Rip Hunter, party of one?

Its Friday, July 9, 2010 and with Bruce Wayne bouncing around time a bit I figured on doing the same.

COMIX!!

This week was small but solid, and highlighted by BATMAN AND ROBIN #13 which should come as no surprise by those who have suffered through me gushing like a loon about how damn good Grant Morrison's run on Batman has been. There's been a bit of a gap between #12 and #13 to get the current storyline set up with THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE. This is fine because now we have two storylines in two comics both heading to the same station.

Frazer Irving takes on the art chores on this stint of the run and its a joy. His style is so very clean and clear, and it delivers. There's so much going on in this story that it takes this straight forward approach to hit us with it. There's no ambiguity to what we are presented. The history of the Black Glove in what seems like an Elseworlds story, but this character is right in the face of the readers. Then there's the seemingly sane Joker, and this really shone through in Irving's artwork because he made the Joker seem almost normal in a normal setting. There was no exaggeration to him in how he was drawn, but his later mannerisms showed more than all the "dynamic" artwork would properly convey. Even the seeming execution scene at the beginning of the story is presented in a very matter of fact manner.

Note my use of seeming.

The Black Glove seems to be Thomas Wayne. The Joker seems to want to help Batman against the Black Glove. One of the key prophecies of BATMAN #666 seems to come to pass.

But what do we know?

We know there's an eclipse coming and those mark Bruce Wayne's pinballing through time. We know if Bruce Wayne reaches the present then bad things will happen. We know this was set in motion by Darkseid. We also know that the Joker knows something he isn't letting onto quite yet.

Which leads us to our suspicions. We suspect that the Black Glove may be the devil himself, but if this is a the case, and it is the result of the Omega Sanction that has Bruce Wayne bouncing through time, what exactly is the relationship between the two. Everything is wrapped very tightly into a narrative ball, and in the next couple of months we'll see which way it bounces.

HOME ARCHEOLOGY!!

The Missus discovered some books behind a drawer in the kitchen. Many of them contained recipes and quite a few of those were hand written. Beautiful handwriting too. Among the books was IN TIME OF EMERGENCY: A CITIZEN'S HANDBOOK ON ... NUCLEAR ATTACK ... NATURAL DIASTERS which was published by the Department of Defense and the Office of Civil Defense in march of 1968. The following is an excerpt on Improvising an outdoor fallout shelter.

If your home has no basement, no storm cellar and no protected crawl space, here are two ways of improvising fallout protection in you yard:

*Dig an L-shaped trench, about 4 feet deep and 3 feet wide. One side of the L, which will be the shelter area, should be long enough to accommodate all family members. The other side of the L can be shorter, since its purpose is to serve as an entrance-way and to reduce the amount of radiation getting into the shelter area.

Cover the entire shelter with lumber (or with house doors that have been taken off their hinges), except for about 2 feet on the short side of the L, to provide access and ventilation.

On top of the lumber or doors, pile earth 1 to 2 feet high, or cover them with other shielding material.

If necessary, support or "shore up" the wall of the trench, as well ad the lumber or doors, so they will not collapse.

*Dig a shallow ditch, 6 inches deep and 6 inches wide, parallel to and 4 feet from the outside wall of your house.

Remove the heaviest doors from the house. Place the bottoms of the doors in the ditch (so they won't slip), and lean the doors against the wall of the house.

On the doors, pile 12 to 18 inches of earth or sand. Stack or pile other shielding material at the sides of the doors, and also on the other side of the house wall (to protect you against radiation coming from that direction).

If possible, make the shelter area deeper by digging out more earth inside it. Also dig some other shallow ditches, to allow rain water to drain away.

Yeah. Pretty sure I'd be very much dead.

FUTURE TECH!!

And now we move onto the future, where the movies come to life.



I find this interesting from a writer's standpoint. I have no use for it, but I sit and wonder while reading BIRDS OF PREY why is Oracle still using a keyboard? Its like a reverse of when GLOBAL FREQUENCY had that TV pilot that unfortunately did not get picked up and Warren Ellis had described the phones used by GF agents to a Nokia representative and their response was "We've got those." Communication tech is keeping pace with sci-fi, but in terms of how people interact with computers truth seems to outpace a lot of fiction.

But then tech doesn't make people smarter. Take phone solicitors for instance...

Joey: Hello?

Phone solicitor: Hello sir, we're calling to see if you're interested in upgrading your telephone service.

Joey: We don't have a phone.

Phone solicitor: Oh. Alright. Thank you.

Click.

MUSIC!!

And in keeping with our themes of comics and time travel here's the theme song to the movie TIMECOP based off a comic from Dark Horse.

POP QUIZ!!

1: If you could time travel, when and where would you go?

2: What do you think about the true identity of The Black Glove?

3: What's the coolest old thing you've discovered?

That's it for Friday. Leave a comment and if you have G-Mail head over to my Buzz to vote in this month's Tourney to determine the best action movie star.