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longwuzhere · 1 year ago

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Some cool Easter eggs I caught watching My Adventures with Superman that I want to show to people so they can be in on it with comic book readers

My episode 2 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My episode 3 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My episode 4 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My episode 5 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Episode 6 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Episode 7 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here and here

My Episode 8 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Episode 9 easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Episode 10 easter eggs and refences in My Adventures with Superman post is here

My Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman comic issue 1 post is here

My Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman comic issue 2 post is here

My Easter eggs and references for My Adventures with Superman comic issue 3 post is here

(SPOILERS if you haven't seen the show yet):

Lois Lane has a cut out clip of Vicki Vale. Vicki Vale is a journalist in Gotham City. Her first appearance was in Batman #49 (1948) as seen in the panel here (W: Bill Finger, A: Lew Sayre and Bob Kane, I: Charles Paris, L: Ira Schnapp).

Looks like Jimmy is a fan of Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. Good video game taste.

Jimmy mentions a psychic starfish and the one starfish in the DC universe who is psychic is Starro the Conqueror, who's first appearance is in Brave and the Bold 28 (1960) (the cover art here is done by Mike Sekowsky, Murphy Anderson, and Ira Schnapp) and has the power to mind control people.

Lois, after barging into Perry White's office about a story, mentions Mt. Simonson. This is a neat name drop to Superman: The Man of Steel writer Louise Simonson, one of the nicest comic book writers you'll ever meet. She helped co-create John Henry Irons a.k.a Steel with artist of the Superman: The Man of Steel comic, Jon Bogdanove (really hope we get to see Irons in this show too).

Jon Bogdanove also gets a name drop here as does...

Dan Jurgen, comic book writer and artist on the Superman comic in the 90s (also one of my favorite Superman artists).

Now who are these kids that call themselves the Newskid Legion? Well, they are a VERY deep DC cut and reference to the Newsboy Legion back in the 1940s. The group was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, LEGENDARY comic book creators.

The page here is from Who's Who: The Definitive Directory of the DC Universe #16 (1986) with the art by Jack Kirby and Karl Kesel. Most of the Newskid Legion is named after the Newsboy Legion members

Gabby and Big Words here share names with their Newsboy Legion counterparts as does Flip Johnson...

who shares names with Walter "Flip" Johnson here on the cover of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson #137 (1971) which was done by Jack Kirby, Neal Adams, and Gaspar Saladino.

Patty, the cartoonist of the Newskid Legion homages this panel from Adventures of Superman #500 (1993) (W: Karl Kesel, P: Tom Grummet, I: Doug Hazelwood, C: Glenn Whitmore, L: Albert DeGuzman), the first appearance of Superboy, Conner Kent/ Kon-El.

But who is the one below that drawing? We'll his name is in Big Word's word puzzle, in the show. It's Jim Harper, the Guardian.

Jim Harper becomes the Newsboy Legion's legal guardian despite their causing trouble for him. The page here is from Star Spangled Comics #7, the Newsboy Legion and the Guardian's first appearance, by Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and Whitney Ellsworth. You might've seen the Guardian on the recent Young Justice cartoon.

When Lois, Clark, and Jimmy go investigate about the smuggled robots in Metropolis, Jimmy makes a reference to super intelligent gorillas in France. This is a subtle hint at Monsieur Mallah, the Doom Patrol villain who will be in the show along with his partner, the Brain. Both made their first appearance in Doom Patrol #86 (1964) .

The cover art here is done by Arnold Drake, Bob Brown, and Ira Schnapp.

Later in the episode we see Clark receive his powers and he is surrounded with electricity, giving off Superman Blue vibes when in the comics, Superman gained electricity powers and became Electric Blue Superman who's first appearance was in Superman #123 (1997) (cover art by Dan Jurgens, Joe Rubenstein, Patrick Martin, and Todd Klein.

Link to Episode 2 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 3 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 4 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 5 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 6 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 7 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here and here

Link to Episode 8 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 9 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

Link to Episode 10 of My Adventures with Superman Easter Eggs and references is here

My Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman comic issue 1 post is here

My Easter eggs and references in My Adventures with Superman comic issue 2 post is here

My Easter eggs and references for My Adventures with Superman comic issue 3 post is here

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canmom · 1 month ago

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the adventure of canmom at weird weekend (part 1)

is this 'adventure of' joke getting old? like I've already done the 'translate into scots gaelic' variant. it's not exactly an adventure if it's a half hour bike ride is it? ah fuckit

This weekend was the Weird Weekend film festival in Glasgow! it's the tiny kind of film festival with one screen and folding chairs - they did get their hands on a real beast of a projector mind you...

Look at that concentrated beam of pure film. Kind of awesome to actually see a lightfield intense enough to scatter off random bits of dust in the air honestly.

This is apparently the fourth time this festival has run - though as is often the case I'm terribly out of the loop and only heard about it when @birdfriender told me it was on lol. It's also only my third time going to a film festival (the previous times both being Annecy, a very different kind of festival). It was a great time: the organisers have excellent taste and there's a lot of deep cuts, and made some good friends among the attendees.

On Friday night I showed up for the opening evening of interactive film - this included a short film/video essay commissioned for the festival based on of all things the Goncharov meme (seriously...), followed by a brief history of interactive film including the amusingly ill-fated venture of a certain former Microsoft guy called Bob something (I really should have written this down), and then someone called Puke ("everyone’s favourite genderfluid body fluid") came out dressed like this to oversee the actual event...

...and we watched of all things Final Destination 3 with the DVD feature that lets you switch in alternate scenes at various points (mostly death scenes). This was actually a pretty good time since it was my first time seeing a Final Destination film, and there was a good energy in the audience (although it seemed like the film always picked the opposite of what we voted for - not sure if that's a thematic point or programming error lol), but I'm glad the rest of the festival was more obscure stuff.

On Saturday, the festival proper began! I am reminded of a certain line in Exordia, in which the alien Ssrin gives her assessment of humanity, opening with "You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck." And indeed, there were few films this weekend that did not offer an opportunity to watch someone fuck. That's art for ya babey.

Looking back the clear highlight was Louise Weard's film Castration Movie I: Traps, but more on that anon - let's start at the beginning. I ended up catching all but one of the films over the course of the weekend and there was maybe only one I'd call an outright miss, so great going in all.

On Saturday we opened with a pair of Hungarian films directed by György Révész, about an incredibly up himself intellectual-in-exile named Dr. János Bátky - the self insert of author Antal Szerb. the first film, The Loves of a Dilettante, sees Bátky going through a series of affairs with women around him - in each case abruptly ending the relationship because it doesn't conform to his specific fantasy. The reasons become increasingly absurd: at first Bátky wishes instead that his partner is a certain Countess, but when he chances to meet the lady herself, he refuses to believe she is who she says she is; at last another woman at the library turns out to be the secret admirer who has been sending Bátky gifts in the post, and he cannot stand to be pursued instead of the manipulative pursuer he fancied himself to be, and spurns her as well.

Bátky is very much the butt of the joke in this film, and the ending sees everyone pretty much done with his bullshit; at the same time, he is an entertaining character, with a nonstop patter full of literary allusions, bizarre tangents and dubious observations. Not so charming that I can quite see why all these women are throwing themselves at him, but that's the conceit of the film I suppose! The actor playing him, Iván Darvas does a splendid job of making this sideburned wanker come across as interesting enough to carry a film.

The second Bátky film, The Pendragon Legend was a major tonal departure from the first - and also featured a different cast, despite including a number of the same characters. (Funnily enough Iván Darvas returns, but as a different character.) This time, rather than a study of Bátky's foibles, we have a complicated conspiracy at a stately home in wales, tying in with biological experiments, immortal sorcerors and the Rosicrucians, assassination plots, affairs; the works. It ends up a lot of fun, although the sheer number of characters made it a little hard to keep track of everything. Here, Bátky is pulled in as almost an observer of all the shit going down, and comes across a lot more sympathetic as a result.

All in all, a pretty fascinating pair of films and window into Hungarian cinema. With both these films set in London and Wales but voiced entirely in Hungarian, it seems to present an amusing alternate universe in which Hungary is the language of the UK, but nobody knows where Hungary is. It's a very old-school 'from outside' view of the UK, full of tea-sipping aristocrats and walks in the park and intellectual conversations in a library - it's quite funny to me. I haven't seen a ton of Hungarian film (mostly animation), but everything I've seen has been fascinating, and terribly literary.

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A whole lot of the films in this festival were restorations of various out of print films, and that includes to the next one, Treasure Island directed by Scott King. This film has absolutely nothing to do with Stephenson's book, instead referring to the island near San Francisco where mail was processed during the second world war.

The basis of the story is the historical Operation Mincemeat, in which the British constructed a false identity for a corpse and planted it to mislead the Nazis; here the story is transplanted to the American invasion of Japan, but the focus is hardly wartime intrigue, instead the psychosexual inner lives of the two Americans who are involved in constructing the fake identity for the corpse. One of them secretly has two wives, one a white civilian woman and the other a Japanese woman who works in translation for the military; the other habitually invites other men for group sex with him and his wife and has a whole lot of hangups about how he is not gay, and that corpse is not at all sexy thank you.

As the film progresses, both of them are increasingly struck by visions of the dead man talking to them and the line between 'reality' and fantasy gets blurrier. It's a very well crafted and engaging film; shot in black and white in 1999, it aimed to challenge the rather sanitised and straightforwardly heroic picture of the 'Greatest Generation' who fought the war, presenting a more 'warts and all' look with the sexuality and racism and so forth in full view. I found it very effective! And it was cool to have the director there, a bearded American guy who spoke very confidently about his intentions for the film - I got to ask a question about how he kept all the fantasy and more literal elements straight while scripting the film.

(Do you find that when you get a Q&A session like this, you really want to ask a good question? Because I do. It's very silly. But like if I am going to hold the mic and get the spotlight on me... sure I don't want to waste peoples' time, but also I kinda want to come off well lmao. If I can get people to go 'ooh that's a good question' I feel like I've won audience Q&A, a real thing that is reasonable to want.)

In the afternoon we got a massive block of trans films old and new. We opened with Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucubers featuring Holly Woodlawn; Jaye Hudson of the TGirlsOnFilm Instagram account (which I was not previously familiar with) gave an introduction, telling the story of how Woodlawn came into the orbit of Warhol's 'Factory', and reading out some funny anecdotes about her experience on set. As Jaye talked about it, at that point in the 70s, trans girls were kind of the flavour of the month and we appeared in a bunch of films at the time, of which this was one.

The film sees a girl called Eve Harrington moving to New York in pursuit of the dream of becoming an actress; there she meets a series of weirdos from taxi-driving nuns to 'Mary Poppins', the drag empress of a kind of roommate finding service who's always trailed by worshipful boys. Most of the film sees Eve trying to find an apartment and a boyfriend, and running into various 70s archetypes along the way: a werewolf (also played by Woodlawn in boy mode), political lesbians, a plant-obsessed hippy, and finally a taciturn amnesiac Russian woman and her brother, a little person in a cowboy outfit who does pro wrestling. It's an intriguing slice of the 70s and of New York in particular.

Apparently this film has long been out of print and only narrowly evaded being lost media, so it's pretty sick to see. (And honestly despite the long cultural shadow they cast, I don't actually know that much about the girls around Warhol's 'Factory', so I was glad to get a look in.)

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Next up we had 'An Untitled and Perfectly-Legal Coming-of-Age Clown Parody Film' - not hard to figure out what film this is (The People's Joker), especially with the still and trailer right there, but while the courts in the US seem to have come down on recognising it as a valid Fair Use defence, the legal status is still a bit up in the air in the UK.

This one got a lot of buzz for thumbing its nose at Warner Bros.' copyright empire - and of course being part of a recent wave of trans girl directed independent films such as I Saw The TV Glow. It's a trans girl coming of age story built around the Batman milieu, and clearly by people with a pretty thorough knowledge of Batman's cinematic history and DC universe deep cuts (the final act involves a musical number with Mx. Mxyzptlk, played as a puppet, which I'm sure means something if you read the comics).

It's largely shot on greenscreen, with all kinds of mixed media and animation segments - deliberately going for a grungy, chaotic look where it doesn't try to match lighting and animation styles (there's a whole bunch of indepedent animators contributing brief segments here, much as in Barber Westchester). The story concerns Joker the Harlequin, a trans girl who finally moves away from her controlling mother after being drugged with 'Smylex' for most of her life; now in Gotham she can transition, have a dodgy relationship with a trans guy (who is also a version of the Joker, and - spoilers - a former Robin), and build an 'anti-comedy' club with most of the usual Batman villains before going to confront the cultish institution which controls all legal comedy in post-'cyber war' America.

The film's strongest aspect is, fittingly, jokes - throwaway lines about the casually dystopian setting ('drag was outlawed after the explosion at RuPaul's fracking ranch' got a big laugh); a running joke of namedropping cancelled comedians with 'before the unpleasantness, of course' 'of course'; the playful riffs on past Batman films. The core story, though, is a fairly by-the-numbers queer/trans coming of age about self-acceptance, parental mistreatment and finding community, and a bit of a satire on SNL which is perhaps more specific to the director's history - I get the purpose of this kind of narrative and I certainly needed it at a time, and wrote similar stories myself, but it's a kind of story I'm kind of increasingly tired of hearing. I don't mean to say it's bad for that - just it doesn't resonate the way it might have ten years ago.

Honestly, I think trying to make a 'trans movie' kind of paints you into a formulaic corner. A corner very deftly avoided by the next movie, Louise Weard's Castration Movie Part I: Traps. This was the theatrical debut of this movie, though it's been available to download on Weard's gumroad for some time.

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Louise Weard made herself kind of notorious for her previous movie, ten years ago, Computer Hearts, but even more so for her castration scene supercut at the Fantastic Fest '100 Best Kills' event a couple of years ago - something that has left her feeling a bit pigeonholed into castration scenes. Part of the joke about Castration Movie is then that it's eight hours (only half of that presently available) of trans girls being sad (emotional drama) without any castration until the very end of the movie. It doesn't even come up in the first half.

Technically, this is a four hour long movie - the first part of an eight hour long movie! - consisting largely of very long takes of naturalistic conversations shot on an incredibly grainy camera, now and then mixing that with musical montage and sex scenes. Something I'd raise an eyebrow at on description, and I want to kind of lead with that because like, no joke, this is legit one of the best movies I've seen; those four hours absolutely fly by. Incredibly sharp character writing, incredibly strong naturalistic acting - and unreasonably funny, just way too much.

The first hour or so focuses on Turner, an aspiring film director who spends his time working odd jobs at a film crew and increasingly torpedoing his relationship with his furry-artist girlfriend - someone he clearly isn't very compatible with and views with little actual interest, and his efforts to try and salvage the relationship ring false in ways he's clearly unable to see. But at every turn he doubles down and builds on his resentment and sense of emasculation, until he's picking fights with a living statue in the street and busting into his ex's room late at night.

Along the way we get all sorts of darkly funny conversations - Weard has an incredible eye for subtext and awkwardness, and can lend an ultimately very unsympathetic character like Turner enough sympathetic motivation to make his downward spiral completely human and convincing. It's both sad and terribly funny, perfectly pitched.

The punchline sees him posting to /r9k/ - and at this point we cut to a new story about 'Traps', the film's actual main character, a sex worker in Vancouver played by Weard herself, who is caught up with the drama of various partners and her own completely unresolved shit around transition to make her an entirely unsuitable would-be mentor figure to her friend Adeleine, who's kind of the deuteragonist of this act, cracking under the pressure of being the only one in the house with a shit but paying office job while her boyfriend gets top surgery.

The first act sets us up a frame to look at the second - Traps is a pretty messed up person, but in a deeply understandable way, and it serves in ways to show that the shit she's going through is not some unique trans girl thing but very much the torment of being a human. Desperate for connection and fucking it up, digging ourselves deeper while convinced it's the right thing to do. Along the way, we see her having various kinds of nasty sex, injecting DIY HRT, taking a bunch of cocaine, a trans guy getting top surgery, and various other fun things that I could never stream on twitch (or you bet I'd be planning a screening right away) - but it's also in many ways incredibly matter of fact about all this shit we get up to in a way that feels incredibly real.

It's a film that benefitted a lot from viewing with a largely transfem audience who would laugh at certain lines in the right spirit - I have no idea how this whole thing would come across if you aren't trans and don't know what 'agp' means (about the person saying it as much as anything) lmao. But if you are, it's like the film I never even knew I needed. It's way too real: from amusing setups like the polycule who has the access to DIY HRT trying to drag you into an argument about Dune before one of them wakes up and has a panic attack or daft conversations about boobs, to the pinpoint depiction of the kinds of neuroses we end up carrying from our shitty tenuous work, and of course the friction and fireworks of trying to care for each other when we're all burned out from carrying our own shit. Weard is fearless, and does seem to rather revel in being transgressive, but this is not edge for edge's sake.

And honestly this is 100% what 'trans film', if we can't help but have such a category, needs to be I think - a story heavily informed by the specific fucked up experiences of being trans but not like, About Being Trans(TM) in the way People's Joker was. Uncompromisingly honest (but with plenty of humour) about how we are, which is to say painfully human, rather than cheerfully painting the sort of freeing subculture we'd like to think we have.

I got to talk to Weard quite a bit on Sunday (ending up in a pub with her and a number of other mostly trans festivalgoers), and it turns out the slightly ludicrous length of the film wasn't even planned, with the original idea to edit it down to something like a standard 90 minutes - but when it became evident after shooting the first forty minutes or so that these long scenes were kind of absolute gold, someone (I forget who now) made the case that they shouldn't be cut down at all and to just go for the full behemoth. And honestly? They were fucking right. This did not feel like a four hour film, somehow. There were definitely other films this festival where my mind wandered and I kind of checked out a bit, but not this one.

As a chaser (ha ha) to that, we had Louise Weard's 'Unsee' segment, screened just once in the hour before the clocks change (which is in a certain sense lost to time, or at least that's the joke of this segment). An elaboration on the experience of presenting the castration scene supercut at the '100 Best Deaths' event, it dives into a reprise of that supercut before increasingly alternating with scenes of a kind of introspective monologue on how people reacted to that event and how far Louise herself started to end up feeling like the butt of the joke (even as random cis women accused her of being transphobic lmao).

As the video progresses it segues into an increasingly ridiculous sequence where two of Weard's friends step in (as substitute Louise Weards) reading out her essay of Lacanian film analysis on castration scenes in movies, while Weard (behind the camera) gives them directions to frame the shot to better show her cis ex's boobs. In between, more castration scenes! So many, most of them unfamiliar to me (funny moment when I finally recognised one and my brain was like hey! that's Sálo! and I found myself turning to face Violet with an excited grin before my brain caught up with that)

Among other things, the narration talks about the whole arc being a transgressive tgirl filmmaker who frequently faced some rather ridiculous accusations of being a transphobe or nazi troll (by TV Glow's Jane Schoenbrun, although it seems they have since made up), all in a time when it seems like a lot of her contemporaries in the transgressive film scene actually do seem to end up going nazi; the trouble of getting pigeonholed as the castration person, and so on - but also kind of playing with like oh, fifteen more castration scenes, that's what you want right? So many swerves, and the supercut was in fact very funny (I wonder if I find it easy to laugh instead of wincing since I actually have been castrated lmao), ending in a scene which is constructed to suggest Louise actually cut her balls off for the bit - though since she showed the prop penis earlier it was pretty clear that she didn't. (Yet..?)

It's a really clever bit and superbly entertaining bit of filmmaking, all told. I'm a full Louise Weard convert at this point, can't wait for castration movie part ii.

This post has gotten pretty long now, so I'll write up Sunday tomorrow. Do go watch Castration Movie tho, it's worth your time.

#film #louise weard #castration movie #film festival #the adventures of canmom

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