Books of Comics

DC's reboot has caused an uproar over their treatment of women. Characters are portrayed as strippers and sexually promiscuous. Starfire has been singled out in particular. The character was always ready to have sex with friends and showed some skin. She was also strong-willed. The new version is vacuous and treats sex like a handshake ("Hi, I'm Starfire. Want to have sex?"). He costume must be glued on.

Marvel has come in for some criticism, also for the amount of skin showing and for putting women in stripper poses.

It wasn't always like that.

In the Silver Age, under Stan Lee, Marvel's women tended to dress conservatively. Marvel Girl and the Invisible Woman wore the same uniforms as the rest of the team. The Wasp wore something similar to Giant-Man's uniform. The Scarlet Witch and the Black Widow had an opaque body suits as the base of their costumes. Medusa and Crystal of the Inhumans wore full-body outfits.

DC wasn't quite so demure. Wonder Woman's outfit was always skimpy. The Black Canary and Zatana's outfits were a little embarrassing. Hawkwoman wore the same outfit as Hawkman except with a bodice. Supergirl had a minidress version of Superman's costume. The new Batgirl was a little sexier than the Golden Age Batwoman and Batgirl in her form-fitting body suit.

Things started to change when Dave Cockrum began redesigning costumes for the Legion of Superheroes. Previously most of the women wore full body outfits. The few exceptions, like Shrinking Violet, wore short dresses. Their new outfits were based on swimming suits and halter tops. When Cockrum created the New X-Men, he gave Storm the same treatment.

Other costumes got a little skimpier. The Scarlet Witch started showing some cleavage. So did Moondragon who also sported a swim-suit style outfit. Starfire was introduced with a two-piece outfit. She-Hulk's arms and legs were bare. Mz Marvel started out with a skimpy version of Captain Marvel's costume complete with cut-outs showing her stomach. The cut-outs were too hard to draw and dropped. Later she got a Dave Cockrum swimsuit which she continues to wear.

Solo women's comics have never been a big seller so most women were in teams. As their numbers increased, they became more important. It was not unusual for a woman to be the strongest member of a team - She-Hulk in the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, Valkyrie in the Defenders, Wonder Girl in the New Titans, Rogue in the X-Men. Women also led most of the groups at some point.
That included the Avengers (Wasp), X-Men (Storm), Champions (Black Widow), Legion of Superheroes (Saturn Girl and Dream Girl), and the Fantastic Four in the 1990s (Invisible Woman).

Women didn't do as well in non-superhero comics. The women in Conan never wore much and Red Sonja started out with a full mail shirt but switched to a scale mail bikini. Women in the horror comics wore very little. Few wore as little as Vampirella but most had cleavage to the waist. These comics were mainly limited to the 1970s.

Yet a newer generation of artists has taken over and new styles are common. A lot of the art is very good but it exaggerates physiques. The men are all buff. The women have tiny waists and big breasts which are straining at their costumes. Many women's costumes now sport thong-backs.

Some of this reflects a loosening of the Comic Codes. Some of it reflects changes in society in general. But the idea of a superheroine as pin-up is pretty pervasive.

The Three Musketeers has been adapted for film 20+ times. While the novel is considered a timeless classic, the movies seems to have quit adapting it and started adapting each other.

One big problem is that it is a long novel. The plot follows the young D'Artagnan as he travels to Paris to follow in his father's footsteps and become a Musketeer (this was an elite force). Along the way he manages to offend the title characters (Athos, Porthos, and Aramis) and is challenged to a duel by each of them. The first duel is interrupted by the Cardinal's Guard (they are rivals to the Musketeers) and D'Artagnan joins in the fracas, earning the respect of the Musketeers. Later he acquires a mistress - the Queen's dressmaker and through her becomes involved in palace plots. The first of these involves a romance between the Queen and the English Duke of Buckingham. The Queen gave a set of 10 diamonds to the Duke as a memento and one of the Cardinal's agents (Milady) manages to steal two of these.

The Cardinal talks the King into holding a ball so that the Queen can wear her diamonds. D'Artagnan and the Musketeers rush to London to retrieve them.

Later D'Artagnan becomes involved with Milady and discovers that she is Athos's wife who had been sentenced to death. This puts all four Musketeers on Milady's hit list along with the Duke of Buckingham. After the Duke is assassinated, and D'Artagnan's mistress is killed, Milady is caught and executed.

Many adaptations stop with the Queen's jewels. Others try to squeeze the entire plot into a movie. The best of these efforts was directed by Richard Lester. While it was filmed as a single, long movie, it ended up being split in two. This continues to be the best version for fans of the book.

The Lester version cast Christopher Lee as the Cardinal's henchman, Rochefort. Lee wore an eyepatch which was not in the novel.

The next big-budget adaptation was by Disney. They gave the 17th century a thorough going-over in the early 1990s. In addition to the Three Musketeers, they did Pocahontas, Squanto and The Scarlet Letter (through Disney's Touchstone subsidiary). Disney pretty much threw the Dumas's plot away and started from scratch. In this version D'Artagnan arrived in London only to find the Musketeers had been dissolved. He had to rally them in order to save a young King Louis XIII from the villainous Cardinal. The cardinal's henchman wore an eyepatch and did a Christopher Lee impression but wore Black. Milady was an ambiguous character - forced to evil by Athos's hatred.

More recently, a version simply called "The Musketeer" followed D'Artagnan as he saved the young King from the man in black who wore an eyepatch and spoke like Christopher Lee. It featured a lot of wire-work (sometimes called wire-fu) inspired by martial arts movies and was released on the heels of Crouching Tiger. It was more a remake of the Disney version than an adaptation of Dumas's classic.

Now, the newest version looks like it has wire-work, a young king, and a man in black with an eyepatch. Milady seems to be ambiguous. So this looks like a remake of The Musketeer which was a remake of Disney's version which was influenced by Lester's version which was based on the novel.

I don't expect much from it. At least the costumes look better than the Disney version.

Joss Whedon, the director of the upcoming Avengers movie is a respected writer and TV director but he has only directed one theatrical release, Serenity, which was a movie adaptation of the TV series Firefly. I saw it in the theater (I got to attend a preview for media bloggers) and it has been showing up on cable regularly, probably to build excitement for the Avengers. After multiple viewings, there are a few things that stand out, especially the opening.

The movie establishes the general framework, that there are multiple worlds surrounding a sun, that they have been teraformed, that that there was a rebellion between the outlying planets and the inner ones. But this scene turns out to be a memory of River who is being held in a medical facility. Her brother breaks in and frees her. Except this is really a security recording being reviewed after the fact.

So, as we move close to reality, we also go from the general to the specific background for the movie. It's a quick way of bringing new viewers up to date.

Then we cut away to Serenity and follow the captain, Mal, as he talks to each crew member. This takes us through the entire spaceship in one continuous shot. There is a subtle message here - they didn't just build individual sets for the different parts of the ship, they built the entire interior of the spaceship.

The crew lives up to its reputation as anti-heroes by robbing a bank. This is interrupted by an attack by the real bad guys, the Reavers. We met the Reavers a couple of times in the series but never learned where they came from. We just know that they are crazy killers.

You know that they are evil. Their spaceship not only looks evil, it puts out more dirty smoke than a steam engine.

Eventually the crew figures out that there is an answer on an unknown world. They land and their world changes. When it does, the camera does a nice 360.

There are other nice touches, mainly involving the almost unflappable Operative losing his calm.

So, what does that tell us about Whedon as a director? He throws flashy bits in but he keeps them low-key enough that they don't distract from the action.

Morgan Spurlock's new documentary on trying to live like cavemen aired last night. I'm not impressed.

As far as I can tell, the concept was to thrust a group of modern people into a caveman-style existence with little preparation. The trouble is that they had too little preparation and retained too much of the 21st century.

Their first problem was to find good drinking water. They found a clear, fast-running stream fed by snow melt. But they didn't drink it. Instead they assumed that it was impure and set about purifying it. They boiled it then filtered it. Not only was this something that no caveman would ever consider, even people from the first part of the 20th century would not think twice before drinking from that stream.

The hunting grounds was two miles away. The hunting party kept walking there and back. Real hunter/gatherers would have sent a hunting party out with orders not to return until they had food. It made little sense for them to keep returning. It burned extra calories at a time when they were already feeling week from days without a proper meal and it cost them time and opertunity. Big prey is often at its most vulnerable at dusk and dawn. But the hunting party was busy commuting at those times.

The way that they hunted seemed poor to me. They just tried to get close enough to a herd of elk to throw a spear at them (to be fair, they had atlatls which increased their range). I suspect that they used techniques meant for hunting with a rifle. Given modern weaponry, as soon as you can see your prey you can kill it. With the atlatl, you have to be much closer. Given that, they should have taken their time and surrounded the herd.

Once they finally did manage to kill an elk, one of the cave women announced that she did not eat red meat. That is a luxury that hunter/gatherers would never have.

All told, this did not shed much light on how early humans lived. It was more about how whiny modern humans can get.

Amazon just launched a new tablet computer to compete with the Barnes and Noble Nook Color and refreshed their line of e-ink Kindles, again competing with B&N's Nooks. The highlights are a new, lower price point for the readers and heavy integration with the Amazon cloud for the Fire - the new tablet.

B&N will be announcing a new Nook Color in time to compete for Christmas and there are rumors that Amazon will launch a better tablet early next year.

I've been doing most of my reading on electronic devices this year, using a Viewsonic G-Tablet and a Nook touch. The Nook is great for what it is. It is light. The battery lasts a long time. I can carry dozens of books with me at once which was very useful while vacationing on a schooner with very limited space. It also works well in the sunlight.

But I've recently gone back to using the G-Tablet for my reading. At night it is easier to read a lit screen than a reflective one. I also like having to do fewer page turns. I tend to hold my book or tablet in my left hand. I can turn the page on the Nook by pushing a button on the left side (there is also a button for going back) but I have to press harder. On the tablet I can swipe right-to-left and turn the page. On either device I can also touch the right side of the page to advance.

There are drawbacks to the tablet. It weighs a lot more so I have to rest it on my leg. The battery life is measured in hours instead of days (or weeks) so I have to plan ahead so I don't end up wanting to read when it needs charged. Fortunately I can simply switch devices and keep reading.

The Nook app for Android has matured a lot in the last six months. Most of my complaints have been resolved. There are still a few issues. If I go from portrait to landscape and back it almost always goes back a page. If I leave the app and come back I have to reopen the book that I was reading.

The Nook Touch could use a few software improvements. Syncing between the devices does not always work. It knows what the current book I am reading is but it makes it difficult to switch between multiple books. The main screen is too busy trying to sell me new books and does not have a history. I have resolved this by having a shelf in my library for current books but that substitutes a manual process for something that should be automatic. The Kindle app does this.

But these are quibbles. With the cost of entry for ebooks dropping, this will keep growing as the preferred medium for reading.

I saw an interesting comment by John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London. Some people complained when ordinary bullets killed his vampire.

When I made this film I remember some guy came up to me and said that at the end of the movie the werewolf is killed with bullets and you can't kill a werewolf with bullets. He went on and on about the fact that you can only kill a werewolf with silver bullets, which struck me as so funny. Because, it's like, 'Really? How many werewolves do you know?'

"Silver bullets specifically come from Curt Siodmak, who was the original screenwriter of The Wolf Man. In one of the sequels he talks about silver bullets being the way of killing werewolves. He talked about where that came from once with me and he said he happened to be listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio and he thought, 'Silver bullets, that's great!' So he made that up. So much of what we accept as folklore and mythology is invented by screenwriters.

In fact, most of what we know about monsters was made up for movies and fiction. Werewolves in myths were never unfortunate creatures who were victims of a curse. They were witches who changed shape with the help of a skin made from wolf or human skin. They changed into an actual wolf in order to inflict evil on their neighbors - things like killing livestock. When caught, their skin was seized and they were burned at the stake.

Bram Stoker made a serious effort at staying true to folklore but there are dozens of vampire myths and they are not consistent. Sometimes the only reason for driving a stake through a Vampire's heart was to pin him in his grave. A vampire had to be back in his grave by dawn and there were ways of keeping him out too late. If you spilled seeds or left a tangled string, he would be distracted tidying things up until dawn. One variety would strip his shroud off when he rose and put it back on when he went back to his grave. If you could find the shroud and hide it he would keep looking for it until it was too late.

Most vampires couldn't turn into other creatures but sometimes their heads were on backwards or they would have books for feet.

Stoker's version of the vampire and the stripped down Hollywood version was the accepted version for decades. It didn't really change until Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire showed that a writer could change the rules. Since then, every writer decides how vampires work. The only constants are their aversion to sunlight and thirst for blood. Now some vampires just sparkle in sunlight instead of dissolving.

Werewolves' makeover came later and the Hollywood idea of werewolves being cursed was never lost. Starting in the 1980s, writers started taking advantage of research on real wolves and making their werewolves act more like the real thing. Before the 1980s werewolves were always solitary. Since the 1990s they are almost always in a pack.

While it is generally accepted that silver bullets hurt werewolves, vampires were not always susceptible. In Love at First Bite, Dracula is shot in the heart with three silver bullets by Dr. Rosenburg. Dracula's response, "No, Rosenberg, that is a werewolf ." As he is being hauled away (for shooting someone in public), Rosenburg says, "No harm done! The man's all right! This was for a werewolf! No problem! Calm down! Take it easy! I'm a doctor! I know where I'm going!" Since then most fiction has vampires affected by silver. It makes a convenient substitute for religious objects in these multicultural times.

Slate has an article on Who Killed 3-D? When they say "killed" they are talking about receipts per screen. A couple of years ago a screen showing 3D saw a significant box office increase over screens showing the same movie in 2D. That has vanished and, in some cased, reversed. This Summer's Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean releases earned less on their 3D showings setting new lows for 3D releases.

So what's going on? Slate offers four suspects: an increase in the 3D premium, a flooded market, pickier customers, and the lowering quality of 3D movies. I think that all of these are factors but there is more to it.

Personally, I am sick of 3D releases. When they first started there was a modest premium and only suitable movies were shown in 3D. As the craze took off, the 3D premium was raised. I have been at some movies where 3D added 40%-50% to the ticket price. Very few movies are worth that extra. We have gotten to the point where we see if we can go to a 2D showing instead of a 3D one. The theaters have anticipated this and adjusted their schedules. The 7:00-8:00 showings which are the most popular are devoid of 2D offerings. So you have a choice - go to a 2D movie at an inconvenient time or pay the 3D surcharge. This means that 3D movies are doing even worse than the statistics would indicate. It might also be keeping people home since the third option is to skip it and wait for the DVD.

Too often 3D adds little or nothing to the movie. We saw Pirates of the Caribbean 4 in 3D. This movie was actually shot in 3D instead of being shot in 2D and converted like Harry Potter. This gives the 3D a more natural look which actually hurts it. Why pay more for 3D if you don't notice it? The movie managed to work in a few swords coming out of the screen. Otherwise the 3D it didn't add much.

I was impressed with the 3D in Captain America. This raises a different question - is it a good thing for the 3D to distract you from the plot? Color movies went through this phase. Through the 1950s, color was considered a distraction. Serious movies were filmed in black and white. You can see echoes of that today. 3D movies are mainly CGI or adventure movies. Part of this is that the process itself is costly so only potential blockbusters are given the treatment. It is cheaper to make a CGI movie in 3D than a live action one so they tend to be 3D.

Horror movies are also being given the 3D treatment. Fright Night was only available in 3D. In fact the full title is "Fright Night 3D". It might as well be called Fight Night Splattervision. Most of the movie takes place in fairly small rooms so the 3D is wasted. The only time it is noticeable is when a vampire dies. That is accompanied with splashed of goop and sparks flying into the audience.

Had the studios and theaters restrained themselves, 3D would have been a small but viable market. Instead, by overpricing and oversupplying, they threaten to eliminate it.

It would be nice if that happened by next Summer's blockbuster season.

Marvel recently put up a batch of early Golden Age comics on the digital site. Reading these got me to thinking about relative power levels.

Superman quickly comes to mind. Ever wonder why someone who flies would ever need to "leap tall buildings in a single bound"? It's because he couldn't fly when that line was written. He could run very fast (faster than a speeding bullet) and leap great distances but he could not fly. That came a few months later. Captain Marvel made the same transition. Early on he needed a space ship to travel to Mars (or Venus - I'm doing this from memory). Later he could make the trip under his own power.

Superman gained some powers along the way. He didn't have heat vision at first but it occurred to someone that strong x-rays heat things. Later writers explained that he actually projected heat from his eyes. Somewhere along the lines he also developed telescopic vision and super hearing. He could even throw his voice to a location hundreds of miles away (through solid objects) using super ventriloquism.

Given the world's strongest lungs, it made sense that he could blow harder than others. This turned into super breath. Superman was able to store huge quantities of air in his lungs and expel it at hurricane force. He could even provide an atmosphere for an earth-like planet with a few trips from a gas giant.

Until I read the Human Torch's early appearances I hadn't realized that he had made the same power gain. In his first few appearances his flames made him lighter than normal which allowed him to ran fast. He could outrun a fast car or a train. But he could not fly. His second appearance was fighting someone with an airplane who kept leaving the Torch behind.

Power levels can go both ways. The Sub-Mariner started out as Timely's strongest (anti-)hero but he got weaker. Eventually there wa a story where he was summoned by Atlantis's Emperor who pointed out that Namor was barely stronger than an ordinary Atlantean. Atlantis's scientists had devised a treatment that returned him to his original strength level.

By the Silver Age, Superman had unlimited power. You name it and he could do it. The same was true for Supergirl and Mon-el. They could move planets or re-light suns. In Superman's world, super-strength was a binary value. You either had it or you didn't. If you had it then it was a waste of time trying to overpower someone else who was super. It would cause too much collateral damage.

Marvel was much more restrained. Originally the Thing could only lift a few tons and falling from a great height would hurt him. He kept getting stronger until the Marvel Universe Handbook topped him out at 80 tons. At the same time he got a lot tougher. You could knock him through several buildings followed by a fall and he would get up again.

The Hulk was always the strongest there was but that didn't mean that much at first. He could be imprisoned in a cave. When they were first created both the original Abomination and the Red Hulk were stronger than the Hulk but both were eventually beaten.

Spider-Man started out pretty strong but seemed to get weaker in the 1970s. It got to the point where a thug with a fancy name (such as Man-Mountain Marco) could give him a fight. A change in writers and artists fixed that and by the 1980s he could hold his own against Mr. Hyde or Firelord. His webbing also got weaker and this was fixed by mixing a stronger batch.

When DC rebooted the DC Universe they weakened Superman. He could be hurt if you hit him hard enough. He needed oxygen. He could no longer fly faster than the speed of light or travel through time. Super ventriloquism was never spoken of again. This lasted for some time but writers kept stretching his powers a bit at a time until he was close to his original power levels.

Some heroes had their power levels changed as plot points. At first Ghost Rider could create solid objects out of flame including his motorcycle. He lost most of those powers and could only project flame. This started increasing again. Apparently it was tied to the strength that his inner demon had. The more control it had the stronger his powers were.

Then there are the heroes whose power levels constantly change. Originally the Dazzler could turn sound into light. She could use this as a light show while performing or she could distract an opponent with it. If she had enough sound she could turn it into a laser. At first she could not store energy so she had to find sources of sound. One time she made Spider-Woman sing (badly) in order to cut them out of a trap. A few issues later she absorbed Klaw who was made of solid sound and gained enough power to be recognized as a peer by Galactus. That changed her and she was able to store sound but she used up the energy she got from Klaw.

With Daredevil, it wasn't enough that he was blind. He kept running into situations that interfered with his radar sense. He got over that around the time he changed from his yellow and black outfit to his red one.

Similarly, Iron Man's transistors kept running down in the middle of a fight. This is one place where a hero gaining power over time makes sense. As technology improved, Iron Man got stronger.

There is an art to keeping heroes weak enough to build suspense. Often a hero got too strong and an artificial weakness had to be introduced. Superman had kryptonite, Thor had to keep hold of his hammer. Green Lantern had to avoid yellow. While these can make an interesting story, they are easy to overuse.

The same is true for villains. A villain may start out as powerful but each time he is defeated he becomes less menacing. The writers in Dr. Who decided to retire the Daleks. They started out as the ultimate killing machines but they have appeared more often than any other Dr. Who villain which means they have been defeated more often. I'll talk about villains later.

Up until the 1960s, comic books seldom had any sort of continuity. Some major events were remembered like the time Lex Luthor saved a planet and the grateful residents renamed it in his honor and made him ruler. For years after that he would occasionally visit. More often, the events of a story were forgotten as with the last panel.

This was partly because of the way that comics worked at the time. Comic book publishers kept an inventory of stories. Since any story could be published at any time, it could not refer to any other story unless it had already been published and was memorable. TV was the same way. The characters in the Superman TV show in the 1950s wore the same clothes in every episode so that they could film multiple episodes at once. Most episodes had a scenes in Clark Kent's office so they could do those scenes for multiple episodes while the set was in place.

Marvel and Stan Lee changed that. Stan and his brother, Larry Lieber, did all of the writing and Marvel didn't have enough money for much inventory so stories were published as soon as they were finished. That meant that events could spill from one issue to the next. At the end of the second issue of the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch quit, feeling that he was not given enough respect. The third issue began with the rest of the team looking for the Torch who returned to the team after accidentally discovering the Sub Mariner. Similarly, the Hulk quit the Avengers at the end of the second issue. In the third issue he joined forced with the Sub Mariner. The fourth issue began with a cameo of the Sub Mariner and the Avengers searching for him.

Continuity in Spider-Man was more subtle but more important because it introduced real time. People remembered events from the previous issue and referred to them as "last month". This included little things like arguments.

Things got more complicated when Stan started accounting for villains and how they returned from their last appearance. Fans started noticing discrepancies. Stan grew tired of complaints and started offering "no prizes" to the fan who came up with the best explanation for a seeming goof (after Stan called the Hulk "Bob Banner" a fan suggested that his full name was "Robert Bruce Banner").

All of this was great for the reader. It gave the impression of a single, seamless "Marvel Universe".

But time passes and things happen. The Marvel Universe stopped running in real time. Otherwise Spider-Man, the Torch, and the X-Men would be in their 60s, Reed, the Thing, and Professor X would be in their 80s, and WWI veteran Dum Dum Dugan would be well voer 100. But slowing the character's aging causes problems with continuity. If Tony Stark is only in his 30s then how could he have been injured in Viet Nam? The Black Widow started as a spy for the Soviet Union which disintegrated more than 20 years ago.

So some events have to be ignored or the continuity has to be retroactively changed (retconned).

A bigger problem is that changes that seemed like a good idea at the time can become a burden later on. Spider-Man's marriage is an example. It seemed like the natural progression of his relationship with Mary Jane but later editors felt that he worked better as a loner. So Mary Jane left and was presumed dead. Then she came back. Then Mephisto changed time so that they never wed in the first place. Except later they remembered their relationship. But no one else remembers that he revealed his identity.

Things were worse at DC. Instead of simply referring to the Golden Age versions of different heroes as being from the past, they invented a parallel universe for them (Earth 2). This would have been a simple curiosity except they started setting stories in Earth 2. This became confusing to new readers (If the Huntress was Batman's daughter why was she a similar age and why did she think her father was dead?). They "solved" this with the Crisis on Multiple Earths limited series. By the end of that, there was only one reality. They spent the next few years trying to tidy up the new continuity. Then they gave up and had another reboot to fix the first one. Rinse and repeat.

Enter The New 52. DC is doing yet another reboot. Decades of continuity is being thrown out the window. Superman is back to being single. Batgirl was never crippled. Other characters will get ethnic make-overs.

I don't really care. I stopped reading DC comics precisely because they do so many reboots. It's too much trouble keeping up with them.

One good thing to come out of this - digital comics will now be available at the same time as print editions. I still subscribe to Marvel's digital comics but their policy is that digital comics lag the print editions by months and series are hit-and-miss on being digitized.

The PC turned 30 a couple of weeks ago but it really took its current form 16 years ago when Microsoft released Windows 95.

Prior to Windows 95, Microsoft sold MS-DOS and Windows separately. Both had some serious competition. DRDOS was as good or better then MS-DOS and IBM's OS/2 was better at Windows. Windows 3.1 was clunky and suffered from some serious limitations. The biggest one was memory. The original IBM PC used a chip that could only address a megabyte and the designers reserved memory above 640k for system calls and hardware mapped interfaces.

By 1995, most games and business software needed more that 640k. There were several ways of getting around this but the were mutually incompatible. It was common to have to use a different boot disk for each game in order to get the memory drivers correct. MS-DOS also suffered from a file system that only allowed short file names - eight characters followed by a dot and a three character suffix.

OS/2 got around these problems and supported superior multi-tasking. And it could run Windows programs.

Windows 95 was years late. There were jokes about Microsoft merging with the Catholic Church in order to gain control of the Gregorian calendar. That would allow them to extend 1995 until Win95 was ready for release.

Microsoft solved the problem of DRDOS by bundling MS-DOS and Windows and claiming that they were inseparable. Actually, the PC still loaded DOS then loaded Windows but the process was seamless. Other features were much more important. Win95 had a new interface, the basis of the one still used in Windows 7. It allowed long file names. It had a built-in memory manager which would emulate the main alternatives so nearly anything would run on it.

It also had basic networking built in which was something that OS/2 did not have. Overnight OS/2 became irrelevant. If you wanted to connect to other computers you had needed Win95.

This also became the high-water mark for Microsoft's market dominance. Prior to Win95, most people used 3rd party programs like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. There was some question about these running on Win95 and most analysts recommended switching to Microsoft Office. Within a couple of years the previous market leaders were gone.

At the same time that Win95 came out the public suddenly became aware of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Win95 could handle these out of the box although Win98 did a much better job.

While a big improvement over previous versions, Win95 had some serious limitations. It did not have real multitasking and its security was a joke. Microsoft solved some of these problems with Windows NT but that platform did not have the performance for games and CDs. Windows XP married the two platforms in their most successful product to date.

A new Conan movie comes out this week. I don't have high expectations for it. August releases are often second-rate movies that are dumped at the end of the Summer. More important, the character as created by Robert E. Howard is difficult to translate to other media.

I read all of Howard's Conan stories as well as most of his other works in my teens and 20s. This summer I reread Red Nails and some of Howard's Solomon Kane stories so I am up on the material.

Howard is credited with inventing the Sword and Sorcery genre. He saw it as a precursor to the modern world filled with archetypes. Even though it took place thousands of years ago, it was still an old world. Atlantis had risen and fallen well before Conan's time. Other horrors had populated the world before the rise of humanity and some of them were still lurking in the shadows. Howard often corresponded with H. P. Lovecraft and incorporated some of the same otherworldly monsters in his fiction.

Conan himself is a complex character. Howard saw him as the embodiment of vitality, untamed by civilization. He was bigger, stronger, and faster than civilized men. His senses were sharper and his mind keener. He was a master of languages although he spoke most with an accent. He was a born leader. He was amoral but trustworthy (for the most part). If you hired him he would put his life on the line for you but he would kill you in an instant if you betrayed him.

Conan was not always the central character of the story. Red Nails, the last story written, features Valeria, a female pirate, more than Conan. This is a classic Howard story with a lost city peopled with a dying race who stole the city from its builders but do not know all of its secrets. Everyone betrays everyone and Conan and Valeria are the only survivors.

The character was briefly popular during the days of the pulp. In the 1960s, Howard's stories were resurrected and collected into a series of paperbacks. In addition to this, story fragments were finished and non-Conan stories were altered to fill out around a dozen books. They were very popular.

Because of the popularity of the books, Marvel Comics bought the rights and began a long, successful series of Conan comics. It started slow. British artist, Barry Smith, was selected on the basis of a sword and sorcery horror story he had drawn. At first his art was uninspiring. He quickly grew as an artist. Smith left the book after a few issues but came back almost immediately. His return marked the full flowering of his talent. He had been inspired by the pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century. Their focus on Arthurian themes worked perfectly with Conan and Smith became a fan favorite.

He eventually left for the more lucrative field of limited edition art and was replaced by John Buscema. Buscema's first issue began with an adaptation of a King Kull story so Conan didn't appear until ten pages into the book. While Buscema's version of the character looked quite different from Smith's, he was instantly recognizable. The first time I read that comic I was two pages past Conan's first panel before I notices how different he looked.

Coupled with various inkers from the Philippines, Buscema became a fan favorite on his own.

Marvel was trying to expand into the more adult-oriented black and white tabloid comics and Conan began appearing in both formats (plus some over-size reprints of the Smith comics).

Roy Thomas wrote all of Conan's appearances. He was a huge fan of Howard and some of his adaptations were excellent. Thomas's original works were less successful. In the stories, Conan never had a sidekick. At most, he got the girl at the end but there was never any long-term commitment.

Thomas felt more comfortable introducing various supporting characters. Some of them came from Howard's stories. Most were either implied or original. This made story-telling easier but the stories lost Howard's feel. Also, as time went on, Thomas began over-writing his stories. He often felt the need to add a dialog box where none was needed or to have a character explain a plot twist. There was also the problem of creating new challenges for Conan. After you have killed a dozen wizards in a year, what do you do next year?

By the mid-1970s the Conan craze had faded. Marvel shut down its black and white line. Thomas and Buscema left the strip and it declined.

The most lasting contribution from the Roy Thomas Barry Smith days was Red Sonia. This was adapted from a non-Conan story set during the early 16th century. This featured a Conan-style character and Red Sonja (with a "j"), a military commander. Sonia originally wore a full mail shirt over average breasts but the character was later given a scale mail bikini and more generous cleavage.

The big screen version of Conan tried to be memorable by lifting the most memorable scenes from Howard's stories. These included Conan killing a vulture with his teeth while being crucified and a slain lover appearing long enough to save him. Since The Empire Strikes Back had just come out, they also threw in James Earl Jones telling Conan, "You are my son." The action was slow and the movie is not very good. The sequel is faster moving with a plot by Roy Thomas but is generally inferior to the first movie or the stories.

The character has been revived in comics a few times but was never the hit that it was in the 1960s and early 1970s. A syndicated Conan series was produced for a while. I only saw a few episodes. They were not memorable.

Which brings us to the new movie. The first review I saw panned it and the trailers do not resemble anything Howard wrote. Interested parties would probably be better off watching The Scorpion King again.

The Disney Channel is showing Beauty and the Beast in preparation for its release on Blu-ray. The movie will be 20 years old this November.

It holds up well as befits its status as one of Disney's most important movies. Who Framed Roger Rabbit renewed interest in classic animation and roved that Disney could still do it. The Little Mermaid proved that they could produce a hand-animated movie as good as the classics done under Walt himself but its audience was still limited to kids and their parents. Beauty and the Beast changed that. It made many critics' best list for 1991 and it was the first animated movie to get a best picture nomination. It won several other best picture awards. Eventually it was made into a Broadway play with the 8th longest run on record.

It made a lot of money. It was followed by Aladdin and the Lion King. These made even more money. In-between, Disney rereleased some of their classics like Snow White. Suddenly it was ok for adults to see an inimated movie, even without kids in tow.

Of course it didn't last. Disney ran out of fairy tales and the Disney spin didn't work as well with other properties. The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas took liberties with classic literature and history. Hercules and The Emperor's New Grove went with a more cartoonish look. Their reinterpretation of Tarzan as a confused adolescent marked the end of Disney's revival. The movies went from sure-fire blockbusters to risks. The animators unionized, raising the cost of production.

At the same time, the adult market for animated movies migrated to CGI.

Ironically, one of Beauty's most memorable scene, the ballroom dance, was CGI as were some of the dancing silverware.

In some ways CGI has left me jaded. I know that Beauty was a marvel of animation but it no longer looks like it. Hand-drawn background just can't compare to CGI ones. The recent Disney release, Tangled, was a nice throw-back to the hand-animated look but it was CGI and far more detailed.

We are seeing the first views of the new Spider-Man and Superman movies. So far I'm not impressed. I was half-way through the Spider-Man trailer before I realized that it wasn't for some new Twilight take-off (or possibly it was). In the comics and the original movie, Peter Parker was always a likable nerd with bad luck. The new movie seems to be remaking him into a misunderstood heart-throb.

Over at Marvel, they have killed Peter Parker and replaced him with someone else. Again!!! This plot device was over-used by the time they brought back the Spider-Clone. I can't believe that they are doing it again. Not that it matters to me. I stopped caring about the character after they erased 30+ years of continuity. The Peter Parker they killed isn't "my" Peter Parker. He is a creation of Mephisto.

It doesn't matter what the ethnicity is of Peter's replacement. They will bring Peter back by the time the movie comes out.

Wired has a first look at the new Superman. I notice that he is in another textured rubber costume. I assume that they do this because it is easier to reproduce digitally.

The last Superman reboot left such a bad taste that I don't have much interest in this one. When I think of a Superman movie I now think of the bullet-in-the-eye, torturing dogs, Superman-as-Christ, Superman-as-stalker/rapist, and "Truth, Justice, and all that."

I haven't bothered looking things up. This is just my personal recollections abut Cap in the comics.

The Silver Age of comics is usually defined as beginning when the Flash was created as a new character but inspired by the Golden Age version. He was followed by Green Lantern and some others. All of these were published by DC but Timely Comics decided to follow DC's lead. At the same time they changed their name to Marvel Comics.

Marvel's first creation, the Fantastic Four, included a Silver Age version of the Human Torch. By the third issue of the FF, the Sub-Mariner had been introduced but, in this case, it was the original character instead of a new version.

It didn't take Stan Lee long to test the waters for bringing back the third of Timely's big three heroes. Captain America made a guest appearance in the Human Torch's solo strip. As it turned out, it wasn't the real Cap, just an acrobat using Cap's identity to get close to a car that he wanted to steal.

The real Captain America finally appeared in Avengers #4 when the Sub-Mariner chanced on some Eskimos worshiping a figure frozen in ice. The Sub-Mariner threw a temper tantrum and tossed the figure into the ocean where it drifted south and began melting. It was found by the Avengers who were hunting the Sub-Mariner. The figure was, of course, Captain America, who had been in suspended animation until the heat of the Avengers' submarine thawed him out.

Cap joined the Avengers and became the leader a couple of years later when the founding members quit. Cap also received a solo strip, sharing Tales of Suspense with Iron Man.

Cap made a guest appearance in an early issue of Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. This was also the first real appearance of his side-kick, Bucky. Stan Lee hated side-kicks so Bucky died in the same event that froze Cap.

When Cap first appeared, Iron Man added some gimmicks to his shield so that it returned automatically. He could even control its flight. This only lasted a couple of issues. Cap explained that he threw that stuff out because it ruined the shield's balance.

At first Cap struggled to find a direction. In his first few appearances he fought groups of criminals. This was followed by an origin issue and a return to WWII (complete with Bucky).

The strip returned to the present with Cap realizing that it was the anniversary of the Red Skull's death. Sure enough, some of the Skull's agents activated the Sleepers - three robots that were designed to destroy the world. Obviously, Cap stopped them.

It eventually turned out that the Skull had also been preserved in suspended animation. Just think of the irony if his Sleepers had succeeded in avenging his death when he hadn't actually died.

Cap began running into a SHIELD agent called Agent X who reminded him of his lost love, Peggy Carter. She eventually turned out to be Peggy's sister Sharon.

After Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD was canceled, the whole organization moved in with Cap for a while with Cap taking the unofficial role of special troubleshooter.

At one point Rick Jones became the new Bucky in a few issues done by Jim Steranko. Stan still didn't like teen side-kicks and dropped Rick as soon as he took over the writing again.

The Cosmic Cube began in Captain America. It was created by AIM (Advanced Idea Mechanics) but the Red Skull managed to get it a couple of times. The second time he used it to exchange bodies with Captain America. Then he watched Cap run from the police and some ex-Nazis who had a grudge against the Skull. Along the way Cap ran into Sam Wilson and convinced him to become a super hero - the Falcon. At first the Falcon was just an acrobat with a trained falcon but later his costume was redesigned so that he could fly.

The book became an official team-up between Cap and the Falcon. Sharon Carter was the unofficial third member of the partnership.

Stan finally left the comic for good. Steve Englehart took over and answered the burning question of who was the Captain America during the 1950s? (Actually, I think that Roy Thomas was the only one who really cared. Thomas spent years working out the exact chronology of who wore the Captain America costume when.) It turned out that the government used a new version of the Super Soldier Serum to create a new Captain America and Bucky during the 1950s. The serum was defective and they became irrational so the government put them in suspended animation until the 1970s.)

Englehart made some significant changes to the characters. At some point Cap's identity as Steve Rogers had become public so he adopted the identity of Roger Stevens and got a job with the NYCPD. He also gained mild super strength (Englehart insisted that he was returning Cap to his original levels).

The most significant event came when Cap and the Falcon foiled an attempt by President Nixon to take over the country. Cap resigned as Captain America and became the Nomad (the 1950s Bucky later took this role). There was a sub-plot with various people attempting to take Rogers's place as Captain America and failing. Eventually Steve Rogers returned to the role.

The Red Skull captured the Falcon and revealed that he was really "Snap Wilson", a petty criminal. The Skull had given Snap a new personality when he had the Cosmic Cube. Honestly, I'm not sure how this was resolved.

Jack Kirby returned to Marvel and took over Captain America as writer/artist. The Falcon was dropped along with the Snap Wilson plotline. Sharon Carter vanished (even though she was a Kirby creation) and Cap's strength returned to normal. Kirby didn't stay long.

In the late 1970s, writers were figuring out what made Captain America unique. In the Avengers, Jim Shooter defined him as the hero who would never give up. Other writers added that he was the one man who would fight for dreams. By the early 1980s, Cap had changed from an acrobat wrapped in a flag to a real symbol.

After a stint with writer J. M. Dematties which I didn't care for, Cap came into his own. Publication was increased from monthly to fifteen issues per year with biweekly issues during the Summer. This was a very productive time with writer Mark Gruenwald writing the comic from 1985-1995. DeMatties had killed off the Red Skull but Gruenwald brought him back in a body cloned from Steve Rogers. He also invented Crossbones, the Skull's principle agent (get it: Skull and Crossbones?).

Sharon Carter disappeared and was presumed dead so Cap began a relationship with Diamondback, a reformed criminal.

In one of the Summer story arches, some drugs bonded with Cap's blood, making him perpetually angry. The only cure was a complete blood transfusion. This meant that Cap tied at a normal rate.

In one plot that now seems trite, someone in the White House discovered that the government owned the trademark to "Captain America". They informed Cap that he would be answerable to them. Instead he resigned and began calling himself "The Captain" and carrying a silver shield provided by Tony Stark. A new Captain America was recruited. Eventually President Reagan found out what was going on and ordered the Captain America identity be returned to Steve Rogers. (In an issue of the Avengers, an alien erased all knowledge of Captain America's secret identity.)

Cap also lost his shield for a while. It dropped into the Atlantic.

Eventually his Super Soldier enhancements began to break down and Cap started to die. Tony Stark provided a version of his Iron Man armor to provide life support but Cap eventually died.

He got over it, of course and was reunited with Sharon Carter who was peeved that he forgot all about her for a decade. They fought the Red Skull who had gotten the Cosmic Cube for the third time.

This incarnation lasted five or six years before Cap died again. This time he was blown up. He returned, of course.

Marvel's cross-continuity event, the Civil War, starred Captain America as the leader of the forces that resisted registering with the government. At the end of the war he was killed again, this time by a brainwashed Sharon Carter.

For decades there were only a few constants in the Marvel Universe. The biggest one was that Bucky died. That was finally reversed. It turned out that he was saved by the USSR, given cyborg parts, and kept frozen until they needed him to kill someone. He became the new Captain America.

Steve Rogers was brought to life, yet again and currently heads SHIELD.