As Congress debates whether to authorize a multibillion-dollar bailout of the U.S. automotive industry, several media outlets, notably New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, nationally syndicated radio host Lars Larson, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews, have used data that combines the average cost of current wages and benefits and future benefits to falsely assert or suggest that autoworkers make $70 or more per hour. But, as analysts and some media outlets have noted, the figure includes not only future retirement benefits for current workers, but also benefits paid to current retirees. Further, the "Big Three" U.S. automobile makers negotiated with the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 2007 to significantly reduce the salary and benefits packages for certain new employees, a fact that Larson and Matthews did not note.

Despite the misleading nature of the $70 per hour claim, it continues to be repeated. In a November 17 New York Times column, Sorkin described General Motors employees' benefits as "off the charts": "At G.M., as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs." Contrary to Sorkin's suggestion, the "health care and pension costs" include health care and pension benefits for current retirees, and not what an "average worker was paid," according to GM. The Associated Press reported:

GM, which negotiated the four-year deal that serves as a template for UAW deals with Chrysler and Ford, says its total hourly labor costs dropped 6 percent this year from pre-contract levels, from $73.26 in 2006 to around $69 per hour. The new cost includes laborers' wages of $29.78 per hour, plus benefits, pensions and the cost of providing health care to more than 432,000 GM retirees, GM spokesman Tony Sapienza said.

On the November 20 edition of Hardball, Heritage Foundation senior research fellow James Gattuso stated, "I think that there's no reason that a UAW worker should get total compensation of $70 an hour when the average American only makes about $25 an hour in total compensation." Matthews responded, in part: "They negotiate for their salaries, and they're getting 70 bucks. So that's how the free market works." While speaking about the "unskilled, high-school graduate workers" in U.S. auto plants on his November 19 radio show, Larson said, "When you're paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you're going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately." Contrary to Gattuso's, Matthew's, and Larson's assertions, a UAW worker is not "get[ting] total compensation of $70 an hour."

In a November 18 post on his American Prospect blog criticizing Sorkin's reporting, economist Dean Baker wrote that the $70 figure Sorkin used is distorted by conflating "legacy" costs -- medical benefits and pensions paid to retirees -- with current labor costs:

The New York Times told readers that GM's autoworkers are paid $70 an hour (including health care and pension). This is not true. The base pay is about $28 an hour. If health care cost per worker average $12,000 per year, that adds in another $6 an hour. If the pension payment takes up 25 percent of base pay (an extremely high pension), that gets you another $7 an hour, bringing the total to $41 an hour. That's decent pay, but still a long way from $70 an hour.

How does the NYT get from $41 to $70? Well the trick is to add in GM's legacy costs, the pension and health care costs for retired workers. These legacy costs are a serious expense for GM, but this is not money being paid to current workers. The person on the line in 2008 is not benefiting from these legacy costs.

The UAW also notes that the auto companies frequently inflate their labor costs by combining all of the expenses attached to maintaining their workforce:

In addition to regular hourly pay, the labor cost figures cited by the companies include other expenses associated with having a person on payroll. This includes overtime, shift premiums and the costs of negotiated benefits such as holidays, vacations, health care, pensions and education and training. It also includes statutory costs, which employers are required to pay by law, such as federal contributions for Social Security and Medicare, and state payments to workers' compensation and unemployment insurance funds. The highest figures sometimes cited also include the benefit costs of retirees who are no longer on the payroll.

From Sorkin's November 17 New York Times column:

G.M. currently employs about 8,000 people who actually don't come to work. Those who do go to work are paid about $10 to $20 an hour more than people who do the same job building cars in the United States for foreign makers like Toyota. At G.M., as of 2007, the average worker was paid about $70 an hour, including health care and pension costs.

Those costs are already coming down slightly because of a renegotiated deal with U.A.W. last year, but not nearly enough.

From the November 19 broadcast of Westwood One's The Lars Larson Show:

LARSON: When Detroit is making cars at $73 an hour to its line workers, its unskilled, high-school graduate workers, and I'm a high school graduate as well. When you're paying $73.73 an hour to those people with salary and benefits and your competition is paying $48 to its workers, you're going to get your butt kicked in the marketplace unfortunately.

From the November 20 edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: Don't we need factory workers to be a healthy society?

GATTUSO: Well, first off, in the auto industry, were -- it's not a matter of losing factory workers to keyboards. It's -- to a large extent, losing factory -- UAW jobs for non-UAW jobs. Jobs in Michigan for jobs in Tennessee --

MATTHEWS: Do you think that's a good change? That's a good --

GATTUSO: -- or jobs in Michigan for jobs in Indiana.

MATTHEWS: You like having non-union labor? Is that a healthy thing?

GATTUSO: I think that there's no reason that a UAW worker should get total compensation of $70 an hour when the average American only makes about $25 an hour in total compensation.

MATTHEWS: Well, you negotiate for your salary, and they negotiate for --

GATTUSO: And there's no reason that the average American should have to pay for that UAW worker.

MATTHEWS: Sir, you negotiate for your salary at the Heritage Foundation or wherever. They negotiate for their salaries, and they're getting 70 bucks. So that's how the free market works.

GATTUSO: And if Heritage didn't have the money to pay me -- which, you know, I hope they do -- but if they didn't have the money to pay me, I wouldn't go to the government asking for more money. I would have to take a lower salary.

MATTHEWS: Touché.

Of all the young artists we've met in the past few years, few have impressed us as much as Gaia. At only 20 years of age, the depth and level of commitment that Gaia brings to his work is remarkable. We're pleased to share with you his A's to our Q's:

Age: 20
Hometown: New York City
Where do you now live?: Baltimore, Maryland
Where would you most like to live?: I'll always love New York but Baltimore has such a kind and open atmosphere that I haven't found anywhere else. But New York most definitely has the best spots.
What is your favorite thing to do on your day off from work?: Ride bike and peruse the local farmer's markets.
What is your favorite color?: Red
Who (or what) do you love?: I love the excitement of a new project and of being apart of a community of artists who are united and bound by their passion for their work. I love the independence that my bike affords me. I love to constantly reconsider my beliefs.

Wooster: Who and/or what are some of your influences?

My peers and the people that I live with offer the most valuable critique that I could ever hope for. I am forever indebted to the dialogue we have established and the possibilities that they introduce to my work. My primary influences currently exist amongst the formative teachers, students and topics experienced in art school.

Wooster: What other artists do you most admire?

Of course, Swoon will always be an artist whom I deeply admire. The scope of her installations, street work, and social projects seems boundless. Kiki Smith's exploration of the body, of humanity's relationship with nature, the diverse media she employs is also a strong inspiration within my life. These two artists in particular were the impetus for my getting up in the streets.

Wooster: How would you describe your art to someone who could not see it?

My emotional relationship with the important people within my life is what inspires the content of my work. My art is deeply personal and cathartic. I try to maintain an honest articulation of both my frustrations and felicity in each piece. Whether it is the celebration of a burgeoning young boy who I once babysat or the valediction of a person who lives in my past, I want to express a feeling that can be fundamentally understood by the viewer. I am very interested in communicating these passions on the street and in an attempt to relate to others through the imagery.

I put my work up in order to reactivate a space and reconsider our modern notion of property and domain. By applying my work to a surface or installing an environment in an urban setting, I am establishing a new significance and understanding of a particular space.

Wooster: What other talent would most like to have?

I want to know how to weld, work with radio, wire electronics. I am actually teaching myself how to mold and cast a pig head as I am writing this interview for my collaboration with the brilliant fibers and installation artist Rachel Lowing.

Wooster: What do you fear the most?

When I began my first block nearly two years ago, it seemed an impossibly difficult endeavor to establish myself in the New York street art scene. It just didn't seem feasible and I felt as if I was being left behind. There was a sense of urgency that I would simply remain in obscurity if I didn't get up hard and consistently. But flickr gave me a palpable sense of who was paying attention to my pieces on the street and that there was a momentum that was building.

That original sentiment relates persists in what I fear most now, and that is to be forgotten. I so want to be apart of this unbelievable movement in contemporary art that exists on the street. I am afraid of fulfilling the belief that I am just "a flash in the pan" or the possibility that I be reduced to a trendy hype. I strive ever day to maintain a trajectory in my work that has longevity so that I do not turn out to be another burn out or maybe more applicably a one hit wonder.

My calling is with the interaction of people and right now I find that on the streets. I am forever beholden and thankful to the artists who have come before me and truly blazed a clear and focused trail for me to follow.

Wooster: What is your greatest ambition?

I feel like my work is fundamentally traditional in medium and subject matter. My pieces' true function is when they are situated on the street otherwise they are relatively static. While there is an extensive and rich history of street art and graffiti, for it is arguably the largest and most accessible artistic movement in our history, I still believe that the streets are a pertinent genre and are extremely contemporary.

My greatest ambition would be to find a balance between my very formal practices of approaching fine art with pieces that function and are relevant in the real world. Each ambition fulfilled serves a platform for subsequent growth and opportunity.

You can see more of Gaia's artwork on his Flickr page here.

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/72887?ns=guardianpageName=Business%3A+30%2C000+jobs+at+risk+as+Woolworths+teeters+on+the+brinkch=Businessc3=The+Guardianc4=Woolworths+%28Business%29%2CRetail+industry+%28Business%29%2CBusiness%2CRedundancy%2CPolitics%2CUK+newsc5=Personal+Finance%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CBusiness+Marketsc6=Julia+Finchc7=2008_11_22c8=1122275c9=articlec10=GUc11=Businessc12=Woolworthsc13=c14=h2=GU%2FBusiness%2FWoolworths" width="1" height="1" //divpMore than 30,000 retail jobs were at risk last night as Woolworths fought to avoid collapse and the fashion discount chain MK One crashed into administration for the second time in a year./ppWoolworths' future was hanging in the balance after its bankers objected to a management rescue plan to sell the loss-making 800-store chain to Hilco, which specialises in restructuring distressed companies./ppThe 99-year old retailer, which is a mainstay of town and city centres across the country, is now in last-ditch talks with its lenders in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy. But a source close to the negotiations said the talks had reached "an impasse" and "are not looking good"./ppSome 25,000 staff work in Woolworths stores and another 5,000 for two other businesses in the Woolworths group: EUK and 2entertain. The group also has 10,000 pensioners and pension fund members./ppEUK distributes DVDs, CDs and books to major supermarkets including Asda, Sainsbury's and Morrisons and if the distributor is forced into administration alongside the Woolworths stores it could threaten the supermarkets' supplies in the vital Christmas shopping weeks./pp2entertain is a joint venture with the BBC which produces and distributes BBC programmes on DVD and has had big successes with shows such as Little Britain and Top Gear./ppMK One, which operates 125 stores aimed at young women and teenagers, has 1,400 staff jobs at risk./ppThe latest potential job losses come amid vast cutbacks in the retail industry, which is slashing staff costs by reducing workers' hours. Argos, for instance, has cut workers' hours by 20%. The specialist magazine Retail Week yesterday reported that across the high street such cutbacks now equal 100,000 full time jobs vanishing in the last year. The retail sector employs 10% of the UK workforce./ppThe stock market fell sharply again yesterday as investors worried about the effects of a recession on the corporate sector. Leading UK shares suffered their third worst week on record with the FTSE 100 slipping to 3,780, its lowest level since April 2003./ppWoolworths has been battered by other retailers for years, but in recent weeks it has also been squeezed by the economic downturn and the impact of credit insurers - who protect suppliers from non-payment of invoices in the event of a retailer going bust - withdrawing cover to Woolworths' suppliers. That has left the chain having to pay suppliers on delivery - or have empty shelves./ppWoolworths bosses have tried to sell the chain for a year in order to protect the other two businesses, but without success. A possible offer from Iceland supermarket boss Malcolm Walker in the summer fell apart when Baugur, the Icelandic investor backing his approach, ran into its own, credit crunch-related, problems./ppEarlier this week Woolworths confirmed it might sell the stores, which are all leasehold, to Hilco. The US-owned group would have also taken on pound;265m of Woolworths' pound;380m of debts. Woolworths wanted the other pound;115m of debt to be transferred to EUK and 2entertain, which last year made profits of more than pound;40m before interest and tax./ppIn normal banking circumstances, such an arrangement would be commonplace, but a source familiar with the situation said: "The banks just won't let it happen. They seem to want to put the whole lot into administration to get all their money back immediately. The banks have the whip hand here."/ppWoolworths has a range of lenders, and many have been hit hard by the credit crunch. Its lead lenders are GMAC, of the US which is applying to the American bank bail-out fund for support, and Burdale, part of the deeply troubled Bank of Ireland, which yesterday said it had received a takeover approach./ppWoolworths' other lenders include Barclays, which is raising pound;7bn from Middle East investors, the American bank Wachovia, which has just been taken over, and GE, which has had two profits warnings this year./ppA spokesman for Burdale, one of the lead lenders, refused to comment on the discussions with Woolworths./ppThe crisis at Woolworths and MK One will increase fears that other ailing retail chains could collapse in the coming weeks. Casualties - and a fresh round of job losses - had been expected in the new year, when the Christmas winners and losers emerge. But lenders and suppliers had been thought unlikely to force stores into bankruptcy in the run-up to Christmas, when they should be raking in cash. Woolworths, for instance, normally makes 90% of its profits in the six weeks before Christmas. However, in the first six months of this year it crashed pound;100m in the red./ppWoolworths shares closed last night at just 1.43p, down 32%, valuing the entire business at just pound;25m - equal to about three days' sales./ph2strongJob cuts this week/strong/h2pstrongMonday/strongbr /Citigroup, London strong2,400/strongbr /Avis, Hayes, Middlesex strong100/strongbr /Hoover, Merthyr Tydfil strong337/strong/ppstrongTuesday/strongbr /Wolseley, nationwide strong2,000 /strongbr /National Express, East Anglia strong200/strongbr /PSL Energy Services, Aberdeen strong50/strong/ppstrongWednesday/strongbr /SIG, nationwide strong900/strongbr /Fidelity International, London strong300/strongbr /Deutsche Bank, London strong450/strong/ppstrongThursday/strongbr /Rolls-Royce, Derby strong140/strongbr /AstraZeneca, Macclesfield strong250/strongbr /BAE Systems, nationwide strong200/strongbr /Daily Mail and General Trust strong400/strongbr /Tughans, Northern Ireland strong20/strong/ppTotal strong7,747/strong/pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/woolworths"Woolworths/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/retail"Retail industry/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/redundancy"Redundancy/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Businesscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660246112201400459684"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Businesscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227317660246112201400459684" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"a target="_blank" href="http://www.nemertes.com/"Nemertes Research/a continued to throw cold water on the future of the Internet this week, releasing a study projecting that demand for bandwidth on the Web would exceed its capacity by 2012./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The study, which is a follow-up to a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/111907johnson.html"similar research/a Nemertes conducted last year, projects that the current global economic recession will only delay rather than eliminate the increased demand for bandwidth the firm predicted last year. Then, Nemertes projected that traffic growth would eclipse supply by 2010, but the firm now says it has adjusted its projections to reflect deteriorating global economic conditions./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Does the#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/11/11/46FE-broadband-limits_1.html"bandwidth shortage mean out Internet future is in danger/a? ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Nemertes emphasized it is not projecting that the Internet will crash or shut down altogether. Rather, the typical user probably will experience Internet quot;brownouts,quot; where such high-bandwidth applications as high-definition video-streaming and peer-to-peer file-sharing will stop performing up to users#39; expectations, the firm says.#160;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"During a presentation at an Internet Innovation Alliance symposium this week, Nemertes analyst Mike Jude a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/111908-alliance-national-broadband.html"said/a that one consequence of declining Web performance would be that users would look less to the Internet to deliver their desired applications. quot;More and more applications are coming online that will drive expectations for service quality even higher,quot; he said. quot;I#39;m not saying that the Internet is going to crash in 2011, but that people#39;s expectations are going to be throttled. People will stop going to the Internet for those services.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"One big reason for the projected growth in traffic is the continuing emergence of virtual workers who work from home or in remote branch offices located far away from companies#39; central offices, Nemertes says. In particular, these remote workers quot;expect seamless communications, regardless of where they conduct businessquot; and they quot;often require more advanced communication and collaboration tools than those who work at headquarters,quot; including videoconferencing and Web conferencing, the report says./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Another factor is simply the large growth in high-bandwidth applications for users to employ. More ISPs in the coming years will follow the lead of such companies as a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/082908-critics-question-comcast-broadband.html"Comcast/a and a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/110408-att-trialing-dsl-bandwidth.html"ATamp;T/a trying out bandwidth caps that will charge extra money each month for heavy bandwidth consumers, Nemertes says. Although#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/08/29/Comcast_sets_monthly_bandwidth_limit_for_customers_1.html"Comcast now caps individual bandwidth consumption at a relatively high 250GB per month/a, average future users will easily reach or surpass that bandwidth limit as they find higher-bandwidth applications to use, the firm says./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Though this traffic load is [currently] more than typical, it certainly isn#39;t exceptional,quot; Nemertes reports. quot;This type of usage will become typical over the next three to five years. The fact that Comcast#39;s network is, by its own admission, not able to cope with such usage patterns is a clear indication that the crunch we predicted last year is beginning to occur.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Looking forward, Nemertes says that if this capacity issue is not addressed, the Internet will fracture into a tiered system where companies with the most money will pay for specialized network infrastructure that will ensure their content is delivered at higher speeds than non-favored content./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"This fractured system -- where certain entities can pay extra money to give their content favored treatment -- is what advocates of a target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/092208-politicians-push-for-net-neutrality.html"network neutrality/a have been working to avoid by preventing ISPs from discriminating against certain types of content. The Nemertes report gloomily concludes that although the Internet will not shut down entirely, it will experience a dramatic slowdown in innovation because quot;new content and application providers will be handicapped by the relatively poorer performance of their offerings vis-#224;-vis those created by the established players.quot;/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=6f133e36fa7698c33d630eb489aa4407p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=6f133e36fa7698c33d630eb489aa4407p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=6f133e36fa7698c33d630eb489aa4407 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

The vultures are circling. What was once a small trickle of layoffs at major newspapers has become a waterfall of lost jobs within the media business. One can almost picture the Poynter Institute's widely read journalism industry blog Romenesko sauntering up to Time Inc. and Conde Nast and screaming, "Bring out your dead!"

But one advertising and blogging company is seeing opportunity in the storm of bad news, devising a method to "bail out" some of these journalists and use their skills for profit. Anil Dash, vice president of Six Apart, owner of blogging platforms Moveable Type and TypePad, has watched this ticker-tape of layoff announcements with growing concern. A few weeks ago, Dash and others within Six Apart began talking about what they could do to help fellow journalists fallen on hard times. On a lark, Dash posted a somewhat tongue-in-cheek item called, "The TypePad Journalist Bailout Program" on the TypePad site.

"Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist!" he wrote. "We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you."

The idea, essentially, was to provide a net to soften the fall as journalists leapt from burning buildings. A recently unemployed journalist could apply for the program. If accepted, he would gain access to several features, most notably a TypePad Pro account, Six Apart Media's advertising program, and around-the-clock support and promotion from the company. Theoretically, he then could continue with his beat reporting, publishing his articles on his own blog rather than with a traditional news source.

"The idea had really been to just send it to a couple friends and they'll think it's clever and useful," Dash told me. "And now we have dozens of reporters that have written in asking about how to participate; the page has gotten thousands of views. Candidly, if we thought it was going to be this widely covered we probably would have been a lot less snarky. But that's the nature of the web."

The theory behind the program mirrors what Web 2.0 futurists have been saying for years -- chiefly that major news outlets are too weighed down by middlemen and that journalists should instead branch out and work under the umbrellas of ad networks. In this scenario, more money goes directly to the content maker rather than funding the over-staffed, bloated news outlet. Individual journalists could therefore work their beats while relying on an online advertising company to secure and place the ads. This way, the journalist is able to create and manage her own brand rather than being incorporated into a faceless company entity.

"It was a little bit like giving people tinker toys, saying 'Assemble this yourself'," Dash said. "And the people who had done it actually had done very well by it and had seen some success with it. And we thought that not everyone has the time to put all those pieces together, especially those who have their day job and are worried about it. They're not going to spend company time when they're chasing down stories to learn about this new [Web 2.0] world."

Dash has worked as a new media developer for The Village Voice, and today dozens of major news outlets, ranging from the Washington Post to Wired, use Six Apart products for their blogging platforms. As someone with a decade of blogging experience -- he was one of the earliest writers to experiment in the medium -- Dash has seen journalists start mini-media empires on their own as bloggers, founding online journals that would eventually account for a portion or even all of their annual income as they rose in popularity. Josh Marshall, for instance, was an editor at The American Prospect before launching Talking Points Memo, a site that now employs nearly a dozen people.

Six Apart's advertising program already represents more than 1,000 bloggers, and Dash said that it's backed by a sales team that focuses on placing CPM display ads. An individual blogger's revenue is based on various factors, including the amount of traffic coming to her site as well as her particular niche -- some topics sell for higher rates than others. As with most ad programs, the blogger receives a large percentage of the money made from the ads sold on her site.

Skepticism

But the journalist bailout program was immediately met with skepticism from some quarters, especially working journalists. Shortly after I tweeted a link to Dash's proposal, I received a message from Priya Ganapati -- a journalist for Wired who covers hardware and emerging tech -- who simply dismissed the idea as a publicity stunt to promote Six Apart's products and advertising program. In a follow-up phone conversation, she accused Six Apart of putting the cart before the horse and said that, while she enjoys its products (Wired, after all, uses TypePad), the company should focus more on convincing journalists why its platform is superior before speaking of advertising and revenues.

"You have to a build a blog, you have to build a following, you have to have a product out there before you even begin to think about revenue and a sales team," Ganapati said. "And what TypePad isn't doing is focusing on the features of the product; instead it's talking up the ad sales of it. If you're going to start a new blog, or you're an existing blogger and want to get into it full time, you have to concentrate on picking the best blogging platform that is offered and build a strong readership. And then you start thinking about ad sales. But if you start thinking about ad sales first, you probably will end up making an unsuitable choice for your means."

Many of these thoughts were echoed by Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, one of the earliest advertising companies to focus exclusively on blogs (and a competitor of Six Apart's ad network). Though Blogads has a sales team that works to secure clients and place ads, its platform allows low budget advertisers to essentially create, pay for and place ads with little or no human involvement. Copeland told me that journalists -- even good ones -- often don't adapt well to blogging. The medium requires more than good writing and reporting skills. You also have to know how to network and promote your content, something about which many journalists are clueless.

"Journalism is kind of like being a monologist, and journalists are very used to pontificating," he said. "And I know a lot of people think that's just what bloggers do, but bloggers are more like someone in an improv theater group. It's just a different skill set."

What makes a blog successful, Copeland argued, is its personality -- or rather the blogger's ability to connect that personality to his readership. Though he wouldn't go so far as to say that these laid-off journalists weren't cut out to be bloggers, he said at the very least they would need to understand that in the blogosphere you often have to become your own marketer.

"There's just an awful lot of competition, which these people have not experienced recently," Copeland said. "At a newspaper the competition is really at the corporate level, and once you've won your slot as the metro reporter for City Hall, you might have competition with one other reporter in the town, you might have zero competitors -- either way it's not very competitive. And for every 100 reporters that look for jobs online, only one of them is going to be paying the rent a year from now. And whether that's with Six Apart or Blogads or Federated [Media], that's really beside the point. The point is that only one of them will have an appreciable audience that can be monetized.

I mentioned these concerns to Dash, and he immediately asserted that "we try to be very careful to not make any promises." He argued that the entire point of the journalist bailout program is that, although it's targeted at those who may be blogging novices, it's not necessarily a sink-or-swim endeavor. For instance, journalists involved in the bailout would automatically have their content displayed through blogs.com, which he said is a heavily-trafficked aggregator owned by Six Apart.

"[Blogs.com is] a great starting point and we're actually going to get some feedback from the journalists in the program to see what they're looking to do, because I think the answer's going to be different depending on the journalist," Dash said. "We don't want to dictate what is to happen, but we have a lot of experience in promoting sites that way and I think it'll be really interesting to look at [Blogs.com] as an aggregator of all these individual journalists. And another thing is because we've been doing this for so long, we know journalists in a lot of news verticals, we know a lot of bloggers in this area."

A Grim Future For Online Ads?

Of course, the underlying business model Six Apart is touting, online advertising, could well get hit hard during the recession. In fact, Six Apart itself announced recently it would lay off close to 10% of its workforce. In a recent widely-circulated post, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton argued that the decline in online ads would be even more severe than analysts expected. And sure enough, within days of that prediction, Denton announced that he would be cutting his own staff and folding some blogs.

Given these grim warnings, would it be realistic to think that journalists-turned-bloggers will be able to sustain themselves?

"For Nick in particular, I've been friends with him for years, there's nothing I wouldn't say to his face, but I think he's always made a very good business of being the most doom-and-gloom person in the room," Dash said. "And also he ends up being right a lot of time; if you're consistently negative then half the time you end up being right. But if what he's saying is true, I think it's better for writers if they get a bigger cut for what they're doing ... And secondly, we're not trying to be a publisher, and though I think Nick is a successful publisher, there's still a middle man with Gawker just like Conde Nast or any other publisher. I think that model is inherently a little harder to sustain. The web is very efficient at routing around middlemen."

What do you think? Is the bailout program a gimmick or a real boon for laid-off journalists? Have you signed up? Share your thoughts or experience in the comments below.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. He currently works as an online analyst for New Media Strategies. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

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divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/64999?ns=guardianpageName=World+news%3A+US+embassy+guard+suspended+for+criticising+Barack+Obamach=World+newsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Barack+Obama+%28News%29%2CUS+news%2CUK+newsc5=Not+commercially+useful%2CUS+Electionsc6=Owen+Bowcottc7=2008_11_21c8=1122074c9=articlec10=GUc11=World+newsc12=Barack+Obamac13=c14=h2=GU%2FWorld+news%2FBarack+Obama" width="1" height="1" //divpAn American security guard has been suspended from work at the US embassy in London after publishing a blog criticising the president-elect, Barack Obama./ppThe decision to remove him was taken following "mutual" agreement between his UK employer and US diplomats, an embassy spokesman told guardian.co.uk./ppThe controversial comments appeared on a website run by the security guard, who reportedly heads security teams patrolling the heavily fortified building in Mayfair, central London./ppOne of the comments, which has now been removed, reads: "... ideals that are the very cornerstone of American liberty and democracy could very well become an ephemeral memory of American history under the socialist leadership of the incumbent Barrack Obama./pp"... The real question of concern, now that Obama is the president-elect, is what promises have Obama's camp given in return to these socialist, communist, fascist and terrorist supporting nations and special interest groups? Such accolades and endorsements do not come easy in this nuclear age."/ppThe US embassy spokesman said: " [The security guard] is no longer working at any US government facilities pending an investigation."/ppAsked whether diplomats had requested his transfer, the spokesman said: "It was a mutual decision between the embassy and the company [Pedus Services, that employs him]."/ppPedus Service, based in Newport, south Wales, is contracted to protect the embassy. Martin West, the general manager, said the firm was carrying out an investigation and that Hubbard had been suspended from work. /pp"We work very closely with our partners at the US embassy and we will continue to work through this while the investigation is carried out," he added./ppThe guard's website offers personal protection training using guns and knives, and claims to have taught members of the US Marines and the Metropolitan police./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/barackobama"Barack Obama/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/usa"United States/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Newscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227291257924112118260344580"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Newscountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227291257924112118260344580" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a

br /What it doesbr /br /A tool with a self-explanatory name, TweetStalk will enable you to follow anybody on Twitter without the other person knowing about it. Or to put it in even clearer words, stalking instead of following. br brAll it takes to do so is installing the Firefox add-on that is available from the site and then go to any Twitter account that you desire to stalk. Once there, all you have to is click on the “Stalk” button that is featured and under cover of darkness you go. br brThe uses of such an application are left to each user, and every person will employ it as he or she sees fit. On first looks, anybody would think it has only negative connotations but I feel a tool like this can also be used with good purposes, such as monitoring the online activity of a child who is keen on micro-blogging without stepping in the middle. In the meantime, you can put into practice yourself by following the link that is provided below. brbr /br /In their own wordsbr /br /“Sometimes you want to follow someone on Twitter, but you don't want them to know you're following them. We present to you TweetStalk, the simple way to stalk Twitter users without having to follow them.”br /br /Why it might be a killerbr /br /Twitter has such a huge fan base that any new product has a ready audience waiting for it.br /br /Some questionsbr /br /Which features should be added to this application in order to make it more flexible?br /br /Link: a href='http://www.tweetstalk.com'http://www.tweetstalk.com/abr /Our Review: a href='http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/tweetstalk-com-stalk-twitter-users'http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/tweetstalk-com-stalk-twitter-users/abr /br / nbsp;div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=qzKmpuwG"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=vS7vXb3v"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=nKzMKCut"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=nKzMKCut" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=X4Q8pwrJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=X4Q8pwrJ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=k6UhDWfc"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?d=43" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?a=l1vd5qyW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/killerstartups/BkQV?i=l1vd5qyW" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/killerstartups/BkQV/~4/mGChCnrnjFQ" height="1" width="1"/

As I’ve said in the past, I get a fair amount of mail. A lot of it is from former students who want to ask about one comics-related point or another.

Just for fun, and to give you an idea how our odd little pop-culture backwater looks from the outside…here is a series of letters between me and Rachel.

Rachel is a cartooning graduate, and now she is an occasional TA-slash-intern for me at the art studio. This ever-lengthening correspondence has been going on for the last week or so and finally I said to her, “You know, I might as well do this as a column,” and she graciously agreed. So here it is.

It started with Rachel sending a note that she was no longer obsessed with Spider-Man. That was over. It was time to put away childish things.

Now, she was all about The X-Men.

As it happened, I needed a model for my portrait class down at the studio that week. So I sent Rachel a note back suggesting that if she’d be willing to come by the studio and sit for my students for an hour or so, I would hook her up with some X-Men books, and I’d throw in the Birds of Prey DVDs I’d been promising for a while, as well. (Over the years, I’ve discovered that when I employ students for odd jobs, using the barter system is more fun for both of us, and a better deal for the kids than cash money.)

Rachel did a fine job modeling for the drawing class and certainly had earned some cool swag. I gave her some X-Men trades I’d had around the house that were superfluous for me, that I thought she would enjoy.

(And also that I considered to be “the good stuff.” I reasoned that if Rachel was going to collect X-comics, I owed her a proper start. She has the rest of her life to read crap like Inferno or X-Cutioner’s Song.)

A little while later she sent this note, which I answered point-by-point.

*

Hi Greg,

I am totally in love with the X-Men comics you gave me!! I especially like the Neal Adams book.

I had a few questions though.

In the Neal Adams book, there is no Storm, Wolverine, or Rogue in the group. Why is that?

The Neal Adams book is taken from the stories that ran in the FIRST version of the X-Men. Those were published in the 1960’s.

Then, later, the title was revived with a new, more international roster.

It’s all explained here.

So Alex is Scott’s brother?

Yes.

Why isn’t Beast blue?

It was before he mutated further. The character’s history is explained here.

I would appreciate if you could help me understand.

Thanks,
Rachel

You should have one more book coming, The Dark Phoenix Saga, that falls between the two I gave you at the studio, in the overall X-chronology. Julie and I found it at a Goodwill and decided you needed it, so it’s in the mail.

Really, though, if you want to get caught up, you should get the Essential X-Men books… they are great big phone-book-sized reprint volumes that give you twenty to twenty-five comics’ worth of stories in each book.

They’re in black-and-white, which puts off some people, but if you just want to read the stories that’s your best bet. They’re cheap.

–G.

*

A couple of days later Rachel called the house to say thank you, squealing with delight about The Dark Phoenix Saga and how much she loved it. Shortly thereafter we got a note that her e-mail address had changed from spideyzgirl@…. to j.thedarkphoenix@…. I couldn’t resist and sent her a reply saying I’d noted her new address, adding, “Book must have been good, huh?”

Which led to this e-mail, that I again answered point-by-point.

*

I’m gonna try and get those Essential books - they look really cool!

So, the girl with the green hair is Lorna, and her powers are magnetism, right? I wonder why Alex Summers wasn’t in the movies. Probably not enough time for him, I guess.

Alex Summers really hasn’t been in the COMICS that much when you look at the last forty-plus years of X-Men.

But Wolverine: Origins comes out in 2009!! I’m so excited!

I’m hoping you mean the movie, because the comic wasn’t worth getting that excited over.

For that matter, the Wolverine of the comics really was disliked by many people at the beginning. He started out as a Hulk villain.

And later when he was drafted for the new X-Men he was primarily the guy that nobody cared for, the agent of discord on the team. Marvel used to get letters saying “And kill off that obnoxious Wolverine.” The star character in the revival was Nightcrawler because Dave Cockrum really liked drawing him. And in fact there was a point when the Wolverine character was getting so much hate mail that they were thinking of dropping him from the book.

When John Byrne took over the art from Cockrum, one of the things he wanted to do as co-plotter of the book was ‘rehabilitate’ Wolverine… that is, make the fans like him more. Part of it was that Byrne was Canadian himself and didn’t want the only Canadian superhero at Marvel to go away, and part of it was that Byrne thought it would be a fun challenge, taking a hero so despised and seeing if he couldn’t get the fans to come around. So Byrne began, very subtly, to slant stories toward Wolverine. (In those days, Marvel’s artists had a lot more control over a story, because the art was done from a brief outline rather than a script. Then the writer would come in and write captions and dialogue based on the penciled art.)

If you look at the Dark Phoenix book you will see that in play.

Wolverine gets most of the cool action shots, Wolverine gets a big dramatic cliffhanger, it’s really Wolverine Comics co-starring the X-Men.

And it worked. Wolverine became a star.

Except I almost got the Dark Phoenix saga taken away by my Spanish teacher, because I was “reading too much in class.” I told her I couldn’t help it, and she let me keep it with a warning.

Boy, THAT takes me back. I actually HAD books taken away. My parents were very annoyed with me about the whole book thing. (”Why don’t you go play outside? Why do you have to spend every penny on books?”) Mine were Star Trek books and James Bond books and Batman comics, though. The Batman stories that really blew me away at that age were, oddly enough, by a young Neal Adams, who partnered with Denny O’Neil on a run people still talk about today. Ra’s Al Ghul, from Batman Begins, is an O’Neil/Adams villain.

I know I’ve already thanked you - but I seriously realllly appreciate the books. The movies got me hooked, but the books are also really incredible!

Plus, Professor Xavier and Scott don’t die in The Dark Phoenix Saga, which is nice, because whenever I watch those scenes in X-Men 3 I start bawling. And I like it better that Jean realizes she has to kill herself to stop Phoenix, rather than having Wolverine kill her which is really sad.

Something that caught me off guard, however, is that in The Dark Phoenix Saga, Wolverine is short. And sort of “spooky,” as Kitty says. And obviously has no relationship with Jean. So I wonder how that whole Jean/Scott/Logan movie triangle came to be.

Well, first of all, bear in mind that model’s wages in an art studio run anywhere from $15-20 an hour and that’s about the same dollar value of those books in a used bookstore. So it wasn’t really a ‘gift.’ You earned them, that’s your pay for an hour’s work at the studio. (The BIRDS OF PREY shows, well, I’d been promising to burn a set of those for you for years, that was just guilt.)

As for the rest… Wolverine IS short. He’s named for a small snarling rodent and that was the key to his visual.

Now, actor HUGH JACKMAN is tall, but as writer Len Wein (the guy that actually created Wolverine) likes to say, “I don’t mind, because Jackman plays him as being short and pissed off,” and it’s true. Jackman nails it so perfectly that none of us really mind that he’s way too tall.

The love triangle with Jean and Scott and Logan goes back to the earliest days of the revival– the Dave Cockrum years. Remember, Wolverine was the team malcontent, the guy that created discord and tension. The love triangle was just one more way for that to happen. In fact, a lot of the reason so many fans hated Wolverine in the early days was because of that triangle and the idea that Logan might somehow break up Scott and Jean. People forget sometimes that it’s FICTION and that writers put their characters under pressure for a reason. The more tension you have, the more suspense there is about how it will all work out, then the more interesting the book is and the more engaged you are by the drama.

Really the love story with Scott and Jean went through so many wild freaky twists and turns, and taken as a whole makes both of them look so badly-behaved, that it’s best not to think about it as a complete history. Fans tended to forgive them because we all so loved the two of them as a couple, and the Dark Phoenix story was such a powerful love story that it overshadowed everything. We just KNEW they were in love, and the fact that they sometimes acted crappy to one another (Scott, especially, behaved very badly over the years) …well, that didn’t really ‘count’ in our heads as we were reading, we always forgave everything if they would just get back together.

The movie people wisely went back to the earliest days of the book for their story material, before there were thirty more years of convoluted comic-book soap opera history layered on top of it. The best way to read the X-Men is to just kind of cherry-pick your favorite era and concentrate on that. Because there have been A LOT of bad X-Men comics out there.

Also, Rogue is not there. Which makes me sad. Because she is my 3rd favorite character. (1st: Jean, 2nd: Wolverine, 3rd: Rogue, 4th: Scott).

I guess you really have created a monster, as you titled your email, because now I’m really obsessed - more than I was with Spider-Man, believe it or not.

Well, the good news is, there are lots of books out there for you. Julie and I were at Half-Price Books in Southcenter last night and saw the first three Essential X-Men volumes for about four dollars each, along with a bunch of other X-stuff.

The Essentials are the easiest way to play catch-up but there are lots of other books too. There are prose X-Men novels as well. Here’s a PARTIAL list. Some of those are comics and some are prose. Click on the book cover to find out more about a particular book.

I’m partial to the ones by Christopher Golden, in particular: CODENAME WOLVERINE, and the MUTANT EMPIRE trilogy.

You can see more about those here.

As for Rogue, she came later, and her story is very different from the movie one. You have to understand the movies are very streamlined and condensed and tend to mash up stories together that took place years apart in the comics. The first movie was an original story that kind of tried to do everything, it had references to every era of the book and the team roster was a sort of “Greatest Hits” cast culled from the forty years of publishing. X2 was a kind of riff on GOD LOVES MAN KILLS but incorporated a lot of original stuff from the first movie and added Lady Deathstrike to replace Anne Reynolds. X-Men 3 grafted together Dark Phoenix and ASTONISHING X-MEN: GIFTED and threw in Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. And so on.

Truthfully, I lost interest in the X-Men comics in the 90’s– Marvel did so many spin-offs and tie-in series that it became impossible to keep up. Every so often something catches my eye still– I liked GENERATION X while it was around, and that even got a movie. (A bad made-for-TV one, but still kind of fun, you see it bootlegged at shows a lot.)

I enjoy the X-Men movies a great deal and do still sometimes pick up an X-comic. I quite liked Joss Whedon’s run on Astonishing X-Men, as well as Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men.

But mostly I’m a Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne guy, Essential X-Men volumes one, two and three. My X-Men are the ones in the three books I gave you, of which God Loves, Man Kills was the newest. But every generation has their particular favorite run and their particular favorite team lineup. I imagine that as you keep reading and watching movies and so on, you’ll arrive at a Dream Team of your own.

–G.

*

By now it was starting to get away from me. Answering Rachel’s questions was reminding me how much I myself had loved the Marvel mutants once upon a time, and her enthusiasm was contagious… I’d start out to write a quick answer and it would turn into a little mini-essay. It must have been entertaining for Rachel, too, because in a day or two this note arrived, which I have again answered. It was about halfway through replying to this that I thought, “Hell, this all might as well be a column,” and got Rachel’s permission to put it up here.

*

I have more questions!

1. In the first book you gave me, it looked like Lorna and Bobby were going out, but in the very beginning of the Dark Phoenix saga, it seemed like Lorna was with Alex. What happened there?

Years passed. Different writers come on a book and each new one has a different idea about how things should go. That’s really what happened.

But I imagine you want the in-story reason. In this particular case, as I recall Bobby had a thing for Lorna but she really only had eyes for Alex. I think there have been times when she starts to relent and maybe give Bobby a second look, but nothing serious ever came of that.

Iceman does a hell of a lot better in the movies with girls than he ever did in the comic. In the X-comics, what I remember is that Bobby Drake was a little bit of a sad sack, someone who was always getting his heart stepped on. He was the classic case of the guy who always ends up being ‘just friends’ with a girl. I think in recent years they’ve been a little kinder to him, but he still seems to have a lot of girls leaving him or being revealed as villains or something. Nothing like the movie where there’s two different girls fighting over him, that’s for sure.

2. In the 2nd movie, when Professor X is being mind-warped by Stryker’s son (isn’t his name Jason?) to kill all mutants..That seemed very similar to Jean being mind-warped by Jason Wyngarde (who was really Mastermind, the illusionist guy) in the Dark Phoenix saga. Am I just being paranoid or is that the same person?

Well, here you get into a whole thing about adaptation and what that all means. Does Jason Stryker have the same power as Jason Wyngarde/Mastermind? More or less, I suppose, though nobody ever tried to extract anything from Mastermind’s glands and drip it on people’s necks for purposes of mind control. (I don’t think so, anyway. You have to remember I haven’t been keeping up with every X-Men comic since 1975. In spite of what my students think, I don’t actually know everything about comics.)

Is it the same guy? Maybe Bryan Singer and the movie people named him “Jason” as a little nod to Jason Wyngarde, maybe even the character started out to be “Mastermind,” but as characters, they’re nothing alike.

In the comics, Mastermind was kind of a weaselly little coward who used his power to make himself suave and sophisticated, and his main concern always seemed to be insinuating himself next to some hot girl….the Scarlet Witch, Jean Grey, whoever.

For that matter, X2 took quite a few liberties with Stryker himself.

God Loves, Man Kills was originally published in the 80’s, when television preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were really starting to build a following, and a lot of their message was about us vs. them: whichever “them” they happened to be picking on at the moment, the televangelists were always demonizing their opponents and scaring people. Nowadays these TV ministers are looked at mostly as jokes, but in the 1980’s they were extremely powerful public figures. So it’s a pretty easy leap from that to creating a televangelist villain who is scaring people about mutants.

Now, in the 2000’s, it’s been the government that gets a lot of mileage out of scaring people and using that fear to justify doing bad things in the name of ‘protecting’ citizens. Today the natural leap isn’t from televangelist to X-villain, it’s from obsessed government official to X-villain. So Stryker got a makeover for the movies.

The beauty of the X-Men concept is that it’s infinitely adaptable. There are always going to be groups of people that are afraid of other groups of people because they’re different. And that kind of fear always leads to prejudice and hatred. Those conflicts are very easy to build X-Men stories on, because the whole premise for the book in the first place is “feared and hated by the world they’ve sworn to protect.” Any time you have fear and hatred you have potential story material for the X-Men.

3. Did Jean, Scott, and Professor X really die in the comics? (Obviously, I know Jean dies in the Dark Phoenix Saga). I’ve heard that X-Men 3 pretty much veered away from the plot of the comics, and was wondering if the deaths happened as well.

Honestly? Nobody ever really dies in the comics.

It’s kind of reached the point where everybody snorts and says “Yeah right,” whenever a character gets killed.

Cyclops, the Professor, and Jean have all been ‘killed’ or presumed dead several times, and so have most of the other X-Men. Really at this point I think it’s easier to keep track of who hasn’t been presumed dead for at least a couple of issues.

Now, as of right now this minute as I write this? Jean is dead– she was resurrected and then killed off again, once or twice since the Dark Phoenix book you have. Scott is still around. Professor X is still around but I think he’s not playing a big active role at the moment, he’s retired or in hiding or sulking or something. But sooner or later he’ll be back, as will Jean. Jean’s really easy to revive, since the whole schtick of a phoenix is ‘resurrection.’

I kind of like Jean Grey being gone, myself; I think it diminishes the heroism of her sacrifice to keep bringing her back from the dead as though she’s just been down with the flu, like death’s just occasionally inconvenient. And I enjoy what writers have done with Scott and Emma Frost. Grant Morrison, especially, just took Emma’s character and ran with it.

The idea of the X-Men’s resident boy scout romancing such an unrepentant bitch, and how they are each adapting to one another as she tries to be good and he occasionally lets himself be a little bad, is really a lot more interesting to read about than the swooning True Love of Scott and Jean.

…but that’s just me.

Because it’s comics, no one stays dead, and there is always going to be that group of fans that wants Scott and Jean back together no matter what. So I imagine sooner or later she’ll be back.

4. About Rogue’s history being different - I heard she was raised by Mystique??

Yes, that’s correct.

Really the movie Rogue is nothing like the comics Rogue, except for her powers. Rogue in the movies is a lot more like the original Kitty Pryde, a teenage girl who joins the team and ends up forging a special friendship with Wolverine. Which in turn made it odd when they decided Kitty would actually have a real role in the third movie.

Rogue in the comics began as a villain, and her path to becoming one of the most popular members of the team was too convoluted to even try to recap here. I will cheat and link you to this page instead.

Marvel Comics, as a whole, tends to get a lot of mileage out of reforming villains. (Remember, even Wolverine started as a Hulk villain.) Just in the X-Men books alone I think Magneto, Emma Frost, Rogue, Mystique, and Juggernaut have all been ‘reformed’ at least for a little while. So far, with Rogue and Emma, rehabilitation seems to have stuck.

5. Speaking of Mystique. She, Nightcrawler, and Beast are all blue. Are they related at all?

Ha! This just goes to show that everything occurs to everybody, sooner or later.

Yes, Mystique and Nightcrawler are related. She is his mother, though he didn’t know it for years and years, she abandoned him and he was raised by gypsies in a traveling circus. This was all eventually told in one of those big shock-revelation stories done after both characters had been around for a while. And I believe the reason this storyline was done is because someone thought “hey, they’re both blue.”

Now, the Beast, Hank McCoy, is a slightly different story. He originally started out looking human, just sort of bulky and Neanderthal, and he was one of the five original members of the team.

In the 1970’s, when I was about your age as a matter of fact, he got his own series in Amazing Adventures.

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L#8217;op#233;rateur t#233;l#233;phonique am#233;ricain Verizon Wireless a indiqu#233; que certains de ses employ#233;s avaient eu acc#232;s sans autorisation au compte d#8217;un vieux mobile personnel du pr#233;sident #233;lu Barack Obama. #171;#160;Cette semaine, nous avons appris qu#8217;un certain nombre d#8217;employ#233;s de Verizon Wireless ont eu acc#232;s et regard#233; sans autorisation le compte du t#233;l#233;phone mobile personnel du pr#233;sident Barack Obama#160;#187;, indique l#8217;op#233;rateur, dans un communiqu#233; publi#233; jeudi soir. Verizon Wireless pr#233;cise que ce compte #233;tait inactif depuis plusieurs mois et qu#8217;il concernait un simple t#233;l#233;phone #224; clapet, qui ne pouvait pas recevoir de mails ou d#8217;autres donn#233;es. #171;#160;Tous les employ#233;s qui ont eu acc#232;s #224; ce compte, avec autorisation ou pas, ont #233;t#233; mis en cong#233; imm#233;diatement, sans salaire#160;#187;, le temps que le r#244;le de chacun soit d#233;termin#233;, annonce Verizon Wireless, sans pr#233;ciser le nombre d#8217;employ#233;s concern#233;.img width='1' height='1' src='http://rss.feedsportal.com/c/864/f/11087/s/26a0b27/mf.gif' border='0'/br/br/a href="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/24192751178/u/89/f/11087/c/864/s/40504103/a2.htm"img src="http://da.feedsportal.com/r/24192751178/u/89/f/11087/c/864/s/40504103/a2.img" border="0"//a

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