My Tiny World Is Invaded by Hypercubes

All right, none of this makes sense.

For those who don't know, 52 is a weekly comics series currently being published by DC. It tells, in real time (sort of), the story of the year that elapsed (in the characters' lives) between a previous DC series, the ever-hilariously named Infinite Crisis, and the set of storylines that has been released since the end of IC under the banner "One Year Later." This is a Big Event Comic, partially because DC has dubbed it so (repeatedly and with great vehemence), partially because it is written by a consortium of four of superhero comics' top writers (although I only actually enjoy the writing of around 1.8 of them), and partially because weekly comics are fairly rare, especially in a world where most high-profile comics consistently fail to ship on schedule.

So I read this week's issue, and it involves giant white cubes annihilating the life on some alien planet. I'm thinking, hey, this is like that Flatland thing: a four-dimensional creature interacting with our three-dimensional world would look bizarre to us, but the example often given to aid intuition is that, just as a two-dimensional cross-section of a cube is a square, a three-dimensional cross-section of a four-dimensional hypercube would be a cube. Since one of the writers, Grant Morrison, has messed with this kind of sci-fi notion many times in other works of his, I figure this is a plausible theory, and I had planned to blog about it just so, if I turn out to be right later, I can have evidence. To show. The police.

Anyway: there's sort of a point to this. After reading 52, I read the latest of the weekly interviews that the book's editor does with the comics news site Newsarama, which I reload probably a trillion times a day. He mentions something about the clues that have been given so far as to the identity of a mystery character called Supernova. He also mentions how he's not too crazy about people trying to spoil all the suprises in the series on their daily 52 blogs. This is a reference, I assume, to the blog 52 Pickup, which I'd looked at a little bit before. So I head over there, and sure enough, this bastard has scooped me (not that my point was so un-obvious, but still).

I have mixed feelings about the Big Scary White Cubes, but they do have a certain chilling blankness--speaking of Prisoner allusions, as I was a few weeks ago, they're somewhat Rover-ish.…And the idea of them being from "beyond the [52?] gates of spacetime itself" makes them come off as greater-than-three-dimensional incursions into three-dimensional space. (Morrison has played with this idea a lot before…)

(Prisoner refers, of course, to the British TV show of the same name, which I've spent a fair amount of time watching via Netflix.) This same blogger does in fact seem to spoil the Supernova mystery through a combination of smarts & obscure comics knowledge; in the process of explaining his theory, he links to this old Justice League cover:

Ahem: "I've got you caught in my key-hole traps, Justice Leaguers…" !! I actually think I've seen this cover before, but still.

Elsewhere in the same 52 Pickup entry, the blogger, apparently correcting an error in this week's Justice Society (not League) of America #1, notes that "Harvard University does not have sororities (or fraternities), and virtually all undergrads live on campus." Hm. I read the previous entry, which is entitled "The Panopticon in the Empty Quarter" and which discusses Bentham/Foucault at length. Hm.

A few minutes of poking later, and I learn that the blogger, Douglas Wolk, graduated (magna cum laude) from Harvard. A Hollis search brings up a book that he wrote as an Adult (Live at the Apollo), but also A Translation of Horace's Ode II.13, which in 1991 won the John Osborne Sargent Prize for a Latin Translation, and My Collection of Alan Moore's Work, a bibliography for which he won the Visiting Committee Prize for Undergraduate Personal Libraries, also in 1991. (His write-up is, incidentally, the only work in Harvard's possession that falls under the "Moore, Alan -- Bibliography" subject heading.) He was also the WHRB music director at some point.

He's a fairly prolific freelance writer. He had a music column in the Seattle Weekly until March 15; the title of the column was

Smallmouth.

"This is the final installment of the third incarnation of this column. (Smallmouth originally ran in Rockpool in 1992 and 1993, and then from 1997 to 2002 in the Boston Phoenix. In answer to the question nobody ever asked, it's named after a very good album by Scrawl.) Thanks to all my readers, especially the angry Norwegians." Scandimania?

::brain explodes::