The book follows my favorite format for a technical guide, taking the reader step by step through an example that resembles the kind of thing you’d want to do in real life. It breaks down everything thoroughly with plenty of pictures. Topics covered include not only CSS but also MediaWiki PHP functions that are integrated into a MediaWiki skin. As a bonus, there is information on adding on some of the latest widgets that Web 2.0 has to offer, from thickbox to twitter. To make your skin a real professional class act, you can even learn exactly how to use licensing and copyright options and exactly how to make your skin printer friendly. If you’re going to be spending any time messing with MediaWiki skin design, and you’re like me and don’t have time to spend hours spinning your wheels, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book.

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Publisher
Brooke Spangler
http://agirlandherfed.com

Credits
Creators: Brooke Spangler

Grade: 7
A Girl and Her Fed follows the daily life of a young, single, female, liberal journalism intern who is under the surveillance of the fed. Her fed knows that she is not a terrorist, but ever since she has written an article defending civil liberties, he has just been doing his job by following orders to open her mail and watch her. This sounds like a deadly serious subject, but the topic is rendered hilarious by its treatment by Brooke Spangler. For example, her fed has had an annoying Pocket President, an AI version of George W. Bush, installed in his brain without his consent. His Pocket President does battle with the ghost/hallucination of Benjamin Franklin, to whom our heroine has been talking ever since an LSD trip. I laughed out loud intermittently as I followed the progress of the story.

Spangler does both the writing and the drawing for this comic. She herself says that she likes writing a lot more, and that she knows it shows. She’s right about that, but the writing is so funny that the comic is enjoyable to read in spite of the crudeness of the drawings. I’ve never read a political comic quite like this. I usually don’t find political cartoons or comics hilarious. Sometimes they get a smirk out of me. They rarely make me laugh out loud. Spangler manages to avoid being didactic, in spite of the intelligence and relevance she often allows to creep into her characters’ dialogue. She even humanizes the fed. This comic is a satire of what a liberal’s paranoia might look like, while also being a satire of the reasons for the paranoia that some feel in our era. It’s also an example of the freshness that can issue forth from somebody’s imagination on the web.

Browse all the entries under Reviews, Web Comics.

Publisher
BuyMeToys.com
http://www.buymetoys.com/

Credits
Writer: Ben Avery, Casey Heying
Penciler: Casey Heying
Colorist: Snocone Studios, Casey Heying
Letterer: Comicraft
Cover Artist: Joe Jusko, Boris Vallejo

Grade: 8

This second issue of The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles begins with Humpty Dumpty singing on a wall, when he is rudely interrupted by the Jabberwocky, a fearsome creature imagined in a poem and brought to life. As Humpty falls off the wall, Alice wakes from a nightmare in which she has seen these events unfold. She immediately sits up in bed, grabs her guitar and begins to compose a song out loud, singing Humpty’s lyrics. It may just be a joke, or it may be another example of synchronicity among the dimensions, that her roommate Polly comes in immediately to ask if she wants some eggs for breakfast. Alice declines the eggs but accepts some coffee and, as she is drinking it, she learns that her best friend and roommate Dorothy has been out all night – again. Meanwhile, a roommate named Dee (short for Wendy?) is going out for a jog, with the comment that she can’t stay young forever. Later, it turns out that Dee also tends to date younger guys, making it even more likely that Wendy Darling will also turn out to be a major character in The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles. These are all examples of the way that even the most mundane conversations and events have meaning in this comic. Paying attention to detail is rewarding, even at times when it seems on the surface like nothing is happening.

As the rest of the story unfolds, the uncanny occurrences are not only appearing in Alice’s dreams and her roommates’ conversations. Alice and Dorothy look out their Chicago apartment window and to see a flock of flamingos flying by, munchkins walk by outside the bar while Alice has played, and an official from the Emerald City approaches Alice and Dorothy looking disheveled and speaking with his conversation laced with clues that ought to jog Dorothy’s memory. By this time, Alice and Dorothy are starting to seem either like they’re a little slow or like their memories are massively repressed. As they walk home from the bar, the former Wizard of Oz helps them fight off a group of strange men with bicycle wheels for hands and feet – they’re Wheelers, which Dorothy somehow knows. This is finally the turning point.

The story suddenly speeds up as Mr. Oz fills them in on the tear in the fabric of both worlds. He, too, has been seeing many sightings, including a Wogglebug indigenous to Oz. The epicenter for the tears is Chicago, where Dorothy and Alice have been drawn together to be friends and roommates. Mr. Oz makes a new head for Jack Pumpkinhead, who tells Dorothy she is needed in Oz. Aunt Em still has the magic slippers, and Dorothy puts them on and returns to Oz, where she takes the form of a little girl again and is recognized by the denizens of Oz as Princess Dorothy. Alice doesn’t have such an easy path to Oz. She is nearly attacked by the lion and the tin man, until they realize she is a friend of Dorothy’s. At the close of the story, Dorothy asks where Scarecrow is. We see that the witch has captured him for questioning. When he refuses to tell her any answers, she spills the stuffing out from his head and hints that she will use magic to extract from the straw the answers she seeks.

This issue of The Oz Wonderland Chronicles has pulled me even more into the story, and I’m looking forward to finding out what will happen next. The plot development had seemed slow to me at first reading, but when I paid more attention to detail on my second reading, I saw that even when it seemed like nothing was happening, the panels were rich with information. A sophisticated story seems to be taking shape, one with a lot of layers and details that can be discerned from a close reading. Eventually, the story arc is sure to involve Wendy (Dee) and probably even the other two roommates, as well. There are already hints about this possibility. Knowing how much it pays to understand all the details, I’m planning to re-read Alice in Wonderland and to read the Oz books. I like these heroines. They remind me a little bit of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They are young, pretty, contemporary, sassy and tough. They have active social lives that intersect with other dimensions as they battle evil. I am going to be able to get into this series.

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Studio
Warner Bros. Pictures
http://vforvendetta.warnerbros.com/

Credits
Director: James McTeigue
Starring: Hugo Weaving, Natalie Portman
Rating: R

Grade: 9

The movie V for Vendetta is based upon the eighties comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. The Wachowski Brothers wrote the screenplay. Hugo Weaving plays V, the larger-than-life revolutionary behind the Guy Fawkes mask. His character is a master of guerilla theatre as much as he is of one-man guerilla warfare. He has been compared to Batman, but unlike Batman, he does not protect the status quo. His largest mission is to inspire rebellion against the extreme right-wing, totalitarian Norsefire regime that has come to power in a future United Kingdom. When watching this movie, the audience is immediately confronted with both V’s subversiveness and the movie’s political relevance. As we are faced with the movie’s provocative challenge to decide how we will relate art to life, we can immediately pass negative judgement on V for Vendetta. Alternatively, we can choose to suspend our judgement of V, working through our cognitive dissonance in a very intense viewing experience. Throughout this riveting story, the psychological journey of the character Evey can be our guide and touchstone.

Evey is played by Natalie Portman. She seems much more like a real person than V, who is more of an idea than a man. She is a character who learned fear of her government at a very young age, when she watched her father become a political prisoner. She could be taken to represent a psyche processing the ideas represented by V. We watch her grow from fear to fearlessness during the course of her very complex relationship with V. When she first encounters V, he rescues her from being raped and murdered by the secret police, as punishment for her violation of curfew. V grooms Evey to be his ally, but she feels ambivalent towards him. Out of a mixture of both fear and conscience, she betrays him. As the plot unfolds, we learn with her of V’s plans to re-enact the failed plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up the parliament buildings 400 years ago. He also murders, one by one, corrupt government officials without compunction. At one point, Evey asks him, “What the hell are you talking about?” He answers without a hint of hesitation or apology, “Justice.” At this point, she still has too much fear and confusion to dare to help him restore justice.

The pivotal part of Evey’s transformation involves her capture and torture, and it is also one of the more confusing parts of the story. The audience is led to believe that she has been captured and is being held and tortured by the state. When she is finally released, it is revealed that V has actually been the one who has been torturing her all this time. While in her prison cell, she reads an autobiographical story written on toilet paper by a woman named Valerie. The lesson of Valerie is that even if we have only one inch of integrity, in this space, we are free; and we have nothing if we give this up. Evey believes Valerie to be her adjacent cell-mate. Valerie’s story is real, but it is V, not Valerie, who has been passing it through the wall to Evey. V finally releases Evey once she has become completely fearless. This fearlessness is his paradoxical gift to her. V taught fearlessness to Evey the way he had learned it, himself, during his own incarceration, when Valerie passed her life story through the prison wall to him. At the climax, Evey has to choose whether or not to help V blow up the abandoned parliament buildings. She decides that her country needs an idea more than it needs a building.

Though it is commonplace to say that V is a terrorist, this label is not wholly accurate. The aim of a terrorist is to inspire terror in the body politic. The ultimate end result of V’s actions is to inspire fearlessness in the people. In fact, it is the state that seeks to keep its people in a state of fear. V achieves his objective. The people become fearless, like Evey. One by one, people choose courage, as they converge in a crowd to watch the building blow up. Valerie is alive and with her girlfriend, in the crowd, smiling. The movie is never more symbolic than at this moment. We know that Valerie is actually dead. We know that we’re seeing something about ideas and that we’re not supposed to take it completely literally. When the building blows up, the feeling is victorious, happy and celebratory, like 4th of July fireworks.

The resemblance between art and life, whether deliberate allusions or not, have not been missed by critics of this movie. Some critics have even made the case that it is directed specifically at the Bush administration, but these people seem unaware that the movie is based upon a comic book series that was written well before George W. Bush was elected. Instead, a case could be made that the comic book series was prophetic in its dystopian vision of a government that has degenerated into a protection racket, under cover of piousness and patriotism. Make no mistake about it, though. Yes, V and Evey blow up a building, but this movie is not about blowing up buildings. Nobody supposes that The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand was about terrorism, even though the main protagonist Howard Roark blew up a building in the story. Like The Fountainhead, V for Vendetta is about ideas. In the case of The Fountainhead, the idea was the creator’s right to destroy his own creation if his creative vision was compromised. In the case of V for Vendetta, the idea is just as the movie’s slogan says: “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

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