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Finding the Spark

Posted February 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

I don’t think I fully realized it until last week, but I lost a little bit of enthusiasm for comics over the past year. There was plenty of good work coming out, stuff I enjoyed reading and that I’m happy to have in my collection and on my bookshelf. But there was a spark missing somewhere. The books I really loved all seemed to sputter and fade in 2002. Either they were cancelled due to low sales, or they ran into scheduling problems, or the creators that made them special left to do other books. Even the few new series I did check out were good, but not outstanding. Our trips to the comics store were becoming the sort of thing we did when we got around to it, not something to specifically plan for. Sure, part of that’s because our schedules have changed radically over the last year . . . but in part, it’s because there was never anything we were in a particular rush to get.

Fortunately, I didn’t really realize that enthusiasm was gone until I got it back. Last week was the first Wednesday we made it a point to get to the comics store I could remember. (New books usually arrive in comics stores on Wednesdays.) We made the midweek trip in part to free up our weekend, but just as important to Pattie and me was this: for the first time in over two years, Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross produced a new issue of Astro City. As Pattie’s fond of saying, she nearly tackled Busiek in San Diego in 2001 to find out when the next issue was coming, so it’s fair to say we had built up some anticipation.

You know what? It was worth it. As a reintroduction to the series, it covered some old ground, but I think that just shows the strength of this series and its character-intensive approach. I didn’t mind that the narrator was telling me things about Astro City that I already knew, because he was doing it while telling me about himself. When Busiek’s at the top of his game, he makes the triumphs and failures of the everyday person come alive, and in 22 pages he made me care about a character I’d never seen before. The book looked terrific, with Ross turning in one of the best covers I’ve seen him do. Anderson uses a couple of splash pages to convey different aspects of the city, but he mostly employs a pretty dense panel structure in order to cover a lot of narrative ground and handle the amount of conversation and narration that Busiek writes. (I gotta say, it was nice to read a comic where it actually took some time to read the thing.) Astro City: Local Heroes 1 is a wonderful celebration of courage and compassion, and I am not ashamed to say that my eyes well up every time I read it. It is that damned good, and it reminded me why I love this medium.

When I finished reading the book, one of my first thoughts was ‘Why can’t I find more books like this?’ In the last week, as I’ve done my usual browsing about the web, I’ve realized that it looks like some more of those old favorites like Astro City should be making their returns in 2003. This week, it looks like Christian Gossett and his comrades at Archangel Studios will relaunch The Red Star under the auspices of CrossGen Entertainment. While that series has never gone away, it’s been a while since the last story arc concluded. If I can believe the Archangel website – and I think I can – this relaunch is the beginning of a more-frequent publication cycle, and that has me enormously excited.

Way back in May 2001, Barry Kitson told us that he and Mark Waid would be taking their Empire series over to DC’s Homage imprint. I’ve been checking the news regularly to see when this story of a successful world conqueror would be back on the shelves, and now DC’s website says we can expect it in late summer. Kitson sounds very excited about the return of a series that may as well be entitled Dave’s Favorite Creators Do The Best Work of Their Careers, so that’s one more hint that 2003’s going to be an excellent year.

DC also recently solicited a new issue of Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, and Laura DePuy’s Planetary, and even though they promptly canceled that solicitation, they did so with an announcement that Batman/Planetary will ship this summer. To an extent, I’ll believe it when I see it, but I’m in an optimistic mood. This’ll be a great series to have going during the summer blockbuster season.

Jeff Smith’s outstanding Bone series is slated to wrap up this year, and while I’ll be sorry to see it go, I can’t wait to read the conclusion and see what other projects Smith has on tap. Jay Hosler’s Sandwalk Adventures will be collected early this year, which will be fantastic. I’m looking forward to reading both of these books, and the thought that in the next few years I’ll be able to read them to my daughter makes me look forward to them that much more.

More than anything, though, what thinking about all of these returning favorites has done is get me excited about comics in general, which means I’m more likely to go hunting for new creators and new stories and find the next thing that excites me as much as any of my old favorites. I can’t wait.

Filed in Comics

It’s a Gas, Gas, Gas

Posted February 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Bit of a grab bag of topics this time out, but it’s a thematically connected grab bag. Inspired by President Bush’s call in his State of the Union Address for over a billion dollars in funding for research on hydrogen-powered cars, I’ve spent some time trolling the web looking for insights and information on fuel efficiency and other energy-saving endeavors. I don’t think I found any solid answers, but I do think there are several interesting launching points for further discussion.

First, I was disappointed but not terribly surprised to find that Bush’s billion dollar proposal isn’t as impressive as the sound bite might suggest. It actually represents a cut in the absolute funding for fuel-efficient automobiles. During the Clinton Administration, the government funded the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicle (PNGV) to the tune of about $170 million dollars a year. This ten-year program was a partnership between the government and the Big Three American automakers, whose goal was to have 80 mpg family sedans in car showrooms by 2004, at a price comparable to more traditional cars. In order to make that deadline, PNGV focused on hybrid cars which use both a gas-powered and electric motor, much like the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic Hybrid that are available today. By shifting the focus to hydrogen-powered fuel cells, the Bush Administration has pushed forward the point at which the government/industry collaboration is expected to produce a more efficient car decades into the future. Setting a more ambitious goal and then cutting the funding earmarked to achieve it does not strike me as sound policy.

It’s also worth noting that, as I said, Japanese automakers already have hybrid cars out on the market. Granted, they serve a very small niche market right now, and they don’t get 80 mpg – more like 40 to 60, which is still nothing to sneeze at. But Toyota and Honda got their cars on the market despite being rebuffed in their attempts to join up with PNGV. There is a certain irony here – a program designed to increase the competitiveness of the American auto industry inspired America’s competitors to do a better job. Sam Roe of the Chicago Tribune argues that there wasn’t nearly enough coordination between the participants, which suggests that there are significant cultural roadblocks to public/private partnership that need to be overcome. Autoweek columnist Kevin Nelson says part of the problem might be the scale of the effort – the government wasn’t kicking in enough money under PNGV to overcome the additional bureaucracy, competition and inertia it created. And if the Clinton program didn’t do much to advance the cause of science, it’s likely that Bush would do even less. As Nelson says, “Federal funding at this level would appear to have no effect on hastening technological progress.â€? Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

A Helpful Tension

Posted February 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

Continuing our discussion of the theoretical questions a democratic reformer in the Deweyan tradition would need to answer:

While reformers will find it a challenge to construct a sound logical case for their program, they may well deem it the least of their problems once they face the task of persuading a skeptical public. A strong argument will help, of course, but the plight of the ‘undiscovered public’ is that its members are ruled by ignorance and passions more than by rationality, so thus will often fail to recognize the wisdom of even the best-argued position. The reformer might be able to sidestep this problem with a rational appeal to a ruling elite, one which would hopefully be more receptive to such tactics and be willing to enforce the reform upon the reluctant public. Unfortunately for the Deweyan reformer, ruling elites enforcing policies from above is exactly what he is trying to prevent. Direct persuasion of the public is the goal, so that the public might create for itself the most beneficial social structure possible. Reformers have no alternative but to confront the would-be public’s resistance to change, especially when such change challenges popularly held beliefs about the justice, morality, and validity of the current society.
The reformers’ best tool in this effort may well be the very social image that is the target of reform. Society forms its beliefs about itself in haphazard, piecemeal fashion, and is often unable or unwilling to develop its new ideas through to a conclusion.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

Just Desserts?

Posted January 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

The Bush Administration recently filed a brief with the Supreme Court stating its opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policy. One of the rhetorical points quickly made by the administration’s critics is that Bush himself benefited from affirmative action in his academic applications, using his geographical location and status as a ‘legacy’ student to help him get into Andover and Yale. It’s a pretty effective debating technique, highlighting the fact that – especially when it comes to education – strict ‘merit’ rarely completely wins the day. What I’ve wondered more and more since the stories started hitting the press is, is that such a bad thing?

The idea of a meritocracy appeals to everyone’s innate sense of fairness, I think. We like to see other people get what they deserve, and we like to think that whatever we have, we have because we’ve earned it. In its idealized form, it’s a terrific guiding principle. But when you put it into practice, it becomes pretty mushy. Sticking with education, how do you determine academic merit? Grades? But different schools have different grading systems, not to mention different curricula and standards. Just an example – my high school worked on a 4.0-scale, and didn’t give extra weight to As from honors classes. The guy with the highest GPA in my graduating class didn’t take many – if any – honors math or English classes, while the guy right behind him did. (I am neither of the people in this example, for anyone who might think I’m bitter or anything.) Standardized test might help smooth out the comparisons – but studies have shown that they don’t nearly as good a job predicting future academic performance as our current reliance on them would suggest. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

The Virtue of Patience

Posted January 1, 2003 By Dave Thomer

One of Not News’ central tenets is that by providing a forum for discussion of current social problems, we can help build a truly democratic society. In that discussion, however, it’s sometimes easy to ignore the question of what a ‘truly democratic society’ is, or how we should go about building it. I’d like to use the next few Philosophy slots in the article rotation to discuss some of these issues, starting this time out with the question of how far into the future reformers can look in good conscience.

Even when a group of people agree that a system or society must change, the question of how fast it should change can be extremely divisive – as is the related but often overlooked question of how fast it can change. Some of this division can be traced to conflicting agendas, a lack of clearly articulated ideals, or a poor decision-making structure within a reform movement, but in and of itself the timing issue is contentious. Reformers often target those elements of the social order that pose an immediate threat to the physical and mental well-being of large segments of the population, many of which are rooted in longstanding traditions such that any delay in addressing them only compounds the injustice. However, while ‘When do we want it? Now!’ might be an effective rallying cry, and an expression of the optimal turn of events, a truly pragmatic reformer must inevitably accept compromise and look to the future, setting timeframes not in terms of months or even years, but in generations.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

Why I Watch Them Play the Games

Posted November 2, 2002 By Dave Thomer

I’m starting this essay while waiting for the start of a Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the San Francisco 49ers. Since the Eagles’ franchise quarterback Donovan McNabb broke his ankle last week, there’s a very good chance that the Eagles will lose and I will be a sullen, morose individual by the time I’m finished. Because while intellectually I can accept that the odds are against my team, I still believe they can win, and I certainly hope that they do.

You may ask yourself at this point why I’m going to spend three to four hours absorbed in something that’s likely to disappoint me. Besides a healthy dose of masochism, there’s something uniquely compelling about sports, because you can’t help but be aware that no one really know what’s going to happen next. It’s one of the greatest proving grounds for the notion that truth can be stranger than fiction. Last night I watched a football game between the Indianapolis Colts and the Denver Broncos, played in Denver, in the snow. Indianapolis’ kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, had missed field goals attempts in each of his last three games, but he hit a 54-yarder in the final seconds to tie the game. Then he hit a 51-yarder into the wind to win the game. All of those late heroics were only possible, however, because Denver’s placekicker had missed an extra point earlier in the game – his first miss in over 300 attempts. You write that in a script, no one believes it. But to see it unfold live was exhilarating. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches

Peirce Strings

Posted November 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

While John Dewey is considered one of the classical pragmatists, ‘pragmatism’ is not a word he often used to describe his way of thinking. Rather, the term was popularized in the early 1900s by Harvard philosopher William James, who credited the term to an old friend of his named Charles Sanders Peirce. For a number of reasons, Peirce never attained the academic successes of Dewey and James, and he gradually developed a complex philosophical system that is beyond the scope of both my expertise and this article. However, in a series of articles published in popular magazines in the late 1800s, Peirce set forth in rather clear terms a number of the principles that James and Dewey later adopted and developed.

Peirce was deeply interested in what he called the fixation of belief. Belief by Peirce’s definition is the opposite of doubt – when we have a belief, we know how we should respond to a given situation, but when we are in doubt, we are momentarily unable to act. The doubt acts as an irritant, provoking us to do something to establish a belief and therefore regain our ability to act. Let’s take a somewhat trivial example to illustrate the point. If I want to go somewhere, I might have to decide whether to take the bus or walk. If I already have some established belief about which method of travel is better, I’ll choose that method without much of a thought, and go about my business. But let’s say I can’t decide. I am in doubt over the preferred method of travel, and so I neither walk nor take the bus. Instead I need to take some kind of action to resolve the doubt. I might check my pocket and realize I don’t have exact fare, at which point I believe that walking is the best course of action. Doubt resolved, course of action chosen, I can proceed.

According to Peirce, the human being doesn’t really care how the doubt gets resolved. It just wants the doubt gone. However, human history has revealed that some methods are ultimately more effective than others. Peirce defines ‘more effective’ according to the original goal of eliminating doubt – if a method generates a belief that generates a new doubt almost immediately, it’s not a very good method. Peirce identified four commonly used methods, and he wasn’t shy about pointing out his favorite.
Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Philosophy

How I Learned to Love Comics Continuity

Posted October 15, 2002 By Dave Thomer

So a few weeks ago Pattie and I were visiting my mother, and the premiere of Birds of Prey hit the screen. If you haven’t caught it, the basic premise is that three attractive female superheroes and one attractive male cop run around Gotham City fighting crime. With all the attractive people running around, the show certainly fits into The WB’s overall oeuvre, but that’s not why my family sat down to watch. Since the show is loosely based on the DC comic of the same name, we were there to observe – and where necessary, explain – where the show’s writers drew their inspiration.

And that’s the true genius of the show, from where I’m standing. It draws concepts from just about every interpretation of Batman over the last 25 years, and smooshes them all together with some attractive people and Top 40 hits. Pattie, my brother and I spent the night trying to explain it all to my mother.

“The therapist is a bad guy?”
“Yeah, she came from the animated series.”
“When did Catwoman have superpowers?”
“The Tim Burton movies.”
“The Joker shot Batgirl?”
“Yeah, Alan Moore wrote that in the mid-80s.”
“Wait a second, Batman has a daughter?”
“That’s from the seventies.”
“Who’s that in the Batman suit?”
“The guy from the OnStar commercials.”

Now, you may think that we’re freaks for keeping track of all this information. On the other hand, right now Fox is broadcasting the World Series and keeping track of the number of outs the Angels have made on ground balls. Every supermarket checkout lane includes multiple guides to the latest soap opera goings-on. And there are plenty of folks who know so many details about major military battles that they go out and re-enact the things. So obsessive attention to detail is not the sole purview of the superhero comics fan.

On the other hand, we do have some of our own little quirks, but I think the world would be a better place if those quirks became more widely accepted. Take the retcon, for example. Retcon is a shortened form of ‘retroactive continuity,’ which is what happens when one writer decides that some story that got written ten or twenty years didn’t actually happen the way the previous writer wrote it. For example, in 1985 Marv Wolfman and George Perez produced Crisis on Infinite Earths, which basically established that nothing DC Comics ever published actually happened, unless someone later decided to say that it did. (That this sort of revision happens often enough that comics fans not only came up with a technical term for it, but eventually needed a shortened slang version, should tell you something.) Sometimes this is necessary because the old story attempted to be current and topical, which is often a bad idea because time never really passes in comic books. Sometimes the new writer doesn’t like the old writer, and sticks in a retcon as a bit of a literary poke in the eye. And sometimes the writer is just trying to surprise people, with the old ‘Everything you knew is wrong!’ trick.

Either way, I think it would be fun to be able to employ the retcon in our everyday lives. It could work like instant replay in football, where each half the coach can throw a red flag on the ground and get the ref to look at instant replay to change a call.

BOSS: Those proposals you were supposed to send to the Los Angeles office never got there, and so we lost the big account! You’re fired!
DAVE: (throwing flag on the ground) That’s a terrible plot development. I demand a retcon.
BOSS: Great job getting those proposals done at the last second! The client’s so happy they’ve sent you this priceless collection of rare gems as a token of their appreciation, and we’re giving you that big promotion and the desk with the comfy chair!

Then there’s the ‘imaginary story.’ This occurs when the writer of a story wants to make clear that no one will ever acknowledge the events of the story again, and they will have absolutely no repercussions for any of the characters’ ongoing plotlines, and therefore should be distinguished from the non-imaginary stories of people who fly, run at the speed of light, and stick to walls. This supposedly gives the writer license to tell edgier, more outrageous, or more ridiculous stories, although it often results in ‘What if Superman’s rocket were found by Batman’s parents?’ On the other hand, imagine waking up and declaring that today is actually an imaginary story. Eat all the junk food you want. Rip off a mattress tag. It doesn’t matter – it’s an imaginary story! Of course, when it’s over, you may not remember that any of it happened, but hey, that might be a good thing too. Those mattress clerks can get really protective.

There is one potential drawback to this concept, as Birds of Prey the TV show aptly illustrates. No matter how many writers try to simplify things, no matter how many retcons they may employ, no piece of continuity ever really truly dies. There’s always the chance that the imaginary me who ripped off that mattress tag is gonna show up demanding a crossover, and those always end up in trouble. Plus there will undoubtedly be some guy on an Internet message board arguing passionately that my firing was a much better story than the rare gems. At least I can take comfort in the fact that no one pays any attention to people on the Internet.

Filed in Comics

What’s In That Glass?

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

The linguists and scientists among you will hopefully find this of interest and/or amusement.

One recurring topic in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, especially the analytic branches of those fields, is the question of what determines the meaning of the words a speaker uses. It should be a pretty uncontroversial assumption that a speaker can’t make words mean just anything. Otherwise we wouldn’t get to have fun correcting people on their use of ‘it’s’ and ‘its,’ ‘affect’ and ‘effect,’ and so on. So what’s the piece of linguistic magic that connects a particular utterance to a particular set of things or phenomena? Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam argued in the 1970s that what the speaker intends or thinks the word means has no bearing on the actual meaning, and came up with a thought experiment designed to prove his case. It goes something like this:

Imagine a world somewhere that is exactly identical to Earth, right down to the population and languages spoken; call it Twin Earth. The only difference is that the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and is called ‘water’ by the Twin Earth equivalent of English-speakers, does not have a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen. Instead it has some bizarrely complex structure that we will abbreviate as XYZ. There is a substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen on Twin Earth, but it’s an incredibly rare substance that has a black color and a tar-like consistency.

Now imagine that you somehow manage to take a trip to Twin Earth, and you’re pretty thirsty from the long journey. You ask your host for a glass of water. What are you really asking for? According to Putnam, you’re asking for the tarry stuff. You come from the community of Earth-English speakers, and the words you say still mean what they would on Earth, not what they would on Twin Earth.

OK, you may say, fair enough, but how does that make me ask for the tarry stuff instead of the clear stuff? Especially since my hosts will give me a glass of the clear stuff and think nothing of it? According to Putnam, what ‘water’ really means is not ‘the colorless, tasteless liquid that fills rivers and oceans, boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, freezes at 32 degrees, makes up the majority of the human body, and so on.’ ‘Water’ means ‘the substance with a chemical composition of two atoms of hydrogen plus one of oxygen,’ and that’s all there is to it. The former definition is a colloquial, secondhand kind of thing, one that’s vague and somewhat problematic at the edges. Add salt and food coloring to a glass of water, and it’s not colorless and tasteless anymore – is it still water? What about heavy water? Mineral water? We need something more precise.

What’s the essence of water, then, the thing that makes it what it is? According to our current scientific understanding, that would be its chemical structure. Relatively few of us have extensively studied the chemical composition of the stuff that comes out of our tap, so we defer to the experts who have, and when they tell us that water is made up of two atoms of hydrogen for every atom of oxygen, we defer to their knowledge and let it determine the extension of the word. (The extension of a word is the set of all the things and phenomena in the world that can be correctly referred to by that word.) Now, even before we knew the chemical composition of water, it had that chemical composition – its essence was always fixed, and so according to Putnam the meaning of the word ‘water’ was always fixed, and it was the job of our experts to determine what that essence was, not decide it for themselves.

The net result is that if our experts were to analyze the glass of liquid your Twin Earth hosts gave to you, they would discover that it was XYZ and not H2O, and they would tell you that, in fact, it wasn’t water. You were speaking a different language from your hosts, and it was a happy accident that the resulting error in translation resulted in you getting the kind of beverage you wanted. The funny thing is, since there are not in fact any experts analyzing the glass, both you and your hosts are unaware that you were really asking for the tarry stuff. Whatever was going on in your head – images of a glass of clear liquid, swimming pools, whatever – had absolutely nothing to do with the actual meaning of what you actually said. What mattered was the external conditions – the structure of the natural world, and the judgment of the experts who analyze that world. Putnam’s position, therefore, came to be known as externalism, and folks are still arguing about it today, even as it’s been refined and expanded through subsequent thought experiments. It all starts on Twin Earth with that glass of liquid, though, so that’s where I figured we’d kick off the conversation.

So what do you think?

Filed in Philosophy

Something to Cry About

Posted August 1, 2002 By Dave Thomer

It’s been almost five months since our daughter was born, and it’s truly been a wonderful experience. One thing I’m quickly learning is that once you’re a parent, you need to come up with answers to a whole bunch of questions that were once easy to dismiss, and the process of finding those answers can be a painful one. We got a very sharp lesson in that reality earlier this week.

Alex is for the most part a very well-behaved child. She’s friendly, smiles a lot, and can attract a flock of grandmothers in a diner from ten feet away. The one slight hitch is her sleep schedule – as is little surprise given her genes, she has none. She tends to fall asleep late, and she absolutely hates her crib. What’s worse, even while asleep, she can sense the moment you put her in the crib, wake up and start telling you, loudly, what a bad idea this was. Her three favorite places to sleep are her baby carrier, in someone’s arms, and in the bed next to Pattie or me. Since only the latter is a safe place while both of us are asleep, this has usually meant that Pattie and Alex sleep in the bedroom at night, while I take a nap on the couch and wait for her to go to work, so I can catch a few hours in bed with the baby. Not exactly what you’d call conducive to ‘putting the baby on a schedule,’ which is the one piece of advice we seem to get from all corners. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Special Order Speeches
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