I think the joke is that one of the jokes of the original movie was that they were all a bit too old to be playing camp counselors, and now they're *really, really* too old to be playing camp counselors (except Paul Rudd, who is ageless)

surely it was "you are a boor, sir"?

Contention: No show has ever gotten measurably more viewers as a result of a grade given by the avclub. I mean, I suppose there's some number of people who might see that and watch the show, but not nearly enough for that to be a good thing for the show in any way. It'll be a good thing for the people who decide to…

Supposedly, Clarke's sequel is going to focus on Childermass and Vinculus, or at least they'd be major characters.

They're apparently living together at the end of the story, and Lady Pole, at least, is clearly done with men. I'm going to argue that Lady Pole/Arabella is canonical.

I don't think it's so much that it couldn't work on TV, as just that it would have taken a lot more time, and there was already so much plot to get through that it didn't make sense to spend so much time on the totally tangential disposing of a secondary character.

I do agree with you that it's the weakest part of the series, but even people who've never read a comic book know what superheroes are. I think you're assuming a level of ignorance of superhero comic books that does not actually exist in the real world. And there's literally one superhero bit in the whole first…

I miss the ridiculous gifts to Steven. That was always good stuff. I think the more malevolent version of the Gentleman worked very well on its own terms, but there was definitely something lost.

I think the better question would be "would you recommend a film from 1915 to get someone into movies?" Or "would you recommend a novel from 1720 to get people into novels?" It's not that 1938 is so long ago that nothing good could have come from them. It's that comics from 1938 weren't very good, because it was a new…

Does it matter, though? The only ones who matter are, in fact, the "real heavy hitters" - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, plus Luthor and Captain Marvel, I guess. I don't think anybody else does anything where it's really important to have any prior sense of who they are, other than "a superhero".

I don't get this at all. You don't need to know who Doctor Destiny is to follow the comic, and the rest of the DCU stuff is even more extraneous. There are comics where you're going to miss a lot if you don't know the backstory, but the first volume of Sandman is certainly not one of them. What is there to be confused…

With this and Ultimate Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel, I'm never sure I quite get what the appeal of yet another teen superhero is supposed to be. I mean, I understand that actual teenagers might be into that, but I'm in my 30s, and this feels like a genre that's been done to death.

Kirby sort of has two modes for dialogue - the stuff you're talking about, and then a lot of sub-Stan Lee stuff that you get in the Jimmy Olsen stuff, particularly.

Well, my problem is more broadly with the writing, and Kirby was certainly involved in coming up with storylines - and probably sometimes with dialogue, too, although it seems a bit unclear how much. When Kirby *does* write, as in the Fourth World stuff, it's not any better.

There are still places whose prime business is baseball cards?

The Dr. Destiny stuff is very much "Gaiman trying to be Alan Moore," though. The Sound of Her Wings really feels like the proper start of Sandman in a lot of ways.

I don't necessarily love "grim and gritty" comics, certainly not for the Fantastic Four, but is it unreasonable to say that, for anything but historical interest, I enjoy the Waid and Hickman runs far more than the Lee/Kirby stuff? Because, among other things, Waid and Hickman write dialogue that sounds like an actual…

It was definitely a comic where I read the first few issues and enjoyed them without fully getting them, and then got to the Hellblazer parody and was like, "oh, wait, *that's* what's going on."

That was terrible, especially since Frank and Jordan basically said nothing new in the second part of their scene. It didn't help that those are the two most boring parts of the story.

So who is this season's titular "True Detective"?