Back to School
I went to take an aptitude test for college this morning. I'm going back to college in January. The test was to give me an idea what level classes I should take. I was told the test takes an hour and a half to two hours. I was done in under an hour. The English sections were an extremely and I recieved nearly perfect scores. I wasn't concerned about my English. The math section, however, reminded me just how much I hate math. They were all equations and algerbra problems that I had been taught how to do once upon a time but have had absolutely no use for since. The last math class I took was in 1994. Eight years later, I'm looking at these problems again and only remembering how to so some of them. Math is really like a foreign language. If you don't use it, you don't retain it....but at least foreign languages are fun. (No offense to people who do find Math fun....) Needless to say, I did not score well on Math.

The Best Comic Book Ever?
After the test, I walked around the campus a little and looked at the library. I then drove over to Underworld Comics, a comic shop in Ann Arbor to pick up my comics. I haven't been there in a few months so I had a few issues of each title that I have them pull: The Spectre, Green Arrow and New X-Men. (What!? No Superman comics!? You read right. I may be a big Superman fan, but I rarely pick up the comics these days. They haven't been very good lately, so I only pick up the occassional issue that looks good.)

First thing after getting home, I caught up on The Spectre. The newest Spectre comic book series has been out for two years now and it just keeps getting better and better. The writer, DeMatteis has long been one of my favorite writers but this goes far beyond anything else he has ever written. The comic tells the story of Hal Jordan. Once, he was Green Lantern, He was a superhero and a member of the Justice League of America. After sacrificing himself to re-ignite the sun after it went out in the DC miniseries, Final Night, he was hanging around in purgatory. You see, even with that sacrifice, Hal still had some stains on his soul. Then, in another DC miniseries the old Spectre, Jim Corrigan, died. Jim Corrigan's Spectre was the manifestation of God's Wrath... a ghost that punishes murderers and other evil-doers. A replacement was needed and it had to be another dead guy. So, Hal Jordan was recruited.

That's the back story. That's where DeMatteis came in with the character. What he has done since has been amazing. At first, the series was just OK enough to get me to buy the next issue but amazingly the series has gotten better issue after issue. Today I read issues 23 and 24 and during the last 24 issues, Hal has transformed The Spectre's mission from being a spirit of Wrath to being a Spirit of Redemption and DeMatteis has transformed a decent comic into one of the best comic book series I have ever read (and I've been reading comic books for 20 years).

Why do I like this series so much? It manages to mix elements of traditional superhero comic books with the more "brainy" stories of DC's adult line, "Vertigo." Like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, The Spectre explores themes of theology, spirituality and symbolism while still working in some classic superhero themes and characters. A few issues back, there was a terrific issue dealing with reincarnation as Hal helped a friend and fellow spirit Abin Sur deal with a tough choice. He was offered teh chance to reincarnate as the daughter of one of his best friends but he feared the loss of his current self and losing the memory of all that he had been through. On the other hand this was a chance to live again. It's stuff like that which has made this series so interesting.