bits of stuff to read

I try not to only read just serious stuff and I recently finished a trade paperback of Paul Dini's work on Detective. Yep, in case I hadn't mentioned this anywhere else I'm a Batman fan. I've got all the cartoons for the DC animated universe and while I'm not much of a TV or movie watcher lately I still pop in an episode or two now and then and still like to read a comic book once in a while. My brother recently got me the first three volumes of one of my favorite comic book titltes ever, Maison Ikkoku. See, after about ten years of absorbing Kafka, Dostoesky, Didion, Conrad, and other "serious" authors I finally hit a point where I wanted something that was the complete opposite of that stuff and a fizzy romantic comedy comic book by a Japanese woman is about as opposite as you can get from serious, earnest dead white guys from Eastern Europe!

Hanging out on web forums is interested, sort of. It gives you a chance to see how nostalgia can be unfettered by any sense of proportioning reason. Take a super-geek point of reference, worries that Michael Bay's new Transformers movie is going to disrespect the source material. I just dont see that happening, not because I'm convinced Michael Bay is a great cinematic auteur (or that the auteur explanation holds up in the end) but because I do not have a particular childhood fondness for the original cartoon unqualified by all other ordinary characteristics about being an adult male in his 30s. I mean, yeah, I've got a lot of cartoons but the cartoons are all cartoons I bought after seeing them as an adult and liking them as an adult. I have not bought things exclusively for the reason that I liked the cartoons as a kid and therefore had to be able to show any possible future kids what I grew up watching. Not that people can't do THAT, of course, but the more I see on-line debates suggesting that Bay is going to destroy the potential subtlety and nuance of Transformers or miss how the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons serve as a metaphor for our own battles about energy resources and the environment ...

Sorry guys (and I know most of you ARE guys) but that is a childishly simplistic explanation that ignores the fact that if the ecological motiff is really the thrust of the show why are the good guys a bunch of old vehicles that hog gas while the bad guys are jets. Are the good guys good guys only because they have lower carbon emissions relative to the bad guys? Not saying you can't like the cartoon after all this time but I'm just saying ripping on Bay for being Bay is not going to make the premise of Transformers any more profound than it already is ... which is to say not at all.

Hmm, how did I ... oh, yeah, from one comic book story to a cartoon.