Ha ha, I had the same exact thought — I actually did that mental inventory thing, wondering if all this time, somehow Aaron was never being seen by anyone else on the mainland, like in Sixth Sense…

Canada gave us William Shatner, KiTH and Phil Hartman. End of discussion.

It's easy to over-rate anything pop culture from the 90s because the previous decade sucked so very much

RE: Steve Heisler
Forgive this off-topic response, but it's weird to see a Secret of Evermore reference someplace. I worked on that game, a decade and a half ago…

Namaste in the past-y
That's a tortured Futurama reference, to bring up something my wife keeps insisting — that Jack is going to turn out to have been Christian all along, and vice versa. I thought she was crazy when she started saying that a few weeks ago, but now with Jack 30 years in his own past, I'm starting to…

Agreed — that's two weeks in a row that I couldn't make it through the whole episode. AD and the Simpsons were each mediocre, and I missed KOTH.

Oh! I wish I was dead! (biting hand in seething envy)

So you're the one who managed to register "Aqualad" before I could. (shaking fist in impotent, moist rage)

No way was this the worst Simpsons episode of this season
Recyclage or no, the episode still had some fun laughs (Ralph needing to go potty, then cheerfully letting Skinner know he'd already finished before they got to the restroom) and was miles above some other recent episodes like the iPod one.

What about the Ross/Dini painted one-shots from a few years back?
For new readers of superhero comics, Paul Dini and Alex Ross distilled some of the best themes from the iconic heroes into a series of large format stories, culminating in a Justice League one shot that I think had a lot of mass appeal:

Have you read that one since you were a kid? Squadron Supreme was more like the gas station shrink-wrapped sandwich to Watchmen's sirloin steak dinner.

WE3 is fantastic. Sad and poignant, and, I'd argue, Quitely's best work.

You're probably just well-adjusted. For want of a better term, how about "Normal"?

Eclectic Eel is exactly right, as was Leonard, above — Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns were conceived of as endpieces for the superhero genre in the 1980s, when most comic book enthusiasts seemed to agree that pretty much all the meat had been picked off the carcass of that genre. Moore and Miller said back then that…

I've yet to outright hate anything Morrison has done, though if you read all his stuff you start to see him recycle a lot of (admittedly cool) concepts, particularly outside forces reaching into the characters' world (often from ours) and messing with them.

I also concur with Red Son as potentially the second best Superman story ever told, right behind All Star Superman. I wouldn't recommend either one as a "gateway" to superhero comics, though. Each is too steeped in Super-geeky nostalgia for a new reader.

I read the first few issues of Whedon's X-Men and it was, in fact, great. I should pick up the trades.

It kept me amused for two hours on my cross country flight Sunday night thanks to JetBlue's in flight TV, though I missed out on the Simpsons actually being in HD that way.

I also laughed at the Bale tape scene, even though it went on so long it begged you to notice how much money they saved on animating anything for ten minutes of screen time.

This (apocryphal?) anecdote makes me want to like Tarantino as a human being.