Clark Kent and the decline of the print media.

Ever wondered how the Daily Planet is likely to be effected by changes in the news industry? I09 columnist Jive Tarkin (AKA Moff, who does his own good stuff at Another D—ed Blog) has what you're looking for:

Yes, newspapers are dying, and even if flying backwards around the earth to reverse time really worked, it would only delay the inevitable: The Internet would just get invented again, revenue from classified ads would drop sharply, Franklin Stern would be forced to conclude that pay-to-view was a flawed model and abandon the PlanetSelect program, and where would that leave Metropolis’s favorite couple?

The long and short of it: Clark Kent, professional blogger.

On Watchmen, briefly.

Watchmen is all bound up in the late stages of the Cold War, especially with the looming threat of nuclear war. But a weakness of Watchmen then might have been that it was a unipolar reflection of what was then a bipolar world. That is, the history of the Watchmen universe had made the Soviet Union completely impotent as an economic or ideological threat.

But, strangely enough, the story's power dynamics match the war on terror fairly closely. Not that it's an allegory.

(I'm still afraid the movie will make a mess of things.)

(May I take a moment to recommend Eve Tushnet's 2004 essay on Watchmen to any fans?)