Yeah, what is it with ALICE IN WONDERLAND comics(with all due respect to my good friend Vroom Socko who conducted an excellent interview with Mr. Gregory)? I mean, most comic readers are dudes from their teens to their early 1000s these days. Isn't it like:

"Hey, Todd, whatcha readin'? Some cool, twisted Vertigo thing? The Punisher? CIVIL WAR: DAMNED YANKEES or what?"

"It's a new take on ALICE IN WONDERLAND about her daughter."

"I am now going to hurt you badly, Todd."

"Yes, we can, Buzz, and not to be homophobic, but in yer case it's damned sickening!"

Sell. I meant sell. Really. Sell.

Every problem that I had with the first issue was addressed and handled creatively and excellently. NEW FRONTIER blew away everything else I read last year.

I don't think it would work within DC continuity as it stands now, but I would say that it wound up ultimately working within the world of NF. And the main reason it worked is because it set up extreme audacity on the part of pilot Jordan and projected him into a situation where he had to violate his flippant ultimatum. And that transition of his character, from cocky youth who thinks he can get away with fighting war but not killing, to realizing that this ain't the way the world works -- especially in war time. Turn-off at first until I read it on through in context and in light of the world Cooke was establishing.

And I don't read arcs, story arcs or character arcs. I read stories about characters. And when something is presented to me to buy in installments, installment number one better work for me if they expect my money for installment two. And I can judge if something is stupid. However pretty NF was, stupid is stupid.

NF # 1 didn't read as a particuarily fanciful, Silver Age type story even though chronologically it was set in the Silver Age. If that's the argument, there'd be no mention of the war, HUAC, etc. This was superheroes in history, which means that rules apply.

All Cooke would have had to do was to read Tom Wolfe's book THE RIGHT STUFF (even better than the movie, which I love). Fighter pilots are highly aggressive individuals. They'd know instinctively if a recruit lacked killer instinct. Hell, he could have watched some movies. Even OFFICER & A GENTLEMEN or TOP GUN. I believe Cooke was unable to properly reconcile his political agenda with the times and the profession of his character.

NF is a true example of the pitfalls of realistic comics. Very few have the skill to have it both ways. Like I said, I'm with ya on flying cars, death rays, time travel and Cyclopean sea monsters. And I'd have been with ya if Hal had refused to fly. But a bunch of macho fighter jocks aren't going to fly with a guy who thinks he's a better person than they are and they're not going to risk their lives, their missions and their careers on a pilot who won't kill. A mistake like that is terrible writing because it takes the reader (me) out of the story and expecting me to come back for more is merely relying on the addictive nature of comics, not much better than something like CIVIL WAR.

El, I'm surprised at you. Text to text comparisan is the sign of a sophisticated reader.

Damn. I think the river Styx just froze over.

Didja see THE GREAT SANTINI? What the hell do you think Robert Duvall would have done to one of his men who refused to shoot down the enemy? After the asskicking, the guy certainly wouldn't be getting into a US Marine fighter plane any time soon.

Good fantasy has rules. Bad fantasy ignores human nature, for one thing. In other words, you can have a bunch of grunts battling dinosaurs and that's great...but the grunts better behave like grunts.

This reminds me of film school. I was in an argument like this in a screenwriting class, although it was more twisted. I'd written a screenplay about a pair of LRRP soldiers who are assigned to escort a five man CIA team into Cambodia. They could only travel at night. The team carried bodybags with them...yes, they were vampires. Our two young heroes ended up fighting alongside villagers to stop them. Because I was young and stupid, it had a downer ending where one of the heroes was a vampire operating for Reagan in then-present day El Salvadore. The stupid thing was the class started telling me what vampires would or wouldn't do. Not the military. Not the intelligence community. Vampires. "You can't kill a vampire that way." "Why doesn't the vampire just bite the soldier when he's sleeping?" (okay that one was easy: like vampires, LRRPS slept in the daytime and killed at night). They couldn't believe that I'd just made up my own vampire shit. Finally, some guy in the class shouted to everybody else:"He can do that because VAMPIRES DON'T FUCKING EXIST!" My feeling is that you can play fast and loose with vampires, T-rexes, robots, caped vigilantes, etc. but when ignoring the character of a profession or a class of people is either self-serving or lazy. Like I said, if it'd been, "Okay, Jordan, you fucking pussy, you won't kill and you won't fly, we're putting your ass in the infantry. Get used to hearing 'em yell medic because that's one of yer names from now on and the rest of 'em are gutless, pantywaist..." And then had Hal have to end up killing, because a lot of the c.o. medics really did end up packing and having to kill.

Comic book readers are too forgiving. In any other medium, you lose the reader, you've lost. Or the viewer. Let's just say that, for me, NF had it's Jump The Shark moment far too early. I mean, nobody was saying,"I know it was stupid to have Fonzie waterskiing in his leather jacket, but maybe the show'll be better next week."

*choke*

I did.

*mwhah*

Now, that's as far as you get with me, El. I'm strictly hetero.

I, too, love THE GREAT SANTINI. For one thing, Pa Maverik was a Duvall look-a-like. I'm just an Andy Kaufman look-a-like (when he was alive, not now).

For me, the whole "you gotta read the whole comic to have an opinion" thing doesn't hold up. I know that NF was intended to be a graphic novel rather than serialized, but it WAS serialized and sold that way. Sorry, but it's a comic book. What do I owe a comic book or its' publisher or Creator Who Didn't Really Create Anything that I need to read the whole thing if I didn't like an issue or it was bungled? That's just addiction and programming. I mean, El, how can you say you didn't like Rob Liefeld's YOUNGBLOOD if you haven't read every single issue? I'm being rhetorical here because anybody can say they didn't like anything, especially YB, if they look at it and see that it sucks.

But I like to make up my own mind, especially about comics. I don't need to know what a bunch of other people thought about a comic book, which is why I wrote my reviews the way I did. I'd write ABOUT a comic, how it made me feel or what it made me think but I always tried to not tell other people what to think or what was in the comic. One of my pet theories about fandom is that we seek the consensus. We do have our sacred cows and our scapegoats. Usually, our sacred cows deserve the accolades but as fanboys (another pet theory) we either worship or despise and nothing can live up to that. KINGDOM COME showed holes first and THE DARK KNIGHT isn't aging so well. WATCHMEN holds up because of the care put into each panel, but as it goes mainstream with the movie it's at risk because nothing can live up to that much worship. Flawless writing, perfect art but the degree of nihilism and negativity are slightly undergrad, for example. That's fine if yer an undergrad but that's a few short, meaningless years of our lives. Put down the torches, pitchforks and nooses, I still love WATCHMEN but I'm just sayin'...

I think a lot of the regard NEW FRONTIER has received is that it reconfirmed the visual power of comics in what has become, overall in the mainstream, a wordy, writer's medium. The premise, superheroes in 20th century history, was great. I mean, Byrne did it first with that Batman/ Superman thing where they aged like real people, but I think he did that too late in his career. Fans, numbed by slow, overwritten comics, were enraptured by the art. I know I was. But when I get a derivative Batman/ Superman clash (in my review, I cracked myself up by speculating that, since Batman carries a chemical in case he has to fight Superman, maybe he carries around a vial of semen in case he has to fight Wonder Woman)and you can't have two heroes arguing in a bar during the Viet Nam War without WATCHMEN being invoked. I'm all for swinging for the fence, but don't telegraph your shot. Don't tell me it's going to be DKR or WATCHMEN. And yeah, if it's a pure fantasy world, say an Old West where the gunfighter hero only shoots the guns out of people's hands or Zorro cuts Zs into people's asses but never runs them through, no problem. But if you're saying something about American history, you have to say it in a way that makes sense. It's just too convoluted and what yer telling me doesn't make it any better. You're telling me that Hal doesn't go anywhere. Dig it: he starts out a pilot who won't kill (does he have a brother who's a sniper? Cal Jordan, the sniper who won't shoot anybody) and some how he encounters a Korean boy and has to kill him...to confirm that killing is bad, which he believed in the first place. That's not development. That's poor writing. For me, I hate when I can see the writer involved and I think that, as many of our friends from the Great White North are (and I'm with ya politically guys, it's just bad writing I can't stand), Mr. Cooke leans to the left and couldn't bear to have a hero doing something that he personally doesn't approve of. Forget the stupid comic by this title, but hawk to dove is interesting. Dove to hawk is also interesting. Dove to dove is staying the same. Good fantasy involves change. The characters may return to the Shire, may return to peace, but Frodo is never the same short furball he was when he left. Even Conan may be the same Hyborian killing machine he always when when he seizes the throne of Aquilonia, but he rules as a wiser, more troubled man.