Clarification, accidental insults, and how not to cut your hair.
Just to clarify my discussion of Infinite Crisis and other house-cleaning company crossovers…I’m not stuck on the idea of company-wide continuity, and it doesn’t much bother me if, say, the revamp of Hedge-Trimming Man contradicts the back-story given to Punch Squad. I’m more bemused than anything else…I’m not going to write nasty letters to the publisher, or write fan-fiction “correcting” the mistake, or anything like that. I might comment on it here because, hey, this weblog doesn’t write itself, but it ain’t nothin’ I’m gonna get worked up over.
Unless it screws with Swamp Thing continuity. Then you’d better look out.
And I did like Hawkworld, since the subject came up. I particularly enjoyed the fun first annual, which was, I believe, the first of many efforts at explaining how this revamped Hawkman fit into the history of the DC Universe. And probably the initial moment when the folks at DC realized “Uh, oh…what’d we do?”
For further reading on internal consistency/revamps in myths and storytelling, may I recommend this discussion?
So former employee Kid Chris (here’s a photo for the ladies and so-inclined guys) related a tale to current employee Nathan, which he shared with me, which I’m now going to share with all of you (though names will be omitted to protect the embarrassed). KC was at a party recently, and the topic of his involvement in the funnybook retail world came up. Someone at the party informed Chris that his roommate was, in fact, a comic book writer…a writer of a particular indie title that had received a good amount of positive buzz. Tact-master Chris responded with “Wow, that comic flopped!” And, as it turned out, the person’s roommate, the writer in question, happened to be standing right there. He simply turned to Chris and said, sadly, “Yeah…I know.”
I’d been in a similar situation…many years ago, when I still went to the occasional comic convention, I was in the process of purchasing stock for the store when a fellow going through a comic box next to me decided to start up a conversation.
Fellow: “Hey, you guys sell [a particular now-defunct publisher] Comics?”
Me: “Yeah, they do okay, I suppose.”
Fellow: “So, what do you think of them?”
Okay, at this point I should have realized, “Hey, this guy may be involved with the company somehow.” However, I was but a young Mikester, my instincts not yet fully honed, so this was my response:
Me: “Well, they’re pretty amateurish…there are one or two okay artists, but otherwise, I don’t think they’re very good.”
Fellow: “Um…I draw for that company.”
And that’s how I felt like a real jerk for the rest of that day. Yeah, I know, he asked, but I still felt pretty bad.
Not as bad as that one time I completely and unintentionally mocked a customer from Ireland who was visiting our store, but that may be a story for later. (And it was unintentional, I swear!)
“Is it weird to get your hair cut like a super hero?”
“I just really liked the way Clark Kent’s hair looked in this issue of Birthright and got my hair cut person to do it like that for me. I know it’s just you basic part, but it just looked really cool. I didn’t begin to question whether or not this was kind of weird up until I was flipping through the latest Premier magazine with Brandon Routh on the cover and really liked his hair, too, then I got my hair cut person to cut my hair like that. Is that weird?”
“Yes, if it looks like Wolverine’s style…”
“Now if you were trying to get Guy Gardener’s Bowl cut, or try to have it on fire like Firestorm, then I’d be worried.”
“I ended up getting up a Guy Gardener cut once. I’ll never forget the expression on my face when I saw it in a mirror.”
“My hair is long.Brandon Lee from The Crow long.”
“Every summer, I get the Lex Luthor ‘do.”
“I got my haircut like super legend Guy Garner. Once a guy called me Moe so I kicked his behind.”
“Id love to have hair like Hal Jordan,He has a great head of hear.”
