Last night in bed, Victoria decided to get my attention by poking me in the left eye. It worked.

Boy, howdy, that was (and remains) painful! I'm sure there's a lesson in this somewhere, but I just can't see it right now. Tonight I'll be sleeping in safety glasses.

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Even Superboy hates Daylight Savings Time.

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Quick, name the three most important people that you can think of!

I'm going to bet that your list didn't include "Police Chief Parker of Smallville." Who would have guessed that Superboy's motto was "think globally, act locally"? What could the chief of police need Clark for so desperately, anyway?

Oh. Never mind. Pulling boners always leaves me in a fog, too.

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If you could travel through space and time at will, and you needed to dispose of something so no one could ever use it again, where would you put it?

Adventure Comics #290, November 1961

Never send boys and girls to do a Superboy's job! Not only does the Legion of Super-Heroes decide not to actually destroy the six dangerous containers, they choose to take them 500 years into the past, giving determined evildoers 500 extra years to find them! It doesn't take a Brainiac 5 to realize that's a bad idea.

For the record, lest you were worried, Superboy easily tracks down the containers and eventually destroys their contents -- components for a humanoid robot that can turn good things evil and evil things good -- with a quick blast of heat vision. And thus Superboy saves the future. Again.

This was hardly the only time that the Legion had a terrible solution to a pretty simple problem. But what can you expect from a bunch of teenagers raised in a future with role models like this guy:

Action Comics #287, April 1962

Sheesh.

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Let's learn cause and effect with Superboy in "The Cigar that Killed Superboy!"

Ever hear of carcinoma, Superboy? As Pa Kent learned the hard way, lung cancer is the most common cancer-related death in America. Remember kids, "super-convenience" may seem swell, but you'll feel far less guilty if you make your parents get their own matches! Better luck with your next set of parents, Kal-El!

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Headlines across the internet are screaming about a chimpanzee named Travis that went bananas and mauled a family friend. I first noticed the story when I flipped past MSNBC, which had apparently had enough of reporting the terrible news from Wall Street ("DOW in Bottomless Free Fall!" "Automakers Beg for $20 Billion More!" "New Investment Scammer Revealed!") today and turned to an in-depth investigation of the case of the crazy chimp.

Travis was apparently treated like a member of the family for over a decade, even joining the family at the dinner table. (Which makes the owner's reported screams of "Just shoot him!" make me wonder how she treats her real children.) Every incident report about the situation includes something similar to "he appeared in advertisements for Coca-Cola." I'm sure that the suits at Coke never considered their association with a sociopathic chimp when they were casting for the part of star Coke-swilling monkey: "Kill Humans! Drink Coke! Ahhhhhh!"

Now, I'm no fan of the primate. ("They're like little, furry people," supporters say, and that's exactly why I hate them.) But, I don't really think this is that big a story, people. It just seems to me like we're looking for something other than the now-commonplace bad economic news. So we've turned to "Monkey Mauls Man" as escapist fantasy.

I mean, who didn't see this coming? Animals snap all the time. (If it were a human, we'd say they "went postal" or whatever phrase is en vogue these days.) We've all seen Planet of the Apes, Monkey Shines, and The Wizard of Oz. We've all read The Monkey's Paw, The Jungle Book, and Curious George. We're all familiar with >shudder< Gleek.

They may seem friendly, start out as "helpers," but soon they're going through the garbage, cooking methamphetamine over your stove, and beating the hell out of your loved ones. Monkeys are bad news. Always have been, always will be. Stay away, people, stay away. Let global warming do it's job.

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I swear, DC is trying to drive me away from comic books altogether.

Honestly, the only reason that I still buy comic books is because I've been collecting Batman and Detective Comics for as long as I can remember. I didn't start at birth, so I've had to do some catching up. But I now certainly own every issue that has been published in my lifetime. It's that sort of loyalty to the adventures of a stupid fictional character who dresses like a bat that has me shelling out however much cash DC Comics charges me on a monthly basis. (I'm not old enough for 10¢ comics, yet I do distinctly remember when "Still only 75¢" stopped meaning anything.)

Once upon a time, heroes were jovial fellows who did the right things for the right reasons. Back then, might didn't make right, but it could make things better. But things began to change; the heroes began to have doubts and flaws. Gradually, the heroes became humans. Soon there came a Crisis on Infinite Earths, and things changed. In the world that survived the Crisis, only the annual ritual sacrifice of some former hero could save the Universe from total destruction. Morbid? Maybe. But it was still better than things to come.

A few years ago, DC published Identity Crisis, a surprisingly dark tale springing from a rape, murder, and slavery for the sake of pure shock value that began the slippery slope away from moral superheroics into the morass of psychological despair that now seems to drive modern comic books. Soon characters were being slaughtered left and right to keep the shock and awe campaign going. Before long, there was Infinite Crisis, in which Wonder Woman was painted as a common murderer and Batman's paranoia had created the most dangerous weapon since the atomic bomb. By the end of that series, the heroes of a previous generation were revealed to be the villains of today: one Superboy murdered another while multiple Supermen were reduced to squabbling over territory like feral dogs.

Now there's been a Final Crisis, a truly unreadable pile of shit (sorry, but there's no way to sugarcoat it) whose encyclopedia of minor characters is targeted at longtime fanboys while ignoring the conventions of storytelling, heroics, morality, and defined character that those fanboys would theoretically hold dear. True to form, DC killed off several major characters simply for "wow" factor. As you may have guessed by now among those characters is Batman.

So DC, in the infinite wisdom of Dan Didio (and by infinite, I mean the man is a bottomless pit), will not publish Batman or Detective for the foreseeable future. Sure, they'll be coming back, but so much for a run uninterrupted since 1939. And I find myself asking if should I be thanking them for making it so easy to walk away.

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And while I'm bitching about black football jerseys, I may as well complain about black uniforms in general. (Let's just chalk it up to Bitch Inertia. "A complaint in motion tends to stay in motion.") Though I could be talking about the home uniforms of the New Orleans Saints, in this case, I'm referring to Spider-Man's black costume. Hell, let's go ahead and include every black super-hero costume. (Villains are excluded. They're supposed to be evil, remember? So Black Manta, you're excused from this conversation. Go rob a sandbank or something.)

See, once upon a time in 1973, Marvel got it in their heads to give Namor, the Sub-Mariner a black costume. Sure, it seemed innocuous enough at the time, especially since Namor didn't have much of a costume other than a green Speedo and some little wings on his ankles. However, the new costume failed the first test of superheroic costume design; namely, a good superhero costume design should identify the hero and his powers at first sight. The new costume was terribly ugly and seemed to say little more than "I, Prince Namor, King of the Sea, am ready to disco!" Not surprisingly, Namor's comic was cancelled soon afterwards. Though this swift cancellation would seem to have serve something of a mandate that the black costume was unwelcome, the damage had been done: at least one fan thought, "hey, a costume in all black would be great!"

By 1984, that poor, misguided child had grown up into a poor, misguided man, and Spider-Man was given a new costume. Replacing the famously creepy red and blue costume with a black unitard may be the greatest error in comic book history. Between issues, Spider-Man went from friendly neighborhood wall-crawler to mopey, self-indulgent anti-hero. It turns out that the black costume was really a semi-sentient alien symbiote seeking to devour Spider-Man. (I told you that black costumes were no good, Spidey. But did you listen...?) Yet the fans seemed to enjoy seeing a classic design, perhaps the most clever costume in comics history, carelessly discarded for a shapeless, colorless travesty.

This, of course, started a trend of new heroes dressed in all black. Soon every movie with a superhero in it featured a black costume. Batman and the X-Men cashed in their leotards for black leather. And the sickness spread. When Superman briefly "died" in 1993, we mourned his resurrection in a suit notable for it's lack of color. Gone was the traditional blue, red, and yellow. In the garishly decorated world of the 4-color funny pages, "black costume" equals "death" or worse, "cancellation." Still the fans cried for more.

A decade later, we should have seen it coming. Poor Superboy, once a rebel wearing a *gasp* black leather jacket (what a clever nod at the time: a super-hero who wore his tights underneath the mandated black leather!), was suddenly wearing a black t-shirt and blue jeans by 2002. Not just black, but also not even a super costume! Horrors! Is this the logical conclusion for "realism" in superhero comics? If I were to suddenly gain super powers, would I be limited to what was already hanging in my closet? (Smallville, I'm looking at you!)

Fortunately, there may be a happy end in sight to this terrible trend. Shortly after Superboy turned his back on spandex, he was killed in a battle with an alternate-universe Superboy. And the murderous mirror universe twin still wore his classic red, blue, and yellow tights! It's pretty hard to cheer for the "hero" when the "villain" is meeting out the cosmic justice for blatant uniform violation. I guess when the good guys wear black, the bad guys have to change with the times. (Maybe you should still be paying attention after all, Black Manta.)

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On today's very special semi-final "Teen Tournament" episode of Jeopardy!, none of the brainiac children knew that the imperfect foe of Superman with two consecutive "r"s in his name was "Bizarro." What is America's youth coming to when no one knows who Bizarro is? (The one kid brave enough to buzz-in guessed "Who is Lex Luthor?" Great Caesar's ghost!)

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On the upside, I did get to hear Alex Trebek pronounce the name of Bizarro's home planet, "Htrae."

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Today I wore a Fantastic Four logo t-shirt with my Superboy leather jacket, and the sales staff at Best Buy, EB Games, and Kroger all gave me grief about wearing Marvel and DC trademarks together. I was impressed by the knowledge that these people had about comic book publishers and copyrights. Though they were admittedly all much, much younger than I am, each property had a movie in the past 2 years, so I shouldn't be too surprised, I suppose. In any event, long live comic books!

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