Wonder what we did while Kat was visiting last week? Here’s her photos of the trip.

Click on the photo to see all of Kat’s photos from her visit to Huntsville.

We had an awesome time with Kat here while Stephen was gone to Dragon*Con. Thursday, after I had dropped off Kat at her parent’s house and picked up Eli from school, he moped around all afternoon saying he missed Kat and moaning. I can’t say I’ve recovered any better.

I’ve never been a full-blown comic book addict, but from time to time I go on a bender and read a bunch of comics collected as trade paperbacks. The benefit is that I don’t have to wait every month for the next installment, and I can check out reviews to get an idea of which ones are any good. Yes, yes, I’m the one with my jackboot on the neck of the comics industry because I’m not buying monthlies. I’m evil like that.

To assuage my guilt, I will now tell you what 5 comics from the majors (i.e. DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and Image) you should go run out and read right now, especially if your knowledge of good comic book stories begins and ends at Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. I’ve thrown in small scans of a panel or three from most of the comics so you can see what they look like. All the comics in my list are genre works, though they run the gamut from straight-up superhero comics to fantasy retellings of fairy tales to the equivalent of a complete science fiction novel. All are available in trade paperbacks. Given each title’s vastly different goals, and that I’m only focusing on the major comic book publishers, don’t take this as a “BEST COMICS EVER!” list.

1. Blue Beetle. (Ongoing, with the first four arcs collected in TPB.) Blue Beetle is a DC hero who’s had two incarnations since 1939. In 2006 writers Keith Giffen and John Rogers (yes, that John Rogers) introduced a third, Jaime Reyes, a Latino teenager who discovers the scarab that gives Blue Beetles their power.

This has the most mainstream-comics approach of all five picks, which means that you have to deal with a lot of cross-overs. Bits of Jaime’s story show up in comics that aren’t collected in the TPBs. Thankfully, the stories in the TPBs stand on their own, and you don’t need an advanced degree in DC history to follow the stories. Even better, the writing, after a slow start, catches fire. Jaime has a family and a life outside being a superhero, and the relationships between him and his friends and family are tremendous fun. In fact, “fun” describes what this series is aiming for and what it delivers. It’s the comic-book equivalent of macaroni and cheese done exceedingly well. If you give the series a try, stick with it past the first four issues. By issue #11 (in the second TPB), writer John Rogers is flying solo and has found his footing, mixing great pacing with fun — and funny! — storytelling.

Plus in one issue Jamie gets to say, “Huge fancy-talking guys with swords on top of giant super-horses fighting evil! I take it back! Outer space is very cool!” Yes, indeed, Jamie, it is very cool.

2. Y: The Last Man. (Finished, with 10 TPBs.) Brian K. Vaughan’s concept is simple to sum up: what would happen if a plague killed off every mammal with a Y chromosome except for one guy and his pet monkey? From that premise Vaughan builds a fascinating and realistic story, aided and abetted by Pia Guerra’s understated artwork.

What makes me the happiest about Y is how Vaughan avoids a lot of apocalyptic end-of-the-world tropes. Civilization doesn’t break down overnight; instead, parts of it start grinding to a halt. A lot of the US government is now dead, and there’s practically no Secret Service left to protect the remnants. The preponderance of engineers and electricians were men, so the electrical power grid starts having problems. Holes fray in the fabric. The apocalypse is here, but it’s distributed unevenly.

And the last man isn’t really a hero in the traditional mold, nor does Yorick really grow into one, even as he’s smuggled about the country in the hope that a cure for the plague can be found before all mammals die out. All the characters — Yorick, Agent 355, Dr. Mann, Yorick’s sister Hero — respond in believable ways to an unbelievable event. Here’s a comic book series grounded in people and their reactions to each other.

Y: The Last Man is complete, so you know the series didn’t end before the story. Go grab it now.

3. Casanova. (Ongoing, with the first two arcs collected in TBP.) Pa-zow. Oh, man, where to begin. Casanova Quinn is a super-thief turned super-spy whose father is the head of a S.H.I.E.L.D.-like law-and-order organization. He’s a prodigal son who has a good twin sister — or bad, depending on what timeline he’s in. See, he gets yanked out of his home timeline and into another at the whims of brilliant madman Newman Xeno whose organization’s name, W.A.S.T.E., is a nod to Thomas Pynchon.

In the first issue, Casanova is thrown out of a large flying casino after besting its owner, three men squashed together into one through the power of Zen, in a staring contest. As Casanova falls he shoots two pistols at the casino in a futile attempt to damage it before being snatched out of midair and into his new timeline.

Later on sex bots with mad martial arts skills and a giant WWII-era robot show up, just so you know how this comic rolls.

The art is striking, the story so compressed and so fast-paced that it’ll take you a good two issues to figure out some of what’s going on, and it’s brilliant. I’ll warn you, though, that the sex and violence quotient of the series is insanely high. If a character quoting Ice-T from New Jack City (“I want to shoot you so bad my dick is hard”) sets your teeth on edge, this is not the comic for you. If you’re up for James Bond, a blenderized take on the past’s version of a science fiction future, and a story that could not stop for death, all moving at breakneck speed, then pick this series up. (Comic Book Resources has all of issue 1 online.)

4. Fables. (Ongoing, with 11 TPBs.) Like Y: The Last Man, Fables has a simple high concept: what if all of the characters from fairy tales and folklore were driven out of their fantasy world by The Adversary and had to live in secret in Fabletown, an enclave in modern-day New York City? And like Y: The Last Man‘s Brian K. Vaughan, writer Bill Willingham uses his premise to set up a lot of characters and then let them bounce off of each other. While the overarching menace of the Adversary is present throughout, the core of the series is how this group of displaced people adapt to their surroundings and how they deal with each other.

Willingham plays the “what if?” game with his characters. What if Snow White and Prince Charming were now divorced, leaving her to be the deputy mayor of Fabletown under Old King Cole while Prince Charming was forced to depend on the kindness of others? What if the big bad wolf took on human form and was Fabletown’s sheriff? What if Goldilocks grew up to be a political activist who wasn’t above assassinating those who got in her way? What if Jack of giant beanstalk fame became a trickster figure whose schemes often went awry?

Fables is ongoing, but Willingham is good at creating self-contained story arcs. He even took what he had planned as the final Fables storyline involving the Adversary and managed to work it in earlier without killing off the series. Start at the beginning and work your way forward. You won’t regret it.

5. Starman. (Finished, with 1 hardcover out and 5 more to go.) “Wait,” the comic book fans are saying right now, “wasn’t the critically-acclaimed James Robinson Starman over in 2001?” You’re right! But it’s been out of print for years, until the new hardcover omnibus arrived this year. There are five more to go, at which point all of the issues will have been republished. And Starman is so awesome that it deserves this resurrection.

Like Blue Beetle, Starman was a previously-existing hero whose name got passed on to someone else. In this case, the new Starman was Jack Knight, son of the first Starman. Jack becomes the new Starman reluctantly, never dresses in a standard spandex costume, and early on would much rather be doing anything other than being a hero. Where Robinson excelled with the series was in building a compelling story out of cast-off bits of the DC Comics universe, and do it in a way that even I, who knew very little about the DC Universe, could enjoy it. He took a grade-C superhero and a grade-D supporting cast and turned them all into interesting, complex people. He made a comic about families coming to grips with their legacies, whether heroic or villainous. Moreover, he made Opal City, where Jack Knight lives, a character in itself, occasionally offering issues that filled in the city’s history. By the end of the run, Opal City was as much a character as Jack Knight, The Mist, or The Shade.

The careful worldbuilding, the intricate plotting, and the fully-realized characters made Starman one of the best comics in the 1990s, but it wasn’t wildly popular, quickly falling out of print. Now that all of the issues are returning in omnibus format, you can see why so many people praise Starman.

We’ve been Groovlily fans for a while now. Stephen and Brendan became friends over the internet eight or ten years ago and we were fortunate enough to get to see the band play live while we lived in North Carolina. (Brendan playing keyboards, dancing around minus his shoes = the awesomest!)

I was doing some errands this morning and listening to “Mom’s Music” (as Eli calls it) in the car. “No Room in Your Bag” came on and I was struck anew by how much I love this song. The events in the song have just enough similarity to my own life to give me a terribly bittersweet feeling. So here’s the lyrics and if you want to listen to the song, you can do that here.

No Room In Your Bag
Recorded by: GrooveLily
Written by: Brendan Milburn
For Julie Milburn

She said in 1967 she got married to my father with a borrowed pair of blue jeans and a bridesmaid
And San Francisco was a bubble of excitement like a butterfly a-flapping in the stomach of a decade
She didn’t know exactly everything he’d been through
She didn’t know exactly what she’d gotten into

She got an offer from a magazine to write about the music scene because they liked her resume and bio
She told her husband who’d been offered a position on the faculty of music at a college in Ohio
He said, “You either take this job or save our marriage”
She put her luggage in the back of his carriage
She said

CHORUS:
“You make a choice, you make a call
You may rise, you may fall
You will pay for what you get,
But you got no room in your bag for regret”

She said that 1975 was like a purgatory doing needlepoint inside a decompression chamber
And Cincinnati was a garden of conservatism growing like a vine that tried to tie her down and tame her
She said, “Now surely there has been a big mistake here
This ain’t resembling the mark I want to make here”

She saw her future like a single at the bottom of a stack of records that’ll never ever see the buzz bin
And she had subjugated all of her desires for the good of the family unit and the betterment of the husband
She saw that they had not been marching to the same drum
She took her son and hit the road to where she came from

CHORUS

She drove that beat-up Pinto out to California
She kept the windows down and the air was hot and dry
She kept hearing Joe Cocker on the radio
Singing “You Are So Beautiful,” and it always made her cry
And in the rear-view mirror, piled high were crib and walker
Toys and clothes and little shoes for little tiny feet
There ain’t no room in here for things she wished she might have done
Only her behind the wheel
And a consequence of all her actions
Fast asleep on the passenger seat

Yeah yeah yeah

She said that 1989 was like a fuse that burned inexorably to the dynamite of my departure
And she was sad that I was growing up and glad to shoot me out into the world like an arrow from an archer
As I was packing up to leave and go to college,
She took a minute to impart a bit of knowledge:

CHORUS

Yeah yeah yeah

Dear Internet,

The Large Hadron Collider will not kill us all.

Sincerely,

Your Friendly Neighborhood Physicist

P.S. “Look, it’s a 10^-19 chance, and you’ve got a 10^-11 chance of suddenly evaporating while shaving.”

The large towns in Japan are very blind-friendly.

This past May, Stephen asked me if I might want an older Mac laptop his company was retiring. I asked him how old the laptop was and what kind of prices they were asking. The price couldn’t be beat! It was missing the bottom cover but it was going for $2. He took the cover from another old laptop and did some Dremel work and suddenly I had a brand new (to me) 1 GHz G4 Powerbook.

It turns out that its biggest problem (besides the lost bottom cover) was that it needed a new battery. I found one for $60 on an Ebay store. Then I upgraded the memory since it only had 512 mb. It now has 1 Gig of Ram and a second new battery since the first one was a dud.

While Kat was here last week I was admiring her laptop. She has a pirate sticker on the cover of hers, which is nice because it’s distinctive and easily recognizable as hers. Not to be outdone, I started applying stickers to my laptop cover. If I had bought a brand new laptop I would have never put stickers all over it. It’s close to sacrilege to defile the pristine beauty of a new Apple product with anything. But since someone Stephen works with had already hauled it from one side of the country to the other, I felt I could decorate with impunity.

Last night I completed the upgrade with an install of OS Leopard so that it could get onto our home network wirelessly. ‘Cause, you know, what’s the point of having a laptop if you can’t sit on your couch and search the internet?

So now I present to you the FrankenMac:

I don’t know how much work I’ll actually do on the laptop but I sure will look cool doing it!

We were outside at the playset one afternoon this past week and Eli requested I tell him a story. He’s always making up stories so I guess he decided he needed a break from all the work and wanted to hear someone else’s made up stuff.

I might be crafty with a glue gun and paper or even upon occasion fabric or other materials. I think I can cook decently and do a few other things nicely but I am not a storyteller. I guess it is the practical gene in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read. I just don’t seem to have the ability to make this stuff up.

So I started telling him the story of a boy named Kreeli who fought a dragon and saved his friends, LukeDuke and Burwill, and his sister, Bliza. Yeah, after that story I was out of juice. I didn’t have much to begin with but I was tapped out after the dragon.

But as in all things with kids, the thing that you most want to disappear becomes the most favoritest thing they can imagine.

Every night this week I’ve had to tell a Kreeli and Bliza story. Sometimes I slip and say Eli and Liza and he reminds me that these kids names are Kreeli and Bliza. I guess he has to maintain the wall or something. I’ve tried to keep the stories fantastical but the last couple of nights they’ve deteriorated into rehashes of the day or previews of the next day. He doesn’t seem to mind as it netted him pancakes this morning since Kreeli had pancakes last night in his story.

The nicest part of this is that it allows me to reinforce stuff we’ve discussed during the day. Kreeli never kicks other kids on the soccer field. He’s kinder than that. Kreeli always watches out for Bliza and takes care of her. Kreeli always does the brave thing, the kind thing, the smart thing. So while in the beginning it was annoying for me to do, it’s starting to grow on me.

My birthday occurred during Dragon*Con this year. I mentioned it to some of my friends, and said that I wanted to celebrate somehow.

Friday, when the convention is getting in full swing and all of my friends are, like me, crazy busy trying to keep things running, they showed up in the room I help manage.

They brought cake.

(Pic courtesy of Tito)

And this is one of many reasons why my friends are awesome.

This year’s theme: Stephen’s big ego.

First, I was recognized by so many people. I blame Brian Richardson. Sure, he’s had me doing videos for DCTV, but this year, in his role as director of videography, he started broadcasting panels on the DCTV in-hotel channel. Viewership jumped, and people began recognizing me and several other DCTV actors. I gave autographs and had people take their picture with me as if I were Captain Tightpants. That was deeply weird, but in a good way. I got a lot of compliments about DCTV as a whole, which I hereby pass on to Brian and the rest of the DCTV crew.

Second, the DCTV spots I was involved with went over well. The bumpers were a hit, and for the first time we had a video done entirely here in Huntsville. I borrowed Rick and Jessica‘s camera, got a friend to convince his workplace to let me film there one weekend, and got a lot of other friends to be in my video. The result was DCTV’s second music video, this one for a remix of Jonathan Coulton’s Code Monkey.

But wait, there’s more! This time I was an honest-to-goodness convention guest, which meant I could go up to the green room and eat free hors d’oeuvres. It also meant I was on four panels. The Evil Geniuses panel was a blast, as I and my fellow panelists Richard Altstatt and Jan Osburg revealed our plans to take over the world and answered questions such as, “What’s the difference between a minion and a henchman?”

My talk about on-orbit docking and how it’s nearly killed a lot of people went well. My PowerPoint slides from my talk should keep you entertained, though not as much as the forthcoming audio.

The quantum computing talk was standing-room only, so anyone who was standing in the back should find the three people who fell asleep during my presentation and kick their asses. After the talk a couple of people asked me where they should go to learn more. If you’re one of them, hi! Take a look at the unfortunately-named Quantiki and at Scott Aaronson’s blog and links. And here are my PowerPoint slides, with the audio to follow.

But those weren’t what truly proved that this convention was all about me. Our live panel for our WhatTheCast podcast did that. The show itself was fun enough, with excellent riffing with the audience, but after some friends pointed out that my bald dome was the one under the only light above our table, we had to create a tableau.

That’s Chris Lloyd, Patrick Jarrett, and Brian Richardson basking in my radiance. Photo courtesy of Amy and her fine, fine camera.

Really, is it any wonder that my head is three times as big as it was before the convention?

And boy are my dragon wings tired. I had a fabulous time, my panels went well, and people asked me for my autograph (!) and took their picture with me (!!). I bet you can’t wait to hear all about it.