I know everyone has moved on, the holidays an increasingly distant memory, the way I know no one is really all that interested in how someone else’s holidays went. Though I do admit mine had a few points of interest.
Christmas Eve I had lunch with an old friend who I hadn't seen since I moved to Cincinnati. We're about the same age but couldn't be less alike, in fact, the only thing we really have in common is comics. But we get along great, as long we don't talk about comics. Not having approved of anything Marvel or DC has done since around 1995, he's given up on reading current superhero comics. He doesn't care for their contents, their price, he even hates the paper they're printed on; I swear the first thing he said once we sat down was "I hate the paper." Which was followed by a discourse on why Baxter paper was vastly better.
Christmas Eve was spent with friends. After dinner, my contribution to the evening entertainment was my Netflix copy of Guardians of the Galaxy. The audience included a pair of retired academics in their 80's and while it's not their "normal sort of thing," they seemed to genuinely enjoy it. Oh, they found all the fighting "a little wearying" and seemed to have some trouble telling Ronan and Thanos apart. But they got the jokes and seemed particularly taken with Rocket and Groot.
On Christmas Day, I saw The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies. While I agree with the critics who've said it was unnecessarily long, two things sustained me through the long slog to the final act. One, Ryan Gage as Alfrid Lickspittle, whose unrelenting swinishness provides much needed relief from all the heroic posturing. Not since Edmund Blackadder has there been a character so thoroughly vile; he'd be perfect as the lead in a Lord of the Rings sitcom, the shifty manager of one of those rowdy roadside inns ragtag groups of adventurers are always frequenting (think Fawlty Towers but with Orcs). And two, just when the audience, well me, had their fill of waiting for the final battle to commence, in strides Billy Connolly as Dain Ironfoot astride his mighty warpig to give those snooty elves an earful.
After Christmas I stopped at my local CVS for my usual after-holiday trolling for 50% off holiday candy, where I discovered that it is now apparently retail standard operating procedure to put out the Valentine's Day and Easter merchandise at the same time. And I found that just as mysteriously as it had appeared, the Diet Cranberry Sierra Mist had disappeared for yet another year. That was how the old year passed for me and now the cycle begins anew.
Oh, one more thing. This year, for the first time in my life, I actually had a New Year's resolution. Although I'’ve always been painfully aware I could be better, the concept of the "New Year’s Resolution" has always struck me as cheap and false, yet another way to set yourself up with unobtainable goals and make people dissatisfied with themselves as they are. And yet, while I'm entirely too old to actually expect people to get any in better in 2015, please, could we all try to be at least a little less horrible?
It's not that I hold to the fallacy that people were ever any better, but we now live in a society where athletes, politicians, executives, entertainers and creators of all kinds feel absolutely entitled to behave as badly as they possibly can. You don't even have to be rich and famous; as we know all too well from the events of this past year, the Internet gives us all the same opportunity to be equally ugly. And that's reflected in the characters we follow in TV dramas, sitcoms, and comic books. I place into evidence Infinity Man and The Forever People.
I'm on record as being a fan of Jack Kirby's Forever People (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--The Eye Offends") and that I was looking forward to seeing what Dan Didio would do with the characters. I was hoping he'd give them a millennial makeover, maybe by making them conscientious objectors in the war between good and evil. Unfortunately, as with his take on OMAC, the idealized and idealistic has been surgically removed from Jack Kirby's concepts. Here his well-meaning "space hippies" are transformed into petty Gen Y brats who can barely tolerate each other. Naturally they loathe merging into The Infinity Man (a cosmic caretaker whose catchphrase is "Let me help you") because doing so makes them (ugh) empathize with each other. We and The Forever People deserve better.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
