She-Hulk: Livin' Large and Litigious

I recently invested in the She-Hulk: Single Green Female trade paperback, after having enjoyed the new series by Dan Slott and Juan Bobillo (and having addressed some issues of that series here).

The trade (collecting #1-6 of the last series) didn't disappoint, and it's provided good fodder for several posts. #2-4 are all standalone legal stories ready-made for analysis, and the other issues offer some scattered material of their own. I had wanted to get started on those issues this week, but it looks like I'll probably have the first one ready for the start of next week. Hopefully I'll progress through them with some degree of regularity.

Meanwhile, I have a question of sorts. I haven't bought or read the second She-Hulk trade, Superhuman Law, because despite its title, I thought I'd heard that there really isn't all that much law in those issues. Is that true? Or is there an issue or two in that book that I ought to check out?

Friendly, Neighborhood Spider-Justice

I've been lax the last couple of weeks, but I have something in the works for later this week that should remedy that. Stay tuned.

Until then, I'll share a neat tidbit from Brian Cronin's Comic Book Urban Legends series. While I'm usually concerned with how the law affects events presented in comic books, sometimes events in comic books can affect the law. One such true example of this phenomenon came from a New Mexico judge, who admitted that Spider-Man inspired electronic ankle bracelets that courts use to track probationers and persons awaiting trial.

I suppose criminals should be glad that the judge just got his ideas from the Spider-Man comic strip, and not from John Ostrander's Suicide Squad. ("And fair warning, if you misbehave, the ankle bracelet will blow your foot off.")

Breaking News...

The following headline (and article) appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on January 31, 2006:

'Testament' Gets Kinky

To follow up on my previous Testament post, I wanted to comment on something said in Cliff Biggers' interview with Rushkoff. In that interview, the author makes several unusual arguments, but only one that I want to address here:

"Moses has man-to-man sex up on Mount Sinai...Joshua was Moses’s apprentice, and the Bible talks of their encounters ‘face to face’—which, as any Greek knows, is the sexual position reserved for man-to-man sacred sex - women are to be done from behind."

This is inexplicably erroneous on Rushkoff's part for two reasons. First, what "any Greek knows" is totally irrelevant. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament (which includes the story of Moses), was written in ancient Hebrew, not Greek. And Hebrew had no such meaning for "face-to-face."

(And if you're as confused as I was about how man-to-man sex could be face-to-face to start with, it seems that the ancient Greeks did things a little differently.)

Second, I've perused several Bible translations, and I can't find one that ever refers to Moses and Joshua meeting "face to face." Not a single verse, whether relating to Mount Sinai or otherwise. There are several that refer to Moses and GOD's meetings being "face to face," (Exodus 33:11, Numbers 12:8, Deuteronomy 34:10, etc.), but I imagine that a sexual liaison between Moses and the Lord might be a little too much for even Rushkoff to propose.

So I'm at a total loss as to where Rushkoff pulled this particular interpretation from. And I'm guessing that he plans to use it in a future arc. Does anyone have any idea what he thinks he's talking about?

Kasnia

One of the things I love about comics is fictional geography. DC's fictional cities can be richer than any real city depicted on the four-color page, and fictional countries allow creators to develop whole cultures and socities for the stories they tell.

In the DCAU (the common universe of the Bruce Timm DC cartoons), the go-to fictional foreign country has been Kasnia. It was Kasnia that hired John Corben (aka Metallo) in the pilot episode of Superman: The Animated Series. Kasnia was a big player in the pilot of Batman Beyond. The country also showed up in Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman and in several Justice League episodes.

One such episode, "The Great Brain Robbery," aired this past weekend, wherein the Legion of Doom hijacked a trainload of Euros being transported into Kasnia. Once the Justice League gets word of the heist, Mr. Terrific dispatches several Leaguers to a specific set of coordinates, which he types onscreen:

45* 9' 8" N
19* 5_' 13" E

It's not completely legible (Mr. Terrific's head covers one digit), but it's close enough. And thanks to Mapquest, we can easily determine its precise location. It's just a few miles outside of Novi Sad, the second-largest city in Serbia-Montenegro. In other words, it's a spot in the Balkans, precisely where it's always been suggested that Kasnia lies.

So kudos to the JLU team for the attention paid to even a subtle detail like this.