Marshal Rogers Batman

I remember when comics were something to be looked for at the newstand.  Now, I look for comics in the graphic novel format, because that's how comics writers write.

Recently I bought Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers. Marshall Rogers was who I associated with Batman in my youth. He had such a crisp style. It evoked Neal Adams and John Byrne. I was happy to collect what issues I could get here in Paradise. I got most of them on news stands.

This was a nice volume of all of Marshall Rogers' Batman work.  It starts with Batman fighting the Calculator.  For the previous six months, assorted heroes, drawn by Rogers, faced off against the calculator in back up stories in Detective Comics. I would have liked to see those stories in this volume before the novel length battle between Batman and Calculator.

Nest are the Detective Comics written by Steve Engelhart and drawn by Marshall Rogers tat captured my imagination. I think I have a soft cover collection, but this edition had a couple of stories I had not read before. Add to that, the Legends of the Dark Knight arc written by Archie Goodwin and the Engelhart and Rogers Dark Detective mini series. . .

You should get this book.  Marshall Rogers was a great artist.  You'll spend hours looking at a single panel of Batman.

Keep Christ in Christmas and Our Money in China

I just saw a piece on ABC Evening News where they are trying to get people to buy American. Ross Perot tried the same thing in 1992 and 1996 but NAFTA was the big thing.  For those of you that don't remember, NAFTA would ease trade barriers between Canada, Mexico and the United States.  Another unanticipated consequence was "Outsourcing", where companies create customer service phone banks in India. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to that swore the "by Vishnu, my name is Sally."  And since we can't point out truth, a recent credit card campaign has the phones answered by a heavyset Russian guy, who tells everyone his name is "Peggy." It would be racist to do an Indian accent apparently.

Back to my point: this year we are sending $6 billion to China, since they make everything we consume. Wal-Mart used to tout that everything they sold was made in America.  When they started forcing suppliers to continually cut costs and reduce the costs to Wal-Mart, manufacturers moved their production facilities to China. Plants here closed, putting people out of work. And as the big corporations made larger and larger profits, Congress gave them more incentives to move jobs from here to there.

Perot once asked: "Hear that sucking sound? That's jobs leaving America."

Democrats and Republicans let corporations take jobs from Americans and send them overseas.  Meanwhile, they distracted us with things like Illegal Immigration, and War on Christians, and War on Christmas. And like well-trained animals, we decided we should blame all our woes on "people who want to destroy America." That way we wouldn't look at Congress.