I was complaining about them here. Now there comes news that Japan will produce a manga version of Das Kapital. Will it be better than Howard Zinn’s American Empire? Not likely, because all manga sucks (bid for controversy). The Independent reports here.

(I should note that the link comes by way of Ezra Klein.)

Again we sample From Sawdust to Stardust: The Biography of DeForest Kelley, Star Trek’s Dr. McCoy. (See here for the last sampling.) I was going to call the post “Pseuds Corner,” but that’s been done. Anyway, the author isn’t a pseud. What she shares with us isn’t pretension, just the authentic wonder of her soul.

A reflection on Star Trek III:

The new energy created an archetypal gravity now invested in the three heroes and their story. The Star Trek crew had crossed from static icon to active mythology through the passion play, once introduced in 1968 with “The Empath.”

I especially like bringing in “The Empath.” (Good episode!) Because she figures it’s where the Star Trek passion play got started and she wants us to be clear on that point. She’s conscientious.

Fans worried that Star Trek III downplayed women. But the author feels they missed the point because, after all, the Enterprise blew up in that movie:

The Enterprise herself was a mother goddess. The mother’s sacrifice for the sake of the children is one of the oldest and highest myths of ancient humanity. The Enterprise destroyed herself so that the crew might live on, a holy event in the spiral of life.

And it is. A holy event in the spiral of life produced by Harve Bennett. So you know it was on budget.

In 1988 the Republicans could call Dukakis a liberal and that was enough to make him fold up. This time they had to call Obama a socialist and it still didn’t work.

Shamefully, I found this link thru the deranged but hardworking Ann Althouse. The Zippy daily strip archives go back to 1994 and can be word-searched.

(Added value: Ronald Reagan just didn’t get Zippy’s brand of humor. Seriously, he said so and added that his favorite strips were Mary Worth and Apartment 3G. I learned this from a passage in Dutch by Edmund Morris that describes Reagan and Vice President Bush having lunch together. One of them, either Reagan or Bush, mimed jerking off during the lunch, as punctuation for some joke.)

Here’s another mini-review from The Comics Journal. I really like the TwoMorrows books I’ve seen; those guys do a good job. A while back I posted about the shittiness of superhero books, but I was careful to limit my comments to books about “superheroes in general.” TwoMorrows puts out books about particular superheroes, books by people who find those characters interesting and don’t mind sweating a bit to produce useful material about them.

There’s a downside, though: being fans, the TwoMorrows people are frequently a bit uncritical. The Blue Beetle Companion is my favorite book from the company because no one can really be a fan of Blue Beetle. To consider him is to automatically become a dispassionate observer. And what a history he has to observe!

And now:

Blue Beetle started as a knockoff of the Green Hornet. But a hornet is menacing, a beetle isn’t. When the Golden Age hoodlums reeled back from their hideout’s table, aghast at the sight of a beetle emblem, it was like they had been unnerved by the sign of a broom or a tea cup or a basset hound. Nobody had thought this matter through because no one had thought about anything at all involved in Blue Beetle (or “the” Blue Beetle, as he then was). Dick Giordano was present for the creation, more or less, but isn’t quite sure who gets responsibility. “It wasn’t important enough in the day to support a conversation,” he says.

Blue Beetle drifted along through the 1940s because Victor Fox wanted to publish comic books and didn’t worry much about their contents. He popped up again in the 50s, then the 60s. At least the 60s version (Ted Kord) was masterminded by Steve Ditko, so his fingers resembled a bed of kelp waving on the sea floor. But the best Ditko could do in rethinking Beetle was to make him like Batman, and pretty soon Blue Beetle had been canceled again. The poor soul had to wait another 20 years before Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis made something distinctive out of him. In the past, a superhero was always supposed to be the guy, but by the ’80s a hero could be just one of the guys, even a class clown. Blue Beetle, being so nondescript, slid right into the niche and finally acquired some life.

The Companion traces the whole dilapidated story. Christopher Irving’s syntax sometimes goes missing, but his research gets whatever goods can be got. Rich J. Fowlks does a nifty book design, and the supply of photos and reproductions is quite lavish. Blue Beetle functions here as a pop-cultural dust ball around which develops a fine coating of lint: posters for unwanted colas, photographs of forgotten actors. The book does leave unanswered the central question of why Blue Beetle keeps popping up and not the Flame or the Green Mask. The answer, I guess, is that the other heroes are something and Blue Beetle is very close to nothing: a catchy but meaningless name, a costume so standard it’s archetypal. In the end Beetle is a default character, a function of the industry’s need to generate product with a minimum of thought. No wonder he’s still around.

Here’s my new favorite opening line to a Hollywood biography. Actually it’s the opening line of the book’s foreword, which was written by Harve Bennett. He produced Rich Man, Poor Man and a bunch of Star Trek movies. In this line he’s talking about the man who played Dr. McCoy:

I am not especially religious, but I do believe in the Hand of God. And never was His Handiwork more evident than on the day DeForest Kelley got his star on Hollywood Boulevard.

But the reason behind Bennett’s claim is kind of a letdown. It’s not that he thinks God especially wants the Walk of Fame people to honor decent middleweight character actors. Instead the line above is a setup for a “you had to be there” after-dinner anecdote: by chance the spot for Kelley’s star was near a very tall escalator and at the top of the elevator there hung a neon sign and the sign read “The Galaxy.” True story!

In the old days right-wingers accused people of being Jews. Now they accuse people of being anti-semites. I’d say that was progress.

(See Franklin “Rosenvelt” vs. what the McCain campaign had to say about Rashid Khalidi.)