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

... 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"

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

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 ...

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

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

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!

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

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!

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...

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

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)

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

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!

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

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."

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 ...

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 ...

... 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

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!

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!