"The indictment of the judge, Hannah C. Dugan of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, was a routine but significant step in the Justice Department’s case against her."

"The Trump administration has defended the prosecution as a warning that no one is above the law, while many Democrats, lawyers and former judges have denounced it as an assault on the judiciary...."

From "Wisconsin Judge Indicted on Charges That She Helped Immigrant Evade Agents/Judge Hannah C. Dugan was accused of helping an undocumented immigrant elude federal agents who were waiting to arrest him outside her courtroom" (NYT).

[E]arlier this month, more than 150 former state and federal judges signed a letter to Ms. Bondi calling the arrest of Judge Dugan an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. “This cynical effort undermines the rule of law,” that letter said, “and destroys the trust the American people have in the nation’s judges to administer justice in the courtrooms and in the halls of justice across the land.”

What is a "hall of justice" if not a courtroom?

Do people who want Trump to fail ever get tired of posing as if they're offering to help him avoid failure?

I'm reading Eugene Robinson over at WaPo:

President Trump’s increasingly frantic attempts to smear former president Barack Obama reek of panic. As disgusting as these efforts are, they are likely to backfire, perhaps in spectacular fashion.

Maybe there are readers at WaPo who lap this stuff up. They want Trump to be going nuts and they'd like to see his attacks backfire spectacularly. But there's no way an interpretation like this could influence Trump. He's not going to think: I'd better calm down and realize that attacks on Obama will only hurt me. It makes much more sense for him to interpret a column like that to mean that his attacks are effective.

Maybe Trump just cannot abide the fact that Obama is a Nobel laureate, respected around the world, while he has had to endure being snickered at by world leaders and portrayed as hapless and ignorant by the “fake news” media he claims to hate yet compulsively devours. Increasingly, his imagined victimizer is Obama himself. Trump even tries to blame Obama for his own administration’s botched response to a disease that did not exist when Obama was in office.

I thought everyone knew you don’t tug on Superman’s cape....

And yet, you're doing just that.

By the way, the line "you don’t tug on Superman’s cape" comes from Jim Croce's "You Don't Mess Around With Jim," and the question why Superman wears a cape — what good does it do him? — has long plagued readers of comic books who think too much.

IN THE COMMENTS: Calypso Facto said:

"Jim" also gets his ass handed to him by the upstart "Slim" at the end of Croce's song. Maybe more on point than Eugene Robinson intended? (And isn't Slim a great nickname for Trump in response to Pelosi's failed fat-shaming?)

The NYT's Charles M. Blow thinks it's "a mistake to believe that Trump’s supporters don’t see his lying or corruption. They do. But, to them, it is all part of the show and the lore."

Blow writes:

[W]hen you survey the constellation of folk heroes, you see that many have been criminals. Bonnie and Clyde. John Dillinger. The Sundance Kid....

Perhaps one of the most popular folk heroes in the world is mythological: Chinese folklore’s Monkey King.

Please note that Blow is black and Trump is white. If the races were reversed, Blow's career would be over. Ask Roseanne Barr.

The British Council wrote of [the Monkey King] legend: “Despite his superpowers, at the heart of the Monkey King’s appeal is his human fallibility — he is greedy, selfish, and prone to sudden changes of mood and outbursts of exceptional violence. He defies divine authority, laughs at attempts to be controlled, and leaves chaos in his wake. But we know that there is fundamental good within him. He is the misbehaving child who only needs a firm hand and a sense of purpose to come good.”

This is an insight that's been easily available to Trump haters since at least 2015.* But I guess it feels like a revelation to those who refuse to look at Trump from any angle that could be at all flattering.

And Blow's column ends with no solution for Trump antagonists (and of course there's no reconsideration of whether Trump is the enemy):

Anti-Trump forces must stop operating as if they are doing battle with a liar; they are doing battle with what his supporters have fashioned into a legend. How does one fight a fiction, a fantasy? That’s the question. Its answer is the path to America’s salvation.

_______________________

* To try to find early instances of the recognition that the Trump story is a hero narrative, I did a search of my blog archive for "Trump" and "hero." One thing that came up, from last October, was this fascinating rant from Kanye West:

"You know, they tried to scare me to not wear this hat—my own friends. But it’s hot! It gives me, it gives me power in a way. You know, my dad and my mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though! But there’s times where, you know, it’s something about—I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign, 'I’m With Her,' just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son. There was something about, when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman—that’s my favorite super hero. You made a Superman cape for me, also, as a guy who looks up to you … looks up to American industry guys, nonpolitical, no bullshit.…"

Maybe Blow could analyze that. By the way, Blow's column begins with a discussion of his mother (who, he says, was "austere" and full of "moral rectitude" but nevertheless loved the Democratic Party scoundrel Edwin Edwards), but he says nothing about a father.  Blow did write a column about that Kanye incident at the time, but he dismissed Kanye as a "troubled... rambling, incoherent" and concluded:

The spectacle wasn’t really Kanye. The spectacle was watching Trump pretend to care about remedying a problem that he is consciously continuing to not only cheer but worsen. Kanye was just being used.

I'd like to see Blow extend his folk-hero analysis of Trump to Kanye's rant about making him feel like a super-hero. Blow wrote about how women might embrace a rogue, but what about how a man might see himself in the hero?

Ironically, it's sexist to think there is something wrong with a dress.

"You know, they tried to scare me to not wear this hat—my own friends. But it’s hot! It gives me, it gives me power in a way. "

"You know, my dad and my mom separated, so I didn’t have a lot of male energy in my home. And also, I’m married to a family that, you know, not a lot of male energy going on. It’s beautiful though! But there’s times where, you know, it’s something about—I love Hillary. I love everyone, right? But the campaign, 'I’m With Her,' just didn’t make me feel, as a guy that didn’t get to see my dad all the time, like a guy that could play catch with his son. There was something about, when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman. You made a Superman—that’s my favorite super hero. You made a Superman cape for me, also, as a guy who looks up to you … looks up to American industry guys, nonpolitical, no bullshit—put the beep on it—however you wanna do it, five second delay…"

Said Kanye West, talking to Donald Trump today. I got the transcription from "Inside The Historic Trump-Kanye Oval Office Summit" (New York Magazine). You can watch 24+ minutes of Trump and Kanye and Jim Brown, here:



ADDED: Kanye hugs Trump and tells him he loves him:

Kanye West with President Trump in Oval Office: "I love this guy right here." pic.twitter.com/40Q24j5fRJ

— CSPAN (@cspan) October 11, 2018

"While I am not prepared to defend bouts of 'She-Ra doesn’t give me boners anymore' extremism..."

"... I can see the kernels of the argument that sexuality shouldn’t be in diametric opposition to capability. There’s no reason female characters can’t be glamorous and sexy and also battle-ready, smart, and compassionate. It’s not unlike the ongoing debate about Wonder Woman’s appearance and whether her revealing uniform ultimately undermines her feminism. I’d argue that the most important thing about women superheroes in skimpy clothes is agency — what matters is that their costumes aren’t designed primarily for the sake of someone else’s erotic thrill."

From "The Fight Over She-Ra's Netflix Redesign, Explained/Some men are mad she isn’t sexier," by Alex Abad-Santos.

Cartoons are complicated!

Here's the old and the new She-Ra to help you understand:

The new She-Ra looks like Tom Holland. 🤔 #SheRa pic.twitter.com/DTN4phQJHN

— Liam (@TribalSpaceman) July 14, 2018

I had to look up Tom Holland:



Apparently, he's Spider-Man these days. I think of Spider-Man as being that other guy, what's-his-name. Anyway, is Spider-Man's costume not in "diametric opposition to capability"? There's so much suspension of disbelief in the watching of superheroes, something I've just about never done — I've seen a few of the "Batman" movies — but a huge proportion of the world's population seems to love to do. What is the role of the costumes? It's nothing like If that was my work, that's what I'd wear to get my work done. I'm not even sure the extent to which the costume itself is magic. Does Superman fly because of the cape or is the cape kind of like those ribbons people attach to house fans to add drama to the wind flow?

But I do love this scene in "Batman Returns" where we see Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) putting together her costume for the first time:

"She said [Christopher] Reeve, making one of his first screen appearances, became irritated whenever she would read during breaks."

"He’d say, ‘You don’t stay in character?’ I’d say, ‘For Christ’s sake, Chris, I’ve been Lois Lane for a year, all you do is look left, I can handle it.’ And I’d pull out my book and he’d get very cross."

From "Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in blockbuster ‘Superman,’ dies at 69" (WaPo).

Also:

[I]n 1996, she endured what she later jokingly called the “biggest nervous breakdown in history, bar possibly Vivien Leigh’s,” a reference to the troubled “Gone With the Wind” star. “If you’re gonna fall apart,” she advised, “do it in your own bedroom.”

Her collapse, she said, was triggered by a virus on her laptop that erased years of work on a memoir. The loss sent her spiraling. She became convinced that her first husband, author Thomas McGuane, was trying to kill her with the help of the CIA. She slashed her hair and removed several teeth in a bid to go unrecognized.

Over the course of three days, she wandered the streets and narrowly escaped being raped. She was found disheveled, penniless and disoriented in the back yard of a home in Glendale, Calif., and was taken to a private psychiatric clinic for evaluation....

That's the detail I never forgot about her: She was so mentally troubled that she pulled out some of her teeth. I looked to see if pulling one's own teeth is at all common in mental illness. What I found was "Pulling Teeth to Treat Mental Illness" (The Atlantic):

As medical director of the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum in Trenton between 1907 and 1930, [Henry Cotton] routinely practiced what he called "surgical bacteriology," the extracting of potentially diseased parts of the head and body, based on the observation that people who run high fevers sometimes suffer hallucinations.

This "focal infection therapy" seemed so scientific and promising that Cotton and his assistants yanked more than 11,000 teeth.... Cotton's experiments were unethical and awful, but they weren't that illogical if you consider the knowledge that was available at the time....

If you had no idea about neurotransmitters or lobes, it makes a weird sort of sense that micro-infections in the head would be the true cause of schizophrenia... [W]e still don't know, say, the very best way to prevent schizophrenia....

But it doesn't say that Kidder had the deranged idea that her teeth were the cause of her psychological distress. It says she was trying to change her appearance so people wouldn't recognize her. I question the accuracy of that report (especially since it had to come from the person who was mentally ill enough to subject herself to such a painful, damaging ordeal).

"James Comey is a proven LEAKER & LIAR. Virtually everyone in Washington thought he should be fired for the terrible job he did-until he was, in fact, fired."

"He leaked CLASSIFIED information, for which he should be prosecuted. He lied to Congress under OATH. He is a weak and..... ....untruthful slime ball who was, as time has proven, a terrible Director of the FBI. His handling of the Crooked Hillary Clinton case, and the events surrounding it, will go down as one of the worst “botch jobs” of history. It was my great honor to fire James Comey!"

Trump tweet tweets this morning. ("Tweet tweet" is my coinage for a run-on double tweet like this.)

I'm reading the tweet tweet at the NYT article "Trump Calls Comey ‘Untruthful Slime Ball’ as Book Details Released."

The book isn't out yet, and I'm not seeing any interesting new details. So I'll just say there shouldn't be any interesting new details, because Comey should have already told us the whole truth, not withheld morsels for the book — that is, for his own personal money making and career boosting.

I wasn't sure if "money making" should be one word, but I chose 2 words, so I could write this sentence connecting my deliberation on the subject to Trump's spelling "slime ball," because I'm utterly certain the correct spelling is "slimeball," although forevermore I will pause before writing "slimeball" and think of Trump and feel that it would be an allusion to Trump to write "slime ball."

In the 15-year history of this blog, I've used the word "slimeball" exactly once. In 2006, I called Glenn Greenwald a slimeball. (It was in self-defense: "Why not take a little trouble to try to understand the person you are criticizing before you write, you disreputable slimeball? (And your writing is putrid.)"

Anyway, if you want to buy the Comey book, here's the Althouse-supporting link to Amazon: "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership."

What I want to talk about is the incredible badness of the title. You've got a set of loftily — preeningly — positive words — "higher," "loyalty," "truth," and "leadership," and then you've got the clunker — "lies." "Lies" is sitting there as if it belongs in the set of positive things, as if it's one of the virtues Comey means to claim as his own. I realize it's there to imply that Comey is fighting against lies, but then for parallelism, he should have written "lie fighting" or something.

Consider Superman's catchphrase "truth, justice, and the American way." Imagine writing "Lies, justice and the American way." You'd get that Superman was against the lies, because he's Superman (or, as I like to call him, Super Man).

But Comey isn't Superman. We're not sure he's the good guy. He should not have "Lies" in the title as if it's one of the things with which he means to associate himself.

And consider the alliteration. There are a lot of Ls: "Loyalty... Lies... Leadership." In the logic of alliteration, the outlier is "Truth"!

Also, consider the rhyming. You hear poetry whether you consciously acknowledge it or not. And the internal rhyme heard by your mind's ear is "High... Lie..."

So that's 3 reasons why "Lies" jumps out: rhyming, alliteration, and being the odd thing in the set. Maybe Comey is so steeped in virtue that something is making him say: I am lying.

"Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?"

"The answer? Limitation," writes Jordan Peterson, recounting "an old Jewish story." He continues, now with his own insight:

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being. It helped my client, too. I don’t want to overstate the significance of this. I don’t want to claim that this somehow makes it all OK. She still faced the cancer afflicting her husband, just as I still faced my daughter’s terrible illness. But there’s something to be said for recognizing that existence and limitation are inextricably linked.

Peterson proceeds to talk about Superman, who got boring when the plotline was that he had powers that worked on anything that could happen. His story was revived by giving him limitations:

A superhero who can do anything turns out to be no hero at all. He’s nothing specific, so he’s nothing. He has nothing to strive against, so he can’t be admirable 

AND: I feel a pop-song cue to the Talking Heads' "Heaven." That link goes to Lyrics Genius, where you can play the song, read the lyrics, and see line-by-line commentary on the lyrics. On the line, "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens," someone has added:

This refrain at first seems nonsensical, or perhaps tongue-in-cheek: Why would the most perfect place in all of creation be so…well…boring? However, consider: Once a state of perfection is reached, anything deviating from that is then imperfect. And if Heaven is imperfect, what’s the point? How’s it any different from Earth? This at first frustratingly rational take on spirituality also serves as a reminder of how boring life would be if things really were perfect: In the immortal words of Dolly Parton, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”

If those Dolly Parton words really are immortal —  omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent? — why did I keep finding them only in quotes (like that one) and not in song lyrics? Because it's a paraphrase, I think. People haven't remembered the words, only the idea. I think I found the song, a song for children, "I Am a Rainbow." The line is, "To make a rainbow you must have rain/Must have sunshine, joy, and pain."

This is my favorite rendition of a song about rainbows — it's never boring...

What did Noel Neill — the Lois Lane of the 1950s — mean to you?

The actress has died at the age of 95, and I hadn't noticed, but I got a text from RLC saying: "I assume you're going to blog about Noel Neill!!" I didn't even remember the name, and I looked it up and saw the obituary, and I wondered why my ex-husband had that assumption about me. Or was it just that he liked her?

Then I was looking at old pictures of Neill and I saw one that took me back to a childhood memory that perhaps, long ago, I conveyed to RLC. Here's the picture:



"Adventures of Superman" was on TV from 1952 — when I was 1 — to 1958 — when I was 7. That show made some kind of impression on my undefended, very young mind. When I thought about becoming an adult — turning into a woman — I pictured Noel Neill. Dressed like that, hair like that, demeanor like that.  I had my own particular look and ways about me as a girl, but I believed a finished condition, adulthood, stood at the end of childhood. My formative period — girlhood — would end, and I would, of necessity, at the age of 21, become an adult woman, and that woman I saw in my head for years and years, was — as I got closer to actual adulthood I recognized her — NOEL NEILL!!

"Reality TV star hit by train was going for action shot, friends say."

Gregory Plitt's girlfriend said: "He wanted to push things to the limit. He's just like Superman."

100 years ago: the birth of George Reeves.

It wasn't a bird or a plane, it was Superman:



George Reeves, born January 5, 1914.

I think there are 2 main topics associated with George Reeves: 1. Was he the greatest Superman, and 2. Did he really kill himself?

1. Was he the greatest Superman?

• "Ranking the Supermen." ("Reeves didn’t differentiate too much between his portrayal of Superman and Clark Kent, which sort of hurt his ability to sell the two characters as individuals.")

• "Men of Steel: 11 Actors Who Have Played Superman" ("George Reeves’ portrayal of Superman/Clark Kent turned the traditional dynamic on its ear. The ruggedly handsome Reeves, with his broad smile and lantern jaw, virtually turned Clark Kent into the central figure.... While Reeves wore a padded costume to accentuate Superman’s physical power, his deep voice and the easygoing authority he projected (no actor has yet matched Reeves’ looks of bored exasperation as some hoodlum empties his gun at Superman) made him the definitive Superman for a generation.")

• "Celluloid Superman: Is George Reeves the Best Man of Steel?" ("The platform beneath Reeves is visible when Superman flies, and the footage is recycled again and again. Cuts between shots of bodies falling/landing and Superman demonstrating his super-powers (best rubber knife scene ever!) are just plain awkward and poorly executed.")

2. "Many people have refused to believe that George Reeves would kill himself and have pointed out that..."

... no gunpowder from the gun's discharge was found on the actor's skin, leading them to believe that the weapon would therefore have to have been held several inches away from his head when it was fired; however, forensic professionals say that gunpowder tattooing is left only when the weapon is not in contact with the skin, while Reeves' skull fracture pattern shows that it was a contact wound....

In the partially fictional Reeves biography Hollywood Kryptonite, Reeves is murdered by order of Toni Mannix as punishment for their breakup.... Toni Mannix suffered from Alzheimer's disease for years and died in 1983. In 1999, following the resurrection of the Reeves case by TV shows Unsolved Mysteries and Mysteries and Scandals, Los Angeles publicist Edward Lozzi claimed that Toni Mannix had confessed to a Catholic priest in Lozzi's presence that she was responsible for having George Reeves killed.... Lozzi also told of Tuesday night prayer sessions that Toni Mannix conducted with him and others at an altar shrine to George Reeves that she had built in her home. Lozzi stated, "During these prayer sessions she prayed loudly and trance-like to Reeves and God, and without confessing yet, asked them for forgiveness."

"Rick Perry’s extreme makeover."

A Politico headline. I guess they believe in the Superman/Clark Kent concept of extreme makeover. Put glasses on and you're like a completely different guy.

To be fair, Rick Perry had a problem with the "deer in the headlights" look, and glasses could be especially effective for him if they work to tone that down.

David Gregory, in a word choice he immediately regrets, speaks of Obamacare unraveling.

This was on "Meet the Press" this morning, at the end of an interview with a couple doctors (the delightfully named John Noseworthy of the Mayo Clinic and Toby Cosgrove of the Cleveland Clinic):

Thank you both for helping us get beyond the debates about Obamacare. I’d love to have you back and as this thing un-- unravels over the course of the year- - not unravels in a bad way -- but continues to roll out over the course of this year…

A song lyric comes to mind:

If you want to destroy my sweater
Hold this thread as I walk away
Watch me unravel, I'll soon be naked
Lying on the floor (lying on the floor)
I've come undone...
It's good to see you lying there in your Superman skivvies
Lying on the floor (lying on the floor)
I've come undone...

Is it ridiculous/unethical for a woman to wear glasses to look smarter?

This is a seemingly silly question asked of the NYT "ethicist":

I wear nonprescription eyeglasses on job interviews or when meeting new clients for the distinct purpose of gaining respect by appearing smarter and more credible. It would be unethical to use a wheelchair to gain sympathy by appearing disabled, so is this any different?

The letter writer is a woman, and the ethicist — a man — tells her it's not unethical and only an unintelligent person would think glasses make you look more intelligent. And: "If this fashion decision fools people, they deserve to be fooled."

I have about 10 problems with this answer:

1. There's an unexamined opinion that it's okay to fool people who are not intelligent.

2. There's the completely wrong notion that intelligent people have only rational, fact-based thoughts, not emotions and intuitions and sexual urges that influence what they do.

3. There's no attention to the analogy to using a wheelchair, which has many intriguing similarities and differences, such as the fact that a wheelchair only partly corrects a physical deficiency, but glasses presumably get you up to 20/20...

4. ... and the person in glasses is not trying to stimulate a feeling of warmth — sympathy — she's trying to avert feelings of warmth — sexual attraction — or avoid the appearance of warmth that may emanate from the unbespectacled face of a woman.

5. The word "fashion" is used to connote superficiality and light weight, but fashion is powerful in making impressions, and not just on fools. In fact, you're a fool if you think fashion has no impact on you.

6. Saying "fashion" implies the alternate analogy to clothing, but most of us dress in a special way for job interviews or to meet new clients, and we take that pretty seriously without assuming only a fool would be influenced.

7. The analogy to clothing is interestingly inaccurate, because glasses are needed — when they are needed — in a way that is different from clothing. We all need clothing to avoid being naked, but glasses are needed to get to an ideal level that some people have naturally. So wearing glasses contains this claim of physical weakness that the letter writer feels might constitute a lie.

8. Is unnecessary display of physical need wrong in this professional setting? We certainly — if we can — hide sexual urges and our need to urinate. Imagine what our clients would think if we made an outward display of those things. On this analysis, one could imagine thinking that people who need vision correction ought to wear contacts lenses.

9. This might really be about makeup. Studies have shown that it's contrast that makes a woman's face look more feminine — and women often use eyeliner, mascara, and eyebrow pencil to achieve this effect, but too much makeup may seem to send the wrong message. Glasses are a way to get some contrast onto the face.

10. Why do glasses work to turn Superman into Clark Kent?

A quick wrap-up of today's incipient "mask" theme.

Sometimes the blog acquires a theme, like today, when the first post of the day was about masks that the Hopis don't like to call "masks" — you call them masks, we call them friends — and the second was a metaphorical use of the word "mask," to refer to Ben Carson's current persona. But I would be bullshitting if I said that the third and fourth posts were on theme. Oh, I could do that bullshitting. But I'm not going to waste your time. As the title of this, the fifth post, says, quick wrap-up. So here's the news about masks:

1. "Vogue models 'ate tissues' to mask hunger: Revelations follow similar claims by fashion industry insiders."

2. "Hamas militants’ menacing mask of defiance: Hooded gangs patrol Gaza as Israel fires first attack in months breaking fragile truce."

3. "A man wearing an 'old man' mask robbed a Cleveland Chase Bank Wednesday morning, the FBI said." (Hints for bank robbers: Use sunglasses to keep the rubber mask in place and to provide additional masking.)

4. "Do North Korea’s threats mask power struggle behind the scenes?" ("Those who study the Hermit Kingdom have very serious doubts that any attack on the U.S. or allies South Korea and Japan is even being seriously considered. 'It could be there’s a whole other game going on,' said Stephen Long, a North Korea expert at the University of Richmond.")

5. The General Zod mask from "Man of Steel" has been identified as the Halloween costume item for 2013, but the images that were at this link — purportedly terrifying — have been "removed at the request of the studio." Here's a 2010-era General Zod action figure, decidedly unscary.

6. "Police are looking for a man who went into a Turkey Hill [store] in Palmyra early Sunday morning wearing nothing but a ski mask." ("The man is described as a white male, approximately 50 years old, standing 6 feet tall with a 'heavyset' build. He had no visible scars, marks, tattoos or body piercings, police said." An amusing twist on the old phrase "no visible scars." Usually it refers to scars other than on the face. Here, the face is where the scars could be.)

7. The gas mask Justin Bieber wore around town in London last month was just "a joke." (And he "know[s] who [he is]" and is "not gonna let negativity towards [him] bring [him] down.")

So put down the tissues and eat some real food. Don't let the negativity bring you down, baby. Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy. It's not your style.

Artist drops out of "Adventures of Superman" anthology because other artist in the project doesn't support same-sex marriage.

If Orson Scott Card is in, Chris Sprouse is out.

“It took a lot of thought to come to this conclusion, but I’ve decided to step back as the artist on this story. The media surrounding this story reached the point where it took away from the actual work, and that’s something I wasn’t comfortable with.”...

An online petition calling for DC to remove [Card] from the book has more than 16,000 signers. Comics Alliance has a series of interviews with retailers, including one who will not offer the book when it becomes available in print and another who will donate proceeds to the Human Rights Campaign.

So Sprouse is caving to pressure.

More here, quoting Jono Jarett of gay fan group Geeks OUT:

Chris Sprouse is a talented artist and it's not surprising that he's chosen to distance himself from this radioactive project. It is, however, surprising that DC continues to stand by Card, whose very public bigotry and anti-gay activism remain at odds with the publisher's attempts to engage their fans in the LGBT community.

And:

Fans' anger over Card's views are now threatening promotions of the filmed adaptation of his sci-fi novel Ender's Game, which hits theaters in November and will star Harrison Ford.

Get ready. This is the future, unfortunately. Anyone who doesn't adapt and embrace same-sex marriage will be treated as the equivalent of a racist. You can say: What about freedom of expression? But that is freedom of expression.

"Democrats hailed Mr. Cuomo's aggressive gun-control push..."

"... citing it as an example of a muscular brand of politics that the governor has made his signature in two years in office. He has bent a Legislature partially controlled by Republicans to his will on other liberal issues, such as legalizing gay marriage and solidifying higher tax rates for the wealthy."

Hail! Governor Cuomo, O muscular leader, you of the aggressive push! Yea, even as Superman to a bar of steel, you have bent a Legislature!

Why was Superman wearing underpants over his tights in the first place?

Rob Bricken pushes back against those who are outraged at Superman's redesigned outfit. The original outfit (from 1933) was based on what circus strongmen of the time wore. But no one gets that reference anymore. So:

No one is looking at Superman's redesigned outfit in DC's New 52 and saying, "Boy, now that Superman doesn't have underpants, he no longer looks like a circus strongman, which was a visual that had no value to me!" Maybe a few people are saying, "Boy, Superman's skin-tight unitard sure looks adult and manly now that he isn't wearing underwear!" …maybe. But most people are saying, "He looks weird without it."

Think about why old-time circus strongmen dressed like they did: They wanted to show off their muscles in a leotard and tights, but they needed to avoid all that precise definition around their genitalia. If it's just a drawing though, the artists can render the crotch any way they want. They don't need pants, but the lack of pants makes you think about it:

I have no idea why this is - maybe our brains instinctively know when a guy is effectively wearing a unitard, his junk should be visible. You don't have to want to see it, you don't even have to think about it for more than a second, but the lack of underpants forces us to acknowledge the super-crotch, while underpants allow us to ignore the region entirely.

And then there's movie Superman. (Photo of underpantsless Superman at the link.)

By taking away Superman's briefs in both the comics and the movies, DC is working against 80 years of tradition, a tradition that superheroes have completely claimed from their original inspiration. They aren't making Superman look any less "silly" - he's still wearing tights and a cape, for fuck's sake. They're simply making people think about Superman's penis now, and not everybody wants to. 

 (Via Metafilter.)

"Don’t sell yourself well? Think of 'you' as a superhero version of yourself."

"Make a list of your best qualities. Dress the way SuperYou would dress. Talk the way SuperYou would talk. Be SuperYou. Role play. It’s a part. Experiment. This is play."

Advice, from Susannah Breslin, via Instapundit.

Is it good advice? I don't think I want everyone following it. I think Obama follows it.



That's a great video from JibJab, which I'd never seen before. It went up in June 2009. Really interesting to watch now. I just happened upon it, Googling "Obama superman" to illustrate my little "I think Obama follows it" remark.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH links to this hilarious "Dragnet" clip ("Would your entire life fit into one small room?"):