K-Squared Ramblings

The Vastness that is Central City

Central City is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Central City. (With apologies to Douglas Adams.)

It’s an old post, but I just found the Absorbascon’s take on Central City, looking at the wide expanses depicted in Carmine Infantino’s Silver-Age drawings of the Flash’s hometown.

What is this vast complex? The National Science Center? NIH? STARLabs HQ? No. It’s Barry Allen’s back room. In his APARTMENT. In your house, this sort of room is barely big enough to hold the Cybex machine you don’t use. In a Central City apartment, it’s about the size of a bowling alley.

On a related, but more serious note, letterer Todd Klein has posted a 4-part study of the Flash Logo from 1940 through the present day: Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 · Part 4. With his insider knowledge, it’s far more thorough than the study I did a few years ago. (via Wallyoeste)

Did the Flash Save Comics?

Yesterday’s article about the Flash (warning: major spoilers for this week’s DC Universe: Zero) in the New York Daily News brings up the hero’s key role in launching the Silver Age of Comics. Superheroes had fallen out of favor in the early 1950s, and comics were exploring genres like westerns, horror, romance, etc. When DC successfully relaunched the Flash in 1956, there was an explosion of new super-hero titles.

The Daily News quotes former Flash scribe Geoff Johns as saying, “Without Barry Allen, we’d still be reading comic books about cowboys.”

I don’t think that’s precisely true. Not to discount Barry’s contribution—it’s entirely possible, even likely, that super-heroes would have remained a background genre. But for one thing, we’re looking at half a century of ephemeral pop culture. For another thing, let’s consider: why were comics going after the western, crime and horror genres when super-heroes failed? Because that’s what was popular in movies and television at the time.

I’d guess that, without the Flash revitalizing super-heroes, we would have seen more science-fiction comics in the 1960s, more police comics in the 1970s, sitcom comics in the 1980s, and so on. Comics genres would probably have followed along with trends in pop culture instead of becoming heavily focused on a single genre.

We wouldn’t be reading cowboy comics today; we’d be reading reality comics.

Perhaps the presence of multiple genres would have eventually gotten rid of the “but, you know, comics are just for kids” mentality. (Not that it’s worked for cartoons or video games yet, but video games are still relatively new, and cartoons have similarly been dominated by the musical fairy tale and slapstick comedy short.)

Eh, who knows? Maybe they’d be all about pirates.

Edit: The comment thread at The Beat also has some interesting speculation on comics without the Silver Age Flash.

DC Comics Archives Survey

The Comics Archives has launched its 2008 DC Archives Survey. Readers are asked which DC Archive books they own, and which series they would be likely to buy if new volumes were released next year. Results will be collated and sent to DC Editorial.

DC’s Archive line is their line of hardcover reprints on nice, glossy paper, usually following a character or team starting at the beginning of the series. DC has two sets of Flash archives right now:

• The Flash Archives: 4 volumes following Barry Allen from his first few appearances in Showcase through the start of his solo title, covering 1956–1962.
• The Golden Age Flash Archives: 2 volumes following Jay Garrick through the first 2 years of Flash Comics and All-Flash, covering 1940–1941.

The survey also asks about other reprint formats, including the paperback Chronicles series, the Omnibus series (hardcover, but lower-quality paper), and more thematic reprint sets (one suggestion is Flash: The Death of Iris Allen

So if, like me, you’re still hoping for that next volume of Golden Age Flash Archives—or any other classic DC book that hasn’t been reprinted in decades, if ever—stop on over and fill out the survey.

(via Comic Bloc Forums)

Flash Sighting? Opera: The Fastest Browser Alive!

Opera Software has just released a new beta version of the desktop web browser, Opera 9.50 beta 2. The splash page makes me think of something a bit different, though:

Opera 9.5 beta
Speed, security, and performance matter.

Now, we’ve made the fastest browser in the world even faster. Opera’s new beta is quicker to start, faster at loading Web pages and better at running your favorite Web applications.

Hmm, a red and yellow blur, zooming across the view? And an emphasis on speed? That reminds me a bit of this guy:

Opera has long promoted itself on its speed, and it has used a super-hero theme in its advertising before. The vaguely Superman-like* “Opera Man” was used heavily in advertising Opera 8, despite being ridiculed by most of the browser’s user community.

So why not a subtle reference to the Flash?

*Blue costume + red cape. Hey, if a blue shirt and red jacket work for Clark on Smallville, you know the color scheme has become iconic.

Links: Freedom and Security

The CBLDF has issued a press released detailing the victory in the Gordon Lee case. This was the case in which a comic book store in Rome, Georgia, as part of a 2004 Halloween promotion, was handing out free comics left over from that year’s Free Comic Book Day. Among over 2,000 comics, they accidentally included a copy of Alternative Comics #2, which included a story about Picasso which included him running around his studio in the nude. And they accidentally gave it to a kid. The parents wouldn’t accept an apology, and pressed charges instead. The DA has been determined to make an example out of him, pushing grossly overinflated charges including felonies that would have given him prison time. 3½ years, 3 trial dates, a mistrial for prosecutorial misconduct, and $100,000 in defense costs later, the Rome DA finally agreed to drop the case in exchange for a written letter of apology — which is exactly what the store owner had offered in the first place.

Cookie Security in WordPress 2.5. The latest version of the blogging software has a feature that can make it harder for attackers to grab your login sessions. It involves setting a pass phrase in wp-config.php, one which you’ll never have to remember, but which will be unique to your site. You have to copy the SECRET_KEY section from wp-config-sample.php and add in your passphrase…or you can generate a random code at http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/ (be sure to put it in the middle of the file!)

The Internet Storm Center writes on Hundreds of Thousands of SQL Injections — all websites that have been hacked to host various sorts of malware.

Conventions and Distance

You may have noticed I’ve been thinking about fan conventions lately.

It started after last year’s Comic-Con, when I decided I wanted to go to something a bit less…intense. Last year’s Wizard World LA was nice, but a bit sparse, so I went looking for more comic and general sci-fi/fantasy cons within driving distance of the LA/OC area. Surprisingly, I didn’t find much. Gaming conventions, costuming conventions, Anime Expo, sure, but sci-fi? Pretty much just Loscon, which we both gave up on after 2002 (and from what I’ve heard, hasn’t picked up again). I asked around a bit on some forums, and someone on either Comic Bloc or Newsarama suggested WonderCon, and suggested considering the city as a vacation destination, not just a place to find a hotel for the con.

Since WonderCon worked out so well, I’m looking at what else might be fun. That’s part of why I did my price comparison last month, and Kevin Standlee’s comments got me looking at WorldCons and the like again. Not for this year, but maybe a few years out.

Looking at all these cons, I realized that beyond a certain threshold, distance doesn’t matter. Only the destination. If it’s far enough away that you have to fly, the only thing that distance impacts is the cost of your plane ticket. Whether your flight is 5 hours or 10 hours*, it’s still going to take up most of a day or night when you factor in dealing with the airports. Everything else, from hotel prices to whether you need a passport, a phrasebook, or currency exchange, is a factor of the destination.

WonderCon, I think, was at the boundary of driving distance from here. We could make the trip out in one day, but it was a lot more fun to break it into stages and make it a road trip. San Diego is at the boundary of commuting distance. We could drive out there in the morning and drive back at night (and I did that with my parents for over a decade), but it’s not practical to do for more than one day. Whereas if I wanted to, I could easily commute to Wizard World Los Angeles 2 or even 3 days. (As it was, we only went for Saturday.)

With two cons in Q1, and San Diego coming up in July, any traveling we do later this year is probably not going to be convention-related. As it is, we’ve talked seriously about three possible non-con vacation spots. But it might be worth casting a wider net for cons in 2009 or 2010.

*Katie and I were talking about this, and realized that it’s probably different if you have kids. In that case, a 5-hour flight probably would be significantly harder to manage than a 3-hour flight.

Three Kinds of Time

I was thinking about the timeline of DC Comics’ Earth-51 (home to the Great Disaster in Countdown to Final Crisis) and trying to wrap my head around what the past and present might mean for a world that’s been created and destroyed twice in as many years, and realized that some of the time paradoxes make much more sense if you consider that there’s more than one kind of time.

Real-world time is, as you’d expect, the time that passes between when two stories are published. For example, it’s been 45 years since Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 (Aug. 1962).

In-story time is the time that passes within a story. So even though it’s been 70 years since Superman first appeared on the newsstand, it’s only been 10–15 years since his debut within the DC Universe.

The tension between these two leads to a strange, fluid take on time, which has its own issues.

But then you get into time travel and cosmic retcons, and in-story time can’t quite explain things. Read the rest of this entry »

Tori Comics

So, what comic book event of the summer has me the most excited? Is it Marvel’s Secret Invasion?  DC’s Final Crisis? The release of The Flash Companion? Geoff Johns returning to The Flash for Rogues’ Revenge?

Well, that last one is close, but it’s actually Comic Book Tattoo, the upcoming ~500-page anthology of comic book stories inspired by Tori Amos’ music announced last December, and Comic Book Resources has a huge article about the project, including art.

(as last time, via Colleen Doran)

Cataloging Worlds

After reading the “Who cares what Earth this takes place on!” intro to the Justice League: New Frontier tie-in comic, I started thinking about the whole Earth-1, Earth-616, etc. thing. The confusion over Earth-1 vs. New Earth in DC (something which overshadowed discussion of the actual story in the first issue of Tangent: Superman’s Reign) highlights the question: just how important is it to label these fictional universes, anyway?

And once you’ve decided to catalog them, how do you label them?

A few multiverses that come to mind are DC’s, Marvel’s, and Michael Moorcock’s.

The multiverse of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion cycle is extremely fluid, with details changing whenever he wants to tell a different story. Just looking at the Elric stories, there are three or four origins for Stormbringer, and as many for the Melnibonéans and their pact with Arioch. There are several versions of the 20th-century Count Ulrich Von Bek (depending on whether you include Count Zodiac). Worlds are less like parallel lines and more like streams that can run together, mingle, and separate again (kind of like the briefly-used Hypertimeas used by DC).

DC and Marvel, on the other hand, favor a discrete structure in which each universe can be precisely identified. This may have something to do with the focus on continuity as a key element of comic-book storytelling, and would explain why, for instance, Marvel has made an effort to number what seems to be every single alternate reality they’ve ever published.

Approaches to numbering:

• Sequential. DC started out like this, with Earth-1, Earth-2, Earth-3, etc.
• Random. Current DC multiverse, except for the first few we saw at the end of 52 which were based on worlds from the original DC multiverse (Earth-2, Earth-3, Earth-5 from Earth-S, Earth-10 from Earth-X). Marvel’s main continuity, Earth-616, was reportedly picked at random (though there is some disagreement on this point).
• Referential. Things like choosing Earth-S for the worlds of Shazam or Squadron Supreme, or Earth-C for Captain Carrot. Earth-97 for Tangent (which appeared in 1997) and Earth-96 for Kingdom Come (which appeared in 1996) would also fall into this category (but see the next point).
• Systematic. Taking referential labels a step further, using a consistent scheme. Marvel derives most of its designations from publication dates.

Personally, I prefer to just name them. “The Tangent Universe” or “New Frontier” or “Supremeverse” gets the idea across more directly than, say, Earth-9.

Hazards of Q&A Sessions

I think anyone who’s been to a panel at a con in the past few years will appreciate Mark Evanier’s remarks on opening the floor to questions.

An open mike at a public event has increasingly become a magnet for people who should not be allowed near open mikes at public events. Audiences have begun to dread that portion of the program and to regard it as the signal that the event they came to see has come to an end. Thereafter, they can either leave (many do at that point) or sit there and cringe as control passes from the person they wanted to hear and goes to some stranger who, but for this opportunity, would never be speaking in front of a real audience and/or to someone of importance.

He goes on to mention the warning signs, like “On behalf of everyone here…” The people who, instead of just asking a question, need to turn it into the longest. public. statement. of. support. evar, as they pontificate about how this show changed their life, or that show inspired their writing, and can you please answer this stats question about my home-made Star Trek Role-Playing game after I read you a poem I wrote aaaaaall by myself?

No, really. I am not making this up.

As an example, at the Serenity panel at the 2005 San Diego Comic-Con, one “fan” took the floor to make a long rambling comment on behalf of fans who lived in Norway, London, England (“Both London and England?” “He’s got multiple personality disorder.”) etc. and explained that they thought Joss Whedon was “the best thing to happen to television since aerosol cheese.” Then he asked some question about the end of Angel and how they should handle some issue with the RPG. Joss tactfully handed it off to another panelist rather than tell the guy flat-out that it was a dumb (or at least inappropriate) question. (We’ve collected some more quotes from that panel.)

But this sort of thing happens all the time.

(via The Beat)

Wizard World LA 2008 - Con Report

Wizard World Los Angeles turned out to be a surprisingly good con. Originally I was planning to go on my own, but when they announced the addition of Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli) to the Heroes panel, Katie decided to go as well. So we drove into LA Saturday morning, and arrived at the con around 11:00 AM. I was expecting a much sparser crowd based on my experience last year, but that had been a Sunday. This Saturday was a full-fledged con.

Update: The photo gallery is up!

The Floor

I spent most of the time on the main floor, hunting down back-issues, bargains and autographs. A lot of dealers had brought their bargain bins (some of them, thankfully, alphabetized!), and a lot of them had trades and hardcovers for half-off or close to it. There were also the booths selling high-grade Silver-Age and Golden-Age books, toys and collectibles, and at least two booths selling swords. Yes, swords.

At one point, I overheard two comic-book dealers discussing whether the show was worth it. One of them said that people here tended to be looking for bargains, so it was hard to sell anything else. They agreed San Diego was a better bet.

I’ve been joking that the logo design for this year’s con (see above) was inspired by the gigantic auto show that shared the convention center witl last year’s con. So I was surprised to find a mini-auto show here: Marvel-themed cars, including Iron Man and Punisher SUVs.

There was a stage set up for Guitar Hero. At one point, I noticed the music was Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” It seemed appropriate.

Costuming

There weren’t quite as many people in costume as I saw at WonderCon last month (also a Saturday). But there was a large contingent of people in Jedi costumes, some of whom seemed to be sparring with lightsabers every time I walked down the right edge of the dealers’ room. And there were Imperial Stormtroopers directing traffic, making sure people could find the one large panel room that was half-way to the other end of the convention center.

Read the rest of this entry »

What’s Dynamic About It?

In my post on Webslices, I mentioned that the home page of my Flash site uses server-side includes instead of a static HTML file. But it doesn’t really update that often: maybe 3 or 4 times a month. Is it really worth building that file dynamically? Should I switch from SSI to something more powerful, like PHP, that will let me add headers so that repeat visitors won’t have to re-download the whole page except when it’s actually different? Or should I switch to a static file, with the same benefits but simpler? What am I actually building, anyway?

Looking through the code, I find:

Browser upgrade banners. People using old versions of Firefox (currently 1.5 or older) or Internet Explorer (currently 5.5 or older) get an “Upgrade to Firefox 2″ banner instead of the thumbnail of the current issue of the comic. This is just as easily done with JavaScript—and is done with JS elsewhere on the site. (I used to make some minor adjustments for other versions of IE, but I converted them all to conditional comments a while back.)

Last-modified date in the footer, pulled from the actual file. I’ve already got a script to update this in the static files, so it’s just a matter of adding it to my general update script. A two-minute, one-time change and I’ll never notice the difference.

Latest posts from this blog. Probably better done with an iframe, or maybe using AJAX. Drawback: either method would mean an extra request from the client. On the plus side, repeat visitors would be able to re-use the rest of the page, and only download the 5-item list.

Unique-per-day spamtrap addresses, hidden where harvesters might pick them up. But only a few of them still accept mail and feed it to filters. Mostly, they just waste spammers’ resources. I could easily either get rid of them or change the script to generate a new address with each update instead of each day.

So really, there isn’t much stopping me from using a static file for the most-viewed page on the site, with all the attendant savings in system resources, bandwidth, etc.

On the other hand, I keep contemplating switching to a database-driven system for the whole thing, which would make any changes now meaningless. But since I’ve been thinking about that since around 2000 or so, and haven’t changed it yet, that’s not exactly a blocker!

Update (March 30): I’ve made the conversion to a static file. The blog posts and browser upgrade banners are now done client-side (and run after the rest of the page is loaded), the last-modified date is part of the pre-processing script, and I just removed the daily spamtrap addresses. Now to see whether it actually improves performance.

Black Flash T-Shirt

One of the cool things I discovered at WonderCon was this T-shirt with the emblem of the Black Flash, the personification of death for speedsters and the only Flash villain that Davan MacIntire likes. Okay, it’s just the regular Flash logo with the colors changed, but it means I’ll actually wear it.

I’ve never really liked wearing bright colors, especially not bright red. I have a standard red Flash T-shirt that may be 15 years old, but I’ve probably only worn it 5 or 6 times (mainly at cons), so it still looks almost new. The silk-screen printing is only just now starting to crack. But black T-shirts? Never had a problem with them. At one point, I had so many that I declared a moratorium on getting any new ones.

At the last 3 or 4 cons I’ve been to, I’ve been idly looking for a black T-shirt with the Flash logo, but hadn’t stumbled across any until last month. This will do nicely.

Comic Book Convention Prices Compared

I’ve been trying to decide whether to go to Wizard World Los Angeles this year. On one hand, it’s close. On the other hand, I just went to WonderCon last month. The astonishing thing is that a one-day ticket for WWLA costs almost as much as a 3-day membership to WonderCon. This got me thinking about comparing convention prices.

So I looked up the comic conventions in the area, plus the other two Wizard World cons that have prices up.

And to compare to some non-comic-focused conventions, some nearby, some just big:

It’s interesting to note that WonderCon (San Francisco) and ConDor (San Diego) are extremely cheap if you sign up far enough in advance. Also, when you expand to more general cons, San Diego Comic-Con is right in the middle of the range, with several conventions being more expensive. I’d guess that the more volunteer-based cons like Westercon and Worldcon probably don’t bring in as much money from exhibitors, so they’d be more dependent on memberships to keep afloat.

In compiling this, I discovered that this year, Comic-Con International isn’t going to be selling any memberships on-site. It’s going to be pre-registration only.

I guess they’re expecting it to sell out again like last year, and don’t want people to count on something they won’t be able to deliver. Plus I’m sure it’ll simplify matters for the con, since they won’t need to deal with taking money for registration.

Update: Added Loscon for nostalgia’s sake. Also fixed some links; GenCon rearranged their website sometime in the last 4 days, and I somehow typed in the wrong domain name for ConDor.

Note: These are the 2008 prices, except for the ConDor advance price, which is for 2009. All prices were obtained from the events’ websites except for the way-advance price for San Diego Comic-Con, which is simply the price I paid last summer for this year’s con. For shows with multiple membership packages, such as Wizard World, I selected the most basic package that lets you walk in the door.

*CCI always has a booth selling pre-registration for the following year’s convention at an even lower price.

Con-Fusion

A press release from The Hero Initiative arrived today, describing their plans for MegaCon. The dateline said Los Angeles, which I found funny, because I knew MegaCon was somewhere on the east coast, but I couldn’t remember exactly where (and the press release didn’t say).

So I looked up the convention website. The first location I saw was Orange County, which was a bit confusing because I live in Orange County, California, which is right next to LA. Then I remembered there was an Orange County in Florida as well. Scrolling further down the page I confirmed that the con was in Orlando.

The cognitive dissonance lasted all of a second or two, but it makes me want to go back and look at anything I’ve posted about WonderCon in the past week and make sure I mentioned it was in San Francisco.

(The post title is not to be *ahem* confused with ConFusion, a convention in Michigan for which I’ve occasionally seen flyers.)