I like to think I know a lot about comics, and this sure seems like something I should have been aware of before now.

"Superman Jr." (drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and inked by Dick Giordano) is from the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide, where it is accompanied by the following description:

SUPER JRS. give licencees the opportunity to use pint-sized versions of DC's most popular heroes, including Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Robin, and Flash! All have been transformed into the most loveable and huggable mini-heroes you've ever seen!

I mean, yeah, like everyone else, I knew there were Lil' (Justice) Leaguers who have occupied their own corner of the DC Multiverse — Earth-42, 'natch — since 2008. For some reason I assumed that the Lil' Leaguers had been inspired mainly by the popularity of the late-1980s X-Babies comics, an adorably alternate-reality version of the best-selling X-Men from DC's chief competition, Marvel Comics. As it turns out, those 2008 characters were more likely descended from the only Super Jrs. comic appearance: The Best of DC Special #58 digest-sized comic in December 1984.

The really weird part is that 1984 story had actually been created seven years earlier for a format nearly twice the size! According to October 2014 issue of Back Issue magazine — which also includes a list of all known Super Jrs. licensed products — the Super Jrs. were originally developed (by Tom DeFalco, Vince Squeglia, and Kerry Grandenetti) to be used in a DC treasury-sized comic book in 1977 as the first in a whole series of Super Jrs. comics. But the treasury edition line was canceled, and DC instead decided to shop the Super Jrs. characters around for a cartoon series that never materialized, finally printing the comic in '84 to give the digest series a "new" Christmas story.

(I find the Super Jrs. an interesting contrast to DC's Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, also a kid-friendly take on DC's Justice League of America characters — the Zoo Crew began as "Just'a Lotta Animals" — created in the early 1980s as a cartoon pitch only to become a comic series in 1982 yet doesn't appear in that Style Guide. Did the Zoo Crew perhaps have a different licensing agreement?)

Anyway, that 1982 Style Guide entry up there is for a character created in 1977, licensable for a television cartoon that never happened, and who wouldn't see print until 1984. In hindsight, I've certainly seen the cover of that Style Guide before, and I must have confused the Super Jrs. with the likes of Superbaby (first appearing in 1948) or any of the many Superboys or even the several Sons of Superman (some more imaginary than others). But no, it turns out Super Jrs. are their own thing.

Aren't comic books great?

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UGA football legend (and gameshow-host Donald Trump's best "see-I'm-not-racist-I-have-a-black-friend" friend) Herschel Walker won the Georgia Republican party primary for U.S. Senate with over 801,000 votes (68%). He literally won every single county in the state. He trounced his closest opponent, Gary Black (13%), who has been the state Agriculture Commissioner for the past 11 years! If I was writing headlines, this would read: Football Culture Trumps Agriculture.*

Now Walker will head into the general election to face sitting senator Raphael Warnock. So far Walker — who it should be noted has a net worth upwards of $29 million yet has sent me, a UGA football season ticket holder, at least 7 letters asking for campaign contributions — has refused to describe any specifics of his platform (other than "Teamwork good" and "Democrats evil") or debate any of his Republican rivals, instead relying purely on the goodwill garnered in college in the 1980s. And it's easy to see why he's so reluctant to speak up. When asked on friendly Fox News what he would do to prevent future mass murder of elementary school students like the 19 who died this week in Texas — Walker's home state for the past decade, right up until he decided to run for Senator of Georgia — he said this:

You know, Cain killed Abel and that's a problem that we have. And I said what we need to do is look into how we can stop those things. You know, you talked about doing a disinformation. What about getting a department that can look at young men/women that's looking at their social media. What about doing that? Looking into things like that? And we can stop that that way.

Yes, poor Abel would still be alive today if Adam had only kept his eyes on TikTok instead of Eve's fig leaf.

Besides, Cain killed Abel with a rock, the Daniel Defense DDM4® V7® AR15 with Improved Flash Suppressor rifle of its day. No one would ever try to ban rocks, so why would you want to ban 30-round magazine automatic rifles? (According to Christian dogma, the rock was given to Cain by The Devil, which I'm sure Walker would insist in no way reflects on for-profit gun manufacturers selling military-designed long guns to 18-year-old civilians.)

Sadly, I think there's every chance that bible-thumping, gun lobby-supporting, social media-spying Walker will win a seat in the U.S. Senate on nostalgic name recognition alone. And if that is the case, Georgians will be getting exactly the representation in government they deserve. That's democracy in action, folks!

* While Trump did indeed endorse Walker, it's not like Black wasn't trying his damnedest to earn his evil overlord's favor too, including refusing to admit that Biden is the lawfully elected president of the United States. Trump's endorsement in this race means far less than Walker's 82 touchdowns as a Georgia Bulldog.

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What's under Batman's cape?

Perhaps that's best left to the imagination.

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It can't be September! I haven't finished listing movies I watched in July yet.

132. (1571.) Ice Follies of 1939 (1939)
Jimmy Stewart and Joan Crawford on ice! Well, only briefly. I mean, there are a lot of skating scenes, but the stars aren't the ones in skates. Fells a little bait-and-switchy. (The studio must have thought so too, judging from Joan Crawfords final lines.)

133. (1572.) Final Exam (1981)
A pretty typical college-coed slasher flick in the vein of Halloween. The highlight is the ridiculous number of times she stabs him with the knife in the end. It's a lot.

134. (1573.) Night School (1981)
Another slasher! (Thank you TCM Underground!) It has the atmosphere of a procedural crime film, but the killer is painfully obvious from very early on, limiting the "mystery" and my interest. The scene with the pot of stew was notably hard to stomach (har, har).

135. (1574.) The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954)
Uh, so war is hell but we do it anyway because.... they tell us to? I think the message here is a little muddied, but you do get Grace Kelly skinny-dipping. That's not nothing.

136. (1575.) Life After Flash (2017)
Someone made a documentary for the Flash Gordon movie. It's ostensibly about the f'd-up life of the lead actor, Sam Jones, but there's also many great movie anecdotes and Brian May of Queen. Probably a more enjoyable watch than the movie it celebrates.

137. (1576.) I Confess (1953)
Shallower than the usual Hitchcock thriller, but I liked it. I think it made good use of Montgomery Clift's usual stoicism.

138. (1577.) The Boss Baby (2017)
Great animation. Very imaginative. Very enjoyable. Another case of Alec Baldwin's voice making a movie better.

More to come.

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I watched two buddy picture movies on Sunday that, on the surface, would appear to be polar opposites. The first was Jimmy Stewart's Harvey, which I own and have long declared one of my favorite movies. The other movie was

158. (1597.) Midnight Cowboy (1969)

Despite its infamy, I've avoided this film for years because it contains two things I generally don't like: Dustin Hoffman and John Voight. They always turn in great performances, sure, but they never play anyone I want to spend any time with. Case in point: here Voight is an idiot wannabe hustler and Hoffman is a deranged petty thief. Fun guys.

But Midnight Cowboy isn't really about whether or not I like those two jerks. It's about those two jerks' unified struggle to survive in a downright hostile New York environment where they have failed to be either A) smart or B) pleasant. They might as well be a drunk and a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tall invisible rabbit in 1950s suburbia.

Say what you will about how many awards Midnight Cowboy won, many of them deserved, but I still consider Harvey to be the better movie. Midnight Cowboy is so concerned with either apologizing for or justifying its protagonists that it overloads with camera tricks, flashbacks, meandering incidental vignettes, and songs. Maybe if it had been a stage play first, the director would have realized that sometimes lipstick only makes the pig uglier.

If the raw grittiness of Midnight Cowboy your thing, that fine. There's certainly something to be said for the fearless intimacy of the experience. Personally, I'll keep Harvey and its stronger, more satisfying narrative in which everyone finds someone to love. Life is already too much of a downer to spend my free time in someone else's gutter.

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I have featured Grumpy Cat not once but twice on this here blog. This will mark the third, and very likely last, time. Grumpy, aka Tardar Sauce died Friday at the tender age of 7.

Wired.com has an article on how Grumpy's passing marks the end of the "Joyful Internet." I'd say it's the period on the sentence.

As a web developer, I'm keenly aware that gone are the days of HomestarRunner and Flash games. Everything has to fit on a smartphone screen now, and most of what is left that can be called "content" is driven by a small number of corporate behemoths (mostly Facebook and Google). The contemporary Internet is the 21st century equivalent of a shopping mall in too many ways. In 25 years, we'll probably be paving it over to make a parking lot for whatever comes next.

You can't fight progress.

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The first night game of the season meant the return of the cell phone lights to Athens!

Ok, so they're not really visible in that pic, but trust me, it's cool. In fact, the only reason Sanford Stadium was that full at the start of the 4th quarter (score at the time: Vanderbilt 6, UGA 38) was because the homecoming crowd was waiting to play with their flashlights. It was worth it.

As for the football game itself: Vanderbilt was who we thought they were, and UGA started its season 6-0 for the second straight year — for the first time ever! National title, here we come (he says, tongue only partly in cheek).

The next home game isn't until November. I have my fingers crossed that by then, the temperature will finally fall below 80° during a game. While I like my Georgia football team hot, I prefer my Georgia football weather mild. And yes, I believe that I *can* have it all.

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I've migrated to another server. This is at least the fourth host for Wriphe.com. I doubt it will be the last.

It's funny, when you stop to think about it, how the Internet has changed since I launched this site in 2003. It wasn't exactly new then. By the early 21st century, it had already outgrown its dial-up modem origins. The web 2.0 bubble had come and gone, and interactive Macromedia Flash websites were the rage. Amazon.com only sold books. Facebook didn't exist. My how things have changed.

Sigh.

Anwyay. I've poked around the new host a bit, and everything seems put together correctly. I've even made a few small improvements to the back end! As always, if you find anything out of sorts, please let me know. Assuming the contact and comment forms still work.

Thanks for sticking around.

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Earlier today I had to run some errands. Despite the cool weather, I decided to take the Jeep because it hadn't been out of the garage in a few weeks. Turns out, that was a bad idea.

The Jeep had been drydocked because its left turn signal was out. I had tried replacing the bulb that wasn't coming on, the left fender light, but that hadn't solved the problem. Most people would probably have taken their car to the mechanic. Not Walter. I decided to solve the problem myself.

The contacts were corroded in the 20-year-old bulb fixture, so I figured that was the likely problem. I bought a replacement part, pulled the old fixture, reconnected the wiring, and put it all back together. It still didn't flash for turns, but it did come on for hazards. So I replaced the flasher relay. That didn't fix it either.

It was at this point that I realized that one of the parking lights wasn't working correctly. It blinked with the hazards, but stayed off when the headlights were on. Swapping the two parking-light bulbs caused the left flasher to work and the right to fail. Voila! The whole problem was indeed a bad bulb, just not the one I originally suspected.

As I said, after all that, I finally took the Jeep out on the street. It felt great to be driving it again. I turned on the right blinker as I pulled up to a right turn . . . and I got rear ended.

The good news is that the rear lights were indeed working. The lady who hit me just wasn't paying enough attention. It was a minor fender bender that will cost about $70 to fix. (Bulbs and rewiring the front end had cost $80.) I gave thanks that it hadn't been worse, and went about my business.

On the way home, I hit a deer.

I didn't take a picture of that. (Terrorists don't deserve the recognition.)

For the record, I did get the message. This just isn't the year for me and automobiles. The Jeep is going to stay safely in the garage until 2018.

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