According to sources, Zack has posted some very minor spoilers for The Wire below. (They are properly flagged and everything.) While I think it's great that Zack is posting again, I am a total spoilerphobe and am thus unable to look at my own blog while his post is at the top. So here, to take up space, is a picture of a loldog. Borrowed from icanhascheezburger.com, obviously. By the way: am I the only one who thinks loldogs are way better than lolcats?

What better way to mark my triumphant return to the 'sphere after a hiatus shooting big game in the jungles of Tanzania than with this shocking tale: I was on a train from DC yesterday (Acela, coz that's how I roll) and we stopped in Baltimore. Who should get on but fockin McNulty! I swear to God. He sat down on the other side of the aisle, one row in front of me, and just started reading the international section of the New York Times, as if there weren't an ongoing epidemic of gang-related drug crimes and political corruption in the city, crying out for his hard-charging no-bullshit approach to police work. As the train left Baltimore, we could see the derelict backyards of those row houses in the ghetto, with like trash and car parts strewn everywhere, like where they left Omar's boyfriend after shooting him the eye or whatever. And McNulty didn't even look up!

Eventually the guy next to him got off the train, so I came over and was like "McNulty!" and he kind of smiled shyly. So I asked him if I could sit down and talk to him and promised it'd just be for a couple minutes, since I didn't want to be like the guy in Zuckerman or whatever, and he said sure, in a not unfriendly way. Of course I had to start off asking him questions premised on the fact that I was talking to "Dominic West", but I soon realized I didn't really care much about "Dominic West", so the conversation was a bit stilted (he was less impressed than I had hoped, for instance, by my revelation that I, like him, am from England). But once I just started assuming he was McNulty things went better. He said he's not in season 5 very much (which they're filming in Baltimore right now, hence him being there) but it's the best one yet. It'll be out in January. SPOILER ALERT - SKIP TO THE END OF THE PARAGRAPH IF YOU WANT TO AVOID LEARNING EVEN THE MOST BANAL TWO PIECES OF INFO THAT I WAS ABLE TO GET OUT OF HIM ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN SEASON 5: He ends up with that nice Beadie Russell but they "have problems". Bubbles does not die.

I got him to flash that roguish McNulty grin a few times, to my immense gratification (though I am no coblogger.) One time I think was when I told him that my Mom liked Stringer Bell best, and he said alot of the ladies like Stringer Bell best, and then he said "Bastard!"

Re: On Chesil Beach: Who knew that Ian McEwan was such a fan of the early-'60s British blues boom? I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's the greatest novelist in history to mention both John Mayall and Alexis Korner in two consecutive books.

Attention Zack fans: My erstwhile coblogger has a piece in the New Republic, on NBC News White House correspondent David Gregory and how he "saved the White House press corps." Update: Doesn't coblogger read kind of like a homophobic slur? Not intended, bro, for reals.

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick explains the significance of this week's Guantanamo decisions:

In the coming weeks, we may well learn that Brownback and Allred drive Volkswagen buses and wear love beads. But I doubt it. More likely, we'll learn that they are among the many, many highly conservative legal and career military professionals once willing to follow this president wherever he led them, until suddenly one day when they were not.

Jezebel (new gynocentric gossip blog from the Gawker empire) has a feature whose premise is as follows: men's magazines are better written than women's magazines, so let's get a men's magazine writer to critique articles from women's magazines. I am curious as to the identity of the lunatic/genius who thinks of this stuff. Anyway, this recent installment is more than 1,500 words long, and it's about Alyssa Shelasky, who writes a blog for Glamour, and it has nothing to recommend it except its quality. You can totally enjoy it without reading the source material.

I especially like the way the reviewer's insight into Shelasky's failure as a writer bleeds into criticism of her failure as a person -- a slippage that, given the nature of the work under discussion, is both inevitable and appropriate.

Three new TV ads demonstrating the iPhone's interface. Holy cow. Update: Gruber goes into detail: "I can’t recall the last time I’ve seen any tech product advertised simply by demonstrating how it works."

NYT piece on Google's constant refinements to its search engine. Contains a surprising amount of information that isn't in any of the millions of other Google articles.

It was twenty years ago today ...

... that i watched a BBC documentary entitled It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, about the making of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I remember coming home from school and sitting on my parents' bed with my dad, glued to the screen as George Martin played the original master tapes of the album to show how the different parts were layered and various commentators explained how the songs were sequenced to create the impression of a continuous, thematically coherent work. Today, on the twentieth anniversary of that formative childhood experience, I'm feeling a bit nostalgic. I'm not sure if there's been a falling-off in quality or if I'm just getting old, but somehow today's documentaries about defunct pop groups can't compare to the classics of my youth. The documentaries of 1987 had an innocence, a feeling of possibility, that I'm not sure we'll ever recapture. I feel sorry for today's kids, having to listen to things like this weekend's Radio 2 documentary, in which "multi award winning engineer Geoff Emerick heads back in to the studio to demonstrate the innovative techniques employed for the recording at Abbey Road studios back in 1967." It's just not the same.

David Leonhardt has a good point about Lou Dobbs, one that applies to much of the talking-head community:

The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths.

Crazy Wikipedia stuff (blah blah blah series): Perhaps, like most people, you believe that the Church of Scientology is a dangerous cult that preys on the credulous and goes after its critics with a heavy hand. But what if, unlike most people, you also believe that the wacky sci-fi theology of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is a valuable body of religious teachings? Well, you might find some like-minded friends in the Free Zone.

An open letter from The Office's B. J. Novak: "I bet I'll really like The Wire when I get around to watching it. It sounds great. In the meantime, please SHUT UP ABOUT HOW MUCH I AM GOING TO LOVE THE WIRE. I have a lot to do, and I have a long Netflix queue."

Crazy Wikipedia stuff (3rd in a series): How do people measure the comparative spiciness of different foods? Why, they use Wilbur Scoville's eponymous Scoville scale, of course.

There's a grammar thing that's been bothering me for a while now: sometimes people put commas between adjectives, and I know that the commas don't belong there but I can't explain why. A clear example is What a good, little boy! Most people would agree that comma is out of place. But why? We use commas in What a beautiful, complex, challenging book! It's one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it things, and those always make me uneasy with grammar because what if my precious instincts are wrong?

The truth is more complicated and elegant than I had guessed: adjectives in English go in a precise order by category, which goes like this:

opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose

and as long as the adjectives can be categorized you don't need commas between them. A discussion of the phenomenon is here; an explanatory chart is here.

What's amazing is that every native English speaker has absorbed this system and maybe one in a thousand could explain it.

Crazy stuff you can find on Wikipedia (second in a series): You have 1,679 binary digits in which to communicate with aliens. How much information can you convey? Probably not as much as the authors of the Arecibo message.

Al Gore: "It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse."

Crazy stuff you can find on Wikipedia (first in a series): Is 90 percent of all television actually set inside the mind of an autistic boy? Why yes it is, according to the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis.

Mark Pilgrim responds to Microsoft's patent-infringement assault on Linux with a bit of autobiography:

My name is on a software patent. It happened during my brief tenure at IBM.... No one had done this exact thing, in this exact way, for this exact purpose, before we did. The patent was original, it was innovative, and it was still shameful.

UPDATE: There's a good history of Microsoft's war on open-source at Roughly Drafted.

Who's stronger: Alan Moore or Grant Morrison?

A year ago, in response to a request from my erstwhile coauthor to comment on Alan Moore's spoiled-brat media tour, I posited an alternate-universe Moore:

Imagine if, instead of bouncing from publisher to publisher, he had followed a path through mainstream comics like that of Grant Morrison, who has alternated periods writing mainstream superhero books (New X-Men, JLA, and soon Batman) with work on his own creations for DC's mature-readers imprint Vertigo (The Invisibles, The Filth, We3 -- all of which Morrison owns outright). Imagine if, instead of writing Superman homages in Supreme and Tom Strong, Moore had spent a year writing Superman, or, instead of WildCATs, JLA. I suspect Moore's later work would be more satisfying, and mainstream comics would certainly be richer for his involvement.

In the year since I wrote those idle words, Grant Morrison has apparently been thinking about Moore's career this way too, to the point of embedding the idea in his recent Seven Soldiers series, and most recently issuing a subtle challenge to rival and bête noire Moore in an interview posted last week.

How all this works is going to take some explaining.

In 1990, Grant Morrison wrote himself into the DC Universe. Morrison was wrapping up his run on Animal Man, over the course of which the animal-powered protagonist had gradually gained metafictional self-awareness and begun to suspect that he was a character in a story being written by someone else. Comics are often preoccupied with different realities – parallel worlds, alternate futures. Morrison’s big idea was to play with the boundary between the fictional reality in which Animal Man uses his powers to fight crime and the apparently-less-fictional reality in which Grant Morrison sits in a flat in Glasgow writing Animal Man for DC Comics. (Morrison, who practices chaos magic and has taken a lot of drugs, would probably say that neither reality is any more fictional than the other.) In his final issue, he and the character had a long and mind-blowing conversation about all this.

Although no one had done such a deep pomo metafiction thing in superhero comics before, other DC writers and editors had appeared in the company’s comics, usually in cute little jokes like this 1985 issue of Superman, which was a 70th-birthday present for longtime editor Julius Schwartz.

Twenty years later Morrison wrote Seven Soldiers, a crazy, brilliant web of interlocking narrative that appeared as seven separate minseries about peripheral DC characters. On the fringes of 7S was a set of shadowy agents known sometimes as the Seven Unknown Men and at other times as the Time Tailors, who were seen performing surgery on the fabric of the story itself. These figures, Morrison said in interviews, were himself and Schwartz and the rest – the writers and editors who had appeared in DC comics in the past. Morrison recognized that he and the others, by breaching the wall between fiction and reality, had become citizens of the DC Universe, available to be deployed into stories just like any other minor DC character.

This idea of deploying is important. Any comic set in the DCU (or the Marvel Universe, or etc. etc.) is both a thing-in-itself and a single piece of a massive collaborative project that stretches back (in DC’s case) to 1938. (Name another kind of story being written today that’s connected to a story from seventy years earlier, not as a retelling or an appropriation but as a continuation.) When Grant Morrison writes a story about Animal Man, he’s making artistic use of a character made up by Dave Wood and Carmine Infantino in 1965 and amended by countless others. When he writes about Zatanna and Mr. Miracle and the Guardian in Seven Soldiers he’s grabbing whatever shiny things catch his eye from seventy years of storytelling and playing with them. And this deploying thing is not just the form or condition of Seven Soldiers – it is, in a way that will become clear in a few paragraphs, the theme.

The villains in Seven Soldiers are a bunch of evil time-travelling fairies called the Sheeda, who come to our present for something called the Harrowing. The Sheeda are an agricultural race, and what they farm is civilizations: they’ve given us 20,000 years to develop culture and technology and society, and now they’re coming to reap, to raze our civilization and feed off it, leaving a few humans alive to “seed the crop” for the next Harrowing in twenty millennia.

This is weird enough, maybe. But there’s more: the Sheeda were set in motion by one of those Seven Unknown Men, a renegade referred to as the Terrible Time Tailor. The real behind-the-scenes villain, in other words, is one of the DC writers/editors who has appeared in a comic at some point. And it’s pretty clear, from a bunch of clues in 7S that we won’t go into right now, that the villain in question is Alan Moore.

Moore than a feeling

Morrison’s enmity toward Moore is perhaps comics’ most outrageous instance of the Anxiety of Influence. Moore was the first British writer to come to prominence in American comics, and in his wake DC sent over recruiters to see if the British comics industry might have any more like him. Among others, they found a Scottish kid named Grant Morrison and let him write a Batman graphic novel and a book about a minor hero called Animal Man. That Batman story, and the first few issues of Animal Man, are very much in the style of Swamp Thing-era Alan Moore: serious, wordy, aiming to lend psychological and thematic and poetic depth to what are basically superhero stories. Within a year or so, though, Morrison was exuberantly throwing off the shackles of Moore-imitation and developing the riffs that mark his own work: surrealist humor, metanarrative game-playing, and the ambition to distill the least realistic, zaniest, most colorful aspects of Silver Age comics into dense, fast-paced stories packed with strangeness and surprise.

Alan Moore's best-known work is still Watchmen, the canonical new-wave superhero comic. The non-comics people who read Watchmen (and there are many: it was listed on Time’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century) probably don’t realize this, but the characters in Watchmen were based on a line of superheroes published by an also-ran company named Charlton Comics in the 1960s. The history goes like this: in the early ’80s DC acquired Charlton’s characters, superheroes like Captain Atom and the Blue Beetle. Alan Moore looked at the Charlton heroes and realized that, because they were so derivative of DC’s and Marvel’s characters, they comprised a complete set of superheroic archetypes – the superman with godlike powers, the gritty urban vigilante, the millionaire crimefighter with the crazy gadgets – and could thus be used to tell a very nice Ultimate Superhero Story. Moore pitched such a project to Dick Giordano, then DC’s executive editor. Giordano declined to hand Moore the reins to the Charlton characters, but encouraged him to create new superhero-archetype characters to use in their place. So Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, and the Question became Rorschach, and Moore wrote Watchmen and Dave Gibbons drew the pictures and the series sold huge and was one of the first comics to be collected in a mass-audience paperback and was in general an Event.

At some point after Watchmen’s release, Moore stopped working for DC. In an interview with the Comics Journal in 1990, Moore gave explained the split thus: After Watchmen was done, Moore was afraid DC would cheapen his work with spinoffs and sequels. During a meeting, one of the top editors told him that no such secondary works would be published as long as Moore maintained a good working relationship with DC. “I don’t respond well to threats,” Moore told the Journal, and so he walked. Still, DC hasn't done anything with the Watchmen characters in the twenty years since the end of Moore’s series – despite the fact that, say, a Rorschach solo book would have been a sure commercial bet.

This story, I think, reveals why Grant Morrison cast Alan Moore as the villain in Seven Soldiers. From a Morrisonian perspective, Moore, like the Sheeda, wants only to reap, never to sow: he took the Charlton characters, and Swamp Thing, and other DC properties, and he used them for his own purposes and refused to contribute anything to the common pool of ideas. (What characters or concepts in today’s DC Universe have their origin at the hand of Alan Moore? Well, there’s, uh, Mogo.) Morrison, by contrast, prides himself on giving as much as he takes. Part of his plan for Seven Soldiers, for instance, was to rehabilitate obscure characters for other writers to take over. So Jack Kirby creates Klarion the Witch-Boy in 1973, and Klarion mostly drops out of sight until Grant Morrison uses him in 2006 and provides him with a milieu and a supporting cast, and three months later he shows up in an issue of Robin written by Adam Beechen.

By Morrison’s lights, then, when Moore got protective of the Watchmen characters, he wasn’t just being precious and arty; he was being selfish. Worse, he was hoarding characters that had ultimately been invented by other hands. What Moore should have done (again, from Morrison’s perspective) is to say, “Yeah, we borrowed these characters, and changed them in certain ways, and we had a great time with them and got to tell our story. And now if anyone else wants to pick up anything we’ve done and run with it, well, that’ll just enrich the massive collaborative fictional tapestry that is the DCU.” Which is, of course, pretty much exactly the opposite of what he did.

Permission Granted

And so we come to this week’s interview. The occasion for the interview was the end of 52, a yearlong weekly DCU-spanning series on which Morrison was one of four writers. (One of the remarkable things about it was Morrison’s willingness to collaborate on an equal basis with three writers who have their talents but who are not artistically in his ballpark.) The end of the series featured something DC fans have wanted for a long time: the restitution of the multiverse. (In a nut: from 1961 until 1986, the DCU consisted of an infinite number of parallel earths; from 1986 until this month it consisted of just one earth; now it consists of parallel earths again, although only 52 of them.) In the final issue of 52 we saw glimpses of a few of those parallel earths, one of which appears to feature the Charlton heroes: Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, the Question, and the rest. Remember, these are the characters that Alan Moore adapted for Watchmen.

And in the interview, Morrison says "If you miss Vic Sage as the Question [Sage died of lung cancer in 52], you should be able to follow the adventures of Vic's counterpart on the Charlton/Watchmen world of Earth 4." Not the Charlton world -- the Charlton/Watchmen world.

Don’t think Morrison doesn’t know what he’s saying here. He’s saying, Those Watchmen characters don’t belong to Alan Moore, they belong to DC. He didn’t create them himself, he adapted them from other people's creations. They are on the table. They are in play. And his work is part of the soil that DC’s writers are tilling, even if he wishes it wasn’t.

Or, If you don’t play nice, if you don’t share with the other kids, we’re going to take your toys away from you.

Let me be clear: I don’t think the DC brass have some big plan to reclaim the Watchmen characters from Alan Moore (although you never know, especially with the Watchmen movie looking like it's finally a go). I think it's mostly just Morrison having some fun. I suspect that when he said "the Charlton/Watchmen world" he was grinning like the proverbial canary-eating cat, and the only thing compromising his happiness was the well-known fact that Alan Moore doesn’t have an internet connection.

RoBros gets results! From the LA Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Alan Moore book: An article in the April 29 Calendar section and a subsequent For the Record referred to the title of an Alan Moore graphic novel as The Watchman and The Watchmen. It is simply Watchmen.