25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 25! Merry Super Christmas!

Merry Christmas, every buddy!

In this time of thanksgiving, let's take a moment to reflect on the goodness and generosity we've received this year, and maybe how we can repay that into the great karmic circle in 2016.

For now, I wish you a day of peace and joy.  May you be with loved ones, or at least be in touch with them on this day.  And I hope, as this year draws to a close, you can cherish the good moments and put the bad behind you, with lessons learned from both.

Have a Merry Christmas, however you celebrate the day.  Jamie and I wish you the best.

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 24

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 23

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 22

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 21

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 20

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 15

25 Days of Super Christmas - Day 5

Your Obligatory "Batman y Superman: Something Something Hey! Wonder Woman!" trailer post

Yup. That is definitely a trailer for a movie that is coming out.

And, yup, WB finally (finally!) got Doomsday on-screen as a Lex Luthor product. They've been wanting to do that since I was in college.

Happy Belated Birthday to Noel Neill, Our Lois Lane!

Technically, Jamie is Our Lois Lane, and I hate to play favorites when it comes to the great talent that has come to the role in radio, movies and television.  But I'd be lying if I didn't admit to tremendous affection for actress Noel Neill in her role as Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman, and her affiliation with Superman as a character in other ways.

November 25th marked Neill's 95th, and we want to wish her a very happy belated birthday.

Ms. Neill was not in the first season of The Adventures of Superman when the role was played by actress Phyllis Coates.  She arrived in Season 2, and brought her own spark to the part.

She had practice!  Neill also played Lois in the 1948 Superman serials starring Kirk Alyn as The Man of Steel.

On Current Political Situations

Ads like this used to run in Superman comics quite often in post-WWII America.

And, you know, lil' Kal-El was a refugee, too.

Thanks to SW for the image.

Update - I am told this is from World’s Finest #111, which would be about August 1960
Script: Jack Schiff
Pencils: Curt Swan

Comic Collector's Corner: On the Accumulation of Things and When Your Comics Own You

One benefit of being a state employee is the accumulation of vacation days.  I basically earn enough vacation that "banking" vacation isn't really something I worry about.  Now, finding time to take days off - that's another problem.  But, way back in July or so, I asked my boss for days off in November.

I took a few days before the weekend and two more after.  I spent Day 1 (a) working, anyway, but on my sofa, and (b) realizing I was actually pretty tired, and so I just sat there.  But on Day 2, I got going on the project I was home for - dealing with my comic collection for the first time since the beginning of The Great Culling, a year-long period during which something like 20 boxes, long and short, went out the door and became dispersed into the back-issue bins of Austin Books and Comics.*

Last summer I had some long talks with Stuart about the nature of collecting, aging into a point where you realize you might not need this stuff anymore, etc... all while standing in the middle of the Hollywood Museum in Metropolis, Illinois.  Stuart's a bit ahead of the curve from me on this.  He's got stuff, but he's divested a good chunk of his comics, etc.. which I feel I've made progress on, but it's an imperfect system.

Purchasing far, far fewer comics these days than I used to certainly expedited the process this go-round, but the idea that I had fewer comics to wrangle also made me lazy and sloppy on a day-to-day basis.  I just hadn't managed the loose comics well at all.

this comic may or may not be somewhere in my pile of comics

It would be a great thing to come to comics in the modern era.  So long as Comixology exists, the money you spend means the comic you own is really a flipped bit associated with your user profile somewhere out there in the cloud, granting you access to that digital content.  No bags and boards and boxes.  No figuring out if you remembered to inventory into that online system you pay for.  Most importantly, the piles of comics you regret purchasing wouldn't wind up as something you'd feel you still had to curate and manage (and I do throw some in the recycling.  Don't think I don't.)

After all, when you're trying things out on the regular, you get a lot of detritus in the collection.

I was probably 31 before I had the conversation with my LCS manager back in Phoenix that set me thinking a lot more strategically about actually "collecting" versus hoarding.  At the time, I was most certainly just hoarding as I was in a race to try to "get" all of DC Comics and most of Marvel, buying as many comics as I could afford.

Super Watch: Supergirl Pilot on CBS

So.  Here's where I'm the jerk who didn't like the pilot of CBS's new Supergirl TV show that everyone is so excited about.

Look, sometimes I forget just how terrible 90% of network television truly is.  It's no secret network TV has its formulas, its trope for every situation, and never met a bit of exposition it didn't like.  I get that they had to get the character introduced and get a lot of things started quickly, and in the post-Lost wake, the networks think they've learned their lesson and are absolutely terrified of not giving the audience every detail about a show in the first episode.

And I say this as someone who likes Supergirl.  A lot. I've got Action 252 hanging up in my office in a frame (please don't rob me).  I've read Silver, Bronze, 90's, 00's and even gave the trainwrecky New 52 Supergirl a shot.  I'm not a stranger to the character.  And, while I actually like the general tone of "Kimmy Schmidt as Supergirl", because I was really convinced I'd never see that take again (thank you, Sterling Gates, wherever you are, for giving me that Supergirl, oh, so briefly)...  The show is a mess.

Yes, it is a show for children and for those who don't know Supergirl, and no one is under any legal or moral obligation to maintain fidelity to the comics.  I think Marvel has proved that's all pretty unnecessary so long as you get the basic details down.

Christopher Reeve's 63rd Birthday

Today would have marked the 63rd birthday of actor and activist Christopher Reeve.

A child of the 1970's and 1980's, of course I am most familiar with Reeve from his portrayal of Superman, and I've seen the Reeve-starring Superman movies dozens of times.  I've seen a few of his other movies, such as Somewhere in Time, Village of the Damned, Noises Off..., The Remains of the Day and a few other appearances.

You forget, because of the broadness of the Superman films, but Reeve was a heck of an actor.  Just to do what he did with his dual roles of Superman and Clark Kent, in film, is worth checking out.  It's near Shakespearean.

Jack Larson, TV's Jimmy Olsen, Merges With The Infinite

The Signal Watch is deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on the 1950's television series, The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958).

Over six seasons, Jack played the young Daily Planet reporter, leading to such a spike in Olsen's popularity that the character spun out of second-banana obscurity and landed his own comic book, Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen, that ran from 1954-1974.

Super Watch: Superman IV - The Quest for Peace (Master Pancake Theater)

Oh, Superman IV.  You are not a good movie.

Maybe not the worst superhero movie ever put out, Superman IV was victim of severe budget cuts and shortfalls, overly ambitious filmmaking, muddled scripting and editing, and Jon Cryer just being a doofus.  I've written about the movie before.  At length.  So, go read that review.

For something like a decade, Austin has had it's own set of popular movie riffers in Master Pancake Theater.  It's sort of a cultish sort of thing to do in Austin, and they have their loyal legion, and while I like the idea, I've just never gotten off my butt to go see them.  After all, "riffed" movies are not something I've felt I've had a lack of access to in my lifetime after having grown up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and still enjoying RiffTrax even today.

But I couldn't pass up this week's screening as it was, as you'll have guessed, Superman IV, a movie I have deep affection for, and am all too aware of its limitations.

Super Watch: Superman 2 - the Richard Donner Cut (2006)

By anyone's estimation, the production of Superman: The Movie and Superman II as co-developed/ co-produced movies was a bit of a trainwreck.  It's nothing less than a super-feat that the two movies which came from that effort went on to become world-wide classics beloved across at least two generations.

I actually care about and read about the Superman movie franchise, and I've read and heard so many different versions of what happened during the production of these movies that I have absolutely lost track of all the moving pieces.  But the short story is this:

Happy Birthday, Lois Lane

August 17th is the comic book birthday of Lois Lane.  For whatever reason, that's her fictional birthday, with the year sliding around to keep her somewhere between 28 and 38ish.  I tend to think of Lois as maybe a couple of years older than Superman.

Lois Lane is an ass-kicker, and has been since her first appearance in Action Comics #1.

don't just assume you can claim a spot on Lois' dance card

The New "Superman v. Batman" trailer exists, so here goes

Circa 2002, before Superman Returns, WB really, really wanted to do a Superman vs. Batman movie, and it even got a reference in a billboard in the background of I Am Legend.  This was just after the success of Spider-Man and X-Men, and WB was trying to figure out to jumpstart the DC heroes, something they'd sort of ignored in the wake of the slow death of the Batman franchise under Joel Schumacher.

As I recall, the storyline for the script was that Batman had been around for a while, gotten married, semi-retired, etc... but then along comes Superman who has a super-fight, and in the battle, somehow Bruce's wife is killed as a bystander.  In this version, in order to keep up with Superman, Batman makes a deal with Satan or something and gets magical powers in order to stay toe-to-toe with Superman until, of course, they had someone else to go fight.

Never make a deal with this guy

A script leaked a couple of years ago has a different version, but, again, Bruce loses a spouse but Superman just says "hey, don't kill nobody, okay?" which Batman totally wants to do.  It involves Joker clones and a lot of painting oneself into a corner, narratively

If you're keeping score, even WB - the people who brought us Catwoman, Jonah Hex and Green Lantern - decided against the green light on this script, maybe deciding we first needed to remind America what Superman looked like.

Well, when Man of Steel did pretty well, but word of mouth wasn't all that great and it wasn't clear WB could just roll out a Superman sequel and expect success, they finally went ahead and pulled the trigger on the Batman/ Superman meet-up, and - if nothing else - they hopefully finally got it out of their system and came up with a product that will give everyone the same entirely unsatisfactory match-up that's occurred in every superhero comic, ever, where neither wins and they become friends so they can go off and fight the other threat that was a bigger deal than their little misunderstanding.

Here's the new trailer, by the way.

Super Watch: Superman (1978)

So, yesterday, I journeyed to the Alamo South Lamar for a "Kid's Club" screening of Superman: The Movie (1978).

It's impossible to know how many times I've seen Superman, but I figure I'm pushing triple-digits at this point.  Or maybe it's been a mere 70 times.  Who knows?  I've seen it in the theater so many times I've lost count - but I figure it's at least 10 at this point, and I would have skipped this one, but after going to Metropolis and reading that Larry Tye book, it just felt like serendipity that the movie was screening, and I should probably go.

"Kid's Club" screenings are always fun.  As much as I enjoy the evening throw-back screenings of movies at the Paramount and Alamo, seeing movies with the original intended audience is always amazing.  Superman runs something like two and a half hours, and I didn't hear a single anxious kid nor a peep out of anyone aside from some mild excitement during properly exciting scenes.  There's a sweet spot you can hit where the movies are not as dull as some kids movies, but without over-stimulating kids with just too darn much going on up there on the screen - because I have absolutely witnessed that phenomenon, even in a Harry Potter movie, and the kids start just blanking out and futzing with their chairs or asking for Cheerios or whatever.  And despite our weird idea that "kids are so advanced these days"*, the kids certainly don't know about or understand the difference between CGI FX and in-camera or practical effects.  They just don't care, even if they're vaguely aware this doesn't look like other movies.  And I've seen this again and again, including favorites like The Time Machine, Fantastic Voyage and Batman '66.

The kids even totally dealt with the "Can You Read My Mind" scene at face value.  No ironic snickering, no groans of disapproval.  It was kind of nice.

One other weird factoid about "Kid's Club" - they show the movies in 35mm, so the print yesterday was beat to hell, discolored in places and had audio issues, but nobody cared, including the kids.  It may be the last time I get to see Superman in 35mm, so it was a nice treat.

Anyhow, it was a fun screening.  I may want a break between screenings for a while as I did just watch the movie, like, three months ago, but I didn't regret going.  Got to hang with Simon and his lady-friend, Tiffany, and we got some nifty plastic Superman rings from Toy Joy.

*what?  Kids got better at being kids?  That doesn't even make sense.  They're just fine with adapting to the world they were born into that has stuff their parents didn't have at the same age.