The Horton Grand

comment on the post “San Diego Comic Con Reflections, Part One“:

My wife and I were also at the Horton Grand. I absolutely agree on that hotel — it’s fantastic.

Except for the fact that we were in a second-floor room that looked out onto Fourth, and the windows didn’t block much sound, so we could hear drunken revelers, motorcycles, and stretch Hummers idling below our window into the late hours of the night.

I wasn’t aware it was supposed to be haunted. I think I would have preferred the ghosts to the street view.

Re: Continuity questions (Annuals, specials and spin-offs)

Hmm, let’s see if I can have a go at this:

> Flash Annual #1-13

Annual 1 is tricky, because Wally’s seeing Connie, not Tina, but living in his mansion. I put it between #4 and #5, figuring that he’s met Tina, but they’re not dating yet.

Annual 2 I put between #19 and #20 — it’s clearly after the long Vandal Savage story that ends in #18, but before the Invasion!-through Porcupine Man story that starts in #20.

Annual 3 is easy: between #28 and #29. #28 wraps up the Porcupine Man story. The annual features Wally’s Justice League transporter being delivered. He uses the transporter in #29.

Annual 4 is unclear, since there’s nothing to really anchor it, but I set it around the time of #55, the War of the Gods crossover, because Armageddon 2001 and War of the Gods ran more or less concurrently.

Annual 5 is another slightly vague one, but I place it around #66, early in Waid’s run and right after the framing sequence of “Born to Run,” because it’s the last time you’ll see Chunk for a long, long time.

Annual 6 is explicitly set during “The Return of Barry Allen,” between #77 and #78

Annual 7 is out of continuity

Annual 8 is a bit vague, but I’d place it just before “Dead Heat” because Wally and Linda have worked through the worst of their post-“Terminal Velocity” relationship issues.

Annual 9 is either out of continuity or so far in the future it doesn’t matter.

Annual 10 is sometime after “Hell to Pay,” so shortly after #129.

Annual 11 is unclear, but sometime before “The Black Flash” starts in #139. I’ve put it between #134 and #135, which doesn’t *quite* fit.

Annual 12 is early in the Dark Flash saga, probably not long after #152, because no one knows who he is yet.

Annual 13 is shortly after Wally’s and Linda’s wedding and honeymoon — I’ve put it right before the start of “Wonderland,” between #163-164

> Speed Force #1
> Secret Files #1-2
> 80-Page Giant #1-2
> Flash Plus Nightwing #1

The rest of these are trickier to place, especially since they range all over. I’ll let someone else give them a try.

> Also, are there any other spinoffs or major guest appearances from around 1992-2001? Thanks!

Well, there’s Impulse, of course. There’s Flash: Iron Heights, which fits nearly into Geoff Johns’ run right after “Birth Right” and Flash: Our Worlds at War which brings Cyborg to Keystone City.

Green Lantern #66-67: “Fast Friends”
Green Lantern/The Flash: Faster Friends (2 parts, the comic book seen in season one of Lost)
Robin #62-64
Flashpoint (a 3-part Elseworlds mini)
Amalgam Comics: Speed Demon
Legionnaires Annual 3 has XS meeting Barry on a trip through time.
New Year’s Evil: The Rogues
Silver Age: The Flash
The Kingdom: Kid Flash
Wonder Woman Plus Jesse Quick

Cosplayer Coincidence

Wayne Lippa wrote:

So, I was looking at a few of your other pictures, Kelson, and just out of curiosity, what was the story behind the photo of you and Misty Lee?

Early last year I followed Mark Evanier’s blog for a while, and in one of his posts he recommended a magic show in the Los Angeles area. It was a one-weekend show with one act of Misty Lee and one act of Sylvester the Jester. I got tickets and went. I think it was around March, or maybe May.

So during the 2006 Comic-Con, I was walking around and saw someone who, at first glance, seemed to be wearing a very good Zatanna-style costume. I asked her if she’d pose for a picture (which unfortunately turned out to be out-of-focus, so I didn’t post it). As I lowered the camera, I recognized her as Misty Lee.

I told her I’d been to her show in Burbank, she said something about “I hope it wasn’t ___ night, that one was terrible!” I couldn’t remember which day of the weekend I had gone, and she offered to pose with me for another photo. She also offered me tickets the next time she did a show in the area. She seemed very happy to be recognized as Misty Lee, magician, rather than as random attractive woman in hot costume. I handed my camera to the man she was walking with, and glanced at his name badge: he was her husband, Paul Dini.

So I got my picture taken with Misty Lee, by Paul Dini! (It’s too bad I look terrible in that photo — I’m 5-10 pounds heavier than I am now, only half-smiling, and starting to blink.)

Re: To be honest i hope Bart stays

Christening Wally West and/or Bart Allen as The Flash was never necessary. DC already had an established character, Barry Allen, as The Flash.

Unnecessary perhaps, but we got some damn good stories and characters out of Wally’s run as the Flash. We also got Impulse. How likely would DC have been to introduce Impulse if they still had Barry as the Flash and Wally as Kid Flash? And it’s hard to imagine Young Justice without Impulse.

Similarly, it was unnecessary to create Barry Allen in 1956. DC could easily have pulled Jay Garrick off the shelf, dusted him off, and revamped him, but they chose instead to create a new character using the Flash name. And this was someone who carried three titles for the better part of a decade!

Typing Patterns for Authentication

“NPR’s Marketplace is reporting on a new authentication scheme. BioPassword tracks the way you type your password: how long each key is depressed, the time between keystrokes, overall speed. When someone tries to log into your account, it compares the pattern to what it has on file. It only allows you in if both the password and patterns match. The technique has been around a while: World War II morse code operators used it to determine whether a message was sent by an ally or an impostor.”

On Slashdot

Browser Wars Declared Over

Opera Watch reports that Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google declared the Browser Wars to be over at a panel at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. “Instead of trying to trump one another by adding features in point releases, the companies that developed these browsers are instead intent on advancing their use as platforms for a new generation of rich Internet applications and for tackling the hurdles that will come along with that shift in strategy.” ComputerWorld and eWeek have more details. Apple, the remaining major browser manufacturer, was not represented at the panel.

On Slashdot

Crisis and Retconning

There’s an easy way to keep things simple: Either build on earlier stories without changing them (or change only the obscure stuff), or start over.

Retcons are like epicycles, the sort of secondary orbits that astronomers invented to explain discrepancies in planets’ motions when they thought the planets all had circular orbits and revolved around the Earth. The epicycles got more and more complicated until enough people noticed that you could get rid of most of them if you assumed the planets revolved around the Sun. Then they realized that you could get rid of the rest if you assumed the orbits were elliptical instead of circular.

If you *totally* reboot a series, like Wonder Woman after COIE or Legion of Super-Heroes after Zero Hour and again last year, things are simple. It’s just like launching the Justice League cartoon — it’s a totally separate continuity from the previous version, so contradictions aren’t a problem.

When you revise *parts* of history, things get complicated. Wonder Woman herself might have had a simple reboot, but the Justice League and Wonder Girl (Donna Troy) were still around, and their histories had to be revised. Donna has gone through *how* many origins since then? Origin-wise, she’s hardly recognizable. They actually did a better job with Power Girl by saying “Forget all the retcons, she really is the cousin of Earth-2’s Superman”

Sorry about the rant…

Re: Starship Troopers

On its own merits, Starship Troopers was a passable, somewhat cheesy action/war movie. Nothing fantastic, but not a complete waste of two hours either.

As an adaptation, though, it was terrible. It was as if someone read the back cover, wrote a script, then skimmed through the book to add in salient details in hopes that people who had read it would be happier. (Hey, it says here that the main character comes from Buenos Aires. Let’s add that in!)

A movie *can* be both a good film and a good adaptation. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a good example. It didn’t stick to the books 100%, but most of what it changed made sense, given the difference between the written word and the moving image. And because it stayed true to the books where it counted most, people who have read them tend to like the movies as much as people who haven’t.

An interesting side note about Starship Troopers: I was actually an extra in the opening scene with the hybrid football/basketball game. They needed spectators, and it was filming nearby (California State University at Long Beach, usually referred to as Cal State Long Beach). It was actually
extremely boring — I assume it’s typical that you spend more time setting up a shot than actually filming it. I spent two days waiting for them to set things up, then cheering or booing for 30 seconds while the cameras rolled, then waiting again. In the end I got: (1) a cast/crew T-Shirt (2) lots of reading time (3) conversations with some interesting people and (4) a girl’s phone number. So it wasn’t a *total* waste of time!