Lena Dunham’s Girls debuted last year. I hadn’t heard much about it, but a friend talked me into watching it, and it was pretty definitively Not For Me. But because I’m an idiot, I’ve kinda/sorta kept up with following the reaction and controversy about the series — how it’s super white, how the writers like to say stupid things in public, and so on. Looky-loo stuff, really. “Why do these people hate/love/defend/attack this stuff so much?”

Of course, that began backfiring almost immediately, because all things do. I don’t think I’ve read a single pro or con piece on the show that was worth the time, though a few of the more measured reactions — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s piece definitely included — were interesting, from the outside looking in. I’m curious about what works about Girls, what doesn’t, and why much more than I am than checking it out firsthand.

The latest one I’ve read was a piece by Rob Hart called “Call It What It Is: The Hatred Directed At Lena Dunham Is Petty, Childish Bullshit,” which I checked out after it drifted across my Twitter. It’s one of those defenses that depends and/or suggests that everyone is either a moron or jealous — in other words, not a good defense so much as a “You are all dumb and mama said knock you strawmen out.”

But this defense, when dismissing any and all negativity also tripped one of my pet peeves once I got to here:

As soon as the race card got played, there was no way for Dunham to win. When Donald Glover showed up as a black Republican, instead of being an interesting role for a funny and talented person, adding a black person in a featured guest spot was deemed RACISM (according to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, at least).

There’s a lot I don’t like about this bit. Abdul-Jabbar said “But this really seemed like an effort was made to add some color — and it came across as forced,” which is pretty objectively not what Hart says he said. But the bit that made me roll my eyes, that made me second-guess this habit of driving slowly past other people’s problems and gawking, was the first eight words: “AS SOON AS THE RACE CARD GOT PLAYED.”

If you believe in the race card, you’ve got some scumbaggy views on race and culture. End of story.

It’s cool to defend Dunham or whatever, I agree that a lot of the rhetoric about her and her show has been pretty stupid and thinly veiled horribleness, but I feel like you shouldn’t act like a moron and pretend like the race card is a thing that actually exists while defending some dumb TV show.

The race card isn’t real. Let’s say that for the purposes of this argument the race card is a real thing that can be played by colored people. It isn’t, I repeat, but let’s say that in this hypothetical world full of unicorns and dragons and magic, it is real. The race card wouldn’t be the big joker or the small joker. It wouldn’t be the Ace of Spades or a Royal Flush (assuming you had several… never mind), either. It wouldn’t even be Draw Four. It would be that extra card that comes in card decks that explains the rules to a card game. You know the card that we all ignore? It’s that one. But the only thing written on it is “YOU CAN’T WIN.”

PARKER / BROTHERS: LIFE IN AND AROUND COMICS
Friday
Room: 3AB
Start: 7:00PM
End: 7:55PM

Jeff Parker, writer of fan-favorite comics like Red She-Hulk and Agents of Atlas, sits down with David Brothers to have a frank and funny conversation about what working on comics is really like, where inspiration actually comes from, and why if you want to be a pro you need to stop being a fan. Do you have preconceptions of what the comics industry is like? Come through and watch this tag team destroy them with jokes, opinions, and hard facts.

LOOKING PAST THE TARGET AUDIENCE
Sunday
Room: 2AB
Start: 1:00PM
End: 1:55PM

This year, the geek community’s strained relationship with diversity came to a head. Conflicts over exclusion, and identity politics, and what makes a “real” geek have exploded into the mainstream media. Creators, curators, community leaders, and critics on the front lines examine the fight over geek identity and barriers to diversity in geek communities and media; and propose concrete steps toward a diverse and inclusive geek culture. Join industry leaders Rachel Edidin, David Brothers, Andy Khouri, Regina Buenaobra, Sarah Kuhn, Cheryl Lynn Eaton and Kate Welch as they discuss this hot button issue.

You should come by and let me put this poison in you.

Studio Ghibli and Level-5’s Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a type of game I don’t play very often: a family-oriented big budget title. It’s heartwarming and kind, to the point where even its violence is positioned as being a temporary evil that will lead directly to greater good. I had one thought just after the game really got going that forever shifted the experience for me: what if this isn’t real, and it’s just Oliver’s way of coping with the death of his mother?

It sounds stupid and cynical, doesn’t it? We have a habit of attempting to ruin or taint everything that reminds us of our own lost innocence, and you can definitely look at that thought as being part of that trend. At the same time, it’s a hard idea to let go of, particularly when you start to consider a few things in the game itself with less of a blindly trusting eye.

The death of Allie, Oliver’s mother, is what really gets the game started, with her revival being the end point of Oliver’s quest. To bring her back, Oliver is going to go up against Shadar, the Dark Djinn, with the help of Drippy, his fairy friend.

Drippy enters the narrative just after the death of Allie. Drippy was a doll that Allie gave to Oliver, and represents Allie’s love for her son. As Oliver cries while holding his doll, his tears fall onto the doll, causing it to come to life. Upon waking up, Drippy explains that he is not just from another world, but was locked away by an evil entity who may hold Allie’s life in his hands.

Drippy spins a tale full of wonder, but the heart of it is one idea: Oliver can get his mother back. Oliver accepts Drippy’s reality because he’s guaranteed the power to change things if he goes along with Drippy. He can return to point when he was happy. On the one hand, this is a standard hero’s journey. On the other, it’s incredibly convenient, isn’t it?

The cracks in Drippy’s narrative become even more obvious when you consider his behavior. He’s hiding things from Oliver. Oliver knows that he’s meant to save this world from the Dark Djinn, but Drippy spends more time reiterating how capable he is than actually giving him advice. Drippy emphasizes Oliver’s potential, not his reality, whenever they meet another character.

Drippy downplays the danger, and that makes me wonder if I can trust him. His explanations of how this new world works don’t quite make sense. He shows Oliver how to transfer emotions from one person to another, but that process somehow leaves the giver feeling even more of the emotion they gave away. Later, he assures Oliver that they aren’t really killing the creatures they fight. They simply go somewhere else after being chastised and will soon return as loving creatures. Where do they go after you hit them with fireballs and swords? Um. Somewhere?

The biggest warning sign, the moment that gave me pause more than any other moment, came when Oliver returned to the real world for the first time. At this point in the game, he’s fully accepted his quest and acquired clothes that fit the magical realm. We’d laugh at him if we saw Oliver in real life, with his cape, Little Lord Fauntleroy getup, and ridiculous boots. In the game, from what I saw, everyone simply takes it in stride. It barely rates a mention, and that bothered me.

The townspeople care about Oliver and how he’s coping, but they rarely remark on his clothes and avoid speaking to him at length about his mother. I got the feeling that they don’t know how to take the situation or Oliver himself. A child loses his mother and walks into your store wearing a ridiculous outfit. How do you react to that? Apparently the answer is “you ignore it and pretend like everything is mostly okay.”

The idea that Oliver is out of his depth with his grief a dark twist born from a dark thought, but the more of Ni No Kuni I play, the more the puzzle pieces seem to fit together. If I took Ni No Kuni entirely on its own terms as a lovable game about loving and being loved, I would probably lose interest pretty quickly. But my own baggage, my interests and tastes, gives me a greater — or probably just “different” — appreciation of the story.

I feel like what you bring to a work of art is about as important as the art itself. No work of art is a monologue. It’s a conversation between you and the creator of the work. You are a large part of the reason why a fantastic work of art clicks with you so hard and why some other fantastic work of art falls flat. Sometimes your mind is perfectly shaped to take a certain story. Sometimes it isn’t. In the case of Ni No Kuni, my own baggage and interests changed the game for me.

Instead of bailing out of the game early on with a “Good, but not for me,” I’m playing a lot of Ni No Kuni in an attempt to prove this thought wrong. I don’t want Oliver to have to face up to his own impotence and grief. I don’t want his mother to be dead. I don’t want Drippy to be a guide with dark intentions. I want Oliver to win.

I want you to keep this two-page story by Matt Wayne, John Paul Leon, Noelle Giddings, and Dave Sharpe from Static Shock Special in mind this month. I want you to think of this every time someone — anyone, myself included — invokes Dwayne McDuffie’s name.

I want you to think about what they have to gain when they say the man’s name.

I’m working on a thing, but I think I need a little help. I’m researching this on my own, but maybe you can help me out.

I’m working on a list of 1) black writers 2) who have done work on the Big Two’s superhero comics 3) and contributed more than one issue to that universe. These constraints are important, I think. Cape comics are mainstream comics, the big leagues in a way, and the writer tends to be, if not the captain of the ship, the person who decides the destination.

I’ve got a spreadsheet here. It’s read-only now, but if you know of more black writers who fit the criteria, leave a comment below and I’ll add them in. Who am I missing? Is this everyone?

I’m not sure where I’m going to go with this info, not yet. But I know that I want to go somewhere, and at the moment, I’m feeling the bullet more than the ballot. Thanks for helping, if you can. Thanks for reading if you can’t.

Chad Nevett is doing a Blogathon for charity, a blogathon being a 24 hour blog writing jamboree, and I’m helping out. Helped, technically, but you haven’t seen my staggering contribution to the blogathon yet. Chad’s going big for his final blogathon, which is very cool. Here’s the roster of assistants: Tim Callahan, Tucker Stone, David Brothers, Alec Berry, Brian Cronin, Graeme McMillan, Jeff Lester, Tim O’Neil, Ryan K. Lindsay, Adam Langton, Matt Brady, Ales Kot, Shawn Starr, Kaitlin Tremblay, and Augie de Blieck, Jr.

Lotta people in there I dig a whole lot, though I run hot and cold on that Brothers guy.

You can see full details here, but here goes an excerpt, too:

Now, you may think that by bringing in 15 writers to do 16 posts, that means I’ll be taking it a bit easier this time. You would be wrong. For those half-hour periods, I will be doing a series of posts over at Comics Should be Good on the best of 2012. It’s not just a bigger Blogathon in contributors, but in blogs.

That brings us to the most important thing in all of this: the Hero Initiative. It’s a charity that provides financial assistance to comic professionals that require it. It’s an organisation that I have a large amount of respect for and one that, sadly, the comics industry desperately needs.

This is a good project, and you can help out by donating to the Hero Initiative in the project’s name. You can also buy products from their site or visit their eBay store.

Either way, on 1/26 — tomorrow! — take a look at Chad’s site and Comics Should Be Good and enjoy a whole bunch of opinions on and around comics.

Tumblr questions! I take questions on tumblr because I get bored real easy, they’re easy to knock out between paying work, and I like when people want to know what I think about things. I got this question from stavner the other day:

Would it be better for the health of American comics if Marvel and/or DC got out of the comics business and just focused on licensing?

My reply was short, but I think pretty okay: “That would literally destroy the direct market almost immediately, so definitely not.”

I got a follow-up question from an anonymous dude and I wrote a half-thought out book on it. I don’t think I’m too off base, though. I’m sure y’all will let me know if I am. I wrote this in… ten minutes? Sorry if this is rough. I lightly edited this after posting it on tumblr to make it more readable. And by “lightly edited” I mean “put in some words that I forgot to put in and cut a paragraph because it didn’t turn out like I wanted.” Onward:

Re: you answer to the question of whether it would be good or not for Marvel and DC to get out of comics and just focus on licensing, you said it would destroy the Direct Market. Putting aside the jobs that would be lost – would that be such a bad thing 4 the art form? (Presumably the original questioner means that, with Marvel and DC out of the picture there’d be less capes & corps) And isn’t the death – or at the very least decimation – of the direct market as it currently exists inevitable?

Nothing’s inevitable, and anything that happens occurs because we tolerate it. You’ve got a lot of things going here, so I’m gonna throw out points instead of a straight answer.

“Putting aside the jobs that would be lost – would that be such a bad thing 4 the art form?”
-You can’t put aside the jobs. Putting them aside makes your hypothetical situation a lie. “Putting aside all the deaths, wasn’t invading ____ a good idea?” No, it wasn’t. You have to account for those deaths, and if you delete Marvel and DC, you have to account for the fact that they have upwards of 60% of the market share. Losing 60-some percent of your business is catastrophic. When that business is the main draw for your store — Marvel and DC have specifically cultivated an audience of people who hit shops like clockwork for a hit in a way that I don’t think most other publishers have managed — it’s apocalyptic.

You lose the curious foot traffic that comes in for X-Men comics but kinda likes that Brian Wood guy’s other stuff, or that digs Wonder Woman and realizes that Empowered is awesome. That counts for a lot, and smart comic shops know this. “Oh, you like Uncanny X-Men? This guy also writes Casanova and it’s crrrrrazy!” “Dazzler fan, huh? Tried Phonogram?” You lose the regular and reliable pay check that comes from selling Big Two comix. You have fewer options for events and materials, on account of Marvel and DC not opening up their wallets.

And screw the art form if the jobs don’t count for anything. People come first, every single time. Do right by the people and the business side of the art form will improve, which will help improve the art form itself. Human beings over everything.

“And isn’t the death – or at the very least decimation – of the direct market as it currently exists inevitable?”

-Inevitability is a fake idea. The direct market doesn’t have to die, and if we’re being real, it probably shouldn’t. It’s a dependable delivery system for a specific type of book to a specific type of person. It serves a purpose that could easily be expanded and fixed.

The problems with the direct market — an apparently unbelievably conservative population of retailers, gaming the system, backstock, ordering, timely deliveries, awful customer service, etc — are ALL fixable. Every single one! It would take work and effort, and yeah a lot of squares would get upset, but it’s fixable, and nobody cares what they think anyway. The rise of Vaughan & Staples’s Saga is a fantastic sign, as-is the continued success of The Walking Dead. Empowered has had a gang of printings and is at the deluxe hardcover stage of things. People are interested in new things — we just have to get those things in front of them so they know to get them. Comic shops, especially ones with personable, intelligent staff, are the best way to do that. If somebody can answer two questions — “What do you like?” and “What do you like about it?” — then you can find something to sell them that they’ve never seen before and will probably enjoy a whole lot. I did it back when I worked (non-comics) retail, and my friends who are still in retail all know that that’s how things work.

So no, the DM doesn’t have to go away, especially not when the alternative is to make it a leaner and meaner murder machine.

“Putting aside the jobs that would be lost – would that be such a bad thing 4 the art form? (Presumably the original questioner means that, with Marvel and DC out of the picture there’d be less capes & corps)”

-It’s not about the art form. It was never about the art form. The art form is what it is. Ed Benes’s atrociously ugly comics deserve to sit alongside the Blankets dude’s sad sack comics as much as anything else. They both serve a different purpose and are aimed at a different audience, and each of them are just as valid as artistic pursuits as the other. Yeah, I think one of them is trash, but that’s just me.

Capes aren’t bad. Corporations aren’t bad. Corporate comics aren’t bad, either. What’s bad is the behavior that people get up to, whether that means screwing talent, running games on your audience, stiffing your retailers, and using predatory tactics to flood the market and then blaming readers for books flopping. Corporations and creator-owned dudes both run scams on people.

It’s not a corporate problem. It’s a people problem. Marvel and DC aren’t holding comics back from being an art form. They’re already an art form, and Marvel and DC have definitely produced books that are genuine classics of the art form. They aren’t the problem with comics. They’re problems in other areas, but erasing them? That won’t fix comics or make comics palatable to whoever.

It’s a real baby/bathwater proposition you’re talking about here, when the more reasonable answer is just “do better.”

I’ve long enjoyed Los Angeles as a setting for crime movies or novels, especially ones set just after World War II. It’s not my favorite, on account of New York between the ’60s and ’80s being the best setting for everything, but it’s up there. The way it sprawls, the cities that make up what we think of as Los Angeles and their own little cultures and legends, the interstates, the desert, the mountains… I can’t get enough of Los Angeles. It’s beautiful.

With the exception of going to LA whenever I can to visit friends, though, my LA experience is limited to movies, music, and books. Which is cool, yeah, but that’s pop culture, right? It isn’t true. It might be accurate, but it isn’t real. My friend Tucker put me onto this fantastic book a couple years back, John Buntin’s L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City. It’s really great. It’s a history that runs from the ’20s up through the Rodney King riots, and it really enhanced my mental picture of LA as a location and a culture. It almost retroactively justified my love of Los Angeles, in a way.

Gangster Squad debuted with a trailer that was something like this one:

They got me with the Just Blaaaaaaaaaaze!, Emma Stone as a cutie pie of a tired moll, Anthony Mackie, and Michael Peña. The rest is aight — Gosling was cool in Drive, Brolin is pretty okay, ROBERT PATRICK — but that’s what hooked me. All my friends who are smart about movies began each conversation we had about Gangster Squad with “Mannnnnnnnnnnn,” but I kept the faith, even after stories of reshoots and rewrites. Saw it release day, even.

I saw Killing Them Softly a couple weeks beforehand and didn’t really like it. I thought it was okayish, but a mess. But the further I got from it, the more I liked it. I thought about it a lot and finally got what they were going for. And now, I’m afraid I’ll love it if I see it again.

Gangster Squad is like that, but inverted. Here’s four reasons why.

Gangster Squad isn’t boring, but it ain’t new. If you’re going to it in search of spectacle, you will find it. Things explode while dudes walk away from them, there’s a posse up scene, there’s a plucky ethnic sidekick, and Ryan Gosling’s character approaches a shoot-out like life is cheap and he got bullets three-for-one at the gun store.

The weird thing about Gangster Squad is that you have to make a mental adjustment when you start watching it. I was expecting something in the vein of a knock-off Michael Mann or Tony Scott flick. Modern action and nihilism in an old setting. Instead, about ten minutes in, I had to readjust my expectations. There’s a strange noise filter over most of the movie, the dialogue is a bit much, and the gunplay is actually much more subdued and boring than I’d expected. I honestly had a moment where I thought “Wait, is this a weird period homage kind of movie and not a real movie? Why are they talking like that and why does it look like this?”

The setup is familiar, but one of the first details they reveal during the movie almost lost me entirely. Josh Brolin plays O’Mara (cool, Irish cop), a WWII vet (even better) who did some secret spy stuff during the war and is some kind of super-soldier (nah son). Ryan Gosling plays Wooters, another WWII vet (Wooters and O’Mara bond over the war at one point and it is the saddest, limpest thing since “O’Mara, you’re basically Captain America. Can you go kill some dudes for me, Nic Nolte playing Police Chief Bill Parker?”). Wooters is… dirty? Probably? He hangs out with mobsters, but he never actually does anything that’s dirty, so whatever. Some kid he liked dies in a shoot-out and Wooters has a change of heart and decides to start killing criminals. He also murders two criminals in the street immediately after but it still somehow a cop/allowed into crime clubs. Who cares. Emma Stone plays Grace Faraday, Mickey Cohen’s etiquette coach slash girlfriend. Great name. Flat character. Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen like a Dick Tracy villain crossed with the Joker.

The rest of the cast are just sketches. Anthony Mackie’s Coleman Harris is good with a thrown switchblade (sure, okay), hates heroin, and patrols whatever they said the black part of LA is. Robert Patrick and his Sam Elliott mustache is an ancient gunslinger by the name of Max Kennard. Michael Peña’s Navidad Ramirez is obviously Max Kennard’s illegitimate son who is following in his father’s footsteps and has the best name in the movie. (#2 is Grace Faraday because it’s a classy classic, followed by Coleman Harris. #worst is “Wooters.”)

That’s all they are. They’re a brief sentence and a one-liner in a gunfight to remind you that they have a personality.

Gangster Squad mines a rich period of American and Los Angeles history, but mucks it up for no reason. Part of my interest was seeing how they’d fit an action/adventure narrative into the very real story of Mickey Cohen. As it turns out, the answer is “They’re going to rewrite the story of Mickey Cohen entirely.”

Here’s a short list of things Mickey Cohen got up to in real life: sexual extortion, blackmail, boxing, bootlegging, walking into hotels and just firing his gun to try and draw some dudes out, sold love letters to a dead man to the news, and owned a bulletproof Cadillac.

Here’s a short list of things Mickey Cohen does in Gangster Squad: talks about boxing, orders hits, looks menacing, sets up a telephone scheme, says “I’m God,” and I guess goes to jail shortly before getting out of jail in the ’50s so he can hang out with Billy Graham and them.

He’s a cartoon, a Hollywood villain, and is nowhere near as amazing or fascinating as the real Mickey. He’s just some goon with a lot of other goons under him. He’s boring. He’s not scary, or charismatic, or anything. He’s Sean Penn in eight pounds of makeup, and that just isn’t interesting, especially when compared to the real deal. Mickey was flamboyant and charming. Penn doesn’t rate.

It doesn’t help that the squad of super cops all have gimmicks like they were superheroes. O’Mara is Captain America, Gosling is good at walking between crime and law (note: he doesn’t do this in any of the movie), Harris throws switchblades with deadly accuracy, Ramirez is plucky, and Kennard is I guess so old that he only knows how to use revolvers.

I realize that having regular dudes wouldn’t make for the most exciting movie, but we basically had regular dudes in real life and Cohen was eventually put away. Regular dudes on the warpath against an overwhelming threat? That’s great.

Everything doesn’t have to be the Dirty Dozen, and when you jazz it up like that, you lose a lot of the texture that made that time period so interesting. Open corruption, hard-driving politicians and cops attempting to clean up the joint, and actual factual race riots in the precincts are way more interesting than “oh yeah, this guy can throw a knife really fast.”

They should’ve mined that, instead of just taking the setting and stopping there. Real life is already rich and it doesn’t need generic embellishment to be watchable.

I love Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña, but what the heck were they doing in this movie? I will check out anything that Anthony Mackie and Michael Peña choose to do, pretty much, but Gangster Squad was amazingly mis-written from their perspective. Outside of a joke about Ramirez’s heritage being the reason why no one will partner with him but the dude who is obviously his absentee father and the black folks in LA hanging out with other blacks, that’s the only attention given to race in the movie.

Jackie Robinson was doing work and getting hate around the time that Gangster Squad was set, but somehow a black cop and a Mexican cop can hang out with white cops in bars and don’t get crap from their fellow police on account of their skin color? Nah, son. False. I don’t need a movie-stopping break for a discussion of the black and brown condition, but don’t suggest that things were all to the good by omitting the ugliness, either. They threw in a racial slur toward Mickey Cohen and that’s about it. It shatters what little verisimilitude the movie has, because America was wild racist in those days, including and/or especially the police.

Their roles are actually pretty symptomatic of what’s wrong with Gangster Squad. Instead of including them and doing a little extra legwork to show how they fit into the culture of the day, they’re just included in the crew with barely a mention given to their point. Coleman Harris is anti-heroin, Mickey Cohen deals heroin, so of course he’d be down with murdering him. Really? No. That is straight out of a comic book. O’Mara wouldn’t have gotten stand-up guys for this gig. He would’ve gotten a bunch of bent cops with guilty consciences.

Instead, he’s got the most unlikely Benetton Brigade ever, a big fat dollop of untruth that’s stinking up the whole movie. It’s pretending to be race-blind, and that’s terrible.

Ryan Gosling has a weird baby voice. Maybe I’m late to the party or something, but I’ve really only seen dude in Drive and he barely spoke in that. But in Gangster Squad, he says a lot of things, some of which are actually pretty cool but most of which are just “Because the genre demands it!” nonsense. “Don’t go,” he says, as Emma Stone walks out the door. “Don’t let me,” Emma Stone says, in the least convincing delivery of her life. “Please leave,” I say, watching this movie and wishing it was over.

Gosling’s baby voice distracted me the entire movie. His voice is pretty okay in real life, as this youtube video I found by searching “Ryan Gosling” shows, but his voice in Gangster Squad is like a pinched and nasal cross between his actual voice and some kind of awful Edward G Robinson impression, see?

But he waffles back and forth between baby voice and real voice and it doesn’t work at all.

Props for that scene where he fires at a car that’s speeding away, because his body language there is impeccable, but that’s in the trailer.

There’s probably a really good cut of Gangster Squad that halves the Gosling/Stone scenes, jacks up the police brutality, and ends with the whole squad dying that’s really, really good. As released, though? No thanks.

You should read L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City instead, and then catch the television adaptation of it whenever Frank Darabont gets around to completing it. Gangster Squad is worth waiting for until it comes on TBS at 0300.

drawn by Milo Manara, yapped from Marvel Unveils Milo Manara “Uncanny Avengers” #2 Variant – Comic Book Resources)

Milo Manara is like Frank Cho, in that he’s very good at one specific thing and really good at a few other things, but he got so good at that first thing that the rest of the work sometimes suffers.

Frank Cho draws great busty women and decent thick women. That’s his thing, and I feel like only one of those dudes that draws Cavewoman — I think I’m thinking of Budd Root and early Devon Massey, and even that’s a reach — could go bar-for-bar with him in that very specific race. But Cho’s storytelling and focus has suffered as a result. The sexy girls seem like crutches, immaculately drawn though they may be, and nothing else in his stories has been clicking half as well as the girls do. That’s part of why Liberty Meadows works for me while his later work hasn’t — he could indulge the funny animal/dumb joke side of himself in addition to the carnival boobs, so there was something more to read the series for beyond “What unlikely-but-sexy pose is Cho going to draw a hot girl in this time?”

Manara’s similar. He’s fantastic at drawing a specific type of woman. His women possess a smoldering sexiness, one that’s probably best typified by Megan Fox these days. It isn’t entirely my bag, maybe because it isn’t as close to being in line with my tastes as Cho’s trunked out girls are, but I can still recognize how unbelievably talented he is sometimes. He tends to draw women who are (often literally) two panels away from being in full erotic ecstasy, with their head thrown back and hair blowing in the wind and mouth a perfect O.

It sounds familiar and lazy, but there’s an art to it. A lot of the empty cheesecake we complain about in cape comics is approach Manara’s throne, but it gets screwed up at the most basic level. Manara knows what he’s doing, and it shows.

But, as near as I can tell… that’s about all he does. I mean, he’s still an incredible draftsman, but like Cho, his women have a certain gravity. They feel like the real focus of the story to me at this point, like each story is a vehicle that exists just so that you can see Manara (or Cho) draw pretty girls.

Which is fine, on a certain level… X-Women was interesting, if neutered, and Cho’s Shanna was pretty okay, but again, felt neutered. But it gets old so fast. Their new work feels like echoes of their old work, but without the swing and passion that made the old work so interesting. You know that these guys can go in, but it just feels like a book that was created on autopilot.

It’s one thing to see something familiar done well, but seeing something done well in the exact same way over and over and over… it gets boring, no matter how solid it is. So you end up with things like this shot of the Scarlet Witch, which is drawn very well but uninteresting beyond the weirdness of one of the greatest porno artists ever drawing Marvel characters. When you expand it to include the rest of his covers, which are similarly vacant… I dunno. It ain’t working for me.

(I’m bad at email. A guy emailed me with a question about Django, so I answered it in my usual format: thirty-thousand words of overkill. Then, after reading a reply from him, I finally read the subject line of the email and I realized he meant to interview me for a quote, rather than being simply curious about stuff. Whoops. But, this is me. And is more:)

The Django Unchained and Blazing Saddles comparison is, at best, a really cheap comparison. The two movies are too different to compare directly. It’s sort of the same thing that leads people to compare Amistad and Beloved to Django Unchained. They share a few surface similarities, but as soon as you step into the waters, they’re entirely different animals.

The short version is that Blazing Saddles is a comedy (or satire, or whatever — let’s go with comedy because it’s easier) set in the late 1800s and Django Unchained is a western set in the antebellum south. Django Unchained has funny moments, and a lot of them, but the way it uses humor couldn’t be more different from how Blazing Saddles does.

Saddles wants you to laugh until you cry. Brooks layers in pointed jokes like the black sheriff, goofy stuff like anachronistic gags, and goofy names because he wants to make you laugh until you cry. It has a point that’s worth saying — most good comedy does, I think — but it isn’t controversial in the same way that Django is. It’s tackling sensitive subjects, but not to the extremes that Django is.

The sticking point with Django is that it’s about slavery, something we tend to tiptoe around, and it’s an action movie. More than anything else, Django Unchained is about a dude trying to get his wife back, even if he has to kill people in the process. It’s set in 1858 and 1859, so they couldn’t avoid slavery or excise it from the narrative without being dishonest. So Tarantino made the decision to tackle it head-on, to make slavery and its issues text instead of subtext, and that’s where the sticking point is. Considering how sensitive slavery is, an action movie set in that time period runs the risk of disrespecting, or maybe not paying enough fealty, to the very real misery that slavery caused.

Now, Django Unchained is funny. It’s really funny. But where Brooks was trying to make you laugh until you cried, Tarantino is trying to make you laugh to keep you from crying. He’s dealing with one of the most painful periods in American history, and having to confront the reality of that pain when you’re just trying to have a good time at the movies is tough. If he tilts too far in one direction, he’s disrespecting the subject by not treating it seriously enough. If he tilts it too far in the other, he makes a movie that feels more like a lecture than anything else (most slavery movies are the latter, here).

So he walks down the middle. The violence against the black characters in Django Unchained is realistic, whether that means rooted in history (the chains, the masks, the whips) or treated realistically if they’re fake (the mandingo fights, which are uncomfortably brutal and not like the fistfights we see in flicks usually). The white guys get geysers of blood and exploded and so on. There’s a marked difference there.

But the thing is, realistic depictions of pain suck. It’s a HUGE bummer, to understate things, and you run the risk of losing the audience that came to see dudes get shot and damsels de-distressed. So Tarantino layers in jokes that we can appreciate from our 2013 perch, but also jokes that work just because they’re good jokes. We laugh at the reaction to Django on a horse because, guys, really, people were SO backward. We laugh at the regulators arguing over their masks because it makes what those guys eventually turned into — church-burners, child killers, and terrorists — look like buffoons. It’s an agreeable idea to us, and executed in a way that’s fantastic.

That’s the reason why comparing Django Unchained to Blazing Saddles doesn’t work. Outside of black cowboys, black dudes on horses, and laughter, they don’t share too much at all. Django’s funny because it’s needed to keep you pushing past the pain. Blazing Saddles is funny because it’s a comedy.