Category: Generalities & Rants

On the Nature of Memory

I’m not sure what my earliest memory is, but I do remember this:

When I was four or five — I know I was at least four because we were living in the house in Bedford, and I know I was no older than five because I couldn’t read yet — I was poking around in my parents’ bedroom. My mother had a fancy, if somewhat battered, vanity table in the French Empire style, painted cream with “gold” trim, with a big trifold mirror, and with three drawers, one under each mirror panel. There was a big drawer in the middle, and much smaller drawers on either side. I was looking for something in the left-hand drawer.

I don’t know what I was looking for, or why, or whether I had my parents’ permission to be in there at all. I might have been after one of these odd hair curlers my mother had that I thought made great toys, or maybe I was just seeing what was there. In any case, I found a picture postcard. I didn’t recognize the picture, couldn’t even figure out exactly what it was a picture of, but it seemed familiar. There were bands of bright color against a dark background, and I had the definite feeling I’d seen those colors before.

So I took the postcard to my mother and asked what it was, and why it seemed familiar. She told me that it was the lights on Niagara Falls at night, and she didn’t know for sure why it would be familiar, but that we had all visited Niagara Falls when I was two, and had seen the colored lights shining on the falls, so maybe I was remembering that.

Or not, because, you know, I was two at the time. I certainly didn’t remember anything else prior to the summer of 1958, when I turned four, but maybe, maybe the sight of Niagara Falls at night had impressed me enough that I still remembered it.

I decided that sounded good, so when asked I would sometimes say that my earliest memory was seeing Niagara Falls when I was two.

But I don’t think I really remembered it even then, and I certainly don’t really remember it now. It’s possible that what I actually remembered on that long-ago afternoon was seeing the postcard before. Or it might have been something else entirely — colored lights in the darkness might have been the big Christmas tree on the town common a block from our house, for example. It might have been a picture in a book. Or it could have been pure fantasy; maybe that feeling of familiarity had no actual basis in fact at all.

So maybe my earliest memory was seeing Niagara Falls when I was two, but does it count when the actual memory is long gone, so I only remember remembering it?

And then there’s another memory that might be my earliest. It’s from early in the summer of 1958; I don’t know exactly when.

At the beginning of that summer we were living in a peculiar house on the outskirts of Billerica, Massachusetts. We had a big yard, maybe an acre or so, so most of the neighbors weren’t all that close, but to the south our next-door neighbor was just across a gravel driveway and a strip of lawn. The family there had a little girl not too far from me in age; I don’t recall her name, but I’m pretty sure she was a year or two older than me.

We had, in my parents’ bedroom, a device called an Aircrib, but more commonly known as a Skinner baby box, that my father had built from a kit. This was a climate-controlled enclosure where a baby could sleep without being troubled by changes in temperature, loud noises, airborne infections, etc. My baby sister slept in it. It had a roller system so that soiled bedding could be pulled out from under the baby without actually taking the kid out of the crib. The roller itself was a wooden rod painted blue, maybe three feet long.

I have a very clear memory of holding that blue rod with both hands, swinging it over my head, and chasing the girl from next door, intending to whack her over the head with it as hard as I could. I remember rounding the corner of the house, chasing her across the lawn. I still remember this very clearly — the bright blue rod, the rich green grass, the girl’s dark hair bouncing as she ran.

But it never happened. Ever. Nothing remotely like it. I handled the rod once or twice, but never outdoors, probably never outside my parents’ bedroom. I never chased or hit the girl next door — heck, we were friends, more or less. As near as I can determine, I dreamed this one night in 1958, and for some reason that stuck more than anything real that happened before mid-July of that year.

So can a dream count as my earliest memory? I definitely remember it, and I can definitely, irrefutably date it to sometime between May and mid-July of 1958, but it’s something that didn’t happen anywhere but in my head.

I specify mid-July because that’s when my very first absolutely inarguable memory is from: my fourth birthday party. I remember the cake with pink icing (I had insisted on pink over my mother’s objection), and the sugar-candy candle holders, and… well, not much else, actually.

I also remember an incident from August of 1958, when we were getting ready to move to Bedford; it happened on a visit to the house we were in the process of buying. I mention it because for years my parents denied that it ever happened, which confused me.

I’m not clear on exactly why we were visiting the house. It was apparently during school hours or something, because my older siblings weren’t there; my younger sister was only seventeen months old and spent the whole visit in our mother’s arms. My parents were meeting with the women (mother and daughter) who were selling us the house and had brought their two youngest along, and it was my first look at what was going to be our new home, so I was pretty excited. We walked through the big double doors into the front hall, and I looked around, and one thing that really caught my eye was the hall light fixture. It had two pendants with glass shades, which had a brick pattern on the glass, and one light was yellow and the other was red, which I thought was very cool. I’d seen red bricks and yellow bricks, so it made sense.

So, we bought the house, we moved in, and the first thing I notice when we do is that now both front hall lights are yellow. I ask my parents what happened to the red one.

“What red one?” they say. “They’ve both always been yellow.”

I am very confused and a bit upset by this; I know one was red. I remember it clearly… just as I remember chasing the neighbor girl with that stick. Hmm.

They continue to deny there was ever a red light there, so I eventually decide my memory is playing tricks on me.

And then years later — many years later, a decade or more — my mother casually mentions in passing that she can’t imagine why the Harleys (the people who sold us the house) had put a red bulb in one of the hall lights. It had made people’s faces look weird, and she had insisted my father replace it with a white one before we moved in.

I stare at her in disbelief. “You said there was never a red light there!”

Flustered, she says she had only insisted there was never a red glass shade. Both shades were always yellow. One just looked red because it had a red bulb in it.

So my memory was not wrong that time, but I had been convinced it was.

And my point is simply that memory can’t be trusted.

Magazines Reloaded

So I just took a look at the magazines that have arrived in the last month or two, and thought I’d post an update.

I was, you may recall, involuntarily subscribed to Forbes, Yachting, ESPN: the Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Chevy High Performance.

Yachting is still coming — it was a two-year subscription and runs through next June. Generally I still go through an issue in maybe five minutes, but there was a fluke a couple of months back, and one issue was fascinating, with a whole bunch of interesting stuff. Articles on things like how to deal with infections picked up in foreign ports, insects that can stow away and damage your boat, unusual ports of call, historical stuff, etc. I read it cover to cover, and thought that if this was going to be their new standard I was going to be spending a lot more time with it.

It wasn’t the new standard; the two subsequent issues are back to the five-minute flip-through stuff.

The subscription to Chevy High Performance ran out. I don’t miss it at all. I was slightly surprised they never made a serious effort to get me to renew, but they didn’t.

Men’s Health ran out, as well, and again, I didn’t get the expected barrage of renewal offers. I’m puzzled.

As I said last time, I passed Men’s Fitness on to a friend — sent in a change of address with his address. I assume he got it; I haven’t asked.

It took a couple of issues before the change of address for Forbes went through, but it’s gone now.

Entrepreneur is still coming, but I’ve fallen behind on reading it.

Fast Company is also still coming, and I’m a little behind on that, too, but not as much.

ESPN sent me two issues after the supposed expiration date, but it’s gone now, and I belatedly read my last issue a few days ago. It’s still the coolest sports mag I ever saw — articles on sports surgery, gay luchadores, and a zillion other unexpected goodies, all well written and researched — but I should get more accomplished now that it’s gone.

The crowd is definitely thinning.

Building Universes

[Note: Someone suggested I should do something to preserve and disseminate some of my more interesting Usenet posts. I said I’d give editing and converting them to blog entries a try. Here’s the first.]

It was reported that Orson Scott Card said that he didn’t think much of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes — that “most seventh-graders can come up with better ones.” This was my response.

The thing is, nobody came up with the Star Trek universe; it just accumulated. When the show started, nobody thought it was necessary to create a consistent background, and nobody bothered. In the very early episodes even stuff like what “USS” stands for and what the name of the government is aren’t consistent; they didn’t settle on “United Federation of Planets” until halfway through the first season. The “science” was nonexistent because nobody on the show cared, and nobody thought viewers would notice or care. If stuff changed from one episode to the next, so what? They assumed viewers only cared about the characters and the action.

There’s a reason that the various “tech manuals” and the like didn’t come out until years after the original Trek series was off the air — they didn’t exist until people who had worked on the show went back afterward and created them by going through what had been seen. It wasn’t worked out in advance, it was built up as needed.

As for “Star Wars,” George Lucas knew perfectly well it was nonsense and initially rejected attempts to even call the first movie “science fiction” — it was “space fantasy.”

So if by “better” you mean more consistent or more scientifically accurate, then any bright seventh-grader probably could do better, because neither Roddenberry nor Lucas was trying for consistency, logic, or scientific plausibility. All they cared about was providing a cool background for storytelling.

Which they obviously succeeded spectacularly at, though in both cases it was the result of years of accumulating cool ideas from multiple writers, actors, set designers, directors, etc.

The whole concept of “worldbuilding” didn’t really exist in Hollywood until 1982, when “Blade Runner” established it — I remember reading articles in places like STARLOG about how Ridley Scott had consciously decided to have Syd Mead and company design the world beforehand, instead of letting it accrue gradually or be worked out by fans, and this was seen as almost revolutionary.

Yeah, some writers and SFX people had tried to work out background stuff for movies and TV before that, but the directors hadn’t seen it as binding and would change it any time it was inconvenient for a story.

So yeah, “better” technically is easy. “Better” as a backdrop for cool stories? Not so much.

Magazine

Well, it’s finally happened. I got a renewal offer. Took longer than I expected.

About a year ago, I started getting stuff in the mail that I hadn’t ordered. I’m not sure whether it was meant as a joke, or a birthday present, or what, but someone — I don’t know who — had signed me up for a whole bunch of things. They started arriving, without explanation.

First there were the cosmetics on trial. I returned those. I was a bit concerned because the packing slip said they’d been paid for with an AmEx card, and I made sure it wasn’t mine. Put a watch on my credit, just in case.

Then came the intro package from Book of the Month Club. I canceled my new membership immediately, explaining I hadn’t actually signed up, someone else had, and I asked where I should return the books. They said not to bother, so I added them to my “to read” stack.

Next was the membership in the North American Hunting Club. That brought a knife, a game cookbook, and a magazine subscription; I returned the cookbook and canceled my membership, so I only got one or two issues of the magazine, but I kept the knife, as it was a “free gift.” (Some gifts aren’t free?) These folks were much less helpful and cooperative than BotMC or the cosmetics trial, but they eventually accepted that I wasn’t interested, and I passed the magazines on to some guys serving in the military overseas. (The magazine wasn’t bad if you’re a hunter; I’m not.)

And after that, it was all magazines. New ones kept showing up through March 2013, too. I’m guessing my mysterious someone had a bunch of airline points to burn off before they expired. At any rate, I eventually found myself with subscriptions to Forbes, Yachting, ESPN: the Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Chevy High Performance. (I think that’s all of them.)

Yachting was the first to show up, if I remember correctly. It’s weirdly fascinating because there’s the contrast between the rather down-to-earth attitude, with articles on maintenance, ports, etc., and the fact that it’s about toys costing millions of dollars. I read the first one pretty thoroughly, but quickly got inured to it and now typically go through an issue in about three minutes, mostly looking at the pictures, before passing it on to friends who like boats.

Chevy High Performance — if you own a Chevrolet muscle car from the ’60s or ’70s, you need this magazine. If you don’t, it’s absolutely useless and might as well be written in Etruscan. I don’t. This is another one I pass on to guys in the military. But wow, if you want to know anything about restoring, maintaining, or hot-rodding an old Chevy, this is a gift from the gods.

I’d seen Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness on the racks at the supermarket, and assumed they were sister (or in this case, brother) magazines. Never had any interest in ’em. But once they started showing up, I read them, and discovered they aren’t siblings, they’re rivals, and Men’s Health is the good one. It’s more upscale, better written, better edited, and all around classier, so I still read it, though I’m not going to renew when my subscription runs out. It looks at lots of lifestyle stuff for guys in their twenties and thirties. Men’s Fitness is much more concerned with, well, fitness — exercise, diet, and not much else. Where Men’s Health has a well-rounded feel and is clearly aimed at straight men, Men’s Fitness is narrowly focused and has (at least for me) a faint homoerotic vibe. I found it really boring, and transferred my subscription to someone else who was interested. (I hadn’t mentioned that homoerotic vibe to him, but then, it may just be my imagination in the first place.)

Then there are the three business magazines. I’d heard of Forbes, of course, and always assumed it was a business mag, but it isn’t, really; it’s money porn. It’s not about business, it’s about billionaires. It’s rather badly written, self-congratulatory in tone, and mostly about how wonderful the very rich are, simply because they made piles of money. Add in the editorials by Steve Forbes and others that demonstrate an insane misunderstanding of real-world economics, and the real world in general, and you have a magazine that I’ve found steadily more and more repulsive. When I noticed from the label that I’d been given a two-year subscription I decided I had to get rid of it, and Julian had a friend who works in finance, so I’ve just signed that one away.

Entrepreneur, on the other hand, is kind of fascinating. It’s not about business in general, but only about entrepreneurs. It’s better-written than Forbes, and doesn’t take a political position; it just looks at how these guys got to where they are now (and maybe you can too!). That was one of the late arrivals, so I may revise my opinion in time. I don’t really have much use for it, and would hit the old change-of-address road if I knew of anyone who wanted it, but at least it doesn’t embarrass me to have it in the house.

And Fast Company is cool. It’s about the cutting edge of business — innovation in every field, high-tech news, online developments, etc. It’s tied to several websites that I haven’t really looked at yet, but every time I read an issue I come away with scribbled notes about things I want to check out online. This one might be a keeper.

Which brings us to ESPN. Okay, I watch ESPN sometimes. I’ve read Sports Illustrated. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong.

ESPN is the best magazine we get, including the ones I subscribed to myself, rather than having dumped on me. I’m not a big sports fan, but there is some fine, fine writing here. It’s got stats I never thought about, human interest stories I’d never have considered. A recent issue had a huge feature on racism in Italian soccer that did a better job of looking at race and history than anything I’ve read in more general publications. There are big chunks I skip in most issues, because I frankly don’t give a damn about basketball or most of the NFL, but even there, I can see it’s some fine writing and excellent research.

And today I got a renewal offer for ESPN — another year for just a buck.

I wouldn’t even be tempted by any of the others, but that one…

But no. I don’t have the free time to read more magazines; I’m years behind on my fiction reading, and could always use more time writing. So I am reluctantly going to let it go.

But it did prompt me to finally write this blog post. I’d been meaning to do it for months, and this renewal offer was what finally pushed me to do it.

So there we are.

Old New England

As mentioned in my last post, we visited New England last month and spent a few days in Rhode Island. Looked at the famous mansions of Newport, poked around Providence, admired the ocean cliffs, etc.

But you know what I find myself thinking about? The Newport Creamery.

We ate there twice. We also ate at several other restaurants — the trendy TSK, Belle’s Cafe, Scampi up in Portsmouth, and so on — but it’s the Newport Creamery I remember.

You know why? Nostalgia.

I grew up in New England — in Massachusetts, in Billerica and Bedford. Naturally, like any kid, I thought that what I grew up with was normal; it wasn’t until I moved away that I began to realize what was standard American, and what was specifically New Englander fare. It took even longer before I began to miss the New England stuff.

And some of it I still didn’t necessarily realize was New England specific; I thought it was just old-fashioned.

But eating at the Newport Creamery brought back a lot of memories, and a realization that some of that stuff is unique to New England.

When I was a kid, we used to eat at Friendly Ice Cream sometimes. That’s the chain that later became Friendly’s, but in my youth it was Friendly Ice Cream, no apostrophe S, and it was still pretty local — they didn’t get outside New England at all, and were mostly just in Massachusetts. For 95 cents you could get a cheeseburger and a frappe — that’s the New England name for what most of the country calls a milk shake; it’s one syllable, “frap,” not the same as the whipped-fruit thing called a “frappé.” And the cheeseburger would be on butter-grilled toast, not a bun.

But then the chain started expanding, they changed the name to “Friendly’s” and updated the menu, and the burgers were on buns…

Getting sandwiches on butter-grilled toast — that wasn’t just Friendly. There were a lot of places that did that when I was a kid.

Turns out there still are — in New England. It’s not so much old-fashioned as regional.

And the Newport Creamery of today has almost exactly the same menu that Friendly had fifty years ago. Not at the same prices, of course, but wow, everything tasted just the way I remembered the food at Friendly.

So for the past month I’ve been thinking about that food, and wishing there was some way to get it here in Maryland.

A Certain Age

I’m fifty-eight. This is an age when a lot of my contemporaries are worrying about caring for their elderly parents or other relatives. Many of them, understandably, post about their concerns in various online venues I frequent.

Which makes me feel a bit odd. The last of my ancestors died more than twenty years ago. I have exactly four living blood relatives older than I am, so far as I know — two siblings, and two first cousins once removed. (There may be some other distant cousins, but none of them live in the U.S. and I lost track of all of them long ago. One of the living first cousins once removed lives in England, come to that.) My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are all long gone.

My wife’s parents and grandparents are all gone, too, though she still has some aunts and uncles.

While I can see that caring for aging parents must be stressful, it’s a problem I sort of wish I had. But only sort of. I miss my parents very much, but I’m relieved I’ll never need to worry about them.

So every time I see some article talking about how sooner or later we all go from being cared for by them to being caretakers for our parents, I have a rush of mixed emotions as I say, “Not all of us, damn you.”

Writers’ Folly

There’s something beginning writers do — especially, but by no means only, self-published ones — that I don’t understand.  Beginning writers do a lot of stupid and counter-productive things, of course, but I have in mind one particular one that I find baffling.

Or maybe, now that I think about it, not all that baffling. Consider: There you are, Joe Author, and your new book Carbuncles of Mars is now available on Amazon, and you are simultaneously swollen with pride at your accomplishment, and terrified that nobody will buy it or review it or read it or acknowledge your existence in any way. You want to prove that you’re a Real Writer, and you want to sell your book.

So you join writers’ groups wherever you can find them, to prove you’re a real writer — I get that. But what I don’t get is then posting ads in them, rather than talking about, you know, writing.

I suppose it comes from forgetting that proving you’re a real writer, and selling your book, aren’t the same thing.

But you know what happens when you post ads to writers’ groups? The real writers leave. Because we aren’t looking for more stuff to read; we always have more than we can possibly keep up with. We want places where we can talk about writing, but we won’t wade through ads to do it.

I just saw this happen over on Facebook, where C.J. Cherryh left a writers’ group because it was overrun with ads. She took the trouble to say she was leaving, and why; I suspect that most of the name writers there didn’t bother, they just vanished. I’m not 100% sure why I haven’t left that particular group yet; I’ve certainly dropped out of plenty of others over the years when the ads from beginners overwhelmed the discussion.

And that’s the thing — this always happens. Every. Single. Time. Any time anyone creates a writers’ group that doesn’t have either steep membership requirements or ferocious moderation, the newbies pile in, eager to be accepted, but instead of talking about the craft or business of writing, they always, always start posting about their own latest literary accomplishments, trying to coax everyone to check out Carbuncles from Mars.

Always.

Sometimes there’s actually a substantive discussion for awhile, but it always fades out, smothered under a thousand variations of, “Lookit me! I wrote a book!”

Which is stupid. Writers aren’t your market; writers have no time or money to waste on semi-pro work from unknowns. We have enough trouble keeping up with the big names in our field. You don’t want to advertise to writers, you want to advertise to readers. Not the same group.

A few years back I was managing editor of a webzine called Helix, which pissed off a lot of beginning writers because we did not look at unsolicited submissions. We did that because our acquiring editor was a cranky guy who did not want to read slush, and we expected it to annoy our would-be contributors, but what amazed us was their argument against it: “No one will read your magazine if you don’t let us submit stories!”

Good heavens, do they really think only would-be writers read short fiction? Because if so, that’s pitiful. We were aiming at readers, not writers.

Other writers are not your audience. Really. Other writers are, in fact, a very hard sell, because we know enough about how it’s done to see everything you did wrong.

So, all you beginners, newbies, would-be writers and wannabes, stop it. Oh, join writers’ groups if you want, but don’t advertise in them. All it does is chase people away.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

Before Watchmen

So DC is doing this big project, “Before Watchmen,” where they’re publishing mini-series prequels about all the major characters in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. They’re doing this against Moore’s wishes, which is tacky, but they do own the rights, so they’re doing it.

So far, most of them (that I’ve read; I’m a couple of weeks behind) have been pretty good. But today I read Rorschach #1.

I’m okay with the plot. The art is entirely adequate. But the writer does not have Rorschach’s voice right.

I’m surprised. The writer is Brian Azzarello, who is generally a very good writer with a good ear for dialogue, and Rorschach’s voice in Watchmen, both the original comics and the movie, is distinctive and not that hard to imitate, so why did Azzarello screw it up so badly?

Rorschach doesn’t normally use unnecessary words. He drops pronouns and articles unless they’re essential. Azzarello’s narration gets this wrong. The only time the “real” Rorschach uses words he doesn’t need is when he’s ranting about the moral degeneracy of the world he lives in.

Also, Rorschach doesn’t ordinarily use profanity; that’s part of his attempt to rise above what he sees as the filth around him. Azzarello has him calling drugs “shit,” which he would only do when berating a criminal, and only if the criminal had used the word first.

So as one example, Azzarello’s “I’ve spent days wading through garbage looking for shit” should be, “Spent days in garbage, looking for poison.” Azzarello’s version just isn’t Moore’s character’s voice.

Which is too bad.

Meanwhile, I thought J. Michael Straczynski pretty much nailed Dr. Manhattan in Dr. Manhattan #1.

Distractions

You would think that, since I don’t have a day job or kids at home, I’d be able to get lots of writing done, wouldn’t you? Yet here I am, turning out maybe fifteen-twenty pages in a good week. So what do I do with my time?

Well, eating, sleeping, housekeeping, web-surfing — all the obvious stuff. But I manage to find some more eccentric ways to put off work, as well.

Right now, for example, I’m in the middle of carefully editing a digital transfer of the Moody Blues’ “Seventh Sojourn” from LP to iTunes. This is an album I haven’t played in four or five years, but it suddenly seemed urgent to get it archived on my computer.

And I just wrote a letter to a bank to let them know that the guy they’re looking for at this address hasn’t lived here for at least five years. Anyone sensible would have just tossed their letter, instead of answering it.

Earlier I spent some time identifying a coverless old book I inherited, which turns out to be A.D. 2000, by Lieutenant Alvarado M. Fuller, published in 1890 — while I knew the title, the author’s name does not appear anywhere after the title page, which is missing from my copy. Now I’ve not only identified it, but was able to print out scans of the pages I was missing. Which was entertaining, but not very useful.

I also sorted a bunch of old manuscripts as part of an ongoing effort to tidy my office. This had me happily contemplating questions such as, “Do comic book scripts go with novels or short stories?” “Do I need to keep all the drafts of short stories?” “Did I really do that many rewrites of my scripts for Tekno*Comix? Well, at least they’re all dated, and therefore easy to sort.”

And of course, I’m writing this blog entry, instead of something that might make money.

So now you know why I’m still only a paragraph into Chapter Seven of The Sorcerer’s Widow.

52 Pick-Up

As any comic book readers out there already know, last September DC Comics relaunched their entire superhero line as “the New 52,” starting classics like Action Comics over at #1, relaunching several canceled titles (e.g., Swamp Thing), and adding assorted new titles, such as Justice League Dark.

They’ve done big relaunches before — Crisis in 1986 was the first, then Zero Hour, and 52, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some.  This time, though, they wanted to not just clean up continuity, but to make real changes to several long-established characters, and according to their pitch at the San Diego Comic-Con, to try to get back to what had made the characters appealing in the first place.  They didn’t want everyone to just yawn and say, “Oh, look, they’re doing it again.”

So they cancelled every DC superhero title and started an entire new line, fifty-two titles launching with new #1 issues, some the same, some new.  The theory was that they would all start off fresh, so new readers could pick them up and not be lost in a maze of accumulated continuity.

It didn’t really work out that way, but that was the theory.

So the new Justice League #1, the alleged flagship, was the only DC title shipped the last Wednesday in August of 2011, and the other fifty-one all premiered in September of 2011.

Naturally, not all of the fifty-two succeeded; in fact, they recently announced the first round of cancellations, six of them.  They’ll be replaced with six new titles.  That prompted me to look at what I was reading, and whether I wanted to continue, and whether I wanted to pick up any of the six new ones.

I used to read a lot of DC and Marvel superhero titles, but in recent years I had dropped them all.  I didn’t like the big crossover events that the publishers staged more or less annually, so I made it a firm policy to drop any title where the regular ongoing storyline got mucked up by a big crossover event I wasn’t reading.

This meant that by the end of 2010 I was no longer reading a single Marvel title — I’m still not — and my DC reading was down to a handful of Vertigo titles and short-run oddities.

I figured this relaunch was a good place to jump back in, and see whether maybe they’d gotten it right this time.

Initially, I was pretty excited about the whole thing.  Oh, I wasn’t about to buy all fifty-two — I really hated some of the characters they were including — but I did pick fourteen of the fifty-two — more than a quarter of the total — and bought those.  I’ve also now read several of the other titles that friends had subscribed to, but this was my own list:

Action Comics
Detective Comics
Superman
Batman
Superboy
Supergirl
Batwoman
Catwoman
Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
Blackhawks
Demon Knights
OMAC
Voodoo
Wonder Woman

OMAC and Blackhawks are among the six canceled titles that will end with #8.

Looking at the six new titles, I won’t be replacing them — none of the new six interest me at all.  In fact, rather than adding any, I’ll be dropping some others.  Haven’t decided on the exact list yet, but Superboy, Supergirl, Voodoo, Frankenstein, Demon Knights, and Catwoman are all at risk.  And I was considering dropping OMAC and Blackhawks anyway, though the decision has been taken out of my hands.

Of the titles I’ve read but didn’t subscribe to — Resurrection Man, Animal Man, Grifter, Swamp Thing, Batman and Robin, Justice League, Justice League Dark, etc. — I don’t intend to add any.

So I could be down to six.  Out of fifty-two.  This isn’t very impressive.  So what went wrong?

I really liked several of the first issues I got, but here’s a title-by-title account of what’s gone wrong (or hasn’t):

Action Comics:  The idea here is that this is filling in some backstory on Superman, showing us how he got established in this new version of the story, while Superman is set in “present day” Metropolis, where he’s more of a known quantity.  Eventually, Action is supposed to catch up and they’ll more or less merge.

I loved the first issue, where he’s not called “Superman” yet, he’s wearing blue jeans instead of tights, etc.  Unfortunately, a few issues in the storyline started getting much less linear and became harder to follow.  I’m sticking with it, but I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm.

Detective Comics:  It’s Batman.  They really didn’t change much from what was going on before the relaunch.  It’s dark and violent.  I like it.  It isn’t especially innovative or anything, but it’s good, solid Batman stories, and I like those.

Superman:  Superman is still relatively new in Metropolis here, but he’s accepted as the city’s hero, battling alien menaces, etc.  I’m content with it, not thrilled.

Batman:  Not as good as Detective, but serviceable Batman stories.

Superboy:  This one started out great.  The current version of Superboy, for those of you who haven’t looked at any comics lately, is a partially-successful attempt to clone Superman.  They couldn’t get completely Kryptonian DNA to work, so they used a mix of human and Kryptonian, and the result is something new.

The first issue has him waking up in a big test tube while his creators debate what to do with him.  He’s something of a blank slate.  This is cool.  Lots of things you can do with that.  There’s a subtle inclusion of a character from Gen 13 that I didn’t pick up on at first.  (I hadn’t realized DC now had the rights to Gen 13.)

Unfortunately, the whole thing started downhill with the second issue.  They aren’t doing what I wanted to see.  I realize that’s maybe my problem, not theirs; I also realize that sometimes authors come up with something better than what I wanted or expected.  In this case, though, I don’t think that’s what happened.

As Julie puts it, Superboy has yet to develop a personality.  He does have some (justifiable) feeling of persecution, and he’s a bit whiny, but there’s nothing interesting there.

Also, see Systemic Problems #1 and #2 below.  They both apply here.

Supergirl:  Great set-up — Kara Zor-El remembers getting ready for her high school graduation (or the Kryptonian equivalent), and then next thing she knows she’s waking up in a crashed rocketship in Siberia, on a planet she’s never heard of where the only person who speaks Kryptonian is some guy who claims to be her baby cousin Kal-El all grown up.  Wonderful start.

Unfortunately, since then the story has her flailing about wildly and refusing to listen to explanations or ask sensible questions.  Oddly, one of my complaints here is that Systemic Problem #1 does not really apply — she’s fighting villains while she still has no idea what’s going on.  And there’s Systemic Problem #1a.

This one may still be salvageable, though.

Batwoman:  Beautiful art, pretty good story, but it’s picked up from the old continuity with no changes at all, so it hasn’t always been easy to follow, and a new reader may not get who some of the characters are.  Still, I’m enjoying it so far.

Catwoman:  They introduced a cool new supporting character, then promptly killed her off, and many readers aren’t happy with the depiction of Batman’s relationship with Catwoman, but I’m okay with this.  Not blown away, but it’s not bad.

Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.:  This is apparently picking up continuity from some title I never read.  Frankenstein’s monster is working as an agent for a secret organization called SHADE that battles menaces threatening the world.  Cool.  Some of the other agents he works with are also cool (and apparently from one of the various “Creature Commando” series, none of which I ever read).

Unfortunately, the writer seems to think readers want action, action, action.  I’d much rather get some background on what’s going on, see conflicts develop over time, etc.  Systemic Problem #1a and #2 are both very much in evidence.  (#1, not so much.)

Blackhawks:  The Blackhawks are a super-high-tech organization based in central Asia fighting various menaces, but Systemic Problem #2 is huge here.

Demon Knights:  All DC’s magical medieval characters team up to battle supernatural menaces.  Cool.  Except that we get absolutely no introduction to any of them; we’re just thrown into the middle of it as they find themselves trying to fight off a huge army besieging a village.  I don’t know who half these people are, or why I should care about them.  After six issues, we’re still in the middle of that first battle.

OMAC:  Someone clearly adores 1970s-vintage Jack Kirby.  Unfortunately, Systemic Problem #1 and #2 undercut the whole thing.

Voodoo:  Voodoo is the stage name of a shape-shifting alien spy working as a stripper.  Five issues in, it’s not yet clear whether she’s the hero of the series, or the villain.  I think she’s supposed to turn into a hero.  She hasn’t yet.

Wonder Woman:  The premise here is that the Greek gods are not the anachronisms we’ve seen them portrayed as in the past.  They’ve kept up to date.  And they’re still the ruthless, petty, vengeful, inhuman bastards they were in Greek myths.  Zeus is still screwing anyone and anything that catches his eye, and Hera is still royally pissed about it.  Diana, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, is caught up in their intrigues.

This mostly works for me — except when the story goes to Paradise Island.  I like some of what the writer’s done with that background (I’m trying not to spoil anything here), but the scenes actually set there just bored or confused me.

So, about those systemic problems…

The first systemic problem:  These are superheroes, right?  Heroes?  People who do good deeds?  Who fight villains, and protect innocents?  That’s the whole underlying concept, isn’t it?

Couldn’t prove it by me, after reading most of these comics.  Oh, Batman is still doing his job, tracking down homicidal freaks, and Wonder Woman is trying to protect innocents, but a lot of these people seem to be fighting themselves or (systemic problem #1a) each other, rather than bad guys.  We have yet to see Superboy or Supergirl do anything that wasn’t based on their own self-interest; OMAC is thrust into battle against his will by Brother Eye, whose motives are unclear.  We’ve seen Superboy fight Supergirl, Frankenstein fight OMAC — why?  Aren’t they all supposed to be good guys?

Maybe I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but I’d like to see some of these superheroes fighting bank robbers, or saving people from tornadoes, or other such old-time heroics.  Most of these characters have no grounding in anything remotely like the real world, and give us no reason to care about them.

The second systemic problem:  What the heck is it with the DC universe being overrun with super-high-tech clandestine organizations?  There seem to be dozens of them — SHADE, Checkmate, NOWHERE, Blackhawks, Cadmus, etc.  What’s more, they seem to be fighting each other more than they’re combating any obvious evils; the idea that they might all be on the same side doesn’t seem to ever occur to anyone.  When NOWHERE goes up against Checkmate, which side am I supposed to cheer for?  Why would I care?

I loved the original Blackhawks, who were a team of heroic aviators.  The Blackhawks in the title that’s being cancelled aren’t a team, they’re a bureaucracy.

And finally, to sum up:  There’s a depressing sameness to most of these comics.  Nothing stands out as fresh or witty or touching.  Except for Superman and the Batman titles, they seem to exist in a realm where super-powered beings defend themselves from other super-powered beings and ordinary people either don’t exist at all, or are relegated to the distant background.

I don’t care about super-powered beings; I care about people, and there are damned few of those in these stories.

So I’ll be cutting my list, and regretting that DC blew their chance to do this relaunch right.