Phoenix was a desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland. It’s the kind of city where they can never set a zombie film, because how could the audience tell, you know?
Scottsville, at least, had some personality. But what we saw of that personality was tacky and gaudy and just a shade exploitative.
New Mexico was stunningly beautiful. Albuquerque was kind of funky and eclectic, at least in the neighborhood we visited, which was near the university. Also, the fact that we were dining with Lyle and his partner Scott, and our companions were so charming, may have distracted us a bit.
I remember little of Texas, other than that the clerk at Stuckey’s was blisteringly hot.
Oklahoma was like something out of Mad Max, only with obese Puritans. I mean, by California standards, I’m a big guy. Seeing the mid-West has made me much less self-conscious about my weight. That the highways were littered with vague in meaning signs that read “No Tolerance” prompted the gay and the jew to speed through as quickly as possible.
Missouri was just slightly off, with oddly aggressive drivers. But a fair portion of the male population is good-looking and bearish and I think I’ve seen more porn shops advertising arcades and “spas” there than in any other part of the country.
Indiana…yeah, we passed through there.
West Virginia we were in for all of five minutes. I’m okay with that.
Pennsylvania was interesting. It was much like Oregon, only more conservative and with worse roads. And exorbitantly priced toll roads. It’s also were I had to make an escape from heteronormativity and ran off to the local gay bar. Which was dead. On a Saturday night.
Which says something about Pennsylvania, I think.

The way back has brought us through Ohio, where we stopped to see my last living grand-parent, an outspoken woman born in Tennessee during the Depression who worked in an auto factory after the war, was a single-mother and married a Lebanese man and still doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about all that. My grand-father Eddie was also an amazing man, and former body-builder, Mr. Ohio and physique model.
We moved on to Michigan, were we spent a fantastic day with Gayprof, who showed me Midwestern Funky Town in person. It is both Midwestern and Funky, and Prof is the sweetest, most charming man I’ve met outside of Pete, and just as smart and funny as his blog leads you to believe.
That brought us to Illinois and Wisconsin and Minnesota. Chicago people, I love you, but there’s not enough money in the world you can pay me to set foot in that town. It made L.A. look Utopian. Minnesota has been flat, farms and homophobic teens. Wisconsin was intriguing bill-boards about roadside attractions and horrible drivers. Again, to a degree that makes L.A. look like a bastion of politeness and correct use of turn-signals.

Oh, one thing John and I have discovered: folk music makes an oddly appropriate back-ground noise for the less inhabited parts of the country.

Here’s me in front of the Mississippi.

So, while I was in San Diego, plans fell together for me to make a cross-country road trip with my best friend John from California to Pennsylvania. It’s kind of last minute, so there isn’t going to be a hell of a lot of stuff here for about two weeks or so. You’re welcome to follow along on my Twitter feed and my Flickr feed, both of which will be updated when possible, and I may manage to squeeze in some posts here and there as time permits.

Until then, behave, be good, and enjoy some of my new Wildcat sketches.

The results are in! And, well, no one guessed it. Now, to be certain, there are a number of good guesses. Gambit is well worth hating for being, well, Gambit. Snapper Carr and Rick Jones both deserve the ire they receive as well. Kitty Pryde is high on my hate list as well, both for being a blank slate for fans to project their fantasies of an ideal girl-friend on to, and her fans. And Penance is a great example of the worst excesses of Marvel’s pandering to the lowest common denominator, but that just makes me sad.

But there’s really only one character I hate so much that I would actually buy a Spider-Man comic by Mark Millar and Rob Liefeld if it featured Spidey beating this character to death with a blunt object:

In a universe that’s already littered with an embarrassing number of Superman and Captain Marvel knock-offs, Sentry is a redundant amalgamation of the two concepts. His method of introduction, the “hoax” of him being a lost Silver Age character, was so transparent as to be insulting to Marvel’s fans. He’s been shoe-horned into events and high profile books, where he does nothing. And his “woe is me, life is shit” demeanor is the worst kind of crutch in comics writing; the mistaken belief that melodramatic angst and self-pitying is the same thing as characterization.

But the prize goes to Mike Loughlin, who had this to say:

Green Arrow, because he’s a lame Batman wannabe with a stupid Peter Pan costume and a beard straight out of 1850. He fights people with guns with a weapon that fires *slower* than guns. He thinks he’s a liberal crusader when he’s really a condescending jerk (see: any time he talks to Black Canary, espeacially when he calls her “pretty bird”). Worst of all, he walks around like he’s the world’s greatest super-hero. He can’t see just how hard he sucks!

Yeah, there’s no way I can argue against that. Green Arrow pretty much sucks. Heck, I have an entire category here dedicated to how lame he is. So even if Ollie isn’t my most-hated character, Mike makes a good case as to why he should be, and that’s why he gets a copy of Boody, a joyfully anarchic comic with no sign of angst.

• There should have only been one Star Wars movie.
• Doctor Who really is a children’s program.
• The fiscal impact of illegal file-sharing is probably insignificant, but it’s still a scummy thing to do.
• Internet petitions don’t work.
• Normal people don’t care what internet nerds think about anything.
• Your fan-fiction sucks.
• Wikipedia is pretty much useless for anything other than tv show and movie trivia.
• British television isn’t better than American television. They just know better than to run a show for more than thirteen episodes a year.
• Your blog is not important.
• Joss Whedon’s television shows are not feminist.
• Manga in America was just a fad.
• “Nerd” is not an honorific.
• Publishers, film producers, television networks, etc., are not trying to spite you.
• Comics are, if anything, probably too cheap.
• “Deconstruction” doesn’t mean what you think it does.
• Neither does “gravitas.”
• No one thinks your animated gif is funny.
• “Sexy vampires” have killed the horror genre.
• Film producers will stop making remakes when you stop going to see them.
• The so-called “casual” market for video-games is larger than the “hard-core” market. Deal with it.
• There is something creepy about grown men and women who collect toys.
• Saying “but I have gay friends” after you say something homophobic is a lie, and you know it.

Over the weekend on Twitter, I made a passing mention of the fact that, as well known and warranted as my antipathy towards that whiny little creep Spider-Man is, there actually is a character that I hate more than him. And let’s be clear here: I really hate Spider-Man. If Marvel published a Spider-Man comic written by Grant Morrison and drawn by a miraculously revived Jim Aparo I still wouldn’t buy it.
And there’s a character I hate even more than that.

And then I had the idea that it might be amusing, to me anyway, to make it into an actual contest, with a copy of Boody, the collection of amazingly bizarre and eccentric Boody Rogers comics awarded to the person who correctly guessed who I hated.

But since a guessing game of who I could hate isn’t very fun, or interesting, I decided to up the stakes a bit. Not only do you have to guess who, you have to guess why, or at least why you think I should or would.

Leave your best guesses and explanations in the comments to this post. At approximately 11:59 PM, Wednesday June 3rd, I’ll close the contest and notify the winner, who will be either the first person to guess correctly or the person who comes up with the best explanation of who I should hate.
Anyone suggesting “Wildcat” will get banned from the comments section.

There are a lot of people I probably should thank, because without their friendship, feed-back or encouragement, it’s highly doubtful that I would have kept up with this as long as I have. But the people who were particularly instrumental are Kevin, Chris, Bully and his pal John, Lisa, Melissa, Neilalien, Matt, Larry, Tom, Chris B., Gayprof, Lyle, and the rest of you who know who you are.

And special extra thanks go to Peter (who knows why), John (who knows why) and Mike (who probably wonders why).

For the above, and the rest of you, and for a limited time, I decided to celebrate and thank you with the only true sign of love that exists in this world: a mix tape. Click the below, and for a limited time enjoy a selection of in-jokes, oblique allusions, meta-commentary and personally meaningful stuff.

For those of you keeping track at home, the fifth anniversary of this site is next week.

While I do have at least one or two posts planned in commemoration, I’m opening the floor up to suggestions of what you folks who have been reading the site for all that time would like to see.

• If a film has a comic book “prequel,” the film won’t be any good.
• If a film is primarily advertised in comic books, it won’t be any good.
• The people who complain the loudest about a comic are the ones least likely to have read it.
• Your importance as commentator on the comic book industry is inversely proportional to how important you think you are to the comic book industry.
• The more exposition in a comic written by Grant Morrison, the more people will complain that it doesn’t make any sense.
• The people most concerned about comics being accessible to new readers have been reading them for over twenty years.
• Sales will always be mistaken for quality.
• Every character has at least one fan.
• If every comic book reader who threatened to boycott a publisher’s products actually did so, the comic book industry would collapse overnight.
• Collector’s items aren’t.
• If comic book publishers actually produced the books people say they want, no one would actually buy them.
• Nobody ever “demanded” it.
• The more stringent a character’s “code against killing” the more cavalierly they will break it in a film adaptation.
• If you mostly read Marvel comics, their books are creatively driven, as opposed to the editorially driven books that DC publishes.
• If you mostly read DC comics, their books are creatively driven, as opposed to the editorially driven books that Marvel publishes.
• No matter how stupid and boneheaded a thing a comic book publisher does, someone will defend it.
• They’re called Marvel Zombies for a reason.
• Comics were always better when you were a kid than they are now. If rereading a comic published when you were a kid reveals it to be sub-literate hack-work, well, clearly that one particular issue was the exception that proves the rule.
• The best comics ever written and drawn came out when you were twelve. It’s all been downhill for the industry since then.
• People will complain when publishers don’t give them what they say they want.
• They will complain more when publishers do give them what they say they want.

Further ideas are welcome in the comments.

Greenmantle, 1988, Charles de Lint
This time last year I was sitting in our apartment, trying to think of something to do as a regular feature for the site, since I was finding myself with decreasing amounts of motivation to post over the weekend. I briefly considered doing a series of reviews of older and concluded in the US manga titles, but then realized that the only possible name for a feature like that would require that the posts go up on Mondays, and I had no plan to give up my Sundays. And then, I noticed the large and conspicuous piles of my books and Pete’s books in the bedroom. And I was inspired.
Unfortunately, the book I wanted to feature, an early example of the urban fantasy genre with an uncomfortably sexy illustration of Oberon on the cover, was nowhere to be found.
So you all got a chosen at random vintage paperback instead.
And now, for the one year anniversary, here’s the book that should have started the feature off all along.

Who is the Dark Knight Detective on the hunt for? Could it be an alien time traveller?

Hollywood bad-boy and occasional nudist Scott Caan?

Skaro bad-boy and occasional nudist Dalek Caan?

Or, in a rare cross-over, is he hunting down an over-exposed X-Man?

Only you know for certain!