Power Levels

During the Silver Age of Comics, DC heroes strode the earth like demigods. Their powers were limitless and existed beyond mortal physics. Superman epitomized this. He was invulnerable to everything except kryptonite and magic. Nothing was beyond his strength (except the metal "inertron" which was not invented until the 30th century). He could melt anything (except lead) with a glance or freeze it with a puff of his super breath. He could see anything anywhere (unless lead was in the way). Using super hearing and super ventriloquism, he could hold conversations with people anywhere on the planet. He could fly faster than light and, if he spun at the same time, could go into the past or future. What's more, he was a genius inventor who built advanced robots that could pass for human.

The other DC heroes were not far behind. Wonder Woman and the Martian Manhunter had many of Superman's abilities. Green Lantern's ring could do anything as long as yellow was not involved. The Flash had to work a little harder but could do things like vibrate through solid objects.

Even non-powered heroes like Batman never met anyone they could not beat with their bare hands. The only trick was following some obvious clues to find the villain.

Contrast this with the Marvel heroes, especially the first few years. They were much weaker. The most powerful heroes, Thor and the Hulk, could not even fly. Thor needed his hammer and the Hulk jumped. There were things that even the Hulk could not break.

The Thing could only lift a few tons. The Human Torch's flame lasted around a half hour, less if he pushed it, then he had to rest. Cyclopes, the most powerful member of the X-Men, could move a few tons with his power beam but the effort left him weak or even unconscious. The same was true for Marvel Girl who collapsed after lifting a few hundred pounds. At 12 feet tall, Giant Man wasn't all that strong and was clumsy. He could grow larger but only for short times. His partner, the Wasp, was more of an irritant than a threat.

The most powerful heroes had built-in weaknesses. Thor lost his powers if he didn't hold his hammer. The Hulk changed back to a puny human. Iron Man constantly had to recharge his batteries. The Sub-Mariner grew weaker when he was out of water.

Even Daredevil had constant problems. He was a blind, costumed athlete with radar sense but power lines and other things confused his hypersenses. A guy dressed as a matador, or someone on stilts, or someone in a frog suit was enough to give him a challenge.

Then there is Spider-Man. He had superhuman strength but he usually fought people who were even stronger. Just a group of regular people was enough to give him a work-out. The trio, The Enforcers, fought him to a standstill more than once. They consisted of a cowboy with a lasso, a guy who knew martial arts, and a big strong guy.

While most of the Marvel heroes grew stronger during the late 1960s and 70s, Spider-Man grew weaker. Regular guys with a gimmick were enough to give Spider-Man a challenge.

The funny thing is that the Marvel heroes were a lot more interesting. There was never any question that Superman or Batman would win a fight. The plots were often structured so that they had to out think their foe. While admirable, it did not induce page-turning excitement like hand-to-hand combat with someone who is stronger.

Over the years the Marvel characters have gotten stronger and the DC characters a lot weaker. When they finally fought, the Marvel heroes came out on top.

At the same time the Marvel villains have gotten stronger so that the fights are still a challenge. Still, they do not seem as grounded as they used to.

Important Superhero Movies

There have been a lot of superhero and comic book-inspired movies over the last few decades. Some have been good, many have been forgettable. This is my list of ones that were important. When I say important, I mean that they had an noticeable effect on other movies.

Superman (1978)

Billed as Superman the Motion Picture with the tag line, "You will believe that a man can fly", this was the first big-budget super hero movie. Stories about production problems had been going on for years before the movie made it to the screen. For a long time it was considered a "troubled production". When it actually came out it was a huge hit.

Part of the success was the contrast between the earnest, too-good-to-be-true Clark Kent/Superman and the post-feminist, post-Watergate Lois Lane.

The movie started on the doomed planet of Krypton, showing us Jor-el sending his son to the Earth and educating him at the same time. It followed as the child was adopted and brought up with solid mid-western values, eventually discovering his heritage and assuming the identity of Superman. We saw Clark meet Lois then rescue her as Superman. He then went on to save multiple people (and rescue a cat from a tree).

Unfortunately the movie peaked half-way through. Once Luther and his goofy assistants were introduced it was all downhill into camp.

Superman 2 never duplicated the lyrical parts of the first movie and never got quite as campy. Superman fought a trio of villains with the same powers that he had. He was also pulling powers out of a hat. After that, the movies went downhill fast.

Superman was notable for its visual effects, particularly the digital wire removal. It proved that comic book heroes could appeal to adults if taken seriously.

Batman (1989)

The comic book character was notable for going through two reboots in the 1960s. The first one trimmed the cast eliminating Batwoman, Batgirl, Batdog and Bat Mite. Also eliminated were fights involving giant props, the Batplane and whirlybats (flying chairs). The over-sized Batmobile was traded in for a convertible sports car. Plots involving aliens or wacky villains were dropped in favor of a more realistic approach. Then came the campy TV show and a lot of the camp crept back into the comic. By the late 1960s, the character was being redefined again. Robin was sent to collage and everyone started referring to him as the Batman.

This change was reflected in the approach to the character. Camp was banished. The Batman took himself seriously.

The look of the movie had a major effect on late superhero movies. The Superman movies were set in the present-day. Care was taken to reproduce the offices and street-front of the New York Times as the Daily Planet. While this added to the realism, it also meant that the Superman movies did not age well. By the mid-1980s, the first couple of movies already looked dated.

For Batman, Tim Burton designed a Gotham City that never existed. Few cars were shown and none were contemporary. As a result, this movie still looks fresh more than two decades later. The only jarring point is when we see Bruce Wayne looking at various TV screens. The TVs use picture tubes rather than flat screens.

The movie showed that a superhero movie did not need any camp or tongue-in-cheek to succeed. But, since it was a Tim Burton movie, it did have some bizarre touches. The sequel had more. The third and fourth movies were over the top and killed the franchise.

X-Men (2000)

Several marvel properties had been made into movies but there were C-list characters (Blade) or flops (Howard the Duck, Punisher). This was the first A-list Marvel title to make it to the big screen and it was a hit. This was followed by an onslaught of other Marvel heroes which continues to this day. Most of them are true to the original character which was a problem in the earlier adaptations.

The X-Men also added sub-texts to superhero movies. The mutants could be seen as stand-ins for issues such as terrorism and gay-acceptance.

Spider-Man (2002)

Superman showed that there was still a place for superheros in the cynical, post-Watergate era. Spider-Man showed that the same was true in the post-9/11 era. It was a huge hit.

Both X-Men and Spider-Man showed that superhero franchises did not have to sink into camp as they progressed. Both series stumbled on their third movie by stuffing too much into the plot but neither committed a sin equal to "bat nipples".

Batman Begins (2005)

This movie introduced the concept of rebooting a character. I still prefer the Tim Burton version but without this movie no serious Batman movies would be possible.

Iron Man (2008)

This was the first marvel Studios movie and it introduced the Marvel movie formula. This includes a long middle act where we get to know the character. The casting and scripting on Iron Man were brilliant because this middle act is the best part. The movie actually becomes less interesting when Tony Stark starts fighting.

Where the X-Men kicked off movies featuring Marvel characters, this one began a series of movies produced by Marvel in which the characters share a common universe and interact. Without the previous four movies, the Avengers would have flopped. It would have taken too long to introduce the characters.

Iron Man was also notable because the head of the Academy of Motion Pictures admitted that it (and The Dark Knight which came out later the same Summer) should have gotten best picture nominations. This was a break-through in acceptance of superhero movies.

The Dark Knight (2008)

 Another huge hit, this is the first superhero movie to win a major Oscar (best actor for Heath Ledger. No camp here.

The TRS-80

35 years ago Radio Shack announced the TRS-80 Microcomputer. I ordered one two weeks later and finally got delivery just before Christmas.

1977 was an important year in computer history. Microcomputers are the parent of today's desktop computer. They had been around for a few years but mainly as kits. For $1,000-2,000 you got a case, one or more printed circuit boards, and a lot of parts. It was up to you to solder the right parts into the circuit board. Once you were finished you could expect to spend hours looking for places where some extra solder shorted out a circuit or you accidentally fried a transistor with your soldering iron (I'm repeating this from published how-to guides from the period). 1977 saw a new generation of microcomputers that were cheaper and were pre-assembled. This included the Commodore PET computer and the Apple II.

None of these had a fraction of the power of a smart phone. They were slow and had limited resources. Storage was limited to a cassette tape drive. Still, they were the first computers aimed at people who wanted a computer instead of an electronics project.

Radio Shack was trying to reinvent itself. A craze for CB radios had just ended and they were trying to improve their image. The TRS-80 was one of a line of new prestige products that were not expected to sell very well. Projections were that each store might sell one or two per year. Instead they sold their entire planned annual production the first day.

By the time that the TRS-80 was released I had a job and enough money (barely) to buy one. I went with the TRS-80 because it had a local dealer and because I could get an RF converter and hook it to a regular TV instead of paying $200 to them for a modified black and white set. I never regretted the choice. The Commodore had a non-standard keyboard and heat problems. The Apple was a nice computer for the time but the TRS-80 cost me $400 and an Apple was over $1,000.

The TRS-80 was cheaply produced. The expensive kits had multiple slots for memory and device drivers. The TRS-80 had a single motherboard. It looked like a thick keyboard. It came with 4k of ran and 4k of ROM which held its BASIC interpreter. The display was 16 lines of 64 characters. It also had a graphics mode made up of little white rectangles. Tandy saved money by only using 7 memory chips instead of 8 so it could only display upper case. It used the Z80 chip which could run at 4 megahertz but Tandy saved money by using an internal signal instead of adding a clock chip. This reduced its speed to around 1.77 megahertz. By any measure it was thousands of times slower than anything made today.

Within months Radio Shack announced upgrades. You could upgrade the 4k of ROM in your base unit to 16k, you could upgrade the 4k Integer BASIC to a 12k floating-point version from Microsoft and you could buy an expansion module. This plugged into the back of the original unit and allowed you to add another 32k of memory, a printer, and up to four disk drives. Suddenly the TRS-80 was a real computer able to compete with ones that cost thousands of dollars.

Radio Shack later renamed the original computer the Model I and introduced a Model II. This was a one-piece computer, monitor, and dual disk drives. Other models followed including one that eventually ran a version of Unix. By the early 1980s, microcomputers were competing with game consoles and were expected to have color and accept game cartridges. Radio Shack came out with three models of Color Computer for this market. The third one of these used the 6809 chip and could run an operating system known as OS-9 that was years ahead of anything that IBM or Apple offered.

By the mid-1980s Radio Shack had converted most of their lineup to IBM PC compatibles. By the late 1980s they decide that they could not keep up with the development costs and dropped their line of computers. Instead they began carrying ones from Compaq (now HP).

Commodore followed up their PET computer with the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64. Both were huge sellers.

Apple lucked out when the first "killer application", Visicalc was written for it. This was the first spread-sheet program and made the Apple II a must-have for business.

Life imitates art - the Batman shootings

A major sub-plot in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns is the idea that costumed heroes inspire costumed villains. In the backstory to the series, the government put pressure on the superheroes to retire. The exception was Superman who took direction from the President and kept a low profile.

Then a violent gang took over Gotham City and Batman returned to straighten things out.

The prediction was accurate. Two-Face and the Joker returned and began killing people. The Joker in particular returned because Batman did.

At the end of the series Batman faked his own death and went underground, leading former members of the gang in the fight against crime. The war would go on but the day of the costumes was over.

At the premier of The Dark Knight Rises, a gunman dressed in black with body armor and a gas mask entered a theater through the emergency exit, threw a canister of tear gas, then began firing into the audience. A dozen were killed and dozens more were injured including small children.

It is possible, maybe even likely, that the gunman was inspired by the Joker's random acts of violence in The Dark Knight.

The Heath Ledger Joker was unique among superhero villains. Usually they are bigger than life. Lex Luthor keeps trying to conquer the world, or at least destroy several states. Tim Burton's Joker was already part of organized crime. Catwoman didn't kill anyone except a villain who was trying to kill her. Even Liam Neeson's character in Batman Begins was part of a secret organization and the Scarecrow was a psychiatrist with some unusual pharmaceuticals.

In contrast to most other comic book inspired movies, Heath Ledger's character worked alone and was mainly interested in death and destruction for its own sake, especially if it revealed the worst side of humanity.

Last night's shooter was not directly inspired by the Joker. He hid his identity and wore armor that was more reminiscent to Batman than the Joker. Still, the idea of shooting a bunch of people at random as they waited to see a Batman movie would appeal to the character.

So, did The Dark Knight go so deep into human nature that it inspired a mass shooting? Or was the shooter just someone who was mad at the world and chose a movie audience as a convenient target? Hopefully more information will be forthcoming.

Time Keeping

We got a new clock alarm a few days ago. You don't even have to set the time. Just plug it in and it finds the time.

That got me remembering how clocks used to be. Electric clocks that plug into wall sockets have always been acurate (within my lifetime). The power company carefully maintains 60 cycle per second alternating current. An electric clock based on that will always keep good time.

I remember a news report after a blizzard in the late 1970s that warned that, due to increased power demands, the power company had allowed the cycles per second to slip by a few seconds but they would make up the extra seconds later that week.

Of course you had to set your electric clock to the right time in the first place. Radio and TV stations would give the exact time regularly or you could call the phone company. Most phone companies had a time and temperature number using some early automatic equipment and prerecorded messages.

Once you were out of the house you were on your own as far as time went.

Watches were common. There were no battery-powered watches. They all ran off of a mainspring that had to be wound.

I still have my father's watch. My mother gave it to him before I was born. It was an expensive, high-end timepiece. It was self-winding which meant that it used an internal weight and the wearer's arm movements to wind the watch. If you didn't move your arm enough the watch would wind down (although you could wind it manually). There has been a revival of self-winding watches in the last few years. They are not made as well as my father's. Undoubtedly they cost a lot less, also.

As watches from the 1950s go, this one is quite accurate. It does have to be adjusted every few days.

Timex used to have a line of kids watches. These were cheaply made and not very accurate. Typically one of these had to be adjusted daily. I remember having one that was off by around 10 minutes a day. These watches didn't last long, either. The mainspring or some other vital part would break within a year.

Larger clocks were more accurate. A lot of alarm clocks had to be wound daily but kept decent time.

The worst clocks were in cars. When a car's engine is running it is charging the battery and produces around 13.5 volts. When the engine is off the battery is discharging at around 12 volts. Electric clocks were just electric motors and the higher the voltage the faster they run. car makers tried to estimate how much time a car would be running and designed clocks based on that average. For most people this resulted in clocks that were off by several minutes per day. Even high-end cars had this problem.

In the 1970s watches based on cheap, accurate working became available. Suddenly everyone could afford an accurate watch and timekeeping was never the same.

Mulan and the Princesses

My daughter pointed out that, unlike other Disney princesses, Mulan has both parents. Since the plot centers around her trying to bring honor to her father, I forgot about the mother.

The funny thing here is that Mulan may be marketed as an official Disney princess, she is not a princess. She is the daughter of a noble. She doesn't even become a princess by marriage. So she doesn't break the mold by having both parents.

An irony here is that Mulan is the closest of the Disney princesses to Brave's Merida. Both are tom-boys and at the beginning of both movies the girl is tidied up and stuffed into an uncomfortable dress in order to impress potential suitors. Both of them have trouble with a stray hair, also. Both of them are also accomplished warriors with their own warhorses.

Brave - is Merida a Disney Princess?

Pixar's first dozen movies featured male characters. Most of them were non-human males but even WALL-E had a male personality compared with EVE. Their 13th, Brave has a female lead, the Princess Merida. Her mother is also a major character.

This movie has gotten a lot of criticism. Some people have dismissed it as just another Disney princess.

Originally Disney had six "official" princesses: Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora (Sleeping Beauty), Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine with Pocahontas, and Mulan as unofficial princesses. Later the last two were added to the official role along with the latest creations,Tiana, and Rapunzel.

Right off the bat, Merida is disqualified from being a typical Disney princess. She has too many parents. Of all of the official princesses, only Aurora has both parents and neither parent plays a role in her story. The others are missing one or both parents*.

Merida has both parents and has a normal relationship with both of them. He father is kind and indulgent. He is the one who gave her her bow and arrows and taught her to shoot. Presumably he also gave her the war horse. Her relationship with her mother is strained but familiar to anyone who has raised a daughter.

Merida is also lacking a handsome suitor. She does have the sons of the three clans competing for her hand but the first is skinny with a big nose, the second is incomprehensible, and the third is, well... the third choice of this trio.

Finally, Merida is lacking anyone who actually wishes her harm. Belle and Jasmine have unattractive suitors forcing themselves on the respective princess. Most of the others have someone who is actively trying to kill her (there is a giant bear but he seems to hate everyone).

All of that said, there are some similarities: She is a princess and, like most Disney princesses, she is fairly young (at 14 she is the youngest). There is an element of the supernatural including a woodworker/witch. Finally, she does have some intelligent animal companions.

The biggest difference between Merida and the Disney princesses is that she is a totally original creation. All of the others were pilfered from myth or literature.


* Rapunzel's parents are both still alive but she didn't know this. She was raised by a woman claiming to be er mother.

Secret Identities

I recently wrote about Spider-Man's wisecracks. This got me to thinking about the differences between a costumed hero and his secret identity.

Back in the Silver Age, you got the feeling that a DC character really was his costumed version and that his secret identity was a disguise. This was certainly true for Superman. His real personality was the guy in the cape. When he put on Clark Kent's glasses he assumed a different personality. He was timid and clumsy. I was never sure why he would want to be Clark. It was a lot of work with little return.

Batman was rich but he never spent any time in his mansion or enjoying his wealth. He was always out patrolling with Robin. The Flash pretended to be slow (and always arrived late for dates).

Contrast that with Peter Parker. That was who he was. When he wore a costume he acted a little differently, mainly by being more assertive and making wisecracks. That was perfectly normal. Most people act like this when they know that they are anonymous. That is why Internet trolls and flame wars happen.

Daredevil was similar. He really was a blind lawyer. He just downplayed his additional senses. When he was in costume he was acting by pretending that he could see.

The Fantastic Four didn't even bother with secret identities. Neither did the Sub-Mariner or Doctor Strange. The X-Men kept their identities secret from the outside world but they spent most of their time at the school. They were unique in the lengths they had to go to to hide their identities. Cyclops had to wear special glasses. The Beast had special shoes. Angle strapped his wings to his body, something that he compared to wearing a strait-jacket.

Thor and the Hulk really were different people. When they changed identities they gained several inches height and spoke differently.

Captain America went out without his costume but never established a life outside of the Avengers (until the 1970s). Even then, he never changed personalities. Giant Man and the Wasp wore masks but didn't seem to have a life outside of crime-fighting and research. At some point their identities became known but no one commented on it when it happened.

Back at DC, Green Lantern had the most fully-developed secret identity as a test pilot with a (small) supporting cast.

Then there were the Metal Men - robots who didn't need secret identities (they tried establishing them in a last-ditch effort to escape cancellation but failed). Metamorpho, the Element Man was a freak whose identity prior to his transformation was publicly known.

Martian Manhunter was a shape-changer and took on different identities. The Specter was separate person from his host body although he still needed to merge with it to rest.

Anyway, my original point was that Silver Age Marvel heroes "real" identity was the person behind the mask. In many cases they didn't even bother to wear a mask. DC heroes, especially hold-overs from the Golden Age, put on an act when they took off their mask.

This was part of the appeal of Marvel heroes. You didn't have to become a different person.

Getting Spider-Man Right

There were problems with the first three Spider-Man movies but they got a lot right. Tobey Maguire was perfect as Peter Parker. He embodied the everyman quality that made the character so popular.

Watching trailers for the new version, I keep wondering what they were thinking?

The guy playing Peter Parker doesn't come across as an everyman. He seems more like a character from Twilight. He isn't picked on, he is angst-ridden over his parents. And he already has a girlfriend.

But what really seems wrong is Spider-Man himself and his mouth.

Stan Lee's comics were full of wisecracks but these came across as Groucho Marx style commentary. Sometimes the villain seemed puzzled by Spider-Man's quips. That was ok. The reader knew that he was talking to us. Here's an example:

Green Goblin: After I finish you there will be no one to stop me!
Spider-Man: There's always Irving Forbush!
Green Goblin: Who?
Spider-Man: It's an in joke.

Prior to this, Stan used the name Irving Forbush as a recurring joke in the credits.

So, in the trailers for the new movie we hear Spider-Man making a joke about "You found my secret weakness... a small knife!" before disarming a petty crook. In a different trailer he makes some comments about how people are dressed.

I couldn't put my finger on what seemed wrong about this until I saw an article about the reboot including a lot of sarcasm. There is the problem. Someone with super powers makes some sarcastic comments then beats you up. That isn't how Stan's hero acted. That's how a bully acts. Stan's version didn't use sarcasm, he made jokes. It's the difference between Groucho Marx and Don Rickles.

The trailers may be misleading but I suspect that the new team doesn't understand Spider-Man at all.

Smart Phones

Verizon announced changes to their plans that would have seriously increased by monthly phone charge. I was eligible for an upgrade anyway so I got a new phone and (hopefully) grandfathered my current rate for another two years.

I had been using a Droid Incredible which was top of the line when I got it. It still did everything I need from a phone although an operating system upgrade left it with a serious bug. It didn't recognize all available memory and would give me out-of-memory errors. When this happened some things like Gmail stopped updating. There is a fix for this but my phone complained that it did not have enough memory to install the patch.

Anyway I got an LG Lucid. By current standards this is considered an entry-level phone but I mainly use it for email, Facebook, driving directions, photographs, and occasional web searches so it does everything I need. I'm not thrilled about the battery. My Droid had an extended battery which was good for 2-3 days. I have had to charge the new one twice in a day. I have an extended battery on order. I will see how that helps.

One nice thing about this phone is that everything except the case from my old phone still works. I moved the memory card from the old phone to the new one and had all of my pictures and music. You can't do this with an iPhone or Windows Phone - they don't even support memory cards. Also, the rumor is that the next iPhone will have a new connector that will be incompatible with the old one. Worse, Microsoft announced that the current line of Windows 7 Phones will not be able to run Windows 8. My Lucid is supposed to be upgradable to the next release of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich) although nothing has been announced.

This is my second Android phone plus a couple of Android tablets so I know my way around the operating system. LG made a few changes, mainly cosmetic. One I like is that the wallpaper changes when it is charging. This is an easy way to be sure that your phone is solidly connected to the power supply.

I did have trouble connecting with my Roadrunner email. I could not get the native email client to do it. Eventually I downloaded one called K9 (after Doctor's Who's assistant) and this works just fine. I can get both to connect to my work email.

One complaint I have with the Lucid is the lack of an indicator LED. This is useful for seeing when a new email has arrived and for seeing when the battery is fully charged. Other than that and the battery, it is a nice phone. Considering that the current iPhones and Windows Phones are about to be made obsolete, I'm glad I stuck with Android.

Addams Family and the Munsters

A new Munsters movie is in the works. The Addams Family had its turn at the movies two decades ago. Originally, they competed with each other.

The 1960s was a time of high concept TV. Several shows included leading characters that can only be described as unusual. This included the Addams Family and the Munsters. There was also My Favorite Martian (also made into a movie), Bewitched (another movie), I Dream of Jeanie, The Living Doll (about a life-like female android), The Ghost and Mrs. Muire, and My Mother the Car. In addition, Gilligan's Island and the Monkeys had occasional supernatural episodes. On top of that, there were the straight, hour-long science fiction shows, Star Trek, Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants.

Some of these did a better job than others at finding an audience and none were huge hits.

The Addams Family was based on the cartoons of Charles Addams. The Munsters were inspired by Universal's monsters.

The two shows had some similarity. Both featured unusual families that did not seem to realize that they were anything but normal. On the other hand, the Addams Family was higher class in every way. The family itself was rich. Morticia was the embodiment of the genteel matron and one of the sexiest mothers on TV. The family had some quarrels but in general they went out of their way to support each other. They also had a large extended family.

The Munsters were working-class. They were often quarrelsome and could be petty. Herman was childish and given to tantrums. Herman and Grandpa didn't seem to like each other but regularly conspired with each other because they didn't have any other friends. A standing joke was that their niece (who looked normal) thought that she was plain. The Addams never let a woman think that she was plain. If it came up, they whipped out some X-rays to show that her beauty was on the inside.

Previous attempts have been made to revive the Munsters as a TV show.  They never worked.

I suspect that the new remake will have more in common with the Bewitched movie than the Addams Family.

Gays in Comics

DC announced that a Allan Scott, the Green Lantern from an alternate Earth is gay.

So far DC has had a black Green Lantern, a Hispanic one, a few women, and various humanoid and non-humanoid aliens. Why not a gay Green Lantern?

At least they didn't decide to mess with Hal Jordan again.

Having a gay comic book character isn't really news. Captain America had a gay friend in the 1980s.

The first openly gay superhero was Northstar, a member of Alpha Flight although they danced around the issue for a long time. At first they dropped some fairly broad hints - he didn't like women. Later he came down with an acquired immune deficiency syndrome although no one used the acronym (AIDS). Northstar is going to be the first gay superhero to get married this month.

Cat woman was probably the first openly gay lesbian but Wonder Woman and her supporting cast dropped a lot of strong hints in the 1940s including swearing by Saphos, the Greek poet from the Isle of Lesbos (which is where we get the word Lesbian). But, Wonder Woman's sexuality in the 1940s was pretty racy, even by 21st century standards.

Archie made the news recently with the introduction of a new gay character. It would have been more interesting to have had an existing character come out - say Moose.

Considering how often DC reboots their continuity, this is really a meaningless gesture. Not long ago Allan Scott was older and had a gay son. Now it is Allan himself who is gay. Next year he could be older again and it is his granddaughter who is gay.

I cut way back on the Marvel characters I follow but I stopped caring about DC completely a long time ago. None of the characters I grew up with exist any longer. They have been written out of existence multiple times. Why get attached to a character if he will be rebooted later with a different personality?

Attack of the Fill-ins

The 1970s were a bad time for comic books. Demand was down and many traditional outlets like supermarkets stopped carrying comics. There were paper shortages which caused prices to outpace inflation. DC ended half their books because of paper shortages. A new generation of writers and artists had entered the field and they were enthusiastic but had not properly learned their craft.

Things were even worse at Marvel. Stan Lee had ended his long run as editor-in-chief and Marvel couldn't find a competent replacement. The office had a revolving door with each new editor only staying until it became obvious that he sucked. Regular assignments were similarly haphazard. New comics were created with a top-tier team who left within a couple of issues to go launch the next new comic. In some cases, a book might be cancelled by the time the first issue came out.

With all of this going on, production schedules slipped and people began missing deadlines. Since Marvel had a contractual obligation to get something out the door, they started resorting to fill-in issues. At first these were reprints or partial reprints framed with some new pages. Other times they would round up anyone available and have them do an issue. This may or may not work into the ongoing continuity.

I heard Tony Isabella tell about one Fantastic Four story he did under those circumstances, It had been plotted Marvel-style meaning that the artist was given a rough plot and the writer would add the dialogue to the finished art. Things were so tight that as soon as a page was drawn it was sent to Tony for word balloons then sent to be inked and lettered. Tony had the villain command "Release the Three Who Wait!". The next day he got the next page which had a fourth opponent. He solved this by having the Thing exclaim, "I thought you said there were only three!" and the villain replied "I lied!"  (note - in the 1970s, word balloons always ended in exclamation points).

Eventually Marvel started commissioning inventory stories just for missed deadlines. This was a good short-term solution but in the long-term it made things worse since it relieved some of the pressure. Nearly every comic was hit by a fill-in at some point. It got so bad that the staff began to joke about the DDD - Dreaded Deadline Doom.

A few fill-ins were actually good stories. Tony Isabella did one for the Avengers involving a professional assassin that I remember liking. That was an exception. Most fill-ins were, at best, annoying,

There were a lot of things going against the fill-ins, They interrupted the continuity, sometimes in the middle of an intense continued story. They were seldom done by the regular team for the comic, More often, the stories were written by assistants or new guys looking for work. There was little incentive for these people to do their best work since it might never be used, anyway.

Even with these excuses, it is hard to believe that Marvel once ran a comic pitting the Defenders against Tapping Tommy and his Killer Dancing Robots. Really. A frustrated chorus boy captured an Avengers-like team and tried to kill them with dancing robots.

This unfortunate period came to an end when Jim Shooter took over as editor-in-chief. He was controversial but he got production under control.

Men In Black 3

The big question about this movie is why? It's been 14 years since the original one and a decade since the disappointing sequel. Will Smith is getting a little old for the smart-mouth bit.

Fortunately this movie avoids the problems of Men in Black 2. The first sequel rehashed scenes from the original movie and expanded throw-away characters rather than come up with anything new. MiB3 manage a lot more originality. It also features James Brolin doing a dead-on imitation of Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K.

The villain, Boris the Beast, is menacing enough. His goal is to go back in time, kill Agent K, and destroy the Earth. J has to follow.

One goal of the movie is to give some depth to K's character by showing him when he was more open. In contrast, J's character barely grows.

The movie does not manage to recreate the wonder of the original but it is entertaining and throws in many new twists.

Dark Shadows - the Movie

Fans of the Dark Shadows TV show started worrying about the Tim Burton version as soon as the first trailer came out. Fortunately, the trailers are not very representative of the movie. Yes, it is Tim Burton's funniest movie since Pee Wee Herman but a lot of the TV show is there, also.

All of the major characters are there, even Maggie Evans who changes her name to Victoria Winter a few minutes into the movie.

The family members are all there - Elizabeth the family matron, Roger the officious ass, Caroline the rebellious teenager, and David who talks to ghosts. Also living at Colinwood are the servants, Willie Loomis and Mrs. Johnson and Dr. Hoffman, a psychiatrist who was suppose to spend a month treating David and never left.

There are some changes. The biggest is Dr. Hoffman who drinks heavily as well as using drugs.

Then there is Barnabas. In the movie he is deathly pale, speaks with a British accent, and constantly suffers culture shock. He is much more bombastic than in the TV show and most of the movie's humor comes from his transition into 1972.

In the 1970s House of Dark Shadows, Barnabas is released after nearly 200 years and introduces himself as a long-lost cousin. The family governess, Maggie Evans looks just like Barnabas's long-lost love, Josette and he courts her. Along the way he drains Caroline Collins of blood and she returns as a vampire. Dr. Hoffman guesses that Barnabas is the main vampire and offers to cure him. At first the treatment works but Dr. Hoffman falls for Barnabas herself and, in a fit of jealousy, gives him an overdose which causes him to age to over 200-years old. He reverts to being a vampire and plans to convert Maggie but is destroyed.

A lot of these elements are in the new movie but a new element is added - the witch Angelique who cursed Barnabas and spent the last 200 years tormenting his family. This takes over as the main plot and the rest is pushed to the background. This is good for the rest of the cast since most of them died in the original version.

The new treatment is fairly successful although it has a few flaws. The biggest is that the romance between Barnabas and Victoria is barely shown.

Then there is Depp. He is a great actor, assuming characters wildly distinct from each other, but he does not bring as much emotional depth to the role as Frid did. He just isn't as tortured.

One interesting thing about the movie - it is much more firmly part of the 1970s than the TV show was. The show could not afford the rights to popular music so it made do with a few pieces written for the show. The movie's soundtrack is largely made up of period music. That and real, outdoor sets make the movie much more of a period piece than House of Dark Shadows.

There are several Tim Burton touches in the movie starting with a scarecrow near the beginning.

Overall, fans of the show and of Tim Burton should be pleased with the movie.

Dark Shadows the series

With the Tim Burton Dark Shadows out today, I thought I would take another look back at the series.

It started as a dream - literally. Producer Dan Curtis had a dream about a woman named Victoria Winters and decided to make it into a soap opera. I believe that it was writer Sam Hall who actually translated this into a tv show.

At the time, gothic novels were hugely popular. These were all take-offs of Jane Eyre in which a young woman (often a governess) enters into a relationship with a rich, eccentric family. The plot revolves around a mystery which appears to involve the supernatural but at the last minute all is revealed. The least likely character turns out to be the perpetrator and the heroine runs off with the previously unavailable hero.

When it started, Dark Shadows had all of these elements. Victoria Winter was the governess, come to care for David Collins in the mansion of Collinwood in the town of Collinsport. The other family members were David's father, Roger, the younger son who had run through his inheritance and was reduced to working for his sister, Elizabeth Stottard. Elizabeth had a rebellious daughter, Caroline, who was in her late teens.

The other main characters were Sam, a drunken painter, and Maggie, his daughter the waitress. There was also Burk Devlin who had just returned to Collinsport and who had a history with the Collins family.

There were also hints of the supernatural, mainly ghosts. The ghosts of three widows were supposed to reside in the Old House, an abandoned mansion on the property. The principle ghost was Josette Collins.

For the first year or so, something would happen then different combinations of the characters would talk about it with each other. For example, Roger's breaks failed and he blamed Burk but it turned out that Roger's son David had sabotaged the brakes. The factory manager was killed and Roger and Burk accused each other. In this case it turned out that the Collins caretaker had killed the manager to keep him from nosing into family business.

This plotline eventually pushed the show into the supernatural. Victoria found an important clue about the murder and the caretaker kidnapped her and took her to the Old House where the ghosts drove him insane.

After that, plots involving the supernatural became more common. Roger's ex-wife returned. She was a phoenix who periodically died in fire along with her children then returned decades later to marry again, often choosing Collins men (she married at least three in three centuries).

Ratings climbed and Dan Curtis decided to drop the traditional soap opera plots and switch entirely over to the supernatural. The original plots were wrapped up or dropped. Years before, Burk, Roger, and Roger's wife had been out drinking. Their car killed someone. Burk was too drunk to remember who was at the wheel. It was Roger but he bribed Sam, the painter, to say that Burk was the driver. Once the truth came out, Burk made his peace with the Collins family and became engaged to Victoria.

The other original plot involved Elizabeth. She was a recluse who never left the mansion. This was because she had killed her husband and buried him in the cellar and was afraid that someone would find the body if she left. Later it turned out that she only stunned her husband and he left before she could try again. His best friend, Jason, told Elizabeth that he had buried the body so that he could blackmail her later.

Two other plots were dropped completely. Originally the show had dropped broad hints that David Collins was actually Burk's son and that Victoria was Roger's daughter. The plot about David was forgotten and, decades later, it was revealed that Victoria was Elizabeth's daughter.

Jason, the blackmailer, had brought a friend named Willie Loomis to Collinsport. Willie heard hints that one of the Collins family in the 18th century had been buried with her jewels and went looking for her. Instead he found her son, Barnabas who was a vampire.

Barnabas fit neatly into the established family background. He was from the time when the family lived in the Old House and Josette's death was linked with his vampirism. He introduced himself as a long-lost relative and moved back into the Old House with Willie as his servant. He also wrapped up the plot involving Jason the blackmailer - Barnabas killed Jason and hid the body.

Barnabas felt that he had been unfairly separated from his true love, Josette, and set about making Maggie the waitress into a new Josette. She eventually escaped but the shock gave her amnesia. After that, Barnabas pursued Victoria.

From there the characters took a new direction. Barnabas was the new star. Elizabeth and Roger never knew what was really going on. Caroline had a talent for attracting the wrong person. First Barnabas sunk his teeth into her, then a Frankenstein's Monster fell in love with her, and eventually she married a Lovecraftian horror. Her cousin David made friends with whatever ghosts came by including Barnabas's little sister.

A new character was introduced - Julia Hoffman, a doctor and owner of the asylum that Maggie had been taken to. She realized that Barnabas was a vampire and tried to cure him. When that failed he tried to kill her.

The family knew that something strange was going on and held a seance. They contacted Barnabas's sister who transported Victoria back to when Barnabas was human and engaged to Josette.

Barnabas had previously had a fling with Josette's maid, Angelique, who was a witch. She forced Barnabas to marry her and when she found that he was still seeing Josette, she engineered Josette's death and cursed Barnabas.

While this was going on, Victoria was accused of witchcraft and hung. She returned to the present just in time to escape hanging.

Barnabas bit Victoria and suggested that they run away together but they had a car accident and ended up in the hospital. While he was unconscious, a doctor cured his vampirism.

Then things got complicated.

The show worked through variations of numerous horror stories. The doctor who cured Barnabas was creating his own Frankenstein's Monster and after his death, Julia Hoffman had to finish. Angelique returned and tried to turn Barnabas back into a vampire.

The show took other trips into the past - twice to the 19th century then into an alternate word and finally into an alternate 19th century. A second cursed Collins was introduced - Quentin. Originally he was a ghost from the past. In the past he was a werewolf and was finally cured through a portrait (Dorian Gray). Barnabas fell in love multiple times, only to have his love snatched away. At the end he was finally reconciled with Angelique (who was shot a few minutes later). He was always accompanied by Julia Hoffman who obviously loved Barnabas deeply.

Dark Shadow's appeal was not in any individual episode. The acting was poor - the actors only had a few hours to learn their lines and block out their movements each day. The effects were limited to blue screen and bats on wires. Still, the earnestness of the show was infectious.

Also, the character of Barnabas was irresistible. He was a complex character. He hated what he was but he couldn't resist biting someone in the neck every now and then. He would risk his life to help the innocent or a family member but he would also kill anyone who threatened his existence, even family members.

During the height of the show, a movie was made based on the original Barnabas plotline - House of Dark Shadows. A followup, Night of Dark Shadows, was made around Quentin but it was a flop.

Over 20 years ago a new version of Dark Shadows was made for prime time. The pilot followed the plot of the movie (without Barnabas's death at the end) and the rest of the season took the plot through the end of the seance. It was not renewed.

Thanos and Warlock

Yesterday I started a capsule summary of Thanos, the guy who appeared at the end of the Avengers movie. Before I go on I have to backtrack and talk about Adam Warlock because the two appear in most of Jim Starlin's works (within the Marvel Universe).

It started when some scientists kidnapped the Thing's girlfriend, Alicia. She is blind and does sculptures by touch. The scientists had created a new lifeform which got away from them and started glowing. They needed Alicia to sculpt a model of it so that they knew what they were up against.

It turned out that the life form, known as "Him", was still in a cocoon. The FF rescued Alicia and the cocoon hatched revealing a perfect, gold-skinned man. Him, as he was still known, had no interest in helping the scientists and left the Earth.

Later Him decided that he needed a mate and grabbed the first pretty woman he saw. This was Thor's girlfriend, Sif. The two fought and Him retreated back into a cocoon.

He was still in his cocoon when he encountered the High Evolutionary, a highly evolved human with god-like powers. The High Evolutionary was creating a world without sin occupying Earth's orbit but opposite us. Unfortunately, one of the High Evolutionary's failures interfered. This was the Man-Beast, a human/wolf hybrid. He introduced original sin to Counter-Earth.

The High Evolutionary was going to scrap his project but Him offered to go to Counter Earth and clean up the mess. He emerged from his cocoon and was named Adam Warlock by the High Evolutionary and given a soul gem to replace the powers Adam lost by emerging early from the cocoon.

The story arc played out as a Jesus parable with Adam eventually being killed, forming a cocoon, and emerging again. After his resurrection, Adam reverted the Man-Beast and his minions to the animals they were created from. Adam then left the solar system. This is where Jim Starlin took over the character.

Starlin's run featured two story arcs. The first concerned the soul gem. The name was not poetic. It was semi-self-aware and could steal the soul from anyone at Warlock's command. The story arc concerned Warlock's battle to keep control over the gem.

The second arc concerned the Church of Universal Light and its god, the Magus. The church was brutal and the Magus turned out to be a mirror version of Adam Warlock. Warlock devoted himself to opposing Magus. Along the way he picked up a sidekick, Pip the Troll, and an ally, a mysterious green-skinned female assassin named Gamorra.

The Magus had his own goal. He was a future version of Warlock who had been transported to the past and he wanted to assure his continued existence. The two confronted each other and Magus started the chain of events that would turn Warlock evil.

Enter Thanos. The personification of death had deserted him after his defeat at Captain Marvel's hands but he was still Death champion and the Magus was Life's champion. Thanos's short-term goal was to prevent the Magus's creation. His first attempt had been the assassin, Gamorra. After she failed, he took matters into his own hands and engaged Magus in personal combat.

While this was going on, Warlock traveled into his own-near future and used his soul gem to take the life of his battered and beaten future self. The Magus vanished on the verge of defeating Thanos.

But this was only Thanos's short-term plan. His ultimate plan was to give such a gift to Death that she would take him back again. In addition to Warlock's gem, there were five other Infinity Gems of great power. Thanos siphoned off elements from them and built a cannon capable of destroying stars. He planned on starting with his home system, our sun.

Gamorra found out his plans and tried to stop him. Warlock found her dying and had his soul gem take her soul. As a joke, Thanos destroyed Pip's mind and Warlock took his soul, also.

The Avengers along with Captain Marvel and Warlock gathered to stop Thanos. They were able to destroy his cannon but Warlock was fatally injured and his soul taken. The rest of the Avengers were captured. Thanos decided that he could still use Warlock's gem to destroy one star, our sun, in the hope that it would be enough to satisfy Death.

Spider-Man and the Thing joined the fight and freed the Avengers. Thor and the Thing took on Thanos and lost but that gave Spider-Man enough time to free the soul gen from a crystal globe Thanos had put it in. An energy version of Warlock appeared from the gem and turned Thanos to stone.

Back inside the gem, it turned out to be a sort of paradise where Warlock was reunited with Gamorra, Pip, and others.

A few years later Captain Marvel died of cancer. At his last moment, Thanos appeared to him as Death's emissary so that he would have a warrior's death.

In the late-1990s, Starlin took over the Silver Surfer comic book. Soon after the Surfer had a vision of Death's minions releasing a soul who had been punished long enough. This was Thanos and he was sent back to change the balance between life and death (in Death's favor).

Thanos discovered that the Infinity Gems were far more powerful than he originally thought. When assembled they gave the holder total control over everything. Thanos succeeded in gathering the gems and mounted them on a glove which he named the Infinity Gauntlet. Unfortunately, this made Thanos more powerful than Death and, while she would have accepted him as an equal, she was miffed that he was her superior. They were never again on speaking terms.

Earth's assembled heroes opposed Thanos but were easily defeated. So were the universe's cosmic beings. But all of this was a distraction so that Thanos would not notice Warlock striking from within the Soul Gem. Warlock seized the Gauntlet and became the new ultimate power and Thanos fled.

The cosmic powers forced Warlock to break up the Gauntlet and to give the gems to guardians to prevent them being used again. He gave them to various Starlin creations including Gamorra, Pip, Moondragon, the Destroyer, and Thanos.

After the Infinity Gauntlet was reassembled to fight a new manifestation of the Magus, the cosmic powers decreed that it could never be used again.

Warlock and Thanos appeared in a few limited issue specials. In one of them, Thanos actually became God (not just the power of God through an external source). He saw that the universe was flawed because too many people had come back from the dead so he fixed it, expecting to be destroyed in the process. He survived but was returned to his original state.

So, that is what the Avengers will be facing in their next movie - a villain who is already powerful and plans big.

Thanos

Since nearly everyone in the world seems to have seen the Avengers, I'm not giving away much but talking about the scene at the end of the movie. A defeated alien tells his boss, "To attack the Earth is to court death." The boss turns and smiles.

This guy is Thanos, one of Marvel's top villains.

He has an interesting pedigree. In the early 1970s, Jack Kirby moved from Marvel to DC and created a trio of comics (he called it a trilogy) loosely inspired by The Lord of the Rings. The comics were The New Gods, The Forever People, and Mr. Miracle and they involved the struggle between a race of super beings and a powerful being named Darkseid (pronounced Dark Side).

Darkseid was a stone-faced humanoid with a massive build and enormous personal power, especially beams that came from his eyes. He ruled a ruined planet full of "dog soldiers" and his ultimate goal was to possess something called the Anti-Life Equation. This would allow him to control everyone, anywhere.

A few years later an artist named Jim Starlin started at Marvel and began introducing characters he had dreamed up. Central to this was Thanos (Greek for death), a stone-faced humanoid with enormous personal power (including eye beams) who literally loved death (in the Marvel Universe, abstract concepts like death can take on human form).

Thanos was from a race called the Titans because they lived on Saturn's moon, Titan. His father was Mentor and his brother was Eros. His father was Cronus who was sort of a disembodied god.

From an early age, Thanos was fascinated by death and was eventually joined by an avatar of Death appearing as a icy-cold woman in dark robes.

Along the way Thanos bombed his own people, killing most of them. While scouting the Earth, his spaceship was seen by some humans in a car so he destroyed it. One of the car's occupants, Heather Douglas, survived and was rescued by Mentor and raised on Titan where she developed great mental powers and took the name Moondragon.

Mentor asked Cronus for help against Thanos so Cronus used the spirit of Moondragon's father to animate an artificial being named the Destroyer. His only mission was to destroy Thanos. Eventually the two met and fought. The fight destroyed the planet they were on and the Destroyer was captured.

This was all backstory. These characters entered the Marvel universe when the Destroyer managed to contact Iron Man and ask for aid. Iron Man tried to free the Destroyer with his repulser rays but was knocked on his rear. Then a giant foot stomped on Iron Man's hand, denting the armor.

This was our introduction to Thanos. The Destroyer was freed using Iron Man's armor as a relay for energy sent from Titan by Mentor and Thanos disappeared.

He next surfaced in Captain Marvel where his plan was revealed. Thanos was after Captain Marvel's alter ego, Rick Jones whose mind held the location of the Cosmic Cube (called the Tessaract in the movie). Once Thanos got his hand on the Cube he had a single wish - to be an all-powerful god.

While this was going on, Captain Marvel gained "cosmic awareness" which allowed him to realize that Thanos the god was still powered by the Cosmic Cube. Marvel destroyed the Cube and Thanos vanished.

Star Wars to Avengers

Today is Star Wars Day and the premier of the Avengers. Assuming that the Avengers meets expectations as a summer blockbuster, it will owe everything to Star Wars.

A couple of weeks ago TCM played Logan's Run. It was slow and a bit of boring. Even though it won a special effects Oscar, the effects were poor. They never worked well enough to reach suspension of disbelief. You knew that someone was triggering squibs when the guns fired, that there was someone inside Box, and that the big explosions were just superimposed fireballs.

Star Wars changed our expectations. Its effects were good. You accepted the droids. You never questioned the blasters or light sabers or the Death Star blowing up. You saw a hovercar and wondered how they did it.

When he started Star Wars, George Lukas expected that he could just call up a special effects company for what he needed. It turned out that such things didn't exist. Movies would establish their own effects unit then dissolve it when production ended.

So, he created one - Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). At first it was mainly Disney employees who were moonlighting. The saying was that working for Lukas was fun but you will never make a career out of it.

But Lukas didn't dissolve ILM. He kept it together and it became an industry force. Star Wars made so much money that every studio wanted to make an effect-laden money-maker. It didn't take long before there was more demand than ILM could handle so alternate effects companies sprung up.

And that led to superhero movies that didn't suck. Hopefully the Avengers will be one of those.

Review - the Questionable Tails

I was searching Barnes and Noble for steampunk books and found The Questionable Tails: A Steampunk Trio by Michael Seeley. It was free so I figured, why not?

The answer is that it is not a very good book. It is a collection of three stories linked by the airship "Questionable". In fact, the airship is the only claim that the stories have to being steampunk. Give me five minutes with a word processor and I could remove all of the steampunk elements.

So what it left? Three short stories in order from shortest to longest. None of them are very good.

The first is a very short build-up to a twist ending. A man is challenged to a duel by his beloved's long-lost brother. It reminded me of the type of story I wrote in the 8th grade.

The second story also has a twist. A poor man obsesses over a painting. It eventually turns out that he does not want to buy it. He wants to steal it to sell.

The third story is an abomination to my sensibilities. The main character is Karl Marx (yes, that Marx). In the story he goes to India (on an airship) and pours his heart out to the first man he meets. This man takes him to some elders who are easily sold on Marxism. The next thing we know, factory workers are rising to arrest foremen and execute the factory owners. In our world, Marxism lead to the deaths of 80 million to 100 million but in this world we are told that the revolution leads to a century and a half of peaceful communism in India.

Seriously, I thought that people gave up on Marxist fantasies after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So, even for free the book is not worth the effort to read.

Avengers Assemble

In the early 1960s, the publishers from National Comics and Timely Comics used to get together regularly to play golf. At one of these games, the guy from National told the guy from Timely that one of his top-selling comic books was a superhero team-up called the Justice League. After that, the guy from Timely, Martin Goodman, called his editor and told him to create a new superhero team.

It had been years since Timely had tried to publish a superhero book, They had several hits in the Golden Age but efforts to revive them in the 50s flopped. So the editor couldn't have established heroes team up. He had to create some new ones. He called the newest staff artist and they came up with some characters - mainly recycled from previous characters. Since this was so different from anything that Timely was publishing at the time, the editor came up with a new name for the line - Marvel Comics.

Obviously I am talking about Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and the Fantastic Four. As it turned out, there was a huge, untapped market for superheros. Stan followed the Fantastic Four up with The Hulk, Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man (who was Giant Man by the second issue) and the Wasp. Then he gathered them into a second team called the Avengers.

The Avengers was a different kind of team. The Fantastic Four was an extended family. The Avengers was a collection of solo heroes who didn't necessarily get along. In fact, the team was formed to fight the Hulk. When it turned out that Thor's brother, Loki, was the real villain, they decided to keep meeting - even the Hulk. But by the end of the second issue the Hulk quit and spent the third issue fighting the Avengers alongside the Sub-Mariner. Captain America joined in the 4th issue and became a mainstay.

Stan thought of the Avengers as being like a baseball team with members changing. In issue 16, the original members all quit and were replaced by three misunderstood villains - Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch.

Hawkeye has started out wanting to be a superhero but got off to an inauspicious start. After stopping a bank robbery, he was the one holding the money when the police arrived. Not long after that he met the Black Widow, a Russian spy, who wanted his aid in fighting Iron Man. After the Black Widow vanished, Hawkeye reformed.

Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were members of Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. They joined because they felt they owed a debt to Magneto for saving the Scarlet Witch's life. After Magneto was abducted by an alien, they declared their debt satisfied and reformed.

The "New Avengers" were one of the weakest teams ever. Their most powerful weapon was an explosive-tipped arrow. That put them on par with the Dukes of Hazard.

After a few months Giant Man came back as Goliath. Hercules came and went a few times. The Black Panther added more manpower if not more muscle. Thor and Iron Man were came and went. The Vision was the first original character in the Avengers. He was an android who could control his density.

Other characters started out as villains and later became members. The Swordsman and Power Man started as one-shot inside agents and later reformed and joined as trusted members.

Somewhere in there the Avengers became Marvel's top-selling team, rivaling Spider-Man and burying the Justice League (whose publisher was now known as DC).

By the late 1970s, the Avengers was amde up of two camps. There were the heroes with their own books (Thor, Iron Man, Captain America) who were mainly in the team to boost sales. Then there was the core group (Scarlet Witch, Vision, Swordsman, Mantis) who had all of the character development.

In the 1980s, the team picked up several new characters and most of the characters with their own books dropped out.

There was even a spin-off book, the West Coast Avengers. A third, Great Lakes Avengers made a couple of appearances but never got off the ground.

The team has been rebooted several times in order to boost sales. Fan favorites such as Spider-Man and Wolverine were added.

More recently there were multiple groups of Avengers. The "official" group was composed of super villains under Norman Osborn. A resistance version was also formed. Currently the team also includes an academy where new superheros are trained.

Logan's Run to Star Wars

Over the weekend TCM showed some 1970s science fiction movies including Logan's Run. I think that the theme was actually science fiction dystopias because they also showed Westworld (robots go crazy) and Soylent Green (the land and oceans are dead so humanity is reduced to eating people). Logan's Run is interesting because it came out a year before Star Wars and because it won an Oscar for special effects.

In Logan's Run, the world's population is confined to a single city (or appears to be at the beginning of the movie). To prevent overpopulation, people are expected to go to an arena and try for renewal (actually all of them die). Some people try to avoid this. They are known as runners. A group of special police, called Sandmen, hunts down the runners.

Logan is one of the best of the Sandmen so he is given a special assignment. It seems that some runners are unaccounted for so he is to go undercover and try to find their sanctuary. Everyone has a "life crystal" implanted in their left hand that shows their age group. Logan's is sped up so that he appears to be 30.

Along the way Logan picks up a girlfriend named Jessica who is part of the underground. After surviving a mad surgeon and some feral teenagers, they find what appears to be Sanctuary. It turns out to be a food storage facility run by a robot named Box who freezes everyone who passes by.

They escape from Box and explore a ruined Washington DC. Eventually they meet an old man who lives in Congress and quotes T. S. Elliot. They return to the city and bring it down.

The movie made money and inspired a TV series in which Logan and Jessica keep going from settlement to settlement looking for Sanctuary. It is never explained why they didn't settle with the first people they encountered. Maybe that's why is only lasted 14 episodes.

So, how do the special effects hold up? To be honest, they weren't that good when the movie came out. The grand special effect is the city. It is a miniature filmed to look like an actual city except it didn't fool anyone. It looks empty and antiseptic.

There are some shuttle cars that look like remade golf carts (which they were). The guns were kind of neat. They had some flame come out around the muzzle. They were not convincing, though. A Sandman would point his gun and fire it and something in the general direction of his muzzle would explode. There was no sense of a projectile or energy beam.

Box is an interesting comparison with C3P0. Box is a multifaceted, mirrored box with arms and a head. You can see the actor inside moving his mouth when he talks and he looks like he could never get up if he fell over (which was true of the actor inside the costume).

The movie saved money by using some existing buildings as sets - mainly malls. It shows. It also has a failing of science fiction movies at the time - everything is too clean.

One reason that Star Wars was so big when it came out the following year was that it was so different from science fiction to date. The production values looked expensive. The sets looked real. No one would mistake Luke's speeder for a golf cart and no one looked at a the Death Star and said, "That looks like a miniature."

But only a year separated them.

One thing that Logan's Run did have was casual nudity. At best, Logan's girlfriend, Jessica, wore an outfit that looked like a short nightgown. It was short enough that you can see her underwear (which changed colors at unlikely times). Occasionally she shucks off her nighty completely. In addition, Box stripped his victims before freezing them in chambers that were transparent from the waist up. This gives a nice view of a couple of actresses painted white.

Prior to Star Wars, science fiction movies were a niche production and made on the cheap. This was one of the last of these movies.

Jonathan Frid

Jonathan Frid, the original Barnabas Collins, has died of natural causes at the age of 87.

Frid was a classically-trained actor who spent most of his early career on the stage. At one point he moved to England and started spelling his name "Fridd". His father found out and he changed the spelling back.

In the 1966 he was dissatisfied with his career and had accepted a job teaching. He was packing when his agent called and sent him to ABC to read for a soap opera. While waiting he noticed that all of the other people auditioning "looked dead" and wondered what that said about him.

The soap opera was Dark Shadows. At the time it was on the verge of cancellation and the producers hoped that a new character would boost ratings.

During the 1960s, the most popular genre of novel for women was the gothic romance. The plot was always a variation of Wuthering Heights - a young woman, possibly a governess, entered into a family with dark secrets. There was a hint of the supernatural but it always turned out to have a natural explanation. All of the mysteries would be wrapped up in the last few pages and the woman would find happiness with the handsome but melancholy head of the family.

Dark Shadows was the TV version of this and, at first, everything supernatural turned out to have a reasonable explanation. Slowly the writers started adding real supernatural elements to the show. The ghost, Josette, appeared on her own instead of as a hallucination. A missing, presumed dead, character showed up as a phoenix whose purpose was to kill her son in flames.

After these starts, the producers decided to go all the way and introduce a vampire, Barnabas, the long-lost lover of Josette. They worked up to it over several days and tied the character into existing elements of the show. At first, Barnabas's nature was only hinted at but eventually he started biting the female leads.

The new character worked. Ratings soared. At first the writers kept making Barnabas more and more evil but during a flashback to the 1790s, they changed his character. He was an innocent victim of a curse who was horrified at what he had become. When the flashback ended, this characterization continued. Barnabas was a tragic hero, trying to do good but lapsing into evil. Prior to this vampires had always been portrayed as Dracula - willingly evil. Frid's tormented vampire was new and led to today's versions.

As Barnabas became more popular, Frid's screentime increased. Dark Shadow's format was to use seven actors a week with five per episode. This gave the cast some time off but Frid was included every week for over a year. Eventually Frid convinced the producers to add a second charismatic lead, Quentin Collins the cursed werewolf. That gave Frid a little breathing room but he remained the most popular character.

One thing that Frid attributed to his success was a personal failing. Frid had trouble learning lines quickly. With multiple scenes every week he was constantly afraid of forgetting lines. This added some nervous energy to Barnabas which was perfectly in character for someone who was always keeping secrets.

After Dark Shadows ended, Frid made a couple of movies but mainly returned to the stage. In the 1980s he started touring with a one-man show that demonstrated how good he was when he had time to memorize his material. I saw this twice. The second time was a special show that he gave after officially retiring.

Frid's last performance was a cameo filmed for the upcoming Dark Shadows movie. Reportedly he was delighted to discover that the cast and crew of the movie were huge fans, especially Johnny Depp.

Comics on tablets

If the future of books is tablets then what is the future of comic books?

I just explored a couple of options. I am using a Nook Color which is a 7" tablet. I have tried comic books on a 10" tablet before, also and the results are about the same.

My Nook Color runs a dual boot so I was actually using it as a generic Android Tablet running the Nook Android App. The results are the same as running it natively since the Nook Color is Android-based.

Barnes and Noble is offering some graphic novels in digital form. I bought Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 volume one.

So, what's the experience like? Not that good. A tablet is a fraction of the size of a graphic novel. I had to zoom and pan in order to read it. Also, Nook only supports this format in portrait mode. That lets you see the entire page but you can't read it. It would be a big improvement if you could rotate the page and have it auto-size.

So - reading comic books on a Nook Color or the Nook Tablet leaves a lot to be desired.

But... Marvel and DC offer free Android apps. Since I am running generic Android, I was able to install these. They make a huge difference. You can read the comic book normally (with the same problems as the Nook app) but they also support a pan and zoom mode. This does all of the work for you. It will show you the splash page then zoom on the word balloons or, where appropriate, start with the close-up and zoom out. It is almost cinematic. Even better, Marvel is upgrading their books. When I loaded the app I was notified that some books that I had already downloaded had been enhanced and offered to refresh them.

Also, this app does support rotating. In some cases a panel was tall and thin. In other cases it was short and wide. I could rotate the tablet and the panel would resize.

This is probably the future of comics. Especially as artists get used to creating content for electronic media.

Bad Cars

I've watched a couple of episodes of the US version of Top Gear. One was on dangerous cars and the other was on "uncool" cars. I didn't actually care much for the show. The hosts are trash-talking jerks. Still the cars deserve a second look.

Their choices for most dangerous cars were the Ford Pinto, the Chevy Corvair, and the Suzuki Samurai. I have some experience with two of these. My parents owned a Corvair and I owned a Samurai.

Since I never even drove a Pinto there isn't much I can say except that the show exaggerated the danger. In a famous lawsuit it was alleged that a design flaw made it more likely that in a rear-end collision the fuel tank filler would break off, spilling fuel and making the car more likely to catch fire. A document was produced showing that Ford had calculated it would cost $11/car to fix and decided to save the money.

Much later a study found that only a couple of dozen people were killed in fires involving Pintos out of 2 million sold. This was typical for cars from that period. The memo on cost was a regulatory requirement and senior management had never seen it.

Ralph Nader built his reputation on the Corvair. His first book, Unsafe at Any Speed, devited a chapter to the car and soon after GM stopped selling it. Nader claimed that the car was difficult to control, especially at high speed.

In the 1960s when the Corvair was being made, most small cars had manual steering and an engine sitting on top of the front wheels. The Corvair had a rear-mounted motor. This made it easy to oversteer the car. This happened to all cars with rear motors. I remember my father commenting on it to my mother. He had previously owned a Karmann Ghia which was a sporty body on top of a VW Beetle frame. Both cars behaved the same.

The government tested the Corvair and found that it was one of the more stable cars with a rear motor. GM had always planned on dropping the car when it did because the profit margin was too low.

The Samurai got it's reputation from a Consumer Report review which claimed that it turned over during testing. My experience with it was that it was a poor car on the highway but great for off-road (which is what I used it for). I never had any problems with stability, even on gravel roads with sharp turns.

Suzuki sued Consumer Reports claiming that they anti-rollover equipment that they attached to the car changed the balance and that they were trying to help an employee win a battle with an insurance company. Eventually Consumer Reports apologized for their rating.

So, none of these cars were particularly dangerous. Regardless, Top Gear managed to spin the Corvair, roll the Suzuki, and even got a smoldering fire to start in the Pinto for no reason. All I can say is that stunt drivers can get cars to do a lot of things and the camera never showed what caused the spin or rollover.

On to the uncool cars - the Yugo, the Mustang II, and the Pontiac Aztek.

The big question is how they missed AMC's Gremlin and Pacer? Those were uncool when they were new and the Pacer tops most lists on worst car ever made.

Of the ones they did pick, the Yugo stands out as particularly bad. It's only selling point was that it was the cheapest car on the market. A product of Yugoslavia, the car was poorly engineered, poorly built, underpowered, and a generally bad car. The reviews said that the few hundred that you saved by buying one were not worth the money. If you were really strapped for cash you were better off buying a used car. It would be more reliable.

The Pontiac Aztek was supposed to be a crossover SUV. It ended up looking like someone had cut the top third off of a car and the bottom third from a second car then stacked them. This impression was helped by the body styling and double rows of headlights. It wasn't a bad car but no one liked the look.

The Mustang II was a product of its time and really should be judged as such. The Mustang started out as a small car with a big motor - one of the first muscle cars. Over the next few years it grew into a big car with a big motor.

Ford President Lee Iacocca wanted to return the car to its roots as a small car and the Mustang II was introduced. The car has a bad reputation now because the Mustang II could be ordered with a 4 cylinder motor which was pretty underpowered. Even the 8 cylinder motor was slower than the earlier models because of new air quality and safety standards.

I can't argue with the other two choices for uncool car but a Mustang II with a good motor was cool when it came out - something that could never be said for the Yugo or Aztek.

The flop that wasn't

John Carter has gone down as one of the biggest flops in movie history. Disney projected that they might lose $200 million on it.

Except it is a huge hit overseas. So far it has taken in $172 million in addition to its $72 million domestic take. That is a total of $264 million on a movie that cost around $250 million to make.

Disney is not out of the woods, yet. It has been reported that they spent another $100 million on marketing so it still has a ways to go before it breaks even. At the same time, it is still in first run and hasn't opening in Japan, yet. Then there are the DVD and Blu Ray sales.

We might see the planned sequels, yet.

John Carter - What Happened?

John Carter is a great adventure movie but it looks like it will be a financial flop for Disney. What happened?

The movie got mixed reviews with many critics complaining about the slow opening. The part that they complain about is also the biggest change from the source material. When adapting the novel, it was decided to flesh his character out more. He was given a wife who was killed during the Civil War making him hostile and apathetic about anyone else. This hurt the movie. In the novel, when presented with a new world to conquer and a princess to win, Carter embraced his opportunities. In the movie, Carter spent the first half trying to return to a miserable existence on Earth. Imagine how poorly Star Wars would have done if Luke kept worrying about getting back to the moisture farm.

The movie was marketed poorly. Disney spent $100 million on marketing alone but never mentioned certain key words like "Edgar Rice Burroughs", "Princess of Mars", or "from the creator of Tarzan". The ads gave no sense of what the movie was about and were nearly indistinguishable from the upcoming sequel to Clash of the Titans.

Monster Man

SyFy followed the second season of its make-up effects contest show with a new series - Monster Man. This is about a firm that does custom make-up efects. After the high bar set by Face-Off, this show is a bit of a disappointment.

The pilot followed the same formula as other shows about fabricators (American Restoration, Sons of Guns). The staff takes on two projects. There is a lot of drama about making deadlines and finally the big reveal. In this case the reveal is to the director who commissioned the work.

This time they did a werewolf and an "ugly" mask to go on a pretty dancer. The werewolf suit was the big project. It apparently took weeks to do. It was fairly basic - a muscle suit, painted and covered with hair and a mask. The mask's jaws could open and close but it could not change its expression. Apparently it was only used for a few shots taking place in some woods at night. There was also a lot of blood and guts.

The first season of Face-Off had its own werewolf as well as a steam punk Red Riding Hood. A small team led by one of the finalists had three days to do both figures and they were a lot better than this one.

I suspect that most of the contestants from Face-Off could have done a better "ugly" mask, too.

Oh well, the next season of Face-Off is already filming.

Nook problems and solutions

A couple of weeks ago we flew to Florida. I took my Nook Touch and my Nook Color. Since I have a dual boot installed on the Color, it is my main tablet. It is great for web browsing, checking email, and Facebook but it is a little heavy for reading and the battery has to be recharged daily. I planned on using the Touch for my reading and I have a number of unread books on both devices.

I dutifully turned both devices off when asked to but the Touch would not come back on. It got as far as a screen saying "Read forever" and hung. Rebooting did not solve this. I even managed to return it to factory defaults but it still hung at the same place. Later I reset it two more times but it never made it past the ironically-named "Read Forever" screen. I suspect that the internal memory went bad.

Not a big deal since I had the Nook Color with me. Otherwise I would have been without my reading material. I also had a netbook, just in case, and I could have downloaded the books to it during a layover. The layover was in Baltimore which charges for WiFi and the netbook is not as good as a dedicated reader but I did have options.

That's the bad part. The good came when I contacted Barnes and Noble. All of the Nooks have a one year warranty. After explaining the problem to their technical support, they shipped me a new one with a mailing label to return the old one. Three days later I had a working Touch again.

So, one bad mark on build quality and one good mark on customer service.

Dark Shadows

I started watching Dark Shadows soon after it moved to the 4 pm time slot. Before that it was on while I was in school. At the time the central plot involved a cult called the Leviathans. They had a magic box that brought something Lovecraftian into the world. Normally it appeared like a child but inside a special room it turned into something that drove people mad just seeing it. The thing started as a baby then was replaced by a child and finally a hippy. The cult was opposed by Barnabas and company although Barnabas was an inside agent. He was discovered and turned into a vampire. This was the first time that I had seen Barnabas as a vampire and I was hooked.

Previously vampires were always heartless monsters. Barnabas was different. He didn't want to drink blood. Jonathan Frid played the character as a drug addict who kept relapsing. Except when he relapsed, people died.

The trailer is out for the new Dark Shadows movie. I don't see any of the original Barnabas.

I'm not really surprised. The original story was done three times, first in the serial then as a theatrical movie and finally in the pilot for the 1990s version. I can't imagine Tim Burton doing a story for the fourth time.

Also, our view of vampires has changed. In the 1970s they were still monsters. Like I said, even the remorseful Barbabas regularly killed innocents. Now we have audiences rooting for a high school girl to choose between a vampire and a werewolf. Vampires no longer kill. Instead they sparkle in the sun. An audience that has seen Twilight would be mystified by the original Dark Shadows.

Instead we get a story about an 18th century man adapting to the 1970s. His vampirism is a side note. It also looks like his battle with Angelique is more direct and physical.

Too bad. I was hoping for more from the director of Sleepy Hollow.

A Princess of Mars

It's been a long time since I read A Princess of Mars. It was probably the first book I read by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was in a collection of Burroughs books that my parents gave me for Christmas around 1970. The collection included all of the Mars books, the Venus books, and a few others. Burroughs was very popular in the late 1960s and 1970s so it was easy to find his books.

Of all of Burroughs' creations, Tarzan is the best-known but John Carter of Mars was his first. Tarzan and its sequel are more mature books and (this is important) much easier to film since they took place in Africa. Burroughs' other series take place on other worlds (or inside the Earth) with alien creatures. Until now that meant that they were unfilmable except as animations. There were some attempts to make the Mars books into animated movies. Bob Clampett did some test footage.

A Princess of Mars was written a full century ago in 1912. It was enormously and became the template for a century's worth of hero-on-a-different-world books. There have been numerous imitators, Just in the 1970s, there were a dozen or more series following Burroughs' formula. The most prolific of these was the Antares series featuring Dray Prescot. There was also the R-rated Gor series. I have heard that Avatar is another decedent in this genre.

Burroughs used the same basic plot for the first book in all of his series and many of his stand-alone books. Sometimes he played with the formula. In Tarzan the plot was spread across the first two books but it was all there.

In short - the hero is introduced to a new environment where he quickly acquires a friend/mentor. He meets the heroine early on, often saving her from captivity. They form a relationship but there is a misunderstanding and she leaves or is torn away. He sees her twice more, quickly, before the final conflict when the couple confesses their undying love. In a series, this is followed by the heroine being snatched away.

After the first book, the series go their separate ways. The main similarity from there is a dependence on coincidence.

Burroughs' heroes were all cut from the same cloth. They were all tall, strong, and honest. Most of them were slightly superhuman (because of differences in gravity or having been raised by apes).

While not a great writer, Burroughs is in the tiny group of writers who invented and dominated an entire genre. Hopefully the new movie will inspire a new wave of popularity.

Heroes and their girl friends

A couple of days ago Wired had a column "written" by Lois Lane entitled "Dear DC Comics: Why Do You Keep Fridging Me?" (fridging = killing). That got me thinking about the relationship between superheroes and their girlfriends.

I can't say a lot about the Golden Age. I've only read a fraction of the comics from then. My impression is that girl friends were rare. The big exception was Superman and Lois Lane although she was more of a college than a girl friend at the time.

By the time I started reading comic books, Lois's relationship had changed. She was more of a pest than anything else. She regularly got into trouble and had to be rescued or tried to prove that Superman was Clark Kent. She could be jealous of Lana Lang who had known Superman since he was Superboy.

The old Superman TV show was still in syndication and probably had an influence on the comic book portrayal. In the show, she was sometimes suspicious of Clack being Superman. There was little to no romantic attraction. He treated her about the same as Jimmy Olsen.

In the comics, Superman always claimed that he would marry Lois but that it would put her life in danger. Just knowing his secret identity could be deadly. This never sounded right, even when I was a ten-year-old. After all, Lois's life was already in danger from being a known associate (a group called the Superman Revenge Squad had a bounty on the heads of all of the supporting cast). She didn't have to tell anyone that he had told her his secret identity. They could even get married in secret.

DC did a number of imaginary and dream issues where Superman and Lois got married. Sometimes he found a way of giving her super powers. Sometimes he married her as Clark Kent. She was often miserable when married in secret because she wanted to be able to boast about her husband's accomplishments (this was the 1960s when a wife was supposed to live through her husband).

I suspect that all of this was aimed at the publisher's view of pre-adolesent boys. In the late 1960s, DC redefined the Superman Family. Lois and Jimmy started having adventures revolving around their careers as reporters. Lois started wearing her hair loose and appearing in bikinis, possibly as an acknowledgement that the readers were older.

The came the Superman movies. The first two centered on the relationship between Lois and Superman. They even consummated it although Clark eventually had to choose between being Superman and having a personal life.

When Superman was rebooted in the 1980s, John Byrne's Lois was inspired by the movie version. They eventually married in the 1990s, coinciding with their marriage in the TV show Lois and Clark. That lasted until last year's reboot.

Outside of Lois, most girl friends in the early 1960s were just filler - something to fill up panels until the hero put on his costume. It was a running gag in The Flash that he was always late for his date.

Marvel put its own spin on the girlfriend - the doomed romance. There was always some reason that the hero couldn't get together with the girl. Iron Man had a bad heart. Thor needed his father's permission. Cyclopes worried about hurting people close to him with his hard-to-control eye beams. Daredevil thought that his secretary deserved better than a blind man. Bruce Banner turned into the Hulk.

There were exceptions. The big one was Reed Richards and Sue Storm married around four years after the Fantastic Four started. This has been the main, lasting marriage in comic book history.

Spider-Man actually went through a normal relationship with Betty Brant. They met and started dating. Along the way she also started seeing Ned Leeds, a reporter. Leeds asked Betty to marry him. Peter almost proposed himself but realized that Betty did not want to be married to a superhero and the two broke up. After a brief fling with Mary Jane Watson, Peter settled down dating with Gwen Stacy.

Other Marvel heroes relationships changed. Thor broke up with Jane Foster and started seeing the goddess Sif. Cyclopes and Marvel Girl started dating. Daredevil and Iron Man broke up with their their secretaries.

A new generation of writers entered the field around 1970 and they stirred things up. The Flash finally married his girlfriend then had marital problems.

Henry Pym (Ant Man/Giant Man/Goliath/Yellowjacket/etc.) and the Wasp had a solid relationship from the beginning although they never got around to getting married. This finally happened while he was thought he was someone else. Later he began abusing the Wasp and they divorced. Even later they reconciled prior to the Wasp's death a few years ago.

There was a period during the 1970s and early 1980s when a new writer on a strip meant a new girlfriend. I lost track of Tony Stark's. At one point he was trying to relieve his guilt over manufacturing weapons by chasing after a hippy chick. Later he dated the daughter of a crime lord. Daredevil went through a few girlfriends with Electra being the most memorable one. Spider-Man's girlfriend, Gwen, was killed and he went back to Mary Jane although he had a fling with the Black Cat (Felicia Hardy). Thor alternated between Sif and Jane Foster before marrying the Enchantress in an alternate future. Captain America's long-time girlfriend, Sharron Carter, died and he dated around before Sharron returned. Even the Hulk got a green girlfriend for a while.

I think that this represents two factors. One is that new relationships are easier to write and can add some freshness to a strip. The other is the desire of a new writer to mark the strip as his own.

Comic book marriages have been amazingly unsuccessful. Either they break up, one of them dies, or the whole event is written out of continuity. The Hulk has been married a couple of times and both wives died (although Betty came back). Cyclopes married two different versions of Jean Grey and both died (more or less). The Flash and his wife both died. Spider-Man's and Superman's marriages never happened.

One final point I wanted to touch on - occasionally the girlfriend outshines the original hero. The Silver Age Hawk Man was married to Hawk Woman. In later continuity, he vanished and Hawk Woman continued.

After their breakup, the Wasp continued on with the Avengers and led the team for several years.

Then there is Carol Danvers. She was a supporting character in the Captain Marvel comic. She was not a girlfriend but there were implications that she could be given the right circumstances. That never happened.

Later she returned as a superhero in her own right - Ms Marvel. An alien machine had given her powers similar to Captain Marvel's. She has bounced around a lot since then. She changed powers a couple times and names several times, but she is still prominent and had her own comic for several years in the 2000s. Captain Marvel, on the other hand, died in the 1970s and his name was given to a female character for a long time.

Why are Reed and Sue still together? Probably because they were married during the Lee/Kirby days. That's long enough ago to be part of their DNA. All of the other relationships were much more recent. Reed and Sue were married before most professionals entered the field and before many of them were even born. Breaking them up would be like changing Superman's powers. You know that it would only be a temporary change.