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weeks later, and it's "Apollo on steroids?" The bold new look for American crewed spacecraft is a four-men-to-the-moon, six-men-to-the-ISS Apollo capsule? Sure, the thing'll have more than 64K in its computers, and maybe as a sop to taxpayers we may even get our boys in diagonally zip pered jackets, but WTF? They held shit up for forty years, just so they could do the same exact thing again, albeit on a larger scale?

Where's the innovation, the thrill of the unknown, the walking-into-a-vol cano-naked-on-the-chance-you'd-learn-something-new?

From comics to politics to economics to social awareness, I am bone tired of people doing the same old thing. Sure, not every new idea is a good one until it works, and even failures can be noble.

But I sure am not liking the stagnant smell of inertia that is the hallmark of the early 21st century. And like I said, I blame Nixon.

I mean, how else to account for what passes for comics criticism, nowa days? When was the last time you read something online or in print that wasn't a bunch of negativity, or, at best, dissembling? Where is everyone's passion? Where is the enthusiasm? I mean, if you don't like what you're reading, here's a thought: stop. Parenthetically, it's not lost on me that the same argument could be applied to me, here. If I think comics criticism is a wasteland of naysayers and chuckleheads, I should just stop reading the crap, yeah? Well, honest ly, I wish I could, but as a publisher I'm duty-bound to keep on top of the yahoos who may accidentally be getting out a word or two amongst all the noise. You know the writer Joe Klein? Followed Clinton around for years, wrote Primary Colors? He wrote another one explaining "the misunderstood pres idency of Bill Clinton" called The Natural, and addresses this climate of negativity in the newsroom: "There was considerable peer pressure to stay cynical: reporters who wrote favorably about politicians were considered to be 'in the tank.' A negative story about a politician was the safest story. 'Over the past two decades, political reporters have become more concerned with how other political reporters judge their work,' said Bill Kovach, a curator of the Neiman Fellowship at Harvard. 'Not wanting to look soft leads to a negative spin: no matter what position is taken by a politician, the journalistic tendency is to examine it in a negative light-- to emphasize political calculations rather than substance.'"

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