Polite Dissent

As a last look back at the past year, I present the 2004 Polite Dissent Awards for the Best and Worst in Comic Book Medicine

Worst Depiction of Medicine:
There were way too many comic books to choose from in this category. A (Dis)honorable Mention goes to The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe: Wolverine 2004 for the single image of Wolverine that contains 6 blatant medical errors.
A second (Dis)honorable Mention goes to Strange #1 for its inadvertent revelation that Stephen Strange never attended enough medical school or residency to actually earn a medical license, let alone be certified as a surgeon of any kind.
The Worst Depiction of Medicine in 2004, without a doubt, was the interminable autopsy of Sue Dibny that spanned three comics (Identity Crisis #2, JSA #67 and Identity Crisis #6). From incorrect anatomy to bad science to gaping logic holes, this one wins hands down.

Worst Doctor:
Worst doctor not in terms of evilness, but in terms of apparent medical ability. This year’s winner is Dr. Mid-Nite. When he wasn’t bungling an autopsy, he was mistreating a heart attack (JSA #62), leaving stitches in a dirty wound (JSA #65) or handing out controlled substances like candy.
Dr. Mann from Y: the Last Man comes in a distant second with her botched diagnosis of botulism.

Worst Single Medical or Scientific Concept:
The façade virus, which can be transmitted by light, in Cable/Deadpool.

Worst Imaginary Medication or Treatment:
AVX, the is-it-a-narcotic-or-is-it-a-steroid patch from Captain America and the Falcon receives a (Dis)honorable Mention, but the award goes to Rick Tyler (Hourman II) for his revelation in JSA: All Stars #5 that the once addictive Miraclo is now a safe “homeopathic” patch.
While we’re on the subject of Rick Tyler, he has the single most logic-defying moment of the year, also in JSA: All Stars #5, for the 45 minutes it took him to run up the stairs of a building — while using his allegedly effective super drug.

Best Depiction of Medicine
While War Games: Act One had a lot going for it (and the medicine was well handled), the surprise winner in this category is Strange #2 for its excellent job of explaining Stephen Strange’s injuries.

Best Doctor:
Ironically, just as the Worst Doctor is a hero, the Best Doctor is a villain: Hush wins for his treatment of Prometheus’s injuries in Batman: Gotham Knights #53.

Best Single Medical or Scientific Concept:
The water breathing people (and dogs, but not pandas) in Sub-Diego from recent issues of Aquaman (even if it was handled a bit bluntly at times).

Best Imaginary Medication or Treatment:
From Sgt. Frog, Sergeant Keroro wins for his lifesaving CPR-performing Super Suction Space Octopus (Volume One). Corporal Giroro comes in second for obtaining a liver from a space keropes to treat Natsumi’s fever (Volume Three).

Special Mentions:
The following artists wins my heartfelt apprectiation for taking the time to draw the nasal cannula correctly:
Pete Woods (Detective Comics #797), Pia Guerra (Y:the Last Man #29) and Michael Choi (Witchblade #80)

Catwoman #37 is the last issue written by Ed Brubaker. Ostensibly about a birthday party for Selina Kyle, the story is really a send off for Brubaker. He has done some stalwart work on the comic and turned a previous two-dimensional character into one of the most interesting characters in Gotham City.

Still, this issue didn’t sit right for me. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a medical concern this time, but more of a legal issue. I liked the party scenes; they were appropriate both for the characters and Brubaker. Gulacy’s art was acceptable (although I didn’t realize that Wildcat was at the party until someone referred to “Ted”). All of my concerns come down to one scene: when Catwoman intervenes between a rich braggart and his trophy girlfriend. After trading quips, Catwoman quickly KOs the guy and his bodyguards. She then steals his Rolex watch, money clip, and other accessories and gives them to the girlfriend for her to pawn and keep the money.

This is where I have a problem. It’s supposed to be “rob from the rich and give to the poor,” not “rob from the rich and turn to poor into Accessories after the Fact.” Giving money obtained illegally to someone needy is one thing; involving that person in the crime is something else entirely. Catwoman has made the conscious decision to act as a vigilante and accept whatever risks for criminal charges that may bring. For her to involve a bystander who has not made that choice is the wrong thing for her to do.

(It also makes me wonder about the criminals who are caught by super-heroes. For instance, let’s say that Spider-Man interrupts two thieves breaking into a warehouse. He webs them up and leaves them for the police, even including a little note for the men in blue. What can the police charge them with? If there were no victims or witnesses, it is the word of the criminals against a more or less anonymous masked man. Is Spider-Man going to show up to testify in court or give grand jury testimony? And could he, as a masked vigilante? I bet the D.A. is letting a lot of these people go.)

As my final Year in Review post, I’m taking a look back at all the “Monday Guilty Pleasure” topics I’ve posted about since I started this blog.

Books were the most common topic with 5 posts, followed by Snack Foods and Canceled TV Shows with 4 posts each. Comic Books had three posts as did Current TV Shows. Animated TV Shows, Comic Strips from Dragon Magazine and Music each earned 3 guilty pleasure posts. Comedians, Doctor Who Companions, Movies, Musicals, Restaurants, Video Games and Writers had one post each.

The results are pretty much what I had expected — although I thought I had posted about Snack Foods the most. Well, that gives me something to work on for this year.

It was just after one in the morning and I finally got my first break of the day. I had been on the go non-stop since four the previous morning. The day itself had been busy, but really no busier than any other day on my VA surgery rotation. Overnight call started at five and we immediately were called for an emergency gallbladder surgery. No sooner had we gotten out of that operation when we were called to another one. This one was more serious and lasted over six hours before we were finally finished. Grabbing a quick dinner from a convenient hallway vending machine (thank you Little Debbie), I trudged through the back hallways of the hospital to the service elevator. I rode it up to the top floor of the hospital. As usual, it was deserted and quiet. I turned down the hallway where the medical student call rooms were located and walked down the threadbare carpet to my room. As usual, it was drafty and freezing cold. I wrapped myself in the blanket from the bed and took a minute to eat my nutritious dinner. I read a few chapters of a Melanie Rawn book then about 1:30 I finally turned out the light and tried to get some sleep.

An hour later, the phone rang. It was Randy, the surgical intern on call with me. Frankly, Randy was rarely a pleasant person to be around. He was arrogant, rude and bossy. I figured it was because — except for the medical students — he was the lowest man on the totem pole. So whenever he got stressed or upset he took out his frustration on us.

“Hello?” I said sleepily.

“Scott,” he said. “How would you like to draw some blood on Mr. Hollis on five?”

It was early, I was tired, and I naively decided that honesty would be the best policy.

‘Thanks for the opportunity but it’s been a long day and I’d rather just try and grab some sleep.”

“Umm…OK,” he said and hung up.

Even in my sleep-addled state I should have realized that however it was phrased, it wasn’t a question at all — more of an order really.

I pulled the pillow over my head and tried to go back to sleep. The phone rang again almost immediately.

“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” Randy spat out when I answered. “You will go down and draw blood on Mr. Hollis.”

“No problem,” I replied. “I’ll go take care of it.”

I pulled my lab coat on over my scrubs, pulled on my shoes, and trudged downstairs to the fifth floor. I drew the labs and waited for the results. They were all normal, so I called Randy and reported the results to him. He grunted.

I crawled upstairs again and managed to catch an hour’s worth of sleep before having to get downstairs for pre-rounds. As we were going over the patients’ vital signs, Randy pulled me aside.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone about our trouble last night.”

“There wasn’t any trouble,” I replied. “You asked me a question and I answered it honestly. If there was something that you wanted me to do, you should have just told me to do it. Don’t pretend it’s optional and then get upset when I decline.”

Randy walked off without saying another word and I finished pre-rounding on the patients. We got along without incident for the rest of the rotation, even on call nights, but it was never what you would call a cordial relationship. This episode led me to devise Scott’s Third Law: Before answering, make sure you know the real question.

The next year, I happened to end up on a rotation with Randy again. This time we got along splendidly and worked well together with no trace of acrimony. I think it was because we both had matured; he was no longer the stressed-out intern and I was no longer the clueless third-year medical student.

January 4, 2005

Matt Murdock
Murdock and Nelson, Attorneys at Law
Hell’s Kitchen, New York

Dear Matt:

Now that you have officially announced to the world that you are Daredevil, we would like to invite you to join our organization: the Society for Super Powered Professionals. Primarily, we are a social club and a support network for those individuals like yourself who are both a super-hero as well as a licensed professional, such as a doctor, lawyer or dentist. Unlike your teammates, we realize the difficulty of finding the time to stop a gang war between depositions. We understand the frustration of trying to track down a master criminal, yet still make it back to the office in time for your 1:00 appointment.

We meet in the back room at Mulligan’s Bar and Grill on the second Tuesday of every month.We start with an informal cocktail hour and then have a brief presentation during dinner. This month, Janet Van Dyne will be our speaker and her topic is “Fashion and the Unstable Molecule.” Next month’s topic should be of particular interest to you. Former A.I.M. scientist Dr. Benson Honeywell will talk about his latest project: M.O.D.O.S. (Mental Organism Designed Only to Subpoena).

Sincerely,

Pieter Cross, M.D.
President


Jennifer Walters
Social Chair

Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #88 “Through a Murderer’s Eyes” or “The Girl with the Haunted Eyes”
Leo Dorfman, writer
Irv Novick, penciler

Shortly after finishing an article about seeing-eye dogs, Lois Lane is shot at by a thug from crime boss Nero Cary’s gang. It seems that Lois is one of the star witnesses at Cary’s trial and they don’t want her to testify. Lois is not directly hit by the bullet, but it does graze her eyes. She begins to have difficulty seeing so she goes to local oculist Dr. Wade. While in his office, her eyesight goes from bad to worse. He diagnoses her with blindness due to corneal injury, and tells her it might get better in a few days because the rest of the eyes are undamaged.

Lois doesn’t want anyone to know she’s blind, so she and her sister Lucy try to hide the fact from Perry White and Superman, but Superman figures out the ruse. Later, he saves her from an attack by more of Cary’s thugs. Lois returns to Dr. Wade who tells her that her corneal damage is so bad that she’ll never see again! Her only hope to regain her vision is a corneal transplant. While there are no donors available in Metropolis, there is one conveniently available in Gotham City. Superman retrieves the cadaver and the operation is performed. The catch: the corneas come from an executed murderer.

When the bandages come off a few days later, Lois’s eyesight is perfect. But then she starts seeing images of people who aren’t there — people who are screaming in terror. Dr. Wade reassures her that it’s common for people in her situation to hallucinate, and puts on a nightly sedative. After continuing to experience hallucinations, Lois eventually realizes that she’s seeing images of the people murdered by the donor.

As she is called as a witness at Cary’s trial, the defense attorney objects because “Miss Lane has been subject to hallucinations and violent outbursts in public! She could break down at any tine!” Right on cue, Lois begins to see another screaming face. This time, with help from Superman, Lois reveals that the hallucinations were all a ploy by Cary to make her believe she was insane. The eye doctor she saw was not Dr. Wade, but instead an imposter. Lois never received corneal transplants because she was never really blind to begin with. During her “operation”, Wade put special contacts on Lois’s eyes that would show an image when bathed in infra-red light. One of Cary’s cronies would follow her around with an infra-red flashlight and another would slip into her apartment while she was sedated at night and change contacts. Luckily Lois discovered it was all a hoax when she realized she was seeing the faces of people who were shot in the back. Realizing he has been caught red-handed, Nero Cary throws himself on the mercy of the court.

This story contains a tremendous amount of bad medicine, but most of it can be blamed on the fake Dr. Wade. However, I’m surprised that an experienced investigative journalist like Lois (or Clark) didn’t realize the doctor was a fake because:
1. I’m not sure what instrument Dr. Wade was using, but it sure wasn’t an ophthalmoscope.
2. Lois became entirely blind during her appointment with him
3. Instead of performing surgery, he placed contact lenses on her. Come on, you can’t tell me that someone wouldn’t realize that 1) no surgery had been performed on their body, and 2) they had contacts on. Even if Lois didn’t notice, Superman should have.
4. Corneal transplants don’t heal in 2-3 days and most post-transplant patients still require corrective lenses.
4. Hallucinations are never normal.
5. Real doctors don’t prescribe sedatives for hallucinations, and if they did, they wouldn’t hand them out in bottles from the office.

Other thoughts and random facts:

• If Cary is trying to kill Lois, why not just kill her at night when she’s sedated? One of his henchmen is already in her apartment anyway.
• How did Lois get bumped to the top of the transplant list so quickly? And what happened to the actual corneas, did they go to waste?
• Why did Superman fly an entire corpse from Gotham City to Metropolis, when only the corneas were needed? (And why fly a cadaver on a gurney?)
• Infra-red does not work that way.
• Even if Lois’s medical history were common knowledge (which it shouldn’t be), the defense attorney should have revealed her hallucinations while trying to discredit her testimony on the stand, not launch an objection beforehand.
• The story did play fair with clues. Whenever Lois had a hallucination, there was someone nearby with an infra-red flashlight. The newspaper headline in the Daily Bugle morgue read “shot from behind.”
• Corneal transplants were one of the first successful transplant operations. First performed successfully in 1905, they were common practice by 1950.
• Finally, you gotta love the Scooby-Doo style reveal at the end, when they pull the fake face of the imposter doctor.

Sgt. Frog
by Mine Yoshizaki

For the inaugural look at medicine and manga, I thought I’d start with one of my recent favorites, Sgt. Frog. It tells the story of an invasion force from the 58th planet of the Gamma Storm Cloud system — an invasion force made up entirely of bipedal alien frogs. For various reasons, most of these aliens end up living with — or at least frequently visiting — the Hinata household. The series is a fun read, and it veers into medical territory on a couple of occasions. Overall, Yoshizaki does a good job with the medical science (such as it is), but it also makes a good starting point for a discussion of a common medical condition.

The first scene of medical interest appears about halfway through the first volume, when Momoka brings the entire Hinata family with her to her own private tropical island. In an attempt to catch Fuyuki Hinata’s eye, she swims out and pretends to drown. A rescue attempt by Sgt. Keroro goes awry, and the fake drowning becomes a real one.

Natsumi is ready to begin CPR to revive Momoka, but Keroro wants to make up for his drowning her in the first place so uses his “Super Suction Space Octopus” to perform the CPR. Momoka is successfully revived, but no one has the heart to tell her that it as an octopus and not Fuyuki. (As a nitpick, I’m not sure Momoka needed full hands-on CPR as much as she needed rescue breathing.)

Take home messages:

• Don’t let outer-space frogs save people from drowning.
• Space Octopi should be standard issue for all rescue squads.
• Alien frog anatomy and physiology must be pretty close to human if CPR works on both.

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The next scene takes place in Volume 4, when Natsumi comes down with a sudden and severe febrile illness. Her temperature is 40.02° Celsius. Bearing in mind that 37° Celsius is the normal body temperature, 40° Celsius is equal to a temperature of 104° Fahrenheit.

Sgt. Keroro and Fuyuki drag Natsumi to bed. Fuyuki wants to call an ambulance, but the frogs won’t let him. Instead, Sgt. Keroro offers to help Fuyuki care for her by sponging off her forehead.

Natsumi’s fever doesn’t go down, and Fuyuki is once again ready to call an ambulance when Corporal Giroro arrives, carrying with him the liver of a space keropes. Eating this organ is alleged to cure any disease, but before he can give it to Natsumi, Keroro eats it, believing it to be breakfast.

First Sergeant Kururu walks in and announces that he is to blame for Natsumi’s illness she is infected with a “Level 5 Virus” never before seen on Earth; a virus, coincidentally, which he designed. Keroro “encourages” him to create a serum to treat the virus and Natsumi is cured by the time her mother arrives home from work.

Take home messages:

• 37° Celsius is the normal human body temperature (I have no idea what the normal body temperature for an alien frog is, I guess it depends on whether they are cold blooded like their terrestrial relatives).
• Fifteen minutes is an incredibly quick time for that severe of an infection to occur. It certainly can happen, but it tends to be bacterial diseases that strike that fast, not viral — probably because viral reproduction requires the virus to hijack the body’s cells, and that takes time. Then again, I’ve never seen a “Level 5 Virus”, so it may be something entirely different…
• Evaporative cooling (i.e. sponging people off) is a moderately successful way of dealing with fevers. Better ways are to use acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Motrin or Advil). Aspirin can also be used, but is not recommended in children with viral illnesses because of the possibility of Reye’s Syndrome.
• Sadly, Corporal Giroro was mistaken, as every doctor knows that it is not the liver of the space keropes which can cure disease, but instead its spleen. The liver does make a nice snack, particularly with some rye toast. (Actually, I have no idea what a keropes is. An internet search only turned up my own site (the irony!), so I assume it’s just the made-up name of an alien creature (like a targ, Tamaranian, Ewok, or Libertarian))

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A couple of final notes regarding fever:

• First, do NOT tell the doctor or nurse that you have a fever because “you feel warm” or are “warm to touch.” Buy a thermometer for heaven’s sake! They’re inexpensive and the digital ones are easy to use.
• Do NOT tell the doctor or nurse that your temperature was only 99°, but that’s a fever for you because your temperature always runs lower than normal. We’ll nod our heads and smile, but we won’t believe you. We’ll believe that you believe it, but we don’t. Everybody tells us this, and it’s never true. Body temperature fluctuates throughout the day, with the average being just shy of 99°. Most doctors don’t consider a temperature a fever unless it is at least 101 or 101.5 %deg;.
• If you have a fever and are feeling poorly because of it, then start taking acetaminophen and/or ibuprofen. If it is a low-grade fever and you can tolerate it, then do nothing, as fever serves a purpose (raising the body temperature makes it too hot for invading germs to thrive).

Fallen Angel #18 “Hurlyburly, conclusion”
Peter David, writer
David Lopez, penciler

As seems an all too common situation for women in comics, Lee is having a rough pregnancy. At the end of the previous issue, she was surprised in her home by Boxer and struck in the abdomen. She started bleeding and was brought to the emergency room by Boxer before he fled.

A similar situation is shown in a flashback to Boxer’s youth, when his father beat his pregnant mother, causing her to lose the child she was carrying.

I have no complaints about the medicine in this issue; David does an excellent job. Blunt trauma is very dangerous to the developing fetus for several reasons. If the mother dies, then the baby is almost certain to. Maternal shock or blood loss can cut blood flow to the placenta, killing the fetus. The trauma can also have a direct effect on the fetus (more common in penetrating trauma than blunt trauma). However, the most common cause of fetal death after trauma is placental abruption.

Placental abruption occurs when the placenta rips away from the wall of the uterus. The classic symptoms of abruption are bleeding and severe abdominal pain. Depending on the extent of the abruption, the bleeding can be fatal for both the mother and fetus.

Boxer’s mother suffered a severe placental abruption due the beating inflicted by her husband. Her child did not survive. Studies show that physical abuse occurs in four to seventeen percent of pregnancies. Most women who were physically abused before pregnancy report an increase in abuse during pregnancy. Two-thirds of abused pregnant women seek medical treatment, but only 3% tell the doctor the cause of the injury.

Like Boxer’s mother, Lee also suffered an abruption due to abdominal trauma. The extent of Lee’s abruption is an integral part of the story, so I won’t spoil it here.

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While we’re on comics by Peter David, let me point out that unlike another recent Marvel mutant title, Madrox #3 shows that David and penciler Pablo Raimondi know the anatomy of the hand. David’s also right about which fingers are easiest to break — at least in the manner he describes.

Sorry for the outages last night and today. Apparently there’s been a series DOS attacks against my host, and many of their sites were affected (mine included). It’s annoying and frustrating when you’re trying to post…but if that’s my biggest problem right now, I think I’m in pretty good shape overall.

UPDATE (8 Jan, 1939): On top of that, one of the host’s primary drive’s failed, and they had to back everything up. That took my site completely offline for the better part of today. 2 posts were lost (this one and the one on Fallen Angel), but I kept backup copies on Word and in Outlook. A few comments were lost, too, but I restored those fully, as far as I know. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I’m going to go take something for this headache now…

A few words of wisdom regarding rashes. Do NOT put any of the following on a rash unless explicity told to do so by a physician (or Physicans Assistant or Nurse practioner — I’m open minded):

Bleach
Should be a no-brainer, but would I be mentioning it if I hadn’t seen somebody do it?

Butter (or Margarine)
I don’t care what your dear old Grandmother told you, do not put butter on a rash. There’s a good chance it could make things worse. Plus you’ll get grease marks all over your comics and computer.

Neosporin
This product only has a very limited use. It should not be used as a general spread for any rash. It contains neomycin, which can be very irritating and even allergy-inducing. Use with caution. (Personally, I don’t use it at all. I don’t think it accomplishes anything plain old soap and water can’t).

Alcohol
I’m specifically talking about rubbing alcohol here, though you really shouldn’t apply any alcohol to your body except in rare situations. Rubbing alcohol is very drying and irritating so often makes rashes worse.

A mostly lazy weekend. When I wasn’t trying to fix my website, I decided it was time to learn Access, so I’ve been trying to wrap my head around some of the bizarre concepts found in database programming. (And take it from me, make sure you back up your site regularly, or keep some sort of back up copy somewhere. It saved me hours of frustration and extra work).

I’ve been listening to the soundtrack for Wicked, which is coming to Chicago soon. The Polite-Wife is a big fan of Gregory Maguire’s books, so I think we’ll make the trek up north to see it. The music is better than I expected, not as much the paint-by-number musical theater common on Broadway lately.

I’ve been taking a lot of breaks playing Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the third in the Ratchet & Clank series. So far, this one has been excellent, just like the first two. The level designs are clever with many little secrets to find. In addition to the occasional arena combat levels, this one also has several battlefield levels, which are exhausting, but a agreat deal of fun. The cut scenes, as always, are hilarious — especially the “Courtney Gears” video. Did I mention the game-within-a-game 2D levels where you’re playing someof Captain Quark’s old adventures? A great game so far.

We also finally went to see The Incredibles. I thought it was great. I particularly liked the part about the capes. I can see how they’re going to have a hard time making a live action Fantastic Four movie after this.

Sunday Blog-O-Bits:

• There is something not quite right about Tim O’Neil’s latest comic book remix. But yet, I can’t look away. I particularly like the part about Sally wanting to become an X-Men, yet bitter-graping that she could never fit in the costume.
• Don’t miss Laura’s Bloggity Contest #1. There’s achance to win a copy of Colonia: Islands and Anomolies by Jeff Nicholson. There’s also a chance to win an orignal page of artwork from the book.
• The Comic Treadmill needs to stop doing such excellent review of Archive Editions. They make me want to own every one. My comic book budget is big enough already, H.
  (And you all caught their Twelve Days of Christmas. Right? Right?)
• Finally, here’s an interesting site by an author who proposes a Unified Field Theory (of sorts) for super-heroes. Apparently it call comes down to Superman and viruses, transfusions, and promiscuous sex.

Watching The Incredibles, I noticed that there was scene in the previews that was not in the movie (the scene where Mr. Incredible was trying on the old Incredi-suit and the belt slipped, ricocheting around the room).

I remember a similar situation in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, where a scene was in the previews (Michael Caine’s character pushing an innocent bystander into the water) but not in the movie itself.

Can anyone think of other instances where a scene was shown in the previews, but never made it into the movie?

Flying Blind was a half-hour comedy shown on FOX on and off from the fall of 1992 to the spring of 1993. It tells the story of the neurotic loser Neil (Corey Parker) who meets a wild and crazy girl (Téa Leoni). In some ways, it was a forerunner of Dharma and Greg, though admittedly without the much of the subtlety.

Flying Blind was a brash show — but that was where it was fun. Being on Fox in the early 90’s, it pushed the envelope a lot more than regular network TV did. This was the Ned and Stacey version of the “opposites attract sitcom” (and both starred Thomas Hayden Church, trying to break out of his village idiot Wings role).

While not necessarily a “great show” that will go down in history, it was a great show to relax and laugh to….plus Téa Leoni.

This is in no way intended to be an in-depth analysis of Crisis on Infinite Earths. If you’re looking for that, make sure to check out Matt Rossi’s excellent posts over at the Howling Curmudgeons. Instead, this post is going to look at how Hawk and Dove assisted during the Crisis, and how the events of the Crisis ultimately affected them.

Dove can first be glimpsed in the background aboard the Monitor’s spacecraft in issue #5, but nothing more comes of that.

The first real appearance of Hawk and Dove come in the ninth issue. At this point in the story, the villains have taken control of Earth-4, Earth-X and Earth-S. The heroes are called together to wrest control of these Earths from the villains. Acting true to form, Hawk objects to the presence of Red Star, a communist and a Soviet, among the heroes, but Dove reminds him that it’s for the greater good.

Dove can later be seen among the heroes fighting to free Earth-4. He and Robotman are losing a fight against Black Adam when Kole comes up from behind and turns Adam to crystal. Robotman wants to smash him into little pieces, but Dove won’t let him because “it’s not right to hurt someone else…no matter what he did to us.” This is a little extreme, even for Dove. I can fully understand Dove not wanting Robotman to kill Black Adam, but not for the reasons given. Dove is against violence and brute force. He is not, however, against punishment and ‘hurting” others when appropriate. It’s a subtle difference, but a real one.

Hawk is nowhere to be seen during this skirmish, or in any of the battles on Earth-X or Earth-S. It would be logical that he would be sent to Earth-4 with Dove, but then you would expect him to be fighting alongside him. His actions during this period are unknown, but he was probably out there punching some villain (or communist) in a frenzy of violence.

In the following issue, Dove is shown as one of the heroes sent back to the dawn of time to fight the Anti-Monitor. Again, Hawk is not seen, but since all the heroes were sent back in an attempt to stop the Anti-Monitor, he must be among the crowd somewhere.

In the final issue, the five Earths have been merged into a single new Earth, but danger is still present. The Anti-Monitor has sent his shadow demons to destroy this new world. Hawk and Dove, along with the Human Bomb, Doll Man, Batgirl, Vixen and the Inferior Five are in New York City escorting civilians to safety. Dove notices a child left behind. He runs to get him, but is ambushed by a shadow demon on his way back and killed as Hawk looks on in shock.

Don’s funeral is featured on one of the last pages of the book. Family and teammates can be seen standing solemnly next to Don’s tombstone. There is some controversy as to whether or not Hank was there. He can’t clearly be seen at the funeral (but it is a tiny picture), and events in the Kesel and Kesel Hawk & Dove mini-series suggest that he was not at his brother’s funeral.

Hawk continues to fight crime, but without Dove to control his wilder impulses he becomes more violent and unpredictable. He appears in various DC titles for the next three years, ending up as a hostage in need of rescue in Central America. He finally begins to regain his focus and returns to America. But that is a post for another day…

Almost every day it seems that a new groundbreaking medical reports is mentioned in a front page newspaper article or on the cover of a weekly magazine. The claims are bold: eating red meat leads to colon cancer, drinking soda leads to diabetes, green tea extract cures strokes and so on. But are any of these claims legitimate?

Medicine can be a confusing field, and statistics even more so. T-scores? Z-scores? Power? P value? How is a non-physician supposed to find out which reports are reasonable and which are unfounded?

It’s not that difficult if you remember to be skeptical and follow these two simple rules.

Skepticism is Your Friend
Approach all medical articles with a great deal of skepticism. These articles and reports are trying to convince you to do something different, such as eat less of this or that or take this vitamin or medicine. Don’t just take their word at it. Make them prove it to you.

Rule #1
Where was the study published? To be believable, it should have been published in a well-known, well-respected medical journal*. These journals include the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.

Be wary if the report is from a presentation at a conference and has not been published. Published articles are closely examined and reviewed by experts. The same doesn’t necessarily hold true for a presentation.

Don’t trust a news release or report put out that is not published in a legitimate journal, or at least presented at a legitimate conference. Most suspicious advice, sloppy science and bad medicine comes from these “reports” (and the most eye catching headlines too).

Rule #2
Look at the number of participants in the study. If it is for a well-known condition (such as heart disease, stroke or cancer) or addresses a common situation (diet, exercise) then there should be thousands, if not tens-of-thousands, of participants. A study that addresses a common condition or makes sweeping statements yet only has a few hundred — or fewer — participants should be viewed very, very skeptically.

Following these two rules will allow you to efficiently separate the wheat from the chaff and discover which newspaper medical reports you really need to pay attention to, and which can be dropped at the bottom of the birdcage.

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* That is not to say that smaller medical journals don’t produce quality groundbreaking articles; they do, but it is rare. Big name journals also publish poor papers from time to time. Still, if it is published in a journal even a non-physician has heard of, then it’s most likely believable and legitimate.

Brat Pack
Rick Veitch, writer and artist

The Midnight Mink has a secret: he has a healing factor with amazing regenerative capabilities. He took a round of bullets point blank and lived to tell the tale. He didn’t come by these abilities naturally, instead it was a gift from True-Man:

…one day I got careless and [True-Man] had to perform immediate hyper-speed surgery to save my life.
That’s when he noticed I was H.I.V. positive
True-Man went away soon after that. But he left me with a parting gift…a transfusion of his own blood.
He knew his hyper-powered antibodies would make my own weakening immune system almost as strong as his own.

Now that the Mink’s sidekick, the latest Chippy, has learned the secret, he shares the healing factor with him by a transfusion.

As comic book transfusions go, this one is fairly low key and makes sense — in a comic-book science way. My main nitpick would be gravity. There’s not enough blood pressure in the Mink’s arm (even if he used an artery instead of a vein) to push the blood to the top of the IV stand. Remember that when you give blood, the collecting bag is hanging lower than you. The Mink needs to be closer with the blood transfusing directly into Chippy, or he could be above with his blood running down, or an already collected bag of blood could be transfused.

I also have some questions regarding the Mink’s description of his healing abilities. I can see how “hyper-powered antibodies” would be able to prevent disease and infections, but a lead bullet is not an infection. I’m not sure how these antibodies would be able to heal such things as punctured lungs, ruptured muscles, and so on. Antibodies do not play a role in this kind of rebuilding. Additionally, antibodies have a limited lifespan (about 3 months) and need a variety of specialized white blood cells (B-cells, T-cells, APCs and so on) around to consistently produce them. I suspect that Midnight Mink’s understanding of the whole situation is limited and the transfusion supplied more than antibodies, probably a beneficial virus or some form of modified DNA.

It also apparently only takes a small amount of the blood to pass on the healing factor. Chippy is able to transmit it to the other sidekicks with just a sip or two of his blood in a later scene of the book. This lacks the forced intimacy of a transfusion scene, but it does add in a Last Supper-like “this is my blood” connotation.

Note that I used the Brat Pack trade paperback for this review; it has some differences from the original issues.
Thanks to Jog for reminding of the transfusion scene in Brat Pack. I also note that Brat Pack is copyright 1991. This makes Midnight Mink one of the earlest H.I.V. positive superheroes, if not the first.

• The dental adventure chapter in Sgt. Frog, Volume 4 is really nothing more than a Japanese update of the Crest Team. Of course, if Marvel had published the comic, it would be Crest Team Mangaverse
• Laura brings up some good points in regards to Aquaman and his lack of great villains. I think the whole “great villains make great heroes” statement is overused and oversimplified. It would be better phrased as “great threats” or “great challenges make great heroes.” Think back to some of the great early classic Spider-Man tales. When Spider-Man has to summon all his strength to lift that heavy block or when he throws his costume in the trash, it’s not because of a super-villain. Good heroes face threats from within as often as without. More recently, most of the Vertigo series lack “great villains” but are still captivating comics with compelling heroes. Too many writers try to create an iconic villain too soon in their run on a character, and it never works.
• She’s also right about the damage done by the Superfriends cartoon show. Let’s not forget Aquaman’s own Filmation series, though. Heroes with flippered sea-mammals as sidekicks have a hard time with credibility.
• I spent the last couple of nights catching up on some trade paperbacks and graphic novels.
  • I had picked up the first issue of Killer Princesses when it came out and enjoyed it, but moved and missed the rest. Last night, I read the trade cover to cover in one sitting. It is a perfect fusion of Gail Simone’s writing with Lea Hernandez’s art. But be warned: there are simply too many laugh-out loud lines and situations in this book to read it in public.
  • The third volume of Hopeless Savages is my favorite so far. The plot is more down to earth and believable than the previous volumes. There are some excellent character moments, particularly for Arsenal. As a bonus, there is less Skank Zero, which is good, because I can only tolerate her in small doses. I would like to see more Rat Bastard though. (That should bring me some interesting internet searches.)
  • Metabarons Volume #1 and Volume #2. Beautifully painted. Very European feeling science fiction, like it stepped out of Heavy Metal. There is a little too much “tell” rather than “show”, and sometimes when they do show instead of tell, it’s difficult to understand what’s going on. Still, it’s epic science fiction, something we don’t see enough of anymore. I’m looking forward to the new edition of The Incal
• Captain America: The Return of the Asthma Monster. Must. Read. This. Comic. (Link courtesy of the Precocious Curmudgeon)
• Battlestar Galactica begins tonight.

Black Widow #4 “Part 4: No Place Like Home”
Richard K. Morgan, witer
Gorlan Parlov and Bill Sienkiewicz, artists

After the previous issue, I found myself enjoying the mystery and flavor of this mini-series. I was looking forward to learning more about the hormone Medusagen as the story progressed. Sadly, the plot stalls in issue #3 and all momentum is lost.

I also wonder how Black Widow fans will take the news that she is not the Black Widow, but instead a Black Widow, only one of many. You’d think that Natasha, with all her vaunted investigative skills, would have figured out this basic fact by now.

My biggest problem with Black Widow #4 was the return on the “Military Strength Pain Killer” from issue #2. As I noted last time, the entire notion is absurd. Soldiers do not suffer more pain than everyone else. If anyone suffers the most severe pain, it’s cancer patients, not military members. The military pharmacy is also much more restrictive than a civilian pharmacy; fewer drugs are available and side effects are closely monitored. (Think about if from the capitalist point of view as well. If I’m a drug company and I’ve developed a super pain killer, I’ll make billions more on the open market than in a restrictive deal with the government.)

This issue, we actually get to see the bottle of pills. “Phenoany-,” the label reads. “Military Grade Extreme High Potency Pain Killer. Caution! Use as Directed.” It then goes on to list side effects: “[liv]er damage, headache, insomnia, [bl]urred vision, nerve damage, [???] hands and feet, nausea, [??? unintelligible], [bl]oody nose, thyroid damage.”

So the military is going to give its soldiers a pain killer that causes headaches (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a pain killer) and blurred vision? The last thing the military wants is a soldier who can’t see (and has a headache and bloody nose).

I’m also interested to know where she got the bottle. It doesn’t resemble a pharmacy stock bottle or label. It looks more like an over the counter drug bottle, but no over the counter medication would be that dangerous. Maybe she picked it up in Moscow pharmacy…in the drugs-written-in-English section.

When playing a world-building game such as Civilization (or Civilization II or III and so on), do you keep the default names for cities, or do you use your own? If you use your own, which names do you use and why?

Being the fanboy I am, when I’m playing Civlization, I name my cities after planets in the Legion of Super-Heroes. Seriously. I usually make Rimbor my capital and go from there. There’s something reassuring about seeing Bgztl, Bismol, Winath and Trom taking over the world.

Between a recent move and trying to find a good mail order comic book shop, I’ve amassed a nice collection of duplicate comics. These take up valuble box space, and so most of them have bbe nput up for sale on eBay. Comics for sale include She-Hulk #1-6, Excalibur #1-6, Powers #1-7, Manhunter #1-5, recent Birds of Prey, the Supergirl storyline in Superman/Batman and many others.

I’m also paring down my anime collection, so there are some choice anime DVDs up for grabs, including a shrinkwrapped Love Hina perfect collection.

All the auctions can be found here.

I love Pop Rocks. Whoever invented them deserves a Nobel Prize. I run across them a couple of times a year (usually in the check-out line in a toy store) and buy several packages. They’realways gone before I get home.

When I was about ten or eleven, I was on vacation with my family in the Great Smokey Mountains. At a candy store in Gatlinburg, I bought some Pop Rocks. I had recently heard the rumor that combining Pop Rocks and soda would kill you. Being a not-always-as-bright-as-I-should-be ten year-old, I decided to give the rumor a test. I downed a package of Pop Rocks followed by a can of Coke. Right after guzzling the Coke, it suddenly dawned on my juvenile brain that if the rumor were true, I had made a pretty big mistake. My ten year-old life flashed before my eyes (and didn’t last long). It was all in vain, though — nothing happened. I didn’t explode, throw up or even belch. So much for rumors…

To enliven the winter doldrums, I’m happy to present the first Polite Dissent contest. I have three brand new copies of the Nikolai Dante: The Romanov Dynasty trade paperbacks to give away. This is a great book, perfect for a winter’s evening. Who doesn’t love a little romance, a little sci-fi, and a lot of swashbuckling?

Interested? It’s easy to win: all it takes is a quick e-mail. Those with a little creativity stand an even better chance.

As I have three copies to give away, there are three ways to win a copy of the book: Quality, Quantity, and Pure Luck.

Quality:
Spin me the tale of a Russian Nobleman (or Noblewoman). It can be a story, a poem, a comic, a picture, haiku, iambic pentameter or even a song. The choice of a medium is entirely up to you. Fun and creativity count the most, with actual talent coming in third.

The catch is that in addition to the Russian aristocrat, the tale must contain at least four of the following six elements: 1) a bottle of vodka, 2) a river otter, 3) a copy of The Annotated Alice in Wonderland, 4) an ice cream sandwich, 5) Spiro Agnew and/or 6) the island sounds of Don Ho.

Quantity:
Same rules as above, except — in addition to the Russian nobleman — include as many items off the Big List as you can. Whoever’s tale has the most items (and makes some sort of sense) wins. Ties will be broken randomly. Again, the exact medium is unimportant and fun and creativity are key…and a little talent wouldn’t hurt either.

Many of the items on the Big List have been purposefully left open to interpretation. E-mail me with any questions.

Pure Luck:
Simply e-mail your name to the address below and you’ll be entered in a drawing to win one of the books. It’s as simple as that. No creativity needed. People entering one of the above two contests are automatically entered in the Pure Luck drawing. One entry per person in the drawing, please.

More or Less Legal Ramblings:
1. Creator retain the copyrights to all entries, though all winning entries (and any others that catch my fancy) will be published on Polite Dissent at the conclusion of the contest.
2. Multiple entires are allowed for the creative portion of the contest, but only one entry per person for the Pure Luck drawing.
3. As the material in the book may not be appropriate for children, you must be at least 18 to enter the contest.
4. The decision of the judges is final.
5. No whining.
6. Is the NHL ever going to play a game this year?

Monolith #10 “Everything Old is New Again, part two”
Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, writers
Phil Winslade, penciler

I’m going to take a slightly different view from other reviewers because I find nothing wrong with what Tilt is saying in this issue.

At some point, most of us have been taught the “Five Stages of Grief”: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Originally conceived by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, they’ve become fairly entrenched in popular culture. While they provide a basic understanding of the grieving process, they are a vast oversimplification of the situation.

A better way to look at it is that there are five common phases experienced by people who are grieving. The order is not that important; people will bounce between stages and even cycle through them repeatedly. There is no final destination of “acceptance” as once thought. It’s also important to realize that there is no discrete line separating the various stages. A person can be both angry and depressed, for instance. People who do not follow the classic progression of stages are not grieving unhealthily or poorly; grief is a very individual process.

Tilt, in issue #10 of Monolith, is a good example of how complex grief can be. She has just recently found out that she is H.I.V. positive. Explaining the situation to the golem Monolith, she first says:

I did do bad things and now I am being punished.

This strikes most of us as a shocking and unhealthy attitude. However, remember that she just found out some devastating news and is still coming to terms with it. More than anything, this is her anger speaking. She is angry at herself for some past bad choices, and feels that she is being punished. In my experience, such thoughts of punishment are a common reaction to this kind of news and not harmful. If she stays fixated on this concept of punishment then it could be unhealthy, but generally it is not destructive.

Next, she says:

I was a whore and there’s no changing what I did…only what I will do in the time I have.

This shows some level of acceptance of her situation. Tilt is perfect example of how a person can be both angry and accepting at the same time. As time moves on, she’ll no doubt also experience the other stages of grief, some several times, and not necessarily in any fixed order. Her thoughts and reactions as shown in Monolith #10 are perfectly normal given her situation.

I agree with other reviewers that the dialogue is clunky in spots and the ending a little too deus ex machina, but the process of grieving was well shown. I’ll definitely miss this book when it’s gone.
Further Reading:

• A site showing the “classic” view of the Five Stages of Grief.
• A site highlighting the more modern (and in my opinion, more enlightened) view of the grieving process.

Start looking at the Big List and putting your ideas together…but remember creativity is not necessary to win my Nikolai Dante trade paperback contest, all it takes is an e-mail!

Thanks to the people at the following blogs for helping me promote my contest: Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog, Gutterninja, Progressive Ruin, the Comic Treadmill, Tangognat, Johnny Bacardi, Thought Balloons, Tom the Dog, Cognitive Dissonance, and Unqualified Offerings.

UPDATE (19 January): Thanks to Postmodernbarney and the Precocious Curmudgeon as well.

UPDATE (20 January): And how could I forget Yet Another Comics Blog, Blog This! Pal and The Low Road?

Thanks to Charles and Dorian for pointing out the cover of the upcoming Teen Titans #23 to me. There’s Dove in the upper left hand corner, and a little lower, standing next to Flamebird and Bumblebee, must be the new Hawk.

It’s an interesting mix of Titans, past, present, and future, on the cover. Even Wildebeest and Duela Dent (looking more svelte and sane than her last in-continuity appearance) are there.

Identity Crisis #7
Brad Meltzer, writer
Rags Morales, penciler

I’m a little depressed, because this will be my last chance to review an issue of Identity Crisis. On the other hand, that fact also makes me very happy.

The criminal “mastermind” and killer of Sue Dibny is revelaed to be Jean Loring, Ray Palmer’s ex-wife. She committed the murders in an attempt to get Ray back. Jean shrunk down to sub-atomic size and traveled the phone lines to the Dibny household. She jumped out of the phone then entered Sue’s brain, presumably by way of her ear. Once in the brain, she enlarged enough to kill Sue.

Jean said her plan was only to knock Sue out, but that wouldn’t have worked. A microscopic foreign body in the brain is not going to knock someone out. It might cause a seizure, but I don’t think it’s going to cause unconsciousness.

Similarly, it would be hard for a microscopic person to cause a stroke in someone’s brain. If Jean cut or blocked some blood vessels, then it might cause a stroke, but there is no way this could be accidental, it would have to be on purpose. She didn’t cause a hemorrhagic (bleeding) stroke, because the blood would have been obvious during the autopsy. She probably caused a stroke by blocking some blood vessels; these blockages were what Dr. Mid-Nite was pointing out in Identity Crisis #6. (As a side note, it would have taken more blockages than the microscopic ones he noticed to cause a fatal stroke)

Since Jean caused Sue’s death due to blocking the blood flow and causing a stroke, why is Sue bleeding profusely out of her ear? Bleeding from the ear is not a sign or symptom of strokes. In face, ear bleeding is not associated with strokes at all. And why didn’t Dr. Mid-Nite notice that much blood during the autopsy?

(While we’re on the subject, who came up with the concept that telepaths bleed out of their nose, ears or eyes? I can see how severe straining might cause some bleeding from the nose, but not the ear or eyes. A blood vessel might pop within the eye itself, but there wouldn’t be any overt bleeding. It simply doesn’t make sense anatomically. If someone is straining that much to cause bleeding out the nose, I’d be more worried about the sky-high blood pressure and possibility of popping aneurysms).

Finally, I have some legal questions. What happened to Jean’s due process? One moment she’s in bed with Ray and the next she’s being locked up at Arkham Asylum. Some time has passed, but the script suggests it wasn’t that much. What about a trial?

Why is she in an insane asylum? She acted criminally, but she didn’t act insanely. She committed a pre-meditated assault that turned into murder. She knew her actions were wrong and tried to cover them up by burning the body. She hired someone to kill Tim Drake’s father, but purposefully chose someone weak so that he would survive (but things didn’t work out according to plan). She clearly had thought through what she was going to do and knew what was right and what was wrong. She wouldn’t come close to meeting the definition of criminally insane in most, if not all, states of the Union. With his legal background, Meltzer should know better.

Finally, since she’s not insane, why are they medicating her? There’s no pill to cure criminal tendencies.

1. One of the medical assistants likes to accuse me of making up words. A perfect example is the word “foosh” — she-s convinced that I’ve made it up, when in fact it is a legitimate medical term. FOOSH is actually an acronym and describes a common type of injury. It stands for Fall On Out-Stretched Hands. If you’ve ever fallen forward and caught yourself on your hands, then you suffered a FOOSH — rollerblading injuries are a classic form of this injury (and it’s why you should wear wrist braces). FOOSHes are important because certain permanently disabling wrist injuries are associated with them.

   I just found out that there’s a caffeinated mint out called Foosh. I think I’ll have to buy a case for work.

2. A patient named “Mack” came in the other day. I made some comment to our other assistant about Mack the Knife, and she just stared at me. She had no idea who Mack the Knife was (and we probably did more harm than good trying to sing her the song). She didn’t even remember the McDonalds add featuring the song. Conversations like this always make me feel old. Then when I was looking on Musicmatch Jukebox for a version to play for her, I found a rendition by the Psychedelic Furs. That made everything all better.

I’m going to start a new feature here at Polite Dissent. From now on, Friday is “Lois Lane Day,” and every Friday I’ll take a look at some of her great Silver Age antics. I’ll try to stick to stories involving hospitals and medicine, but I may stray a little from time to time. For the first installment, I’ll be looking at the first story in Superman #125, “Lois Lane’s Super-Dream.” This is a fun story that features not one, not two, but three transfusions: one real one and two imaginary.

Lois Lane’s Super-Dream (the first story in Superman #125)
Jerry Coleman, writer
Kurt Shaffenberger, artist

Determined to get a scoop, Lois is trying to sneak into the Metropolitan Science Fair when she falls off a narrow ledge and hits her head on the concrete sidewalk below. She is rushed to the hospital by Superman. The doctors diagnose her with shock and decide to transfuse her. Since Lois has a rare blood type*, Superman has to fly to Chicago to get blood for her.

Overhearing Superman talk about the blood transfusion, Lois believes she is going to be transfused with his super-blood. In her head-injury addled state, she starts dreaming that the transfusion gives her super powers. She dons a green and yellow costume, puts on a red wig, and becomes Power Girl!

As Power Girl, she works alongside Superman fighting crime and saving lives.

Superman: I must leave Metropolis for a few days, Power Girl. I’m sure I can rely n you to take my place here while I’m away!
Power Girl: Have no fears Superman! You can trust me completely!

A short time later, Clark Kent is injured in a power plant explosion. Lois (a.k.a. Power Girl) gives him a transfusion of her blood which ends up giving him super powers as well. Lois gives Clark his own green and yellow costume (and a moustache for a disguise) and names him Power-Man. Unfortunately, Clark is a timid and bungling super-hero. He runs away at the first sight of danger and behaves in a totally inept manner. For instance, he tries to stop a fly ball from breaking a window, and accidentally demolishes the entire house. Another time, he spots trouble and dashes into what he thinks is a closet to change into Power-Man. He ends up changing into costume in the front window of a department store in full view of everyone. As Lois flies in to rescue him she wakes up from her dream. Later, when Clark visits her in the hospital, Lois berates him for being so incompetent as a super-hero while he shares a knowing wink with the reader.

Medically, I’m very concerned about the care Lois received in the hospital. The doctors are focusing on a small aspect of her case and missing the big picture. Since she needs a transfusion, she must be bleeding from somewhere. Given that she struck her head, Lois most likely has cranial bleeding and she needs neurosurgical consultation much more than she needs a transfusion.

The medicine gets a failing grade, but the script is good because it never pretends to be anything other than a dream, and the reader is in on the joke the entire time.

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* remember this fact. It’ll be important again in a few weeks…

Just a little over a week left to get me your entries for the Nikolai Dante contest! It’s easy to enter…all it takes is little luck and sending your name in an e-mail to contest [at]politedissent.com.

However, if you have just the slightest hint of creativity, there are two other ways for you to win:

1. The Quality Contest: Tell me the tale of a Russian Nobleman (or woman) that includes 4 of the following six items:

• a bottle of vodka
• a river otter
• a copy of The Annotated Alice in Wonderland
• an ice cream sandwich
• Spiro Agnew
• the island sounds of Don Ho

This does not have to be a prose story. It can be a poem, song, picture, comic or whatever. The medium is up to you. Send all entries to contest[at]politedissent.com.

2. The Quantity Contest: Tell me the tale of a Russian Nobleman (or woman) that includes as many items on the big list as possible. Again, the medium is unimportant. Sheer quantity is what counts. Here’s an image to inspire you. I created this in less than five minutes in photoshop. So far it lacks a Russian aristocrat (and has an alligator instead of a crocodile), but it’s a good start.

Multiple entries in the Quality and Quantity contest are allowed.

More information can be found here.

One of my pet peeves is authors who ruin the suspension of disbelief in their books by trying to be too clever for their own good. I have no problems with authors basing their works in reality or history. H. Beam Piper was one of the best at basing his works on history yet being totally original. What I hate is when authors hit you over the head with their lack of originality in this regard.

Two good examples come to mind. In David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, the enemy planet Haven was based on events in France after the French Revolution. That’s fine. It was a fascinating period of history and has a great deal of built in drama. But did he have to name the lead villain Rob S. Pierre? This is just way too blatant and totally ruins the suspension of disbelief.

Another example is in Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy. This one hit me before I even started the book. The map of this “imaginary realm” is an inverted map of Alaska. So much for fantasy… (Here’s a fan’s computerized version of the map. Look at the top half of the image.)

For the record, the Harrington series is one of my favorite science-fiction series. It’s the closest I’ve found to a “Hornblower in Space” series. I found the Farseer Trilogy too dense to read comfortably. The follow-up Mad Ship Trilogy was much better.

The Teen Titans wrapped up the two part “Titans East” storyline with the Titans taking on a cyborg-ized Brother Blood and the brainwashed Titans East. Nice fight scenes, but the ending was a little too deus ex machina for my taste — though they did manage to explain most of it away at the end. I liked seeing the new Bublebee again, and Mas and Menos are new favorites as well. My main problem was that John DiMaggio, who voices Brother Blood, also voice Dr. Drakken on Kim Possible and they sound identical. I kept picturing the blue bufooinish mad scientist instead of Brother Blood.

Meanwhile, Justice League Unlimited was the first episode of a two-part story arc entitled “The Once and Future Thing”. The story involves Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and time travel. Hunting a petty thief with a time belt named David Clinton (which incidentally is Chronos’s real name), they end up back in Oklahoma in 1879. The name of this first “chapter”, Weird Western Tales, was apt because that was the comic that Bat Lash, Jonah Hex, Pow Wow Smith and El Diablo all starred in. These same characters co-star in this episode. Jonah Hex (voiced by Adam Baldwin), in particular, was hilarious because he kept referring to his travels in the future, so this must be the post-Crisis Hex. They are fighting Tobias Manning (who was Terra-Man in the pre-Crisis universe).The episode ended with the Justice League trio stranded in the future where they meet up with an older Static Shock, Batman Beyond and a Thanagarian-looking hero who calls GL “Dad.” Cue the ‘To Be Continued” sign. Overall, it was a nice episode with some good action, nice character moments, and a few in-jokes. I suspect Dwayne McDuffie had a gret time writing it and I look forward to the next chapter (for Batman Beyond, if nothing else).

I have never liked the “everybody dies” endings that seem all too common in comic book mini-series, one-shots and graphic novels. I don’t object to death in comics per se, I just hate arriving at the end of a story to find that the writer has killed off all of the characters. I can not think of a story that ends this way that I’ve really liked, and I can think of plenty that have pissed me off.

These ending cheat the reader. We’ve spent time and money buying and reading these books, only to find out at the end that it didn’t matter at all. There has been more than one story I would never have started had I known it had that kind of ending. We’ve spent months getting to know characters only to have them all killed. Do this enough, and we stop buying that writer’s books.

These endings are cop-outs for the writer. They give the impression that the writer has written themselves into a corner, or just given up caring, so they kill off everybody. I’m sure this is not the real reason most of the time, but it’s the impression I get as a reader. These comics then sit in a box or on a shelf gathering dust because I have no interest in ever reading them again.

These endings are faux deep. They are not nearly as clever as the writer thinks. I have never once read one of these stories and thought, “What a great ending!” If the writer were truly an accomplished writer they would be able to tell the same story, or a better one, without the wholesale slaughter at the end.

Hopefully you recognized the source of the title of the previous post. If not, keep reading…

Red Dwarf tells the tale of Dave Lister. In the not-too distant future, Dave is the lowest ranking employee aboard the enormous mining ship Red Dwarf. He breaks the ship’s rules by bringing a stray cat on board, and a pregnant cat at that. The captain orders him to hand the cat over, but Lister refuses and as a result he is placed in suspended animation for punishment. While he was frozen in time, there was a radiation leak on the ship that killed everyone and left the ship dangerously radioactive. The ship’s computer steered the Red Dwarf deep into space until the radiation faded enough that it was safe to wake up Lister. It took 3 million years for the radiation to die down, so Lister may very well be the last human alive, and is still 3 million years away from Earth. To keep him company, the ship has created a hologram of his much hated supervisor Rimmer. In the three million years it took to steer the ship into deep space, the offspring of his pregnant cat have evolved into a bipedal sapient species, and one of these “cats” accompanies Lister and Rimmer on their adventures. They also manage to acquire an obsequious android named Cryten later on.

I wasn’t sure what to make of Red Dwarf the first time I watched it; the humor can be very subtle one moment and over-the-top crude the next. The more I watched it, the more I understood the characters and the better it got. The show does a good job of addressing most of the common science fiction cliches: aliens, time travel, crazy computers, alternate dimensions, etc. It is a very well plotted show, and ideas that are hinted at in the first one or two episodes come to fruition several seasons later.

There are many brilliant moments including the “total immersive” video game Real Life, the good and bad luck viruses (and the maniacal penguin puppet Mr. Fribble) and of course Kristine Kochanski.

The show is available on DVD now (or at least the first four seasons). Here’s a good site for Red Dwarf information (and it’s where I borrowed most of the images)

Tags: comics television red dwarf guilty pleasure

As a Family Practice physician, the physicians I interact with the most are the doctors from the local Emergency Department. We have a good hospital and an excellent emergency department, and I trust every physician there. Still, there are some things that frustrate me as a primary care physician. With that in mind, here are my recommendations to make a good Emergency Department physician a great Emergency Department physician.

Cut to the chase — Start out by telling me the most important thing: the disposition of my patient. Tell me right off if you are calling about an admission, a follow-up, or just to ask questions. Don’t try and tack it on in the end with an “Oh, by the way, I’d like to admit this patient…” You’re not fooling anyone.

Be concise — Sum up why the patient came in, what you did in the emergency department, and what your plan is. Include pertinent positives and negatives but please don’t tell me the patient’s entire life history. I’ve probably already heard it time and time again and I’ll undoubtedly forget the important parts before you’re finished.

Get appropriate labs — The main problem I see in this area is blood cultures. If a patient is being admitted for an infection, they need blood cultures. The best place to obtain this is in the emergency department before any antibiotics have been given. (This goes for urine cultures too.) If you’re convinced the patient has a heart condition or pancreatitis, prove it to me with the appropriate labs, don’t just assume and admit because it puts me behind the eight ball.

No politics — I know you don’t get along with that other doctor, but please don’t involve me in the situation.

No agendas — There was an emergency department physician I once worked with who felt that the hospital needed better inpatient cardiac facilities (and he was probably right). To prove his point, he tried to admit every single chest pain patient that set foot in the emergency department. Don’t make me and my patients hostages of your agendas.

Careful with Follow-Ups –I appreciate it when the emergency department arranges appropriate follow-up appointments for my patients with specialists such as surgery or orthopedics. However, please make sure these physicians are actually accepting follow-ups. I’ve had a number of patients in my office who were told to follow-up with a particular orthopedist despite the fact that he hasn’t been taking new patients in over a year. Some insurance companies require primary care physicians to sign off on all consults. If this is the case, I will need to see the patient myself because I don’t sign anything without evaluating the patient for myself (it’s not that I doubt your skills, but it’s my name on the line).

Timely Reports — For patients who are following up with me, it is extremely helpful to have their emergency department report — along with labs and radiology results — in hand for their appointment. So please write neatly and make every effort to get these to me in a timely manner.

Specialists are not always necessary — Don’t suggest that patients need specialists for the care of routine problems. Not all ingrown toenail require podiatrists; most hypertensive patients can be handled in primary care clinics. This is one of my pet peeves. I don’t undermine your medical care of the patients, please don’t undermine mine.

Tests – Don’t promise patients tests or studies that may not be necessary. At least once a week I see patients in my office who tell me that the emergency room doctor told them that they needed an MRI (or some obscure blood test). Sometimes they do; usually they don’t. Certainly some of these patients may have misunderstood what they heard or have their own agendas, but when it’s always patients of the same emergency room doctor, I get frustrated.

Report status changes – If something happens between the time we talk and the time the patient gets admitted to the floor, please update me. If the patient goes to a different floor than we planned or leaves AMA, please let me know. I don’t have the time to waste searching the hospital for my patient the next morning.

It was a decent episode of House tonight. The character moments were good and the medicine started out well, but then went rapidly downhill. The ultimate diagnosis was organophosphate poisoning from stolen pants. Organophosphates are always an interesting topic not just because they are present in many pesticides but because they are a potential chemical weapon.

This week, the team made the correct diagnosis in the first fifteen minutes but then spent the rest of the show trying to determine precisely which organophosphate was the culprit so that the specific antidote could be used. The problem is that while there are general treatments for organophosphate poisoning, there is not a unique treatment for each specific toxin. The show tried to explain it away as “experimental drugs used by the Army.” I hate it when medical shows start basing plots on experimental drugs; that’s when we go from the realm of plausible medicine to the realm of science fiction.

The idea that the military would have a unique antidote for each specific organophosphate is absurd. I’ve deployed to areas where we had to stock medications for organophosphate poisoning. Just the standard treatments of diazepam, 2-PAM and atropine take up a tremendous amount of space because you need multiple doses for each soldier present. Now multiply this by forty, because according to the show there are 40 different organophosphates — and just hope the enemy is nice enough to tell us which one they used, or didn’t develop one of their own.

I liked the character bits with Dr. House and Dr. Foreman, and thought the sex-starved 82 year-old lady was clever, but I hope this is the last episode we see built around “experimental medicine.”

Now that Crisis on Infinite Earths is over, I’m going to pause in my strict chronological review of Hawk and Dove and look at how the Crisis affected them. OK, I know the Crisis killed Dove, but what I mean is how all the post-Crisis rewriting of continuity affected the original Hawk and Dove stories. To do this, we are going to jump ahead in time to Secret Origins Annual #3 from 1989. This comic, by Marv Wolfman and a variety of artists, is the equivalent of a bad TV clip-show with Nightwing forced to remember past Titans adventures, this time re-written into post-Crisis continuity (it reminded me of the horrible Buck Rogers episode where Buck is hooked up to a machine that reads all his memories — i.e. clips from previous shows — in an effort to discover who the villain is, and it ends up being Gary Coleman).

I wonder why Wolfman felt that he needed to change the Teen Titans’ history at all. All the characters were Earth-1 characters and they didn’t have any adventures or interactions with Earth-2. I suspect it was his way of putting his own stamp on some of the older stories and maybe trying to rewrite some of the particularly bad ones.

No changes were made to the origin of the Hawk and the Dove, nor were any changes made to the stories from their own comic. Similarly, their first adventure with the Teen Titans in Teen Titans #21 was left unchanged.

Their next stint with the Titans, from Teen Titans #25-29 was rewritten. In the original story, the Titans along with Hawk and Dove were present at a peace rally when a riot broke out. One of the rioters pulled out a gun, and though the heroes tried to stop him, the gun went off and a Nobel Prize winning scientist was killed. The Titans blamed themselves for not preventing the shooting, and the Justice League blamed them too. A mysterious rich man offered them a chance to do good without using their powers or costumes, and they jumped at the chance. Several bland and uninspired stories followed.

In the new post-Crisis version of the story, the riot was a plot to intentionally kill the Nobel Laureate. The plan was hatched by a police officer with radical separatist ties. When he saw the Titans, he decided to frame them for the murder. The Justice League, despite having the “World’s Greatest Detective” in their ranks, went along with the idea that the Titans were guilty. The teens decided to give up their costumes and powers until they could prove their innocence. It’s still a stupid plot, but better than the original.

The next Hawk and Dove adventure with the Teen Titans was in Teen Titans #50-52 and it also is ret-conned. This was the adventure where the Teen Titans West debuted. It was also the last original adventure of the Teen Titans West*. In the previous version, the Titans West were composed of Hawk, Dove, Lilith, Bat-Girl (the Bette Kane hyphenated Bat-Girl, not the Barbara Gordon unhyphenated Batgirl), Golden Eagle and Beast Boy. Gnaark the caveman, who was Lilith’s fiance, was also along for the ride.

In the revamped version, Hawk, Dove, Golden Eagle and Beast Boy are still part of Titans West. Bette Kane is there, but she is now known as Flamebird, not Bat-Girl. Inexplicably, Mal Duncan and Karen Beecher (Bumblebee) are now part of Titans West instead of the original Titans, as they were in the pre-Crisis version. This is particularly interesting because at this point the Titans still had their hideout in Mal’s disco — so what’s he doing out west? He’s going by the name Gabriel in the rewritten version, while in the original story he had retired his Gabriel identity and switched to calling himself Guardian. The rest of the plot is unchanged, with Captain Calamity and Mr. Esper remaining the villains of the piece.

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*Teen Titans #56, a fill in issue by Marv Wolfman and Mark Bright, gives us another look at the Titans West and presents the post-Crisis Gnaark. This story occurs sometime after the original Teen Titans #51, when the Titans West were still a team. According to this story, Don Hall (Dove) and Lilith were dating, though clearly it wasn’t that strong of a relationship. While getting a tour of the West coast S.T.A.R. Labs from Karen, Lilith gets a strange vibe from inside one room. Somehow, this leads the Titans West and East to a South Asian excavation led by a rogue S.T.A.R. scientist. Working with the Titans, he is able to unearth a Cro-Magnon man frozen in ice, yet mysteriously still alive. A strange crystal from a meteor is fused to his chest. This frozen prehistoric man is Gnaark. His meteoric crystal allows him to communicate telepathically with Lilith and the two of them fall in love (sorry Don). The bad scientists want to dissect Gnaark while the good scientists want to return him to life. He gets shot in all the confusion and falls into an irreversible coma. He dies, still on life support, a year later — Lilith still by his side. I’m not sure what this story accomplished except explaining Gnaark’s place in the post-Crisis world, and warning us that Lilith is not a faithful girlfriend. Poor Don, dumped for a Cro-Magnon.

Just to show I don’t only pick on bad medicine in comic books and TV, here is a brief look at an article in a major weekly publication.

In the back pages of this week’s Newsweek (January 31, 2005), there is a brief article on muscle soreness after exercise. The author states:

There’s no cure, but you can treat the soreness with an anti-inflammatory like Tylenol or Advil, or apply ice.

Wrong. While Advil (ibuprofen) is a good anti-inflammatory, Tylenol (acetaminophen) has absolutely no anti-inflammatory properties. (Ice is a fine choice.)

I find it puzzling that the author chose to list Advil and Tylenol solely by brand name. Generic names were not provided — which is the standard procedure in medical articles (like I did above). Both ibuprofen and acetaminophen have been available generically for a long time and are much cheaper that way. If only brand names are going to be listed, then why not at least mention Motrin IB, since it contains the identical medication that Advil does?

It’s very peculiar. This is a good example of why mass media is rarely a good source of medical information.

Let’s be honest: food is important. As a medical student, I was on the Air Force Health Professions Scholarship. That meant that while my tuition and school fees were paid for, the modest stipend I was given to live off of placed me below the poverty line. I didn’t have many expenses, so I was able to get by without much trouble. I drove an old car and had a dinky apartment in the better part of Maplewood (which isn’t saying much). I pretty much lived off of cold cereal, ramen noodles, and Chef Boy-Ar-Dee for the first two years of school.

During the third and fourth years of med school, I spent the vast majority of my waking hours (and many of my sleeping hours) at the hospital, so I didn’t eat at home nearly as much. Most of the hospitals we worked at took our student finances into account and provided a discount on meals. For instance, the children’s hospital gave us a 10% discount in the cafeteria. We could get up to five dollars worth of food free at Deaconess Hospital whenever we were on duty. St. John’s Mercy had a similar policy, but a more generous dollar amount and a much better cafeteria, so I would eat there some days when I wasn’t even working. Saint Louis University Hospital had printed up little bills of fake money — like Monopoly money — that was good in their cafeteria. Residents got a stack of these bills, but as med students we got a mere $20 per month. I was never particularly frugal, so I’d eat well for the first week and then suffer for the next three. (The Saint Louis University Hospital cafeteria was also infamous for making the gravy for biscuits and gravy out of chicken stock. While it was generously full of sausage, it was also yellow and strongly chicken flavored. I would still eat it though.)

The downtown VA hospital offered a 10% cafeteria discount, like the children’s hospital. The other VA hospital, Jefferson Barracks, fed us lunch for free. Unlike the downtown VA hospital, Jefferson Barracks was set up for long term care and rehabilitation, including a psychiatric hospital. As part of our psychiatry rotation, we had to do a month there. I ended up assigned to the Geriatric Psychiatric unit, the least desirable floor. I worked there along with two other students, Mark and David. Mark was a good friend. He was smart and a hard worker. He was happily married; he had met his wife when they were both in junior high and they’d been together ever since. David was the opposite. He wasn’t particularly bright and tended to procrastinate and slack off. David was one of those people who got bypassed when common sense was being handed out. He was already notorious around the school for showing up in his pajamas at a Code Blue when he was on surgery call. He also let it be known in no uncertain terms that he was God’s gift to women.

Jefferson Barracks provided all medical students with a free lunch. It was served in the hospital cafeteria and was the same meal the patient’s got. It was nothing fancy, just plain cafeteria food, but it was free. Day after day, fewer and fewer medical students showed up for lunch until at last it was just me and Mark. As I said, it wasn’t horrible and it was free.

Occasionally, one of the pharmacy students rotating at the VA would join us for lunch. One day in particular, Mark and I were joined by Susan. She was a cute blonde pharmacy student who we knew from some of our psych lectures.

“I hear that there’s a medical school Halloween party coming up,” she said as she sat next to me.

“Yes. This Saturday,” I replied.

“Are you going?”

“I think so.”

“Are you going with anybody?” she asked, leaning closer.

“Nope,” I said, munching my spaghetti.

“I’m free this weekend,” she added.

“That’s nice,” I said as I went on blissfully eating.

Later, as Mark and I were walking back to the psych building, he turned to me and said, “You do realize she was flirting with you?”

I stopped mid-step. “She was?” I thought it over. “Oh my God, she was.” I’ve never been able to tell when someone is interested in me; I’ve always been horribly naive that way. It was a sad situation: a pretty girl was flirting with me, and not only did I fail to realize it, but I had to be told by someone who’d pretty much been married since eighth grade.

I went back to the cafeteria but she was long gone by then. We told David the story when we got back to the unit and he sprinted off to the cafeteria himself, convinced that she was only flirting with me because he hadn’t been there. He couldn’t find her either.

I still attended the Halloween Party and had a good time, even though it did lead to a date that was so bad it would put sit-com writers to shame…but that’s a post for another day. And, of course, there was free food at the party.

Only four days left to enter the Nikolai Dante contest!

There’s only been a handful of entries in the Quality and Quantity competitions, so chances are excellent there. There’s been a flurry of activity in the Pure Luck category, but odds are still good so don’t forget to enter!

• More information here.
• E-mail entries to contest [at] politedissent.com
• Deadline is January 31, Midnight Central time

I am not a dentist. Please do not come to my office for dental pain, tooth infection or broken teeth. I would like to help you, but it is not my area of expertise. Do not come to me for a note to go back to work after having dental work done. You wouldn’t want a plumber to wire your house; you don’t want a doctor to treat your dental problems. I am happy to work with your dentist if there is some medical concern, but I not a dentist. Please talk to them.

It’s Friday, so that means it’s Lois Lane day here at Polite Dissent. Today’s comic is Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane #43, which features Lois’s first appearance as a volunteer nurse (because her life wasn’t busy enough being a reporter and Superman-stalker).

Daily Planet Editor-in-Chief Perry White strolls into his office, trips over some photography props, and breaks his leg. Slamming his fist on the desk in frustration, he breaks his wrist too. He is admitted to the local hospital for treatment (though I’d suggest some anger management classes might be in order too).

As she heads to the hospital to begin her shift as a volunteer nurse, Lois glances at Perry:

I only hope I don’t have you as a patient you cantankerous old slave-driver!

Perry sets up a mini-newsroom at his bedside. His sends Clark Kent to track down the 14-Karat Gang, a group of criminals who are responsible for a number of brazen art thefts in the city.

A young man in an iron lung is wheeled into the room. An Army general walks in and explains to Perry that the young patient, Lieutenant Hunt, is a war hero and a top agent. He was shot with an experimental bullet by an enemy agent. No American surgeon can remove the bullet, only a specialist in Mexico City can save his life. In the meantime, he needs to be hidden from enemy spies and the general figures being in the same room with Perry would be best. The general shows Perry a (badly underexposed) x-ray that allegedly shows the bullet lodged near the lung. Lieutenant Hunt needs the iron lung because the bullet “is lodged in a vital spot, affecting his ability to breathe.” (It’s probably a phrenic nerve injury, though that wouldn’t get better after surgery.)

The lieutenant is charming and Lois is drawn to him. She reads to him and he draws pictures of her. One night, Perry overhears him talking in his sleep, confessing his love for Lois. Perry tells Lois the lieutenant loves her and as a sign of affection she arranges for Superman to fly the lieutenant and his iron lung to the clinic in Mexico.

After he leaves, Lois realizes her mistake. Seeing another patient in an iron lung, she deduces that the lieutenant was a fake because his arms were outside the machine, when they should have been inside. She’s also suspicious that such an accomplished secret agent would talk in his sleep.

She hops a ride on the plane to Mexico and confronts the lieutenant and general. She discovers that they are not soldiers at all, but instead the infamous 14-Karat Gang. They needed a way to get the loot out of the country, so they came up with the iron lung scheme and the lieutenant pretended to fall in love with Lois knowing that she would arrange for Superman to fly him to Mexico. They dump Lois through a conveniently located trap door, but Superman shows up just in time to rescue her and subdue the crooks.

Despite taking place in a hospital, there’s not really much medicine in this issue. Still the comic does a good job highlighting some of the changes that have taken place in the practice of medicine in the forty years since the comic was published.

In today’s world, unless Perry White had a significant fracture that required surgery, he would not have been admitted to the hospital. Forty years ago admissions for broken bones were more common.

Iron lungs are pretty much a thing of the past. First developed in 1928, the artificial breathing machines came to the forefront during the polio epidemic of the 1950s. The heavy unit is closed around the patient with an airtight seal and air pressure expands and compresses the lungs, breathing for the patient. Thankfully the polio vaccine has been extremely successful so these monstrosities aren’t required much nowadays. Technology has also greatly improved and better forms of mechanical ventilation are used currently. In 1963 when this comic was published, it is reasonable that an iron lung would be used. I am just surprised it took Lois so long to realize it was fake and even more surprised that no other nurses or doctors noticed it first.

Thoughts:

1. The “14-Karat Gang” is hardly a flattering name. That’s barely 50% gold. What do they do, steal cheap jewelry from dollar stores? I’d be more impressed by the 24-Karat Gang, or at the very least the 18-Karat Gang.
2. Please explain to me why a soldier trying to hide from enemy agents would be safer in a public hospital compared to a military hospital located on a secure military base. This fact alone should have raised some questions in a trained reporter like Lois.
3. Exactly what war is the lieutenant a “war hero” from? The Korean War was over a decade earlier. There were some “military advisers” and pilots in Viet Nam at this time, but I don’t think anyone was called a “war hero” for being over there since it was still pretty hush-hush at that point. Again, a reporter like Lois should have been suspicious from the start.
4. OK, Lois is safe. But can anything be done about the 14-Karat Gang now that they’re in Mexico? Was there an extradition treaty with Mexico in 1963? Does Superman have any police powers south of the border?

This is Hawk’s first outing sine his brother died, and it’s not one of his prouder moments.

New Teen Titans #19 is primarily a set-up issue. Most of the Titans have split town for one reason or another. Cyborg is helping Changeling look for his step-father. Raven is missing and Nightwing is searching for her. Jericho is working with his mother and Starfire is in outer space with her husband. Wondergirl is the only Titan remaining. When a request comes in from a secret government agency for help on a case, Nightwing refuses to get involved. Frustrated, Wondergirl argues with him and then recruits her own team of Titans. For her team, she goes back to the basics: Robin (Jason Todd, in this case), Speedy, Wally West (in one of his first outings as Flash), Aqualad and Hawk.

In New Teen Titans #20, the team travels to Switzerland. Their mission is to protect the U.S. and Soviet ambassadors from an attack by the assassin Cheshire. The ambassadors are having secret peace talks at the top of the Alps. Cheshire launches a pre-emptive strike against the Titans at their chalet. She shoots and severely wounds Flash but escapes before she can be captured. The next morning the Titans travel to the top of the mountain where the ambassadors are meeting. Cheshire arrives and has her first face-to-face meeting with Speedy since giving birth to their child, a fact that is news to him.

The rest of Cheshire’s men scale the mountain in New Teen Titans #21 and the battle ensues. The Titans are surprised by the fact that Cheshire doesn’t seem to be trying very hard. Speedy suspects she’s up to something. He’s right: her mission is not to assassinate anyone at all but instead to expose the Titans and stop the peace talks. It turns out that nobody is supposed to know the ambassadors are meeting, and the arrival of the Titans halts the peace talks and exposes the Titans to international scorn.

While technically proficient, two and a half issues of second-string Titans do not make for a very interesting read. It’s the equivalent of watching the XFL instead of the NFL. Remember how long that lasted? I never thought I’d say this, but Jason Todd was the most interesting character of the bunch. Wondergirl is too concerned with being a leader to be a hero. Flash is obsessing about making Barry proud while Aqualad spends all his time mourning for Tula (and who thought bringing Aqualad to the top of a mountain would be a good idea?). Speedy is conflicted about fighting Cheshire and Hawk is just plain crazy.

How do we know Hawk is crazy? The script tells us time and time again. No subtlety here. Flash calls him the Titan’s “looney toon contingent.” Donna tells Robin, “Hawk’s been insane since his brother died.” Even the villain agrees. “He’s insane,” thinks Cheshire. Back to Wondergirl: “Only Dove could keep Hawk in check…without his brother Hawk’s a maniac!” A little later she tells him, “Hawk, you don’t need to be with the Titans, you need a psychiatrist!” And did I mention he spends all his down time carving a block of wood into a gun with a hunting knife? Nope, it’s not hard to miss that Hawk is supposed to be crazy.

Eduardo Barreto’s art is generally very good, but he can’t draw Hawk’s costume very well. His cape looks more like withered fingers than feathers. George Perez draws Hawk much better on the cover. Barreto keeps forgetting (or it could be the Wolfman’s script) that Hawk can only be in costume when there’s danger present. Sitting around the Titan’s Tower, he should just be Hank.

All in all, another lackluster adventure with the Titans. I think the Titans West storyline was the closest the Titans ever came to an exciting story that involved Hawk (and/or Dove).

Only 2 days left to enter the contest to win yourself* one of three copies of the Nikolai Dante: The Romanov Cospiracy TPB.

Entries are due by midnight (central time) tomorrow night!

More information on the contest here!

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*You can enter to win for somebody else, if you want, I guess

Ultimately, I found both the Teen Titans and Justice League Unlimited to be lacking this weekend.

In Teen Titans, Robin is defeated by a martial arts expert thief and goes to the Himalayas to find the martial arts True Master. He defeats various animal guardians on the way up the mountain to the Master’s house. When he gets there, he finds the Master is the same little old lady he met at the foot of the mountain. Tell me that anyone was actually surprised by that and I’ll be shocked. The main problem (beside a predicatable script) is Robin himself. He is an unpleasant obsessive boor. Easily th eleast exciting of the Titans, any episode where he is the lead suffers. He’s too much Dick Grayson and not enough Tim Drake. Even Jason Todd would help.

Justice League Unlimited, “Time, Warped” was the second half of last week’s time traveling episode “The Once and Future Thing“ featuring Chronos, Batman, Green Lantern, and Wonder Woman. This one was disappointing because it should have been so much better. We finally get the meeting between Batman and Batman Beyond and it’s boring. The script seemed rushed and non-sensical at points. The final solution, as Mike points out, was deus ex machina. I’d like to pretend this script never happened and hope for a better first meeting between Batman and Batman Beyond (though I will give a thumbs up to the Batman/Bruce Wayne good cop/bad cop routine and Hal Jordan’s appearance).

Tonight’s guilty pleasure is the third in the trifecta of long-forgotten yet excellent comics from Dragon Magazine. Wormy had the best art and the deepest storylines. What’s New (with Phil and Dixie) has a wonderful cartoony style and an exuberant sense of humor, and was one of Phil Foglio’s earlier works. The third comic, and probably my favorite overall, was Yamara.

Yamara, by Barbara Manui and Chris Adams, was illustrated in a simple cartoon style, yet each character is clearly drawn and unique. The humor is funny and topical. Never has Dungeons & Dragons been mined for so many legitimately funny jokes. There are a lot of background gags too, with pun-filled books on the bookshelves and so on. The story was clever and actually had a plot. It never ceases to amaze me that despite being limited to only 4 to 8 panels a month, the strip’s authors still manages to tell a good story that progressed from issue to issue. If only today’s comic authors could learn from them.

The comic features several memorable characters. The title character Yamara Took (later Yamara the Undisciplined) is a halfling fighter/thief. She has a sense of morals, but just barely. Joe Holy is the local cleric. Fea is an elf sorceress who has had her alignment changed to evil, and likes it more than she should. Ralph is her unfortunate familiar. Blag is a dwarf, and probably the unluckiest character ever to be in a comic strip. And then there’s Ogrek (part orc, part ogre, part human, part elf and part pixie), he is rich and eccentric…and the bane of Yamara’s existence.

I’ve reproduced two strips here to give a feel for the comic. The first strip shows when Yamara is being hired to steal the jewelry of Frinn. Ultimately, to obtain the jewelry she has to marry the infamous Ogrek the Undisciplined. She gains the jewelry and it gives her deity-level powers…at least until her unfortunate run-in with Fea’s Flesh to Plush spell.

The second strip showcases Percy. She’s Joe’s wannabe girlfriend/stalker. She’s also a high level evil vampire. Here, she’s sharing dungeon quarters with a mummy and ghoul when Tim the Paladin arrives. General excitement and merriment follow.

Steve Jackson Games published a Yamara collection several years ago, and copies could be obtained until recently on the Yamara.com site (a site which sadly seems pretty defunct now).