Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part XLVII: Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge

First off, my ongoing attempt to catch up on audio reviews continues, with The Diary of River Song: Series One at Unreality SF.

Secondly, for months now, you've been reading (whoever you are, dear reader) comics reviews written months after I read the comics in question, and since I get them from the library, usually without the comic in question to hand. That all changes today! Even though this review didn't appear until March 2016, I actually wrote it in July 2015, immediately after finishing the book. This means, I hope, better reviews with more detailed commentary.

Comic hardcover, 144 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 2002-08) 
Borrowed from the library
Read July 2015

Final Crisis: Rogues' Revenge

Writer: Geoff Johns

Penciller: Scott Kolins
Inkers: Scott Kolins, Dan Panosian, Doug Hazlewood
Colorists: Dave McCaig, James Sinclair
Letterers: Nick J. Napolitano, Gaspar Saladino, Kurt Hathaway

This is the last of the during-Final-Crisis tie-ins in my readthrough-- there are still some "aftermath" titles to review, though. Like Legion of 3 Worlds and Revelations, this story seems to primarily be using the events of Final Crisis as an excuse to catch up with some other characters, the basic hook here being that Libra is trying to recruit the Flash's Rogues Gallery into his organization (this is before Libra is revealed as the herald of Darkseid), but the Rogues want nothing of it: they just want to lay low, since they're still on the run for the murder of the Bart Allen Flash. They plan to take out Inertia, the evil speedster who co-ordinated their murder of Allen.

I don't have much familiarity with the Rogues, unlike the characters featured in Legion of 3 Worlds and Revelations, which definitely hindered my enjoyment of the story; all I really know about them comes from their appearances in Countdown to Final Crisis (where they're also on the run for Bart's murder). In reading Rogues' Revenge, I felt like I was on the edge of reading a good story, it was just that I didn't have the emotional investment in these characters that the story wants you to have. Johns doesn't do much to introduce the reader to them, but rather throws you in at the deep end of their characterizations and histories. What I did grasp had me interested: these are a group of messed-up criminals, to be sure, but they're people, not supervillains cackling and trying to take over the world. Captain Cold especially is put through the emotional wringer here, but he seems to emerge the stronger for it. You do get those Geoff Johns splash pages that seem designed to excite someone who knows more than me; "I'm Kid Zoom!" shouts Inertia triumphantly, as if that has some kind of intrinsic significance.

Scott Kolins's art is very good; he does interesting things with panel layout that are occasionally hard to follow, but usually work well in establishing the oppressive tone of the book; it's really on tone where this books succeeds, between Kolins's art and Dave McCaig's colors, everything is appropriately gloomy. There's the occasional flashback scene that's not clearly marked as such, but if such a technique is good enough for Chris Ware, then I'm sure Johns and Kolins can use it too. The pasts of the Rogues very much live on in their presents.

There are two extra stories in the back of the book, "Absolute Zero" and "Rogue Profile: Zoom," which lay out histories for Captain Cold and Zoom, respectively, both reprinted from Johns and Kolins's 2000-05 run on The Flash. I ought to have read them first, as they make stuff in the main story much more clear. I have Johns's Flash Omnibus volumes on my shelf, waiting to be read; perhaps I'll reread Rogues' Revenge once I have the grounding in Flash lore the story obviously expects.

Next Week: We finally move to the aftermath of the Final Crisis, and it's time to Run!

Return of the New Jedi Order, Episode XXV: Remnant by Sean Williams and Shane Dix

I've finally built up a couple week's buffer here, which means I can finally get back to my other reviewing duties: I have a whole pile of Big Finish audio dramas that I've listened to but not yet reviewed at Unreality SF. The first is up now (and hopefully more follow, as it's my spring break this week): Doctor Who: The War Doctor: Infernal Devices.

Mass market paperback, 413 pages
Published 2003
Acquired 2003(?)
Reread June 2015

Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Force Heretic I: Remnant
by Sean Williams and Shane Dix

Year Four of the Invasion (Month 8)
This is one of those 400-page books that you're hard-pressed to explain how it could possibly be as long as it is. There are basically three plots: the first is Luke Skywalker, Mara Jade, and company, en route to the Unknown Regions, helping the Imperial Remnant (hence the title, I guess, though I've no idea why this trilogy is called "Force Heretic") fend of a Yuuzhan Vong attack. This is, for what it's worth, the most interesting of the plots. Which isn't worth very much. It's always nice to see Pellaeon, but otherwise little of interest goes on here.

But that said, the other two plots are even worse. Han and Leia are sent off on the Millennium Falcon to see how some far-flung parts of the galaxy are faring during the invasion, and the answer is utterly tedious. Local politics, blah blah blah, pointless bickering, blah blah blah. Like, it would be hard to imagine a duller plot to inject in the middle of your galaxy-spanning invasion series. Even the Tahiri subplot is utterly dull: I like the idea that her Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong sides have to be reconciled, but Williams and Dix handle it in the most uninteresting way imaginable.

Finally, Nom Anor is getting up to cult hijinks underground on Coruscant. Again, should be interesting; again, sure is dull. I love Nom Anor, but this meanders and goes nowhere.

All that said, this is probably the best of the "Force Heretic" books!

Next Week: A comic book side trip into the universe of video games in "Equals & Opposites"!

Review: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Two: 1987-1989 by Bill Watterson

Comic trade paperback, 351 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1987-89)
Acquired December 2014
Read January 2016

The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book Two: 1987-1989
by Bill Watterson

This volume picks up shortly before Christmas 1987 and carries through until the final day of December 1989, giving us just over two full years of comics, and three whole Christmases. The winter strips are some of the most iconically Calvin and Hobbes, of course; everyone who reads it remembers those horrific snowmen, and there's a lot of good stuff about Calvin's attempts to be good for bad reasons. I was surprised at a couple timeline references; it's specifically said to be 1988 at one point, and at another, Calvin recalls the horrific ever-raining camping trip of the previous year, both of which seem like they call attention to Calvin's unchanging age. There's also some subtle retconning going on in this volume: more than one reference indicates Hobbes has been around since Calvin was a baby, which was clearly not the case in Book One.

The regular vacation storylines are joined by a number of more imaginative storylines in this volume, such as the sequence where Calvin and Hobbes travel to Mars, or (one of my favorites), the one where in the course of an evening of attempted math homework, Calvin's gravity reverses and then he expands to be larger than the Earth. But despite these flights of fancy, many of the volume's standout storylines are more mundane: Calvin failing to write a report on bats ("BATS AREN'T BUGS"), Calvin anticipating a beanie from cereal proof-of-purchases, and Calvin's uncle visiting (I think he never appeared after this, which makes sense, because his character didn't really offer anything other authority figures in the strip didn't). Best of all are a number of babysitting storylines, culminating in the epic one where Calvin locks Rosalyn out of the house for the night. This volume also sees the debuts of Stupendous Man, arch-nemesis of Mom-Lady, and the secret society of G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS).

There's also an increased focus on Calvin's parents as individuals, who I am more interested in now that I read this as a thirty-year-old married man instead of a ten-year-old kid. We see that Calvin's mother feels like her husband does very little work around the home. We also get a number of Calvin's dad's terrible explanations for things, like where the sun goes when it sets, or why old photos are black and white. And his claiming the family will just steal another family's Christmas tree after New Year's to save money is hilarious. There's also the storyline where the family home is broken into while they're on an overnight trip to a wedding; Calvin gets some focus, since Hobbes was left at home and can't be found at first, but much more of the storyline is about the unsettling feeling of your home being invaded, and (unusually) we get several Calvin-less strips in a row as his parents deal with these feelings.

Watterson's art also increases in quality here: there are some good uses of shading in the daily strips. Furthermore, he begins experimenting with combining panels, especially in the Sunday strips, which gives much more room for his artwork to shine. I know later this becomes commonplace, but here it's restricted to three or four Sundays-- all of which make an impact.

As always, these are consistently laugh-out-loud entertaining. It was also striking to me how much less saccharine Calvin and Hobbes was than many of its modern tributes and imitators; a number of the strips are devoted to how Calvin would rather watch cartoons than do anything imaginative or interesting!

Dissertation Defended

So this Wednesday, I successfully defended my dissertation, the culmination of three years of writing and research, and eight years of graduate school. It's a pleasant, but almost surreal feeling: in a few weeks, for essentially the first time in my life, I won't be a student. And it only took three decades to get to that point!

Here are some fun facts about my dissertation for you:

• It consists of an introduction, seven chapters, an appendix, and a bibliography.
• As originally proposed, it had only four chapters; some material was dropped from the project, while the original proposal's Chapter 3 was split into Chapters 2, 4, and 7 in the final version.
• The current total word count is 107,600 including front matter, end notes, and bibliography; this comes out to 332 pages in double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman font with one-inch margins.
• Omitting all the malarkey brings it down to 93,460 words.
• The average chapter is 38 pages long; the shortest two are each 20 pages, while the longest is a whopping 70!
• Some material in the project dates back to Spring 2010, which I wrote for the final paper in the seminar where I first began to want to create this project.
• There are 215 items listed in the 21-page bibliography.
• There are 88 end notes, which comes out to an average of 11 per chapter (if you count the introduction as a chapter).
• The project covers 17 different novels, which is too many and probably why this thing ended up so long. Two chapters cover one novel apiece; one chapter covers two; and four chapters cover three apiece. (The introduction also covers one.)

And this is it:

Double-sided, and minus the first few pages because they seem to have walked off.

Of course, I'm not entirely done-- there a typos to fix and minor edits to make-- but I'm almost there. Commencement, here we come!

Here's a little flowchart I made of how the project mutated over time. The top row is the chapters and texts as they existed in my original proposal of May 2013. (The ones in orange I never wrote about at all.) The middle row is the breakdown as it existed about six months ago; the bottom row is how it goes now. As you can see, there was a lot of splitting, a lot of rearranging, and far too much adding.

Early SF Tales from the Eaton Collection: Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe by Frank Attfield Fawkes

Hardcover, 271 pages
Published 1895

Borrowed from the Eaton Collection

Read January 2015

Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe: Being a Record of Some Strange Adventures in the Remarkable Career of a Political and Social Reformer Who Was Famous at the Commencement of the Twentieth Century
by X

The title page attributes this book to just "X," who was apparently really Frank Attfield Fawkes, an industrialist (according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia) or a pharmacist (according a 1931 issue of the British trade publication The Chemist and Druggist). There's not a lot of biographic information out there, but he also wrote thrilling books like:

• How to Organize Bazaars, Concerts, Fetes, Exhibitions and Various Charitable and Other Functions 
• Horticultural Buildings: Their Construction, Heating, Interior Fittings, &c., with Remarks on Some of the Principles Involved and Their Application 
• Architects' Joinery and Its Ornament 
• Adventures of a Chemist: A Series of Unusual Detective Short Stories Embracing Drama, Comedy, Tragedy, Love, Humour, Infatuation, Passion, and Revenge
• The Mystery of Human Life: An Attempt to Throw a Little Light Upon the Great Problems: What Am I? Whence Do I Come? Why Am I Here? Whither Do I Go?

Just like The English Revolution of the Twentieth Century, this early sci-fi novel is framed by it being a document that has fallen back in time: the frame is narrated by a guy riding a train who momentarily slips into the future, where his companion in the compartment gives him this book to read. The "Marmaduke" of the title (I assume this name sounded less ridiculous for an emperor before the comic strip) is actually Arthur Hardy, an author and journalist who thinks he knows how to regenerate society, but no one will listen to his theories. After his wife dies, he's given an opportunity to put his theories into practice by the Emperor of Germany, who he eventually persuades to disarm-- at Germany's military peak, so it doesn't come across as a move of weakness. Hardy is a Christian:

it will be a bloodless revolution; a beneficent revolution; a revolution which is intended to cleanse the land of the foul weeds of class and national hatred; a revolution which will prepare the ground for the good growths of love, peace, and prosperity. The revolution is inevitable and imminent. But you will have no reason to dread it. On the contrary you will welcome it. For this revolution is nothing more or less than a rebirth of Christianity. (105-06)

But he is also a highly gifted statistician, who is not cowed by the immensity of his task, providing charts and tables showing the best way to disarm, yet his is flexible in the application of his theories; he does not follow a "cast-iron pattern" and try to fit every nation into the same mold (208). He writes to one of his skeptics:

You assume that I shall be ‘overwhelmed and crushed with the gigantic task of elaborating a system of political and social reform for such a vast area as Europe.’ What would you say if I told you that in dealing with Europe and European questions, I had a difficult task to persuade myself that I was not contemplating the infinitely little under a microscope? (206)

At a certain point, he's believed dead, and he lets the world maintain that belief, deciding it is better off animated by Marmaduke the spirit than Marmaduke the man. Peace eventually takes over the world!

Fawkes's work is mostly notable for how distinct it is from that of his contemporaries, especially George Griffith, whose protagonists in his novel Angel of the Revolution (published just two years before this book) are an alliance of anarchists, socialist, and nihilists that band together as the Terrorists to reform the world. This statement by the narrator about Arthur Hardy seems a repudiation of the Griffith worldview:

He abhorred anarchism, nihilism, and other exponents of brute force. He refused to identify himself with people who, calling themselves “socialists,” advocated such mad schemes as [...] general partition of property—all capital withdrawn from individual and put under public control—abolition of all private property and ownership—and other plans which simply meant slavery for the individual.
     Arthur believed in social reform, but only such reform as was just, gave to every man the equality of opportunity, and could be obtained by strictly constitutional means. (15)

Much of that is what Griffith's Terrorists accomplish in Angel. That said, there are many people who join socialism in Marmaduke because they like its stance against militarism though few others of its tenets; one assumes they eventually end up joining Marmaduke's movement because of his own hatred of force.

Griffith's revolutionaries frequently justify their violence by pointing out that they're only doing what the state does: when nations kill, we call it war, but when individuals kill, we call it murder. For Griffith, this authorizes terrorism, but for Fawkes, this points toward hypocrisy: (Apologies for all the long quotes, but Fawkes is one of those kinda writers.)

Militarism would indignantly repudiate any connection or similarity, however remote, with anarchy. Public opinion places them as far asunder as the poles. To the one is attached the title of ‘honorable profession of arms’; to the other is applied epithets of opprobrium and reproach. One marches proudly in broad daylight with music and flags, the other slinks in the hidden darkness. With one is connected glory and honour, with the other disgrace and degradation.
     Analyse results, however, and what do we find?
     They are both the visible embodiment of brute force. Neither of them has the slightest regard or pity for their innocent victims. They are both engaged in ringing the terrible changes on death, suffering, and disaster. They are each the antitheses of right. They are each absolutely void of utility or benefit. They are each the sworn enemies to progress, justice, or righteousness. Nations have progressed in spite of, not in consequence of, either militarism or anarchism.
     Does war produce anything but national chaos? Is anarchism intended to produce anything but social chaos? Granted that one chaos is on a smaller scale than the other, yet it is still chaos. (121)

Militarism ought to abhor us as much as terrorism, but we've dressed it up to make it justifiable. One suspects that Fawkes would have had a lot to say in this modern era of drone warfare and a military-industrial complex gone mad. Despite its preachiness, Marmaduke was one of the more interesting and nuanced 1890s books I read at the Eaton Collection.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part XLVI: Final Crisis: Revelations

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2009 (contents: 2008-09) 
Borrowed from the library
Read June 2015

Final Crisis: Revelations

Writer: Greg Rucka

Penciller: Philip Tan
Inkers: Jonathan Glapion, Jeff de los Santos, Walden Wong
Colorists: Ian Hannin, Nei Ruffino
Letterer: John J. Hill
Illustration: Steve Lieber

The decision, during Infinite Crisis and 52, to take two of DC's best nonsuperhuman characters, Gotham cops Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen, and transform them into superheroes of sorts is one I have sort of a mixed reaction to. I did really like the Question coaching Renee to move beyond her anger and eventually step into her place, and I felt that Allen as the Spectre had some potential as well. Revelations brings back both characters, along with Kate Kane as Batwoman (also introduced in 52), showing what they get up to involving the Crime Bible during the Final Crisis. What the story does is confirm that really, these characters should have stayed as they were in Gotham Central. Rucka and Tan do their best, but this is generic comic-mystical gubbins; Montoya and Allen were much better served as ordinary cops navigating an extraordinary world than they are being extraordinary characters. There are flashes of interest in Revelations, but much of it seems to be Rucka doing damage control (Allen's son was killed in a previous Spectre series not written by Rucka, and Rucka brings him back here), and too much of it focuses on the potentially-interesting-but-usually-not Religion of Crime.

Next Week: What are the old enemies of the Flash doing during Final Crisis? Yes, I wasn't really wondering either, but let's find out in Rogues' Revenge!

Return of the New Jedi Order, Episode XXIV: Ylesia by Walter Jon Williams

PDF eBook, 90 pages
Published 2002
Reread April 2015

Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Ylesia
by Walter Jon Williams

Year Four of the Invasion (Month 3)
This is another New Jedi Order side story that I'd read before, but never in context: I don't know if this is true, but it reads as if it was cut right out of the middle of Destiny's Way, and it was released as an eBook alongside it. I don't think I read it until three years later, though, when it was printed in the back of Dark Nest I: The Joiner King. On its own, I seem to recall, it's a fun side adventure: the Galactic Alliance has to take the Hutt world of Ylesia from the Yuuzhan Vong and the Peace Brigade, only it's currently being run by the weaselly Thrackan Sal-Solo, cousin of Han. Thrackan is a dumb-but-fun villain, and it's enjoyable to see all his plans unravel. But while I remember enjoying Ylesia when I originally read it back in 2005, if you pause Destiny's Way in the middle to read it, it comes across as irrelevant padding: it's only a distraction to the main plot of the novel it was (presumably) snipped from. I would have been better off reading this on its own than in the middle of the bigger story.

Next Week: It's the beginning of the end of The New Jedi Order, as Luke Skywalker goes looking for a Remnant!

Review: Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Comic trade paperback, 193 pages
Published 2015

Acquired August 2015

Read January 2016

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

At its core, I'm sympathetic to this book. It's about ways of seeing, something I think about a lot, and about how having many ways of seeing is better for us-- to use Sousanis's term, it "unflattens" us, a term he borrows from Flatland, which he refers to a lot. Sousanis communicates his ideas in comic book format, and part of the book advocates for the comic book itself as a means of unflattening, because of its combination of word and image.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't really add up to much. I imagine Sousanis meant to elaborate on this idea throughout the book, but instead it just feels like he repeats it again and again, never going deeply enough to really make it meaningful. There are a lot of metaphors for unflattening, but precious few examples of it in action, and I'm not sure his maps of how his wife varies her commute through New York City to work are really enough. The book seems to be making its case to someone who's never thought about any of these ideas before, but it's hard for me to imagine someone who'd never thought about these ideas before wanting to pick up the book. In essence, it's preaching to the choir. (In that regard, I felt like the book's optimum use might be as a textbook, which is where you can make someone read about a topic they have no fundamental interest in. It covers a lot of useful concepts pretty basically.)

Other times, it belabors or overstates its point, such as when it depicts all of society as trudging drones. Or puppets. Except for those enlightened few of us who read Unflattening, apparently (and modestly).

Sousanis's drawings are pretty good, and some of them are downright striking, but he doesn't always quite nail the grammar of comics: there are some pages where it's hard to figure out where your eyes should go. And his attempts to distill other people's complex ideas into single pages often over-compress; I had to reread the images he used in his synopsis of Flatland a lot before I got them, and I've read that book before!

Like a lot of weak books (because that's what this book it, not terrible, just weak) it reveals what worked well about other books in its failures: Sousanis narrates through nothing but caption boxes, which come across as vehicles for would-be profundity from on high. I definitely prefer Scott McCloud's self-deprecating, personal, on-panel narrator for the effect he creates. Reading McCloud feels like you're chatting with someone fun; Unflattening is being lectured at by someone overly serious.

I was pleased to see both Gene Kannenberg and Charles Hatfield cited/acknowledged, both comics scholars who received their Ph.D.s from my own institution, albeit before my time.

Serial: From Mystery to Muddle

I listen to a few different podcasts, all put out by NPR or broadcast on NPR stations (Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me!, Radiolab, On the Media), so it was perhaps natural that when the murder-mystery podcast Serial aired during October through December 2014, literally everyone was asking me if I'd heard it.

I hadn't. I can scarcely stay on top of the podcasts I do listen to in addition to the copious amount of Big Finish audio drams on my iPod. But I added it to my list, and finally listened to it this past summer, around six months after the whole thing had come to an end. But I felt like I'd missed out on something, so I resolved that whenever Season Two came along, I'd set all my other podcasts aside and listen to only this one.

The end result of this is that I've gone from being the only person not listening to Serial to the only person who is.

I can see why people who were into Serial Season One, especially those who listened as it came out, are less into Season Two. Serial has a very meandering narrative structure, with a lot of side facts and dead ends that go nowhere, facts that turn out to not be relevant. But Serial Season One was about a murder, while Season Two is about someone's motivation for defecting during the War in Afghanistan. In Season One, all of those dead ends felt like they might not be dead ends. The convention of the murder mystery genre to which Season One belonged (perhaps inadvertently) is that small things can surprisingly become hugely relevant. This turned out to not really be the case in Serial, as the series ended pretty inconclusively, but at the time you first hear it, you don't know that. Small "characters" could turn out to be important players for all you knew; a guy's story about something someone told him in high school could have in theory cracked the whole case.

My main takeaway from doing a Google Image search for "serial podcast" just now is that producer Dana Chivvis (on the far left) looks a lot cooler than you'd imagine someone who gets excited about cell phone records and fantasizes about analyzing them for the FBI would.

In Season Two, the mystery-- such as it is-- is mostly one of motivation. Why did Bowe Bergdahl walk off a military base and end up captured by the Taliban? But this means that all those side diversions don't have the same level of narrative energy they did in Season One. Though I've really been enjoying its examination of the problems of the War in Afghanistan, you pretty much know that talking to people who never even met Bowe isn't going to answer the outstanding questions. And indeed, the outstanding questions aren't all that outstanding. As of Episode Six (I've heard up through Eight, and Nine just came out on Thursday), it seems like the issue of Bowe's motivations are pretty well sewn up. I'm continuing to listen because I think the failures of the U.S.'s mission in Afghanistan are pretty interesting, and Sarah Koenig's analysis of Bowe as a person has been very thorough and sympathetic as well, but I'm not left wondering about anything. There's nothing specific I still want to know.

In some ways, I don't think this is the fault of Koenig and company. I've been enjoying Season Two just as much as Season One-- but that's probably because I didn't listen to Season One live, so I had a pretty strong suspicion that it ended inconclusively, as I hadn't seen or heard anyone say anything definitive in the months since. So my expectations weren't for a murder mystery with a clear solution, but for a thorough explanation of a muddled situation, which is what Season Two has given us as well. Serial Season Two is very much the "difficult second album" for a team that's become victim to their own success, but considered outside the context of how popular Season One became (how many public radio podcasts get parodied on SNL?), I think it's still one of the better podcasts on the Internet today.

Review: Origins of Futuristic Fiction by Paul K. Alkon

Hardcover, 341 pages
Published 1987

Borrowed from the library

Read January 2013

Origins of Futuristic Fiction by Paul K. Alkon

Alkon's book charts the rise of the genre of futuristic fiction, which eventually becomes subsumed into the larger genre of science fiction, once that emerges in the 1890s-1920s. He doesn't care much about why the genre emerges, but how it works, exploring its generic forms. Basically, the utopian story stops being spatially distant and starts becoming temporally distant, though he claims that early futuristic work's like Louis-Sébastien Mercier's L'An 2440: Rêve s'il en fut jamais [The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One] (1771) aren't really interested in extrapolation in the way that later works will be; their future histories aren't really connected to actual history, they're just distancing techniques. The background was really nice, of course, but as someone whose focus is 1818+, I really appreciated his exploration of the evolution of futuristic fiction in that period, as he charts what's new, and what's departing the genre, like the emphasis on where these narratives come from. An angel gives the narration of Loudon's 1827 novel The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century a vision of the future, for example, but this technique is fading away by the time of H. G. Wells, though even as Wells makes the future more realistic, other authors are starting to use it just as a background for daring adventures.