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This is a test. Mobile blogging.

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Help me blog.

Moving the posts

I'm moving, sort of. I've shifted most of the material here to my other Blogger bloggy-blog-blog, The Weird Turn Pro (http://proweirdo.blogspot.com/). The main reason: the name. "The weird turn pro" is an apt description of what I had been doing with the blog--namely, showing off my writing--and the moniker "Doctor Bippie" is a little tougher to explain.

Doctor Bippie will stay in business for now. It will probably be a spot for linking to interesting sites and cultural phenomena, and maybe the occassional critique or commentary.

If you've come here as a result of having received my business card, the stuff you want to see--writing samples and such--is probably at The Weird Turn Pro.

In any case, I hope I'll see you around the 'sphere.


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Article: "Attack of the Supersized Comic Book" (Chesapeake Family Magazine)

My first print article, about graphic novels in education and mainstream culture, has been published in Chesapeake Family Magazine. It's pared down from a slightly more ambitious--and probably unreadably florid--effort. I am nonetheless proud of it. I'm grateful for the opportunity provided by Chesapeake Family and its editor, Kristen Page-Kirby.

So check it out, and chime in. Comments will be slipped into pH-neutral melamine sleeves and allowed to appreciate in value.

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The Hulk is back

The Incredible Hulk review is back up here, and at the Movie Tuesday index.

Movie Review: The X-Files (Chesapeake Family)

My review of The X-Files: I Want To Believe is now up on the Movie Tuesday Blog.

Comments will be waved at from a rowboat. (Watch the end credits and you'll understand.)


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The Dark Knight: Some Scraps

Sometimes in my rapture I write a tad more than I should. What follows are some bits and pieces I'm a little proud of that couldn't possibly fit into my little 600-word confection.

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The look of the movie adds much to its exploration of the blurry boundaries between light and dark. Batman prefers to work at night, of course, gliding through the negative spaces of Gotham's sprawl. But a fair part of the action takes place during business hours, in the spare, rectangular domains of financial and civic power. Nolan and his production team juxtapose night's hard shadows with a flat, gray light that seems to coat rather than illuminate. It hums from the drop ceilings of government offices or oozes in through the windows of ivory tower boardrooms. Not even the Batcave escapes the quotidian glare. With Wayne Manor under renovation, Batman is forced to hide his toys in a single football field-sized room buried somewhere in the inner city. Lined with fashionably polished concrete and lit with bands of fluorescent light, it resembles a huge empty desk drawer. But who has time to decorate?

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The Joker wants our fear. He has no beliefs, no allegiances and no agenda. He knows exactly what he’s doing but scoffs at the notion that he has a plan. “Nobody panics when things go according to a plan,” he coos, adding, “even if the plan is horrifying.” It’s one of many instances where the ostensibly simple and silly comic-book world echoes the murky complexities on the other side of the theater walls. A look inside the mind of this fictional hyper-terrorist just might remind the audience of the thorny thicket of our own continuing response to terror, and of the hard lesson that crazy men who want to kill us may not be half as frightening as sane men who want to watch us lose our minds.

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At two and a half dark and stormy hours, the film might have benefitted from some trimming. Not fat, mind you; the movie is all muscle. But there are some pretty long stretches of dialogue, and much of what would otherwise have been subtext finds its way onto someone’s lips eventually.

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Oh, how I do love the sound of my own voice.


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