Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Notes to "In a movie theater at least you can hold hands."

* Another: Archie can be seen--if it's possible to conceive this--as a smart, competent Bertie Wooster, while Nero Wolfe could be seen as--again, if it can even be conceived--more confident Jeeves . . . who has turned the tables on Bertie and is, rightly, giving the damn orders himself. ** On this front Sue Grafton deserves to be celebrated. She published her first Kinsey Millhone novel, A is for Alibi, in 1982, and, as she's progressed through the alphabet in her titles, she's deliberately allowed time to get away from her, telling Sarah Weinman in 2009 that Z (is for . . .) would coincide with Kinsey's fortieth birthday in 1990. (Side note to a side note: I've long thought that the Marvel Universe--so incredibly innovative when it appeared fifty years ago--could have been even more amazing had it been able to figure out a way to allow its characters to age. Peter Parker reached his late twenties (maybe early thirties) and stopped; Reed Richards and Tony Stark their forties. Imagine a world where we were in the third or fourth generation of Marvel heroes, where Peter Parker was nearing seventy, Bruce Banner eighty--yet still Hulk-powered, Professor X long dead not through malice but age, Doctor Strange but a powerful memory to his legion of mentees . . . )