Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane?? Is It An EFFIN’ COMMIE LIBERAL???
Shorter D.S. Hube, Newsbutthurters
Is Liberalism Leading to Comic Books’ Downfall?There is nothing left for me to read now that commie comic books are all about oil spills and shit like that.
The liberal media must be falling down on the job because the folks over at Newsbutthurters have now taken to complaining about comic books, apparently not being able to find, today at least, anything in the news to butthurt about.
First, let me get this out of the way: if you are a grown-up that eats Fruit Loops, wears a onesie to bed, or reads comic books, it’s probably best to keep that to yourself. But the Newsbutthurter in question, one D.S. Hube, admits that this is pretty much all he reads, if “read” is the correct word. At least this is all that he “read” before he decided to bring the whole comic book empire crashing down through his one-man boycott to punish the comic book publishers for trying to turn him into a communist by slipping subversive plots into their comic books.
As a big comicbook geek from waaaaay back (I have a section of my blog, The Colossus of Rhodey, dedicated to comics), and as one who continued to purchase comics up until the mid-2000s, I find this modern “progressive” trend not only disburbing, but disgusting. It’s what led me to stop purchasing contemporary comics outright, and lose some, if not friendships, associations, as a result.
So what’s an example of what D.S. finds “disgusting” and caused him to lose all his 12-year-old friends who hung out at the comic book shop with him?
You pick up a superhero comic book featuring a childhood favorite of yours, hoping to reignite some of that magic you felt way back when and you see that the opening sequence in the comic deals with an oil rig disaster. You immediately and disappointingly know what’s going to be said, either by your childhood favorite or by some other character given credibility within the story. You turn the page, and sure enough, your childhood favorite grumbles about his/her country’s dependency on oil or how inherently dangerous oil drilling is to the environment.
The disgusting idea that we should stop giving a fortune to the Saudis was enough, I imagine, that it sent D.S. Hube to go turn on all the lights in his studio apartment (all four of them) just to show Batman who is who and that he can’t keep shoving stuff down D.S.’s throat just because he’s Batman.
This cumulative effect eventually took its toll on me. I kept purchasing comics probably longer than I should have.
Yes, D.S., if you bought comics once you were older than fourteen, then that’s the smartest thing you’ve said in your entire post
Many of the stories were top notch despite my knowing the politics of the creators … but at a certain point, I had had enough. … I just asked myself “Why do I continue to support these guys? I give them my money — and they continually spit in my face.” … And, thus, all this is [partly] why I blog. I why I’ll continue to not shell out $3-4 for a comicbook any time soon.
Actually, I think I feel much better that this grown man with an overdeveloped interest in muscular men in tights has decided to start blogging instead of lurking around kids in comic book stores. So, maybe, just this one time we can honestly say that Newsbutthurters is actually performing some kind of public service.
It’s what led me to stop purchasing contemporary comics outright, and lose some, if not friendships, associations, as a result.
Once again, the schaden freudes itself.
(Got a heaping dose of same last night with the Pig Newton win…I can’t wait to see what the WaPo chickenhawks have to say now that their main man, Rmoney, is looking vulnerable.)
~
Given that you’re named for a BD character, and are some sort of Frencho-Belgian homofag, you should have more respect for your actual sequential art.
Yeah, and when you tell your doctor you smoke two packs a day and eat a bacon double cheeseburger for dinner every night, you ALSO immediately and disappointingly know what’s going to be said.
Gee, I wonder why that is.
Hi there, I’m older than 14, I read comics, I run a comic book blog, I’m a fairly enthusiastic nerd. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I saw a non-adult in the local comics shop.
Please edit the post to include more “Huhr, huhr, nerrrrds” stuff. That makes you look totes cool.
I was just watching Santorum froth on This Weak. He was impugning Newt’s prior acceptance of “the junk science that is global warming” which George just let sail past without mention of “90+% consensus of peer-reviewed scientists” (and next up, the thoughtful, intelligent George Will). So comic books dominate how a paid writer at Newsbusters sees the world?
The hell you say!
You’d think that they’d be aware of the comic genius of Day by Day or Mallard Fillmore.
Hube is specifically ranting about superhero comics, and he links to another wingnut creep. who describes how a right-wing superhero would handle the Deepwater Horizon oil spill:
what you might find is the protagonist mentioning something like how statistically safe drilling for oil is, how important oil is to mankind, what technological marvels modern oil platforms are or how well the platform’s damage control team responded to the unusual crisis. (Complimenting the damage control team would reflect positively on the company they work for and imply that the company is a responsible one…
The Amazing Adventures of CorporateShillMan
D S may have stopped reading comics to blog instead but he still can’t get out of momma’s basement. That’s some real Hube-ris.
In some countries, comics are not just a “kid’s” medium. Japan most notably.
I saw some pretty adult-oriented comics over in France. They would definitely be rated “R” for realistic violence and sexual content.
I bought a couple that had cool pictures of Mirage Jets blowing stuff up. I have idea what they’re saying but the pictures are cool.
Whydoes hewrite “comicbook” likethis?
I’m surprised he isn’t freaking out, like other wingnuts, over that “Archie” comic where the gay couple gets married.
Comicbooks are what algore reads.
I think we can say with some certainty that the only thing this wanker has ever read are comic books and that his lips get tired if the stories get too long. Also to that whole muscular guys in tights thing is a bit creepy and I think we need to alert the police and schools in his area.
Hi there, I’m older than 14, I read comics, I run a comic book blog, I’m a fairly enthusiastic nerd. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I saw a non-adult in the local comics shop.
Also too, I do not understand why I have never had a date in my whole life and parents grab their kids and move away when they see me.
Here is a conservative comic book.
Needed more grovelling peasants, Subby.
I agree with Scott. Moving on:
If comic book buyers are young, or liberal, then one shouldn’t be surprised when comic producers give them stuff that alienates older conservatives who once read comics. Conservatives tend to overestimate the ubiquity of their sensibilities. In this case, they may unreasonably assume that there’s a market for conservative comics. I strongly doubt that.
Comic book artists should follow their own inclinations, their creative visions, almost without exception or restraint. Iconic long-lived titles face different challenges, but still hafta write/draw for current markets. If cons see a market failure ripe for some entrepreneur, let them have at it.
The only comic book I follow, Knights of the Dinner Table, has an avid and vocal fan-base. There’s ample evidence that its readers have irreconcilable opinions and lifestyles. I suspect that the author is conservative by my standards but chooses not to politicize his work. Letters to the editor demonstrate that people can read whatever they want into whatever they want.
Once upon a time in the ’70s comic books like Spiderman were pure escapism, dealing with issues like the cocaine addiction of Peter Parker’s best friend Harry Osborn. Now they’re just rubbish confronting the aftermath of the Iraq War, as Flash Thompson returns without a leg and with PTSD.
Stories, myths. Bah! They’re for kids.
Sandman by Neil Gaiman is pretty good.
Personally, I can’t stand superhero comics and don’t get adult fascination with them. But, then, I love “funny animal” comics (most of them intended for adolescent or adult readers), so…. what Scott said. Please try not to be a Dick.
I’m all for spergy obsessions, but I kind of have to call bullshit on the idea that print comics (let’s just stick a pin in manga and eurofaggotry for now) are an acceptable subject for an adult to dedicate their lives to. It’s a subject I could spend all fucking day on, but here is the précis:
1) As spergily obsessed over, the comix in question tend to be more or less exclusively products of the obsessive’s childhood;
2) The industry is increasingly predicated on that being true of their consumers; but
3) Also, it is predicated on their main consumer base being a narrowly-constituted band 40-year-olds with lots of money and not much else to spend it on, which imposes a certain worldview on things;
4) In spite of all that, the formal boundaries of the genre are still set by the things acceptable to show to teenagers.
This is not a case like Harry Potter where the product has basically grown up with the core audience. This is a case where the core audience has become physically bigger and more powerful and the product has remained literally puerile.
And this cycle of things is so fixed that a revolutionary change – a clean slate – involves redeveloping the comix so they cater to not only the people who want to see a billionaire give a fake woman designed 40 years ago a deep dicking but the people who want to see a billionaire give a fake woman designed 20 years ago a deep dicking.
This is not a spergy obsession for consuming. This is a spergy obsession for laying down and avoiding.
Rich Johnston, a guy D.S. Hube links to, actually has some good points (in a separate post, “How Conservatism May Be Hurting Comic Book Sales”):
“But as as a genre, the superhero is very conservative indeed. Though this can be interpreted in different ways. They stop bank robbers or other super villains dressed in a similar fashion, they don’t try to alter the causes, create a world where people don’t want to be bank robbers or super villains. Proponents of law and order, but not part of big government, they emphasise individual responsibility over statism, in keeping the world as it is, simply dealing with the side effects of that. In a universe where the Fantastic Four can create portals into other dimensions, robots and all manner of otherworldy devices to beat the bad guys, they don’t eliminate poverty, they don’t create free, environmentally friendly energy. Any attempt by someone to do such a thing, and solve real world problems such as people losing limbs [?], has their laudable aim backfire on them and they become a super villain like the Lizard. But why?”
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/01/06/how-conservatism-may-be-hurting-comic-book-sales-by-rich-johnston/
This is a great deal more insightful than D.S. Hube. Johnston looks beyond the surface and sees fictional worlds reflecting certain assumptions about change and agency. Utopian collective activity is for aliens!
Hey comic dudes; chill the fuck out. This place is specifically designed to make fun of people and ourselves. Leave the butthurt at the door or take it over to newsbutthurters.
BitTorrent is where it’s at!
I really enjoyed this interview with a now-dead black writer on a portion of his audience.
Also, you’d have an awful hard time proving to me that any political ideology has any sort of effect on comic sales. What is hurting comic sales is the internet and the xbox. Poontang tends to slow them down a little too, I think.
I’m more of a Ruby the Dyke Meets Weedman kind of guy myself, but de gustibus non est disputandum as all them Latin types say.
And when they encounter sensibilities that they don’t share, they tend to react by trying to stomp those sensibilities into the mud.
“I really enjoyed this interview with a now-dead black writer on a portion of his audience.”
That’s a good clip. Superhero comics (and most comics) puzzle me, but this guy is talking about them to weigh in on important stuff, very effectively I would say.
“If you are a grown-up that […] wears a onesie to bed”
It’s called a union suit, and it’s as manly a piece of sleepwear as can be found. No booties, of course.
My grandfather the WW2 vet always wore jumpsuits. They were blue or gray. Finally in my teens somebody explained to me that he had a colostomy bag due to the same incident that deafened him. He was an officer in a tank unit. Story was that he was the white officer for a black unit. His tank got hit and he was carried to safety by one of his men.
He also explained to me that a black serviceman showed him how to smoke marijuana out of a toilet paper roll with a tinfoil bowl. He raised the subject himself. It seemed odd since he hated talking about the war and could barely speak in any case. But he had to get the dope story out I guess.
I totally get the fascination with superhero comics. I love The Matrix movies. The Bourne series, Jet Li kung fu flicks, etc… I also enjoy Halo on the xbox. All variations of the same theme. Superhero fantasy. Some prefer the comic medium.
I also like Rush, Nickleback and Creed. Suck it haters! FERRETS!!!!!ONE!!!
Also, to and such; Pig Newton = best name ever.
CRA, Scott et al., I though you guys ditched the “comic book” appelation in favor of “graphic novels.”
BLART.
I think the worst part is not still obsessing about comics like they are the canary in the coal mine for all culture (cause not even the stereotypical Comic Book Guy does that shit), but the expectation that comics would somehow be unchanged from a vague memory of what they were like when the author was a child in the Silver Age. Yes, why couldn’t comics be unchanged artifacts of some long ago time and safely remain in their non-offensive (to white, straight, male suburban children) child-safe bubble we placed them in 50 years ago (Comics Code of Authority, y’all)?
Hell, that’s not the worst part, the worst part, is still reciting the horse shit that got them stuck in that bubble (comics with actual plots will corrupt our youth, comics with actual commentary on actual themes will drive our kids to homosexuality and communism) at least 40 years since that shit was debunked, thoroughly mocked, and every sane person wanted to pretend that no one seriously thought that (but we still needed to censor real characters in comics because…reasons).
But yeah, for the other time-travelers freaking out about the “liberalization” of comic books. Comic books are trying to tell those stories about non-white, non-straight, non-male, non-christian members of the human species, because if you hand human beings a medium, whether it be costumed people in tights, serious literature, or the composing of musical notes into top 40 radio hits, people are going to want to use it to actually say something meaningful from time to time.
And that’s never going to change until the day conservatives learn enough creativity and empathy to write shit that speaks to anyone else other than the fundamentally damaged and the emotionally immature.
Comic Book Guy-
Eh, the medium grew up and the distinction became less important. Same with most things “everyone knows” are for kids.
Conservative arguments are the notable exception.
I always thought Batman was pretty rightwing, but I still enjoyed some of the more recent “Dark Knight” stories, such as “The Long Halloween.” But there’s a difference between sometimes enjoying a different mode of story-telling and living for the one type. It’s like the difference between enjoying some Cheetos every now and again as an occasional treat, and living on them and Mt. Dew. Hube strikes me as the type with fingers stained permanently orange.
I bought and read comic to about age 12. Now, nearing 50, I “collect” comic books — sort of. I only buy them if they have politicians or caricatures of politicians on the cover, most recently the “Archie” with Obama and Sarah Palin sharing a milk shake at Pop’s Choklit Shoppe, which I scan and use as examples in various classes I teach.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/comic-riffs/2010/09/obama_and_palin_share_a_milksh.html
(Notice how happily Palin sucks down the chocolate… Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
I don’t read them, with one exception — I *do* read the Cold War anti-Commie books I’ve purchased. *Those* are “conservative” comic books. See, for example, “T-Man,” the adventures of Treasury Agent Pete Trask (a “T-Man,” as opposed to a “G-Man”). http://www.toonopedia.com/tman.htm
Trask traveled in the nefarious world of nefarious late-WWII and early Cold War villains, as in this (in)famous episode when he helped bring down that democratically elected, but nevertheless Commie Pinko Socialist, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh:
http://www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/t-man-comic-book-propaganda/
Otherwise, it’s always been my impression that to the extent comic books had *any* politics they were *always* “liberal.”
Wasn’t it the Right that freaked out over comics in the 1950s?
Weren’t Superman and his fellow tights-wearers principally engaged in fighting injustice, the promotion of which is the main occupation of conservatives?
Let’s not go sucking each other’s dicks quite yet etc. Seduction of the Innocent was in a broad way what one might describe now as right-wing, but the left was pretty homophobic in the day. You know, bourgeois decadence and all that.
And the big shift wasn’t really so much a shift in understanding of the underlying reality; it was the eroding concern by the left for society, and the liberationist cult, in Stephen Bond’s beautiful words, taking Stalin’s dictate to its logical extreme of Socialism in One Person.
We defeated the policeman living in our heads and offered the policeman living down the block power over life and death, and now we’ve got the civilization we asked for, is the idea.
your childhood favorite grumbles about his/her country’s dependency on oil
I know most wingnuts tend to insert the word “foreign” in between “on” and “oil” here, but this guy’s jumped the fences. So a dependency on oil is a good thing for him?
how a right-wing superhero would handle the Deepwater Horizon oil spill:
what you might find is the protagonist mentioning something like how statistically safe drilling for oil is, how important oil is to mankind, what technological marvels modern oil platforms are or how well the platform’s damage control team responded to the unusual crisis…..
So, wait, he’s saying Superman would just stand around talking, watching the oil keep pumping out?
Superman? Why would you want to see the adventures of some kind of super man? That’s commie talk. All power must be arrogated to benevolent corporations; all comics must be Kasco Komix.
All for Mammon! All for Mammon!
Alternate punchline: The New Adventures of Lex Luthor.
“Let’s not go sucking each other’s dicks quite yet etc”
Ummmmm, okay.
“the left was pretty homophobic in the day”
Yeah, I’m not really thinking that homophobia is one of the elements in the set of issues that comprises the customary left-right continuum in American politics — certainly not during the time period in comics that Hube is referring to.
You’re right about that, but Seduction of the Innocent – the comix-industry’s customary point of reference for horrible old scolds freaking out about the possibility of Batman and Robin’s dicks touching through their little primary-color tights, on the basis that it is entirely about that and was important enough to lead to a Congressional inquisition and a substantial change to the way comics did their business – is way back in the stone age when you couldn’t qualify as a leftist without giving a shit about teh poors, even a little.
Marsden, one of the figures that precipitated Seduction, had a lot of ideas we’d identify as right-wing and yet gets championed by liberal types in large part because he didn’t actively despise and fear women. Soft bigotry low expectations &c.
Comics hero stories lend themselves to a conservative mindset, because they tend to reduce complex issues to simplistic good-guy/bad-guy scenarios. It’s comforting to a conservative to envision a world where Captain Capitalism can rappel down from the AmeriCopter and bash the evil Doktor Fatwah with a dramatic right-cross to save the day. Sophisticated analyses of real-world conflicts over conflicting ideologies, distribution of resources or shifting geopolitical alliances don’t lend themselves to the action-packed comic format.
What? I’m not the one saying we should just leap headlong into fellatio. That’s the last thing I want. Why am I the bad guy here??
@Russell_in_LA:
Is this the “Commie Pinko Socialist” you were referring to? —
Mossadegh Reprimands Misguided Communists – 1944
How the CIA used “anti-Communism” to extinguish Iran’s democracy
Captain Capitalism can rappel down from the AmeriCopter and bash the evil Doktor Fatwah with a dramatic right-cross to save the day.
Or Captain Dogwhistle could rappel down from the RacistCopter and bash the evil Doktor Foodstamps with a dramatic no-holds-barred debate thrashing to save the day….
Leaping the head long.
This is what conservative comics look like:
http://io9.com/5845828/frank-millers-holy-terror-isnt-just-a-bad-comic–its-a-bad-propaganda-comic
Cerb’s comment upthread was the thing I was trying to get across in an entry I wrote a week or so ago at my joint and Whiskey Fire. About how the world is “liberalizing,” so naturally many aspects of our pop culture are going to reflect that.
And, actually, I’ve definitely seen some things from out here on the periphery of the comics world that indicate that that particular genre is still very much Privileged White Boy World.
I’ve definitely seen some things from out here on the periphery of the comics world that indicate that that particular genre is still very much Privileged White Boy World.
On average, it still is. Fortunately that description does not fit the entire genre.
by gum that shit got me to gigglin’
i’m all agiggle i sez
Weren’t Superman and his fellow tights-wearers principally engaged in fighting injustice, the promotion of which is the main occupation of conservatives?
Grant Morrison points out that the very first superhero, Superman, when he first got started was fighting… war profiteers, corrupt senators,and wife-beaters.
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/helen-lewis-hasteley/2011/07/superheroes-superman-graphic
I’ve run into this dickhead Hube before. He wears his ignorance and prejudices like they were armor protecting him from a hostile world out to batter him with, well, reality. In short, the epitome of the teabagger wingnut. If he thinks The Authority were “liberal”, reading The Invisibles would make his tiny little testicles retract so far he’d look like he has three Adam’s apples.
“CRA, Scott et al., I though you guys ditched the ‘comic book’ appelation in favor of ‘graphic novels.'”–Comic Book Guy
I am a nerd but not of the comic book variety. Upthread I took no pains to distance myself from them.
Maus is a graphic novel. Batman is a comic book. A novel should have a first page and a last page. A novel can be serialized, and if it’s not complete before serialization begins, that’s fine. But someone who writes installments with no intention of stopping is not writing a novel nohow.
Hey, you all should check out Brent Bozell’s latest whine…it’s on the same page as this crap.
People don’t make jokes about Obama!!!! WAH WAH WAH!
OBAMA ISN’T FUNNY. In fact, he’s pretty close to boring.
The best image I have heard all day, and I thank you for it.
“… bash the evil Doktor Foodstamps with a dramatic no-holds-barred debate thrashing to save the day….”
He will change personas yet again, where he was once Sir Newton Royalty, then Prof Greatmind, to Captain Dogwhistle, to GEN Greycoat NB Forrest (of Ft Pillow fame), leading the charge with Charlie Daniel’s The South’s Gonna Do it Again booming at his back.
And, actually, I’ve definitely seen some things from out here on the periphery of the comics world that indicate that that particular genre is still very much Privileged White Boy World.
Oh Bob yes, it is. And made worse by the fact that when authors try and fix that, the particularly scum-sucking parts of the community scream their heads off like whiny children.
Why isn’t this guy reading any Frank Miller stuff made past 2002? The man has become a right wing parody of himself.
‘Twas ever thus.
Young Jonah.
Again, the superhero shtick isn’t my thing, but I don’t really agree.
When superhero comics are approached as pure escapism – and that’s how they’re usually intended – then I don’t think that they’re inherently right wing or left wing or anything at all. Normally, they’re just a pastime, fun for those who enjoy that sort of thing but nothing more.
If someone starts taking them seriously and trying to apply them to the real world… well, yeah, then that person has some problems. But any adult who’d take them seriously probably has problems already.
Shorter Hube = “I’M THE GODDAMNED STILL-LIVING-IN-MY-MOM’S-BASEMENT-MAN.”
OBAMA ISN’T FUNNY. In fact, he’s pretty close to boring.
He’s sure gone two country miles out of his way to reach for going Full Generic, alright.
Surely noone could have predicted such a shocking development!
…where Obama had three wives like Newt Gingrich and Newt only one like Obama.
All comments from Alternate Universe Fox News:
“Obama’s not a father, he’s a baby daddy!”
“Three wives? Obama’s not a husband, he’s a pimp!”
“The President and the First Ho…”
“Obama dumps two of his wives while they’re ill and in danger of dying. Isn’t this just how he’s treated the economy?”
“A man is known by his behavior towards his loved ones. Obama treated his wives like dogs – worse than dogs, you get locked up for treating a dog like that. He’s evil and has no business being President of the United States of America.”
Substance’s link is a letter to an editor, containing this:
“… the Avengers has a majority of conservative, old-fashioned men (Captain America, [etc.] and Doctor Druid).”
I have never heard of Doctor Druid but my curiosity is piqued. I imagine he’s REALLY conservative and old-fashioned. Probably hates latter-day wiccans and pagans with a red-hot fury. I doubt he’s on good terms with the American Medical Association either.
People do that with myths, superhero comics are myths. Marvel in particular used to do a pretty good job of identifying the powers with emotions and situations – uncomfortable teenage boy becomes yucky bug…but a powerful bug! I dunno if anything is really simple escapism in that light, but I don’t think the superhero comics, dumb as they are, are just escapism.
I really like a lotta heavy metal, and I treat it as a form of escape and I don’t take it seriously, but it, like comics, pushes a power fantasy that very easily lends itself to the wrong message.
You guys are analyzing this to death. Superheroes are an artist’s rendering of the Conquering Hero dream. They preach a sense of the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, same old ancient stories. Where they run afoul pf conservative mental illness is where they introduced moral ambiguity-most notably on the Dark Knight series. In other words, the stories sometimes deal with just how complicated the human is, and questions our sensibilities about right and wrong. The moral of the story is that nobody is perfect. Even our beloved defenders of truth, justice and the American way.
He’s a pinko compared to Captain Neanderthal.
*POW!*
Take that, regressive income tax!
*WHAM!!*
You’re days are over, unequal wealth distribution!
*Ka-BOOM!!!*
I think we’ve seen the last of you, third-world-sweatshop-job-outsourcer!
If someone starts taking them seriously and trying to apply them to the real world…
I suppose it depends on how they try to apply them. (I’m thinking of The Watchmen here, where Alan Moore wondered what sort of people would want to get into the costumed vigilante gig and concluded they’d be highly eccentric– if you’re lucky.)
Historically comic books have always been left-of-center.
Just like right wingers that still love the TV show M*A*S*H, but hate liberals now, DS Hube loves his old comics and hates the new ones because they tell the truth about reality instead of presenting far-right wing lies and corporate propaganda.
Remember the older James Bond stories, the ones where the wealthy industrialists were the villains intent on taking over the world, well the bad guys have won.
“He’s a pinko compared to Captain Neanderthal.”
Ah yes, the Unfrozen Caveman Superhero. You can’t blame him for being a reactionary — our modern world frightens and confuses him. But there is one thing he knows: right from wrong.
Conservatives just love things they think confirm their views and don’t ask them to question what they believe or accept something they didn’t necessarily know or believe. They love shows like 24 and hate shit like Crash.
While there’s the occasional freak, the application is about the use of power and the ethics behind it; do you break the rules in the use of power for “justice”? You can dress it up as protecting the orphans or Lois Lane or whatever, but naked strength and its use is the theme.
If more comic books featured naked acts of strength, there would be more comic book fans.
Ho ho ho, Ned has apparently never used the internet.
Yeah, my immediate thought went to the shitfit-throwing that seems to be an issue with some white fanbois these days when anything outside of white, straight, male perspectives is depicted in video games and comic books. I’m still confused as to why seeing people who don’t look or act like them is such a horrible thing, or why trying to expand the core audience of a media product (especially in the case of superhero comics, which have been *dying*) is something to be upset about.
I’ve also seen a lot of shit from white, male, straight geeks about how they are *so* oppressed, and that being a geek in this society is as difficult as being a person of color, or a woman, or queer. Needless to say, this is horseshit, and I think this sense of persecution exacerbates their whiny-ass reactions when they see their privilege within the geek world threatened in any way. (This is similar to what goes on in atheist communities, too). Nothing’s more obnoxious than a normative dude with unexamined privilege who thinks he’s being oppressed.
Of course, all of this dovetails with the conservative sense of persecution because they see white, heterosexual, Christian social dominance disappearing, but we all knew that already.
I’d happily point Brent Bozell to any number of websites that make frequent jokes about Obama, many including references to watermelon and fried chicken. But I doubt he’d care to admit they’re his comrades-in-arms.
Alt shorter: I can’t fap to this.
Oh, hello, TL; DR of what everybody else said!
How about this?
Yeah, you have a point. I know that back sixty or seventy or eighty years ago, in the early days of the genre, the superhero stuff was nearly universally regarded as fluff, not to be taken seriously. Maybe with the passage of time even the silliest crap starts to ooze its way into the collective hive mind and becomes a commonly held myth.
Ugh. Creeps me out. That’s not the kind of mythology I want.
People do that with myths, superhero comics are myths… I don’t think the superhero comics, dumb as they are, are just escapism.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
Comic books have dealt with political issues as long as there have been comics-just read anything published during World War II. If they seem more ‘serious’ about the issues now, that’s just because comics in general have been trying to be more serious for a long, long time-there’s a reason phrases like ‘darker and edgier’ and ‘gritty reboot’ are pretty much jokes. This guy isn’t worried about propaganda seeping into his escapist form of entertainment-he just wants everything he sees to agree with him, all the time, just like most rightbloggers.
As for the superhero comics issue in general, I’m not much of a fan, but I am a fan of some pretty nerdy stuff, some of which could definitely reveal some pretty illiberal messages that my white straight male self might not notice, if anyone wanted to pick them apart. It’s also tough for me because I believe in the power of fiction and storytelling to help people understand the world, but what I think is that you kind of need to stay at a remove and not draw actual life lessons from it. Otherwise you just turn into one of those clowns like John Hawkins who list the ‘most conservative’ this or that, except from the other side of the political fence.
I kind of think that even if an artist has different politics than mine, if they can hide it well or do something clever with it, and/or if they’re good at their craft, I’m willing to go with it. Artists who do nothing with their work but spew their political rants never produce anything good anyway.
See, this is why I think people on the Internet are talking about ME, even ‘though I don’t eat Fruit Loops & get to sleep nekkid ’cause it’s SoCal.
you smoke two packs a day and eat a bacon double cheeseburger for dinner every night
OK, stop it. Not funny any more!
Maybe this guy should stick with Christian Archie.
Does anyone remember when I posted a link to these outrageously offensive/homophobic comics/tracts? It was a few months ago. And also too did anyone by any chance save that link? I think it’s RELEVANT.
Sandman by Neil Gaiman is pretty good.
Anything by Neil Gaiman is good. I’ve got the complete Sandman series. I enjoy mythology, and Gaiman uses myth brilliantly
The only other comic / graphic novel I own is Cerebrus (before the author went off-the-edge).
This has been an interesting thread so far. I don’t read comics, so it’s an opportunity to read about subjects I know almost nothing about. I would never go to a comics site all on my own (except Comics Curmudgeon, which I have bookmarked).
This is one of the things that keeps me addicted to S,N: Exposure to all sorts of unusual stuff that I would never find on my own.
Got your conservative comic right here.
I don’t know how I could’ve forgotten this guy until now. Everyone loves Chick tracts!
See also Pigman.
I feel like one can both overstate and understate the degree to which privilege is responsible. On the one hand, it amplifies and encourages certain lines of complaint. (As in, Rupert Murdoch’s news empire will not pretend to care about ‘they changed Spiderman’s outfit, now he sucks’ but will pretend to care about ‘they changed Superman’s race, now he sucks’.)
On the other hand, the only complaint the fanboy is actually equipped to make about anything in this world is ‘this isn’t what I learned to enjoy in my sexless ignorant youth! Make it go away!’
That this should dovetail with privilege should surprise nobody.
I wonder if Frank Miller would approve of this Sin City.
Spaghetti Lee said, …”I kind of think that even if an artist has different politics than mine, if they can hide it well or do something clever with it, and/or if they’re good at their craft, I’m willing to go with it. Artists who do nothing with their work but spew their political rants never produce anything good anyway.”
Well said.
I don’t get why nerds get so angry when people mock the extremities of their lifestyle. I’m a weird-ass person who dresses up on weekends and plays knights and ladies (and occasionally middle-class English persons who fight with pikes), and I make fun of myself all the time. I love what I do, and I know it’s weird, and I know people make fun of me. I don’t care; I’m happy being nerdy.
Maybe the difference is that I don’t care what people think of me, and white comic book nerds are all terribly insecure. But it’s not like they’re risking death just to go to the comic book store and read comix, so I don’t really get the oppression whining. If it’s that they got beat up or made fun of in high school, well, welcome to the club – everyone who did not fit the norm went through that, that’s why a lot of people are working to change the way people behave towards people who are different from them.
Instead of joining that movement, pasty white-boy nerds seem to have simply gone off and perpetuated the exact same unjust society, just with themselves at the top of the heap. They set themselves up as the kings of their little world and demand that everyone cater to their whims, then they whine when someone outside their world makes fun of them. I can’t really dredge up much sympathy for them, tbh.
Fenwick — Comics Curmudgeon can be fun. C.C. also has my eternal thanks for introducing me to Neitzsche Family Circus:
http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/
Refreshment of which eventually gets you something like
http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/perm.php?c=86&q=251
What sort of person invents comic-strip characters?
Re: our discussion of which animals > other animals, I’m going to have to rate for these loving owls.
As someone who actually reads comic books (including superhero comics) on a weekly basis, I’d say it’s pretty hard ascribing a single ideology to the entire medium.
The truth is, some superhero stories are right wing fantasies about power and the glorification of the individual. Frank Miller is a total crank whose work has devolved into Holy Terror (a comic linked to above that pits a superhero character – originally intended to be Batman – against Al Qaeda). You hardly see the same themes in works by liberal writers like Grant Morrison and Gail Simone.
And yeah, comic book fandom has a lot of problems with white-boy privilege. And the very fact that hacks like Rob Liefeld keep getting work is a travesty. Still, no fandom is a monolith. I’m friends – er, online friends – with a number of fans who enjoy it through a feminist/racially aware/anti-oppression lens.
A big thing from cons last summer was a young woman dressed in a (Stephanie Brown) Batgirl costume who went to all the DC panels questioning the lack of female representation, both in characters and creators.
Underwear freaks?
It’s pretty obvious why the whole “oppressed mutant” thing got big: it spoke to a lot of people. But the payoff is always punching.
I’m a comic book nerd (Though I never read many superhero books and I’ve been out of comic books in general for the last few years) and there’s so many things I want to say.
1. There is, definitely, a thread of radical left-wing politics in American comic books. Garth Ennis’ Preacher is one of the nastiest anti-Christian screeds you will ever read. It’s a comic that posits that the whole DaVinci Code thing about Christ marrying is true, and that there’s a secret part of the church that has kept the bloodline “pure” through inbreeding to the point where Christ’s direct descendant is an inbred retard who tends to urinate in public. He’s watched over by a morbidly obese priest who is pretty much exactly the same as Mr. Creosote. Other comics from the Vertigo imprint are similarly radical in their politics.
2. That said, the examples in both Hube’s and Wagner’s articles are really poorly chosen. The Authority, for example, are the superhero group who dealt with an invasion from mirror universe Italy by teleporting the entire country into outer space. Were there any children or slaves or innocent bystanders in evil mirror universe Italy? The question is not addressed. So why are we assuming that they’re left-wing superheroes?
As with a lot of attempts to criticize art from a conservative standpoint, terms are all really poorly defined, to the point where “liberal” just means “something that personally offends the author”.
3. As for the oil spill example, I can’t speak for Aquaman, but his Marvel comics counterpart Namor has been complaining about surface-world depredations of his undersea kingdom for the last 50 years. This is just what he does. Aquaman is a Namor rip-off, so I assume he does the same thing.
And second, the deepwater horizon spill was one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Saying we shouldn’t let it effect our perception of oil drilling is like saying Chernobyl shouldn’t effect our perception of Soviet nuclear safety standards.
That shit failed catastrophically and made a huge mess. You don’t get to fucking complain just because people point it out.
Mike Lane, Professional Drug Tester.
Proof that comic-strip characters can in fact be role-models for the readership.
Hmmm…I’m actually not sure if classifying Grant Morrison as liberal is terribly accurate. I guess he is, but he’s got some pretty loopy ideas on top of it. He’s brilliant either way though.
I love issue 10 of All-Star Superman where Superman creates a miniature universe so he can observe what a world without him in it would look like. The end of the comic shows 1938 in the miniature world, where we see Joe Shuster first draw Superman. A world without Superman in one where we’re driven to create Superman.
Not necessarily. Bill Willingham, who writes Fables, is a hard core right winger. It doesn’t come through in the book much, but I’ve seen the man’s opinions expressed elsewhere.
The superhero genre rests entirely on the unfathomable idea of anarchists (vigilantes who answer to no one, routinely break laws, and who tend to follow a moral code that applies only to themselves) protecting the status quo (“Truth, Justice, and the American Way”).
It is neither liberal nor conservative, really. In truth, it’s a philosophy that’s wholly inapplicable to any real-world scenario or political view.
“If I had the power to fuck up this evildoer I’d use it” is not too far from anybody’s imaginings.
Uh… yeah. You really made your point by taking one phrase out of my post, refuting it, and totally ignoring the actual point I made.
Two whole sentences too much for you to respond to?
I suspect Hube has a very limited exposure to comic books.
Green Arrow has always been unabashedly liberal, fighting poverty both in an out of costume. (Must be the whole Robin Hood trope.)
Daredevil was a defense lawyer–and we all know how those damn trial lawyers are! (There was a well-written mini-series where Spiderman caught a notorious predatory pedophile, and Daredevil ended up as the defense atty. When an angry mob comes to lynch the defendent, the two superheroes end up arguing about the rule of law and the right to due process as Spiderman has to to decide whether to beat up on the same people he’s spent his career protecting.)
Hell, the entire X-men series has been about minority rights in the face of societal fear and prejudice–just that the minority happened to have super powers instead of dark skin.
And apparantly Hube never see any of the old Super Friends cartoons on Saturday morning (during the Wendy and Marvin era)? Pretty much every single plot was “some aliens polluted their planet beyond livability and have come to take over Earth”. The resolution was always the Justice League fixing up the aliens’ planet, the aliens promising never to do it again, and everyone gravely hoping Earth learns its lesson before it’s too late. (I guess this was before environmentalism was branded a commie plot.)
As for the overall condemnation of comic books as kiddie fodder, comic books are just a medium, like TV and music. There’s a lot of crap TV and music around, and there are eras where it seems like all TV and music are crap. That doesn’t mean that there is no TV worth watching or no music worth listening to.
Boo hoo! I didn’t mean to write that sentence I wrote!
Then I guess the answer is yes, two whole sentences was a bit too much for you to grasp.
Welcome Tom! You’ll have a fun time here.
I’ve been coming here for years.
Tom: Note the phrase “anybody’s imaginings.”
And while “defending the status quo” was true in the ’40s & ’50s, it no longer really applies.
I know.
“What Might A Conservative Comic Book Look Like?”
Wingnut comic book fans really are a fickle bunch, aren’t they? How soon they forget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberality_for_All
“Tom: Note the phrase “anybody’s imaginings.””
I did. Note that I wasn’t talking about anyone’s “imaginings,” I was talking about the underlying philosophy of superhero comics, which is anarchy in defense of the status quo.
“And while “defending the status quo” was true in the ’40s & ’50s, it no longer really applies.”
Sure it does. I’ve been reading comics on and off since 1972 and the superhero genre hasn’t really fundamentally changed in that time. Bruce Wayne doesn’t combat crime by looking at its societal, cultural, and economic causes; he fights crime by going out and hitting it in the face. Attacking the root causes of crime would mean attacking the status quo and he simply doesn’t do it.
Superman doesn’t end poverty and famine, nor does he interfere with any world governments or get involved in wars or military actions. He ignores all of that and fights robots and mad scientists.
These actions (or lack of them) might not qualitfy as “defending” the status quo, but they sure as hell ensure that it’s upheld.
“I know.”
No you don’t.
The creepiness and conceit that drove hannity to make himself a comic hero defies description
The creepiness and conceit that drove hannity to make himself a comic hero defies description.
It’s every cartoon character’s dream to be a comic hero.
From the William Moulton Marston link at 23:24…
If only Chamberlain had offered this to Hitler when they met at Munich, World War II could have been avoided.
Remember the older James Bond stories, the ones where the wealthy industrialists were the villains intent on taking over the world, well the bad guys have won.
Charles Stross has a hilarious essay about this subject in the afterword of The Jennifer Morgue.
Historically comic books have always been left-of-center.
A lot of the early superhero comics were written and drawn by children of Jewish immigrants living in New York City, and reflect the values of a minority population living in a cosmopolitan community. The book Up, Up and Oy Vey delves into this topic in engaging fashion.
Sure, and that’s Superman and Batman and the sort of thing they’ve done for decades. There was some silly crossover once in which the Marvel superheroes met the DC superheroes and got a peek at each others’ worlds and the former essentially called the latter authoritarian monsters and the latter accused the former of letting everything go to hell.
There aren’t many underwear guys attacking the root cause of poverty because there’s less punching in it and politics is fairly boring in a comic, but there are differences in the way the characters interact with what their writers and artists are willing to draw of “the world”, the rebellious outlaw superhero being a Marvel staple.
Even *I* know this, who knows almost nothing about comics. (I did read X-men forty years ago.) Minority rights / societal prejudice was the backbone theme in X-men even in the distant past. Probably had something to do with why I read it, and didn’t give a shit about Captain America.)
((Dorothy: I only pulled out one sentence of your comment; I enjoyed all of it, especially the final paragraph!))
“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound.”
–“If only Chamberlain had offered this to Hitler when they met at Munich, World War II could have been avoided.”
Ah, but Hitler wasn’t full of wholesome pep, he was full of amphetamines.
I’m embarrassed to say that I liked this and also this while in college. To give the latter site props it does mock this
From the link at 0:29…
Damn, I love wingnuts.
There’s always comic books based on Objectivism (I mean those apart from the works Rand herself penned):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._A
A re-imagining of Candide, in other words — in which Dr Pangloss is the central character, and has superpowers, which he never uses, for fear of disrupting the level playing fields of the market economy.
“Sure, and that’s Superman and Batman and the sort of thing they’ve done for decades.”
It’s the sort of thing ALL superhero comics have done for decades. Switch out “Daredevil” for Batman and “Thor” for Superman. It doesn’t really change.
“There aren’t many underwear guys attacking the root cause of poverty because there’s less punching in it and politics is fairly boring in a comic, ”
Yes, that was essentially my point; to put paid to the erroneous idea that superhero comics are either conservative or liberal. They’re neither, because the genre doesn’t support real-world political views. It has no place for them in the wholly unrealistic worlds it creates.
Nymstrad: Thanks for the link!! Wiki provides the premise and plotline:
The series was cancelled after three issues.
((Nymstrad’s link is the perfect example of what I find addictive in Sadlyville: I never would have encountered this comic or storyline in the course of my usual web interests.))
If only Chamberlain had offered this to Hitler when they met at Munich
Wilt dominated from the low post.
what you might find is the protagonist mentioning something like how statistically safe drilling for oil is, how important oil is to mankind, what technological marvels modern oil platforms are or how well the platform’s damage control team responded to the unusual crisis. (Complimenting the damage control team would reflect positively on the company they work for and imply that the company is a responsible one…
Wow, does THAT sounds exciting! Youse conservative guys should TOTALLY fund this baby.
No.
But switch out Wolverine for Batman and Deadpool for Superman and it does. All is just too strong.
But that’s a misunderstanding of all of art: it’s not that a world needs to be realistic, but that a theme resonates. It’s like saying no science fiction can ever have political content because warp drive is impossible.
set out to thwart Ambassador Usama bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City.” (taken from official website)
The series was cancelled after three issues.
But people LOVE zombies! Shit, Zombie Ambassador should have his own damn comic.
I am sure conservative comics are just as good as christian rock.
But people LOVE zombies! Shit, Zombie Ambassador should have his own damn comic.
Where is Zombie Rotten McDonald when Sadlyville really needs him?
That is what the Kasco Komix example served for: on the one hand comics about how benevolent corporations, in their beautiful market-driven glory, are creating a better future for all of us (us white people (who deserve it)) are Politically Correct, and thus pass by the wilting lilies of the would-be Censor for Public Morals.
On the other hand they are unbelievably fucking boring.
Even when they are handed an intrinsically interesting topic like a war or a murder, they tend to wring all the fun out of it by making it a one-sided story of complete depravity – oh no! – being completely eradicated by total heroes – hooray! – and those heroes are us, without any reform or self-interrogation – double hooray!
Zzz.
Also: robo-Hannity but no robo-Ole Perfesser? He haz a sad.
I want a comic where bio-mechanically enhanced versions of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, and Che Guevara take on the radioactive Lord C’Heney from Planet Dick.
Are we talking reality or comics?
They exist in reality?
I don’t get why nerds get so angry when people mock the extremities of their lifestyle.
Some people seem to be incapable of moving past high school.
“It is 2021, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. America is under oppression by ultra-liberal extremists who have surrendered governing authority to the United Nations. Hate speech legislation called the “Coulter Laws” have forced vocal conservatives underground. A group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and a young man born on September 11, 2001, set out to thwart Ambassador Usama bin Laden’s plans to nuke New York City.” (taken from official website)
However in real life, we couldn’t afford to wait for either the year 2021 or for talk-radio wingnuts to acquire superpowers.
Therefore it fell upon the “ultra-liberal extremist” Obama to dispatch UBL (or OBL, as the American non-Fox media refers to him)
Kasco Komix example
[Alec’s link at 20:12] I read the whole thing.
they are unbelievably fucking boring.
Well, I enjoyed the part where everybody dressed up in pinstripe clothes made from old feed bags. Re-use and Re-cycle, say I.
Agree 100%. I’m especially brutal with nerd hobbyhorses and nerd self-congratulation and little totems of nerd oppression because I’m capable of accepting the fundamental sillness of myself and what I do for fun, and it’s queasy-making to have someone presume to speak for you and then say horrific, stupid things.
Because I love Stephen Bond like my own precious bald Irish baby, I will just link to his two brief essay treatments of this subject.
Also worth reading: Bond on Tolkien and Peter Jackson. I trust you all to look up “Epic Pooh” on your own.
That is what the Kasco Komix example served for: on the one hand comics about how benevolent corporations, in their beautiful market-driven glory, are creating a better future for all of us (us white people (who deserve it)) are Politically Correct, and thus pass by the wilting lilies of the would-be Censor for Public Morals.
I’m reminded of the three “capitalist cartoons” Warner Brothers produced that were underwritten by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Yankee Dood It, By Word of Mouse and Heir-Conditioned). They’re… odd. You can watch Yankee Dood it here.
The free market guarantees the right to become a robot:
In his house at R’lyeh, no pulse C’Heney waits dreaming…
I want a comic where bio-mechanically enhanced versions of Eleanor Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, and Che Guevara take on the radioactive Lord C’Heney from Planet Dick.
This is what I’m going to think of instead of Jesus or England.
Also, a better example of what I was trying to illustrate with the Kasco comics – which, to their credit, are less tendentious than they are asinine – is this piece of shit, which is like if Riefenstahl had contracted “Triumph of the Will” out to Andy Warhol.
“But switch out Wolverine for Batman and Deadpool for Superman and it does. ”
It really doesn’t. I’d ask you to expound on this, but it’ll just be a waste of time.
Case in point:
“But that’s a misunderstanding of all of art: it’s not that a world needs to be realistic, but that a theme resonates. It’s like saying no science fiction can ever have political content because warp drive is impossible.”
Just like I never said anything about the “imaginings” of the readership, so too did I not say anything that even comes close to “a world needs to be realistic.” Like, not even on the same continent as it. And this:
“It’s like saying no science fiction can ever have political content because warp drive is impossible.”
Is so far off base from anything I’ve said that I have to assume you either have a traumatic brain injury or English is your 5th language. It’s not about what the genre CAN do; it’s about what the genre DOES and ALWAYS HAS DONE.
It was “good” talking to you.
The right to a touchscreen is the most fundamental right, as touchscreens are going to make it possible to spend money on living forever cuz Moore’s Law. What are you, against human life?? Statist!
Reynolds’ Universal Robots: we can heh-indeed it for you wholesale.
(Also I would be remiss as a fucking fanboy if once the topic of libertarianism making you a roboid came up I didn’t plug Adam Curtis – “Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace” makes that and weirder connections.)
You too Tom!
Glenn Reynold’s modified Laws of Robotics:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence
as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.I’d ask you to expound on this, but it’ll just be a waste of time.
I am going to use that when I argue with my wife.
Superheroes are rather inescapably required to protect and defend the weak from predation by the strong. It’s really hard to make a comic about a super “hero” defending billionaires from consumer lawsuits or from hippies waving signs outside the ground floor lobbies of their well protected corporate headquarters. Moral issues aside, it really lacks the pathos needed for an entertaining story.
Right wing interests, as a rule, need no protection because they are the strong seeking to prey on those weaker. I suppose if you want to have a comic about a hero fighting the Venezuelan government as it nationalized the oil industry, you could find a way for a superhero to defend weak right wing characters from being victimized by powerful left wing foes, but it gets pretty absurd, pretty quickly.
The Punisher occurs to me as an exception, but still the essentials of hero-dom seem to me to be more amenable to left wing politics.
A group of bio-mechanically enhanced conservatives led by Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, and a young man born on September 11, 2001
Okay, this is totally not fair if you don’t let Glenn Reynolds play!
Wow, does THAT sounds exciting! Youse conservative guys should TOTALLY fund this baby.
They do seem to eat up those seventy-odd page harangues.
Salvation, though, usually occurs through violence to lawbreakers.
The classic way around this, in superhero comix, is to make the comic exclusively about powerful men beating up one another, then identify the ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ with classic wingnutty totems: Law and Order versus Chaos in the case of Batman; Truth, Justice, and the American Way versus Degenerate Eggheadery in the case of Superman; Patriotic Spiders versus Knob Goblins in the case of Green Lantern, etc.
It’s an unfair opinion but I sort of feel like a super-heavy focus on print comics sort of murders your perspective, because you’re following a moribund industry dominated by rich old white hetero man producers and rich middle-aged white hetero man consumers, and that gives you a false impression of how much the bastards in power can do to maintain complete dominion over all things. It’s an interminable slog towards the barest modicum of progress; alternative media have long since left DC/Marvel/etc behind in terms of inclusion and are now increasingly irrelevant to the culture at large.
In much the same way people whose only news source is The Politico* may genuinely come to believe that what’s missing from this election is a centrist, moderate, sensible choice between the extremists Barack Obama and John Huntsman – let’s say Bloomberg, because The Politico always does – people whose only comix are mainstream print comix have an annoying tendency to make the tiniest, most glacially slow gestures towards the outside world and imagine they are being radical somehow.
A perfect example is the recent Womanthology, which is predicated on the idea that women are a tiny, weakly-represented bloc in comics… which is true only in the reactionary, crumbling print comics world. Of about a dozen webcomics people I like enough to name off the top of my head more than six are women. (And fewer than six are white Americans.) The logic of tokenism becomes insulting when there are enough representatives of a category in the public eye that you could separately anthologize good, bad, and mediocre members of that category, yet anthologize them all more or less equally and at random.
TL, DR: don’t let DC or Marvel hold your view of the world hostage. Nobody who matters in the world of art & culture is anywhere close to as narrow-minded and stupid as they get away with being.
* – use of ‘The Politico’ is an obscure insult of provenance similar to “Simon Le Cowell”; the gag is fundamentally that their name is like baby talk in that a syllable here or there doesn’t matter, with a dash of pretension thrown in.
Related:
http://www.letsbefriendsagain.com/2012/01/09/yes-more/
In one of his comic blog posts, Hube refers to Frank Miller as being “grounded in reality” (as opposed to Alan Moore). Uh-huh.
Also, no shame in liking elfquest back in the day when it was all about the killing and elf orgies before the killing.
Reynolds’ Universal Robots: we can heh-indeed it for you wholesale.
From the same author as War with the Newt.
Sure it does. I’ve been reading comics on and off since 1972 and the superhero genre hasn’t really fundamentally changed in that time. Bruce Wayne doesn’t combat crime by looking at its societal, cultural, and economic causes; he fights crime by going out and hitting it in the face. Attacking the root causes of crime would mean attacking the status quo and he simply doesn’t do it.
The Nolan movies kind of touch on how the Batman gig can backfire, actually. Gordon mentions his fear of escalation at the end of Batman Begins. You see that played out in The Dark Knight, when Batman/Gordon/Dent’s war against the old-school mob corrupting Gotham… ends up just making room for the even worse “freaks” like the Joker and Two-Face. Meanwhile, Gotham’s problems aren’t getting solved, and Catwoman’s lines in the new Batman trailer imply that a lot of people are pissed at the status quo.
I doubt if they’ll explore that stuff to the extent that I want, because at the end of the day they’re just movies, and explosions sell better than deep social commentary. Still, there’s some good stuff in there even for the social-justice/violence-doesn’t-solve-everything crowd (e.g. us), in my opinion.
Does Superman ever keep the bank from being robbed any more?
Oh, also,
Remember the older James Bond stories, the ones where the wealthy industrialists were the villains intent on taking over the world, well the bad guys have won.
… that, again, is something the latest Bond (Quantum of Solace) actually touched on very blatantly, since you basically have the British and American governments doing the bad guys’ bidding and M and Bond trying to fight it all by themselves. But again, I doubt they’ll follow that all the way through, especially given how much criticism was thrown at QOS. More’s the pity.
I assume you mean that DC and Marvel are irrelevant.
To which I must say SPIDER-MAN BROADWAY MUSICAL!
Even *I* know this, who knows almost nothing about comics. (I did read X-men forty years ago.) Minority rights / societal prejudice was the backbone theme in X-men even in the distant past. Probably had something to do with why I read it, and didn’t give a shit about Captain America.)
Same here. I ignored comic books and comic book movies for the longest time until in high school, I happened upon the 2000 X-Men movie and picked up on the themes immediately. I was like “hey… this is actually some really good stuff!”
And got slowly pulled into the Marvelverse that way. There’s some good stuff elsewhere too, including in Captain America, but X-Men remains my fave by far because of said themes. It just feels way more adult (a relative term, I know, but still) than the Avengers and the rest.
This discussion seems to rely on hero vs. villain being the only conflict in superhero comics.
What about hero vs. hero, which is becoming ever more common? The majority of Marvel’s recent event comics have been based around that theme, from Civil War to the current Avenger’s Vs. X-Men. I’m not really a fan of Marvel books that aren’t Agents of Atlas or feature Squirrel Girl, but there you go.
What about series that take place from the villains’ point of view, like Gail Simone’s Secret Six or Paul Cornell’s run on Action Comics that had Lex Luthor as the main character? Both of those are great, by the way. DC cancelling Secret Six to make way for the absolutely dreadful (by all appearances – I haven’t read it myself) Suicide Squad really pissed me off.
On the one hand yes. On the other hand there ain’t no party like a run-on party cause a run-on party don’t
Point cheerfully withdrawn!
(Alternate punchline: pronounce as if Yiddish name, kvetch about power and responsibility to jazzy up-tempo acapella, always with the power and the responsibility, tradition! etc etc etc.)
There used to be a Joker comic in which he killed a bunch of people, and that was, I think, before the Comics Code died.
But the payoff is always punching.
UNTRUE. There is sometimes zapping.
Only in my dreams does Superman use his SuperFarts to blast villains into space.
There used to be a Joker comic in which he killed a bunch of people, and that was, I think, before the Comics Code died.
A lot of the CC-era Joker stories had a lot of killing.
What about series that take place from the villains’ point of view
Not a comic, but along those same lines. I picked this up for $2.99 on my Kindle and found it extremely entertaining:
http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-D-List-Supervillain-ebook/dp/B004WE0D3E
…in beautiful dreams.
Not really. The current run on Action Comics has brought Superman back to his roots as a social crusader. Issue 1 started off with Superman forcing a public confession out of a corrupt slum-lord. That fails to accomplish much, but the comic is a young, inexperienced Clark.
The first few issues are about Superman vs. the police, military and Luthor (who’s working for them). It seems to be heading into using the alien computer-being Brainiac as the villain of the story arc, but I’m not sure what the take on him will be. The book seems to be retconning him into having being made on krypton, the way he was in the Animated Series. Not sure what he represents in the story as of yet.
I’m rambling.
That would be awesome. Naturally right-wing science-fiction authors have pursued this angle, though from a more boobular perspective.
What about series that take place from the villains’ point of view
Isn’t that what Wanted was?
Reminds me of “The Iron Dream”, which reminds me of my favorite fandom anecdote: Norman Spinrad getting letters to his dying day about why he had to ruin his cracking fantasy yarn with all this Nazi bullshit.
Oh, the original post bothers me for another reason.
It confuses Batwoman with Batgirl. Barbara Gordon didn’t even exist when that comic was made. The Bat-Girl at the time was Betty Kane.
Oh, the current Batwoman comic is really great. Batwoman is a lesbian who was expelled from the military due to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It also had some of the best art in comics right now. Highly recommended.
Superman hasn’t really dealt with street crime since the Man of Steel reboot, right? That was when Lex Luthor stopped being a regular super-villain and became an evil industrialist (with a stint as President of the US to boot).
With the new 52, I have no idea but I really don’t care. I thought things were fine before the latest shake-up.
This, I think, is where I’m a Luddite: it’s rare that I like modern colouring. I think it’s only got to do with age. I look back at the things that I enjoy with one colour per blacked-in border and it looks bizarre, but I still want it.
What is that? A Fourth World sex toy?
Also: robo-Hannity but no robo-Ole Perfesser? He haz a sad.
Nah, the Ole Perfesser is cool with it, because robo-Hannity has a fuckable butt.
a fuckable butt.
All boats are submersible; some come back up again.
Probably. I forget where I snagged it, but it was in some Kirby thing.
Yeah, New Gods, because I grabbed this one around the same time.
Only in my dreams does Superman use his SuperFarts to blast villains into space.
You’ll love the debut of Bonnacon at Comicon.
What about series that take place from the villains’ point of view
The Dr. Impossible sections of Soon I Will Be Invincible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_I_Will_Be_Invincible
Norman Spinrad getting letters to his dying day about why he had to ruin his cracking fantasy yarn with all this Nazi bullshit.
He’s not dead yet.
He’s not dead yet.
He doesn’t want to go on the cart.
Well played, Nym!
He’s not dead yet.
I still have time to write my letter! Woohoo!
SOCIALISM!
In a properly written conservative comic book, Superman would have held a press conference where he mentioned how statistically safe slum dwellings are, how important rent gouging is for mankind, and how efficiently slumlords respond to complaints from their ungrateful and unproductive tenants.
I still have time to write my letter! Woohoo!
I feel terribly remiss because I have yet to read The Iron Dream.
Reading the comic book.
Closing tag
I haven’t read it yet either but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.
In a properly written conservative comic book, Superman would have held a press conference where he mentioned how statistically safe slum dwellings are, how important rent gouging is for mankind, and how efficiently slumlords respond to complaints from their ungrateful and unproductive tenants.
It’s a nerd! It’s a pain! No, it’s Stosselman!
Closing tag
Well hello there, sailor.
“I give them my money — and they continually spit in my face.”
Honey, I know you are disappointed, but you have to pay extra for “the golden shower”…
Back in my pre-teen days I read everything from “Little Lulu” to “Archie” and then later on through “X-Men” and “Avengers,” whatever we acquired in our rural, tightly-rationed world. I retained two things from it.
1. Storytelling is a worthy art.
2. It must be great to be able to draw realistically.
Anybody trying to propagandize me failed miserably.
The liberalism of a superhero pretty much depends on the liberalism of the author writing them. Wonder Woman written by Greg Rucka had her as an ambassador for Themiscyra and trying to promote their cultural views on war and social equality as equally important to her saving the world from supervillain duties. Catwoman by Ed Brubaker had her fighting for the social improvement of the worst section of Gotham and had her sticking up for the folks falling through the cracks and economic injustices. And so on. During the Dark Ages when everything was “dark and gritty” the heroes were more full-on wingnut and talking about how crime was inherent in the dusky populations and what not and maybe killing a few people would fix stuff.
Overall, I think superheroes tend towards status quo because that’s just easier to write. No one wants to kill off or shut away forever the “cool villains” that make heroes great, so in superhero world, prisons are about as useless as wingnut sex drives. Similarly there’s no big change to the society, because that could get rid of the setting people loved. It’s harder to portray visually (at least in an exciting manner) a battle of social injustice or economic injustice, so it becomes easier to just have the hero beat up the standard bank robbers, purse-snatchers, or alleyway rapist and thus unfortunately reinforce the idea that those are the worst crimes out there.
In short, our heroes are only as good as the people writing them. And nowhere is this more clear than if you like following superheroines, because then whether or not a series is even readable entirely depends on whether or not the writer is actually good or some sexist pile of trash who thinks the heroine should be their canvas for all their issues about women.
. It must be great to be able to draw realistically.
Hence Rob Liefeld.
Oh wait…
Marvel asked that sickening bigot Orson Scott Card to write a couple of Iron Man mini-series, long after Card had established himself as virulent, active homophobe (Card is currently a board member of the despicable National Organization for Marriage). It’s doubtful Marvel would have asked anyone with a similar record of promoting racism or anti-Semitism to write anything for their company, but they had no problem handing a gig over to an anti-gay blowhard.
So there’s one right-wing comic writer, right there.
“Superheroes are rather inescapably required to protect and defend the weak from predation by the strong. It’s really hard to make a comic about a super ‘hero’ defending billionaires from consumer lawsuits or from hippies waving signs outside the ground floor lobbies of their well protected corporate headquarters. Moral issues aside, it really lacks the pathos needed for an entertaining story.”–The Tragically Flip
All true and well put so far as it goes. But propagandists have found ways around these problems. Selectivity and emphasis are key.
“The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” makes him out to be an underdog hero following orders and fighting armed aggressors (“we responded to their rifle fire …”) et cetera. The awful truth of My Lai is absent, but its intended audience found pathos in abundance.
Native Americans were, in retrospect, clear underdogs in the course of U.S. territorial expansion. Propaganda therefore had to focus, say, on a vulnerable white family trying to mind their own business on the frontier, suddenly outnumbered by savages intent on scalping and raping innocents. The larger truths about the balance of power and the validity of moral claims scarcely entered into it.
A right wing superhero, therefore, should not be shown assisting the powerful. He should be shown defending the weak, or himself. To conservatives, (some of) the powerful are misunderstood heroes in their own right. One didn’t defend Hitler by joining the S.S., one defended grandma, schnitzel, home and so on.
…We’re men, we’re men in tights.
We roam around the forest looking for fights…
I enjoyed Roxxon. In a few issues of, what, X-Men or something, they recognize that other dimensions=more oil.
Seen on yeh interducks: Newt Gingrich’s family values – use children from first wife to convince people your second wife is lying about your third wife.
How about Mark Waid’s mi–sorry, “limited series” Empire? It was the story of what happens after a super-villain disposes of all his enemies and becomes the ruler of the world.
Oh, btw, I simply love Batman’s goofy little smile in the illustration. In both versions of the image, that smile seems to be saying “blowjobs on demand for the rest of my life!”.
It’s so darned… happy.
Great Caesar’s ghost! I might as well be Lost in the Andes trekking through this thread.
Newt Gingrich’s family values – use children from first wife to convince people your second wife is lying about your third wife.
I can’t believe the kids went along with that… but, then again, we’re living in a post-shame society.
Oh, btw, I simply love Batman’s goofy little smile in the illustration.
a.m.e.l! something tells me that you will love Superdickery– don’t read any of it while you are in situations where loud guffawing will disturb others, or interfere with your breathing.
Okay. Against my better judgment, I hopped out of the boat.
Has he read “Superman: Red Son”? The entire thing’s a deconstruction, not just of superheroes but of communism and similar utopian/authoritarian ideologies as well. It’d be ridiculously easy to fit that into a conservative worldview denouncing liberal “social engineering” and liberal elitism and big gubmint and the like.
Um.
Dude.
Those North Korean Muslims?
They were the bad guys.
Yeah… Whatisnuts is complaining that a comic book is anti-American because it features heavily caricatured enemies of America, spouting anti-American rhetoric, as the bad guys. Next he’ll be saying Star Wars promotes genocide because Darth Vader blew up a planet.
You’re complaining because the government was portrayed as the bad guys and the brave militias who didn’t want to have to answer to any big gubmint authority were portrayed as the good guys?
Damn. You’re… not like other conservatives at all, are you?
Thanks for the link, B4!
Two mangoes that seemed ripe (but not over-ripe, for once) for plucking:*
Now granted I haven’t bought comics since my teens, but this is the impression I’ve been getting from tvtropes: the loonies are running the asylum and quality has nosedived accordingly. That plus “There’s a recession, numbnuts” would seem to explain declining circulation better than any alleged librull bias. And the second:
That one kind of says it all to me: “Who gives a fuck about the motivations of the hero and the villain? Bring on the senseless carnage!”
*Are mangoes plucked? Am I mixing metaphors? Is my malaria flaring up? I… I don’t know. 🙁
Bond on Tolkien
Absolute rubbish.
Yeah… Whatisnuts is complaining that a comic book is anti-American because it features heavily caricatured enemies of America, spouting anti-American rhetoric, as the bad guys.
But… but… the author is an avowed leftist from way back!!! The anti-Americanism is axiomatic.
Thanks for the link, B4!
I live to serve! Warning, you may be laughing so hard that breathing becomes difficult.
The comics-luvin’ folks must have read this, right?
This is what I’m going to think of instead of Jesus or England.
I would like to take this comment, all bundled up, on a sleigh ride through a winter landscape.
The Dr. Impossible sections of Soon I Will Be Invincible
Why do I always tell them my plan?
I know I’m late to the discussion of Wertham, but I think he has gotten a bad rap in some respects. Some of what he says about the comics depicting sexualized violence and racist portrayals of non-white characters would not sound out of place in any modern, leftist critique of comics. Even the Batman/Robin stuff, when you consider the age difference between the characters, wasn’t so much about homophobia as pedophilia. And he didn’t call for censorship, at least not in Seduction of the Innocent. He just thought comics should have a rating system, like movies, so adult content would be limited to adults.
Now, some of what he said, like his attempt to “prove” that comics cause delinquency…well, that was pretty awful. He wasn’t a hero, but I’m not sure he’s all that much of a villain.
That “anonymous” was me. I forgot that my iPad doesn’t know my secret identity.
That “anonymous” was me. I forgot that my iPad doesn’t know my secret identity.
What about your youthful ward?
True story: China in Ten Words (in addition to being a great book in general, and painting a really weird and idiosyncratic picture of modern China) actually features a story exactly like this. The author recalls running afoul of a hack playwright when he was first trying to be an author: the playwright was something of a big deal locally, and generously read his juvenile play. Lots of juicy executions, about what you’d expect from a clever teenaged boy in rural China in 1970.
This guy generously edited his play – scribbling little red notes in the margins of his book. (The author returned the favor – which, needless to say, made the little big playwright furious.) He relates this because in the topsy-turvy world of Chinese literature, it actually represented a serious brush with proscription and even death.
This playwright’s stock in trade, you see, were incredibly hackish villainous tirades. The evil feudal landlords/bureaucrats would sometimes literally stroke their moustaches and deliver vicious, cackling declarations about how they loved to rob the honest peasants, and every second word in the villains’ mouths was a swear word because (a) Chinese society is kind of prudish and (b) that’s how you know they’re the bad guys.
Even at the time, the future author found this ridiculous, but it at least represented a certain level of plodding medieval dedication to perspective. As it turned out, not everyone shared this. Eventually, this dogmatic little man’s plays were discovered by some Cultural Revolution watchdogs, and he was brought in before some judge, who asked him very angrily why he had written plays where people said such things about workers and peasants and why there were so many profanities, and so on.
Even the fact that these plays, as soon as night follows day, rewarded these Maoist stock villains with defeat and death in uprisings and so on, he was labelled as a capitalist roader and had to stand around in struggle sessions being shouted at by children and gadabouts with a sign around his neck declaring him a reactionary propagandist.
The whole time, he looked very ashamed of himself.
Would you care to venture a basis? Gonna be frank here: I’ve never met anyone who didn’t read Tolkien at around the same age and form around the same opinions of him (wise! grown-up! serious! Literature!), and then reassess him in exactly the same way (hey, these characters are kind of wooden! The Hobbit thinks really little of my intelligence!) after reading him after wading through a thousand pages of anything more adult.
He is more charitable to Tolkien than Moorcock, though, so if that’s enough to piss you off maybe “Epic Pooh” isn’t exactly for you?
This is what it always comes down to: the counterargument to “bad culture erodes the fabric of society” is generally not “it doesn’t, and here is why”, but “there’s no such thing as society”.
It is kind of funny nobody talks up the horrifying racism aspect of Seduction, and by ‘funny’ I mean horrible, as usual.
It’s a nerd! It’s a pain! No, it’s Stosselman!
Wit. Nymstrad haz it.
I would like to take this comment, all bundled up, on a sleigh ride through a winter landscape.
Watch yer wives, boys. We got one a them there smooth talkin’ La-TEEN-o types.
Oh Lordy, I knew as soon as I read the words
that this thread would quickly dissolve into an interminably dull discussion of same, interspersed with defensive comments like “Hey, I read comic books, what are you trying to say?”. Comic book readers are convinced they’re the most oppressed minority on earth, and throw around the term “nerd” with the same defiance wingnuts say “Merry Christmas”, like “nerd” carries some stigma anymore, and they’re totally up against world opinion. And then they proceed to dominate every fucking thread in the history of the internet.
On the “Seduction of the Innocent” tip, I was born in ’84, so I was reading comics, and reading about comics, before the internet really got big and before DC and Marvel started furiously reprinting their golden age material.
Additionally, Seduction of the Innocent was and apparently still is a fairly rare book. Amazon has a 2004 addition for around $50, and there are no copies in the libraries of my town, community college or regular college.
So for a long time comic book history was second-hand; everything most people would hear about Wertham and the stuff he crusaded against was filtered through some historian.
My perception of the “Golden Age” of comics completely turned around once golden age material became easier to get, and I suddenly discovered that most of what was published in the golden age was utter shit. I’m not talking about golden age comics not being as good as Maus, the vast majority of golden age comics are crap even when compared to the goofy nonsense that got published in the silver age. In art, storytelling, everything.
That said, I’m mostly talking superhero stuff; I’m not too terribly familiar with, say, horror comics.
Anyway, I think it might not be a coincidence that Wertham is being somewhat rehabilitated in the comics world at the same time golden age material has become more accessible. When you’ve actually read golden age Batman it’s kind of hard to see why you wouldn’t write a book complaining about him.
I know, right? You write a blog post entirely about comic books and all of a sudden a bunch of nerds take that as some sort of invitation to talk about comic books.
Let’s just not get into nerds’ relationship to the hideously obvious and its close cousin, the stupefyingly counterintuitive. That would only lead to open-source boobs and A equalling A, and from there it’s just a matter of time until you’re dry-humping a Big-Mouth Billy Bass modified with a bootleg UB40 cassette.
And that’s terrible.
I would like to take this comment, all bundled up, on a sleigh ride through a winter landscape.
My mental google-image search is not returning anything specifically sleigh-ride-related so I hope this will suffice.
So, not a word about the GODDAMN GIANTS, huh? You people disgust me.
Don’t worry, I gotcha covered.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
etc.
And then they proceed to dominate every fucking thread in the history of the internet.
In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet is pretty much comic books writ very large.
Well, you’ve never met me. I seem to fall outside the parameters of your sweeping generalizations.
In 1967, I first read Lord of The Rings in college; Fellowship was on the reading list in an Honors Lit class. LoTR is–to use a snippy characterization–wise, grown-up, serious literature. But, shit ,what do I know with a fancy-schmanzy BA in Fiction Writing and an MFA (Fiction). I read The Lord of The Rings at least once every year, and often more. Each time I read it, I discover something new.
No, not particularly. I don’t want to get into a pissing-contest about Tolkien’s skill as a craftsman or literary value. Please resume the discussion about comics, about which you clearly DO have far more knowledge than I.
In re comics: I know exactly jack and shit about comics. My area of specialty is people-watching and alls I know is that superhero comics are so dominated by horrible anoraks people customarily step on eggshells for fear of upsetting their privileged little apple-cart. Even in a room presumed to be at least a little on the liberal side you can get whiplash following the political barometer from any other topic to comix: all of a sudden a room that would not brook a word against the basic goals of affirmative action isn’t sure if a black man qualifies to be a bit player in a Zack Snyder movie. That’s the aspect that interests me, if I’m honest. I could give a shit less about Thor.
In re pissing: Gotta say that I didn’t start the pissing here. I linked, you pissed, I inquired, you declared it a pissing match. I cannot step to your hose and will not try. I am willing to concede that “I like them in a way I feel is mature and literary” is an all right counterargument for you personally against the claim that JRRT wrote children’s books (Bond) or corrosive reactionary mouth-music (Moorcock). It’s less universally applicable and in fact basically a more elaborate version of “rubbish!” for everyone reading it.
I’m afraid I lack the intelligence to reread The Lord of the Rings every year and the qualification to find rereading it every year rewarding. The fact that I found it an incredible slog the second time around and would not consent to a third for money perhaps explains my failure to get through college and get more knowledge. I’m sure you know what my trip to Jupiter was for.
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
.So, not a word about the GODDAMN GIANTS, huh?
Why? Thor kicks their ass in every comic book arc so its hardly worth talking about losers.
Great Caesar’s ghost! I might as well be Lost in the Andes trekking through this thread.
Consider me a fellow traveler, the exception being that I did really get into the Watchmen shortly after episode 5 came out and after racing through those, found myself in waiting anguish for each installment that followed.
I really wish I still had them.
I have enjoyed reading the thread though not aware of how many comic nerds we had in our midst.
I think a Ham Radio thread would die a quick and merciful death though I would be all over that like a cheep suit.
.
Thanks to whoever dropped the super dickery link, it is bookmarked for future perusal.
.
Except that the post isn’t about comic books. It’s about how the wingnuts have to view everything through the lens of politics.
actor212 said,
January 23, 2012 at 12:30
Thor? I’m tho thor I can hardly thit down!!
Theriously, what’s the opposite of schadenfreude? ‘Cause that’s what I’m feeling over here………………
East Coast Super Bowl, Bitcheezzzzz!!1111!!!
Also, 2008 repeat?? Bookmark it!!11!!111!11!1!11!1!
Interesting
Except that the post isn’t about comic books. It’s about how the wingnuts have to view everything through the lens of politics.
Comic book heroes know how to deal with troublemakers like you. Bang! Zoom! Right in the kisser! To the moon, VS!
Interesting
His older sister was a middle school class mate and friend of mine. We ended up at different high schools. Ran into her during the summer betwixt Junior and Senior year at a camp consisting of the (generally speaking) brighter kids from both high schools. She was still wicked smart, but had managed to blossom into a gorgeous young lady. I did not have a clue about how to deal with the combination at the time so I set about organizing a group of blokes into a band of pirates, though we did no raping or pillaging, or anything much pirate like save sport bandanas on our heads in the pirate fashion and carry on like the smartasses we happened to be.
Misty golden memories.
Josh was a few years behind us so I never got a chance to know him though I have taken in a couple of his shows one of the benefits of growing up and living in a town with a World class music school.
.
Oh and VS the loving owls are adorable, still have that tab up when I need a fix of the cute.
.
52 degrees in Ohio in January is certainly nice, but there’s something inherently wrong about it.
I’m pretty sure we broke the planet.
Regarding who’s “ruining comics”: Grant Morrison and Gail Simone are liberal. Frank Miller and Rob Liefeld are conservative. Draw your own conclusions.
Frank Miller and Rob Liefeld are conservative. Draw your own conclusions.
My conclusion: 50% of conservatives can’t draw for shit.
I’m pretty sure we broke the planet.
Yep! It’s showing 51 degrees in south central Indiana during a time of the year that we should be flirting with the teens, or aughts even.
What with the methane releases from the melting of the permafrost we may be quickly approaching the tipping point. On the other hand solar scientists suspect the possibility that we are headed for another Maunder minimum which coincided with a portion of the little ice age (causality not firmly established). So maybe it will all come out in the wash. Giving our corporate overlords the time they need to transition us to an abundant yet clean energy source that they can still charge us plenty for.
Thunderstorms and Tornado’s in January kinda freaky.
.
The Honeymooners were comic book characters?
“You Break It, You Buy It”
What an interesting story ProviderUNE.
Confession time: I don’t know a thing about Joshua Bell. I just found the idea of a world-class musician playing for a group of people who basically ignored him profoundly sad.
And i’m so pleased you commented on the owls–How cute are they?!
The Honeymooners were comic book characters?
Let em answer your question with a question: they were real people?
The Honeymooners were comic book characters?
If you count The Flintstones, which was pretty much an animated version of The Honeymooners.
I hope not!
Erm. I meant…your quote then… “True”
If you count The Flintstones, which was pretty much an animated version of The Honeymooners.
The Honeymooners would have been greatly improved by the presence of a pet dinosaur.
This is ground control to Major Kong….
“Earth to” comment reminded me of that song. I like that song. It’s a good song.
Relevant.
And i’m so pleased you commented on the owls–How cute are they?!
Freakin adorbs cubed, I’d say, though now I have to search for that link as I had to shut the browser down ’cause it was pegging my cpu’s.
.
There we go…….Awwwwww!
.
And i’m so pleased you commented on the owls–How cute are they?!
My cute-meter went off the scale.
It’s kind of sad that a middle aged man still
faps to Vampirellacollects comics.Let em answer your question with a question: they were real people?
Clearly, you need to spend more time in Canarsie.
It’s kind of sad that a middle aged man still faps to Vampirella
What’s so sad about that?
It’s kind of sad that a middle aged man still faps to Vampirella
Relevant
It’s kind of sad that a middle aged man still faps to Vampirella
What’s so sad about that?
Two words: Internet porn.
It’s kind of sad that a middle aged man still faps to Vampirella
Relevant
On the other hand…literally…um, could you close the door to my bunk on the way out, please? Thanks.
Rand Paul detained at airport: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71818.html
It’s an outrage!
Rand Paul detained at airport
Alert TSA agents wrestled the raccoon on his scalp to the ground…
Everything is a comic book: http://www.comiccollectorlive.com/LiveData/Issue.aspx?id=92324cbc-eeef-475d-b138-cc4b5b00f6e8
It’s an outrage!
Of course it is. He’s not brown and muslimy.
He’s not brown and muslimy.
He’s pink and slimy. Doesn’t that count for anything in this country any more?
Rand Paul detained at airport
It would be irresponsible not to speculate. So. what do you think Rand Paul was trying to smuggle onto an airplane?
So. what do you think Rand Paul was trying to smuggle onto an airplane?
A jar of his own precious bodily fluids that he’s been keeping for thirty years.
It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
I say – based entirely on speculation and without the slightest shred of evidence – his pierced PENIS set off the alarm.
So, I have a new nephew as of this weekend, and if you haven’t seen one, the model year 2012 miniature people look totally delicious. I can’t speak to the flavor because my brother took away the 20″ long hot dog bun, and jar of honey mustard I brought to the hospital, as he may have divined my intentions.
I say – based entirely on speculation and without the slightest shred of evidence – his pierced PENIS set off the alarm.
At his knee?????
I say – based entirely on speculation and without the slightest shred of evidence – his pierced PENIS set off the alarm.
It’s still considered insufficient evidence.
It’s an outrage!
Of course it is. He’s not brown and muslimy.
It turns out that he was not detained. He just was not allowed into the secure area. After he refused the pat down he was sent back into to public area of the terminal, where he bought a ticket for another flight, cleared security at another checkpoint and went on his way. So his pink and sliminess did count for something because I seriously doubt that someone who is brown and muslimy would be allowed to do that.
Helmut, congratulations, uncle. Of course, since you own the motorcycle you have many new responsibilities as the Cool Uncle. I hope you give them the serious attention they deserve.
Also, too: be careful. It’s a thin line between being the Cool Uncle and Crazy Uncle Helmut.
And, as usual, they are missing one niggling detail, at least re: Deepwater.
The damage control team got exploded.
I hate these fargin’ iceholes.
OT: Seen on Facebook:
This seems to project some anger issues.
Folks, I have found the wingnuttiest internet post ever.
However, just as the latest Jonah Goldberg post will be the stupidest thing ever written only until he writes something else, the latest John Hinderaker post will only be the wingnuttiest thing ever written until John Hinderaker publishes his next one. Still, behold:
Oh boy, we’re in for a ride! This is a long post, so I’m just going to “Shorter” Hindy’s list of of Barack Obama’s governmental encroachments into your private family life.
That’s quite a list! Here’s his verbatim conclusion:
Remember, liberals: you only oppose torture due to Bush Derangement Syndrome.
That federal government sure is ridiculously intrusive, isn’t it? I notice that things like warrantless wiretapping and TSA scans and patdowns are conspicuously absent.
Still playing leapthread to try to catch up, but,
Is one of the best nuggetst I’ve seen in forever!
Another keeper from a poster on GOS:
Yeah, tell me again how liberals are the violent ones. This makes me sick.
Warning! Graphic and disturbing!
Ken Aden’s Campaign Manager Comes Home To Find Cat Killed; “LIBERAL” Written On Its Corpse
pursuing private family matters
We are all adults here, he could just straight-out say “fapping to Vampirella”.
tell me again how liberals are the violent ones
A union thug knocked me over while preventing me from further beating his downed friend, or shall I say “comrade” lol.
Yeah, tell me again how liberals are the violent ones. This makes me sick.
For much the same reason that when an atheist speaks up to protest public displays of religious icons, or public prayers in schools, or overt discrimination against non-believers, it’s never the peace-loving Christians who end up getting death threats
A guy in the comments in Major Kong’s link:
Yeah, no kidding. Thank God they weren’t.
It makes you wonder what would have happened if the family had been at home when the attackers struck.
In my case they would find out that I’m not the gun-control kind of liberal.
The possibility exists, that the pet-murdering sickos made sure the family was out before they did their dirty work. They (oh who am I kidding, it was a dude) He was probably just psyching himself before he escalates the violence. He needs to be stopped. like now.
REAL tough guys, killing a fucking defenseless cat. I’ll bet they “discipline” their wives and children too. These are the kind of people that would shout racial epithets at a Pop Warner football game.
Fucking disgusting pieces of shit. I’m with Kong–if that shit was happening in my front yard, that motherfucker woulda had an M9 stuffed up his fucking nose.
Internet tough guy is tough on the internet.
Internet tough guy is tough on the internet.
A little lube will ease that internet right in…
300!
But Barack Obama utters bullshit like today’s Roe v. Wade proclamation, secure in the knowledge that no one will call him on it except for a few amateurs like us
Unwittingly, Hindrocket exposes some subconscious self-awareness…
What’s that? Did I enjoy my lunch of salmon slad on toasted homemade rye with fresh homemade potato chips? Yes. Oh yes I did.
The salad was good too.
It does seem like the sort of line Ed O’Neill would follow up with “Oh God!” and some weeping.
Phew! We’ve been so worried about Pupienus and his open sammich/ toast/ salad thingy.
300!
Come back with your keyboard…or on it!
Come back with your keyboard…or on it!
My keyboard fails to inflame my passion sufficiently for option two.
Ok, what’s the over-under on how long it will be before some wingnut blogger theorizes that Burris’ killed his own cat just to “make conservatives look bad”? That is, after all, the next step in the Official Wingnut Playbook.
The cat was an extremely determined and literate suicide.
My keyboard fails to inflame my passion sufficiently for option two.
Don’t have a TrackPoint, then, eh?
Were the letters backwards?
My keyboard fails to inflame my passion sufficiently for option two.
Fap harder.
I guess these alleged “conservatives” don’t live by “pick on someone your own size” anymore, huh? Yuck, if someone did something like that to one of my cats, I’d lose my shit…but I sure as hell wouldn’t lose my political views.
looks like someone’s salad got a bit jumbled.
maybe even tossed?
I’m pretty sure we broke the planet.
Uh oh. The spare one we keep around for emergencies like this is still there, r- OHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCKOHSHITOHFUCKOHSHIT, shitfucking fuckshit.
Boy, are our faces red (with the blood of our children’s children)!
I’ll take under an hour for that one, TB. Liberals are just that nefarious.
In my case they would find out that I’m not the gun-control kind of liberal.
I’m pretty sure that we are in straw liberal territory here. The only Liberals that make any noise about gun control any more are city councilmen who represent heavily populated Urban centers and the Cops that police the same.
Oh and the occasional suggestion that the second amendment doesn’t necessarily include the right to tack a 50 cal machine gun on top of your hummer, a Bradley fighting vehicle in your garage and put a cruise missile silo in the back yard.
Other than that I haven’t heard a peep about taking guns away from people who have properly registered them, but then again, I may not be in possession of the secret decoder ring.
.
That is, after all, the next step in the Official Wingnut Playbook.
I was going to say tomorrow by 10 am.
However I think S. cerevisiae might be right on the money with his guess.
Not that I want to go trolling around for an answer to the question, but as the sun rises in the east this is definitely not a Schroedingers cat problem. It will happen for certain and I’d say soon.
My guess is that the first place that theory is advanced will be in a comment thread at free republic.
.
I’m pretty sure that we are in straw liberal territory here. The only Liberals that make any noise about gun control any more are city councilmen who represent heavily populated Urban centers and the Cops that police the same.
Well, “gun grabbers” are straw liberals. Most of us favor sensible gun control that keeps guns out of the hands of felons and children, and mandating safe storage and background checks. We also think schools aren’t the coolest place for a guy to be able to pack a gun (excluding law enforcement, of course), and we really don’t think a bar is a great place for guns.
But yeah, the “ban all guns” stuff is mostly media hype, crime victims (understandably), and people who just don’t really have a grasp on the idea that outlawing guns is an idea will just never work in a nation that has as many guns as people.
and people who just don’t really have a grasp on the idea that outlawing guns is an idea will just never work in a nation that has as many guns as people.
Just curious, do we have as many ounces of marijuana as people yet?
Just curious, do we have as many ounces of marijuana as people yet?
Probably, but I don’t think anyone would argue that that ban is “working”.
Has no one posted this yet?
Have the bullet hoarders slowed down yet? I thought I heard the US went on a record gun and ammo buying binge after Obama was elected. Has that slowed down yet? So, if not, what happens in ten or fifteen or twenty years, when all of that recklessly hoarded ordinance is just junk in the basement? Will we see deadlier house fires? More kids and unstable people discovering grandpa’s arsenal? More gun trade with Mexico? Or was it just a statistical blip, and the general availability of firearms and ammo will be about the same?
Just curious, do we have as many ounces of marijuana as people yet?
The DEA seized 722,000 kgs of pot in 2010, times a thousand is 722,000,000 grams, it’s about 29 grams to an ounce, so even if we assume that the DEA only seizes about a tenth…
Um, no.
At least nobody put a backwards “B” on the cat.
[Portlandia] Put a B on it! [/Portlandia joke]
Just curious, do we have as many ounces of marijuana as people yet?
Speaking for one small household we’re above the criteria in both categories, guns and green.
Have the bullet hoarders slowed down yet? I thought I heard the US went on a record gun and ammo buying binge after Obama was elected. Has that slowed down yet?
The Christmas season 2011 saw the largest number of gun permit applications in the history of the United States.
So Imma say, no.
Will we see deadlier house fires?
Oh lord I hope so.
At least nobody put a backwards “B” on the cat.
Can I get an AHEM?
But yeah, the “ban all guns” stuff is mostly media hype, crime victims (understandably), and people who just don’t really have a grasp on the idea that outlawing guns is an idea will just never work in a nation that has as many guns as people.
Personally, I love the rationale that somehow, a even a semi-automatic Glock is going to deter a force of a hundred National Guardsmen who are under orders from the governor to take you out.
Just not getting it. I can understand self-protection, but the rationale of arming against the government should be grounds for immediate institutionalization.
So we can expect another year of the yeoman’s militia keeping us all safe from the threat King George’s redcoated, tea-taxing, minions? Huzzah!
I do have to point out that I have personally fired bullets that sat in my grandpa’s basement for over 20 years and they all fired like brand new ones. As long as they stay dry, they are pretty stable and dormant.
I do have to point out that I have personally fired bullets that sat in my grandpa’s basement for over 20 years and they all fired like brand new ones.
Yes, but we’re talking about people whose idea of roof repair is to staple a rain coat over the hole.
On the comics topic: I’m reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman right now. So far I like it.
Off topic: Hey S. cervisae and Pup, did you see the pictures of the flood?
I’m not really worried about the properly stored bullets. I’m more worried about the ones stashed in leaky toolsheds, damp basements, and drafty double-wides. I’m worried about the caches of bought and forgotten bullets that will probably be dug up in a century or two, like like those hoards of roman coins they still find in England, only with less historical value and more *bang* “Ow my eye!”
Or, what actor said.
Glock is going to deter a force of a hundred National Guardsmen who are under orders from the governor to take you out
It wouldn’t deter a squad of guardsmen with air support and armored vehicles.
Also, you might ask any remaining inhabitant of Fallujah just how effective armed militias are against a trained military.
Also, guns are SEVERELY overrated for self defense. A good dog, an alarm system, locked windows and doors, not having windows or sidelites on your exterior doors, and a baseball bat increase your odds of not being shot by your own gun or shooting your intruding teenager who is sneaking out or in. They are unwieldy, and their introduction in a fight generally means whoever loses dies. I own several guns, but I don’t harbor any intentions of using any of them for home defense. It could happen, but statistically and realistically speaking, that’s probably not going to happen.
I wasn’t going to Ahem.
My bare hands are registered as lethal weapons.
The gum’i’ment can take my hands when they pry them from my cold, dead wrists!
MEHA.
Wait. Are you saying you’re limp-wristed?
Some of the common taters are already speculating it was a set-up: http://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2012/01/23/3rd-district-campaigners-cat-killed
OBS, those are some good pics. Never underestimate the power of water.
Fucking A. It’s in Arkansas? OF COURSE IT’S IN ARKANSAS.
*sigh, cry*
Mr Yeast wins the over/under bet, and did his own sleuthing as well.
Huzzah!
Did you check for a time stamp from the time the article went on line compared with the time of the first “speculation”
Once again that shopworn maxim is proven: Projection thy name is Wingnut.
I find myself wondering if the Ancient Greeks had wingnuts within their midst. First I find it hard to believe that they did, and if they did, I find it more difficult to believe that they would put up with them for a second.
Maybe that is why they came up with the ostracon.
.
Mr Yeast wins the over/under bet, and did his own sleuthing as well.
Huzzah!
Did you check for a time stamp from the time the article went on line compared with the time of the first “speculation”
Once again that shopworn maxim is proven: Projection thy name is Wingnut.
I find myself wondering if the Ancient Greeks had wingnuts within their midst. First I find it hard to believe that they did, and if they did, I find it more difficult to believe that they would put up with them for a second.
Maybe that is why they came up with the ostracon.
Joss Whedon did the first 24 issues of Astonishing X-Men (an offshoot created just for that purpose) He got it completely, and included the standard Joss humor (a sort of Buffy meets the X-Men). Wolverine’s dialog was especially hilarious (“Spandex uniforms? Seriously?” Scott: “What do you want, black leather”?)
Good enough for Joss (aka the person J.J. Abrams wants to be when he grows up), good enough for me.
Fucking A. It’s in Arkansas? OF COURSE IT’S IN ARKANSAS.
Christ on a crutch, that’s my hometown. 🙁
OBS is picking on my House Clown!
350.
Sorry; not a comic guy at all, and never really was in any serious way, so not qualified to comment on this, so much.
However, my StatCounter account says there are those here who enjoy really good photos of Siamese cats, so I feel the need to pimp one, again. 😉
.
A “House Clown” is like a House Elf in the Harry Potter universe, except that instead of helping out around the place the House Clown drinks all your beer, murders your pets and haunts your nightmares.
House Clown: It’s never lupus or a water-spraying boutonniere.
It’s never lupus
SARCOIDOSIS!
.
SARCOIDOSIS!
with oversized shoes.
Dat was sum flood!
Weren’t ne’er as dramaticals roun these parts.
JP, your Larry Elvis is far too gorgeous. I love that inscrutable look that cats sometimes get, as though they know the secrets of the universe but won’t tell.
And for those complete and utter bastards who cravenly murdered a cat, I hope they suffer from raging haemorrhoids for the rest of their lives, have all their fingernails fall out, and suffer from uncontrollable drooling in public places.
Plus I’d like to break all of their bones. Bastards.
Sorry, where were we? Ah, comics. Carry on.
Glock is going to deter a force of a hundred National Guardsmen who are under orders from the governor to take you out
The Predator drone locking on to me from 5 miles up isn’t going to be all that impressed by my pissant 9mm handgun.
The Predator drone
Not to mention the Alien queen.
It’s yet another example of the cognitive dissonance that infects the Right these days.
You have be able to believe at the same time that:
1. The US military is the awesomeist most unstoppable force ever assembled ,that nobody on earth can defeat.
2. Me and my buddies from the shooting range will be able to stop them cold.
The only things I fear are Alien queens with acid-spraying boutonnieres.
…and joy buzzers and whoopee cushions.
The only things I fear are Alien queens with acid-spraying boutonnieres.
Now that’s comedy.
I find myself wondering if the Ancient Greeks had wingnuts within their midst.
Sadly, yes!.
Maybe that is why they came up with the ostracon.
The one event worse than a Trekkie conference.
However, my StatCounter account says there are those here who enjoy really good photos of Siamese cats, so I feel the need to pimp one, again. 😉
Kitties! Kiiiiiiiiiittttttttiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!! 🙂
Other than that I haven’t heard a peep about taking guns away from people who have properly registered them, but then again, I may not be in possession of the secret decoder ring.
Wasn’t the NRA recently peddling the story that President Obama’s failure to enact new gun control legislation was proof of his gun-grabbing ambitions?
Apparently, the less the liberals do something, the worse it gets.
Okay, let’s take this thread in a new direction: If I was a superhero….
Name: Appliance Man
Awesome super-power: Mind control over small household appliances and power tools. Can communicate with toasters, blenders, and electric sanders and order them to do his every bidding in Epic Superhero Battles that happen to occur in kitchens and woodshops. Can transform himself into a power drill or waffle maker.
Incognito persona: Eddie Morpheme, mild-mannered Sears salesman. Every month, he is tortured by the ginormous size of his electric bill.
Origin story: Has something to do with a coffee maker from the planet Beta Carotene and a huge power surge.
Sidekick: Extension Cord Girl. (Sexual tension, y’know…)
Kitties! Kiiiiiiiiiittttttttiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!!
And cute owls! Owwwwwwwlllllllls !! My most favoritist raptor evah! (Thanx VS)
Kitties! Kiiiiiiiiiittttttttiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!!
Here you go:
I’m ready for my closeup Mr. DeMille
A former kitty in a tree off my balcony, four floors up.
…
Look! Up in the sky!
It’s a gaping maw!
It’s a black hole!
It’s…GOATSE MAN!!
I already have the power to turn any kind of wood into a completely different kind of wood.
I have the power to turn into a driveway.
Arm Fall Off Boy.
Turning the wood.
A former kitty in a tree
Looks like a kitty to me. TIL about transspecieism.
Nothin’s easy in Easy Company
Personally, I love the rationale that somehow, a even a semi-automatic Glock is going to deter a force of a hundred National Guardsmen who are under orders from the governor to take you out.
I love even more the rationale that somehow, the NRA guys are going to be the ones taking on those Hundred National Guardsmen if the U.S. government ever goes totalitarian… rather than the SA/KKK type militias hunting down the Undesirables.
Good enough for Joss (aka the person J.J. Abrams wants to be when he grows up), good enough for me.
I wholeheartedly concur with your assessment of both gentlemen.
No takers in the Superhero game? Well, I tried….
Mango from freeperville, where they are furious at Ann coulter for attacking The Newt.
Emphasis mine,
And the revolution eats another one of its young. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
This man (or woman) was ALWAYS at war with Eastasia, and don’t ever let anyone tell you different, even though for some reason or another his principled stance on the subject is only emerging now. I wager he’s also one of these guys who strongly protested the eight years of record deficits under Bush and always knew that man was a liberal and up to no good.
The ad hominem attacks on 1.5 million Muslims, that was all good. The times she said women couldn’t be trusted to vote, that was all good. When she said propaganda worked because most people are stupid, that was all good. But going after the people of South Carolina goes way over the line, because, well, they’re South Carolineans!
Turning the wood.
The lathe of Heaven.
New post for all ya’ll.
Turning the wood.
For some reason this took my mind back 40 years to the tamping machines in Moderan:
I know this thread is dead anyway, but as someone who tried to “follow” comics for almost a decade, commercial comics were and are almost unbearably right wing already.
Geoff Johns, for example, though admittedly talented, turned Justice Society into a not-so-crypto-conservative screed, marginalizing and killing off gay and Black characters, replacing them with obscure young blonde females, and took special time out to character-assassinate atheists and feminists.
Dwayne McDuffie on his run on JLA before he died was told that he was trying to put too many African-American characters in the book (unlike in Johns’ case, these were long-established JLA chars). “Two of those people on the team at once? Heavens, Wimbeley, ‘America’s Team’ is looking awfully Negroid.” — “Sir, may I suggest we adjust the saturation levels of the cover in Photoshop. The results are most striking, I think you’ll agree.”
BTW, McDuffie had done a remarkable turn on the animated series, JLU. For some reason, Black or Asian characters are acceptable in some measure on “children’s” cartoons. (JLU is more fairly called “all-ages” because it was censored for kids but probably watched more by adults with arrested development. With 500 bajillion characters mostly of interest to the nostalgia crowd… well, it was no Teen Titans.) However, like STATIC SHOCK, I suppose they can get cancelled for not selling enough toys.
Oh god, remember the woman who invented the feminist media critique “women in refrigerators”, Gail Simone? Well, she got a DC gig and now writes stories where white women are harassed by Black teen males but use their superpowers to beat them up, or a previously sympathetic Black man reveals that he killed a white girl at a frat party decades ago (& he was the only Black guy there, and none of the bros ratted him out… suuuuure) so now must die, and so on and so forth. Stay classy, Gail.
PS: JUST TO BE FAIR, Marvel Comics is a bit less right wing authoritarian than DC. For this reason, they have actually managed to consistently attract new fans… unlike DC, whose fanbase under Didio is both shrinking and aging. For someone who likes to read long-running series, Marvel has mostly sucked but they did create YOUNG AVENGERS which has an absolutely adorable young, gay, interspecies couple in it. (And the grandson of the Black Captain America is team leader. Unlike comic book movies that avoid discussing race, the comic books sometimes do face it head on.)
Jesus, I don’t know when D.S. Pube was reading comics, but I know he wasn’t reading for comprehension. Unless he grew up reading only Ayn Rand-approved issues of Charlton Comics or some Very Special Christian Tracts (oh, Jack Chick), his examples of leftward bias in comics are, well, ridiculous!
Did this man not read any mainstream DC titles in the 70’s or 80’s except for GREEN LANTERN? Did he never watch a cartoon adaptation in the 80’s or 90’s? Did he miss the environmental movement, racial integration, and Alan Moore?
There were some pretty fascist leaning comics with a bit of the old ultra violence in the 80’s but you had to go off the reservation (mainstream, comics code approved titles) to get them, so WTH does he mean by beloved characters? And good grief, the insanely violent, sarcastic LOBO (actually, a thinly-veiled parody of the genre) was and is penned by a known lefty. (The guy did something like 12 issues of MIDNIGHTER. Which is about a faggity fag fag. Who kills people. And has a husband. And a daughter. And, um, kills people. Basically, think PUNISHER but more psychologically stable.)
Even those shitty Superman movies from the 80’s were pretty liberal, to hear butthurt conservatards tell it. (Solving world hunger? That’s communist! Never mind this was done in the comics as one of those fancy hardcover graphic novel special editions that sold like hotcakes. Superman would NEVER endorse creeping socialism. Oh, wait, I’m getting a phone call. Weird, they say it’s the 1930’s… when Superman punched a slumlord in the nose. Well I never!)
I recently found that my local liberry has a small but pretty cool comics section. I got to read the whole run of Sandman, which I had seen some of when it came out, and was finally introduced to John Constantine and the Swamp Thing, both of which are well-written and sometimes well-drawn, with nearly no musclebound dudes in tights. Also, a collection of The Escapist, from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, presented as a retrospective of the character’s development. Actually I’m surprised that nearly 400 comments in there’s been no mention of Kavalier and Clay.
Anyway, I have the impression that we hear a lot more from the “rest assured I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world” guys, which colors and inks our perception of adult readers of comics, for whom, yes, “This is different from whatever crap I was obsessed with when I was twelve”, which is actually phrased as “Michael Bay (or George Lucas, or whoever else) raped my childhood” – is the central complaint. In this respect, DS Hube is being a stereotypical fanboy. Except complaining about creeping leftism in comics is sort of like complaining about the dialog becoming too realistic.
Looking at some watercolors Hitler is supposed to have painted, I note that his style was pretty conventional and not, you know, bad as such (except that it was PAINTED BY FUCKING HITLER). I’m kind of imagining how it could work in a graphic novel adaptation of The Iron Dream. Not as the main style, of course, which would be that “heroic realism” style that just looks like a more romanticized social realism.
http://calamityjon.tumblr.com/post/8501329457/the-man-of-steel-schools-a-tea-party-fink-june
“In spite of all that, the formal boundaries of the genre are still set by the things acceptable to show to teenagers.”
Oh, everything in comics is acceptable to show to teenagers! Oh, that’s a relief, I was worried that my girlfriend would be mad if I gave her daughter a copy of Alan Moore’s “The Black Dossier,” but now I know it’s A-OK.
Thank you, Internets!
By the way, the Nerds are Virgins thing is Homophobic.
You might want to look think about what you are doing with that meme…
The idea being that since Nerds are not having sex with women, they aren’t manly. (Whether they are having sex with men or women current or not, I guess you are deeply involved in their personal lives and really know they, right?) Therefore, the Nerd is acceptable to turn into the school “punk.” Also, he won’t be able to struggle so much, being more into books then tackling dummies.
Generally, it’s started by Jocks who are angry at their own homoerotic feelings, and fantasize about having sex with the Nerds they are mocking (preferably against the Nerds will, since these Jocks are self-hating closet cases) but have to settle for beating on them to satisfy their erotic urges.
Getting an erotic thrill from beating on someone being more acceptable in grade school than actual rape. The fact that these beatings are eroticised by cries of “fag,” “he’s looking at my butt” and “queer” should clue you in.
So, those of you who feel a need to pick on Nerds because of the inappropriate erotic feelings they inspire in you, please head to your friendly neighborhood gay bar and find a nice guy who will dress up as Spiderman and tell you what an impressive dick you have as you thrust it in to his tender parts. You’ll feel better, and you won’t have to harm some innocent victim of your lusts.
I’m deadly serious here. Come out of that closet. You’ll feel better and you’ll be a better human being.