1. Upsetting phone call to the store yesterday:
Me: “How can I help you?”
Boy on phone (maybe 12 or 13): “How old do you have to be to go?”
Me: “Excuse me?”
BOP: “How old do you have to be to go to your store?”
Me: “Um…there’s no age requirement. Anyone can come in, whether you’re 5 or 55.”
BOP: “Okay, just checking…thanks!”
I make sure that the front of the store has family friendly merchandise…newspaper strip reprints, children’s comics (Disney, Archie, etc.), the giant Wall O’Manga, some boxes of bargain comics, no posters of large-breasted women wielding bloody swords*…and this is the thanks I get.
2. Commenter George came close to hitting it right on the head, as it were…the sole purpose of Batman’s terrifying statue was to be knocked over on top of the bad guys. Even better, the base of the statue was apparently made of a fast-melting wax, so that Batman was able to toss a heat-pellet at its base, causing it to immediately melt away and drop “Humpty Dumpty” right on top of the intruding alien creature (don’t ask). Whether the statue served the same purpose in that theoretical Storyville adventure mentioned on the plaque, as commenter George wonders, I have no idea…like commenter Bob, I wonder if any such Storyville story exists.
3. The latest Smallville brings us yet another head injury for Lex, probably leading to the true reason for his eventual villainy…brain damage. At any rate, since it appears that Lex’s pop Lionel has had an honest-to-goodness jail cell conversion (as a result of his “miraculous” healing caused by exchanging “life energies” with Clark in a previous episode*), that leaves Lex as the sole regular cast member in the “villain” role. Of course, he hasn’t really been much of a villain so far…he’s been a jerk at times, but nothing that would result in supposedly fated life-long conflict with Superman. Plus, most of rough patches between Lex and Clark have mostly been Clark’s fault, stemming from either Clark trying to keep his powers a secret, or from Clark just being outright unreasonable. That could play into the Silver Age comics’ origin of the Superman/Luthor enmity, with Clark having a hand in creating his own worst enemy, but I expect instead that we’ll see Lex do something completely evil and irredeemable on his own near the end of the series, and that’ll be that.
3a. While it was nice to see Jane Seymour in this episode, I’m not sure the cost of having her in the episode (an extension of the “Lana possessed by a witch” story I hoped we were done with last time) is worth it.
3b. According to the Kryptonsite rumors page, Smallville‘s Chloe Sullivan may be introduced into regular DC Comics continuity…perhaps in her own series.
* You should see some of the promo posters we receive…parents would burn me in effigy if I put some of these things on our walls.
** Sometimes there just aren’t enough quotation marks. Just picture me rolling my eyes as I wrote that entire parenthetical aside.
