BIDING ELECTORAL TIME
Real Art Big Geek Edition

I just heard on PBS' News Hour that the Ohio polls may very well be open until midnight due to a huge turnout; I've also heard that Florida has a backlog of absentee votes in the hundreds of thousands. Given that, we may not know who our next President is until tomorrow, or even later. So, what's a blogger like me to do? I'm not much of a wonk, so there's no need to split hairs over electoral nuances, moment-by-moment, and virtually every political issue that I usually talk about (except for, maybe, authoritarianism in education) is deeply tied to the election. At the moment, I don't really have much to say about politics in America.

That's why I'm going to indulge myself with some geek stuff.

From Chicago comic shop Atlas Comics courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:

THE 25 ALL-TIME GREATEST
COVERS OF AMERICAN COMIC BOOKS

The comic book cover--along with her stylistic antecedent, the Pulp cover--is one of America's most instantly satisfying pictorial entertainments. Precisely because of their need to appeal to an unsophisticated audience, they are often shocking, lurid, exciting, powerful, grotesque or titillating. As a result they elicit an immediate response from the reader, one which eschews the intellectual reaction so often required of other visual arts.

The very thing which, until recently, divided the Comic Book cover from traditional illustration--unselfconsciousness--had long been a crowning virtue of the medium. No shame, no guilt and no embarrassment were in evidence--no awareness of the social force or influence which comics exerted, however subtly, in our society. Lacking the pretense of civility and conformity found in other media, they were allowed to develop and change apace, stripped of any mitigating influence until all that we were left with was pure, unadulterated sensationalism. In the end, in spite of the low critical esteem accorded to art which appeals to our more base and hedonistic nature, there is something to be said for the momentary thrill of discovery, or shock, or horror. For comic books, they, especially reach back to our youth, and innocent days when those were our only possible reactions to the world we knew.

Click here for the rest of the introduction and the criteria for selection. Click here for the covers. Click here for the the 12 Dumbest Covers of All Time (I actually have one of these, the issue Lois Lane in the bottom left corner).

Here's my favorite, Detective Comics #31 from 1939:



Next, for my buddy Shane, a report on one of my favorite movie monsters from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Scholars taking Godzilla seriously

Yoshikuni Igarashi, director of east Asian studies at Vanderbilt, sees Godzilla films as important cultural artifacts.

For example, the first Godzilla film came only eight months after the United States tested a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.

The movie -- in which H-bomb testing disturbs Godzilla's undersea habitat and transforms him into a behemoth with fiery, radioactive breath -- reflects anxiety and a feeling of helplessness in the face of a nuclear threat, Igarashi said.

The franchise was widely known for its campy special effects. Godzilla films featured men in dinosaur suits stomping around miniature urban landscapes and some monster battles that, Tsutsui acknowledged in his book, seem more like professional wrestling matches.

When an American version of the first film was released in 1956 -- re-edited to include new scenes featuring Raymond Burr of "Perry Mason" fame -- the New York Times dismissed it as "cheap cinematic horror-stuff."

"It is true there were some bad, bad films produced, particularly in the late '60s and early '70s," said Igarashi, who plans to lecture at the conference on the 1964 movie "Godzilla vs. the Thing," in which Godzilla battles the giant moth, Mothra, and its offspring.

Click here for the rest.

Actually, scholars have been taking Godzilla seriously for at least a decade. I remember the subject coming up in a film and video theory course I took in the early 1990's: Godzilla, the terrible monster spawned by radiation from a nuclear bomb, is a cultural manifestation of Japanese anxiety about being the only country ever to be attacked by nuclear weapons. I wonder why the news media is reporting that academics are only now treating the big lizard as worthy of study.

Whatever. Here's a pic:



Really, this is a pretty good representation of what Bush plans to do to the country if re-elected. However, I think Godzilla looks more like Tom DeLay, if you ask me.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$