There’s not a novel called PROJECT: WILD CARD, it’s a shard-universe anthology series, Wild Cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards

No, there is a novel called PROJECT: WILD CARD, or OPERATION: WILD CARD, or just WILD CARD. I can never remember the name of the two authors, and it never shows up on most Google searches without those names. Making it even worse, I actually own a copy of it… somewhere… but my personal library is very extensive, and if I can’t remember the names of authors, it doesn’t help me track something down. ::banging head against table::

Anyway — the novel itself is set in a future where the United States is being torn apart by different violent ethnic and extremist factions, so the President initiates a top secret project to fake an alien invasion “to unite the nation”. He tells all the scientists involved that he only wants the ‘aliens’ to use a biological weapon that will make people sick for a while, but then has one particular scientist make the weapon lethal, for maximum psychological impact. Once the project is finished, he puts everyone involved on board a plane and then has the plane shot down over the Gulf of Mexico. The book ends with a minor government functionary about to decide between opening a message that will tell him everything about Wild Card… or throwing it out unopened.

So, yes, there is a shared universe edited by George R.R. Martin called WILD CARD, but that’s not the WILD CARD I’m talking about.

Wait, goddamit, I found the fucker. It’s just WILD CARD, by Raymond Hawkey and Roger Bingham, published in hardcover by Stein and Day, New York, 1974. Library of Congress catalog card no. 73-91858.

There, goddamit.

Kip W said,

Somewhere in the 60s, there is a back-up feature in Superboy comics where Krypto (on two or three occasions) runs into a sort of legion of super canines, whose exact group name I seem to have forgotten. They walk on their hind legs (two legs better!) and have names like Hot Dog, Tusky Husky, and Paw Pooch. Talk about having to be drunk to write! In one blazingly memorable panel, a dog who can show the future in his giant crystal ball head is showing Krypto that Superboy is pinned under a glowing green meteor, one of billions of chunks of Krypton that follow the last son of Krypton wherever he goes. “Yip! Yip!” says Krypto, perceptively, “My master is in danger!”

I actually own a beat up reader’s copy of one of those issues — Superboy #131. The story is “The Dog from S.P.C.A” — S.P.C.A. standing for “Space Canine Patrol Agents”, a group of super powered dogs consisting of worthies like Tusky Husky, Chameleon Collie, Paw Pooch, Tail Terrier, Hot Dog, and Bull Dog. Also Massive Mutt, but he died at the start of the story. Alas, no crystal ball headed dog, but he must have showed up in some later S.P.C.A. back up story (it boggles my mind that a concept like Space Canine Patrol Agents proved popular enough for sequelization, but the Silver Age was a different time than this).

Jesus fucking Christ, I am either too geeky to live, or I am some sort of obscure but powerful geek deity. Worship me!!!!

Leonard Pierce: The other two things that Lileks knows, by the way, is that hippies spoiled everything, and that some day terrorists will nuke Seattle.

Lileks probably once read Heinlein’s Friday, whose title character says “My records (or one set) show that I was ‘born’ in Seattle, a destroyed city being a swell place for missing records.” Being Lileks, he couldn’t tell the difference between science fiction and reality.

Lilleks uses as his conservative archetype a man who was personally a liberal, and who has, as his two most recognizable characters, an anti-Fascist/anti-Nazi activist (who was getting the hell out of Paris because the Nazis had him on a list of targets when the whole thing with Ilsa and his bad, rainy day at the train station happened) and a private detective created by a guy who was dragged in front of the HUAC and roundly denounced by Jimmy’s intellectual ancestors, such as they were.

Yeah, that’s quite a typical start for another spellbinging trip to his Daliesque interior world.

Hey, did James Dean hate frozen pizza, too?

Also, Hammett himself was the kind of commie that Lileks would have rushed to denounce. And Chandler was a one-time Bloomsbury poet who sometimes had to be drunk to write. (Mind you, they’re close to the top of my personal hit parade. Chandler was the Debussy of the pulps, Hammett was the Ravel.)

Somewhere in the 60s, there is a back-up feature in Superboy comics where Krypto (on two or three occasions) runs into a sort of legion of super canines, whose exact group name I seem to have forgotten. They walk on their hind legs (two legs better!) and have names like Hot Dog, Tusky Husky, and Paw Pooch. Talk about having to be drunk to write! In one blazingly memorable panel, a dog who can show the future in his giant crystal ball head is showing Krypto that Superboy is pinned under a glowing green meteor, one of billions of chunks of Krypton that follow the last son of Krypton wherever he goes. “Yip! Yip!” says Krypto, perceptively, “My master is in danger!”

I finally realize why that photo of Lileks looks so familiar. It reminds me of the dog with the giant crystal ball head. Yip! Yip!

There’s not a novel called PROJECT: WILD CARD, it’s a shard-universe anthology series, Wild Cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards

I think Moore and Campbell’s FROM HELL is Moore’s best so far, a real masterpiece (with more footnotes than INFINITE JEST).

It’s nice to see so many shoutouts for IN A DARK PLACE. But though there’s a powerful moral ambiguity in it, it’s still somewhat Hollywoodized, as the Bogart character would really be a murderer, if they had followed the source novel more closely.

Guns. Psshhh.

What they needed was Alice! [Swoons, mops forehead, goes outside for air]

mikey

This is not what deconstruction is.

Seriously, if River were alive today, we’d be seeing an amazing career. Joaquin wouldn’t have a job and Leonardo would have some serious competition.

That’s probably because he was (a) a vulnerable, and (b) purty. Combine the two and you’ve got a guaranteed wingnut enemy. Think about it: Dean was the sort of guy who got women’s panties, well, not exactly in a wad. That hurtin’ bad boy that made every woman want to cuddle him and make it right (along with a bit of screaming sex).

And I think that makes so many wingnuts mad because you can’t do that vulnerable thing unless you’re purty: if you’re butt ugly, it just makes you a complete nerd who gets his head flushed down the toilet every day.

That’s why they idolise manly men: you can be ugly as a hatful of arseholes and still be a tough guy, and therefore still be sexy (to anyone who fancies a man with no brain). They’re not cute and they’re not funny, so pretending that they’re tough, imagining women swooning and clinging to their biceps (the wingnut’s biceps, not the women’s) is their only chance of engendering uncontrollable lust.

Well, that and teh ghey.

Comic coda: Sandman totally rocks. Other than that, I fancy Japanese anime: there’s a great series called Saiyuki that’s based on a manga (comic) that’s a version of the Journey To The West (the Monkey saga). The original manga is written and drawn by a great artist who’s also a woman (and not just in her spare time), which means there’s a lot of interesting byplay between the characters. Which in its turn means that it provides a fertile field for yaoi stuff.

I’m sorry, I think my brain just ran out of my ears. Fulsome apologies. I’ll return as soon as the problem has been rectified.

“Take that, you Charlton fans! I’ve turned the Question into a dirty, practically homeless paranoid redhead! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”

Couple of things here. ‘Deconstruction’ refers to much more than simply ‘humanizing’ a larger than life hero. It is the process of taking a particular mythology, as a whole, and breaking it down into pieces, and then examining those pieces, turning them to different angles, and, generally, rebuilding the myth in an entirely different context.

Moore has pretty much pioneered the technique in superhero comics; his MARVEL/MIRACLEMAN was the text book case of ‘deconstruction’ as applied to these grand fantasies that often had little or nothing to do with actual mundane day to day existence.

Now, my reference to Moore’s motivations in writing WATCHMEN as being little more than a sadistic urge to aggravate fans of the original Charlton heroes was meant to be an amusing aside. I think there’s some element of truth to it — I think Moore gets a very real joy from knocking the pedestals out from under his childhood heroes, and what that says about him is for someone more qualified to go into — but I also think that Moore’s main motive in his deconstructions is often positive, as he’s trying to salvage characters and story elements that he may have loved as a child, and that will no longer work to his adult sensibilities. I believe that’s what he was doing in stories like MARVELMAN, and in “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow”, among others.

But it’s important to understand that, as regards WATCHMEN, Moore wrote his precis specifically for those Charlton characters, once DC got the rights to them. DC loved the idea, but didn’t want to so finally dispose of the properties they’d gone to so much trouble to acquire, so they asked Moore to transform the characters somewhat. This is what led to Blue Beetle becoming Nite Owl, Captain Atom becoming Dr. Manhattan, the Question becoming Rorschach, Peacemaker turning into the Comedian, Nightshade becoming Silk Spectre, and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, transforming into Ozymandias. Moore doesn’t always ‘deconstruct’ with an eye towards eventually rebuilding. Sometimes, as with WATCHMEN, or as with the JLA stand ins in TOP 10, or as especially with his never produced TWILIGHT prospectus, he is simply indulging in a childish desire to tear something down.

My conclusions as to WATCHMEN being a profoundly flawed work do not arise from any attachment to the original Charlton characters (although it’s important to note that these characters were childhood favorite’s of AM’s himself, and he doubtless got a pretty big personal thrill out of knocking them all into the dirt, much the same as Rick Veitch did smearing slime all over the Teen Titans in BRAT PACK). They mostly come from the fact that in a few crucial places, the central story arcs make no sense. Most importantly, by 1977, there are only three independent superheroes still publicly active in the WATCHMEN world — Rorschach, Nite Owl II, and the semi retired Silk Spectre II — it is simply ludicrous to think that the police would go on a nationwide strike because of these three costumed vigilantes, none of whom even have superpowers. Without the national police strikes and the subsequent national uprisings against superheroes, there would be no Federal Keene Act outlawing superheroes, and without the Keene Act, WATCHMEN has no central conflict.

Beyond that, WATCHMEN’s underlying Ozymandias plotline is lifted wholesale from an obscure SF novel named PROJECT: WILD CARD. But never mind that, Moore steals a lot of his material from other places. He generally improves on the source, so I’ve learned to let that go.

I’m also highly suspicious of your analogy between the child sex ring JLA in Top Ten and the dystopian Charlton characters in Watchmen. You seem to be saying the latter didn’t work because they were too close to the original characters and you just couldn’t stand seeing Nightshade have an affair with Blue Beetle, Captain Atom killing the Question, whoever the hell Comedian is supposed to be thrown out a window and whoever the hell Ozymandias is supposed to be as some sort of Machiavellian Ubermensch who kills a bunch of people to make Captain Atom leave Earth and save the world.

No. Again, that was simply an aside. I couldn’t care less about the original Charlton characters. My point was, Moore cared about them a great deal, and he gets a significant kick out of ‘re-imagining’ characters he enjoyed in his youth. Sometimes he does this in a positive way, other times he’s just wrecking shit for the fun of wrecking shit.

I can get that The Watchmen didn’t do a whole lot for you, but your critique sounds really forced, as if you can’t just accept that people saw something you didn’t, so you have to find something, ANYTHING to say as criticism, whether it makes any sense or not.

WATCHMEN is an extremely significant work in the superhero comics genre, and much of it is brilliantly written. That I am capable of seeing its flaws as well as its qualities doesn’t make me wrong or foolish, although, certainly, it seems to make me unique among WATCHMEN readers and Alan Moore fans. However, for the record, I own WATCHMEN and enjoy reading it very much. It’s just nothing even remotely like the sacred perfect immaculate holy writing that the remainder of its fans insist on viewing it as.

I work with a lady who doesn’t like the Impressionists and Modern painting, she doesn’t like poetry, and she just can’t accept that its nothing more than a personal taste issue. She all too frequently bags on what an awful painter Picasso is, or goes off on how stupid poetry is. It’s quite tiresome. And she just basically looks kinda foolish in the office, and she has no idea she looks so foolish. (She also thinks the Narnia books and Alice in Wonderland were written by the same person.)

You seem to be drawing parallels between this person and myself. If so, I would like to quietly suggest these comparisons are unfounded.

If only they’d had guns, it would’ve been fine! That’s how it always turns out in American zombie flicks, after all.