Rainbow Batman

Who can say why Batman feels a strange compulsion to wear all those different-colored outfits?

The Good Duck Artist

A short documentary in two parts about the career of the late Carl Barks, a shy, lonely boy who found his life's calling in drawing the Scrooge McDuck comics, which were among my special favorites.  By the time I was 12 or so, I had amassed over 1200 comic books of all kinds, which I kept neatly filed and organized by brand, title, and date - if I had them now, I would be a rich man, but alas, all but a handful were lost to the vicissitudes of life.

Mickey Mouse never interested me much - by the early 1960's, he had become a rather bland, Ward Cleaver kind of character without any charisma, to my way of thinking.  But Donald Duck was always getting into hilarious trouble, usually through his own hubris.  And Uncle Scrooge stories were the most fascinating - partly because of the thought of those uncountable fantasticatillions in his Money Bin, and partly because of the rather ingenious storylines that took the reader from the Lost Cities of the Incas to the Arabian Desert to the center of the earth, and so on.  Somewhere years ago I read that Barks often drew inspiration for his stories from current National Geographic articles, and that certainly gave them an exotic, intriguing atmosphere.

And no, don't even talk to me about Duck Tales - tedious juvenile pabulum.  The Barks stories had an adult sophistication to them that none of his successors ever achieved.

The Comic Side of Marriage Equality

The Archie comic book series has had a gay character, Kevin Keller, for some time now. In the latest issue of Life with Archie, Kevin marries his fiance, Dr. Clay Walker.

Wow.  Your Head Trucker is speechless at the thought of how far we have come from the days when I was a kid reading those comics - and the only choice a guy had was between Betty and Veronica, or Ginger and Mary Ann. Some changes since, huh?

Psst:  Hey guys, I think I missed the last memo from Gay Headquarters, so clue me in: is this part of our United Nations plot to make half the world population homosexual within the next 20 years?

And where can I get my own gay marriage, is there like a sign-up sheet or something?