I'm very short, for a guy, at 5"2". My wife is about 5'8". It has never been particularly odd for us, although every once in a while I stand on the stairs to kiss her, just to see how the other half lives. (The last woman I dated before marriage was 5'10" — eight very solid inches, to stick with your cheesy double…

Great picture — the glossy dress reflects (and maybe helps deconstruct) the oiled-all-over shininess of traditional bodybuilding photos.

So ... did Benjamin Franklin really help them use S&M as a tool to greater self-actualization? I didn't really think so, but it was still a memorable episode.

A Rockette and her boyfriend dropped by my parish on a Sunday morning, years ago. They seemed swell, and I wish they had come back. It was the sort of place where artists often felt at home. Plus, I don't get many brushes with fame.

Avatar: the Last Airbender can be streamed on Netflix. My kid and I are both loving it, and if I were going to be alone at Christmas, I'd just watch the series straight through.

That one line — "I can't wait to meet my second wife. I hope she likes me better than this one" — rings stunningly true with regard to conversations among my middle-aged-married-man cohort. Its not that we want our wives dead — far, far from it. They're awesome. It's that, midway into a lifetime of marriage and…

What I love about Samuel L. Jackson is that he so clearly loves the world of comics and science fiction, and takes such pleasure in being a part of it. It's a big contrast to some actors, who drop hints that they are slumming when they make a superhero movie. (There's a lot less of that these days, to be sure.)

Yes, Carol Danvers has deserved to be Captain Marvel for a long time, and I don't grudge her the title one bit. But do you know who else deserves to be Captain Marvel? Billy Freaking Batson, that's who. Only now, courtesy of some bad decision-making by DC's creative and/or legal teams, he's know as "Shazam." …

You've made your point, and its a good one. But now can we talk about the real danger, which is letting Jim Lee redesign the DC universe, costumes and all?

Little-known facts: Frankenstein's Monster is now a chiropractor in Tuckahoe. Countess Marya Zaleska is a yoga teacher. And I've heard that Kharis the Mummy was running self-empowerment workshops in California, but I can't find his website.

Second that on John Noble. He brings a level of subtlety to his various iterations of Walter that is simply astonishing. In a genre filled to capacity with mad scientists, his is both the maddest and the most achingly human.

I don't see what the fuss is about. They've already told the stories of Khan and the Squire of Gothos and Q; there's really no point to going there again. (If Flaubert had written a sequel to Madame Bovary, she wouldn't have just had more sex with the same guy, would she?)

You pegged it with your headline picture. Despite an emotional attachment to Gigantor, the Iron Giant is my favorite design-qua-design.

Hulk smash puny soldiers. After Hulk finish this delicious lobster ravioli.

I think that guy runs a deli near me.

You and I may remember the 1978 movie a little differently; Pa Kent was played by Glen Ford, then an important enough actor that his appearance, even if brief, added heft to the part.

Great, more origin. Because I wasn't sure where this character came from.

If you had a Superman based on physics, I think he'd be called Pa Kent, Kansas Farmer.

In related news, the same producers are being sued by Israel, India and the United Kingdom for turning their respective gods and heroes into cheesy movie devices.

By the same reader: "Hey, Professor Tolkein — you know Gandalf was really an elf, not a wizard, right? Man, your books are so fake!"