This was being written before Obama was elected and was finished into his first few months in office. However, I feel the points raised are still relevant to his campaign today, hence I’m posting it. Here is the introduction.
I could already see that her door was ajar after having reached floor. I trod carefully with my arm stretched out for the handle, hoping to open it slowly and maybe get a feel for things before making my presence known. It flung open.
I feel Kerouac believed the goal of a free life was something that he could actually achieve; at least he did in his younger days: “I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age…” (Kerouac, 1955: 14)
Black Mask was never really a villain I could get into, and the whole ‘magic mask’ aspect of the Batman mythos is a far cry from the realistic template that Loeb, Miller and now Nolan have imprinted on the Universe.
…only a few titles actually change your perception of a well-established universe and sometimes all-too-familiar characters. The Dark Knight Returns did it, Year One did, Red Son, too. Kingdom Come does it also.
Batman: Holy Terror takes place in some Cromwellian dystopia where the Machiavellian elite rule with an iron fist. Bruce Wayne is a priest who is told by Gordon, who himself is an Inquisitor, (nobody, Spanish Inquisition, you know the drill) tells Bruce that the powers-that-be ordered the execution of his parents due to them helping vagrants and miscreants on the sly. Not good.
The chances are pretty remote that the P-R-I-V-A-T-E call is anything other than an over-eager eighteen-year-old telephone monkey reading from a hymn list of carefully scripted phrases designed to lull the receiver into an verbally incapacitated state by which the words, “no, I’m not interested, sorry” are somehow lost from your vocabulary as they bombard you with open questions and well-crafted one-liners.
Comics, Politics, People 