Here's a mock source-criticism analysis of the "T" and "PJ" redactions of the "War of the Ring" traditional narrative. Interesting, but I think the author neglects the possibility of an earlier "S" redaction or "UT" collection of sources which might explain a number of common narrative elements between the received texts without direct communication between the two redactors.

As for the kerfluffle about who the Rohirrim are supposed to be, I'd go with Goths-with-stirrups, myself. They're early-Germanic nomads living on plains that had once been occupied by the Fallen Empire, but now exist in political independence-but-culturally-influenced. Maybe the Avars? I don't think they were Germanic, though...

Via Professor Bainbridge here and here.

I just finished reading Johnson & Wilentz's the Kingdom of Matthias, a weird little history I found in a used bookstore in Pittsburgh last week. It's a study of a very minor cult figure of 1830s New York. The book works best when it's not talking about "Matthias" (a Scot from upstate New York born Robert Matthews), but rather about the religious context of the times in question. Matthias' cult, "the Kingdom", is rather tedious, picayune and dull by modern standards. When the authors use Matthias as a starting-point to explore the general religious landscape, things start to sparkle and shine. The authors are of the opinion that Matthias was a failed version of Mormonism's Joseph Smith. I don't know enough about early Mormonism and Smith himself to properly judge that evaluation, but it intrigues me enough to go looking up material on Smith's early years. I rather regret not buying that life of Joseph Smith that was sitting next to the Kingdom of Matthias on the shelf.

Insert Bismarck Quote Here

Dan Drezner is subbing for Andrew Sullivan on Sullivan's blog, the Daily Dish. Yes, Sullivan's blog has a name - it's just that nobody remembers it, so he's universally linked by his name, instead of by the blog name. It helps that he was a nationally-known journalist and columnist long before blogging took off. He's Andrew Sullivan, while Glenn Reynolds is still universally the Instapundit.

Anyways, Drezner is covering for Sullivan. Drezner is a substantial blogger and columnist in his own right, so that's a tad odd. He's having great fun with the gig, though. He's running a stream-of-consciousness log on his own blog, discussing the thinking behind his turn at Being Andrew Sullivan.

We don't really have New Years Eve in Centre County. With the university in State College, we have all the drinking nights the police and emergency personnel can handle. About ten years ago the townies of State College came up with First Night as a family-oriented replacement for the usual bacchanal. It's run these days by the Arts Fest people as their off-season event, but First Night isn't a particularly commercial event. The students are typically out of town for winter break, and it's just locals, townies, and university employees. The merchants bring in ice sculptors, and each participating shop, bank or restaurant in the downtown has one or two two-foot-high customized ice sculptures placed by their doorstops. Allen Street's downtown block is closed off, and the ice sculptors compete to produce the most elaborate and impressive large-scale sculptures. These tend to be ten or twelve feet tall and can range from twelve to twenty feet long. One guy likes to do a sea serpent with free-standing coils coming up out of the pavement every few feet for a fair expanse of the road. Others will do Lady Liberty, or Neptune, or a pegasus, and the like.

There are a couple of tent pavilions selling hot chocolate, and a resolutions booth or what-have-you. I rarely get into town for the children-oriented events, but I'm told they do exist; the Spring Creek Slammers people are going to be doing some sort of children's and teenagers' reading events. There are musical performances in the local churches and so on. Websters Bookstore is open late, Fred Ramsey's drumming circle has been known to break out the strange percussion for late-night noisemaking. At midnight, they'll be setting off a large-scale fireworks display. Some years it's on Old Main Lawn, but the last few years they've been using the football field at the foot of Central Parklet behind the downtown post office. Their firing area is small and contained, but their fireworks inventory is vast, such that the air over the football field quickly becomes a red-lit column of sulfur smoke like a djinn in full rage.

All in all, it resembles nothing so much as an American matsuri. The only thing it's missing is a set of torii leading up to a old-fashioned temple for the first visit of the year…

Jessica of Teep is in the process of tanning deer hides. Why? Because someone has to, damnit.

I'm continually in awe of Jessica's capacity for intensive hobbifying. I was about to offer an excuse that my neighbors would object to the smell of tanning, until I remembered that my neighbors are either students or dead. I can't imagine that people that live next to a crematory would be squeamish about something like tanning. Drat, I guess I'll just have to fall back on ye olde "I'm too lazy!"

Memes Are The Thoughts Of Hive Minds

Somebody exposed Steven Den Beste to serial experiments lain. He's a cell network systems engineer, that shit is like catnip to network engineers. The end result is an exceptionally long essay for a famously long-winded essayist. The basic argument is that he's hepped up about the possibility that internet-enabled "hive minds" are going to achieve superhuman intelligence within our lifetimes - intelligences capable of thoughts impossible in individual human minds.

Surprisingly, he doesn't add the obvious caveat that what he's talking about isn't "group mind" - intelligence with personality. lain, after all, is a group personality. The characteristic of a hive mind is intelligence without consciousness. I suppose you could say that hive minds can be distinctive in a fashion similar to "personality", but it's clearly not the sort of personality that says "I" of itself.

Den Beste offers Open Source projects and blogspheres as examples of emergent hive minds. I don't have much personal experience with OSS projects, but I sort of see what he's talking about in terms of blogspheres. He makes a strong argument that a catastrophic-expansion, singular hivemind like Lain isn't the most likely development. It presumes a perfect, literally instantaneous matrix, I think. The current models of hivemind are very much task-oriented - specific long-term projects, ideologies, affinities, etc. I have to wonder if general-purpose internet hiveminds are even theoretically possible, let alone likely. This is why I've been somewhat hostile to the notion of The Blogosphere, as opposed to an array of lesser blogspheres. The blogspheres are discontinuous. Hrm, I wonder if anybody's done degrees-of-separation studies to see what the average associative order is? I mean, six degrees is obviously too low, but it's certainly not a single-degree situation.

I was supposed to meet my parents in Cranberry Township last night for dinner. My mother works out of an office there; if you've ever been to Cranberry Township, you'll have some idea of how bad an idea this is at the height of the holidays. Twenty years ago, Cranberry was a nondescript crossroads in the middle of a large, open stretch of Butler farmland at the edge of moraine country. Its only distinguishing characteristic was that the Turnpike and I-79 crossed Rt 19, the Red Belt, and Rt. 228 in quick succession, creating a respectable tangle of roads. Fifteen years ago, a number of strip malls and facilities servicing the two interstates had started to spread, wildly. The completion of I-279, AKA "Parkway North", had pushed the first pebble in an avalanche; people could now drive directly and quickly into the centre of the city of Pittsburgh, or to points east and west via the Parkway East and West, along I-279.

Large, moderately expensive housing projects appeared all over the slopes of the highlands. Shake-and-bake condo developments started sprouting all over. The strip malls of the commercial centre around the actual cloverleafs spread into every possible tract of land, and the older, low-end stores started getting pushed out by actual franchises - an enormous WalMart, a Barnes and Nobles, a monstrous Home Depot larger in its interior than the town centre of Bellefonte, then a Costco, a Target, and so on. The developments drove down Rt. 228, which was converted from a horribly overcrowded country road to a multilane artery. The population density of Cranberry and its neighboring boroughs and townships - Adams, Seven Fields, Warrendale - is now higher than the McKnight corridor, or old Shaler Township. Tiny, condo-ridden Seven Fields is probably more dense than the old industrial borough of Millvale that my dad's family is originally from.

I failed to find them in Cranberry; I went over to the Barnes and Noble to use the pay phone to track them down. Twenty minutes of waiting for somebody else's family drama to cease monopolizing the only pay phone in the area, Dad came wandering through looking for me. The family knows where to find me if I'm missing - just look near the closest pile of printed material. I've got to get myself a cell phone. The pay phone is rapidly becoming a relic of the bad old Twentieth Century.

Visiting the folks these days has become an experience rather like camping out in a restaurant. Lots of food, but you have to sleep in the manger with the dogs, or dog, as it were. There's only one bedroom in the current condo, and that goes to the Princess of the Pea & her 9 PM bedtimes. I shouldn't complain - she had a much longer way to go, and via Logan Airport at that. The only travel hazards I have to fear are sleep-deprived maniacs in eighteen-wheelers trying to make NYC by daylight.

No stateside terror attacks yet, unless you believe that al Queda has gotten its hands on major-league BW technology, and chose to use it to attack the beef industry. Beagle II stubbornly refuses to say a peep; I fear that would be due to its current simultaneous occupation of twenty acres of Martian outback. My sister sounds like one of those myopic leftie villains from an old Ben Bova novel, complaining about money spent on the space program which "ought to be spent on education". She's been in New England too long; must be something in Boston municipal water or something. I blame the Kennedies.

I went shopping in a little game shop over on Babcock Boulevard yesterday. Malls are all different, but comix and gaming shops are all the same in their little ways. Had to pry the clerk out of a tabletop gaming session in the back to get my shopping done. Twice. They had the POS station wired with a synthetic voice, announcing the details of every transaction. Wonder if they have a blind clerk on one of their shifts or something?

My sister got me a DVD of Chicago for Christmas, and then complained bitterly when she found out that the parents didn't have a DVD set for the television. She had counted on watching it. Way to go, there, Sis. So she watched an old VHS tape of the Matrix, kevtching about how ooky it was.

I am losing confidence in my judgment on the Last Samurai, mostly because I find myself on the same side of the subject as The New Republic's always-wrong Stanley Kauffman, who is one of the few people to work for that magazine who is not an editor. In my defense, his dislike for the movie is based on tedious script structure quibbles and a dimwitted inability to understand Japanese absolutist politics, rather than anything particularly substantial. He also doesn't like all the fighting. What else he expects from a movie about warriors is beyond me.

I *think* that article is on the free side of the TNR website. I sometimes have trouble forgetting which is which.

Is there anyone who isn't an editor at The New Republic? There must be thirty of them on the masthead. No wonder these political commentary magazines never make a profit.

I've been greatly enjoying my new Maison Ikkoku DVD set.

Back when the only people translating non-SF/Fantasy anime was Vancouver's own Prince of Darkness, William Chow of Arctic Animation, Maison Ikkoku was the most-anticipated part of any shipment of tapes to Quest Labs of State College. I think I brought a tape or two back from one of the monthly marathon copying sessions in a Lawrenceville library basement (old-line fan club in Pittsburgh - Anime Keiken), and most everybody in PSSFS loved it, even though it didn't have science-fiction or fantasy elements like Kimagure Orange Road.

The translations of Arctic Animation were famously haphazard and erratic. "Cry rusted clock" became PSSFS shorthand for Maison Ikkoku, due to a typically wacky translation of the first opening animation song on that show. The fansubbing operation which briefly ran out of Quest Labs State College joined an umbrella fan project to properly translate and sub Maison Ikkoku; we called it "Project Haruka-chan" for in-joke reasons that will only make sense if you've seen the whole show. Bill Johnston went and bought the Japanese box set for the source material. It must have cost him somewhere in the range of $1200-$1600, at a time when he was putting himself through college while working at McDonalds and supporting himself. We never got that far into the project - we might have completed eight episodes before the ravenous beast that was Otakon devoured all of our free time. But if you search for my name on Google, you might find an old message prattling on about a cultural/religious reference in the first episode.

Viz bought the show, and then screwed up royally in selling and marketing the story. Viz certainly isn't the most incompetent marketer in the business - CPM and AnimEigo and a host of lesser lights certainly out-compete them in that respect - but they certainly aren't very good at it. They just didn't have any idea how to sell a non-action, non-fantasical neighborhood-comedy to American fandom. I'm not sure that they're doing any better these days, but a rising tide lifts all boats, and the relatively cheap prices on the current DVD sets can't hurt. The video quality is acceptable for a mid-Eighties TV series, and the sound quality is absolutely gem-like in comparison with the sloppy mess ADV defecated onto disc for the Sailor Moon box sets.

It's been so many years since I've seen the show, that it feels like watching it for the first time. Strangely, without disturbing this new-viewer innocence, I can almost recite the Japanese dialogue as it plays. This is, no doubt, due to the many incompetent hours I spent trying to time these early episodes for Project Haruka-chan, or listening to Bill's or Dave Asher's timing sessions. Thus my strange, faulty memory allows me to both enjoy the story on its own merits, and bask in the glow of a sort of deja-vu nostalgia.

I helped found Otakon, an anime convention that runs these days in the Baltimore Convention Center in Maryland. It was, in 2003, the largest anime convention in the United States. Yay, Otakon. I'm not particularly involved in planning these days, but I do still help with registration and such.

This stands in place of the longish, detailed article that the Blogger monster ate when I tried to post it. Maybe I'll replicate it later, but I doubt it.

I saw The Return of the King from the balcony of a very full Garman Opera House on the Saturday matinee. Normally I like watching films from balcony seats - I'm not particularly sensitive to the sound distortions that bug audiophiles, and I relish silly childhood memories of Statler and Waldorf on the Muppet Show. But the Garman's balcony isn't nearly tiered steeply enough to give the seats on the aisles a proper view of the screen. Luckily, there isn't a director in the world that makes heavy usage of the bottom corners of the widescreen, and once the projectionist shut the damn projection-room door, I was able to forget where I was and disappear into the film.

Well, as much as Jackson was willing to let me to, anyways. Other folks have pointed out the timing issues. I couldn't remember how much of the Dead storyline was from the book - it's been years since the last time I read the trilogy - and I was distracted with worrying over that issue instead of dropping into the story. No, the worst problem I had with the third movie is the same problem with the whole trilogy, which is Jackson's low taste in overly-cinematic battle scenes. They're far too self-conscious, bloodless, and decorative. The battle in front of the Black Gate especially drove me around the bend. The way the forces of the West just let themselves be surrounded took me completely out of the action.

I hold Braveheart as a standard for premodern battle staging. The movie as a whole is overheated anti-British bigotry and Highlander self-glorification, but the battlefield pieces are marvels of clarity, interest, and violence. Of course, they're also Celtic medieval melee messes, but then, that's what they're supposed to be. Later films which have incorporated those elements have stumbled, mostly because those elements are inappropriate outside of that context. The Patriot, for instance, is problematic largely because it's clearly Braveheart in American Revolutionary drag.

Anyways, The Lord of the Rings. The ending of the third movie was missing something, but I'm not sure the Scouring of the Shire was what was missing. As much as I would have hated it if the movie had ended in that Gondoran sickroom, I think it might have worked better than the trailing coda that was shown. The best ending would, no doubt, have been the coronation scene in Minas Tirith. The books are elegiac, and mournful, and regretful in the final analysis. But the books are not spectacles, and the movies work the least when they try to be elegiac. If it had been a single-season TV series, which took its time from one end of the books to the other, if it had been a picaresque with room for many moods, instead of an epic with many battles and alarums... As it is, the elements of elegy and spectacle clash violently in the delivered film. There isn't enough space to allow the moods to coexist without doing damage to one another.

As a side-comment, I have to say that it's still too close to 2001 to enjoy the spectacle of a collapsing tower without political twinges. Especially not when it's the Evil Lord's tower. They tried to diffuse the expected resonance with a giant blinking Eye and an explosion and digital effects; it only half-worked for me. I know this is my issue, and not the film's. Damn bin Laden, anyways.

Eowyn's part of the battle in front of Minas Tirith is worth the admission. That was always my favorite part of the book, and it worked almost flawlessly. Well, OK, the humongous morning-star was a little too reminiscent of Gogo Yubari from Kill Bill, but I got over that... good scene. Certainly made up for six minutes of slaughtering oversized CGI mammoths.

Michael Jennings of Samizdata has an article explaining how the incestuous tangle of bilateral airway agreements led Virgin Atlantic Airways to give Cathay Pacific US landing rights in exchange for "fifth freedom" passage via Hong Kong on the Australia passage, and why British Airways and a passel of whining American carriers are up in arms about it. It's all very mercantilist in a way that I had thought had disappeared during the Carter Administration deregulations. Samizdata is good for "you learn something new every day" articles like this...

I got a question about Kare Kano, aka Kareshi to Kanajo no Jijo or His and Her Circumstances. It's hard to recommend shoujo comics like Kare Kano - and Kare Kano is so very, very shoujo - without knowing the tastes of the audience in question.

Kare Kano is a very popular girl's romance comic in Japan; the wildman director of the anime industry, Gainax's Hideaki Anno, adopted it into a flawed but brilliant TV series of the same name, which is available in the US from the Right Stuf. Like other shoujo manga which have been adopted into popular series (Marmalade Boy, Kodomo no Omocha aka Child's Toy), watching the anime before the manga may drain a lot of the fun out of the experience of reading said manga. I certainly found that to be the case with Marmalade Boy. Personally, I've been enjoying the US release of the Kare Kano manga. But your mileage may vary.

Yukino Miyazawa is a brilliant, athletic, kind, generous, popular high school freshman. She's also an egotistical, monstrous fraud, who delights in fooling the world into believing that she's the perfect self she's built in her own image. She's a lot of fun as a protagonist, even after the love interest figures her game out, and the fraud comes out in the open. The love interest, Souichiro Arima, is similarly self-invented, if somewhat more tortured about this falseness.

The A plot doesn't last very long in either the anime or the manga, and generally behaves like a bad case of malaria - going into remission for long periods, only to come back viciously. While the A plot is in remission, various B plots about the swarms of secondary characters chug along in an amusing fashion. Both versions bear more resemblance to a good-humored, sprawling Victorian novel than the usual run of soap opera or romance-comic intrigue. Think Middlemarch.

The anime is probably a little darker, mostly due to Anno's massive personal issues. But the anime is also a much denser text than the manga, and directly incorporates large chunks of comics imagery directly from the manga. The anime is strongly experimental in ways that the manga simply isn't. On the other hand, the manga is a mildly impressive exercise in high shoujo formalism in and of itself. It's this aesthetic quality that's held my interest in the Tokyo Pop GNs, whereas the more utilitarian, plot-oriented Marmalade Boy failed to retain my attention.

For at least one friend of mine, the main reason to look into the Kare Kano manga is because of the incomplete state of the anime - he wants to know how the story ends. Anno was dumb enough to jump into a project when the material wasn't sufficient for the half-year season he had committed to, and tried to pad things out by animating every single part of the manga story, including a long-running arc called "14 Days" which *hadn't been finished at the time Anno was working*. The anime gets, like, five days into the "14 Days" and just calls an end to the series, leaving the audience seriously in the lurch. It's a large part of why I call the anime a failed masterpiece.

One of the manga I wasted my credit on this week was the first volume of Hellsing, which is being released by Dark Horse in the states. Dark Horse insists on maintaining a higher price-point than everybody on the Tokyo Pop train; I was willing to shell out for Hellsing, but not so much for something I haven't heard of before. Dark Horse is really knifing itself in the back with this strategy - they aren't going to get much of a casual-browser lift when their obscure titles are more expensive than everybody else's obscure titles.

Hellsing is a violent vampire-killer story. The name is a wacky Japlish rendition of "Helsing", as in "Dr. van Helsing", but there's no relation to the fearless vampire-hunters of yore. Instead, Hellsing is a British black-ops organization dedicated to fighting monsters, Satanic cults, and the enemies of Her Majesty and the Church of England. It's technically an order of Knights, but in practice it's a bigoted Protestant madman's notion of what the SAS ought to be. Except possibly for the supervampire assassin Hellsing uses to wipe out its more formidable enemies, Dracula Alucard. Alucard is more than halfway on his way to Elder Godhood, but normally is restrained by his enslavement to the bloodline of the Hellsing family, and the only currently surviving member of that family, "Sir" Integra Hellsing. (The author seems a little confused about English usages - Integra is a woman, and not a cross-dressing one, either.)

At the beginning of both the anime and manga versions, Alucard mortally wounds a policewoman in a hostage situation, and "saves" her by turning her into his undead minion. Much violent, graphic mayhem ensues, between the monsters, the members of Hellsing, and their Catholic rivals of the Vatican's Section XIII "Iscariot".

For reasons known only to my id, I bought the run of Hellsing on DVD when they came out. There are elements of the Gonzo production that are worthy - a certain sense of style, viciousness, and the music - but overall it's something of an artistic failure. The TV series makes Celas Victoria (our undead policewoman/minion) the protagonist, and then makes her something of a simpering weebler with a highly variable character design. The writing on the later half of the series is weak, which seems to be something of a defining characteristic of Gonzo work - both Last Exile and Gadguard started out strong, but lost narrative way after a half-dozen episodes or so. Same might be said of Gatekeepers, come to think on it. Anyways, Hellsing TV: promising failure.

I thought to fall back on the source material, since I liked the premise. I've seen bits and pieces of fan-translated Hellsing here and there, but scanned images are not exactly the same thing as a well-printed GN in your hands. The verdict? Not bad, not great. The manga goes a lot faster than the anime, and there isn't a lot of the poorly-considered atmospherics in the source material. The anime ends up being a lot more, hrm, "Anne Rice" than the manga. The wild, silly Christian bigotries are original to the manga, and not an invention. Gonzo might even have toned things down. I liked that aspect of the story, but then I laughed at all of Moore's racist gags in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so take that with the obligatory grain of salt.

The artwork is kind of variable, though. Various characters have insanely elongated arms, with forearms as long as their torsos and upper arms to match. Poor Celas continues her escapades in bad character design, although she tends more towards an elflin superdeformed alarm than the zaftig squatness of the anime character design. It doesn't matter as much, because she isn't as much of a protagonist in this volume. She also seems to be less of a wimp than the glum and conflicted Anime Celas; I rather prefer the manga version. We'll see how the series goes, but so far it's worth Dark Horse's danegeld.

Updated to add some actual description of what exactly the hell I was talking about... sorry about that.

The mouse I mentioned yesterday has been adopted and taken home by Ben "Chromal" Hauger, who has named it "Plague". Yes, I passed along Fred's warning about Lyme's Disease and all that.

Professor Bainbridge discusses an attempt to use "transactional costs" analysis to demonstrate why parties are less important in an Internet-enabled world than otherwise. The good professor argues that costs of informed decision are going to be nonzero, regardless of the ease of information search, because processing the information still requires expenditure of a limited resource - cognitive effort. He offers the example of voting for president versus voting for sewer commissioner, and how the perceived need to research a presidential candidate outweighs the transactional cost of thinking about it, while that same need in the case of the sewer commissioner will, for most voters, not tip the scales. He further notes that party affiliation represents a shorthand that allows decision without significant intellectual expenditure of resources. He calls it an application of "heuristics", but really he's arguing for the usefulness of habit in the form of party allegiance.

He makes a good point - I find it pretty hard to educate myself on the issues, and Pennsylvania isn't a initiative-heavy state like, say California. But I think he overruns the original argument, that the reduction of education barriers reduces, if not eliminates, organizational costs. It means that parties have to dedicate a smaller proportion of resources to voter education than they once did. The Dean campaign, in particular, has been able to divert a significant proportion of activist resources from educational efforts ("getting out the message") to financing and other organizational efforts that normally would be handled by the party apparatus. It weakens the tie between the campaign and the party, and offers a greater possibility for shake-and-bake campaign-generated party organizations, or transient, short-term parties.

The professor's cited heuristic or allegiance-based force is a centripetal force working against the centrifugal force of the new technology - it means that the old parties aren't necessarily, automatically toast. But the adding of a new force to the existing diagram certainly means a shift in the centre of gravity, I would think.

Jeff Jarvis has an excellent essay in the old Buckleyite "Standing Athwart History" vein, arguing that political campaign blogs are not, and cannot be the two-way revolution of dialog that the advocates have been proclaiming. Now, if you haven't been reading BuzzMachine, you won't realize how unusual this is. Jeff is a big blog-revolution booster, and he's very enthusiastic about the potential and practice of community in journalism, the academy and so on. His favorite mantra is "news is a conversation". The fact that he's stepping forth and proclaiming that political campaign blogs are not, and cannot be conversational in a true sense is striking.

I happen to agree strongly with him on this, but I'm not as strong-blog enthusiast as he is to start with, so *that* isn't particularly impressive. He points out three claims by the conversational campaign blog advocates, and discounts the first two, while agreeing on the third point. That third point is the argument that political campaign blogging allows a democratizing of process, if not of policy. That is, the new blog-reliant party structure is more conductive to the democratic control of extension of message, if not the crafting of the message itself. I am not at all certain about this line of reasoning. It sounds an awful lot like the people-power enthusiasms of the primary-boosters of a generation ago, when the caucuses of Iowa and the town meetings of New Hampshire got the boomers all excited and idealistic. I haven't seen anything so far from the Dean phenomenon that doesn't strike me as a virtual Iowa, characterized by the same degree of relevance and the same sort of insularity that resulted in decades of nationally worthless ethanol subsidies. While the caucuses were physically unscalable, I am concerned that Dean-type virtual caucusing is functionally unscalable - you can't extend them past the very real, if less defined, virtual boundaries of online community.

I predict that we're going to be talking about the limitations of the virtual Iowa in ten years.

"Art isn't democratic, but industry sure as hell is"

I'm wandering through the comics-fanboy end of the blogsphere, which is mostly new territory to me. I came across this rant about the usual "why do mainstream comics suck so relentlessly" questions that were old and tired when I first went wandering through comics fandom ten or twelve years ago.

Aside from producing the above grand Old Leftist quote, which I am quite in love with, the writer also touches on a theory that I hadn't heard before. He suggests that the monthly pamphlet format of mainstream comics is geared to naturally produce eternal superhero serials. The monthly pace drives a simplicity and broadness of characterization and plotting, because the average reader is going to forget more subtle or elaborate constructs in the interval. The broadness lends itself to outsize dramatics, and thus, inevitably, to tights and mutant powers. Manga has certain similar issues; the installments are even shorter in the original formats.

I would argue that the weekly formats lend to a higher level of complexity, but for the fact that the weeklys are generally broader and more simple-minded than the higher-toned monthlys. Graphic novel releases would tend towards a higher tone under this theory; sadly, that's not the original format of most manga - the GNs are compilations from the phonebook weeklys or monthlys. Perhaps it has something to do with the universality, portability, and cheapness of Japanese GNs? They're much smaller than the bulky, floppy American graphic novel, much cheaper (average of under 700-800 yen as opposed to the American $15-$20), and much more predictable in their appearance.