Hi folks,

Anyone have experience with web app frameworks? I'm looking (not for work) at a situation requiring a new app written on an old database schema that (for reasons not worth going into) can't currently be changed. Proposals range from building something entirely from scratch to using a content management system such as Drupal. I've looked at Ruby on Rails and determined that while pretty, it's far too concerned with everything being pretty to handle a cracked-out legacy schema such as the one I have to deal with. My current leading candidate is Django (a Python-based system), which is more configurable than Rails (convention is nice, but only when you control the things that have to conform to conventions) and also has build-in user management and administrative functionality, rather like a content management system would. Anyway, anyone have any thoughts? This is definitely not my area of experties. DB is mysql if it matters, btw- but every framework I've looked at has supported mysql so I doubt that's much of a constraint.

I got Cat-Man Comics #10 (May 1942) in the mail today. It includes an obscure feature, "Volton", which was Joe Kubert's first work in comics (he actually started with issue #8, and did not create the character). For those who don't know, Kubert is a very big name among comic artists, and he's still alive and working today. He was probably no more than 16 when he drew this (lots of artists had gone to fight WWII so they were taking almost anyone they could get).



Anyway, in light of his long and stellar career, I'm amused to report that when he first started out, he couldn't draw hands worth shit. Seriously, they're these weird blobby things on the ends of people's arms that just kind of have some lines roughly dividing them into fingers. Just more proof that drawing hands is hard :-)

So I was looking at the Wiki page for the band Genesis after something reminded me of their hilarious video for "Land of Confusion" with the Spitting Image puppets. For those who don't remember, it features a clueless Ronald Reagan wearing a Superman costume and accidentally nuking the world- it's really a classic piece of 80's pop culture. Anyway, what inspired me to post was this:

On October 2nd [2007] Starbucks released the CD Sampler "Genesis: 14 From Our Past", the track list is The Knife, Happy The Man, Watcher Of The Skies, I Know What I Like, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Squonk, Your Own Special Way, Follow You Follow Me, Turn It On Again, Abacab, That's All, Land Of Confusion, Hold On My Heart, and Congo.

Um... wow. That's one track from each album (except their first, which is best forgotten) in chronological order. I know this because I was big into progressive rock when I was in college, and the early incarnation of Genesis, with Peter Gabriel on lead vocals, was one of the major bands of that movement (which means the punks had two reasons to hate them- prog-rock excesses and pop-ballad sappiness). I'm just envisioning some casual fan who couldn't distinguish between Genesis and Phil Collins solo hits putting this on and getting assaulted by "The Knife", a 7+ minute rant from a very young Peter Gabriel about how revolutionaries become dictators, complete with sampled machine gun sounds and falsetto screaming during the riot bit. Phil Collins wasn't even in the band then. He's on drums starting with the next track, but not on vocals until "Squonk". I should also mention that the Peter Gabriel of the early 70's doesn't sound much like the world-beat pop of his later solo albums either.



Granted, they did a good job of finding the most accessible and pop-ish songs of the band's early career ("The Knife" is actually quite catchy, and holds up surprisingly well for its age). Only "Watcher of the Skies" is truly unabashedly and excessively prog-rock, with it's 7/4 time signature and majestic mellotron intro (assuming they didn't edit it out- there *was* a single version IIRC). But even still, I'd love to see the reactions of people who were expecting an album full of "Hold On My Heart" :-)



However jarring that track listing must be to the casual 80's pop fan, it's inspired me to dig out my old albums and revisit my prog-rock days (I should note that this was just 10 years ago, so prog-rock was horribly out of fasion then as now). While reading up on SQL. I feel like a college student. Except with more comfortable furniture.

On the whole, I'm thrilled with the effect the "Messiah Complex" crossover is having on this book. It's forced the writers to allow the cast to deal with the effects of the last several storylines, and they've been doing a pretty good job of it. They've integrated their recurring bad guys, the Church of Humanity, into the story well, although whether that was planning or good fortune I really can't say. Given the haphazard mess the x-books were when New X-Men started their storyline, I'm going to say that either it was just a bonus that they happened to be using a group that was concerned with extinguishing mutants based on information from the future, or that concept was the start of the whole "must kill mutants with knowledge of the future" plot thread in the first place. Either way, it's a great fit now, and along with the exploration of the characters' reactions that it provokes, a vastly better direction for this book than layering on another new round of horror. Which is all it was doing before. Repeatedly. However, one thing that happens in this story really illustrates all that's gone wrong with this book.



So in this issue, Hellion dies! I mean, apparently. He's got a bunch of spikes through his chest, but it's a comic book so who knows. Maybe Pixie will teleport him back to Elixir in time for him to be healed- he's certainly not in as bad a shape as Prodigy was when his heart got literally ripped out, and Elixir took care of that. Then again, they had Blindfold do some vague precog-type foreshadowing of bad things happening to people, and Hellion was on the list. It wasn't entirely clear whether the people on the list were going to die, though.



But whether or not Hellion's really dead is not the point. The point is that despite Hellion being one of the most well-developed and interesting characters in a very strong cast, the scene had absolutely zero impact for me. Why? Because this is New X-Men under Kyle and Yost. Members of the cast die all the time. Literally, in every single storyline except for the one where Mercury was tortured a lot and the three issues where the team took a breather at the mansion, someone dies or appears to die. Usually multiple someones. Now we're in a legitimately Big Event. There should be weight to everything that's happening, and in general "Messiah Complex" is doing a surprisingly good job of it, in no small part due to some good groundwork in the lead-in stories.



But someone dying in the pages of New X-Men just makes me sigh, roll my eyes, and wait until next month to see if this is yet another feint or the most egregious example yet of Kyle and Yost being more interested in "shocking" their audience than in using their excellent cast well.



Now, if a member of X-Factor of the X-Men died on-panel, I'd be genuinely shocked and interested in what would happen, largely due to the context of "Messiah Complex". I'd still take the approach of "wait and see, it's probably not what it seems", as that's the most likely truth. But take, for example, Mystique shooting Rogue in X-Men #200 in that book's "Messiah Complex" lead-in. That was a great WTF? moment and played well on the fact that it's nearly impossible to predict Mystique's purposes at any given point. Letting Rogue die would be unlikely, but not impossible. Using near-death as a trigger for some interesting change would be even more possible, and interesting. (Contrast with the "death" of Cyclops in Astonishing X-Men, which was obviously not going to stick and therefore done entirely for (unsuccessful) shock value).



Anyway, back to New X-Men. A big crossover is the kind of place where working in a major character death makes sense, if it enhances the story. But Kyle and Yost have so overused that move that it comes across as business as usual. And that's very disappointing. I hope the follow-up on this scene rescues it somehow, because otherwise the writers will have taken the best opportunity yet to do something that actually moves their team forwards and instead gone back to revisit the same tired path of death that they've been exploring ad nauseum for the past two years.

This has to be one of the most astoundingly racist war covers I've yet seen. Don't forget to read the caption at the bottom to get the full effect.



Most of the propaganda of the time is fairly understandable in the context of a society that did not think in terms of civil rights the same way we do now and was constantly trying to whip up support for the war amongst the populace. This doesn't excuse things, it just puts them in context. But sometimes, as with this cover, the propaganda went way over the top.