First Wave is exactly what I need right now. No tragedy porn, no endless continuity, no terrible life-altering baggage; there’s just Doc Savage’s disregard for keeping his nipples covered and Batman’s Fearsome Bat-hug.
I also love that the victim looks about ten times as horrified at Batman saving her than she did when she was being threatened by a man with a rusty knife and poor dental work.
Mark Millar on the opening scene of Ultimate Avengers #5:
PS Wasp wasn’t raped. These guys were political torturers, but it wasn’t sexual. Sexual violence in Marvel books is a bit weird and I’ve avoided since I started (as far as I recall) as this stuff is all available to kids.
Political torture? What did they do, tie her to a chair and read her some Glenn Beck quotes? Did they get into a really, really heated debate over healthcare? Maybe diss her for voting Perot? Did they make fun of her for thinking that dead prez’s (bounce to this…) socialist movement was going anywhere?
Did they make her cry when they carefully explained that no one will ever spend as much on education as they do on war?
C’mon, son.
We don’t believe you, you need more people.
I’ve tripped and fallen across half a dozen links this morning about censorship and labeling and adult material and so on. I figure that’s a sign, so I’m throwing these out for you to check out. Keep in mind that various links may or may not be nsfw.
-Steve Bissette has been doing a great series of retrospectives on a comics controversy from 1986/1987. I came across it via a link to Colleen Doran’s blog, where she discusses her role in the controversy. Bissette has several (prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4) posts up currently, all of which are worth reading. Bissette’s got a really engaging style of writing and does a pretty good job of collating all this data. It’s a fun history lesson.
-Molly Crabapple’s new book, Scarlett Takes Manhattan, is not being carried by Barnes & Noble for being “too pornographic.” Amazon’s got it, though.
-There’s an amendment to a child porn law in Japan being proposed right now that’ll “restrict sexually provocative, “visual depictions” of characters who sound or appear to be 18 years old or younger.” My understanding is that it is broadly worded, poorly researched, and unconstitutional. Yoshitoshi ABe has a particularly interesting opposition to the amendment, and a few dozen manga creators and publishers on Twitter have vocalized their opposition.
I usually hate empty linkblogging, but I’m still organizing my thoughts. I figure I’ll have something tomorrow or the day after. I will say that I am generally anti-labeling/ratings- I don’t think that you can apply a system with an objective scale to something as subjective as art, be it written, drawn, painted, scrawled, filmed, or programmed.
To wedge myself out of the pit of mild crankiness I’ve been in regarding comics, I have started looking ahead to things that I look forward to.
Thank you, The Brave and the Bold, for seemingly being an impossible title to bog down in misery, no matter what medium you are in. Here we have a female team-up book, a happy-seeming story, and complete indifference to current continuity. It has everything I’m looking for in a book.
Moreover, it has Barbara Gordon as part of it all. This is the kicker for me. She’s a sentimental favorite, and while I think her role as Oracle is great character development, I can’t get over the fun she had as Batgirl. I’m always willing to see more of that. This and Wonder-Con, another reason to look forward to April.
Ron Wimberly’s been in Japan for the past few weeks, making me mad jealous. I’ve only been once, in the fall of ’08 for a work trip. All expenses paid was nice, but staying only a week was too short. But them’s the breaks! I did buy about five hundred bucks worth of clothes, though!
Ron’s been busy, drawing comics and making connects. He’s got a big deal coming up, so I’ll let him (and Benetton) tell it:
On Saturday, March 13th, Benetton Japan will be hosting a live paint show by an American artist, Ronald Wimberly, to celebrate Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku’s renewal opening. During the event, which takes place from 3pm to 9pm, the artist will be painting on a big screen in the window, which will be reported live on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/benettonpress.
So, details:
Where: Benetton Mega Store Shinjuku‘s official Ustream channel
When: If you’re EST (where Brooklyn at), 0100-0300 Saturday morning. For those of us in PST (From Oakland to Sac-town, the Bay Area and back down), you can check it out from 2200-0000 on Friday evening. For those inbetween… do the math.
Who: Ron Wimberly, aka dπ
What: Live painting
Tune in, you might see something cool. In the meantime, check out the kid’s site, revisit his Black Future Month interview, or get familiar with GratNin. You can also read the press release.
Tucker Stone compares baby killing at Marvel vs toddler killing at DC:
We at Marvel have always worked to support the trend towards ultraviolence–our readers like it, we like it, and you’d have to be fucking terrified of money to put a leash on Mark Millar. But we’ve always tried to remember that, at the end of the day, we’re making a product, a bit of fun, and that if we take it too seriously, if we try to make some kind of philosophical statement about justice or heroism, we’re going to end up with a dour, boring slice of poorly written shit.
How do you like your brutish and child-like extreme violence? Do you like it to look deeply into your eyes, desperately asking if you get it? Do you understand what has to happen to make a good man do wrong? Do you see how he can’t stop killing, as if he’s developed a taste for blood? Did you see those bloody socks? Do you get it? This is horrible, do you finally understand the stakes?
Or do you like it to be off the cuff violent, an act done simply because That’s What Bad Guys Do, something borrowed from Crank 2 or the best of crime cinema? No message, and no meaning beyond, “Yeah, this guy? He’s a douchebag.”
Okay. You ordered a bunch of Marvel Omnibus titles from Amazon as part of The $14.99 Glitch and they’ve been cancelled. You probably knew they would do. But you may have received a previous e-mail saying that you would get at least one at the magic price. Or maybe Amazon never got round to emailing you at all, they just deleted the order from your account. And you’re feeling a bit miffed.
I’m geting reports that people who have complained, even using the Amazon Call Me Back feature on the website, have been getting recompense from the multinational online retailer.
[…]
Me, I’m not complaining. I don’t think Amazon owe me anything. I understand however, that you may feel differently.
If you feel differently, you’re the laziest kind of crook there is. Tucker Stone breaks the situation down better than I can right now:
But when they get called on it, what do they say?
“I’m going to file a class action lawsuit” – some random infant, repeated exponentially
That’s the kind of response that would make George Washington weep. A class action lawsuit? Really? That’s the legacy you want written across your face, attached forever to your name?
Crime is a holy profession, and to join its brotherhood is to put oneself alongside this country’s greatest heroes. After oil and weapons production, it’s the most successful industry on the planet, with a storied history that stretches further than any religion. Getting caught out in it–even if all you did was take advantage of a gigantic corporation’s obvious pricing error–is something that should be handled with nothing short of the pride of a Dwayne Michael Carter. Playing the hurt consumer in this situation is the equivalent of standing in the door of the bank after the ATM accidently farts out an extra 20 and refusing to hand it over. It’s spitting on the flag, it’s saying that you’re only willing to play the game if everybody agrees to do it by your rules, and your rules are these: you can’t have done anything wrong, because it’s somebody else’s fault.
Amazon doesn’t owe you a single solitary thing. They’d be well within their rights to cancel every order and not lose a few thousand bucks. There’s even a note in their TOS that sometimes, on occasion, books are mispriced, and sucks to be you if they charge you the full price. Until the book ships, they do not charge your card, meaning that there is no sale. That means they owe you nothing until the book leaves their warehouse.
So to call them up and ask for a refund for time wasted ordering obviously mistakenly marked down books makes you something like a jerk. They don’t owe you anything. If anything, you owe them whatever the actual price of the book you ordered was. It’s a blessing that they honored any of the orders, considering it was such an obvious cheat that we were all taking advantage of. I got a few Ultimate Spidey HCs and I’m pretty happy about that. I didn’t get a Tomb of Dracula, but so what? I don’t expect Wal-mart to let me buy eighteen computers that got marked down to 50 bucks because somebody dropped a decimal point, and they’re under no obligation to let me do that.
Basically, don’t be the old lady at Kroger with a fistful of coupons, trying to game the system and score a dozen eggs for free and getting pissed off and demanding recompense when the manager is like “Sorry, we’re all out.” You played the game with a few aces hidden up your sleeve. If you lost, so what? You lost what, ten minutes of your time? A couple megabytes off your bandwidth for the month?
Get real.
“The greatest rapper of all time died on March 9th.” Christopher Wallace died 13 years ago, after a career where he brought jiggy and drugs and excess to the mainstream and created a swagger hundreds of rappers have jacked since. Whether it’s “You got it, nigga, flaunt it” or “Picture me being scared of a nigga that breathe the same air as me,” Biggie is probably the blueprint for your favorite rapper.
RIP
I’ve done a few background-type redesigns on the site over the past year or so– widening the post box, changing the way the headers work, fonts, etc etc. My secret guru/consultant in that has been David Cole of Sleepover. He does webdesign professionally, and he’s the guy I go to with dumb questions like “Is this how CSS works?” and “Hang on, is this hard to do?”
He did me the favor of doing some minor web work, or so he says, on the site over the weekend. He’s the reason why each post, the sidebar, the headers, and the navigation are their own separate elements now. There are some other background things you probably won’t notice– cleaning up functions, straightening out some navigation stuff, blah blah blah. I went in behind him and added in a few dozen headers (some of which Gav mailed to me, oh, eight months ago or so). I’ll be doing some sidebar work over the next week, too.
Anyway, he did me a solid and I wanted to publicly thank him. Check out Sleepover, take a peek at what he does to show off, and if you’re in the market for some web design work… give Sleepover a shout. If he’ll do stuff for my piddly little comics blog, he’ll definitely make your corporate site prettified.
Thanks David!
The new Iron Man trailer premiered tonight during Jimmy Kimmel. As expected, it looks like heat rocks. Check it out on Apple’s site if you want to watch it in high def or hit the video below for the official Youtube HD embed.
I’m liking what the story is shaping up to be. The US gov’t getting in bed with Whiplash to bring down Stark, Rhodey backing up his homey, Pepper still not falling for his tricks, Scarlett Johansson looking like Scarlett Johansson… it’s gonna be a good’un.
