Oh, Thursday.

* Water discovered on Moon.

It's not a lot of water. If you took a two-liter soda bottle of lunar dirt, there would probably be a medicine dropperful of water in it, said University of Maryland astronomer Jessica Sunshine, one of the scientists who discovered the water. Another way to think of it is if you want a drink of water, it would take a baseball diamond's worth of dirt, said team leader Carle Pieters of Brown University.

I can't wait to drink bottled moon water. Delicious.

* NeilAlien has some good links about the Kirby heirs' attempt to reclaim their Marvel copyrights in the wake of the Siegel heirs' successful lawsuit against DC.

* Naomi Klein interviews Michael Moore about who hates America more.

* For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table. In the past three decades, the earth's dominant carnivores have tripled our average per capita consumption; in the next four decades global meat production will double to 465 million tons.

* Salon on the end of oil and the era of extreme energy.

* Moammar Gadhafi vs. the World Cup.

A few more links for today, as my brain is otherwise useless.

* io9 has your Disney/Marvel crossovers in the other direction. I too am looking forward to the Dark Mermaid Saga.

* Again with the Comics has scans from Chris Ware's extremely rare "Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future." Get them before the C&D.

* Who's ruining air travel now?

* Biden breaks down 2010.

* Today in our awesome post-racial society.

* And could Jennifer's Body actually not be all that bad? Feministe reports.

Has the Disney/Marvel merger scored its first big win with Pixar's Ant-Man?

Sunday! Links!

* Jaimee has a new poem online at Country Dog Review.

* Traxus has a nice post on status update activism jumping off my post at HASTAC the other day.

* In praise of the sci-fi corridor.

* All about ocean acidification, the climate change disaster no one is even talking about.

* Confessions of an Aca/Fan has two good posts about where District 9 came from, one on transmedia promotion strategies and the other on Afrofuturism.

* NeilAlien is your source for Disney/Marvel merger news, especially more Photoshopped images than you can possibly handle. Here are even more Photoshopped images.

* Why is Glenn Beck wearing an East German military uniform on the cover of his new book? No, really, why?

Up too late tonight.

* Because you demanded it: MTV has greenlit a Teen Wolf pilot.

* Contrary to what you may have heard, the appendix has a function.

* And if you aren't sick yet of the Disney/Marvel mashup meme, you can find a bunch at Super Punch.

Attackerman rightly declares the Internets won for the day.

Disney has just bought Marvel Comics for $4 billion dollars. Nerds are talking about what it means; I doubt anything good will come of it.

MMLD #2.

* The recession comes home to Randolph: they're closing our beloved Pathmark.

* A musical tribute to "Ozymandias" from Handsome CD Plus Three.

* On everybody's lips: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. Links to reviews here and here. I look forward to having time to read this c. 2017.

* "Do It Again: One Man's Quest to Reunite the Kinks."

* Comics Should Be Good is running a month-long "iconic panels" series all month long to celebrate Marvel's 70th.

* And Joss Whedon says they should have renewed Terminator instead.

Exciting comics nerds everywhere, Marvel Comics has unexpectedly announced that it now owns the rights to Miracleman/Marvelman. Keep an eye on this; it's great news.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is upset that Marvel's bringing back Captain America. I'm upset that they're using the word "Vonnegut-esque" in such a way that I have no idea what they mean.

But Marvel won't disclose how he rises from the dead. Executive Editor Tom Brevoort teases that the character has been "on a Vonnegut-esque metaphysical journey," including some soul-searching about his place in the world.

Captain America meets his creator? Becomes unstuck in time? Visits Dresden? Ends the world by accident? Evolves into a dolphin? Becomes trapped in some other thinly sketched but darkly humorous situation? Has great ideas, "if only he could write"? Tell me what it is you're trying to say.

Wednesday!

* I have a review in the Indy this week of Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Keywords: copyright Constitution Buffy pornography Superstar Mystery Science Theater 3000.

* Cases for and against Buffy without Joss.

* Sarah Connor creator: I won't be back.

* Some days I think Marvel just doesn't get women. Via MeFi.

* theauteurs.com: Streaming video of Criterion Collection films. (via Vu)

* And the year of Senatorial madness shows no sign of ending: Joe Sestak intends to unseat Arlen and Burris's scumbaggery is caught on tape.

Friday night links of variable goofiness.

* Ze Frank has your optical illusion of the night.

* Lateral thinking interview questions from Microsoft.

You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of getting a red marble using your scheme?

* My friend Jay explains the story behind his possession of the world's most badass scar.

* Who ate all the Neanderthals? Oops.

* Which of our own closely held beliefs will our own children and grandchildren by appalled by?

* Also: classic sci-fi box office adjusted for inflation.

* Jacob directs our attention to the growing threat of Transforminators.

* Bo Obama, Dog Superhero.

* Wes Anderson, the YouTube Channel.

It's becoming more and more apparent that conservatives simply take as fact anything that is broadcast on any Fox Network. First 24, now Prison Break.

Despite all that, we never tire of the specter of the Big, Bad, Villainous, Omnipotent Muslim Terrorist. They're back, and now they're going to wreak havoc on the Homeland -- devastate our communities -- even as they're imprisoned in super-max prison facilities. How utterly irrational is that fear? For one thing, it's empirically disproven. Anyone with the most minimal amount of rationality would look at the fact that we have already convicted numerous alleged high-level Al Qaeda Terrorists in our civilian court system (something we're now being told can't be done) -- including the cast of villains known as the Blind Shiekh a.k.a. Mastermind of the First World Trade Center Attack, the Shoe Bomber, the Dirty Bomber, the American Taliban, the 20th Hijacker, and many more -- and are imprisoning them right now in American prisons located in various communities.

We've been doing that for two decades. What are all the bad and scary things that have happened as a result? The answer is: "nothing." Take note, Chris Cillizza and friends: while it's true that "not a single prisoner has escaped from Gitmo since it was created," it's also true that no Muslim Terrorists have escaped from American prisons and our SuperMax prison "has had no escapes or serious attempts to escape." Actually, the only person to even make an escape attempt from a SuperMax is Green Arrow, who hasn't succeeded despite the help of Joker and Lex Luthor.

Seriously, that Green Arrow movie sounds pretty good. But how's he going to get hold of a bow while he's in prison, much less his trick arrows?

Meanwhile, Attackerman checks in from the Marvel Universe, where the picture is much more bleak.

Found on the Internet: grown-up Calvins and Hobbeses. I've seen a couple links to this one and it made me want to poke around.



That's Susie Derkins, of course.

This one, I think, is my favorite:



A few others. I found these via a Google image search, so I confess I don't know where they came from.





(original context)

This last one is less a grown-up Calvin than an updated one, but there's a similar poignance to it all the same. And I know from the file name it comes from Jim Rugg, who I published way back in Backwards City #1:



It's quite reminiscent of this better-known "end of Calvin," which I've linked before.



If you're not done yet, there's always Fight Club.

(a couple via NeilAlien and this Marvel Peanuts MeFi thread, but mostly just via Google)

Fresh from his appearance in Amazing Spider-Man, Obama takes on the Green Goblin in Thunderbolts #128. He's also picking the new Youngblood team.



I bet DC is regretting not including him in their election storyline last year.

Will Morbius, the Living Vampire, be the Big Bad in Spider-Man 4? I remember seeing this character in the animated series when I was a kid—he certainly seemed ridiculous then, though some of that may have to do with silly network interference. (Aside: Who knew Morbius was a part of Blade's backstory?)

If I were Sam Raimi—and I am—I'd go the whole other way with it. All humans: Spider-Man vs. the cops, Spider-Man vs. terrorists, Spider-Man vs. Kingpin, Spider-Man vs. Black Cat, Spider-Man vs. Punisher, Spider-Man vs. Kraven the Hunter. (Spider-Man vs. the Vulture! Spider-Man vs. the Terrible Tinkerer! And so on.) Part of what was deeply wrong with Spider-Man 3, I think, was that the bizarre physical properties of Sandman hadn't been earned—it turned the franchise into (yes) a cartoon. An all-human ensemble would immediately restore suspension-of-disbelief and thereby restore credibility. Cut the next few song-and-dance numbers and you're halfway there.

I'll give Raimi the Lizard because he's kind of been grandfathered in, but leave Hydro-Man and the Rhino at home this time around...

Your panorama of the day: every "Handbook of the Marvel Universe" side by side.

With just one day before this long presidential election is really, truly, and finally over, here's a collection of presidential pop culture from Again with the Comics.

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!

I'm still hoping to see Iron Man this weekend, but it looks as though Spencer Ackerman has already nailed all there is to say about it:

The second way Marvel subtly readjusted Iron Man for America's post-Vietnam sensibilities was to reveal that the reason Stark could control neither his company nor his relationships was that he couldn't control himself. Stark's booze-soaked, womanizing lifestyle was cleverly reinterpreted as rampant alcoholism and self-loathing. His drive to save the world was nothing more than a martyr complex born of a callow solipsism. It was a brilliant maneuver by the writers. Iron Man began to ask America: Would you trust such unfettered, unaccountable power to someone this messed up? The introduction of War Machine took the critique a step further, showing that the very act of donning the armor makes you messed up. Some exercises of power are too dangerous to be left in the hands of one man. The writers never turned Iron Man into a villain -- that would have been the easy way out. Instead they presented a fascinating character study, a compelling Cold War critique, a subtle plea for liberal internationalism, and a defense of a series of theses presented to the world in America's founding documents. It helps that Iron Man also blows stuff up.

Other recent updates to the Stark/Iron Man story have jettisoned the Cold War element but deepened the dynamic established in the 1970s. In Extremis, a reboot of the franchise during the current Bush era, Warren Ellis, one of the most talented comic-book writers currently working, has Stark unable to answer the question "What is the Iron Man armor for, Tony?" A left-wing filmmaker, dismissive of Stark's protestations that he's more than a weapons merchant, asks, "Do you think they have your painkilling drug pumps in Iraq? Do you think an Afghan kid with his arms blown off by a landmine is remotely impressed by an Iron Man suit?" Tony Stark is meant to be read as a tragic figure. He is one of the smartest men alive, yet he cannot think his way out of the traps his genius constructs for him. And so he blunders, again and again, into a hell of unintended consequences.