July 18, 2025 · 4:30 pm

“The weekend at the college didn’t turn out like you planned” … and neither did this week

(Title from Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the Years”)

Before we get to the week, let’s get back to Con-Gregate. Winston-Salem is less than 90 minutes away, it was a smooth drive and I found a spot in the parking garage very close to the entrance to the hotel. On the downside, parking cost around $40 for the weekend; it may be a good thing if they switch hotels next year.

(The view from my hotel room)

Because the “author’s alley” tables for selling books were all bought up, I had to settle for a table in the dealer’s room. That was less than ideal as they cost more and have shorter hours. I did, however, want to sell more than I was able to at Ravencon, and that wasn’t going to happen without some sort of table. So … and it paid off, covering the cost of the space and a little more.

I’m always fascinated by how some books click at different cons more than others. There’s no pattern to it I can see, unless it’s something in the way I display them. This time I sold five copies of Atlas Shagged. One of them because one of the audience at my reading Sunday liked Dark Satanic Mills so much. That’s very flattering.

I also sold three copies of Questionable Minds, three of Undead Sexist Cliches, and two each of Atoms for Peace, Ceaseless Way and Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast. Links available at my Behold the Book page. This time I was professional and figured in sales tax ahead of time — otherwise I’d be going “Oh, I’ll eat the tax, don’t worry about it” rather than figuring it out.

I only had three panels: one on fashion in fiction, one on fae in fantasy (I plugged Southern Discomfort mightily) and one on mad science in movies (I brought up some Dr. Jekyll, of course). The rest of the time, I sat at my table. Which was fine except I kept worrying when I left to get food or tea that I’d miss another sale — and yes, I’m small-fry enough that every sale matters. As guesting comes with a free second membership I’m thinking about inviting someone along to help — though they’d still be stuck paying for hotel rooms (I really value having a room to myself and I can’t afford two). Food for thought.

I still managed to chat with several friends and bought $60 of tea from Moments in Tea, a dealer who’s found cons supplement their online business well (I’ve bought from them before so I knew they were worth it). Then a smooth drive home.

Then the week. I took Monday off to recover but rather than rest it was the third type of day off — attending to assorted tasks that had accumulated. A couple of issues with my insurance (resolved), one with pet insurance (still up in the air), various other odds and ends. Necessary, and glad they’re out the way, but not relaxing.

Tuesday I spent mostly working on Local Reporter update articles on Tropical Depression Chantal. One about the impact on local businesses, one about ways to donate to help. Then, Tuesday evening TYG was running a quick errand and wound up with a staple in the right rear tire. The big heavy kind, not the paperwork kind. Fortunately she got home safe on the donut, once AAA changed it for us, but I spent Wednesday afternoon at the tire place getting a replacement. And that after a Wednesday morning spent at a doctor’s office, one of those routine “let’s check that possible problem to make sure it’s not a problem” appointments. That chopped up the working day to the point I got zippo done.

Yesterday? Cleaners came in, which didn’t use to be a big deal. Now I spend a couple of hours upstairs with Snowdrop and Wisp – we lock them in so they don’t panic and rush out with strangers in the house. This is surprisingly brain deadening so I budget it into my time … but as the cleaners came first thing in the morning, that meant most of the day deadened. Probably worse because I think I have a low level of “con crud” — nothing disabling, just a general sense of dragginess. This morning I overslept by about two hours which is way abnormal for me. If that’s the worst it gets, though, I’ll consider myself lucky.

So a little bit of work on Savage Adventures, a little bit on Jekyll and Hyde. Nothing else. And this weekend we take Snowdrop to the vet for his annual physical. Pray for us.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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July 18, 2025 · 5:00 am

Con eye candy

I was at ConGregate in Winston-Salem last weekend. I took photos. First, this was on the wall of Washington Perk, a coffee shop I frequented a lot.

This is a shih tsu/lhasa apso crossbreed, the same mix as Plushie. The resemblance is amazing though this one looks even more like a stuffed toy (he’s real, honestly).

Cosplay, of course. I also like the “I tried to form a gang but it turned into a book club” shopping bag.

The pizza across the street was good too, and in generous quantities.

That was a two-slice serving.

And finally this shot of a parking garage. It was a staple of 1970s detective TV that if the hero walked into a parking garage during an investigation, someone would try to run him over. Astonishingly it’s never happened to me — perhaps it’s a good thing I never tried to get a PI license.

Details of the weekend to follow in this afternoon’s weekend roundup post.

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July 17, 2025 · 5:30 am

I think it’s a bad thing to have the inmates running the asylum

“Rush University Medical Center in Chicago is adding a new twist to its curriculum for medical students and residents, using AI tools and learning modules to teach how to more quickly identify measles rashes on different skin tones. It’s another reminder that diseases once thought to have been eradicated are showing up with increased frequency in clinics and ERs, posing challenges for younger physicians and health workers who thought they were relegated to history.”

That’s what you get when you have an ignorant anti-science, anti-medicine dude such as RFK Jr. in charge of health policy. “There have been 1,267 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, almost 4.5 times the total for all of last year and on track to pass the highest annual count since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” He’s not a vaccine skeptic, he’s an anti-vax extremist who thinks this is a better alternative than kids getting autism (which isn’t an issue anyway — vaccines don’t cause autism, despite Kennedy’s lies). And he’s not just talk. Also this.

This also extends to a hatred for respected scientific journals that print facts. Because the facts are not on his side.

Kennedy says staying healthy is our patriotic duty — which is repackaging old cliches that if you’re sick, it reflects your bad decisions. Because like so many health crackpots he thinks we can stop ourselves being sick if we try (This is not new: Rep. Mo Brooks several years back argued that requiring insurance cover pre-existing conditions is bad because those conditions are our fault. Or complaints by some libertarians (John Stossel) that healthcare would work better if insurance didn’t let us use “too much” healthcare)

Epidemiologist Elizabeth Jacobs discusses how chronic disease is a fruitful ground for flim-flam hustlers and fake cures (something true throughout American history); sewing doubt about vaccines opens up preventable diseases to the same money-making opportunities.

It’s also fruitful ground for women who get sucked from wellness into fascism.

RFK’s vaccine review committee is stuffed with anti-vax clowns. And of course the Felon is an imbecile who thinks maybe 18 people out of every 10,000 don’t have autism. Plus his federal funding cuts have forced projects such as NC’s long-covid recovery clinic to close. mRNA breakthroughs are facing tough sledding, despite their tremendous potential. AG Pam Bondi, as ever a loyal toady to the Felon, has dropped charges against Dr. Michael Kirk Moore for (allegedly) providing people with fake vaccine cards and destroying several thousand dollars worth of vaccine. Fraud and destruction of government property are pretty trivial crimes to Bondi, as long as they’re directed at the public and not her Fuehrer.

Scientific integrity doesn’t matter much to these creeps either. I have a feeling they won’t worry about nuclear safety either — after all, the Felon would never accept any blame if anything goes wrong

Speaking of clowns, here’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the guy who wrote yet another RFK Jr. has a point article.

Kennedy talks a lot about how he wants to eliminate environmental chemicals but he’s lying. Apparently he doesn’t care about processed foods as much as he pretends either. I’m also curious if he has a financial stake in his push to get everyone wearing health trackers. We know lawyer Mat Staver approached anti-vaxxing as a tool to raise money; now he’s fund-raising off God supposedly curing Staver’s covid, saying that if he’d taken “Fauci’s deadly protocol” he’d be dead (what, God can’t counteract it?)

Here’s to more lawsuits like this one. And to scientists working on an end run around the CDC, even if they aren’t there yet. Because Republicans will destroy America’s scientific establishment if it doesn’t conform to their distorted reality. For example, Greene’s claim that the Texas floods were caused by weather control. She’s not the only one spewing this bullshit and it’s leading to attacks on weather stations. Lee Zeldin, the Felon’s EPA administrator, says he’s outraged these questions are dismissed. The truth is, they’ve had the answers — no, our government is not doing weather control — but they don’t want to accept them. That doesn’t entitle them to be taken seriously. Hell, they’ve been screaming for years that human activity can’t possibly make the climate worse — but consistency isn’t the issue.

We are indeed in the stupidest timeline. As Paul Campos says, “This country has always been chock full of credulous paranoid morons, but there used to be some sort of effort to keep them handling snakes as opposed to congressional committees and federal agencies.” As witness the Felon, having horned his way into the Club World Cup awards ceremony, is now keeping the trophy. Stupid and pathetic.

But I guess Republicans destroying the Department of Education will keep people too uneducated to notice.

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July 16, 2025 · 11:02 am

The Felon’s right for once: Jeffrey Epstein is dead

It was just this year that AG Pam Bondi announced the Big Reveal of all kinds of deep, dark secrets from the Epstein files. Only it never happened. And now the MAGA world wants to know why. Who is the Felon administration protecting? What are they hiding?

The Felon’s response is to insist it’s no big deal: “I don’t understand it — why they would be so interested. He’s dead for a long time. He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand what the interest or what the fascination is. I really don’t and the credible information has been given.” (the media would be screaming about senility if Biden had said anything that incomprehensible).

Unusually, his supporters are outraged at him and not buying it. As No More Mr. Nice Blog says, “Trump and his propagandists have sold the base on a narrative that’s at odds with the facts. The Epstein narrative is that there’s a global pedophile network that includes everyone MAGA hates, that’s much bigger than just the dozens of elitists on Epstein’s flight logs, and that’s central to the liberal/commie/globalist actions of the Deep State.” So far rather than give up the paranoia, they’re criticizing their glorious god-king.

Contrary to FOTUS, Epstein is a serious issue. As David Dayen says, he’s a textbook example of how the rich and the powerful live outside the law. For years he engaged in sex with underage girls (and of course, arranging the same for others) without repercussions; when he was busted and charged, Alex Acosta gave him a sweetheart deal, though one the Justice Department later decided was above board. Given how insanely generous it was, I’m not sure if this translates into “DOJ covers up for a fellow prosecutor” or “the outrageous thing is, DOJ thinks failing victims like this is acceptable.” It isn’t acceptable: as Fred Clark says, “It’s a perversion of justice — and such a perversion of justice is infuriating. “The dozens of teenage girls (that we know of) who were treated unjustly by Jeffrey Epstein were then denied legal justice by Acosta, Dershowitz, Starr, et. al. Their voices were silenced by the very legal system that was supposed to be acting on their behalf.”

For the record, the deal included state prostitution charges instead of federal, a 13 month sentence (he could have gotten life on federal charges), freedom to spend half the day at his office, no further investigation into Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking, and immunity for any co-conspirators. There was no attempt to notify the victims despite Florida law mandating victims hear when their case gets a plea bargain (county jail also didn’t allow work-release for sex offenders). The prosecutor on the case has denounced Acosta’s decisions and his account of events and so have others. Acosta’s defense is that he was really, really concerned about the hardship of forcing the girls to testify … but he didn’t give them the choice.

Did Acosta get a payment under the table? Or was it simply that he decided a long hard legal fight he might lose was not good for his career — er, an efficient use of resources, how did I get that wrong? Did some of Epstein’s co-conspirators have enough clout to shut things down? I’m sure it didn’t help that the victims were nobodies and that our justice system has a long history of ignoring rape victims.

Either way, it’s a horror story. One of the hardest things to do is to hold the rich and the powerful accountable for actions that would get a nobody jailed — to make wickedness unsafe in any station, in the words of Cato’s Letter. Epstein’s crimes and his hundreds of victims show why.

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July 16, 2025 · 5:15 am

Cover art for art’s sake

First an uncredited cover

Next, one by Margaret Brundage

One by Paul Lehr —

And to wrap up, one by Ed Emshwiller

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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July 15, 2025 · 5:07 am

Jim Shooter, RIP

Talking about Jim Shooter can generate as much heated argument online as discussing whether Stan Lee or Jack Kirby did more for Silver Age Marvel Comics. While Shooter was a terrific writer, I remember his tenure as Marvel’s editor-in-chief produced any number of bad creative and policy decisions. Like a number of other comics creators (and creators in other fields) he hit the level at which nobody could tell him no and he assumed his own judgment was right.

That was my view as a comics reader at the time. In the wake of his recent death, plenty of creators have spoken up about the man’s good side. Kurt Busiek recently posted on Facebook about how Jim Shooter paid him for coming up with the idea for resurrecting Jean Gray. Busiek suggested it back when he was just a fan; there was no legal obligation to pay him but Shooter did (Jean should have stayed dead, but I’m still impressed by Shooter’s consideration). “He was always a pleasant to interact with on a personal level, but I never worked for him directly, and I know that could be a very different experience.”

Jim Starlin, also on FB, says Shooter “was instrumental in improving the lot of the freelancer writers and artists who produced Marvel Comics during his time as editor-in-chief: getting many freelancers onto Marvel’s medical insurance program, setting up incentive pay (royalties), making sure people got paid for the work they did. Though Marvel has since rolled back most of the benefits Jim gained for freelancers, there was a time when working for Marvel Comics was a good gig. That was Jim’s doing.”

Starlin also credits Shooter with being more open to creative work than he’s often given credit for. And that there was “no going around behind your back to screw you surreptitiously. And that is a rarity in the comic book business.”

Plus there’s no question that Shooter did some great work as a writer (even if he also wrote the oh-so-meh Secret Wars and created Marvel’s equally meh New Universe). An incredible run on the Silver Age Legion of Super-Heroes —

Introducing the unstoppable Parasite, one of the few Silver Age villains who could go toe-to-toe with Big Blue —

He created the all-powerful wizard Mordru to fight the Legion, one of the great invincible villains.

He also did some good writing at Marvel.

I’m sure someone out there is doing their best to sum up Shooter’s life and his works and decide whether the good outweighs the bad. I don’t feel the need to do that. Goodbye Mr. Shooter: thanks for the many stories you wrote that I enjoyed.

All rights to images remain with current holder. Covers top to bottom by Curt Swan (x 2), Neal Adams, Gil Kane, George Perez.

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July 14, 2025 · 5:15 am

I’d like to see this fury turned upon the Felon

As I blogged about recently, Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York has thereby infuriated bigots (I presume he’s why the Felon wants to take over NYC) — but also a bunch of centrist Democrats and the media.

The New York Times, for instance, refused to publish hacked Trump campaign emails about JD Vance last year. They had no problems printing a right-wing eugenicist’s hacked reveal that Mamdani, born in Uganda, listed himself as “African American” on a college application. Which is hardly a sizzling scoop so the Times is going with “Mamdani faces scrutiny” as an argument this is a Real Story. Of course the only scrutiny he’s facing is from the NYT; it’s like articles I’ve seen discussing some quirk of politician behavior and then declaring “the story is sticking to him” — without admitting “sticking” means “we keep writing about it.”

Their performance is journalistically dubious but as Dan Froomkin says, there’s a school of thought that good journalism means punching left. It’s not a new problem but it is a problem. What’s even more dubious is describing right-wing race and gender hustler Chris Rufo as an “independent journalist.” He’s never been a journalist, just an online outrage artist — by his own statement, mission one is to scream DEI about everything that goes wrong until he makes it toxic. He’s never been a journalist but fear he’d break the story drove the Times to rush to publish.

It’s not all about the press. Democratic centrists, as I mentioned in the previous Mamdani post, are terrified that electing someone who wants to help people — free mass transit, government grocery stores in food deserts — is so radical he’ll doom Democrats everywhere. No question Republicans will happily hold up Mamdani’s policies — or any Democrat anywhere — as proof of how “radical” the party is, but I think describing his policies would make Dems look good (Republicans will solve that by lying).

I’ve heard the hostility to Mamdani stems from the influential pro-Israel AIPAC lobby (Mamdani oppposes the genocide against the Palestinians) or from rich people upset by someone who wants to help the poor. Or owners and publishers of the media who hang out with the rich people who hate Mamdani. I also think a lot of Democrats are terrified of Republican criticism and would rather do anything than take a stance that someone might object to. Spoiler: there’s no stance worth taking that won’t have detractors. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

As one meme points out, this proves the media and the Democrats can still stick it aggressively to a candidate they don’t like. So why are so many of them whaling on Mamdani and dancing around the Felon?

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July 13, 2025 · 5:15 am

Hanna-Barbera, space adventure and robots! Graphic novels read

Following DC’s Future Quest series mashing up most of the Hanna-Barbera 1960s cartoons, DC published 12 issues of Future Quest Presents showcasing various characters in solo adventures in the aftermath of the big crossover. Space Ghost gets a multi-part arc, followed by the Galaxy Trio (who were more interesting than I found them on TV), Birdman, Mightor, the Herculoids (the weakest arc) and Frankenstein Junior.

Without a running plot and with a variety of different creative teams, this doesn’t work as well as the original. Still, fun enough I’d have liked to see more (and some stories hint at the possibility) but apparently that’s it for this universe.

THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM is a comic book series by G. Willow Wilson and Christian Ward of which I recently read the first two collections, Walking the Path and Edge of Everything. It’s set within a small solar system dominated by a powerful church and an all-powerful Lux corporation (think Amazon for an equivalent). Protagonist Jess is a novice nun who discovers the church is in cahoots with Lux; Grix, a space captain who works freelance deliveries for Lux winds up allied with Jess against the sinister cabal.

This is a mixed bag. I honestly don’t care about the evil forces arrayed against our heroes, but the characters are strong enough to keep me reading — though the second book introduces too many supporting characters for me to care about any of them. I’ll be back for V3 though.

METAL MEN: Full Metal Jacket by Len Wein and Yildiray Cinar was DC’s attempt to revive “the robots who think they’re human” during the New 52 reboot (from the same Legends of Tomorrow anthology book as Metamorpho: Two Worlds, One Master). Surprisingly this was a lot of fun, Wein clearly knowing and liking the team.

As in the original series, the Metal Men are a group of self-aware robots who can shapeshift and use the natural abilities of their metal forms — Mercury can turn liquid, Lead is radiation proof, Tina (Platinum) can spin super-thin wire, etc. A sinister hacker, Nameless, is unleashing assorted robots built for the DOD to force Doc Magnus to turn his creations over to him: Nameless can access anything through the Internet but the responsometers that power the Metal Men enable them to operate independently off-line. He wants them under his control, by any means necessary.

The resulting arc is fun, though it suffers from the setting: the villain behind Nameless, Mother Machine, was apparently a big threat who’d already appeared in other New 52 books; as I never read them, the reveal did nothing for me. That ain’t Wein’s fault, though.

Art top to bottom by Evan Shaner, Riccardo Federici, Ross Andru and Francis J. Manapul. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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July 12, 2025 · 5:37 am

Jungle adventure at the movies!

One of my fellow Atomic Junk Shop bloggers ranked THE LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) as the Tarzan movie he’s always dreamed of; after watching it, I can see why. It really is that good — a film made by people who get the books, but also get why they’re problematic in some ways.

It’s the late 1800s and Alexander Skarsgard and Margot Robbie are living in London as John Clayton, Lord Graystoke (“I’m not ‘Tarzan.'”) and his wife Jane Clayton. American ex-Buffalo Soldier George Washington Williams convinces Clayton to accept a mission from the British government investigating King Leopold II’s schemes in the Belgian Congo. At the time, the Congo was Leopold’s personal colony (as opposed to the property of his country) and it set new standards for how brutal imperialism could get.

Clayton and Williams go off to investigate but Jane insists on coming too. They come up against Leon Rom (Christopher Waltz), Leopold’s ruthless agent, who plans to build a military presence in the Congo that will eliminate any threat of rebellion (Rom was indeed a very nasty piece of work). Rom needs Tarzan — in return for delivering the ape-man to a tribe with a grudge, Rom will get the diamonds of Opar (here just a place, rather than the lost Atlantean colony of the novels) which will finance the military occupation. He’d rather not use Jane as bait — he’s got the instincts of a European gentleman — but that’s how things turn out so he rolls with it. Jane is largely unfazed: Rom has mercenaries and modern weapons but Jane knows the odds are against him, even if he doesn’t see it.

I recommend Greg’s post at AJS because I’d just repeat his points about why this works. Suffice to say it’s a good script, a great cast and a solid story — that, like John Carter, didn’t spark the series it should have. “An ordinary man will do the impossible to save the woman he loves — and my husband is no ordinary man.”

TYG wanted to watch something light this weekend so she picked JURASSIC WORLD: Rebirth (2025), the first film in this series I’ve watched since the original Jurassic Park. Somewhere between the two, dinosaurs got out into the wider world … and now they’re dying, except for a few areas of the tropics (I presume this is some sort of reboot to lay the groundwork for future films). Mercenary Scarlett Johansson agrees to visit one island where the creatures are still thriving, with an eye to collecting DNA from three giant reptiles to create a cure for heart disease (jungle quests for miracle cures go back to the 1940s at least). Of course they have to survive all the hostile creatures to pull that off, and then they get saddled with a family (one father, two girls, one girl’s boyfriend) stranded by a seagoing dinosaur attack. Worse, it turns out this is the island where genetic experiments that were too freaky for Jurassic Park got left to die — or breed …

It’s standard stuff but TYG and I weren’t looking for deep thought and we got what we paid for. On the down side I don’t think the opening sequence adds anything (or even relates to the rest of the film) and while the gene-engineered dinosaur of the climax is impressive — like the one in the image to the right, it can crush a modern vehicle in its jaw — the island seems otherwise occupied by standard issue saurians (I’m guessing this is also laying the ground for a future film). Still, we had fun — and I’m amused TYG recognized more of the cast than I did, knowing them from Bridgerton and Game of Thrones. “How would I deal with a genetically engineered dinosaur in the accounting ledgers? That’s not the right question!”

Covers by Jack Kirby and Ross Andru (top, bottom). All rights to images remain with current holders.

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July 11, 2025 · 4:00 pm

Rain, rain, go away.

Last weekend, Tropical Depression Chantal hit the Triangle. We didn’t notice anything but heavy rain at our house; Carrboro and Chapel Hill, which are low-lying, were hard hit. Carrboro — the heart of my Local Reporter coverage — lost its Public Works building (three feet of flooding) and all the city vehicles parked there that night. Lots of residents are out of their homes or isolated by blocked roads; some stores are down, some have already said they won’t reopen. So far, though, no loss of life.

Needless to say, the results were a lot more work for the paper than I’d anticipated. Lots of calls, tuning in to an online press conference, researching information … the results were three stories, two of which are combined into a general roundup (don’t worry, I get paid for both). The third looks at one of Chapel Hill’s past flood-control efforts, the political blowback and the final outcome.

We got more rain the past couple of days so I’m sure I’ll have something to write about next week.

That was most of my week, along with me and TYG taking the dogs in to confirm their dental surgery hadn’t left any scars. Now they can go back to eating kibble and hard treats.

My Jekyll and Hyde work included a couple of “monster mash” movies where Hyde’s a cameo; I’ll get to them soon. I’d hoped to catch some TV as well but time did not permit. I did a lot of work on the writing, though: rewrote my entries on the March and Tracy adaptations, then reshuffled the other entries around to make the chapters more cohesive. McFarland wants them all roughly equal in length; as I get further along and the writing’s closer to finished, I’ll factor that in.

Firestorm cover by Pat Broderick. All rights to images remain with current holder.

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