Comic Wars: Episode 8

Greetings, space-dweebs! And welcome once again to another episode of Comic Wars.

In the last episode, if you recall, I pointed you to a wonderfully pointed and sick critique of The Phantom Menace. Well, our prostitute-kidnapping friend has returned with a complete tear-down of Attack of the Clones. It’s just as good as the first one. Watch it.

In the mean time, we muddle our way through issue #8: Eight Against A World, starring Dick Van Patten – I mean Han Solo.

Now, the title should sound a little familiar. I suppose it was really too much to ask them to at least reach double digits before completely ripping off their own prior issue titles. Not only is it a repeat, it’s incredibly content-free, as well as incorrect: They are not fighting an entire world, just one band of ruffians. Did these people even read their own comic book? (I’m collecting quite a bit of evidence to suggest that they, in fact, did not.)

Allow me to briefly draw your attention to the blurb about Luke’s Deadly Mission. I’m not going to cover it much in this review, because it’s really boring. The short summary is thus: Luke leaves Yavin – piloting a Corellian Corvette all by himself, no less – to go look for a new hiding place for the Rebellion. Nowhere in this issue does he meet with any deadly foes, or even a mildly dangerous hyperspace detour.

Also note the guy on the far right in the blue spandex and brown vest. He is nowhere in the issue, I guarantee it. I can only assume, because of the floppy hat and goggles, that he is supposed to be the cocky kid who reminds Han of Luke (you’ll see), but that kid dresses exactly like Luke, with the white karate top and tan leggings. Whereas this guy is easily in his mid-40’s and looks more like Bruce Dern than Mark Hamill. More proof that whoever designed the covers did not actually read the issue.

And the ominous red shadow that is advancing on Han and his merry men? Who is that? The main villain in this story line is a normal human who has an exceptional mustache, not some Wampa-crushing monster. I guess this is supposed to be some metaphorical representation of the terror that they face on this planet. Either that or Exhibit B in the People vs. Stupid Cover Artists.

Wait – the cover said “Eight Against A World”, and now it’s “Eight For Aduba-3″? Which is it? Did they come up with two awesome titles for this episode and were just unable to decide between them?

And, just as you thought the title would be the worst offender on the page (go on, I know you were thinking that), the eye moves just subtly downward to take in the horror that is the opening scene. How doest thou offend me? Let me count the ways:

1. When last we left Han, he was standing alone, unmolested, while three Chinese playboys entered the room and gave him an offer he couldn’t accept. Now, he’s being manhandled by a warty green ogre, the Asian gentlemen are nowhere to be found, and in their place are, from left to right, an alien from They Live, Luke Skywalker (note how little he looks like the man in blue on the cover), and Bob Roth strung out on meth.
2. The sheer amount of words Han spouts out in this single frame defies the sequential art concept. I mean, he spouts out three speech balloons before reacting to the hand on his shoulder that is clearly there the whole time. I’m all for a little suspension of disbelief, but this is ridiculous.
3. Luke Skywalker? Really? We’ve been alone with Han & Chewie for a whole issue and you’re already copying the main characters? Did last issue really sell that poorly?

So the reason Han is being roughed up is because the girl he was flirting with at the end of last issue is supposedly Green Guy’s girlfriend. Although, knowing jerks like this, he’s probably one of those guys who fantasizes that he’s dating the stripper, even though she just wants his money. That’s what passes for romance on this backwater planet.

I’m not sure what species he is, but apparently it’s a feature of his kind that one of his hands has three fingers and one has four. In most species this is a genetic abnormality, but in his, apparently it’s a feature. Especially since the spare finger can jump from hand to hand depending on the laziness of the artist.

Either way, he and his mismatched hands are ready to liquify Han for talking to his “girlfriend” and Han’s rather insulting bon mots are no defense. He proceeds to beat the shit out of Han (and his punches make the sound “THPOOOM!” every time he uses them, which I’m sure he trained long and hard to achieve) and knocks him into all the other patrons of the cantina, who become upset and begin attacking Han as well.

This fight scene continues to display Han’s propensity to speak EVERY SINGLE WORD THAT ENTERS HIS BRAIN (despite what we saw in the movies). It makes me wonder if the writers have ever been in a bar fight. Or any fight. Or seen a fight on TV. Or have ever seen Star Wars. While dramatized fights certainly have their share of witty banter, “Oh oh! Ducking time again!” sounds like something no one over the age of thirteen could write, much less read. Once again, 90% of these things could be either thought balloons or narration boxes. Or better yet, just left on the cutting room floor.

Han’s soliloquy in the second panel of the top row suggests that, rather than the grizzled veteran smuggler we all assumed him to be, he’s really only seen as many aliens as we have (i.e. the Cantina from the first movie), since he seems to be surprised that determining the gender of a different species might be difficult. If I were him, I’d be less surprised that the gorilla is a female, than that she thinks she can procreate (or even simulate procreation) with a creature who has an exposed brain and has to be completely covered up by a pressurized exoskeleton to survive in a primate-friendly atmosphere.

Brainy McGasmask’s super power seems to be the ability to make an impact sound (“SKOK!”) while swinging his fist through the air above Han. Maybe it has to do with the fact that he has four fingers on his left (or “Skokking”) hand, and only three on his right, much like Mr. Green Jeans over there.

As Han is delivering a Street Fighter-class uppercut to our rebreathing friend, he delivers the line “Okay … Now you can look!” For the life of me, I can not figure out who he’s saying that to, or what he means by it. It’s like they had some quota of speech bubbles to fill, and just let the intern do it.

Once again, we’re treated to another display of Wookiee martial prowess, in the form of Chewbacca standing there getting punched for three panels before retaliating.

While I appreciate the gratuitous Wookiee awesomeness, the physics of it just don’t work. Perhaps I’m being a bit picky here, but hear me out. Just as Superman shouldn’t be able to stop a speeding locomotive, no matter how strong or invulnerable he is – Newton’s second law says he’ll get thrown back because he weighs less than the train – Chewbacca shouldn’t be able to stand there and get THPOOOMed without even flinching. This guy just sent Han flying across the room. Chewie should at least have to step back to avoid the sheer kinetic energy knocking him over, even if he’s too tough to be hurt by it. He’s not even standing in any sort of fighting stance where he could absorb an impact  - he’s just flat-footed. Bah!

Having taken care of this ruffian, Han and Chewie turn back to the changelings who approached him about a job back in the last issue.

So, the locals have a problem: Their poor village gets raided every year by a band of hooligans led by a mustachioed douche named Serji-X, whom they call “Arrogantus – the Arrogant One”.

Sigh. Look, I realize that Lucas got really, really, bad at giving characters names in his later years (c.f. “Nute Gunray”), but “Arrogantus” is worse than Harry Potter’s use of Latin. At least in Harry Potter, it sort of makes sense, because they’re on Earth and even the wizards and witches derive some part of their culture from the Latins. It just doesn’t make any sense in the Star Wars universe.

Hey, but at least it’s a new villain. Even though he looks like the mascot of a breakfast cereal (“Hey, kids, be sure to eat your bowl of Captain Quazar for breakfast! It’s out of this world!”).

So, Captain Quazar – I mean Serji-X and his band of “Cloud-Riders” (riding bikes that are eerily prescient of the speeder bikes in Jedi) attack the same poor town at the same time every year, stealing their money, banthas and women (“First you get the banthas, then you get the money, then you get the women”). And if the villagers resist, the outlaws burn down their meager crops.

Now, I’m no outlaw (although I did omit some of my online purchases when filing my taxes this year), but it seems to me that committing the same crime in the same place at the same time every year seems like a bad plan. You might want to mix it up a bit, keep those peasants on their guard.

And speaking of peasants – why are you robbing poor people? They barely have enough to survive themselves. You do realize that when people are desperate enough, they will fight back. Whereas if you target more comfortable or well-off people, while they might have somewhat better security, they won’t fight back as fiercely, since they probably have insurance.

So, of course Han decides to take the job, pretty much pro bono (and without so much as consulting Chewbacca, I might add), as these villagers have little money. They only offer food and shelter, which I’m sure Han has plenty of on the ship. So I’m not sure why he’s getting involved. I guess the whole “saving the galaxy” thing is getting to his head.

Which doesn’t stop him from insulting them at every turn (“Gee it’d be a real loss to the galaxy if your village ceased to exist. Ha ha.”). Have some class, spacehole.

So he puts out word that he needs some help and sets up interviews in … his hotel room … sitting on his bed … with his shirt off. I’m sorry, did we just enter a porno?

The first applicant is a pocupine-person, wearing only a cape, boots and matching green jockstrap … wait, this is a porno! No, no, it’s just the writers’ attempt at another alien species, which, for some reason, all have to be anthropomorphized earth animals.

Anyway, porcupine-man impresses Han with his quills (bow-chicka-bow-wow) and gets hired. Next up is … Jodie Foster from Taxi Driver.

Seriously, I applaud the desire to add some sex-appeal into this storyline, but her outfit is just laughable. First of all, there’s no pink in Star Wars. And second, how does she expect to be taken seriously in the rough-and-tumble underworld with pom-poms on her shoulders, a rose in her hair, thigh-high boots and fuck-me pumps? I guess she must be tough if she’s survived so far dressing like that. I have a feeling that Mr. Thpooom would have made quick work of her, guns or no guns.

I’m not going to say that Lucas writes the best female parts – far from it, in fact. But at least in this trilogy, Leia does more than just look good. She acts as a foil to Han for the first two movies, dressing very conservatively until being captured by Jabba. In fact, sex appeal is just not a part of the Star Wars universe (aside from that one exception) which is why it sticks out so much here.

After some juvenile, sexually-charged banter, she gets the job and leaves, which means it’s time for another Earth-based reference. Enter Don-Wan Kihotay.

If it wasn’t obvious before, it becomes apparent that this comic is aimed at eight-year-old boys who have never read, or heard of, The Man of La Mancha, or cared that this character is a cheap steal from great literature. (Of course Lucas stole as well, but he did it in a more general sense, and stole from the archetypes of mythology. He didn’t just change the spelling of people’s names).

The fact that they added “Wan” to his name is, I hope, a reference to Obi-Wan, rather than Don Juan, because I’d rather not see this fool try to seduce any women, especially the bimbo with the shoulder sponges.

I’m really dreading this next bit. But I can’t think of anything else to say about Don-Wan, so we might as well get this over with.

Hoo boy. Yes, there is a six-foot anthropomorphic rabbit with cartoony-elastic legs in the middle of a Star Wars story. Oh, but he’s not just a rabbit, he’s a “Lepus Carnivorus — a meat-eatin’, rocket-ridin’ rabbit”. It’s bad enough that they’re trying to cross Star Wars with Looney Toons, but to make him such a ham-fisted attempt at an unlikely bad-ass is just pathetic.

I also love how his spindly-leg kick sends Mr. Thpooom flying down the stairs. I guess this is supposed to show how powerful his kicks are, but the artwork belies that. Real rabbits can jump because a great portion of their body mass is concentrated in their (comparatively) massive hind legs. This idiot is thinner than Paris Hilton’s shadow. There’s no way he can kick that hard.

The only explanation for this and Chewbacca’s fortitude is that the Green Goblin is a paper tiger, which makes the fact that he tossed Han around even more hilarious.

Next up is the kid from the first page who looks like Luke, for some unknown reason.

Although, between page 1 and page 22 his sleeves have gotten torn off somehow. I guess he wanted to show off his guns or something. He basically has nothing to offer Solo’s effort other than a tank-tread-based robot he’s built. Wait a second. Annoying useless kid, builds robots. Why does this sound familiar? Oh yeah.

And, once again, the intern was left to fill in some speech balloons, because I can’t believe that professional writers would write the line, “Because I’ve stuck on Aduba-3 all my life”. Are we to surmise that Marvel Comics – Marvel! – did not hire proofreaders for a flagship comic such as this?

The kid’s name is “Jimm, but I call myself the Starkiller Kid”, which must be a reference to Luke’s original name in an early draft of Star Wars. If even Lucas thought it was a bad idea, why did these people adopt it? And since when does adding an extra “m” to “Jim” make it spacey?

Well, other than Han’s line “We can always use a good robot, son” (Why? Doesn’t it depend on the type of robot?) this scene just serves to segue into Luke’s non-adventure, so let’s go ahead and skip over it.

It’s the next morning, and before Han has the chance to brief his motley bunch, the enemy shows up. And rather than just blow them all to bits, Serji-X opts to parley and try to buy Han off, assuming that since he looks like Daniel Day-Lewis from Gangs of New York, his charisma will do the trick. But no dice – Han has already developed a conscience and would rather take the villagers’ last dime than get bought off by this guy. Which I can understand. I hated Gangs of New York. Yeah, I hated it, fuck you.

At this point, plucky comic-relief Jimmy Starkiller tries to blast Serji-X, but Han has his Number One Whore, Amaiza (wow, that sounds like a female character’s name I would have thought up in junior high school) knock him out with a THOK to the head.

And just a little while ago, he shot Greedo (FIRST) to get out of paying some debt to Jabba. Actually, it wasn’t even to get out of paying his debt – it was just to get a little extension on it. So, now, after hanging with Luke and Leia for, what, a couple days, he’s gone from murdering an honest bounty hunter for a little more time to pay back his debt to honoring a truce agreement with an admitted criminal. I guess his character arc is not as profound as it once appeared. And if Lucas has his way, he’ll have no character arc at all.

As an added bonus, I noticed the letters-to-the-editor page in this issue, mainly because it consists almost entirely of a negative letter and its response.

This confirms my suspicion that the writers were working with a pre-final script and as such are not to blame for including things in the comic that got cut from the movie. But I would still argue that they made qualitative changes to the dialogue that are unforgivable. And I agree with this letter-writer that the artwork seems rushed, especially given the uneven nature of it.

So, nice try, editor, but you’re not getting off the hook that easy.

Comic Wars: Episode 7

Welcome to Comic Wars, Episode 7.

Before we get started, I have to point you to an awesome, scathing review of The Phantom Menace. It’s 7 installments of 10-minute YouTube videos, but it is well worth your time to watch it. Not only is it insightful and intelligent, but it is hilariously funny. One of the best parts is actual clips of Lucas from 1977 talking about how storytelling trumps special effects, juxtaposed with footage of him from the late 90’s talking how much crap he was going to pack into every frame of the Phantom Menace. Go watch it.

Another reason I bring up that review is to talk about storytelling. Up until this point in this series, I haven’t really gone into the story at all, because, well, it’s Star Wars - we all know the story. It is what it is. If you don’t already know it, you’re probably not reading this.

But now we get to delve into the minds of Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin who wrote this and the next couple of issues. I’m not sure how they worked with Lucasfilm to decide what got into the comics, or even how much Lucas cared (as compared to today, where every book, comic, video game, etc., gets vetted by someone before going to print) because the story (and the art) quality takes a steep nosedive immediately in this issue.

The cover is pretty cool, though – apart from the crap dialog, and Flash Gordonian “laser-gun” that Han is holding. It has a buff Chewbacca beating up two aliens at once, and Han in a heroic crouch, with a conveniently placed “Wanted” poster in the background.

(Is it just me, or does the idea of paper “Wanted” posters being placed all over the galaxy seem like a losing proposition. I think Roy and Howard still hadn’t gotten their minds wrapped around this whole “Science Fiction” thing yet. But beside that, it really has nothing to do with this issue. Nowhere in this comic are Han and Chewie wanted by the law. They mostly get in trouble with pirates and crazy hicks.)

And, getting back to that dialog. I’m sure I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: they are “blasters”, not “laser-guns”. There’s a difference. A laser is a focused beam of light. A blaster fires a discrete energy burst. They never say “laser gun” or “laser sword” in the movies, they say “blaster” and “lightsaber”. It’s one of those nice touches that makes it otherworldly, while Roy and Howard keep pulling it back by injecting Earth-normal terms, like “laser” and “holy” and “was this trip really necessary?”.

The artwork in the first six issues was highly inconsistent. Sometimes it was very detailed, enough to recognize the actors who played in the movie. Sometimes you could barely tell that the blobs were supposed to be people. But for some reason even this first page seems to feel different, even though Howard Chaykin is still the artist. Is it just that all of a sudden we’re witnessing events that did not take place within the movie, and so it has a patina of non-canon to it? Or has something objectively changed? I think you know which answer I’ll end up at.

This page is all exposition to get Han and Chewie off on their “adventure”. I think it’s amusing that Luke and Leia are back in the outfits they wore through the bulk of the movie, even though there’s no real reason for them to do so. We’ve already seen Luke in two different outfits (not counting the stormtrooper uniform): the X-Wing flight suit and the mustard-yellow biker outfit for the throne room scene. Why would he get back into his Tatooine moister-farmer duds (which now seem to have shrunken quite alarmingly – what kind of crappy Sullustan labor do they have running the laundry at the Rebel base?) when he’s not on a desert planet anymore?

And Leia seems to have had her hair put back into the much-beloved cinnamon bun style, even though she probably doesn’t have the dozens of handmaidens here that she had back on Alderaan (I wonder if that’s why she was so upset at its destruction – now she has to take care of that mountain of hair herself).

Let’s not forget poor Artoo, standing there, seemingly missing his the bottom half of his left arm/leg and emitting a pitiable “BLOOP” before he inevitably falls over.

I’m not sure what nonsense to begin with on this page. Let’s get the “star-spurs” out of the way first of all. Apparently, my complaints about “space” jargon were sent back in time to 1977 and were read by Roy Thomas, but instead of cutting it out, he switched over to “star” words instead.

In the very same panel, Han talks about getting back to Dantooine to pay off Jabba. This in itself is a Force-choking offense. As we all know, Dantooine is some remote planet that used to have a Rebel base on it. Tatooine is where the Trilogy started (and ended, if you don’t count the Ewoks, which I don’t), and where Jabba runs his crime syndicate.

But now that they’ve gone ahead and made the astronomical mistake of confusing Tatooine with Dantooine (and why would anyone make that mistake, eh George? Nice imagination, there.) they go right back and reverse it in the next panel, when Han says, “Set ‘em for Tatooine.” Which is it? Are they going to Dantooine or Tatooine? Did no one read over this comic before they went to press?

And what happened to Han’s hair in the second panel on the middle row? He suddenly has a Monkees bowl cut. The fluidity of Han’s hair kind of becomes a running joke in this issue, as we’ll see. I have to chalk it up to the fact that no one in the seventies had any idea what to do with their hair, and that complete lack of ability to coif themselves respectably bled over into the eighties, and eventually ended up with the mullet. Thanks, The Seventies.

The bottom row is just useless filler. Three panels showing what I can only assume is Roy and Howard’s ideas of various alien worlds, but look more like Fisher Price toys (and I can’t even tell what the last panel is supposed to be – it just looks like the trash jettisoned by the Star Destroyer in Empire), while Han makes a completely inane statement about having to fly some light-years before cutting to hyper-space.

How fast do they think the Millenium Falcon can go on sub-light engines? If it’s anything less than the speed of light (which it is, by definition), well, then they’ll be waiting a few years before they jump to hyper-space. Are we to believe that several years have passed before we even get to the main plot of this issue? You might actually wish that were so, once we get there. Or that there was a plot to this issue, which there isn’t. Just a series of random encounters.

First up, Han and Chewie get attacked by pirates. (And don’t you think that Han didn’t shout the words “SPACE-PIRATES”, because you know he did.) And I’m not just talking about pirates of the kind you might see in Firefly or any decently written scifi story. No. We’ve got full-blown Ice Pirates-style pirates, complete with bandanas, swords, eye-patches and buccaneer boots. Oh, and don’t forget the stormtrooper.

I have to credit the writers – when creating their motley band of space-pirates, they thought it would be cool to include a stormtrooper who had defected. That’s a great idea, and you could even write a whole story around that. But do you think he’d continue to wear the stormtrooper armor? Especially given the fact that it doesn’t seem to protect the wearer from pretty much anything, coupled with the fact that if he wore it on any planet or station with the merest hint of an Imperial presence, he’d be caught and shot on sight for desertion? He’s either the stupidest or ballsiest pirate in the group, and for that, we should fear and pity him.

Getting back to Han’s hairdo. The first panel on the middle row shows that Han has spent the last few light-years attacking his locks with a curling iron, getting rid of the Davey Jones look for the moment. Did they use a different artist for every page, or what?

Han seems to know these pirates, though. Or at least their leader, Crimson Jack. They trade jovial barbs (a little like Han and Lando would do in a few years) and then Han just hands over all the reward money he got from the Rebellion. This combined with the story about how he lost Jabba’s loot to the Empire seems to paint Han as being a pretty terrible smuggler. He just hands over his loot to whoever boards his ship. Why the hell does he have the smuggling compartments, anyway?

I find it kind of hard to believe that any sane person at Lucasfilm would have approved a storyline where Han loses all his money within minutes of getting it from Leia.

But even more than that, they created this rag-tag band of pirates, with enough thought to give one of them a sword and another an entire stormtrooper uniform, and they only occupy two pages of story time. Unless they come back in some future issue, that’s a real waste of time and effort.

So, after Han and Chewie hand over the only honest money they’ve every made to the pirates, they decide to lie low for a while on some Outer Rim planet. Let’s see what kind of planet-side shenanigans Roy and Howard can think up, shall we?

After landing, Han and Chewie make their way into the town center, remarking about how few people are about, until they stumble upon the reason: apparently, this town only holds 20 people, because they’re all harassing some poor “insect-guy” on a Bantha.

(Oh, and let me just take a moment here to say that it cannot have been easy for these writers to write a comic about two characters where one of them speaks only in grunts and growls. It’s not a situation that any sane comic creator would have gotten into willingly. It’s just one of those things that works better on screen than on the page, so I’m not going to make fun of any of the “Guh-Runk”s or “Hrak Hrak”s that float above Chewie’s head. Unless they’re really funny.)

The worst part about this page is (and I know this will come as a big shock to those of you who know me, or have read the previous episodes) the religious reference.

I have no problem with them creating an alien priest character – scifi is loaded with great religious characters from all sorts of races and planets. But Han’s reference to Sunday School is inexcusable. A)”Sunday” has no meaning outside of Western Earthen civilizations, and B) “Sunday School” is very specifically a Christian practice.

Are we to believe that Han, born and raised on Corellia, somehow grew up in a Christian family, thousands of years before, and millions of light years away from, the supposed birth of Christ? I may be inordinately sensitive to religious references, but this seems to me to be a confirmation of the unchecked Christian bias on the part of the writers. Those of you keeping score at home, let’s see how many references like this we can rack up.

Apparently, Mr. Insect-Man was attempting the very grave (ha!) crime of trying to bury a cyborg in a, well, I was about to say “all-human graveyard”, but that doesn’t make any sense, as there all all sorts of aliens here. Let’s say “all-organic graveyard”. Which is apparently objectionable to the locals.

But the best part of this page is in the top right corner. Chewie is getting all medieval on their asses, so much so that his head hair is standing straight up, while his eyes have glazed over in his blood frenzy. The poor quadopus man has just had his spine (if he has one) broken and is moments from a coup de grâce, while Han is busy “rough-housing” the other miscreants.

The aliens in the final panel on this page look less like the wretched hive of plausible aliens that appeared in the Mos Eisley Cantina and more like some Shrinky-Dinks that were left out in the sun too long. Or like something I drew when I was five years old.

The rest of this issue is taken up by Han and Chewie duking it out with these hick aliens while Han expounds about their prejudice and how silly it is.

Once the attackers threaten deadly force, Han and Chewie respond in kind. This is actually pretty cool, since in the movie, Peter Mayhew’s costume did not allow him to really show the kind of physical violence a Wookiee is capable of. It is merely hinted at (which is OK, by the way – they do it well). But in the comic, there is no such limitation. Chewbacca is a 7-foot tall barely-civilized ape-like creature who is adept at flying spacecraft and somewhat skilled at holo-chess, although, it’s hard to tell because we’ve only seen him play against a computer, and even the easiest level of computer chess can kick my ass.

But the unbridled violent potential latent in any Wookiee is finally unleashed in this comic book, and it is a wonderful thing to see – he can finally open his mouth, unencumbered by the physicality of the mask, and deal brown, hairy death to his enemies.

Even better, as we see in this panel, is that Wookiees have fifteen separate words for violence. Of course they all sound like “Gronnk! Shuuuk!” to us, but never mind that. And what the hell is with Han’s hair? Is he wearing goggles on his forehead now? Or have his bangs just gotten that long and curly?

So Han, Chewie and the insectoid priest finally defeat all of the prejudiced locals and bury the cyborg on the cemetery hill. Do they think that the creepy locals won’t just wait until they’ve gone and dig him up again? Funeral rights are not usually won by a gun battle.

But after burying the poor cyborg, Han and Chewie head to the cantina for some well-deserved debauchery. Which means that this issue has now moved on to its third storyline without ever setting up a coherent plot. Granted, after the heavy story arc of the first six issues, perhaps they were just going for a random-encounter type of issue as a break between major plots, but still, Han and Chewie deserve better than this.

I’m all for Han sowing his not-yet-royal oats. He and Leia have not gone down the path of falling in love, so he’s still a swinging bachelor. And he should be every bit the match for James T. Kirk in the banging alien chicks department.

But if this is any example of the pickup lines he uses (not to mention the sad state of his hair) I’d be amazed if he’s just as much a virgin as Luke:

What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this — I hope!

What does that even mean? He takes a well-worn, completely clichéd, Earth-based pickup line, and throws “– I hope!” on the end. Is he trying to fry some synapses in her brain with radical non-sequitors in hopes that, in her confusion, she will agree to sleep with him? Or is this some ploy that is reputed to work well on the blue-skinned, yellow-lipped women of Minibaar-7?

But she seems amenable, and as they’re leaving, Han checks in with his wingman Chewie, who is busy groping Lady GaGa and what I can only describe as a slutty yellow-skinned Jewish Ninja Princess, what with her Throwing Stars of David strapped to her thighs.

Before Han can seal the deal, however, he’s cockblocked by a trio of what look like Chinese gangsters in green bathrobes who come from the planet of people who speak more obliquely than Yoda.

Whoever they are, they seem to have scared Han’s hairpiece into curling itself up into a little swirl on the top of his head, while his chin has grown a few inches.

Next issue will explain what trouble Han has gotten into in Paradise – although this planet has seemed like anything but Paradise so far, so I’m not sure where that comes from. But I can’t let this issue go without showing you the ad on the back cover:

This is one of the scariest toy ads I’ve ever seen. First of all, it prays on command. That’s bad enough, but the creepy, intense description of what she’s made of “under the nighty” makes my skin crawl. And what kind of fun is a doll that just kneels and prays? This is purely a ploy for parents to indoctrinate their children into their chosen religion (any religion at all, as long as it’s Christianity).

I’m glad to see she at least comes in caucasian and African-American (sorry, “White” and “Black”) varieties. We wouldn’t want to exclude anyone – except those Asians, Middle Easterners and Canadians, amiright?

But the coolest thing is the technology behind it. They didn’t have microchip sound machines in 1977. This chick has a full-fledged miniature record player “in her tummy”. And if you turn the record over, she sings “Brother John” (I have no idea what that is, and I have no desire to find out).

She could have been yours for a mere $9.95 plus $2 postage in 1977. I would love to know how many of these were sold. Because I’m sure that the audience for Star Wars comic books (young boys and geeks of all ages) overlaps mightily with the “buys religious gifts for young girls” audience.

Comic Wars: Episode 6

Welcome to the sixth episode of Comic Wars. In case you missed the previous episodes, you can start here. It is at this point that we reach the frayed end of the lifeline connecting the crazed imaginings of the comic book writers to the comparative rationality of Lucas’ universe. From here on out, we’re off the reservation.

Once again they chose cover art that merely symbolizes what happens, without showing anything that actually happens. Yes, Luke and Vader enter a battle on opposite sides, although they don’t actually cross sabres until the next movie (or perhaps earlier, we’ll see where the comics take us). And if they did fight, we all know that Luke’s lightsabre (which was actually Anakin’s before) is blue, not red. Red is Sith color. Jedi lightsabres are all pride flag colors.

And for some reason they drew a Y-Wing fighter on the cover, but I don’t think they ever show a Y-Wing fighter anywhere in either issue 5 or 6, even though they were there in the movie. This leads into an entirely different Blue vs. Red discussion, which we’ll get to later.

And no melodramatic cover would be complete without the damsel in distress lying prone, being protected by her knight. It’s like some cheap imitation of a Boris Vallejo painting, minus the skill and vast amounts of bronzed skin.

While we’re here, take a look at Vader’s pants. Notice the horizontal stripes/seams. Comic artists have used that effect all over the place (most notably with Colossus, although I always thought that had to do with his metallic skin) and I really don’t know why. Do they just not like expanses of unbroken color? If they paid attention to the movie they might have noticed that Vader has vertical ribbing in his tights (for her pleasure, I’m sure), not horizontal. If they just wanted to break up the color they could have used that, but they went with the horizontal lines instead. Does anyone know why comic artists love this so much?

In the movie, two squadrons (at least) attacked the Death Star: Blue squadron and Red squadron. It’s not clear to me if Red was all X-Wings and Blue was Y-Wings or whether there was a mix in each group, but as we all know there were two groups and Luke was Red Five. “Red Five – I’m going in” has become part of the fan lexicon almost as much as “May the Force be with you.”

But, in their infinite wisdom, the authors of the comic book pared it down to one squad – Blue, which makes Luke “Blue Five”. First of all, if you only have one squad, do you really need the color? And if you do, why not use the same goddamn color they used for Luke in the movie? You had a fifty-fifty shot of picking the right one, you couldn’t watch the movie – or scan the script – one more time and let the coin toss land on the Red side?

Hoo-boy, here we go with the religion again – “space-gods”? Really? Aren’t gods, by definition, not tied to our plane of reality? What would be different about a “space” god?

But the best part of this page is the line from the lovingly-shaded Imperial mid-level officer in the third row, “Why aren’t they simply defending themselves on Yavin’s fourth moon as we expected?”

This must be the same lament of every movie villain ever - why aren’t the good guys just lying back and taking it? Why are they getting all uppity and defending themselves? It’s beautiful. This guy knows they have a gun that can explode a planet and yet he expects the Rebels – who know about the gun, and have technical plans of the battle station – to try to defend themselves from the moon’s surface.

He must have been promoted out of his white plastic suit too soon because his uncle was head of the gunners or something.

This comic keeps going back and forth between drawings of people that barely have facial features to these insanely detailed close-ups where every wrinkle and hair is shaded in with care. It would be nice to have some consistency.

But even that wouldn’t help when they totally butchered the “Red Five, I’m going in” line.

Darth Vader had to get one last jab in against General “Ultimate Power In The Universe”, didn’t he?

I just love this sequence so much it hurts. So far, the artists are doing a pretty decent job of depicting a space battle – just enough detail, good action lines, etc. And this page is no exception. So we can enjoy it for that.

Porkins’ death scene in the movie is ok, but it was always memorable for two reasons. One, Lucas actually decided to name a character “Porkins”, and then have him be fat. It just doesn’t get much more heavy-handed than that (until the prequels, anyway). And two, when Porkins’ ship is hit, he’s told to eject but he rides it out to his doom. But really – would ejecting have saved him? It doesn’t look like he’s wearing a pressure suit. And those fighter ships don’t seem to have any passenger seats – how could he have gotten rescued before the Death Star blew up?

The writers of the comic really wanted to play up Porkins’ death though, so they added a couple narration boxes talking about how Luke only knows him as Blue Six (even though, in the same panel Luke is calling him by name), but that Biggs knew him well enough to call him a friend.

But the coup de grace is Biggs’ line: “So long, Piggy. You wil be avenged!” I doubt even Lucas could have gotten an actor to say such a ridiculous line dramatically with a straight face.

Peter Cushing, along with Alec Guinness, is one of the finest actors to ever appear in a Star Wars movie. Those two are kind of like Christopher Lee and Ian MacKellan in Lord of the Rings – they just class the whole thing up.

Grand Moff Tarkin (WTF is a “Moff”, anyway? Almost sounds like a kind of species of Muppet.) only had a few scenes, but he was such a great villain. Not only was he pure evil, he had Darth Vader on a leash – how bad-ass is that?

Most of his lines became memorable through his delivery alone, his last line being one of them. In the movie, it’s “Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances.” He’s cool under pressure, although he’s also dead wrong. But that’s beside the point. He’s going down with his ship.

So, once again, changing lines for no reason, we get “Evacuate? Never! The very idea is treasonous. We shall prevail — in the name of the Galactic Empire!” Never in the movie does Tarkin resort to petty jingoism. He’s above that. He didn’t rise to the position of Grand Moff by just reciting propaganda. That took some intelligence and strength of character. Ordinary Moff’s on the other hand are just thugs who were in the right place at the right time, but Grand Moff is an entirely different story.

It’s a shame that his last words in the comic got cheaped out like this.

The climax of Luke’s character arc in this movie is that at the crucial moment, he forgoes the targeting computer and trusts in the Force to aim the proton torpedo at the thermal exhaust port. His targeting computer is working fine, but he hears Ben’s voice and decides to switch it off. This is where he really starts becoming a Jedi. It’s huge. It’s the pivotal moment of the entire movie. The Wachowski brothers used that exact type of scene in the Matrix when Neo begins to believe in himself, that he can defy physics and take on the Agents. It’s classic Hero’s Journey stuff.

So, given all that, what do you think the comic writers decide to do? That’s right, they make his instruments malfunction so that he has to aim manually. Ben is basically a life coach at this point, saying, “It’s OK, you can do it. You’re awesome.”

This, above anything else, shows how much they missed the point of the movie.

And then of course we get the expositional thought balloons where Luke, for no reason whatsoever, assumes that Ben’s voice in his head means that Ben “merged with the force” and is not representative of some sort of psychosis. Nice defense mechanism, there, Luke.

The next Rebel pilot to go is Biggs. This is another big moment for Luke in the movie. Biggs was his best friend – the only link to his old life. Even though they cut the scene with the two of them on Tatooine, we get a sense of their close friendship in the brief moments they have preparing for and attacking the Death Star. So when Biggs gets toasted by Vader, it’s a big deal for Luke, and he does a pretty good job showing it – and then getting a grip and finishing the mission. A good character moment for Luke.

(Although, I don’t know why they ever let Biggs behind the wheel of an X-Wing. He doesn’t seem to be that good of a pilot. Wedge has to take care of the TIE fighter that is behind Luke, when it was Biggs’ job, and Luke has to save Biggs’ ass at one other time. I guess the Alliance was really desperate for pilots. Although they seemed to have hundreds of spare pilots to fill out the awards ceremony later on – tell me not one of them was better able to fly than Mr. Agonized Scream Of Flesh And Metal.)

The worst part about the comic adaptation of this scene is how much of an asshole Wedge is. “Hey Luke! We lost Biggs! Do you copy? We lost Biggs! Your best friend from childhood! The only link to your past! He’s dead, Luke! Dead! Do you copy? You little whining shit.”

Well, looky here – it turns out there really was a Red Group. This is the first mention of them. And once again, why did they put Luke, Wedge and Biggs in Blue Group?

I guess we hadn’t seen them before because they were busy getting “beaten off”.

Vader in the movie: “What?!”

Vader in the comic: “By the immortal gods of the Sith!”

For the last time, even though The Force is thought of as a “religion”, there are no gods mentioned in the Star Wars movies. Nor does anyone say “Holy” anything.

And how quickly do the contents of an exploding TIE fighter start to decompose? Without atmosphere and bacteria, I would think space would be the last place decomposition would happen.

I realize it’s unrealistic to expect the comic writers to religiously copy the dialogue from the movie, or even, given that they won’t do that, to avoid making up new “spacey” words. So I’m prepared for some of that to happen. But “technicos”? Really? Is that the best they can come up with? Did they really think that people would actually use that term as a shorthand for “technicians”? How about “techs”, or even “Hey, you”?

Speaking of space jargon, Luke uses the terms “Space-Devil” and “Space-Dust” in the same speech balloon. I do believe that violates the Geneva Space-Convention, rule 917/J regarding density of “space” terms in dialogue.

I never thought about this before, but look at all the pilots in that throne room. Why didn’t they send all six hundred of them up against the Death Star? Is it because they only had seventeen ships? If so, now they’re down to two X-Wings and the Falcon, so they’re still kinda fucked.

The writers attempt to explain why Leia didn’t put a medal on Chewie (other than the obvious reason – he’s subhuman, and therefore not worthy, essentially a pet) in that he was too tall. But a) I didn’t see a third medal lying around that he could put on later, b) he just helped save your ass, so get a fucking step ladder, and c) now they’re making sweeping generalizations of the average height of Space-Princesses.

Do they really think anyone thinks of themself as a “space-princess” just because it is commonplace in their life to travel through space? Did we call Diana an “air-princess” because she traveled by plane frequently? I don’t think so.

Well, this wraps up the story of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Thank you all for joining me on this voyage, but don’t leave, because as the comic warns us: there is a “next issue” in which we will get to see what kind of insane “space”-stories these writers come up with when not even constrained by Lucas’ cockamamie script. (Hint: It involves space-pirates with actual space-eyepatches and space-cutlasses. That’s imagination for you.)

Comic Wars: Episode 5

Welcome to the fifth chapter of Comic Wars. From looking at the cover, you might get the impression that the rather more smooth-surfaced cousin to the Death Star actually strafes Rebel bases, picking off people and ships, rather than exploding entire planets, like the real Death Star.

While that does sound like a really awesome subplot that was never in the movie (I’m imagining some sort of cross between the Death Star and the Imperial Interrogation Droid that’s about the size of a meteor, manned by a couple dozen guys all wearing identical spherical helmets with little slits to see out of. And they go around the galaxy solving mysteries. Maybe they have a pet Ewok for comic relief. Coming this fall on the CW!) nothing like that actually happens in this issue. The cover is more like an impressionist collage of elements from the book, rather than a realistic depiction of any one scene.

In the scene, Luke and Chewie seem to be best buddies now, since Luke is barking orders at him, leaving Han out in the cold, and making him even more nihilistic than ever, thus leading him to exclaim, “It’s too late, kid! We’re finished!”. Whatever happened to, “Never tell me the odds!”?

On this next page, the human characters have a stunning lack of detail, while we can practically count every hair on Chewbacca’s face, and the inaccurately drawn TIE Fighter pilot is bursting forth from the minimalism of the page with his stunning realism.

Is the artist finding much more inspiration in the non-human characters in the story? (and the Imperial troops might as well be called non-human with their portrayal in the movies as faceless drones who couldn’t hit a wall from six feet with a shotgun. And aren’t they all clones of Jango Fett, anyway (if the prequels are to be considered canon, which I’m not sure they should be)? If he’s been cloned over and over again for the past twenty years, surely the latest generations have lost whatever humanity once embodied their physical beings. And if they stopped using clones after the Clone Wars – which is what I kind of assumed all along – then the poor saps who sign up for trooper duty only to enslave entire cultures deserve nothing less than to be called inhuman). Are the lines of dialog that started out being pretty banal when Lucas penned them and got even worse when the comic writers pissed all over them turning the poor artist against humanity in general and siding with those in the story who never even speak English?

This sequence is also notable for the sheer quantity and intensity of thought balloons. Back on the Death Star, Han spoke aloud every thought that flitted through that smuggler’s skull of his, but now everyone seems to be holding their thoughts closer to the vest. Which is good, because their thoughts are those of a MySpace drama queen.

But Leia’s despair pretty closely matches Han’s from the cover. I guess that’s why they ended up together.

I’ve talked before about the introduction of silly religious exhortations into the dialogue of this comic – usually when someone says “Holy–!” – but this is ridiculous: “… and Han Solo finds out that space-mercenaries, too, can pray!” Of all the characters that might pray in the entire story, Han is the least likely. He openly scoffs at even the quasi-religion of the Jedi; he mocks the beliefs of everyone and doesn’t believe in anything supernatural, even his belated, “Hey, Luke, may the force be with you.” is strained and insincere. There is no way he was praying just because a couple TIE fighters were hassling him.

This scene in the movie is a great character-defining moment. In most movies, once the main characters have been through hell together, they predictably fall into an all-for-one sense of camaraderie. But after our heroes escape certain death many times over in the Death Star, Han retreats to his baser instincts and makes sure that Leia knows that all he cares about is the money. It sets up the final scene where he comes back to save the day, beginning his character arc from selfish smuggler to genuine hero and all-around pansy.

Apparently, the comic writers didn’t think the movie was heavy-handed enough in this scene and gave Han a couple extra lines: “What else is there? Well??”, underscoring just how much he loves the Benjamins in exclusion of all else, even freedom from tyranny. Meanwhile the artist makes Han look like a very young Randy Quaid.

Oh, there’s so much going on on this page, I hardly know where to start.

First of all, how did the Falcon’s cockpit get to be the size of an Arena Football stadium? I mean, really. The claustrophobic confines of the Falcon set not only are way more realistic – have you ever been in a plane or a (non-cruise) ship? Space is at a premium in any sort of vessel like that.

But besides that it very literally brings the characters closer together – they’re constantly reaching over each other to fiddle with knobs or get in and out of seats.

Somehow the inside of the Falcon’s cockpit has now swollen to Vegas casino-like proportions, with a large, polished floor and a windshield that looks like it was stolen from the Emperor’s throne room on the second Death Star. Heck, if that’s the cockpit, they could house the entire Rebel fleet in the cargo hold.

This is also another wonderfully ham-fisted scene, thanks to the comic writers. In the movie, it’s a great little scene where we get to see Han and Luke doing some verbal sparring about Leia and suddenly realizing they’re in a bit of a competition with each other for her affections (all together, now: ewww).

First of all, Luke, seriously. Do not sit like that.

Then we have a gigantic close-up of Luke thinking “I care!”, holding his gargantuan left hand up to his chin and looking soulfully at Leia’s retreating form.

Then, after a bit of back and forth with Han, Luke boils over into a furious rage, his teeth fusing together in a mass of enamel, the better to resist breaking when Han inevitably punches him right in his beautiful pearly whites. Luke looks like he’s about to turn into the Incredible Hulk.

Meanwhile, Han just chuckles, knowing that he can toss Luke out of the airlock anytime he needs to. Because he’s a murdering bastard, that’s why. Just ask Greedo.

The comic writers couldn’t have known at this point that Luke and Leia were siblings, since I don’t think even Lucas came up with that until he sat down to bang out Return of the Jedi (otherwise, I don’t think we would have had the kissing scene in Empire), so I can’t really fault them for throwing in another incestuous kiss as Luke is about to go save the galaxy. I’m sure they thought it would just add to the tension factor with the whole love triangle thing going on. They had no idea that Lucas would turn this into a Greek tragedy.

But still. Eww.

The final page in this issue once again has the narration box talking directly to a character, in this case “Blue Leader”.

But before that, we have Blue Leader saying, “Approaching target at 1.3 parsecs”, which is great because, taken in context, this use of “parsecs” seems to be a rate of speed, i.e. “approaching target at 350mph”, rather than a measure of distance (as in the real world) or a measure of time (as in Lucas’s world).

It’s as if the writers figured “parsec” was just some generic space-term that had no real-world meaning and they could do whatever they wanted with it.

But then he says, “Now–it’s do or die!” and the omniscient narration box responds with, “Or perhaps both, blue leader … perhaps both!” What does that even mean? To my mind, the “do” in that statement is “stop the Death Star from destroying the 4th moon of Yavin” and the “die” part is, well, the death of the Rebellion. Sure, we all know that they do destroy the Death Star, and most of the rebel pilots do end up dying (except for Luke and Wedge), but the Rebellion survives, so I don’t think this really applies.

Also, did they hire the guy that did Dr. Katz to ink this last page? Why are all the lines so squiggly?

Well, now that you’re all riled up and ready for the exciting conclusion to the greatest space saga of all time (hint: the good guys win) we’ll need to break until next issue, where you’ll see (according to the cover) Luke Skywalker have a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader, which is going to be tough, what with the spaceships and dogfighting and all. But hey, we’ll see.

Comic Wars: Episode 4

Welcome back to another issue of Comic Wars where, if it wasn’t in the movie, it doesn’t belong on the page.

(If you haven’t yet, please read episodes 1, 2 and 3.)

We catch up with our heroes getting cornered in the detention area just after freeing Princess Leia from her cell. And by this time, I bet Han is getting a bit tired of the mouth on that woman, and almost wishes she were back in her cell, if you know what I mean.

There’s nothing really out of line with the title page, other than all of the dialog is completely made up for the comic and would never have been written by Lucas (at least until the prequels).

Plus the fact that Han quips, “Now I know why they call this place Death Star” when there’s no way he knows that’s what it’s called. The only person he’s talked to who knows that name is Leia, and they’ve barely had time to start lusting after each other. Unless maybe when they were riding up the elevator to the detention level, there was a plaque that read, “Welcome to the Death Star, please select floor”. Or maybe the stormtrooper uniforms say “Property of Death Star” on the inside.

Oh, and now that I’m thinking about it, whatever happened to the poor guys whose uniforms they stole? As far as I can tell, they were shoved in the smuggling compartments and left there to rot. It’s not like Han did any smuggling after this point, so he probably didn’t look in those compartments too often, given that he was constantly on the run from bounty hunters.

I can just picture him giving the Falcon a thorough cleaning once the teddy bears defeated the Empire and finding a couple of naked bodies, fingernails worn down to nubs from trying to claw their way out. Unfortunately, Han had soundproofed the chambers so no one ever heard the cries for help. These two guys – plus the poor technicians, whose only crime was to be good at operating a sensor array – ended up dying of thirst in each others’ arms.

But, getting back to the story, Leia grabs a gun and shoots a hole in the wall leading them down into the garbage compactor:

Once again they completely miss an opportunity to use one of the best lines of the movie: “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered.” Also, once again Han says, “Holy –!” which we know was never uttered in any of the movies. So knock it off.

In the movie, Han is the last one down, by a few moments, so it’s not out of the question that he tries blasting his way out of the garbage room (although when Luke says they already tried that, I wonder why Han (or the audience) didn’t hear the blaster bolt bouncing around the chamber the first time. How long was that chute, anyway?) But here, Han even says, “These trash chambers are vacuum sealed” before trying to shoot. So, he knows it’s magnetically sealed, and shoots anyway? That seems suicidally stupid, even for Han.

And what kind of non-union, crappy Sullustan laborers assembled that hatch? I can’t tell whether it was designed to be an octagon or a hexagon, but there are seven radial struts, none of which are in any position to support each other. Chewie doesn’t look too happy about it, either. Maybe, being a Wookiee, he knows that the downtrodden slave races forced to labor for the Empire do shoddy work on purpose. Kind of like Oskar Schindler, but with Ewoks instead of Jews.

Here, Han, looking suspiciously like Superman, complains that they’re going to die in the stolen stormtrooper outfits. Is he really that vain? I mean, when the Imperial sewage crew is forced by the investigation team to dredge every compactor for human remains, is he afraid that they will point and laugh at the fact that there are crushed stormtrooper armor parts mixed in with the slurry that was once Han Solo?

This is what I was talking about in Chapter 3: If they went through the trouble to use the correct call sign for that stormtrooper earlier (“TK421″), why did they go and make up a new serial number for the garbage unit? We all know it’s 3263827 (I’m not the only one who’s memorized that, right nerds?). I mean, they don’t even have the correct number of digits! That would never have gotten past the Imperial Hatch Numbering Committee (and you just know there was a committee for that, don’t you?).

I’m not sure what “flying thru the five fire rings of Fornax” means, but I can only assume that it’s some crazy sexual maneuver that requires a flight suit, a lightsaber and a mynock.

This page displays some of the worst visual storytelling I’ve ever seen. Comics are at least 50% a visual medium, but the writer, for some reason, felt like he had to have Han narrate every intention, action, reaction and effect in the whole sequence.

Granted, the printed page lacks the motion of the movie screen, so you might need to tweak it a little to play out this joke. But there are better ways to do it. For instance, instead of extreme close-ups of Han’s face, you can have bigger shots of the stormtroopers finding themselves cornered and turning around to see that only Han (and possibly Chewie) is chasing them.

Or, assuming the artist is not up to the task (and he isn’t), you’ve got the fail-safe of all comics: the narration box. It would be simple, and appropriate, to have a box say, “Han chases the stormtroopers down the hall UNTIL … they are CORNERED and have to turn and FIGHT! Then, realizing that JUST ONE MAN – HAN – was making all the noise, they set about blowing him to SMITHEREENS!” Just insert the word “space” in a few random places, and Bob’s your uncle.

Or, failing that, just have Han think the things he’s saying, instead of saying them out loud like some kind of moron who speaks at length, very loud, to no one, while running full-bore in a life-threatening situation. So, in a sense, like every other comic book character ever.

As they say in the movie biz: Show. Don’t tell.

… and everybody knows what happens when you say “boop”*

*And if you don’t know, shame on you for not listening to the D-1-3 Show. Your new assignment is to go listen to all right now until you know what “boop” means.

Tune in next time to see Luke say, “Hurry, Chewbacca! We’re being attacked by the DEATH STAR!” No. Really.

Three Gee Yes!

I’ve had my iPhone 3GS for one week now (yes, I did buy one on the first day they were available, but I didn’t wait in line for it – the AT&T store here in east-nowhere had plenty) and I’d like to share with you my impressions.

Now I’m not going to go on and on about the faster response due to the hardware, although that is impressive, or the fact that upgrading from a first generation iPhone to anything with 3G and GPS is awesome. Nor will I sing the praises of Copy and Paste, although the inclusion of them is of course the long-awaited cherry on the top of the iPhone Sundae.

No, better people than me have written about all these things.

What I want to talk about are some of the lesser publicized benefits of drinking the 3GS Kool-Aid.

Play It Again

On the Edge version of the iPhone (not sure how this worked on the 3G) if you were listening to music (or, more likely in my case, a podcast) and paused it, probably using the button on the earbuds, there was some period of time during with clicking the earbud button again would un-pause the audio.

I never figured out how long this was, but if you waited too long (definitely 10 or 15 minutes was too long) nothing would happen and you would have to dig the phone out of your pocket, unlock it, go back to the iPod application and hit the play icon to start it up.

With the 3GS, the play/pause functionality on the earbuds seems to have no timeout. This, to me, is the equivalent of your car stereo starting up at the same spot every time you turn on the car, versus resetting to some idle state if the car is off for more than fifteen minutes.

Jam and Edge

It was almost comical, a few months after the iPhone came out, everybody suddently became specifically aware of the noise that GSM signals caused when interfering with audio equipment. I remember sitting in the meeting room at work, with severn or eight people packing iPhones and the conference call speaker phone sputtering the whole time.

The worst part, though, was that I had to put my phone into Airplane Mode whenever hooking it up to the radio in my car. This is probably because the radio (and the car) is somewhat old and doesn’t have the shielding necessary to deal with today’s electronic interference. But still it was a pain.

With the 3GS (and I assume the 3G), this all went away. Sure, I still get some interference, but a) it happens so infrequently and has such short duration that it is easily ignorable and b) the 3G interference noise is so much less offensive than the Edge noise.

The Edge interference noise was usually louder than the volume coming out of the stereo and, at least in the areas I tend to drive through, was “on” more than it was “off”. It was so bad that driving the 3 minutes to my allergy shots from work, I couldn’t leave the phone’s GSM radio on because I wouldn’t be able to listen to anything without the interference killing it.

The 3G interference noise is much quieter, and on some level, it also just sounds like the data is being passed so much quicker, which is probably why it doesn’t last as long. It’s like listening to a 9600KBaud modem connection noise versus a 2400 Kbaud.

I’ve driven to and from work and all around town this week with the 3GS plugged into the car stereo, and the noise has been on the order of a few seconds per day, versus 30+ seconds for every minute on Edge.

And lest you think that I’m an anomaly, I don’t live in a major metropolitan area (proof: right down my street is a place that, until recently, had a sign outside that said “Taxidermist/Beauty Salon”) so my 3G coverage should not be any better than most places around the country.

I’m Ready For My Close-Up Mr. Damille

But the most surprising, and coolest, thing about the 3GS is the camera.

Of course this was a major weakness of the original (and 3G) iPhone. Even though it had 2.0 Megapixels (which, coincidentally, is the same as my decrepit point-and-shoot Canon camera) the tiny optics and lack of exposure and focus control made it only useful because it was the one camera you always had on you. My pictures were consistently blurry and lint-covered. Not to mention over/under-exposed.

The 3GS not only has a 3.0 Megapixel camera, with focus and exposure controls (to some degree) which actually work pretty well, but it adds video capability.

You all knew this already. But there is one feature of the video camera that deserves special mention.

How many of us have, when we first got hold of a digital camera that shot video, rotated the camera 90 degrees to capture something in portrait aspect ratio, only to find, upon importing it into the computer, that neither the camera nor the computer could compensate for that, and now you’re stuck with either fixing it in some high-end software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, or watching what you recorded with your head tilted at a painful angle?

I mean, the cameras are smart enough to rotate still photos 90 degrees, but they don’t seem to understand how to do that with video.

Engineers at Apple must have run into this because they hooked the video camera into the tilt sensor of the phone, so that if you turn it, it still plays back right-side up. This is one of the many touches that make me think that Apple could dominate the camera market if they a) wanted to, and b) hired enough optics experts away from Canon and/or Nikon.

All Is Not Well

There are, however, a few missteps, as there always are, even with Apple.

First of all, the iPhone 3GS does not come with a dock to set it in while charging/syncing. I don’t know if the 3G came with one, but the Edge one did, and I used it daily. Apple charges $29 for one. Is anyone going to pay that much? I’m not.

The next one is probably a fluke, but the power adapter that came with my phone doesn’t work. I did the whole combinatorial testing suite (old adapter, new cable; new adapter, old cable; etc) and came to the undeniable conclusion that my power adapter does not charge.

So I called up the AT&T store, and using the imperfect choices on their menu, got shunted over to Apple’s support line. Apple’s tech support guy took fifteen minutes and a consultation with a “technical specialist” to tell me to go to the AT&T store for a replacement part.

You’re probably smart enought to predict that when I got to the AT&T store, they said I had to go to the Apple store, since AT&T doesn’t stock replacement parts. So now I need to trek over to the Apple store, which is much farther than the AT&T store, to get it replaced.

I haven’t heard any other reports of anyone’s adapter being DOA, so like I said, this is probably just a fluke.

My third complaint is about the shape. The rounded back of the 3GS (and 3G) is problematic. The Edge phone had a nice flat back that remained stable when you pushed the home button while it was on a tabletop.

Not so with the 3G varieties. I understand that they had to increase the thickness of the middle part of the phone due to increased hardware so the tapered the ends give the illusion of thinness, but I’d rather have a slightly thicker phone all the way down than try to type on a weeble-wobble.

My last complaint is perhaps not unique to the 3GS, but I haven’t tested it on any other platform. And it’s sort of one of those “problems you’d love to have” kind of things.

You see, my company operates a Wifi network. I’ve had my Edge iPhone connected to it for at least the past year. It’s nice because when I’m in part of the building where reception is good, bandwidth was noticeably better than Edge speeds.

Now that I have access to the 3G network (such that it is on AT&T), my throughput on 3G anywhere in the building is faster than the best throughput on the corporate Wifi. So, I told my phone to ignore that Wifi network. Done and done.

Or so I thought.

Every time I open up Mail, Safari, or any other net-enabled application, it asks me if I want to join the very network that I told it to ignore. What was the point of ignoring it?

If anyone knows how to stop the phone from asking me to join this network, please let me know. It’s kind of annoying.

Until then, I’ll keep hitting “Cancel” every time it comes up and enjoying my 3GS speed demon.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Part II: The Review

(Some more Classic NeoZAZ)

I remember the first two Star Wars action figures I owned were Darth Vader and C-3P0. I hadn’t even seen the movie yet, but I thought they looked interesting, I guess. Anyway, just try to imagine the exciting plots and stories you can concoct with those two:

Vader: I am Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith!

C-3P0: Er, would you like me to translate something for you? Perhaps work out a tricky bit of protocol? I could program your binary load lifters for you.

Vader: Arrr! Have a taste of red plastic death as I slide my lightsaber out of my forearm!

C-3P0: Okayy, maybe later, then. Toodle-pip.

You get the point. Not a lot of possibilities there. But it was still better dialog than just about anything in Episodes I-III. OK, yes, the dialog in Episodes IV-VI wasn’t stellar, but at least there were some memorable lines (“I happen to like nice men.” “I’m nice men.”) and they were delivered with conviction.  In the prequels, we get seriously laugh-out-loud dramatic dialogue (“You’re so beautiful.” “It’s only because I’m in love.” “No, it’s because I’m in love with you.”) delivered with all the emotion of a tax form.

I saw Episode III on opening night, the very first show, 12:01am. We had stood out in line for several hours (see Part I) and the theater was packed with hard-core Star Wars geeks. We cheered when the lights went down. We hooted when the 20th Century Fox fanfare blared. We clapped as the opening strains of John Williams’ score played over the text crawl. And everyone laughed at the “romantic” dialogue.

It is just unforgivable that such a high-profile, big-budget movie with so many talented people working on it could make it through to production with such awful lines. But that’s really the biggest complaint I have about Episode III. Most of the rest of it was somewhat enjoyable. Sort of.

Warning: Spoilers ahead! I know that everyone on the planet has seen this movie twice by now, but in case you haven’t, and there is still some suspense left (Anakin becomes Darth Vader) then you’d best stop reading now. Go join the forums and come back when you’ve seen the movie. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

The opening is classic Star Wars: starts off right in the middle of the action. Even the text crawl was brief and to the point – the Chancellor has been kidnapped, and Anakin and Obi Wan are battling to rescue him. I liked the way the camera follows a single fighter as it flies along the surface of a screen-filling proto-Star Destroyer, only to pan past the edge of the cruiser and be assaulted by the hundreds of ships in combat. I bet if you frame-advance that scene on the DVD (and won’t we all) you can see all sorts of cool stuff going on in the background. I really think the animators had a blast with this movie. As well they should, for the animated stuff was much more convincing than the live actors.

One of the problems I had with the prequels was all of the references to the original trilogy. Example 1: R2-D2 and C-3PO. Even though there were some nice R2-D2 moments in the movie, I still think the two droids did not belong in the prequels. It was just too much of a stretch. Sure, I guess it explains a few lines from Episode IV, but it just seems cheap. The same goes for Chewbacca.

And speaking of Chewbacca, the scenes on Kashyyyk were somewhat disappointing and brief. Lucas finally had the chance to make up for the Ewoks by showing the Wookiees kicking serious butt, and all we get are a few quick moments of them swinging on vines (again with the silly Tarzan yell) and shooting at the lame robots. It’s all well and good to show Yoda talking to Chewbacca and other references to the original trilogy, but mostly those scenes just serve to remind us of how much better the originals were.

After the opening action sequence, the movie settles into the plot, which is the crux of the whole prequel trilogy: Anakin’s fall from grace. The problem with it is that we all know what’s going to happen: Anakin lets his emotions get the better of him and is seduced by the Dark Side, he kills all the rest of the Jedi and Palpatine becomes the Emperor. Since the audience is well aware of the outcome, the movie has to sell the slide into evil with acting and emotion. Sadly, we get Hayden Christiansen’s hideous mullet for two and a half hours.

I will give George credit for some passable writing for the scenes in which Palpatine manipulates Anakin toward the Dark Side. It’s not great, but it’s almost believable. In my opinion, though, Anakin’s transformation should have begun a lot sooner, like Episode I. This sort of epic, cataclysmic character arc deserves a lot more detail and drama than it got, and it all got squeezed into the third movie. To me it felt rushed. Sure, Anakin was whiny and impatient in Episodes I and II, but they should have shown him doing more evil stuff, like the slaughter of the Sand People. They needed to show more of Palpatine’s influence on him.

The Chancellor/Emperor himself was very well done in this installment. He was kind of in the background in the first two (you know, the “Phantom” Menace) but in Episode III, he’s most definitely the main bad guy pulling all the strings. Pretty much everything that happens in the whole prequel trilogy is according to his plans. And, when you think about it, perhaps he even created Anakin. He tells Anakin the story of the old Sith Lord who discovered the secrets of prolonging life, and even creating life, using the Force. Let’s see, Anakin was born without a father, and he pretty much has Midichlorians instead of red blood cells, hmmmm… Almost explains that whole virgin birth thing.

The two best aspects of the movie, in my opinion, were the ships and the lightsaber fights. Growing up, I knew the name or model number of every ship in the original trilogy, even if I didn’t have them all as toys. Much like the rest of Star Wars, they were cool because they were dirty – no shining white star cruisers here. No, the X-wings are all dirty and battle-damaged. The Millenium Falcon is constantly on the brink of complete failure, and even the Empire ships look mean and purpose-built. The ships in Episodes I and II are sleek and rounded and look like candle drippings. Finally in Episode III, they had cool ships again. Probably because they were trying to make them look like prototypes for the X-wings, TIE fighters and Star Destroyers that we know and love. Whatever the reason, they were a big improvement.

The other cool thing was the lightsaber fights. Episode III is packed with lightsabers, just stuffed to the gills with Jedi twirling their glo-sticks around. So much so, in fact, that it got confusing watching them. In the first trilogy, you had one lightsaber duel per movie, with perhaps some other random lightsaber action thrown in. Kind of made it something special. But of course, the prequels take place during the time of the Jedi, so everybody and their brother has a flashlight hanging from their belt. And, with movies like Crouching Tiger and The Matrix released in the interim, along with countless Jackie Chan movies, Lucas had to up the ante a little on the saber-fu in this trilogy.

And, just as with Episode II, the award for best lightsaber battle has to go to Yoda v. Palpatine. Once again proving that Lucas is much better at directing animation than live actors. Maybe he should team up with Disney or Pixar for his next movie. No, scratch that – Pixar is turning out consistently good movies with decent stories and dialog, let’s not ruin that.

Notice I didn’t give the award to the duel we’ve been waiting twenty years for: Obi Wan v. Anakin. Well, I don’t want to ruin the Space Opera with anything like logic or physics but let’s just examine the final climactic battle a little.

First off, it’s a planet-wide volcano. The entire planet is covered with molten lava, a sort of permanent slow-motion eruption. So, he gets points for making it an energy source, but minus several thousand for actually having people on the surface. The temperature there has got to be in the thousands of degrees (whichever scale you use), and Anakin’s just walking around in heavy black robes, barely sweating. Oh, not to mention that all the oxygen had to have burned up long ago, so there wouldn’t be anything to breathe that close to the surface. OK, enough scientific nit-picking, on to the fight.

It starts off well enough, with Padme dumping Anakin for being too evil, which is probably the worst decision ever made in the entire saga, so he chokes her until she passes out. This is good – the final step in Anakin’s slide toward the Dark Side. Lightsabers light, tempers flare, lame dialog is prattled off, and the battle is joined.

Obi Wan and Anakin proceed to duke it out, to greater or lesser effect, for the next ten or fifteen minutes. By the time they’re riding little jet skis on the lava, it had gone too far. If there were a lava shark, it would have been jumped. Now for the tricky part: Lucas has spent three movies showing how Anakin Skywalker is the most powerful Jedi ever — and now that he’s given into the Dark Side, he should be even more powerful – how does he lose to Obi Wan, who, let’s face it, is getting on in age? Oh, silly me. The answer is simple: Obi Wan gets the “higher ground”. What? Does that give him a +20 to hit or something? That’s almost as bad as Darth Maul’s death in Episode I.

At that point, the rest of the movie writes itself: Padme has the twins, Luke & Leia, then dies on the table (by the way, I thought the delivery droid with the forcep hands was rather humorous). Palpatine scoops up the charred remains of Anakin (I guess he’s Darth Vader by now) and pours him into the famous black suit. Obi Wan takes Luke to Tatooine, and puts a down payment on a hermit cave. Jimmy Smits takes Leia back to Alderaan, creating the only provable plot hole (i.e. in Jedi, Leia says she remembered her real mother a little bit, but she couldn’t have because she died in childbirth. Whatever. Kids have wild imaginations, especially orphans).

Now, I saw this movie at 12:01 on opening day, the very first showing. I came out rather disappointed, as you can tell. But I watched it again a few weeks later, and for some reason I liked it better the second time. I’m not sure if I had my hopes up too high for opening night, or whether I just knew when the bad parts were coming and could ignore them.

The bottom line is I treasure my VHS and DVD copies of the original trilogy (even with all the Special Edition crap they put in), but I don’t think I’ll even rent the prequels, much less buy them. Could this be because of the age at which I watched them? Perhaps. But even at that age, I knew that the Ewoks were crap.

After watching Episode I, a friend of mine remarked that the only way Lucas could make up for that debacle would be if in the opening seconds of Episode II, Jar Jar choked to death on an Ewok. Well, that didn’t happen, and Lucas hasn’t redeemed himself. If you want to watch what he should have done, click here. Me, I’m going to go play with my C-3PO and Darth Vader dolls.

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Part I: The Rant

(Please enjoy another installment of Classic NeoZAZ, reposted now out of laziness.)

Very rarely does a movie’s advertising campaign get it so right by accident.  I don’t know if you’ve seen these particular commercials for what could possibly be the most awaited movie in the history of cinema (of course, I don’t know much about movies before 1977, because they all suck, except for Hitchcock) but the text flashed on the screen in between rapid cuts of the movie is “On May 19, Sith Happens”.  Ha ha, very funny. A play on words. A “pun,” if you will. Fox’s marketing department didn’t know just how right they got it. Episode III is shit, and a very disappointing ending to one of the greatest movie franchises ever.

Now for some full disclosure: I’m a Star Wars Fan (capital “F”). Always have been. Strangely enough, I saw Empire before I saw Star Wars. But then I got to go back and see Star Wars in the theater, because that’s how good it was – they were re-releasing it after the sequel came out. I even had the figures before I ever saw the movie. That was the power of the first Trilogy – little kids were acting out the scenes in the movie without ever having seen it. How amazing is that?  Has any other movie infiltrated the mass consciousness as much and as quickly as Star Wars did? Even movies that are designed to be marketed and are basically 2-hour toy commercials (XXX, I’m talking to you) don’t grab hold of the hearts and minds of the masses like Episode IV: A New Hope did.

So yes, I had all the toys (well, all the toys my parents would buy me – I had to improvise quite a bit with paper and cardboard, but that’s what the toys were all about – using your imagination. So what if my Death Star playset included scenes from Episodes IV and VI. That was cool.) and played with them well past the age I should have stopped. The only thing that got me out of playing with Star Wars toys was G.I. Joe toys. Man, were they cool! They had elbows! And since Lucas had seen fit to abandon us (only for 16 years or so), I turned to the crass jingoism of G.I. Joe vs. Cobra. You gotta admit, though, any army with it’s own ninjas is pretty cool. I’d’ve joined the army if they had ninja training, no doubt.

Anyway, what all this means is that I’m predisposed to liking anything Star Wars-related. Like most males of my generation, I feverishly waited the 17 years for the prequels. I dutifully went to the theater to see the “Special Edition” versions of the original Trilogy (don’t get me started). I read the Star Wars novels, I played the Star Wars video games, I bought the Star Wars posters, I went on the Star Tours ride at Disney World. I slept on the damn Star Wars bedsheets.

Were my expectations set too high? Perhaps for Episode I, yeah. I think when everyone’s been fantasizing about, writing fan fiction about and dreaming about a particular story/universe, it’s going to be very difficult to meet the expectations of millions of rabid fans. When Episode I came along, it was destined to disappoint. Even if it was good. Which it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. I don’t have to go too deep into it, because everyone knows how much it sucked, and why (rhymes with “Darbar”). But, I mean, come on. It’s a sure-fire money maker. All Lucas had to do was some basic background and some good action scenes. At least hire a dialogue writer and a director. Alas, no. Lucas has surrounded himself with people who won’t say “no” to him (and, with the money he brings in, who can blame them, really – that would involve artistic integrity) and there is no filter between George’s brain and the big screen.

So Episode I comes along and resets everyone’s expectations for the prequel trilogy. We figure it’s going to be crap, but at least colorful crap, with explosions and lightsabers. What we weren’t prepared for is the murky, rancid, stinking, vomitorium that is Lucas’ idea of romantic dialog that we got in Episode II. I mean, wasn’t there anyone in all of Lucasfilm who had the guts to say, “George, the fight scene with Yoda rocks, but all this dialog before that has to go. Seriously.”

The whole point of the prequel trilogy is the fall of Anakin Skywalker. For him to fall from being the prophesied “one”  (I dunno, you think Lucas watched The Matrix once or twice? Oh, and what’s with the whole “virgin birth” thing? Did George get religion as well as have kids?) to being the most evilest guy in the galaxy requires a certain amount of emotional depth. A depth that wasn’t necessarily required in the original trilogy, mind you. But with lines like “I don’t like the sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating – not like you. You’re soft and smooth,” causing the audience to wrack with spasms of pain, you just don’t get the kind of attachment to the characters that is necessary to buy the fall from grace.

And then there’s the direction. Look at the cast they got: Ewan MacGregor, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee, etc. Phenomenal actors in other movies. With the possible exception of Liam Neeson, they were uniformly unwatchable. I’m reserving judgment on Hayden Christensen, since I haven’t seen him in anything else yet. Granted, he may get the Mark Hamill curse, and we’ll never see him again outside of a SciFi convention.

OK, two strikes, but Episodes I and II were merely vehicles to get us to the climax of Episode III – the fall of Anakin (and don’t even tell me that a brooding teenager like him would suffer anyone calling him “Annie” without cutting off a major body part). Episode III was supposed to redeem the first two, and tie us into the original trilogy. Well, it certainly tied into Episode IV nicely, even using some of the same sets, but we’ll get to the question of redemption later. First, there’s the line!

For those of you who have never experienced a Star Wars line, let me sum it up like this: Imagine all the geeky friends you had in high school in a line. Dressed as Darth Vader. Wielding lightsabers. OK, so it’s not that much of a stretch. Especially if you’re like me, and all of your friends were Star Wars geeks.

When the first trilogy came out, I was but a youngster (or “youngling”, as the “new”, or “crappy”, Lucas would call it) and so I missed out on all the fun of spending weeks in line to see really good movies. So I had to settle for spending hours in line to see really crappy prequels to really good movies. And such I did.

For Episode I, a friend of mine who lives out in the boonies volunteered to stand in line overnight to get tickets two weeks ahead of time for opening day. I gladly took a day off of work and drove two hours out to frick’n Manteca to watch Star Wars with my friends. And I liked it the first time I watched it. Even with Jar Jar, Midichlorians and all, I thoroughly enjoyed my first Episode I experience. Then I watched it again a few days later, and I realized what a Star Wars-withdrawal-induced haze I had been in. Boy did that first movie suck. I mean, come on – Midichlorians? How could Lucas take something so cool and mysterious as the Force, and dissect it into its component particles? Did he actually, for a minute there, think he was writing Science Fiction? No, it’s a Space Opera. Magic is allowed in Space Opera. You don’t have to explain everything like you would on Star Trek.

Aside from nitpicky things like that, the entire story and cast of Episode I was vastly inferior to the original trilogy. The original trilogy had give-and-take between the cornfed goodness of Luke and the battle-worn cynicism of Han. It had good guys with white hats, and bad guys with black hats (well, sometimes the good guys wore black, and the stormtroopers wore white, but you get the idea). It had a vast galactic conflict. What did Episode I have? Trade disputes. Economic sanctions. Senate hearings. Is this Star Wars or C-SPAN?

In many ways, the prequels should never have been made. An old adage for writing is that good stories have no real distinct beginning or end – the characters and histories exist far back into the past and far into the future. But you, as a storyteller need to pick a point at which to start your story, and a point at which to end it. The part in-between those two points should be the most interesting part. The stuff that comes before is backstory, and the stuff that comes after is irrelevant (until the sequel).

Lucas, the 1970’s Lucas, who knew how to tell a story, had the whole thing in his head: The rise of Anakin Skywalker, his descent into Darth Vader, the coming of his children, and the eventual overthrow of the Empire. He wisely chose the second section of this history to be the interesting part: The galaxy is in peril, the Empire is Evil with a capitol ‘E’, and here comes the son of the most Evil guy in the galaxy to save the day. That’s a good story.

Sure, after seeing the first trilogy, we all wanted to see Darth Vader’s rise and fall. But, as much money as it made, artistically, that story did not need to be told:

1. It’s a prequel, so everybody knows how it’s going to end up.
2. It’s three movies of exposition, without a conflict/resolution story arc.

That cripples it, dramatically, from the beginning. Add in the fact that Lucas could never write good dialog, is a terrible actor’s  director, and lost his ability to tell a good story about halfway through Episode VI, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster.

And don’t get me started on Episodes 7, 8 and 9. Yes, I’ve read some of the books. And no, those movies do not need to be made. Sure, there are some interesting characters they came up with, and a few semi-original plotlines. But once you’ve saved the galaxy and destroyed the Evil Emperor, what’s left? There’s no sequel worth doing. You know what? If you’ve got all these writers chomping at the bit with cool ideas, have them write something original, or another Star Trek novel. There is no compelling reason to make a movie after Palpatine dies. Each new movie just cheapens the originals.

But back to the line. Anne’s friend, Doug, who is the biggest Star Wars geek I know (he’s the one I go to when I don’t remember some bit of arcane trivia) works right across the street from the movie theater in downtown Santa Cruz.

Doug was going to get us a spot in line for the opening day midnight show. He reported around 11am that the line was starting to fill up. He or one of his friends got in line around 3, so they were about half a block from the theater. When we got there around 8, the line went around the corner and down the next block. By the time they let us in, it had wrapped all the way back around the block to the theater. I don’t think this was quite as big as Episode I, but we had much higher expectations then.

Of course there were plenty of people in costume. Now, it’s not that hard to throw on some brown robes, grab a flashlight and call yourself “Obi Wan”, but some of these folks really went above and beyond.

Right behind us in line were Darth Vader and Chewbacca (not really a pair you’d picture together, what with the Imperial enslavement of the Wookiees and everything, but they are two of the better masked costumes from the movies). They were just about perfect: Vader had a nice shiny helmet and shoulder pads, his chest panel had all the requisite switches and blinking lights, and his cape was very swirly and black. Even Chewie looked very authentic and had an excellent Wookiee growl.

The only problem with these costumes was this: both guys were about 5’ 5”, including the boots and helmets. Somehow, seeing a full-size Darth Vader head about two feet below where you expect it is unbearably funny. But they were cool and posed for pictures with anyone who came by.

There were several high-school girls dressed as Padme from Episode II, so that was some nice scenery, but the Boobie award definitely goes to the woman dressed as Slave-girl Leia, from Jedi. It was a dark and rainy night, filled with pimply geeks who had escaped their parents’ basement to stand in line all day and night, and she was out there in just the bronze bikini and red wraps. Very brave of her. But of course she had Vader and Chewie to protect her.

There were also several dozen random people with lightsabers of various build and quality, who would spontaneously start massive Jedi battles every so often. That certainly helped to pass the time. Even though their combat skills were, let’s say, less than adequate.

The other way we passed the time was with trivia. I had brought a stack of Trivial Pursuit: Star Wars Edition cards. Unfortunately, there’s about one question in ten that is actually difficult for a real fan to answer. The rest are along the lines of “What is the name of Han Solo’s ship?”

Some other folks had brought what looked like at least a 25” TV and some sort of game console, and were playing some 4-way games. But they were almost at the front of the line, so I assume they’d been there for twelve hours easy by then.

At around 11:30, the line started surging forward, which probably meant something was happening. After much jostling, we were finally admitted into the theater, to see the final chapter in the Star Wars saga.

Stay tuned for Part 2: The actual movie review.

CigarFest ‘05

(NOTE: This is being re-posted since it didn’t transfer over from our old host. Enjoy reliving the memories.)

CigarFest ’05

or, Aching for Air

When someone thinks of CigarFest, I would bet that the adjectives “classy” or “clean” are not in the top 5, or even 10 things that come to mind. Nevertheless, the sight that beheld us upon entering the Pennsylvania Expo Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania failed to meet even the most lowered of our expectations.

Certainly, if you pack several thousand cigar-smoking people (yes, “people” – there were female attendees, I believe at least three of them, one of which was sporting a T-shirt that read “If you’re going to ride my ass, at least pull my hair”) into a poorly ventilated warehouse, you expect a – how shall I put it – certain quality of air. CigarFest ’05 did not disappoint.

After careful scientific readings, the atmosphere inside the expo center consisted of the following:

• 5% Oxygen
• 2% Nitrogen
• 4% Carbon Dioxide
• 51% Cigar smoke
• 7% Pipe smoke
• 11% Cigarette smoke
• 8% Sweat
• 7% Old Spice
• 3% Booth Babe perfume
• 2% Pork

After the odor(s), the first thing we noticed was the lines. It worked like this:

The ticket to get in cost $75. For that you got a book of coupons and a bag. The coupon book contained some twenty-odd coupons – good for one or two free cigars at each cigar vendor in the expo. Your mission was to hit each vendor booth and use your coupon to claim your free booty.

What the expo planners didn’t realize was that if you have several thousand people all trying to hit the same twenty-odd booths at once, you quickly reach a saturation point. Once this point of saturation has been reached, the lines at each booth begin to meld together like the Terminator T-1000, forming one giant line progressing from booth to booth in search of Sarah Connor.

We walked around looking for a gap in the line into which we could insert ourselves, but there were none to be found. It was a giant, smelly, shuffling centipede, wending its way around the expo floor, scooping up free cigars and tiny little shots of beer.

Not wanting to spend the day standing in line and starving because we hadn’t eaten yet, we went in search of food.

At the back of the expo hung a big sign reading “Food Court”. Typical of the rest of CigarFest ’05, our expectations were somewhat different from reality. Rather than a courtyard of vendors, each supplying their own brand of deep-fried delicacy, CigarFest’s Food Court consisted of: a pig. Now, I like pork as much as the next guy, but there’s something unsettling, and slightly creepy about seeing the cook scooping your lunch out of the waxy carcass of a roasted pig, no matter how much they dress it up with apples in the mouth and whatnot.

Nevertheless, we were hungry, and the pork sandwiches were free, so we chowed down.

This trip marked the first gathering of just the four of us: Matt, Eric, Quint and myself. The previous and first time we were all together was last October at my wedding. I’ve known Matt since high school and when we get together, for some reason, we always end up getting lost (this weekend was no exception). Eric was my lab partner in freshman Chemistry, and we’ve shared a brain ever since, much to the chagrin of our respective significant others. Quint is a crazy Canadian I drink lots of wine with every Wednesday night. We smoke cigars when we can get away with it, but it tends to irritate our honeys, so we don’t do it that often.

Matt is the cigar connoisseur out of the four of us, to the point that he can identify cigar manufacturers on sight and can pretty quickly estimate the street value of any cigar by sight/smell. He’s the one that started this whole trip rolling. Quint and I thought it would be a lark, although we don’t smoke nearly as many cigars as Matt. Ironically, Eric is the only one that lives in the area, and he smokes the least out of any of us.

Living in California, where smoking is forbidden in all public places (although now that we’ve got Arnie as Governor, who knows how long that will last) eating a greasy pork sandwich while inhaling gallons of cigar smoke made the smoking section of a restaurant seem like an operating room by comparison.

After eating, the MegaLine T-1000 had not seemed to dissipate any, so we found the end and joined it. Staring off into space, we followed our fellow cigar-hunters, taking tiny little half-steps every few minutes, our eyes streaming from all the smoke. This was truly a lesson in Soviet Russian culture. There was plenty of supply to meet the demand, but the organization of the distribution was so bad that nobody could get anything.

As we passed the Cigars International booth (the fine institution who organized this shindig), they took pity on us and offered us their free cigars without having to wait in their line. They were also the only booth selling any sort of cigar paraphernalia, and that was pretty slim pickings: a few lighters, some cigar cutters, and some T-shirts. They certainly have a lot to learn about conventions. Having a bunch of schwag booths would have distracted people from getting their free cigars for a while, which would have thinned out the lines a bit.

Approximately forty-five minutes later, we were within spittoon distance of the first booth, where again we were met with one of the many differences between “CigarFest: The Marketing” and “CigarFest: The Reality”. The ads for CigarFest had touted “Playboy Bunnies” (plural). What we got was one woman, who had appeared in Playboy, sitting at the Playboy cigar booth, grimly autographing pictures of herself. As Quint said, “On a Playboy Bunny scale, she’s only a 7 out of 10.”

At this point, Quint had had enough of waiting in line and started doing some recon to see if any other booths had shorter lines.

It turned out that the crowd had thinned enough that the giant MegaLine had broken up in various places around the expo, and (after getting a picture of the Playmate, of course) we took off around the room, getting our free cigars. Over the next two hours, we bounced from booth to booth, wherever the line was shortest (or they were handing cigars out on the side) scoring our booty.

Things picked up even more when we discovered you could keep going back to the Sauza booth for free mini-shots of Tres Generations.

I’m sure Matt could write a page about each and every cigar manufacturer there, but as far as brands go, I don’t know Don Diego from Don Corleone. I was there to hang out with the guys and score some free stogies.

Matt, on the other hand, recognizes cigar makers on sight, so he was in heaven when he saw the guy who makes Gurkhas. I like Gurkhas – Matt’s given me a few, and they’re quite good – but I could care less who makes them. Regardless, I was happy to snap a photo of Matt with Mr. Gurkha (if that is his real name). Matt’s grin was as wide as mine would be if I met, say, John Cleese.

Not only did Matt get to meet his Cigar Idol, but Gurkha Man was giving out massive, foot-long logs of tobacco. Matt figured them to be worth about twenty bucks a piece.

At least the CigarFest organizers, as well as some of the vendors, had hired some busty booth babes. You have to wonder how much they had to get paid to agree to spend an entire afternoon in a warehouse with thousands of stinky guys, breathing cigar smoke so thick it could be elected president, while wearing tight T-shirts and handing out free phallic symbols. Whatever they made, I’m sure it was more than this guy got to put on a foam cigar costume and wander around all afternoon drinking beer and smoking a cigar. I don’t know, doesn’t that strike you as sort of cannibalistic?

C.A.O. had a good gimmick: As they handed you the free cigar, they said if you smoked it and brought back the butt, they’d give you another freebie (ostensibly better quality). From the looks of their butt bin, that booth alone was responsible for ninety percent of the smoke in the room.

After we finished plundering (Quint was the only one of us to use all of his tickets, totaling 36 free cigars) we stepped outside to catch some fresh air, and finish our C.A.O. cigars, so we could go back in for our bonus free cigars.

I forgot to mention that there was a band playing in there, but they were almost impossible to hear over the din of the crowd and the horrible acoustics of the mostly empty warehouse. But they did do a passable Janis Joplin, although their singer’s voice was much less scratchy than Janis’, which is ironic considering she was inhaling probably more smoke in one afternoon than Janis did her entire life.

I have to tell you, the fun thing about smoking cigars with Matt and Quint is that, since they are such chain smokers, they will pause in the middle of smoking a really fat stogie, to smoke a cigarette, because they can’t get enough nicotine out of a cigar. Makes you feel not so bad about smoking one cigar once in a while.

Overall, we had a great time that weekend, despite the fact that I had heart palpitations for a week, probably due to sudden nicotine addiction followed by equally sudden withdrawal, and I had to air out my leather jacket for a week and a half before I could wear it again. Plus we got to see a Playboy Bunny.

Apple of my Ear

For all their faults, Apple’s stock earbuds are the most comfortable audio devices to ever grace my aural canal. I never thought an ear bud could be that comfortable – all through the Walkman years of the 80’s and 90’s I resisted anything that went into the ear, which makes it difficult to listen to music while riding a bike, let me tell you (they didn’t have those cool wrap-around-the-back-of-the-head ones then).

The first earbuds I used for any amount of time were the ones that came with my first-generation iPod. They were fine, but just a touch too large, so if they were in for longer than an hour or so, they would meld with my ear, which I didn’t feel while it was happening, but when I took them out, would feel like my ear canal was coming out with them.

And, of course you needed to use the little foam covers which eventually got lost or torn, requiring many replacement pairs.

The ear buds that come with the iPhone, though, are so comfortable that I can (and often do) leave them in all day at work, without even noticing they’re in there. So much so that I’ll accidentally try to scratch (okay, pick) my ear, forgetting that they’re occupied by little white blobs of plastic.

I’ve had my iPhone for a year and a half now, and I’m on at least my third pair of Apple earbuds. During this time I have also tried three kinds of non-Apple earphones (bud, in-ear, on-ear), none of which had the comfort of the Apple buds.

The first pair died because the plastic outer layer of the cord became detatched from the plug end, eventually causing the wires to be exposed and then to tear. I tried staving this off with electrical tape, but the rubber/plastic of the outer casing seems to resist adhesion.

The second pair is still functioning, but they look sadder than a dachshund whose dinner has been given to the cat: the protective sheath on the plug end has disintegrated, and the rubbery rings around the ear buds have completely eroded. I only keep them around as a backup.

I would say that this speaks ill of Apple’s build quality, but I do use these things literally daily, many hours a day. I listen to lots of podcasts, and I like to use them for any phone call longer than thirty seconds. In fact, I’m eagerly awaiting the iPhone 6th Generation that just feeds audio straight into my brain, so I can be constantly connected, with the music gently fading away if a call comes in, or somebody starts talking to me. Then I can dispense with ever having to purchase another headset or car stereo.

The latest generation of ear buds from Apple has a distinctly different feel to the rubber coating. As Gruber noted, it’s more rubbery, and feels more durable. I hope these will last longer than previous ones. But I’m sure that will just reveal the next weak point.

In the middle of this, I also tried some non-Apple headphones, although I didn’t spend too much on them, as I don’t want to blow $100 on headphones and then not use them because they’re uncomfortable.

Let me also preface this by saying that I probably have overly-sensitive ears (not in terms of hearing, but in terms of tolerating foreign objects in them). Just being at the bottom of a 10′ swimming pool is almost too painful for me. I’ve even had to ask a flight attendant to ask the pilot to depressurize the cabin a bit so my head didn’t explode.

I bought a pair of Sony MDR-NC6 Noise-Canceling headphones. They have very good sound, but their noise-canceling ability seems a bit lacking. I did try them on an airplane ride, and they do cancel out some of the engine noise, but in any other environment, it seems like all it’s doing when you flip the switch is boosting the volume.

Also, they are very uncomfortable – the hard speaker is very noticeable underneath the thin foam padding, so I can’t wear them for too long.

Next, I tried a pair of Sennheiser CX 400 in-ear headphones. I really wanted to like these – the noise blocking and bass response is phenomenal. As far as iPhone compatibility goes, they came with an nice short cable, which attached to my Griffin SmartTalk iPhone adapter with built-in mic.

The main problem with these was comfort – I just can’t wear in-ear headphones, my ear canals are way too sensitive. I could only stand to keep these in for a few minutes at a time, no matter which size tip I put on.

I also tried a pair of Sennheiser MX760 ear buds. Like the previous pair, they had a nice short cable which can plug into the Griffin adapter (more on the adapter in a second), but these are bud-style, not in-ear. Sound reproduction was adequate, but I wasn’t expecting perfection at this price point. Again, the problem was comfort. The buds are just too large for my ears, especially when the foam covers are on (which they need to be, because the buds themselves are nasty hard plastic.

I really tried to give these buds a good shot, wearing them whenever possible. But when the Griffin adapter started flaking out, I threw in the towel and went back to the Apple buds.

Even before it crapped out, though, I did find the usability of the short-cord-plus-adapter combination to be inferior to the almost-perfectly placed microphone on the Apple buds. The placement of the Griffin mic required clipping it to my shirt (and the clip was very weak, so it didn’t want to stay put), while the Apple mic just hangs right near my mouth.

I’ve heard good things about the V-Moda Vibe Duo in-ear headphones. I’d like to try them out, but I don’t want to spend $80 on another pair of phones that will just get tossed in a drawer. Does anyone have a pair they wouldn’t mind getting my earwax all over?

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