Or bending the curve in his direction. It's sometimes scary how many characters and storylines can be traced to one-shot (literally, in the case of Oracle) choices by Moore.

But it's also frequently their underpinning. (If nothing that happened before matters, why does this story?) Even if the original creator doesn't care to sweat the details, fans will, and they'll be vocal about it.

I liked the ongoing, which was a great "immigrant encounters America" story. The mini was too 80s grimdark-for-the-sake-of-grimdark for my tastes.

I know a Sophonisba, but she's a) too young to be posting, and b) named after Sophonisba Breckinridge.

Enlightened self-interest would be a massive step up for most of the cast. Which makes sense, since while many of them also have bad luck and circumstances, most have one or more really bad decisions or judgment leading to their current address.

It's a little tricky, since it has to bad enough to extend her sentence but not bad enough to send her out of minimum security. (Or to transfer her out of Lichfield.) I'm guessing perjury or something else relating to her case is more likely than violence.

Crap— looks like KP went the same route. Dammit, Disney.

Kim Possible is also there. (Hint hint, A.V. Club.) Which almost makes up for the lack of mass-market DVDs.

It's also around the time states started banning shoe-store fluoroscopes, so it fits the idea that concern about radiation exposure was starting to sink in.

It's the go-go checks of the 2010s!

Right— throughout the fifties the phrase was "the heat of my X-ray vision". (It even didn't work on lead bullets sometimes, even though that makes still less sense than the power itself.) The switch to "heat vision" may have come when even grade schoolers started to be aware that sufficient X-rays to generate…

Quick— someone tell Oxford's med school! (aka the Medical Sciences Graduate School http://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/… )

Oh, no. He did it because he was horny and she was offering.

I didn't get the impression that sexual humiliation was his motive for allowing her to continue.

Agreed that that was Caputo's worst act. (What he does when no one's in the room doesn't hurt anyone, even if he should really wait till he gets home. And while accepting an unsolicited attempt at a bribe he has no power to deliver on isn't going to win him any humanitarian awards, most of the people on the show…

The earliest use I encountered for "fanservice" wasn't predicated on reacting to specific viewer response: it came from anime fandom, and meant things like gratuitous panty shots: plot-irrelevant or even distracting insertions, meant to please the presumed primary demographic of the fanbase. (And by implication, of…

And Bumi was a certified (and certifiable) genius, shown developing new techniques and getting deep into the philosophical underpinnings of earthbending, which probably helped a lot in compensating for any lost physical prowess. (Like being able to bend using just facial twitches.)

See also the Sun Warriors style of firebending vs. the Fire Nation's.

"What do you mean a connection?!"

It's true that if they only have one person with the truth-sensing talent (or a small number in cahoots), that's a huge quis custodiet problem staring them in the face.