#the thing is comics are a visual medium. so much is said merely in the positioning the juxtaposition of panels.

[87dvhnk]

"i read the wiki and i saw the pages/panels already, why do i need to read the comics?"

because a) some those comics fuck with awing dexterity and stamina b) there's a good chance shit is out of context or simply misrepresented (innocently, humorously, ignorantly or maliciously) and c) you know the beats/endings of tons of shit, but it doesn't impede your enjoyment of it, now does it? sure it's nice to go in spoiler free, but if the gimmick of spoiling material is all a piece of media has, then that piece of media is meritless. you knew who luke skywalker's father was before you saw the movie. is it still worth watching? you knew romeo and juliet died before you read the play. is it still worth reading? do you not want to go on a journey? do you not want to feel something? do you not want to commiserate about the human experience through art? a wiki will never be comprehensive enough to cover everything you would have read or seen yourself--it can't be, not without being the thing itself. even then, you still miss the things not on the page/screen, the things that are only implied, the things that go unstated, or else conspicuously omitted. don't talk to me about shit haunting the narrative if the only haunting you've ever been apart of was your passing despite your dogshit analysis skills haunting the conscience of your eng 101 adjunct professor in perpetual fear of losing their contract and being relocated from their car to under a bridge by demanding college students demonstrate basic reading comprehension, critical thinking, and coherent argumentative skills. boast about killing the author? my friend, you are cain advancing in the fields, skulking, stepping in abel's footprints, filled with murderous intent, with nothing but the chinese telephone-equivalent of a description of a weapon cutting into your soft palms.

[maxwell-grant]

so where is the dividing line between pulp weaponry and superhero gadgetry? Is it just a matter of gas guns, grappling hooks,regular guns, etc not being as wacky batterangs or trick arrows?

I think the dividing line just comes down to branding and the visual aspect of it. There's not really much of a basic difference between how Doc Savage fights crime with gadgets and how Batman fights crime with gadgets, besides Batman’s themed branding and Doc specifically being more tethered to practicality and pseudo-scientific/scientifically-plausible inner workings than a comic book superhero gadget usually is.

There is the fact also that comic book superheroes were always more built from the get-go to sell toys, which makes it a sound decision to invest in giving your characters different toys than those the other characters have, which is a lot easier when you base that toy around your character's unique aesthetic that you also had to make unique in order to make them visually stand out, which was less of a consideration in print medium where the covers had to be more visually evocative than the protagonists. I know people use “toyetic” as an insult and I’m really not doing that here, it’s just a basic fact of their makeup. They were much, much more suited to sell decoder rings and costumes and etc, and branch out into other kinds of accessible and identifiable merch, than most of the pulp guys ever really could have been.

We don’t really tend to think of pulp heroes having “gadgets” other than assorted guns because most of them didn’t have gadgets with those combat purposes, since that’s what the guns and fistcuffs were usually for and most of the weird weaponry went to the villains. But disguise kits are gadgets, weird rings are gadgets, weird cars and autogyros are gadgets, smoke bombs and cane swords are gadgets, and etc.

For a specific point, I’m gonna bring up The Shadow’s yellow boomerang from Lingo. It is as textbook gadget as it gets and has been said by some to be the inspiration for the Batarang, which I don’t believe because it functions nothing like a Batarang, but anyway: It’s described as this fairly clunky cross-shaped yellow boomerang that The Shadow tosses around some big stone griffon heads to help set up a zipline, it being colored yellow so that he can see it in the dark and follow it’s trajectory accordingly. It’s not that much more logical, or less wacky, than Green Arrow shooting zipline arrows and you could argue it makes even less sense, but you can see how, if this was a comic book concept, The Shadow would probably be using some sleeker, black-colored gadget to zip around buildings without all the set-up it has to make it believable, or if somebody had the idea of giving The Shadow a boomerang, it would probably be some Castlevania flying guillotine monstrosity to better fit The Shadow’s spooky image instead of something more practical.

Speaking of weird Shadow gadgetry, did I ever tell you guys that The Shadow invented a weird kind of clock that expands his perception of time/slows down the seconds so that he’s able to control the speed/pace of his own work? I mean, is that a gadget? I don’t know what else you could call it, it’s even described as if he’s able to put time on pause, and it’s not even a one-time thing or the only time he’s displayed some kind of weird timing / time-based skill (like in The Money Master where he’s able to crack safes by adjusting his timing and becoming a “human stopwatch”, that’s the story’s phrasing not mine)

An observer would not have believed that those indications on the outer circle of the dial were mere seconds. It seemed as though The Shadow, even when engaged upon the routine procedure of summarizing the reports from his agents, could hold back time in its passage. He was a being who dealt in split seconds when he worked! - The Red Blot

Instead of hands, it showed marked circles which registered the passage of seconds, minutes and hours. Each second seemed to pause as though waiting The Shadow's order. - Death Clew

It’s not that there aren’t cool or unique or visually interesting gadgets or tools to work with, it’s that it’s harder to translate the weird and cool ones they do have into the kind of toyland warfare superheroes, and Batman specifically who is the baseline for superhero gadgetry, thrive in, also not helped by the fact that so many of these were rarely seen and never got to hang around and become iconic parts of their characters, even when they absolutely should.

This is something that’s been phased out more as the pulp heroes started having to become more visually distinct to survive and made the jump to comics and film, with guys like The Green Hornet and The Phantom being particularly successful examples of that kind of superhero-esque branding, applied to pulp weirdos who shoot lightning or green drugs at people, or have a family tradition of punching skull markings into pirates. I think this is a positive development and I think it should be more common place, even if you do start to get a little tired of just guns and rings constantly.

I do want more things like, yes, that weird self-hypnotizing clock that gives The Shadow some kind of enhanced time awareness/distortion that he uses to get investigative work done faster and more efficiently (there’s a part in The Red Blot that states the clock is turned off when he can take things at a slower pace, which means it’s not something he can use constantly Allard what the fuck have you done to yourself). I’ll always be in favor of embracing the further weirdness these guys have in them.

[cleave-and-plough]

just another normal episode...

i'm not totally sure if body swapping is actually more common in japanese media than US/western, though it certainly has the reputation of being a classic "weird" anime trope. i really have to hand it to the show for using it both as a gag and as a means of enriching the characters, and i'm reminded of how often tropes are used poorly just as references, rather than as functional narrative tools. as is so often said, tropes and cliches aren't inherently signs of poor writing: they can be thoughtfully used and explored in service of the theme and story (and not just as subversions or deconstructions).

nanami continues her role as both comic relief and villain, her obsession with touga getting her into yet another scrape. now setting her sights on both utena and anthy, she attempts to overspice their curry in cooking class and inadvertently causes them to swap bodies and personalities: utena becomes demure and subservient, tending to the garden, while anthy becomes aggressive and athletic, dominating the basketball court and high jump and standing up to anthy's bullies. there's something so fanfiction-like about these scenes - the side characters delight in the novelty, buying photos of the swapped pair (even despite heartbreak, in miki's case) as if they were souvenirs from an alternate universe's canon.

however, touga is displeased - not only did nanami almost injure the rose bride and the current champion, she's disrupted the will of end of the world and must make it right. of course, this means she needs to fly to india to collect another sample of the spice. all the animals in heaven and earth continue their war on nanami, and she suffers about a half dozen elephant attacks throughout her journey and return. as with the body swap, i'm struck by how matter-of-fact the show's tone is in these moments - of course they're hilarious, but they're also fully within the show's world, not hallucinations or dream sequences or anything that would elide reality. it all feels extremely cartoony, something i love to see in animated works - embracing of the medium. letting things be kooky and normal at the same time is such a great use of animation - though this tone can also be captured in live action, it's more often through dialogue and acting than the kind of extraordinary visual hijinks seen here.

at the same time, the body swap uncovers a new truth about utena and anthy - how much they care about their appearances, and how much this reflects their respective freedoms. as the pair walk through the school halls together thinking about how to reverse the spice's effects, anthy expresses a certain apathy, saying she doesn't care how she looks. "well, i do!" utena retorts, and it feels like a new door is opened on them. throughout these initial episodes, both characters have shown a notable sense of purpose in their outfits and appearances. utena actively and intentionally wears the boys' uniform to emulate the prince and chafes at having to wear anything overtly feminine, while anthy dresses reactively in the outfits expected of her: her school uniform, the rose bride's dress, a maid's outfit, and nanami's dress only after utena's insistence. for anthy, clothing and her appearance are mere extensions of the role she's playing - they aren't expressions of her self, which she seems to suppress and ignore. and yet i wonder if there isn't something exciting to anthy about the swap - through circumstances entirely out of her control, she gets to look totally different and inhabit the body of one of the school's most beloved students, free of the shackles of the rose bride. the two fall into their usual habits, so it's not as if their roles have completely reversed, but there's a tension of shifted power: utena is uncomfortable not having control over the way she looks, but anthy seems grateful for a brief moment of freedom from her typical expectations.

amidst all this, saionji returns, and much like the episode itself he shows a mix of silliness and seriousness. ever devoted to his exchange diary, he makes the fatal error of baring his soul to utena. i'm surprised by her brief sympathies and gentleness toward him, but i can see what's going through her mind - like herself, saionji is caught up in anthy's strange game of duels and seems lost in it, and the honorable thing to do is to allow him his privacy. intriguing as that commonality between them is, i'm glad she goes back to despising him after seeing his drawing of her - he isn't close to being redeemed in my mind, and i suspect anthy feels similarly. she’s very quick to misinterpret utena’s words as a command to discard and escape the diary - i really believe these moments (along with her comments to the defeated duelists) communicate a great deal about her inner feelings and how she tries to subtly convey them.

at last, nanami returns to deliver the spice, which she immediately drops after slipping on chu-chu's banana peel, and one last elephant blows it away in the wind. as the silhouettes say, divine justice. the ending of the episode is mysterious in a lot of ways, and perhaps it's best not to overanalyze it. instead, contemplate the image of chu-chu saionji crouched on a tree branch, eating a banana.

stray thoughts:

this is the first time the silhouettes have appeared twice in an episode, and i think it's extremely effective. it's interesting to me how sometimes their shadowplays are very relevant to the episode's story (as is the case here), and sometimes they seem completely unrelated.

the prelude repeats at the start of this episode, and i casually wonder if they weren't trying to fill a little airtime.

nanami's ojou laugh really doesn't get old, and i like touga's dramatic interruption. not sure why she got so tanned on the trip but her friends look exactly the same - yet another mystery.

really don't know what to make of the indian spice being stored in a genie-esque oil lamp. also confused by the strange, scooby-doo-like way everyone runs to greet nanami - i guess accentuating how they're leaving saionji to wallow in the garden?

[yeeyee-alumni]

Ellie’s (lack of a) character arc & why the result is an unsatisfying story

Let’s state the obvious: Ellie does not have a character arc in The Last of Us Part 2. A character arc is defined as a gradual transformation or inner journey of a character in response to changing developments in the story. And you may argue that Ellie from the beginning of the game is not the same as the one at the end of the game, and I would agree with you. She went from a woman consumed by revenge (not really but we will stick with that for now) to a woman able to forgive her aggressor and move on. However, there are problems with this supposed inner change on multiple levels. a) the change is not gradual b) the change comes out of nowhere c) the change is not informed by anything I don’t think there’s any need to thoroughly explain the first statement. Ellie has the same goal from the beginning to the very last second before attaining her goal. At no point in the story is she self-reflective, questions her methods, there’s no moral dilemma for her, no inner conflict, no doubt that causes her to put her own actions into a new perspective and possibly change her motivation. From beginning to end she believes to be 100% justified in her goal to kill Abby. Subsequently, if Ellie were actually consumed by revenge, the only logical conclusion to her story would be for her to eventually drown Abby.

Which neatly leads me to the next point: her change comes out of nowhere. The decision to let Abby go, as is implied by the narrative, is triggered by a random, arbitrary flashback of Joel. First of all, the timing here is outright comical. For what reason is she having this specific flashback at this very moment? Sounds like contrived, convenient bs to me to give the appearance that her decision is informed by something (which it isn’t, and we'll get to that in a moment). Second of all, getting a flashback to the most important person in your life that has been brutally murdered in front of you, seeing an image of what could have been and what was unjustly taken from you, is not gonna inspire you to forgive your aggressor. If anything, it would make you more determined and sadistic. And third of all, I hear you all yelling "but it was a flashback to their conversation about forgiveness and that inspired her to forgive Abby." And I have multiple qualms regarding this line of thinking. Number one, forgiving the person you love most in this world for having lied to you cannot be compared to forgiving the person who brutally took said person from you. This actually further accentuates my previous point, this is the person that robbed you of your opportunity for reconciliation. Implying that Ellie's thought process here is „I wanted to forgive Joel, but this person robbed me of any opportunity to, so I have to forgive her” is muddled, nonsensical and quite frankly unrealistic. And number two, is the implication here that this is the first time Ellie has thought back to that conversation? That’s a whole new level of nonsense. She will have reflected on all moments with Joel, including this one, and yet at no point prior to this moment had she considered even the possibility of forgiveness, as I have illustrated earlier. So why now? Very obviously to get a payoff, which was neither set up nor properly developed. And moving on to my last point: it is not informed by anything. I know a lot of players didn’t want Ellie to kill Abby, and even I felt that way at first, albeit presumably for entirely different reasons (I was so drained and removed from the narrative by that point that I only thought to myself "just go home, you psychos"). But upon reflection, I concluded that that would have been an unsatisfying conclusion narratively speaking. Nevertheless, Abby seems to have grown dear to many players. After all, they have spent several hours with her, they have seen her struggle, overcome her obstacles, fight for what she believes to be right. Their feelings towards Abby are informed by the person they have seen her to be and by the experiences they went through with her. Yet Ellie is missing all of that context. She has not been with us throughout our three days in Seattle, she doesn’t know Abby outside of her having horrifically killed Joel and she has not gained any new information that would lead her to change her opinion about her. And so, we have another example of the story making characters do things that are not informed by anything, for the sake of a poor payoff. And since we're talking about characters acting nonsensically, let's talk about the roughly three minutes leading up to Ellie nearly drowning Abby, shall we? Ellie approaches the beach absolutely determined to find and kill Abby (repeatedly murmuring Abby’s name to herself). Yet when she reaches the pillars, she cuts Abby down, letting her free Lev and follows them to the boats, indicating that Ellie has changed her mind, showing pity/empathy upon seeing Abby a mere shadow of her former self. And yet again, we have Ellie acting in a way she never has before. She didn’t have pity for Nora who was coughing her lungs out, or for Jordan who had advocated for letting her live, or for any other innocent WLF or Seraphite that came in between her and killing Abby. But the one person she holds a grudge against to the point of killing hundreds of innocent people without batting an eye, that is the person she is suddenly capable of feeling pity/empathy for? Is it really that surprising that Ellie's actions here feel forced, uncharacteristic, and illogical? But it actually gets worse. In an additional display of Druckmann not knowing how humans work, we have Ellie putting her backpack with all her gear in the boat, looking at her bloody hand and then remembering "Oh yeah, that's the woman who killed Joel. I almost forgot.” And at this point in my playthrough I was laughing out loud. And so, we have Ellie all of sudden determined to kill Abby again, so much so that she is willing to threaten an innocent child’s life (this by the way was the final nail in the coffin for me, they thoroughly obliterated Ellie’s character throughout the entire game, but this goes against the very core of her being). And we know the rest, they fight, Ellie nearly kills Abby but eventually lets her go. To summarize what happened in the three minutes before our big emotional payoff to our 25 hour-long journey of playing this epitome of misery porn: Ellie has 3 - count them 3!!! - changes of heart. Her motivation does a perfect 180 almost every minute. This is not how people work! That’s lazy, contrived beyond believe, and borderline comical levels of writing, because Druckmann prioritized having a final boss battle on a beach over organic, coherent, and logical storytelling (but I guess it was worth it for the goddamn visuals). However, what’s most infuriating is that there are such easy fixes if one only thinks about it for more than two minutes that could erase nearly all for the major issues I just illustrated while maintaining the plot points of the two fighting on a beach and Ellie letting Abby go. If we have Ellie walk to the beach immediately, finding Abby there untying the boat (Lev nearly passed out in the boat, Ellie not seeing him) and she then attacks Abby, immediately we have erased two of Ellie’s changes of heart, she remains consistent in her goals/motivation, not jumping back and forth between two extremes. The two women fight much like we see it in the game, and then as Ellie is about to finish it, we hear Lev calling out to Abby. And there we have our motivation for Ellie to not kill her. Not because she gets a random, convenient flashback, not because she forgives Abby (Abby has done nothing to earn Ellie’s forgiveness), not because Abby has earned her redemption, but because Ellie cannot find it in her to put an innocent child through the pain Abby has put her through. Because at the end of the day, Ellie’s hatred for Abby does not outweigh her capacity for compassion and empathy for those deserving of it (a core characteristic of hers that was established in the first game). Because Ellie would rather let an individual live that is undeserving of it than cause the same pain she was put through to an innocent child that is undeserving of it. Granted, if we were to go with this ending, we would still have to build towards it properly and therefore would have to tweak the rest of the game, mainly by showing Ellie being self-reflective, merciful towards innocents, and even doubtful about her goals at times to make her final decision informed by prior developments in order to have the character arc actually be a gradual transformation leading to a logical conclusion. I have been a writer for nearly 4 years now, which means I am in no way an expert, or the most creatively talented person around and yet I would argue that this ending would be much more satisfying to most players than the alternative we were presented with. Because as it stands, none of our actions or decisions (and yes that is something important to consider when we are working within the medium of video games), or Ellie’s for that matter, lead up to this conclusion. The conclusion to this story, the final moment, the big emotional payoff hinges on a random flashback, not on any other developments that previously occurred in the story. Subsequently rendering all of the 25 hours entirely pointless, none of it had an influence on the finale, none of it mattered narratively speaking. So, is it even a surprise that many found this to be dissatisfying? I noticed a few people who are fond of Abby accusing people feeling differently of having too much of an emotional bias or even going as far as to say they are less emotionally intelligent. This is problematic for two reasons, a) different people have different reasons for disliking Ellie’s final choice. Some still hate Abby as much as in the beginning, others feel drained and indifferent, and others still feel similarly to how I feel in that it’s mainly narratively dissatisfying. And b) the same story can have a different effect on any amount of people (otherwise, we would have settled the discussion about what the greatest movie all of time is long ago). My point being, that no matter how you feel about this particular story you are 100% justified in feeling this way, and yes that includes people that by the end of the game still hate Abby just as much as they did the moment she bashed Joel’s skull in. That does not necessarily have to be personal bias, more often than not it’s the ability to see through the storytelling techniques used, rendering them mostly ineffective for these people (and I include myself in this). I wanted Ellie to kill Abby not because I was unable to empathize with her or couldn’t see past my own personal bias, but because that would have been the logical, narratively satisfying conclusion to this specific story.

[derekfoxwit]

Doctor Dorpden’s Critical Tips of Prestige

Note: This post was made with satirical intentions in mind. I’m only emphasizing because I’ve had a couple of comments on previous joke posts I’ve did take it seriously. With that said, here we go.

Tip 1: For starters, remember that when looking at the work, if the Mystic Knee twitches fast enough to punch a hole in a wall, this suggests that the work should be near the lowest of the low. No further development of opinion is needed.

Tip 2: For an equal degree of sophistication, give the warm comfort of nostalgia at least 5 times more chances than the new thing that MAY seem actually poggers.

Tip 3: If you have the anecdote of encountering shitty fans, then use them as a scapegoat for the show they flaunt over being shitty. Clearly, they’re always making the show the way it is.

Tip 4: If you haven’t heard much about a newer film or show you’re yet to watch, there’s an 85% chance that film or show is actually not worth your time. The Father (2020) isn’t as widespread as Joker (2019) for a reason.

Tip 5: At this point, just go for the Asian Artist Dick. I’m actually in the mood to see merit in that because I want to look edgy against cute doodles. Stop attacking Uzaki-Chan, you cowards!

Tip 6: Avoid the electronic tunes. They’ll make you smell like a bum, for there’s no structural in a music album that’s nothing but wubs.

Tip 7: If you see a Tweet that looks dumb, use it as a means of generalizing all the fans of a work as sharing that same opinion.

Tip 8: If the cartoon I’m given doesn’t provide me with mature ideas such as slicing an Arbok in half or fake boobs, then the cartoon might as well be on the same level as Teletubbies.

Tip 9: You know the music is (c)rap when it brings up drugs, regardless of lyrical context.

Tip 10:  Raw mood is the indicator of quality cartooning. If you’re quick to assume the worst in the newest HBO Max original cartoon, then you got thyself a stinker. Same thing if you were super bummed out when watching a new thing, regardless of anecdotal context.

Tip 11:  When you’re not given continuous throwbacks, ensure you’re as reductive and over-generalizing about the works shown as possible.

Tip 12:  If your hazy and imperfect as hell recollection of a children’s film, whether it’s Wall-E or Lilo & Stitch, would describe said film as “too sugary” or “key-waving schlock”, then that HAS to be the case. No meat on that bone whatsoever.

Tip 13: Simpler, more graphic style that isn’t as realistic as old-school Disney or Anime? You got yourself a lazy style with zero passion put into it.

UPA? Who’s THAT?!

Tip 14: Don’t trust anyone saying that western children’s cartoons had any form of artistic development after 2008 (with, like, TWO exceptions). If it did, why didn’t we go from stealing organs in a 2001 cartoon to showing opened stomachs in a 2021 cartoon?

Tip 15: Big booba is always important to the strong female character’s quality.

Tip 16:  Only MY ships count, for they provide me with a feeling of intelligence.

Tip 17: “PG-13″ and “R” rating just simply mean you’re not caring for expressing themes in a sophisticated manner. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 18:  In this age of smelly radicals, “Death of the Author” is more important than ever. Without it, this’ll imply that a classic like The Matrix was secretly toxic, due to what the Wachowskis have to say about it being an “allegory of trans people.”

Tip 19: Turn the fandoms you hate into your torture porn. Ask in Tweets to Retweet one sentence that’d “trigger” them. Go out of your way to paint all of them as blind consoomers. That’ll show them, and it’ll show how much more intelligent you are compared to those clowns.

Tip 20: Whatever the Mystic Knee dictates upon the first viewing of a work is what shall indicate the full structural extent of the film.

Tip 21: The mindset of a 2000s edgelord is one that actually understands the artistry of the medium of animation. Listen to that crazy but ingenious man.

Tip 22: Because sheer ambition makes me feel manly, the high pedestal you bestow upon a cartoon work should be based mostly on the mere mention or mere suggestion of serious topics. This means that pure comedy is smelly.

Tip 23: Is the new work tackling subjects that you’ve loved a childhood work of yours for covering? Just assume it’s super bare-bones in that case compared to the older case, for there’s nothing the older work can do to truly prove itself otherwise. Seriously, Letterboxd. Stop giving any 2010s cartoon anything above a 4/5

Tip 24: If the Mystic Knee is suggesting that the work is crummy, then consider any explanation off the top of your head for why the work in question is crummy.

Tip 25: Sexual and gender identity is inherently political, so don’t focus on them in the story. It’s no wonder why Full Metal Alchemist has caught on more than the She-Ra reboot.

Tip 26: Since I got bothered by a random butt monkey type character in a crummy cartoon, I’m now obligated to assume that having a butt monkey will only harm the writing integrity of the cartoon.

Seriously, Mr. Enter....what?!

Tip 27: We’re at a point where pure comedy for a kids’ cartoon is doing nothing but dumbing down the children. Like seriously...... I doubt Billy and Mandy would ever use farts as a punchline, unlike these newer kids comedies.

Tip 28: The difference between the innuendo in kids’ cartoons I grew up on and the ones Zootopia made is the sense of prestige they give me. Just take notes from the former instead.

Tip 29: Wanna make a work of artistic merit? Just take notes from the stuff I whore out to. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 30: Always remember this golden rule: If the newer work, or a work you’ve recently experienced the first time, was truly great, why isn’t it providing the exact emotions from your younger, more impressionable years?

Tip 31: If the Mystic Knee aims to break the bones of a character doing certain things (.i.e. having body count of thousands; lashing out to character; etc.), that means the character is bad and deserves no redemption.

Tip 32: If you want me to believe there’s any intrigue or depth in your antagonist, give them redemption, for I am in need of that sorta thing being spelled out. Looking at you, Syndrome. Should’ve taken notes from Tai Lung.

Tip 33: In a case where you’re going “X > Y” (.i.e. manga compared to western comics), ALWAYS CHERRY PICK! Use the recent controversies of the “Y” item while pretending that the “X” item has never had anything of the sort.

Tip 34: BEFORE you bring up those comments that shat on the original Teen Titans cartoon back when it was new, whether for making Starfire “more PC” or whatever.......the DIFFERENCE between them and me is that THEY were just bad faith fools that couldn’t see true majesty out of blind rage. I, however, am truly certain that calling any western TV cartoon from 2014-onward a work that transcends its generation suggests a destruction of the medium.

Tip 35: Based on fandom growth, it shows that any newer show isn’t being watched much by kids, but rather loser adults that act like children. Therefore, there’s more prestige in what I grew with.

Tip 36: The focus on children is bad at this point since the children of today have attention spans that flies would have.

Tip 37: A select few screenshots (or even one) of either a less elaborate attacking animation, less realistic game graphics, or a less on-model image in a cartoon indicates EVERYTHING about the work’s quality.

Tip 38: Consuming or writing media where characters go through constant suffering is little more than gaining pleasure out of it. YOU SICKOS!

Looking at you, Lily Orchard!

Tip 39: Whether it’s a sexual awakening story or just simply a romance, focus on a character being lesbian, trans, bi, etc., then it shouldn’t be in a kids’ work. It’s too spicy for them by default. Kids don’t want romance anyway.

Tip 40: The very idea of a western cartoon with no full-blown antagonist (i.e. Inside Out) is a destruction of animated artistry. Sorry, but it’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 41: Unless it’s my fluffy pillow, such as Disney’s Robin Hood, it should be obligated to assume the inserting of anthros is only there to pleasure the furries. Looking at YOU, Zootopia!

Tip 42: With how rough and rash The Beast was, it shows that he was more of an abusive lover. Therefore, I refuse to believe that Beauty and the Beast has any of the meticulous moral writing that most of Disney’s other 90s films has.

Tip 43: When you suggest one work should’ve “taken notes” from another work in order to do better, BE VAGUE! Those who agree will be shown to be geniuses.

Tip 44: Remember how morally grey Invader Zim was? That really goes to show how little the Western Animation scene has been trying since that show. Really should just be taking notes from that series (and of course anime).

Tip 45: Even if I have a radar that clearly indicates such, hiding the item I look for inside an enemy is always bad, for I refuse to believe it would be inside the enemy.

Goddamn it, Arin!

Tip 46: People struggle understanding your gender identity or pronouns? All there is to see in that is a giant cloud of egotism that reads “My problems” zapping another smaller cloud that reads “other people’s problems”. Seriously, kids are starving, so WHAT if you identity confused someone. Grow a spine!

Tip 47: Stop pretending that adaptations should colorize how a story or comic series should be defined. No way in FUCK can a cartoon or film incarnation become the definitive portrayal of my precious superhero idol.

Tip 48: Enough with your precious “limited animation” techniques, YOU WESTERN HACKS! All you’re doing is admitting to sheer laziness and lacking artistic integrity. Now if you excuse me, I’ll be watching more anime, since that gives me a sense of prestige.

Tip 49: If getting five times more detail than the 2D animated visuals have requires someone getting hurt, so be it. No pain, no gain after all.

Tip 50: Yes, I genuinely struggle to believe there’s this majestic level of layered material without having the most immediate yet still vague re-assurance practically yelling in my face. But that’s STILL the work’s fault, not mine.

Tip 51: Every Klasky-Csupo cartoon has more artistic integrity than any of them cartoons with gay lovers such as Kipo or the Netflix She-Ra show.

Tip 52:  If Sergio Pablos’ Klaus is anything to go by, we have no excuse to utilize those smelly as fuck digital animation “styles” found on Stinky Universe, Suck-Ra or Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turds.

Tip 53: Stop projecting your orientation onto works of actual talent. Seriously, how does Elton John’s I’m Still Standing expel ANY rainbow flag energy?

Tip 54: Hip hop and electronica have been the destruction of music, especially the kind that’s actually organic and not farting on the buttons of a beeping or drumming gadget.

Tip 55: The audience for cartoons has become significantly less clear over the years. We should just go back to Saturday mornings of being sold toys or shit kids actually want.

Tip 56: PSAs for kids shouldn’t be about ‘woke’ content. They should be actual problems such as doing drugs; not playing with knifes / outlets / matches; or acceptance.

Tip 57: The instant you realize a detail in a childhood work that’s better understood as an adult, you’re forced to paint that work as the most transcendent thing in the world. It’s just THAT simple until I dictate otherwise.

Tip 58: Before you lash out on ALL rich people, remember this: #Not All Rich People.

Tip 59: There’s nothing to gain out of the (c)rap scene other than becoming a spiteful, gun-wielding thug that sniffs weed for breakfast.

Tip 60: Since the Mystic Knee told me to get anal about prom episodes in several gay cartoons, this shows that writing about one’s younger experiences just makes you look pathetic.

Tip 61: Another smelly thing about Zootopia is how it was painting a police chief as stern and exclusive. #Not All Chiefs

Tip 62: Me catching a glimpse of Grave of the Fireflies as a kid and turning out fine shows that you may as well show kids more adult works without worry. No amount of psychological questions being asked will suggest otherwise.

Tip 63: There’s a reason why the Mystic Knee keeps leaning more toward the 90s and early 2000s than most decades. That knee KNOWS where there’s a sense of true refinement.

Tip 64: The BIG difference between rock and electronica? Steward Copeland actually DRUMS. All that the likes of Burial, Boards of Canada, Depeche Mode and several others did was push drum buttons.

Tip 65: One exception to the golden nostalgia is when the work in question doesn’t stuff your face with fantastical, bombastic stories. At which point, there can only be rose-colored blinds covering Nickelodeon’s Doug. Nothing of merit or personal resonance to be found.

Tip 66: Remember that the sense of nuance in the work comes down to there being everything including the kitchen sink, whether it involves multiple geographic landscapes; giving us hundreds of characters; etc. Only through the extremes will I be able to tell there is nuance.

Tip 67: Once you see a joke that has an involvement with sexual or violent content, just ignore the full picture and just reduce it to having nothing to it but “sex, violence, gimme claps.”

PKRussel has entered the chat

Tip 68: With all the SJWs messing up the art of comedy, lament the times where you could be called a comic genius, NOT a monster, for shouting out the word “STAB,” calling a gay weird, painting Middle Easterns as inherently violent, etc.

Tip 69: Guitar twang will always win out over (c)rap beats. There’s a reason your grandma is more likely to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd than Kendrick Lamar.

Tip 70: Once the Mystic Knee notices a lack of squealing at the video game with linearity, that shows there’s more artistry in going full-blown open world.

Tip 71: Related to Tips 66 and 68, ensure your comedy gets as much information and mileage out of each individual skit as possible. EMPHASIZE if you need to. Continuously spout out your quirky phrase of “STAB” if needed.

Tip 72: Based on the onslaught of TV shows with many seasons and episodes, animated or otherwise, it shows that there’s more worth going for that than simply having a miniseries or a 26-episode anime.

Tip 73: Building off of the previous tip, you’re better off squeezing and exhausting every little detail and notable characterization rather than keeping anything simple and possibly leaving a stone unturned, especially if there’s supposed to be a story. 

Tip 74: Playing through the fan translation of Mother 3 made me realize how much some newer kids’ works just try too hard to get serious. Why even make the kids potentially think about the death of a family member?

Tip 75: The fear I had over Sid’s toys from the first Toy Story and similar anecdotal emotions are the be-all indicators of what kind of show or film is fitting for the children.

Tip 76:  Seeing this British rapper chick have a song titled “Point and Kill” just further exemplifies the fears I’ve had about rappers being some of the most harmful folks ever.

Tip 77: The problem with attempting to make a more “relatable” She-Ra is that kids aren’t looking for relatability. They want the escapism of buff fighters or something similar. This is why slice-of-life is so smelly.

Tip 78: Based on seeing the rating of “PG-13″ or “R,” I can tell that the dark humor is little more than “hur dur sex and guns.” Given the “TV-Y7 FV” rating of Invader Zim, the writers should’ve taken notes from that instead just so I can sense actual prestige.

Tip 79: The original He-Man has more visual intrigue in its animation than any of those smelly glorified doodles found in the “styles" of the 2010s and early 2020s.

Tip 80: It’s always the fault of the game that my first guess (that I refuse to divert from) on how I have to go through an obstacle won’t work.

Tip 81: Zootopia discussing prejudice ruins the majestic escapism I got from my precious childhood films from 1991-2004. Them kids might as well be watching the news. Now to watch some Hunchback after I finish these tips.

Tip 82: There is no such thing as an unreasonable expectation, and there’s especially no wrong way to address the lack of met expectations! For example, if you expect some early 2010s cartoon on the Disney Channel to be a Kids X-Files, yet you get moments such as some girl getting high on stick dipping candy, you got the right to paint the worst out of that show for not being “Kids’ X-Files.”

Tip 83: Related to my example for Tip 82, if you get the slightest impression of something being childish, you know you got yourself a children’s work that does little than wave keys and has basically nothing substantial for them. In this situation, those malfunctioning robots found in Wall-E are the guilty party.

Tip 84: Without the extensive dialogue that I’m used to getting, how can one say for certain there was any amount of characterization in the title character of Wall-E?

Tip 85: Ever noticed yourself gradually being less likely to expect an upcoming work or view a work you’re just consuming as “the next best thing”? That’s ALWAYS the fault of smelly “artists” (hacks really) and their refusal to give a shit.

Tip 86:  It’s obligatory for your lead to be explicitly heroic just so there is this immediate re-assurance that they’re a good one.

Tip 87: Without the comforting safety net of throwbacks, one cannot be for certain that there has been an actual evolution of a series or the art of animation and video games.

Tip 88: Don’t PSA kids on stuff they give zero fucks about. That means no gender identities or pronouns, race, etc.

Tip 89: Don’t listen to Mamoru Hosoda saying that anime women tend to be “depicted through a lens” of sexual desire. He’s just distracting from the superior prestige found in anime women.

Tip 90:  If you’re desperate to let others know that your talking points are reasonable, just repeat them over and over with little expansion on said talking points.

Tip 91: 7 or more seasons of art is better than 26 episodes of art.  EVERY TIME!

Tip 92: Always remember to continuously talk up the innuendo and mature subject matter of the childhood work as the most prestigious, transcendent thing of all time. With that in mind, there’s a high chance that your favorite childhood work will be better known than Perfect Blue (1997), and there’s likely a reason for that.

Tip 93: An art style that gives many characters relatively more realistic arm muscle details will always shine through more than any sort of art style done for “simplicity” (laziness, really).

Tip 94:  Seeing a few (like, even VERY FEW) people show more enthusiasm for Steven Universe over Invader Zim really shows the lower bar that has been expected out of the western animation scene compared to anime.

Tip 95: Electronic music makes less conventional time signatures cheap as hell. REAL music like rock makes them the exact opposite.

Tip 96: If your Mystic Knee suggests that the 90s cartoon being viewed doesn’t showcase a vague sense of refinement or artistic integrity, then every related assumption of yours is right. EVERY TIME!

Tip 97: Doing everything and the kitchen sink for one series or movie shows a better sense of refinement and prestige than any form of simplicity. THIS includes character design as well.

Tip 98: The advent of that Star Wars: Visions anime really shows just how stinky western cartoons have become.

Tip 99:  For those wondering, no, Europe isn’t being counted in my definition of “western animation”. Doing so is a complete disservice to prestige.

Tip 100: If even less than half of these tips aren’t being considered, you can kiss that prestige badge goodbye. After all, I SAID SO!

[doomonfilm]

Ranking : Christopher Nolan (1970 - present)

From the moment he kicked the door down on the scene with the breathtaking Memento, the name Christopher Nolan has rung synonymous with high thinking, high level and high entertainment film.  He always finds fresh and unique ways to tell stories, be it visually, narratively, or some combination of the two, and many of his conceptual deep dives have opened real conversations in regards to different aspects of space and time.  For an artist, the impact the Christopher Nolan has had on the populous as a whole is impressive, which is why after recently seeing Tenet, I felt it necessary to take a look back at all of his films and determine where they stood in relation to one another (in my eyes). 

11. Insomnia (2002) As stated with every instance of ranking the work of a director, there’s always one film that’s got to take the bottom of the list hit, and for Nolan, it was Insomnia.  The film in itself is not a bad one, and it does offer some strong visuals in regards to the unrelenting amount of sunlight that one experiences in Alaska, but it does suffer not only from being a remake, but a remake that pales in comparison to the original.  For my money’s worth, Nolan works best with original ideas, with one specific trilogy standing as an exception to that notion.

10. Memento (2000) While not his debut film, this was the film that put Nolan on the map.  The story is unique and intriguing, and the manner in which it is told really makes it work, as a standard A to Z telling of the film would eliminate much of the dramatic tension felt.  That being said, this film suffers from a similar fate to that of films like The Sixth Sense : it’s cool the first time you see it, it really wows you the second time you see it, and then further viewings find diminishing returns in regards to the experience of the “gimmick” (for lack of a better word).  Definitely worth seeing if you’ve never seen it, or are looking for a gateway into the work of Nolan, but underwhelming when held up against his future work.

9. Batman Begins (2005) As previously stated, Nolan (in my opinion) works best as a writer/director of original ideas, so like many, I was slightly surprised when he was tapped to handle the Christian Bale edition of the Batman movie canon.  There wasn’t so much doubt about his ability to pull things off visually, but with such a beloved franchise and character in his hands, there were thoughts about whether or not his style would translate in a way that an already dedicated fanbase would appreciate.  Batman Begins was an effective table-setter for his Dark Knight trilogy, but due to the necessity of having to address an already familiar backstory, many of Nolan’s best ideas would have to wait until the sequel.

8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) This film found itself the unfortunate victim of an all too familiar national tragedy in the form of a mass shooting during an early screening, forever putting a sort of black cloud over the film as a result.  That being said, the film was a stellar entry in the Dark Knight trilogy, anchored by an instantly iconic Tom Hardy performance.  If this film was attributed to any other director, it would possibly stand as one of their top works, but Christopher Nolan is a man of such depth and style that The Dark Knight Rises merely stands as above average output from a creator who is pulling back a bit to fit the Hollywood ideal (or his version, anyway) of a comic book film.

7. Following (1998) Quite possibly the most personal of all Nolan films, which makes sense, considering it was his first.  It was the buzz that this film generated during the 1997 festival season, along with an already completed script for Memento, that turned Nolan from an aspiring director to a household name.  Following gives us a bit of insight into Nolan’s creative process, presenting us with a highly stylized version of an observational writer, forever receptive to the stimulus around him.  The look of the film displays Nolan’s eye for location and cinematography, and the non-linear nature of the story served as a sneak preview to a format of storytelling he would soon master and manipulate beyond our ability to initially understand.  Though a bit on the short side for a feature film, it is certainly a fun ride with much indication of where its creator was headed.

6. Interstellar (2014) Throughout the 2010s, it seemed that Nolan was hell-bent on warping our brains through the entertainment medium, and after the warning blast that Inception was, Interstellar served as a sort of thematic and spiritual double-tap for our psyche.  Nolan took the basic structure for a story of familial, unconditional love and skewed it by thrusting our protagonist into the uncharted depths of space, skewing his perception of time so radically that the people he loved became old while he did not age, which in itself is enough of a heartbreaking concept to build a film off of.  Add to this the fact that we are presented with (to the best of our knowledge, anyways) the most photo-realistic depictions of a Black Hole and a tesseract, and the end result is a powerful genre-blending journey that stands in rare company, with films like Tarkovsy’s Solaris and Kubrick’s 2001 : A Space Odyssey serving as the closest points of comparison.

5. Tenet (2020) When you have a track record like that of a Christopher Nolan, it is inevitable that people are waiting on your downfall, and with 2020 changing the way we take in films, many tried to seize this opportunity and label Tenet as this moment in time.  To me, this is an absurd stance to take... not only is Tenet one of the most intriguing films I’ve seen in years, but its efficiency in storytelling trims away so much fat that we are left with archetypical characters with subtle amounts of depth shepherding us through a narrative line that folds in and overlaps on itself numerous times.�� With this premise set and our characters deeply devoted to their functionality (though not at the expense of performance), we are left with the spectacle of some amazing choreography and in-camera special effects work that makes you really and truly have to stop at times just so you can try and process what it is you are seeing.  Hopefully, in repeat viewings, the “gimmick” won’t take precedence over the film itself, as I believe there is enough going on outside of the visual trickery to keep one interested time and again.

4. Dunkirk (2017) It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan has the talent to build vast, textured and deeply imaginative worlds with his films, but up until the point of Dunkirk, Nolan had not attempted a “period piece”.  Luckily for us film lovers, Nolan decided to try his hand at that style in the form of a war movie, and the result was the extremely moving and powerful experience of Allied troops in World War II caught in a situation where death seemed inevitable.  Despite the vastness of the beach and sea we are shown, the feeling of being trapped permeates through and through, and it is enhanced by stellar cinematography and practical effects.  Even with a cast full of familiar names and faces, the experience of hopelessness created soon eliminates the familiarity that comes with star power, and we are left with nothing but our investment in the story.   

3. The Dark Knight (2008) Simply put, The Dark Knight really has no business being as good as it is.  You’d think that its placement between the two trilogy bookends would give it a transitional nature, potentially only existing to move the story forward to its conclusion.  What we are given, however, is one of the most nuanced looks at heroes, villains, anti-heroes, and just how much those roles can alternate based on the perspective of those applying the title.  For all of the horror that the Scarecrow character brought, or the pure intimidation of Bane, The Dark Knight gives us a complex agent of chaos in the form of Heath Ledger’s instantly iconic (and tragically final) performance as the Joker.  All of the pacing issues that weigh down the other two films are completely absent in this middle offering, and the movie hangs around in your mind well after the final credits roll.  To many viewers, this film set the artistic benchmark for what a so-called “comic-book” movie had the potential to be.

2. Inception (2010) For many, Inception marks the culminative peak of all that Christopher Nolan brings to the table as a director and storyteller.  His ability to coherently weave together a narrative that deals with the perception of time as one goes deeper and deeper into the psyche is impressive in its own right, but the amount of breathtaking nuance, visual effects and mental gymnastics used to tell the story would bring a lesser director to their knees.  If The Revenant and 2015 served as the culmination of Leonardo DiCaprio finally receiving much-deserved recognition as an actor via an Academy Award, then Inception feels like the starting point for that final leg of his journey.  Everyone brought their A-game to this table on both sides of the camera, leaving us with a true visual and storytelling spectacle for the ages. 

1. The Prestige (2006) Irony is a funny thing... I bring that up because Christopher Nolan has literally taken on (and, in some ways, conquered) space, time and perception in his films, all of which would be incredibly lofty concepts to illustrate and visualize, let alone make entertaining.  With all of that in mind, it’s ironic that his best film would be one that does not rely on all of the aforementioned lofty aspects and visual tricks.  The Prestige, at a base level, is a story about jealousy and how it can drive you mad, but it’s the way that this story is told that makes it possibly the best film in the Nolan canon.  Christian Bale’s performance (or performances, at the risk of spoilers) is enough to put this film in a class of its own, but the balance that Hugh Jackman’s performance brings to the overall equation keeps you guessing on whom we are supposed to root for right up until the final frame.  The triangle of love triangles in this film further serve to build up the eventual scale of damage that is presented when everything falls completely apart on both sides of the narrative coin.  Most importantly, like any good magic trick, the film sets you up with expectations, only to wow you in the end.  If you had to pick one Nolan film to watch, this would be the one that I recommend, hands down and without question.

Who knows where Christopher Nolan plans to take us next.  I, for one, would not consider myself clued-in enough to hazard a guess on this, but I would almost certainly put money on the fact that wherever he chooses to take us, he will entertain us and amaze us, if not both at the same time, as he always does.

[goldenkamuyhunting]

Ramblings about the changes in vol 21

So, as promised, I wanted to ramble a bit about the huge changes in vol 21 and how they impact on the characters.

I’ll divide them according to affected characters.

For the visual I recommend you checking my previous post “Quick outline of the changes in Golden Kamuy Vol 21 ”.

We’ll start first with those who were only vaguely affected to progress with the ones who were HUGELY affected.

TANIGAKI

Ironically Tanigaki, who’s on the cover of the volume is the least one to be affected by changes… but well, they’re an improvement for him.

1)

While in the magazine version Tanigaki only said he was sure Inkarmat was well and they should go visit her once back, which implied a baseless confidence in her recovery without him not even attempting to check on it and a medium wish to see her again, now Tanigaki talks of receiving telegrams confirming she has recovered and her urgency to see her as soon as he’s back is more marked.

It’s overall nothing big but gives the impression he cared more about her than in the magazine and therefore make smoother how he’ll want to go back to her in what will likely be vol 23.

2)

He also seemed more involved in the vision of the movie, as if to imply for him too that scene was a touching moment of bonding with Chikapasi. Nice but it’s still pretty weak and underwhelming.

TSUKISHIMA

Tsukishima also get minor changes. I like to think some of them give his feelings more deep.

However it’s worth to mention something before talking about the changes in Tsukishima and this something is that in vol 20 the scene was changed so that Tsukishima was present when Ogata called Koito ‘Barchonok’ (Барчонок  ‘pampered little rich boy’) so I expect this change would affect the plot of vol 21. This wasn’t the case. The scene in which Koito mention such a word in chap 201 is completely unchanged, Tsukishima not recognizing it in the slightest and if he recognized it in chap 210, when Koito contextualized it… well, it’s hard to say as the scene is again unchanged.

So what changed?

1)

Tsukishima was less pushy when, in chap 205, he tried to get Sugimoto to talk with Asirpa, as this time he doesn’t say they’ve no time before Tsurumi will get there. I’m not sure why this was removed as Tsukishima will be pushy as they make the movie but maybe this merely interrupted the flow of Sugimoto’s words.

2)

We see an interesting thing. When Noda redraw chap 103, he removed Ogata’s smiles as he talked to his father. In the volume version Ogata will remain serious through the whole talk and smile only at the end and when he talks to Tsurumi.

Instead here Noda had Tsukishima, who in the magazine was serious, smile as he says he was tricked too. Tsukishima also digs more in Tsurumi’s deception, saying how Tsurumi poured affection into a place in him that was wilted away so as to better describe how meaningful for Tsukishima was what Tsurumi did. That moment in which Tsurumi made him feel he was important enough for Tsurumi to go so far Tsukishima should have felt really impressed… and it’s meaningful how there seems to be tears in his eyes, when he says that it’s fine for him if he was used and that his life didn’t matter much to him.

Tsukishima is saying it’s fine but it actually pains him.

Tsukishima becomes a good example of how men sometimes smile when they’re in pain not because they’re happy but because in that way they seem/feel more in control, their smile being actually a bitter one and of how one might say he’s okay and instead think the opposite.

KOITO

Changes about Koito are also fundamentally minor but they work to flesh out his feelings better in consideration of how Koito’s perception of the world and stance are going to change.

1)

Personally I found interesting how Noda added Koito saying ‘like his Excellency Hanazawa and Ogata Hyakunosuke… like that parent and child’. The sentence remarks their parent/child relation and the parallel with himself and his father. It draws a connection between his situation and Ogata’s, allowing Koito to humanize someone he has always despised but, at the same time, strongly implying Koito’s judgment is strongly tied to his own perception of father/child relations.

It’s hard to judge where this will lead but I think Koito’s view of Ogata, while talking with Tsukishima, has shifted completely from the previous view he had. Probably he felt him closer, both tricked, both, according to Koito, caring about their parents. Koito, who strongly wants his father’s approbation, despised Ogata for betraying Hanazawa’s memory and rebelling but if Ogata was pursuing revenge for his father… well, I think Koito thought this he could approve.

2)

Koito now looks a lot less happy and comfortable to see Tsurumi so, differently from the manga, it’s much more clear he was faking when he pretended to be impressed by how far Tsurumi went to get him. Therefore, even though later he’ll decide to still put faith in Tsurumi, from now on he’s clearly no more a compliant and enthusiastically blind follower.

SHIRAISHI

Minor changes for Shiraishi too but they are relevant enough. Shiraishi qualifies as a smart guy who can watch things objectively and has a better grasp of the situation.

1)

In the volume version in fact, he’s present when Sugimoto and Asirpa discuss, so he heard their little chat but he clearly wasn’t involved. Asirpa asked for Sugimoto’s opinion and Sugimoto first missed the point of her worry (the Ainu, not herself) and then gave a pretty unrealistic reply, at which Shiraishi left, with the result he ends up overhearing half of Koito and Tsukishima’s discussion. Actually, if he got out just after he left Sugi and Asirpa he overheard part of Koito’s accusations and all of Tsukishima’s confession.

In this way the volume tells us that Shiraishi might have heard quite a good part of their chat… and while he was completely sober.

2)

The following changes are in the discussion he has with Sugimoto. In the magazine Shiraishi said Asirpa isn’t the Asirpa he knew anymore. In the volume he says she isn’t the Asirpa he first met. It’s overall similar but I think here Shiraishi remarks more not so much that Asirpa has changed as a person but that what she has learnt had pushed her into different goals. The Asirpa Sugimoto met was unaware of many things and thought since she didn’t need the gold she could happily hand it out to Sugimoto and Shiraishi and lived a life unaware of how Ainu could end up. Present Asirpa wants the gold to be used for the Ainu, she’s more aware of the situation of her people and wants to improve it.

It’s a different type of change in her, one not given by an abrupt shift in her character but by a greater awareness of the world around her.

Character wise Asirpa is still the same. She doesn’t want to kill, she loves her people, she’s a glutton at heart. But now she has knowledge of the world around her, of the dangers for her people. It’s as if she’d sampled the forbidden fruit of knowledge and can’t turn back anymore. This is what Asirpa had been trying to tell Sugimoto, that it’s not that she doesn’t want to go back to say citatap and hinna hinna, it’s not that those things don’t interest her anymore, is that she knows she can’t because her way of living, her people, are in danger.

3)

Always in that same discussion Shiraishi points out something else that’s really relevant and that before he didn’t mention. He basically questions Sugimoto’s ‘naïve belief’ Tsurumi might care about the Ainu. Sugimoto in the volume told Asirpa Ainu would have a use for Tsurumi as a workforce (which, let’s be honest, is not really a great option as this would imply Ainu should leave their own way to live and start to work in Tsurumi’s army factories or in his opium factories so bye-bye Ainu lifestyle). Shiraishi’s question points out not only how this is naïve, but that he doesn’t think Sugimoto himself believes this.

(Note that Tsukishima and Koito didn’t talk about the Ainu so the fact that this is naive is something Shiraishi figured by himself)

Shiraishi in short is showing he understands the Ainu cause is important for Asirpa and, in a way that probably surprises him as well, he has sort of grown to care for it as well and is basically asking Sugimoto if he’s stupid, delusional or a liar when he’s saying Tsurumi would care about the Ainu. I won’t dig into Sugimoto now because I’ll talk about him later but in the volume version Shiraishi comes out as someone who got a more objective look on the situation and a better grasp to what Tsurumi wants as well as even more critical of Sugimoto’s actions than in the magazine.

4)

The last change is very minor. In the magazine Shiraishi throws up, distracting Tsurumi in such a providential way it seemed done on purpose. In the volume version Shiraishi doesn’t throw up, he burps when Tsurumi claims he wants everyone’s happiness and to cooperate with Asirpa which sounds more like a sound of lack of disbelief, even if his face is slightly shadowed. Personally I prefer this change. We already saw Shiraishi getting drunks but in the morning he was always fine. Even though it was clear this time he came back completely wasted (and I wonder if Vol 22 will develop him more) he had also thrown up twice with Sugimoto. He shouldn’t have anything anymore in his stomach.

If anything the only thing I question is that they still have used him as a comic relief not having him escape with Sugimoto and Asirpa but allowing an arrow to hit him. Changing this would have been appreciated.

ASIRPA

Changes about Asirpa are very relevant for how we read Asirpa. Sure, if you want they take from her a ‘first glance’ intuition that however seemed unrealistic but Asirpa becomes more thoughtful and more proactive and determinate. Even more she doesn’t let others order her around but demands for explanations and take her own decisions.

1)

We start really tame, with Noda remarking how Tanigaki’s words about how they can’t try helping Shiraishi because if the sniper is Ogata, the target is Asirpa.

Let’s go back to that scene and look to a bit that remains the same in the volume.

When Vasily started shooting they immediately realized the one shooting them was a ‘sniper’ (狙撃手) and not a random guy. Asirpa sweats slightly hearing the word ‘sniper’, repeating it as Noda shadows her face with an uniform toner. Asirpa knows who the sniper could be and it tosses on her a shadow.

They will however need the sniper to shoot again before Tsukishima (or is he Tanigaki? Hard to say as we don’t see the speaker) will claim the sniper has to be Ogata Hyakunosuke, something Sugimoto also thought, since as he runs toward the sniper he thinks he’s gonna fight Ogata.

When Tsukishima states so, Asirpa’s face is shown again but, although she’s sweating because she realizes the situation is serious, there is no shadow on her face. I take it’s a hint that Tsukishima’s words merely confirmed what she had thought but didn’t verbalize, that the attacked could be Ogata.

Noda didn’t feel the need to add a shading here.

We go on, Tsukishima points out how Sugimoto is moving to attack Ogata and Koito points out how it’s weird Ogata would forget to check on Sugimoto.

Asirpa worries about saving Shiraishi and Tanigaki tells her they can’t because if it’s Ogata it’s her he wants to kill. And Noda here, in the volume version, added a shading but not an uniform shading like when Asirpa heard the word ‘sniper’ but a swirling shading.

Of course it’s possible it’s just because he wanted to remark which sort of burden Tanigaki pushed on Asirpa. It’s due to her that Shiraishi got shoot, because Ogata wanted to kill HER.

But, I wonder, if Noda didn’t want to hint more here.

Later in fact, Asirpa will question herself and the others about Ogata.

For start she question if he’ll come back at which Sugimoto replies she’s the key to the gold so there’s a chance he’ll do.

Asirpa doesn’t reply at first, then mentions how Ogata ACTED LIKE HE WAS GOING TO KILL HER. If she’s the key to the gold, killing her means giving up on the gold. It’s also interesting she doesn’t say he attempted to kill her, but that he acted as if he was going to do so. Asirpa knows two things Sugimoto doesn’t know.

The first is that Ogata encouraged her to shoot him, deliberately gave her reason to do so and time to do so. The second is that when she hit him, he smiled as if he had got exactly what he wanted.

Honestly I’m not sure she understood most of what Ogata said as she should need previous knowledge about his father and brother.

There’s a third thing Asirpa might have realized but, on this, I’m not sure. She knows first-hand Ogata is very fast but, although both of them were supposedly startled by Sugimoto’s scream, while she let go her arrow in surprise, Ogata didn’t push the trigger. His eyes remained on her but he made no attempt to harm her even though he threatened her about it.

To sum it up when Asirpa basically rejected him Ogata’s first instinct wasn’t to kill her, it was trying to goad her into killing him, although he threatened her to do so he didn’t and, lastly, killing her would lead him nowhere. He still wouldn’t have the gold.

I think that swirling shading might be there to point out how Asirpa had tried to let the whole thing of the drift ice behind her, maybe hoping after Ogata’s escape she wouldn’t see him again, forgetting the whole thing as she had attempted to do with her father’s memories the first time she believed Wilk died but Tanigaki’s words brought it all back and with it, the need to figure the whole thing out.

Not only Ogata’s behavior made no sense from her point of view but also the idea he’d really want to kill her makes no sense either and it’s possible Noda felt a shading was needed to hint how it was Tanigaki’s sentence that triggered Asirpa’s following questioning.

2)

The second change actually refers to what Sugimoto will say to Vasily but, as Asirpa overhears him and that conversation ties with another conversation she will have with Sugimoto, this will become relevant.

In fact originally in the magazine Sugimoto said just because the world Asirpa was looking at had him in it, this cleaned him and he thought he could be saved. There were many reasons due to which Sugimoto could think so, starting with him thinking that if someone as pure as Asirpa were to be friend with him, this somehow made him a better person.

So in the magazine Asirpa saying Sugimoto was doing it merely because he saw himself as a child in her, felt as Asirpa hugely interpreting what she overheard Sugimoto saying. Sure, she was right, but since Sugimoto’s original sentence was so different, it felt like a huge leap.

Now instead not only her words aren’t anymore that distant from Sugimoto’s words but the type of burden pushed on her changes.

In the magazine her existence somehow made Sugimoto feel he could be purified and he saw this as a chance of salvation.

In the volume her existence is just a reminder Sugimoto was like her once, he sees himself in her so he wants to protect her the way he couldn’t protect himself. For Asirpa, who has a crush for Sugimoto, it’s clearly something painful because Sugimoto doesn’t want to protect her for herself, but because he sees himself in her.

Sure, it pushes on her less responsibility than being considered a ‘purifying deity’ or some sort of ‘purifying shaman’ but, at the same time, it denies her as her own person and it makes the matter worse how, when this is discussed, she learns her father too didn’t see her as her own person but as a way to continue his own partisan fight.

Both Wilk and Sugimoto are pushing their own wishes on her (we’ll debate another time on who has the best wish for her) without considering her own.

They don’t ask her which sort of future she wants, they decide for her which future is the best for her, the future THEY WANT.

It clearly pushes Asirpa, who was so proud of choosing for herself her own fate, in an unpleasant place… until, at the end of the volume, she’ll take back the reins of her own life. But we’ll discuss about this in a while.

3)

It’s a tiny change but Asirpa is less of a rabid movie director in the volume. Asirpa is generally not particularly polite but not overly rude so maybe Noda decided to remove it not fitting with her character.

4)

The next change is about the discussion Sugimoto and Asirpa will have as they wait for Tsurumi to come.

In the magazine Asirpa asked Sugimoto what he would do afterward, if he would cooperate with Tsurumi, to which Sugimoto didn’t reply.

The volume removed this scene because it was plainly stupid. Asirpa had already asked Sugimoto what he was going to do in chap 192. The volume even expanded the magazine scene. Having her ask it again with Sugimoto not replying to it didn’t really make much sense.

The other change to the scene has Sugimoto answers to Asirpa’s question about what will happen to the Ainu. In the magazine he said nothing. Here he said that since Asirpa knows the code she has an advantage over Tsurumi and can get him to do what she wants. Although Asirpa is doubtful this actually works much better for Asirpa’s character.

In fact, in the magazine, despite having shown she cared so much about the Ainu and wanted the gold to be used for their benefit, after Sugimoto told her about how terrible it would be if she were to have to kill someone, the fact she doesn’t oppose to being handed to Tsurumi even if Sugimoto doesn’t know what will happen to the Ainu afterward makes her look as if she is considering giving up on protecting the Ainu interests to protect herself from killing.

Sure, later in the magazine she’ll claim she’ll understand which sort of man Tsurumi is just by watching him and, as what she saw didn’t please her, she’ll escape but… we’ll discuss about this later and as if this happened in chap 211 it clearly made her look way too remissive in chap 210.

Here instead, Asirpa’s apparent compliance can be explained with her thinking that agreeing can still work to protect the Ainu, that by giving the gold to Tsurumi the Ainu still have lot to gain.

In short the change it doesn’t make Asirpa consider giving up on the Ainu for her own wish to protect herself. They’re always her first thought and she’s considering going through Sugimoto’s plan because he presents it as one from which the Ainu could still possibly benefit.

5)

And so we reach the hugest change in the story.

As mentioned before, in the magazine Asirpa states she’ll understand which sort of man Tsurumi is just by looking at him. Apparently Tsurumi saying her she has her father’s eyes didn’t impress her positively because she decides to escape a second later.

In the volume Asirpa doesn’t claim she’ll decide which sort of man Tsurumi is just by a glance, she just listen to Sugimoto who, for the second time, tells her everything will go well.

It’s Tsurumi who basically fails to act smoothly, evidently undervaluing her. In fact he begins immediately making clear he plans to part Asirpa from Sugimoto and Shiraishi.

This causes Asirpa to smell disaster and she begins to question Tsurumi asking him why they aren’t going together. Tsurumi, evidently thinking he’s dealing with a child, claims it’s just because there isn’t enough space for them in the ship but Asirpa reminds him he said afterward Sugimoto and Shiraishi would have to remain on stand-by at Wakkanai, meaning she won’t wait for them nor they would reach her.

She asks to know where he’s taking her to which Tsurumi gives a dismissive answer ‘I’ll tell you later’.

As Sugimoto sweats but says nothing Asirpa continues to question Tsurumi, demanding to know if he’s trying to divide her from Sugimoto.

Tsurumi denies this, claiming she will be able to meet Sugimoto wherever she wants, they’re just aiming to bring her to a safe place because everyone is targeting her.

Asirpa isn’t deterred by this.

She remarks that her father only told Hijikata Toshizou about her existence, which might imply she’s starting to wonder how Tsurumi knew about her, and how he did so in order for her to oversee that the gold were to be used for the Ainu’s sake.

So she demands to know if he’s really going to take care of the Ainu in his future plans.

Tsurumi tries to give her one of his propaganda talks, they aim for a future in which everyone is happy and they want her cooperation (which we know is a lie as a previous page made clear they actually plan to keep her trapped in a jail until they got the skin and the Ariko chapters made clear Tsurumi forces people to cooperate with them by blackmailing them).

Asirpa insists she won’t help him if the gold isn’t used for the Ainu. She’s calm yet firm, she’s not sweating, only frowning slightly.

From this exchange Asirpa comes out as someone who’s confident, who doesn’t bow easily and who can read between lines. She doesn’t fall for Tsurumi’s fake reassurances and pretty words, she insists on her line and trying to protect her interests. In a way she is left alone to face Tsurumi as Sugimoto won’t say a word against Tsurumi’s plan and Shiraishi only makes a mocking sound.

It’s worth to mention though that Tsurumi’s emotions play to Asirpa’s advantage. Tsurumi’s brain fluids keeps on dripping always a bit more and he’s clearly reminded of Wilk more than once as he watches her. This is probably why, even though Tsurumi is a consumed liar, he snaps and tosses against her how that gold was a war fund to kill Japanese.

In short he stop trying to smooth Asirpa into doing what he says and tries to scare her into compliance, which surprises his own men.

While I think in a way his answer is what Asirpa wanted, as with such answer he reveals his not benevolent feelings toward the Ainu, Asirpa wasn’t prepared to him attacking her like that.

She sweats as she replies that the few Ainu who had that goal in mind died, that not all the Ainu want to fight and that the usage of the gold should be for the Ainu who are alive in the present to decide.

Tsurumi takes this as Asirpa claiming she’ll inherit and follow Wilk’s wishes and that she has his eyes. Then as he starts laughing hysterically, brain fluids dropping everywhere Asirpa will take her decision to escape which now makes a lot more sense than in the manga as Tsurumi has clearly proved himself as a man with malicious intentions toward her and toward the Ainu, a liar who tried to manipulate her into compliance and someone who’s not all right in the mind.

I won’t stop talking about this much, although the fact Tsurumi tattled out he knew Wilk’s eye colour, combined with how he knew about her existence (something Wilk revealed only to Hijikata), might have helped her to realize he knew her father personally (and might have been what pushed her to escape in the magazine as that her eyes looked like her father’s was the only thing Tsurumi managed to tell her).

I’ll focus more on Asirpa’s last sentence. Skipping for a moment how she continues to affirm she believes the Ainu gold should be used for the Ainu which was something she always claimed wanting, her previous statement regards how she claims that the Ainu who wanted to kill the Japanese were few and had died.

The cynical person that’s in me and who knows how partisans work felt like this is just her assumption. She can’t really know if there are more people like that or not.

Partisans work in secrecy, if there were some they wouldn’t openly discuss this around, especially with someone who is, by their standards, a child.

In short I speculated there should have been partisans in Hokkaido, it was just Asirpa didn’t know about them.

On the other side I assumed Asirpa’s idea that there aren’t Ainu who would want to kill the Japanese, or that those are a negligible minority, is not merely due to her religious belief killing is wrong and all Ainu would abide to this precept, but because she’s not really informed on how partisans work.

In fact not only she didn’t go to school but this wasn’t exactly a common concept among Japanese people at the time.

In fact Ushiyama, an adult man, had never heard the word and Hijikata had to explain it to him (chap 70).

The previous Ainu rebellions were due to Ainu clans deciding to fight against each other or against Japanese. From an Ainu perspective they were wars, battles or occasional uprising. Even the gold, although collected in secrecy, was collected by villages, not by a bunch of men in secrecy.

So Asirpa might be completely ignorant on how partisans would operate, how they would hid among her people, acting one way and thinking another, meeting in secret and keeping their identities secret.

As there’s no such malcontent between Ainu villages that they would revolt, for an Ainu like Asirpa, it would be reasonable to assume they wouldn’t revolt, that the Ainu who died moving the gold supposedly because they wanted to use it to wage war, were ‘oddities’ without real support.

Despite her religious beliefs she knows Ainu can kill, not only they too have murderers, but Ainu went to the Russo-Japanese war, Kiroranke and Ariko being veterans from it and Makanakkuru knowing many other Ainu veterans so it’s hard she could have been unaware of Ainu killing people existing. So I don’t think she ruled the idea out just because Ainu don’t kill but merely because Ainu didn’t act as if they were willing to wage wars. There was no such malcontent (conditions that spurred the rebellions were way more terrible than the ones we see in GK) and there were no councils of war and for her this is probably what’s matter. Even if she were to take into consideration there could be one or two Ainu willing to kill Japanese, in the great scheme of thing  one or two people couldn’t wage war and therefore wouldn’t matter.

This would cause her to completely miss the existence of partisans because she doesn’t know well how they work (Kiroranke told her something about their partisan life but I think he wasn’t detailed enough and she might have mistaken their secrecy for them having been involved in the emperor’s murder and being fugitive) and therefore she would be unable to spot signs of their existence in Hokkaido, not mentioning she doesn’t know all the Ainu of Hokkaido, although she definitely knows many people in various town and travelled through it (Asirpa knows where they’re going during their travels, she has an idea of where her relatives are and how Ainu of certain regions live so maybe she travelled around with Wilk).

It doesn’t help Wilk completely overlook that part of her training. Although he wanted her to be a guerrilla fighter, he hadn’t taught her secrecy and lack of faith as well as he didn’t toughen her up to ready her to kill people nor, apparently, made her politically aware of Ainu condition, of his past and his belonging to partisans.

Long story short, my feelings were there was a tight network of partisans and Asirpa just didn’t know because she lacked the instrument to spot it. You can’t find something of which you don’t truly know the look. Even if it were placed under your eyes you wouldn’t recognize it, same as she didn’t recognize Kiro was a partisan, nor did Sugimoto, who only though he was a competitor for the possession of the gold.

It will be Inkarmat who’ll inform the group about how Wilk was a partisan but from the way she describes the partisan movement to Asirpa, she doesn’t seem aware of how it works because from the way she describes how Wilk was hurt, it’s clear she seems to think of him having been involved in a real battle, which not only is false but also unlikely as the partisans’ modus operandi isn’t actually to give battle to the enemy.

From the way Inkarmat put it she also doesn’t consider a possible involvement of partisans from Hokkaido, who might have joined forces with the ones in Russia and no one corrects her belief.

No one expects partisans to exist in Hokkaido, even Sugimoto who at first was afraid of Ainu assumed there would be rebellious villages, not men plotting in secrecy.

After all it’s meaningful in Japanese the word “partisan” is “パルチザン”, which is merely the katakana version of the French word “partisan” and the same goes for the word “guerrilla”, “ゲリラ”, the Katakana version of the Spanish word “guerrilla”. Japanese people didn’t have such word, they adopted it from other cultures so it’s possible to assume back then they didn’t know well how such things worked.

However, as I was discussing in Discord about it, two things dawned on me.

The first is that actually so far Golden Kamuy had given us no single proof such partisans exist.

Hijikata do not search their alliance, nor, apparently, did Kiro or Wilk. In fact Wilk was supposed to contact the partisans and revolutionaries in Russia, not to rally the help of the partisans in Hokkaido, and Kiro too wants the help of the revolutionaries in Russia, and doesn’t search the one of the partisans in Hokkaido.

Also Wilk, who tried to get Hijikata to find his daughter, didn’t give him names of Ainu partisans who would join him. Even with all his faith in Asirpa, leaving his daughter, a young girl, alone into an allegiance with Japanese men is risky, it would be much better if Asirpa were to have Ainu allies to support her.

The Ainu who join Hijikata are Kirawus, who apparently did it because he searched for money and who met Hijikata coincidentally and Ariko who was yes, the son of one of the Ainu moving the gold, but he’s clearly not a partisan.

As for the Ainu who helped Wilk to move the gold, they didn’t necessarily have to be partisans. As Boutarou figured out, before it was moved, there were too many people already who knew where it was. Wilk could have managed to persuade the Ainu the Japanese government had found out where it was as well and planned to steal it, so that the Ainu would have to relocate it in a more secret place.

Long story short yes, it can be it just wasn’t in the Hokkaido Ainu culture to be ‘partisans’, that they simply didn’t conceive such a way of fighting, so there weren’t partisans, just some unhappy people who wouldn’t really manage to do much harm.

The other important thing is that… well, even if Asirpa had been aware of Hokkaido pullulating of partisans she couldn’t really tell Tsurumi this in such a situation. She was testing ground to see if an allegiance was possible, giving him a speech about how Hokkaido had plenty of Ainu who wanted to kill him would have only sparked animosity toward the Ainu in a moment in which Japanese had a army to fight them while Ainu had not.

So it’s hard to judge Asirpa’s reply since it’s actually the only reply she could give regardless of her knowing/believing partisan existed or not.

6)

The last change is rather small but Noda added a sentence in which he made clear Asirpa’s position.

She says that between going back to her village and WAGE WAR to protect the Ainu there’s only an option she can take. This paints her intentions as much more belligerent than they were in the volume and makes clear that, if Sugimoto is her partner, she wants his support in THIS.

In short she comes out as a much more determinate Asirpa. I think there might be changes in vol 22 as well, so it’s possible that it’s by this point Asirpa starts to consider she could murder people to protect the Ainu and not some chapter later, just to protect Sugimoto.

However we’ll need to wait and see.

SUGIMOTO

Sugimoto… well, he goes though a lot of changes but, in a way, except for a couple, most of them don’t play in his favor in the sense they mostly don’t show him acting better than in the magazine (except in one instance) but digs more and more into how terrible and self serving Sugimoto’s plan was, even if his intentions were good, so that the volume is ultimately a VERY HARSH critic to Sugimoto’s idea it would be better for Asirpa to be handed to Tsurumi.

1)

The first change is minor but, as I’ve already commented, it’s probably also relevant. Noda removed the light in Sugimoto’s eyes when he runs toward where Vasily is, persuaded the attacked is Ogata.

I take this is Noda’s attempt to hint that what Sugimoto wants to do is no good for him on a psychological level, as the lack of light in people’s eyes often hints ‘inner dead’ (see for example Sekiya’s eyes prior to his daughter’s death and after he realized she died). I like to think this hints at how Sugimoto’s wish to kill Ogata is actually psychologically harming Sugimoto who was a man who started this adventure saying he wasn’t a murderer and that he would only kill if someone were to try to kill him back… but now he’s running to kill Ogata not so much because he thinks Ogata is holding his friends at gunpoint but because Sugimoto wants to kill him, because when Ogata escaped he remarked his wish Ogata would come back so he could ‘fucking kill him’. This is no more self defense, ‘oh, I didn’t want to kill him but he attacked me so I had to’, this is more ‘I want to kill you so, please, please, please, give me a reason to fulfill my wish’.

And of course since Sugimoto doesn’t want to be a murderer, longing to murder someone clashes directly with this.

2)

The second change refers to what Sugimoto will say to Vasily.

In fact originally in the magazine Sugimoto said just because the world Asirpa was looking at had him in it, this cleaned him and he thought he could be saved. This caused Asirpa to look like she was an entity who, just by turning her gaze on him, would wash away his sins, sort of like a goddess giving him her blessing.

And just to be clear, this is not romantic, this is delusional. Even though ‘Golden Kamuy’ has joked Asirpa was Jesus not even Jesus would clean people of sins at random, just by happening to look at them when they weren’t even planning to stop sinning. Pushing on Asirpa the role of his magical sin-washing-machine was pretty terrible.

Noda then decided to change this for the volume version, a change that was probably already planned not much later that chapter was printed as Asirpa’s words in chap 206 matches with what she overheard in the volume version, not in the magazine version.

So in the volume version Sugimoto says when he watches Asirpa he thinks he can be saved merely because he retained part of his purity which he had when he was a child.

Long story short in Asirpa Sugimoto sees the ‘little Saichi’. As he thinks ‘little Saichi’ was pure and deserved to be saved and ‘little Saichi’ is a part of him, he thinks he as a whole can be saved.

It’s still bad, even if in a way that’s different from before.

We don’t exactly know what Sugimoto means by ‘salvation’ but it’s clear a part of him loathes himself, thinks he deserves a special place in hell, but now he finds a renewed appreciation in himself because as a child he wasn’t a murderer. Which would be good only if he were to act over it.

Just because he was pure as a child, it’s not like this will make all his wrongdoing magically disappear. Everyone started as a pure child.

And it’s interesting compare his words with Ogata’s.

Now take this with a grain of salt as I’m going by the definitions as they were explained to me as I’m not a Japanese expert.

Anywa…

Ogata talked about ‘Kiyoi’ (清い) “Pure/innocent” with Yuusaku and Asirpa (yeah scanlations translated the word in two different manner, ‘innocent’ with Yuusaku, ‘pure’ with Asirpa but Ogata is actually using the same words). Interesting enough ‘kiyoi’ is the word used in this sentence, ‘Kokoro no kiyoi hito-tachi wa saiwaidearu’ (心の清い人たちは幸いである) or, if you prefer “Blessed are the pure in heart” from Matthew 5: 8 (full sentence being “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”)

Sugimoto used ‘Kirei’ (きれい) “Pure/Beautiful”.

Apparently ‘Kiyoi’ isn’t commonly used, except in literature but it has a strong meaning of ‘nobility’ as it implies not just ‘cleanliness’ but also ‘honesty/inner nobility’. What Ogata complains is that no one is inherently ‘kiyoi’, pure, noble, innocent. We’re all imperfect beings after all, we all not only have the power to hurt/kill others but we’re also responsible of what we let/encourage/empower the others do. Yuusaku lead the men to murder other men, even if he didn’t kill anyone he was still involved in the massacre, motivating men to do it. Even though he didn’t personally stain his hands in blood, he was no better than the others because he actively encouraged others to commit murder.

Ogata, who probably was also used as hit-man, denounces the hypocrisy of who believed that, as long as he weren’t to commit the deed personally but had another do it for him, he remained pure.

Sugimoto’s ‘kirei’ instead is a much more commonly used words and implies a general ‘beauty of clean/pure things’. I think his idea is that having something that’s ‘kirei’, beautiful, pure, gives him a sense of worth. He can be saved just because a part of him is worth being saved.

So, even if, in the English version, they seem to talk about the same thing, ‘purity’, their speech is actually referring to something different.

Something that was believed to be pure but actually it felt so merely because it let other do the dirty work versus something that was pure because it was never tarnished and therefore remained beautiful.

Probably Sugimoto would see Yuusaku as ‘kirei’ as he never personally killed, never tainted his own hands with it, while Ogata feels he’s not ‘kiyoi’ because guilty of murder by association.

Anyway, since Sugimoto sees his child self in Asirpa, he wants to keep her ‘pure’ as in ‘untarnished’, he wants her to be saved the way he couldn’t.

He doesn’t want Asirpa tainted by Ogata’s death, he doesn’t want her to become a killer. It’s not a matter of her remaining noble, of her keeping on believing killing is bad, but of her remaining untainted, unsullied by the action of killing.

Sugimoto won’t tell her ending a life is bad, just that the guilt that will come with doing it will make you feel bad, as if that guilt wasn’t tied to the wrongness of killing.

There’s a bizarre dichotomy in Sugimoto. He agonizes over his kills, over how he couldn’t go back to his own old self but, at the same time, he thinks killing is the best choice when something threatens him and tries to overcome his sense of guilt by telling himself those he kills are soulless creatures. Sugimoto can never go back to his own old self as long as he doesn’t accept killing is the wrong choice and that he had made a mistake, that he had been forced during war to make it, but that killing wasn’t right.

Of course since all this is hellish hard and people normally would need to go into therapy before realizing it, I get it’s not so easy for him but anyway, his belief that Asirpa doesn’t have to be tainted, explains his view.

3)

The next changes are in the words Sugimoto says to Asirpa after they watched the movie.

In the volume Sugimoto reports Wilk’s words correctly instead of just his own interpretation. Now… this is better on a storytelling level. In media there’s the recurring trope that, if a character has to report the words of another, he’ll quote him word by word and if he doesn’t he’s trying to hide something. In the real world of course it doesn’t work like that, more often than not we don’t remember words that exactly however, as this is a media, Sugimoto not quoting Wilk in the magazine, gave me a bad impression, as if he were trying to push on Asirpa a falsehood or, at least, a biased information so the change is definitely an improvement in Sugimoto’s favor.

Sugimoto in the volume also better explained how things went with Kiro.

In the magazine it sounded as if Kiro died to push Asirpa to fight… when Kiro actually had no intention to die in the first place as he very clearly was murdered against his will.

In the volume version Sugimoto gives a better account of how things went but the implication is that, along with Wilk who forcibly pulled Asirpa in the gold fight, Kiro also took Asirpa to Karafuto to have her remember the code and paid this act with his life but, doing so, pushed her to think Asirpa has to fight for what she wants to protect.

This is more what had happened although the implication is that Kiro’s actions were forceful and moved by the will to drag Asirpa into that battle... when Asirpa actually wanted to remember the code and willingly followed Kiro because THAT WAS THE PLAN, should things go bad. Actually, hadn’t he been shoot, Sugimoto would have gone to Karafuto with her as well.

Ultimately is clear that Sugimoto is telling the fact through his visions as his summary ‘stand at the head of the Ainu and die’ and ‘fight and kill people’ aren’t exactly what Wilk and Kiro told her to do.

Wilk in particular never said she had to die… and Kiro didn’t tell her to kill people.

Sugimoto interprets their words and actions as such and, while in the magazine he said just this was what they were telling her, now he says with those words they’re casting a curse on her.

This new choice of words implies even more than the previous how negatively Sugimoto sees their actions but also kind of undervalues Asirpa’s ability to decide for herself and, more importantly, doesn’t offer any other way to protect what Asirpa wants to protect, nor admits his own role into dragging her in that gold battle as HE is the one who started Asirpa’s involvement.

In light of the changes of Sugimoto’s sentence in chap 203, it’s clear that although Sugimoto in the past commented Wilk’s cause was just, he prioritizes preserving Asirpa’s purity. Someone has to fight but it doesn’t have to be Asirpa who’ll fight to protect what she’ll care about and it’s clear Sugimoto isn’t saying this just because Asirpa is young or female. He doesn’t want her involved but he doesn’t offer any other solution from saying ‘I’ll do it’ to ‘you can protect the Ainu in another way’.

It’s more a ‘give up on protecting the Ainu and protect your purity instead or you’ll regret it’, that fails to see the problem that Asirpa is an Ainu and by protecting Ainu she’s also protecting herself.

So overall the changes made Sugimoto more sincere but didn’t really change him much even if now it’s more clear he was trying to preserve Asirpa’s purity not because her existence washed away his sins but because he saw himself in her.

Although he would chose something different for Asirpa, overall his way to go at it is the same as Wilk.

Both he and Wilk saw Asirpa as a version of themselves and both tried to force her on the path they preferred without asking about Asirpa’s opinion.

To Sugimoto’s defense it can be said his own seems safe, but only in a superficial way, as he actually plans to hand her to Tsurumi, which would be very unsafe for Asirpa, although in a way that’s different from taking part to a war.

4)

Another important change in the volume is that while in the magazine, when Asirpa claimed she worried for the Ainu Sugimoto didn’t reply, now he does. However it’s clearly something he’s not really believing. His eyes are completely black, and at first he hesitated and turned his gaze away from her when replying Tsurumi doesn’t want the Ainu as enemies but as a workforce, continuing they’ve overwhelming advantage over Tsurumi so he’ll do as Asirpa demands.

Now… while it’s good he answered his answer is… well, pretty farfetched and misleading.

Although Ainu in Hokkaido back then were 15,000 this count included old men, women and children.

The only things Tsurumi might need the Ainu for are as extra troops for his army or as workers in his weapon and opium factories. This would mean the Ainu would have to drop their lifestyle, which Asirpa wanted to preserve, to become soldiers or factory workers (never mentioning factories would pollute nature damaging Ainu environment fundamental to hunt or fish) or, in case of the females, wives of Japanese, otherwise they’ve no use for him, it’s not like Ainu are producing something fundamental for Tsurumi he can’t get rid of them.

Sugimoto either knows his own is a lie (or, if you prefer, a very misleading answer) or he’s seriously deluding himself.

He then goes on claiming since Asirpa is the only one who can solve the code, they’ve overwhelming advantage so Tsurumi should just obey her.

This also is completely wrong.

First of all it he can’t be sure the tattooed code couldn’t be solved without Asirpa as he has not the slightest idea how the code works. Tsurumi could get code breakers to solve it or maybe figure it out on his own for all Sugimoto knows. Other codes were cracked after all, and we’ve no idea how versed Wilk is in making codes. Just because Sugimoto doesn’t know how to crack it, it doesn’t mean no one can.

But the real problem here is once Tsurumi has Asirpa he can very well torture her to force her to tell him the code, or just threaten her by telling her he’ll kill one Ainu after the other until she doesn’t talk.

And if Asirpa gives him a wrong key to the code he can just resume torturing.

After all we were shown in this exact volume how Tsurumi coerced Ariko into cooperating.

Sugimoto can’t be unaware of this as Tsurumi imprisoned and tortured him too and Tsurumi has, differently from him, the means to carry it on.

So while Sugimoto would never torture Asirpa and might not manage to force Boutarou to talk, Tsurumi has plenty of means to torture Asirpa and plenty of time and if she gives him a wrong answer it’ll only slow him down a little.

The changes in the volume, which show how Tsurumi in truth never planned to get her cooperation but just to imprison her and postpone worrying about the code after he got the tattoo add to this.

Noda wanted us to be extremely sure Sugimoto’s choice to entrust Asirpa to Tsurumi was wrong, wasn’t moved by great ideals or sense of responsibility but merely by personal feelings.

5)

We’ve another moment that’s changed and that’s when Shiraishi questions Sugimoto, asking him if he really thinks Tsurumi will care about the Ainu. Sugimoto is surprised by being questioned but also nervous (he’s sweating), yet his reply is ‘Dōiu imida?’ (どういう意味だ？) “What do you mean?” however this isn’t only used in the sense of ‘I hadn’t understood you’ but in the sense of ‘What are you implying?’ and in the sense of ‘what in the world are you saying?’

Shiraishi was accusing Sugimoto with his question, basically asking him if he’s stupid, delusional or a liar when he’s saying Tsurumi would care about the Ainu. Honestly I hope this will be developed further in the next volume but, for now I think Sugimoto is probably being neither of the three. He’s actually being dismissive about the Ainu.

When Asirpa questioned him it’s clear his first worry is Asirpa, in fact in his reasoning he didn’t consider the Ainu at all.

“Nobody will come after you.” Which match with his previous “It doesn’t have to be you (who’ll fight).”

When he’s pressured by Asirpa ABOUT THE AINU, he likely replied the first thing that came to his mind that would reassure her and make her play along. There’s not Sugimoto’s heart in that answer, it’s just a way to reassure Asirpa (hence the ‘dead eyes’ and him avoiding her gaze).

Sugimoto claimed he didn’t care about what Tsurumi plans to do with Hokkaido, implying also he didn’t know what this thing is.

However if he were to care about the Ainu he should care about what Tsurumi wants to do because it would affect the Ainu and this something Tsurumi plans to do, as far as he knows, could be everything, from world peace to Ainu extermination. This is relevant.

His words are basically words said to push Asirpa to accept but they’re based over nothing. Sugimoto hasn’t asked himself what Tsurumi would do with the Ainu and doesn’t care, he cares about protecting Asirpa but Asirpa is an Ainu so he’s hugely missing the point.

6)

Another minor change.

After Tanigaki suggests Asirpa to ask Tsurumi to go visit her grandmother, Sugimoto tells her it’ll go well. This is a call back to the talk they had in chap 192, when Asirpa pointed out how she didn’t believe Tsurumi would allow her to see her grandmother and Sugimoto (in the volume version, in the magazine version he agreed with her) insisted that Tsurumi would let her do it.

Basically Sugimoto’s words are again aimed at reassuring Asirpa so she’ll play along with the plan… with Noda immediately informing us that no, Tsurumi won’t let her see her grandmother, Tsurumi tells Usami he’ll plan to hide her in a basement with no windows or furniture for all the time it’ll need him to crack the code, even several years if that will be the case.

7)

The following change isn’t a change to be honest but an addition and sadly it’s not about something Sugimoto does or say, but about the chat Tsurumi has with Asirpa, during which Sugimoto will look at first a bit surprised and then sweat but won’t comment not even once. And this is really terrible because although it became clear Tsurumi wanted to rip Asirpa from him and Shiraishi and hid her and, since he didn’t even bother to lie about where he was taking her, it probably was nowhere good and, if she couldn’t be with her friends it’s even more clear she couldn’t be with her grandmother, Sugimoto says nothing.

It’s Asirpa who questions Tsurumi, if she hadn’t, Sugimoto would have let him just take her away.

There’s an expression we use in my country to imply that a person in order to keep another safe, doesn’t want to allow that person to get in contact with anything and is ‘to put someone under a glass bell’.

Basically this is what Sugimoto wishes for Asirpa. As long as Tsurumi doesn’t ask her to murder, even if he keeps her jailed, he’s fine with it.

It gets worse.

Tsurumi, instead than trying to manipulate Asirpa into being obedient with lies, ends up on arguing with her, clearly showing he has not benevolent feelings and creeping out even his own men. Sugimoto still does nothing, he doesn’t try to defend Asirpa saying ‘no, she’s not going to wage war like Wilk, she’s a peaceful person’ nor, apparently consider walking back from that deal.

But sadly this is still not the end of it.

When Asirpa tells him she’ll chose her own destiny, in the magazine Sugimoto was first surprised then smiled.

Here instead he’s visibly more anxious, sweating, his eyes thinning slightly (in the magazine they widens) as he chews his lips for ultimately agreeing with her with a nod… that’s clearly without the smile he had in the magazine.

Sugimoto is not happy with Asirpa’s decision. He bows to it to remain her partner but he would have let her in Tsurumi’s care.

8)

There’s another change, even if it’s hard to spot. At the very end in the volume Asirpa says that between going back to her Kotan and waging war to protect the Ainu there’s only a choice she can take, implying she’ll wage war to protect the Ainu. Therefore her words about wanting Sugimoto to say something optimistic like ‘let’s do this together’ tie to ‘wage war to protect the Ainu’.

Sugimoto’s reply though is unchanged. He says ‘let’s find the gold by themselves’ but this doesn’t imply his future involvement in the Ainu protection.

It can be something that will be developed further in the volume version but, for now, this volume set up firmly several points about Sugimoto.

His plan to protect Asirpa from killing by entrusting her to Tsurumi was the WORST POSSIBLE IDEA he could have. I’m aware many thought that since it would be terrible for a child like Asirpa to murder people, this seemed a good plan but, actually, it’s just another type of horror.

Sugimoto, differently from Asirpa, is not interested in the future of the Ainu at all. He acknowledges their cause might not be wrong but overall, as he said to Wilk, they should just keep quiet and do what they’re told to do so as not to cause a civil war. Or maybe change lifestyle and serve in Tsurumi’s army and factory.

Sugimoto’s interests as stated in this volume are therefore: find the gold, protect Asirpa from murdering and murder Ogata.

There’s also something I should have noticed earlier when watching chap 211 but that I missed and that was actually noticeable also when the chapter was released on the magazine.

The argument between Sugimoto and Shiraishi parallels another argument they had, in chap 62.

Back then Shiraishi suggested they would just take advantage of Inkarmat’s magic ability of predicting the winner of a race to get the money they both needed without running around risking their lives.

Sugimoto claimed he couldn’t do so because it would mean to tell Asirpa to fend for herself… in short to go to Abashiri on her own to discover the truth about her father (on a completely unrelated note can you see Wakayama and Nakazawa behind him?).

While Sugimoto’s words are painted as noble it’s worth to note that, as Shiraishi pointed out, going there meant to risk their lives and it’s Sugimoto who involved Asirpa in the gold hunt and is not even considering telling her ‘Asirpa, is dangerous, you should go back home’ in an attempt to persuade her to give up. In short he’s not prioritizing her safety but HER WISH, or so he says.

In chap 211 Shiraishi turns the argument against Sugimoto.

He points out he keeps on saying he is doing it for Asirpa but it turns out he hasn’t given up on the money, in fact he had made an agreement to get the money. Asirpa has made clear she wants, same as when she wanted to go to Abashiri, know the truth about her father but handing the code to Tsurumi doesn’t insure she’ll get what she wants.

In short this time Sugimoto is prioritizing his own wishes, getting the money and keeping Asirpa pure (which isn’t even ensuring her safety) while Shiraishi points out how Asirpa has grown for that time and, instead than deciding for her he should support her, and how Sugimoto’s decision might not even protect her.

Now… just to clear things up.

I don’t think Sugimoto is doing what he’s doing because he’s evil or something like that. But he’s taking wrong choices under the guise of doing something good for Asirpa.

By doing him do this and remaking he’s doing this, Noda is telling us that Sugimoto isn’t the classic Shonen hero whose decisions, even the most controversial ones, either ultimately work out greatly (think to how Goku spared Piccolo and Vegeta and they turned out to be allies) or are immediately set right (when Goku spares Freezer and Freezer betrays him Goku immediately kills him… well, tries to as Freezer will survive) or, at least, immediately pointed as wrong (Goku’s plan to have Gohan fight Cell without warning him is quickly denounced as dumb by Piccolo).

Sugimoto’s decision was bad, very much so, but he took it in vol 14 and we had to wait till vol 21 to see how bad it was and it’s not even Sugimoto who acknowledges ‘ops, I made a mistake’ when Shiraishi warns him and fixes things or tries to but it’s Tsurumi who screws up while it’s Asirpa who fixes things.

Long story short, just because Sugimoto has the ‘main character’s status’, it doesn’t mean he’s always right or that he’s always doing good. He screws up like any of us.

Noda didn’t want us to despise Sugimoto, just remind us that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and if you aren’t careful you might screw up beyond belief.

TSURUMI

Actually there are no changes regarding Tsurumi, there are additions.

1 & 2)

We learn contrary to what Sugimoto and Tanigaki thought Tsurumi had no intention to let Asirpa some measure of freedom, he just wanted to keep her trapped until he were to solve the code. We also learn he planned to part her from Sugimoto and Shiraishi as soon as possible.

Honestly I’m not particularly surprised by this and I don’t think Noda made us aware of this to point out that Tsurumi is a jerk. The chapters with Ariko but also the one in which he cut Nikaido’s ear or murdered Wada or have Ogata kill Hanazawa or kidnapped Koito, should have told us Tsurumi would do everything to get what he wants. He wants the code and he doesn’t want others to get it. Of course the safest way it to keep Asirpa trapped in a place where nobody can find her and get that info from her.

Also, as long as he hadn’t checked the info, even if she were to tell him the code, he could never be sure she had been sincere, hence the jailing.

The changes in the volume version though, only remarks what was already pointed out. Tsurumi doesn’t come out worse or better, he just confirms his modus operandi.

3)

Tsurumi has a giant size grudge toward Wilk, seeing Asirpa immediately causes him a beyond strong emotion that causes him to leak brain fluid like crazy and the fact she reminds him of her father only causes him to lose his cool, stop attempting to manipulate her and attack her verbally, claiming Ainu wanted to kill Japanese and she’s going to follow her father’s footsteps, a flashback implying Tsurumi believes Wilk might be responsible for Funa and Olga’s death.

This is all new material for Tsurumi. We knew Tsurumi knew Wilk but in the magazine it wasn’t shown Wilk shoot, it was something that was added in the volume, and anyway, as Sofia blamed herself, it was assumed it could be her who murdered Sofia and Olga.

Instead he suspects Wilk and he seems very hung up on his loss, to the point he loses it in front of Wilk’s completely innocent daughter who, however, got to grow up differently from his own.

This definitely adds quite a big load of new meaning to Tsurumi’s actions.

On another side I’ve always wondered if the loss of Tsurumi’s brain fluid is mean to imply an orgasm or him crying. I think Tsurumi is so messed up in him pain and pleasure conflated and, in a way, it’s both. But it might be just me.

Well, this is all for the comments to the volume version. Sorry if it was a bit late.

[contextualalice]

Contextual Studies: Final Essay 2020

Essay Research and Preparation:

Possible Topic:

·       Why do art teachers hate Manga?

·       Why is Manga so popular?

·       How Ghibli captured the hearts of the world

·       The Dark Side of Manga: Erotica, Violence and the Sexualisation of Children

·       Is there really a lack of diversity in Manga?

·       Is Hollywood misinterpreting Manga through white washing?

·       Is Manga endorsing damaging gender stereotypes?

·       How Manga is causing a racial divide in East Asia

 Manga and its origins:

·       Manga are comics/graphic novels that originated from Japan during the late 19th Century, but is an art form believed to have been developed from earlier Japanese art.

·       The art style has no set genre and is therefore very popular among all ages and backgrounds.

·       If a series is popular enough it will sometimes be developed into Anime which is essentially just Manga animated.  

·       The first Manga are said to date back to the 12th Century and represent the basis of reading from right to left, but the word came into common usage in the late 18th Century.

·       Uncertainty of origins due to cultural/historical events following the World Wars and Meiji.

·       Meiji is an era when industrialisation and consumerism (western society) started to overpower Japanese culture/tradition.

·       Edo period (1603 to 1868) is also said to have influenced Manga. It is characterized by economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policies, stable population, “no more wars”, and popular enjoyment of arts and culture.

·       Osamu Tezuka is believed to be the first official Manga artist (“The Father of Manga”) because he globalized Manga with the success of his Manga series such as Astro Boy, Princess Knight and Kimba the White Lion during the late 1940s.

·       In more recent times (from 1985 when it was co-founded till now) Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films have also made Manga/Anime more popular than ever with consistent viewings of the films on television and high praise from other animation/cartoonist such as Disney.

·       Manga combines elements of comic, animation, expressionism, Monochrome, screen tone (hatching/line art), digital, traditional etc…

·       Santo Kyuden is a Japanese artist, poet and writer from the Edo Period who is believed to be the first to illustrate elements of the Manga style.

The Dark Side of Manga: Erotica, violence and the sexualisation of children

What is Manga?

The term Manga is believed to have come about during the late 19th Century and simply refers to comics and graphic novels that originate in Japan. When translated Manga literally means ‘irresponsible images’, which immediately suggests a playful and exoticness many Westerners in particular would find appealing.  Manga also has no set genre and has therefore grown very popular among all ages and backgrounds; some series even getting developed into live actions and Anime (Japanese Animation). Typically Manga is Monochromatic due to being mass produced and is created using the technique of screen tone, which is primarily line art and hatching. In more recent years this traditional method has also been combined with digital programs to make the process faster and even more detailed. Despite these diversities Manga has a very distinctive style that sets it apart from Western Cartoons. The most notable factors of the Mange style are in its character design. These are evident in aspects such as large eyes, colourful hair, additional lines to reinforce emotion and tribute to Japanese fashion through their clothing. The reason these character features of Manga are so important is because not only do they define the unique image of Manga, but have also stirred a huge amount of controversy across the globe in relation to themes of violence and erotica. Nevertheless is this the true nature of Manga or are they just misinterpretations of the Japanese art and culture due to its swift advancement from niche to mainstream?

How Astro Boy paved the way for Manga

An example of Manga Plagued by this Controversy is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy. Astro Boy came into existence during the 1950’s and was the first successful Manga to become a household name, even raising Tezuka’s status to ‘Father of Manga’. The Manga was initially revered worldwide for the styles simplicity because it made the illustrations versatile and relatively cheap to develop into animation and merchandise. The character design of Astro Boy himself also contributed to the art styles success by rivalling Disney with his large but beautiful expressive features and bold outfit of underwear paired with boots. Howbeit the Western world quickly perceived the prepubescent android’s somewhat androgynous appearance as too provocative firstly because it subtly encourages the idea of sexualising the underage, and secondly because it is a similar aesthetic to robots and dolls in the sex industry. On the other hand, it could be argued that these character design choices are merely a reflection of Japanese culture as they are known for looking youthful due to genetics and advancements in cosmetics/surgery. Japanese fashion also demonstrates this idea of preserving youthfulness and embracing uniqueness with styles such as Kawaii, Lolita and Visual Kei for which purposely go against the suppressive traditions, stereotypes and labels within their country. It is believed this experimentation of art in Japan was provoked by the Meiji and Edo Period (from 1603 to 1868) when the industrialisation and consumerism of Western society started to overcome Japanese culture and tradition, resulting in economic growth, strict social order, isolationist foreign policy and population stability. Evidently much of the Manga style actually stems from Western ideas and is hypocritically criticized when it is the readers that interpreted and fetishised the characters. This is distinct in Western superhero comics that adorn their characters in revealing and/or form fitting outfits, with emphasis on body shapes that are over-sexualised and dangerous to obtain. Many artists and readers of today would disagree that this range and exaggeration of character designs has vulgar intent because they quite accurately capture how different bodies are and fashionably experimental everyone is in real life through a playful, shocking and thought provoking style.

Another aspect of Astro Boy that is heavily condemned is how graphically the violence is depicted since understandably, something so similar to a children’s comic will be available to younger viewers. In addition, at the time of the mangas rising popularity there wasn’t much thought for potential adult fans, hence why many ended up hugely censored or difficult to come by. Regardless of how explicit some of the illustrations were, from an artistic perspective this sort of censorship is quite unreasonable because it prevents readers from fully experiencing the meanings and emotions Tezuka is trying to convey through rawness, whilst enabling for misunderstanding such as the sexualisation of Astro Boy that was discussed previously. The fact Astro boy falls into the genre of Science Fiction, with the majority of characters involved in fighting (including the protagonist) being robotic further suggests that the violence portrayed shouldn’t be as much of a concern as critics make it out to be as it doesn’t deliberately encourage human harm. However, due to how human-like and heroic Astro Boy is this fear of inspiring younger readers in particular to be a ‘beautiful weapon’ is valid.

Conclusion

In conclusion there is definitely an issue within the Manga industry associated with providing their readers with ‘fan-service’ in a far too revealing way. However, I believe these artistic choices are rarely intended to encourage violent or predatory behaviour, but rather to keep up with rapidly changing trends of topics and styles across the world. Ultimately proving the Manga style is a form of expressionism that is inspired by society and interpreted by the readers.

References:

Matsutani, M. (2009), ‘Manga’: heart of pop culture, Japan Times [September 21, 2016]

Ladd, Fred (2009). Astro Boy and anime come to the Americas: an insider's view of the birth of a pop culture phenomenon. McFarland & Co. ISBN 978-0-7864-3866-2.

Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's Astro Boy leaping from niche to mainstream (theage.com.au) Vanessa Burrow, March 19, 2006  

9 anime things that Astro Boy did first (syfy.com) Michelle Villanueva, April 26, 2017

Birmingham Museum of Art (2010), Birmingham Museum of Art : guide to the collection, Birmingham, Alabama: Birmingham Museum of Art, ISBN 978-1-904832-77-5

 Tokyo Fashion. "Genderless Kei - Japan's Hot New Fashion Trend." Medium. January 30, 2016. Retrieved August 26, 2020 from https://medium.com/@TokyoFashion/genderless-kei-japan-s-hot-new-fashion-trend-9e25a2c559c6

[thenightling]

The most ableist things I’ve seen said in regard to The Sandman audio drama

Note:   Most of these comments I’m paraphrasing can be found in one form or another in the comments of the Polygon review of The Sandman audio drama.

Some people were questioning why a story like Sandman should have an audio drama at all and others were saying the story NEEDS to be changed and updated otherwise “There’s no point in making an audio drama version.”

The following are some of the statements I’ve come across, paraphrased.

1.   “It shouldn’t have an audio adaptation.  Some stories NEED to be seen to be appreciated.” 

If you can’t grasp why this may be ableist I don’t know how I can explain it to you.

It’s akin to saying “If you can’t physically see the pretty pictures you don’t DESERVE to know this story.”

2.   “We already have the originals. We don’t need the same exact stories retold. They should be updated and modernized.”

This wasn’t just said in the comments.  The author of the review said this. It’s like they don’t have the imagination to grasp that there are lots of people with disabilities and disorders like dyslexia, or visual impairments who could not enjoy the original Sandman in its original form.  

How selfish and inconsiderate do you have to be that you require something to be changed when for the first time ever it is accessible to those who couldn’t enjoy it before?     I’m borderline legally blind.   If not for digital format I probably wouldn’t have been able to read The Sandman: Overture because the print is so tiny in that one and yet The Sandman: Overture is one of my favorite Sandman stories.   If my eyesight was just a little bit worse I’d be completely dependent on the audio dramas.   

No, not everyone already had access their original versions.  Imagine if someone took a look at the audio book versions of A Christmas Carol, or Les Miserables, or Dracula and decided they needed to be updated and modernized.  Yet again, there are people dependent on this format.   The moment your friends start discussing the original version you’d be left out of the loop again because the only version you can access is the “updated” version.  You don’t get a taste of what the author was thinking or feeling at the time the story was written, you don’t get a feel of the culture surrounding the era the story was first told.   “Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes.” and you would deny us those tales based on what is currently culturally popular so that the story loses connection to when it came into being.

You’re getting an updated version with the Netflix series.  For those who have never had access to The Sandman before let them have this.  Stop being selfish.  Let those who couldn’t enjoy it before finally know the story the way their friends and loved ones knew it, without modifications for “modern sensibilities.”   The modern version is being made by Netflix.

3.   “What’s the point of doing it if you’re not going to update and modernize it?”

Well, you make it accessible to those who couldn’t enjoy it before.   Not to mention the new Netflix series is already being updated and modernized.   

 Now for one that really pissed me off...

4.  “Some stories can be appreciated just as a story but some stories are like sunsets. They need to be seen to be appreciated.”

The person who said this doesn’t even comprehend why what they said here is extremely, extremely ableist.  Ironically they said this in an argument explaining that they are NOT ableist.    If you don’t know why this is ableist, let me explain.

The blind can and do appreciate sunsets.  Sure, sunsets are beautiful to look at but there are lots of other things to a sunset that the blind can appreciate.  

The air gets cooler.  With each long cloud or stretching shadow the air gets cooler, the wind picks up.   The sounds of daytime life shift to nocturnal. If you’re on a beach suddenly the seagulls are joined by owls and bats, and crickets.  Certain flowers close and new ones open.  Jasmine, for example, blooms at night and has a light, sweet, fragrance.   

The sounds change, not just with the nocturnal animals coming in, but the tide changes, and you hear the shift (if it is a beach sunset).    You feel the warmth of the sun slowly dim as it moves beyond the horizon.  The blessed cool of night gently caressing you as that heat fades.  There are lots of sensations attached to a sunset that people take for granted.  There’s a lot more to a good sunset than the visual (though most sunsets are visually beautiful.)     

Now if he had compared it to an oil painting that would have been slightly more understandable but Sandman is a lot more than pretty pictures.  In fact the entire point of Sandman is about the appreciation of stories, and how stories touch us.   Yes, comics are a visual medium but to pretend something like Sandman cannot transcend mediums is an insult to the quality of the story.

To me this was almost as insulting as the one time I came across someone on Facebook who told me that the blind are incapable of love since sight is an important part of falling in love.

You don’t realize just how much casual ableism exists until someone says that and doesn’t even think they’re being hurtful.

5.   Now to end on a lighter one.  Someone said that making The Sandman into an audio drama is like making an audio recording describing and explaining the art at a museum.   ...Those do exist...

I’m so tired.   I am not feeling well.  I have been sick for a few days and I was / am looking forward to The Sandman audio drama but the behavior of those who got to hear it already is very discouraging.  And I don’t mean discouraging about The Sandman.  I mean discouraging in my faith in humanity...

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Surviving in a Different Medium: The Struggles of Making a Comic Book Movie

There have been live-action film adaptations of just about everything under the sun, from video games to cartoons, to books, to television shows, heck, even to amusement park rides or board games.  While some adaptations can turn out some….less-than-great products (Street Fighter, Inspector Gadget, Dune), other adaptations tend to do fairly well, such as adaptations like Jaws, The Princess Bride, or Forrest Gump.

Not all adaptations are created equal.  Some source materials are simply easier to adapt to the big screen, such as novels.  Others, like cartoons, are considerably harder to turn into a coherent, movie-length story.  But none of these, it would seem, pose quite the challenge that is the balancing act of a comic-book adaptation.

Comic book movies are odd in that, when they are successful, they are extremely so, but when they aren’t, they’re really bad.   For every major hit, there has been twice as many misses, (up until recent years).  For every Superman, there is a Supergirl.  For every Batman, a Catwoman looms.  For every Blade, there’s a Steel.

And that’s not even mentioning the sequels, or heaven forbid, Howard the Duck.

When you think about it, it’s kind of odd that studios should have so much trouble with what seems like a very simple task: cast actors who look like comic characters, take a story from a comic, and make a movie.  The plot and characters are already there.  All the filmmakers have to do is make a movie out of it, right?

Easier said than done.

Wait a minute, you might say.  I’m not blind.  Have you seen Marvel’s film roster over the past ten years?  They’ve been very successful!  And what about Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy?  Or Wonder Woman?

Admittedly, comic book films have been far more successful (and respected) in recent years than they have been in the past.  This is a good thing.  It means filmmakers are learning.  But by the same token, even in this new age of comic book blockbusters, there are some films that haven’t done so well.  The Fantastic Four.  Green Lantern.  Daredevil.  Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  

The question is, why?  Like I said, a comic book movie seems like it’d be much easier to do than a board-game film.  Comic books themselves are practically story boards.  What is so hard about lifting a comic onto the big screen?  Or, put another way:

How can comic books survive in a different medium, specifically live-action film?

That’s the question we’re going to be answering today, particularly as it pertains to superhero films.  Let’s take a look.

Comic books are, by nature, visual novels.  They are stories told through pictures as much as words, typically full of larger-than-life characters or situations that are nearly impossible to replicate on-screen.  You can do anything with comics.  The sky is the limit.  The creativity of the illustrator (and author) are the rule-makers in the universe of comics.  It is due to this unlimited creativity that villains such as Stilt-Man can exist, or heroes like Spider-Ham.  The costumes or abilities of characters are not governed by what can realistically be shown the audience.  They are governed by what the artist is able to draw.

Already, we’ve stumbled upon problem number one.

When adapting a comic to film, already, something has been lost: the freedom of visual style.  Comic characters have the benefit of being drawn by different artists, in distinctive styles, with costumes or abilities that are difficult to be done with on screen.  For this reason, many costumes for film adaptations end up changed for practicality reasons, such as any version of the Wonder Woman ensemble, or Scarlet Witch’s costume.  The recent adaptation of Captain America redesigned the look for a less-goofy design, and even the Batman costume, while remaining one of the most accurately depicted, has had a few changes in order to function on a movie set.

The realistic nature of live-action also cuts down on the heroes and villains that are usable.  Batman, the Joker, and the majority of his Rogues Gallery are able to be adapted to film with relative ease, as their gimmicks, while outlandish, don’t require an inordinate amount of special effects.  On the other hand, Marvel villains such as M.O.D.O.K. are far more difficult to replicate without it looking unrealistic or overly disturbing.  This is the primary reason that of Superman’s villains, only Lex Luthor has adapted well to the big screen: he is the most human, and therefore, the easiest to do realistically.

The problems with adaptation don’t lie merely in the visuals, however.  More difficult (and important) is the translation of character.

Comic book characters, specifically superheroes, are big and bold, with personalities to match.  On top of that, especially in older comics, characters were typically stagnant.  Up until more recent years, there wasn’t a whole lot of development, so readers weren’t confused if they happened to miss a few issues.  On top of that, thanks to the different iterations of each character, trying to find the ‘definitive’ version to adapt can be challenging, especially with all the alternate timelines, clones, and other odd occurrences that can make for new methods of storytelling with the same characters.  These methods, while good for comic readership, don’t make for easy, accessible adaptations for wider audiences.

As a result, we can get films like Man of Steel, where interpretations of the character are wildly different from traditional comic canon, or the change for Tim Burton’s Batman to disregard the ‘no-kill’ rule that has been widely accepted as a trait of the character.  To create a distilled version of a character, some traits have to be changed, or removed altogether.  The problem comes with how this is done, trying to make it work within the context of the character, and the context of the story you are telling.

So, to successfully adapt a comic book character, we’ve addressed that you need to change both the personality somewhat, and the look, if casual audiences are to enjoy the film version of this character.  While doing this, you must also balance the existing, canon character most traditionally viewed, ensuring that you do not alienate the already-existing fans by changing the character too drastically.  It’s a tough balance, but it’s one that more and more filmmakers are hitting, and have been since Christopher Reeve first donned the Superman cape in 1978.   But there’s more to comics than just the characters.

The stories have to be changed too.

In recent years, superhero blockbusters have become bigger and bigger spectacles, with the world (or the universe) at stake.  Some of these stories are original to the filmmakers, taking well-known villains and heroes and creating their own story.  Others, on the other hand, try to compress comic-book storylines into movie form, and therein lies problem number three, if anyone’s keeping count.

The issue with adapting the plot of a superhero comic is twofold: format and pacing, and nature and scope.  In the first of these two problems, the problem is very simple: movies don’t have the time for it.

In a comic series, a storyline can have several issues to play out, as demonstrated by The Dark Phoenix Saga, Snowbirds Don’t Fly, and The Dark Knight Returns.  In arcs like these, it can take several issues for a plot to be wrapped up, and in cases like Infinity Gauntlet, these stories are so vast that they are practically impossible to adapt into one concise film without leaving anything out.  As a result, the scissors come out.

In a lot of these cases, such as Marvel’s Infinity War/Endgame films, stories are condensed in order to fit into one (or two) films.  Subplots and characters are cut, things are switched around, and sometimes, the final result is very different from the original comic.  This is the risk of adaptation, no matter what format, but for comics, there’s a little more to it than that.

The nature of comic book stories is very eye-catching, expansive, larger-than-life.  The dialogue is typically over the top (either campy or dark), the comics are full of action scenes, (nobody wants to read a comic about a bunch of people standing around and talking) and the stakes are grand, the action grander.  The visuals of comics are a large part of what draws people to them, and so it’s for the best that they’re big and bold.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t exactly translate the best to live-action film.

Except in cases like Batman from 1989 and the original Superman film from 1978, most comic book films have a very hard time pulling off the ‘campy’ feeling from the comics while also being a genuinely good film.  Straddling the line between keeping the same tone from the comics while making sure it works in the context of the film is tough, with most subsequent films going too far either way.  Either a film becomes so over-the-top campy that it’s impossible to take it seriously (Batman & Robin, Superman IV, the original Captain America attempt), or so gritty that it can be alienating (Man of Steel, Batman Returns, Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice).  While both extremes have their fans, most fans seem to be the happiest with a balance, again, a balance that’s hard to achieve, especially when you’re working with caped crusaders and flying people in tights.

When it’s put like this, it can seem almost impossible to make a good comic book movie, especially by the time you work in a script, actors that might work, and actually begin shooting the thing.  It seems like an uphill battle.  But there is good news.

Like I said, since 1978, superhero films based on comics have been hit or miss, but recently, there’s been more hits than misses.  Besides the original Superman and Batman films, there are newer endeavors like the MCU and Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Shazam, all of which are proving that live-action superhero films can be done, and done well, by achieving that balance.  There will always be misses, but the odds of filmmakers understanding the delicate stability of the elements to making comic book films are looking better with every passing movie.

The secret to helping comic books survive in a different medium is a blend of styles and focus, everything from the visuals to the characters.  That’s it.  There’s no secret tip or trick, nothing that the filmmakers are ‘overlooking’, very simply, the secret to a good comic book film is just knowing what to keep and what to leave out, which can vary from project to project.  Some films operate better as darker, more serious films.  Some thrive on the ‘campy’ source material.  Some movies work better with changes made to the characters, others succeed far better with a more accurate portrayal of the characters.  It depends on the individual story, characters, and even filmmakers.  There’s no manual to make a movie a success, no matter the source material.

In short?

For a comic book to survive as a live-action film adaptation, the people behind it must have understanding and respect for the source material, combined with an understanding of both mediums involved.  When you have the respect already in place, and the desire to make a good movie, the rest doesn’t seem quite so impossible.  

Thank you guys so much for reading!  Don’t forget that the ask box is always open for questions, discussions, suggestions, recommendations, or conversations.  I hope to see you in the next article.

[the-desolated-quill]

Watchmen - Movie blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. if you haven’t seen this movie yet, you may want to before reading this review)

A movie adaptation of Watchmen had been in development in some form or another since the graphic novel was first published back in 1987. Over the course of its two decade development cycle, being passed from filmmaker to filmmaker who each had their own vision of what a Watchmen movie should be, fans objected to the idea of a movie adaptation, describing Watchmen as ‘unfilmmable.’ Alan Moore himself condemned the effort to adapt his work, saying that Watchmen does things that can only be done in a comic book. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and in 2009, Watchmen finally came to the big screen, directed by Zack Snyder.

I confess it took me a lot longer to write this review than I intended and that’s largely because I wasn’t sure how best to approach it. Snyder clearly has a lot of love and respect for the source material and tried his best to honour it as best he could. Snyder himself even said that he considers the film to be an advert for the book, hoping to get newcomers interested in the material. So how should I be looking at this film? As an adaptation or as an artistic tribute? More to the point, which of the three versions of the film should I be reviewing? The original theatrical cut, the director’s cut or the ultimate cut? Which best reflects Snyder’s artistic vision?

After much pondering, I decided to go with the director’s cut. The theatrical release was clearly done to make studio execs happy by keeping the runtime under three hours, but it comes at the cost of major plot points and character moments being chucked away. The ultimate cut however comes in at a whopping four hours and is arguably the most accurate to the source material as it also contains the animated Tales Of The Black Freighter scenes. However these scenes break the narrative flow of the film and were clearly not intended to be part of the final product, being inserted only to appease the fans. The director’s cut feels most like Snyder’s vision, clocking in at three and half hours and following the graphic novel fairly closely whilst leaving room for artistic licence.

Now as some of you may know, while I’m not exactly what you would call a fan of Zack Snyder’s work, I do have something of a begrudging respect for him due to his willingness to take creative risks and attempt to tell more complex, thought provoking narratives that don’t necessarily adhere to the blockbuster formula. Films like Watchmen and Batman Vs Superman prove to me that the man clearly has a lot of good ideas and a drive to really make an audience think about what they’re watching and question certain things about the characters. The problem is that he never seems to know how best to convey those ideas on screen. In my review of Batman Vs Superman, I likened him to a fire hose. Extremely powerful, but unless you’ve got someone holding onto the thing with both hands and pointing it in the right direction, it’s just going to go all over the place. I admire Snyder’s dedication and thought process, but I think the fact that his most successful film, Man Of Steel, also happens to be the one he had the least creative influence on speaks volumes. When he’s got someone to work with and bounce ideas off of, he can be a creative force to be reckoned with. Left to his own devices however, and his films tend to go off the rails very quickly.

Watchmen is very much Snyder’s passion project. You can tell a lot of care and effort went into this. The accuracy of the costumes, staging and set designs speak for themselves. However there is an underlying problem with Snyder trying to painstakingly recreate the graphic novel on film. While I don’t agree with the purists who say that Watchmen is ‘unfilmmable’, I do agree with Alan Moore’s statement that there are certain aspects of the graphic novel that can only work in a graphic novel. A key example of this is its structure. Watchmen has the luxury of telling its non-linear narrative over twelve issues in creative and unorthodox ways. A structure that’s incredibly hard to translate into any other medium. A twelve episode TV mini-series might come close, but a movie, even a three hour movie, is going to struggle due to the sheer density of the material and the unconventional structure. Whereas the structure of the graphic novel allowed Alan Moore to dedicate whole chapters to the origin stories of Doctor Manhattan and Rorschach and filling in the gaps of this alternate history, the structure of a movie doesn’t really allow for that. And yet Snyder tries really hard to follow the structure of the book even though it simply doesn’t work on film, which results in the movie coming to a screeching halt as the numerous flashbacks and origin stories disrupt the flow of the narrative, causing it to stop and start constantly at random intervals, like someone kangarooing in a rundown car.

Just as Watchmen the graphic novel played around with the common tropes and framing devices of comics, Watchmen the movie needed to play around with the common tropes and framing devices of comic book movies. To Snyder’s credit, there are moments where he does do that. The most notable being the first five minutes where we see the entire history of the world of Watchmen during the opening credits while ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ is played in the background. This is legitimately good. It depicts the rise and fall of the superhero in a way only a movie can. I wish Snyder did more stuff like this rather than restricting himself to just recreating panels from the graphic novel.

Which is not to say I think the film is bad. On the contrary, I think it’s pretty damn good. There’s a lot of things to like about this movie. The biggest, shiniest gold star has to go to Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. While the movie itself was divisive at the time, Haley’s portrayal of Rorschach was universally praised as he did an excellent job bringing this extreme right wing bigot to life. He has become to Rorschach what Ryan Reynolds is to Deadpool or what Mark Hamill is to the Joker. He is the character (rather tragically. LOL). To the point where it’s actually scary how similar Haley looks to Walter Kovacs from the graphic novel. The resemblance is uncanny.

Another standout performance is Jeffery Dean Morgan as the Comedian. Just as depraved and unsavoury as the comic version, but Morgan is also able to inject some real charm and pathos into the character. You believe that Sally Jupiter would have consensual sex with him despite everything he did to her before. But his best scene I think was his scene with Moloch (played by Matt Frewer) where the Comedian expresses regret for all the terrible things he did. It’s a genuinely emotional and impactful scene and Morgan manages to wring some sympathy out of the audience even though the character doesn’t really deserve it. But that’s what makes Rorschach and the Comedian such great characters. Yes they’re both depraved individuals, but they’re also fully realised and three dimensional. They feel like real people, which is what makes their actions and morals all the more shocking.

Then there’s Doctor Manhattan, who in my opinion stands as a unique technical achievement in film. The number of departments that had to work together to bring him to life is staggering. Visual effects, a body double, lighting, sound, it’s a truly impressive collaborative effort, all tied together by Billy Crudup’s exceptional performance. He arguably had the hardest job out of the whole cast. How do you portray an all powerful, emotionless, quantum entity without him coming across as a robot? Crudup manages this by portraying Manhattan as being less emotionless and more emotionally numb, which makes his rare displays of emotion, such as his shock and anger during the TV interview, stand out all the more. It’s a great depiction that I don’t think is given the credit it so richly deserves.

Which leads into something else about the movie, which will no doubt be extremely controversial, but I’m going to say it anyway. I much prefer the ending in the film to the ending in the book.

Hear me out.

In my review of the final issue of Watchmen, I said I didn’t like the squid because of its utter randomness. The plot of the movie however works so much better both from a narrative and thematic perspective. Ozymandias framing Doctor Manhattan makes a hell of a lot more sense than the squid. For one thing, it doesn’t dump a massive amount of new info on us all at once. It’s merely an extension of previously known facts. We know Ozymandias framed Manhattan for giving people cancer to get him off world. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine the world could also buy that Manhattan would retaliate after being ostracised. We also see Adrian and Manhattan working together to create perpetual energy generators, which turn out to be bombs. It marries up perfectly with the history of Watchmen as well as providing an explanation for why there’s an intrinsic field generator in Adrian’s Antarctic base. It also provides a better explanation for why Manhattan leaves Earth at the end despite gaining a newfound respect for humanity. But what I love most of all is how it links to Watchmen’s central themes. 

Thanks to the existence of Doctor Manhattan, America has become the most powerful nation in the world to the point where its disrupted the global balance of power. This has led to the escalation of the Cold War with Russia as well as other countries like Vietnam being at the mercy of the United States. It also allowed Nixon to stay in office long after his two terms had expired. The reason the squid from the book is so unsatisfying as a conclusion is because you don’t buy that anyone would be willing to help America after the New York attack. In fact it would be more likely that Russia and other countries might take advantage of America’s vulnerability. Manhattan’s global attack however not only gives the whole world motivation to work together, it also puts America in a position where they have no choice but to ask for help because it was they that effectively created this mess in the first place. So seeing President Nixon pleading for a global alliance feels incredibly satisfying because we’re seeing a corrupt individual hoist by his own petard and trying to save his own skin, even if it comes at the cost of his power. America is now like a wounded animal, and while world peace is ultimately achieved, the US is now a shadow of its former self. It fits in so perfectly with the overall story of Watchmen, frankly I’m amazed Alan Moore didn’t come up with this himself.

It’s not perfect however. Since the whole genetic engineering stuff no longer exists, it makes the existence of Adrian’s pet lynx Bubastis rather perplexing. Also the whole tachyons screwing with Doctor Manhattan’s omniscience thing still doesn’t make a pixel of sense. But the biggest flaw is in Adrian Veidt’s characterisation. For one thing, Matthew Goode’s performance isn’t remotely subtle. He practically screams ‘bad guy’ the moment he appears on screen. He has none of the charm or charisma that the source material’s Ozymandias had. But it’s worse than that because Snyder seems to be going out of his way to uncomplicate and de-politicise the story and characters. There’s no mention of Adrian’s liberalism or his disdain for Nixon and right wing politics. The film never explores his obsession with displaying his own power and superiority over right wing superheroes like Rorschach and the Comedian. He’s just the generic bad guy. And I do mean bad guy. Whereas the graphic novel left everything up to the reader to decide who was morally in the right, the film takes a very firm stance on who the audience should be siding with. Don’t believe me? Just look at how Rorschach’s death is presented to us.

It’s very clear while watching the film that Zack Snyder is a big Rorschach fan. He gets the most screen time and there’s a lot of effort dedicated to his portrayal and depiction. And that’s fine. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. As I’ve mentioned before in previous blogs, Rorschach is my favourite character too. However it’s important not to lose sight of who the character is and what he’s supposed to represent, otherwise you run the risk of romanticising him, which is exactly what the film ends up doing. Rorschach’s death in the graphic novel wasn’t some heroic sacrifice. It was a realisation that he has no place in the world that Ozymandias has created, as well as revealing the hypocrisy of the character. In the extra material provided in The Abyss Gazes Also, we learn that, as a child, Walter supported President Truman’s use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet, in his adult life, he opposes Adrian’s plan. Why? What’s the difference? Well the people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t American. They were Japanese. The enemy. In Rorschach’s mind, they deserved to die, whereas the people in New York didn’t. It signifies the flawed nature of Rorschach’s black and white view of the world as well as displaying the racist double standards of the character. Without the context of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rorschach’s death becomes skewed. This is what ends up happening in the movie. Rorschach removes his mask and makes a bold declaration to Doctor Manhattan, the music swells as he is disintegrated, defiant to the last, and his best friend Nite Owl screams in anguish and despair.

In fact the film takes it one step further by having Nite Owl punch Adrian repeatedly in the face and accuse him of deforming humanity, which completely contradicts the point of Dan Dreiberg as a character. He’s no longer the pathetic centrist who requires a superhero identity to feel any sort of power or validation. He’s now the everyman representing the views of the audience, which just feels utterly wrong.

This links in with arguably the film’s biggest problem of all. The way it portrays superheroes in general. The use of slow motion, cinematography and fight choreography frames the superheroes and vigilantes of Watchmen as being powerful, impressive individuals, when really the exact opposite should be conveyed. The costumes give the characters a feeling of power, but that power is an illusion. Nite Owl is really an impotent failure. Rorschach is an angry bigot lashing out at the world. The Comedian is a depraved old man who has let his morals fall by the way side so he can indulge in his own perverse fantasies. They’re not people to be idealised. They’re to be at pitied at best and reviled at worst. So seeing them jump through windows and beating up several thugs single handed through various forms of martial arts ultimately confuses the message, as does the use of gratuitous gore and violence. Are we supposed to be shocked by these individuals or in awe? 

Costumes too have a similar problem. Nite Owl and Ozymandias’ costumes have been updated so they look more imposing, which kind of defeats the purpose of them. The point is they look silly to us, the outside observers, but they make the characters feel powerful. That juxtaposition is lost in the film. And then there’s the Silk Spectre. In the graphic novel, both Sally and Laurie represent the changing attitudes of women in comics and in society. Both Silk Spectres are sexually objectified, but whereas Sally accepts it as part of the reality of being a woman, Laurie resists it, seeing it as demeaning. The only reason she wore her revealing costume in A Brother To Dragons was because she knew that Dan found it sexually attractive and she wanted to indulge his power fantasy. None of this is touched upon in the film, other than one passing mention of the Silk Spectre porn magazine near the beginning of the film. There’s not even any mention of how impractical her costume is, like the graphic novel does. Yes the film changes her look drastically, but it’s still just as impractical and could have been used to make a point on how women are perceived in comic book films, but it never seems to hinder her in anyway. It’s never even brought up, which is ridiculous. Zack Snyder’s reinterpretation of Silk Spectre is clearly meant to inject some form of girl power into the proceedings, as she’s presented as being just as impressive and kick-ass as the others, when the whole point of her character was to expose the misogyny of the comics industry at the time and how they cater to the male gaze. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the graphic novel did it perfectly, but it did it a hell of a lot better than this.

Die hard fans have described the film over the years as shallow and ‘style over substance.’ I don’t think that’s entirely fair. It’s clear that Zack Snyder has a huge respect for the graphic novel and wanted to do it justice. Overall the film has a lot of good ideas and is generally well made. However, as much as Snyder seems to love Watchmen, it does seem like he only has a surface level understanding of it, hence why the attention and effort seems to be going into the visuals and the faithfulness to Alan Moore’s attention to detail rather than the Watchmen’s story and themes. While the film at times makes some good points about power, corruption and morality, it doesn’t go nearly as far as the source material does and seems to shy away from really getting into the meat of any particular topic. Part of that I suspect is to do with marketability, not wanting to alienate casual viewers, but I think a lot of it is to do with it simply being in the wrong medium. I personally don’t think you can really do a story as complex and intricate as Watchmen’s justice in a Hollywood film. In my opinion, this really should have been a TV mini-series or something.

So on the whole, while I appreciate Snyder’s attempt at bringing the story of Watchmen to life and can see that he has the best intentions in mind, I don’t think this film holds a candle to the original source material. 

[mst3kproject]

1013: Danger: Diabolik

 I haven’t seen this episode.  How could I possibly just sit down and watch what was, for years and years, the last ever episode of MST3K?  I’ve always felt there would be something symbolic about that, like it would somehow mean the show was ‘really’ over, and even though I know it’s irrational, that feeling is even stronger now that we’ve had two new seasons.  So here is the movie, but I won’t be discussing the episode at all.

Despite all the precautions attendant on a shipment of ten million dollars, master thief Diabolik and his girlfriend-slash-accomplice Eva still manage to get away with the loot.  While they head back to their extravagant underground lair to have sex in a big pile of money, the government tries to figure out what they’re going to do about this intolerable situation.  They grant emergency powers to the police.  They make deals with gangsters.  They even offer a one million dollar reward – nothing works!  When Diabolik blows up the tax offices, threatening the country with bankruptcy, it seems there’s only one thing left to do: protect the national treasury by pouring all its gold reserves into one giant, twenty-ton ingot. Surely, even Diabolik can’t steal that… can he?

Danger: Diabolik reminds me of several things.  The most obvious is the Adam West Batman show.  Part of this is just the colourful sixties milieu and the overblown, comic book feel of everything that happens – but Diabolik himself, with his fancy gadgets, his high-tech cave, and his apparently untold wealth, seems very much like a Batman of Crime. He’s even got things helpfully labeled like the ‘anti-exhilirating-gas pills’.  The only thing those are missing is the word bat.  But it also makes me think of First Spaceship on Venus, in that it’s a movie in which a lot happens, but it still feels weirdly unfocused because it has no interest in its people.

This begins with the writing.  Every scene in the movie is merely functional – it imparts information about what just happened, or what’s going to happen next, and then it’s done.  There’s very little that might be considered character development, and opportunities for it are almost always sidetracked into artistic nudity. The acting does nothing to save it, either. Not a single member of the cast ever tries to infuse their characters with any personality.  Diabolik himself is merely cackling evil, the gangsters are stock gangsters, the politicians are buffoons.  It’s not going to help that the whole movie is dubbed, but the physical performances aren’t any more interesting.

Diabolik and Eva pull off several heists, stealing money, jewels, and finally the enormous gold bar, always managing to escape right out from under the noses of the police.  The crimes themselves are fun to watch, as we are introduced to the various precautions taken and see how the criminals manage to outwit them, but we never get any idea of these two as human beings.  Thieving and sex are their entire lives, and we don’t even know why they do these things.  They don’t seem to use the items they steal.  The money just gets used as a mattress, the emeralds are thrown into a lake, and we have no idea what, if anything, they were going to do with the gold.  They seem to do this stuff just because they can.

Diabolik himself never even has a proper name.  The one person who might use it is Eva, but she never does, and the police are oddly unconcerned with his identity.  There’s a sequence in which they believe they have him dead on a table, but they make no effort to figure out who he is besides being Diabolik.  After he escapes, there are no wanted posters with his face on them.  This seems to reinforce that Diabolik is not really a person, he’s just Diabolik.  As Crow once said, who you are is irrelevant.

Of course, plenty of movies have a main villain who is nothing more than an evil force.  What keeps us interested in those is the good guys, with their relationships, personalities, and conflicts.  Danger: Diabolik doesn’t have any of that, either.  Opposing Diabolik are various government and police officials, who spend most of the movie shouting impotently and being made fools of.  We’re clearly not supposed to like or root for them, either.  The closest thing Diabolik has to a hero is Inspector Ginko, who sees Diabolik as a personal arch-nemesis.  He is competent and intelligent enough, but he’s not interesting.

What this means is that even as the crimes (and the attempts to prevent them) grow ever more outrageous, and the escapes ever more daring, nothing in Diabolik ever feels like it’s really at stake.  Since we don’t care about any of these people, we’re basically just watching to see what happens next.  It’s less like a story and more like some kind of Rube Goldberg machine. The inner workings are elaborate and it’s neat to see how all the pieces fit together, but the audience never gets involved.

Insofar as Danger: Diabolik has any kind of point to make, it’s pretty obviously about government incompetence, but it doesn’t have much to say about it.  The elected officials in the movie are unable to get anything done.  They shout a lot and hold press conferences, but none of it has an effect on the real world. The aristocrats, embodied in the British couple, are frivolous and out of touch with reality – Sir Harold is a senile old coot who plays with toy soldiers, and his wife thinks a crime spree is ‘frightfully romantic’.  Diabolik’s crimes show them to the people for the fools they are.

If this were intended as commentary, it’s strange that we are never shown how the common people react to Diabolik and what he does.  The only time we get a look at the man on the street is a brief glimpse of television viewers laughing about the destruction of the tax offices.  One may get the impression that while the government is panicking about Diabolik, ordinary people either don’t care, or indeed, think it’s all a big joke – and why shouldn’t they?  Their government are jackasses, and it’s the government that Diabolik is stealing from.  As long as his victims are not private citizens, it’s all in good fun.

Both the movie and the Diabolik comics are Italian, and Italy is of course a country with a notorious history of… let’s be nice and say ‘troubled government’.  We are never given a name for the country in which all this is supposed to be happening, but assuming it’s a stand-in for Italy seems reasonable enough. Perhaps an Italian audience would automatically assume the citizens are rooting for Diabolik, because the government are fools and deserve what they get.  The bit with the million dollar reward tends to support this, actually – as does Dr. Vernier’s warning to Eva.  Nobody wants to turn Diabolik in, not because they’re afraid of him, but because he’s something of a hero to them.

Even then, there’s still something missing, because Diabolik doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him.  He shows no interest in fame, never even bothering to say anything about it. He never leaves his hideout except to perform his next heist.  Sometimes he does seem to be doing things for political reasons, such as the laughing gas prank or his letter saying he’s blowing up the tax offices so that the government can’t waste any more public money on rewards.  Other crimes, such as the theft of the emeralds, seem to have no motive at all except perhaps to entertain Eva.  His inner life is a complete mystery to us.

While Diabolik is poorly-written and poorly-acted, I have to say it does look pretty good.  The elaborate sets and matte paintings that represent Diabolik’s lair are a lot of fun, and there’s some really well-set-up shots.  The whole movie is colourful and campy, but it often goes just a tiny bit too far with its visuals, veering off into weird, artsy asides.  The opening credits, over footage of unidentifiable stuff spinning around and around, made me feel a little ill.  The sequence of cartoon faces while the prostitute describes Eva to the sketch artist is just weird and unnecessary.  A lot of the stuff in Diabolik’s lair, intended to showcase the set design, goes on just a little too long, testing the audience’s patience and drawing attention to their careful staging.

I wonder if a lot of this stuff wasn’t based on things that worked perfectly well in the comics but didn’t translate to the screen.  That’s probably true of some of the artsy shots – you can have something like that in a comic and it won’t come across as contrived, but if you try to put it in a live-action movie the artifice of it is obvious.  The sketch artist sequence feels like a tribute of some sort to comic book art, but it’s intrusive and doesn’t do anything for the story.  Diabolik’s complete lack of identity outside his crimes would probably fare better in two dimensions than it does in three.

Or maybe it’s one of those adaptations that assumes you’re already familiar with the source material or you wouldn’t be watching it.  Maybe the comics did deal with things like Diabolik’s motivations and how people outside the government feel about him.  If so, the film has failed as an adaptation.  Moving into a new medium should bring more people into an audience, not shut them out.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Who Watches The…oh never mind

by Wardog

Thursday, 12 March 2009

Wardog opens a can of worms very very carefully indeed.~

As my comments in the playpen may recently have indicated, I was not entirely impressed by Watchmen. It doesn't help that people, however vaguely, connected to it are going around saying things like this and it also doesn't help that I read Watchmen for the first time three days ago. I understand that Watchmen is something that the sort of people who are inclined to be passionate about comics are passionate about; perhaps if I had been less busy being an embryo in the 80s when it first came out I might have felt the same way. But Watchmen is dated dated dated. I'm not saying it's not interesting and that it doesn't have merit, but reading it is rather like reading those 18th century novels that are completely consumed by the terror of the incipient collapse of Civilisation As We Know It because of the French Revolution. I'm not saying those novels aren't interesting or don't have merit either ... but you do read them with one eyebrow slightly cocked and think to yourself as you go "oh how quaint."

Quaint may seem an odd term to use in connection to a comic renowned for being gritty and real and, like, totally Dystopian and literary man; but I felt the same about V for Vendetta. Watchmen'spreoccupations, as far as I see it, are Cold War anxiety and Wanking About The Nature and Form of the Comic Genre. I'm not dismissing the impact of Watchmen, nor its power to have shaped (and to some extent validated, insofar as books with pictures in them can be validated) the genre, but the point is the Cold War is over and the genre has been shaped. There are, of course, wider themes to engage us - "about the nature of man, or vigilante justice" if you absolutely insist but bear in mind you can get those better done elsewhere - but Watchmen is so utterly bound up in itself, so defined by the form it takes, that ultimately it's little more than an extended navel-gaze about comics, albeit a moderately interesting one.

The movie, of course, is such a slavish adaptation that it barely merits the term adaption; watching it, therefore, is like watching somebody gaze at somebody else gazing at their navel. In bullet-time. Being now at a noticeably remove from the navel, this is quite dull.

To force myself to give credit where it is due, there is a lot to like about the Watchmen movie. It is stylishly and lovingly done. Everybody looks and sounds exactly like you'd want them to look and sound. The level of detail is mind boggling and the special effects, right down to Dr Manhattan's flapping blue dong, are fabulous. The changes they've made are spot on: I'm really glad they took out the giant squishy squid aliens. Because they are made of stupid. I loved the opening credits where they distill the ponderous backstory into a succession of imaginative and striking images. When the film was engaging critically with the Watchmen comic, it had real potential. Unfortunately, critical engagement gave way to abject drooling adoration about 2 seconds after the credits ended ... and the rest of the film is little more than a panel-by-panel, word-for-word recreation of the comic, bar a few subtle alterations to the way characters are perceived, which I shall talk about presently.

I suppose this is where we get into "what is an adaptation anyway" territory. For me the clue is in "adapt" - I think a process of adaptation is an act of transformation and interpretation. You stay true to the spirit of the original but you accept the fact that what works in one medium does not work in another. The Harry Potter movies are splendid examples of failed adaptations: they're little more than monorail tours of the main attractions of the books. They don't stand up on their own, they have no merit on their own, they are, in fact, shit and pointless. But you can also see this kind of failure going on in a more low key way when people throw plays at the screen and end up with peculiarly static, oddly awkward films (Closer, The History Boys, An Ideal Husband, The Libertine). Again, to be fair, the Watchmen film does almost stand on its own: they've managed to enforce some coherence on a notoriously fragmentary text. But this is mainly because it's identical to the text, right down to the cringe-inducingly stilted dialogue and voice-overs that read beautifully but sound terrible. And as far as I'm concerned if something is identical to the original, right down to the dialogue and the visuals, you might as well just read the original and be done with it. Alan Moore himself apparently said: "My book is a comic book. Not a movie. It's been made in a certain way, and designed to be read in a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cosy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee."

The other problem with such a rigid approach to the text is that it leaves no space for acting to be anything other than simulacra. When you go and see a performance of Richard III, you don't stare at the actor playing Richard and think to yourself: "Wow, that's awesome,

he looks totally like him

." But the only scale for judging the actors in Watchmen is how far they resemble the characters they're playing - the answer to this is, for the most part, "lots." But it's still a really shallow way to engage with a performance.

Now this is when I'm going to play dirty. I know I've just leveled the criticism that the film brings nothing new to the table, being merely a moving version of the comic book. And now I'm going to complain that it also missed the point, or at least a point. I know you might think this is a direct contradiction and that I can't say the film is not enough of an adaptation for me and then whine about a possible misinterpretation but ... hey, look over there,

a fluffy kitten, being cute

. Seriously though, for what it's worth, I don't actually consider this a misinterpretation as such - the film was too fanboyishly clingy a parasite to have anything as measured or sensible as an interpretation - I think it was more an act of mis-translation, in that everyone was so concerned with bringing every fucking element of the comic lovingly into motion (apparently

there's going to be a DVD

of Tales of the Black Freighter - no thanks) that nobody ever bothered to pay attention to what they were doing.

If I had to sum up Watchmen in a glib and pretentious way (why would anyone ask me to do that?), I'd fall back, as I'm sure others have done before me, on quoting Yeats: "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity." Now, perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick and I know the friend I saw the film with disagrees with me, but I thought the film valorized Dan (and to a lesser extent Laurie) in a way that reduced the impact of the story. In the comic, Dan is anti-heroic: he is middle-aged, impotent, flabby and passive. He is "the boy next door" in the worst possible sense. His niceness, like his Nite Owl costume, is a mask for his essential weakness of character. Despite being in love with Laurie, he makes no attempt to forge a relationship with her, not because he is "just too nice" but because he is "just too pathetic"; he wins her, if wins it can be called, simply by being around to pick up the pieces after her relationship with Jon falls apart horribly. Laurie, of course, is equally broken but has the virtue of being hot - just as all of Dan's behaviour is controlled and limited by compromise, her decision to be with him is a compromise as well, the rejection of the strange and the challenging, youthful dreams and romanticism, for the safety of the everyday and a man whose abject inferiority makes you feel good about yourself. In the comic, their relationship is very much the cleaving of the desperate and worthless: that they go out and do minor heroic things (like saving some people from a fire and springing Rorschach from a prison he is already escaping) after they shag for the first time is an indictment of their behaviour. They seek, and find, validation with each other, yet the validation is based on their joint illusions i.e. that they are people even remotely capable of changing the world. The movie portrays their civilian-saving / prison-breaking exploits as a return to their true heroic selves; the comic uses scenes of stereotypical heroism to reveal Laurie and Dan as the self-deluding, play-acting fools they really are.

Similarly, in the comic, when they are confronted by what Ozymandias has done, Dan and Laurie slink off to a corner of his ruined facility and shag. Dr Manhattan finds them asleep on Nite Owl's winter cloak, looks at them with mingled pity and affection and goes off to confront Ozymandias with the futility of the atrocity he has committed ("nothing ever ends"). Again, this is hardly a celebration of the human spirit in the face of calamity. Confronted by their own profound impotence and the destruction of their carefully constructed charades, they take refuge in the mundane, fleeting affirmation offered by physical pleasure. In the movie, this scene is gone and, instead, Dr Manhattan's final act is to kiss Laurie goodbye - as if he, too, is asserting the value of human relationships as an antidote to Armageddon. (Personally, I'm with Rorschach on this one). In the aftermath of Ozymandias's destruction, the movie gives Dan a line about how he's been tinkering with Archimedes and it'll soon be ready to go, the implication, I think, being that he and Laurie will resume their super-hero lifestyle.

One of the more interesting aspects of the comic is the intersection between public and private identity. One of the questions it asks is why anyone even on polite nodding terms with sanity would "dress as an owl and fight crime." The answer, of course, if its five heroes are anything to go by, is: "they wouldn't." Rorschach is clearly batshit nuts - and for him, Walter Kovacs is the disguise he wears. I've always liked the way that when he confronts Dr Manhattan, it is Walter who dies, not Rorschach. Dr Manhattan has no choice but to be a super-hero but then he is barely human, or anything like it, any more. The Comedian is a fucking psychopath who uses the flamboyance offered by a costume to give outward form to his moral dysfunctionality. Ozymandias also belongs to the Special Club. And Dan and Laurie both use it as a way to escape the disappointments and failures of being merely themselves. Unfortunately the movie inadvertently engineers a reversal of this: Laurie and Dan end up re-discovering their true super-hero selves, whereas in the comic they are ruthlessly forced to confront their inadequacies as human beings. If I was feeling uncharitable I would say this symptomatic of the typical geek fallacies - Watchmen is constructed as a super-hero comic without heroes, attemping to make Dan heroic undermines both the force and interest of the story.

The overall effect of which is that you get a film that is at once a tediously faithful rendering of the comic while somehow contriving to miss the point entirely.

Grats guys.Themes:

TV & Movies

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Comics

,

Watchmen

~

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Arthur B

at 14:59 on 2009-03-12Playing devil's advocate: while I agree that Dan and Laurie are given an easy ride by the film (perhaps because they're the characters the audience is most likely to identify with), I don't think it completely derails their characterisation to have them go back to vigilantism. I don't have my copy of the comic with me, but I seem to remember mild hints in their final conversation with Sally that they might be getting into some action whilst they spend their time on the run in Ozy's new order. Like I said in the comments on Dan's review, I read the armageddon plotline as an indictment of the passivity of superheroes; crimefighters are essentially reactive, fighting society's symptoms without trying for a cure. (The grotesque scale of Ozymandias's crimes is, of course, the flip side of the argument: a cure might be more harmful than the disease itself.) In the movie, I saw their return to crimefighting as a retreat; there's no suggestion that they're seriously trying to expose Ozymandias, they're just dicking around beating people up to capture their rapidly-fading youth.

But that said I do agree that it's problematic that we are expected to identify with those specific characters in the first place; Dan and Laurie's capitulation and passivity are meant to be character flaws that are just as serious as Rorschach's fanaticism, or Dr Manhattan's nigh-autistic detachment, or Ozymandias's fatal combination of the two.

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Guy

at 15:44 on 2009-03-12I think I like the comic more than you do, Kyra, but I am very impressed by your elucidation of its themes... and it does seem likely that I should go into the film with low expectations. I would like to say I would refrain from seeing the film at all, especially now that I've read Hayter's idiotic letter... but maybe if I go see it in the third week or something I can feel that I've spited (?) him in some way.

I think I read the meaning of the Dan and Laurie characters a bit differently than you do, though. To me, they are essentially sympathetic characters, and a big part of that is their realisation in the end that, actually they're not all that important or powerful, and whether or not they're OK with that, they have to live with it, the way that millions of ordinary men and women do. This in contrast with Rorshcach, who has a kind of absolutist integrity that won't allow him to refrain from doing what he believes is right (even when it's totally futile, or worse, seriously destructive) - a quality he shares with heroes from all kinds of stories - but that "integrity" also makes him, as you say, a psychopath.

I think my favourite moment in the comic is the bit where Ozymandias tells Dan to grow up. It does raise a question for me about what counts as "growing up". Ozymandias thinks that he is the grown up, because he is the one prepared to make hard choices, cross moral boundaries in service to the greater good, &c &c... and that Dan is still a child playing at super hero, making oversized toys and not really doing anything... which is basically accurate. There's a reason that remark cuts Dan. But I think... there's something interesting, something a bit complex, about the question of what actually growing up means. The way you put it above where you say that Dan and Laurie are ruthlessly forced to confront their failings and inadequacies as human beings... I guess to me it seems that that is part of what being a grown up is: a person who has confronted their failings and accepted them. Which then, in a funny kind of way, ties in to the whole Ozymandias crazy plan, which in a sense is about forcing humanity as whole to grow up in spite of itself. Which... yeah, I don't know, for me that theme doesn't date, because we are to a large extent living in a world run by men (arguably, madmen) who act as they do because they believe they are being grown-up on behalf of the rest of us, because ordinary people don't really understand what the world is like and need them to make our hard choices for us. And of course I hate the idea of someone else making my hard choices for me, but it doesn't take long to find examples of people who you genuinely feel glad are not being held totally responsible for themselves... but I think at this stage I may be less responding to your review than I am just rambling. ;)

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Wardog

at 16:06 on 2009-03-12I feel like I'm validating Wankstain Hayter by saying this but I like the comic more retrospectively for some of its concepts. I didn't actually enjoy reading it all that much (not, though, because it is Out Of My Comfort Zone, man, and much of it, as I said, strikes me quaint and alien. And, again, at the risk of saying anything that could in any way chime with anything That Moron has ever said - Watchmen does inspire some interesting disccussion.

In the movie, I saw their return to crimefighting as a retreat"

Because the crime-fighting they do in the film is so massively glamorised - the bit where they kick-ass their way into the prison for example - I personally didn't get this vibe. But I think it's an arguable point.

But that said I do agree that it's problematic that we are expected to identify with those specific characters in the first place

Yeah me too - they obviously thought they were most normal of the bunch. Sigh. As Guy says below, I think perhaps they are the easiest to identify with because they are flawed in a lowkey very human way (i.e. they are rubbish and self-deluding) but identifying with them is an uncomfortable process because I'm sure we'd all rather be Dr Manhattans than Dans. (Although secretly I'm convinced we all want to be Rorschach - there's something utterly compelling about fanatics).

Thanks for your comment, Guy, I didn't find it rambling at all, I found it fascinating. I think my reading of Dan and Laurie is perhaps unnecessarily (and perhaps even unsupportedly) harsh. The thing is, although I said something about them having to face up their failings ... I don't think there's ever really a point they accept them or learn to operate with them ... which, as you say, is what most grown ups do. To be fair, I don't think I have accepted my failings or learned to operate with them *either* but I don't dress up as an owl and fight crime... =P Dan and Laurie seem to constantly be engaged in processes of retreat, compromise and distraction: for them sex serves exactly the same purpose as super-hero costuming. It's a cheap way to use someone else to make you feel better about yourself. They don't *deal* with what Ozymandias has done, and what it has shown them about themselves, they run away from it and bonk.

Which reminds me - sex is such an unfailingly negative force in Watchmen.

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Arthur B

at 16:17 on 2009-03-12

Because the crime-fighting they do in the film is so massively glamorised - the bit where they kick-ass their way into the prison for example - I personally didn't get this vibe. But I think it's an arguable point.

I think it's glamorised

at that point

because before the big reveal Dan and Laurie are convinced that they are Making A Difference, and the audience is meant to believe the same; we haven't had Ozymandias hit them (and the audience) with the revelation that they're not actually achieving anything beyond putting Rorschach back on the streets for one last round of psychosis before he goes to the Antarctic to explode.

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Arthur B

at 10:21 on 2009-03-13There's a very interesting article about the film's financial prospects

here

. I'm wondering whether this isn't the precise article that Hayter was responding to with his open letter.

Short version: There is a very real possibility that just about everyone who was interested in seeing

Watchmen

went to see it in the first week it was out, and ticket sales will slump by the second or third week. There's a growing consensus that the film was too faithful to the comic, which hurt it, and that this is one of those rare situations where there was

too little

studio involvement in the production process.

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Andy G

at 11:33 on 2009-03-13I haven't seen the film, but I did read the comic over the weeked. I had quite a negative reaction to Dan in the comic - his angsty, hand-wringing inadequacy doesn't really excuse the very dubious things he does or condones. I think he appears more sympathetic perhaps because he is the character who it is easiest to identify with for the average reader.

The guy who wrote the Stan Lee version of the comic made the plausible prediction that the film would unironically wallow in the violence as something cool, and rather the miss the point. Does that happen?

I wasn't sure about it having dated though. I mean, even in terms of the Cold War stuff, there are still nuclear weapons and stupid human beings. Though it's perhaps not exactly the story you'd choose to tell now 20 years on. I kind of felt the same about Frost/Nixon.

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Dan H

at 11:35 on 2009-03-13God the comments on that post are full of wank.

I really wish people would accept that "this movie is too long" is actually a valid criticism.

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Gina Dhawa

at 17:32 on 2009-03-13I'm not so worried about

Watchmen

feeling dated because, it addresses old concerns in a fairly familiar way. It's still set in the eighties after all. We're not worried about the same things anymore, but I'm pretty sure we can appreciate the fear of The Other, which is something that I think the film does very well with choosing to frame Dr Manhattan instead of having the original ending.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2009-08-15*deep breath*

Funny, I never got the impression that I was reading/watching something particularly dated either from

V for Vendetta

or

Watchmen

. True, the cold war is over, but the threat of nuclear war hasn't exactly gone away, and the various nations are being just as much jerks to each other as they were back in the 80s.

I loved the opening credits where they distill the ponderous backstory into a succession of imaginative and striking images. When the film was engaging critically with the

Watchmen

comic, it had real potential.

Really? I loved the opening credits, too, but I didn't consciously get the feeling that they were engaging critically with the comic. Would you care to expound a little more on

how

you felt they were critically engaging with it?

I thought the film valorized Dan (and to a lesser extent Laurie) in a way that reduced the impact of the story.

Interesting argument. I admit I handed considered this interpretation of Dan and Laurie from the comic book, although it makes perfect sense.

Thing is, I find that even if it does muddy up the discourse, the story is

improved

by the movie's presentation of Laurie and especially Dan.

My reason? Because in the comic, both Dan and Laurie were dull, dull

dull

. I didn't love them, I didn't hate them, I was apathetic towards them. In the movie, at least, I felt there was something there to engage with emotionally.

And even if it was a deviation in character, I found Dan actually coming out and

telling

Adrian “You haven't idealized mankind but you've... you've deformed it! You mutilated it. That's your legacy. That's the real practical joke” very cathartic.

I also didn't get the same "massive anti-climax" feeling from the movie as the graphic novel.

Although secretly I'm convinced we all want to be Rorschach - there's something utterly compelling about fanatics

Oh god. I'd almost rather be the mass-murdering ego maniac or the spiritually incompetent big blue guy than that monster. I've got the fanatic part down just fine, it's just that I find the "kills, tortures and abuses people" and general misanthropy just a liiiitle bit repulsive.

As a matter of fact, I don't think I particularly identify with

anyone

in

Watchmen

... maybe because the only characters in it who have any sort of strength to their convictions have such a misanthropic, nihilistic view of humanity. I certainly wouldn't want to

be

any of them.

Which reminds me - sex is such an unfailingly negative force in Watchmen.

Interesting point.

I really wish people would accept that "this movie is too long" is actually a valid criticism.

Totally, although for myself, I find if I say "this movie is too long" what I mean is "this movie already annoys the hell out of me and will it please get to the end already." If a movie manages to keep me engaged/entertained (as

Watchmen

did) I'm prepared to go along with it for much longer than 2.5 hours.

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Arthur B

at 20:56 on 2009-08-15

True, the cold war is over, but the threat of nuclear war hasn't exactly gone away, and the various nations are being just as much jerks to each other as they were back in the 80s.

I think nuclear conflict is still a danger, but the

kind

of nuclear conflict presented in

Watchmen

has become almost impossible. Which isn't to say it won't become a possibility again, but it's definitely on the back burner. Limited exchanges between recent entrants to the nuclear club seem more likely than large-scale human extinction events.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 17:06 on 2010-03-10Necromancy ho!

@the issue of datedness and the nuclear arms race

After reading through the article again, I kinda get what you were saying, Kyra. The theme didn't really date the comic for me, partly because I've always got one foot stuck in nuclear war fiction, and partly because I found it easy enough to read the nuclear symbolism as a symbol of an unstoppable force of annihilation that none of the characters are capable of understanding, something that can be applied to many eras and contexts.

Still, it does date the movie. IIRC, Paul Greengrass was attached to the project for a while, and he was making noises about moving it to a contemporary War on Terror setting, which I don't think you could really do without totally rebuilding the story, simply because, while we may be as scared in 2010 as we were in 1985, our fears are coming from different places and take different forms. In the '80s, we assumed that the silos would open and all humanity would die screaming. Nowandays we just assume that life is going to continue getting shittier and shittier and mor and more incomprehensible, with extinction as a vague possibility we suspect may be denied to us.

Did what I just write make any sense?

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https://profiles.google.com/elzairthesorcerer/about

at 20:09 on 2011-05-17This is kind of off-topic, but what are the names of some of those 18th century novels you mentioned? I would like to read one.

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Wardog

at 20:38 on 2011-05-17There aren't specific texts that deal *explicitly* with it - I just meant that you can infer a background level of social anxiety and uncertainty, even in books that seem to be about entirely other things. I guess that isn't very helpful. Also it occurs to me I meant 19th century novels. I hate that thing, I always get my centuries confused. Novels written after 1800 are 19th century novels. It makes no sense! But I mean, it's there in Persuasion, or Daniel Deronda, for example. Middlemarch. Vanity Fair.

[justforbooks]

If Stan Lee revolutionized the comic book world in the 1960s, which he did, he left as big a stamp — maybe bigger — on the even wider pop culture landscape of today.

Think of “Spider-Man,” the blockbuster movie franchise and Broadway spectacle. Think of “Iron Man,” another Hollywood gold-mine series personified by its star, Robert Downey Jr. Think of “Black Panther,” the box-office superhero smash that shattered big screen racial barriers in the process.

And that is to say nothing of the Hulk, the X-Men, Thor and other film and television juggernauts that have stirred the popular imagination and made many people very rich.

If all that entertainment product can be traced to one person, it would be Stan Lee, who died in Los Angeles on Monday at 95. From a cluttered office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan in the 1960s, he helped conjure a lineup of pulp-fiction heroes that has come to define much of popular culture in the early 21st century.

Mr. Lee was a central player in the creation of those characters and more, all properties of Marvel Comics. Indeed, he was for many the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general, overseeing the company’s emergence as an international media behemoth. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium’s silver age.

Many believe that Marvel, under his leadership and infused with his colorful voice, crystallized that era, one of exploding sales, increasingly complex characters and stories, and growing cultural legitimacy for the medium. (Marvel’s chief competitor at the time, National Periodical Publications, now known as DC — the home of Superman and Batman, among other characters — augured this period, with its 1956 update of its superhero the Flash, but did not define it.)

Under Mr. Lee, Marvel transformed the comic book world by imbuing its characters with the self-doubts and neuroses of average people, as well an awareness of trends and social causes and, often, a sense of humor.

In humanizing his heroes, giving them character flaws and insecurities that belied their supernatural strengths, Mr. Lee tried “to make them real flesh-and-blood characters with personality,” he told The Washington Post in 1992.

Energetic, gregarious, optimistic and alternately grandiose and self-effacing, Mr. Lee was an effective salesman, employing a Barnumesque syntax in print (“Face front, true believer!” “Make mine Marvel!”) to market Marvel’s products to a rabid following.

He charmed readers with jokey, conspiratorial comments and asterisked asides in narrative panels, often referring them to previous issues. In 2003 he told The Los Angeles Times, “I wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn’t aware of.”

Though Mr. Lee was often criticized for his role in denying rights and royalties to his artistic collaborators , his involvement in the conception of many of Marvel’s best-known characters is indisputable.

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan, the older of two sons born to Jack Lieber, an occasionally employed dress cutter, and Celia (Solomon) Lieber, both immigrants from Romania. The family moved to the Bronx.

Stanley began reading Shakespeare at 10 while also devouring pulp magazines, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, and the swashbuckler movies of Errol Flynn.

He graduated at 17 from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and aspired to be a writer of serious literature. He was set on the path to becoming a different kind of writer when, after a few false starts at other jobs, he was hired at Timely Publications, a company owned by Martin Goodman, a relative who had made his name in pulp magazines and was entering the comics field.

Mr. Lee was initially paid $8 a week as an office gofer. Eventually he was writing and editing stories, many in the superhero genre.

At Timely he worked with the artist Jack Kirby (1917-94), who, with a writing partner, Joe Simon, had created the hit character Captain America, and who would eventually play a vital role in Mr. Lee’s career. When Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, Timely’s hottest stars, were lured away by a rival company, Mr. Lee was appointed chief editor.

As a writer, Mr. Lee could be startlingly prolific. “Almost everything I’ve ever written I could finish at one sitting,” he once said. “I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.”

Mr. Lee used several pseudonyms to give the impression that Marvel had a large stable of writers; the name that stuck was simply his first name split in two. (In the 1970s, he legally changed Lieber to Lee.)

During World War II, Mr. Lee wrote training manuals stateside in the Army Signal Corps while moonlighting as a comics writer. In 1947, he married Joan Boocock, a former model who had moved to New York from her native England.

His daughter Joan Celia Lee, who is known as J. C., was born in 1950; another daughter, Jan, died three days after birth in 1953. Mr. Lee’s wife died in 2017.

A lawyer for Ms. Lee, Kirk Schenck, confirmed Mr. Lee’s death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by Ms. Lee and his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who drew the “Amazing Spider-Man” syndicated newspaper strip for years.

In the mid-1940s, the peak of the golden age of comic books, sales boomed. But later, as plots and characters turned increasingly lurid (especially at EC, a Marvel competitor that published titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), many adults clamored for censorship. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee led by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver held hearings investigating allegations that comics promoted immorality and juvenile delinquency.

Feeding the senator’s crusade was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-comics jeremiad, “Seduction of the Innocent.” Among other claims, the book contended that DC’s “Batman stories” — featuring the team of Batman and Robin — were “psychologically homosexual.”

Choosing to police itself rather than accept legislation, the comics industry established the Comics Code Authority to ensure wholesome content. Gore and moral ambiguity were out, but so largely were wit, literary influences and attention to social issues. Innocuous cookie-cutter exercises in genre were in.

Many found the sanitized comics boring, and — with the new medium of television providing competition — readership, which at one point had reached 600 million sales annually, declined by almost three-quarters within a few years.

With the dimming of superhero comics’ golden age, Mr. Lee tired of grinding out generic humor, romance, western and monster stories for what had by then become Atlas Comics. Reaching a career impasse in his 30s, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics he wanted to, not merely what was considered marketable. And Mr. Goodman, his boss, spurred by the popularity of a rebooted Flash (and later Green Lantern) at DC, wanted him to revisit superheroes.

Mr. Lee took Mr. Goodman up on his suggestion, but he carried its implications much further.

In 1961, Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby — whom he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel — produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabbles and, in the orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.

Other Marvel titles — like the Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a decent man transformed by radiation into a monster — offered a similar template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.

A timid high school intellectual who gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was prone to soul-searching, leavened with wisecracks — a key to the character’s lasting popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a Broadway musical.

Mr. Lee’s dialogue encompassed Catskills shtick, like Spider-Man’s patter in battle; Elizabethan idioms, like Thor’s; and working-class Lower East Side swagger, like the Thing’s. It could also include dime-store poetry, as in this eco-oratory about humans, uttered by the Silver Surfer, a space alien:

“And yet — in their uncontrollable insanity — in their unforgivable blindness — they seek to destroy this shining jewel — this softly spinning gem — this tiny blessed sphere — which men call Earth!”

Mr. Lee practiced what he called the Marvel method: Instead of handing artists scripts to illustrate, he summarized stories and let the artists draw them and fill in plot details as they chose. He then added sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes he would discover on penciled pages that new characters had been added to the narrative. Such surprises (like the Silver Surfer, a Kirby creation and a Lee favorite) would lead to questions of character ownership.

Mr. Lee was often faulted for not adequately acknowledging the contributions of his illustrators, especially Mr. Kirby. Spider-Man became Marvel’s best-known property, but Mr. Ditko, its co-creator, quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966. Mr. Kirby, who visually designed countless characters, left in 1969. Though he reunited with Mr. Lee for a Silver Surfer graphic novel in 1978, their heyday had ended.

Many comic fans believe that Mr. Kirby was wrongly deprived of royalties and original artwork in his lifetime, and for years the Kirby estate sought to acquire rights to characters that Mr. Kirby and Mr. Lee had created together. Mr. Kirby’s heirs were long rebuffed in court on the grounds that he had done “work for hire” — in other words, that he had essentially sold his art without expecting royalties.

In September 2014, Marvel and the Kirby estate reached a settlement. Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby now both receive credit on numerous screen productions based on their work.

Mr. Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to develop Marvel properties, but most of his attempts at live-action television and movies were disappointing. (The series “The Incredible Hulk,” seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was an exception.)

Avi Arad, an executive at Toy Biz, a company in which Marvel had bought a controlling interest, began to revive the company’s Hollywood fortunes, particularly with an animated “X-Men” series on Fox, which ran from 1992 to 1997. (Its success helped pave the way for the live-action big-screen “X-Men” franchise, which has flourished since its first installment, in 2000.)

In the late 1990s, Mr. Lee was named chairman emeritus at Marvel and began to explore outside projects. While his personal appearances (including charging fans $120 for an autograph) were one source of income, later attempts to create wholly owned superhero properties foundered. Stan Lee Media, a digital content start-up, crashed in 2000 and landed his business partner, Peter F. Paul, in prison for securities fraud. (Mr. Lee was never charged.)

In 2001, Mr. Lee started POW! Entertainment (the initials stand for “purveyors of wonder”), but he received almost no income from Marvel movies and TV series until he won a court fight with Marvel Enterprises in 2005, leading to an undisclosed settlement costing Marvel $10 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel, announced that it had paid $2.5 million to increase its stake in POW!

In Mr. Lee’s final years, after the death of his wife, the circumstances of his business affairs and contentious financial relationship with his surviving daughter attracted attention in the news media. In 2018, Mr. Lee was embroiled in disputes with POW!, and The Daily Beast and The Hollywood Reporter ran accounts of fierce infighting among Mr. Lee’s daughter, household staff and business advisers. The Hollywood Reporter claimed “elder abuse.”

In February 2018, Mr. Lee signed a notarized document declaring that three men — a lawyer, a caretaker of Mr. Lee’s and a dealer in memorabilia — had “insinuated themselves into relationships with J. C. for an ulterior motive and purpose,” to “gain control over my assets, property and money.” He later withdrew his claim, but longtime aides of his — an assistant, an accountant and a housekeeper — were either dismissed or greatly limited in their contact with him.

In a profile in The New York Times in April, a cheerful Mr. Lee said, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” adding that “my daughter has been a great help to me” and that “life is pretty good” — although he admitted in that same interview, “I’ve been very careless with money.”

Marvel movies, however, have proved a cash cow for major studios, if not so much for Mr. Lee. With the blockbuster “Spider-Man” in 2002, Marvel superhero films hit their stride. Such movies (including franchises starring Iron Man, Thor and the superhero team the Avengers, to name but three) together had grossed more than $24 billion worldwide as of April.

“Black Panther,” the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starring an almost all-black cast, took in about $201.8 million domestically when it opened over the four-day Presidents’ Day weekend this year, the fifth-biggest opening of all time.

Many other film properties are in development, in addition to sequels in established franchises. Characters Mr. Lee had a hand in creating now enjoy a degree of cultural penetration they have never had before.

Mr. Lee wrote a slim memoir, “Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee,” with George Mair, published in 2002. His 2015 book, “Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir” (written with Peter David and illustrated in comic-book form by Colleen Doran), pays abundant credit to the artists many fans believed he had shortchanged years before.

Recent Marvel films and TV shows have also often credited Mr. Lee’s former collaborators; Mr. Lee himself has almost always received an executive producer credit. His cameo appearances in them became something of a tradition. (Even “Teen Titans Go! to the Movies,” an animated feature in 2018 about a DC superteam, had more than one Lee cameo.) TV shows bearing his name or presence have included the reality series “Stan Lee’s Superhumans” and the competition show “Who Wants to Be a Superhero?”

Mr. Lee’s unwavering energy suggested that he possessed superpowers himself. (In his 90s he had a Twitter account, @TheRealStanlee.) And the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged as much when it awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2008. But he was frustrated, like all humans, by mortality.

“I want to do more movies, I want to do more television, more DVDs, more multi-sodes, I want to do more lecturing, I want to do more of everything I’m doing,” he said in “With Great Power …: The Stan Lee Story,” a 2010 television documentary. “The only problem is time. I just wish there were more time.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[tadpolepublication]

By Jonathan Kandell and Andy Webster

Nov. 12, 2018

Leer en español

Stan Lee, who as chief writer and editor of Marvel Comics helped create some of the most enduring superheroes of the 20th century and was a major force behind the breakout successes of the comic-book industry in the 1960s and early ’70s, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 95.

His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, was confirmed by Kirk Schenck, a lawyer for Mr. Lee’s daughter, J. C. Lee.

Mr. Lee was for many the embodiment of Marvel, if not comic books in general, and oversaw his company’s emergence as an international media behemoth. A writer, editor, publisher, Hollywood executive and tireless promoter (of Marvel and of himself), he played a critical role in what comics fans call the medium’s silver age.

Many believe that Marvel, under his leadership and infused with his colorful voice, crystallized that era, one of exploding sales, increasingly complex characters and stories, and growing cultural legitimacy for the medium. (Marvel’s chief competitor at the time, National Periodical Publications, now known as DC — the home of Superman and Batman, among countless other characters — augured this period but did not define it, with its 1956 update of its superhero the Flash.)

Mr. Lee was a central player in the creation of Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor and the many other superheroes who, as properties of Marvel Comics, now occupy vast swaths of the pop culture landscape in movies and on television.

Under Mr. Lee, Marvel revolutionized the comic book world by imbuing its characters with the self-doubts and neuroses of average people, as well an awareness of trends and social causes and, often, a sense of humor.

In humanizing his heroes, giving them character flaws and insecurities that belied their supernatural strengths, Mr. Lee tried “to make them real flesh-and-blood characters with personality,” he told The Washington Post in 1992.

“That’s what any story should have, but comics didn’t have until that point,” he said. “They were all cardboard figures.”

Energetic, gregarious, optimistic and alternately grandiose and self-effacing, Mr. Lee was an effective salesman, employing a Barnumesque syntax in print (“Face front, true believer!” “Make mine Marvel!”) to market Marvel’s products to a rabid following.

He charmed readers with jokey, conspiratorial comments and asterisked asides in narrative panels, often referring them to previous issues. In 2003 he told The Los Angeles Times, “I wanted the reader to feel we were all friends, that we were sharing some private fun that the outside world wasn’t aware of.”

Though Mr. Lee was often criticized for his role in denying rights and royalties to his artistic collaborators , his involvement in the conception of many of Marvel’s best-known characters is indisputable.

Reading Shakespeare at 10

He was born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, in Manhattan, the older of two sons born to Jack Lieber, an occasionally employed dress cutter, and Celia (Solomon) Lieber, both immigrants from Romania. The family moved to the Bronx.

Stanley began reading Shakespeare at 10 while also devouring pulp magazines, the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mark Twain, and the swashbuckler movies of Errol Flynn.

He graduated at 17 from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and aspired to be a writer of serious literature. He was set on the path to becoming a different kind of writer when, after a few false starts at other jobs, he was hired at Timely Publications, a company owned by Martin Goodman, a relative who had made his name in pulp magazines and was entering the comics field.

Mr. Lee was initially paid $8 a week as an office gofer. Eventually he was writing and editing stories, many in the superhero genre.

Stan Lee

At Timely he worked with the artist Jack Kirby (1917-94), who, with a writing partner, Joe Simon, had created the hit character Captain America, and who would eventually play a vital role in Mr. Lee’s career. When Mr. Simon and Mr. Kirby, Timely’s hottest stars, were lured away by a rival company, Mr. Lee was appointed chief editor.

As a writer, Mr. Lee could be startlingly prolific. “Almost everything I’ve ever written I could finish at one sitting,” he once said. “I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.”

Mr. Lee used several pseudonyms to give the impression that Marvel had a large stable of writers; the name that stuck was simply his first name split in two. (In the 1970s, he legally changed Lieber to Lee.)

During World War II, Mr. Lee wrote training manuals stateside in the Army Signal Corps while moonlighting as a comics writer. In 1947, he married Joan Boocock, a former model who had moved to New York from her native England.

His daughter Joan Celia Lee was born in 1950; another daughter, Jan, died three days after birth in 1953. Mr. Lee’s wife died in 2017. He ism, survived by Ms. Lee and his younger brother, Larry Lieber, who drew the “Amazing Spider-Man” syndicated newspaper strip for years.

In the mid-1940s, the peak of the golden age of comic books, sales boomed. But later, as plots and characters turned increasingly lurid (especially at EC, a Marvel competitor that published titles like Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), many adults clamored for censorship. In 1954, a Senate subcommittee led by the Tennessee Democrat Estes Kefauver held hearings investigating allegations that comics promoted immorality and juvenile delinquency.

Feeding the senator’s crusade was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham’s 1954 anti-comics jeremiad, “Seduction of the Innocent.” Among other claims, the book contended that DC’s “Batman stories” — featuring the team of Batman and Robin — were “psychologically homosexual.”

Opting to police itself rather than accept legislation, the comics industry established the Comics Code Authority to ensure wholesome content. Graphic gore and moral ambiguity were out, but so largely were wit, literary influences and attention to social issues. Innocuous cookie-cutter exercises in genre were in.

Many found the sanitized comics boring, and — with the new medium of television providing competition — readership, which at one point had reached 600 million sales annually, declined by almost three-quarters within a few years.

With the dimming of superhero comics’ golden age, Mr. Lee grew tired of grinding out generic humor, romance, western and monster stories for what had by then become Atlas Comics. Reaching a career impasse in his 30s, he was encouraged by his wife to write the comics he wanted to, not merely what was considered marketable. And Mr. Goodman, his boss, spurred by the popularity of a rebooted Flash (and later Green Lantern) at DC, wanted him to revisit superheroes.

Mr. Lee took Mr. Goodman up on his suggestion, but he carried its implications much further.

Enter the Fantastic Four

In 1961, Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby — whom he had brought back years before to the company, now known as Marvel — produced the first issue of The Fantastic Four, about a superpowered team with humanizing dimensions: nonsecret identities, internal squabbles and, in the orange-rock-skinned Thing, self-torment. It was a hit.

Other Marvel titles — like the Lee-Kirby creation The Incredible Hulk, a modern Jekyll-and-Hyde story about a decent man transformed by radiation into a monster — offered a similar template. The quintessential Lee hero, introduced in 1962 and created with the artist Steve Ditko (1927-2018), was Spider-Man.

A timid high school intellectual who gained his powers when bitten by a radioactive spider, Spider-Man was prone to soul-searching, leavened with wisecracks — a key to the character’s lasting popularity across multiple entertainment platforms, including movies and a Broadway musical.

Mr. Lee’s dialogue encompassed Catskills shtick, like Spider-Man’s patter in battle; Elizabethan idioms, like Thor’s; and working-class Lower East Side swagger, like the Thing’s. It could also include dime-store poetry, as in this eco-oratory about humans, uttered by the Silver Surfer, a space alien:

“And yet — in their uncontrollable insanity — in their unforgivable blindness — they seek to destroy this shining jewel — this softly spinning gem — this tiny blessed sphere — which men call Earth!”

Mr. Lee practiced what he called the Marvel method: Instead of handing artists scripts to illustrate, he summarized stories and let the artists draw them and fill in plot details as they chose. He then added sound effects and dialogue. Sometimes he would discover on penciled pages that new characters had been added to the narrative. Such surprises (like the Silver Surfer, a Kirby creation and a Lee favorite) would lead to questions of character ownership.

Mr. Lee was often faulted for not adequately acknowledging the contributions of his illustrators, especially Mr. Kirby. Spider-Man became Marvel’s best-known property, but Mr. Ditko, its co-creator, quit Marvel in bitterness in 1966. Mr. Kirby, who visually designed countless characters, left in 1969. Though he reunited with Mr. Lee for a Silver Surfer graphic novel in 1978, their heyday had ended.

Many comic fans believe that Mr. Kirby was wrongly deprived of royalties and original artwork in his lifetime, and for years the Kirby estate sought to acquire rights to characters that Mr. Kirby and Mr. Lee had created together. Mr. Kirby’s heirs were long rebuffed in court on the grounds that he had done “work for hire” — in other words, that he had essentially sold his art without expecting royalties.

In September 2014, Marvel and the Kirby estate reached a settlement. Mr. Lee and Mr. Kirby now both receive credit on numerous screen productions based on their work.

Turning to Live Action

Mr. Lee moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to develop Marvel properties, but most of his attempts at live-action television and movies were disappointing. (The series “The Incredible Hulk,” seen on CBS from 1978 to 1982, was an exception.)

Avi Arad, an executive at Toy Biz, a company in which Marvel had bought a controlling interest, began to revive the company’s Hollywood fortunes, particularly with an animated “X-Men” series on Fox, which ran from 1992 to 1997. (Its success helped pave the way for the live-action big-screen “X-Men” franchise, which has flourished since its first installment, in 2000.)

In the late 1990s, Mr. Lee was named chairman emeritus at Marvel and began to explore outside projects. While his personal appearances (including charging fans $120 for an autograph) were one source of income, later attempts to create wholly owned superhero properties foundered. Stan Lee Media, a digital content start-up, crashed in 2000 and landed his business partner, Peter F. Paul, in prison for securities fraud. (Mr. Lee was never charged.)

In 2001, Mr. Lee started POW! Entertainment (the initials stand for “purveyors of wonder”), but he received almost no income from Marvel movies and TV series until he won a court fight with Marvel Enterprises in 2005, leading to an undisclosed settlement costing Marvel $10 million. In 2009, the Walt Disney Company, which had agreed to pay $4 billion to acquire Marvel, announced that it had paid $2.5 million to increase its stake in POW!

In Mr. Lee’s final years, after the death of his wife, the circumstances of his business affairs and contentious financial relationship with his surviving daughter attracted attention in the news media. In 2018, Mr. Lee was embroiled in disputes with POW!, and The Daily Beast and The Hollywood Reporter ran accounts of fierce infighting among Mr. Lee’s daughter, household staff and business advisers. The Hollywood Reporter claimed “elder abuse.”

In February 2018, Mr. Lee signed a notarized document declaring that three men — a lawyer, a caretaker of Mr. Lee’s and a dealer in memorabilia — had “insinuated themselves into relationships with J. C. for an ulterior motive and purpose,” to “gain control over my assets, property and money.” He later withdrew his claim, but longtime aides of his — an assistant, an accountant and a housekeeper — were either dismissed or greatly limited in their contact with him.

In a profile in The New York Times in April, a cheerful Mr. Lee said, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” adding that “my daughter has been a great help to me” and that “life is pretty good” — although he admitted in that same interview, “I’ve been very careless with money.”

Marvel movies, however, have proved a cash cow for major studios, if not so much for Mr. Lee. With the blockbuster “Spider-Man” in 2002, Marvel superhero films hit their stride. Such movies (including franchises starring Iron Man, Thor and the superhero team the Avengers, to name but three) together had grossed more than $24 billion worldwide as of April.

“Black Panther,” the first Marvel movie directed by an African-American (Ryan Coogler) and starring an almost all-black cast, took in about $201.8 million domestically when it opened over the four-day Presidents’ Day weekend this year, the fifth-biggest opening of all time.

Many other film properties are in development, in addition to sequels in established franchises. Characters Mr. Lee had a hand in creating now enjoy a degree of cultural penetration they have never had before.

Mr. Lee wrote a slim memoir, “Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee,” with George Mair, published in 2002. His 2015 book, “Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir” (written with Peter David and illustrated in comic-book form by Colleen Doran), pays abundant credit to the artists many fans believed he had shortchanged years before.

Mr. Lee continued writing to the end. His first novel, “A Trick of Light,” written with Kat Rosenfield, is scheduled to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt next year.

Recent Marvel films and TV shows have also often credited Mr. Lee’s former collaborators; Mr. Lee himself has almost always received an executive producer credit. His cameo appearances in them became something of a tradition. (Even “Teen Titans Go! to the Movies,” an animated feature in 2018 about a DC superteam, had more than one Lee cameo.) TV shows bearing his name or presence have included the reality series “Stan Lee’s Superhumans” and the competition show “Who Wants to Be a Superhero?”

Mr. Lee’s unwavering energy suggested that he possessed superpowers himself. (In his 90s he had a Twitter account, @TheRealStanlee.) And the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledged as much when it awarded him a National Medal of Arts in 2008. But he was frustrated, like all humans, by mortality.

“I want to do more movies, I want to do more television, more DVDs, more multi-sodes, I want to do more lecturing, I want to do more of everything I’m doing,” he said in “With Great Power …: The Stan Lee Story,” a 2010 television documentary. “The only problem is time. I just wish there were more time.”

Correction: November 12, 2018

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the amount of money the Marvel movie “Black Panther” has made worldwide. It is more than $1.3 billion, not $426 million.

Correction: November 12, 2018

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the last year of the animated “X-Men” series that made its debut on Fox in 1992. It lasted until 1997, not 1995.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting

[eurello]

Media Diet, Week of April 19th

I am forever working on improving the quality of the deluge of culture I am taking in at all times. Lately, I’ve been especially rigorous about this, as I keep realizing exactly how much valuable time I am wasting slurping up really dumb stuff. In an attempt at accountability (and to make myself ashamed to spend too much time on anything purely dumb), I am going to try logging and posting about the culture I consume. I will analyze what attracts me to the trashier things, and attempt to train myself, little by little, day by day, into better habits.  

Sunday, April 19th:

As I was getting ready and making breakfast, I listened to podcasts as usual — the end of Oh No, Ross & Carrie, and the beginning of Baby Geniuses. I enjoy both of these podcasts a lot, and I think they are good things to listen to, although this particular episode of ONRC went on for too long. I have gone through phases of listening to a lot of political podcasts, but I have recently admitted to myself that I’m not that interested in politics, and that is perfectly fine. I think it’s important for a citizen to remain up to date and aware of what is going on, but I have this sort of weird feeling that smart people are obsessed with politics? And I don’t know why I feel that way. There’s nothing especially noble or intelligent about political governance; quite the opposite most of the time. Politicians are often venal, and even if when they aren’t, the more time you spend paying attention to the largely broken processes they attempt to navigate and massage every day, the worse it probably is for your own sense of hope, and certainly for your own creativity. So I’ve let myself off the hook on this one, and now I mostly listen to humor podcasts and weird fictional things.

As I drank my breakfast (smoothie/coffee) and procrastinated at doing something more worthwhile, I spent probably two hours on Twitter, Instagram, and various websites. This is becoming a big problem for me. On Twitter, I follow mostly comedy writers, liberals, feminists, black Twitter, and weird Twitter (and intersections of all of the above), and some local political organizations. I tweeted a lot this morning, as well. On Instagram, I follow a lot of the same people I do on Twitter, plus a TON of visual artists. I am not a visual artist, but because Instagram is a visual medium, it’s nice to follow artists, and I sometimes find it inspiring — if not to create art myself, at least maybe to make my house look nicer (although I never do). I also follow some old school fashion and lifestyle bloggers who I’ve been following for like ten years, and although I do not find that kind of blogging interesting at all anymore, I am interested in these particular people, and invested in their lives at this point. I also embarrassingly have been paying a good bit of attention lately to a certain terrible influencer, who I won’t name because I don’t want to draw the wrong kind of attention here, but you probably know who she is. She is entirely boring, but people are interested in her for a variety of reasons, and they all have complicated explanations for why. I think it’s that she’s sort of the purest example of the sort of woman (blond, thin, pretty, performatively aspirational yet empty enough to be completely non-threatening to anyone) that middle-class Americans have always been culturally encouraged to admire and, if they are women, to emulate, and yet, it’s so apparent that there is no there there. I imagine most people who follow her are thinking, “I can’t believe I thought I needed to be this in high school!” For me personally, there’s something else to it, and after thinking about it so that I could write it down here, I think it is that I spend a lot of time mildly regretting that I had not been more intentional about pursuing my creative dreams in my 20s (I was sort of dabbling in comedy and performance and writing; I had some talent but little intelligence), but at the same time, when I look back over my work and writings from that time, I am horrified by how stupid I was without realizing it (and not just stupid for my age, because I was surrounded by far more intelligent and creative people who have gone on to do amazing things, and there are many preternaturally wise and hilarious babies who are creating right now). Had I had a bigger platform at the time, I fear I would have looked a lot like a less successful this girl. So, it’s a sort of cautionary tale that really just serves to make me feel better about having avoided exposure I’d now regret (albeit through laziness rather than foresight). And also, being able to realize this now is a reminder that I am at least smarter now than I used to be, so I have been growing in some way, even if it feels like I’ve just been atrophying intellectually and creatively ever since I got a real job. I think now that I’ve written this down, I’m ready to let go of paying attention to her. Also, though, I just feel bad for her, and I want to see what happens to her and if she ends up ok or not. Which possibly sounds nobler than it is — am I really just rubbernecking at an accident? I don’t think I wish her harm. Anyway, in non-shame scrolling, two of my favorite comics on Twitter and Instagram right now are Eva Victor and Alyssa Lamparis. They are both brilliantly hilarious.

The first few chapters of “Joshua”, while working on one of my blog posts about the Old Testament.

A chapter of The High Growth Handbook, for work, which I’m finding more interesting than most business books.

Moral Clarity by Susan Neiman, which I’m not really enjoying. This isn’t necessarily why I’m not enjoying it, but I gave some thought while reading this about why I find the left’s current backlash against “identity politics” to be disingenuous. I mean, other than the fact that it is only white people (and mostly white men) who argue that identity politics are a pointless distraction from real social change. And it’s that nobody — no matter how naive — thinks that we are going to transform all human systems overnight. Abrupt revolutions rarely happen in established societies, and even when they do, they never stick; no matter how you come about it, lasting social change always takes forever. So, eschewing identity politics as a mere distraction implies that those who unfairly have less power and influence under the current system should just be content with their marginalization until we have a new system altogether. And that those who are over-represented in the current system shouldn’t be criticized or made to lose anything in the interests of equity and social justice until we have a new system altogether. That this is the same old self-serving bullshit from a different direction seems so obvious to me, I don’t understand why so many smart people are buying into it. There is no getting around our historical legacy of racial oppression! There’s just no scenario in which white people are not going to have to deal with that first, before we can successfully build systems that are more just and more fair! You have to address both things at the same time, and no, just focusing on economic class is not going to cut it — especially not when so many people pretend that they don’t understand that poverty results from lack of access and limited options, and has little to do with whether you have much money at any given time (in reality, they understand this very well). And I can’t take any leader seriously (no matter how far left) who does not get that, and/or who won’t force their followers to acknowledge it.  

“Where outrage itself is exhausted, even despair is impossible. The resulting inertia is not the result of an ideology, postmodern or otherwise. But anyone who wants to oppose it must oppose an ideology that makes inertia the most rational response.”

Finished Baby Geniuses and started listening to Get Rich Nick as I prepared for my run, and as I showered after my run. Nick V is a good pal of mine from Chicago — we came up through iO at the same time and were on a Harold team together for like a year. He’s hilarious and I enjoy his podcast, but I suspect I partly find it so funny because it’s just very…Nick.

I listen to the same Spotify playlist on every run. I made it for running and it’s all exactly what you’d expect someone like me would listen to while running.

I watched an episode of season 2 of “Big Little Lies” while I ate dinner. I thought the first season (while it had its faults) was perfectly cast and pretty impressively honest in how it dealt with domestic violence and rape. I wasn’t interested enough to seek out season 2, but I recently noticed HBO is streaming some shows for free right now on Amazon Prime (which I have finally, finally canceled because #morals but still have through August), so I started watching it, and I still love the cast. I will watch Laura Dern in absolutely anything, and it’s really fun to watch Reese Witherspoon play what I imagine is basically herself.

Listened to more Get Rich Nick while I cleaned up the kitchen and got ready for bed.

Finished the night off with The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty — she’s one of my faves and I’ve read two of these four collections multiple times, but right now am on The Wide Net which is new to me. Read the titular “The Wide Net” and really enjoyed it and then “A Still Moment,” which was boring but made me want to get my computer out and google Audubon. Then fell asleep reading this weird old novel I’m slowly working through called The Man Who Loved Children.

“‘She’s a lot smarter than her cousins in Beulah,’ said Virgil. ‘And especially Edna Earle, that never did get to be what you’d call a heavy thinker. Edna Earle could sit and ponder all day on how the little tail of the ‘C’ got through the ‘L’ in a Coca-Cola sign.’”

Monday, April 20th:

Instagram on the toilet, Get Rich Nick while I performed my ablutions and made coffee, and Instagram stories and Feedly for a bit while I drank it. I spend less time on this today, the awareness of accountability is already working! About Instagram stories — I usually ignore them altogether but every so often I go through phases of watching them. I find them mostly very boring, but because I mostly follow creatives on Instagram, there’s something inspiring about starting my day by watching a bunch of creative people all around the world making things. At least starting a day off this way (which today fortunately is); starting a work day this way makes me feel an intense despair. I also follow a few farmers, and it’s fun to see their daily lives. And also just a bunch of people who live in gorgeous places around the world. And ok, yeah, a couple of hate follows, which for me are people who I just find so unbelievably grating and irritating in every way that I can’t stop watching them — I just can’t believe they exist and yet aren’t entirely consumed with self-loathing. And I think for me it’s like, I find them so utterly obnoxious in every way, but they still all have lots of people in their lives who truly love them, and that’s affirming to me personally, because I often feel like I couldn’t ask anyone to tolerate me for very long unless/until I’ve attained perfection in every sphere, so it’s a nice reminder to me that that’s not really how people operate. In Feedly, I follow 3 Quarks Daily and The Morning News, some political digests, a number of old school bloggers I’ve been following forever (mostly funny ones), a handful of newsletters (mostly by people who used to be bloggers), and some sustainability bloggers to guilt me into making better choices. I probably spend about 90 minutes on all of this? Which is too much time!

More “Joshua.”

I poke around online and find and follow a handful more artists from around the world on Instagram and/or Twitter. These aren’t really very interesting ones, and so I’ll probably unfollow them soon, but they’re a bunch of diverse young people, and lately I feel out of touch with what young people are doing. One funny thing about young people is they have so much energy and so many interests, so all of them are doing like ten really shitty things — they’re making crappy art, they’re writing nonsense, they’re performing dopey shows, AND they’re in a shitty band. And then they get older and they realize that it takes an incredible amount of time and effort and research and angst to do even one thing semi-well, and at that point, they either disappear or focus. Anyway, I mostly stick to Twitter for these — I only follow artists on Instagram whose work I find genuinely appealing; Twitter is more for people I’m interested in hearing more about how they perceive the world, but am not necessarily interested in what they’re making. Also, for Twitter, I use TweetDeck and make lists, so it’s a lot easier to follow and unfollow groups of people than it is on Instagram. Like I’ll make a list of “possibly interesting” and watch it for awhile, and then I might move two people on it to a more permanent list and then just delete the whole list.

Listen to The Read while I make a smoothie.

Two short stories from an old issue of Salt Hill, both terrible.

A chapter of High Growth Handbook, and two of Moral Clarity.

Listened to The Read and Scam Goddess while gearing up for run, walking back from run showering, cooking dinner, and cleaning up the kitchen. Usual playlist on run.

Spent some lost time on Twitter and Instagram while crouching on the floor and shivering in my sweaty running clothes, and then again after dinner while sitting on the couch. I’m starting to realize that I look at social media when what my brain really wants to be doing is just….sitting and staring and not taking in anything.

Three Welty stories, “Asphodel” (enjoyable), “The Winds” (in which Welty is starting to find the voice she will master in The Golden Apples), and “The Purple Hat” (eh). Interrupted, I am embarrassed to admit, by looking at Twitter and my email and also reading some articles about Welty.

The Man Who Loved Children

Tuesday, April 21st:

There are two things I want to stop doing, and I did both today. First, after my alarm went off, I spent 90 minutes hitting the snooze button and also pursuing Twitter and Instagram in bed. My entire goal is to reserve as much time for myself in the evenings as possible, for doing what I want to be doing. And I waste a lot of that limited time in procrastinating what I don’t want to be doing. And this is the first place it happens — lounging in bed staring at my phone instead of getting up and going to work.

Finished Scam Goddess and started The High Low while I got ready, made coffee and my smoothie.

After work, I did the second thing I want to stop doing — I spent 90 minutes sitting on the couch looking at Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and rubbernecking at a long train wreck thread on NextDoor (people are wilding out at this point), procrastinating getting my running kit on and going out for my exercise. All together, this is THREE HOURS of wasted time that could go toward my evenings, where I get to do the stuff I want to do! I’m robbing myself of this valuable time.

I walked for most of my run because I was sore from some exercises I did, and I finished The High Low. When I got home, I listened to Office Ladies, which is not a very good podcast, but it’s just mindlessly comforting to listen to and I like thinking about The Office, which is mindlessly comforting to watch, as I took a shower, made dinner, and cleaned up the kitchen.

The Man Who Loved Children

Wednesday, April 22nd:

Well, I still hit the snooze for an hour but I DIDN’T browse Twitter before I got out of bed. Listened to Lady to Lady while I got ready and made a smoothie and coffee.

Couple of breaks during my workday, during which times I looked at Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.

I worked later than usual and it was rainy out, so I didn’t go out for exercise, but I still spent TWO HOURS on the couch mindlessly scrolling (Twitter, Instagram, NextDoor train wreck). So, all told, I still wasted three hours on garbage today.

Listened to Lady to Lady and Your Favorite Band Sucks while I made dinner, ate it, cleaned up after it, and got ready for bed. Your Favorite Band Sucks takes down a lot of bands I genuinely like, and I truly do enjoy hearing people rip apart things that I enjoy for some reason (cultural masochism). This episode, though, is on Billy Joel, which I feel is low-hanging fruit, although it reminds me of when this guy I had a massive crush on in high school got super into Billy Joel (I know) and so I spent a few months listening to him and trying to convince myself I also thought he was brilliant. Listening to this podcast makes me realize how much time I spent trying to convince myself that I liked bands that guys I had a thing for worshipped. I don’t really listen to music very much (note absence of it from this entire week) since podcasts became a thing -- I just always vastly prefer narrative if I have a choice. Either music is too distracting from the thing I’m trying to do, or I have enough bandwidth to listen to a podcast while I’m doing the thing, which I prefer. There’s just very rarely any place in my day where music makes sense. You will never find me getting stoned or drunk and just sitting and listening to music -- I can’t fathom how people do that. Whenever I’ve tried it, I’ve just gotten so angry that I took away the mental capacity to read and am wasting all that excellent reading time just sitting there. I guess I don’t really like turning my brain off. Some people spend all their time trying to turn their brain off, but that actually causes stress in my case; fun for me is more taking a ton of adderall to really get it jumping. I don’t mean to imply by that that I’m smart or I use my brain for anything worthwhile, I really, really don’t. I just like the feeling of being alert and I like thinking my dumb thoughts and following along with narratives of whatever kind. 

The Man Who Loved Children

Thursday, April 23rd:

Success! I hit snooze for 20 minutes only and then I got to work!

Listened to a new podcast by a comic I like while I got ready, and I won’t say which one, because it wasn’t very good, and I don’t want to slam the first episode (I’m sure it will get better).

Very brief Instagram/Twitter/Feedly breaks a couple times throughout the day.

Success again! After work, I only looked at Twitter for 20 minutes before heading out for my run. Usual playlist on run. On my walk back, I recorded an Instagram story.

Listened to old episodes of Sawbones and By the Book (both of which I’m trying to decide if I like or not) and You’re Wrong About while getting ready for run, showering, cooking dinner, cleaning up the kitchen, getting ready for bed. This episode of You’re Wrong About was about Marie Antoinette and was really fun, although I have a hard time with this podcast, because the voice of the woman who hosts it kind of traumatizes me. I do not like criticizing women’s voices and she can’t help her voice or how it affects me, but she has this sort of sarcastic, flat, patronizing tone that makes her sound like a cool girl of the intellectual cast of cool girls who thinks you are the stupidest little try-hard femme ever to be brought before her, and it gives me some unpleasant flashbacks to certain incidents in college. But I like the podcast overall (and her probably!) and so I just try to get over it.

Read “Livvie” by Eudora Welty, and then finished The Man Who Loved Children.

Friday, April 24th:

Hit snooze for a full hour, but then got up. Listened to another first episode of a new podcast by another comic I like that also was not very good while I got ready, etc. and also a bit later in the car as I made a grocery store run.

Couple very short Twitter/Feedly breaks throughout the day.

Usual music playlist on run. I’ve got a podcast playlist of weird fictional stuff that I’m mostly listening to old episodes of from the beginning and many are new to me and I’m trying to decide if I liked them. Today, during the usual periods of podcast listening, I went through episodes of Welcome to Night Vale and The Lost Cat Podcast, both of which I am enjoying, although I have trouble paying attention to Welcome to Night Vale and always realize after I finish an episode that I didn’t really hear any of it.  

Watched 1.25 episodes of Big Little Lies while I ate takeout and spotted my friend Mike playing the marriage counselor in one of them! Having a background in performance makes for very weird TV and movie experiences now, because I’ll pretty often see someone I know well in something. Often, it’s a really happy surprise like this one, but sometimes it’s a really unpleasant one, like when you’re sitting around with your family and you see a guy who dumped you pretty brutally playing the dopey, amiable dad in a commercial and get plunged into despair and self-hatred in the midst of a bunch of oblivious people in your aunt’s living room and start to feel like you are living in a surreal world no one else is actually a part of and also like your personality is fragmenting in what is possibly a psychotic way.  

Started The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. I’m really happy to be done with The Man Who Loved Children and on to a new book, and this one looks to be an easy, possibly dumb page-turner, which is well-timed.

Saturday, April 25th:

Snoozed for 40 minutes. Listened to Tanis while coffee etc. Bit of Instagram and Feedly.

While I cleaned the house and deep cleaned my office, I listened to The Bright Sessions, Within the Wires, The Box Podcast, Tracks, and Rabbits.

While I got ready for run, walked back from run, made dinner, cleaned up kitchen, put the laundry away, and got ready for bed, listened to Father Dagon, The Amelia Project, Glasgow Ghost Stories, Middle: Below, The Last Movie, The Van, Video Palace, Blackwood, Dreamboy, Caledonian Gothic, and The London Necropolis Railway. I went through a ton of podcasts today (but also these fiction ones are quite short).

Started to read “At the Landing” by Welty, but I fell asleep super early. I usually save fiction for a couple hours in bed before I go to sleep, because fiction is my favorite thing in the world, but I am so tired by the time I lie down that I often can’t really enjoy it, and fight to stay awake while I try to read and then just fall asleep. So I might need to rethink this timing.

Overall, I think this has been a successful first week of doing this! On Saturday, I had a day off, and I spent basically zero time procrastinating with garbage media! I can really see how my consumption of dumb stuff went down through the week.