In 1988 the Republicans could call Dukakis a liberal and that was enough to make him fold up. This time they had to call Obama a socialist and it still didn’t work.

Shamefully, I found this link thru the deranged but hardworking Ann Althouse. The Zippy daily strip archives go back to 1994 and can be word-searched.

(Added value: Ronald Reagan just didn’t get Zippy’s brand of humor. Seriously, he said so and added that his favorite strips were Mary Worth and Apartment 3G. I learned this from a passage in Dutch by Edmund Morris that describes Reagan and Vice President Bush having lunch together. One of them, either Reagan or Bush, mimed jerking off during the lunch, as punctuation for some joke.)

Here’s another mini-review from The Comics Journal. I really like the TwoMorrows books I’ve seen; those guys do a good job. A while back I posted about the shittiness of superhero books, but I was careful to limit my comments to books about “superheroes in general.” TwoMorrows puts out books about particular superheroes, books by people who find those characters interesting and don’t mind sweating a bit to produce useful material about them.

There’s a downside, though: being fans, the TwoMorrows people are frequently a bit uncritical. The Blue Beetle Companion is my favorite book from the company because no one can really be a fan of Blue Beetle. To consider him is to automatically become a dispassionate observer. And what a history he has to observe!

And now:

Blue Beetle started as a knockoff of the Green Hornet. But a hornet is menacing, a beetle isn’t. When the Golden Age hoodlums reeled back from their hideout’s table, aghast at the sight of a beetle emblem, it was like they had been unnerved by the sign of a broom or a tea cup or a basset hound. Nobody had thought this matter through because no one had thought about anything at all involved in Blue Beetle (or “the” Blue Beetle, as he then was). Dick Giordano was present for the creation, more or less, but isn’t quite sure who gets responsibility. “It wasn’t important enough in the day to support a conversation,” he says.

Blue Beetle drifted along through the 1940s because Victor Fox wanted to publish comic books and didn’t worry much about their contents. He popped up again in the 50s, then the 60s. At least the 60s version (Ted Kord) was masterminded by Steve Ditko, so his fingers resembled a bed of kelp waving on the sea floor. But the best Ditko could do in rethinking Beetle was to make him like Batman, and pretty soon Blue Beetle had been canceled again. The poor soul had to wait another 20 years before Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis made something distinctive out of him. In the past, a superhero was always supposed to be the guy, but by the ’80s a hero could be just one of the guys, even a class clown. Blue Beetle, being so nondescript, slid right into the niche and finally acquired some life.

The Companion traces the whole dilapidated story. Christopher Irving’s syntax sometimes goes missing, but his research gets whatever goods can be got. Rich J. Fowlks does a nifty book design, and the supply of photos and reproductions is quite lavish. Blue Beetle functions here as a pop-cultural dust ball around which develops a fine coating of lint: posters for unwanted colas, photographs of forgotten actors. The book does leave unanswered the central question of why Blue Beetle keeps popping up and not the Flame or the Green Mask. The answer, I guess, is that the other heroes are something and Blue Beetle is very close to nothing: a catchy but meaningless name, a costume so standard it’s archetypal. In the end Beetle is a default character, a function of the industry’s need to generate product with a minimum of thought. No wonder he’s still around.

Here’s my new favorite opening line to a Hollywood biography. Actually it’s the opening line of the book’s foreword, which was written by Harve Bennett. He produced Rich Man, Poor Man and a bunch of Star Trek movies. In this line he’s talking about the man who played Dr. McCoy:

I am not especially religious, but I do believe in the Hand of God. And never was His Handiwork more evident than on the day DeForest Kelley got his star on Hollywood Boulevard.

But the reason behind Bennett’s claim is kind of a letdown. It’s not that he thinks God especially wants the Walk of Fame people to honor decent middleweight character actors. Instead the line above is a setup for a “you had to be there” after-dinner anecdote: by chance the spot for Kelley’s star was near a very tall escalator and at the top of the elevator there hung a neon sign and the sign read “The Galaxy.” True story!

In the old days right-wingers accused people of being Jews. Now they accuse people of being anti-semites. I’d say that was progress.

(See Franklin “Rosenvelt” vs. what the McCain campaign had to say about Rashid Khalidi.)

Here’s an old bullet item from The Comics Journal, a review of De:Tales. I think the book got some attention when it came out, so you might know it: a slim paperback volume of black-and-white vignettes written and drawn by Fa?bio Moon and Gabriel Ba?, twins down in Brazil. Dark Horse published it two years ago.

Judging by this book, I’d say Moon and Ba? have talent. But so do lots of people, many of them with more going on inside than the boys apparently have. MoonBa? put me in mind of my old surefire observation about George W. Bush: maybe he’s not stupid, but he might as well be. And maybe MoonBa? aren’t a pair of no-talent poseurs but … all right.

The title of De:Tales doesn’t even make sense. Ok, “tales” and “details,” so you have a pun, but why “details”? The stories don’t have anything more to do with details than other stories do. Someone just wanted to feel clever and didn’t think about what cleverness involves. As I remember, the book’s foreword also contained a clunker. The editor, I forget her name, tittered over how the boys had first approached Dark Horse with superhero art samples. I can see how contributor guidelines might warn against superhero stuff because otherwise a company risks being deluged with nonsuitable material. But if the pages are in front of you, surely you can tell whether they show any talent. Waving them away because of some capes and tights seems like a caste gesture.

There are no superheroes in De:Tales, but it’s a dumb book. The editor couldn’t tell. Why do I care? Basically because I was assigned the book and I wanted it to be good because otherwise I’d be stuck reading crap for an hour or so — and guess what happened. Worse, the crap was prettied up with the scent of the artists’ self-regard. Not to mention the editor’s.

Still, it’s not a bad life the boys have down there in Brazil. They’re working hard, tapping American dollars, turning out professional product. Going by their self-portraits, they’re youngish fellows, lanky and rangy, and Brazil has lots of good-looking girls. It’s a nice thought, the lives they’re hypothetically leading. I just wish the guys would shut up.

And now my bullet:

Fa?bio Moon and Gabriel Ba? are Brazilian twins who share writing and art duties but don’t like using the same last name. The foreword to De:Tales, a collection of 12 short pieces by the team, tells us they picked new surnames off the rack as “reflections of their distinctive artistic spirit.” This isn’t a good sign. The foreword promises stories “of love and loss, of coming of age, of the questions of youth and life’s search for answers”; the collection’s first piece adds to the list “stories with bars and drunk people” and also “fairies and talking birds” and “dreams.” In practice this means stories that are like the old “no soap, radio” joke, except that one of the elephants is a craggy fellow with long hair and the other is a cute girl in a belly shirt and they’re walking down a street in São Paulo instead of sitting in a bathtub. The two brothers can really draw, but they have trouble getting a point into their work. The best they can manage is wistfulness attached to some generalized problem. If the problem has a bit of size (for example, the absence of a dead friend), the story manages a little heft. But most often the problem has to do with the sort of girls you see in beer commercials. It seems the girls aren’t available often enough, or else not on terms that make the brothers feel emotionally cozy.

“Happy Birthday, My Friend!,” the collection’s meatiest story, has charm, a bit of feeling, a decent joke about London. Second place goes to an anecdote (“Qu’est-ce Que C’est?”). Past that point we find notebook entries and exercises in style. In “Outras Palabras,” a beautiful girl lights a candle against the night sky. We move from the candle’s flame to a street light, along telephone wires, past more street lights, and arrive at a dark window where a craggy fellow is gazing out past another candle flame. This isn’t a story, it’s a printed rock video.

The brothers, especially Gabriel, can be too loopy and expressive in drawing individuals, but they do fine crowd scenes and settings. The local color is a big attraction here, and the characters always move through well-paced sequences of well-chosen shots. But the expertly assembled panels convey content so vapid it’s shocking. A beautiful girl with bad teeth doesn’t really cover the effect. Imagine a beautiful girl with no teeth: She opens up and all you see is gums and darkness. Or maybe there’s one tooth, a single gleam against the black, a lonely candle in the night. If that image makes you wistful, read De:Tales.

I had to get this past Noah.

UPDATE: Noah points out that not everyone is registered with the Washington Post. All right, I’ll swallow my pride and offer this.