#because we were both dumb edgelord teenagers together

[destroyscythe-heck]

Slime Witch’s zine that they’re hyping up like it’s some super bold avant-garde transgressive media ™️ and they’re like the second coming of John Waters, the Marquis De Sade, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keneth Anger, and Lucifer Valentine all at the same time, even though John is not even dead. It will also (sic) “blow your tits clean off”. But it turned out to be just a collection of deliberately poorly drawn (because Underground Comix) pictures of the characters from Paw Patrol reenacting Salo and the 120 Days of Sodom for no other reason than “wouldn’t it be fucked up if… yeah I’m totally subverting innocence and making a statement and not just being a common edgelord”, and selected snippets from their MCU Thorki BNF days with the names are changed because they want people to forget that era. As if was even possible for them to ever be into something like the MCU because they’ve rebranded and are a serious transgressive ™️ artistic genius who would never stoop so low in their entire life.

Also one of Slime’s former partners is about to drop another round of Allegations about why they broke up, how they were a complete nightmare to be in a relationship with, and how Slime got both of them kicked out of the Punk house they were living in three months ago and Slime lied about getting kicked out by their parents and they just wanted to slum it a bit to make their art more “authentic”. Their dad is Anna’s boss at Lockheed and probably a huge thorn in Anna’s side in the tech support department because he still does not know that a PDF and a Word Doc are different.

Heaven forbid they ever find out that there is more to being a transgressive subversive artist than just writing edgy fanfic about the same fandoms that are the most mainstream fandoms ever at the time.

Even though we haven’t talked since at least three years before your first call out post, I’ll never forget you *******.

You truly were an uhhh unique acquaintance.

Sorry to all of the people who had to flee book Twitter because of Elon. I can simulate it for you right here though!

[davidmann95]

If you we’re in charge of rebirth , what would you do?

That’s become a difficult question, because Rebirth has kind of worked; I suspect that’s in large part because it doesn’t take much right now to shine brightly compared to Marvel, but DC’s stable and people seem to like their output, even as most of it remains middling at best. The meat-and-potatoes approach worked out, because they held steady and made clear they had a plan and didn’t shoot themselves in the foot. This is less figuring out how to rebuild a car so much as taking it through the wash.

The one pre-Rebirth change, and an essential one: the Supermen combine at the end of Final Days, and even if it takes awhile to explain the mechanics of it, we’re immediately into the status quo we have with Superman now, the red trunks being in right from the start. No one was ever going to do anything of substance with time-refugee Superman - it was clearly mandated that they wouldn’t do anything with that, since they were going to fuse later so there was no reason to compromise the quality of any potential evergreens - so the middleman is cut out, and all the minor continuity changes of the last year-and-a-half can be chalked up to that rather than ‘years being stolen’, which not only doesn’t work but demands further, even more confusing continuity changes down the line when they’re inevitably restored. Berganza’s fired right off the bat (along with Van Sciver), and the Super-books are handed to suitable creative teams, as are Justice League and - forgive me, but Williamson and Humphries have never struck me as anything other than entirely mediocre - The Flash and Green Lanterns, shoring up the core books and putting the best foot forward. Double shipping is largely phased out within the year aside from a couple major books, but I’ll admit it did the job of giving the line a running start so it’s still there at the beginning.

That’s the macro-scale of how the books are handled on a month-by-month basis, but then there’s the meta-narrative tying it all together kicked off by DC Rebirth itself. And dammit, I have to admit that did its job - it reestablished what needed reestablishing, and it got people talking. The problem is it did the latter in the worst way possible…but that last-page reveal needed to be genuinely seismic in a way nothing else could be, and Watchmen is at least on a shallow surface level symbolic of the worst of what’s happened to comics since 1986. So while some fixes for that special are easy (the other two Jokers don’t immediately reveal themselves and raise the question of why Batman hasn’t interrogated the one who’s apparently in jail yet; Wally doesn’t come back because they already introduced a Wally, I’d go with Kieran Schiach’s suggestion of using Bart Allen instead), what to do at the end is a real pickle.

I’d square the circle, so to speak. Batman digs into the wall, and does pull out the Watchmen button. Except while that seems like the last-page reveal, Batman then turns it over. To see the little DC Comics copyright markings on the inside. Watchmen the characters and universe never get involved, but Watchmen the fictional story does ala that one issue of The Question in the 80s, because Oz, the real villain, turns out to be Superboy Prime, not only justifying Oz sounding like a stupid child’s idea of a mysterious supervillain monologuing to himself but putting the whole story into a substantially more honest context. I mostly discuss it in the first of the two links I just posted, but Prime having returned to our universe after leaving in 1986 would have Watchmen as the logical top of his reading list, and as a moody teenager who had his semi-happy ending stripped away by J.T. Krul, would very possibly be WAY into it. 

So he decides the DCU still sucks, but not because it isn’t bright and shiny enough, but because it isn’t nearly rad enough, so he smashes in Wildstorm and Vertigo and gives everyone dumb armor like his, and now he’s attempting to mash in Watchmen itself (but ONLY attempting - he never pulls off that existential threat hanging over the whole thing, Watchmen only exists here as a comic book and that ‘universe’ never remotely touches anything or is impacted in any way) on the misunderstanding that that will fix everything that Superman screwed up when he accepted both aspects of himself. Hell, after Dark Nights: Metal, Prime could tap into the Dark Multiverse to build up his own angsty Justice League, with not-calling-it-DKR-Batman-but-we-all-know Batman, and Dark Flash Walter West, maybe Parallax, and a few others. Throw in him having attempted to split Superman into a ‘boring’ version (who he has conflicted feelings on since he originally hated him for not being good enough) and the partial New 52 self - who enrages him by being too Superman under Morrison and Pak instead of the brooding badass he was constructed to be - as a test run for grimming up everything else too and completing the process he started with Flashpoint (Pandora rambling about how it was necessary to consolidate brands to fight a threat down the line literally becomes a dumb backstory excuse Prime made up). Maybe Prime himself gets similarly split into constituent parts, the current edgelord and the retro freak and the genuine hero he once was? And the whole thing inevitably spirals into the even bigger plot by the Gentry and Empty Hand, and a whole wild battle for the soul of comics and heroes grappling in-universe with the ideas of poisonous nostalgia and the limits and proper meanings of deconstruction. Basically Infinite Crisis but good instead of just stupid fun. I.e. what Doomsday Clock is already trying to be, but honest and not directly shitting on Moore.

[smokeybrand]

Poppycock

Last night, i read a ton of the Crossed comics. I’d been seeing the Horsecock meme for a few years now and finally decided to pull the trigger to see what all the fuss was about. I’m always curious about ho the US does mature content in anything other than cinema because it rarely ever turns out decent. So how does Crossed fair? As something that wears it’s graphic nature on it’s sleeve, is it the unicorn that finally executes mature content, overt sexual situations, and storytelling in a way that is both satisfying and rewarding to the reader? No. No it does not. Crossed sucks. There shouldn’t be fuss because this sh*t is trash. Aside from the fact that the art is ugly as sin, making it incredibly difficult to want to keep reading, the actual narrative content is mediocre at it’s best and a whole ass dumpster fire at it’s worst. This sh*t is peak, teenage, edgelord, nonsense and it’s weird there are so many f*cking issues in the franchise. How is Crossed so successful? F*ck, dude, The Walking Dead does this entire narrative better. It’s like someone read that, removed all of the compelling character work and intricate world building, amped up the gore to cartoonishly ghoulish levels, and sh*t it out into a public too lazy to do the work. The Walking Dead is a story where the violence is a consequence of the plot. Crossed is a narrative that in service to, and almost an afterthought of, the violence. It’s the Michael Bay of this specific genre and i hated every minute i spent reading this trash. Also, and i can’t stress this enough, the art in these books is f*cking ugly. Not disgusting like they want it to be, but fundamentally poorly drawn.

Now, i may be a too hard on this series. May be. I’m not entirely sure but i feel like I'm not. I as raised on Eighties era Japanimation. That’s what we called it back then, not anime. Weebs weren’t a thing a yet, we were Otaku. I had a subscription to Newtype when i was, like twelve, that’s how deep i was into that sh*t. That’s how deep i am still into that sh*t. It’s wild seeing the culture shifts and how everything gets sanitized as appeal broadens but that’s a different essay. My point is i grew up on sh*t like Angel Cop, Dark City, Battle Angel Alita, and Akira. Tits and gore and sex and ultraviolence. It was intricately detailed and never skimped on the grim reality but was drawn with a passionate reverence for the art form. Hell, even films that have cultural significance and are heralded as high art like Grave of the Fireflies, never shied away from the brutality necessary for that narrative. I’ve seen a lot of f*cked up sh*t before my tenth birthday because of my love for the Japanese imports so i might be desensitized to this kind of stuff. That said, i know shock schlock when i see it and Crossed is definitely that. It’s an ugly, bloated, meandering, franchise filled with bad writing, poor art, and uninspired storytelling. We’ve seen this narrative before. Something triggers an apocalypse. Terrible people are terrible. Earnest people are trying to survive in the new status quo of nightmare and brutality. Now and Then, Here and There, did this much better, with less mutilation and more character development. The f*cking Mad Max franchise is built on this sh*t and Fury Road won Oscars for it. You don’t have to be Hemingway but, f*ck, give us something! Crossed doesn’t even present the bare minimum

Nothing is in service to a narrative. It’s all just murderrapezombies just for the shock of murderrapezombies. Holy sh*t, there’s incest in Family Values? That’s horrifying! Yosuga No Sora. They murdered those kids in the first limited? How f*cking bleak! Erased. I’ll admit, there are some interesting choices made in how to tell these pedestrian ass stories, Psychopath really stood out on that front, but the story, itself, is f*cking dumb. The first limited flirted with being pretty good over all but I've seen it done better elsewhere. Blood-C is a great example of that sh*t. Graphic violence, ridiculous gore you can feel, and still a damn decent overarching plot to tie it all together. The violence never overstays it’s welcome. It’s there to accentuate the powerlessness of our principals, never the main f*cking point of the story. I mentioned Alita before but if you want to focus on character, that’s your bet right there. The adventures of Gally are some of the most devastating situations you’ll ever experience. That chick has lived a life. Belladonna of Sadness is a horrible time but a beautiful watch. Want to go wide? An ensemble type narrative? AD Police. F*ck, dude, Devilman exists! Everything just mentioned, came out at least thirty f*cking years ago. Why is Crossed so bad when there is a plethora of material you can read that does this sh*t better? How can you not tell this type of story, when you have literally hundreds of example on how to tell this story properly, both contemporary and historical? And I'm only using Japanese content because that’s what I'm most familiar with. The French can give the Nihon a run for their money with some of the sh*t they’ve dropped over the years. Metal Hurlant, Heavy Metal when it skipped across the pond, is a straight up pioneer in this type of content. That motherf*cker has been publishing since the Seventies. It’s entire thing is mature storytelling and it does it in a way that’s compelling, easy on the eye, and rewarding to experience. Crossed does none of that.

Crossed is just gore porn trash. There’s no substance to be had . None of the characters are actually compelling. All of the violence is gratuitous. It’s never used as a mirror to humanity, just bloody viscera for the sake of it. It does nothing with that naked violence that has merit outside of just being there. Why do the Crossed f*cked each other to death? Is the fact that there are a mother and son character f*cking matter outside of the intrinsic revulsion humans are supposed to feel toward that type of sh*t? Where is the narrative reward for that guy f*cking a moose corpse? I can’t express how try-hard all of this comes across. There’s so much rape and mutilation in this thing, it just becomes normal. All the carnage s just background noise at some point and you’re left with lackluster storytelling for the remainder of the read. Like, there’s a scene where a bunch of these assholes are circle jerking into a bowl of bullets to turn people they shoot. That’s a scene in this comic which had potential. You could have explored how maybe the Crossed are more capable and build them up as a far deadlier threat. Nope. Another shows a bunch of Crossed eating baby corpses in an long abandoned delivery room. Why? What’s the point of this scene? How much harder would it hit if it wasn’t Crossed eating the fetus jerky, but regular people? This is how low some people would stoop just to live another day, even if that day is in a living hell. I read Sweet Tooth a few weeks back and it has a lot in common with Crossed. They can be companion pieces. Sweet Tooth is infinitely better. It does all the things you need to do, in order to tell this type of story. Emotional anchoring, strong motivations, a unrelenting sense of bleak struggle; Sweet Tooth is everything Crossed should have been. Instead, i got horsecock.