I'm sure I've mentioned it before, but one of the most gratifying things to doing Fanboy Rampage is the mail.  There's a certain glowy satisfaction from seeing your crazy conspiracy theory in print, I admit it, but there's something even more heart-warming when your mailbox is clogged with letters from admiring fans.  Take this letter that I got just last week:

Hello   Editor  :

I am a big fan of   Fanboy Rampage  , the   column  that runs   every month  in   Onomatopoeia  , so much so that I'm writing to personally offer my services.  My name is Chuck Austen, and I'd love to write your   column   for  Onomatopoeia  .

In case you didn't know, I've wanted to work in comics my whole life, and now I'm a successful writer for the two largest comic book companies in the world, Marvel and DC Comics.  And although I'm currently working on eleven titles total for the two companies, including a much-lauded run on my dream project X-Men, and a soon-to-be-lauded run on my idle-daydream project Superman.   I'm still finding myself with plenty of time (and bills!) on my hands.  And considering I'm such a big fan of  Fanboy Rampage , I'd find it a fantasy come true to take over writing the  column , should anything happen to its current writer.

As you can see from the enclosed resumé, I have an impressive track record of working on popular and flagship titles, and I excel in coming in on a title after a popular writer has left and continuing  in the style and themes that made the work so popular.

But I'm sure you're probably too busy assembling the latest issue of  Onomatopoeia  to peruse something so detailed as a resumé.  So let me quickly summarize my considerable assets for you:

·                     I've been involved in the comics industry for almost twenty years, and yet continue to tackle topics and trends that today's culture finds timely, such as sex, religion, and sexy religions;

·                     I'm able to meet absolutely any deadline, no matter how tight;

·                     I'm fully capable of taking the slightest story and telling it for half a year.  Conversely, I can take a year-long epic and compress it to a single issue, depending on your trade paperback needs;

·                     I started off as a cartoonist, capable of drawing with a certain stiff and stilted competence, then went on to work as an animator for King of the Hill for several years, so as a writer I know how to craft visual scenarios for the artist that are visually dynamic (in a stiff and stilted way);

·                     I'm absolutely bulletproof to criticism.  As long as your checks keep clearing, I'll go in any direction agreed on by us, no matter what the response to the work might be;

·                     I have recently acquired a Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, allowing my characters to appear learned and quote at length from many of the world's great writings; and

·                     I'm fully capable of crafting the occasional satisfying piece of story or characterization on odd occasions to keep anyone from fully giving up on me, no matter how they try.

So on the off-hand chance something should happen to the current writer of   Fanboy Rampage  , I hope you consider me as a replacement.  My pay rates are negotiable, my work ethic is rock-solid, and I'm a very nice guy in person.  I also have experience completing unfinished storylines or ideas left behind.  If you suddenly need me to step in mid-  column  for any reason, please don't hesitate to give me a call.  I look forward to the opportunity to working with you!

Sincerely,

Chuck Austen

[phone & contact info]

Now, I'm no fool. When I get a letter like that, I know it's not just a letter.  I can tell when someone (such as Brian) is sending me a message.  In this terrifyingly subtle way, Hibbs is actually saying, "Hey, man!  Why don't you knock it off with that conspiracy paranoid bullshit, man! Nobody needs a perfectly sexy episode of Red Shirt Diaries (a.k.a., Enterprise) spoiled worrying about what'll happen to the President if the episode turns out good for a change.  Besides, all the producers have to do for the show to be good is have Bakula pick up a phaser!  Show him holding a phaser!  Get him using a phaser!  Then you can have the Vulcan massage with a happy ending!  First, the phaser!  Then, the happy ending!  Nobody needs to get shot, man!  And Chuck Austen is breathing down your neck, man!  And Ben's been asking about your job, too! Sure, he's only four months old, but we were sitting there the other night playing Avalon Hill’s Panzer Leader and he expressed some interest in writing Fanboy Rampage.  (Technically, all he did was spit up on himself, but there's a special way he spits up when he's obviously considering Fanboy Rampage.  It's the sort of spit-up that says, 'You know, Dad, Jeff has been writing Fanboy Rampage for a long time now, and sometimes I get the feeling he's stuck in a rut.  And his work seems less like funny ha-ha, and more like funny paranoid-junkyard-dog-mean (which is still funny when you kick the fence he's trying to sleep near), and maybe it's time someone with some new blood--and by new, I mean blood that's only four to seven months old--to take over the whole endeavor.  I have some observations about Marvel's trade paperback program you're sure to find charming and puckish."  You know, that kind of spit-up (it sort of looks like an upside-down Florida).  So, you should clean up your act, man! Stop with the bad, and get back to the rad!  Down with the frown and up with the gown!  Get away from the paranoid and back on the Super-Adaptoid!"

You kind of have to read between the lines, but it's all there, I assure you.

But I can't stop, my friends.  As much as I sometimes might like to.  It's like the weight of the world is resting on my fragile shoulders and it presses me to action.  It's like that famous statement:  "First, my parents threw out my old issues of Superman, and I did nothing because I wasn't reading them. Then they threw out my baseball cards, and I did nothing because I had given up on trading them.  Then I turned eighteen and they came to throw me out, but by that point it was too late because there was nobody left to speak up for me.  Man, can you imagine what those issues of Superman would be worth now?  And I had two Dimaggio rookie cards!  Two of them!  Sometimes, I just think about what my Dad threw away and it kills me!"  Or however that old saying goes--the point is that I have to tell the cold-hard truths, no matter what a four month old might think of me as a result.

So I have to say, that there is a powerful evil sweeping through fandom, an almost irresistible force turning the multi-colored whorls of geekery into one undifferentiated mass.  If we don't do something now, in another few years, our rich and verdant fields of strangeness will be an unending suburb of entropic sameness.  As I'm sure you've all figured out by now, I'm talking about Samuel L. Jackson.

That's right.  The actor, Samuel L. Jackson.  And by actor, I mean "charismatic usurper of all that is geeky and unhip."  When you pick up Ultimates, do you see the old Nick Fury, a middle-aged white guy who looks like he's about to yell at kids to get off his lawn?  No!  You see the new Nick Fury, a sexily bald African-American man with a thin expensive cigar and a Christian Dior eyepatch who makes a team of superpowered men and women obey him out of sheer respect.  When you watch The Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones, do you see Mace Windu, Jedi--a title which in the past always meant "bored English guy who wanted to dress up like Gandalf but couldn't do more to get into the part than putting on his bathrobe?"  No, you see Mace Windu, a sexily bald African-American man where immaculately tailored cloaks who can make Yoda listen to his suggestions out of sheer respect.

And the list goes on and on.  That upcoming Pixar movie, The Incredibles, about a family of superheroes trying to retire and live a normal life until they're forced back into action?  It features the voice talents of Samuel L. Jackson.  That superheroes-done-gritty-and-kinda-boring movie, Unbreakable?  Starring Samuel L. Jackson as on obsessed comic book collector.  Any Tarantino movie but Reservoir Dogs?  Samuel L. Jackson's in there, usually swearing with the gusto of three potty-mouthed actors.  Remember how great the first Die Hard movie was?  So did Samuel L. Jackson--that's why he worked so hard to get into number three.

Remember when blaxploitation was coming back big with the film geeks?  There was Samuel L. Jackson as Shaft, walking around so cool he either didn't notice or didn't care that Jeffrey Wright was stealing the movie right out from under him.  Or when we were all getting misty-eyed about shark movies, Samuel L. Jackson popped up to give us the best scene in Deep Blue Sea.  I remember once when Ed Brubaker was in the store pow-wowing with us clerks, and we all decided that one of the coolest TV theme songs of all time was the theme to SWAT.  Little did I know that the Brube was a little more than a scout, sent by his all-powerful lord, to figure out what movie he should commit to next.  The only emerging geekisms Mr. Jackson's missed have been all that Planet of the Apes hoopla (and I figure that it was because the script to Burton's flick was so lousy even he couldn't get excited about taking it) and Magic: The Gathering, although I've heard rumors that there's a rare Italian card called the Samonzi L. Jackeria, that is so powerful by sheer force of its sleek and profane charisma it's been banned from all tournament play.

Did you know that Samuel L. Jackson is in the running to play Luthor in the new Superman movie?  Did you hear that Samuel L. Jackson is negotiating to play Jughead in Archie:  The Motion Picture?  Would you suspect that Mr. Jackson has already called dibs on the voice of Optimus Prime in that big-screen launch of The Transformers?

Now you're probably asking:  is there anything really wrong with that?  After all, Samuel L. Jackson is a tremendously great actor.  Remember Jules in Pulp Fiction?  The crackhead brother in Jungle Fever?  The sad and obscene criminal in Jackie Brown?  The man haunted by the past in Eve's Bayou?  So what if Samuel L. Jackson is currently negotiating to play Casey Jones in the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles installment?  Can't that help but make the movie better?  Who could complain now that he wants to take the role of Charlotte in a revival of Charlotte's Web?  After all, haven't we all wanted to have classic scenes updated so we get something like:

INTERIOR--FARMER'S JOHNSON'S BARN

Wilbur lies trembling on a bed of straw.

WILBUR (voice of Tobey Maguire)
They--they're going to kill me, Charlotte.  Farmer Brown is going to kill me.

CHARLOTTE (voice of Samuel L. Jackson)
No, Wilbur, they're not going to kill you.  You know why?

WILBUR
Why?

CHARLOTTE
Because you are one fine mother-fucking pig, Wilbur!  That's right!  And all we have to do is make sure the whole world finds out!

WILBUR
But--but--how are we going to do that?

CHARLOTTE
Well, I did some thinking about this, and I've come up with a little plan.  Take a look!

Charlotte gestures to her web in the rafters, and spelled out is silken webbed letters is the phrase: ONE FINE MOTHERFUCKING PIG.

See?  Nobody could take exception at a tasteful and sensitive updating of an old classic like that.  But that's never what ends up happening.  You will never get a scene in a Star Wars movie where Mace Windu gets to say something like, "Womp rat may taste like pumpkin pie but I'll never know because I won't eat the diseased motherfuckers," or, "I'm going to take that fruity-colored lightsaber of yours and make you walk like a syphilitic bantha with it."  Instead, we get him nodding at the stick that will later be replaced with a CGI Yoda and saying, with a very bored look on his face, "But Master Yoda, how are we to know who the traitor is, if they can hide themselves from the Force?"

Jackson may well be every inch the ultra-fanboy as the rest of us, but that doesn't mean he's a powerful enough actor to make sure all these projects are made properly.  He's just powerful enough to get cast in them, and then look stultified and uncomfortable because of the stupid shit he has to say.  In another ten years, we'll look back at our movies and see Samuel L. Jackson in all of them, little more than a marker, a man talented enough to be wasted in his roles, and smart enough to know it, and we'lll see in him all our fannish dreams unhappily fulfilled, knowingly and professionally smothered, without a single profane or delightfully startling moment to them.  It seems to me some dreams are perhaps better left unattained--but maybe Chuck Austen could make a more convincing case for that than me.