Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I don’t know if the 80s really were a sort of Golden Age of syndicated comics, or if I’m just remembering the highlights better than the lowlights. But there were some genuinely great strips back then, many of whom made the rare decision to exit the field before they got stale and stagnant. We got ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, ‘Bloom County’, ‘This Modern World’, ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’, we got ‘Dilbert’ (hey, they didn’t all get out before going stale and stagnant…)

And we got ‘The Far Side’.

The wonder and beauty of ‘The Far Side’ is that even though it ended almost twenty years ago, in a way it’s still with us today. Because that was what made it so great; Gary Larson wasn’t just a talented writer and a gifted artist, he had a sensibility that changed the way you look at the world. And that change has been passed on ever since, a meme that has continued to spawn and mutate even though the strip is long gone from the funny pages. Gary Larson didn’t just make perfect, hilariously funny single panel comics day in and day out, he made the world seem like a strange and unusual place. Nobody who’s ever seen a ‘Far Side’ strip can quite think of human history the same way after seeing a picture of two cavemen staring at a dead mastodon, a spear impaled in its side, and saying, “Ooh. We should write that spot down.” (And it’s all part of the peculiar alchemy of his words and his art that the people who’ve never read that strip are saying, “What’s so funny about that?” while the people familiar with it are smiling all over again.)

Larson’s work was an inspiration to a generation of comedians, who went on to found single-panel “quirky” gag strips like ‘Close to Home’, ‘Bizarro’, ‘Ballard Street’, ‘The 5th Wave’, ‘Rhymes With Orange’, ‘In the Bleachers’…good strips in their own right, all clearly bearing the unmistakable stamp of their ancestry. They all work in a world where the strange and unusual is commonplace, where people are slightly eccentric in entertaining ways, and where animals behave like (slightly eccentric) people. They write what they know, and what they know is the world Gary Larson showed them. And even better, Larson’s interest in science, combined with his way of writing about it in an entertaining and humorous way (an amoeba husband hectored by his wife: “Stimulus, response, stimulus, response–don’t you ever THINK?”) inspired a generation of young people to take an interest in anthropology, astrophysics, biology, paleontology (the classic cartoon, featuring a bunch of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes with the caption “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs”) and a host of other fields. ‘The Far Side’ was witty, literate, twisted, and indescribably funny. Every day since Gary Larson brought it into the world is a slightly more amusing, slightly more amazing day. Whether it’s pushing on a door marked ‘PULL’ (“School for the Gifted”) or trying to train your dog and imagining it hearing, “blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah GINGER”, we’re all of us touched a little bit by Larson’s extraordinary perspective on the world.

Now, may I please be excused? My brain is full.

(This is apparently not the only such instance; Mark Waid noted in response to Conway that he did not get a creator credit for Impulse on Young Justice.)

It’s really simple: this is completely indefensible. Completely. It’s all the more shameful when you consider that DC, following their granting of a pension to Siegel and Shuster, was the comics company that trumpeted their creators front-and-center and pioneered the practice of putting creators’ names on the cover. I strongly suspect Man of Steel (which I really want to see) will be the last DC-themed anything I purchase for quite some time, and I already know I’m going to have to counterbalance it with an equal donation to the CBLDF or something just to keep from feeling guilty.

For those of you interested, we now have a “Characters” page for Al’Rashad which has… a lot of information for you! Maybe you will find it interesting. Maybe you will not.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Somewhere in between Hawkman framing a petty criminal for being a space alien murderer and J’onn J’onzz threatening to lobotomize an entire building, you come to realize that all DC superhero comics are now shit and not worth your time for the foreseeable future.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

(hat tip to Jaime Weinman for this one)

So a few years ago I pointed out that Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe was a terrible and stupid idea, and that if you are going to have a DC fighting game, then it should be a game where the characters are all super-strong and punch each other through buildings and where everything explodes when you throw it at people, and it appears that DC paid attention and then, because we are talking about DC Comics here, did it, but went and fucked the bag.

Because come on. A game where you have Harley Quinn and the Joker fighting Superman is a stupid game. A game where Batman, who is not even in Bat-Hyper-Power-Armor, can punch Doomsday through a building is a stupid game. A game where DC heroes are trying to murder the other guys (seriously, look at Superman and his heat vision and tell me he is not in killing-psycho-mode) is a stupid game. Basically, DC should have run the hell away from the Mortal Kombat people, but instead decided that what they really needed to do was embrace the terrible Mortal Kombat people and not incidentally run with all of the worst design ideas invented in Arkham City (“hey, let’s take Arkham Asylum and, you know, basically make it worse in every possible way”), except even more than that. As I have said before: as a general rule, DC Comics and good video games go together like Santa Claus and conquering the Martians.

(Man, imagine how much more pissed I might be if I still bothered to read DC comic books. Which I don’t. I don’t even bother pirating them, because DC comics are so unreadable these days that they are not worth “free.”)

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Click on thumb to see full

As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

I’m in court tomorrow morning (it is my job, after all) and that combined with a couple other things means Al’Rashad won’t get published Monday morning as per usual. We will get it up as soon as possible! (I think this is only the second time we’ve been late, which is not bad for a comic that has been going for… holy shit, over two and a half years? Man, the time gets away from you, don’t it.

Way back at the beginning of my time on this site, I waxed rhapsodic about ‘The Elongated Man’, but I think it’s been long enough that it’s worth repeating: The old ‘Elongated Man’ backup strips in the Silver Age ‘Flash’ comic, which have been collected in DC’s ‘Showcase Presents’ series of big black-and-white trade paperbacks, is absolutely brilliant.

For those of you unfamiliar with the “classic” version of the character, The Elongated Man was a contortionist who discovered a secret plant extract called “gingold” that amplified his natural abilities to Plastic Man-level powers, and proceeded to become a super-hero. At first it seemed like his primary goal was to show off how much better he was than Barry Allen, but after a few stories, he settled into a nice guy, revealed his secret identity (which, since this was the Silver Age, did not result in his gruesome death at the hands of a well-organized band of ruthless supervillains) and married Sue Dearbon, a rich heiress. The two of them settled into a regular back-up feature in which they traveled the world, bumping into strange and unusual mysteries that they solved a la Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, or Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.

The mysteries are not “fair play” mysteries, but they are clever and they always have inventive hooks. One story, for example, opens with them going to a sold-out play…only to find out that they’re the only people in the audience, and yet the sound of laughter and applause rings through the room and the actors play as though to a whole crowd. (The solution to that one involves an eccentric billionaire, but I won’t divulge more.) Ralph and Sue are both clever and charming, and clearly in love, and they use their wits together to solve the mystery and find the culprits.

At which point a fistfight usually ensues, because this is a superhero comic, and it’s here that you understand why Carmine Infantino is such an amazing and legendary artist. His solid draftsmanship makes every scene look good, but his pencils in the fight sequences really make you understand how a character with super-stretching powers can be less of a cerebral thinker or a whacky comic-relief character and more of a bad-ass one-man whirlwind of flying fists and feet. Ralph uses his stretching abilities to launch villains into walls, punches six guys at once, or twists like an unwinding rubber band to literally hit everyone in the room at once. I never thought of Ralph Dibny as a tough guy, but after reading this I’m seriously convinced hat he could take Batman in a fight.

Every story is charming, funny, and casual-reader friendly. Each mystery is fun to read, and while it’s not a “fair play” mystery (one in which you could reasonably deduce the ending from the clues provided by the author), it isn’t one that out-and-out cheats, either. The collection is 500 pages of pure fun, and now that all of the mistakes that made the character unworkable post ‘Identity Crisis’ have been undone by the reboot, DC could do worse than revisit the character…assuming they did so in the same spirit as the original, of course. Which, in the interests of staying positive as I always try to do for these entries, I will not discuss here.

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