Comics & Sports #1: Dash Dartwell

As all geeks (looking at you, Djmmm) know, every Wednesday (and Thursdays when Monday was a holiday or something) is that most hallowed of days, new comic book day. In the spirit of that most beautiful of days, I present a new feature spotlighting the potentially awesome confluence of sports and comics.

I recently spent two weeks in scenic (no, really, it sort of is) East Lansing, Michigan, having somehow scammed my college of choice into funding my research into a little something called Centaur Comics. Ultra-quickly, they were a fifth-rate (much like this blog) comic book publisher back in the late thirties and early forties, during the so-called Golden Age of comics. They trotted out a variety of oddball heroes, including an honest-to-goodness centaur, a ventriloquist-turned-detective, and a giant flying eyeball that may or may not be God. So yeah, no lack of creativity over at Centaur. Sanity is a whole 'nother issue.

They also did a bunch of stories that mixed elements of the emerging superhero genre with the world of sports, producing predictably bizarre results. Today we spotlight a steroid parable written six decades before anyone even realized that was an issue. Of course, the whole thing is about the virtues of performance-enhancing substances and how people who use them are heroes. Start taking notes right now, disgraced major leaguers. The key to your redemption may well lie within these pages.

First of all, the set-up. From the comic:

Dashford (Dash) Dartwell is a student at Dravrah University and a member of the "scrub" track team. However, his interest in track is secondary to his new interest in the research of Dr. Drew Moss, Professor of Bio-Chemistry at Dravrah. An added attraction is Bettie Moss, Dr. Moss's lovely daughter.

Three things...

1. Dashford? I think I know what I'm calling my children. Yes, all of them.
2. Dravrah? I would make a crappy joke here about how I bet its rival is "Elay", but, um...that's actually the name of its rival. Oh, that crazy forties-style wordplay!
3. Bettie Moss? If I didn't know better, I'd call that a cheap knock-off of Hulk love interest Betty Ross. Just because it was made twenty years earlier doesn't prove anything!

OK, with that out of the way, let's take a look at the story itself. Professor Moss has just created "metabo-tablets", and he's the first to admit he doesn't have the faintest idea what they'll do...


Leaving the really questionable medical ethics aside for a moment (I mean, shouldn't he first force-feed a bunch of rats ten times the recommended dosage before he even thinks about human tests?), I'm pretty sure the "But I'm not even going to play anyway, so it's OK!" line later became the core of Alex Sanchez's defense.

Meanwhile, a bunch of mobsters with apparently nothing better to do than fix an Ivy League (sorry...Yvi Eugael) track meet kidnap all the top runners, forcing the coach to use the now-medicated Dash...


Frankly, I don't know what Dash was ever doing on the second team in the first place. I mean, his name is Dash Dartwell. For crying out loud, hasn't the coach ever heard of nominative determinism? Anyway, now that the performance-enhancers have kicked in, Dash does the only reasonable thing - demand to be in every single race. Of course, I'm sure he'll take things easy, using his amazing new powers to only just win. Right? Right!?


Because I've very legitimately got nothing better to do, here's a comparison of the modern records in those various events with Dash's marks...

100 Yard Dash: 9.72 seconds vs. 3.5 seconds (Dash)
High Jump: 8 feet vs. 19 feet
Broad Jump: 29.4 feet vs. 70+ feet

And that's without sixty years worth of improved conditioning. So, um, yeah, holy shit. Way to be inconspicuous, Dash. The best part, of course, is where there are no repercussions whatsoever. Hell, no one even vaguely questions whether these completely impossible results are on the level. His coach only gets concerned when the tablets start to wear off and he almost loses. OK, that last part is pretty believable, but still.


Well, OK, there is one repercussion. Those violent mobsters are going to try to kill him. But in terms of oversight from the governing athletic body? None. None whatsoever. And what's the press's reaction?


That's right, they're total suckers for the great story. Huh. Maybe this isn't that ridiculous after all.

Also, Dr. Moss? You're giving the credit for three world records to "you, with the help of my metabo-tablets"? With the help? Yes, in much the same way the Apollo astronauts reached escape velocity with the help of the Saturn V. Or, if you'd prefer sports-related, in much the same way Jud Buechler won three NBA championships with the help of Michael Jordan.

Well, anyway, Dash fights the angry mobsters and defeats them because he's, well, really fast. He also wears a suit the whole time while fighting crime, which is strangely badass. All of which leads to...


And so, because he uses his incredible drug-fueled powers to not only rewrite the record books but also to beat the crap out of some local gangsters, Dash Dartwell is a superhero. All I know is, if Barry Bonds starts busting skulls in the Bay Area, I think we'll know which comic book he started reading. Well, assuming those skulls belong to criminals. I could also see him as a super-villain. Either way, it really seems like his only logical career move. Other than Taiwan of course. You can't be extradited if the US doesn't recognize the country!

In any event, remember the timeless lesson of Dash Dartwell - drugs makes sports better! Yay for performance-enhancing substances!

Join us next Wednesday for another Comics & Sports entry where our friend Dash will use his tablets to hit more home runs. No, seriously. I swear that's actually going to happen.

That doesn't really seem like a principle...

The Associated Press, which is probably my favorite sportswriter because it's really just a mildly sentient computer, has a report on the 23 cent pizza deal that Papa John's did in Ohio to assuage outraged LeBron fans. I'd say "Cavs fans", but, well...you know.

Since, like I said, the AP is my favorite sportswriter (other than that sexy Michael Tunison!!!), I don't really have any criticisms of the writing. But this quote from a woman by the name of Jennie Moore struck me as downright bizarre. She's explaining why she stood in a four-hour line for cheap pizza:

"I did it for the principle of it."

That principle being...what, exactly? That the pizza was cheap? I mean, there's no shame in that being the principle. Hell, as a poor college student I'd sell my own lungs for a week's worth of half-price pizza. I figure we're going to re-evolve gills any minute now anyway.

Apparently, however, that wasn't quite the principle Jennie Moore was thinking of:

"The principle of it is he's not a crybaby and Papa John's should not have gotten into it."

Is that really a principle? My wordy sense says no. In case you don't know, wordy sense is my special ability to sense whether something is the correct usage of a word or not. I got it as a result of being bitten by a radioactive dictionary. Weirdly, I'm never able to be sure whether people are using the words "venom" and "carnage" correctly. Funny how that works out.

Fuck, better check the Wiktionary, just to be sure:

principle

1. A fundamental assumption.

We need some sort of principles to reason from.

I don't know if it's a fundamental assumption that "he's not a crybaby and Papa John's should not have gotten into it." I mean, the Wizards would certainly argue those points, and they do have the full force of the dark arts on their side.

2. A rule used to choose among solutions to a problem.

The principle of least privilege holds that a process should only receive the permissions it needs.

I guess you could argue that's the principle Jennie Moore used to justify buying cheap pizza. I guess. But that's not really the usage implied by the phrase "the principle of the thing", is it? I think that's this one:

3. (generally plural) Moral rule or aspect.

I don't doubt your principles; you are clearly a person of principle.
It's the principle of the thing; I won't do business with someone I can't trust.

There's that phrase she used! So it's got to be a moral rule, apparently. Sorry, but I don't think LeBron's suspect emotional state or Papa John's somewhat asinine business practices really count as moral issues. And if they do...well shit, fuck morality, I guess.

What? I'm just saying what you're all thinking. Well, I'm typing, I guess, but I did just say "fuck morality", so I've sort of got bigger issues on my mind. Dodging lightning bolts, for a start.

Anyway, I think the word Jennie Moore was really looking was "reason." So she should have said this:

"I did it for the principle reason of it. The principle reason of it is he's not a crybaby and Papa John's should not have gotten into it."

Or if Jennie Moore has a female hard-on (those don't exist, right?*) for the word principle, she at least should have had the common courtesy to be specific:

"I did it for the principle of it, and by that I mean 'principle' in the sense of Wiktionary's second definition of the word, not the third, which is the usage generally associated with 'the principle of it'. The principle of it - and again here I am using the second definition as opposed to the more customary third because the second definition better conveys the sense of a rule I use to determine the best course in action, and so now I will explain my logic - is he's not a crybaby and Papa John's should not have gotten into it."

See? Much clearer! Let that be a lesson to you, Jennie Moore.

Of course, I guess she could have said all that and the AP just edited her down. That dude is sort of a dick. Did you know he let his calculator girlfriend (she's totally a TI-92 Plus, fucking loaded elitist) take him to Made of Honor instead of Iron Man? That's one whipped computer, dude, and I think he deals with his angst by taking random Cleveland residents slightly out of context.

Fucking dick, man. Fucking computer dick.

*Don't correct me. Frankly, I'm pretty sure I don't want to know. I am a blogger, after all.

I got scooped...

...by the awesome Larry B (he thinks I'm a cokehead!) over at Fire Jay Mariotti. So I'm not going to bother doing a full thing on Dr. Z's Favre piece. Because apparently Larry is capable of positivity and compassion, he chooses to actually laud Dr. Z, instead of just shitting on him on principle.

I think my main issue with Dr. Z's piece is that he keys in on the least offensive parts of the Brett Favre mythos. I mean, the 4th and 26 was a pretty terrible fucking play on the part of the Packers defense, plain and simple.

Also, there's some weird stuff about Mike Holmgren:

Holmgren knew how to handle greatness. He had worked with Montana, who could get into streaks of almost surreal accuracy, plus he had outstanding athletic ability to fall back on.

So he knew how to handle greatness, huh? Because Seattle seems to suggest he doesn't know shit about handling above-averageness. Or whatever.

And how about this?

His fourth quarter and overtime meltdown against the Giants last season, which put a sad end to a remarkably classy season? Never mind ... the redemption of the Giants' field-goal kicker was the angle.

I am never, ever going to criticize people for making the winning player the angle. I think you earn that by winning, and I get really tired when certain teams (read: the Yankees) dominate the headlines win or lose. I think I'd be just as irritated if that was the time all the sportswriters chose to shit all over Favre and ignore the Giants.

Also, what's with all the talk about "angles"? What is this, a 1930s newsroom? Because from what I've heard, they could get pretty weird.



Actually, I think Dr. Z would fit right in over there. He's certainly got the name for it.

I dunno, I'd go further into this, but I don't want to look like I'm just picking up the scraps of others. I mean, I am, no question about it, but I don't like to look that way.

52 52 52 Week #1: Mississippi

In which I examine crappy local sports journalism on a state-by-state basis, progressing through the states in terms of an alphabetical ordering of the heights of their tallest points. Because I can.

My first stop in my 52-state tour of bad journalism takes me to Mississippi, where Tishomingo County's Woodall Mountain clocks in at a robust 806 feet. Some facts about Woodall:

1. Locals are rather charmingly self-aware about the fact that such a tiny peak is their state's highest point. You can buy a hat in area stores that proudly proclaims, "Ski Woodall." Yes, please.

2. There's a bluegrass band in Tupelo called the Woodall Mountain Boys.

3. During the Civil War, the Battle of Iuka took place in 1862 on Woodall Mountain. General William Rosecrans won victory by taking the mountain and barraging the nearby town of Iuka with artillery and plenty of it. No word on whether or not Rosecrans or his aid, Staff Sergeant Guildenstern, met their fates in the battle, although I imagine they're now dead.

Mississippi's representative in the series is Tommy Snell, who writes a column about golf for The Sun Herald, a Biloxi newspaper whose readership is mostly made up of denizens of the Gulf Coast. To the paper's immense credit, they kept publishing during Hurricane Katrina even after all their offices were devastated by the hurricane, which forced them to publish out of the Columbus, Georgia newsroom of the Ledger-Enquirer. This ultimately won them a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. So yeah...nothing but respect for The Sun Herald.

This column by Mr. Snell? Eh, not so much.

Brandel Chamblee of The Golf Channel suggested, maybe even demanded, that Tiger Woods stands as the greatest athlete of all time.

Ooh boy. Look, I'm already going to say I'm not on board with any of this. I think "greatest athlete ever" is a really dumb topic to begin with - I mean, how the hell do you compare the relative athletic excellence of, say, Wilt Chamberlain to Gale Sayers? Let's say for a second you tried to do this scientifically. Even if you figured out how much they outperformed the average players in the sport, how do you calibrate the two marks so that it's a fair comparison? Is being the greatest pitcher ever more impressive than being the best quarterback? I've heard it argued Wayne Gretzky is greater than Michael Jordan because his stats were way more insane relative to the league averages. But does that mean he really was better or just that, for whatever reason, it's easier to outperform the mean in the NHL compared to the NBA?

Then there's the concept of "athlete." Does that mean we're talking about them in the context of their sport, or are we trying to get to some transcendent quality of "athleticism"? I suspect many people who want to argue this topic are more interested in the latter, which is pretty much wholly unquantifiable. Was Pele more "athletic" than Sandy Koufax? And speaking of Koufax, how do you deal with people with incredible athletic abilities whose careers never panned out the way they should have, like Bo Jackson or David Thompson (or even, much as I hate to say it, Michael Vick)? Should Bo or Deion Sanders get extra credit for excelling at two sports?

So yeah, all of these are valid rebuttals to the idea that Tiger Woods is the greatest athlete of all time. A much less valid but more assholish counterargument would be that his greatest rival looks like this:



When your chief competitor has man-boobs...yeah, I don't think I'm buying you as greatest athlete of all time. Honestly, there's only one worse choice than Tiger Woods that I hear when this argument comes up.

That's fast company, Secretariat would say.

And there it is. I'm not going to argue this beyond four incredibly simple words: SECRETARIAT...WAS...A...HORSE. I mean, if you're making some top fifty list of greatest athletes, I could see putting Secretariat in there somewhere to add a bit of color. But as the first athlete Tommy Snell names to refute the Tiger Woods argument? That just won't stand.

That's not a slam dunk, Michael Jordan would argue.

His Airness is a legitimate candidate for this asinine title. Also, that's a terrible...wait, does that even count as a joke?

Brett Farve's Fanatics from the Kiln would just have everyone look at the record book.

This is, I think, why I wanted to embark upon this project: to discover the weird in-jokes that dominate local sports columns. Seriously, I have no idea what the Kiln is supposed to be or how it got its name, but I'm going to assume it's a group of amateur potters who spend all their time firing clay sculptures of Brett Favre in various exciting positions, such as "throwing a potentially career-ending interception" or "sitting on a tractor." Also, those fanatics apparently love Brett so much that they haven't actually bothered to learn how to spell the man's name. I will resist any temptation to impugn the intelligence of the great people of Mississippi, but I'd really appreciate it if they didn't keep lofting softballs at me.

Oh, and Brett Favre as all-time greatest athlete? Eh, it's better than Secretariat. But I'm a little dubious of Favre's credentials for a made-up bullshit title like this. What am I supposed to be arguing again?

On a Sunday when Tom Brady and a bunch of Patriots might throw a different name into the "super" ring, it's fitting to start the argument of "greatest athlete of all time."

So this was written right before the Super Bowl. I think it should be pointed out that that sentence suggests that either the Patriots currently have on their roster several candidates for the best athlete who ever lived, or that he's suggesting the Patriots as a team might be the best athlete ever. I don't know which of those arguments is sillier. Also, "throw a different name into the 'super' ring"? I get that the word "super" is in there because of the Super Bowl, but I'm still pretty sure that doesn't make even a quantum of sense. Or solace, for that matter.

I happen to agree with Brian Hewett of TGC that Secretariat was the greatest athlete, if we can call a horse an athlete.

No, we can't call a horse an athlete. You realize why, right Tommy?

A horse is a horse, of course.

Precisely, though no points for the obvious reference. I'll see you your Mr. Ed and raise you Comet the Super-Horse.

Farve might not be playing in Phoenix today,

Since Favre is apparently the Sun Herald's local deity, I'm still shocked they can't spell his name correctly. This is the sort of thing I just assumed was a myth...I didn't honestly believe anyone was this terrible. Once again, my faith in humanity is totally unwarranted.

but as they toss 5-yard dumpoffs or 70-yard TDs, Manning and Brady will feel the grip of NFL and Packer records etched in the pigskin. Unitas, Bradshaw, Starr and Brady won't catch the USM grad this year or the next, and that's argument enough to throw down the "greatest" gauntlet in The Kiln.

Let me get this straight...with just the Super Bowl left to go in the 2007-08 season, Tommy Snell feels the 59-year-old Terry Bradshaw, the 74-year-old Bart Starr, and the dead Johnny Unitas are unlikely to do enough to surpass Favre's achievements? And just to make things clear, even another season for three men a combined 204 years of age won't do enough to edge past Favre? THAT is the Kiln's argument? That his 2008 campaign will be better than a dead guy's, even if said dead guy is Johnny U? I'm not hallucinating, right?

Man, gotta love the Kiln. They're so fucking edgy. Logic is for pussies when they're around. By the way, how has this proven anything - and I'm using "proven" incredibly loosely - beyond Favre being the best quarterback ever? When are we going to hear about how Brett Favre will throw more touchdowns next year than Georges Vezina? C'mon Kiln, step it up!

Tiger might be the luckiest athlete of all time. He conjures up shots at just the right moment.

Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, let me get this straight. As part of your argument that Tiger is one of the greatest athletes ever, you essentially write off all his obviously prodigious skill as mere luck? I'm sorry, do you just keep a gun constantly trained at your own foot? I bet the Kiln would be behind something like that, especially if they could make an erotic Favre sculpture based on that imagery. It'd be controversial, but all the better for it.

With unmatched crowds and a stadium-like setting (600,000 expected this week), he made a hole-in-one on No. 16 at the FBR Open, the loudest stage in golf.The more he practices, the luckier he gets. Cliché? Maybe, but facts are facts. More wins? More majors? As the lyrics suggest, "it's just a matter of time."

WHAT LYRICS!? I admit my cultural milieu may be slightly different from Tommy Snell's, but I have no idea what the hell he's referencing. Is it Randy Travis or Brooks Benton? Maybe Cartel? Dream Street!? Fuck it, I didn't get into this to be a musicologist.

Greatest coach? That's easy, John Wooden. Seven consecutive NCAA national championships and the greatest winning percentage (.813) of all time. When Florida wins five more in a row, we'll talk.

Did you include that just to take a random shot at SEC rival Florida? Come on, Tommy, be honest. I won't forgive you, but at least I might someday understand you.

Greatest athlete? A bit more difficult. The jury's still out, but Tiger's giving his closing remarks.

You know, I'm pretty sure when a jury is out for, you know, deliberations...well, I'm pretty sure the time for closing remarks has passed. You know, you make your closing remarks, and then the jury's out. So if this metaphor is correct, Tiger would be giving his closing remarks to an empty jury box.

All of which leads me to me to think that even if Tiger Woods is the greatest athlete in the history of everything, he's sure as hell not the best jurisprudent. Actually, I'm pretty sure that title goes to the feller from Alabama, not Mississippi.

Congratulations, Tommy Snell...you just got your local ass handed to you! I feel so big right now, you can't even imagine.