Crazytimes at the State House last night, relative to a bill that’d mean a tax decrease for about 85% of Rhode Islanders, and shift us away from regressive municipal property taxes, and towards progressive state-wide income and capital gains taxes.

PROVIDENCE –– The advocates flooded the State House hallways, staircases and committee rooms yesterday, fighting on the same afternoon for competing priorities as lawmakers decide how to close the largest state budget deficit in nearly two decades.

The army of protesters included poor children, business leaders, advocates for the homeless and taxpayer groups. At one point there were three rallies running simultaneously and two groups jockeyed for use of the microphone and podium in the State House rotunda.

Question, though, for the gazillionth time, to all of those who claim that RI’s expenditures are out of whack: Why can’t we acknowledge this? Or, in other words, WHY IS EVERYBODY ALWAYS LYING ABOUT RI’S RELATIVE FISCAL POSITION?

But if you can stay awake long enough, you’ll reach RIPEC’s Table 10, which measures the Big Three taxes, as well as other money that governments collect from citizens, like car registrations and beach fees.

In these terms, Rhode Island is 26th from the top, as a ratio of personal income.

Also, holy freaking crap:

Later, Carcieri dismissed Mr. Anderson’s concerns.

“Show me empirical evidence that Head Start has done anything,” he said. “I think it’s been the biggest waste of money, frankly.”

One of the Head Start protesters, however, said he’d have to leave his construction job if Head Start didn’t care for his 4-year-old son every day from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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In lieu of me droning about funny books you aren’t going to read, dig hot new-ish trailers for Marvel-ous movies you probably will see. For instance, this sweet trailer for the upcoming The Incredible Hulk fills me with hope that this one will be a lot better than the last:

If the movie’s got the tortured ethos captured by the trailer, I’m going to love every second of it. I think the Hulk myth has a lot to offer that the last movie didn’t capture. Don’t believe me about it’s practical application? Well, the other day, a friend of mine drunkdialed me telling me that he was like Bruce Banner, but when he was drunk he became the Hulk. Clearly it applies to everybody. You know, I’m gonna be seeing it on June 19th when it comes out. (more…)

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The various viral marketing schemes to get people psyched for the upcoming Batman: the Dark Knight (like having Heath Ledger die of a drug overdose) has shifted into a new phase with the launch of a website to draft Harvey Dent to run for District Attorney of Gotham yesterday. Fans are encouraged to film and photograph themselves doing stupid things with downloadable campaign materials from the website. The results have already started to pour in and I have to say this kitty is the best so far:

While Dent promises to rid Gotham of organized crime and corruption if he’s elected, those of us familiar with the Batman mythos know he’s schizophrenic and just going to get his face burned with acid and become the infamous Batman rogue Two-Face when he runs ill of the mob.

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The work of comic book superstar and weirdo old man Alan Moore has a pretty nasty history of being adapted to film. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, while fun and action-packed, really made me not want anyone to do a movie adaption of his magnum opus, the Watchmen. But the production team for the movie slated to come out around this time next year just posted these freaking sweet promo photos on the movie blog. And you know what — maybe this movie won’t be so bad.

That being said, Alan Moore still refuses to see the movie and is passing along his royalties to another creator. Heh.

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Justice League: New Frontier, the cartoon adaption of Darwyn Cooke’s instant classic about the dawn of the Silver Age of DC Comics, came out on DVD last week. When I was watching it, I was somewhat disappointed. My friends who hadn’t read the miniseries thought it was sweet, but I guess the actual comics ruined me. The movie didn’t capture those iconic moments like Hal Jordan kissing Carol Ferris before he takes off to fight the Center and J’onn J’onnz going apeshit and transforming into the Martian Manhunter we know and love when King Faraday died. That being said, I want to talk about something a little more substantive than fanboy concerns.

I want to talk about the political overtones of the story. That period in the late ’50s was an exciting (and scary) time to be alive for far greater reasons than the dawn of the Silver Age of comics. Americans were suffering silently under conformity, lynchings raged across the South, McCarthyism destroyed people’s lives, and we all feared that nuclear annihilation was around the bend.  But the Global South was on fire with social revolution — A lot of folks believed a real change was a-coming. Among them was Martin Luther King, Jr. (after the jump): (more…)

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Fuck Obama, I’m voting for Aquaman.

Wasn’t that far more exciting than anything I’ve ever written? You can read my thoughts on angsty teens in comics after the jump. X-Men First Class #9 counts as Pick of the Week: (more…)

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Drawn & Quarterly artist and New Yorker contributor Adrian Tomine will offer a presentation of his cartooning career, in the RISD Auditorium on Friday, February 29 at 7pm. A book signing of his latest graphic novel “Shortcomings” will immediately follow. “Shortcomings” will be on sale in the Auditorium lobby prior to the presentation.

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One thing you learn not too long after becoming a frequent comics buyer is that the fuckers are inevitably a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month late sometimes. So, I was bound to miss a week eventually. You’ll just have to deal with last weeks comic book column being late. It’s not like they’re paying me.

Comics comics comics comics comics…

So when I first started this gig last year, a friend of mine was like, “Yeah, but it’s all about DC.” Since then I’ve been stranging to open my horizons and make in roads into the fantastical and confuzzling Marvel side of he aisle. As a testament to this, everything I write about this week will be Marvel. (more…)

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The two comic books that bookended (and pretty much defined) my preteen years are now both headed to the big screen; Watchmen, which everyone already knows about, but Akira!? Hard to believe that Akira originally came out 26 years ago and ran for over 8 years in Japan before its graphic serialization in America. I had the originals, they were lost in a flood. ( IO9.com)

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I’m going to do something different this week so, this column won’t take its standard gush-about-stuff-from-this-week format, because I’m responding to something Newbury Comics has done in their weekly comic book and graphic novel e-mail newsletter, which you can subscribe to here. For my thoughts on this week, you can check my blog.

Okay, so down to business. Publishing 10 best comic book titles of 2007 lists from your superexploited employees (I say superexploited because people who work in Newbury Comics don’t make a lot and tend to be people who chose the work environment because of an affinity for some superfluous product the store sells–i.e. comics, cds, hello kitty dolls–and so end up spending a huge portion of their limited income at the company store. I don’t even want to imagine the kind of debt I’d wrack up if I spent 5 days a week surrounded by comics for sale. Yikes. Sorry, huge tangent.) would not seem to be a task that the first week of February 2008 would call for. I know if I were left to my own devices I would never dream of publishing a list of my 10 favorie comics from 2007 this week, but Newbury Comics had to go and do that. What’s worse is that the lists provided by these guys (and they were obviously all male) demonstrate that they are even less equipped to provide such a list to the general public than I am. In the course of human events, there comes a time when I must cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war against Newbury Comics’ tardy best of 2007 lists. (more…)

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So, indie comics. They’re hard to find out about, harder to follow, and have only eensiest fanbase because comics fans are loyal to properties, not creators. With all the big properties belonging to the big two (DC and Marvel) and the big two having a better [funded] publicity system set up, it’s hard for the little guy to compete.

However, this week fans of Kingdom Come’s Alex Ross were given a unique opportunity to break into a new indie comic on the ground-level. This week brought to stands surprisingly large piles of Dynamite Entertainment’s Project Superpowers #0 (above) at the special introductory low price of $1.00. The creative team headed by DC Comics superstars Jim Kreuger and Alex Ross and the fact that large distributors like New York’s Midtown Comics purchased many more copies than they would of most indie books gives the series a distinct possibility of a prominent future. (more…)

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Alan Moore, legendary comics guy and creator of Watchmen, V For Vendetta and so much more, is featured in this 2003 documentary on AlterTube.com. It’s long, and incredibly worth it. Roll something nice and make some popcorn. (via i09.com)

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One of the great things about getting my weekly haul of comics each Wednesday is that I get to experience the full range of colors on the emotional spectrum revealed in last month’s Green Lantern #25. For instance, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Grey, and Renato Arlem’s Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters has continually provoked a response on the violet end of the emotional spectrum (i.e., love).

The week’s number 5 of 8 (right) rocked my world on whole new levels. First off, as always, the art was fantastic. And I must say that anything that opens with the Human Bomb in tank of water being forced to have sex with Red Bee who has been infected by alien insects and plans to turn the human race into a hive mind is golden by definition. Getting to discover (after all this time) the current Human Bomb’s origin story and the reintroduction into mainstream comics of a revamped, blue Neon the Unknown made it that much better. This current round of Freedom Fighters seem chockful of angsty men who were in love with female scientists before they became all strange and metahuman and it seems that our Human Bomb is no exception. Poor guy. The comic did have the problem of awkward dialogue at points, but the whole medium is riddled with this problem. Also, R.I.P. to Miss America and congrats to Doll Man for fathering a child despite being six inches tall.

(more…)

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Let’s talk about comics. I love comics. A lot of other people (read: fanboys) love comics too. Some of them love comics so much they think that they would be better at writing them than the people who do even when the writer in question is my main man Mark Waid (right).

Over on my side of the aisle (that is the DC side), many Flash fans are angry with Marky Mark for the creative direction he has taken the Flash by giving him kids. I would remind folks that this is the Mark Waid who Grant Morrison credited with trailblazing comicdom out of its dark, unshaven ’80s/’90s Hell with his work on the Flash in the introduction to Waid’s early ’90s Flash Year One story. This man knows the current Flash, Wally West, as well as anyone, because he wrote him into the character he is today.

Fans are mad that the book isn’t exactly like it was in the ’90s and think that it’s dumb that any superhero could ever have a family or worse yet that there be a family of superheroes. Their righteous discontent broadcasted loudly through cyberspace has driven Mark Waid off the Flash title and into the position of Editor-in-Chief over at the BOOM indepedent label. (more…)

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So, I wanna start this week’s column with a musical interlude. I’ve been driving around Kentucky in my mom’s car that has a broken CD player, so I’ve been listening to a lot of Top 40. My attention was drawn immediately to Baby Bash and T-Pain’s song “Cyclone.” To the civilian’s ear this song (dig the YouTube video below) would seem about a sexy lady who dances very well in a tornado-like fashion. The civilian would be wrong. The the true believer is able to recognize that this song is actually about one of DC Comics’ newest superheroes: Harvard freshman Maxine Hunkel, the “teen-aged wind witch” who fights the good fight along her comrades in the Justice Society of America as Cyclone.

You see, the lyric “Going hard when they turn the spotlights on” is not actually about a lady who shakes at the club. Rather, as a theater major, Maxine has to contend with stage lights a lot and she doesn’t back down (except when she’s nervous about meeting the Superman of an alternate Earth). The song mentions that she has her own entourage, this of course in reference to the Justice Society. And anyone who would doubt that she could make someone want to do it all night long should just look at the lovely portrait of her by Alex Ross below the cut. (more…)

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Pretty much the only comic I bought this week was Countdown #17, so I thought instead of doing my usual round up of what’s been going on in comics this past week, I would do something a little more creative in honor of the Iowa Caucuses. I remain the insurgent Edwards supporter on the Obamaniac Providence Daily Dose, but what’s more interesting than that would be looking at some superheroes from the DC Universe and predicting what candidates they would support in the 2008 election.

The Democrats:

The Flash I (Jay Garrick) would support Hillary Clinton.

Why: The original World War II-era who resides in Ohio’s Keystone City is probably a moderate voter. With some conservative notions about family life, he’s been around the block enough times with the Justice Society to keep an open mind and his experience of being investigated the HUAC has led him to distrust the hardline held by the likes of the Neocons. The relative sanity of the Clinton years has made the last eight years of Luthor and then an alien android masquerading as president has synched the Democrats for Jay in ‘08. Clinton beats out Obama for Jay, because he’s impressed by her experience and aire of intelligence. Plus, he’s mad old and that puts him in the Clinton camp.

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