And Now...A Totally Random Observation:

I sometimes wonder who decides which celebrities get to appear as contestants on Dancing With The Stars. About 8 years ago, actress Daniella Monet campaigned on social media to drum up interest in seeing her appear on the show...it sounded like a great idea, but she has yet to appear on the show...especially since she co-starred with popstar Ariana Grande on the sitcom Victorious for all of its 3 seasons. It's simple arithmetic of fame=merit×association.

So..8 years later..and she's still not on Dancing With The Stars?!

And thus concludes this week's random observation...

The Great Justice League #Fancast of 2014...

I'm just going to hazard an assumption that fans of superhero teams like to imagine their own lineups. Like NBA draft picks. In 2014, I posted on Instagram two pages from my bullet journal of a Justice League lineup that consisted of 1) Azrael, Batgirl, Hawkman, Captain Marvel, Green Lantern & Plastic Man and 2) Azrael, Batgirl, The Atom, Hawkman, Vibe and Element Woman.

Considering that it was 2014, it was a very timely bit of casting. Barbara Gordon was back as Batgirl after 25 years spent wheelchair-bound as Oracle; Vibe had been sharply modified in large part by appearing as a supporting character in The Flash; Element Woman had appeared prominently in the Flashpoint mini-series and was presumably going to appear more often (she didn't). The point behind the two images was me imagining two or three years worth of stories, so this pipe-dream follows the tradition of shuffling the team roster midway through the tenure to keep things fresh. I even imagined Azrael's habit of wearing different costumes come into play - I used an image from when Sergio Cariello was drawing him, followed by the red armored costume he wore in Knightquest. 

So...of course, I  paid attention to Azrael appearing in Justice League Odyssey. Did somebody involved in the book see my post from 6 years ago and say, "Okay"? It's an extraordinary coincidence to use a character who had been in mothballs from DC canonical continuity for almost two decades. I remember turning Hal Jordan into The Spectre was based on a suggestion from a message board...having the 90's incarnation of Superboy be revealed as a clone made from DNA of Superman and Lex Luthor was inspired by a fan letter that got published in an issue of said placeholder's comic book.

At the end of the day, every idea gets used. I didn't imagine Congorilla joining the Justice League, but that was something James Robinson had in his bullet journal..maybe they just get willed into existence that way. Or we're just reading the same stuff. I'm not going to go into too much detail on how my take on these characters working together would've worked out, but hopefully it will inspire their existence.

And I Don't Know At All If These #BatgirlMovie Rumors About Casting #LilyCollins as #Batgirl Are Unfolding Properly...

...because we should've heard some official news to keep the wheels in motion a little further, given that 2019 is reaching the halfway mark.

A few weeks ago, I re-tweeted a bit of gossip I read on Twitter regarding the upcoming Batgirl film that made me believe my instincts regarding Hollywood casting were right on the money. The rumor was that 1 of 3 actresses were being sought after for the role of Barbara Gordon (Batgirl): Emma Watson, Riley Keough and Lily Collins. The source was Delve Calzone ( @TriggerTwin ).

Who?

A guy. On Twitter. I don't know him personally, but I like that rumor, particularly the mention of Lily Collins. I can believe that she would be perfect casting, as I've hopefully suggested properly in past Batgirl-related posts on this blog. Aside from the fact that she's the only actress alleged to be in contention whose film resume has gotten better and better over the years, wheras other flavors of the week have hit a slump, what helps sweeten the argument are all these beautiful photos I keep finding of Lily, usually as part of her modeling work for Lancome's cosmetics line. I can picture her playing a character who would NEED to wear a Batsuit to battle criminals. We've already seen Emma Watson in another franchise fighting evil characters without having to wear a mask & cape. Riley Keough would just look like she was cosplaying - sorta like Alicia Silverstone did in Batman And Robin. #LilyCollinsIsBatgirl, ok?

Having written that, I must admit the rumor also includes another big leap in the same tweet, which doesn't sound impossible, but only calls attention to how little we actually know of anything...we know Matt Reeves has submitted his script for The Batman and that it will be set in Batman's early days...

...the next leap in Calzone's rumor is that Barbara Gordon is a character in Matt Reeves' Batman film, which doesn't suggest much about what the Batgirl film will be about, but Reeves might be involved in an advisory capacity, like a co-producer of sorts, until they get a director for it, so there might be some talk of having the films be connected without being prequels or sequels of one or the other. Warner Brothers is interested in a female director - of the names out there, I thought Reed Morano would be cool.

And then there's the costume. There are a lot of different Batgirl costumes. Nowadays, the most-popular Batgirl costumes are Cameron Stewart's "Batgirl of Burnside" design and Jim Lee's "New52" design from Gail Simone was writing Batgirl in 2011-2014. I would suggest the film use both.

"#Adulting" or "#Kidding"?

I don't feel like quoting Bill Maher, because that's like quoting from the court jester. His remarks on the reaction to the death of Stan Lee and subsequent follow-up to the public reaction to his reaction...It's all done in jest. His shots at Kevin Smith are also entirely in jest, since Smith is a funny cat in his own way. Both these clowns are for sale and not ashamed of it. They live quite well.

I'm more impressed with the eloquence of "Adulting", the essay by Maher that got the ball rolling. It's just three paragraphs. One page of notebook paper. And this essay will likely not be done in three. If Stan Lee's legacy is, according to Bill, that he created characters that appear in movies and put buns in theater seats, then the legacy of this "dumb culture" is that it kept big-budget movies in business. Quite an accomplishment from comic books being a medium born as a money-laundering front by gangsters shipping loads of booze, drugs & cash back-and-forth via a Canadian printing company.

If you've ever been keen to learn the history of the comic book "industry" and understand why it's got the social stigma that it has, then you're aware that the bulk of comic books in existence are trash. Bill Maher is right, but everyone hates it when he seems to be saying that adults should stop reading comic books because...the only people buying comics in the 21st century are adults. Kids and teenagers are more likely saving money to pay their phone bills. Adults are the only ones in the shops spending thirty or forty dollars a week buying comics until their piggy banks have been smashed, then the comic shops hope a new generation steps in to begin spending after the last one quits. This is not casual spending. The worst excesses of the medium that we saw in the 1990's - variant covers, crossovers, redundant characters, watered-down concepts, diluted brands, price increases, relaunches - keep popping up...because they still work. If there's any "good stuff" amongst that, well, that's nice, but the gimmicks keep the business afloat so that some good stuff can be found...you take what you can get, you read what you like, avoid the stuff you don't care about, know when to take a break, or know when to walk away. It's not going to get better if you collect 'em all. It's all junk. But it can be good junk.

The consumers who still hang in there? You'll find they're not buying as much.

In the past, Will Eisner tried passing off comic book illustration in technical terms as "Graphic Storytelling"...which would've taken off if he was actually any good at writing dialogue. I'm convinced Carl Barks was the only Golden Age-era cartoonist who knew how to write, but his work is marginalized because it's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, which shouldn't make a difference in distinguishing it as excellent storytelling in the medium, but that's not an opinion shared by people only looking at the superhero books. If comic books are ever going to get respect as an art form (and it seems awfully late in the game to bother thinking about this...this is all bull $#!+ in it's own way - always has been), then any talk of it needed to be more democratic..and, unfortunately, that ship sailed a long time ago. There's a lot of trash disguised as treasure. It's been that way for over 80 years, so Bill's just repeating what everyone's mother used to say from under his smirking stance.

Regardless of what anyone thinks about the quality of comic books, I don't recall anyone who's ever read them say they wasted their time. But it was never an activity that people own up to doing with dignity, as it's stuck with the stigma of being the stuff of misguided adolescence...and adults who've become attached to it by habit. It's not going to be taken seriously. It can't be.


And there's always talk that it's almost over.

It's like the old saying: Even a broken clock can tell the correct time twice a day.

And Last Night, I Had Another Batgirl Dream...

Oh, boy...

***

I was in Paris. Lily called and asked me to meet her at a certain cafe. She said she needed to talk to me...

When we met at the cafe, Batman was there, but I couldn't see his face....

Lily was very pleasant. She had brought Cathy & Christina with her. We all had a coffee...

Lily would pause in-between sips to make bat-shaped shadow puppets with her hands, which reflected onto the surface of the coffee cup's saucer. She concluded her puppetry by doing the Batusi while remaining seated...

And then she said the ancient phrase:

"We are like the dreamer, who dreams and lives inside the dream."

We are like the dreamer, who dreams and lives inside the dream...I told her I understood. And then she said:

"But...who is the dreamer?"

But who is the dreamer? A very powerful, uneasy feeling came over me. Lily looked past me and indicated to me to look back at something that was happening there...

I turned and looked...

I saw myself...I saw myself, from long ago, at a defunct comic book store in Manhattan's East Village...listening to Ben, telling me about a dream he had:

"Joseph, it's 10:10 a.m. on February 16th...I was worried about today because of the dream I told you about...the one where I get everything I ever wished for, but it's f*$ked up. I don't like them apples, Joe. I don't like the look of them apples at all...what am I gonna' do? It's like someone's sayin': 'Applesauce, bitch! Take it or leave it'."

And that was the day Matt appeared...

"Joseph?!"

And didn't appear...

"Matt? Is that you?"

"Ben..meet the long-lost Matt Reeves..you may've heard of him."

And while Matt was apparently there, he raised his arm and pointed at Ben, and asked me:

"Who do ya' think that is there?...Naw, naw..we ain't gonna' talk Bats and Babs, now..we ain't gonna talk 'bout Babs or Bats at all..."

I turned around...Lily had put on a purple Batgirl mask and was snapping her fingers before saying one word:

"Meanwhile..."

***

Damn!..

I hadn't remembered that!..

Now this is something really interesting to think about!...

One Last Halloween Treat..

Halloween 2018 is almost over...random thoughts left stirring..not much innovation regarding Halloween candy, in my opinion, though I liked Russell Stover's candy corn-flavored marshmallow with white chocolate-shell pumpkins. I also liked M&M's candy corn-flavored white chocolate-shell candies. The combination is tastier than it sounds, despite the fact that white chocolate is not actually made of chocolate. So candy corn can be delightful when blended with something that cancels out it's dry taste.

Not much innovation regarding Halloween specials for television. All is right with the world (or, depending on your perspective on current events, there's still hope) if It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is still airing annually on network television.

There's more viewing options regarding movies these days. People are trying to make a big deal of the  90's Disney movie, Hocus Pocus. It has it's moments, sure, but maybe the reboot will improve on it...oh, sure, don't be surprised...I can see it happening...Disney tested the waters with a sequel novel, but I can imagine Tina Fey, Rebel Wilson and Aubrey Plaza as the new Sanderson sisters...or maybe do a race swap and reimagine the Sanderson witches as voodoo priestesses, instead...or just do Goosebumps 3 with a more substantial role for Jack Black this time around, assuming he's not busy filming the sequel to The House With A Clock In It's Walls, which, at a glance, looked like a movie starring Paul Dini & Misty Lee (that would be neat), though it's success means Puffin/Penguin/Putnam with hopefully reissue the John Bellairs novel in hardcover, because paperbacks age terribly.

And I'm still wondering why Blumhouse didn't cast Danielle Harris alongside Jamie Lee Curtis in that Halloween reboot film...saving Jamie Lloyd for the next reboot, I guess, since having an older version of Laurie's daughter from Halloween 4 confront Michael Myers and/or team-up with Laurie is one of the few new sequel ideas in that Trick or Treat pumpkin bucket.

I hope you all had a happy Halloween this year. Don't try to finish all the candy at once. Goodnight! ;)

Only To Sleep by Lawrence Osborne

          Way out west, there was this fella,
         this fella that I want to tell you about,
          fella by the name of Philip Marlowe.
          At least that's the handle his beloved,
          yet often sozzled creator gave him.
          But he never had much use for it
          himself.
          This Marlowe, he often called himself
          a "Shamus", with emphasis on
          "SHA" when pronounced, like
          "Sha-na-na" and not "Shay". Now,
          Shamus, that's a name no one
          would self-apply where I come
          from. But then there was a lot
          about this gumshoe that didn't
          make a whole lot of sense to me.
          And a lot about where he lived,
          likewise. But, then again, maybe
          that's why I found Marlowe and the
          place he lived in so durn
          interesting.
          Now this here story I'm blogging
          about took place in the late-80's,
          just about the time of Madonna
          and Max Headroom and cartoons
          talking mermaids and dogs talking
          like Burt Reynolds and just before
          Michael Keaton put on a pair of
          Nike boots and dressed up as
          Batman. 1988. I only mention it
          'cause sometimes there's a man,
          I won't say a hero, 'cause what's
          a hero? But sometimes there's a
          man, and I'm talking about this
          shamus here, sometimes there's
          a man - well, he's NOT the man for
          his time and place. He DOESN'T fit
          right in there, he's an anachronism,
          and that's Philip Marlowe, in Los
          Angeles. And even if he's not a very
          perceptive detective, and Marlowe
          was most certainly NOT that, quite
          possibly the least-perceptive player
          in his chronicles, which would place
          him high in the running for the most
          clueless, yet highly-respected sleuth
          in detective fiction worldwide...But
          sometimes there's a detective...
          sometimes there's a detective...
          Ah, I lost my train of thought, here.
          But...ah, hell. He's the only one who
          cares. I done introduced him enough.

         
Writers will do a thing sometimes to amuse themselves with the manuscript. They'll name-drop an actor who could be their choice for playing the character in their book for a possible film/television adaptation. With Only To Sleep, Lawrence Osborne drops Beau Bridges in there, in passing. Beau Bridges as Philip Marlowe? Or in this case, a 72 year-old Philip Marlowe. Possible. But frankly, nowadays the actor playing Philip Marlowe in a new movie with the surname of "Bridges" is likely to be Beau's younger brother, Jeff. The Dude. Playing Jeffrey Lebowski has become Jeff Bridges performance by default...I don't know if his own personality became subsumed by the character, or if it crystallized him, made him identifiable in a way that he wasn't in roles played prior to The Big Lebowski, which I always thought was the Coen brothers' answer to Pulp Fiction and is arguably more-popular than the latter nowadays...or it just seems so, since you can find Lebowski re-released in theaters every summer and is on basic cable as often as Goodfellas...

             Ah, I'm going off on a tangent..

No, back to Marlowe. He's 72 in this book, retired and walking around with a swordcane...'cause that's a cool "toy" on every old man's want-list. He feels like he's marking time, but young, 38 years-old Marlowe always talked like that in the old books..I can't remember the blogger who wrote it, but he observed that Marlowe always acts like he's wondering why he's alive, and that attitude is in this new book, too, so it feels authentic.

This is the fourth Marlowe novel authorized by the estate of Raymond Chandler. The first three tried coasting on scraps - Poodle Springs was built off 3 brief sample chapters Chandler probably typed up to amuse himself (Marlowe married to Linda Loring? Heh heh heh), Perchance To Dream was Robert B. Parker's sequel to The Big Sleep, which only felt an attempt at identifying Marlowe with his own private eye character, Spenser, followed years later with Benjamin Black's effort The Black-Eyed Blonde, which proved you could do pastiches of Marlowe in perpetuity, but would you really want to read them if it doesn't feel like Marlowe was brought back to life? That's the appeal of the Chandler books. Marlowe may never realize that he's the only character in his stories that's not hip to what's happening, but he's the only character who cares, and the real highlight of the books of finding out what he cares about in each tale that makes him push on in these quests. In The Big Sleep, he felt bad about invalid General Sternwood saddled with two dirty daughters. What's he looking for to care about in Only To Sleep? Osborne decides it's the father of the man whose identity was stolen by Donald Zinn - a con artist who faked his death and is living a new life in Mexico with his younger wife. Marlowe takes a fancy to this femme fatale, but like the Marlowe of old, he resists her comely charms while revealing that he's still tempted as he was in the old days, even though he no longer looks like a matinee idol, if that's how he ever ever thought he looked like.

Zinn is clearly a dark mirror-image of Marlowe, though I can imagine John Slattery playing him in the movie, with Ana de Armas as Delores Araya, Zinn's "widow"/partner-in-crime/able Grable/Marlowe's femme fatale. He's living the life Marlowe toyed with having accepted Linda Loring's impulsive marriage proposal in Playback and tried out in Poodle Springs before Osborne's revelation in Only To Sleep:

"You know, I was married once, but the condition doesn't agree with me. It makes me unstable."

Rather eloquently put, that. There are a lot of passages in the book that give it a convincing texture, even though itdoesn't make much of the fact that it's set in the 80's. It feels it could be set in any decade pre-internet and the results are the same. The window-dressing was never the appeal of the Marlowe books. You read Marlowe for Marlowe. And this feels like Marlowe. Ironic that he's now the same age as Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot, given how Chandler thought little of Agatha Christie's work, but the private eye genre can be just as unreal and far-fetched. Read whatever you like.

Osborne's timeline suggests Marlowe would've turned 100 in 2015, yet because he can exist in that charmed state of suspended animation that keeps fictional characters from aging further, he could still appear again, this time with a swordcane in hand for his 2nd life, pondering the ephemerality of life and the persistence of yearning...he's a Miyazaki character, now.

             
              Well, you know...sometimes
               you eat the bear, and
              sometimes, you know...
             
              The shamus abides.

              I don't know about you, but
              I take comfort in that. It's good
              knowing he's out there,
              the shamus, taking her easy
              for all us readers. Shoosh,
              I hope he keeps on going
              into the next millenia. Well,
              that about does her. Wraps
              her all up. Things seem to
              have worked out pretty good
              for the shamus and Delores.
              And it was a pretty good story,
              don't you think? Made me
              laugh to beat the band...
              parts anyway. I didn't like
              seeing Delores go. But then
              I happen to know..there's a
              little Marlowe on the way. That
              might just absolute horseshit
              on my part, but I believe that's
              the way the whole darned human
              comedy keeps perpetuating
              itself down through the
              generations. Westward the
              Studebakers, across the sands
              of time until we - oh, look at
              me. I'm rambling again. Well,
              I hope you folks enjoyed
              yourselves. Catch you later on
              down the social media trail.
              Say, friend, you got any more
              of that good non-alcoholic
              margaritas? Margarita Hayworth?..