, that may have something to do with the length.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke ***

Two brothers plot to rob a jewelry store to fix their financial situation only for things to go worse than they ever imagined. Cleverly structured, (flashbacks catch us up on not only why things are bad, but why they’re about to get worse), and great performances by the two leads and by Albert Finney who unexpectedly takes over as the film progresses. Depressing as hell, but a very good film. And does ANYBODY say “Shut the F**K up!!” better than Hoffman?

Once (2007) ***1/2

An Irish musician gets inspired to follow his dreams by a young female in this sorta-musical. Yet it’s so much deeper than a simple boy-meets-girl story. One of the more realistic relationship movies I’ve seen. This one gets it right. Full of wonderfully catchy and meaningful songs, it’s a film that shows you the true side to the search for happiness.

Juno (2007) Ellen Page, Jason Bateman ***

Juno is a 16 year-old girlfriend who gets pregnant by her nerdy boyfriend. Conflicts ensue when she gives her child to a yuppie couple. Liked the film, disliked the character. Juno the girl is a pop-culture spewing figment of the too-cool-for-school generation and I found her annoying. What saves the film are the performances of Bateman and Jennifer Garner as the happy couple who seem to have everything. I enjoyed the film, the good far outweighs the bad, the bad just got on my nerves.

No Country for Old Men (2007) Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin ****

A hunter finds $2 million in a drug deal gone bad only to have the most evil man on the planet after him to get it back. Every note about this film is perfect (including one of the most intense scenes I’ve seen involving a closed door and a single faint sound effect.) There will be much comparison to the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, I dare say this is better. Intense scenes, smart characters, and just the right shade of quirkiness make this the year’s best film.

Issue 45: Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By Medulla Vesuvius

Elvis Costello and the Well-Turned Phrase

Few musical artists are as universally revered for their songwriting craft than Elvis Costello. He looks down on mere mortals from the pantheon of wordsmiths like Bob Dylan, Lennon/McCartney, and Bruce Springsteen. In addition to his distinctive, dramatic singing voice he is known for a biting literary wit. The latter never hit home for me until I started perusing his lyrics in research for this article. I discovered song after song after song about bad relationships, love lost, love gained tenuously, cheating, wondering about lost lovers’ new romances, awkward sex and self-loathing. I had no idea that I had been listening to such a vast wasteland of morose musings, for oftentimes these thoughts and themes are delivered with such an accessibly catchy mechanism.

But today I want to focus on a microscopic element of the bespectacled one’s songwriting- namely, the handful of times he has employed a “well-turned phrase”- an idea we musical types don’t discuss very often. Namely, I’m talking about taking a well-known utterance or cliché and flipping it around, tinkering with it, putting it in a new context or otherwise futzing with it to say something new. A couple of examples: the first time someone said “up at the buttcrack of dawn,” or the many times my dad said “No good deed goes unpunished.” A couple musical examples of this would be when the Monty Python guys sang “Always look on the bright side of death,” or when Rush earnestly says “An ounce of prevention, a pound of obscure.”

It’s my opinion that we have with this one literary technique the soul of a modern songwriter’s job. In a world where there’s “nothing new under the sun” a songwriter can only be expected to listen, observe and absorb the world around them and then process the data and synthesize it to make something new. This is a new textbook definition of the creative act, (creatio ex materia.) So, I thought I would discuss the more striking examples of this technique as discovered in Costello’s catalog.

The original example that started this area of thought for me is in the song “20% Amnesia” off the album Brutal Youth. I’ll be honest. I’m not really even sure what this song is about. It’s most likely a commentary on some mid-90s British political nastiness, but it includes a killer line sung by Costello at the top of his range: “Life intimidates art,” of course a play on the self-recursive thought that “art imitates life,” and “life imitates art.” I’m starting to realize the truth of this line, that “normal” life-consumerist, rational, mundane- makes strange bedfellows with the creative impulse. I’m speaking largely of time here. Regular folks are just too busy making money and buying things to spend time creating things of questionable value to the majority of society.

Here’s another succinct example from the song “Senior Service” off the album Armed Forces: “It’s a death that’s worse than fate.” Here Costello merely switches the order of the nouns in a cliché to deliver a pretty clear vision of how he views the prospect of joining the British Royal Navy. Also on the same album is the song “Accidents Will Happen” in which he turns a typically positive, encouraging comment into one of hopelessness: “There’s so many fish in the sea/ That only rise up in the sweat and smoke like mercury,” a very powerful image.

The R&B-influenced album Get Happy!! contains a great love-gone-wrong song called “Riot Act” that includes this clever pairing: “Don’t put your heart out on your sleeve when your remarks are off the cuff.” The album also contains the song “Love for Tender” with the line: “The wages of sin is an expensive infection.” I’ll let you decide what he’s talking about there.

Consider these last few stray examples:

The song “Human Hands” off the album Imperial Bedroom contains “I’m just the mere shadow of my former selfishness.”

“There’s no such thing as an original sin,” from the song “I’m Not Angry” off My Aim is True.

The song “Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head” from Blood and Chocolate.

“One day my Prince of Peace will come” from the beautiful song that Costello calls an “agnostic’s prayer” called “Couldn’t Call It Unexpected No. 4″ off the album Mighty Like a Rose.

So, there’s a sampling of Elvis Costello’s use of the well-turned phrase. Of course, how the act of flipping and amending these well-trodden sayings actually impacts a song is fodder for another discussion. In the meantime- anybody else out there have any other examples of songwriters employing this device?

Issue 44: Superhero Information Initiative
By Amdnarg Toh

Kingdom Come

I’m usually not a huge fan of mixing apocalyptic biblical metaphors with current events, or even fiction. I get enough of that watching overdressed, overweight, sweaty TV preachers with prophecy charts trying to convince me that Saddam Hussein is the antichrist, that there are 88 reasons why Jesus is going to come in 1988, and why the european union will somehow become the devil’s political pawn. But after recently reading the Kingdom Come story, I’m going to bend this particular rule just a bit.

We’re told the story through the eyes of a preacher, who comes to the aid of the Specter, and is assigned the task of viewing the events and passing judgement on the evil doers. The story is set some decades in the future, where the current generation of heroes have aged a bit, and the world is a considerably different place. Superman is in self-imposed exile. Green Lantern has established an outpost in space, and guards against an alien invasion that may never come. The Flash can no longer even move at normal speeds, and is in constant motion. Etc, etc. Most, if not all of the superheroes we know and love have “stepped back” from active duty for one reason or another.

But the beat goes on, or so the story goes. The vacancy left by these heroes is filled by a younger, more brazen group of super-powered beings, some of whom are hard to discern whether they are hero or villain. One super-dude in particular, Magog, becomes the catalyst for much of the conflict. We’re also told that Magog was the reason that Superman went into retirement, when, after killing several people that worked at the Daily Planet, including Lois Lane, the Joker was brought to trial. As he was being escorted into custody, the Joker was killed by Magog. Superman brought Magog in to be tried for murder, and found out that the public sided with Magog. Hopelessly depressed by the public’s loss of confidence in him, and by the death of Lois, Superman went into retreat at his fortress of solitude.

The point of crisis in this story comes as a group of semi-heroes, called the Justice Batallion, led by Magog, attempt to capture a villain known as the Parasite, and in the ensuing battle, Captain Atom is killed, his nuclear energy released on the surrounding Kansas countryside. The fallout kills many and leaves a significant portion of the Midwestern United States irradiated and unlivable. This event drives Superman to come out of retirement and confront the new heroes - his “second coming” of sorts.

Of course, these new heroes think that Superman is hopelessly outdated and clueless about the nature of reality. And a new conflict is birthed out of the ethical and moral cleansing that Superman begins to institute. Essentially anyone who refuses to submit to the “higher” morality that he presents is captured and imprisoned.

And in a nefarious sub plot, Lex Luthor has plans of his own to eliminate the heroes altogether, and give humanity “freedom” from the oppressive presence and rule of the meta-humans. The climactic battle - Armegeddon - comes as the villains escape the prison built for them, and are confronted by Superman. The United Nations are convinced to launch nuclear weapons sufficient to kill all of the metahumans, and as they are being launched, Lex Luthor initiates his plan, and releases Captain Marvel, who has been brainwashed by Luthor, and is sent to keep Superman from diverting the nuclear warheads from the battlefield. Captain Marvel almost defeats Superman, and at the final moments of their battle, is forced back into his human form, Billy Batson. With insufficient time to divert the warhead from the battlefield, Superman forces Billy to make the decision to either save the metahumans by allowing Superman to sacrifice himself, which would allow the metahumans to rampage without control, or to allow the metahumans to die in the explosion. Batson decides to become Captain Marvel and save both the metahumans and Superman by sacrificing himself. However, Captain Marvel was not fast enough, and was only able to contain part of the blast, and few of the metahumans survive.

In the aftermath, Superman flies to the UN building to confront the humans that launched the nuclear weapons. Not realizing that some of his friends survived the blast, he flies into a rampage, until the Specter shows him that he had become what the humans feared in the younger metahumans- a vigilante above the law. Dismayed at his own behavior, Superman vows to cease being a “god”, and will more fully participate in human affairs. He takes it upon himself to renovate the Kansas landscape, hitching himself up to a giant plow (swords to plowshares reference anyone?)

So… We’ve got an apocalyptic event of HUGE proportions, almost as big as The Day After, the 80’s TV movie. You’ve got Superman in a ponytail. Wonder Woman on some kick-ass battle armor. And sub plots involving most of my favorites DC heroes - all the makings of a shut-me-up comic burrito/enchilada combo. Me like!!!

And I can’t help but comment on the ending - a little too much “peace on earth goodwill to men” to suit me. Essentially the message we’re left with is that after the end battle, good will prevail and the earth won’t need heroes to curb evil anymore, and they will focus on bettering mankind through humanitarian deeds. Although I agree with this vision on a personal level, I say “Keep that crap out of my comics!!!” I mean- Lex Luthor as a nurse in Batman’s hospital? Come on… All it cost was the genocide of the majority of the metahumans, (read bad guys), on the planet. I’ll leave the political commentary for some other time.

Issue 44: Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By Clancy Lass

Blind Leading the Blind

It had not been a Merry Christmas to that point…

My newlywed and I were having a very difficult time finishing up the debris from our wedding. Our home was a disaster area, we were still writing thank you notes squeezing in Christmas shopping at the sacrifice of everything else.

I hadn’t been looking forward to Christmas because too much in my life had just changed. My name wasn’t even the same. Between work and the holidays, there wasn’t time to just relax and enjoy being married. The joy had even been taken out of receiving gifts because of the wedding. We received so many, I just honestly didn’t want any more. Though believe me, the sentiment was greatly appreciated.

So the “anticipation of Christmas?” Just not there. Church had also not been the comfort it usually is. That reason I cannot answer. I just seemed to have lost the meaning in between fighting people for the last toy of its kind and wrapping paper that I knew people would tear up and throw away in a matter of seconds.

Sending a few measly Christmas cards felt like a punishment. They were all just courtesy cards to those who had sent cards to me. Baking the sweets for the family used to be something I looked forward to all year round, and hoped a bulk of the duties would someday be mine. Be careful what you wish for. They are now almost ALL mine. And the fun has begun to sink out of this tradition as well, with no one is there to help sift the flour or melt the butter. They all have children and other lives.

We were also on the crucial second year of family division for the holidays. However you choose to divide in the beginning may decide the next several years, as it will then be seen as a tradition. Thus began our fight and my bad mood on this momentous afternoon…

“A Christmas Carol” is generally a story I ignore. The idea that someone is mean all the time and doesn’t like Christmas is just too far-fetched. But in one instance that night, I realized I am Ebenezer. I refuse to say Scrooge, as I have at least seen the error of my ways and hope to make some sort of amends for my transgressions. And all I had to do was get on an escalator.

My husband and I had been bickering for several hours, (bad habit, but we get over it.) Anyway, we climbed aboard an escalator to zoom past Gymboree and the Gap and get to El Chico for dinner in between shopping and a trip to the mall cinema.

As we rode, a man several people behind us began yelling at the woman in front of us. It was his wife and he was puzzled as to where she and her two girls were going. Admittedly, I was annoyed. I didn’t give a crap where they were going and get easily irritated at people yelling a conversation around me. The mother and the girls reached the landing, got off the escalator and just stopped. I assumed they were waiting for their loud-mouth dad. And in a voice I considered under my breath or just to my husband, I sarcastically said, “Why don’t we all just stop.” The mother must have been as eves-droppy as I. She heard me and replied…are you ready for this? She replied…

“She’s blind. That is why we had to stop.”

I didn’t say another word to her. For the first time in years I was speechless. But my defiance and pride stopped me from even looking at the mother or the girl, or making an apology. I just kept walking. I even tried to justify my rude behavior by saying loudly a moment later, “She’s not going to make me feel bad. They could have stepped over to the side.”

We arrived at El Chico and I noticed how silent my husband had become. After some chips were delivered to our table, he said, “Are you just really wound up tonight?” I snapped, “Why? The waitress forgot the lime for your beer, so I asked her to bring some. I wasn’t rude.” He said, “I know. I’m not talking about that.” I said, “I already feel bad enough having tried to shove a blind girl out of the way.” And then I just started crying. He said, “I knew you already felt bad enough. You just seem really worked up.”

We walked down to the movies after dinner to see “Spanglish.” You go into movies thinking you will identify with the main character, who is usually the good person, the one who does the right thing and can’t get a break. …But another slap in the face made me realize I was just like the over-controlling, ever-correcting selfish mother played by Tea’ Leoni. It was hard to enjoy the movie after that, though I did.

For Christmas that year, I received a wake-up call.

Maybe we all have a Charlie Brown and Linus moment of clarity around the holidays. We are all lost, trying to find the spirit of Christmas and brotherly love, and from out of nowhere comes one small thing said by the least expected person/character that changes your entire perspective- humbles you, and makes you thankful all at once. And the fact that I got it and it moved me…Maybe I’m not so bad after all.

But even more unexpected is that I feel like the scrawny Christmas tree more than I do Charlie Brown. I am not attractive. I have nothing to prove and I’m just a sharp small tree that loses her needles around people. But a mother was willing to show me patience because she knew I had no idea of her daughter’s blindness. And my husband continues to love me so much that sometimes, something like a light or a Christmas ornament will show in my smile.

We can’t all be evergreens. We can’t all be good, compassionate people all the time, and Lord knows I’ve never claimed to be. But maybe somewhere in there I can figure out how to be as strong as I am stubborn and change myself…realize I’m the one that’s really blind.

…Or at least buy some duct tape and close off my mouth.