Ray's X-Blog

The Councillor And The Fatally Flawed Timetable "The ramifications of getting this timetable wrong to our people and elected politicians who are not in the loop would be as quick as shit going through a goose." -- Adrian Hicks, "Judgement And Democracy" speech. One day in 2004 Adrian Hicks witnessed a female ET walking penguin-like down High Street in the city of Winchester, England. Employed as an orthopaedic technician at a local hospital where he set broken bones, he could tell from how her limbs moved that while she appeared basically human at first glance, she was really from another world. Her oversized slightly pinky eyes were also a giveaway. This bizarre incident inspired Hicks to run for office. Not mentioning the ET encounter during his campaign, he became a city councillor as a member of the Liberal Democrats. In March 2009 he could no longer remain silent about what he had learned about the presence of aliens on our planet. In his speech entitled ...

The Councillor And The Tutued ET Councillor Adrian Hicks of Winchester, England, paid an artist to recreate the alien he spotted on the street back in 2004. If you're going to see an alien wearing ballet shoes and a tutu it might as well be on High Street. It happened one Saturday afternoon in 2004, maybe in late January or early February, Adrian Hicks doesn't remember the exact date. He was near a bookstore on High Street in Winchester, England, when he spotted the humanoid woman attired in an outre ballet outfit. She could pass for human, he stated, despite her large oval eyes, twirling arms and waddling gait. In one video interview Hicks returned to the spot and recreated for a journalist the alien's penguin-like walk and twirling arms. Hicks waited until March 2009 to publicly talk about the encounter. Why? Politics. Employed as a orthopaedic technician for 35 years, he decided to run for city councillor and didn't want the bizarre event to affect his chances...

Aku Woo And The Matrix On the surface planet Aku looks like any other world populated by terran-type humans. The Aku inhabitants have created a super-scientific civilization, suggesting what the planet Earth might become in the future. But appearances are deceiving. The entities living on Aku's surface are phantoms, thought-images projected from corporeal bodies in suspended animation underground. Of course, the world Aku isn't real. It only exists in the pages of a Green Lantern comic book story called “The World of Living Phantoms,” published in GL #6 in 1961. Back in the days when a comic sold for a mere 10¢. The price was plainly displayed on the cover with big type. Compare that to today's comics that hide the price in tiny print, outrageous sums like $3.99 / 4.99 / the-sky's-the-limit. Besides the large price box, there was also a seal stamped on the cover in the upper right-hand corner: Approved by the Comics Code Authority. After parental hysteria in the...

Bring Back Chiller-Diller! Your comic book is in trouble when the monster is more interesting than the super hero. To be fair, writer John Broome was working in a different era when he penned the early adventures of Green Lantern starting in 1959. A story had to be wrapped up in 6-12 pages. That didn't allow much in the way of character development. And any characterization was hemmed by the strict Comic Code Authority of those days. But as a young reader I didn't notice the lack of three-dimensions with the two-dimensional characters on the comic book page. Now as an adult the lack of depth bugs me. The Hal Jordan/Green Lantern character comes across as a bland mannequin with a magical power ring. His shtick -- firing power beams and creating various objects with his ring -- is the main thing that differentiates him from other cut-outs like The Flash. I've been rereading the early GL stories in the collection, Showcase Presents Green Lantern, Vol. 1 . Unfortunately...

XR #69 Finally. It's been formatted, printed, collated, stapled, stuffed into envelopes, and dropped off at the post office. Why can't a hardcopy zine be as easy as a blog post, just some typing, proofreading, and with a touch of a button, it's published and distributed? When I started the Ray X X-Rayer it was a lot of fun. But I'm spoiled by blogging, especially when I don't have to worry about so many pages to be filled, margins, lay out, all the restrictions I have with paper. The main restriction I have online -- a self-imposed one -- is trying to be concise, keeping my posts around 500 words. This time around I took a somewhat different approach. Instead of just reprinting blog posts into a zine format, the latest XR is semi-original. Some of the material is new and the rest is re-written as needed. This makes it easier to fit my stuff into the confines of a hardcopy format. XR #69 is available as a PDF file over at www.xrayer.com . So you can read it o...