Warren Ellis on Bruce Springsteen

Ellis' Bad Signal mailing, which he's notoriously finicky about being quoted in total, had this (in part) to say about Bruce Springsteen's performance at the Glastonbury Festival yesterday: "It's just him, right now, the stage is blacked out, and there's one spot behind him. And he's hot, and it's cold night out there, and he's steaming. And he's just blown the authenticity thing and gone into supermystification, because it looks like he's got an electromagnetic halo, curls of glowing, pearly white light rising up from and playing around his head and shoulders while he stands there in near-silhouette.... "He looks like he's The Last Rock Star, the Ascended Master who glows in the dark."

The attached photo comes from Springsteen's performance of "The River," live at Glastonbury. It certainly doesn't do the "steam" justice to see it in a still photo, so feel free to check out the YouTube clip here.

Decrypting Terry Moore's Echo

So the second book of Terry Moore's Echo is coming this week (Echo: Atomic Dreams), and so I re-read all of the first two trades before talking to Terry about #11 and #12 last week. Here's one thing that I noticed which, somehow, I had managed to skip over: at some point, bounty hunter Ivy sneaks into Julie's room, is looking around and finds a box hidden at the back of a high closet shelf. She feels around and eventually opens it. She peers in, looks baffled for a second and then says something along the lines of "This is going to be more fun than I thought."

This hasn't yet paid off in the story.

What I wonder; Does the logo on the box (pictured at right) have anything to do with it? Can anybody out there identify this logo, possibly as a Greek or Roman character a la the Phi letter on the front of the Beta Suit?

I suspect that it's just a generic logo of some kind that Terry made up so that the box wasn't suspiciously devoid of markings...but it kinda popped out at me (no pun intended) and I wanted to see if, given the fact that there's a meaning behind what's on Julie's breastplate, maybe there's also some meaning behind what's in her closet that we can divine by looking at this symbol.

Any reader who can tell me what I'm looking at with any degree of accuracy will get a signed copy of Echo: Moon Lake, the first trade in the series (signed by Terry Moore, not by me). This isn't because Terry supports this blog post in any way, but because I have one to give.

Hal Jordan Calls Out Superman as an Elitist

It's funny--when Infinite Crisis was new and on the stands, the scene that struck me the most was the one where DC's "trinity" of characters split, after Batman declared that the last time Superman inspired anyone had been when he was dead.

The funny thing about it, is that I'm a Superman guy. My entire "mature" comics-reading life, I have been. I loved Kingdom Come and I came back to comics after a hiatus when Supes died. Now James Robinson--whose Superman comics I haven't been reading becuase they don't, after all, revolve around Superman anymore--is writing Justice League, a miniseries wherein a number of Justice Leaguers and other DC Universe heroes start their own team and pursue bad guys in a proactive, aggressive fashion. It's retribution, not really justice, and so a lot of what founder Hal Jordan says is nonsensical on the face of it...but the panel at left is one of those great moments

where you really see the superhero as a human being and understand a little of what he's facing every day. It makes Hal more real, and even though it's a little bit petty, you know it to be true. Think about high school and how everything that happened was always viewed through the lens of the small handful of cool kids who ran the athletics teams, the student government and the activities. That's Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

Of course, a little of the strength of his argument is undermined when he makes sure to include Supergirl and Batwoman on "his" Justice League, which according to interviews with Robinson was "to make sure we got those logos on the book" or something like that.