More!

* The World Future Council eyes the possibility of punishing crimes against the future, but news on climate change and ocean acidification suggests we should be more concerned about crimes against the present.

* Here comes your Grant Morrison documentary.

* Early Ditko.

* How to bring the party.

* Are graduate creative writing programs worth it? Only if they're free, and frankly maybe not even then. This, however, is quite true:

A friend and classmate of mine recently said that our program was a place where people who ordinarily never would have met in their entire lives could become best friends.

It's the best reason to do it. Via Jezebel via @sposnik.

* Alain de Botton says "it's time for an ambitious new literature of the office."

* And an art historian thinks Duchamp's readymades weren't really readymades.

This is Ms. Shearer's case against the readymades so far.

Duchamp's readymade glass ampoule, which he named ''50 cc of Paris Air,'' is larger than any that would have been readily available to pharmacists. (And she has a tape of a man from Corning Glass saying so.)

''Beautiful Breath,'' the readymade perfume bottle with Man Ray's photograph of Duchamp on it (now owned by Yves Saint Laurent) is green, she says; the real bottles of ''Un Air Embaume,'' from Rigaud, are peach-colored (like the empty but still-fragrant one that Ms. Shearer bought for $650).

The readymade snow shovel, which now exists only in photographs and replicas, ''would hurt your hand'' if you tried to use it, Ms. Shearer says, because it has a square shaft. And it doesn't have the normal reinforcements to keep it from breaking. (She has hired people to make her a snow shovel like Duchamp's and use it until it breaks.)

There is more: the bird cage is too squat for a real bird, the iron hooks in the photograph of the coat rack appear to bend in an impossible position, the French window opens the wrong way, the bottle rack has an asymmetrical arrangement of hooks and the urinal is too curvaceous to have come from the Mott Iron Works, where Duchamp said he bought it.

A little busy today, but here are a few links I've saved up.

* Watchmen link of the day: The Fate of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis. Via the comments at the Candleblog review.



* Grant Morrison on the superhero genre.

I’m not even sure if there is a superhero genre or if the idea of the superhero is a special chilli pepper-like ingredient designed to energize other genres. The costumed superhero has survived since 1938, constantly shifting in tone from decade to decade to reflect the fears and the needs of the audience. The current mainstream popularity of the superhero has, I think, a lot to do with the fact that the Terror-stricken, environmentally-handicapped, overpopulated, paedophile-haunted world that’s being peddled by our news media is crying out for utopian role models and for any hopeful images of humankind’s future potential!

* Don't Look Back—a flash game based on the Orpheus myth.

* Top 10 myths about sustainability.

* Bad news for solipsists: the universe exists independently of our observation. Via Kottke.

* Also from Kottke: famous directors take on famous comedy bits. A little amateurish, but it made me smile.

Friday morning links.

* Is Dollhouse already canceled? Fox is advertising that Prison Break returns to Fridays on 4/17.

* Mike Krzyzewski gets a tough evaluation on ratemyprofessor.com.



* Alternate-universe Watchmens. Only the Woody Allen hypothesis really sings.



* And this xkcd is quieter than the ones that usually get ricocheted across the Internet, but damn if it didn't make me laugh.



* And is time really the fire in which we burn? Consider the thermal time hypothesis. More at MetaFilter.

According to Connes and Rovelli, the same applies to the universe at large. There are many more constituents to keep track of: not only do we have particles of matter to deal with, we also have space itself and therefore gravity. When we average over this vast microscopic arrangement, the macroscopic feature that emerges is not temperature, but time. "It is not reality that has a time flow, it is our very approximate knowledge of reality that has a time flow," says Rovelli. "Time is the effect of our ignorance."

I think Rovelli just wrote Alan Moore's next three graphic novels. Grant Morrison's, too.

Seriously, I have pink eye. That's just absurd. Here are some links.

* Utopia is now: curing cancer by virus.

* Dystopia is now: New York is talking about taxing Internet porn. What's 4% of free?

* How the Crash will reshape America.

* Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Via American Stranger.

* Salute to British comic creators.

* Is Final Crisis "the death knell of the 'mad ideas' school of comics writing"?

* Nate Silver tries to statisticize the Oscars.

* Goodbye, Dubai.

* And Candleblog directs us to the official Trilogy Meter. Pretty good, but they got Back to the Future 2 wrong; it's not only better than the original, it's the greatest cinematic achievement of all time.

Mark Millar's take on a Superman reboot could be Kal-El at his most poignant, if DC would ever sign off on such a dark take on the character.

I want to start on Krypton, a thousand years ago, and end with Superman alone on Planet Earth, the last being left on the planet, as the yellow sun turns red and starts to supernova, and he loses his powers.

Great idea, and amazingly it's one I don't think we've ever seen before. The perfect source material is already out there and begging to be adapted—just do Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman—but if they're foolish enough to pass on that they could do a lot worse than Millar's take. (Also via io9.)

In other Superman news, Bryan Singer, having already destroyed the franchise once, appears to be opting out of destroying it a second time.

I haven't been reading Morrison's Batman: R.I.P., but Easily Distracted has, and has one of the few reads of the series that actually makes sense.

(Previously.)

All Star Superman in Eleven Panels.

This pair of scans_daily posts are by themselves a nearly complete lesson in just what superhero comics have become in the so-called Dark Age—incredibly dark, yes, but also deeply layered and remarkably postmodern. Grant Morrison's current story on the Batbooks requires at least a passing familiarity with the entire sixty-nine-year history of the franchise to make much sense, including long-abandoned plot points like the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh and Bat-Mite and a rather advanced understanding of meta-concepts like continuity and canonicity.

These features, to varying degrees, dominate the major creative output of both DC and Marvel, and have for at least a decade, though Grant Morrison's comics are certainly near the top of the curve.

Personally I think this sort of labyrinthine narrative complexity is always unequivocably wonderful, but opinions on this point definitely vary.

I stumbled across a review of Robert Mayer's 1977 postmodern superhero novel Superfolks somewhere on the Internet a few months ago, and I was intrigued enough to buy the novel secondhand from Amazon and read it one night when I should have been doing more productive work. It's a fun, quick read, and it isn't at all hard to see why Grant Morrison has said Alan Moore got all his ideas from Mayer, especially Miracleman.

I bring all this up because NPR's got a nice excerpt:

There were no more heroes.

Kennedy was dead, shot by an assassin in Dallas.

Batman and Robin were dead, killed when the Batmobile slammed into a bus carrying black children to school in the suburbs.

Superman was missing, and presumed dead, after a Kryptonite meteor fell on Metropolis.

The Marvel family was dead; struck down by lightning.

The Lone Ranger was dead; found with an arrow in his back after Tonto returned from a Red Power conference at Wounded Knee.

Mary Mantra was dead; cut to pieces by an Amtrak locomotive when Dr. Spock tied her to the tracks and she couldn't remove her gag.

Captain Mantra was in a sanitarium near Edgeville; said to be a helpless wretch ever since seeing his twin sister cut to shreds.

Only Wonder Woman was still in the public eye. And she had forsworn forever the use of her superpowers. Using her real name, Diana Prince, she was a leading spokesperson for women's liberation, an associate editor of Ms. magazine, a frequent guest on late-night talk shows. Her message was that the strength of Wonder Woman resides in all women and they must learn to use it. Battling to liberate womankind, she said, was more important than catching petty crooks. She sounded at times like a sinner repentant.

Even Snoopy had bought it; shot down by the Red Baron; missing in action over France...

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!

Grant Morrison drops a lot of hints about the upcoming DC Comics superevent "Final Crisis" at Comic Book Resources, while Bam, Kapow! argues that Superman will always suck. You see this sort of thing a lot from people who don't understand what makes a Superman story good or even how the Superman character works—though I find this article to be particularly unfair to the poor guy.

There's actually a good argument to be made that Superman's ethical self-policing is in fact reflective of the ideologies of the status-quo ruling class, and that he should spend less time stopping bank-robbers and more time destroying militaries and ending world hunger—but this isn't it.

Ten comic-book characters who have met God. For me the list begins and ends with Animal Man:

I saw into another world and it was worse than this one. It was like I glimpsed Heaven and...and it wasn't Paradise. It was more like Hell.

What if God, or whoever it is, created us to be better than himself? What if God's reality...Heaven, if you like...what if it's so bad that he had to imagine us to help make his life bearble?

What if we're characters and not people?

-Grant Morrison, Animal Man, Issue 19

Elsewhere in religious news, Cynical-C trots out that old atheist saw, the list of gods that Christians and atheists don't believe in.