Luthor, you poisonous snake!

If you think wrapping my hand in a plastic baggie is going to stop me from mopping up the floor with you and your henchmen then soaring into space and causing the Earth to rotate backwards, thereby reversing time and allowing me to stop your warped real estate scheme and save Lois Lane, you're sadly mistaken!

The Hot Toys Superman figure is the most fun thing ever created.  Well, one of the most fun things.  Okay, so it isn't quite up to the level of amusement parks or family vacations to amusement parks or kissing your partner on the ferris wheel at an amusement park, but it does have its charms.

I wish I had a Muhammad Ali action figure to go with him to recreate the classic Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali cover, minus all the other celebrities.  I know there's a statue, but I already have half the equation.  Acceptable alternatives include figures of Gene Hackman and Ned Beatty as Lex Luthor and Otis, respectively, or an Adam West Batman.  The various Christian Bale Batman and the Michael Keaton Batman figures from Hot Toys are impressive as well.  You know, a Tobey Maguire Spider-Man wouldn't be half bad, either.  And a Lynda Carter Wonder Woman.  Lemme think about this and get back to you.

What a super weekend!

I watched Superman the Movie, the 1978 big screen epic starring Christopher Reeve as Superman and also received a couple of fun little items.  One is the trade paperback collection Superman: the Greatest Stories Ever Told and the other is the Hot Toys Superman the Movie 1/6th scale Christopher Reeve as Superman action figure.

The book has a nice Alex Ross cover featuring his version of Superman looking stern and appropriately heroic, spit curl, narrowed eyes, lantern jaw, big red and yellow emblem on his chest.  The stories inside feature a wide array of writers and artists, but a more appropriate title is Superman: Some Pretty Good Stories.  Alongside the origin story from Superman #1 (June 1939) and the John Byrne revamp "The Man of Steel" from The Man of Steel #1 (June 1986) there are some curiosities like the 1940 short story "What If Superman Ended the War?" written and drawn by Superman creators Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster for  Look Magazine and an otherworldly pin-up by none other than Moebius himself.  It's amusing to see the rudimentary yet compelling storytelling of Simon and Shuster as they pit Superman against the real world menace of both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.  All it takes is a quick trip to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and Superman deposits both dictators in Geneva, Switzerland where they're judged for crimes against humanity and the world enters a utopian age of peace and scientific progress...

"Must There Be a Superman?" by Elliot S. Maggin explains why such a scenario probably wouldn't have occurred.  In this story, reprinted from Superman #247 (January 1972), the Guardians of the Universe save Superman's life in deep space then perform a kind of brain washing on him to make him question his stunting effect on human evolution.  This story comes closest to being "great," an interesting attempt at answering a question the question posed in its title.  Should Superman solve everyone's problems?  And if so, would that set back our advancement?  It's illustrated by the legendary art team of Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson and it's a marvel of old school storytelling-- heroic anatomy that isn't overly exaggerated, easy to follow layouts and migrant workers shouting, "VIVA SUPERMAN!" as he rebuilds their shacks like a one man slightly-slower-than-lightspeed Habitat for Humanity.

My second favorite is Byrne's story borrows a few bits from classic Superman comic book lore, a little from the first movie and presents a sci-fi reworking of the planet Krypton into a barren world that looks like Monument Valley painted a sickly green, where its completely hairless population live without concepts such as love and react with shock at the sight of raw, shirtless Kansas farmhands via some kind of holography device.  Always one of comics' keenest minds for explaining away the ludicrous, Byrne invents a Clark Kent who didn't come into his powers all at once-- lest he rip his adopted parents apart and perform who knows what other horrors a la Rick Veitch's The Maximortal-- and uses body language and actor's tricks to convince people he isn't his charismatic alter ego.  Byrne's artwork looks like he's doing his best Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez impression-- very DC merchandising style, but with the characteristic Byrne cross-hatching and keen story sense.  There's a poignant moment where Clark, having performed his first miracle, broods in the dark of his boyhood bedroom after finding the resultant media scrutiny terrifying.  Byrne locates both the god and the man inside the superhero, but the story suffers from too much condensing.  We'd like to linger a bit, but Byrne disposes of entire reams of Superman legend in just a few pages-- and a lot of this stuff would be ripped off later in Lois & Clark:  The New Adventures of Superman and Superman Returns.  Not too shabby, Mr. Byrne.

I wasn't all that impressed with "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way," though.  The late, unlamented Wizard Magazine declared it the greatest Superman story ever, but apart from its central conceit-- quaint ol' Superman versus the British Invasion of smart but cynical and thoroughly dark characters, and by extension, the whole aesthetic of their writers-- but it's too choppy and fragmented.  The Elite just come out of nowhere with little build up and as a result, there's no rising suspense before the final confrontation.  Even the manner in which Superman defeats the Elite is left a little unclear, as if writer Kelly glossed over it because he was so entranced with the philosophical confrontation he never got around to working out the actual plot points.  In fact, he's way too oblique throughout most of the story and sacrifices impact.  He's not helped by some incredibly ugly art.  Some contrast between a Curt Swan-type Superman and some Frank Quitely/Steve Dillon-style enemies would have reiterated and reinforced the story's theme, but no such luck.  The pages look murky and unfinished.  You can't even tell what's happening half the time.  Someone apparently explodes at one point, but it's so awkwardly composed with the person's head partially cropped by another panel-- I suppose to direct our attention to the characters commenting on it in an oblique, nonsensical fashion who, for some reason, the artist has relegated to the background-- you wish it had just happened off panel and we'd only seen the reaction shots with a bit more explicit dialogue.  Speaking of which, Superman's final speech to a blubbering Manchester Black doesn't deliver the goods.  Sorry.

To be fair, I didn't read this story when it first came out in Action Comics #775 way back in 2001 and in the years since we've had rapes and murders, Identity Crisis making the regular rank-and-file of DC's caped marvels almost as nasty as the Elite are supposed to be and Wonder Dog devouring Wendy, so maybe I'm just jaded, so beaten down by the banality of all this caped decadence I can no longer feel Kelly's intended impact.  You really want a Superman who's a beacon of restraint and decency, and Kelly attempts to give that to us while scoring points off guys like Warren Ellis-- who's actually a damn fine writer-- and even DC's own Vertigo line, but when you turn all your heroes morally ambiguous and then pat yourself on the back for it, ironically it turns out Superman won the battle but lost the war.  This Superman doesn't even exist anymore.

There are some Silver Age amusements to be had, with Al Plastino well represented but Wayne Boring unfortunately absent.  And where's Bizarro?  They couldn't find an excuse to include even one single Bizarro story? Well, I guess one shouldn't complain too much when Jim Steranko and Mike Mignola make appearances.

Even at their best, none of these stories approach the magic of Superman the Movie, a relic of time when movie makers told stories.  The Hot Toys Superman is every bit as fun as the movie itself.  It doesn't scream "I'm from the 70s!" at you, though.  They've accurately reproduced Christopher Reeve from the movie and managed to create a timeless image of the first and still greatest of all the super-people.

But it's a little scary, too.  I showed it to my girlfriend via Skype and she freaked out over the eyes.  Too intense, too real.  The Reeve likeness is as close to perfect as you're likely to get, but it's got the same uncanny valley feel you'd expect to encounter in a Hollywood wax museum.  The uniform is spot on, a tiny reproduction of what was already an iconic visual-- the classic blue suit with red cape, undies and yellow highlights.  I paid a ridiculous amount of money for this figure but I had to have it.  I've been looking for the best representation of Superman in toy form for the past few years.  This is it.  By Jor-El's shade, this is it!  I also believe Reeve's performance as Superman to be the most perfect iteration of the character in any medium and this figure is a triumphant celebration of the role.  Part of the proceeds go to Reeeve's charitable organization, the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, and the interior box lid features a poignant dedication to Reeve.

Conan the Barbarian #1 and #2: a comic review!

Conan the Barbarian #1 and #2
Publisher:  Dark Horse
Script:  Brian Wood
Art:  Becky Cloonan
Colors:  Dave Stewart

 Conan gets run out of town and signs on as bodyguard for the merchant crew of a small trading galley.  Well, he actually bullies his way into the job to save his own skin.  It doesn't take the young barbarian long to befriend his sailing companions, especially Tito, their boss, but there's troubled waters ahead.  The pirate queen Belit haunts these waters and Conan's dreams.  One day Conan, Tito and the other sailors sight black sails on the horizon and two who were destined to meet join battle on the open waves.  And so scripter Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan open this new Conan series from Dark Horse, called, cleverly enough, Conan the Barbarian.  They're adapting Robert E. Howard's "Queen of the Black Coast" into comic book perfection.

To continue this nautical theme, there's a typhoon headed our way here in Japan.  We're sending our kids home early because many of them have to take buses and trains to outlying communities along the coast.  If we didn't, and the winds and rains lash us hard enough, these kids would be spending the night here at the school or at the train station.  And w would be in a lot of trouble.  And what thrills me almost as much as the darkening skies and quickening winds and an afternoon that looks suddenly like twilight?

Becky Cloonan's arwork!  I have to admit I'm partial to this kind of expressionistic linework a la Guy Davis, Paul Pope, Joe Kubert.  But it's not simply personal preference for a particular drawing quality or style.  Rendering style aside, Cloonan shocks me with how boldly inventive she is in visualizing her action sequences.  In the second issue, Conan jumps from a ship and kills a couple of pirates underwater.  Cloonan pulls back from the the aftermath into the watery depths to give readers a glimpse of couple of sharks looming for a quick and easy meal.  Truly gruesome!

This she follows with two bravura pages where Conan surfaces then cuts his way through some almost inhuman pirates.  Cloonan uses stacks of skewed wide panels for a dizzying effect, emphasizing movement then freezes time at the climactic moment with a full-page splash.  Why do so many artists refuse to take full advantage of these tricks, rather than relying on static, "widescreen" layouts with inset panels for close-ups and splashes seemingly at random just to show off their detail work?

Cloonan also excels at acting.  This is how you make your characters really live in breathe within your story.  She doesn't rely on stock poses and her characters never have the same expression from panel to panel.  Her young but scarred Conan looks back over his shoulder at his pursuers early in the story and there's a look of pure enjoyment on his face.  Later, he and Tito share more sober quiet moments, and they look at each other with manly seriousness.  Belit, however, is something else entirely.  More on her in a moment!

As strong as Cloonan’s art is, she’s working from a ripping script by Brian Wood.  I’ve enjoyed Wood’s work on DMZ, at least until I finally lost the narrative thread of the strong early issues, but I was so caught up in this Conan yarn I almost forgot he was the same guy.  From a war-torn New York City to the pre-historic Hyborian Age?  Quite the reach this Wood fella has.  And he’s not intimidated by the material.  He’s done no straight lift from Howard’s original, preserving it to the detriment of surprises and fun.  Because of Belit’s supposed significance in Conan’s life—as near as I can tell, she’s the only woman he ever fell truly in love with, although he slept with hundreds, virile barbarian was he—Wood introduces the idea of her earlier than in the short story and gives Conan a foreshadowing dream that appears nowhere in Howard. 

I’ll have to give Wood the benefit of the doubt when he waxes philosophically about war-time archery.  That’s not from Howard, either, but then Howard’s sea battle—while descriptive—is truncated compared to the wild fight found in the comic.  That’s some snazzy expansionist stuff, Wood taking an adapter’s liberty with the material and actually doing Howard one better.  Certainly when you adapt, you change and if you change, by all means you try to improve on your source.  Of course, it helps that Wood has some of Howard’s meatiest prose to build from, and, again, the unforgettable Belit.

Belit isn’t unique, at least in Howard’s work.  A little Internet digging turns up references to others and an image of paperback with the unfortunately generic title Sword Woman.  She's not even the only female pirate to cross Conan's path.  There's also Valeria from "Red Nails," but she's not a patch on Belit.

I’m not about to dig to see if Belit was the first of Howard’s warrior women, but she’s certainly—especially as envisioned by Wood and Cloonan—the fiercest of any I’ve encountered in years of reading Conan stories, including the previous adaptation of this particular one by Roy Thomas, Mike Ploog and John Buscema.  Howard had a tragic fixation on his mother, but I’m not about to engage in pop psychoanalysis.  He created at least two swordswomen—or, if you prefer “sword women”-- for other stories, one of which Thomas transfigured into Red Sonja while imposing some retrograde sexism on her origins and abilities, but I’m not about to make a case for Howard as an early feminist or 1930s Texas version of Joss Whedon.  He wrote this stuff for money, characters had to fit audience demands as interpreted by the editors buying the stories for publication.  Despite the often tossed-off nature and even the racist strains that unfortunately run through the original short story and more than a few of his others, Howard repeatedly shows his knack for making up compelling characters that elevate his better stories above those of his peers or consideration as mere hackwork.  


Whatever inspired Belit, wherever she came from in Howard’s imagination, thanks to the gang at Dark Horse, she prowls the seas again as one of Conan’s most formidable lovers, with a vitality and complexity that’s largely to Howard’s credit as a writer.  And this fresh take by Wood and Cloonan makes the Marvel version do a quick fade for her own safety’s sake.  According to the Conan Wiki, Conan and Belit spend “1000 days” together.  Howard telescopes that into a couple of short paragraphs limned in legendary language.  Poul Anderson also gave Belit completely detailed and completely extraneous backstory with the obligatory “out for revenge after a rape” cliché that I could have, in all honesty, done without.  That trope is moldy now and it was probably pretty moldy when Anderson slapped it on Belit with Howard too dead to protest. 

We all know action men seek vengeance for the murders of their girlfriends, their wives, their families, their soon-to-retire partners on the police force.  Action women go through arranged marriages and then get raped.  Alan Moore’s use of rape as an inciting element in an action woman’s life reaches its apogee League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 1910 with the whole Jenny Diver/Pirate Jenny section.  I wouldn’t have cared if Pirate Jenny/Janni killed all those people simply because they were drunk assholes.  Whether or not she would be justified is beside the point because as Captain Nemo’s daughter she had it in her anyway.  Her inspiration, Berthold Brecht’s Jenny Diver, certainly dreamed about it enough without having been raped.  Or maybe it was Polly Peachum.  Whoever.  Howard didn’t see fit to introduce it into this story and hopefully, if he decides to flesh out Belit’s past, Wood will leave it out as well. 

In fact, let’s all agree to retire this bullshit forever already.  In my mind, Belit grew up wild and untamed—holy terror of her hometown, scared her parents and playmates half to death on a daily basis-- and when she was ready, she left home to explore the world because she’s a hot-blooded seeker of wealth and adventure.  Everyone was glad to see the back of her and they still have nightmares she’s going to show up at the door one stormy night with a severed head in every hand.  If it’s good enough for Conan, it ought to be good enough for Belit.  I have no idea if Howard put much thought, or any at all, into Belit’s backstory.  When you read the story or this comic, you see he just throws her at Conan at a time when she’s already a mythic figure, a near-goddess to her crew.  She sees Conan has a hot bod and likes to kill—he’s damn good at it, in fact—so she does her mating dance, and off they go!

John Milius and Oliver Stone would later loot then soften elements of Belit’s personality and ultimate fate for the character Valeria in the Arnold Schwarzeneggar-starring Conan the Barbarian.  While Sandahl Bergman cuts a dashing figure in that movie and steals scene after scene from the stolid Schwarzeneggar, she’s more a late 70s/early 80s southern California surfer-girl hedonist than untamed pirate queen.  Better Howard’s fully-formed Belit with her rage, her greed, and her lust for life, a singular figure flashing in and out of Conan’s life, the one Wood and Cloonan present in their Conan the Barbarian.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to educate myself on Becky Cloonan's comic book career.  That is, if this typhoon doesn't blow me to Crom's mountain first.*

*Written during Typhoon Guchol, which I seem to have survived.

I love me some Kuberts!

Amy Kuperinsky profiles legendary comic book artist Joe Kubert and his talented son Andy for the Star/Ledger-- an online news aggregator?-- with a name-check for Adam.  I'm shocked Andy and Adam are in their 50s.  I really thought they were younger for some reason.  But I should have known or guessed.  Both sons are seasoned pros with huge bodies of work.  I've just telescoped their careers because time really does fly.

My inability to understand chronology aside, there aren't any big revelations in the story.  Joe Kubert is one of the all-time greats, his sons adore him as a father and an artist, they have a school that's graduated a number of highly-thought of professionals in its almost 40 years of operation.  It's nice to read about a family that does comics together and it comes with a nice slide show, however.

Joe Kubert's garnered praise and awards throughout his long career, but even so as a comic book fan-- especially one who appreciates the old guard, the prime movers, the influences-- I feel any time of the day is the right time to think about him and the thousands of amazing pages he's drawn.  That he's in his mid-80s and still doing vital work is a wonder.  Most artists rise, peak and then decline, but Joe Kubert's charted his own curve that seems to have plateaued at a nose-bleed inducing level and just stayed there, decade in and decade out.  Not many artists get even a rocky little spike to that altitude of greatness and there sits Joe Kubert, a kind of mountain range unto himself.  Appreciate him and feel lucky we've been able to enjoy the view for so long.

The Kubert Mountains.  I thought to scale them when I was a kid copying his Sgt. Rock covers with a yellow #2 pencil into my school notebook.  I got about halfway up one of the foothills before pooping out.

How to do horror magazine covers the right way!

Now that I'm on a 70s horror jag again and because I damaged our imaginations with that Classic Horror Tales monstrosity-- so bad it looks like something I'd do as a joke-- I think it's only fair to share some truly beautiful covers.  I found a neat-o post at Retrospace about Skywald's entries into what soon became a glutted field (thanks to Marvel, who loved to flood markets and squeeze out other publishers).

Skywald never penetrated our market as far as I know because all of these are completely new to me.  Psycho?  I guess if you can have a Creepy or an Eerie, you might as well go whole hog with a Psycho.  It's as though Warren's books promised something slightly off, like that one guy at the comic shop who awkwardly starts a conversation with you but then won't shut up and he's trembling slightly the whole time and won't make eye contact, while Skywald's offerings were more like the guy running around downtown butt-naked who eventually got tazed to death by the cops.  While they're strongly reminiscent of Marvel's B&W line, Skywald's covers have the gothy cheesecake of contemporaneous Warren books along with similar eye-catching gore-- including one called Scream with what appears to be Peter Cushing after having part of his face ripped off in an auto accident.  Because ordinary Peter Cushing just wasn't scary enough.  Behind our disfigured Cushing a woman in a torn negligee looks on in dismay.

"You promised you'd stop fondling skulls after our honeymoon," she seems to be thinking.  It's upset her enough she's about to write Dan Savage who will advise her to "dump the motherfucker already."  She's been GGG enough but Cushing has an obligation to meet her needs, too.

Anyway, that's how you do horror magazine covers.  Your typography can be garish as all get-out, but your illustrations must have strong, uncluttered, well-balanced compositions.  You've got rotten corpses and semi-nude bodies galore, but they're pretty rotten corpses and pretty semi-nude bodies.  I want to read these.  Classic Horror Tales just makes my head hurt.

Give Me Back My Brain!

Since I was an over-imaginative extra-sensitive wuss of a kid, my parents rarely let me have B&W horror magazines.  After all, even a single panel from a Marvel/Curtis Planet of the Apes could give me a screaming fit at bedtime for two or three nights running.  Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced their objection was mostly about the price tag.  My parents were, for lack of a better word, cheapskates and 75 cents was a ridiculous amount to pay for a funny book, magazine sized or not.  On the other hand, my mom never practiced literary censorship in the home.  I read John Irving's World According to Garp with its descriptions of masturbation and marital infidelity before I was old enough to masturbate or get married-- remember, I grew up in the Deep South-- myself.

The kid across the alley, on the other hand, had stacks of B&W mags.  All those Marvel zombie and Exorcist-inspired stories, the science-fiction ones, the kung-fu ones.  Every once in a while when we weren't playing with Hot Wheels cars or plastic army men, we'd have a reading session and out would come the financially forbidden magazines of doom and I'd give into the feelings of curiosity inspired by the invariably lurid cover paintings.  I vaguely remember something about astronauts trying to land on Venus and ending up on the sun only to suffocate to death, a story of claustrophobic and apocalyptic despair that depressed me all afternoon.

The one that really scared me, though, was something called "Give Me Back My Brain!"  The plot is your standard EC zombie comeuppance tale.  I think it'ss about some jerky doctor type who removes another guy's brain for reasons I no longer remember.  Why do these comic book characters do the things they do?  Usually there's some sort of gain involved, romantic or financial.  Maybe the doctor just had a thing for brains, a fetish.  Maybe he saw a CAT scan and thought, "Wow, that is one hot brain.  I gotta take it home and do things to it.  Wild, erotic things!"  Probably not.  His motivation wasn't all that clear to me at the time, either.  Just the horrible end result-- the dead man with his skull cap flopping open showing up at the doctor's mansion and demanding, "GIVE ME BACK MY BRAIN!"

That was the story's hook.  The doctor is all, "Wait, dude, I ain't got your brain and even if I did, you're dead and got no use for it no more!" and the zombie is all, "GIVE ME BACK MY BRAIN!"  There was a chase through the tastefully appointed rooms of the doctor's mansion and finally a scene where the zombie shambles back to his grave.  Cut to the dead doctor, his own cranium opened and emptied of its brain.

Jumbo Size!  For jumbo-sized crapitude!

Come to think of it, I'm not even sure the villain was a doctor.  Whatever he was, why ever he did what he did, it's one of those stories that practically write themselves.  You could come up with all sorts of variations, too.  Give me back my sternum/my tattoo/my ear hair.  Creep victimizes sucker, is outcreeped in turn by sucker's corpse.  Satisfied, the corpse lumbers away.  Shock panel ending, lots of gore.

Today I started thinking about "Give Me Back My Brain!" again and decided to use my valuable work time doing a little research.  The story didn't appear in a Marvel magazine, which were relatively classy if not quite as visually compelling as anything from the prime years of Creepy or Eerie-- despite sharing a few name artists like Tom Sutton and Neal Adams.  Instead it appeared in a cheap knock-off apparently called Classic Horror Tales, and it wasn't even an original.  It was a re-write of an older story from Harvey's Chamber of Chills #6 (1952).  Checking the info on GCD, almost all the stories in this mag are re-worked or re-printed from Chamber of Chills.

The cheapness extends to the cover.  Pure ugly.  Why bother to paint figures that will only be covered by copy and inset panels?  It's a poorly planned composition, indifferently executed.  I'd love to find a copy and see if the interior art measures up to my memories, but looking at this cover I have my doubts.  This is one case where my hyperactive imagination must have done a number on my brain.

Give me back my brain, you stupid horror magazine!

When Returns... the Internet!

Face front, True Believers!  We've got plenty of pulse-pounding posts in the mighty When Comic Books Ruled manner flying at you like Thor and Iron Man after a round of espressos down at the superhero kaffeeklatsch.  Jarvis brews 'em just that strong, almost as strong as our line up of lively and lilting literary laff-em-ups!  You can bet the fine folk over at the Distinguished Competition are shaking in their fuzzy bedroom slippers* while we trip the light fantastic in ties-n-tails and those ol' dancing shoes we shined up extra special just for the occasion!

What occasion, you Faithful Ones ask?  And we Hard-working Ones answer:  The return of our Internet connection, which means a never-ending stream of scintillating stories and never-trivial trivia here at When Comic Books Ruled!  To wit:

ITEM!  How many lovers has Hopey Glass had?  Sources say it's more than a few!
             Let's count them!
ITEM! Professor X once orgasmed Dani Moonstar into betraying everything she
            stood for!
ITEM!  Serial harrasser Changeling fell hard for a lass out to do him and his
             idiot friends no end of harm-- and he wooed her with tentacles!
ITEM!  It's time for a close reading of the early days of our mutant merrymakers,
             the X-Men!
ITEM!  Alex Toth-related books are even now winging their way to Japan for our
             perusal and discussion!
ITEM!  An issue-by-issue study of the Cassandra Cain Batgirl series!
ITEM!  More Creepy, Eerie and possibly EC appreciation!
ITEM!  Marvel Star Wars!  It existed!  I like it!
ITEM!  They canceled the Terror on the Planet of the Apes reprint series!  We're
             going to have to do our part to keep the dream alive!
ITEM!  Stale jokes, sloppy art and more than a few surprises in store!

Who says this isn't the When Comic Books Ruled the Earth Age of Bashful Blogging Buffoonery?  Until Xi'an Coy Manh replaces her metal leg with the lamp from A Christmas Story...  MAKE MINE WHEN COMIC BOOKS RULED THE EARTH!

*Hey, fellas, just a little friendly ribbing!  We love you guys, natch, and we'll see you on the fabled softball diamond this summer at the Big Showdown!