Just a quick post here. I’ve talked before about my brother Geremy. He’s part of a production company called Legs that’s so far pulled off a music video about a creepy puppet made of meat with a disturbingly catchy theme song and did a strange, explosive music video for Florence and the Machine. Now I discover my brother’s latest vision.

I am so proud.

Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet (abridged HTML, unabridged PDF) (04/1964)

The three biggest black figures for me are Richard Pryor, Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X. I learned something important from each of them. Pryor taught perspective, Ali taught confidence, and Malcolm taught the importance of intelligence in all things.

Speak plainly, be friendly, consider your position, and if the time comes, you put the hammer down. You don’t thank someone for finally doing the right thing they should have been doing all along. You don’t accept anything less than what you deserve. Your anger should be a scalpel, not a bludgeon. Get the jelly out of your spine and keep cobwebs out of your mind. When it comes to right and wrong, there is no compromise. There is either the ballot or the bullet.

A brief quote:

“How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what’s already yours? You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress. And I love my Brother Lomax, the way he pointed out we’re right back where we were in 1954. We’re not even as far up as we were in 1954. We’re behind where we were in 1954. There’s more segregation now than there was in 1954. There’s more racial animosity, more racial hatred, more racial violence today in 1964, than there was in 1954. Where is the progress?

And now you’re facing a situation where the young Negroes coming up. They don’t want to hear that “turn the-other-cheek” stuff, no. In Jacksonville, those were teenagers, they were throwing Molotov cocktails. Negroes have never done that before. But it shows you there’s a new deal coming in. There’s new thinking coming in. There’s new strategy coming in. It’ll be Molotov cocktails this month, hand grenades next month, and something else next month. It’ll be ballots, or it’ll be bullets. It’ll be liberty, or it will be death.

Malcolm X would have been eighty-five years old today. Happy birthday.

Johanna Draper Carlson has the details on who won what at this past weekend’s Glyph Comics Awards at ECBACC. She also has some interesting remarks on the awards, particularly in terms of women represented and the number of projects that won multiple awards.

Here’s the list, and commentary/thoughts from me below.

Story of the Year
Unknown Soldier #13-14, Joshua Dysart, writer, Pat Masioni, artist

Best Writer
Alex Simmons, Archie & Friends

Best Artist
Jay Potts, World of Hurt

Best Male Character
Isaiah Pastor, World of Hurt, created by Jay Potts, writer and artist

Best Female Character
Aya, Aya: The Secrets Come Out, created by Marguerite Abouet, writer, Clement Oubrerie, artist

Rising Star Award
Jay Potts, World of Hurt

Best Reprint Publication
Aya: The Secrets Come Out, Drawn & Quarterly

Best Cover
Luke Cage Noir #1, Tim Bradstreet, illustrator

Best Comic Strip
The K Chronicles, Keith Knight, writer and artist

Fan Award for Best Comic
Luke Cage Noir, Mike Benson & Adam Glass, writers, Shawn Martinbrough, artist

I’m not sure of the protocol on judges speaking after the fact, so if I’ve over-stepped, please forgive me. I co-judged this years awards, and I’ve got to say that I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out. Here’s a few brief anecdotes/bits about the winners-

–Unknown Soldier 13 and 14 are collected in Unknown Soldier Vol. 2: Easy Kill. Dysart discusses a few of his favorite pages from that volume on DC’s Graphic Content blog. I talked a bit about Unknown Soldier last year as part of BHM, but I’m well past due for an update.

-In the “Small World” department, it turns out Alex Simmons co-created the dead and forgotten DC hero Orpheus, who I did a poor job of writing about a few years back. Simmons has been telling all-ages tales on Archie & Friends for the past couple years, in addition to documentaries, biographies, working with MoCCA, and launching a comic convention. The paths people take in comics are kind of funny sometimes. I think Tom DeFalco and Herb Trimpe have both done work on the Archie comics in recent memory, to name a couple other names you probably recognize. Archie & Friends All-Stars Volume 3: The Cartoon Life Of Chuck Clayton is the trade collecting the story of Chuck Clayton, “teenage cartoonist” and former Generic Comic Book Black Guy.

-Jay Potts cleaned up! Read my interview with him and then go read World of Hurt.

–I’m glad Abouet and Oubrerie’s Aya got some attention.

–Luke Cage Noir is out in a premiere hardcover, and it was a pretty good tale. I didn’t talk about it on the site, but the Funnybook Babylon gang mostly dug it. I liked how it played upon some of my preconceived notions going into the book, and the creators did a good job of telling a solid done-in-one tale. Here’s the cover:

-I like that most of these aren’t from the Big Two. I don’t say that to be mean or whatever, because the Big Two do what they do fairly well for the most part, but I think the really important work, the stuff you need to be paying attention two, aren’t going to come out of their factories. Supporting black comics isn’t supporting Luke Cage. It’s supporting the people who make the books. I think the Glyph awards do a great job of representing that. Bravo.

Over at Rich Johnston’s blog, some b-team scrub named Ryan Mullenix wrote up a post in response to Chris Sims’s piece on the racial politics of DC’s current style. Sims’s piece was good, and I liked seeing frank discussion of racial issues on a big-name site. Mullenix’s piece… well.

I did it better a year and a half ago.

I’ve got a gang of problems with the piece. There’s no citations, no context, nothing that explains what was going on in the books, no creative teams, no historical context, and nothing worthy of examination. It’s a loose collection of anecdotes piggybacking on a pretty good piece in an attempt to troll for hits. It’s lowest common denominator work at best, and cynical hit-whoring at worst. If you can’t even spell somebody’s name right… well, the craft shows.

These lists do no one any favors. All they do is arm people for crappy, hysterical battles where both sides are too busy shouting to do any listening or learning. “Well CASSANDRA CAIN is ASIATIC!” You couldn’t get any more specific than that, man? What’s more, you couldn’t find something better than some outdated way to say “asian?” Is Cass Cain a member of the Nation of Gods and Earths? You couldn’t take the time to figure out which type of Latino Kyle Rayner is? You couldn’t spell Teth-Adam correctly?

Johnston says that Mullenix “seems to find a striking overall theme.” I think he found the exact sort of thing that makes talking race online such a pain in the neck. I think he found a surefire, cynical, and effective way to log some fat hits for advertisers. I think that he didn’t say anything worth reading. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m wrong.

But people who don’t know anything should speak when spoken to.

Cinder! No, not this Cinder, I mean the one created (I assume) by Eric Wallace and Fabrizio Fiorentino for their upcoming run on Titans. This excerpt is from Titans: Villains for Hire Special, which introduces the team to the DC Universe and readers by interspersing their motivation stories with shots of Ryan “The Atom” Choi getting murked. Here’s Cinder’s origin, featuring art by Sergio Ariño (I think–the title card is unclear on who did what, but it definitely isn’t Mike Mayhew or Fiorentino). She has the power to… well, if you’ve ever played Killer Instinct, she’s basically Cinder from that, but with boobs and a mad-on for child molesters. Read on:

Possible punchlines:
-Never trust a big butt and a smile.
-If you think she’s bad, her sister Glacius is ten times worse!
-Doctor, I’ve got this burning sensation…
-She’s cute, but I heard she burns through her boyfriends like nobody’s business.

I liked Wallace and Fiorentino’s Ink. Thought it was pretty clever, and a good read overall. But Titans… might have to give that one a miss.

I pretty much had the same reaction as Deathstroke to this scene, too. “…huh.” Volcano Vagina, man. What’re you gonna do?

* finally, I’m not sure I understand either Sean Collins’ piece on superhero regression or the piece that inspired it, but it seems to me kind of dopey to pin racial diversification on swapping people out of costumes. The worlds that the superheroes live on have such a hopelessly retrograde and inadequate sense of anything other than their white people that I don’t hold out for them ever getting better.

-Tom Spurgeon, Random Comics News Story Round-Up 05/12/10

He’s right, of course.

Most cape books barely have a handle on decent characterization, and expecting the Big Two to catch up with reality is dumb. Sorry, Charlie, but that just ain’t gonna happen.

I’m not saying that they don’t manage to do nice things with colored folks sometimes. I quite liked Jason Rusch as Firestorm, and Jaime Reyes as Blue Beetle gave DC a nice Spider-Man character. Cassandra Cain had a fantastic hook, and John Henry Irons was a nice twist on the super-scientist character. Even boring old John Stewart is not without his charms.

But, when you get down to brass tacks–all of these are third stringers and supporting characters now. And guess who gets the axe when the time comes to up the ante? Guess who can fade into obscurity with minimal impact on the status quo? If you expect the Big Two to push a more diverse or realistic cast rather than pandering to the idea of legacy or iconic characters… well.

How’s that working out for you?

I wrote about Brandon Graham’s King City for Comics Alliance.

It’s dumb, but I’ve been trying to write about King City for ages. The last time I tried was around issue 4. I think the final text on CA is a mixture of ideas and sentences from three different drafts from several months worth of starts and stops. I finally got focused and put some elbow grease into it, using issue four as the lynchpin, and I think it turned out pretty okay.

The thing is, King City may well be my favorite ongoing comic right now. It’s a book I save to read until several days after new comics day, in part because I know it is going to be fantastic and in part because it makes everyone else making comics look lazy. It’s that serious. Graham is filling each page with amazing ideas and the briefest of thoughts and it all works. It hangs together. Reading King City is like playing Jenga with ideas and concepts, but it never tips over. It stays upright. The oversized floppy format, the black and white art, the page count, the backups, the back cover, the whole book works. It’s cluttered and messy and it all works.

(I haven’t been able to get “Sometimes her cigarette smoke smells like flowers” out of my head since I read it.)

I didn’t want to screw it up when I wrote about it. This is the book that everyone should be reading. It’s your stepping stone to a world of great comics. And like, writing it up and doing a halfway job on it? That’d just be sloppy. I wouldn’t do it justice. I think the CA piece comes as close as I can right now. I may write about it more later on, as the series lumbers toward its conclusion.

One more thing.

I love this comic, man. Y’all should be reading it.

Newsarama has an interview with Fred Van Lente about Shadowland: Power Man. A new Power Man is spinning out of Shadowland, the big crossover where Daredevil turns into Donald Rumsfeld and waterboards and then kills Bullseye, or something. I’m kinda ehhh on Daredevil at the moment (hey how much worse can his life get oh is that so), so I was gonna skip Shadowland. But, Fred Van Lente has a good track record, and I liked the Scorpion he introduced in addition to several dozen of his comics, so I read the interview to see what was up.

And I mean, I’m still sorta skeptical. Daredevil is a Debbie Downer, Shadowland sounds kinda silly, and do we really need a new Power Man? But FVL has done stories with Scorpion and the Savage She-Hulk that I dug a lot, he wrote the best story to come out of Marvel last year, and he included Rocket Racer in Modok’s 11. I’m not too fond of Incredible Herc, but FVL’s overall track record seems to be “Writes comics specifically for David Brothers.”

So it sounds interesting, but I’m kinda like “Maybe I’ll catch the trade.” Except:
Van Lente: One of the things I love about this series is, to me it proves that you can have “street characters” where it’s not dark and foreboding. It can be fun. And “urban setting” doesn’t mean it has to be a grim, noir sort of setting.

Yes, it does have a very youthful feel to it. You have a kid acquiring superpowers and donning a costume and going out there and kicking ass, and making some good money for it. It certainly beats delivering pizzas as an after-school job. His powers, like all classic Marvel characters, are rooted in tragedy. And what that tragedy is, and how it’s affected his family, and how it connects to Bullseye will be explicated as the series goes along.
and
If you were looking for the return of Comanche and Shades, you need go no further than Shadowland: Power Man. And Cottonmouth, another one of my Luke Cage faves, is coming back. I have an inexplicable fondness for Discus and Stiletto, and let us not forget the greatest Luke Cage villain of all time, Cockroach Hamilton, with his six barrel shotgun.

Shades & Comanche in comics again after all these years?

From Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal 2, with words by JT Krul and art by Geraldo Borges:

What do the judges say?

Swing and a miss, b.