A Little Limelight Robbery

Nice but not-that-eventful night. Trevor, Ainsley and I put together a set of Magnetix I bought, which are small magnetic posts and balls with which you can make different shapes such as a nice looking pyramid or diamond. I can tell I'll really have to drop a lot of money to get enough to make suggested designs like Le Tour Eiffel, though! At least it kept Trevor from watching too much TV--a bit of Teen Titans and that's about it...at least until bedtime. I always lay down first with Ainsley and then Trevor for about five minutes, and I had said he could watch five minutes of Cartoon Network in bed before I switched over to a calming cd, but I fell asleep next to him and the next thing I knew it was 9:45 and he was still watching! Little shit :) He'll probably be cranky tomorrow. I started filling out this eharmony.com profile for the first time, as I figure it's got to beat going to bars or hitting on girls at work, so we'll see what happens.

I started going through The Solution, actually reading it, and I was digging it! It's a totally different tone than things I'd been writing the past few months (well, those are different from each other as well) and I'm pretty happy with it. Made a couple notes for small changes, but mainly I was seeing where I might break it up if it was to be made into 22 page monthly issues. It's not too difficult to do this for issue #1, but between #2 and #3 I would need to add some things, which I want to do, anyway, as far as the "villains" of the piece go. I imagine this would be a five or six issue mini. Probably six, come to think of it. I probably have more left to write than I think. I'm sort of torn whether to finish this or Irregular Joe first, but leaning towards writing IJ while tinkering with and more tightly plotting the rest of Solution. I also made some notes on Deduction Engine, which is kind of a sister book to Irregular Joe; the same world, anyway. Writing that is a ways off but lately I'm really trying to take notes when ideas pop up.

Read the rest of Scott McCloud et al's SUPERMAN: STRENGTH 3 issue miniseries, and it's just okay to pretty-good. The story, spread across these three 48 page issues, is that a high-tech gang led by a criminal genius with big father issues, takes back some special gloves the guy created at Lexcorp when he was an employee. The gloves make portable wormholes (as noted in #2 or #3, not unlike something from an old Warner Bros. Roadrunner cartoon) through which they can sneak in and steal stuff and 'port away. Superman gets his head caught in a disappearing hole at the end of #1, so the crooks have got his head hostage--still attached to his body, but his body is back at Lexcorp, you know? He's unharmed. In #2 the gang leader, Fido, allows Superman to save some people, trusting him at his word to return, which he does. Also, McCloud fills up a bunch of this issue with a very unwelcome look at a forgotten early adventure of an 8? 10? year old Clark Kent running through the field when his powers kick in, and before he knows it he's a scared li'l hick in downtown Chicago, discovering urban violence and wayward youth and a grayer morality than he's ever seen. It wasn't terrible, but not something I wanted to see. By #3 we're back in the present with Fido & Co. trying to forge a partnership with Luthor and employing another device, one that enlarges items, so that Fido emptying out his pockets results in huge coins, pens, Altoids and condoms dropping over Metropolis for Superman to grab or knock away. Okay, I was kidding about the Altoids. I don't remember how he got free, but Fido and the gang hijacking some "NASA space car" for a cruise to Egypt was kind of fun, and then Fido dealt with his father issues and turned out not to be much of a menace at all, and there was some boring filler with Lois and Pa Kent. The oddball elements were good, a decent approximation of the anything-goes stories of the 50s and 60s, while the attempt at getting all Kurt Busiek meaningful fell flat. The art is a letdown throughout, Aluir Amancio's style here not cartoon-iconic like his previous work on SUPERMAN ADVENTURES but too cartoony to be good superhero art, and Terry Austin's inking is too light or broken. McCloud's solid breakdowns at least means it's easy to follow, but for $5.95 an issue it should have been closer to Darwyn Cooke quality.

About to go finish the Warren Ellis/Chris Weston/Laura Martin MINISTRY OF SPACE tpb. I didn't much like the first two issues when they came out, and never got the third as a result, but I read these two today and liked it a lot better. Hopefully it all comes together...