T-shirt #30: Kid Flash: Where's Wally?

T-shirt #30: KID FLASH - The meaning of yellow - is it spring yet?

I had intended for today's blog to be dedicated to Superman in commemoration of his 75th birthday.

And then I woke up to snow on the ground.

Let me repeat that statement with emphasis in case you missed it: SNOW ON THE GROUND.

It's April 20th, by the way. Ten years ago, I was in East Lansing on April 20th playing Ultimate, and it was 90 Degrees. Not this year.

So, I have this funny thing with yellow.

For me, yellow means spring.

Maybe it's an Easter thing. Maybe it looks like sunshine. I don't know which is the core reason.

For some time, I only owned one yellow shirt (this one) as I tend to gravitate more to darker colors.

And in the spring, I wear the yellow shirt.

This one's for Kid Flash, though more in line with the cartoon animation versions of Kid Flash than the original comic book versions as seen in the images at the bottom of the entry. Kid Flash started out as Wally West, who took over as the Flash when Barry Allen died in 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths. West started as Kid Flash in 1959 as the nephew of Barry Allen's wife Iris West. The same freak accident that gave Barry his powers happened a second time granting powers to Wally West. After all, each hero needed a sidekick to fill out the roster of the original Teen Titans (along with Aqualad, Speedy, Wonder Girl, and Robin).

Though the death of Barry Allen as the Flash was a major comic event, the "death" of Wally West is a non-event. When DC rebooted its characters and their origins for the New 52, Barry Allen was no longer married to Iris West, and thus, Wally West did not existence (apparently). Currently,  Bart Allen -- Barry Allen's grandson from the future -- serves on the Teen Titans as Kid Flash.

Where's Wally? The fan community has managed to extract some answers about Wally West. Though the official DC line is that West is "benched," current Flash creators Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato claim to have submitted a proposal to deal with the character of Wally West. This is good news to a huge Kid Flash and Teen Titans fan like me.

I may have mentioned my love for the Teen Titans, and if I have not done so yet, I just did.
More Titans shirts to come.

And more of the yellow shirts here in the spring. I own more than one now.

- chris tower, hoping for a real spring and some sunshine, 1304.20





PS: Today's blog is dedicated to my sister and her husband and their 11th wedding anniversary. My sister always liked the Teen Titans. And she's more of a fan of yellow.

T-shirt #29: Detroit Pistons - the red logo shirt

T-shirt #29: Detroit Pistons - Here's some basketball love

The NBA regular season ended on Wednesday (April 17), and my beloved Pistons did not advance to the post-season, a fate decided months ago, even before the team's abysmal ten game losing streak in March. The Pistons posted one of the franchise's worst records for a month with one lone win in March (against the NBA's worst team, the Charlotte Bobcats), going 1-13.

Though the Pistons showed some spark in April, posting a record of 5-3 with a four game win streak and an impressive victory against playoff-bound Chicago, a 29-53 record on the season left the team in 11th place (out of 15 teams) in the Eastern Conference, 37 games out of first place in the conference, 20.5 games behind Indiana in the Central Division, and nine games behind the eighth playoff spot that went to the Milwaukee Bucks, who managed to secure it with a losing record.

Did this stop my fan love?

Are you kidding?

Given that I work at home, and am no longer a night owl, I record a lot of sporting events to watch while I am working. Though I did delete a lot of the losses, I did not delete all of them. I cannot claim to have watched even half of the 82 regular season games, but I did watch many, enjoying wins against Miami and San Antonio as well as some of the losses because of the play of  the new, exciting, young Pistons, the core of the future team. Though Brandon Knight, Andre Drummond, and Greg Monroe are not winning like the championship teams of the past, I am a Pistons fan, so I tune in, I watch, I wear my T-shirts, and from November through April 17th, I record the wins and losses on my score sheet, read the recaps, studied the box scores, and cheer for just one more bucket, one more rebound, one more win.

My love for basketball goes back far into my childhood but the love for the Pistons was more abstract since most the games were not televised locally. We would talk about the Pistons, but it's not the same if one can't watch it. My dad loves basketball, so we watched a lot of it as I was growing up, but he tuned in to Michigan Wolverines basketball more often, especially since the Pistons games were not carried as much outside of Detroit stations.

I discovered my basketball love in college, watching the Celtics and Knicks square off, watching Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Patrick Ewing, and Kareem Abdul Jabar go head to head. Though I could catch more Pistons games at college because I had access to cable TV, my fandom really rocketed into orbit during the Bad Boy era. I graduated from college right about the same time as the Detroit Pistons selected my favorite all time basketball player as the 18th pick in the 1985 draft: Joe Dumars. Paired with the hot, new point guard, Isiah Thomas, the Bad Boys team began to take shape. I was hooked. There were heart breaking losses, especially the 1988 finals in which the Pistons blew a 3-2 series lead to lose to the Lakers in Game Seven. I kept watching, and I was rewarded (as all of us fans were rewarded).

Then came 1989 and 1990. Back-to-back championships. THE BAD BOYS. It all looked great until Michael Jordan learned to play team basketball. Despite drafting NBA poster boy Grant Hill, the Pistons did not win anymore championships for FOURTEEN years. With Joe Dumars now at the helm of team operations, the Pistons made smart trades (Rip Hamilton), free agent signings (Chauncey Billups), and draft picks (Tayshaun Prince), and the new era Pistons won the NBA championship in 2004 against the Lakers. If not for Larry Brown (whom I blame for sitting starters in the fourth quarter), the Pistons would have won again in 2005 against the San Antonio Spurs in a decisive game seven.

The Pistons have not been back to the NBA Finals since 2005.

But I watch. I cheer. I bleed the Pistons blue.

-chris tower 1304.19 - 11:55

T-shirt #28: Batgirl (spoiler alerts)

T-shirt #28: Batgirl: Television, paralysis, and transgender

I dedicate today's entry to Batgirl, even though I am told that today is Superman's 75th birthday. But The Man of Steel will have to wait until I can find my Superman shirt. The T-shirt blog is starting to have a back-logged schedule.

This blog (the entire blog, not just today's entry) traces my life in popular culture: my life in geek. No such tracing could be complete without properly canonizing in a central position the influence of the Batman television show that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1968. And no discussion of how the Batman show influenced me could be complete without acknowledging Catwoman (we will deal with her a different day) and BATGIRL. (Also, always consult the super awesome DC Wiki.)

Batgirl serves as an example of how television produced media influence the comic books and how comic books depictions of heroes or the nature of the actual heroes (identity, personality, character) themselves will be altered to match (at least somewhat) television or film interpretations. Barbara Gordon as Batgirl was the brainchild of comics genius Julius Schwartz (previously mentioned in T-shirt #20, the Flash Logo) and the producers of the TV series in an attempt to boost ratings. By introducing Batgirl to the current comic books, the TV producers hoped to boost ratings by then introducing her to the TV show. PURIST ALERT!

Betty Kane? Yeah, okay, okay, I know. Comic book purists will cite that there was already a Batgirl character, Betty Kane, introduced by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff in 1961 (before I was born), not counting Bob Kane's pesky girl version of Robin in the 1950s. But that was a one shot, and the real, true creation of the beloved Batgirl character came with this plan to boost ratings for the TV show, and the amazing Barbara Gordon.

In 1967, Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino (also mentioned in the previous T-shirt #20, the Flash Logo entry) featured the new Batgirl in Detective Comics #359. In the story, Barbara Gordon, the daughter of police commissioner Jim Gordon, dresses as a female version of Batman for a costume ball. Inevitably, Batgirl comes to the aid of Bruce Wayne, saving him from being kidnapped by Killer Moth. The TV show producers made a short featuring the same basic story and ABC renewed the TV show for a third season, its last. Yvonne Craig played Batgirl in the TV show. Though Craig showed up in many TV shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such as Star Trek , she is best known for this role (with a dear place in my heart and the hearts of many Batman TV show fans). The TV show informed my ideas about justice, fair play, and heroism (though also a campy sense of fun) as a very young boy (ages 4-6) and the reruns that followed for a few years. With only two female roles on the show (not counting Aunt Harriet), both Batgirl and Catwoman influenced my ideas about women. Don't worry. I am not going to engage in any deep psycho-analysis here today. I will leave off with that last statement.

From those early days of the TV show, Batgirl became one of my favorite comic book characters along with her main ally: the original Robin (Dick Grayson). My life as a huge Teen Titans fan (even though Batgirl was never one of the Teen Tiatns) and fan of Robin and Batgirl will wait for another day as well. Suffice to say that I read apearances of Batgirl avidly until 1988 and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke. My world as a comic book reader and Batgirl fan was rocked when the Joker shot Barbara Gordon, quite unaware that he was also shooting Batgirl. The bullet to her spinal cord paralyzed her. (SIDENOTE: Criticism of this story and others in comics became known as "Women in Refrigerators," for which there many great web sources, though I cannot find my favorite from the iconic BITCH MAGAZINE.) Though other characters assumed the mantle of Batgirl in the intervening years, I remained a staunchly loyal fan of Barbara Gordon, who became Oracle and leader of the Birds of Prey from her wheelchair.

For many years, this new role of Barbara Gordon's seemed permanent, much like the death of Barry Allen as the Flash. But the comic book companies will do most anything to increase sales, and I can appreciate that fact of the industry. Though purists might cry foul at Barbara Gordon's miraculous recovery and resuming of the Batgirl mantle for DC's latest reboot 52, I was rather excited to have Barbara Gordon back in the cowl and new stories about one of my favorite comic book characters.

SPOILER ALERT FOR THE CURRENT BATGIRL COMIC (Batgirl #19).


















Though I had not read the issue yet, my wife told me the other day that Batgirl's roommate was going to come out as the first transgender woman in the history of comic books. DC is definitely breaking more ground in regards to LGBTQ issues with new gay characters, such as the original Green Lantern, Alan Scott, in Earth Two; various characters in Legion of Superheroes, whom fans have always argued were gay, such as Lightning Lass, Shrinking Violet, and Element Lad; and Batwoman. Now, Batgirl's roommate Alysia Yeoh reveals that she is trans. Writer Gail Simons handles the scene deftly as Barbara Gordon tells her roommate to call her "Babs" because "people I love call me 'Babs.'" Good articles about it have appeared on Art Threat and The Hufflington Post.



The new issues of Batgirl (through #19 as of last week) have been worth the twenty-four year wait to have Barbara Gordon back in the cowl.

GO BATGIRL!

- chris tower - 1304.18 - 9:54
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

T-shirt #27: The Iron Fist: would you like to live in a hidden city?

T-shirt #27: The Iron Fist: would you like to live in a hidden city?

The Iron Fist debuted in Marvel Premiere in 1974 as the creation of two of my favorite comic creators: Roy Thomas (Avengers, Conan as already mentioned in T-shirt # 21) and Gil Kane, one of my top five all-time favorite comic artists, a list including George Perez, Alex Ross, Jack Kirby, and John Romita. Cashing in on a martial arts craze sweeping the nation in the Seventies, Marvel introduced Kung Fu heroes, including Iron Fist and Shang-Chi. Though Shang-Chi is also one of my favorite characters, the Iron Fist was infinitely cooler with a dragon tattoo on his chest, a bright costume with the flared collar, and his namesake, the power to generate the first of iron, which smoldered like molten metal.

From the age of nine, the Iron Fist, Daniel Rand, grew up in a hidden city in the mountains of Tibet known as K'un-L'un. The city only appears on earth every ten years. Daniel learns martial arts there after both of his parents were killed during a journey to the mystical city.

The idea of a hidden city is one of the great archetypes in mythology. It was a very attractive idea to a young boy who was bullied every day in school. Not only was it a great escape from the abuse of bullies, but it was a place to learn to defend one's self against the bullies.

Apparently, I am not the only one who sought refuge from bullies in comics. In the latest issue of Wolverine (it's latest incarnation issue #2, writer Paul Cornell states that "the Claremont/Smith run of X-MEN was all that made me able to face school the next day [as a severely bullied child]." Though Wolverine and the X-Men are not the same as the Iron Fist (and those issues Cornell cites were published in the early 1980s ten years after the Iron Fist issues), the concept is the same: comics provide a means to escape the bullies.

The Iron Fist has seen many incarnations since his origins in the early 1970s. Iron Fist teamed with Power Man (Luke Cage) for many years as Heroes for Hire. But some of the best work has been done recently in Iron Fist vol. 4 in 2004 by Jim Mullaney (famous action writer on the DESTROYER series) and drawn by Kevin Lau. Though that series was good, the real definitive recent work was done by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja on The Immortal Iron Fist starting in 2007. This series was superb.

More 1970s nostalgia to come, because that's obviously a seminal period for me, but for now, I am thinking of that hidden city, nestled in the mountains of Tibet that only appears on earth once every ten years. At times like this with bombings and wars and militarism and poor economies, it sounds like a great place to go.

-chris tower 1304.17
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

PS: This T-shirt was a gift from my parents for my birthday in 2012.

T-shirt #26: Science is the new rock 'n roll

T-shirt #26: Science is the new rock 'n roll

Did anyone else go through a period of insanity during adolescence or was it just me?

Puberty seemed to obliterate parts of my personality like a disintegrating ray. I forgot about so many things I loved during my adolescence, like Baseball, Mad magazine, the piano, comic books (really! to some extent), and SCIENCE.

I love science. I really do.

I wish I had studied science in college. Right now, I would love to be a doctor of cognitive science or theoretical physics. But for some reason I chose English (creative writing) and Theatre.

I know I fancied becoming a filmmaker, and since my school did not offer film studies, I studied theatre with an emphasis in film.

Had someone clocked me hard upside the head to get my attention and rattle my brains, urging me
to choose something more practical and more fitting with my interests before puberty blasted a cloud of nonsense into my mind, I might now be working on intersections of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology at Google Labs.

So there's some regret. But not too much. Because what's the point of regret. Too much regret and one wallows in the past, stuck in the tar pit of the paleolithic. This is not for me.

I saw an interview once with Bruce Springsteen in which he said something that had a profound impact on me. I do not remember the exact quote, but in essence, he said: "I spent my whole life waiting to become the man I wanted to be, to live the life I wanted to have, until I realized that I needed to live the life I had, be the man I was."

Simple idea, and yet, I had not really considered it in those terms.

So, I am living the dream. I love my life. I feel like I have won the lottery. I am lucky. I am blessed. And though I may not become a futurist prognosticator with PhDs in cognitive perspective and molecular biology, I am in school studying computer science and using this blog as a daily warm-up exercise to writing a novel (actually, several novel projects).

And, in the words of the great David Bowie, "I could make it all worthwhile as a rock & roll star."

Science.

Science is the new rock 'n roll.

-chris tower 1304.16 12:19

PS: This is also probably a good time to plug my tumblr. Mostly I post science articles that may help me in my writing.

The gmrstudios repository of doubt

PPS: Updated 1306.08 - I should have mentioned when I wrote this entry that the shirt promotes a comic from Image Comics called Nowhere Men. But since I am not reading the comic, I did not think to mention it. You can read the five things Craveonline loves about the comic here.

T-shirt #25: "Yes, We Cannibal"

T-shirt #25: "Yes, We Cannibal"

In my continuing series encouraging everyone to have a sense of humor, I present a clever take on Obama's "Yes, We Can" slogan from his 2008 presidential campaign.

Like many of my shirts, I buy them via the monthly Previews catalogue that I use to order my comic books from Kalamazoo's nirvana of comics: Fanfare Sports and Entertainment. Much like T-shirt #14: Occupy Sesame Street, when I spotted this shirt, I had to have it. It furthers my call to the world at large to "Lighten Up," which is advice that I try to take to heart all the time.

I hope you find it amusing, especially on this wonderful day: TAX DAY.

The analogy created by the shirt's slogan and choosing it for TAX DAY should not be lost on anyone.

To close (because this is another short entry), I want to use a quote from one of my favorite poets, Herb Scott, former professor at WMU (Herb died a few years ago, and he is missed). This quote comes from "Butcher's Dream," one of the poems in his book "Groceries."

"I always wondered, "what is the tenderest part of the human carcass?"
Then I seen some cannibal say "the palm of the hand."
A delicacy you can't find in another game.
He'd kill for the human hand.
How do you figure?
Not even a meal.
But it makes you wonder.
It makes you stare at your own hand, like a strange animal."

Okay, did I just diffuse the whole "lighten up" and "sense of humor" thing?

Off to finish my taxes...

- chris tower 1304.15 6:53
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower

T-shirt#24: My Sunday Best: Cerebus

T-shirt #24: Cerebus: "He doesn't love you; he just wants all your money."

I have been saving this shirt for a Sunday, especially since I spend a lot of my time discussing the Catholic Church with my wife the recovering Catholic.

This is a shirt featuring Cerebus, the aardvark, the most famous, non-mainstream comic and comic creation in all of comic book history. The first and best real "independent" and "alternative" comic published by Dave Sim's Aardvark-Vanaheim company from 1977 to 2004.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time in the Cerebus universe. However, because of a lack of issues in the places where I was buying comics in 1977 (no direct sales specialty shops), I did not jump on the Cerebus bandwagon until late in the High Society run of the comic, around issue 47 (the run ended at issue 50). I was in college at this point, and a good friend, Mark Brager (who lived in Detroit and had access to direct sales specialty shops) recommended the comic to me. I was quickly hooked.

At this point in the long running Cerebus title, its creator, Dave Sim, had begun to divide the comic into novels, which would later be published in large collected editions resembling phone books. At the time that I started reading the series, there were no collected editions. My first real taste of the book came with the Church and State storyline collected in two volumes and consisting of issues 52-80 and 81-111 as well as the years of 1983-1988. Soon after I began reading Cerebus, the earliest issues, the sword and sorcery parodies, were collected as the Swords of Cerebus. I bought and read those issues (LOVED them), but I did not have the means to catch up on the High Society issues until Sim released issues 26-50 as the first collected volume in 1986.

I was hooked on Sim's creation from the beginning and quite enamored of this plan of his to write the life of his character in 300 issues. It seemed a huge and daunting task when he announced it in the 1980s. I cannot claim that I remained  as engaged by the stories, or by Sim himself, over the years. But I did read the ENTIRE run of the comic, even when Sim's own beliefs about gender, politics, religion, and many other things were not only unpleasant but downright offensive. (Though I do respect Sim's right to have and even proselytize those beliefs) After all, I am also a fan of Orson Scott Card, despite not agreeing with his views on sexuality. At least OSC keeps his views out of his fiction for the most part or is at least not quite as pedantic and insufferable about pandering these views as Sim became in the later years of the Cerebus novels. Though I did enjoy his essays on self-publishing, his published correspondence with Alan Moore, and his long diatribe essay on the religion of Islam, even though I disagreed with many of his ideas. Sim may be offensive, but he is an intellectual and a worthy opponent in an argument.

I tried Sim's follow up to Cerebus, a comic called Glamourpuss, but I quickly soured on Sim's heavy-handed treatment of his views on the world. Besides, the idea for the comic did not have the "legs" that the Cerebus idea had. I stopped buying it.

Criticisms of Dave Sim's views are very deftly handled on a blog called Upton Park by Andrew Rilstone, Gentleman.

I also quite like this essay on Cerebus by Andrew Hickey: "Cerebus is possibly the most daunting work in the whole history of art. This is not an exaggeration."

Still, I love the shirt. And the Church and State novel is definitely my favorite Cerebus book but also one of my favorite comic books of all time. It's one of the single best parodies on religion, especially Catholicism, ever written.

"At a time when the series was about 70% completed, celebrated comic book writer Alan Moore wrote, "Cerebus, as if I need to say so, is still to comic books what Hydrogen is to the Periodic Table'" ("Cerebus," Wikipedia, 2013).

So, I have included some great images here for your edification and amusement, including one of the best pages from the entire run of Church and State. Enjoy!!

And as always, thank you for reading my self-indulgent blog.

- chris tower 1304.14 12:00
Photo courtesy of Liesel MK Tower