Win: MAD, Loss: CNN

While sitting in the airport today, on my way to Chicago, I couldn’t help but hear the CNN they have blaring through the terminal. They were doing a story on MAD Magazine’s 500th issue, which is awesome. I have a collection of MAD Magazines that’s taller than I was when I first started buying it in 1988 (I have since dropped the title when it went color and quarterly), so I’m a fan of the work.

CNN, must not be familiar with the book, as the news anchor, a ditzy, ditzy woman, started off the report by saying, “As Alfred E. Newman would say, ‘What? MAD? Why worry?’”

Ugh. A few minutes later the weatherman made a joke about “putting the lotion in the basket” and this wonderful anchorwoman didn’t know what he was talking about.

Another comic book anatomy lesson

Captain America, as you may have read, is a shining symbol of American patriotism, liberty, and can-do fighting spirit. Except in the 90’s, when he was a hulking mass of badly-drawn muscles and bright, circus-y colors. I give you, Captain America #431.

Oh, oh, oh, there is so much wrong with this cover, it hurts.

Ignoring the elephant in the room of anatomy for a second, I turn your attention to the coloring. A red, white, and blue character on top of a red, white, and blue background. You could have used different intensities to show contrast but no, both the Free Spirit and the flag come out looking like they’ve gone one too many rounds in the washing machine. Additionally, there is a ncie color error (right on the cover!) next to Free Spirit’s right boot. Yup, the sky is blue, but just for that one sliver.

The US flag doesn’t have enough stars on it. Look it again. Now look at an actual US flag:

How many stars does it have going up the left side? Yup. Someone just threw some stars on a flag without caring. To make matters worse, it doesn’t even have the right number of stripes (5 below the blue field as opposed to the correct number, 6). As we can see by the right side of the flag, there are only 9 stripes. We’re missing some stars and bars here.

Then we get to the meat n’ potatoes of the cover, Free Spirit herself.

Take a look at the part of her hair.

Real hair doesn’t part like that, mainly because most people’s scalps flatten off at the top of the skull, rather than extending up and to the right. If the back of her head was being blown off with a bullet or something, that might explain the weird rising on the back of her head, but I don’t think that’s the case. Hair doesn’t work that way.

For that matter, neither do breasts. Without the aid of a bra, those gentlemen should not be positioned the way that they are. One seems to be ascending, the other descending. Neither looks natural for a woman standing still on a chimney.

“Standing,” being the operative word there. There really is very little of this oddly-shaped woman actually touching the chimney. She’s on there by a tip of a toe and (presumably) some fingers. You have to wonder what the hell happened to her spine? because she seems to have an extra-flexible vertebra that allows her to actual bend 90 degrees apart from her hips. For her to be in this position, she would have to have a completely hourglass figure, and I mean a waist as skinny as the middle of an hourglass with shoulders and hips as wide as the ends of an hourglass. You can imagine it once you see her butt. Her hips are just too tall to be human hips. Whereas normal human beings have hips in a general oblong, rectangular shape, Free Spirit has hers in sort of a square.

Now the legs. NO NO NO. BAD. NO. DO NOT TOUCH. Each leg is an alphabet of woe. Her right leg (on our left), extends from the groin (the lower groin, without getting into female anatomy parts), and not from the hip socket. In fact, the hip socket is a good three inches above where the leg extends from. Her left leg (on our right), WTF? This girl is shown head-on and we suddenly get a leg in full profile. What this means is: SOMEONE BROKE HER LEG OFF AT THE HIP AND IT’S JUST HANGING THERE, A VICTIM OF GRAVITY. It even looks like the foot is turning inwards, which means that this superheroine is 100% pigeon-toed.

On second look, Free Spirit seems to have an extra joint in her hips. Bear with me now. In humans, the hips begin to get wider because there is a ball joint protruding from the pelvis. In illustration:

The femur in the cover does seem to have that ball joint, and you can see the beginning of the slope forming where the lower scarf-thing begins. Then the femur is rudely broken a few inches down at an almost 90 degree angle. To add insult to injury, the left calf is longer than the femur. BAD. NO. FAIL.

And this was the COVER to the issue! This is the thing that would have gone through the most quality control since this was what was being used to sell the book! Printing errors, anatomical errors, and a flag that is obviously not of our country…was editorial having a sick day when this went through? Sadly, yes, I could do a whole series of these anatomy lessons with the output of the later Captain America series.

Is this the next sentinel of liberty? God, I hope not. (She wasn’t)

I talk about video games, and my girlfriend

Just as I’m working on one blog post, I find out that something else I wrote has been put up on another website! Thank God Wizard doesn’t have a non-compete going for me (if they did, I’d be demanding a salary).

This article I wrote is up on Co-Optimus Prime, a gaming website run by my friend Nick Puleo (who just welcomed a baby into his family! Congrats!). Normally, I don’t play many video games, but I absolutely love co-op games and absolutely love writing about geeky things I do (want me to tell you about my collection of books on conspiracies?). So I wrote an article for Nick’s magazine.

(Lots of parentheses in this)

The article is about how my girlfriend Katie and I have been playing through some games recently and how much fun it can be. For those of you who don’t know, playing video games with a spouse is a lot of fun, and makes the time you’d normally spend alone, glued to a screen, more talkative and social. It’s a good thing.