It’s become a recent tradition for me to do the Plus Prop challenge every time I make a visit to New York Comic Con. First time it was with Venom and that was fun. Then I used Juggernaut and that worked out well too. This year I wasn’t sure who to use. With so many choices and some reader support, I settled on using the late, great Randall Poffo, known by many names: Bonesaw McGraw, Rasslor, Leonard Ghostal and most famously, “Macho Man” Randy Savage.
And so, I spent much of Comic Con’s four days badgering various comic artists for commissions at Artists’ Alley. The challenge is to draw Randy Savage plus another object. Any object. What that object is is up to the artist and not me. This one ended up being a ton of fun and most of the artists were incredibly into it. Before he even drew anything, Chris Giarrusso and I spent like a half hour talking about how great Savage’s promos were. So sit back and snap into the fruits of their labor.
This week starts the first chapter of Jonathan Maberry’s Marvel Universe vs. the Avengers, expanding on the world created in Marvel Universe vs. Punisher and Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine. This time the main character is Hawkeye, coming to grips in a world rapidly succumbing to a biological defect. As always, it reads like how Marvel Zombies should have been and as far as I can tell is the first and only comic to ever depict Squirrel Girl as being killed. So it has that going for it!
Early into the issue, there’s a page depicting Captain America giving an inspirational speech to the various Avengers teams and other heroes. Looking at this page caused me a moment of confusion followed by genuine laughter because I know exactly what went wrong.
Can you spot it? Can you spot where artist Leandro Fernandez screwed up? Let’s just say that there was a bit of a miscommunication in there.
Really, when you look at it, it’s such a fun concept. Write a story where the main selling point is that two pre-existing parties cross paths and interact. It says a lot about the power of fiction and the properties that come from it that you can even do that. At worst, it’s a cheap cash-in. At best, it’s an interesting character study.
I think my admiration for crossovers is similar to why I’m drawn to Marvel’s What If series and to a lesser extent DC’s Elseworlds. It’s a celebration of the characters and ideas that have been built up over time while lovingly stretching them in fantastic ways. Like, I’ve never seen Star Trek. At all. Never watched any of the shows or seen any of the movies. I think I tried watching the cartoon when I was really young, but it bored me into a coma. Anything I know about the series comes from pop culture. That said, when they did an X-Men/Star Trek crossover and had a scene of someone busting into the room to yell, “DR. MCCOY?!” and both Leonard McCoy and Beast react to it and then glare back at each other, I still laugh about it because it’s almost like that was the entire reasoning for doing the comic. If it wasn’t, you know that writer had that on the top of his idea list, just over, “Spock takes out Wolverine with the Vulcan Neck Pinch and then Wolverine gets back up because of his healing factor.” Story came secondary at best.
I figured that if crossovers are a celebration of the characters, then maybe it’s about time that I celebrate the crossovers. One of the great things about crossovers – and another similarity with What If – is that they’re all so damn fascinating. It’s hard to make one that’s dull and uninteresting. You might find a crossover that works out great for everyone involved and tells a good story to boot. More than likely, you’ll get a bizarre mess that’s fun to look back at.
I’m not going to strictly talk about comics here. I’m talking crossovers in all media, whether it be comics, TV, movies and so on. I’ll only count stuff that’s official. Fan works and the like don’t count. Avengers fighting the Squadron Supreme, who themselves are Marvel’s stand-ins for the Justice League, doesn’t count. Also, in-universe crossovers don’t really rate here. Spider-Man meeting the Hulk isn’t very special. Regular Spider-Man meeting Ultimate Spider-Man? Yeah, maybe. I’ll at least use DC/Wildstorm crossovers.
For this debut entry, I’m going to go with JLA vs. Predators from 2001, drawn by Graham Nolan and written by John Ostrander. Ostrander’s a guy who I respect enough that I did a double-take when I realized he was behind it because he’s better than this.
This is one of the six times the Predators have crossed over with DC, five of the times in stories involving Batman. It hits me how safe the Predators are in this situation as the story is already written the moment you come up with the title. The Predators have a little more substance and likability than the Alien xenomorphs, but at the end of the day, in situations like this, they’re just high-profile cannon fodder. It’s a race of nameless creatures made up of some loose traits created from scenes from the first movie and, to a lesser extent, the sequel. When the xenomorphs aren’t around to make them the lesser evil, the Predators are simply, “those assholes from space”. They’re cool as hell, but there’s no mystery on who will win and who will die while laughing and exploding.
12 months after DC’s problematic reboot made its way onto the scene, we finish the month of getting various #0 issues of DC properties. A couple comics are canceled as of their #0s, which includes the clever use of which in Resurrection Man. For years, that guy’s been wandering around while wondering who he really is and where he comes from and to have his story end in the origin issue is kind of perfect.
One comic I’m disappointed to see go is Captain Atom by JT Krul and Freddie Williams II. Not at all surprised, granted. In fact, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did (I had similar feelings about ill-fated comics Azrael and Magog). The series was selling terribly and did even worse than Hawk and Dove, which makes me incredibly disappointed because that means at least two people were buying Hawk and Dove before that got the axe.
I feel Captain Atom got a bad rap and was far better than most gave it credit for. It’s no surprise why. Captain Atom is a bunch of comic book wrongs somehow making a right. That’s excluding Williams, who while there are a couple issues that seem a little too fluid and melty, his art is great stuff. I mean, this is a comic written by JT Krul. That is NOT a name that makes you optimistic. You can reboot continuity all you want, but people will still remember a tripping Roy Harper holding a dead cat and thinking it’s his daughter. The fact that he hasn’t worked on anything notably good since then keeps that red flag flapping.
Then you have Captain Atom himself. Captain Atom is one of those guys who I really want to like, but know it’s a hard sell. He’s pretty boring most of the time. He’s a Superman-level hero without much of a spark. He’s so boring that they’ve given themselves no choice but to try and turn him into a villain three times and all three times it went horribly wrong. There have been times when he’s shown promise. I thought he was the perfect ambassador character to interact with the Wildstorm Universe during Captain Atom: Armageddon. I’ll even say that I didn’t hate his portrayal in the days of Extreme Justice. Judd Winick was able to make something of him in Justice League: Generation Lost but, oops, Flashpoint happened and that character growth no longer matters.
You put a character that’s hard to pull off with a writer who can’t pull off something readable and… you get something good! There’s something inspiring about that. I still won’t buy anything with Krul’s name on it that involves a bow and arrow, but I’ll be a little more open-minded to his future work.
I feel that Captain Atom is the best use of the New 52 concept trying something new. New 52 is essentially DC’s Ultimate Universe, only it’s the new mainstream instead of a parallel. Too many characters are nothing more than a reset button for the sake of telling the same stories, but you have guys like Morrison’s Superman who go in a slightly different direction. Captain Atom strays away from the original concept while holding onto just enough, making him a cross between pre-Flashpoint Captain Atom, Dr. Manhattan and the Sentry.
This is something I wrote for a group post that ended up not going up anywhere, so I figured I’d share it here. The theme is “Favorite Spider-Man Moments,” in honor of the character’s 50th anniversary. I’m not sure how old I was when I first read this. It would’ve been ’89 or ’90, I think, which means I was six or seven. It made a real impression. I still like when heroes lose or freak out. It feels more honest than unshakable courage in the face of horrendous danger.
Anyway, Spider-Man was created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. Thank you, fellas.
One of my favorite Spider-Man moments comes from the first comic I ever owned, David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane’s Amazing Spider-Man 316. I didn’t know it at the time, but the comic was the big return of then-new Spider-Man villain Venom. It’s a pretty wild ride for a first comic. My moment comes toward the end of the issue, when Spider-Man goes off to confront Venom. He locates him in a slaughterhouse, they fight, and Venom manhandles Spider-Man. At one point, Venom dumps a vat of offal and blood onto Spider-Man, and Spidey panics. He flips out, crushes Venom under a few machines, and bugs out, accidentally leaving his address behind.
This is so great because it sets up Spider-Man as something other than a super-man. He loses, and on top of that, he panics. He loses control. He gets freaked out. The man beneath the mask was revealed, just for a moment, and he rejected the horrors of superheroic life on an instinctual level. This scene is extremely humanizing, and just good entertainment besides.
I like this scene so much because it feels so true to Spider-Man. When the people in charge of his stories bring their A-game, Spider-Man is Peter Parker first and a superhero third or fourth. He’s not an everyman, not at all in thinking about it, but he is a regular man. He’s meant to be someone we can recognize slivers of ourselves in, and that makes it easier to buy the hijinks he gets into. This scene is just one of several great examples of how Peter Parker is the best superhero ever.
When “Avengers” came out there was a vocal fanbase of “Avengers” co-creator Jack Kirby that thought his role in this big pop culture event was being underplayed. With “Guardians of the Galaxy” coming up, there’s already hype around those characters — especially Rocket Raccoon, who was created by Bill Mantlo. What kinds of safeguards and policies do you want to be in place for Marvel to protect the comic creators who are in their older years now, but whose work is entertaining millions of people around the world?
Well it’s a complex question, but I will say that Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley will take the lead on a lot of that and they are actually quite, quite good in acknowledging and letting us know as we share the scripts and character lists with them [by saying]: Here are the creators of this. Here is where they are. Here is who they are, and figuring out what we can do in terms of recognition. If you look at the special credits sections of all the Marvel Studios movies, you’ll see lots and lots of names, probably half a dozen or so, that apply to even the small characters, much smaller than Rocket, that are included in the movie. In terms of Kirby, I always thought of the “Thor” movie as one of the biggest testaments to what Kirby did because at every turn with the production design, we wanted to embrace it. The helmet design, those horns on Loki. “Do you really want those to be that big?” “It’s gotta be that big.” I love that stuff, it’s tremendous.
Question: What are you doing to safeguard or enrich the lives of the creators of the properties that are making you a billion dollars a year?
Answer: We really like to pay homage in the form of Special Thanks and emulating the things those people did in the comics.
Frustrating, isn’t it? It’s a complete dodge, which is whatever. But it prompted some thoughts in addition to the frowns and rolled eyes:
-These questions matter and absolutely should be asked of Marvel, DC, Robert Kirkman, Dreamwave, and whoever else is involved in labor disputes/benefitting off past sins. It’s not negative, or muck-raking, or anything like that — it’s important. These people should be held accountable.
-But the subjects do not, and will not, answer the questions directly, either thanks to ongoing lawsuits or just complete disinterest in publicly addressing the story. Feige here dodges the controversy and uses it to position Marvel as someone who greatly values their creators. It’s spin. Which is useless as anything but marketing.
-So, what’s the answer? How do you address this in the face of silence or spin? How do you keep yourself from being co-opted?
Hostile interviews aren’t the answer. The subjects clam up and the interview ends. Fawny love-me-please interviews don’t work, either, because you’re too busy trying to make a new BFF to honestly address or apply criticism.
Agitation is necessary. That’s how you get people to change. You make the point of contention public, you explain it so that people can understand it, and then you get up in their face. They bend or they don’t — that’s out of your hands. But you can convince people and try to show the upsides of a change. There are ways to go about it that work better than others, I’m sure, but I’m not sure what they are.
Coming to the end of a five-year run on various titles starring the caped crusader, the Batman brand has cemented Morrison’s reputation as one of the top writers in his field. That fame though has come with the price of becoming a figurehead for the industry, a responsibility that he is happy to escape when he steps away from superheroes next year. Morrison stresses again and again that he sees himself as a “freelance writer” rather than a cog in the corporate publishing machine, yet his words are pounced upon, dissected and recycled by fans and critics alike.
“They try to find some hidden darkness or something like that,” he sighs, “or ‘this proves, this proves!’ – naw, it just proves I said something that day, you know, which either I still agree with or don’t. Why do I have to defend all of this? I think people just want to be mad and want to fight all the time, so I’m gonna join in now!”
From my position as someone who has gone from stannish to uncomfortable to frustrated and on down to fed up with Morrison’s public persona, this is an utterly gross interview on both sides. The interviewer, Laura Sneddon, is clearly a fan of Morrison, which is fine. I interview people I’m a fan of, too, and I don’t hammer them on things. Not every interview has to be hard-hitting, obviously, but there’s a difference between a friendly, fun interview and one that puts the subject over at the expense of everyone else.
Sneddon, when asking about contentious points, minimizes and turns complaints against Morrison into easily-dismissed strawmen. She mentions that it seemed “like many of the detractors were coming from a distinctly middle class perspective” and Morrison agrees with her and goes on about middle class prejudices against the “trappings of high privilege.” (what?) Earlier in the interview, she writes: “Is it a slightly classist thing, I wonder, the idea that you can just drop your job at work as a protest?” (what?) She asks Morrison about comics critic Matt Seneca grilling and eating (part of) a copy of Morrison’s Supergods. Instead of Seneca’s weird performance being an act with some type of point, it’s used as evidence that “Fans are crazy and cynical and stupid.” Dissent is never treated as reasonable, only as aberration, and a de-fanged aberration at that.
This approach is tainted to me, because it’s a journalist once again taking (sometimes) reasonable dissent and painting it as babytown frolics, instead of something people actually care about. The Seneca point is an extreme example, of course, but that feeling permeates the piece. “These guys are dumdums, aren’t they?” instead of “So what’s up with this?” It feels like whenever fans or critics are mentioned, it’s about how they’re hurting comics or doing terrible things to a nice old comics writer.
The most aggravating part of the interview is the quote at the top of the post. That is a grown man asking why people believe the things that come out of his mouth. He wants to know why, after he says things, people care about them and hold him to his word. “Why can’t I just say things willy-nilly without having people look at my position?” he’s essentially asking here.
That is laughable, because he has built a career, in part, on people paying attention to, falling in love with, and believing his words. He set himself up as a counter-culture type of guy by producing works that embraced the counter-culture and drew on classic counter-culture subject matter and authors. He’s given at least one rock starred out speech at DisInfocon, and his letters pages let interact with a specific subset of comics readers.
He built this personality, this image of Grant Morrison-as-King Mob. That didn’t come from the fans or critics cruelly picking apart his words. No, we took him at his word and at his work, just like we’ve done with everyone from Stan Lee to Frank Miller to Dave Sim to Alan Moore. When confronted with the fact that King Mob prefers to defend a corporation over creators, describes a certain subset of fans as “voluminous Goth girls, victims of some unspeakable abuse,” and generally isn’t who he sold himself to be, I (and others, sure, but this is all about me-me-me-me-me) reacted with surprise, and then frustration.
It’s my fault, of course. I believed the hype. I believed in what Grant Morrison said and wrote, so I just set myself up for disappointment. Judging by this interview, what I should have done, were I not a weary cynic ready to burn down the temple (“the temple!”), was to assume that Morrison was just a cog in the machine and not take him so seriously, I guess.
But the thing is, I’m not a weary cynic. I’m a fan. I’m a fan who followed Morrison’s writings in comics and elsewhere, looking for and generally receiving knowledge jewels or great laughs. I’m not a cynic or critic that’s just aching to throw a sacred cow on the rack. I’m disappointed that the persona this guy sold me was a smokescreen, and that the real guy is someone I disagree with on a lot of different things. I feel played, if anything.
Later in the interview, Morrison says that he “still feel[s] the same way I do about the monarchy, the class system, about everything I’ve ever written, about everything I will write.”
I’ve been playing Square Enix & United Front’s Sleeping Dogs off and on over the past week. (Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is taking up some time, too, as is Papa & Yo.) It’s the latest game in the True Crime series, sort of. Those games have generally been pretty okay, but not spectacular. This one isn’t spectacular, but I think it might be genuinely good, bordering on great. The story isn’t special — an undercover cop in too deep? with a grudge? and an attitude?! whoa!– and the gameplay isn’t particularly innovative, but the combination of a faithful recreation of the Hong Kong we see in movies and some pretty smart writing elevates it above most other sandbox games. It’s not on Saints Row the Third‘s level, but it’s definitely beating the pants off that last GTA.
Sleeping Dogs juggles a lot of disparate gameplay elements (cars, counter-centric combat, good/evil alignment, two upgrade systems, several types of unlocks, etc) very well, and the pacing is sharp enough to keep you from getting bored. But more than anything, it’s the writing that’s keeping me going. The script is predictable, almost to a fault, but it’s a script that is emulating one of the types of movies that I like best. I mean, I’ve had speedboat chases and a shootout in a hospital with an AI partner. United Front knows their target audience, and it looks like we’re running through all the greatest hits. Which is cool; a nice cocktail of nostalgia and imminent danger.
There was one moment that leapt out at me, and it has nothing to do with John Woo or Johnnie To or Tsui Hark or people getting shot at all, really. It was during the mission Bride to Be, when you’re escorting Peggy Li to go pick out things for her wedding. You play Wei Shen, an undercover cop who has infiltrated Winston’s gang. Peggy’s marrying Winston, and by this point, you’re trusted enough to be alone with her and escort her around town. I was expecting some type of goofy infidelity plot, when they got in the car together and she started talking about dating. Half of it was because one girl I was seeing in-game had just blown up on me about cheating on her (which I hadn’t realized I was doing because Sleeping Dogs loves ambiguous fadeouts) and the other half was that crime movies love plots like that.
But that didn’t happen. She didn’t hit on Wei, and Wei didn’t hit on her. Instead, Peggy and Wei talked about dating, finding a nice girl, the importance of family, and knowing the value of trading your hardness for softness. Peggy shared a story about her mother-in-law, and explains that she learned, despite being a huge grump, her mother-in-law really cares about her. Wei offhandedly mentions his mother’s disappointment in his choice of girlfriends, and how that was a point of contention between them.
Quickie transcript, which is unfortunately devoid of inflection:
Wei: You’re lucky. My mother never liked my girlfriends.
Peggy: I guess it’s hard for the moms.
Wei: Well… I mean, you know I used to have a thing for blondes too, and that drove her crazy. Bad enough if I went out with a Chinese-American girl, but… but a whitey?
Peggy: [laughs] Well, it’s good to know she was loyal to her people.
Wei: No, she’s loyal to her prejudices, more like.
Peggy: That too.
I’m not sure what the term for this is, there might not be a proper word for it, but I dig it every time I come across it. I feel like it’s so rare in entertainment these days. It’s an admission that races and cultures are different, and that that fact affects our lives on a day-to-day basis in a way beyond just “one group oppresses another group.” It’s the type of conversation that you’d actually have in real life, and the kind of conversation you only see in fiction when you have an author who is talented and brave enough to just go in and damn the consequences. It’s prickly and it’s tough, but when done right, it really adds to stories.
I saw a preview screening of End of Watch with a friend a few weeks back. (It was good, and the Q&A after with Michael Peña and Natalie Martinez was especially good.) There was a lot of dialogue in there that explicitly addressed the fact that the two main characters were a white guy (Jake Gyllenhall) and a Mexican dude (Michael Peña). Gyllenhall asks what the heck chonies are and makes jokes about how Peña is always inviting him to quinceañeras. Peña is like, “Yeah, but if you marry one of my cousins, you’ll always have a party to go to! ;)” There were a few more exchanges of a similar vein, too.
We all practice this kind of cultural exchange on a minor scale on a regular basis (“Here’s a song my parents grew up with,” for one, “Here’s a home-cooked meal the way my family taught me” for another), and all too often in movies and games, that’s either played for wholly comedic effect or ignored altogether. Rush Hour, the Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker joint, was actually really good about being both funny and pointed, especially when Don Cheadle showed up.
This concept seems small, but it really isn’t. I dunno, I feel like there’s this tendency to sand down the uncomfortable parts of race in entertainment in favor of everyone always treating everyone else as… I don’t know. Normal. But you lose a lot in that. Normal isn’t interesting. Normal isn’t true. You avoid the terrible physical or emotional violence that makes race one of the dumbest concepts on the planet, but you also lose the beautiful cultural differences that make race one of the most amazing things in the world.
Real people have real conversations about how Wes Anderson makes white people movies and how so-and-so is too bougie to hang with you and whether shark fin soup or chitlins are grosser, or whatever whatever. We regularly talk about how our races affect our lives, and not in a pontificating or divisive sort of way, either. I’m talking about in a normal and most likely unexamined sort of way, a matter of fact sort of way. It’s like how people use the word “ghetto” in normal conversation and never address the subtext. It’s knowing that white music is one thing and black music is another, but not letting that stop you from enjoying either.
There’s a fine line to walk here, since you’re going to inevitably be dealing in stereotypes, but stereotypes aren’t bad in and of themselves. It’s how and why they’re applied. Here, Sleeping Dogs applied a stereotype to Wei’s mother, and more importantly, they didn’t condemn that stereotype. There’s an implicit critique in there, yeah — Wei is our character, we’re supposed to identify with him and assume that he’s right and moral. But not a condemnation. More of a “It is what it is,” I think, and an acknowledgement that that was then and this is now.
I’d like to stop being surprised when this happens in casual entertainment, too. I remember when Fred Van Lente & Mahmud Asrar tackled the unspoken complexities of interracial dating in Shadowland: Power Man. It was such a surprise because cape comics have a history of depicting more interracial relationships than intraracial ones, and any comment on interracial relationships was masked and fictionalized by the fact that one person had blue skin or wings or whatever fake thing they had. But, FVL and Asrar’s story was straight up “Yo, people feel some type of way about dating outside your race,” a subject that could easily get you slapped.
You know who’s really, really good at this? At this sort of honesty? Howard Victor Chaykin. For the most part, everyone in his books actually has a race that is acknowledged in the text. His books are filled with blacks, Jews, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, and more, and that factors into their personalities, setbacks, and lives. Chaykin loves playing with cultures and culture in his work, whether via someone simply mentioning their background or people getting into arguments over things and it coming up. It adds a lot to his work. More people should be willing to shake things up like that.
Anyway, the car chases and bullet time in Sleeping Dogs are on point, too, so give that a look if you get curious. Personally, I’m rolling through the game while wearing the Mr. Black outfit: black suit, untucked white shirt, dirty tie, black sunglasses, and a hope for a better tomorrow. Portrait of the killer as a young man.
So good news and bad news. Good news is that I’m having a complete and utter blast at King of Trios in Easton, PA. Even if Chris Sims snores like a chainsaw (David can back me up on this). I’ll have a full trip report in a day or so, including how I was completely screwed out of the CHIKARA Not-Jeopardy Challenge and only made second place.
CHIKARASON! :argh:
The bad news is that I’m going to be in Easton until tomorrow and that means I don’t have the means to wait a day to do This Week in Panels. Which kind of sucks because this is the ending of the third year of the feature. This just means that I’ll have to do This Week in Panels #whatever tomorrow and This Year in Panels the day after that. So it’s not like I’ve completely forgotten about it.
I’ve been planning (loosely planning) this thing for a while now. It’s the 30th anniversary of The Hernandez Brothers’s Love & Rockets, and I was going to check them out and write about them from a beginner’s POV. Partly out of guilt, I think — I’ve never read any Love & Rockets, and my first Los Bros book was Sloth, which I found sort of weird and impenetrable at the time.
Almost right after I came up with this plan, Fantagraphics announced that they’d be doing digital versions. Awesome. I’m running on empty when it comes to space, and I don’t need 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 books or however many stinking up the spot and leading to my eventual death-by-falling-books. So I backburnered my plans for a couple months and waited.
The one thing I didn’t expect was that they’d put the digital books up for full retail. There’s just two right now, Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic, both marked volume one. Other than figuring out what order to read these in, I’ve got to choose whether or not to pay full retail for a digital comic that I do not legally own and cannot download or to order Heartbreak Soup and Maggie the Mechanic off Amazon for twenty bucks (ten bucks cheaper!) instead and get rid of something else to find space. I’ll also have to spend time scanning those, which I think dissolves the value of the savings. I’ve also got to figure if spending 30 bucks to make 50 makes economic sense (it doesn’t, I don’t think, especially when you factor in time spent reading + writing) or if I should just go about my business and find something else to write about.
It’s not a big deal, but it’s kind of a weird (and disappointing) high-wire act. “I want to do this thing, but I can’t make it make sense for me to do. So do I buckle or do I leave?” I don’t know the answer yet.
off and on over the past week. (
is taking up some time, too, as is Papa & Yo.) It’s the latest game in the True Crime series, sort of. Those games have generally been pretty okay, but not spectacular. This one isn’t spectacular, but I think it might be genuinely good, bordering on great. The story isn’t special — an undercover cop in too deep? with a grudge? and an attitude?! whoa!– and the gameplay isn’t particularly innovative, but the combination of a faithful recreation of the Hong Kong we see in movies and some pretty smart writing elevates it above most other sandbox games. It’s not 
, which I found sort of weird and impenetrable at the time.
and 
off Amazon for twenty bucks (ten bucks cheaper!) instead and get rid of something else to find space. I’ll also have to spend time scanning those, which I think dissolves the value of the savings. I’ve also got to figure if spending 30 bucks to make 50 makes economic sense (it doesn’t, I don’t think, especially when you factor in time spent reading + writing) or if I should just go about my business and find something else to write about.