A'gachak doruno matak! (Klingon for 'copyright infringement')

What makes up 'Star Trek'? Vulcans with pointy ears? Check. The cowl necks and Starfleet command insignias on crew outfits? Check. Planet Archanis IV (first seen in the original TV series episode "Day of the Dove," in 1968)? Check. Phasers and dilithium and use of Star Dates? Check, check and check. And the list of things Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios say are being ripped off by a California film and TV production studio goes on. Paramount/CBS filed an amended complaint Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleging copyright infringement by Axanar Productions, the wanna-be maker of an independent 'Star Trek' film.

Axanar in 2014 put out a 21-minute film, "Prelude to Axanar," to drum up support for its goal of raising money for a full-length feature film. Here's how Axanar puts it on its website: "Axanar is the independent production that proves a feature-quality Star Trek film can be made on a very modest budget -- approximately $80,000 in the case of the short film that you just watched -- and outside of the studio system. Filmed in Hollywood, this effort, our short proof-of-concept film to show what our professional and highly talented cast and crew can deliver, was made possible by generous donations to our first Kickstarter effort by fans like you. Prelude to Axanar is told in a retrospective documentary fashion, but the follow-up feature-length film that is currently in production will unfold as a traditional film that is told chronologically would. You are fans of Star Trek. We are fans of Star Trek. Together we can make amazing things."

Of course, not if Paramount/CBS has its way. In the suit, the two allege the Axanar works "are substantially similar to, and unauthorized derivative works of, [their] Star Trek television series and movies in contravention of the copyright laws of the United States."

The suit includes side-by-side comparisons of many 'Star Trek' staples, like Vulcans and ship design, with screen shots of what Axanar has done. And to this not-a-copyright-attorney eye, there's no denying Axanar is making a 'Star Trek' movie. Whether Axanar has any legal leg to stand on when it's using ideas and Proper Nouns owned by someone else is going to be interesting to see.

Paramount/CBS is asking for an injunction stopping any further copyright infringement, as well as statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each separate Trek infringement, from "Teachings of Surak," which were referenced in 'Enterprise' episode "Two Days and Two Nights" in 2002, to Klingon home plant Qo'noS (first seen in TNG episode "Sins of the Father" in 1990").

Peanut butter and chocolate in the 23rd century

It's a quintessential James T. Kirk moment. The Starship Enterprise captain and his away team are trapped in an alternate dimension, one where a militaristic Earth controls much of the galaxy in an oppressive police state. The Star Trek crew have run into another batch of folks trapped in the same wrong dimension - this being a handful of the members of the Legion of Super Heroes. Things look bleak for all our heroes. And Kirk starts layin' the charm on Shadow Lass. You can almost hear the smarm coming off the printed page as Kirk tells her "You know, I don't know if I've ever met a woman with skin quite that shade of blue."

And it's little moments like that that make the Star Trek/Legion of Super-Heroes crossover (2012, 152 pages, IDW Publishing, $25) a fun little read. Written by sf novelist/comics writer Chris Roberson, the book collects the six-issue 2011/2012 miniseries by IDW, which has a history dabbling with crossovers of its licensed titles such as Dr. Who, Star Trek and Transformers. Both Trek and Legion are manna for nerds. And both, as the story points out, come from similar, idealistic corners of the s.f. universe - Trek the story of an exploratory ship sent in the 23rd century by the altruistic United Federation of Planets to just go around and discover things, Legion the story of the altruistic United Planets' group of superheroes who fly around and battle evil and alien threats in the 30th century. Both are undeniably hokey, yet have shown incredible longevity (Trek, especially, due to a series of movies, television shows, books and video games, though Legion has done OK as a B- or C-list comic series, with a three-season Warner Bros. cartoon giving it some new life in 2006). I've long been a decent fan of both - particularly the Legion comics, such as the Keith Giffen "Five Years Later" run on the series in 1989-90, as well as the work Giffen did with writer Paul Levitz prior and the times Geoff Johns has dabbled in the Legion in recent years. So seeing this crossover filled me with a giddy rush. But while worth reading, especially if a fan of either/both products, I don't think the end product is a must-have. The art, by Jeffrey Moy, who's worked on Legion in the past, is workmanlike and fine, if a bit lacking in panels that cry out of the scope of, say, George Perez's work in "Legion of Three Worlds." The story, meanwhile, is an amusing "something for everyone," from Vandal Savage/Mr. Flint being the chief villain to Q being, literally, the deux ex machina that both creates and ultimately solves the alternate evil universe challenge. The character archetypes are spot on, though everything is done with this slightly jaunty "look at all this fun we're having" tone that makes it a bit cartoony (cartoony, that is, for a comic book that already combines characters from a somewhat campy classic s.f. TV show and a somewhat campy classic comic book series, thus raising issues within the reviewer's own mind about how much can you expect from this kind of product in terms of adult content, while at the same time acknowledging there are ways to make genuinely moving or adult or intelligent superhero comics - just look at Watchmen or Identity Crisis or Powers - and so to dismiss any desire for something meatier than what the reviewer would've loved when he was 15 are ridiculous and thus we end up in this never ending Lincoln/Douglas). It's at least nice to see Uhura elevated to being an active part of the away team and the events, instead of a helpless token. So there's that.

From the longboxes: Strikeforce Morituri, or another look at a comic I bought 20 years ago and recently pulled out and re-read

Their backs against the wall when facing a powerful invader with superior force, the resistance turns to a last-ditch strategy - attacks that are guaranteed to end in death.
That narrative is both classic (think the Battle of Thermopylae with the Greeks setting out to slow the Persian advance) and timely (think the suicide bombings that have become commonplace in the Middle East or the Japanese kamikaze attacks in the waning days of World War II). And it was fuel for one of the more intriguing comic book concepts of the 1980s, Strikeforce Morituri.
A Marvel series that ran from 1985 to 1989, the monthly book started with a science fiction concept - mid 21st century Earth under invasion by a race called the Horde - as the stepping stone for a superhero concept - genetically engineering people to become supersoldiers with super powers. Those Strikeforce Morituri members, with their costumes and with a major merchandising effort behind them, are to serve as a big morale boost as well as a weapon. The trade off is that the genetic engineering work done to them is guaranteed to kill them within a year. Pretty somber stuff for a mainstream comic book, and SM milks it constantly. Issue six of the series sees the character who had been the chief protagonist for the book killed when his powers burn him out. And a constant theme in almost every issue of the first 20 is some character or another ruminating about how they're guaranteed to die fairly soon (or, in the case of the science and military folks behind the project, how they've condemned the SM volunteers to death).
The series was created by writer Peter B. Gillis and artist Brent Anderson (well known for his stellar, detailed work on Astro City, which you also see here). And during their 20-issue run, the two created a well-regarded book that, despite the comic book conceit, was fairly brutal in its treatment of war (in the first issue, we see one terror tactic of the Horde is to kidnap large groups of people, take them into low-orbit space and shove them out airlocks, while people on Earth see the streaks of light in the sky as those kidnappees burn up on re-entry). It also had interesting ruminations on the moral complexity of the main concept - when the Horde convinced one SM member it had a cure to the one-year lifespan problem, he then had serious contemplation about whether it was suicide, and thus a sin, not to pursue that even if it meant possible betrayal of humanity.
(And reading the issues today in 2011, it's an occasional hoot to play the 'This is What They Imagined the Future to be Like' game. For example, cars that drive themselves (score one point), video cassettes still in use (one point off))
After the Gillis/Anderson run, writer James Hudnall took over to more mixed results. The war with the Horde came to a quick end as another alien race came in and the book shifted to more political intrigue as we saw parts of the one-world government were manipulating the war to maintain their personal wealth. The quality became spottier as the story fell apart in consistency and major plotlines were started and then dropped (like the SM member who was forced to enlist at gunpoint and was intensely bitter for one issue).
The series fell apart, however, with the five-issue epilogue, Electric Undertow, that ran in 1989-1990. Taking place 10 years after the SM series, it revolved around a few surviving SM members taking on a vast conspiracy put together by the new alien race that had seemingly saved Earth from the Horde. But gone was the strong characterizations, replaced by mysteries and revelations that ultimately are silly.
Instead, what's left is an interesting cult favorite that is ripe for rebooting someday.

Live alone in a paradise

Alternate realities are catnip to comics readers, from the imaginary tales and dream issues in classic Silver Age Superman issues to the What If? series of Marvel. The allure is obvious - take familiar characters and tropes and mix in a new scenario. With superhero comics, where Good ultimately has to triumph in a morality play, you can instead have a Greek tragedy result instead.
And tragedy and suffering are splashed all over Wolverine: Old Man Logan (2009, 224 pages), which collects six issues of the Wolverine series plus a Giant Size Old Man Logan issue that rounded out the storyline. Writer Mark Millar has put his stamp all over the Marvel universe in recent years, doing such series as Civil War. He also is well at home in ultra violence, as seen in his decidedly un-kid-friendly work on The Authority and on Marvel 1985. It is that PG-13/R rated Mark Millar who brings us the story of Wolverine 50 years from now in a dystopian, Mad Max-like future after all the super villains got smart, banded together, and in one major push attacked and killed most every superhero and took over the United States. The wreckage left behind is the most intriguing thing in Old Man Logan - the giant skeleton of Loki decaying on a Midwest battlefield under the wreckage of a seemingly transported Baxter Building, the Red Skull's trophy case of Captain America's shield, Silver Surfer's surfboard and other pelts, and the wreckage of Wolverine's life as a subsistence farmer in a West Coast desert, now committed to nonviolence and not able to make the rent payments to the Hulked-out sons and daughters of Bruce Banner who are a bunch of murderous thugs.
The story itself is a mix of road trip and Unforgiven, with Wolverine traveling from West Coast to East, seeing the ruins along the way, and his passivity - the result of a tragedy during that super villain offensive that strains credulity - being constantly challenged and tested.
And it is that testing where the story ultimately stumbles and falls, as he somewhat suddenly on a dime ends up going back to his nature as a killer and the bloodbath begins. The final issue is essentially page after page of white-haired, creased and wrinkled Logan hacking and slashing his way through Hulks Jr. and finally Banner himself in an over-the-top orgy of violence. It probably was inevitable that the story would end up here - we are talking superhero comic books, after all - but that journey, like Wolverine's, was more interesting than the destination.
Steve McNiven's art, like what he did with Civil War, is strong and clean, with some panels - like demanding you stop and linger.

How to succeed in business without really trying, the airline way

The universe tends toward entropy and chaos. Things are gonna break. So I don't begrudge JetBlue the mechanical problem that resulted in my Rochester/JFK flight this a.m. being delayed and delayed until the point that there was no way I was going to make my connecting flight to Phoenix and Reynolds Business Journalism Week.
But it's a sweet bit of irony that JetBlue still made a bit of profit off me for actually never flying me anywhere. When it became clear we'd not take off until too late to make my connecting flight, I went to the helpful ticketing folks. The other JetBlue flight to Phoenix today was booked solid, so they looked at other airlines. And Delta was able to squeeze me in. And as I stood at the Delta desk at Greater Rochester International Airport, the (again) very helpful JetBlue folks wrote out a check to Delta, buying me one-way airfare to Phoenix by way of Atlanta. $217 and change.
The hoot, however, was the fact that I paid close to $600 roundtrip to JetBlue for my Phoenix airfare. Meaning that even after spending $217 to send me one way to Phoenix, JetBlue still cleared, what, $70 or so. For not flying me anywhere. Sure, they had expenses of staff time and mechanical repairs associated with the breakdown, but that's the cost of doing business and thus should be built into the ticket.
So JetBlue shareholders owe me a bit of thanks for fattening the airline's bottom line. You're welcome.

Oh that Family Circus

Peanuts and Andy Capp and the joys of sequential art made me a reader. Among my earliest memories are moments lying on the living room floor on a Sunday morning in Fairborn, Ohio, in my little kid pajamas, reading the Sunday comics while a cat would walk across or plop itself down right in the middle of B.C. or Wizard of Id. It was those brightly colored stories, each panel leading to the next to some punchline, that lead me to comic books - the same thing as Sunday funnies but thicker and more variety and a lot more to read and to books.
So when DC in 2009 launched its 12-issue weekly Wednesday Comics series, printed on folded up 14-by-20 inch sheets like Sunday comics, no glossy covers, with each of the 15 storylines getting one full page a week so that you had 15 different stories going simultaneously, each one done by a different artist/writer combination, I was hooked instantly on the concept.
The hardcover collection (200 pages, $49.99) lets you plow through each storyline one after the other - the dark noir murder mystery Batman story by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso followed by the delightfully pulpy Kamandi story by Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook and so on.
For a concept that harkens back Sunday comics, the test is fun. And some of the stories hit that in spades - the Deadman story by Dave Bullock and Vinton Heuck, where he tries to stop a serial killer and ends up battling demons in some extra dimension where is alive again; the wonderfully pun- and gag-filled Metamorpho written by Neil Gaiman and arted wonderfully by Mike Allred (what will it take to get those two to work together again?); the gritty Sgt. Rock story by Adam and Joe Kubert; and maybe the highlight being the goofy, bright Supergirl story featuring Krypto, Squeaky and Aquaman, courtesy of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner.
Really, the mediocre turns are few and far between - the Demon and Catwoman team up that never clicked; the Superman story that had great art and a nice concept but a weak payoff; and the confusing Wonder Woman tale.
What shines through is that the people doing this had fun. The time twisting Flash story, the fun Metal Men piece, all of them show writers and artists having a blast with the tropes of superhero comic-ing and the Sunday funnies format without being condescending about the whole thing. It's also a love letter to the comic fan - among such bigger names as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, you have a Kamandi piece, an Adam Strange story - characters that are far from household names.
This isn't a book to get someone started on comics - there are plenty of options for that. But Wednesday Comics is a great way to get someone back in if they've been gone. Grade A.

The first round of Yo-Jo Cola is on me.

The 1980s were a golden era for toy/television synergistic marketing crossovers like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe or Thundercats. And the granddaddy of them all was G.I. Joe.
It started as a Hasbro toy line of 12-inch action figures in 1964. (I remember having one in the late 1970s with a bristly sort of beard, though in terms of toy technology it was primitive compared to my Steve Austin with a small crummy magnifying glass built into his skull you looked into a small hole at the back of his head through the magnifying glass and out his bionic freakin' eye.)
And then in 1982 Hasbro rebooted the line with 3.75-inch action figures, playsets and vehicles and put the characters in these garish proto-military costumes and gave each one of them funky nicknames and a weird terrorist-like enemy called Cobra whose members had their own nicknames and '70s Studio 54 looks (I mean, Destro had a shiny metal headcovering mask and wore this leather outfit open to the navel, what was that all about aside from partying with Kristy McNichol and Norman Mailer) and the whole thing was obviously very superhero influenced. And thus was born the modern G.I. Joe line It was popular enough that in 1985 came the cartoon series. That reboot also spawned a Marvel Comics series.
And sales of that were good enough that in 1986, Hasbro and Mavel put together a second G.I. Joe title (the same kind of marketing notions behind the multiple Batman, Superman and Spiderman titles that are forever on the shelves at your local comic store, which is probably not all that local as they are fewer and farer between). G.I. Joe Special Missions was billed as telling the stories of "some missions so secret, so sensitive that even the Joes who go on them are told only the bare minimum."
Which brings us to G.I. Joe Special Missions vol. 1 (2010, 182 pages, $19.99, IDW), which reprints the first seven issues of the series and a prequel that was part of G.I. Joe issue 50.
First, the pluses. Writer Larry Hama is insane. A Vietnam vet, martial artist and longtime writer/editor in the comics world, he's been attached to numerous G.I. Joe products for years. And he clearly has a ball with this stuff, with most every story in the collection focusing on a small team of Joes on some kind of mission, some of which are amazing in their outlandishness - like disabling a toxic payload in an old Nazi bomber that never made it on its original mission to NYC and ended up frozen in a Greenland glacier but now is about to fall out of the glacier and into the sea and maybe kill millions and meanwhile Cobra troops also are after the bomber and meanwhile a SEPARATE Joe team is in Brazil to secure the help of an old Nazi who can disarm the toxic gunk bomb in the bomber but he's also being pursued by a squad of Israeli intelligence, oh and by the way one of the Joes is descended from Holocaust survivors and do you see what fantastic melodramatic fun this guy is having with all these plates going at once? Or there's this piece of primo dialogue from a group of terrorists who take over Cobra's consulate (!!!) in NYC - an incident the Joes use as a distraction to also break in: "Cobra must withdraw all support from the neo-conservative party hardliners that have turned Sierra Gordo over to the illiterate peasantry so that a Menshevikista intermediate regime can take custodianship of power until the masses can be elevated to the level at which they can rule themselves ..." I mean, even Joe leader Duke would sympathize with the Baroness as she slaps her forehead in tired exasperation at that moment.
And alongside Cobra, there's also a constant Soviet threat that creates either antagonists or the plot device that gets many of the stories going.
Artist Herb Trimpe - whose work with Marvel dates back to the Silver Age - does a decent job capturing the sort of cartoon nature of what is going on in this universe where a Joe hides in bushes in a snowy Eastern European mountain range wearing only his boots and boxer shorts as he uses his clothes and chicken blood as a decoy for the helicopter of Soviet bloc thugs chasing him.
And the Mike Zeck covers reprinted in the collection are, like everything Mike Zeck has ever done, a comic art wonder to just study and stare at, with his lines really capturing great splashes of action as well as intensity on the faces on the cover. He might be the master of guns blazing.
Some issues are stronger than others. "Burn Out," featuring the Joes in some Middle Eastern nation with a parallel story of an American pilot working for the regime there falls flat, and the artwork at one point becomes confusing in terms how one of the main characters actually looks, thus creating a speedbump in the reading enjoyment.
And the $19.99 price tag is a bit hefty (though obviously there are places like instocktrades.com where pricing is less withering.)
To be sure, Special Missions is not a place to look for character development or messages or insight into anything. It's over the topness can be draining after a few issues in a row, kind of like eating too much chocolate. But for big stupid fun, it's a good read.

From the library: The Unwritten tpb. vol. 1

Tom Taylor is kind of a loser. The son of a famous writer who disappeared when Tom was a child, Tom tried such routes as acting, writing and music, but never amounted to anything. He makes his living as Tom Taylor, son of the famous writer who wrote a huge YA series about a young wizard named Tommy Taylor (a sort of Harry Potter-esque thing), by appearing at book signings and promotional events.

Except now Tom has questions about whether he really might not be the son of Wilson Taylor, increasing numbers of people think he's either a fraud or actually Tommy Taylor made flesh, and his life is taking on weird parallels to the Tommy Taylor series.
That's the basic premise of The Unwritten, a Vertigo series written and arted by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. The monthly series launched in July 2009. The first trade paperback ($9.99, 144 pages) collects issues 1-5.
This series has gotten a lot of love in critical circles. And the premise - about the importance and power of stories - is intriguing. The highpoint is issue 5, which takes a slight digression from the main Tommy Taylor story to give us some background on the shadowy conspiracy/supernatural group that tries to control storytelling, focusing on Rudyard Kipling's interactions with them and manipulation by them. It's a smart series, with references to everything from Milton to Frankenstein, with Carey obviously being well read and doing his homework and this putting him perhaps on the same level as Neil Gaiman in terms of sheer amount of intellectual content.
The main storyline, with Tom Taylor, is not disappointing. But it's obviously a slow build. After four issues, a lot has happened, seemingly, but you don't quite know what yet.
Am looking to seeing the second and third trades of this, as it builds and as you get a better sense of what exactly is going on.