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COMICAL COMEBACK
The following letters are in response to Luke Y. Thompson's Oct. 12 feature, “Youngblood at Heart,” about comic book illustrator and author Rob Liefeld and his return to comics.
Your article is misleading. Maybe you need a fact-checker on staff or something. Rob Liefeld never left comics. He started Awesome Entertainment and Arcade comics, plus he went back to X-Force and did the Onslaught Reborn mini series for Marvel. He tried to relaunch Youngblood at both Awesome (with Alan Moore writing and Steve Skroce drawing) and Arcade (with Mark Millar writing and Rob drawing). These facts kinda kill your “Seven years after leaving the industry that made him a star, former comic book wunderkind Rob Liefield is ready for his heroes to be reborn.”
You could have found all this info on the Web. But maybe you just wanted to do a puff piece. What cracks me up is getting the issue from your newsstand with its “Free Thinking” tag line.
I'm glad only your advertisers pay for your publication. The article is completely misleading and makes me wonder about the credibility of your other articles.
Brian
via e-mail
Two cover stories about comic books in one year. Since when did OC Weekly become a publication for nerds?
Daniel
via e-mail
MUSICAL CHAIRS
I got the chance to listen this album [Gustavo Arellano's Oct. 12 CD Review of Café Tacuba's Sino] during the weekend, and I think this band makes the synthesis of the new urban culture, composed of many cultural tiles, not only from Distrito Federal, but also from other cities in the country. I'm from Monterrey, and I can feel and trip the sense to what I consider the right merge of the evolving identity of the new Mexicano, and Café Tacuba are the geniuses who provided my generation with the country's best rock band ever. And maybe the best from Latino America.
Exposing the masses to this music is important to me. I went this weekend to visit a friend in Austin, and after going out to a bar on Saturday night, there was this really cool panameño-puerto riqueño DJ who mixed really good stuff. When I went up to him and asked him to mix up some Latino rock, Latino, funk, punk, whatever he had, he didn't know any of the bands I was naming.
Latin American people living in the States and Canada should know about their bands, to get to know the roots of them and the evolution of the genres.
Fernando Rodriguez
via e-mail
SPENT
You completely miss the point of the waste of the Strategic Plan for Harbors Beaches and Parks [in R. Scott Moxley's Oct. 12 edition of It's Your Money]. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to write a report that draws no conclusions, gives no recommendations, devises no specific strategies, and is supported by no one except the Board of Supervisors and the Irvine Co. I recommend you rethink what the real problem is, which the LA Times and even the Register got right—that the county wants to outsource management of our public parks to the two largest developers, the Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo. The “Strategic Plan” just mentions that partnerships are possible, but it does not state the nature nor the process for undertaking those partnerships.
What the stakeholders and the public wanted was a Harbors Beaches and Parks Department that is separate from the Resources Development and Management Department—particularly Bryan Speegle, the man in charge—that is continually giving away the show to the developers. No one is looking out for recreation, open spaces, habitat, etc., for the county-owned parkland, and it gives little hope that the thousands of acres of still undeveloped high-resource-value land left in the county could be acquired, preserved and managed as public park and recreation lands. Why don't you write that story?
Jack Eidt
via e-mail
AW, SHUCKS
This letter is in response to Gustavo Arellano's Oct. 11 Web-exclusive article, “Jane C.R. Doe Speaks,” about a victim in one of the recent sex-abuse settlements by the Diocese of Orange.
Very well-written!!
Mary Martinez
via e-mail
¿QUÉ?
The following letters are in response to Gustavo Arellano's ¡Ask a Mexican!® Glossary at ocweekly.com.
As a native of San Diego, I love ¡Ask a Mexican! and often read it online. Oddly enough, I have had people ask me the same silly question about length, syllables, etc., that was posed in your column in regard to both Spanish (when I was studying it in high school and college) and Italian, which is what I study now. They assumed the Romance languages were more cumbersome than English. My answer: “It depends, but if you want to give a command, Romance languages trump English!” You can pack a lot into one word (damelo was my Spanish example) with the imperative form.
Italian has some good examples, too . . . which I need not repeat here.
I like your approach and recognize most of your Mexican Glossary from my grammar-school days in Placentia. But you left out a few, like huevón and baboso. My friends said my name in Spanish was vetigus (horse's cock, as it turns out).
MUST BE TORTURE
The following letter is in regard to Nick Schou's Feb. 9, 2005, article, “F. Yoo!“—about John C. Yoo, co-author of the Bush administration's infamous torture memos, and his turbulent visit to UC Irvine.
Thank you, students of UC Irvine. I have been searching the Internet to see if ANYONE WAS OBJECTING TO THIS GUY. To say he is un-American is an understatement. And he couldn't care less. As long as the state of California is paying his wages, he can laugh all the way to the bank.
I want to see a movement to get him out of this state—or better yet, out of the country. He is a disgrace to the human race.
DISSING EL D.F.
After reading your article about Ramon Ayala [Gustavo Arellano's “The Shaman of Happiness,” June 1], it just occurred to me how much it hurts chilangos that northern Mexico is now the dominant force in the country. One day, you will realize that no one cares about Mexico City.
