Wednesday 1.

* A dissenting view: as someone who has recently taken up smoking in order to be more like Barack Obama, I require regular fluff stories on the president's cigarette habit to know whether I should smoke on any given day.

* An anti-bullying measure has passed the North Carolina House, a big win for the LGBT activists who pressed for it. Triangulator notes that the bill was opposed by nearly every Republican in the chamber.

* Why we need to criticize Obama from the left: "Lawyers for President Obama are quietly drafting first-of-their kind guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees, officials said Tuesday.

* The Tampa Bay Times has a huge expose on the Church of Scientology, via MeFi.

* And did you know Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common?

Superhero news!

* Smokers of the Marvel Universe.



* Dial B for Blog uses the recent gratuitous [SPOILER] of the Martian Manhunter in Grant Morrison's Final Crisis #1 as the launching point for a passionate rant about the current editorial direction of DC Comics.

Infinite Crisis was a bad story, but at least it was a story. Final Crisis is a marketing plan. There's the money quote, reader: "Final Crisis is a marketing plan."

In the view of Robby Reed, creator of this web site and author of this posting, "FINAL CRISIS" is VERY well-named, because for me it is a death-knell for DC. They have so little regard for either their own characters or those who buy the comics it is horrifying. I actually hope they go out of business, if they keep this up.

At any rate, before purchasing any new DC title in the future, I will inspect each page for evidence of the continuing pornographic destruction of my beloved childhood characters. If I find any, the book goes back on the shelf. Since EVERY book they publish is now like this, that means no more new DC comics for Robby. I will not miss them!

Daniel Clowes on comics, smoking, and publishing in The New York Times, at the Onion's A.V. Club.

The A.V. Club: How did you get started with Mister Wonderful?

Daniel Clowes: The New York Times has been doing the weekly comic strip for two years. I was the second person they asked, after Chris Ware. I was going to do it about a year ago, until I had to get open-heart surgery. The next opening was in September. I'd always wanted to do a weekly strip, or a strip that was in installments like that. It's been fun trying to figure out how to make that work. Their standards are so prissy that they won't allow me to use all kinds of language. Not only can you not swear, this morning I was informed I couldn't use the word "schmuck." I couldn't use "crap," "schmuck," or "get laid." Those three were beyond the pale. But you get around that, and it comes out better. I can't quite explain why.

AVC: Censorship helps, then?

DC: Were I writing a character that couldn't be this repressed, it would be disastrous. I don't know what I'd do. But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols. The reader reads into them something worse than what you normally would have. They work as this outburst of incoherent anger. I've found ways to write around swearing that are much more effective, rather than going for what someone really would say. [Laughs.]

It's a lot like Arrested Development in that respect, actually.