Heroes & Villains

The Killing Joke

2011-05-02T23:58:00.007-04:00

I am clearly not the first person to draw the parallel between a certain recently terminated real-world supervillain and a certain archetypal/unkillable comic book supervillain. (Nor did I ever put much thought into the blockbuster movie that made much of that parallel.) But hey, here's the first visual that looked blog-worthy in a search that yielded 993,000 results as of tonight:

(There was also this, for instance, and I expect a lot more in the days ahead.)

In other semi-breaking news, I gotta say recent events do make this development in superhero land seem even more provocative. What both of these stories make me think about is a soundbite from Martin Luther King that has been floating around Facebook all day today:

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."

But enough seriousness for now. Let's get back to horniness, shall we? You already know I am a bigger Batfan than Superfan, but allow me to linger on this tasty bit of hand-drawn manmeat before I disappear back into the shadows for an unspecified amount of time, as I am wont to do:

It's official: Best. Batfilm. Everrrrrr.

2010-07-23T11:43:00.003-04:00

Check it out, if you haven't already:

CITY OF SCARS
Uploaded by Batinthesun. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

For me this works as a straightforward narrative, AND this Batman remains as hot as he was in his earlier fanfilm appearance. Woof!

PS. Yeah, I know it's been a while since I posted here. I"m sure I've warned you this would happen now and then. For now, here I am again ... Feels good to be back.

I am a sucker for this kind of image.

2010-04-13T23:07:00.000-04:00

Four months pass, and all I give you is another lazy repost. Thank you, Daily Batman:

OK, OK, you deserve more from me after such a long silence.
So here is yet ANOTHER lazy repost from the same place:

Granted, this makes more sense if you know the game or see other video pieces by the same guerilla performance group, but who needs context? It's still pretty funny, even on its own. And I would quite enjoy seeing a real-life Batman creating an exploding bat-logo outside my local Ben & Jerry's.

It's funny cuz it's hot

2010-01-04T02:03:00.007-05:00

Surely it was the '66 Bat-series that instilled in me a lifelong love of things that work on at least two levels--ideally the kind that make me laugh and make me hard at the same time, or nearly the same time.

Latest examples:

•The Daily Batman, in which the mastermind behind the long-entertaining Beaucoup Kevin serves up a fresh dish of out-of-context bat-ephemera every day, including this tasty morsel of bound and unbelted Batman:

•From Cracked (which I remember as a second-rate Mad, though its online incarnation seems to work blue fairly often), a list of "The 20 Most Ridiculous Batman Comics Ever Released". It's a nice trip through the Caped Crusader's more embarrassing adventures (the kind Grant Morrison made such mind-blowing use of in killing off Bruce Wayne). Again, a beltless Bat:

•Finally, a link I've been saving for ages now (and I see it hasn't been updated in years): a YouTube channel devoted to Live Action Comic Book Superheroes. It's a grabbag of trailers and clips from Hollywood movies, fan films, TV commercials, vintage serials, and various odds and ends. There's some Bat-stuff, all of which I think I'd seen before, but what really caught my eye was the only fan film devoted to Hourman I have ever seen. The outfit is a bit cheesy, but there's plenty to recommend it to perverts like me 'n' you:

Good questions, one and all

2009-12-17T20:37:00.002-05:00

I think many of these occurred to me while watching The Dark Knight (a movie I honestly wasn't as crazy about as the rest of the universe), but I am really sharing this with you because I like Batman's somewhat ill-fitting but still sexy outfit here:

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Hip to be square

2009-12-15T00:55:00.009-05:00

I owe LycraLord (who probably owes TowleRoad) for hipping me to Square Hippies, a site devoted to the beauty of the male form by way of "worksafe shirtlessness." The aesthetic at SH is broad, but seems pretty close to my own--which to say, heavy on chest hair, light on twinks, and very easy on the eyes. The subjects are mainly public figures--actors, musicians, and athletes for the most part. The writing, which tends to be brief, is invariably witty. I've spent hours with the handy search feature seeking out pages for people like Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe, Alex O'Loughlin (who was new to me thanks to an Entertainment Weekly photo from his soon-to-be-cancelled tv series), and old fave Kevin Spacey. When Instinct put furry Scott Evans (who plays a gay cop on One Life to Live) on its December cover, I headed to SH in search of more images, and promptly found plenty, along with some of his better-known brother Chris (of Fantastic Four fame, and a fave of the Hub). I was happy to see Corbin Bernsen and of course good ol' Ryan Reynolds and hunky Josh Lucas--but then the list truly goes on and on. If none of the names I've just mentioned floats your boat, don't give up hope--as I say, the range is broad and well worth sampling. I've added the site to my blogroll of "Late-Breaking Transmissions" over to the right there, so if you're lucky you should be notified when fresh beef is available.

Bad boys, bad boys ...

2009-11-24T01:44:00.002-05:00

When you watch this video (which I found at Boing Boing tonight), you're supposed to keep your eye on the suspect, who eats what is believed to be the ransom note for a bank robbery around 19 seconds in. MY eyes were solidly with the cops. Yum!

My life as a bottom, Part 2: Cast of characters

2009-10-04T00:40:00.014-04:00

As I said in Part 1 of this post, the basic structure of my defeat at the hands of a villain is always more or less the same, and the specifics--when they are worth talking about at all--are generally pretty different. So who are the men who have broken the Bat? I've already said plenty about the one I call "the Monk," so let's meet a few of those who have arrived in his wake, over the last 4 or 5 years, in roughly ascending order of intensity ... (Some of these aliases are the ones we really use, and others are modified, just to throw you off. My aim here is not to betray any confidences, only to shed light on a larger phenomenon from my own perspective.)

a. Catch and Release: This is a handy grab-bag of villains who have managed to ensnare Batman over the years, had their way with me, and then disappeared. Here we find several rogue cops, an amoral ex-superhero, and a semi-literate wrestling fanatic whose mistyped/incoherent instructions, utter disregard for the laws of physics, and vast vocabulary of obscure (to me, at least) wrestling holds are notorious amongst my crimefighting colleagues and me. These tend to be situations that are not ideal for one reason or another, which is often clear from the get-go, but eventually I end up giving in to them anyway, usually when a better match is simply not on the horizon for a long time. While these scenarios don't hold much longterm interest for me (or for the other player, needless to say), there is still something grimly erotic about Batman sinking so low that he is bested by someone he clearly feels superior to.

b. Turnabout is fair play: In a couple of cases, I have started out dominating opponents, only to have them turn the tables on me in a fairly decisive way. Also in this category, I suppose, would be two villains who made pretty fast work of me, only to cave in when I managed to escape their clutches, each soon turning into a total submissive himself. This table-turning scenario enables me to enjoy the best of both worlds: the power of being in charge, and the thrill of losing my grip. There's also the fact that men who have subbed (to me, or anyone else, for that matter) often have unique insight into how to play both roles, and they tend to know just how to twist the knife when they seek revenge. On the other hand, having an adversary who enjoys bottoming himself always holds out the hope that Batman will rise again.

c. Officer Daddy: Technically a member of category b, this rogue cop (what can I say? Good Guy Gone Bad is a motif that turns me on) currently enjoys a fascinating relationship with me. We sparred for months, I won, and then--in a move that surprised even me--I found myself turning myself over to him, relinquishing the reins. I'm not sure he particularly wanted this exchange of power, but he's certainly risen to the opportunity. A turning point, after I started fighting back again, came when he pointed out that he hadn't overpowered me (the usual scenario) but that I was the one who had surrendered. As a result, our storyline is the most consensual one of all of these--all the more so because he enjoys scenes in which I'm the "active" one (to use that genteel distinction for who bones whom) and he's the "passive" one. He prefers his "bois" to be manly and strong, and that makes for an appealing, fairly unique, setup to me. The perpetual problem I run into, though, is the moment in a scene with him when I want to just completely take charge, which is no longer my allowed role. There's a powerful degree of tenderness in our interactions; he's the best Daddy I know (although, as is often the case, I am at least 5 or 6 years older than him). This one is about balance, I think--within myself, and in my dealings with him.

d. Mr. S: Relatively new to me, this handsome guy has a terrific feel for how to satisfy my hunger for humiliation. That's a side of myself I'm not entirely comfortable with, but one that (for that very reason?) excites me a great deal. Consequently, I allow myself to try things with him that wouldn't normally appeal to me, precisely because they don't appeal. I absolutely love having my limits pushed and boundaries tested by a roleplayer I trust--although at the moment I think we are negotiating what I am willing to do and what I'm not, when it comes to following orders for offline activity. (Wearing chastity devices to work for a week as a lesson in obedience = mildly hot. Wearing them on a private weekend with the Hub = not so much.) Another interesting aspect of this case is the fact that Mr. S, who I imagine can be as much a bottom as a top depending on whom he's with, tells me he's learning more about how to assume the dom role through his encounters with me. I am more than happy to be his guinea pig at the moment.

e. Machette: That's my own, misspelled pet name for a longtime villain who wears no costume and adopts no rigid persona. We've been playing for at least 3 years now, in a storyline that has taken many zigs and zags. Early on, he was a more traditional comic-book-style nemesis, but he felt disappointed that I never seemed to allow myself (in character) to "enjoy" our scenes (which, I've always maintained, would be totally out of character for a Batman in the clutches of a foe). He wanted to connect with the "real" me, the one who has a regular name, holds a regular job, and does not wear a mask, and it took at least a year before I chose to let down my guard that much around him. (Those kinds of revelations are not generally part of my online life as "Batfan60"--I figure the internet, or at least this part of it, is for fantasy, not reality, and it always seems a little pedestrian to drop the bat-persona; I get to play the "real" me all day long in public, after all.) This led to a fairly long period when the artifice of Batman/villain fell away and we interacted as two ordinary guys saying hello now and then (which normally bores the crap out of me with most online acquaintances, I must say). I even--voluntarily!--lifted the mask once or twice, an unheard-of development and erotic in its own way. With the recent emergence of the Recon superhero chatroom, we're (mostly) back to being adversaries again, though the only kind of scene he seems interested in doing with me at this stage is one in which other people are involved, either as his accomplices, my compatriots, or voyeuristic bystanders (innocent or otherwise). That's okay by me, because we're pretty much on the same wavelength in terms of scenarios for Batman's interactions in public. (For a while, he delighted in demonstrating his mastery over me by forcing me to recite the "I'm a little teapot" song to onlookers, which I admit I found an appealing form of ridicule.)

f. Lycra Lord: Hmmm, how do I neatly summarize a "coexistence" (as we began calling it early on, when we realized the uncanny number of things we had in common) that has become every bit as charged and complicated as the Monk saga? I have only myself to blame for not writing about each twist and turn here as they happened over the last two years, but I think that was the result of my preferring to simply live through the experience for a change instead of retelling and analyzing it here in real time. Very long story very short, what began as a typical (if particularly hot) hero/villain scenario soon took a number of turns for the surreal as we unmasked each other (verbally and then in more literal ways) and learned we work in more or less the same field, have various non-lycra-related interests in common, live a county away from each other, have longterm relationships that started around the same time, had parents who each had the same medical procedure on the same day, and--the capper--even share the same birthday. I used to think there was a novel in this, but the coincidences are so many and so far-fetched no one would buy them. As you can surely imagine, the coexistence far surpasses my usual level of roleplay interaction; safe to think of it as an actual friendship, complete with a work dimension for both of us--and yet there remains, at its core, an element of top/bottom dynamic, all the richer because I have to admit it's not just "Batman" he's affected but the honest-to-god real me underneath and aside from the role. LL is the person who introduced me to the term "edgeplay," and that concept is the best possible way to explain the dynamic between us (other than simply liking each other and liking to flirt with each other, if you want to get pedestrian about it again). Both in specific fantasy scenes and in the sheer outrageousness of our coexistence, I have gone to the outer limit--the edge--of where I can take online roleplay and remain a (very) happily married man. I have always had a very solid rule against actual physical contact with any of my make-believe friends, and yet there I was, a year and a half ago now, in my car, driving 45 minutes to meet him. There was a work-related (or, more accurately, work-enabled) reason to do so, and no lines were crossed--but still, I was wearing what he had "ordered" me to wear, and I had one of the most intense J/O sessions of my life with him when I got home that night. (I also felt obliged to tell the Hub about it a few days later, and his response confirmed that I have got a very special spouse indeed.) The vast majority of our conversations are PG-13 these days, but there is no getting around the erotic charge of spending time with someone who has such unprecedented access to (and, it's safe to say, understanding of/appreciation for) both my inner fantasies and my outer façade.

So that's the lineup. As for what it all means, stay tuned: same bat-time, same bat-channel.

My life as a bottom, Part 1: The basics

2009-09-28T23:11:00.008-04:00

Not only have I been much less frequent in posting here lately, I've largely abandoned the kinds of multi-tiered, multi-installment personal observations that I started this blog in order to share, in favor of quick and easy posts about how I can't wait to see Ryan Reynolds as the Green Lantern. (Which I still can't wait to see.) So here's an attempt to make up for lost time.

It's not just laziness that has kept me from maintaining my old level of self-disclosure here. For a while, I didn't want certain roleplaying buddies to know too much about certain other ones, and I never want to make it too easy for new villains to know too much about my weaknesses without having to work for it. But what the hell: much time has passed since the heavy duty phase of the Monk saga, and the 4 or 5 of you who actually read this blog as regularly as I write it might appreciate hearing what has happened in the meantime, possibly to shed let on your own experiences. I've been thinking a lot lately about what turns me on in batplay, and why, and wanting to put those thoughts down in words.

In a nutshell, getting unmasked (on various levels) and broken by the Monk several years ago seemed to open up a side of myself I've long been aware of but had not fully explored. While I can readily attest that nothing that has followed has carried exactly the same level of emotional intensity (after all, you never forget your first time), it's also true that I've tried to recapture that feeling many times since then with varying degrees of success. I think I've lost track of the number of men who have managed to get me (as the Batman character) to admit defeat--not just in a single scene, but on a more longterm level. I'm not talking dozens here, but it's possible I can no longer count them on both hands. I am called their "batbitch," their "batbaby," their "boi" (a spelling I hate, so hearing it applied to me only heightens the shame and pisses me off all the more). A smaller number have gotten me to the point where I have removed the mask that hides my true face, putting me in a more vulnerable position in regard to them. And an even smaller number--two, counting the Monk--have earned enough of my trust, and proven themselves skillful enough, to find out quite a bit about my "real" life, blurring the boundaries between my assumed identity and the one I show the rest of the world in a way that excites me as much as it frightens me.

Those are the basic stages of what I consider the best kind of bat-roleplay. They always happen in that order, when they happen, and although the details of each case are very different, the overall pattern is virtually identical: I come on strong in my early battles with the villain, winning a few and losing a few more. (The really inept or uninteresting bad guys don't make it past a single scene, unless I'm feeling particularly horny--but I've learned the hard way that it's a waste of my time to try to make it to the next level with an adversary who isn't up to the task.) After a few months (or weeks, or days now, depending again on how badly I want it) of this back-and-forth, the truly talented villain stages some sort of decisive showdown that I ultimately end up losing, but not before putting up the fight of my life. A short time after my defeat, if he chooses, my secret identity is revealed (sometimes this is purely verbal, sometimes it's on camera) and my old career as Batman is essentially over. This stage usually entails some degree of bad feeling, since I don't, as a real person, enjoy failure or defeat as a rule, and even though I'm perfectly aware it's all a game, the hurt is on some small level a real one. I tend to spend at least a day feeling genuinely depressed--but that passes, there is typically one last period of rebellion, and after a certain period of readjustment I come to accept and (in the rarest and best cases) even embrace my new role as a bottom to the villainous Top.

The most interesting part of all this for me is the struggle: the deeper I start to fall in the early days, the more I fight it ... and the more I fight it, the deeper I feel myself being pulled in. In essence, I absolutely love resisting as hard as I can until I am finally ready to admit that I can't resist anymore. (Even then, there is usually that one last gasp of resistance after I've theoretically already succumbed, before I accept my fate once and for all--which is the stage when I admit I don't want to resist anymore.) It's pretty much what happens physiologically, too: I work myself up, then hold back, then work myself up some more, and hold back hold back hold back until I just can't anymore, and whoosh--there's the orgasm, and the period of exhaustion that follows, then the whole cycle repeats the next time with a new roleplay partner.

I have my theories about what all this means, and why it's so powerful for me, but I will hold off on those till later. For now, I just wanted to convey what a psychologist friend of mine calls the "elegant pattern" of the fantasy. I should also note that I don't mean to suggest I am only a bottom (I intend to wrap this multi-parter up with an entry called "My life as a Top," btw), or that I go through every single phase of the pattern every single time I meet someone new online. (I should also note this all happens entirely online and entirely separate from my very happy real-life relationship--which itself does not fit the pattern at all.) The way I see it, the pattern is my way of reenacting a myth--the rise and fall of a good man, who will eventually rise (and fall) again in a new place and time--that, for whatever reason, is part of the story of my life.

Don't ask, he won't tell

2009-09-23T14:02:00.000-04:00

Remember, boys and girls: Do NOT ask a cop this question:

It was Officer Hub who tipped me off to the site Things Not to Ask a Cop. The clip-art gent you see above appears in every installment, much like the characterless characters from the much-loved and much-missed (by me, anyway) Get Your War On webcomic.

When I first checked out Things Not to Ask, I automatically assumed it was the work of a cop or maybe a cop spouse. But the more I looked over the identical-looking single-panel comics, the more I started to wonder. Let's just say if an actual officer of the law is coming up with stuff like this, he or she (no, definitely He) surely won't keep his job very long.

Strangers in the night

2009-09-09T01:47:00.004-04:00

A little more than a week ago a cyberfriend turned me on to the new chatrooms at Recon.com (which, like GearFetish, is a social-networking site aimed at fetish-minded gay men). I'd been a Recon member for years (like GF, basic membership is free, though if you pay money you get access to more features), but largely neglected the site for weeks or months at a time.

Until this past week. Now I find myself hanging out in the "Superhero" room there for stretches of the day and night. (FYI, the main feature that distinguishes Recon's approach to chat from GF's is that public rooms are devoted to particular fetishes and interests, including bears & cubs, daddy/boy, hypnosis, and "scallies," whatever that means. One is called "Chastity," which always throws me off because it's the name of one of my female coworkers. You can also look for like-minded men by geographic location and upcoming leather events.) I haven't partaken in the chat scene anywhere much since the heyday of AOL back in the early-to-mid-90s, and I can't say it's changed much: lots of lurkers, not necessarily lots of interesting exchanges with witty and articulate conversationalists, and a whole bunch of time spent alone in a room waiting for someone else to show up and stick around longer than 5 seconds. For a while it seemed like everyone who dropped in was between 19 and 24, a demographic that didn't even appeal to me when I was in it myself; and the bottoms (generally heroes and sidekicks) outnumber the tops (generally villains) by about 4 to 1. On a good day. Still, Recon's Superhero room is a new way to meet new potential roleplay partners and to reconnect with old friends/fiends, and I recommend it, although I have a feeling I'm burning out on it fast. (It triggers the obsessive side of me a little too much--and I hate the needy feeling of sitting alone in public waiting for someone to talk to me, either online or off.)

Thanks to this NPR piece on the new book Consequential Strangers, I now have a new way to think about the men (and occasional women) I meet through online roleplay. As defined by authors Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman, a "consequential stranger" is someone who occupies that gray area between intimate friend and anonymous passerby; you may interact with him or her once or many times (a barber is a perfect example of the latter), exchanging information about each other to one degree or another, and yet your knowledge of each other is typically limited to a very specific field. Blau and Fingerman cite the kinds of people we exchange holiday cards with, but lots of Facebook friends--the kind I last saw in person in high school 30+ years ago--seem like the best contemporary manifestation to me.

Well, and chatroom/roleplay buddies, too. Some of these people I interact with exactly once and it goes nowhere, others develop into something resembling close friends--albeit friends whom I (almost) never meet face to face, who (usually) don't know my "real" name or what I look like when I'm not wearing a mask, and who (generally) know next to nothing about the details of my daily existence. And yet, at the same time, many of them have earned a glimpse into my innermost self; they see a side of me I wouldn't dream of showing to my best friends, let alone family members or coworkers.

It's an intriguing theory to me because it sheds light on the current Age of Oversharing. I'm frequently accused by people in (what I insist on calling) the Daylight World of being overly private, hard to read, or just plain standoffish. Even in the chatroom setting, when I don't break character with a newcomer or I refuse to reveal my real name or hometown, I can rub people the wrong way. And yet you, gentle reader, are privvy to all manner of my fantasies--but then this is blog is pretty much directed at consequential strangers, for much the same reason that the book's authors offer in the radio interview for why women tell their hairdressers things they would never reveal to their husbands or siblings. The "consequences" of what I write here are limited if you don't know a thing about me--though if I trust you enough to tell you my name some day, then the game changes, slightly.

Blau writes:

While those closest to our heart are synonymous with home, consequential strangers anchor us in the world and give us a sense of being plugged into something larger. They also enhance and enrich our lives and offer us opportunities for novel experiences and information that is beyond the purview of our inner circles.

You can say that again! Sometimes those "novel experiences" are yoga classes, and sometimes they involve one or the other of us on our knees ready to blow the load of a lifetime.

Don't ask, don't tell

2009-08-27T02:01:00.006-04:00

Normally I am put off by public displays of nationalism/patriotism/warmongering, but passing this larger-than-life-sized sign in the airport has become a high point of every flight:

That high forehead! That slightly pudgy face! Those pursed lips! That cryptic expression, bordering on the Mona Lisa's! Those shades! That trace of stubble! (I'd need to get nice and close to really capture it--something I'll gladly do, mind you, but it's not always a good idea to take too many photos in airports these days.) (And yes, I see the irony in that statement.) (I suppose you could say this guy is fighting for my right to snap and get off on pictures of him.) (And I imagine there's a good chance he'd beat the crap out of me if he knew I was thinking any of this.)

Welcome home, hero, indeed.

Promise he'll be in spandex and I am SO there

2009-08-08T07:23:00.006-04:00

OK, OK, I'm about a month late sharing this information, but then if you take a look at the date of the last post here, you'll realize how rare it is to find anything from me these days. And if anything's gonna pull me out of my latest blogging hiatus, it's gonna be the news that this man:

is about to play this superhero:

Which is enough to make me stain my bat-tights. Not only because Mr. Reynolds has got to be one of the hottest men in movies these days, but because it means this won't be happening anytime soon, after all. Whew!

PS. The image of Hunky Hal in a Compromising Position above comes from my once and future favorite source of Lantern news.

PPS. Here's a piece of far more recent news about another Green-themed movie (which also, oddly enough, includes another peripheral reference to Jack Black).

Out of the comics & onto the streets

2009-05-15T23:31:00.005-04:00

Finally got around to reading "The Legend of Master Legend," Joshua Bearman's "epic tale" of self-created real-life superheroes from the Dec. 25, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone. As Bearman noted in BoingBoing back when the story first ran ,

[T]he narrative at Boing Boing (and in the wider world) about real life superheroes has mostly been bemusement at the weirdos in spandex. That was my perception of the world when I started reporting. But this is [a?] most serious look at what it actually means that people are doing this, and having found Master Legend and spent a lot of time with him, I realize that what he's doing is strange, yes, but also strangely sympathetic.

Sure enough, while there's a tongue-in-cheek quality to the story, you do get the sense that our narrator believes there is more to ML and colleagues like these and these than an easy punchline. Here's a bit from the end of the piece:

This may be the real reason Master Legend inhabits a never-ending comic book in his mind, assigning everyone a character in the grand narrative. ... [T]he reality of Master Legend, a guy who has no job and lives in a run-down house in a crummy neighborhood in Orlando, is transmuted via secret decoder ring into an everlasting tale of heroic outsiders, overcoming the odds and vanquishing enemies. To the outside world, this makes Master Legend seem like a lunatic. But to the people around him, he is the charismatic center of an inviting universe. ... Being a Real Life Superhero means that Master Legend can get in his Nissan pickup and call it the Battle Truck. He can tape together a potato gun and call it the Master Blaster. He can stand in the porch light of a disintegrating clapboard house, a beer in his hand, and behold a glorious clandestine citadel. And who are we to tell him otherwise?

Who, indeed?

BONUS! Actual comments from and flame wars between some of the heroes in Bearman's tale here and on page 1 of the online version of the story.
EXTRA BONUS! Deleted material from the original story here.

Night and day

2009-05-10T02:22:00.005-04:00

Just finished reading an essay in/on Reality Sandwich called "Attending to Dreams" by a writer who calls himself Gyrus. It's a bit dense (not a diss), and I envision rereading it a time or two, which is one reason I'm writing about it here--as a bookmark for myself. I also bring it up because I sense a connection between it and my theory that online (and offline) roleplay can constitute a kind of dreamworld. Much of the essay concerns the work of psychologist James Hillman and the notion that rather than "use" our dreams (as with lucid dreaming or psychotherapy), we should learn to "attend to" them.

Here's Hillman:

[T]his dayworld style of thinking [...] must be set aside in order to pursue the dream into its home territory. There thinking moves in images, resemblances, correspondences. To go in this direction, we must sever the link with the dayworld, foregoing all ideas that originate there [...]. We must go over the bridge and let it fall behind us, and if it will not fall, then let it burn.

That term "dayworld" reminds me of a similar phrase I like to use (in my case, as an alternative to "real world"). As for "going over the bridge and letting it fall behind us," I think about that moment that sometimes--during a particularly good solo (and very occasionally joint) roleplay session when I find myself taking a leap of faith, past the point of no return, into the abyss. (I realize that's a string of three clichés, but they somehow seem so accurate as to almost be literal.) It's like getting an opportunity commit to the reality of the dream.

No profundities here, just a memo to self that I want to find out more about both writers.

Holy cornucopia, Batman!

2009-05-04T01:03:00.006-04:00

Thanks, Monk, for letting me know about the "fanofbats"'YouTube channel, devoted to a complete set of Adam West Bat-episodes and even the serials from the 1940s (containing what may well be the least erotic batsuit of all time). Now I can have my all-time favorite tv show at my fingertips any time of the day or night. (Technically, I've had that for years now, courtesy of a bootleg DVD set.) How vividly I remember the long wait between the first broadcast and the reruns in syndication, then waiting around for one basic cale channel or another to air the series.

Hmmm... Which sample episode should I post to accompany this news item? Let me seeeeeee ...

I was planning to go with the deathtrap many folks seem to agree is the all-time hottest--the Riddler's spinning wheel (and accompanying "sticky net"--but on my way to tracking it down, I came across a more literally hot trap, brought to us by the Minstrel (RIP, Van Johnson) :

Ah, such a treasure trove!

"Better than Prozac"

2009-04-25T01:27:00.003-04:00

I have thought comic/film critic Frank DeCaro was hot (and hilarious) from the first time I saw him on The Daily Show, years and years ago. So imagine my delight to learn (here) that he is a fellow Batfan:

Love what DeCaro has to say about B's double life, "the fact that people speculate about his relationship with Robin," the outfit ("he looks great in lycra and leather--what more can you ask for in a character?"), "stalking Toys R Us," and especially the observation that "anyone who collects anything should never point a finger at anybody else, because ... it's all nuts." And perhaps the admonition that "you have to display it properly, because otherwise it's just a lot of crap" will inspire me to pull more of my own crap out of the basement and find a more fitting home for it in Stately Wayne Bruce Manor.

Holy virtual beefcake!

2009-04-23T00:41:00.004-04:00

My experience with video games is largely limited to Pong, Asteroids, and Centipede, but this new one (that I first heard about from the Bat-Blog a while back) certainly caught my eye:

More Batman: Arkham Asylum News & Previews

You've got to love that cape, for starters, and I would absolutely do the grey-suited hunk wearing it, whether he's virtual or not. Let's take another look at our hero:

More Batman: Arkham Asylum News & Previews

Finally, here's one for those of you who like the ladies, featuring a Harley Quinn who's a few light years beyond the original conception of the character. (Thanks, Gray Fox, for bringing this one to my attention.)

More Batman: Arkham Asylum Info

Looks to me like there's more ass-kicking than death-trapping, but perhaps it's possible to manipulate the character so that he falls into the clutches of the Joker or gets strapped to one of the many restraint devices on view. (I do love the way the videos are all prefaced with Adult Content warnings--always a good sign.)

You'll find even more video promos for the game, some of them with audio commentary, here. And here's the official site, sure to grow more useful as more content is added in the days ahead.

Hair of the Bat

2009-04-16T00:50:00.008-04:00

Thank you, Lycra Lord, for alerting me to this TowleRoad item on a shirtless, bearded Batman (more images from the same series here; more work by the same French photographer here and here).

As a token of my appreciation, LL, I am finally referring to you by (assumed) name, rather than as simply "a guy I know."

PS. Not sure what to say to the TR commenter whose response is

What is this, a "Tom of Finland" Batman? I don't need Batman in leather and chaps, taking pisses on other guys in sketchy Gotham backrooms. Um, no. Really. No.

other than: well, you may not "need" a ToF Bat, but sign me up. Except for the backroom "pisses," which as far as I can tell are a figment of an overactive imagination.

Who watches the Watchmen when they take their clothes off? I do! I do!

2009-03-17T23:55:00.008-04:00

I admit I was one of those people with major reservations about the Watchmen movie. In fact, I was one of those people who didn't even want a movie to be made from the book(s).

Surprise, surprise: I liked it. A lot. Not without reservations, mind you, but given how low my expectations were going in, I left feeling pretty satisfied. It's been about 20 years or more since I read Alan Moore's original, so I was roughly halfway between a hardcore fan and a total newbie. I was joined by the Hub (who had never heard of the book, let alone read it), a friend of his who'd just finished reading the book 2 hours before the movie, and the friend's wife (who was in the same boat as the Hub)--and every one of them enjoyed it, too. Sure, it's damn violent, but the thing's about (among other subjects) how to deal with a violent world, so that didn't bother me too much. I also thought the movie did a great job at least raising the thorny moral dilemmas explored in much more detail in the book. And I appreciated the presence of a sense of humor that did not involve wisecracking heroes punctuating their gutpunches with punchlines.

But let's be honest. My favorite thing about the movie was the chance to see Patrick Wilson naked yet again (see also: Angels in America, Little Children, and this troubling spectacle). I had my doubts when I heard he would be playing Nite Owl, but I'll be damned if he didn't end up looking almost exactly like the comic book character (who is supposed to be a bit of a schlub, but I found him cute, too). Did I mention he was naked?

(Bummer! Just learned from IMDB that his 2003 New Year's Resolution was "To be in a movie or a play which doesn't require me to take off my clothes. Unless, of course, I don't get another job... In which case I'll be half-naked and whole-heartedly depressed for the rest of my career." Hey, that Plan B works for me.)

As icing on the (beef)cake, the updated outfit (shall we call it an "owlsuit"?) he wears when he finally suits up is mighty swell, too:

Not sure I bought how quickly the meek retired crimefighter transforms (back) into an asskicking, jailbreaking hero, but that scene struck me as the only one totally untrue to the spirit of the original. Not bad odds, all things considered.

Bonus for readers who actually value literary value over hunkitude: Here's a link to Beaucoup Kevin's list of graphic novels he recommends to folks who've been introduced to the medium via Alan Moore's opus.

Bonus for readers who are as shallow as me: Oh yes, there is also that gigantic blue penis in the movie.

Meanwhile, back in the real (?) world ...

2009-03-11T13:33:00.005-04:00

I must admit, I'm disheartened by the recent murder of two policemen by the so-called "Real IRA" (brilliant name, btw, which has now inserted itself sans quotation marks into coverage of the story, thus lending legitimacy to a splinter group that doesn't appear to deserve any). It seemed for so long lately like Northern Ireland was a workable, inspirational example of actual change in a situation that had been deadlocked for decades, if not centuries--a case for diplomacy and compromise as an end to violence. (I thought it was a very smart move, a few years ago, when reps from Ireland tried to lend their experience to participants in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, not that it appears to have done much good.) This NPR interview with BBC correspondent Audrey Carville struck me, as an outsider, as a very good analysis of the situation--the economic context in which the incident took place, the ironies involved (like the image of a former IRA leader now working with the same British police whose murders he once plotted), and just what is at stake right now. I try very hard to keep an open mind to every side of a story, particularly those that unfold on the other side of the world from me, but this feels to me like a pretty clearcut case of a small minority doing everything it can to undo years of hard work for the sheer hell of it.

On a lighter note, we have "Eye-borg," the superhero-ish moniker of filmmaker Rob Spence, a self-described Six Million Dollar Man fan who is outfitting his empty eye socket with a camera. The first interview I heard with him (which I can't find at the moment) explicitly raised the possibility that he could use his new "superpower" for good or for evil. And at Spence's website, you'll find the following video intro; note the many references to Luke Skywalker, Neo, and other fictional precedents:

EYEBORG-- The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

Maybe Eye-borg can lend his services to "the Troubles."

Stretching out

2009-03-11T03:16:00.005-04:00

I've never heard of Kosmix (which is described as "Beta-ish" in its logo at the moment), but they've heard of me, and presumably you, too. That is to say, they've got a page devoted to Spandex Fetishism. Kind of handy, I guess, since it includes Wikipedia entries, Google searches, videos, and lots of other web resources of interest to underwear perverts the world over. Check it out!

Here's a sample: a portion of an amateur video that is so completely abstract you may even have trouble figuring out the gender of the star. Now that's what I call a fetish!

(Consider the above my gift to the various het and bi males and lesbians I've befriended via this blog and our mutual fondness for stretchy synthetic fibers, no matter who happens to be wearing them.)

As a bonus, the video above led me to two more you might enjoy, starting with this homemade montage of ... well, it's pretty clear right away:

And here's an appealing little tease from an Eye of the Cyclone DVD:

I'm happy to see that "eyeofthecyclone" has a YouTube channel, since the main website is now subscription-based. I'm all for helping a fellow pervert earn an honest buck in these tough times, but it seems like the lion's share of Cyclone stuff is wrestling-related, and while there's nothing wrong with that in my book, it doesn't exactly float my boat, either (if you'll permit me to mix metaphors).

No shit, Sherlock

2009-03-01T22:21:00.004-05:00

Lots of recent odds and ends, connections between which I largely leave to you:

1. An episode of the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge devoted to Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives. For the record, I admit to a mild Holmes fetish, particularly when he is portrayed by Jeremy Brett or Basil Rathbone, and particularly in the WWII-era Rathbone films like SH and the Woman in Green and Dressed to Kill. The real reason I like that series--films in which Holmes is moved into the present day, surely to the horror of true A. C. Doyle fans--is that they are lower than the "real" stories on detective work and higher on, you guessed it, delightfully kinky deathtraps. In many of them (I think there are at least four made back-to-back in the mid-1940s) Moriarty gets to be a Joker-style archnemesis bent on our hero's demise, more overtly than in the canonical novels and tales.

2. Another public radio show, RadioLab, recently rebroadcast an episode devoted to the subject of morality. This summary lays out the terrain:

we’ll explore where our sense of right and wrong come from. We peer inside the brains of people contemplating moral dilemmas, watch chimps at a primate research center share blackberries, observe a playgroup of 3 year-olds fighting over toys, and tour the country’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Prison. Also: the story of land grabbing, indentured servitude and slum lording in the fourth grade.

3. And speaking of morality (see, these items are connected after all!), here's a nice piece on the demise of (and ethics of) the pirated-comic-panels extravaganza Scans Daily from Johnny Bacardi. I admit it--I visited often (though never daily) in search of images that floated my bat-boat. But apparently I didn't check it that often, or I would have known that SD was no more. Easy come, easy go, I guess.

4. Finally, a link that has nothing to do with morality, but if I don't post it now I'll forget about it: Bat-Blog tipped me off to a Flash animation of Batman's utility belt. Here's a direct link to the project, which was originally intended for tech geeks and vanilla-flavored comics fanboys, but I say, bring on the belt-fetishists, too!

I assure you, the animated version is more fun than this mere frame grab:

Holy priceless collection of Etruscan snoods!

2009-02-25T19:10:00.010-05:00

ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950, an exhibition of rare artifacts and memorabilia on view through August 9 at the Skirball Cultural Center in LA, sounds pretty remarkable. (I first learned about it through the Bat-Blog, which also directed me to this slideshow of 20 images from the show on the LA Weekly site.) The show contains such treasures as the very first sketches of the Joker and Superman, as well as the writing desk where the latter character was born and a photo of the real-life model for Lois Lane. But here's the passage from LA Weekly's blog that made me envision Joker himself, Catwoman, or any of a legion of other villains from the '66 TV show scheming to break in:

The copy of Action Comics #1, the holy grail of comics, which contains the first appearance of Superman [, is one of] less than a hundred copies ... known to exist. The copy at the Skirball is on loan from an anonymous collector and is being shown under a plexiglass cover in the "Lights! Camera! Action!" sub-exhibit one room over from the main gallery.

Heavens to murgatroyd! Have the press and museum curators of the world learned nothing since that rash of burglaries at the Gotham Museum back in the day?! Why, they're exhibiting a chunk of kryptonite, all but asking for a skirmish between Superman and some archfiend!

The Skirball also promises "stations that allow children to dress up as Superheroes or transform themselves via a quick costume change in a telephone booth"--and I ask, yet again, why is it that kids get to have all the fun in this world? But there is a serious intent behind all the interactive bells and whistles, as discussed in the blog post quoted above:

We're kind of in need of superheroes lately. That need is one of the major overlaps between the "golden age" of comic books and the present time. Hence, the Skirball's argument goes, the current resurgence of comics. And because it's the Skirball, the other major point is the Jewish connection. Without having to Wikipedia it, did you know that Stan Lee (the genius behind Spider-Man and Marvel comics) was actually Stan Lieber? And that Superman was created by two 17-year-old Jewish boys? In fact, the entire superhero genre was created by young Jewish artists in the midst of the economic turmoil of the 1930s and 40s.

If you're unlikely to make it to the show in person, you might want to consider ordering the exhibition catalogue (pictured above) from the show's home base, the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum in Atlanta. In addition to photos, it includes essays from Jerry Robinson, Jules Feiffer, and Michael Chabon. I'm not sure of the page count, but at $18.50, it might just be a steal.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... Milkman!

2009-02-20T22:57:00.005-05:00

"Steve [Beery] was dressed as Robin from the Batman comics, so the supervisor introduced himself by tossing out an effectively hokey line—'Hop on my back, Boy Wonder, and I’ll fly you to Gotham City.'"

So writes Armistead Maupin in the moving introduction to a new book about the late, great Harvey Milk, as excerpted in this TowleRoad blogpost.

In related developments, I'm a little surprised and very much disappointed that Gus Van Sant's extraordinary HM biopic hasn't yet met a bigger splash in the culture at large--I was fully expecting it to be as big a hit among hets and younguns as Brokeback Mountain before it, but that doesn't appear to be the case. (One of my thirtysomething coworkers the other day asked me, in all earnestness, "Why is that movie called 'Milk,' anyway?") My personal reaction to the film was closer to admiration than transformation; it didn't change my life, but only because my life was already changed--as in politicized--years ago. Even so, I think Milk is the most honest portrayal of activism I've ever seen, capturing both the tedium of day-to-day organizing (all those bulk mailings to stuff!) and the occasional hot sex one encounters along the way (all those bulk males to stuff!).

I know it's supposed to be Slumdog's year, but I'll have my fingers crossed for Van Sant, Sean Penn, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and their very fine movie come Sunday night.

Nice and Terrific: the Justice League of Also-Rans

2009-02-16T22:11:00.005-05:00

In my (so far fruitless) quest to identify a handsome supporting cast member in this 1967 Dick Van Dyke/Barbara Feldon vehicle that happened to be on tonight, I turned up one Stephen Strimpell, star of the superhero sitcom Mr. Terrific, from the same year.

The name kinda sorta rang a bell, as did Captain Nice, the other major-network Bat-ripoff from the same tv season, but I'm pretty sure I never watched either one during their brief runs (which, as TV fate would have it, started and ended on the same day). Enter our modern day Library of Babel, YouTube ...

First, an excerpt from a Mr. T episode that actually aired:

Note the set that looks almost exactly like Commissioner Gordon's office, and the cast consisting entirely of sitcom staples from the era. Now, a glimpse at the unaired pilot, with Alan "WILLLburrrrr" Young replacing Strimpell in the title role:

ct>

(Want to see the other 2 parts? You can find them by clicking on the clip itself.) Meanwhile, here's a learned-looking comparison of the Terrific Two.

Speaking of comparisons, behold this representative episode of competitor Capt. Nice, from the pen of Buck Henry:

In both cases, we've got laugh tracks, unpleasant costumes, and pained humor. On top of that, they're both struggling to spoof something that was already a spoof, which never works too well. Small wonder both have been consigned to the dustbin of history--which is still fun to revisit from time to time.

A good omen?

2009-02-15T18:52:00.005-05:00

Handstamp at an event I attended recently:

Actual bats--some stuffed, some live, none bloodsuckers--were involved. And I had a fine bat-time.

Men in tights, then and now

2009-02-11T00:37:00.003-05:00

Two video treats for you:

1. From TowleRoad, a music video by tights-clad Brit pop singer Will Young:

2. From BatBlog, a very brief early-80s interview with Adam West. (Note that nice shot of an ungloved Batman at the beginning.)

And, oh, what the hell, I'm feeling generous tonight, so here's a bonus #3:

Master Wayne, would you like a manwich?

2009-02-07T10:07:00.003-05:00

Thanks to BatBlog for the heads-up on this video that has been making the rounds:

I'm not a gamer, so I don't get most of the jokes, but that doesn't bother me. I'm mainly in it for the fratboy in the (slightly odd looking) batsuit. He may be the ultimate in batdickery, but I'd watch BATtlestar Galactica with him any day.

This probably calls for a "spoiler alert" ...

2009-01-29T01:58:00.009-05:00

... except I figure anyone who is actually following this whole Batman's-dead/no-he's-not business is probably way more up on all of this than I am. All I care about is, this is a very sexy panel, for more reasons than I can count:

Note: You can find the whole issue here, on Scans Daily. But beware, it truly will make no sense unless you really, really care about this stuff.

"I'm just a kid trying to make a difference"

2009-01-26T19:08:00.003-05:00

News quiz:

1. Is the self-description in the subject line a quote from
a. the anonymous 14-year-old boy who spent 5 hours in uniform (sans badge and gun) on patrol with the Chicago police department, or
b. the 15-year-old Southern California boy who has become an international phenomenon with his "no-cussing" campaign?

2. Which of the above two were you more like in your mid-teens?
3. Which one of the two would you rather have a conversation with today?

The real answer to #1, and my personal answers to #2 and 3, are in the comments. Feel free to leave your own, as well.

As a reward--or possible punishment--for your score, here's the "Don't Cuss" music video:

Shit yeah!

This explains so very much

2009-01-24T16:59:00.004-05:00

As this recent item on BoingBoing confirms, it seems Superman co-creator Joe Shuster led a bit of a double life himself--by day, architect of one of the most powerful emblems of, er, traditional American values (i.e., truth, justice, and the Am-Way), while by night (during rough economic times, at least) he earned a bit of extra coin depicting kinky fantasies.

Granted, the illustrations in Craig Yoe's forthcoming book probably won't float my boat; I'm assuming they'll be all het, all the time. But as the cover clearly indicates, Supermannish men will be bound within its pages, so all I have to do is change the gender of those doing the binding and all will be well. (As a side note, I see that the new volume is the followup to a similar, though broader, project.)

This really does feel like the missing link between the realms of playful childhood hero-worship and darker, arguably more adult, desires. Much attention has already been devoted to the psychology of Wonder Woman's creator, and the Shuster saga only furthers the notion that caped crusaders are a bit less vanilla than we have been led to believe.

(I was about to say "less all-American," but maybe it's really the case that "America" has always been a more complicated ideal than some folks would like to admit. Who knows how many pipe-smoking, slipper-wearing Dads throughout the suburbs of the Eisenhauer years hid copies of these strips from their Superman-loving sons and daughters? Seduction of the innocent, indeed.

One man's trash ...

2009-01-21T00:58:00.004-05:00

Both Warren Ellis and, before him, Dirk Deppey seem to find this admittedly NSFW video so outrageous that they dare their presumably hetero, non-fetish-driven readers to watch it.

Something tells me you are not in that camp. Go ahead. Make your day.

Dead again

2009-01-18T01:02:00.005-05:00

No, I haven't read it yet, and as noted earlier, I probably won't get around to it for awhile. As should be quite clear to even the most casual reader of this blog (and what other kind could there be?), I seriously don't read comics unless they contain images of a hunky man tied up or unshaven or in some sort of deathtrap or with his chest hair exposed--preferably all of the above. If this latest death-of-Batman installment contains enough of that, I'll read it, eventually. Lord knows the dude on the cover up there looks might-tee fine.

I don't really have anything to add to the conversations currently taking place in several hundred blogs, most of it pretty incoherent, misspelled, badly punctuated, and so on. For the record, I only know these conversations are taking place because, after stumbling upon this brief mention, I did a bit of googling to find out how many of my must-haves are included. I gather there is some torture. That's a plus.

Best thing I found was this interview with Grant Morrison about what he's up to. A few lines that struck me as interesting:

"I wanted this story to be mythical. It's on that scale. It's not meant to be about realism. It's not meant to be about politics and about stuff that's happening on the streets. It's the story about what happens when gods start interfering with life and life becomes mythical."

Nice comic timing here:
" The finale is pretty insane. Parallel universes. It's the end of the universe. Everything breaks down. I wanted to do something causality based. I don't think any of us have seen anything like this. It takes it to the point of real, nihilistic hopelessness.

I'm so pleased with it".

And, while I'm not always crazy about Morrison's aesthetic, I admit he's got a point here:
"Once you've seen [the films] Iron Man and The Dark Knight,why bother doing realistic superheroes because now the movies can do them better than anyone. I kind of feel that what it does is free up comics to be a little bit wilder. ... We shouldn't be following the storytelling techniques of Hollywood because they can do it really well. Comics can do all kinds of other things. They can be really crazy and wild and can really stretch the imagination and be really progressive."

Oh, and this recap/think piece seems to make the most sense to a non-comics-follower like me.

Finally, in my travels through cyberspace, I came across this very nice meditation from Ultrasparky on the appeal of superheroes to some of us. It was written well before any of this dead-Batman business, but these lines resonated with me as I read one outraged fan rant after another about Morrison: "A love of comics is just so personal. They've been part of our culture for so long now, pushed and pulled and reinvented in so many ways that they can be something different to everyone." (The Ultrasparky post is really a plug for this outstanding Michael Chabon essay in The New Yorker that I've been meaning to write about here for months. I really should still do that sometime, I guess.)

Hail and farewell

2009-01-15T02:05:00.005-05:00

I learned, mere moments ago, of the death of Patrick "Secret Agent Man"/"Prisoner" MacGoohan from this obit by Johnny Bacardi.

And that one reminds me that I have not yet paid my last respects to two bat-villains who died in recent weeks, namely a certain Catwoman and the only Minstrel I know of. The latter I always found one of the hottest (if silliest) bad guys in the tv show's lineup, and this little bit of gossip suggests he may have batted for my team after all. This isn't the best photo of His Minstrelness (that would by necessity include Batman and Robin rotating and revolving on his fiendish barbecue spit), but it'll do in a pinch:

To the Batcake!

2009-01-14T22:14:00.000-05:00

Spotted at a (fully grown) friend's birthday party:

Fun fact #1: I would totally do that Batman, were he the size of a human being or I the size of him.

Fun fact #2: One party guest did not read the area behind our hero as the exit to the Batcave but instead thought it was a graveyard, representing the Guest of Honor as rising/racing from the ashes of his past headlong into the future. Hey, it works for me.

Bat Music for Bat People

2009-01-09T00:33:00.005-05:00

Three cheers to LP Cover Lover for this delightfully dorky album cover:

which was just one of the finds I turned up tonight in this collection of superhero-themed artwork. The blog also turned me on to this guide to Bat-themed songs recorded during the run of the TV series. There are a few publicity shots of some of the acts, and they're all pretty much as embarrassing as the one above.

Holy Bat-Bargain!

2009-01-07T01:11:00.004-05:00

A tip o' the cowl to Bat-Blog for sharing this hot tip about Batman-themed merchandise now in the dollar bins at Target (alongside all the Valentine's Day stuff). I stopped by tonight and walked away with mucho pens, fancy stickers, markers, and a notebook, all for four buckaroos.

Alas, I missed out on the Groom 'n' Go Bath Set, a perfect way to instill prepubescent boys across America with a stubble fetish!

The spirit's not quite willing tonight...

2009-01-04T00:27:00.008-05:00

Yep, saw The Spirit this afternoon. Too tired at the moment to post the review I really want to write, but in keeping with my pledge to post something somewhere (not necessarily here) every day, I'll take the easy route and share ...

•This link from SlashFilm to a faux ad campaign, the punchline of which occurred to me midmovie:

(The same site also directed me to Roger Ebert's scathing print review.)

•This TOTALLY UNRELATED clip of the only scene in the forgettable Indiana-Jones-ripoff Jane and the Lost City worth watching, tracked down by the Monk last night when I was telling him that Sam Jones (seen bound and shirtless below) is the star of the 80s Spirit TV movie (where he is also bound and shirtless, much to my delight):

I have plenty to say about the new movie, and maybe I'll even say it here, sooner or later. Meantime, you might want to head to the theater pronto if you want to get in on the ground floor of the next Showgirls cult phenomenon. You heard it here first.

A new year, a new leaf

2009-01-01T20:44:00.008-05:00

When my British counterpart/colleague noticed I'd been posting more updates here lately, he asked if I was making up for lost time. Could be--though I've also promised myself that in 2009 I'm going to devote a little time each day to at least one of the many blogs and sites I'm involved with (as Batfan and in my Bruce Wayne existence). Go ahead, call it a resolution if you must. Lord knows I'm way behind with this one and especially this one.

To that end, I made quite a few tweaks to the sidebar on the right tonight. In addition to plenty more links and even a few new categories of them, you can now find the latest updates from the blogs I check most often for H&V-related info, subscribe to this one, and even become a "follower" of H&V. (Yikes.)

While I'm at it, here's more of my ongoing attempt to finally share some items I've been steadily bookmarking for years. (Just call me the Axl Rose of batbloggery.) No overriding theme this time, just odds and ends:

•If, like me, you sometimes take pleasure in obscure comic book heroes and villains from long-forgotten publishers, check out this regularly updated collection of them, which also includes new characters evoking the moldy oldies. The entire Flashback Universe blog from which that list comes is fun, and I've added it to the links sidebar.

•Here's a funny Conan O'Brien/Jim Gaffigan superhero cartoon. (True confession: I wouldn't kick either of these two out of my bed, whether in costume or out. Not sure I'd want them shooting deathrays out of their nipples, though.)

•Despite the horrendous reviews the new Spirit movie has been getting, I will naturally be seeing it. And I will always have a not-so-soft spot in my, er, heart for Sam Jones in the equally ill-fated 1987 tv movie, paid tribute to here. I mean, would you feast your eyes on this man, for the love of God?

•Nice collection of boot-fetish videos on YouTube, which will also point you to plenty of related works. Here's an enjoyable example of Stand & Model attitude:

Minimal, yes, but face it: Had Warhol shot this, it would be playing in museums the world over.

*A reader sent me a link to his 26-chapter BDSM-themed serial, which took him more than two years to complete. I've only dipped in to random chapters thus far, which means I have plenty more to ... chew on.

•Speaking of fiction, here's a reservoir of comics-related fanfic I found somewhere long ago, including some Bat ones. The broader-based home page of the site is now in my links list, too. Oh, and here's a weird, potentially hilarious assignment for your own ill-conceived fanfic.

•Courtesy of another online buddy, here's a Universal Studios Spider-Man getting dressed and doing his duty for the girls and boys, and a few of us oldsters, too. Bonus points for UnderArmour usage beneath the spideysuit:

•I forget exactly why I bookmarked this in the first place--I think it was for a post I was going to write (two years ago) about (male) rape fantasies--but now that I look more closely, I see these are all (?) women victims, so I feel kind of creepy sharing it with you sans political comment. Anyway, here's a semi-famous list, updated here and here.

This looks like a good place to stop for now, but trust me, I've got plenty more where these came from, and this appears to be one of those periods when I'm feeling the impluse to blog again, so stay tuned.

Close but no cigar (and cigars are NMF, too, for that matter)

2008-12-31T17:21:00.009-05:00

Two items that beautifully illustrate/complicate what I mean by the "Not My Fetish" category among the list of blogpost tags/labels to the right over there:

1. WETSUITS = MY FETISH
PENGUINS IN WETSUITS = NOT MY FETISH
Thanks to an item in tonight's news, I learned about Pierre the Penguin who has lost much of his feathers and has been outfitted with a neoprene replacement suit. This recent post notwithstanding, I am not particularly into the sight of animals in outfits that would look great if they were worn by balding adult human males, and yet I still visited this page of penguincams (no sightings of Burgess Meredith or Danny deVito, btw) and even watched this brief CNN clip of Pierre in his fetish gear.

2. GLOVES = MY FETISH
GLOVES IN THE GUTTER = NOT MY FETISH
I've had a link to this now-defunct blog from a now-defunct art project bookmarked as "bloggable" for half a year or more and it took Pierre up there to remind me of it. I can't remember where I heard about this thing, but I assume it too was NPR-related. (Hell, maybe I should ditch the whole Batman/Cop focus of this blog and just write down all my favorite NPR items; that would surely entice a larger readership, anyway.)

This should be clear, but to spell it out, I love leather gloves on men's hands--my own, or almost anyone else's--and spandexy/lyrcraish ones on superheroes' hands, and I have even been known to lust after empty pairs of them hanging on a store rack, but when they are lying in the street, not so much.

(Here is a still-lively site that elaborates on and even markets the same basic concept as above. Handsome design, but still not my fetish.)

Why So Serious, indeed

2008-12-30T17:17:00.006-05:00

I guess I'm way out of the bat-loop, because when the Anonymous Donor and Gray Fox each alerted me within a day of each other that I should check out the premiere episode of the new animated series online, I didn't know what they were talking about. Both friends said the same thing about the show: that it was pretty good, pretty funny, and pretty hot.

Being more of an Old Media sort, I waited to see Batman: The Brave and the Bold on tv (took me a while to figure out that new episodes air every Friday night on the Cartoon Network), and the first episode I caught all the way through was the one guest-starring Plastic Man. Only later did I see the one they'd sent me the link for, which features Blue Beetle. (Each ep also features a surprise cameo, and I'll leave you to discover those for yourself.)

Turns out my pals are right on all counts. After the now-legendary Batman: The Animated Series kiddified itself in its final seasons, only to be followed by the somewhat less interesting Batman Beyond and the MUCH less interesting The Batman, I'd pretty much given up on animated versions of my favorite fictional character, but lo and behold, this one is something completely different. It's not nearly as serious as B:TAS, but neither is it as a child-centric as that show's successors. Gray Fox referred to it as "campy," but that's not quite the word I'd use--"smartass" is more like it. The tone is nothing like the '66 live-action series; it's closer to the recent Teen Titans show (not that I've watched that more than once, mind you) and almost as much a genre spoof as The Venture Brothers, which is why it's a perfect fit for Cartoon Network's patented postmodern blend of kid-friendly action/attitude and parent-friendly nostalgia/parody.

The primary joke in the two episodes I've seen thus far is that Batman's partners are neither brave nor bold, at least not until they learn the sorts of valuable lessons one picks up from an apprenticeship with the master. The Blue Beetle episode--the first of the series--is as self-reflexive as they come, opening (after a prologue and the catchy, stylized theme song) with two teenage Bat-fans watching their hero on tv and engaging in a round of the ever-popular "If Superman and Batman got in a fight, which one would win?" debate. As for that prologue, it's a deathtrap-fetishist's delight, featuring two beltless captives in the clutches of the latest incarnation of the Clock King. Both episodes I've seen so far cut right to the chase, or rather to the kind of cliffhanger scenario that my six-year-old self had to wait 25 minutes to see Adam West and Burt Ward encounter. No more! The pace here is fast, the jokes actually make me laugh out loud, and the artwork evokes the burly, husky Bat of the comics of the late 40s through the early 60s. (There's a higher degree of sci-fi content than I prefer in my bat-stories--lots of flying around in outer space and whatnot--but it works, it works.)

Given how somber the Christopher Nolan-era Batfilms are (and, for that matter, the last two James Bond flicks), I find it intriguing that the Powers That Be at Warner Bros would allow the folks behind the very latest incarnation of the Dark Knight to lighten up so much. I'm all for a balance in tone--I'm no fan of the spoofy/over-the-top approach of the Clooney/Schumacher movie (or Moonraker in Bond-land), but the ultra-seriousness of the Bale/Nolan movies (and even more so Quantum of Solace) doesn't do much more for me, either. What the '66 series did so very well was function on (at least) two levels simultaneously, and The Brave and the Bold shows promising signs of creating its own unique stance in that department. Can't wait to see more.

You animal!

2008-12-20T11:43:00.000-05:00

I was intrigued by the film Zoo from the moment I heard about it. Way back in the taboo-shattering mid-70s, my late mother contended that bestiality was going to be the last taboo. (That should tell you a lot about her.) I should point out right away that neither she nor I was "into" sex with animals, to use the parlance of the day, except as an intriguing topic of conversation on a long car trip. In the intervening years I have of course come out, first as a gay man, and then--to a far smaller public--as a man with several powerful fetishes, and I've often found it interesting to learn more about sexual attractions I don't share, both because they help to shed light on sexuality in general and because I feel a certain empathy for other people with minority tastes.

That said, Zoo isn't really the movie I was expecting at all. It's not a wide-ranging documentary about "zoophilia" in general so much as a true-crime examination of a specific case. Granted, it avoids the snickering tone of other chronicles of the saga of "Mr. Hands", but it doesn't really shed much light on the phenomenon of people who identify really closely with their pets and other animals. (Stylistically, it's a blatant ripoff of Errol Morris's aesthetic, and I could never quite get past that.) As far as parallels with other fetishes, the only one that really struck me was the huge role that the internet has played in bringing people together. Hard to imagine the circle that gathered around Mr. Hands forming without it--just as I can't really fathom meeting (virtually, at least) as many people into masks, gloves, and lycra-clad superheroes as I have without the aid of Yahoo groups, sites like GearFetish, and this very blog.

Beyond that one commonality, I'm on the outside looking in. (The Hub was there with me for about 30 minutes, but lost interest after that.)

Catch-up, continued: The (mostly) Bat Edition

2008-12-13T20:16:00.000-05:00

More stuff that's been clogging the batcomputer waiting for me to mention it here. I've got plenty, on all sorts of topics, so here's a bunch that's specifically bat-centric (with one exception) ...

•Let's begin by watching the single hottest sequence from the whole of the legendary Animated Series (thanks as always, Anonymous Donor!):

•Hot off the press (at least more so than any of the following items), reports of a real-life Batman in the U.K.

•In the interest of balance, however, behold a naughty real-life Captain America. (Fans of unmasking and/or heroes in handcuffs will want to catch the video footage from jail of the bad good-guy being booked.)

•Arkham After Midnight: Riddle Me Deadly, an interesting fan film experiment combining found bat-footage from various sources to create a faux silent film. One Arkham inmate after another finds a parallel from silent classics, and the result suggests that Batman has a lot more in common with German Expressionism and surrealism (among other things) than you might guess; it's also considerably meatier--and more ominous--than the actual bat-serials it samples.

•A now-old (Batman Begins-era) but still functional guide to "How the Batsuit Works," in the tradition of those techno-fetishistic geek guides to the blueprints of the Enterprise, Millenium Falcon, etc. Only difference is, this one's something I've been fetishizing myself for four decades and counting.

•In a related vein, a catalog of "the Great Batman Equipment Archive."

•From 2005, the answer to the question all America has asked at least once: "Is Batman Nuts?"

•Bat-bloggery from ...
Again with the Comics
I Found All Six (Slylock Fox in da house!)
Blockade Boy (RIP)

•More YouTube fun to wrap up this installment:

"Our past belongs to us; we can change it if we want."

2008-12-06T18:27:00.007-05:00

So says Mia Farrow's character at a critical moment in Be Kind Rewind. (Spoiler alert: It arrives two thirds of the way into the movie, and there's no way to make the point I want to make without revealing at least a little of the final third, so you may want to skip the rest of this post if you enjoy surprises.)

As a big fan of Michel Gondry's earlier films and music videos, I'd been meaning to see this 2008 feature during its brief run in theaters, despite the mediocre-to-bad reviews I'd read, but I never quite got around to it until now. I fully understand the poor reception, even from fellow lovers of Eternal Sunshine and The Science of Sleep (for the record, I even love Human Nature, which nobody seems to like). Throughout its first two acts, I kept thinking Rewind was his worst film, marred by a farfetched/downright silly premise and a gratingly generic performance by Jack Black. (The best thing on the DVD is not the movie, but an accompanying short, "Passaic Mosaic," which makes a beautiful if unspoken case for BWR as the missing link between Gondry's surreal features and his otherwise utterly uncharacteristic documentary/concert film, Dave Chapelle's Block Party.)

If you're familiar with Rewind, here's the high-concept part you know: Black's character becomes magnetized and erases all the stock in the last shop in Passaic, NJ (if not America) that still rents VHS tapes, which leads him and clerk Mos Def to shoot amateur remakes of each one. (This practice is called "sweding" in the movie, but they're basically fanfilms.) A wacky enough idea, I suppose, and the best bits are in the official trailer. But it all seemed beneath the talents of Gondry, one of the most imaginative writer/directors around. It also begs two questions: What about DVDs? and Isn't this whole thing a massive violation of copyright? Question #1 is dismissed in five seconds, but the second one proves a doozy. To make matters worse, our heroes learn that one of the major subthemes of the story has been completely fabricated. Fortunately, there's an entire third act not really hinted at in the trailer.

That's when things get interesting--and Gondryesque. Farrow's character states the premise pretty directly in the line above. What began as two guys covering up an accident evolves into a communitywide art project. I'll spare you further details, but it's interesting that the major studio's lawyers are the bad guys (way to stick it to the Man, New Line!) and that the entire film is a defense of fans' rights to retell and extend their favorite corporate fictions. I'd suggest, in the spirit of sweding, that you could even tweak Farrow's line to read "Our fantasies belong to us; we can refine them however we like." There's an intriguing invitation in the final credits directing us to the official website to see the "sweded" films excerpted in the movie, but that site has disappeared and there's no trace of them on the one that remains to plug the DVD. (I kinda wonder if maybe actual copyright lawyers made them go away.) However, you can see a few examples on this YouTube channel.

And if those aren't enough, check out this handy list of Sweded films made for a contest including a parody of Batman Begins featuring a rather fetching Bruce Wayne/Bat.

I heard a rumor from Ground Control ...

2008-11-29T01:30:00.005-05:00

Warning: Do not click on any of the following links if you don't want spoilers, or DC-generated rumors that look like spoilers. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure it will be impossible to avoid this for a few weeks.

Haven't been following the sometimes beautifully written, sometimes baffling-to-a-nongeek-like-me Batman RIP too closely lately since the first couple of issues, but a friend just passed this along. Surprised I haven't seen word of it in the comics blogs I visit the most often (see sidebar to the right), but maybe that's because everyone's been too busy eating turkey and passing out. I'm sure the world will be abuzz shortly... This is the sort of thing that gets the mainstream news all hot and bothered about comics (at least to the point of running brief what-will-they-think-of-next stories every couple of years--see also: Captain America, Death of; Superman, Death of; Spider-Man, Unmasking of).

For the record, assuming there is more to this than the Old Switcheroo, the villain in me loves the sheer sacrilege suggested in who the killer claims to be, and the resulting implication that our hero's entire quest has been wrong-headed. That's the kind of deconstruction/mindfuck I can really get behind.

UPDATE! Speculation, plus a couple of news stories that repeat the same skimpy info as above, here.

Bad acting, corny script ...

2008-11-19T20:02:00.003-05:00

... but you gotta love the outfit:

(For the record, there was a time when I was that alarmingly thin, too, though in my case it ended about 15 years ago.)

Playing catch-up

2008-08-27T00:14:00.005-04:00

Some bat-odds and bat-ends I've been stockpiling for a while:

1. Welcome to the Dollhouse, a blog--or perhaps a semi-random collection of stray bits--that covers a variety of subjects, including funny books. Good writing, nice beefcake sketches. Of particular interest to you, I'm guessing, is the multi-part "ComicArt Chest Fest,' a celebration of semi-naked fictional characters baring flesh. Me, I happen to find this sketch incredibly enticing:

2. On Scans Daily, "Dreadful Birthday, Dear Joker," featuring one of the all-time hottest deathtraps in comics, presented in its entirety. Behold its awesome cover!

3. Finally, a fun little Spanish-language music video I stumbled upon (though not via StumbleUpon) :

I've got more stuff for ya, but I'm falling asleep in my chair at the moment, so this will have to do for now. Stay tuned, boys and girls.

The horror! The horror!

2008-08-23T09:38:00.006-04:00

I come late to the web phenom which is Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog--my first exposure came not through any viral campaign or bloggery but this "oral history" of the project in Entertainment Weekly and this interview with Dr. Horrible himself, Neil Patrick Harris, on Fresh Air. And yesterday I finally tracked the thing down and watched all 45 delightful minutes.

I've never gotten the whole Joss Whedon cult--I'm sure he's very clever, but the concepts behind Buffy and Firefly didn't do much for me. Now, you do a musical about a budding supervillain's quest for acceptance by his peers (one of whom is a horse, another a Thomas Jefferson impersonator) and I am there. (Is it possible I have never written about my affection for The Tick here?) No lycra, sadly (the low-rent outfits are fetish-free for me, aside from Captain Hammer's studly leather gauntlets), but the songs are catchy and the cast--particularly Harris--is a joy to watch.

I particularly enjoy Whedon's reversal of the good guy/bad guy dynamic; you totally root for Dr. Horrible, while ostensible hero Captain Hammer is an arrogant, self-obsessed bully. (I never got around to seeing Hancock, since the reviews were all so mediocre, but Hammer seems like a variation on the same basic concept.) Perhaps it's the musical-comedy aspect of the project that made the connection in my mind, but I couldn't help thinking of Broadway's Wicked, in which all the "good" folks in Oz are exposed as bubbleheads (or worse--far worse) and the "evildoers" are tragically misunderstood. (War on terror, anyone?) The fact that moral ambiguity can still do well at the box office bodes well in the era of you're-either-with-us-or-you're-with-the-terrorists.

PS. All the press suggests that your chance to watch for free is done and that you must now purchase the thing via iTunes (or wait for the promised DVD), but that's not true as of yesterday. Look, it's right here!

High and dry

2008-08-22T11:30:00.005-04:00

I often think of the Olympics as high holy days for lycra fetishists, but sadly--after gawking at that mind-blowing opening ceremony (which was both dazzling and the purest expression of a fascist aesthetic I've ever witnessed)--I've paid little or no attention to the actual games. I'm not much for sports in general, beyond the outfits. And frankly, every single time I've tuned in to try and catch some men-in-lycra action, I've ended up with women's beach volleyball, which is so not my game on so many levels.

This is disappointing, because I kept hearing about the amazing new swimsuits--the ones detractors compare to steroids as an unfair supplement to the human body--and wanted to see them in action. (Let me repeat: I have no particular interest in the sport of swimming; I only wanted to see men wearing skin-tight, full-body lycra. That's all I ask.) In my attempt to find visuals to accompany this post, though, I did come across a truly funny Mo Rocca bit, featuring some guy named Phelps, maybe you've heard of 'im:

Meanwhile, if you ever needed any further evidence that we already live in a creepy sci-fi-movie future, behold this Italian promo for the "Aqualab" where kinkwear is developed and modeled:

Got between $290 and $550 to burn? Never mind overpriced leather fetish wear or simulated movie batsuits; just buy your own Olympic gold!

Gay spies wanted

2008-08-20T13:29:00.004-04:00

Stumbled across an interesting story in Time about the British secret service's new quest for out gay people to serve as spies this morning. I had no idea! Apparently the old reason for not wanting 'mos to serve their country (they were bad security risks because they led double lives and therefore could not be trusted) has been flipped on its ear (because they lead double lives, they have developed an excellent skillset for spying).

Nor had I ever heard anything about this before:

Until gay sex was decriminalized in 1967, Britain's gay community protected itself against potential prosecution by conducting conversations in a special argot, Polari, a mixture of Italian, Romany and London slang.

What's Polari for "You learn something new everyday?"

OK, OK, I finally saw it...

2008-08-17T22:17:00.005-04:00

The Hub and I celebrated his return to town tonight with a long-delayed trip to the movies (our first in weeks, maybe months) to see The Dark Knight. Kinda wish I hadn't waited so long, because all the glowing reviews from press and friends alike had my expectations way up, and thus it came as a shock when I found it ...

*kinda slow, because it was
*really, really unnecessarily complicated, and thus
*WAY too long.

(Insert obligatory spoiler alert here, although I am keeping this all as vague as I possibly can, mainly because I couldn't follow 70% of it anyway.)

Throughout the film I kept getting seriously lost, thanks to jumps in time (wait a sec--I thought Character X was in Location A, but now he's on the other side of town and it's tomorrow, and now he's back where he was a second ago--I ... think), baffling plot turns (let's all go to Hong Kong for five minutes!), and--more than anything else--highly improbable, uh, coincidences. (Where exactly does Joker get the time and personnel, and money for that matter, to run all over town planting devices on boats, in skyscrapers, INSIDE PEOPLE, FER CHRISSAKES--devices whose single function is based on his flawless grasp of human nature? And let's not EVEN get into that whole hey-look-what-I-can-do-with-every-cellphone-in-Gotham-City business.)

I felt like it was a mix of a James Bond movie (the labyrinthine plot, the globetrotting, the gadgets, the discussion of the gadgets, the revelation of the new gadgets, the requisition forms for the new gadgets), a Die Hard movie (the endless sequences of people being held hostage in buildings or other public spaces that were about to be blown up), a Hannibal Lecter movie (does NO ONE ELSE feel a strong sense of deja vu during the Joker-in-a-cagelike-cell-conveniently-located-in-the-center-of-the-jail sequence?), and one of those police-corruption movies that Sidney Lumet specializes in. I have enjoyed each of these subgenres now and then, other than the police-corruption one, but they have little to do with what appeals to me about the Bat saga. I appreciate the fact that Nolan and company have taken that saga to previously unexplored places in their two films, and I am impressed by the way they've worked in things from the comics that haven't appeared in earlier movies or tv series, but those things only slightly interest me; they certainly don't excite me.

As for the much-ballyhooed Heath Ledger performance, I basically enjoyed it, but I'm not really sure I get what's so amazing about it. It is different from any previous interpretation, but that's not necessarily a plus in my book. I spent the first hour thinking: That voice he's using ... I recognize it from somewhere .... --but it wasn't until he became a more prominent player, oh, about FOUR HOURS IN, that it hit me: Dear lord, he's channelling Al Franken!

At various points I wondered: if this movie were my first exposure to the Batman character, would I have found his story anywhere near as significant as I do? I think I can pretty easily answer: no. I don't see any bat-blogs, bat-roleplay, bat-slash, or bat-anything else coming out of me if this were my sole, or primary, sense of the masked manhunter. It's a smart action film that hints at deeper moral issues in a post-9/11 world (though I'm not sure I get the point), and that's all nice, but no more so than, say, a Bourne movie. It's also, I'm tempted to say, the least erotic rendering of the Bat I've ever seen, and that's including SuperFriends and the current WB incarnation of Bruce Wayne as a 30something GQ subscriber.

On the bright side, I think it's a real testament to Bob Kane's creation that the character can assume so many radically different forms over so many years and still basically read as "the Batman." This version doesn't seem to fuck up anything too seriously. It's as much a product of--and representation of--the early 21st century as Kane's early comics were of the late 1930s, or the Adam West series was of the 1960s, or Denny O'Neill's comics were of the 1970s, or Burton's movies were of the late 1980s, and so on. There were plenty of little moments here and there that I enjoyed, and I'm very intrigued by the setup for the third film, which may well be the most radical rethinking of all.

Your thoughts, anyone?

The ecstasy of Saint Adam

2008-08-12T14:55:00.005-04:00

A quick tip o' the cowl to my new buddy Daredevil for tipping me off to Helpless Heroes, a Japanese site devoted to images of the Bat, Spider-Man, Ultraman, and miscellaneous other tights-clad crimefighters in various states of distress.

I don't know the language, but I get the basic idea, and I particularly appreciate this recent collection of stills of an open-mouthed Adam West, which for some reason takes me back to my grad school days and an essay by Jacques Lacan about the true nature of the, wink wink, nudge nudge, "ecstasy" of St. Theresa. Even if you're not particularly versed in French post-modern psychoanalysis, I have a feeling you'll get the idea from just two images:

Open wide and say, "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh."

"Superhero or Sidekick: Which one are you?"

2008-08-10T11:57:00.002-04:00

Needless to say, that teaser on the cover of the Hub's copy of the August Instinct caught my eye, so I had to turn to page 56 right away. I'm not a particularly big fan of the magazine (and there goes my shot at a plug in its pages!)--the models, Photoshopped pictures of which constitute the bulk of the "content," are almost all twinks, the articles are generally glib if not mindless, and would it kill them to hire a proofreader? Even so, I was hooked, and it seemed a good sign that the story was written by a psychologist rather than a staff writer.

The page-and-a-half article itself is basically a Reader's Digest-style paraphrase of Dr. Keith Swain's theory (expressed at greater length in his book Dynamic Duos: The Alpha/Beta Key to Unlocking Success in Gay Relationships) that long-lasting gay couples tend to unite alpha males with beta counterparts. One tends to lead, the other to follow; one takes care of the finances, the other nurtures the emotional bond ... not unlike an idealized 1950s style heterosexual marriage, in fact.

It's hard not to chuckle when Swain begins a sentence, "If we think about this idea on a gut level, it makes sense, like Batman and Robin seem natural" -- one can hear old Doc Wertham spinning in his grave -- but he continues "If we put Superman with Captain America, less so." And it's true, I have never been that interested in the whole Clash of the Titans dynamic, often seen in comic book crossovers, like the one pitting Batman against Captain America or the Punisher. Even the banter and clashing egos among Justice League members (and all other superhero teamups) bores me.

For Swain, this comic book metaphor has its parallels in other "variations in masculinity among gay men--we have even developed our own terminology for this: daddy and son, bear and cub, even, to a degree, top and bottom." To a degree?! That last one seems to me the ultimate example of the dynamic, taken almost to the point of parody.

A natural-born skeptic, I don't want to buy into the theory, or any formulaic approach to human behavior for that matter, but Swain's premise does seem to make sense--not as a surefire recipe for happiness or "key to success," but at least as a potentially useful way to deal with male/male interactions. (Butch/femme archetypes aside, I don't see this operating as blatantly in lesbian relationships, nor does Swain bring up women in the article, but then maybe an actual biological female might want to weigh in here. You reading, Teresa?)

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that, taking the 5-obvious-question quiz in the sidebar ("A or B ... Or Somewhere In Between?: Test Your Inner Superhero!"), I was a 5-for-5 Sidekick and the Hub is a 5-for-5 Superhero. Well, maybe not 5-for-5: a true Sidekick, I suppose, I took the test for him, and thus I don't know for sure whether his second and fourth fingers are the same size or not. That question was kinda wacky anyway, given the others, which were easier to guess the "correct" answers to. ("Which is more attractive to you, a man with a rugged, masculine face or one with a fresh, youthful face?" Well, duh! But hey, I know my answer and I'm stickin' to it.)

The reason that's embarrassing is that I prefer to think of myself, in bat-land, as a lone Batman, with no sidekick myself and no use for one, and 90% of my roleplay adventures pit me against a villain, mano a mano, and it's a bit of a blow to my ego to be revealed as the underdog. I have no interest in playing Robin to someone else's Bat. That said, I should point out:

1. When the '66 tv series was first airing and subtly creating the pervert that I am today, I totally identified as the Boy Wonder. I was 6 and my older brother, 10 years my senior, was clearly Batman. (More on that relationship--one of the most important in my life--in future posts, the kind I keep meaning to write here but have never quite gotten around to.)

2. There is a Robin in my own personal mythology (or rather was, for years ago he hung up the yellow cape in a favor of his own batsuit). Ironically enough, while I was working on this entry we had a bit of a scene together, during which he totally topped me for the first time. Didn't see that coming, but totally enjoyed it--way more exciting to me than the standard mentor/mentee dynamic, though Doc Freud might point out that this latest twist is entirely within that "standard."

No matter what, real life, even real fantasy-life, is a lot more complicated, and therefore more interesting, than any theory. But bring capes and cowls into your theory and I'm bound to pay attention.

Cape-rs

2008-08-06T12:53:00.004-04:00

A bat-friend of mine tells me he's custom-ordering a cape from this costume maker. He sends the photo above as a rough example of what he's getting. Out of my price range at the moment, mind you, but it looks great. As does the model!

Cave-ing in

2008-07-31T10:52:00.005-04:00

A friend just passed along "When Batman Was Gay," a post/essay about my favorite character's oft-discussed sexuality on The Bilerico Project: Daily Experiments in LGBTQ. Not a whole lot of new stuff there, if you've spent the last few decades reading and thinking about this issue, but author Tyrion Lannister does a fine job bringing together the familiar touchstones (Wertham, the changing role of Alfred, introduction of Batwoman and Batgirl, etc.), and the illustrations are those "Subtext? What subtext?" innuendo-loaded images we all know and love.

When I read that Lannister first climbed on board the batmobile in the Dark Knight Returns era, I suddenly felt old, or saw him as a youngun, or something. But he makes a provocative point: that, while Boomers take the campy Batman of the Silver Age comics and the '66 tv show for granted, readers his age have always known a darker, butcher Knight. I was also intrigued by his assertion that Silver Age Batman's partisans miss the central reason why Batman is a compelling and fascinating figure in the first place. Batman's most important relationships have always been with criminals. What drives him to pursue them? How does he distinguish himself from his queries? How is vigilantism anything but criminal? Indeed, Batman's most provocative implications have centered around the distinction between law and justice - Batman's dedication to the latter, often at the expense of the former.

Indeed, 98% of my bat-fantasies are hero/villain, not hero/sidekick or hero/fellow hero. (Probably because there's just not much narrative tension in two guys on the same side of a conflict going at it.) Still, for me, the most eye-opening part of the Bilerico piece was not Lannister's own remarks but this comment from a reader named Brian:

As a queer kid growing up in the sixties and seventies, before I even knew what queer meant, Batman represented the ultimate in cool. He drove a cool car, wore a cool costume and lived in a cool house with a secret cave underneath it. And my secret was safe as long as his was. It didn't matter if he was gay or not. What mattered was how well he kept his secret identity. Batman helped keep millions of us in the closet (i.e. "Batcave") long after we should have taken off our masks.

Fascinating! And it's true, in my case, that the core of the Batman myth is the high premium it places on disguise, on secrecy, on masking. I'm not sure I would blame the comic for keeping me in the closet/cave, though; coming out was my own responsibility. But damn, Batman made having a double life sexy, and the requisite costuming even sexier.

Nope, I haven't seen the movie yet ...

2008-07-23T02:06:00.004-04:00

... and probably won't have time to for at least a week or two, but in the meantime, ya gotta check out Dial B for Blog's "16 Days of the Batman." (The first installment is here.) This series, like the blog itself, is a pop culture treasure trove, full of artifacts both real and fabricated. (One fun fact about the '66 series I did not know: The switch in the Shakespeare bust that Bruce flips to open the secret entrance to the batcave actually turned on a light backstage, signalling the stage hands to open the doors by hand.)

PS. The image above would make a lot more sense in context, but I'm including it here anyway because the artwork in those trading cards is so damn hot.

Comics on the radio

2008-07-20T11:51:00.006-04:00

Time for one of my signature posts on a subject about which I have incredibly incomplete knowledge. (I realize now that if I only wrote about things I know well, I would post here even less than I already do. Guess it's better to think of these entries as reminders to myself to follow through on things sometime in the future.)

I caught only random tidbits of this episode of the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge last week devoted to "Heroes, Anti-Heroes, and Regular Folks." I have a sneaking suspicion it's a rebroadcast, because I could swear I'd already heard the interview with Austin Grossman, author of the novel Soon I Will Be Invincible, told from the POV of an archetypal comic book villain. I've been wanting to read the book since I first heard about it, probably on some other NPR-ish program in the last year or so. And yet I have not, which further establishes my lack of knowledge!

Other interview subjects during the hour are Douglas Wolk, whose book Reading Comics sounds great, and artists/writers Ulli Lust, Roberta Gregory, and Terry Moore. I'd recommend the whole thing, except of course I haven't actually heard all of it myself. I do know I particularly enjoyed Wolk's remarks on the operatic/mythological dimensions of superhero comics, which helped me realize why, even though I am in my late 40s and therefore a grownup who should prefer grownup things like jazz, classical music, and "graphic novels" about the minutiae of everyday people's lives, I am still way more turned on by books about men in tights than about Average Joes. (Can I just say, for the record, that I have never in my life read a Harvey Pekar story I enjoyed as much, or learned as much from, as The Killing Joke, The Long Halloween, or some of the Batman: Black and White stories?)

Value added: In looking up the link to Wolk's excellent blog, I came across a recent entry on it that directed me to his Salon essay comparing the Batman of the Nolan films (and accompanying anime DVD) to the character in the comic books. Once again, he does a great job of explaining what's missing from the movie incarnation--the very thing (beyond the erotic appeal of a hunky man in a mask and tights) that drew me to the character when I was an intellectual, not-at-all athletic or gadget-crazed teenager in the 70s. He was a detective, dammit!

While I was out ... summer reading

2008-07-12T08:46:00.006-04:00

A while back I picked up used copies of the trade paperback versions of a couple of Bat stories I knew from way back, though when they first appeared in comic book form I'd only read portions of them. I freely admit my initial interest in both was purely prurient, but as is so often the case, when I actually paid attention to the storylines I was intrigued.

Or, in its more recent but equally studly edition:

Batman: Tales of the Demon collects Dennis O'Neil's first 11 stories about R'as al Ghul. RAG is a character that I've generally found more interesting in the classic animated series and the 2005 movie than in the comics, but come on, this is the storyline that includes the images that made me gay and the single hottest comic book cover of my adolescence.

O'Neil, writing in a 1991 afterword, apologizes for the whiz-bang nature of the dialogue and faux-Marvel-isms of the narration, and seems very upset about a certain plot inconsistency, but that's hardly my concern. These stories come from the heyday of late 70s/early 80s bat-beefcake, so the musculature is always gloriously pronounced and our hero is constantly getting bonked on the head so that he can lie prone on the floor for several panels an issue. Hooray! As a side bonus, we get to see the origins of Bats' "Matches Malone" alter ego, and O'Neil rightly notes that these stories marked an important part of the character's evolution out of 60s camp and into 90s gloom. But really now: shirts come off (a lot), cowls get lifted, and it's all good, people. It's allllll goooooood.

Here's a lengthy review by "the Masked Bookwyrm," someone who clearly knows and thinks (and cares) a lot more about this kind of thing than I do.

Before we leave RAG for another late-era supervillain, let's savor the animated incarnation I was just talking about, shall we? (There's a good chance I've already posted this clip, because I've been saving it for this purpose for at least two years, but the initial tunic-removal scene bears repeating.)

Batman: The Cult. I know, I know, we're really not supposed to like this thing, because it's ultracynical and hyperviolent and cryptofascist, and all of that is true, but come on, how could I pass up a cover image like this?

To be honest, I lost interest after the second of four parts when this initially came out, but boy, that first issue was hot: Batman bound, broken, on his damn knees before his captor... Need I go on? Years later, I read an interview with Frank Miller about the thing; Miller hated it for all the reasons cited above plus the fact that the premise and even the panel structure owed so much to Dark Knight Returns, but as a BDSM stroke book, issue one is nearly unparalleled in mainstream comics.

I was amused to read writer Jim Starlin's explanation that ubervillain Deacon Blackfire was loosely inspired by the hypocritical right-wing demagogues of the Culture Wars of the late 80s (including the now freshly deceased Jesse Helms), because that certainly doesn't come through in the text. But no matter: Like the RAG story cycle, this makes an interesting pop culture lens on the issues of its time, both inside and outside the comics universe.

Once again, here's the Bookwyrm's take.

(PS. Between my last post here and this one, I caught a good-sized chunk of Skidoo on late-night TV. I'd heard for years about this legendary Hollywood-hippie-era bad-acid-trip of a movie, but had no idea its eclectic cast reunited Frank Gorshin, Cesar Romero, and Burgess Meredith--all directed by Mr. Freeze himself, Otto Preminger!)

While I was out ... Yaoi edition

2008-07-11T19:38:00.006-04:00

Boy, time DOES fly between these posts, doesn't it?

I'll leave most of what I've been up to to your imagination, which may or may not be more exciting than the reality. But here are a few things I've collected since last we spoke:

•Couple of Bat/Joker slash images, courtesy of my British counterpart (and former sidekick):

•Couple more B/J (love that acronym!) Yaoi images, I forget the source (I'm betting it was the Anonymous Donor):

I'm not usually a big fan of the genre--I think it's a generational thing, akin to the way I just don't get manga or anime, or even karaoke--and I don't spend a lot of time fantasizing about Bat on Joker action, but these are pretty damned hot.

More (non-yaoi) updates to come, soon.

(PS. What was on while I was writing this? Why, a 1990 interview with Bob Kane on Fresh Air, conveniently enough.)

How to spend that $60K that's burning a hole in your utility belt

2008-03-28T10:19:00.002-04:00

Bid away.

(Another tip o' the cowl to the Anonymous Donor, who now appears to provide all material for this blog. Although he has not yet donated the above item, in the flesh. Er, rubber.)

... And here's what I don't love about comics

2008-03-24T02:48:00.003-04:00

I got about a third of the way through this explanation of (relatively) recent developments in the DC uni/multiverse before throwing my hands up in despair. I was referred to the entry by the Anonymous Donor when I said I didn't get the whole "Superboy Prime" business I've heard a wee bit about.

Hey, look, I just want hot guys in tight outfits to be tied up, like they were in my youth. Is that too much to ask?

Here's what I love about comics

2008-03-21T01:58:00.005-04:00

Every few years, some lunatic ties Batman to a chair for an entire issue and taunts him relentlessly. In my spotty memory, the lunatic role has been performed by Scarecrow (multiple times, not always limiting himself to a mere chair), one of several Clayfaces (that whole thing is way too complicated for me to sort out), and someone called the Obeah Man (and the Batman was actually Dick Grayson, if you want to get technical). Now comes Batman issue 674, which I believe is currently on newsstands, if you can find an actual newsstand anywhere.

The intentions are crystal clear on the cover:

That's right: the one and only Grant Morrison is behind this one! The story, which as far as I can tell is more or less self-contained, is a typically trippy Morrisonesque tale of hallucinations and false flashbacks and other twists of the sort that always get me going. But of course what really gets me going about the issue is imagery like this splash page--

--which, you will note, features one of my favorite bat-fetishes, the desecration (in this case, the absolute removal) of the chest emblem. The empty space allows some nice hair to poke through the hole, but that pales in comparison to what happens later. I'm cropping the next panel so as not to spoil anything, but then if you're reading a blog like this and you don't know that our hero is about to do something heroic, you are probably too young and/or innocent to be here at all:

Hooray to Mr. Morrison, and a big thank you to my Anonymous Donor for continuing to slip me the images that make my heart beat so.

Check out that bat-crotch!

2008-03-13T23:50:00.006-04:00

From Bat-Blog, a link to a political ad campaign in Brussels depicting superheroes as various minorities. Interesting concept, but I'm a little too distracted by this blind Batman's bunching briefs. Can I get an "amen"?!

Update:The point of the ad campaign was to encourage voters to think about, say, blind people as capable of holding higher office--and, irony of ironies, I posted the above image shortly before New York state got its first sight-impaired, African American governor. Of course, mentioning that here only forces me to admit that if I were really serious about this blog's stated theme, I'd be waxing eloquent on the whole Eliot Spitzer saga, and I just don't have the time or energy to do so. But come on! The man who until about a week ago was frequently portrayed as practically a real-life superhero (or at least the new Eliot Ness, as we were often reminded) falls from grace into utter villainy? A saga worthy of Marvel comics! (Good thing I'm a DC guy from way back, and thus less interested in moral ambiguities than rippling muscles.)

NOW we're talkin'

2008-02-13T22:44:00.006-05:00

I had heard nothing about this particular Batman fan film till tonight, but one look at Patrick Thistle's Deadlock and I'm sold.
Why? Let me count the ways:
*actual film, not a teaser or trailer for something that may never get made
*cast of grownups, not a bunch of well-meaning kids (nothing wrong with kids making movies, but I start to feel uncomfortable if I am more than 30 years older than the main character, for several reasons)
*compelling storyline that totally works with my understanding of the Bat
*feels a bit like one of the Batman: Black & White stories--simple, direct, illuminating
*genuinely holds my interest--I wondered how our hero was going to get out of the deathtrap
*you heard me: deathtrap! deathtrap, deathtrap, deathtrap! at last!
*very nice soundtrack, full of industrial/electronic noise (NIN, Aphex Twin, etc.), all used quite effectively
*solid performances by the actors (who double as producer, director, and crew) who play Batman and the Riddler
*one word: bat-stubble!

The sound is a bit hard to make out (allow me to recommend headphones), but that kinda works--the setting is claustrophobic and the film is grainy and it all feels just right. It's shot on a low budget, but then so are some of the most interesting films ever made.

But why take my word for it? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Deadlock, parts one...

... and two ...

Sympathy for the Devil

2008-02-12T00:58:00.000-05:00

Tonight's interview with Stanford Psychology professor (emeritus) Philip Zimbardo on The Colbert Report reminds me that maybe one day I should actually read his latest book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, if I ever want to think seriously about the notion of "heroes" and "villains."

I meant to write about Zimbardo here when I first watched this recent documentary about his infamous Stanford Prison Experiments among other "Human Behavior Experiments" demonstrating how ordinary people can be prompted to do extraordinarily awful things to each other. Never quite got around to that--but it turns out those two programs are merely the tip of the media iceberg. (Lots more TV and print appearances are catalogued here.)

I see, too, that Zimbardo is quite the master packager of himself--in addition to the site for the book, he's got a snazzy little home page and another devoted to the prison experiments, complete with slide show and discussion points. One such note does a nice job of decoding one of my favorite bits of police fetishism: "Consider the police procedures which make arrestees feel confused, fearful, and dehumanized. Note that this policeman is wearing sunglasses just like those we had our 'guards' wear and as did the head of the National Guards at Attica Prison during its bloody 1971 riot!"

Hours of fun

2008-02-01T01:20:00.000-05:00

"The world does not need another site that makes fun of comic books; there are many, and they are much more complete and exhaustive than this one. Who cares? It’s the internet. There’s room for all!"

That's the raison d'etre of Funny Books: Dubious Moments in Comic History, which is loaded with classic covers like this:

and this:

Of course, for a spandex/deathtrap fetishist like moi, the images are a treat in themselves, but you won't want to miss webmaster James Lileks' high-larious captions/commentaries, like this and this. (Love the reference to Hal's "stupid-sexy-flanders-butt ... but that's inevitable when you're in good shape and wear underwear about in public.") Believe me, it's hard to pick just two examples from this "almost infinite amount of Superman-related crap, bad sci-fi, junky TV-show tie-ins, and the rest of the endless drecktitude."

Only downside: no easy way to navigate through the innards of the site; as far as I can tell, your only options are to start with the earliest or the latest post, which is a bit of a pain on repeat visits, or when you want to skip to a particular title or character. But hey: if you're visiting this particular corner of the blogosphere, you're probably not in any particular hurry to cure cancer or save the world.

Oh, and if you have the same soft spot for this stuff that I do, then you'll want to check out the other related mini-sites collected under one roof as "the Institute of Official Cheer."

I confess

2008-02-01T01:02:00.000-05:00

I could swear I've written about the documentary Confessions of a Superhero here already, but I'll be damned if I want to track down the post to be sure. Still haven't seen it, but this intriguing review of the film reminds me it's out there, and on DVD now to boot.

Crystal meth, mob ties, incarceration...

... and that's just Batman.

(Pssst: more nice photos and some video clips on the official site; see link above.)

No Joke(r)

2008-01-26T02:27:00.000-05:00

I know, I know: I should really compose a tribute to Heath Ledger. To tell the truth, I'm still kind of reeling from the news--what little of it there is at this point. So I'll save those thoughts for another post (ah, if only more people would hold off on reporting news when there is no news to report), and instead share a wonderful 3-D animation of an entirely different Joker. This is very brief, but features some quite nice bondage and beltlessness. You can't wrong with that combo in my book.

(Courtesy of the always-informative Bat-Blog. Check the post there for a darker alternate ending with cameos by two other superfriends.)

You'd better be good, for goodness' sake

2008-01-25T09:40:00.000-05:00

I've frequently made the parallel between Batman and Santa Claus. Here's a fan film whose title--if not its content--picks up on that idea:

Holy homophobia!

2007-12-21T00:53:00.000-05:00

These fine gentlemen were the stars this past summer of A Vida Secreta de Batman e Robin, a Sao Paolo play about the Secret Lives of Batman and Robin. I learned about it here, and you can find more info and an extra photo here. (Don't read Portuguese? Not to worry--Babelfish to the rescue, although you'll encounter translations like this: "The home-bat discloses in the part that wanted exactly was to be the man-butterfly.")

Apparently Bat-actor Renato Pope received at least one death threat for daring to besmirch the sterling reputation (and assumed heterosexuality) of the caped crusader. I am of course intrigued, almost enough to consider booking a flight for Brazil, although I must say the whole premise seems awfully close to a notorious movie about another legendary detective and his live-in companion.

But hey: works for me.

How did I not hear about this until now?

2007-11-28T00:23:00.000-05:00

I've written here many times that comic books were my porn throughout my adolescence and into my twenties. So you can imagine how, er, excited I was to discover The SuperBuds, a site devoted to ongoing chapters in the video adventures of Batdude and Throbin (not to be confused with the stars of a somewhat similiar but not nearly as good porn film from the late 80s), along with Webguy, Superguy, Kitty Woman, and other spandex-clad heroes and villains bearing a striking resemblance to certain characters owned by Marvel and DC.

I've never paid to join a site in my life, no matter how tempted I might be, but there was no way I could resist this one. And I can honestly say what I've seen is worth the eleven or so bucks. There's no false advertising; "Batdude" is my kind of man, and you get to see him suiting up, fighting bad guys, being tortured and trapped, and, uh, doing all the stuff you've ever fantasized about him doing with other men, if that's the kind of thing you fantasize about. The outfit is the real nice gray one from SpandexMan. The cheap yellow rubber utility belt is disappointing, although it's easy enough to remove, which I'm happy to report happens a lot. It's also kind of weird that Bats can't afford gloves (since Throbin owns a pair), but I do have a thing for seeing the hero's bare hands, so I can't complain about the omission too loudly.

The first episode I watched had none of that cheezy music that plagues most video porn of the last 20 years or so, and the absence made me happy, but then I noticed it in lots of other episodes. Oh well. The tone is mildly campy, complete with the "POW!"s and "BAM!"s of the TV show, but it's much less annoying (and much hotter) than the aforementioned 80s Bat-Dude. So far, so good.

I don't really see the point in remaining subscribed year-round, because updates don't seem to get posted all that often. I envision quitting after a month, then coming back half a year later to see what I've missed.

Ah, yet another dream of my twelve-year-old self fulfilled in middle age. Life is good!

If even one of these is any good, I'll be happy

2007-10-30T10:53:00.001-04:00

A Spirit movie written and directed by Frank Miller

A Green Lantern movie that does not appear to star Jack Black

A Flash movie

And by "good," of course, I mean:
*Spandex (where appropriate; this lets the Spirit off the hook, though I'll be wanting the tight-fitting suit and frequent bare chests in his case)
*beefcake actors, not movie stars
*deathtraps, deathtraps, deathtraps (any sort of sublimated BDSM will do)

Fly by night

2007-10-27T01:22:00.000-04:00

Here's an interesting bit from NPR's Marketplace on the economics of those Spirit Halloween stores that seem to pop up all over the place this time of year, only to disappear come November 1. (Hot tip: 50% off on closing day!)

By coincidence, I stopped at one of these stores this afternoon, in hopes of finding a new Batman mask, since every single one of the maybe half dozen in my collection has some sort of major tear or other problem. Saw almost no bat-stuff, aside from one of those cheesy "muscle suit" costumes that no self-respecting crimefighter would ever wear. Availability seems tied to the movies--which means next year should be much greener pastures than this year.

It's just as well I didn't find one. I mean, could there be anything less sexy than this:

Incredible? Indeed!

2007-10-24T00:39:00.000-04:00

Thanks, Bat-Blog, for passing along this groovy mashup:

Two great tastes that taste GREAT together.

Yeah, I'd do 'im.

Compare & contrast

2007-10-19T01:23:00.000-04:00

I seem to be on a Green Hornet jag lately, so check this out: 2 casts, 1 script, 1 Kato.

First, Michael Lipton, sounding a little prissy:

And now we have Jay Murray, closer but still no cigar:

Makes Van Williams look even better than ever. (He's got the best mask, too.)

Fruit-Bat to the rescue!

2007-10-18T01:56:00.000-04:00

It's smart, it's funny, and it's sexy as hell: illustrator J. Bone has posted his Bat-parody in its entirety on his Man's Adventure blog. I've already got it in comic book form, but I'm more than happy to have a digital version, too.

Ah, if only the comics were this good...

Catch of the day

2007-10-14T04:04:00.000-04:00

1.

Here's the full story, in case you've missed it elsewhere on the web, including Boing Boing.

2.

I gotta get this book.

It's not easy being Green, part 2

2007-10-10T00:35:00.000-04:00

Seems my man Green Lantern suffers a lot of head trauma.

Sometimes it's the bad guys:

Sometimes it's police brutality:

Sometimes it's just plain weird:

Now, at long last, the hilariously named Hal Jordan Head Injury Project compiles a whole bunch of this stuff. (First learned about it from this Scans Daily post.) I'm not particularly into the head-injury aspect per se, but I do enjoy a good image of Hal knocked cold or otherwise waylaid. There are over a hundred to choose from on the Flickr page, so let's wrap this up with one of my all-time faves, featuring a very wet and freshly unmasked Hal and his equally damp and undisguised pal Ollie:

It's not easy being Green, part 1

2007-10-09T21:29:00.000-04:00

OK, I admit I'm kind of nervous about the concept of Seth Rogan as The Green Hornet. I have a funny feeling this "news" is a little premature anyway, as this brief video interview suggests. (Hope that link still works--took me to the right place the first time, then never again.) The problems are obvious, and have been lamented by many a nerd before me, so I'll spare you.

But I started thinking: who would I want to see play Britt Reid (now that Van Williams is unlikely)? I"m picturing some kind of ruggedly handsome, hypermasculine-but-not-oafish rising star. I'm picturing, in fact, this guy:

That would be Jon Hamm, a.k.a. Don Draper on the new AMC series Mad Men, who by an amazing coincidence happens to be my current Imaginary Boyfriend.

Speaking of the Hornet, if you haven't seen this French fan film (in English), you might want to check it out--and the star, for that matter.

Fun fact: in this version, the bad guys seem to know the name of the man under the mask. Just for kicks, here's a production still of Messr. Manu Lanzi relaxing sans his signature hat:

Quite the pompadour, non?

Dance, Batman, dance!

2007-10-08T23:09:00.000-04:00

Very, very hot commercial (well, the batbriefs are kinda weird, but the cape and tights more than make up for 'em):

Found at Bat-Blog.

Further evidence that I am not a citizen of the blogosphere

2007-10-08T11:31:00.000-04:00

It took last week's Entertainment Weekly to inform me that a Justice League movie is in the works.

I can't find the actual story online, but here is an EW blog post inspiring dozens of commenters to cast the film. (Ryan Reynolds as the Flash? I'm there.)

While I'm at it, allow me to add my voice to those requesting (okay, most are demanding) a Hal Jordan Green Lantern over a John Stewart GL. Unless they mean the host of The Daily Show, in which case I am SO there.

Since I brought up Hal, let's enjoy a few panels of his bare flesh, courtesy of that new fave of mine, Shirtless Superheroes:

Holy secret identity!

2007-10-07T22:14:00.000-04:00

This episode of This American Life about a man who completely reinvented his life at least nine times would be interesting enough even if one of those lives did not include providing the voice of Batman in a series of record albums in the early 70s (which I swear I've heard). It's a wild story, and I guarantee you'll never hear that booming voice again without thinking of the Caped Crusader as a pot-smoking, child-terrorizing, gray-flannel-suit-wearing, failed-movie-star Christian fundamentalist.

PS. Special bonus discovered while trying in vain to find an image of the album art: this and several other lengthy essays on 60s-era Batman from the site Captain Comics.

The thrills just keep on comin'

2007-10-06T01:42:00.000-04:00

Beaucoup Kevin tipped me off to this great collection of dozens of stills from the 1966 Batman movie. They're all so delightful in terms of their color, resolution, composition--all the stuff that makes the sixties Batman work on so many levels at once.

Speaking of which, here's a fun fact about your humble narrator: many, many people over the years have praised the terrific visual joke in this scene...

... but I have to say, I don't just find it hilarious, I find it really hot. It's a fetish thing, of course: rubber gloves on top of the usual ones. I just wish the site contained a still of a shot just a minute or two later, in which the batphone rings and our hero takes both pair of gloves off one hand in order to answer it. This is historic, because it's the only time in the series (believe me, I've looked) in which we see Batman's ungloved hand.

And that makes me very, very ... happy.

Stop the presses!

2007-09-28T11:41:00.001-04:00

How could I have missed this?!

Behold: Shirtless Superheroes, a blog devoted entirely to one of my favorite subjects. The writing, which tends to be pretty brief, isn't as high-larious as I would hope, but then that's probably the superhero-fetishist version of saying you read Playboy for the articles, I guess.

In the same spirit of brevity, I'll shut up and share two especially nice entries (out of many) with you:

These are the kinds of things I find while avoiding work

2007-09-28T10:49:00.001-04:00

1. A page of recent Geek Soap Box posts on my favorite character, including this hot panel:

(The Geek has issues with Batman's insistence on leaving his mask on while doing the nasty, but I think you know where I stand on that front.)

2. On the Beardwalk, a blog devoted entirely to scruff, full-on facial hair, and other instances of "bearding." Yowsah!

You can probably deduce the search terms I used to find these, but sadly there were no posts there or anywhere else devoted to the Bat's five-o'clock shadow.

Hey, I guess now there will be!

Superman in the news

2007-09-21T01:48:00.000-04:00

Dear lord, am I ever slacking on the blog front these days! I have no seasonal disorders to blame at the moment, just an overfull schedule that I will ... one day ... discuss here.

But I could delay blgging no longer when I was driving home a moment ago and heard a radio report on recent sightings of a flying, blue-suited Superman in Romania. (No surprise, the flying part interests me way less than the shiny blue tights, red boots, and red cape.)

That, in turn, reminded me that I never got around to sharing an item that my cyberpal Wwuf passed along ages ago, about a former Army drill sargeant who forced his male trainees to dress like the Man of Steel and perform sexual acts.

To-do list:
1. Join the Army
2. Get stationed in Romania.

Oh, and:
3. Update blog more often.

Whew!

2007-05-26T01:36:00.000-04:00

As you may have deduced, the awful fog of S.A.D. is starting to lift and I'm getting back into my old groove again, including resuming work on this very blog from time to time. (I am under no illusion that I will ever be a daily poster for more than a couple of days at a time--I'm just not built for that.) And part of that work has included adding tags/labels for every single entry up to now, all the way back to April 2003. (Good thing I don't write here that often, or that would have taken months instead of three short evening sessions.)

It has been instructive to look back at earlier entries--haven't reread too many in detail, but I can still detect themes I explored for a while, then dropped, others that I meant to cover from the start but didn't get around to until much later, etc. When I do get around to writing here, it's at least true that I've stuck fairly close to my original intent and purpose for the blog.

I've met (in the virtual sense, that is) a lot of men as a result of writing so obsessively about my own obsessions here--I've met men who share them, that is, and that's pretty cool. By now I"m even blasé about it ("Yep, here's another one..."), which is remarkable given that as recently as a decade ago I thought I was a freak of nature for fantasizing about the stuff I routinely fantasize about.

It also occurred to me the other night that, far from "outgrowing" my adolescent superhero fetish, I've actually developed a rich fantasy life that indulges them on a fairly regular basis, both in the flesh and in the virtual realm. (I realize I haven't written here in a long time about my online roleplaying colleagues, so here's a quick update:) I still look to the Monk with the highest of regard, as my greatest teacher, even my Master in the pedagogical sense, although he and I haven't really extended our storyline in any significant way for perhaps a year now. He refers to this as my having "plateaued," and I think we both look forward to moving past that somehow, some day. In the meantime, I've got at least three fairly new ongoing "cases" involving villains I don't think I've even mentioned here. I've lost touch with some wonderful old friends, and some equally wonderful old enemies, but new ones come into play fairly regularly, and it's always great to reconnect with the estranged ones, too. In short, my bat-life is a lot like that of the comic-book Batman, who battles a mix of longstanding nemeses and Johnny-come-latelies, some of whom stick around and some of whom vanish after a single encounter. One major change is that I'm less interested in sticking to a single "continuity," as the comics geeks would say, than I was during the early stages of the Monk saga. His story overshadowed and interconnected with all the others; now I've got three or more storylines that don't intersect at all, and none of them involve M.

Most of my roleplay activities, and most everything else that I normally find energizing, was on hold for months while I just struggled against the urge to stay in bed for days on end. (Never actually DID stay there that long; just wanted to.) But, as I say, I'm getting my old self back, I think and hope, and it feels great to be alive again, as both Bruce Wayne and the Bat.

Hit me with your best shot

2007-05-24T00:14:00.000-04:00

OK, I hate the fact that I am in my own teeny tiny way helping a major ad campaign go viral, but what the hell, I love this commercial:

Grab a pillow and cop-u-late!

Batbeef, Spider-Meat, and more

2007-05-23T23:38:00.000-04:00

1. Thanks, [P-Mod Barney], for tipping me off to this hunky bit of bat-beefcake (er, make that butt-cake):

2. Thanks, Man's Adventure, for tipping me off to Antebellum Gallery's upcoming ToonFetish exhibition. Antebellum bills itself as "the only fetish art gallery in america!" (but didn't the artist Hudson do something like this in NYC in the early 90s?) and I certainly want to revisit the site--and ideally the brick-and-mortar gallery--as often as possible.

3. The Hub and I saw Spider-Man III last weekend. I was kind of dreading it, since I am apparently one of the minority who found the second installment unbearably slow, and one of my coworkers had warned me Part III was even longer and more soap-operaish and featured Spidey even less than that one. Glad I lowered my expectations, because I ended up pleasantly surprised. Yes, it was long and no, I really, truly would not give a shit about Peter Parker, Bruce Waye, Clark Kent, or the rest of their ilk if they didn't also lead double lives as sexily costumed crimefighters. But I was pleasantly surprised by the new movie, which is to say I found the black spidersuit really hot (especially when wet!) and the wee bits of spider-bondage titillating, and so on. The Hub, whose taste in men is roughly the exact opposite of mine, was sufficiently pleased by the presence of young Toby, Topher, and especially pouty-lipped Mr. Franco.

I will spare you the rest of my thoughts on the film, except to say that I think the whole megabudget superhero epic is pretty much played out by this point. Wouldn't it be refreshing if someone would make a simple, cheap, little indie movie about a guy who puts on weird clothes and fights bad guys? And, since I'm clearly delusional here, wouldn't it be lovely if said film were not an origin story but rather a tale that takes for granted the hero's backstory and simply follows his latest adventure, much as the average comic book and/or graphic novel does?

Anybody with me on this?

Look who's back

2007-05-02T01:56:00.000-04:00

I know you've probably given up on me months ago, but here I am again, ready to leap--or perhaps crawl--back into the blogosphere and pick up where I left off. If you've been here before, you'll notice that I've finally bitten the bullet and upgraded to the new version of Blogger, something everybody else did half a year ago. I found the update a huge pain in the ass when I tried it elsewhere and avoided doing it here as long as possible. Still, this should make the link list a lot easier to navigate, among other things.

Enough shoptalk. Where the hell have I been, you may be wondering. And the answer is: concentrating on life in the daylight/B. Wayne world for the last few months, battling a few new villains in the bat-world, and so on.

Mainly, though, I've been having a fairly miserable winter. The older I get, the worse my semi-annual bouts with Seasonal Affective Disorder seem to grow. After a very happy and productive autumn, my body and mind just sort of shut down, as they are sometimes wont to do from January through April or so--not every year, but often enough. It's weird how closeted I am about depression in my day-to-day life, and even online; only the Hub, my shrink, and a handful of close friends know what I've been going through for the last four months. It occured to me a while back that since I write so openly here about my innermost fantasies,which are potentially far more incriminating, I could also blog a bit about what my psyche has been going through (with the same goal of letting similarly-wired readers know they're not alone)--but then I've just been so fucking depressed that I haven't been able to follow through until now. In fact, I haven't been able to do much more than sleep late, nap, go to bed early, and accomplish the bare minimum at my day job for weeks and weeks and weeks. The batsuit went unused for months, along with this blog and most other evidence of my bat-life. I'm not totally out of the darkness just yet, but I feel myself getting a little more energy as the sun stays out longer and longer. (Perhaps my archetypal comic book hero is not Batman, the Dark Knight, but Apollo, who draws his power from sunlight.)

I've been accumulating all sorts of things to write about here, and I have a lot of catching up to do. (I've also got a few ideas for how to jumpstart Beginnings again, too, so stay tuned.) If you're reading this, thanks for not giving up on me. I've tried hard not to give up on myself (tempting though that may be when I wake up several hours before I want to, my mind fully ready to go on the attack), and I'm looking forward to getting back into the groove again at long last.

Go fish

2007-01-10T01:18:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to my online pal Wwuf for tipping me off to this item about a new fish and its tail's alleged similarity to a certain comic book hero:

I figured bloggers would be all over this by now, and maybe they are, but of the few I regularly check, only Warren Ellis has covered it as of now. (Commenters there have already beaten me to the punch with Aquaman jokes and hilarity over the name of the source publication, Practical Fishkeeping.)

Holy amazing radio

2007-01-07T23:02:00.000-05:00

Every fan of the 60s tv bat-show (and why else would you be here if you weren't one?) needs to head immediately to Little Steven's Underground Garage for an amazing two-hour tribute. I've never heard so many versions of Neal Hefti's theme song and ultra-obscure tie-in songs in my life. I'm listening right now both on an FM radio and streaming online, but you should be able to find it archived (episode 249, Jan. 7, 2007). NOT TO BE MISSED.

Your opportunity to participate in a heroic act

2007-01-05T23:45:00.000-05:00

Got this email at least a month ago; only getting around to sharing it here now, but the project is ongoing:

Bristol-Myers Squibb is donating a dollar to AIDS research every time someone goes to their website and moves the match to the candle and lights it.

Click here (www.lighttounite.org).

It only takes a second to raise a dollar. You're only allowed to light it once so tell your friends.
Don't let this slow your fight for fair, accessible, equal health care, despite the overwhelming monopoly the drug companies hold.

More mask talk

2006-12-25T18:18:00.000-05:00

In the early, more prolific days of this blog, I wrote several posts about the nature and appeal of masks, beginning here. Now an idle hour of googling other subjects has inadvertently led me to this meditation on masking in art and life from a blog on opera.

Batman makes an appearance, of course, which is how I found the illustrated mini-essay in the first place, but there are also references to tribal cultures, Mexican wrestlers, the KKK, and, of course, opera. (I hasten to add that it's during a performance of Pagliacci, the opera cited in the post, that the Joker nearly unmasks Batman on live television in the 60s series.) I didn't realize until I read the post that the word "mask" is opera-talk for "the region of the nose and cheeks, back up by the sinuses"--more or less the part of Batman's cowl that does not cover his face.

Time to slip my own on and get to work!

I meant to do my work today...

2006-12-18T20:31:00.000-05:00

I have a million things to do tonight, and instead of doing any of them I have paid my first return visit in years to this amazing photo archive of real cops and its 17 pages of motorcycle cops (not counting several more organized by country). Then I found myself reading this blog entry by a woman who appears to view these magnificent specimens of masculinity exactly the same way I do:

For years I have lusted [after] you and your brothers. I have lingered at the courthouse to watch you parked out front, lounging on your motorcycles, striding back and forth from the front steps of the courthouse. I have dawdled along parade routes just to catch a glimpse of your hard thighs and strong knees atop the oh so shiny jack boots. The very sight of you on the road, back straight, sunlight glinting off your boots, legs embracing steel makes me weak and breathless....

Actually, I'd argue that this woman thinks a lot like a gay man. Or maybe we both ...

Damn, now I'm too hot and bothered to finish writing.

This night is not going well.

Or else it's going very, very well indeed. All a matter of perspective.

PS. Allow me to conclude this entry with a photo contribution of my own:

PPS. Now that I look at the picture carefully, it strikes me that the cop I am surreptitiously checking out is himself scoping out a woman. Ah, the circle of life!

The Real Dark Knight

2006-12-13T18:35:00.000-05:00

(Two entries in one day--unbelievable!)

Here's an interesting little animated bat-film I just stumbled upon via BatmanFanFilms.com with an intriguing premise that Dr. Freud might enjoy...

... I know I did.

(Leather-clad) strangers in the night

2006-12-13T06:42:00.000-05:00

What do I do on a sleepless night? Turn to GlovdCopSF's site in search of his latest photo gallery. Upon discovering he hasn't updated that page since October (not that I am in any position to compain, mind you), I head to his amazing and extensive links page, where I stumble upon LeatherCops.US and several fine video clips, including this one:

Uniform fetishism so pure it borders on something Leni Riefenstahl would come up with, and I gotta say I like it.

Value added: I discover that YouTube is actually jam packed with similar material, including this delectable specialty offering that happens to scratch a particular itch of mine quite well indeed:

(Side note: I will never forget the day, about 6 or 7 years ago, when I walked into a local coffeehouse on the morning of a police funeral to find an entire room full of motorcycle cops from around the state all sitting with their boots off, relaxing before the motorcade. Hummina hummina!)

Here's to sleepless nights!

Atomic dawg

2006-11-26T12:50:00.000-05:00

I have a passing, semi-academic interest in fetishes that I don't happen to share, perhaps because they shed light on the dynamic behind the stuff that does turn me on. Rubber dog masks (brought to my attention by a potential Robin-in-training) aren't entirely my cup of tea, fetishwise, but I admit there's something hot about these, especially when modelled by a tasty treat like this guy:

If you're interested, check out the "RubberDawg.com" site.

Woof, as they say.

Question of the day

2006-11-24T18:23:00.000-05:00