So we're gonna nail him on comics, then.

Far be it for me to quote the Onion (I'm sure enough of your friends do this for you) but how could I let Tuesday's story about our new President go unmentioned?

Read "Obama Disappointed Cabinet Failed to Understand His Reference to 'Savage Sword of Conan' #24".

And allow me to give you the accompanying priceless graphic:

Best picture ever? Perhaps.

I have read and heard a lot lately about how comedians are scrambling to get something to mock Obama for. A few folks (Jamie Fox and SNL's Fred Armisen) have gotten laughs out of his strange speaking cadence, but other than that, what is there? SNL seems to have settled on, for now, making jokes that Obama is simply too cool. Until our new President makes a serious policy flub or reveals a somehow unseen nervous tic or something... there's not a ton to work with that's actually funny.

The Onion's present answer is to turn to comic books. And honestly I think that is pretty cool. If our humor regarding one of the most powerful men on the planet comes from insinuating that he knows obscure facts about a mid-70s Marvel fantasy comic and not that he, you know, ruined our country in a shockingly brash display of idiocy... maybe times are not so bad after all. Besides, it's attention for a medium I love. One might argue that it is negative, mocking attention, but I don't think so. After all, if comics are the source of Obama's mockery, we must think Obama is pretty okay... and he thinks comics are okay so... well I'm not very good at math, but I think if you use the transitive property or something it turns out that we're probably all okay with comics too.

I have to point out that I'm a little dismayed that Obama seems to be a clear-cut Marvel fan (the Onion even takes up this point). I truly wish I could sit down with our new President and discuss the neat subtleties of Geoff Johns and Phil Jiminez's Infinite Crisis. I do. But hey, I'll take the Spidey/Conan love in exchange for four to eight years of good leadership. I think that's an alright price to pay. Maybe one day Illinois Lt. Governor Pat Quinn and I can have a tete-a-tete about JLA, if he's not too busy. A guy can dream.

Happy Inauguration Day!

Here is an amusing thought about national security.

With pretty much every comics shop on the planet preoccupied and dealing with President Elect Barack Obama this week... just think about how much comic-related stuff Secret Service agents have been forced to wade through in the interest of security. Every blog post about the Obama variant, every comic-shop email that talks about Amazing Spider-Man #583... it's probably all being scrutinized at this very moment.

So, my friends in the Secret Service, I hope you enjoyed my first post on Marvel Comics' Obama variant cover to this week's issue of Amazing Spider-Man. And I trust you understand that when I said the Spider-Man meeting President Obama was a Skrull, I was joking. I further hope that you did not assume these "Skrulls" to be a threat to our great nation because, well, they're clearly not. They may pretend to have a master plan but really a 20-minute battle in Central Park plus a Norse God of thunder will make their best-laid plans crumble like so many George W. Bush attempts at logical argumentation. Also, please tell our new President that Norman Osborne should not, not, NOT be trusted under any circumstance. Yes, he is sauve and has cool hair, and he has nice suits and stuff. But seriously... I think he's up to something. I'm not saying anything about anything but you may want to ask a Peter Parker what he thinks about this. Or maybe ask Gwen Stacy... OH WAIT.

I trust the real Obama will do a better job than the Marvel one.

In comics, Obama being alive is like Superman being dead.

Or so it seems, as over the past few days the shop has been flooded (relatively speaking) with requests for next week's Amazing Spider-Man #583 featuring President Elect Obama fist-bumping the titular hero in a relatively poorly-drawn picture by Todd Nauck:

(Apparently Mr. Fantastic & co. didn't get rid of all the Skrulls...)

(Okay, obviously I'm just joking, but wouldn't it be funny if a plot point of this issue was that there is still a Spider-Man Skrull running around?).

And, I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, it's gonna be alright for business. It could have been AWESOME for business if we had anticipated just how popular this book would be... and talking with some other shop owners, they didn't do that either. I kind of feel like Marvel should have just overshipped a shit-load of these books, made them totally returnable, and said "trust us, these will sell out." It is a bit hypocritical to blame Marvel for making the same mistake that I made (namely, not knowing how popular this book would be), but on the other hand they've been in the business a lot longer than I. (Props to Marvel, though, for rushing out a second printing ONE WEEK later. That is slick.)

And gimmicky stuff like this, I dunno, it gets to me. Like, it is cool that Obama is president in the Marvel U and it is cool that that is driving people into comic shops (note: it is cooler, by a gagillion times, that Obama is president in the Real U). But few to none of these people will come back. And that is not anything to blame anyone about... it just makes me sad. So the point of this post, I guess, is to say I'm sad. Also I am apparently a 15-year-old high-schooler whose favorite band is From First to Last or something like that.

This could be good for comics, don't get me wrong. The Death of Superman was beneficial for a few years (and also was probably very, very bad in the long run, but who has time to think ahead in today's economy, am I right?!), and the Death of Captain America good for a few weeks. It just kind of breaks my heart a little when people rush into shops to get some milestone issue and don't ever come back. It's like, guys, comics have more value than that. There are great stories and artwork inside lots of them (potentially already inside Amazing Spider-Man, which I understand has been pretty solid lately). And the only way to really convince people of that is to sell them their gimmick book and do it with a good attitude and a smile on your face and hope they come back to read a little more. Of course situations like this make it hard to please customers because the product is obviously going to be scarce (I already ordered more second prints of this Spider-Man issue than I would normally order first prints of any other Spidey book). But the ones you do please... hopefully, they'll come back.

I guess having a guy in the White House who reads Spider-Man and Conan doesn't hurt.

(And can you imagine a Conan comic featuring Obama? Dark Horse, get on this).

In other comics-plus-black-people-in-major-media-outlets news, Newsarama's Matt Brady for some reason has an article about black Kryptonians over at MSNBC, which you can find here. And unlike all the Obama coverage, which just kind of grinds my gears a little bit in a stupid way, this article actually bothers me.

First of all, click that link and check out where it's placed within the MSNBC website. It is: the "Technology and Science" section. Um, what? Unless Krypton is a real planet and scientists have just discovered some new skin pigmentation on some of its residence, I don't see this as science or technology. The fact that the story probably most appeals to "science-fiction nerds" is, I'd wager, the reason it is under that heading.

And the text of this article... my lord. In case you couldn't tell, I am a pretty liberal guy. I balk at some folks' insistence that there is a "liberal media." And yet... this article would almost make me believe. Check out winning lines like "an America finally enlightened enough to elect a black man as President." I'm glad that Matt Brady of Newsarama is qualified to tell us that we are now enlightened. I am sure the millions of non-racist Americans of decades past can now breathe a sigh of relief at this inconsequential article's assertion that America is finally enlightened.

Sorry. This just pisses me off. First of all, it isn't news. Who cares that we can now glimpse black-skinned people on Krypton, besides Matt Brady and apparently someone at MSNBC? I mean, Krypton is an alien world. It's not like Kryptonians being black relates at all to real people being black. The color of any Kryptonian's skin should be fairly meaningless to us readers because we have no idea of the social, cultural, or political backgrounds that come along with it. Black Kryptonians might as well have been orange or magenta; it should change our interpretation of the story not at all.

Second, does no-one proofread these things? This article is really poorly-written and condescending. There are fragmented sentences and opinions expressed as facts. It would be fine for Newsarama, but MSNBC. Science and Technology?!

I guess in the end I just feel like, if comics are going to break in the mainstream news, it should be over something that matters. And sure, Barack Obama's appearance in does, to a degree, matter (black Kryptonians do not. And I think James Robinson and Geoff Johns might agree). But, for instance, no one came rushing to the shop when Oprah Winfrey picked Sara Varon's Robot Dreams for her Kids' Reading List last year (the first time she had ever recognized a graphic novel). This story, maybe the biggest achievement for comics in the mainstream in 2008 (besides potentially The Dark Knight/Watchmen) was not really covered by the news. In fact searching MSNBC's website for "Sara Varon" turns up nothing. "Black Kryptonians," though, gets a hit. I just feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with that.

In a weird bit of synchronicity, the Spider-Man issue in question is #583, while the Superman is #683. Anyone who wants to have some fun: figure out what major comic book will next hit issue #x83, and then conjecture how can a black person make a noteworthy apperance in that book.

Meanwhile, I will be dreading the hordes of callers who want their Obama book. Fortunately, they have only a week to wait, and they have the inauguration of our new President to hold them over.

Man, I am SO glad Obama won the presidency.

Now I won't feel silly for wearing this shirt for at least four more years.

FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS! ...... too soon?

... Actually, you know what... I was gonna leave this post as a joke but fuck it. I'm gonna be serious for a second.

The shirt above, while awesome, is also incredibly apt. Artist Alex Ross knew exactly what he was doing when he cast Barack Obama in a (the?) classic Superman pose. See, to people like me and Alex Ross Superman stands for one thing above all else--hope (don't believe me? Read his Kingdom Come). And following Obama's campaign and watching his amazing acceptance speech just now, it is incredibly clear that above all else this is what Barack Obama stands for too--hope that we can elevate ourselves out of our economic and social drudgery and move ourselves ever closer to the perfect America we all feel we can be. There is one key difference between Superman and Obama, of course--while Superman can only inspire change, Obama can actually affect it as well. He kid about it in his campaign but I kind of feel like it's true--it seems that we have a version of Kal-El as our president for at least the next four years.

On an interesting related note, at the end of the Obama rally in Chicago's Grant Park, after the President-Elect and his VP's families came out to greet the crowd, I heard a familiar song coming over the TV through the park's PA system. It was "The Rising" by Bruce Springsteen, off The Boss' post-9/11 album of the same name. If you read my blog regularly or know me, you'll know that Springsteen is one of my favorite musical artists. I never really made the connection before but, just like Superman and just like Barack Obama, what Springsteen seems to care about most is hope. Sure many of his songs are full of tragic characters and situations, but anyone really familiar with his body of work will know that almost every one of his songs is about getting out, getting away from that tragedy... rising above it, if you will. My very politically active friend Craig (who actually worked on Obama's state senate campaign at the beginning of his career) told me that his favorite Springsteen lines are from the song "Badlands" (my favorite Bruce song, FYI) and it's this bridge:

For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside
That it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive
I wanna find one face that ain't lookin' through me
I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands

I think what we have done tonight, America, is elect the man who is going to do that (metaphorical) spitting. We'll come on up for the rising, we'll save the world from threats both at home and abroad. We've elected the spirits of Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen of Long Branch, New Jersey, and of Clark Kent of Krypton and Smallville, Kansas. We've elected Barack Obama, and at least for one night the nation's got an injection of hope that it so desperately needs. I can't wait to see where we go from here.