Polite Dissent

Five years ago, I started Polite Dissent…

…and much to may amazement I’m still here going (more or less) strong.

Along the same theme, here’s Five Years by David Bowie. OK, other than the title and the vague sci-fi theme, the song has nothing to do with this site or anniversaries — but the name fits, it’s classic Bowie, and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is definitely on my “Five Albums to Have when Stranded on a Desert Island” list, so enjoy.

Another in the series of “stay in school” public service ads, one of the most common themes seen in the DC PSA campaign of the late ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s. Unlike later PSAs, where Buzzy is counseling other characters to stay in school, in this case it is Buzzy himself who wants to drop out.

This is probably because the ad is an early PSA, and the first featuring Buzzy that I am aware of.

This PSA was written by Jack Schiff. I’ve seen the art attributed to both Bob Oksner and Graham Place. It looks more like Place’s art to me, particularly when you look at the hands, but this is well before my time and I’m no expert. This PSA was found in DC Comics from October 1949 such as Action Comics #137, where I found this ad.

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Tags: comics psa buzzy school jack schiff graham place

UPDATED:
This week, Nekolux has the high score with 22 points.

Overall, with just two episodes remaining, The Erskine continues in the lead with 79 points. Ron is in second with 69 points. Ash and Dogma-Central are tied for third with 65 points, which leaves George to round out the top five with 64 points.

Full scores are available here.

I wanted to like this episode of House, I really did, but the absolutely horrible medical care just wouldn’t let me.

There is an accident during a ballet recital, and 21 year-old ballerina Penelope drops to floor, gasping for breath. She is admitted to House’s service and found to have lungs that “keep collapsing” despite the use of chest tubes. Supplemental oxygen can only raise her oxygen saturation to 60%. The team reports that there are no tumors is her lungs and no evidence of any lung punctures. There is also no bruising, trauma, or evidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Her white blood count and temperature are normal, ruling out pneumonia. House suggests a pulmonary contusion, but it is pointed out that her CT scan was normal. He then decides that she is dehydrated and this is masking her pneumonia, so he orders her started on intravenous fluids and antibiotics.

When Penelope fails to improve on the antibiotics, House wants to do a more invasive test to look for the pneumonia. He is told her lungs can’t tolerate a bronchoscopy, so House decides on a transtacheal aspiration. As always seems to be the case, there is a complication during the procedure. This time, her skin starts sloughing off — not just a little bit, but almost all of it. An autoimmune disease is suggested as a cause for the skin problem. House tells them that he is suspicious a liver tumor has caused the lung problem (by eroding into the lungs). Furthermore, he tells the team that her skin problems is toxic epidermal necrolysis — caused by the antibiotic they gave her.

An ultrasound shows a liver mass. The team can’t perform a standard liver biopsy because without her skin, she is at an increased risk of bleeding out. Instead, they go with a transjugular approach. They obtain the liver biopsy and it is negative for cancer, but she is knocked into the abnormal heart rhythm atrial fibrillation. Wilson suggests giving her metoprolol to lower the heart rate, but Foreman rather brusquely shoves the idea aside. The team has apparently decided that the atrial fibrillation must be caused by something within the heart itself, and want to get an MRI of the heart to get a closer look. Unfortunately, the very atrial fibrillation they are concerned about means that they would be unable to get good results from the scan (the heart would be beating too rapidly and irregularly to get a clear image). They decide to stop her heart, take the MRI, and then restart the heart. To prevent brain damage, there is a strict 3-minute deadline. Foreman thinks he sees something in the aorta, but by then the three minutes are up and the MRI is halted.

House agrees that Foreman saw something in the aorta. The differential now includes tumor, scar tissue, or abscess. Looking at Penelope’s boyfriend, House thinks he is spending so much time with her because he feels guilty, so House deduces that the boyfriend must have given her gonorrhea, which led to an abscess in her heart. The boyfriend is tested and sure enough, he has gonorrhea — only he got it from her and not the other way around. Meanwhile Penelope goes into septic shock and they can’t operate to remove the abscess until she’s stabilized. The team decides to give her dopamine (a medication used to raise the blood pressure in critically ill patients) in order to stabilize her. It works, and Chase is able to remove the heart abscess, but unfortunately the dopamine has cut off the blood flow to her hands and feet and they are turning black and starting to die (dopamine can cause occlusive vascular disease). Chase recommends that she has them amputated, but she refuses. After a fair amount of bickering among the team, Taub decides to go with the Hail Mary pass of injecting her with vasodilators to open the closed off blood vessels. Miraculously, it works and her hands and feet are saved.

House’s hallucination of Amber persists. He tells Wilson what is going on, in a round about way, and insists it must be sleep apnea — but he knows it isn’t, because the symptoms don’t fit at all. A sleep study is normal; no apnea. He has a blood test to look for infection, but it is negative as well. He decides the guilt he is feeling about causing the patient to develop TEN is a symptom of multiple sclerosis, but the tests for MS are all negative. He is down to two causes for the hallucinations: schizophrenia or his Vicodin use. He knows schizophrenia doesn’t really match, but he wants it to be that instead of the Vicodin. But eventually House realizes it must be the Vicodin causing his problems and asks Cuddy to help him go through the unpleasantness that is narcotic withdrawal, because she knows him best and won’t let him get away with anything.

As usual, major complaints are in red, minor in blue, nit-picking in green:

It’s not clear to me exactly what caused Penelope’s lung collapse that started the whole business. Was it the heart abscess? The show more or less implied it was, since the team felt that solved her problem, but I don’t know how a heart abscess would cause her lung(s) to repeatedly collapse.

They might have been able to raise her oxygen saturation above 60% if they took her off the nasal canula and used a proper oxygen mask instead.

In this episode, the writers are having a bad case “having your cake and eating it too” in terms of Penelope’s heart abscess. The abscess that is walled off, sealing the bacterial infection away from the rest of her body, making it much harder to detect and treat. However, despite being walled off, the abscess is able to:
Cause septic shock
Deflate the lungs

When we talk about dehydration hiding a pneumonia, we’re talking about the x-ray. An infiltrate (the sign that appears on x-ray showing a pneumonia) does not show up well in a dehydrated patient. Give them some IV fluids, repeat the x-ray, and boom — there’s the infiltrate. Dehydration does not mask the other symptoms he mentioned (temperature, white count — if anything, dehydration will falsely elevate the white count).

You cannot draw a “Vicodin level”. You can draw an acetaminophen (Tylenol, paracetamol) level, but not an hydrocodone level (the two drugs which make up Vicodin). Wilson could have been talking about high acetaminophen levels (which causes irreversible liver damage), but his tone and presentation suggested he was talking about the narcotic component.

The time course of toxic epidermal necrolysis makes it more likely the condition was caused by Penelope’s use of medication (say non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs for sore muscles from ballet) than by any antibiotics she received in the hospital.

Lack of overlying skin should not prevent a standard liver biopsy since it doesn’t decrease her blood’s ability to clot. (You could argue that it should be avoided because it would raise the risk of infection, and I’d buy that, but that’s not what they mentioned).

While I agree the heart monitor was showing a narrow complex tachycardia, it didn’t look like atrial fibrillation to me (way too regular a rhythm, for one).

Speaking of atrial fibrillation, I would have liked them to look a little harder at other causes (say thyroid) before immediately deciding it was something within her heart.

While metoprolol controls the rapid rate of the atrial fibrillation, it doesn’t covert it to a normal rhythm. There are other medications that can do that.
I’m not an electrophysiologist, but whenever I’ve seen someone’s heart stopped electrically, they’ve used internal leads, not external paddles.

A “negative ANA” does not magically rule out all autoimmune diseases. Plenty of people have an autoimmune disease without a positive ANA.

A transtracheal aspiration involves a needle, a tiny catheter, and saline. There is no knife — nothing needs to be cut!

Did they ever convert her out of a-fib, or is she still in it (or did removing the abscess clear that up)?

I assume they put her on a heart-lung machine during surgery, but it would have been nice to mention, since they made such a big deal out of stopping the heart earlier.

Eye protection in surgery, team.

The medical mystery was okay, or it would have been had they stayed with it (I’m still wondering what caused her lungs to collapse), so I’ll give it a B-. As I’ve mentioned above, the final diagnosis doesn’t really fit the presentation, or her complex of symptoms. It earns a D. The medicine overall? Well, take a look at the sheer length of this week’s list of concerns and tell me how it can earn anything other than an F. The soap opera was good, but I feel it could have been better. Still, I’ll give it a B+.

Last week’s House review
A list of all prior House reviews

A rather unexciting episode of Fringe overall, despite several clever plot concepts. Definitely a “sum of the whole is less than the parts” week.

The Plot: A young woman is desperately trying to get to a hospital when she suddenly catches fire and explodes. Agent Dunham and her team are called in to investigate. Through dental records, they are able to identify her as Susan Pratt, a 29 year-old toll booth attendant. They search her apartment and find a large check made out by a mysterious lawyer, a lawyer whose office seems hurriedly deserted. Walter initially suspects spontaneous human combustion, and then deduces that Susan was a pyrokinetic (think Firestarter) who could not control her own powers.

Meanwhile, Agent Dunham is having recurrent hallucinations. Walter tells her that she is experiencing déjà vu, which he explains are visions of an alternate reality. The next time Dunham has one of the hallucinations, she investigates and discovers that in this reality, Susan had a twin sister Nancy. Sure enough, in our reality there is a twin sister too, and Olivia’s team rushes to Nancy’s apartment, but she has been kidnapped. Luckily, Peter has invented a machine that can pull sounds from an apartment window which was melted during the kidnapping. Uncovering the sound of a phone dialing, Olivia is able to trace a call made to Sanford Harris’ phone (if you can’t remember, Sanford Harris is the new a**hole boss at the FBI who took over earlier in the season). She and Charlie track Harris to a warehouse where he and the lawyer have locked up Nancy and are experimenting on her. In the final confrontation, Nancy is rescued and Harris burned alive by her pyrokinesis.

The episode ends with a variety of short scenes: Olivia confronts Walter about the experiments he and Walter Bell performed on her and other children, Nina visits Broyle to discuss the reappearance of the Observer, Walter discovers the missing original ZFT manifesto just as the Observer walks in and tells him it is time to go, and Nina is shot by masked men in her apartment building.

1. Walter’s Reality, Quite Different From My Reality
A myth is an unverified fact? I’m sure Zeus would be happy to know he’s factual, merely unverified.

2. Again and Again
That is an interesting explanation for déjà vu. Just saying.
Would Robert Frost approve?

3. Too Close a Look
There are so many things wrong with Peter’s electron microscope/Geiger counter/mp3 player. Here are just a few:
Electron microscope samples have to be specially prepared.
At electron microscope level, there would be so many natural grooves and bumps in the surface of the glass that it would have tremendous background noise. Even an LP or CD at that level of detail would have so many imperfections it would be hard to hear the actual sound.
A flash fried window captured that much sound?
Peter was somehow able to reproduce the sound perfectly down to the exact voices and tones of a dialing phone?

4. Irony
I had to laugh when Walter told Olivia she was a good investigator — she’s anything but. For instance, she missed the entire closet full of gray clothes and the check from a mysterious lawyer that all tie into the emotion spewing guy from episode 17.

5. Y Kant Olivia Read?
Olivia is a cornflake gal. Is that anything like a Cornflake Girl?

A plainly mediocre episode. Not bad enough to advance the clock, but not good enough to gain some time. (With just one episode left, it is extremely unlikely the Doomsday Clock will run out…this year at least. Fringe has been renewed, so I’ll continue the clock next year.)

Action Comics #871 “New Krypton, part 2: Beyond Doomsday”
Geoff Johns, writer
Pete Woods, penciler

Geoff Johns is usually one of the better writers at incorporating science — or at least decent pseudo-science — into his stories. But in this scene from a recent Action Comics I have to call his bluff:

Superman: You know of Doomsday, Zor?

Zor-El: We know of him.

He was scientifically created on ancient Krypton through the the violent and vile process of Forced-Evolution.

A child was sent into the wild, killed and then cloned from the remains and the process was repeated…

…until that child had evolved to withstand the harsh environment and bloodthirsty creatures of our primordial world.

Here are three good reasons that this “forced-evolution” is utter nonsense and could not have worked:

1. Evolution requires change, particularly change at the genetic level. In the process Zor is describing, there is no change. Cloned individuals have identical genetic codes. Since each generation is a clone of the previous generation, their genetics are identical and the scientists are essentially sending the same kid out again and again and again. This is not evolution; it’s stagnation.

2. Zor seems to imply that the child abandoned in wilderness develops some new skills or abilities to help him survive and this is what leads to evolution. The child may certainly have acquired what he needed to survive the wilds (but not, apparently, survive the scientists), but it’s all a moot point: acquired abilities cannot be inherited.

3. Finally, species evolve, not individuals.

If the Kryptonian’s grasp of geology is as good as their understanding of biology, it’s no wonder nobody but Jor-El noticed the planet was going to explode.

from The Amazing Spider-Man Giant Activity Pad

Another week, another set of goblins…

Which two of these Green Goblins are the same?
No hints and no super-sized version this week because this one is ridiculously easy.

For episode 23, Catesby had the high score with 12 points.

Overall, with just a single episode remaining, The Erskine retains a strong lead with 82 points. Ron remains in second with 72 points. Ash is in third with 71 points. Dogma-Central, Nekolux, and TRad are tied for fourth with 66 points.

Full scores are available here.

A straight forward public service ad this week, reminding us all to eat a good breakfast every day. I really can’t argue with this: breakfast is an extremely important meal.

I do wonder if Danny skipped lunch too, or I’d think he’d have energy for basketball practice since it generally takes place after school.

I’d also not impressed by Miss Jones’ teaching skills — maybe she skipped breakfast too.

This PSA was written by Jack Schiff, with art by Win Mortimer. This PSA was found in various March 1954 editions of DC comics, including Adventure Comics #198, where this ad was obtained.

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Tags: comics psa buzzy breakfast basketball jack schiff win mortimer

A perfectly serviceable episode of House – for the middle of the season, anyway. As a season finale, it was a bit of a let down (until the last five minutes, that is).

Scott is a 20 year-old who has undergone surgery that cut his corpus callosum (the part of the brain that allows the left and right sides of the brain to communicate) to treat a seizure disorder. The seizures have resolved since the surgery, but he has subsequently developed Alien Hand Syndrome, where he has no control at all over his left hand and it seems to have a mind of its own. He is at a restaurant on a date, complaining of bland food, when his left hand starts throwing rolls at an obnoxious diner at another table. A fight ensues, and before the melee even starts, we notice blood dripping from his eye.

Scott is admitted to House’s service for evaluation of his bloody tears and loss of his sense of taste. The initial differential diagnosis includes autoimmune disease, nasolacrimal tumor, infection, or the common cold. House has Taub and Thirteen search Scott’s apartment and they find mold growing on the ceiling in his bathroom. They decide this is the cause of his symptoms and start him on anti-fungal medication. About this time, Scott has a fight with his girlfriend, his left hand slapping her, and she storms out. He tries to follow her out but finds that he cannot walk. The differential now consists of dehydration or a meningioma (the most common tumor of the central nervous system) — only it’s a special meningioma that is allowing the two sides of the brain to communicate again. Instead of running an MRI or CT scan to look for the tumor, they run a test to see if there is communication between the left and right brain. The test is negative, but House notices that Scott is shivering. He also detects an ammonia scent to his breath and sees a caput medusae on physical exam, all signs of liver failure. House suspects the liver failure is due to sarcoidosis and has the team perform a liver biopsy. While performing the biopsy, Thirteen sees splinter hemorrhages (a sign of trauma or tiny blood clots) under Scott’s fingernails. He then takes a sudden turn for the worse, vomiting blood while his oxygen saturation and blood pressure drop.

The team now decides that Scott has a clotting issue, and start him on heparin (a blood thinner). An echocardiogram is normal, so the heart isn’t the source of the clots. They’ve also run tests for Factor V Leiden, Protein C, and Protein S (all things that can cause a clotting disorder), but they’re also negative. Thirteen now recalls his mention of always being sweaty and wonders if that might be a symptom of whatever disease he has. Cancer is thought to be the most likely, particularly lymphoma or pancreatic cancer. House strongly suspects the latter, even when an MRI of the pancreas is normal. He has Chase perform a new test where scorpion toxin and infrared dye is painted on the pancreas and will light up any cancer cells. There isn’t any sign of cancer, but once again Scott starts to develop a dangerously low blood pressure. House now realizes that the clotting problem is caused by his heart throwing off clots, but only when he slips into an arrhythmia, which he does under stress (like surgery or a biopsy), or every now and then. Sure enough, Chase checks a transesophageal echocardiogram and finds an abnormal rhythm and clots in the left atrial appendage. The heart throwing clots explains most of Scott’s symptoms, but what explains the heart condition? The new differential includes rhabdomyolysis (muscle disease), Graves disease (an autoimmune disease that causes too much thyroid hormone to be produced), and Cushing’s Syndrome (a condition where the body makes too much cortisol, a steroid). The Cushing’s seems the most likely, and a dexamethasone suppression test is ordered. About this time, Scott’s girlfriend returns and points out that his left hand only seemed to get “agitated” when Scott’s deodorant was involved. It turns out to be a special deodorant that Scott has to special order. Taub checks on it, and sure enough, one of the ingredients has been shown in one case to cause a heart condition and therefore this is decided to be the cause of Scott’s problem. End of case. Taub also notes ironically that the chemical has been implicated in seizure disorders, and maybe Scott had not needed the surgery in the first place.

As usual, major complaints are in red, minor in blue, nit-picking in green:

Patient has neurological signs (loss of his sense of taste, inability to walk) and they even suspect a brain tumor, yet they never check a CT or MRI of the brain?

The liver failure, particularly the varices and caput medusae, developed way too quickly — or else they’ve been there for a while and the team did a piss-poor physical exam.

It caught my attention when the script was vague about propylene glycol causing “heart problems.” From what I can find, it can cause arrhythmia, particularly bradyarrhthmias (abnormally slow heart rates) and QRS abnormalities. I don’t see any connection between it and atrial fibrillation, the arrhythmia that would cause Scott’s symptoms (again, left unnamed in the script).

The patient is crashing in the OR and no one thinks to look at the cardiac monitors?

I was surprised how quickly the team accepted that propylene glycol caused his problems and just stopped there, other more likely causes left untested for.

While giving blood thinners to someone with a clotting disorder is a good idea, they might want to think twice about giving it to someone with bleeding esophageal varices (at least I assume he has them, that’s the only thing that fits and can explain the vomiting blood).

Chlorotoxin-based (scorpion venom) tumor paint has been used in animal models, but I’m not sure it’s been tested in humans yet. It seems like an extreme step to take though. One of the first things I was taught (and taught loudly) on my surgical rotation was “don’t mess with pancreas” — though the language was more colorful.

So a clot to the brain caused the lack of taste , but what caused the bloody tears?
And don’t tell me “subconjunctival hemorrhage,” that was an embarrassingly bad suggestion of Taub’s.

I like that the writers finally acknowledge that storylines are often built on single case reports (not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that).

The medical mystery was mediocre, and they never explained one of the opening symptoms. His underlying condition (Alien Hand Syndrome) was more interesting that the mystery: C. The final diagnosis fit the symptoms, or at least the main ones, it just seemed the team accepted that the deodorant caused it too easily. I give it a B. The medicine overall was superficial and rushed, but not horrible. I give it a weak B. The soap opera was the highlight of the show, particularly the end scenes with Cuddy and Wilson and earns the show an A in this regard (though shouldn’t Cuddy have been mad that House lied to the clinic about sleeping with her, and not just yelled at him for discussing her sex-life?).

Last week’s House review
A list of all prior House reviews

A good season finale for Fringe. Lots of mysteries were tied up, or at least explained, but enough were left for next season to explore.

The Plot: Nina Sharp has been shot by David Robert Jones and is rushed into surgery. Agent Dunham and her team review the surveillance tapes and notices that Jones did something to Sharp’s bionic arm. After she recovers from surgery, she tells them that he stole an extremely powerful power cell that had been hidden there. Sharp tells Dunham that Jones was once an employee and protégé of William Bell, and he was fired for reasons she refuses to articulate. She goes on to tell Dunham that Jones is hunting for Bell so he can kill him. If Dunham can stop Jones, though, Nina will guarantee her a meeting with the elusive Bell. Nina goes on to explain that Bell is currently living in an alternate dimension, and Jones is trying to travel to that dimension to pursue him. Pulling all the “x-files” the FBI has, Dunham is able to come up with a pattern to the “Pattern” which points to Reiden Lake as the epicenter.

Meanwhile, Jones has set up a strange machine in a New York City street. It emits a high pitched whine, and then open a shimmering doorway into another dimension. A truck comes barreling through, but is cut in half when the unstable doorway closes. Jones later tries the same trick on a soccer field, but this time an unfortunate player is cut in half. He heads to Reiden Lake to try a third time.

Over in Massachusetts, Walter has gone missing. Peter tracks him to an old beach home the family owns. Digging through various boxes, Walter finds what the Observer sent him to locate: a machine that plugs dimensional holes. He and Peter head for Reiden Lake, because Walter tells Peter that’s where he opened the first doorway.

Dunham’s team meets up with the Bishops, and together they confront Jones. He has opened his doorway and is about to go through when Dunham shoots him, again and again. He shrugs off the bullets, explaining that while the radiation from the teleporter may be slowly killing him, in the meantime, it has made him more than human. He finally enters the doorway, but Peter uses Walter’s machine to shut the gate, cutting Jones in half and killing him.

As the episode ends, Walter stands tearfully over a grave labeled “Peter Bishop, 1978-1985″ — so the Peter we know must be the Peter from the alternate dimension. Olivia finds herself transported to the alternate world where she meets with William Bell in his office in one of the towers of the World Trade Center.

1. I’m As Shocked As You
The medicine in the emergency room scene was pretty spot on, so no complaints from me there.

2. It Keeps Going and Going and Going
I like the way Jones was being particularly careful with the energy cell, like it was on the verge of exploding. Meanwhile, Nina had just schlepped it around in her arm, swinging it this way and that, not careful at all.

3. Flight 19, Where Are You?
“The Pattern” works best when it is all fictional. Trying to work in the Bermuda Triangle just cheapens it for me — especially as all good skeptics know, there is no real mystery there at all.

4. A Little Dry
I’d expect more blood out of people cut in half.

5. You Must Learn To Govern Your Passions; They Will Be Your Undoing
There is little Leonard Nimoy can’t add a touch of class gravitas too — well, except this (and this).
Actually, I was expecting more from him. It sounded like he was on the verge of cracking himself up.

A good episode. I liked that it actually answered some questions, which was frankly more than I expected. Of course, there’s still a bunch left for next year. Anyway, it was a good episode — good enough to move the clock back to 11:55

scene from Young X-Men #11 (Guggenheim, Sandoval)

Does Henry have anything to worry about? Can he be kicked out of the American Medical Association for breaking doctor/patient confidentiality?

Yes, and no.

1. You can be expelled from the AMA for breaking its ethical rules, and these rules include patient confidentiality.
2. On the other hand, Henry can’t be kicked out of the AMA because he can’t be a member: he’s not a physician. Sure, he practices medicine for the X-Men, and he has at least one Ph.D., but he has never earned a medical degree, and thus he cannot be a part of the AMA.

While I’m talking about the AMA, there seems to be a misunderstanding among writers (both comic book and television) about what exactly the American Medical Association does.

It is a physician and public health advocacy organization whose mission is to “promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health.” It has a charitable wing and it has a powerful political wing. The AMA publishes a number of medical journals, the best known is the eponymous JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association).

scene from Dr. Mid-Nite #1 (Wagner, Snyder)

The AMA does not issue medical licenses or revoke them; that is the duty of the medical boards of each individual state. From the AMA website: “the AMA is not in a position to take action against a physician’s license to practice medicine.”

Despite what most people seem to believe, membership in the American Medical Association is not mandatory — in fact, less than a third of physicians are members of the AMA (15-30% depending on whose data you accept).

Lex Luthor’s brilliant plant is to use his special maser ray to erase Batman’s mind and then transfer Superman’s mind into Batman’s mindless body. Now that Superman’s mind is no longer housed in an invulnerable Kryptonian body, Lex will physically pummel him until he dies.

I hope it comes as no surprise when I reveal [Spoiler Warning!] that through a cunning plan of their own, Superman and Batman are able to avoid the fiendish trap and defeat Luthor. In hindsight, they really didn’t have to put as much effort into it as they did — Luthor’s plan was flawed at a very basic level.

Luthor seems to believe that light (and similar forms of electromagnetic radiation) are transmitted through the pupil, across the eye, and then down the optic nerve into the brain itself. This is a very common misconception. In reality, the light never reaches the brain because it never passes beyond the eye.

Quick Summary of how the Eye Works:

Light enters the eye through the pupil and falls upon the retina, a special layer of cells at the very back of the eye. The cells of the retina “translate” the light into nerve impulses, and these impulses are what travel down the optic nerve to the visual centers of the brain.

Take home message: Light stays in the eyes; nerves go to the brain

Sorry Lex, your plan is defeated by basic anatomy and physiology. Better luck next time.

storyline reprinted in the book The Strange Deaths of Batman. You really need to pick up this book, if nothing else for the color reprint of The Brave and the Bold #115, the infamous story where the Atom literally jumps into the head of a brain-dead Batman and steers him around, solving crimes and taking out bad guys.

Even before her revelation that she herself is a vampire, Spitfire’s history has been rife with vampiric shenanigans. Her origin revolves around a vampire bite and subsequent transfusion with android blood. Her son became a vampire and fathered a child on Baroness Blood before she killed him and the rest of her vampire followers by exposing them to sunlight¹.

That all brings us to New Invaders #5, where Spitfire has been captured by Baroness Blood. The Baroness explains that she needs Spitfire’s blood to keep her son — Spitfire’s grandson — alive. She goes on the explain that while the vampire bite/android blood gave Spitfire her powers, it caused an inherited degenerative blood disorder in her son², a disorder that was then passed on to his son³. The only way to keep the Baroness’s child alive is to regularly feed it Spitfire’s blood. Thus the Baroness has captured Spitfire and has her tied to a gurney (and continually transfused with blood⁴) so she can provide sustenance for junior whenever he wants it⁵.

The Baroness’s other plan is to feed her vampire lackeys⁶ some of her blood so that they will gain immunity to sunlight. Though unlike her, their immunity will only last for a few days. Still, that’s enough for them to wreak havoc across England. The Baroness also feeds her vampires some of Spitfire’s blood, though the reason for this is never explained – well, other than allowing the good guys a deus ex machina ending⁷.

Notes:
1. Not only did the Baroness clearly skip the leadership lectures of vampire school, but she never read the Evil Overlord list. (This all takes place in the first Union Jack mini-series.)

2. Apparently the vampire bite and/or android blood caused a deleterious mutation in Spitfire’s germ line cells, which is interesting because by that time in her life, her eggs had already formed. So either the blood disease was not related to the vampire/android blood, or they somehow mutated already formed cells.

3. It looks to be an autosomal dominant mutation, which means that a single copy of the mutated gene is enough to cause the disease (so it’s not a disease where the normal gene is simply not working — because that generally means both copies of the gene must be abnormal to see a negative effect — but instead one where the mutated version of the protein is actively causing the disease). This still doesn’t explain how Spitfire’s blood would keep the disease in remission. Maybe her mutated blood cells counteract the abnormal ones in the baby?

4. I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: why is an English vampire based in England using blood from the American Red Cross?

5. For a three to sixth month old baby, Johnny sure has a mouthful of teeth. I’m guessing vampire babies teeth a lot earlier than human babies.

6.The Baroness’s new lackeys that is, since she killed all of her previous ones. This is why you should always do some research on a prospective employer before signing on the dotted line.

7. The Human Torch (the android one) realizes that since the vampires drank Spitfire’s blood, they also have his blood in their system, thus he uses his powers to ignite his blood in the vampires, causing them all to burst into flame. Sound familiar? He just did the same thing to Ultron’s LMDs in the Avengers/Invaders series.

Wanting to see if I could scrounge up some more information on Kenneth Crichton’s “degenerative anemia,” I decided to go back to the sources.

Kenneth makes his first appearance in Captain America #253 and #254 (1981) in — appropriately enough — a Baron Blood storyline. The story also introduces the new (and current) Union Jack. He is drawn as a fairly robust young man, not much different than his friend Joey Chapman who goes on to become Union Jack. The art is by John Byrne who can actually draw skinny and less-muscled people well (Reed Richards and Nightcrawler come to mind), so I have to think the art choice is deliberate.

No mention is made of any anemia, disease, or weakness — Ken even tries to smack Baron Blood with a good-sized floor lamp — though at the end of the comic, he does make a comment that Joey was always the “stronger” of the two of them.

As far as I can tell, Kenneth next appears 17 years later in the first Union Jack mini-series (1998). Since we last saw him, his elderly mother has regained her youth thanks to a transfusion of the Human Torch’s blood. This fact does not sit well with Ken — he feels she is getting all the breaks while he has to suffer.

Ken’s anemia is large part of this storyline. He is drawn looking very thin, almost emaciated, and has a very pale color. The art is by John Cassady, who even at this early point in his career could draw well, so again I’m assuming the depiction is intentional.

In this mini-series, Ken is definitely weaker than average. He’s also a genuinely unpleasant person, a whiner, and a light-weight when it comes to alcohol — but most of this can be explained by his anemia, or his difficulty in coming to terms with his condition. His anemia is shown to be severe — he has to be evaluated at the hospital regularly — and at one point, his local doctor has to give him a transfusion at home to get him up and about.

No explanation of his “debilitating anemia” is given, and there is no suggestion at all that it ties in to his mother’s legacy. It seems New Invaders #5 (discussed yesterday) was the first mention of that idea.

All three storylines are available in collected edition. Captain America: War & Remembrance gets a strong recommendation (great Stern and Byrnes Captain America stories), Union Jack gets a moderate recommendation (fair story by Raab, good early art by Cassady), and The New Invaders is not really recommended unless you’re a sadist, an Invaders completist, or have money to burn.

scene from Oracle: The Cure #3 (By Kevin Vanhook, Julian Lopez, abd Fernando Pasarin)

Here’s an easy one. I’m sure the error was intentional, but it doesn’t make it any less glaring.

In this scene, Oracle (Barbara Gordon) and some of her hacker buddies are discussing how to track down the villainous Calculator.

Previous picture quizzes

As mentioned in the comments the other day, here is the final showdown between Captain America and Baron Blood — one of the best scenes on the Stern/Byrnes run on Captain America (this particular gem is from Captain America #254).

from The Amazing Spider-Man Giant Activity Pad

For your weekend entertainment…which two of these Doctor Octopuses (or should that be Doctor Octopi?) are the same?

Our Army at War #237 (Oct 1971)

An inspired cover, but I still must point out that blood plasma is yellow, not red.

(I know that I’ve complained — many, many times — about the incorrect use of plasma in contemporary emergency resuscitation scenes, but its use is proper in this scene as it was the main blood component used for emergencies in World War II.)

Cut off a limb and two more shall take its place! But injure the heart…and they’re not quite sure what to do.

It looks like the poor Hydra agent is literally trying to massage the victim’s chest — and the victim sure seems to be enjoying it.
And the “two minutes to brain damage”? That’s about three minutes off. Five minutes of oxygen deprivation seems to be the minimum required to cause permanent brain damage.

In the early ’90s, Marvel Comics (and writer Mark Gruenwald in particular) decided that having one of their flagship characters, Captain America, gain his powers through drugs (in this case, the Super Soldier Serum) was a bad idea — after all, it was the tail end of the “Just Say No” era and drugs (all drugs) were bad. So Gruenwald concocted the Streets of Poison storyline which ended with Captain America undergoing an exchange transfusion, flushing the Super Soldier Serum from his body.

Only an unpowered Captain America wasn’t that interesting a character, so less than a year later Captain America was returned to his Super Soldier Empowered status quo. In the otherwise forgettable Captain America #384 (Captain America fights a giant ice worm in the Arctic), it is revealed that Cap’s Super Soldier Serum has regenerated and he has regained his super-powers. It takes a full page of talking heads to explain to Cap (and readers) what has happened, but this panel — which is nearly Claremontian in its amount of dialogue — sums it all up:

So somehow, over time, the Super Soldier Serum had become a “self-replicating virus.” This means two things: First, Captain America gets his powers back. Second, his powers are no longer due to drugs, but a “virus” and therefore he is no longer a “drug user” (remember, drugs are bad) and should not be censured as such. Just to hammer home the point, a few panels later, Cap says:

I guess there isn’t a lot of comparison between my situation vis-a-vis body altering substances and those who abuse conventional drugs.

(And yes, I realize the idea that a drug could become a virus is ludicrous, and the term “self replicating virus” is a contradiction, but it was how hard Gruenwald worked to dance around the “Captain America is on drugs” conceit that really caught my attention.)

For episode 24, Theta Sigma and EmilyH (the second one) had the high score with 9 points.

The episodes with the highest scores were 22, 16, and 17.
The lowest scores were episodes 2, 3, and 9.

Full scores are available here.