Comix Imitatia
It was virtually fated that it was Stan Lee who would bring the first Indian global superhero to life - on the Net if not in print. The lean, professorial bibliotheca of fairytales, creator of Spiderman, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four and honorary chairperson of Marvel Comics, has just finished fleshing out seven heroes from seven different countries, one of which is Imitatia, an Indian, and another, The Streak, a Japanese. Given that all comic book characters are thoughtfully imbued with names that are the most straighforward URLs any creator can cook up for their superpowers, take it for granted that The Streak streaks and Imitatia probably imitates. At www.StanLee.Net, due to part curtains - go to the Website and see whether I'm being unimaginatively metaphorical - in January 2000, Lee will introduce "The Seventh Portal". It's a gateway to another dimension accessible through the Internet - ah, the creative elasticity of cyberspace - and home to seven villains pitted against seven heroes this side of the trenches, one-on-one. Looking for a comix superfix after being spurred on, or rather headed off, by an Attila's army of TV, computer and videogames, Lee and his pen-and-plume legion discovered that the reality escapees who devoured comics also mainlined on the Net and were technology trippers. So The Seventh Portal will be anything but still life: Lee calls them "animated superhero mini-movies". More than the comixtrips at B-Radical.com and WebComix.com, less than Lucas. Imitation imitatia.

Leonardo's smile
After that, a reality check. Why is the Mona Lisa, painted on a slab of pinewood in 1506 for no ostensible reason that would send generations of busybody aesthetes into a tizzy, smiling? You'll be told with youthful earnestness at /13681/data/davin2.shtml that Dr Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs has the answer: the lady's smirking because Leonardo painted himself. Dr Schwartz digitised an unflattering self-portrait of the artist and the Mona Lisa. A computer wedged them into one artistic deoxyribonucleic acid space and she noticed that the lumpy, Methuselah features of one aligned perfectly with the satiny enigma of the other. What a turn-off. But Learning About Leonardo, "a multidisciplinary science-driven Web-based project developed by computer graphics students at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx with their partners in Sweden", is one of those glorious sites whose "stickiness" website owners spend millions trying to get Web demographers and designers to conjure up. It features, among a porcupine profusion of links to other sites, original music composed by Leonardo himself. (If you haven't the time or the inclination to read the conflicting theories of Dr Schwartz and Rina de Firenze, author of "Mystery of Mona Lisa", you can go directly to the haunting patch of score at /13681/data/link3.htm). This is a visit of permanence.