#i need to make a comic out of this . but for the sake of allegory ruben is not just her little brother but Also her

[frogatz]

shirley transgender 🫶

[problemswithbooks]

I think rock lock was used to show that the spinner cult is fanatic and self centered and he might even school them or have some flashback. But it’s still so weird to use the guy whose race is the original allegory for mutants in the x-men 😓

I certainly hope that's what Hori will do with him, but I kind of doubt that. The entire subplot has been handled poorly and given Hori's need to reference pop culture (he used Star Wars refences to name his fictional genocides for fucks sake) I think it's not unfair to assume he just pulled it out of X-Men whole cloth without actually caring about why the OG material had it in the first place.

If Hori doesn't address it and presents Rock-Lock as the same as any of the other 'human shaped' non-mutants, I do think that proves how little he actually cared about presenting this theme. Frankly, he's already steered into sort of offensive territory already, presenting the mutants as joining the PLF/Spinner and wanting to kill everyone. Heck, Spinner's entire reason for joining the LoV being because he was cosplaying Stain and didn't have any beliefs is kind of stupid if he already has a valid reason to be mad at society and want it changed.

And at the end of the day, this is a side plot. I've seen people annoyed with others who find this chapter boring, claiming they just don't get the story or only want their favs and flashy fights. But I don't think the people who say this chapter isn't important are wrong. Mutant discrimination isn't integrated into the main plot at all and is barely focused on even when we're following mutant characters. Sure this chapter brings up big world building things (out of no where), but at the end of the day I don't see this effecting anyone but side characters involved.

This isn't like Full Metal Alchemist. It had it's issues, but at least Scar and the Ishvalan genocide were integral to the main plot. Yes, Ed and Al wanted their bodies back and that was their main drive, but that desire led them to the philosophers stone, which led them to uncover how it was made and used in Ishval. That discovery helped lead them to Father and how the Homunculi were controlling their country and had set up Ishval for slaughter on purpose. Characters like Riza and Roy were haunted by what they did and their main motivations were changing the country so no more genocides happened.

Arakawa cared for this plot. She wove it and Scar into the main story in a way where they can't be cut out of it without changing the entire thing. It's something that impacted almost all of her characters including Ed and Al.

Hori just hasn't put that much care into his own story. The mutant discrimination stuff could be cut and it wouldn't really change all that much. It already wasn't a major part of Spinner's character--he could have just been bullied because he was poor or something. The people fighting for him could all just be PLF goons that escaped during the first war. It doesn't impact Izuku or Shigaraki; didn't change their outlook on the world or challenge them.

It's a set dressing, something that Hori pulled from a different comic to deepen his world building and make a cool side plot with his fun animal/ non-human character designs. It feels shallow and unimportant. Putting the stand in, right next to it's RL counterpart and having them insist he can't understand their oppression is just proof that Hori hasn't given this part of his story as much care as it needed. So, yeah, I can see why people find it boring.

[munohlow]

Ok real quick gonna propose an idea for that powerpuff girls reboot:

Don’t

But it if they really must (they shouldn’t!), there’s some better ways I think they could go about it, as well as what I’ve seen floating around (like don’t).

Pretty much all of these are assuming they’ll go the gritty reboot route because that’s pretty popular atm. A dark gritty take on anything is getting a bit tired, I think people are more open to weird and sincere stories, whether they’re adaptations or original. But recently a lot of comics (good comics!) 10+ years old are getting faithful adaptations (good adaptations!) and reviving that early/mid 2000’s taste for “what if Superman, but bastard?”

Aright one route they could go would be like that of Samurai Jack season 5 on Adult Swim. Written and animated by the original team and keeping to its truest nature while maturing it a bit along with the original fan base and maybe have an overarching plotline. The difference being that keeping it like the original ppg would create a stronger contrast with more mature and brutal violence, similar to Invincible’s friendly neighborhood Spider-man vibes and use of graphic violence.

This would be the second best way to adapt besides not doing it at all..... but that would also take more money and might not last beyond a season, ending with a solid conclusion like Samurai Jack did. Plus I’m semi doubtful the original team would be on board to drag out the girls’ story, especially like this.

Addressing the leaked script, a common comparison made was to the Netflix adaptation of The Umbrella Academy. Both are loose adaptations about child superhero siblings coming together after years of being apart, dealing with childhood trauma and their parent’s wrecklessness as adults.

And talking monkey.

Where Umbrella Academy made changes for the sake of depth and character development amidst the sci-fi madness, the CW Powerpuff Girls script attempted to be edgy and gross for the sake of being edgy and gross. They just want to be mature and topical while ignoring everything enjoyable about the original. It also just straight up sucks. I’m no writer but it seems like a lot of people who are writers are pretty pissed about paid professionals pushing this to the point of post-production. Well not post production, it was being filmed, but I enjoy alliteration. That’s also pretty far into development for something this bad, while it was rejected and is being reworked, it still got approved by enough people to shoot a pilot. If the leaked script itself isn’t a marketing ploy, I imagine that’s the real reason it was shut down. CW probably would’ve went through with it, otherwise. Maybe just keep it cancelled, yeah? Yeah.

This idea isn’t mine either but instead of the child star allegory, it could be more interesting to sort of see it carry on from where it left off, as the continued adventures of the powerpuff girls. Similar to the The Venture Bros. (a show I have not watched but know vaguely about, again this is someone else’s thought, I just think it sounds good) the girls can be grown up but start to realize they want to explore their lives and goals as individuals outside of heroism.

This at least appeals to me because you can keep the show’s status quo, keep the characters together, and have them grow into better more interesting characters as opposed to starting with a dour world where everyone is dead or just worse insufferable people. Instead, begin where audiences are comfortable and open to a new interpretation then let the characters realize there’s more to life and explore what kind of people they can become. (Or just don’t do it.)

Also just hear me out, but maybe, possibly? perhaps the professor was a good dad in the original cartoon? And let’s keep that? Let him remain a wholesome father figure? Is that okay? Don’t make this reboot? But if they do, keep him a nice loving parent?

Since this is the CW/ Warner bros who own DC comics, the best case scenario (cancelled) would be to make it more like the MANY SUPERHERO SHOWS THEY ALREADY MAKE. The good ones, anyway. I’m pretty sure the girls have crossed over with some DC characters in the cartoon already, why not make them canon DC characters? Maybe not. Could be cool! Better not, though. But they could still model the show after some of their better shows. Flash, Arrow, Supergirl are all not bad depending who you ask. I just finished Gotham, that was neat. Superman and Lois sounds like it’s pretty good so far. Powerpuff girls would better suit an earnest, straightforward, lighthearted take. Keep the humor, idk maybe up the violence to keep it dark and cool if that’s what people want (we don’t) and have it contrast with family drama like Invincible. All that to say that a darker, comical, well-written, DC-ish superhero thing they should look to for reference should be Doom Patrol.

This show fuckin litty. It’s like the better parts of Legends of Tommorow and Titans put together, as in it’s super weird and dumb but in a way that’s fun and moving. I recently rewatched season one as refresher before getting into season two and dammit if it didn’t get me in my feels amidst the quarantine. It’s about broken people working through their issues and pulling themselves together to help one another. Admittedly, it doesn’t have the best representation of those with disassociative identity disorder, as one character sometimes referred to as “Crazy” Jane has a different superpower with each of her alters. The character is very much a product of the 80’s but the writers of the show do their best to show that Jane respects the alters and their free will. But it also deals with topics of abuse, self-image, trauma, disabilities, homophobia, discrimination, and more in a way that gave me some catharsis while watching after all that’s been going on the past couple of years. Aside from all the comedy and action, it all flows together naturally, which is what you want in any series, not just your gritty superhero show. Doom Patrol is also batshit weird, every episode feels almost self contained/ freak-of-the-week while still following the main overarching plot, and Powerpuff Girls is very much like that, without the bigger plot or mature themes (as it should remain, let it be). Many will find it vaguely similar to The Umbrella Academy because GERARD WAY WAS INSPIRED BY DOOM PATROL TO WRITE THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY. The og comics, not the show, but still.

Also let’s address this

The hell was this about?

Anyway Idk maybe I sound like “Old Man Yells at Cloud,” but this really isn’t the way to go. Don’t do it, CW. Leave it alone, CW. Just don’t do it. We don’t need more sequels and reboot cash grabs, there’s plenty of up and coming writers with good original ideas waiting for their shot. And even with all those new edgy shows and movies, some of which are actually not bad, not everything needs to be so grim. Like sure Teen Titans Go! is a goofy reboot but it’s still just a fun dumb cartoon, it’s not bad, I bet that other ppg show was also just fine. Maybe YOU are “Old Man Yells at Cloud.” But what do I know?

And all THAT to say you should go watch all those other things I mentioned and some old ppg episodes back to back, instead. Don’t fuckin do it, CW

[phantomofthepairofdice]

George A. Romero’s “The Amusement Park”

George A. Romero might be the man who most directly served as my gateway to critical movie watching. Unlike a lot of the filmmakers who helped me mature my understanding of film as a medium of art rather than a disposable experience, my love for his work has only deepened as opposed to having a twinge of cringe at the pretense with which I embraced some movies and directors that I’ve grown cold on or outright pivoted into disliking. Where, for the latter, they served a valuable purpose but were perhaps able to do so as a result of being digestible or, in retrospect, lamentably simple, Romero’s movies have not a single thread of posturing to something “important” woven in. Romero was always handy in using the backdoor of theme and metaphor to deliver ideas, as opposed to a direct scolding or information session.

At their very best, his movies achieve a balance that few films can when it comes to being experienced as being equally enjoyable and intellectual - while never sacrificing one for the other. There’s almost an elegance to the inelegance that comes from working so far outside of the studio system. The low budgets of his independent fare give a scrappy, tactile quality to locations and do little to glamorize and gussy up things like frequent collaborator Tom Savini’s chunky, visceral makeup effects. His run in the 70s is especially potent as a result of the low-budget aesthetic. The Crazies, Martin, and Knightriders would lose a certain verisimilitude to their outsider art mission statements if they had a glossy studio packaging. 

I’ve been hesitant to write up my love for the late, great Romero since it feels like a daunting task to distill the endless rivers that flow from the massive glacial totem that is George A. Romero. The same thing can be said for a lot of people whose work I have deeply seeded respect and love for like Jonathan Demme or Robert Altman. I know that art and movies are reduced when treated like rites of passage or items on a checklist for credibility, but I have this overwhelming feeling that I want to come correct when it comes to folks like these. It feels like a responsibility to be comprehensive, eloquent, and effective in describing them, their work, or their massive impact on myself.

Well, I finally got enough reason to put down some words when I found out that a bizarre, long-thought-lost missing puzzle piece of this titanic personal hero was going to be released. Not only that, but I could see it in a relatively safe way in a theater. What I was lucky enough to see projected on a bright wall in a dark room was something that filled me with equal parts pleasure and stomach-churning uneasiness. One of the greatest compliments I can give to the film is that felt like it would make a terrific pairing with Carnival of Souls.

The Amusement Park is a film that Romero was commissioned to make by The Lutheran Society about senior citizens being disregarded by society. After having seen what Romero concocted up with screenwriter Wally Cook, it’s no surprise that the film was shelved, and thought destroyed. Like all of Romero’s great films, The Amusement Park operates with a keen but unpretentious metaphor and allegory at its heart. What makes this project immediately different is that it’s bookended with a direct address to the camera from its star, a charming and hammy Lincoln Maazel, breaking down the mission statement and intent of the symbolism within it. What follows is an experiential concept piece that disorients the viewer in an attempt to have them empathize with their elders’ terror and loneliness at the hands of ageism, elder abuse, and death. It’s an effective plea for human decency and a disquieting, haunted trip to hell outside of heaven’s waiting room.

The runtime is under an hour and plot takes a back seat to sensation, so I won’t go into too much detail for the sake of preserving the set pieces’ potency. What I will do is highlight a few moments and stylistic choices.

The Amusement Park is very angry and very sad. The camera is mostly handheld and takes on a documentary texture when it focuses on the faces of other elderly park goers. There’s a lament for the life that these poor folks are trapped within cut between a venomous glare at the ancillary characters who disregard or assault the senior park guests. Romero’s usual distaste for the wealthy resurfaces most notably in a scene where Maazel’s man sees a rich and “proper” man dine on lobster and smoke a comically large cigar before looking back at the old man in absolute disgust. He’s served a slop of beans and bread on a paper plate. Like a lot of the film’s ideas, the dichotomy of circumstances trades subtlety for effectiveness. What makes this scene unique is that when the old man offers to share his meager rations with the other hungry guests, they show no restraint – it’s a nasty collage of shots with bread being torn and people shoved.

The real standout sequence comes as our unnamed protagonist follows a young couple into a fortune teller’s tent while they ask to see their future. The spritely lovebirds want to know if they’ll be still be together in their old age, but the fortune teller offers warning that in order to see their future, they’ll need to see it in its entirety. The couple’s youthful ignorance shows a general feeling of invincibility that many of the young characters have throughout the film, but once they see what the soothsayer has to offer, they are forced to reckon with the ominous vicissitudes that appear before them.

The editing of the sequence is jarring, cutting between the disparate time periods – flash cuts between the crystal ball and the eyes of the woman behind it are slammed into what looks like a documentary or news interview with a building manager who laments the raise in taxes and how it keeps him from fixing the dangerous, dilapidated, low-rent housing behind him. This is an institutional crisis. The film cuts to narrative footage of that same young couple, now old and desperate for emergency medical attention. Outside, a high school marching band blares and trots forward with a brash, spry pace. It’s as if the band is flippantly taunting the old women, life trampling on without her and her bedridden husband. The wife’s attempts to reach their doctor are moot. Chaos overwhelms a quiet passing. Upon seeing his own mortality, the young man targets the protagonist and attacks him in a flurry of confused anger.

The movie has an episodic structure, and some of these interludes work better than others. While I do think that the movie is quite good and a must-see for any curious fans of the director’s career (he even has a great cameo), I certainly wouldn’t hail it as a masterpiece. Working for hire within the specific constraints of an educational film and off of a script that he didn’t write (a rarity within his career), there’s some serious clumsiness to the some of the story beats and how underlined the symbolism is. I also greatly missed the seamless integration gallows humor that spices up even the bleakest of Romero’s other projects. What’s here in terms of levity occasionally undercuts the horror. That being said, its mission to imbue experiential empathy for old folks was undeniably successful in this viewer - the packaging may be a bit busted, but the product is fresh and satisfying. Like The Crazies or his Dead films, the ever-approaching specter of death is the driving force behind the melancholic terrors of the piece. Romero’s knack for satisfying but somber endings is present here as well. Images from this - like the holy men closing up shop - stack up alongside some of the other hauntingly effective moments from Romero’s movies that are emblazoned in my brain like the closing montage of Night of the Living Dead, the opening sequence of Martin, the roaches in Creepshow, and the wall of hands from Day of the Dead.

While it feels weird to offer praise to a man alongside a short review for a movie he was, by all accounts, not terribly impressed with, this is what I’ve chosen to do. *shrugs* I’ll never write the perfect tribute or quite distill the gratitude I have for certain people and the gifts they gave me (along with countless others). I can selfishly make that a burden and never actually put it out there for fear of imperfection, or I can be grateful and embrace the luck that I’ve been able to see another work from one of those people. Especially after watching this, I’ll choose the latter.

The Amusement Park is now available to stream on Shudder.

[dickgreyson]

hey this has officially gone too far

this is now crazy. ive tried to resolve things quietly with the people involved. but whilst that’s been happening, the situation has really spun out of control (thanks to a loud and ignorant few people) and i havent had the opportunity to defend myself in all this.

first of all, my initial statements weren’t actually controversial. i, and a few other tumblr users (including @dykemas) made posts reminding christian, and atheist westerners, that depicting canon non-christian characters in christmas art was insensitive and offensive to people of those faiths. i made this post as a jewish woman, because it’s inappropriate, and sometimes even disallowed by our faiths. 

christmas is not a neutral holiday. it is religious. although american atheists want it to just be a fun holiday tradition, it isnt. and i didnt think it was appropriate to be drawing damian in a santa hat, considering this is old discourse that we went over last year. its alarming to me how quick everyone is to strip him of any religiosity. yes i am aware that arab =/= muslim, and i never said that. it’s pretty widely accepted that he’s a muslim character, considering that talia canonically is. if we want to say for arguments sake that he isn’t then, it’s still unlikely he would be celebrating christmas, and assimilating into christian tradition, when his wider family is jewish.

bruce wayne and dick grayson were created by jewish writers. they were crafted in the great tradition of jewish story telling, as allegories for biblical characters, with jewish speech patterns, and takes on morality and ethics, to subvert white supremacist overtones in wider american media. dc has even, as recently as a few months ago, confirmed that bruce wayne is a jew. this wasnt explicitly confirmed early on, due to the comics code authority being really antisemitic. by the time the authority was overturned, dc was uncomfortable with how overly jewish these characters were, since american society was still uncomfortable with judaism and it’s role in comics’ history, and they knew it would hurt sales. that’s why we see the batfamily in canon celebrating christmas. this is inappropriate.

martha wayne was a jewish woman. bruce’s wider family is jewish. the family is jewish. tim drake was created by a jewish writer, with the intention of being jewish. this family. is jewish.

there’s a reason that jews dont celebrate christmas: because we have our own faith and tradition. and it is insulting to have that brushed away by ignorant and rude people. no jews and muslims dont celebrate christmas. muslims are not allowed to celebrate christmas, since it has roots in paganism. jews arent allowed to celebrate christmas, since it celebrates jesus and we dont view him as a prophet. he’s akin to another g-d and we only. have. one. g-d.

and erasing a character’s non-christian religion is disgusting, especially in the case of judaism. after the shoah the catholic church rounded up jewish children from camps and refused to return them to their families. they instead continued the nazi’s genocide, by stripping them of their faith and language and forcing them to adopt catholicism. so by stripping a jew’s faith, and saying ‘oh he just culturally celebrates christmas’ is really disgusting. because there is a history here that christians just dont understand, and obviously refuse to learn. 

so yeah. i will continue to back my self and my convictions. it is inappropriate to dismiss my concerns about respecting the religiousity of these characters. and it is disgusting to watch you disrespect the intentions of these characters’ jewish creators. as christians/americans with christian backgrounds, you do not get to tell a jew how to view their holidays and traditions, and it is beyond disgusting the way this debate has been depicted. 

it is not hard to be respectful of non-christian people at this time of year, and it is really not hard to learn about comic history. it’s widely known that comics are a jewish art form. when making art around this time of year, there is no need to specifically offend jewish and muslim people. there is no excuse at this point. get informed.

[knifeonmars]

“I let them in and they broke me” The Worldview of Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Batman: Last Knight on Earth, from DC Comics' "mature readers" imprint Black Label, is supposedly the final word on Batman from the team of writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo, who have worked together on the character in some capacity since 2011's New 52 relaunch. This claim to finality isn't entirely convincing given that Snyder and Capullo's current Death Metal event series is also about a Batman and his friends fighting a bunch of evil Batmen, but for the sake of this examination, I take Last Knight on Earth at its word. As an experience, as a comic, Last Knight on Earth (hereafter LKoE) is really good. Snyder and Capullo are both heavily invested in the character and they're firing on all cylinders here, throwing out off the wall ideas which would never fly in the mainstream DC Universe and giving us lovingly rendered, absolutely beautiful pages of devastation and violence. It's a feast and a thrill ride, but it's also not going to be for everyone because it is deeply, deeply misanthropic in its politics. LKoE, more than anything else, is about disappointment in humanity, but where it goes with that disappointment is fundamentally conservative and nostalgic.

To understand this, it's important to know that Snyder's take on Batman has always been grounded in post-9/11, post-War on Terror urban fears. Batman had long been rooted in the urban fears of the 1980's; crime run amok, overwhelmed and inadequate police, etc, thanks to the influence of Frank Miller, a man who was famously mugged multiple times after moving to New York City and wasn't shy about reflecting that feeling of helplessness and anger in his work. Snyder's Batman, by contrast, was not a terrifying spirit of vengeance, but a shining beacon, a folk hero and aspirational figure, Snyder's Batman is heavily informed by the Obama era. LKoE is about this Obama era optimism, naivete if you like, crashing against the reality of the 2016 election of Donald Trump. It's not subtle in its allegory; the apocalypse of LKoE is set off by Lex Luthor and Superman having a debate about good versus evil and the people of Earth democratically "voting" in favor of evil, then rising up and destroying the world. They even come into the halls of power, or rather JLA HQ, the Hall of Justice, and destroy the very people who tried to protect them. The horror at the heart of the book isn't Trump, it's the idea that people are horrible, stupid, and selfish.

It's unrepentant in this misanthropy, but also noncommittal. For a book about how bad ordinary people can be, there are shockingly few of them in this book. There's no Carrie Kelly, no Harper Row (Snyder's own creation, who even he has evidently forgotten about) in this book, no one to push back against the idea that people in general are bad. There is no mention, no glimpse of those who didn't want this, who "voted" for goodness, the election condemns them all, renders humanity as a whole into a monolith of ravenous, mindless evil. The closest we get to confronting this monolith is the Slingers, ordinary humans who tried to use Green Lantern rings, and because they lacked the will to control them properly, have become giant, mindless, evil, energy babies. It's an evocative and amusing image, but the politics of it are distasteful: "This is you." says LKoE, a big baby, totally unprepared for a power which should only be placed in the hands of the chosen elite. One (1) single ordinary person gets to speak in this book; a toe-headed little boy who talks to Batman for just over a page, little more than a cardboard cutout, that's it. For a book that's about humanity's evil, LKoE is completely unwilling to look that evil in the eye.

The final enemy that Batman must confront isn't a Trump analog, it's not even humanity's selfishness as a whole, it's Omega, and who is Omega? Batman, but broken. Omega is the original Bruce Wayne, tortured and mutilated in the aftermath of the "election" as humanity descended into an orgy of self-destruction and violence, now having pieced himself back together as a totalitarian, mind-controlling villain who wants to protect humanity from itself. He could, charitably, read as the rise of fascism in light of chaos, the fear of the guy who comes after Trump, the cleaner, more articulate monster who can really get things done (though such a fear already seems outdated given Trump's efficacy in perpetrating horrors),  but I think that misses that mark. Omega is Batman as a blackpilled doomer, someone who has looked into the face of what humanity is capable of and given form to his misanthropy. Our Batman, the hero of the story, is a clone of this fallen Batman, with matching memories that stop just short of the "election" and his fall from grace. He's the same guy in every way that matters, the only difference is that he was never traumatized, he never really reckoned with what humanity was capable of: he was never a victim. Our Batman is a hero because of his ignorance, because he's been allowed to forget, and in doing so his underlying assumptions about the world have never been challenged. LKoE is a book in which even the Joker can earn redemption and a place in the extended Bat-family, but Omega has to die by the hand of our shiny, unblemished Batman so that the future can live. And what is that future? It's more of the same.

LKoE ends with an almost sickly sweet scene that looks a lot like hope: the heroes all hug each other and strike a group pose looking hopefully at nothing in particular, Batman holds a baby version of Superman and resolves to raise him and bring hope back into the world, but none of it really means anything. It's more of the same, the same people doing the same things, led by a man whose defining virtue is his ignorance of the past, a group of insular elites watching over a people they both hate and fear, doing nothing to make people better beyond hoping, vaguely, that they won't make the same mistakes again. There is no passing of the torch, no new Batman for a new era, it is pointedly, specifically, the same old Batman. LKoE is a comic that's ultimately about staying the course, doing the same thing despite knowing that it means nothing, acknowledging a fundamental contempt for the unwashed masses but not actually doing anything about it because hey, it's not like you got hurt. The bad guy is the one who won't let go of the past, who points at what people are capable of and demands change, and he can't be allowed to exist if we're to get back to doing things the old-fashioned way. 

Last Knight on Earth is motivated by the birth of the Trump era, and arrives as it nears a potential finish, but it doesn't point towards anything new, it just wants to go back to the way things were, even in the face of an unshakable hatred of people and a certainty that they are not to be trusted, that they need their betters to guide them. I don't want to be so thuddingly simplistic as to label what these means politically, but laid out like this it's clear. The ideology of Snyder and Capullo's Batman is born of the Obama era, warts and all, and cannot survive the Trump era, but the solution Last Knight on Earth offers is not to change and evolve once more, but to forget, to fall back. That doesn't work, it can't work, whether it's a comic book or the real world, history only ever goes one way.

[skekheck]

30 Days of the Dark Crystal Challenge

Decided to do poultry-blocks Dark Crystal challenge because it looks like a lot of fun to do. However I’m cheating and I wrote all of this within a couple of days. Warning: fairly large post with pictures and fan ramblings. 

EDIT: I FORGOT TO INCLUDE DAY 16 WHOOP. It’s in there now. 

Day 1. Your favorite skeksis

Idiot, feral, wildman who stole my heart. How? Why? Who knows. *chef kisses* Beautiful stinky bastard.

Day 2: Your favorite gelfling

Bless her and her skeksis cosplay. What a queen.

Day 3: A character that you love that everyone seems to hate.

The tides are changing for her it seems. I think people are appreciating her more, but she still faces her fair share of controversies. Not that I don’t think it warrants discussion nor am I excusing her actions. But she’s way more complex than what a lot of people are making her out to be.

Day 4: A character that you hate that everyone seems to love. 

Hate is a strong word as I don’t hate him, but I don’t really care for Amri. He feels like a bootleg Deet mixed with a little bit of Kylan and Gurjin. Wasted potential and honestly shouldn’t have been the POV for Tides of the Dark Crystal. Seems I’m alone in this opinion, though. Maybe the book warrants rereading?

Day 5: Movie or TV Show? Why?

TV Show by miles! I think the series accomplishes way more than the movie does, like establishing lore,  better written characters, and a more engaging story. I actually cared about the gelfling and it really fleshed out the skeksis in an interesting way outside of “oh they do evil things because they’re evil!”. Doesn’t mean it does everything right, but I’ll get into that later.  

Day 6: Something you wish that happened in the series but didn’t.

Just a few things. I miss the gelfling intermingling with the mystics, particularly urVa. I love everything that happens with urGoh and skekGra, but some of the bonding moments Naia had with urVa are precious and I wish we had more of that. I also wished the gelfling got the message out to the other clans like they did in the book where Kylan dreametched their message onto the Santuary Tree’s blossoms and scattered them all throughout Thra. I also wished Tavra and Onica were an established couple, but maybe it’s not too late for that.

Day 7: Favorite gelfling clan

The Sifa! It was the Dousan at first, but the more I learned about the Sifa the more I grew to love the clan. If I were a gelfling I would probably be a sifa myself LOL. 

Day 8: You opinion on Aughra

She’s a fun and fascinating character! Aughra puts a unique spin on the whole beautiful, wise earth goddess trope by making her ugly, old, and cranky. She’s also a character with her own flaws, even having a mini arc about neglecting to take care of her planet and doing whatever she can to make amends. Not to mention she’s wildly entertaining. Much love for Aughra!

Day 9: Skeksis or Gelfling?

Both!

Day 10: Your opinion on podlings?

They’re just funky little potato people who just want to have fun, dance, and drink all day and I respect them for that. They’re great. Also Hup exists and he’s just an amazing character so there’s that.

Day 11: Your The Dark Crystal unpopular opinion

I think it’s okay to sympathize with the skeksis as long as one is not excusing their actions. I see a lot of people say you shouldn’t because they’re evil and they commit atrocities. Which, yes, it’s true, but I think both can co-exist. I mean, skekTek’s whole cycle of abuse is written very sympathetically yet the show doesn’t coddle him. It shows the ugliness of his character and what happens when someone isn’t capable of cutting off from said cycle. Also the writers consider the skeksis as tragic characters due to their broken nature so I don’t think it’s wrong to be a little sympathetic. But once again with great emphasis, sympathy is fine as long as their actions are judged. They are awful bastards and no amount of sympathy will change that. 

Day 12: Something you dislike about the series

I think the stuff I don’t like about the show is a result of its pacing and cluttered cast. There are so many stories going on and while I liked how they handled it for the most part, you can also see how the show rushes to get through all of them. A lot of important moments where a character should reflect or something that should simmer more is pushed aside for the next thing. Maybe if the show was given more episodes and time to breath it would have been better off. 

Day 13: Most disappointing thing about the series

SkekMal and urVa didn’t have enough screen time and we were honestly ROBBED. 

Day 14: Your OTP

Speaking of which... . Its a crack ship, but I’m all about that allegory for self love (and I just want these two to be alive). Day 15: Favorite quote

Listed plenty of my favorite quotes before, but I’ll pick this one:

“ Life is my paint. Death is my canvas”

Day 16: Rate the skeksis from least favorite to favorite OR rate the gelfling from lest favorite to favorite [or both!]

And if you want my gelfling hot takes, here’s this list (just backwards in context to this post)

Day 17: Opinion on Raunip?

Raunip is a fantastic character. I loved him in Creation Myths and I can’t wait to see what role he’d play in the resistance. And I absolutely love the parallels between him and the urskeks it’s great. 

Day 18: A character that is most similar to you.

I too am a dark-dwelling gremlin who constantly forgets where I put things and crack a few dark jokes at my expense. 

Day 19: Which character do you strongly dislike, why?

This is entirely based on the books, but I find Mera to be awful.  I think it’s because she’s so fake and condescending? When Naia arrived in Sami Thicket, she was acting nice and polite but when the Drenchen asked her why the skeksis never visited Sog Mera responded  “It’s only worth counting what’s valuable”. She continuously disrespects her by calling her pet names even when Naia became maudra. It doesn’t come off as cute, it’s gross. I don’t recall Mera ever apologizing for any of the shit she did to Naia... or Kylan for that matter. She was a pretty neglectful step-mother to him. She doesn’t have an excuse being busy with Maudra stuff because Laesid was a kickass mom to her kids. So in conclusion, fuck this bitch.

Day 20: What do you like so much about the Dark Crystal?

The better question what’s not to love about the Dark Crystal? It has amazing creature design, an expansive world that feels real and alien from our own, having complex and interesting characters as well as villains, the fact that it relies heavily on practical effects a.k.a puppetry... . There’s nothing like it and that’s what makes it so wonderful and unique. It needs to be appreciated more. 

Day 21: Favorite music piece from the soundtrack?

Can’t beat that opening theme. 

Day 22: Your opinion on the sequel comics [Power/Beneath the Dark Crystal]

They have cool concepts and ideas, but they’re not written well. Power is just the movie if it was put into a blender and shredded and ignoring a large portion of established lore for the sake of plot. And Beneath is just a generic fantasy story with the Dark Crystal logo slapped on it. 

Day 23: Which character from the YA novels/comics do you wish we would see more of?

There are plenty of characters that are a given to appear in the series at some point (skekSa, skekLi, urSan, etc). And of course I want to see them, but I really hope Periss shows up (and his brother too). He is one of my favorite characters from the book series and we could use some more Dousan rep!

Day 24: Your opinion on the Age of Resistance comic?

I have yet to read the comics. I’m waiting on them to be part of a collection so I don’t have to buy all of the volumes at once (I prefer owning physical copies). I’ve heard good things about them, especially the story with Hup and the current Mayrin arc. I’m excited to get my hands on them. 

Day 25: The best moment/scene in the series?

There are a lot of great moments, but Rian and Ordon’s fight with skekMal is still my favorite in the entire series. The "Speak For the Dead” scene is a close second.

Day 26: The death of a character that hurt you the most?

He did not deserve this. Fuck you, skekMal. 

Day 27: Your favorite episode from the series?

It’s got to be 4. Not just because a number of my favorite characters debut in this episode, but it’s an important one for the plot. Stakes are being raised, we’re seeing set ups to major story elements and character arcs, and events that impact the rest of the series. It also has a handful of my favorite character moments and interactions. 

Day 28: Your favorite non-skeksis and non-gelfling character? Why?

I’ve come to realize the reasons why I love urVa are the same as why I love skekMal (incredibly appropriate I might say). There’s enough information about him that we get a good understanding on who he is as a character, but still mysterious enough that there’s interest in wanting to know more. Much like his skeksis, he’s unique from the other mystics and thus giving him unique experiences that are fun to speculate. However, the YA novels are responsible for my current fondness of him. 

Day 29: Do you like the urru and skeksis apart or like them as urSkeks together?

A main theme of the Dark Crystal is unity and balance. The main conflict of the franchise are the skeksis, the broken fragments of their urskek self who, according to the writers, “...[have] a dire need for the qualities they lack”. Their only salvation is to become urskeks again and unfortunately many of the pairs never achieve this.  They’re basically a giant allegory for the self and self-love. While we don’t really know what they were like when they were an urskek (aside from SilSol perhaps), we can get some understanding when we look at their pairs and see what traits they share. Speculation is also fun! So as much as I love the skeksis and mystics as individuals, I prefer them to be whole again.

Day 30: What are your wishes for a possible season 2?

A whole bunch of things. I want to see them explore more about the mystics and their lifestyle, having Raunip play a big part in the plot, seeing more of skekSa’s fall from grace from her perspective, the beginning of the Garthim Wars, and more. 

[charmed-and-alarmed]

This is a Public Service Announcement

Gather round children. I think this is a good time to remind everyone the difference between encoding and decoding meaning in text

Now, I'm not going to talk about the actual theory behind this bc no one cares prob, but heres the TL;DR:

The interpretation of a text doesn't have to line up with the creator's intentions. In reality, it usually doesn't.

Let's break it down:

Creating texts (text = books, TV shows, movies, comics, paintings, etc) involves a process called ENCODING. The creator, whoever they are, has some meaning in mind when they make the text - it's supposed to be funny, it's supposed to be heartwarming, it's supposed the be an allegory for the Vietnam War, whatever.

So when the text is shown to the public, some theme or meaning - however insignificant it may be - has been Encoded into it. It may be the literal story you're telling, but it can be more subtle. Its for the creator to decide how they want to do it.

Important: there is no such thing as a text with no Encoded meaning. It's like ppl who say something "isn't political" - everything is political bc everything involves interactions between co-existing indv balancing cooperation with their self-interests, which is what politics really boils down to (feel free to disagree with my definition as loudly as you'd like in my inbox - my point stands)

Now there's a completely separate process taking place with the audience who interacts with this text called DECODING. This is when your viewers/readers/listeners/audience interacts with the creator's text and makes meaning of it.

If the creator is successful, the audience will Decode the text and understand their intented meaning - "crime doesn't pay" or "sharing is good for everyone" or whatever. Good storytelling, therefore, comes from the successful communication of the creator's intended meaning.

Now here's the rub: authorial intentions, at the end of the day, have NO bearing on what the audience decodes (i.e. interprets) the story to mean. Let me say it again: it doesn't matter AT ALL what the author meant to say, if that's not what the audience gets out of it.

In a lot of ways, I (a female white-person) think a lot of this tension is a white-person and/or male-person problem: it's hard to accept criticism for something you didn't mean to say. Like, you weren't trying to be racist - you just made a "historical" drama with no people of color in it. Your movie about gangs in LA isn't supposed to be offensive - there are just a lot of black and latino drug users in gangs. How is it fair to be criticized for saying something you weren't trying to say in the first place, right?

But here's the thing: when you decide to show your creative text to other ppl, you have invited those ppl to Decode your text. You've basically given up control of the texts meaning - all you can do is hope you did a good job Encoding your message so that ppl understand it.

It's like when you accidentally say something that upsets someone: you're supposed to apologize, even if you never intended to upset them. Why? Bc we recognize the fact that what we mean to say and what ppl hear isn't always going to line up. Sometimes it's bc you didn't know some term was racist, but other times (if you're like me) you've said something careless like (after watching a child actor play outside before a show) "I admire your commitment to looking the part, but you probably don't need the smell sweaty too: the audience can't tell, but your castmates can". Was that an incredibly rude thing to say to that child actor and his mother? Yes. Yes it was. Did someone have to point that out to me a few minutes later? Also yes. Bc while my boss knew I wasn't trying to be an asshole, I had been an asshole. So I needed to apologize (and I did)

It all comes down to two things:

1) If you want to tell ppl exactly what you mean, write an essay (or a long Tumblr post)

2) If you don't want ppl to interpret your work, just don't make it public for fucks sake.

This has been a lengthy PSA

[whatwouldteslado]

It has layers: An analysis of Shrek's commentary on race, femininity and the power of white beauty

(I know I said I wouldn’t submit this essay. And look, you don’t need to read it. But it’s a serious essay and something I am very passionate about. I hope you’re not mad. It’s just important to me.)

Subversions of classic fairy tales are commonplace staples in the world of fiction. Whether that includes grimdark retellings, parody or adult-oriented interpretations of the morals, twisting these well-known and classic stories for a piece of fiction is an easy way to deliver a subversive experience because the visual framework and shorthand are already present in the audience’s lexicon.

These fairy tale parodies/retellings typically take a story oriented toward young girls, and either for the sake of comedy or in efforts to capitalize on an older male audience, inject levels of violence (ex: Revolting Rhymes by Ronald Dahl, Fables comics) or sexual themes and interpretations - often sexualizing female characters in the original stories (ex: Red Hot Riding Hood cartoon May 8, 1943) into the fairy tales.

Shrek is a very obvious subversion of fairy tale stories, honing in specifically on the tropes of the Walt Disney versions of classic fairytale stories for its parodic forumla; but rather than rooting the subversion in inducing a raunchier/more violent take on these stories, the subversion is actually one rooted in a feminist rejection of Western beauty standards and a commentary on race in America. 

Fiona and White Beauty

Fiona is a character who is presented to the audience with all of the necessary visual and storytelling cues necessary for us to inform our interpretation of her as a typical beautiful princess: she is a thin, traditionally beautiful damsel in distress.

This interpretation comes with it our built-in ideas of what a beautiful princess should be (dainty, kind, loving, etc.) but it is subverted with the duality of Fiona’s visual form, and the visible efforts we see Fiona take to fit into our preconceived ideas of fairy tale princesshood.

During the day, Fiona has a more socially-acceptable form (smaller-framed, white) and she takes efforts to wear an air of demurity and exaggerated femininity, as is expected of her by the society she lives in. She hides interests and skills not typically valued in women of her environment (kung fu, etc.), feigns helplessness and formality for her savior, and she demands the outcome that she was raised to believe she should want — a fairy tale ending with a prince — and code-switches into princesshood to get that.

 But during the night, Fiona transforms into an ogre - and while the face-value interpretation of this as visual shorthand for not having the features deemed beautiful by Western beauty standards (i.e.: thinness, whiteness, femininity, etc.) is definitely present, it would be remiss of the viewer to not observe the parallels the ogre experience echoes of the experience of people of color in America. 

Our peek into Shrek’s day-to-day life at the beginning of the film strengthens the metaphor - Shrek is, at his core, a man who is assumed violent by the public at large due to his physical appearance, with these assumptions impacting his treatment by nearly every character in the world he resides in. These assumptions and the microaggressions he faces inform his decision to live in seclusion in an under-funded area of the woods with little-to-no attention from those in power, where he is assumed dangerous and mocked or dismissed by the majority community — an experience that many men of color would say are echoed in their own day-to-day lives.

Shrek is also coded as undesirable because of his ogreness, and the in-story-public and audience is encouraged to find the idea of him finding love with a white human princess to be a ridiculous notion. 

Similarly, Fiona’s nightly transformation into an ogre comes with its own list of assumptions on behalf of the audience — that it makes her less desirable and less likely to find love. 

So, paired with what we know about Shrek’s ogreness and the way it impacts his experience, Fiona’s transformation into an ogre isn’t just an aesthetic message for the viewer - it can be interpreted as a racially-coded one. 

Sometimes the beholder is just too damn white: Beauty and the moral of Shrek

It often happens that fairy tales and other stories oriented to younger children or younger girls cannot decide if beauty is important or not. 

We have the Ugly Duckling, where the namesake protagonist goes its entire life feeling ugly and like it doesn’t belong until it turns out the duck was hot all along and just had not yet hit puberty. We also have stories like Beauty and the Beast where aesthetic beauty that complies with Western standards of beauty is simultaneously supposed to be treated as unimportant to Belle (in lieu of the Beast’s other traits) and treated as a reward for the Beast, for once he finds love. In both of these stories, characters the audience is supposed to sympathize with end up acquiring the beauty they seek. 

Shrek is a film that does not give beauty out as a reward. In the movie, Fiona stays an ogress. It is treated as a plot twist, and in first viewings, the audience might wonder what still needs to be done for her to get the ending she wants. But then something happens: Even while the public at large mocks Fiona, and treats her as ugly, Shrek says she is beautiful anyways.

And while Shrek’s idealization of Fiona as a beautiful person does not match the masses’ interpretation of her appearance as ugly, the film does not frame it as incorrect. Instead, the film frames the masses as wrong. 

A socially-acceptable standard of beauty is rejected by the film’s core message, rather than the prize for the female protagonist. 

Fiona is beautiful. 

Not because she is eventually going to turn back into a thin, white princess.

Not because she has a heart of gold, and that’s more important than beauty.

She is beautiful because she simply is. 

Fiona is big, and she is different, and damn it, she is green. But she is beautiful, and the movie Shrek says that if the public can’t see that, fuck the public.

The interpretation of Fiona’s ogreness as allegory for being a person of color strengthens this message. Ogreness is beautiful, just as black is beautiful, and brown is beautiful, and fat is beautiful. 

We are encouraged as a society to reject these features, and Shrek encourages us to reject that rejection.

Conclusion

While many subversions of fairy tales find themselves taking a classic story aimed toward young girls and parodizing it for the sake of an older audience, Shrek delivers a comedic and subversive experience while still maintaining feminist themes and a surprisingly nuanced take on the way those different than the governing group can find themselves ostracized and assumed to be dangerous. 

Shrek is not a story for edgy teenage boys.

Shrek is a story for anyone who has felt like they could not find acceptance because of who they are.

Shrek is a story for the All Stars.

I have to say I hadn’t thought of this idea before. The stereotypes and treatment of ogres in the film definitely parallel people of color within life and alternatively people that differ from what is seen as the norm in varying degrees. Seeing the connection now it’s hard not to see ogres as a metaphor for people of color. I’m not sure what that means entirely for Fiona as her transformation into an ogre could be at least a couple different things from what I first thought. It could be symbolic of people with mixed features, people of color that use certain beauty methods to replicate the standard white beauty, or something entirely different. 

I hadn’t really considered to examine the movie before, mostly because of its effect on my daily life, but this is interesting. 

Also, I am not mad whatsoever. Even if I have seen more of Shrek than one human should, it doesn’t make it or the ideas that can be taken from or about it less important and valuable. Additionally, I can tell you care about it and that in of itself gives it more value.

[nautilusopus]

Serious non-troll: What if you like the cop-outs and the scrambled bullshit plots and the nonsense towers of half-constructed ideas? I agree that for example Nomura is a goddamn crazy person but I find his convulsions fascinating and want to see more of them.

i mean, you’re entirely within your rights to do that. it’s just frustrating that there’s visibly no effort put into any of it, and he’s just writing for the sake of what makes the trailer look good, and that’s been 100% to the detriment of the story ever since he’s started doing it

i’m not even inherently opposed to ridiculous convoluted bullshit. i’m one of those pretentious fuckheads that unironically likes End of Evangelion and thinks it made perfect sense, obviously, duh, with all its absolute nonsense of adam and lilith and rei being a god-analogue from absorbing both the white and black seeds and allowing shinji to dictate the ultimate outcome of third impact in the culmination of a couple of really fucking long and extremely obtuse character arcs. i mean, hell, i’m 38 chapters into a fic that is running off nothing but weird high-concept ideas of how reality and parallel universes work and abstract metaphor andsleep deprivation. in any other circumstances, i’m fine with convoluted batshit nonsense.

i think the best way to explain the heart of the issue is to look at what happened to the matrix trilogy. or actually wait this is tumblr, everyone’s in high school and would’ve been foetuses or something when Revolutions came out. homestuck, then. we’ll look at homestuck. 

okay so homestuck. remember when that was as big as it was? initially, the big stumbling block was the slow pace of act 1 where john just kind of fucks around throwing glass at clown dolls for a while and if you weren’t into that kind of humour that was where the comic immediately lost you, but what ultimately got the ball rolling was [S] WV: Ascend. the general metric back then was if you weren’t hooked by that one, you wouldn’t like homestuck at all, and for many people that was the point of no return. the reason WV: Ascend was as big of a deal as it was is that we’ve been seeing a bunch of disconnected nonsense happening all over the place, and this is the first time we see our first major time loop actually closed, with the promise of a few more being set up. all that supposed joke nonsense we’d been watching the whole time? it actually mattered, surprise! from there, the narrative spends a lot of time introducing a lot of new concepts – we have captchaloguing and paradox slime, and time travel, and doomed timelines, and exiles and future versions of planets from a parallel universe the metanarrative being perpetuated by the author being diagetic and fuck knows what other things i’m forgetting about. and then, to throw you for a loop twelve whole other characters show up on top of that. so then the narrative needs to spend time establishing who these people are and what their relevance to the story is – which it does, by having them be active participants in the first arc as things go on. this ultimately culminates in [S] Cascade, where we see all these different concepts eventually tie into one another because they were deliberately set up to, and it’s at that point that you figure, well shit we’ve hit a point where all the time travel stuff has finally come to a head. and with it, you’d expect it to also bring all the character stuff to a head too, but instead hussie has an entire extra act to go so we can’t have that resolve yet. 

so in the meantime, here are 20-ish whole other characters doing some other things. but we don’t have time to establish what’s effectively the silmarillion by now, so we have to speed past it, meaning we aren’t given a chance to care about these new people. but we can’t have a chance to care about them either, because we still have to tie all this into 5 whole previous acts that are meant to feed into this. at this point, homestuck is visibly collapsing under its own weight. character arcs are forced to fart around in circles because the status quo can’t change because we still need to make it to endgame with these character dynamics more or less intact. but that’s boring to read so we’ll do this entire “what if” thing and then retcon it all out of existence, and then have the fact that you can retcon things suddenly become vital to the resolution of the coming in place of anything we’ve already established previously – not the time travel, not the parallel universe with the trolls, not even the whole thing with the Scratch leading to the alpha kids being here in the first place – when the mechanic was only introduced in the first place to sloppily patch a story together that had long since devolved into infodumps that served to paint hussie further and further into a corner as he was forced to define his lore to get the plot to keep moving forward despite the fact that the narrative wasn’t focusing properly on the people that could make that happen anymore because the story had since switched focus from those people almost entirely. 

and in the meantime the damn thing got eaten up by filler, and suddenly characters from that filler are showing up like they were totally relevant to the main story the whole time even though literally nothing they did in their own subplot had any direct bearing on the story at large, unlike the initial 12 trolls. why yes, Alternate Universe Calliope was a completely necessary addition to the story! didn’t you see our important sidestory thing where they do Stuff, and then her showing up in the climax to resolve some other things that are sorta disconnected from the main plot anyway?

not to mention the shipping. nothing ruins a story faster than throwing in a love triangle or eight, and then immediately invalidating all the character growth that happened on top of that anyway by having it literally never happen. not that it would’ve mattered anyway, because remember, we never actually got to have any of this really developed to begin with. 

by the time we hit end of act 6, there’s been so many new concepts haphazardly stapled onto the story and so many threads brought up and discarded entirely when we already established back with [S] Cascade that the story works best when they actually do this and it is doable, that it stops being merely complicated and off the wall, and starts being spread too thin, incomprehensible, and ultimately no longer part of a whole narrative deliberately comprised of interlocking storylines. shit’s just kinda happening at you, and rather than getting to see parts of a text interacting as a result of them coming from somewhere for the express purpose of then going to somewhere, you’re just being asked to accept that, yup, that’s a thing that’s going on right now. neato. sure is some stuff happening and whatnot. and in the end, for all that posturing, it didn’t even do anything. in pre-cascade homestuck that wouldn’t have even been a full flash. a bunch of nonsense happens, and then They Fightan Good, and then it’s over and there’s not a single time paradox or meta-interaction to be found. none of the stuff they built up to over all these years mattered, and neither did any of the stuff they just threw in, either. 

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at with this. 

(also he treats the women in his stories like shit and quite frankly i’m sick of it and even more sick that people keep giving him a pass for it because it’s practically reached parody levels at this point , so there’s that)

i have no problem with convoluted twisty bullshit in and of itself. but it has to accomplish something aside from just existing, and nomura doesn’t do that. by his own admission, kingdom hearts wasn’t planned, and it shows really badly. characters and entire story mechanics and plot lines are introduced solely for the sake of introducing them. they don’t go anywhere or build to anything, because they can’t, because fuck we have to stall for kh3 shhhh just keep adding more soras and hopefully no one will notice. i think the last time any of this actually mattered was kh2, and even that had a lot of the issues i’ve mentioned here. as a result of all of this, the character arcs suffer a lot, and you’re left with nothing but a big ball of plot twists that goes nowhere, and a bunch of characters that only somewhat have anything to do with any of it. 

i don’t feel like it’s overly nitpicky to find this kinda gross and seriously insulting of the audience’s intelligence. it’s just lazy time-stalling. i get that people sometimes really don’t care about stuff like narrative and character development and are just here to see riku punching mike wazowski in the teeth or whatever, but i think it’s disingenuous to pretend that these aren’t nonetheless important parts of a game’s construction – especially a studio that used to openly pride itself on selling games with a focus on story. 

and the genuinely frustrating part is, no one cares. people are gushing all over everything square puts out because it’s square, so they know they don’t have to put effort into their stories. i’m well aware i’m in the minority for saying that these games are bad. but i also thought we were done with treating, “it’s just a video game, bro! why do you care so much about the story having quality as a narrative? this isn’t an english class!” as a valid rebuttal. 

maybe i should’ve used the matrix trilogy instead. most people hate movies 2 and 3 for the weird “YOU’VE ALREADY MADE THE CHOICE/EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BEGINNING HAS AN END NEO” shit and the bonkers christ-allegory ending. i hate it because neo is about as interesting as the rock that cracked goofy’s skull open.

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of January 2019

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor I haven’t read much American literature, but far be it from me to state that the sole reason for this is my position as a staunch Englishman. In truth, I genuinely just don’t have much of an interest for the great American texts; the enforced reading of such literature during GCSEs and A-Level taught me that even the American texts with the best prose were not on the most interesting of subject matters, concerned with social progress or supposedly deserving of merit because of relevant historical context, as opposed to actually just being, well, enjoyable. Yes, I am obviously over-simplifying to a ludicrous extent, but these were the thoughts that I had way back in the halcyon days of school, and subsequently these are the thoughts that I’ve carried with me since, simply because I haven’t been arsed to actively try to challenge them. However, my infatuation with the grotesque was bound to bring me to the realms of American literature at some point, and so asking my American friend to procure me a copy of this book with a decent cover, I started on this Southern Gothic classic. I love the idea of transposing the gothic genre to a setting different than one would conjure up from the word ‘gothic’, and the fictional deep South town of Taulkinham does a bloody good job at capturing what I want; there’s madness and isolation and a sense of oddity in the air, and the town is populated by a gallery of fantastic and memorable grotesques. The fantastic and evocative prose, almost comical at points, belies how fucking odd the story’s events are, and breathes life into this setting in a similar way to Hammett’s Red Harvest; this is perhaps one of my favourite techniques in literature, simply because I’ve never thought of envisioning America in this fantastical way. The story is rather fragmented, with many of its major scenes basically being some of O’Connor’s short stories stitched together (and the Frankensteined nature of the story does result in a few chapters having noticeably different writing styles to the rest, or some characters’ decisions that would develop into these slotted-in short stories seeming odd and poorly explained). With this awareness, I remain unconvinced with critics’ dogmatic statements along the lines of ‘O’Connor evokes an individual voice/style, unburdened by the rules or conventions of story writing’; if she had that in mind, as a deliberate means of creating a fragmentary narrative in the name of the genre or in reflection of the characters or what have you, she came up with that shit after she started writing. It is a view that I could subscribe to, on account of the fact that this is not a stereotypical narrative. Characters don’t do much or evolve much, with the decisions made by the characters seemingly motivated more by manic episodes than actual rational thought; Hazel, for instance, is depicted as basically coming up with the teachings and philosophies of his Church without Christ as he goes along, repeating his new discoveries to himself and to anyone who will listen as soon as he formulates them, and it is this improvisational drifting (motivated by his own warped thinking) that defines his story’s progression. What separates gothic stories set in recognisably recent times to gothic stories set in the distant histories of castles and deep dark woods, is the changed understanding of madness, and I’ve talked about this a lot in my rambles on Le Fanu but I’ll delve into this book’s treatment of it. In the words of Bakhtin, ‘in Romantic grotesque, … madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual isolation’, but before the advancement of scientific knowledge as to what actually constituted ‘madness’, it often took the form of histrionics and melodrama. This is all fine and dandy when you’re writing a story about tormented murderers hearing hearts beating under the floorboards, or masked men with skeletal faces scuttling around opera houses, but when you’ve got to transpose this madness to a recent-ish society, with said madness being expressed or brought out via recognisable themes such as religion, you’ve got to tone it down a bit. As such, Hazel and Enoch are manic, not mad, and this is excellently conveyed through their individual speech styles and the ways that other characters interact or interpret the two; my favourite example of this is Enoch running down his day’s activities to himself as a strict and sacrosanct ritual of undeniable importance, swiftly followed by the reveal of the actions’ trivial nature (and his co-workers negative opinions of him as a result). WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YES

The Crock of Gold - James Stephens Trying to ascertain the seriousness of this text boggles my brain. Let it first be said that I rather like this book, despite the shoddy John Murray publication that I have it in; I was prompted to purchase it on account of its place in the great ‘Irish comic tradition’, basically expecting something along the lines of The Unfortunate Fursey, but I instead was greeted with a much more thoughtful and interesting read that I advise everyone to pick up at some point, with the caveat that you have to be in a very specific mindset to read it. It’s a funny story, but it is quietly funny; the humour comes from little quirks in the writing, in the speech and actions of its characters, in the ultimate charm of the story. The dialogue is deliberately circumlocutive and often rather meaningless, pondering incessantly on philosophical matters big and small, and ofttimes the narrative itself reflects these rambling trains of thought, most notably a long aimless pilgrimage wherein the Philosopher stumbles across snippets of other peoples’ lives, experiencing quibbles and learning folk wisdom and ruminating on the head and heart. The book’s world is charming, all made up of storybook character archetypes and Irish folklore (described matter-of-factly and easily accepted as truth); ofttimes, the information that we are given is ultimately unimportant and has no bearing on the overall story, and this is a statement that can, truthfully, be applied to much of the text, but it is all the same delicately written and rather pleasant. The book does perhaps toe the line on this point with its rambling philosophical paragraphs from the Gods, with its grand allegories and metaphysical nonsense getting a tad wanky and mind-numbing, but it’s not the most egregious thing in the world. In any case, the philosophising of the Philosopher is entertaining enough to make up for the rather more dense philosophising of the Gods, being much more like the aforementioned circumlocution, going off on unrelating tangents and eventually bringing the rambling back around to the initial point that catalysed said rambling. I bring this up not only as a point of comparison, but because it ties in nicely with the commonly-utilised storytelling method of basically going off on a tangent, following one person off on their quest before jumping back to where the narrative left off to see how things are doing then. This can perhaps be attributed to this book’s lack of urgency or real danger, and thus lack of a need for hastiness and rapid jumping from one person’s story to another. This extends even to the final resolution of the humans’ storyline, which basically amounts to one sentence saying that what they set out to do was done and dusted; there isn’t even a scene to show everyone happy again, because it is simply implied that things will go back to the jolly equilibrium. Hell, when the book incorporates wistful or thoughtful or even flat-out sad tales, no resolution is offered for them. The story just goes on, and we are presumably meant to just assume that all will end up alright in the end, or at the very least, all will just end, and then it’s not worth worrying about any more. Reading what I thought would just be another fucking The Unfortunate Fursey type of fantasy book has really evoked some unexpected feelings in me. So that’s nice. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES, IF YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT MOOD

Gulliver’s Travels - Jonathan Swift I’ll level, I went into this book expecting a low-brow adventure story about little dudes and fucking massive units. It is, in fact, a tad more complex than this. This book is a lot of things; it can be read as a storybook adventure novel, but it is also a satirical piece, both of Swift’s society in general and of the travel writings form, and it is this satire that I am not too fond of. But we’ll get to that. The main technique utilised in this novel (yeah I’m just going to call it a novel for simplicity's sake) is optical conceit, and the idea of viewing familiar things from different perspectives or in different ways, presenting them in a new light as ridiculous or laughable and perhaps to make us reevaluate the workings of society so farcically presented. This technique is noticeable mainly in the first and second travels, coincidentally the two travels that are most widely known, and this optical conceit is a concept that I like a lot more in theory than in practise. The first travel takes us to Lilliput, the island of the small blokes, and here the small size of the people links in with their small-mindedness and melodramatic quibbling over minor matters, but in the second travel to Brobdingnag, land of the big dudes, the size of the folk is seemingly unrelated from the satire. With the possible exception of the pompous Prince, none of the natives have any sort of comical largesse or egotism that might have related to the satire. And then when I had this in my mind, I began scrabbling around to try and find some other snippets of how the native people tie in with the satire, to little to no avail. The Lilliputians put great faith in long and formal written legislations and diatribes (related in full in Gulliver’s account), suggestive of shrewd ink-nosed clerks hiding behind their papers, and much of the Brobdingnagian report is one long rambling philosophical back-and-forth between Gulliver and the Prince, suggesting these large people have large mouths and loud opinions, but the satire, in my opinion, is a) tenuous and b) not what I’d consider engaging reading. And that’s not even considering the specific basis of the satire: contemporary politics! This book is striking an interesting balance between being entertaining in its own right, and ostensibly being entertaining because of its significance as satire, that every character or event in the story is comically reflecting some real-life event in English politics. To this, I have to compare it to Calvino’s story Invisible Cities, and it’s varying depictions of Venice through different disguises; it doesn’t matter how you tart up your source material, or how colourful your new layer of paint is, because if I’m not interested in the original source material then I probably won’t give too much of a toss about how it is newly presented. And contemporary English politics really could not appeal to me less, even if Swift does dress them up as Lilliputian acrobatic displays or thinly veiled warring kingdom allegories. That’s not to say that there is nothing funny to be found in this text; the details in the stories that are not intended to serve any satirical purpose, and instead merely to emphasise the differences between worlds, are always great fun. My favourites are the Lilliputian’s alien descriptions of the gigantic contents of Gulliver’s pockets, and two great instances of humungous monstrosities in Brobdingnag, namely the huge lice on the giant beggars and the scene of a Brobdingnagian mother breastfeeding; the sheer revulsion that Gulliver has to this spectacle is fucking hysterical. The travel to Laputa has got a good grasp on linking the fun content with the satirical aspect (not only is the flying island a great pisstake of science-minded learned folk, but is also like something out of a fucking Lem story), but the overall story is generally rather boring and without much in the way of obstacle or threat. The Land of the Houyhnhnms doesn’t really have the optical conceit, being more of an abstract switcharoo of horses and people, with not much relationship between the two races and a lot of obvious satire about man’s bestial nature. There are occasions of overt physical comedy, again tied in with these changes in size; Gulliver is in one story dousing great fires with his almighty piss stream, and in another being dressed up like a doll or dunked in a bowl of cream by a mendacious dwarf (or rather, a dwarf by Brobdingnagian standards). I am fully in accord with the former sort of comedy, not only because such imagery of dousing fires with a slash puts me in mind of Gargantua and Pantagruel, but because it reflects this book’s fun indulgence in crude toilet humour. Crude toilet humour is fun to begin with, but Swift uses scatalogical humour to demean the noble form of travel writings, taking a moment from seriously discussing the learned folk and their cultures and customs to describe his shitting habits. The latter sort of comedy, however, that serves to emasculate Gulliver by having him toyed with by giant folk or entrapped by tiny folk, only highlights to me the lack of character that Gulliver has, beyond being our narrator. I’m sure that critics will argue for his supposed egotism or pomposity or whatnot, but such details in the text are thin on the ground, and if Gulliver is not characterised as being a dick, why should the reader find it entertaining or cathartic when he gets his shit handed to him? These problems perhaps originate with Swift’s worries of the character of Gulliver being a reflection of himself; he is willing to put the character through light slapstick shenanigans, but he hasn’t got the balls to go too far lest it tarnish his own reputation. Apparently in one early publication of this text, Gulliver partakes in the custom of eating shit with the ape people, but oh no no, Swift couldn’t possibly have something that funny in the story in case anyone thought that he himself might truly be a coprophagous ninny! There is a strange bequeathment of snooty scholarly worth unto this book, considering that it does have talking horses and ape men who shit everywhere, as illustrated by the study done around this book (handily referenced in the editor’s annotations). Let me briefly give some examples. This book uses a lot of nonsense ‘little language’ for its place names and whatnot, and as you can tell by the fact that I’ve taken every opportunity to use the word ‘Brobdingnagian’ in this ramble, I’m rather fond of it all. However, amidst all the daft place names (all bizarre anagrams of existing places), the editor makes sure to highlight some as being ‘obvious, and therefore uncharacteristic’, as though there is a scholarly level of obfuscation or stupidity to adhere to in order to be respectable. This sense of superiority continues to the demeaning of one particularly transparent and obvious satirical paragraph, which is described as being ‘artistically weaker’ than the rest of the text; not that I’m defending the aforementioned insulted paragraph, because it isn’t that good, but the implication that the text deserves artistic merit because of the obfuscation of its satire rubs me up the wrong way a bit. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY NOT

The Nightwatches of Bonaventura - Bonaventura The new introduction to this text, written by the uppity translator Gerald Gillespie, is rather dogmatic in its excessive insistences of all of the things that this text is, or takes inspiration from. As much as I like to portray myself as a learned man and top-quality dude, I’m not so invested in contextualising this book’s composition that I’m willing to engross myself in Napoleonic war history or the works of Kant. What I am interested in, however, is the Romantic grotesque, for whilst Bakhtin’s infatuation with Rabelais’ grotesque completes eclipses any appreciation he might have of any writer who deviates from Rabelais, Bakhtin manages to spare a brief word of praise for this text amidst all the wanking over Rabelais, so I was intrigued enough to get myself a copy. This a book densely populated with great grotesque imagery and content, and as such it is a book that probably warrants re-reading with a certain subject in mind so as to allow for further unpacking, but within the framework of the grotesque, Bakhtin was right to say that this book basically epitomises the Romantic grotesque, because it’s all here in amazing detail. The story is a rambling introspective on dark topics, either prompted by the morbid and corrupt sights of the world around our narrator or plucked from the memories of our narrator’s own dark past. Said narrator, Kruezgang, brilliantly speaks on such subjects with amazing and colourful prose, with literary allusions and warped rumination galore. The other characters in the watches seem more like marionettes or shadow puppets, necessary to tell separate stories or fill a hole where there should be an aspect of Kruezgang’s past, but their purpose as such is fascinating enough and so excellently done that it doesn’t warrant criticism. The world is grim and grotesque, but depicted out as a joke via Kruezgang’s own view of it, described with poetical allegories and bitterly laughing at awful events by portraying them as black comedy farces. This book’s infatuation and idolisation of the mad and the strange and the grim is something fantastic, it really is. Now, having prefaced this ramble with such positivity, I can delve into a truth that looms over this text like a storm cloud; it is so incredibly fucking dense that I could not imagine rereading this book for any reason other than literary analysis. There is so much content, rich bloody content, in this book that it is easy to equate the feeling of numbness in one’s mind with an overload of such fantastic stuff, from the prose to the ideas to the fascinating storytelling, but this process of thought precludes the very important contributing factor to said mind-numbness, which is that the book seemingly just rambles about nothing at all! Am I to assume that such rich prose in the name of maddening circumlocutive (is that a word?) nothingness actually does have a purpose, and my mind just slides over it because it can’t comprehend the information, or perhaps just can’t contain so much information? Am I an uncomprehending fool for glossing over chunks of text, or am I just inadequately prepared to cram so much prose into my bonce at any one time? Such thoughts bounced around in my head as I was reading, and the only conclusion that I could come to was that I would be hard-pressed to recommend this book to anyone, for what if they encountered the same problems, and asked me to elucidate on such matters, when I have no answers to give them? Wouldn’t I look a fool then! But I digress. The introduction snootily says that to break down the narrative’s events chronologically would only ‘contravene the spirit… of the work’, which I believe insofar as a fragmented narrative obviously reflects the fragmented mind of the narrator (real in-depth analysis going on here), but that doesn’t mean that I won’t say that the narrative isn’t all over the shop, generally rather confusing, and interspersed with fragments of other stories of seeming tangential relation to Kruezgang’s storyline, all described with Bonaventura's same grandiose verbosity but often nowhere near as interesting as Kruezgang. Sure, I could have read into the exact (and no doubt important) purpose(s) of these segments, but a) just reading this book and revelling in its dark prose is an enriching enough experience without having to learn all the context clues that contributed to such nonsense being formulated, and b) most of the research writing about this book by Gillespie is just trying to figure out who Bonaventura is, a mystery to which I honestly could not give any semblance of a fuck about. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: NO, UNLESS YOU WANT TO READ IT FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES

Shit I read this month that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: Shakespeare and Co. by Stanley Wells (absolutely amazing, incredibly informative, would absolutely recommend if it’s your thing), and City of Sin by Catharine Arnold (generally fun and informative, Arnold’s voice can get annoying at times, overall would recommend just for the chapters about sex in the medieval/early modern period and the chapter on Victorian pornography).

[thenightling]

Umm...  Uh...  Umm... uh... (The Dreaming related...)

I’m a little disappointed right now.  I’m trying to embrace the parts I like but I’m a nerd and I am compelled to whine about the parts that annoy me.  ‘Tis the nature of Nerdom.

  Warning, here there be ranting and it might be hyperbolic.  

Can someone else take over writing this thing, please?

I don’t know which is worse.  The poor characterization of the old Dreaming comics of the late 90s and early 2000s or the hamhanded allegories in the new The Dreaming.   Poor Merv is now literally a Straw Man about bigotry.  And the Lucien narrations aren’t... good...

I know everyone wants to bring their own flavor to The Sandman Universe and only Neil Gaiman can and will sound like Neil Gaiman but this doesn’t even feel like the characters.   This feels like a self-righteous Marvel comic from a year and a half ago...  And yes, I know that Vertigo is a division of DC, I’m just making the comparison. 

And why the Hell has poor Merv been turned into a thinly disguised Trump Supporter stereotype?  He was always an ass but he was an equal opportunity ass.  WHY would you even WANT to use the blue collar, pumpkin headed scarecrow as your bigot metaphor?  You just made a LITERAL strawman.  This is almost as bad (if not worse) than using Cain to represent misogyny.  

Much like a certain late 90s / early 2000s version of The Dreaming I sense no love for these characters.  It feels like resentment or a belief that they can be used to represent anything at all and to Hell with consistent characterization.  

The Dora-needs-sex scene in issue 1 of The Dreaming felt so pointless other than “Look at us! We have adult content!  Wheee!” It’s like counting all the F bombs in Spartacus: Blood and Sand and realizing most of them were used as filler and or just to remind you that you were watching Starz.

  Some dialogue is just unpleasant to read.  (“Get thee behind me, Creeper.”)   First, Dora, you were created in the 90s.   Creeper wasn’t the usual term in mid-90s. It was usually just creep. I guess she could have picked up on the word from a dreamer so it’s not that bad but she still dresses and wears her hair like the 1990s. 

 Also, Dora, you just slept with this demon and now you’re threatening to crush this being’s testicles for suggesting a bear (which is literally an extension of himself) take part and how dare he still be horny!  As gross as that is, you’re not dealing with a normal bear or normal place and this scene doesn’t “empower” me as a woman.  Anyone else feeling “empowered” by this?!?  Threatening a horny demon immediately after sex with him doesn’t give me a “girl power” feel.  Actually I was never a fan of that slogan because I remember when it was just a marketing gimmick for the Spice Girls.  I wish we had a better woman’s strength slogan.  

Another line that stands out was “Malignant penetration”.   

That was was such an inorganic and forced line, I groaned as soon as it appeared, knowing it was just there for innuendo.   What the Hell!?  This is lazy!  I expect better from The Sandman Universe. 

Way to phone-in witty suggestive dialogue...

 At least they know Brimstone smells like a fart...

Why is it every “empowered” female character has to be edgy, angry at authority, and with a chip on her shoulder now?  It’s turning into a tired cliche.   Do we need to be angry and resentful to be “empowered”?    I’m starting to hate that world, “Empowered.”   It feels contrived and when you sit and think about it, it has a pandering quality that suggests we had no power to begin with.  But that’s a tangent for another day.   

I’m also starting to get annoyed with being smacked in the face with constant reminders that Dora is “Different” and “Dora is special” and “Dreams aren’t supposed to be able to do that” ect...  How many times are you going to tell us how unique she is? 

Also this is getting so blatant.  Lookie, they’re still forming.  They need to be educated.  They’re innocent and still taking shape.  And they’re not really blank after all.   But they can barely speak the language.  And they’re being rounded up by someone who doesn’t care or understand them and kept in pens.  These are children in detention centers.  For God’s sake!

Merv is creating detention centers for children... 

And they are refugees that need sanctuary.  This isn’t symbolic.  This is blatant.  And I feel like I’m being treated like an idiot that is having every little metaphor (and it’s more allegory than metaphor) explained to me.    I don’t mind when writing can make me feel like an idiot (Like discovering the cat in Sandman: Overture was Desire all along) but I don’t like being treated like an idiot who needs everything explained to them.   

And I am dreading what they are going to do to our favorite Jack-o-Lantern and his personality for the October / Halloween issue.   

This is not Merv.   “Make The Dreaming great again” should NOT be a thing.   You have taken the blue collar construction worker type and turned him into an obnoxious allegory.  As I said, Merv was always an ass but he was OUR ass and he never acted quite like this.  This is one of those obnoxious over-the-top political statements that made me wander from Marvel and be embarrassed that I’m a liberal.   

This is also teetering on classism that the only character that can be classified as blue collar worker is the one being used as an ignorant bigot.   Merv had his likable moments in the original Sandman.  This is bordering on offensive.

Also, could someone kindly tell the new writer that unless Daniel manipulated the Griffon’s memory to make him think he was a gift from The Greeks, the Griffon is not of The Dreaming and there for should NOT be changed by the weirdness going on.  He was a gift from the Greeks.

At first I thought The Griffon looking like that was a result of the weirdness going on in The Dreaming and then I was like “Wait a second.  Either Daniel tricked the re-created Griffon into thinking he wasn’t of The Dreaming or he is, as The Wake told us, a gift from the Greek Gods.)

And now Daniel is being messed with and he’s not even in this!  Here, I’ll show you how...

Lucien, disguised as Daniel (and The Dream entities somehow fall for this...) tells Merv to teach The beings and to care for them.   And somehow this is supposed to be out-of-character for Daniel.   Uhh... Why? 

Why do people keep thinking Daniel is supposed to be cold?!    Daniel is supposed to be the warmer, kinder aspect of Dream. 

And yet, here’s Morpheus during his douchiest phase.

Why is it whenever someone other than Neil Gaiman writes Daniel he comes off colder and meaner than Morpheus at his darkest?    I wrote a post a while back explaining my theory as to why this happens but it still baffles me...

https://thenightling.tumblr.com/post/175624611158/theories-about-why-dc-writers-have-not-handled

WHY is the “Care for them” something he wouldn’t say, exactly?!

And poor Lucien.  The constant monologue is weird and yet people are acting like he’s always done this.  Uh... Since when?   It was Morpheus who did most of the narration in the early Sandman and in Sandman: Overture.    Granted there was the weird talk bubble in Dark Night’s metal that made Lucien’s text look like Morpheus’.  It’s enough to conceive a new and weird conspiracy theory.

I’m not really comfortable with poor Lucien’s forgetfulness.  I’m afraid that like the illegal immigration / refugee allegory in that this will be a poorly handled alzheimer's metaphor.      

Okay, I’ve bitched enough.  Now for things I actually like to try to make this post a little less angry and aggressive.  

I like that there’s something mysterious building but I’m afraid it’ll be a let down and something as mundane as Starro again...

I like that now there’s actually a reason Daniel isn’t intervening. 

I love the artwork.  

I haven’t entirely given up on Dora’s potential.   I’m still curious enough to want to know what’s going to happen. 

There are parts actually written well and interestingly, almost like Neil Gaiman, himself. 

And I am still glad that there is new Sandman content but this wasn’t a great first taste of The Dreaming.  I had liked The Sandman Universe 1 well enough but this (The Dreaming 1) ... not so much... 

Anyway, that’s my review of the new Dreaming comic.  Ultimately it wasn’t as good as I hoped and I’m not thrilled with the preachy feel of parts of it.  And Doria’s interesting quality from The Sandman Universe is starting to wane in favor of a cliche chip-on-her-shoulder “empowered” trope and that bugs me because I want to like her.

Anyway...  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O1hM-k3aUY

@deathlyendless @zalemoonshadow @sorry-for-the-chocolate  @endlessemptynight @minxymojo @vagaryhexxx @thejediviking @fortmarmorus @winterbirdybuddy  @treebrooke79 

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews - June/July 2020

I didn't read as many comics that I felt the need to write about these past couple of months, but the ones that I did I generally had a lot of thoughts on.

Hawkworld 

Back in 1989, DC attempted to revamp Hawkman, notoriously the most confusing character in a stable comprised of confusing characters, with Timothy Truman's Hawkworld, a dark, modern take on the sci-fi version of the character. The result is flawed in the most frustrating ways, just good enough that parts of it feel like they could be coming from a hidden classic of DC's back catalog, but never living up to its potential. The story entirely is set on Thanagar, casting Katar Hol (Hawkman) as a privileged heir who has thrown his lot in with the police force and pines for Thanagar's lost golden age, when men were men and heroes walked the Earth. The first couple of issues do some genuinely excellent work depicting Thanagar as a corrupt and crumbling empire which bears more than a little resemblance to the USA and casting Hol as a well-meaning but ultimately deluded dupe whose role as a cop makes him at best complicit in his culture's worst excesses. 

Unfortunately, the second half of the series never manages to live up to the first half, skipping forward in time by about ten years and ditching the systemic critique of its first half. Instead, the corrupt police commander who had previously appeared as a symptom of Thanagar's ills is turned into a literal monster, a strawman for the newly christened Hawkman to soundly thump over the head in place of addressing larger issues. The systemic concerns of the series' first half are never meaningfully addressed in the later issues and Hawkworld ends up falling back into being a simple tale of good cops versus bad cops, despite the first half of the series having been largely unambiguous about cops' nature as agents of state violence and imperialism. It's a shocking and deeply confusing disconnected that I can't tell if it's because I'm bringing modern politics and assumptions to the book or that someone at DC completely lost their nerve halfway through. This is what makes Hawkworld so frustrating to read, on the one hand its insightful and anti-colonial and surprisingly relevant to 2020, but on the other it never commits to those ideas because doing so would be too radical, the end result is a book which is very good right up until the point that it completely wimps out and shuffles back into mediocrity.

She-Hulk

After a long interval of living, unread, in my Comixology files, I finally read She-Hulk by Charles Soule and Javier Pulido. The quality of the series almost goes unsaid; it's one of the best of its era and niche, a part of the a whole constellation of early to mid 2010's "street level" Marvel superhero books which started, more or less with Daredevil and Hawkeye, ran through She-Hulk and Spider-Woman, extended into Hellcat and debatably Squirrel Girl, and then fizzled out several years ago. I try to fight nostalgia back most of the time, but it can't be overstated how good that whole wave of titles was, almost universally fun and approachable, grounded and empathetic, and with top-notch art across the board. Anyway, She-Hulk by Soule and Pulido is fantastic. It keeps to a relatively straightforward procedural style, makes the courtroom antics feel real thanks to Soule's actual background as a lawyer, and connects with the Marvel Universe in ways which set it among the others without ever feeling too overwhelming. The whole deal with The Blue File, the series' overarching mystery is well handled and does something really interesting with Nightwatch, an absolutely nothing character, who I'm a little disappointed we haven't seen turn up again since this reinvention. Reading She-Hulk made me nostalgic for this whole era, of which this series was one of the best.

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal

Petals to the Metal is the arc where the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone podcast found its footing and really began to blossom into the series that it would become, so there were a lot of expectations riding on this entry in the graphic novel adaptations of the series. Generally speaking, it continues to nail most of what made the series work and polish the story into something a little more refined and coherent. The narrative trimming and changes done are smooth, the jokes still work, and its able to foreshadow events in a way that the podcast, given its nature as an emergent narrative, could never really do. Carey Pietsch's cartooning remains fabulous, and what makes this story work as a graphic novel must certainly be credited to her. This series remains the defining work of her young career and while I greatly enjoy what she's doing, I do wonder if she's really going to stick around do all seven potential books, especially if they keep ballooning in size. The only criticisms of Petals to the Metal as a comic are much the same as could be made about Petals to the Metal as a podcast and the big one is the main characters are kind of incidental to the story and don't feel like they have an important role in the emotional climax. Such is the nature of trying to tell a story in a DnD campaign, and its something that TAZ would get better at subsequently, but in graphic novel form hard not to think about. Without as clear of a distinction between "player characters" and "non-player characters" it's not quite as strange to see the main trio take a back seat, but without the charisma and speed of the podcast form it's much easier to sit back and say "wait, the main character's aren't even doing anything here". This volume is also noticeably thicker than the first two volumes of The Adventure Zone, and I hope that this series isn't going to swell, Harry Potter-like, with each entry, if only for the sake of Pietsch not keeling over from the effort.

Batman: Last Knight on Earth

Supposedly the capper to the Batman stories Snyder and Capullo's started telling all the way back in 2011 with the New 52 reboot of the character, though that's a little hard to swallow when they are still very much doing a bunch of Batman stuff in their current Death Metal event series. It's Batman playing in a post-apocalyptic DC universe, bombastic and unhinged, upending the toy box and smashing things like there's no tomorrow. It's fun, beautifully drawn, and incredibly over the top, but it's not going to be for everyone. For one thing, it's a tour of a ruined DC universe, so it's not exactly kind of most characters; there's a lot of death and mutilation and grotesqueness abounds. It's also deeply, deeply, misanthropic. I've got an essay talking about the politics of this book at greater length ready to go up at some point, but the short version is that this is a comic which starts off with an incredibly unsubtle allegory for the 2016 election and then ends with a big, cheesy hope shot that means absolutely nothing.

Even beyond my political reading of it, not everything about the story works. Snyder and Capullo's Batman work has had a ton of Joker in it and his role here is obnoxious and contains a bafflingly unearned redemption arc. More importantly, the book is built on misanthropy and the evil that ordinary people do but is completely unable to actually confront this thematically or narratively. It's a major thematic shortcoming.

I'm reminded of the ending of Grant Morrison's Batman Inc, a similar endpoint to an era of Batman which was fundamentally informed by the rejection of Morrison's vision by the rest of DC Comics. It's a bitter, angry book, but still beautiful and engaging, and fun to talk about.

Batman Universe

The complete other end of the spectrum from Last Knight on Earth, Batman Universe is a glorious romp through the DC universe, exploring the setting and characters and having fun in this day-glo fantasia. Nick Derrington knocks the art out of the park, and the constraints of shorter chapters mean that Brian Bendis' writing is more succinct and energetic than I've ever seen it before. I've idly wondered for years now why there's no current Batman animated series, and Batman Universe seems very much designed as the equivalent of one: the ties to current continuity are nearly nonexistent, the art is distinct and skews away from pseudo-realism in favor of pop aesthetics, and the approach in general is lighthearted.

It's not the deepest book, at least on an initial read, it's pointedly light fare, but it's still incredibly good. It is an unabashed, all-caps SUPERHERO STORY that doesn't feel retro or dated.

[davidmann95]

Thoughts on X-Men in general and Cyclops in particular?

I went into Cyclops before. The X-Men themselves…hoo boy. If the Fantastic Four are the best superhero team, the X-Men in my eyes are the major group whose popularity is most inversely proportionate to their actual average quality.

To be clear, I totally have loved some X-comics: New X-Men, Whedon’s Astonshing X-Men and Aaron’s work on both the X-Men proper and Wolverine in particular have been great. I’ve lately been in the habit of joking that Wolverine and Emma Frost are their only actual good characters, but while I’ll maintain that they’re the indisputable spectacular standouts of the core bunch, Cyclops and Nightcrawler and Storm and Beast are all good, and on the sidelines Fantomex is downright fantastic. Not to mention I’m biased, since unless it’s Invincible-tier Pulling It Off, soap opera for soap opera’s sake comics are just not my bag in the slightest; same as I’ve been put off by Spider-Man over the years by that formula, the X-Men centering around it automatically distances me. Add that they had already begun their official fall from grace as a triple-A franchise by the time I started regularly collecting comics, and they were probably never going to be a favorite of mine.

I do have a real argument against it though, and it’s twofold: one is that Chris Claremont was not actually very good. Great idea man, when he had time like on God Loves, Man Kills or the original Wolverine mini with Miller he did great work, but on an ongoing basis? I admit the only real substantial chunk of his X-Men I read was Dark Phoenix Saga, but it’s supposed to be the absolute pinnacle of the era and…look, it’s been almost 40 years, we’re all adults, it’s okay to come out and admit that Dark Phoenix Saga sucked, 5 or so great panels aside. Not “it was great for its time, but it hasn’t aged well and its virtues may go unnoticed”, regular old bad comics that left me wondering what the fuck a whole generation of comics readers were collectively hallucinating, no matter how much John Byrne’s art killed it. It tries so hard on a technical basis to be a serious comic for grown-ups, and for individual moments or sequences like Wolverine crawling out of the sewers it works, but it ends up mixed - sometimes even in the same panel - with outright retrograde Silver Age monologuing that utterly destroys the moment, winding up a weird bridge between two eras possessing neither an iota of the charm of what came before it, or the consistent sense of craft that made what came after it work. They reach beyond their station, and take 17 years of that with continuity that doesn’t guard against new readers against picking up X-Men so much as spit on them for even glancing at the franchise, and you’ve got some real shit on your hands. It was an 80s soap opera comic so it has die-hard fans by default who will cling to everything that era stands for forever, but I am absolutely willing to go to bat that on a storytelling basis none of it holds up in the slightest even by the standards of earlier decades (I once told my dad that Gerry Conway was doing better naturalistic superhero comics in Amazing Spider-Man a decade earlier, and I’m still pretty sure he quietly cut me out of his will). And everything about the group since has been built on that run.

The other problem is this scene, which beats the basic premise of the X-Men to a bloody pulp, drags its insensate carcass into a dark alley, puts two rounds in the back of its skull, and leaves its corpse to rot in a drainage ditch.

And yeah, that’s about it. The minority/outcast metaphor superhero group is largely a group of gorgeous straight white (or at least white-coded) people who live in a billionaire’s mansion and defeat racism every month by beating up a holocaust survivor before ruminating on whether mutant-on-mutant violence is the real problem, which in the context of the world built around them it actually basically has been for at least the last decade or so. And to boot, when bigots claim they’re dangerous to ‘normal humans’ to drive the racism allegory home, they’re unquestionably right - mutants are mind-shatteringly powerful and dangerous on a planetary and often even galactic scale, with about half of their most prominent public figures pledging to exterminate the entirety of humanity as a species on live television and nearly pulling it off. There are plenty of individual comics that defy that setup and point the way towards something better, but I’d absolutely call that the arc of ‘classic’ X-Men. The most successful attempt I’ve seen at circumventing this was Morrison’s and Aaron’s attempts at reframing them as standing in for youth - as the next stage of evolution it makes sense, it unifies a lot of the disparate strands under a banner of social progression as part of the concept, and that they’re dangerous works because our children will replace us - but that displaces the biggest superhero team standing up as a discriminated group, however poor a job I’d say it typically does with that concept. That legitimate concern paired with regular old fan attachment all but rubs out that possibility, and until and unless the diversity of the group increases to the extent that it needs to, we’re sort of stuck with this foundational problem.

Look, plenty of people whose opinions I respect the hell out of love the X-Men. My dad loves the X-Men, and I’m pretty sure he has something resembling good taste. They’re truly important to people in a way far beyond regular comics fandom, and that makes them important. There’s a real, potent idea in there however buried, a number of cool characters and concepts, and a touch of solid material to build on. I think they can be great. But in terms of the bulk of what’s actually already out there, that so many so dearly love? I do not even kind of get it. Hell, maybe it's just me.