My Life in the Bush of Wombats

We have power but no landline phone, cable tv, or broadband. My cell phone is still working and I've turned it into a wireless hotspot for the first time, so we have some access, but pretty limited bandwidth.

No water came into the house, no branches, we were among the fortunate.

If anyone needs to reach us, try my cell. Thanks.

A "zero tolerance" policy and a "lifetime ban" are completely separate things.

"Zero tolerance" is a type of enforcement--true "zero tolerance" means that if you break the rule, you will receive the punishment, no exceptions. "Lifetime ban" is a definition of a type punishment that is available for those who punish those who violate the policy.

A zero-tolerance policy can have many levels of punishment, based on elements such as specific offense (a "zero-tolerance" rule against possessing weapons could still have different levels of punishment for carrying a knife vs. carrying a suitcase packed with explosives) or repeat offenses. "Zero tolerance" and "lifetime ban" aren't synonyms.

Sixty-nine years ago, the Battle of Kursk had been underway for two weeks; it would last another four. Kursk was the last of the four major battles of the Great Patriotic War, the four years of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Kursk is almost completely absent from the modern Western memory; lacking the cliffhanger drama of the battle of Moscow, the unique horrors of Stalingrad, or the numbing scope of the 3-year siege of Leningrad, Kursk was "just" a long summer battle with no clear narrative. Kursk itself was not one of the great industrial cities of USSR, and the purpose of Operation Zitadelle, the Nazi offensive, was simply to take territory around a bulge in the front line, capturing/killing Soviet troops, shortening the front (thus freeing up some troops to send to the west as the US/British invasion became more inevitable), and giving the Axis a position of strength from which to continue the war on their own terms.

Over a million Soviet soldiers died in the battle, along with 300,000 Axis, and truly staggering amount of war materiel was lost by both sides--twice as many tanks were destroyed in the 6 weeks of Kursk as had been involved in the battle of France three years earlier. Unlike most of the battles of the European war, which were defined by sudden concentrated strikes and sweeping gestures, Kursk was a war of trenches and defense-in-depth, the Nazis throwing their superior tanks and tactics against a vastly larger and well-prepared foe. When the Germans stopped their offensive, they had achieved basically none of their goals, and the Soviets immediately began a counter-offensive that continued until the fall, taking back Orel and Kharkov from the Nazis. The Nazi failure gave the military initiative to the Soviets, who never lost it again.

Paul Carell was a German historian (and "reformed" SS official) whose books Hitler Moves East and Scorched Earth were very influential in shaping Western narratives of the Great Patriotic War. He argued that the Axis defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943 represented the end of Nazi hopes of victory. However, he argued, the Soviets were unable to follow up Stalingrad with further successes, and by the late spring, the Axis still had a hope of fighting to a draw. (What the nature of that "draw" might be is unclear--by that time, neither Hitler nor Stalin would have been likely to agree to an armistice of any sort.) However, with the failure at Kursk and the success of the Soviet offensive at Kharkov, the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt; the Nazis had irretrievably lost.

That was the end of August, 1943. However, it took another 21 months of fighting before the Soviets captured Berlin and ended the war. Of the 46 months of open warfare between the two great dictatorships, nearly half of it took place after the Third Reich had no feasible hope of doing anything other than losing completely. The invasions of Sicily and Italy; D-Day; Operation Market Garden; the Battle of the Bulge; the V-2; the (second) Warsaw Uprising; the bombing of Dresden--all of these took place during that prolonged collapse.

That's the true lesson of Kursk: a lot of awful fighting can mask the fact that the battle is already lost, or won. By the Iron Law of Institutions, the people in control of the losing side are more willing to fight to the last of their underlings than admit defeat and step down. Even though the war is won, yet the victors can not stop fighting, and there's a lot of damage still to be done.

I don't think I've mentioned here that my mother's mother, mi Abuelita, died last month at the age of 96. She was born before Gallipoli, before tanks, before antibiotics, before the US had any immigration laws, in Havana before the communists controlled any country in the world. She lived through, and above, the most genocidal and the most productive century in human history so far, and managed throughout always to believe, sincerely, that things were looking up.

In late May, when Abuelita was in the hospital, I wanted to send her a get-well bear, and I called the hospital gift shop to arrange it. The woman on the phone asked me the patient's name, and when I said "Elita Crow", she exclaimed with delight, "Oh, Elita! We're all rooting for her!" That summed her up as well as any sentence could. Everyone was rooting for her because she was rooting for everyone.

From her I learned two lessons: love the things you love without shame or hesitation, and whatever you do, do with energy and joy. Oh, and 500 Rummy. That served me well, too.

It gives me pleasure, and hope, to think of her, now, smoking with lungs incorruptible, drinking with a liver invulnerable, and laughing, dancing, loving everything and everyone with a heart unceasing and eternal.

I mention this today in memory not just of her, of course. She and Tim had a tempestuous relationship (even more so than she and I did) but I know that the last time they saw each other, they were happy in each others' company as family, really, should be. Let's all be, when we can.

Most of my online social time is on Twitter (@womzilla, of course; please let me know if you'd like me to follow you), and I'm perpetually a couple of weeks behind here, but I do read you and I hope to post a little more frequently in the coming months. Love y'all.

The day we left for the ICFA, I saw my first robin of the year.

As we were driving back from the airport 5 days later, I saw my first groundhog of the year. They're supposed to be in hiberation until early April, but I guess the 82F highs fooled at least this one.

What a world we are building.

(Back since Sunday but drowning in catsup catchup. People to whom I owe e-mails, be assured they are forthcoming.)

Tomorrow may mark the first time that the Direct Market New Comics Day has occurred 5 times in February.

The Direct Market came into existence in late 1972. When I started buying comics in the Direct Market in 1982, New Comics Day was Friday. It shifted to Thursday piecemeal between 1984 and 1990, and then to Wednesday sometime after 1991. I am not sure whether there really was a New Comics Day as early as 1980; if there was, it was probably Friday, in which case 1980 did have 5 NCD in February. So it might only have been 32 years:

Year	Day of Week
1976	Sunday
1980	Friday*
1984	Wednesday
1988	Monday
1992	Saturday
1996	Thursday
2000	Tuesday
2004	Sunday
2008	Friday
2012	Wednesday*

Because the regular shipping calendar only covers four weeks, DC used to run special events during these "Fifth Weeks". That hasn't happened in a long time, but it seems like tomorrow would have been a natural for a revival.

Back in the mid-1970s, Philip Jose Farmer wrote two sword-and-sorcery novels about the denizens of Opar, a lost city civilization created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1913 in the second Tarzan novel, The Return of Tarzan.

The two novels sold decently well, but not well enough for DAW Books to publish the third novel in the series, focused on the cousin of Hadon, the protagonist of the first two novels.

Well, Subterranean Press is finally publishing The Song of Kwasin, as part of Gods of Opar, an omnibus with the first two. It's a shame that they didn't follow Farmer's observation that the third book was so distant from the first two that its best title would be Nowhere Near Opar.

The opening credits for the early 1980s family drama/comedy The Walking Dead.

Courtesy of The Comics Beat.

( Love and laughter )

Selecting works for the Graphic Stories Hugo is difficult because of the requirement to nominate specific stories rather than bodies of work. Since I most still read comics in pamphlets, and then don't re-read or re-buy them in collected form, it's hard for me to tell exactly what meets eligibility. However, I think all of these were published within or had their collected editions in 2011 and are thus valid.

So, here's my long list. Now I need to figure out how to trim this to 5. [ETA: I misunderstood the eligibility rules, which leads me to make a few additions and deletions. Thanks, stevendj.)

• House of Mystery: Conception (Matthew Sturges and Luca Rossi)


• iZombie: uVampire (Chris Robeson and Michael Allard)


• Joe the Barbarian (Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy)


• King City (Brandon Graham)


• Knight and Squire: For Six (Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton)


• "Locke and Key: Open the Moon" (Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez)


• Morning Glories: All Will be Free (Nick Spencer and Joe Eisma)


• Neonomicon (Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows)


• Oglaf, Collected Edition 1 (Trudy Cooper)


• Proof: Endangered (Alex Grecian and Riley Rossmo)


• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal vol. 2: The Most Dangerous Game (Zach Weiner)


• Secret Six: The Darkest House (Gail Simone and Jim Calafiore)


• Unwritten: Leviathan (Mike Carey and Peter Gross)


• The Weird World of Jack Staff by Paul Grist


• Xombi: The Ninth Castle (John Rozum and Frazier Irving)

Stricken because these both concluded in December 2010 and are thus not eligible, but they're still really good and you should buy the collections:

• Bulletproof Coffin (David Hine and Shakey Kane)

Taskmaster: Unthinkable (Fred van Lente and Jefte Palo)

Almost made the list: Order of the Stick: Snips and Snails and Dragon Tails by Rich Berlew. However, this volume is really a collection of shorter pieces, not a coherent whole, and none of the individual pieces are quite of Hugo caliber by themselves. And I'm really tempted to mention X-Men Legacy #260 by Mike Carey and Khoi Pham (and others), but while it's a lovely, emotionally rich turning point for one of the best characters in the X-universe, it's really just a single chapter in the middle of a very long story, much of its impact depending on not just the stories immediately proceeding it but the 30 years of stories leading up to that. As such, nominating it makes about as much sense on its own as a random chapter from The Sword of the Lictor.

For next year, definitely expect to see Iron Man 2.0: Who Is Palmer Addley (Nick Spencer and Ariel Olivetti), the first Demon Knights arc and possibly the first I, Vampire arc, the current bifurcated Unwritten storyline, Warren Ellis's six-issue run on Secret Avengers (whatever its collective title ends up being), Casanova: Avaritia, and Locke and Key: Clockworks. And I suspect Journey Into Mystery will get in there, but I'm just starting reading that now. The "Finder" short stories in Dark Horse Comics Presents are brilliant; let's see if they turn into a story.