An Open Letter

Dear DC Comics,

It's a long, strange trip we've been on, you and I.  How long has it been since One More Day drove me into your waiting arms--five years?  Already?  Damn.  Maybe by your standards it's not that long, but I've read enough of your back catalog to know just how many ups and downs you've had.  And holy hell have there been a lot of downs.  Sometimes I think it's a miracle you've lasted 78 years.

But still, I've stuck by you.  Even if it seems like the screwups have been increasing of late.  I'm not even talking about the relaunch--that's not an out-and-out fuckup, just unnecessary.  You don't seem to have done anything that required such a massive shake-up.  If you wanted to bring in new creative teams to rejuvenate the line, why didn't you just, you know, do that?  It's like buying a new car because you're tired of the current one's bumper stickers--you're paying thousands of dollars to solve a problem a bit of peeling would fix.  Your "fresh new start" has proven neither fresh, nor new, nor even a start.  (Meaning, in fact, the relaunch IS a fuckup.  Oh well, at least we got Jeff Lemire writing Animal Man out of it.)

Indeed, the goofs have been coming thicker and faster than before, but I am a patient and forgiving god, willing to overlook and forgive...up to a point.

Look.  Let me put it this way.  In the past six months, I've watched you turn a character best known from a children's cartoon into a sex drone.  I've seen you turn Harley Quinn into a juggalo AND take a great big runny shit on one of your most fondly-remembered series in one whack.  I've seen you cancel one Rob Liefeld series, only to give him three more (which is at least four too many).  I've seen you change your logo to something resembling a kangaroo getting an abortion (which, strangely, is growing on me--I guess my commitment to reproductive rights just runs that deep).  I've seen you not fire Judd Winick.

Spreading the net a little, I have in my studies found evidence of greater chicanery.  I speak of such incidents as turning a lighthearted fantasy comic aimed at young girls into a horror series, rife with gory deaths and butt-babies.  I've seen you try to turn the JLA into 24.  I've seen you call Countdown "52 done right" with a straight face.  I've seen you take the concept of an elderly Superman fighting twin clones of Hitler in a post-apocalyptic future and make it suck.  And in the face of all this...

THIS is the worst idea you've ever had.

Fuck, I'll go one further.  Not only is this the worst idea you've ever had, it's arguably the worst idea anyone has ever had.  Yes, worse than Comic Sans.  I am so willing to go there.  Yeah yeah, I know, just another case of nerd rage, right?  By tomorrow I'll have forgotten all about it and moved on to the next "worst thing ever".  That's how jaded I am--I don't expect worse, I know worse is coming.  But you know what?  When you get down to it, right now is all you have.  And holy hell am I pissed about this right now.

And don't think a positively dynamite creative team is going to help matters.  Credit where it's due, you've gotten some of the finest talent in the industry (and J. Michael Straczynski, durr-hurr-hurr) in on this mortifying prolapse.  If you got these people together on any, and I do mean any other project, I'd be sprinting to Floating World Comics right now, jizzing all the way, to carve my preorder into Jason's forehead backwards.  As it stands, however, these folks' involvement is just twisting the knife more.  Not even Darwyn Cooke can polish a turd.  It's like if  Pope Julius II got fucked in the ass (little known fact: Julius II--total bottom), then Jules got horrible gas and expelled santorum all over the walls of the papal apartments, then called Michelangelo, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio in and said "there's this old chapel I've been meaning to spruce up and I think this pattern would look really nice on the walls and ceiling".  Those three eminent men of Renaissance art notwithstanding, the end result would still be the Sistine Chapel's interior looking like a frothy shart-splosion.

So no, I won't be buying your stupid Watchmen prequel.  Anyone who does is part of the problem.  Are we really that jaded?  Will we happily slurp down whatever obvious cash-in that gets held in front of our collective face while a reassurance voice warns us of an incoming airplane?

I'm beginning to understand just why Alan Moore is such a cranky old bastard.  With tributes like this, who needs denunciations?

More Yelping

Take a stroll around Old Town sometime, see the sights.  See the loud, angry homeless people, the polite, well-behaved homeless people (courtesy of Right 2 Dream Too), the Chinese Garden, the puddles of clubgoer vomit punctuating the sidewalk, the godawful semi-testicular One Pacific Square building...but, most of all, the Hung Far Low sign.  Yes indeedy, that beloved old restaurant shingle bearing a no doubt innocent Chinese phrase I can't be arsed to look up, which--quite by accident--connotes gravid genitalia in our mongrel gwailo tongue.

The restaurant itself fucked off to 82nd years ago--didn't love us anymore, I guess.  Doesn't matter, though, as a new restaurant now huddles in its erstwhile space: Ping.  Which is, apparently, one of GQ's top 10 best new restaurants of 2010.  Not that I give a fuck what GQ thinks.  I mention this only as an excuse to point out that Ping hasn't let this no-doubt-high honor go to its head--or prices.

Yes, a mere $18 will get you a full dinner of a steamed pork bun, spicy mama ramen, and a bottle of Chang.  The bun was not only made to order, but heated all the way through--more than I can say for the pork buns of some Old Town restaurants *COUGH*houseoflouie*COUGH I could name.  The ramen is the standard "everything including some hard chunks we're pretty sure are bits of the kitchen sink, so watch your teeth" noodle bowl local Asian restaurants love so well.  It's odd in that I like everything in it EXCEPT the noodles, which I'd swear came out of those quarter-a-pop packs you can find in supermarkets and convenience stores the world over (and believe me, having subsisted on the things the middle third of my life I know my cheap ramen).  I can't comment on whether it tastes like your mama (who, if I may say so, is damn tasty if it does), but they're not kidding about the "spicy" part--be certain of your bravery before taking the wait staff up on their offer to toss some more capsaicin in there.  The Chang, eh, confirmed my suspicion that I don't really care for Asian beer.  Not that that's the restaurant's fault.

The place is a bit of a closet, albeit a cozy one--all chunky wood paneling and mood lighting.  The waitstaff are helpful, if not what I'd call friendly--but then if I wanted my ass kissed I'd go to Red Robin.  As is my wont, I sat in the most out-of-the-way corner I could find just to see if they'd forget about me.  They didn't, and I wasn't kept waiting for hours on end, so what more do you want?

Recommended.

Dagnabbit

So I was watching Batman: The Animated Series just now.  The episode was fine, just as awesome as I remembered, that wasn't the problem.  The problem (if it can be called such) lay in the end credits, whose copyright dated the episode to...1992.  Dear lord.  Yes, that's right, the (for me) iconic Batman series, Timm and Dini's masterpiece, is twenty years old.

That latter word is what I'd like to discuss today, because the revelation left me feeling very much so.  I don't know if that's a good thing or not--I may lean one way or another, depending on my mood.  Right now the trend is towards "bad", if only because it was the first time I'd truly felt that way, and as we all know, old farts hate new things.

I'm supposing this happens to everyone--the sudden, searing revelation that one is regarded as "uncool" due simply to one's age.  This is of course monstrously unfair, as in the great uncoolness spectrum it is, perhaps, the only factor over which one has no control.  (Most of the others have to do with "not being a douchebag" and "staying open-minded, for fucksake", truisms that hold regardless of vintage.)

How do I really feel?

(Please to note: I may have a teensy bit of difficulty remembering what, precisely, I ordered at Chin's Kitchen.  It's been several months since I ate there--time I've mostly spent trying to block the memory--and fucked if I'm going to repeat the experience for the Internet's sake.  Now, onward!)

Imagine, if you will, a locker room.  The specifics are unimportant, just your stereotypical, garden-variety locker room.  The sort in which all the traditional locker-room activities took place--the communal showers, the storage of damp clothing, the wet-towel-snapping ass-torment, the semi-public-nudity-emboldened braggadocio, all of it.  Imagine that this locker room functioned for many, many years, literal decades of black mold and simmering homoeroticism, before finally closing, at which point it sat empty for several more years, just to make extra-sure the fungi had taken root.  Finally, imagine that someone or someones came along and decided, without so much as setting mop to tile, that this locker room would make a fantastic Chinese restaurant.

You can stop imagining now, because now you have Chin's Kitchen.

Chin's Kitchen is the sort of place where, upon setting foot inside the doors, your first thought is this is gonna suck.  Most sensible people, upon finding themselves in this situation, do the sensible thing--turn on their heel and go eat at Shandong instead.

Very rarely have I been accused of being sensible.

Yes, I walked into Chin's Kitchen, saw the state of the place, knew on the spot what I was in for--and sat down and ordered something anyway.  Call me stupid if you like--I prefer to think of myself as an optimist.  First impressions have led me astray in the past, after all.  Hell, for the first several months of its existence I was convinced Sizzle Pie was a strip club.  I must have been in a forgiving mood that day, because I ordered a combo platter, was presented with a pile of hot garbage and I STILL ate it.

And garbage it was--canned/bagged storebought garbage, from the looks of it.  Canned water-chestnut slices are never a welcome sight in my eyes, and yet here were the little frozen-jizz slices infesting my chow mein without so much as a by-your-leave.  The chow mein's "noodles" were those awful rock-hard brown things (like fossilized goldfish shit) only crappy Chinese restaurants buy, despite their near-ubiquity in the "ethnic foods" section of your local supermarket.  Gluing it all together into one gelid mass was a gravy best likened to thick, gluey phlegm fresh from the lung.

So, bad fucking food is what I'm getting at.  Almost as bad as the decor.  There's no reason for this place to exist, not when GOOD chinese food is less than a mile away.  Surely you can walk that far--nobody's THAT American.