New to see, New to read

There are quite a few updates in Catland...

The Gotham Rogues chess set from (duh) The Gotham Rogues and Catarang from Not My Kink are on display in the Virtual Visitor Center in Second Life.  Read about it in the Cat-Tales blog.

The new chapter of NMK Inc. is here, Part 4: Mercy.  It would never occur to Lex Luthor that his being in Gotham affects someone other Lex Luthor.  (Go figure)

And while you're on the site, there's a new section in the gallery expanding portraits into more elaborate scenes & images inspired by Cat-Tales episodes.  Remember Matches & Gina? 

Check them out along with Zatanna on stage, Eddie and that darn chess set again, and some old favorites.  Cat-Tales Scenes

From Today, You Won't Have Lex Luthor to Kick Around Anymore

The new chapter of NMK Inc is finally here.  Part 2: Positive Carry will bring us to the Gotham Stock Exchange, and as readers of Part I know, Lex Luthor is coming to town.

As a quick reference for newcomers, I prepared a History of Lex Luthor in Cat-Tales to bring new readers up to speed and refresh memories elsewhere.

After that, it's on to NMK Inc to find out what the crazy cue ball is up to now.

NMK Inc.

The new Cat-Tale begins today.  

NMK Inc. is the name of a firm that first made its appearance in Not My Kink, when Selina took over Batman's patrols for a few weeks while Bruce recovered from an injury.  She wasn't happy about it, having proclaimed crimefighting "not my kink" on many occasions before and after.  That's why Bruce chose the name NMK Shipping when he needed a new shield company to lay a trap for Ra's al Ghul.  It's not like the name mattered, no one would ever see it.  He just needed a new corporate entity unconnected to any of Batman's existing shield companies, and because Ra's was involved, it couldn't be connected to anything Wayne either.  He put Selina's name at the end of the paper trail no one would ever see, and because the whole thing resulted from a lead she uncovered as Catwoman the crimefighter, he called the company NMK as a private joke.

Until The Gotham Rogues, when war broke out between Carmine Falcone's crime family and the theme villains.  Day by day Falcone lost property to the Rogues, and as they fell one by one, Batman scrambled to keep Falcone from getting them back.  He used the old shield company, reinvented as NMK Holdings, and at the start of Wayne Rises, Selina found herself in control of "an awful lot of Gotham real estate."  At first she worked with the Wayne Foundation as Bruce intended, making the properties available for various philanthropic entities and using others for a business incubator to stimulate the Gotham economy.  While this was going on, a faction inside Ra's al Ghul's operation launched a new and very expensive assault on Gotham City and on Bruce Wayne personally.    They had to leverage, sell and otherwise cripple other parts of the organization to fund the plan... and that gave Selina an idea.  She put all the charitable giving on hold and began using NMK to do to Ra's what they'd done to Falcone - buy up, lock down and otherwise screw with all the parts of his operation that were now vulnerable.

Working with her banker in Zurich, she has established Nicht Meine Kragenweite Holdinggesellschaft, an international counterpart to NMK.  And thus begins our new tale...

Jim Gordon is back. When he resigned, Catwoman was an anonymous cat burglar.
Now she's Selina Kyle, living with Bruce Wayne, and running this company
that's messing with Ra's al Ghul. Might be a learning curve.

Not a Twinkie

Man of Steel screenwriter Davis S. Goyer took advantage of the lull before a new Bat-trilogy Blu-ray (new packaging or something) to remind us all that Superman kills now.   The notion that he wouldn’t is "a rule that exists outside of the narrative."

Let’s cross the street where they’re not quite so confused, shall we?  A couple weeks ago, a friend sent me this great trailer for Lego Marvel Superheroes.  I’m not a Marvel, I’ve never particularly clicked with their characters, but watching this just makes me feel good:

 

I think it’s the same reason I enjoy the Marvel movies.  It’s so unabashedly enthusiastic about being a superhero vehicle. 

DR. DOOM:
Dr. Doom’s Doom-Ray of Doom

ORCHESTRAL HORNS:
BWOMG-BWOMM-BWOMMM

This clip is fearless about standing center stage and bellowing out what it is.  Superheroes in Legos, the bad guys versus the good guys.  Nobody here is running away from it.  Nobody is ashamed of it or afraid of being silly.  Nobody is pretending this is serious fucking business.

Isn’t that refreshing?  I don’t think anything with Batman that I’ve seen in a decade has made me feel as good as this 2:05 of characters I don’t give a crap about.

As I was sitting there, fingers poised over my keyboard trying to find a way to express that succinctly in order to share the video on Facebook, I found myself looking at a Twinkie.

Facebook being Facebook, I found myself looking at a Twinkie

Maybe it was the history of those old time Hostess ads in comic books, when the heroes distracted the villains with delicious cakes and fruit pies.  Maybe it’s the fact that Twinkies were out of production for a while there and their return was announced right after Man of Steel, prompting more than a few comments that if they’d only come back sooner, Zod could have been handled the old-fashioned way and all that destruction porn could have been avoided.

Whatever the chain of associations, it led to an analogy that can explain the divide in superhero comics and movies.  I find food analogies cut through so much faux intellectual B.S.  You can convince otherwise intelligent people of a lot of absolute nonsense using phrases like "a rule that exists outside of the narrative," until you apply the principles to something they understand on such a basic level as food.  Maybe you don’t know why the Miller apologist is wrong, maybe you don’t know how to construct the counterargument, but once you get that applying those principles amounts to serving bleu cheese and chopped liver on a Triscuit for Christmas dinner, you do know that is a really bad idea.  Whether you can articulate the reason or not, you’re gagging.  You know there has to be something very, very wrong in any chain of the logic that ends in this being a tolerable plan.  You know you’re not going to serve it to your kids, no matter what argument it makes or how big its advertising budget.  It’s a part of our make-up they haven’t broken: if it makes you wretch, don’t eat it.

So, back to the Twinkie.  Is there anybody reading this who doesn’t know what they are?  Sweet yellow cake with a white, sweet cream filling that may or may not be vanilla-ish flavored.  It’s a kid’s food, most of us ate them and remember them fondly.  There were knock-offs and generics.  There are also some very prestigious restaurants that have made a gourmet version.  (Think champagne cake with a filling of blancmange infused with vanilla and cognac) and less prestigious ones serving up the traditional twink deep-fried, a substance so orgasmically sweet and rich it became an analogy for… well never mind. They’re good.

Now here’s the thing, if none of that sounds good to you, then you don’t like Twinkies.  It’s okay, none of us are judging you.  For most humans, sweet is the first set of taste buds to develop.  We go for it and it’s nature’s way of telling us: eat the berry not the bark.  But if for whatever reason you don’t like sweets, then you don’t like Twinkies.

Superheroes, like Twinkies, are certain things.  They’re fun.  There is humor and color and life in their stories.  Even when there’s angst and horror, it gets broken up with a little f-ing fun.  Burton knew it.  Schumacher absolutely knew it.  He made the worst goddamn Twinkie any of us have ever seen, but it WAS a Twinkie.

Print comics have succeeded in convincing what politicians call “the base” that Twinkies don’t have to be sweet, they don’t have to be made of cake or have cream filling, and it is just so silly and childish and stunted to imagine they do.   And, as in politics, ideas that go beyond 'completely wrong' into the land of 2+2 = cream cheese nonsensical can be accepted inside these little bubbles of true believers, but they run into trouble when they come out here into the real world where reality is in play.   That’s why they have those names.

Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?

The DC movies have been serving up pickled coffee beans and calling them Twinkies.  They’re not, and those of you who cannot let an un-Nolan thought (or an un-Miller thought or an un-gogglewhore thought) pass without comment are not going to argue it into being one.  You like the pickled coffee beans, we get that.  Some of us do too on occasion.   I like bitter and I like sour from time to time.  But not in a Twinkie.  Those things are not Twinkies, no matter what it says on the box or how big a name the director is, how big the advertising budget is, or how you choose to belittle those who refuse to validate your delusion.

See, and I think the important thing is actually not to BE panicking.

Something quite interesting happened Friday night.  It’s a story of hope, involving DC Comics.  That’s worth returning to a topic I thought I was long finished with.  It starts with a website the mere existence of which means the core dysfunction that drove me off years ago has only gotten worse.  It’s called hasdcdonesomethingstupidtoday.com.  Seriously, I thought it was a joke too, but try the link, it’s real.

This website has a counter indicating, as the name suggests, how many days it’s been since the last act of stupidity as covered by an underlying website called The Outhouser.  DC has had a bad couple of weeks leading to multiple resets in a single day.  (And no, this has nothing to do with Ben Affleck.  Let the man be.)   This incident is only tangentially related to the dramas that caused the multiple resets; you can read about those here if you care.  It has to do with the underlying problem and, more importantly, its solution. 

There's a reason Gail Simone gets the
benefit of the doubt when others
at DC Comics do not 

For me, it began with a Saturday morning email that big dramas were about to erupt.  It seems there was an article on the mother site where Gail Simone “fan favorite writer and vigilante crimefighter addresses the DC marriage controversy.”  It took a blog she wrote and then commented/extrapolated in such a way that is common on the site, but in this case it was murky where Gail’s remarks left off and the commentary began.  Clearly nothing malicious, but it seemed to Gail that a journalist ‘just made stuff up’ that she never said.  After tweeting this, she publicly asked the article’s author to message her.  His editor saw that request first and responded.  The article was taken down until it could be edited.  (That’s not a euphemism, it’s back up.)  With apologies on one side and gracious understanding on the other, the whole thing was over in about 20 minutes, drama free.

Quite honestly, without DC Comics being involved, I’d still applaud.  Check it out: two rational adults setting something civilly and amicably on the Internet.  It’s better than YouTube kittens.

So, what about that email?  That was sent to me in the period between Gail’s request for a DM from the author and the editor’s response.  It said basically “Look for a counter reset in 3… 2… 1…”
My reaction, without knowing any of these particulars, was PFFT.  I told my buddy that, while I don’t know Gail personally, I’d seen her on Twitter for over a year and a lovelier woman you simply won’t find.  She has a sense of humor and a rational perspective, and I’ve seen her laugh off plenty of trolls, bigots and creeps who simply weren’t worth engaging.  I knew she wasn’t about to turn into Linda Blair and start spewing pea soup and obscenities over a simple misconstruction.

Now, what’s important here isn’t the lack of another negative PR episode involving someone at DC Comics.  It’s that I knew there wasn’t going to be one before I clicked a link.  I knew because the way this woman conducts herself in public, as well as the material she writes, tells me that she’s not that kind of person.

Back to DC proper.  Several people have tried to position themselves as the voice of reason over the past few weeks (or maybe they’re just fence sitting) saying that DC has a PR problem, an image problem, a perception problem, etc.   The implication is that it’s not the men at the top, the decisions they make, ideas and attitudes that prompt them or the way they choose to express those ideas that’s bringing the tempest upon them; it’s the failure of the marketing and publicity departments who don’t have their backs.  It’s their job to foresee these issues before they occur and be there to give the right spin.

Technically, I suppose it’s true:  In the same way I instantly gave Gail the benefit of the doubt because she comes off like a good person, we all assume the absolute worst whenever someone from DC editorial or management speaks because we think they’re assholes.  Those last 5 words can be described as ‘an image problem.’ But to say that image problem is the problem is, well it's rather like this:

Maybe the impression so many of us have that this company is nothing but the corporate embodiment of a petty, insecure man-child lashing out maliciously but impotently at all that confuses and frightens him isn’t quite as important as the reason we have that impression.

 

Cat-Tales Inside an Enigma - Ebooks now ready for download

"I said I was a patient cat; I am.  I said I would wait, I did. 
And now Fate, friend of cats, has laid the key to his happiness at my feet.

He betrayed my friendship, betrayed my trust. 
And now… he is going… to pay."

Cat-Tales: Inside an Enigma now complete, downloadable as an ebook for Kindle, Mobi and universal epub for other mobile readers, and print-quality pdf is available for download on the Cat-Tales website.

 "It's a labyrinth of cunning and puzzles and riddle-mania… but never hard to follow. That's what makes it riveting…"

"Selina is a lot smarter and a lot scarier than a lot of people realise."

"Simply brilliant

"Inspired

"THAT…was AWESOME, and so very, *very* Kitty!"

Cat-Tales Audio Books - A Girl's Gotta Protect Her Reputation and Fun & Games

Cat-Tales is pleased to announce the first selection of short stories to be released as audio books.

From the earliest tales, the Book One collection...

CT #1: A Girl's Gotta Protect Her Reputation - Let’s say nearly everything you’ve ever read in a comic book is wrong...  This is where it began.  The Gotham Post had been getting it wrong about Catwoman for years.  Until the day they said she was small time, arrested by ordinary cops, arrested... Selina Kyle had enough, punched back - and Gotham was never the same.

CT #7: Fun & Games - We all knew, those two would play some interesting games if they ever got together after all those years of "whatever it was" between Batman & Catwoman.  We weren't wrong.

Read by Caroline Sharp, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, studied with the renowned Atlantic Theater Company in both New York and Los Angeles and at the Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College Dublin. NY, LA, and international theatre and film credits include Group: A Musical, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Country Wife, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Teachers, Chicxulub, Top Girls, Dolly West’s Kitchen, The Sound of Music, Scrooge, Grand Hotel, and the comedy webseries The Majestic Theatre Co.