A round-up of things (Cap Soldier Dad, UT political cartoon, Batman in his Lambo)

Hi guys!

Over the past few days I've received a few links from you guys, and I guess its appropriate to comment.

Cap Homecoming

If you haven't seen the video of the little boy receiving a visit from Captain America for his birthday, and then learning that the unmasked Cap is the dad he thought was in Afghanistan where he's serving, then you really need to watch it.



An amazing and poignant moment, and a reminder that the US military is a volunteer military of men and women who are also fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Here's to all of our Captain Americas coming home.


Yes, I saw the Gawker article and cartoon.  Yes, that's The Daily Texan.

Yes, The Daily Texan is the student paper at UT Austin where I went to school and currently work.  Yes, its embarrassing.

I have literally no idea what the cartoonist was thinking, but contextually, just the use of the word "colored", which is only used in Texas in a weird, gallows humor sort of way to suggest backwards thinking, tells me that this cartoonist was trying to make a point which never quite made it into the strip, and instead just made UT's daily student paper look backward and racist.

If the cartoonist was trying to make a point about how the matronly and condescending media is telling the story by framing the story to a child-like audience to scare them, then...  okay.  I guess I get it even if I don't buy necessarily buy that interpretation.  You'd pretty much need to be handed a few sign posts to get you there.

From looking at the rest of the cartoonist's work on the Texan website, all of her strips (if you want to call them that) are terribly inept and seem to fail to actually convey anything other than a general sense of "I watched CNN last night" and a bit of anger at someone running for student government*.  Frankly, political cartooning is hard.  The skill to create icons and symbolism to convey your opinion or some greater truth with a 2 second glance is hard to come by.  Even among comic nerds, political cartooning gets a certain level of respect for the difficult task it represents.  This student gets an F in cartooning.

But, pulling Eisner's work would mean The Daily Texan would then need to either fill that space with another cartoon (and lord knows how hard that would be to find), or run an ad for Forbidden Fruit or Tom's Tabooley or something.  I just wish the editor or faculty advisor had been able to make a better decision before letting this see print.

Update:  Eisner more or less admitted she screwed up the cartoon.  


Yes, I saw that a guy who owns a Lamborghini apparently likes to dress up as Batman

And I saw that the cops pulled him over for having a bat-symbol, I believe, as his license plate.

Several comics sites talked about the guy, and who can blame them?  A dude who owns a completely amazing black Lamborghini dressed himself up as Batman and drove around in the car (with the top down), pretty much doing what every single person in the world has always wanted to do.

Some were saying this guy does this for kids or a charity or something.  Really, I don't know why he does it, but he's okay in my book.


Speaking of Batman

Here's every window cameo on the 1960's Batman program with Adam West and Burt Ward.

And how can you go wrong hiring Andy Devine to play Santa?  I will tell you:  You cannot.


My Personal Bug-a-Boo of the Day

Mixing historical figures with genre tropes is getting played out.  Especially when you can tell that neither the artist nor the person writing the article (a) realizes this, or (b) realizes that this one in particular was done a long time ago and better as "Tales from the Bully Pulpit".

No, I don't care about the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter movie.


Thanks to everyone for thinking of me and sending me links!  Keep them coming.


*dear students:  these elections will never matter anywhere, to anyone but to sad people reading grad school applications in basements

So the internet might be dead by the end of the day today

Hey, all four of you who read this site.  

If SOPA passes today, that may be the end of this blog.  Just FYI.  If it does pass, I'd have to likely not just stop posting, but may need to pull this blog and the archives of League of Melbotis offline.  And forget tumblr.

Basically, its going to make 95% of what I do and talk about here not just a risk to me (of a felony, not just a law suit), but to any of you who might link back to me.

I've written to my congress people, but they're from Texas, so if anyone is waving a $20 bill their direction, they'll be insisting Jesus pre-ordained SOPA and anyone who doesn't love the bill hates America.

So, you know, now would be a good time to write your local congressperson and see if you can't shake the tree a little.  

Funny.  This really wasn't how I was expecting to end this blog (I assumed one of us would die while saving orphans from a submarine fire), but The League is not going to jail for posting pictures of Superman online without the express written consent of the NFL or whomever.

I think the good folks at Get Your Censor On can help fill in some of the blanks.

Enjoy your internet full of nothing but Kim Kardashian updates.  

@#$%

We're not crazy about the SOPA Bill

I've censored the following, in protest of a bill that gives any corporation and the US government the power to censor the internet--a bill that could pass THIS WEEK. To see the uncensored text, and to stop internet censorship, visit: http://americancensorship.org/posts/6377/uncensor

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I ██████ █████████ ████ ███████.

So, those guys were hiking the Iranian/ Iraqi border?

I've kind of/ sort kept an eye on the story of the three Americans who were held by Iran for the past few years after they, apparently, strayed over the Iranian border whilst out for their morning constitutional.  I, too, had been concerned for the welfare of my fellow Americans caught in a potentially deadly situation playing out on a global scale.  But, I admit, my sympathy for the situation dropped significantly when I figured out today that the three had been hiking the Iranian/ Iraqi border.  To which I say:

...wut?

How has this not been a part of the story?  Why is this buried several paragraphs down in every article where the information actually does appear in some form other than "hiking along the Iranian border"?

I guess I know now why the Iranians thought our friends may have been up to no-good shenanigans.  Hell, I'm not sure I don't believe they were up to something.

And Sometimes Superman Went Crazy and Became King of the World: Action Comics 311

Oh, comics.

I first saw this cover years ago, and only recently obtained a copy of Action Comics #311, the one where Superman becomes a despotic tyrant over all the Earth.  Only, you know, in the kind of goofy way Superman would have become a despotic tyrant during the Silver Age in comics aimed at kids.

I like that he added the fleecing to his cape.  You got to class it up as king.

Key to making sure you're king?  Demanding trays full of jewels.  I will need to remember that.

Superman does nothing by half-measures, so you should expect none of that here.  The story in brief: Superman gets exposed to Red Kryptonite, which splits him into two sides, one bad and one good.  The bad side remains Superman, but the other becomes human-strength Clark Kent. Bad Superman decides there's no good reason to help people, and so he decides to just lord it over them.

No, no it doesn't make any sense.  But where have we seen this good/ bad split before?  Well, not exactly before...  you saw it in the Star Trek episode The Enemy Within. Also, we see good/ bad Superman as Superman/ Clark in...  SUPERMAN 3 where Red-K was also to blame!

So, yeah.  Red K.  Its a real problem. Avoid it.

I'm going to editorialize like crazy here, but there's also an ad run in the front cover of the comic, featuring Bob Hope teaching kids about loving their neighbor, religious tolerance, wrestling with singular world viewpoints, etc... all in 5 panels!  And it is seemingly sponsored by the US Govt.

clearly, Bob Hope was a sleeper agent for Al Qaeda

Quite a few of these pop up in these Kennedy-era comics.  It's oddly kind of stunning.  These days, this sort of hopeful, "it's a small world" talk would get you a 24 hour news cycle on Fox accusing you of hating the troops.

Also:  apparently kids were still into Bob Hope in the mid-60's.

But it's not that, nor the suggestion the comic makes that China built an entire replica of New York City (to scale, btw) just to blow it up for atomic bomb tests that I want to point to.  No, its exactly the manner in which Superman demands the nations of the world crown him Head Cheese.

He heads to the United Nations general assembly, takes the podium, and...

I invite you to click for full-sized madness

 Right on.

For those of you who didn't look...

We will SUPER bury you!

Pretty good stuff.

Of course, the actual pounding of shoe to podium associated with Krushchev may be Cold War myth, but it was taught to me as fact. I am betting that was one of the more fun panels these guys put together.  No idea what readers, their parents, or the CCA said about this one.

And I particularly love that Superman is still going to town, menacing the General Assembly with a bright, red boot as the cameras roll.

at this point, I imagine Superman has broken out into song

This, by the way, is a two-parter!

And if you missed it:

You can drop the "tator" part, Olsen

Hall of Inaccurate Presidents

this struck me as particularly great (and reminded me of Steven G. Harms)



found on twitter @Kevin_Church

Yes to Egyptian Democracy!

I really liked this video linked by Kanye West off his Twitter account.

Its footage from Egypt cut to a Kanye West track.



I haven't talked all that much about Egypt or the calls for democracy and fair representation occurring right now in the Middle East, but as we at Signal Watch stand for Truth and Justice, we can only hope for the best for the citizens of nations signaling peacefully and reasonably for change to a government for the people and by the people.

Liu Xiaobo

Editor's note:  This post is a repost from Steve Harms' website, published with permission by the author.

We talk about comics, TV and movies a lot here, and in those media, the term "hero" is thrown around as if it means something.  Xiaobo is a reminder of what true heroism can look like, an image that bears all too little relation to dreams of revenge and glory that we usually use as our common image of "hero".

Like most Americans, prior to last week's Nobel Prize ceremony, I was unaware of Liu Xiaobo.  Like most Americans, as China has blazed a path into a position as a power player in the 21st Century, I often forget about the endemic human rights violations and extreme censorship that the Chinese government employs on a routine basis.

Below is Steven's post and Xiaobo's acceptance statement.


Liu Xiaobo, Chinese dissident and anti-party activist received the Nobel Peace Prize on the 10^th of this month.

In his acceptance address, Liu espouses the usual high-minded views that one would associate with a Nobel-winning dissident: free expression is a right of all men, democratic reform is coming to China, social diversity is better than a master-planned autocracy, etc.

What was most surprising to me was the poetic description of his love for his wife:

I am serving my sentence in a tangible prison, while you wait in the intangible prison of the heart. Your love is the sunlight that leaps over high walls and penetrates the iron bars of my prison window, stroking every inch of my skin, warming every cell of my body, allowing me to always keep peace, openness, and brightness in my heart, and filling every minute of my time in prison with meaning. My love for you, on the other hand, is so full of remorse and regret that it at times makes me stagger under its weight. I am an insensate stone in the wilderness, whipped by fierce wind and torrential rain, so cold that no one dares touch me. But my love is solid and sharp, capable of piercing through any obstacle. Even if I were crushed into powder, I would still use my ashes to embrace you.

ed.  You can read the full transcript here.