One hundred years ago today was the birth of Milton Caniff. He was born in Hillsboro, Ohio -- about an hour and a half drive from where I live now. Caniff would later go on to draw the wildly popular newspaper strips: Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. Caniff brought a decidedly "legitimate" artistic integrity to the funny pages with intricate details in his work, as well as some IMHO superb brushwork.

I only started reading some of Caniff's work several weeks ago, when Humorous Maximus began publishing Steve Canyon online. He's one of the many artists I know more by reputation than by his actual accomplishments, so I've tried to take it upon myself to see just how good he was. That it's now available for free is a decided bonus.

That's been my (and I suspect many others') biggest hindrance to not knowing more about the history of comics and comic art -- much of what has come before is not in wide circulation, thus making research very cost-prohibitive. The internet has helped considerably and I've benefited enormously in the past year or two with the volume of material that was simply not even available a few years ago.

In honor of Caniff's birthday, I suggest you head on over and start reading Steve Canyon -- even in the short time I've been reading, it's been easy to see why people enjoyed it. But I might also suggest your looking up Wowio and Golden Age Comics Online for other materials. There's so much more to comics than Batman and Captain America (and in light of Civil War, that should come as a huge relief!) that I think it makes sense for everyone to take advantage of the opportunities to experience what else is out there. You might not like Steve Canyon or Gold Digger or Airboy, but you're not going to know that until you try them out, right?

I'm generally not keen on touting my own horn, but I'd like to take a moment to show off my comic "wins" from the past few years. As I've repeatedly stated, I like the whole comics medium and I'm always thrilled to have the opportunity to try new things. What surprises me is that more fans don't seem to enter these contests...

• Comics' #1 Fan
• Frankenstein Mobster Made Man Art Contest
• Sin City Art Contest
• Blogaround Challenge 2007
• Get Your Civil War On!

Oh, there are plenty of comic-related contests I haven't won! Dark Horse has run been running one a month for the past few months, CBR had its famous Comic Book Idol, Newsarama recently interviewed the winner of Atomic Comics' Marvel Editor-in-Chief For A Day Contest, MarvelMasterworks.com seems to have something running all the time... I even hosted one based on last year's Who Wants To Be A Superhero? television show.

I complained some time back about there not being more comic contests out there, but the truth appears that the contests are out there, but people just aren't participating in large numbers. (Which, on a purely selfish level, I'm thankful for!) Is that a marketing issue? Do people simply not know about these contests? Or are the prizes really so uninteresting that people don't care to enter? I'd prefer to think the former, but I'm not always the best judge of these things.

Either way, it strikes me as a business failure to some degree. Either the person running the contest hasn't properly marketed the contest (and, therefore, his/her own backing of said contest) or they've failed to read their market sufficiently to provide an appropriate and warranted prize. Maybe we need more MBAs in the comic industry.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to come up with something for my latest entry for Patriot Factor.

A little over a week ago, I started playing "Second Life." If you haven't played it, it's essentially an online 'game' with no real restrictions or rules or even an ultimate goal. You log in and interact with other people in any way that you want -- or don't interact with them at all and simply explore their world. You can earn (and spend) money within the world, but you don't need to. You can adopt an avatar and persona that allow you to role-play almost anything, or simply go in as yourself. It struck me as a fascinating way to examine online social networking, which still has me somewhat perplexed.

In the week that I've been playing (under the anagramatic pseudonym 'Feldane Klees' if you want to look me up) I've found a warehouse of free creations for my character (everything from clothing to weapons to vehicles to buildings), a central meeting place for Star Trek fans, and the recreation of an Old West town. The warehouse is literally filled with virtual crates of merchandise which characters can freely copy as often as they wish. Starfleet Command is built after the designs seen in the various Star Trek shows, even appropriating many of the ambient noises for sliding doors and turbo-lifts. Similarly, Dodge City looks like it a stereotypical town from the Old West, but directions are given upon entering that inhabitants are required to play their parts in a true role-playing fashion -- whereas Starfleet Command seemed more like it just held the visual and audio trappings of the Trek universe while still holding to contemporary social conventions.

After puttering around for a week or so, an interesting phenomena about Second Life occurred to me. Since the entire world is founded in bytes, there are a number of "advantages" to it over the real world. First, objects are copyable and transferable at no cost. If I have my own hoverbike, I can duplicate it and pass it along to a friend for free. Second, many physcial laws do not apply. Any character can fly as easily as walk; falling off a skyscraper will result in no damage; you can 'hang' objects in mid-air. Third, since objects are virtual, I can carry an infinite array of them with me at all times. I don't need a dwelling to store and protect my holdings; I can create and recreate them at will ad naseum. Fourth, when you create your online character, you are not limited by reality. You can get yourself into great shape with a few button clicks; you can walk around in a Kool-Aid Man costume without sweating buckets. You can present yourself in any way you like. There are other pluses as well, but these strike me as note-worthy.

(This WILL evenutally circle are back to comic books. Stay with me.)

Now, armed with these "main" benefits, why wouldn't you want to live in this world? Within Second Life, you can be and do whatever you want. There's almost nothing in the way of consequences. There's almost nothing in the way of limitations. You can be a rock star or an exotic dancer or a pirate or an alien or... You can build the house of your dreams and never have to worry about upkeep or maintenance.

It got me to thinking how this type of thing could be considered your "opiate for the masses." If your life is dull and drab for whatever reason(s), you can step into your Second Life persona and do something more exciting or invigorating. You can be more attractive, more wealthy, more powerful... at essentially zero cost. (A Second Life account is free, so your only cost would be a computer to run the base program -- which anyone interested in Second Life probably already has.) I can easily see why that would be insanely enticing. It's virtual reality almost to the point of total immersion.

So that got me thinking about when the concept of "virtual reality" was created. It became popular in science fiction in the mid-1990s with Star Trek and Lawnmower Man. The movie The Matrix took the concept even further. But, in doing a little research, the term "virtual reality" was first coined in 1982 by Dan Brodes in his novel The Judas Mandala.

"That's odd," I thought. "I'm sure the concept must have been around before then."

Doing a little more digging, it was indeed around in various forms before then. Ray Bradbury wrote about the concept in The Illustrated Man back in 1951, and a real world VR prototype environment called "Sensorama" was built in 1962 by Morton Heilig. Science fact obviously follows science fiction, and it wasn't until the late 1970s and early 1980s that virtual realities started creeping their way into popular fiction, and it didn't take a real hold until William Gibson's widely-acclaimed Neuromancer came out in 1984. We're still not to that level, obviously, but Second Life certainly sparks some interesting comparisons.

Now (and here's where I get around to talking about comics!) what struck me was an issue of Jack Kirby's 2001 I read recently. In #5, a character by the name of Harvey Norton is introduced. He lives in New York City circa 2040, and spends what free time he has in a simulatron run by Comicsville, Inc. playing the character of White Zero. Harvey essentially is living his second life as a superhero because his day job is quite dreadful and even his trips to the artificially created beach do not fill him with any joy. He has a small apartment and no real social life to speak of. But in the realm of Comicsville, Inc., he is a hero bar none -- truely a super man capable and worthy of saving the city from disaster on a regular basis.

2001 #5 came out in early 1977, so it's clear that Jack didn't pioneer the notion of a virtual reality; it had been around in various forms for over two decades. But, in what I've found so far, Jack's the first person to take the idea of a virtual reality to a commercial leisure activity. Jack -- again, insofar as I've been able to determine -- is the first one to forsee the culture we would actually start to inhabit and how the technology would be used to enhance our sense of escapism. Did anyone happen to catch Opus this Sunday?
Berkley Breathed's coming from a different perspective, obviously, but he's touching on the same notion. That we're living drab, colorless, lifeless lives and are constantly reaching out to find a second life that's more active and engaging. Breathed's living in that world, though; he's commenting on what's happening now. Jack was commenting on what's happening now, 30 years before it happened.

I think that's where some of Jack's storytelling power came from. He could see where the planet was going and extrapolate, logically, how we might be interacting with it. Sure, he put his own flourishes in place that are perhaps off-the-mark scientifically, but good fiction comes from, I think, showing us how we interact with the world, regardless of what that world is. That's where Jack was going; he just beat us there by a couple of decades.

The folks at "The CW" have recently posted the first episode of Smallville Legends: The Chronicles of Oliver Queen on their web site. I understand it was originally released for Sprint cell phone users a few weeks earlier, but I haven't heard/seen any comments about it, so I'm not sure how widespread that's been.

The story is essentially the origin of Green Arrow. I believe it's more in line with Green Arrow seen in Smallville, not the one from the actual comic books. But I don't really watch Smallville so I can't say how closely it's tied to that show. The webisode is short -- maybe five minutes -- so it's really the barest of introductions. It's hard to get a sense of what's well-done.

What did strike me as interesting was that they're using 3-D computer sprites for all of the animation. I suspect that animation would be cheaper for what they're trying to show -- among other things: large, stately homes -- and that's got to be a big factor for something like this, that won't really be generating ad revenue per se. They also didn't go for a "realistic" approach and have rotoscoped the figures, so they all have black outlines, like those you would find in a comic book. I'm curious how much of that decision stemmed from the choice to "broadcast" the originals via cell phone (with absurdly small screens in which details would be harder to decipher) and how much from the character's roots in comic books.

I didn't see anything so far that has me charged to come back, but I didn't see anything either to push me away. It was an adequate presentation and, for free, I can't really complain much. I'll swing back for subsequent episodes, but I'm not going to be pounding on CW's virtual door to get them.

The "big" news this week was the finale of Civil War #7 and, like Abhay, Graeme, Jim, Chris and so many others, I found it lacking. Not so much that it was poorly scripted or drawn, but that it was absurdly anti-climatic and disappointing. It's an ending that really isn't an ending; it's an ending that just peters out.

But that's not what I'm going to focus on here today!

Let me take a moment to present you with an image. This is from last summer's Superman Returns movie.

Before I saw the original teaser trailer for Superman Returns, I was uninterested in the movie. Just not a huge fan of the character; I could take him or leave him. But that scene where Superman flies up above the clouds into the sunrise with Brando's voice-over...? That totally sold it for me. Why? Mostly because of the imagery.

The sun is an extremely powerful image. In the first place, everyone knows the sun. No matter where you live on the planet, no matter what your cultural background is, you know what the sun is, what it does for the planet, how it's important for all life on earth. Consequently, the rising sun is an almost universal metaphor for continuing life and, therefore, hope. The rising sun shows every day that there is a tomorrow to look towards. No matter how absurdly bleak things get, there is still something to look forward to. And silhouetting a hero against a rising sun conveys a very powerful message, directly comparing that rising sun's hope to the hero standing in front of it. In this image, Superman is the herald of tomorrow's hope just as the sun is.

Now, let's look at the final panel from Civil War...
We can't tell if the sun is rising or setting here, but it's cutting through an upside-down horizon created by the SHIELD Helicarrier. The arc of the earth is not present at all, and the sun is hung behind a massive, man-made structure hovering thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of feet in the air. We see what is essentially an image 180 degrees opposite of the universal image we have of tomorrow's hope.

You ever wonder why people hold a flashlight under their chin when they tell ghost stories? It's because they're forcing the light to shine on their face in a decidedly unnatural way -- we are used to seeing people's face lit by sunlight, which always comes from above. That a light shines from below makes them appear unnatural and adds an aura of fear and uncertainty to their tale.

The same principle applies here. The sun is universally above the earth. No matter how much of a horizon you find yourself looking at, the sun will be above it. By shifting the horizon (shown here as the underbelly of the Helicarrier) and having the sun hang below, artist Steve McNiven has created a wholly unnatural image.

Was that a deliberate and discussed story-telling point from the whole creative team? Was that something McNiven threw in to suggest his opinion of the story? Was it a conscious choice, or a more visceral and intuitive design decision? Am I reading too much into one piece of art?

Questions I don't have answers for. But I think the end result is extremely metaphoric -- I don't think there's much to look forward to in the Marvel Universe.

I didn't see this on the shelf this week, but Tom Spurgeon pointed out...Sock Monkey: The Inches Incident #3
I'm going to cheat and use Tom's text description: "A terrible thing about not being near a comic shop is that I miss out on books like this one -- it's not new, it's not a startling new direction, it's not anything except likely to be good."

Okay, so yesterday, I went to my local comic shop to pick up this week's cache of new books. The owner was behind the counter, getting various things organized, his wife/manager was in the back room on the computer, and there were two customers already in the store. One customer was young-ish (early twenties, maybe) and looking at the new books on the shelves, and the other was older (fiftish) and chatting with the owner.

Incident #1 -- As I walked in, the owner said "hi" and turned around to get my file. The other customer continued talking (something about a promotional image of Power Girl sporting a camel toe in the latest Previews) and the owner handed me a stack of comics. He also took a moment to point out that the American Way TPB -- which I had asked about last week -- was on the shelf behind me if I was still interested.

What caught my attention was that he had recalled my offhand question about American Way very quickly. I didn't ask him to reserve a copy; I had just made an idle inquiry about wanting to take a look at it. He remembered that, and pointed it out when he got it in. Anyone who would've specifically ordered a copy would've had one in their file, and he only had one copy left. It probably would've sold to someone anyway, but the owner got a more solid sale by pointing it out to someone who had already expressed some interest in it.

My local shop has only been around for a little over three years, so I still have some concern in the back of my head about their longevity, but incidents like this one suggest to me that he really has a pretty good head for business, and will probably be around for a while.

Incident #2 -- As I picked up a few extra books off the shelf, I wandered back to the counter where the one customer was still talking. (The other had purchased a couple of books and left.) He had moved on to how some folks at DC were intentionally mis-directing fans about various plot points in 52. He would cite various message board posts from DC editors who had said thus-and-so about a character, and two weeks later an issue would come out contradicting that, and how this whole thing was being rolled out as some big mystery, and here's this one image of Ralph Dibney's nose twitching which means his powers are back, and how this was actually set up earlier, and how some fan had actually noticed it and placed a blown-up scan of the panel in question on another message board, and...

I was in the shop for about a half-hour, and this guy's diatribe was running in the background the whole time. He spent the entire time talking about plot points in various DC books -- he even walked me through the latest issue of Hawkgirl page by page, including a ton of back-story that, even with his extended explanations, made little sense to me. I heard more about the vast tapestry that is the DC Universe in that half-hour than I have in ages.

In short, this man -- this fiftish-year-old man -- was the biggest DC fanboy I think I've ever met.

Now I'm not making a judgement against him. He seemed like a nice enough guy and was fairly well-spoken. He clearly knew his stuff and if I were going to enter into some DC trivia contest, he'd be on my short list of people I'd want on my team. He was quite passionate about the DC mythos and heavily invested in it -- financially (he said at one point that he bought pretty much everthing DC puts out) and emotionally (judging by his enthusiasm).

I only bring it up as an "incident" because I don't run into people like this very often. Oh, I've met plenty of fanboy types before, but they're usually very young and not as versed in the comic stories as they'd like to be. I've met older fans, but they're either very nostalgic about comics from their youth or don't pay much attention to mainstream stuff because they "outgrew" it years ago. This gentleman -- who's name I didn't even catch, to be honest -- seemed to me something of a rarity. If I ever get around to writing my book about fandom, I'd definitely be interested in getting his thoughts and/or profile into it.