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.

The exact moment the atomic bomb stopped being abstract, a symbol of America’s cultural and military superiority, was partway through my first and — so far — only viewing of the anime adaptation of Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen. I don’t remember exactly when I saw it, but I googled around and it was probably around 1994 or 1995. I’d have been a pre-teen at the time, old enough to rent movies but not old enough to have my own money to rent those. I cajoled my mom into bringing that one home because the other options were probably some Masami Obari flicks with sexy girls on the cover. Barefoot Gen was the safest choice, I guess because it looked like a movie for kids. It had a little boy running on the cover, right?

It’s about Gen, a young child living in Hiroshima, and it chronicles his life before and after Little Boy was dropped on the town. It’s really good, but I’ve only ever watched it once. I dubbed it off onto a tape after, and I later bought it on DVD, because I feel like it’s a movie that I need to own. It feels important.

It feels important because it devastated me as a kid. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember every little detail, or even how it ended. But I do remember the shots of the plane flying over the town, the way the map of the town snapped from color to black and white with a bright orange cloud once the bomb went off, and the horrors that followed. Humans flashing to dust, melting in the heat, and dying slowly in their own homes while begging and praying for someone to help their children.

I still don’t really cry at movies, but I sobbed my guts out watching Barefoot Gen and probably would if I watched it again. The last movie to give me that reaction was Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke. I got so mad and sad at the utterly pointless loss of life and needless trauma that I just couldn’t take it. I bought the sequel, God Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise, like 18 months ago and still haven’t watched it, because I figure I’ll react the same way again.

Barefoot Gen is an important movie to me because it turned an abstract idea concrete. “The atomic bomb is awe-inspiring and amazing, a true triumph for America!” turned into “The atomic bomb is awful. We murdered innocent people and the effects are still being felt today.” I’ve spent most of my life on or around air force bases, and as a kid, war was exciting. Fighter pilots, right? Glamorous. Awesome. But I didn’t understand the cost. I didn’t understand collateral damage, acceptable losses, and war crimes.

I was a kid then. I’m glad I learned better.

Keiji Nakazawa died of lung cancer on 12/19/2012. He was born on 03/14/1939, and was in Hiroshima when Little Boy was dropped out of the Enola Gay at 0815 on 08/06/1945. He survived, but many of his family members didn’t. His baby sister survived the bombing, but died later.

Barefoot Gen is on DVD, but it looks like prices have skyrocketed since Nakazawa died. If you can find it at a price that works for you, give it a watch.

Merry Christmas, you filthy animals. Service will resume at a later date.

(this is piracy, so if it makes you laugh until you cry like I know it’s going to, pay what you owe and cop those boxed sets. this show is a+.)

When they announced that Twinkies were going away, I didn’t really care that much because I tended to stay away from Twinkies when I grew up. The end of Bazooka Joe comic strips stung slightly, but I only really remembered paying attention to them in the days of pee-wee baseball. I stopped reading Nintendo Power shortly after the 100th issue in 1997, but when I heard that the publication was being canceled, I felt it. Sure, I haven’t read any of it in 15 years and I was more surprised that it lasted this long, but it still represents a chunk of my childhood and seeing it snuffed out takes a lot out of me.

Today at work, we got in the new issue. The final issue, featuring a cover made to look much like the one that came out in 1988.

Which reminds me, why hasn’t Nintendo ever brought back Wart? They use Shy-Guys and Birdo, but they never reintroduced King Wart. What’s with that? And where’s that purple alien guy from Super Mario Land?

Anyway, I had to pick up the final issue for old time’s sake. While they’re long gone, I did have those initial issues, like the creepy one with Simon Belmont on the cover holding Dracula’s decapitated head, garnering the complaints of many parents. I think I stopped when I came to terms with the fact that Nintendo Power is a propaganda piece from Nintendo. It was a stage of growing up. There were better magazines out there (though certainly not that waste of paper Gamepro) and other game systems worth reading about and the chance that somebody might completely lay into a terrible game.

And you know what? Back in the days of the NES, that stuff wasn’t necessary. Nintendo Power obviously had the better finger on the pulse of Nintendo news than the other magazines. Nintendo practically had a monopoly on video games worth playing until the Genesis arrived. Most importantly, it didn’t matter that it was propaganda and that they were talking up how great nearly every single game was. Back in those times, being a kid in the NES era, nearly every single game WAS worth playing. It was a simpler time where you were either stuck owning a game or you were renting for the weekend. Unless the game was confusing or flat out terrible, you’d play the everloving hell out of it. Years later, I found out that Ikari Warriors 2: Victory Road was a bad game. My seven-year-old self played that thing for weeks!

I haven’t had much time to really sit down and read the final issue, but the last few pages caught my eye. Early on, Nintendo Power had a regular comic interlude called Howard and Nester, based on Nintendo employee Howard Phillips. The series went on for a while, eventually Howard left and it became teenage know-it-all Nester’s show. After the failure of his Virtual Boy game, Nester fell into obscurity, making a special appearance every now and then.

Not counting the “GAME OVER” final-final page, this is how Nintendo Power volume 285 ends. Not with Howard and Nester, but Nester and Maxwell, showing off how many years have passed since that clay Super Mario Brothers 2 cover from back in the day.

The last thing I noticed in that final panel was Howard’s bowtie in the center. Damn. :frown:

To cheer myself up, here’s a completely metal cover of the Ikaris Warriors 2: Victory Road main theme by Ryan8bit that I discovered many years ago.

I don’t know about you, but this makes me want to surf on a tank while on my way to fight the devil.

Today’s the big voting day, because apparently it is an election year? Who knew.

Anyway, go out and vote if you feel led to do so. If you’re in California, here’s a guide to the state propositions. Some of them are tricky. I mean, obviously you want to vote against human trafficking, but apparently that prop is slanted to unfairly malign sex workers and makes colored folks even more vulnerable to arrest? Read up before you go out! Politics is an ugly, lie-infested, dissembling business, so don’t get caught out there. Here’s another guide, if you want to compare/contrast or check for biases in whatever direction. I haven’t looked at the latter one yet, but my main man Shumphries just put it on twitter and I figure having two sites to look at is better than just one.

Don’t be a dick to non-voters today, either. Not voting is in no way, shape, or form a vote for “the other guy” (whichever other guy it is you hate). It’s choosing the third option, the “you’re both terrible” option. Mitt Romney hates women, Barack Obama has been killing brown faces overseas. Pros and cons, cons and pros. Neither of these dudes are perfect, and both of them are beholden to corporations who are not Us. If you feel strongly about something, don’t let people peer pressure you into compromising your values. Vote with your heart and your mind, and if it doesn’t feel right to you, you don’t have to do it. Voting and not voting are both valid political choices.

Pundits are saying 40% of eligible Americans aren’t going to vote today. This isn’t a sign that they are lazy or stupid or hateful. That opinion is as dumb as the old “Oh, high schools are just meant to turn out unthinking moronic robots” nonsense. If almost half of eligible people aren’t voting, then that’s a sign that something is deeply wrong with our process. If they don’t care, what made them not care? If they don’t feel like their vote counts, that needs to be addressed.

“Vote for the lesser of two evils!” is a thing I’ve heard over and over this election, but somehow voting for an evil is more acceptable than rejecting evil outright. We don’t have to compromise if we don’t want to.

Vote or don’t. All I ask is that you think real hard before you do either, because doing either one of them just because doesn’t help anyone. I, personally, know what I’m doing. I’ve put a lot of thought into it. Rev up your mind, crank up your conscience, and make the decision that feels right to you.

Part of fun of writing about comics, for me at least, is the competition. I don’t mean scrapping with scrubs or anything, either. I mostly mean competing against my friends. Gavin, who is currently without power and won’t see this until he’s back, has been my funniest friend for going on ten years now. No one throws shade like the late, lamented Pedro Tejeda, the ghost of Funnybook Babylon. No one is as well-reasoned as Jamaal Thomas. Nobody’s got an eye for comics history like Chris Eckert. Tucker Stone is the king of insight, and Abhay has punchlines that’ll stop you cold. All these dudes do things that I wish I could do better, and I really dig seeing them work their craft.

Sometimes, my friends will do things that make me jealous, as in this post by Sean Witkze called Away From Human Memory: Editing And Composition In Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns’. I got to read an earlier draft of it and it was good, but I’m still jealous.

Sean’s talking about how Miller controls the reader in Dark Knight Returns and Ronin, and it’s really good stuff. I know the basics of this stuff, how big panels make you do one thing and a stutter-y cascade of panels make you do another, but Sean turns jargon plain and lays everything bare, revealing new facets of works I thought I knew well. And I mean, I love Frank Miller’s body of work, I’ve been through these books dozens of times… but Sean is revealing the iceberg just beneath the water’s surface here.

It’s way deeper than “Frank Miller draws nice.”

Sean elevated the game. If you’re trying to figure out how comics work, to examine what a master did in a period when he dropped more classics than most people get in a lifetime, you should read it.

This week starts the first chapter of Jonathan Maberry’s Marvel Universe vs. the Avengers, expanding on the world created in Marvel Universe vs. Punisher and Marvel Universe vs. Wolverine. This time the main character is Hawkeye, coming to grips in a world rapidly succumbing to a biological defect. As always, it reads like how Marvel Zombies should have been and as far as I can tell is the first and only comic to ever depict Squirrel Girl as being killed. So it has that going for it!

Early into the issue, there’s a page depicting Captain America giving an inspirational speech to the various Avengers teams and other heroes. Looking at this page caused me a moment of confusion followed by genuine laughter because I know exactly what went wrong.

Can you spot it? Can you spot where artist Leandro Fernandez screwed up? Let’s just say that there was a bit of a miscommunication in there.

I like it when songs, or musicians, rather, come up with an ill metaphor for living life. I like it because it’s always interesting to see life through someone else’s eyes, and seeing how they approach that life is often valuable or uplifting. My favorite’s probably always going to be the pigeon/phoenix metaphor on Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein (Pigeon bird got a breath left/ Heart beat no more/ Phoenix bird morph and we live off the G-force”), but XV’s “Mirror’s Edge” is one that I think about a lot lately, and dig a whole lot.

The hook sets it up: “It feels like I’m running on walls, and I don’t wanna touch the ground/ And if you say that I’m lost, then I don’t wanna be found.” The verses are about being on the come-up and living life better than you ever expected, and they always come back around to the chorus by way of a direct lead-in. The chorus is kind of the point of the song. It’s what XV is feeling about where he’s at in life.

I like that this song sounds very open and casual, kinda dreamy. There’s a pointed refusal in the chorus and XV’s delivery, like someone’s pointed out that he’s about to fall, but he’s too busy enjoying the moment to take a moment to accept that. And that’s why this POV works so well for me, I think. It’s about being in a moment and appreciating that moment. It’s about understanding that moments are momentary, but that isn’t a reason to not enjoy that moment to the fullest.

But “Mirror’s Edge” is also about appreciating what you’ve got, but not getting so wrapped up in that moment that you lose sight of what’s coming. Enjoy, but be prepared. Walk that knife’s edge, but have the stitches ready. You can hear it in his voice. He’s incredulous and elated, but with his eyes wide open.

It’s a simple metaphor about living in the moment, but it works so well because XV doesn’t drape it in magic tricks or wordplay. Even if you don’t know Mirror’s Edge, the game that inspired XV’s song, it’s easy to get. It works.

(The reverb-y sound of the song puts me in mind of Gorillaz’s “Doncamatic,” too.)

I’ve been reading this new-ish site, Strawberry Fields Whatever. It’s the blog of Laura Jane Faulds, Elizabeth Barker, and Jen May. I don’t know Jen beyond her art, but Liz & LJ have been Twitter friends with me for a while now, and I bought their Beatles zines last year, too. They’re cool people, and I think of them as friends. Is it weird to write about your friends? Who cares, I’m doing it.

SF Whatevs is a great site partially due to the fact that LJ and Liz don’t write like anyone else I read. It feels different and fresh, anything but sterile. It’s very music-centric, in that they both use rock music as the soundtrack to their lives. This song reminds me of this trip we took as a kid, this singer makes me feel like I can do anything, and this album is perfect for this scenario.

It doesn’t just stop there, like some type of Family Guy reference, either. The music is used as a stepping stone to talking about their memories and lives. It’s both foundation and segue, so it goes “I liked this song during this time period, and then I met this person, and then this happened, and here’s what that song means now.” The music is the scalpel in an examination, the bright light in an interrogation. It’s an entry point for something bigger, but it still matters when the story’s done.

Liz and LJ are pretty different, too. Liz writes about Los Angeles a lot. I have an outsider’s love of LA. It’s the city of Tupac, Boyz in the Hood, Eazy-E, Cube, and Heat. James Ellroy’s LA. It’s different to Liz, and I really enjoy seeing her work that out on the page. I have this mental image of it that I could probably never really properly express — can you imagine a girl with long sandy-colored hair sitting on the hood of a vintage El Camino, enjoying the sun and the music coming out of her tinny speakers? big sunglasses on her face? that’s the foundation, at least — but instead of sounding more like a crazy person I’ll just share this comment I left on a post she wrote about Cat Power the other day:

You never fail to make LA sound like the best place on Earth. Not like a paradise on Earth or anything, but more like… a place where things happen. Beautiful things, sad things, happy things. I especially like the detail about the couch in the parking lot, and the idea of lost friends being beautiful in their own way. I feel almost like a country mouse saying this, but you make LA sound like a place where adventures are a matter of course, where adventures just happen. And I really enjoy/appreciate that. Thank you.

And I mean, I don’t know anything about Cat Power, the musician that Liz talks about some in the post, but I still got the post, right? I like that.

LJ always amazes me with how personal she’s willing to get. I’m pretty closed off when it comes to that stuff, barring a few things that I’ve grown more comfortable joking/writing about (daddy issues, HOLLA), but LJ is astoundingly open to me. I really dug her “Laura Jane’s Quitting Smoking Journals” (one, two, three, four, five) because they were as much smoking confessional and diary as they were a deep look at motivations, positive/negative reinforcement, and even how we tell ourselves little lies just to keep ourselves going. Life as performance, you’re your own audience. I don’t smoke cigarettes, and I’ve never had to quit smoking cigarettes, but again, I can recognize the truth in her words.

(I had the pleasure of pitching in on a few group posts on SFWhatevs, alongside a gang of writers and musicians, including Kitty Pryde, whose ha ha, i’m sorry mixtape/EP is pretty good. You can find me talking about a song that makes me cry, a song I associate with falling in love, and my favorite Beatles song. Maybe more in the future? I like how they push me out of my comfort zone.)

They do stories, too. You can read their Beatles zines, which are excerpts from a book-in-progress called Let It Be Beautiful or check out their stories on places like Storychord, where LJ wrote about a girl named Sam and Liz wrote about a girl named Sally. Both are good. I don’t have a full list of their fiction or anything, but read SFW and I figure they’ll link new pieces as they come. Their stories have a similar swing as their posts, which is cool.

Anyway, read Strawberry Fields Whatever and follow @SFWhatevs because Liz & LJ & Jen are pretty cool and good at what they do.

This is something I wrote for a group post that ended up not going up anywhere, so I figured I’d share it here. The theme is “Favorite Spider-Man Moments,” in honor of the character’s 50th anniversary. I’m not sure how old I was when I first read this. It would’ve been ’89 or ’90, I think, which means I was six or seven. It made a real impression. I still like when heroes lose or freak out. It feels more honest than unshakable courage in the face of horrendous danger.

Anyway, Spider-Man was created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee. Thank you, fellas.

One of my favorite Spider-Man moments comes from the first comic I ever owned, David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane’s Amazing Spider-Man 316. I didn’t know it at the time, but the comic was the big return of then-new Spider-Man villain Venom. It’s a pretty wild ride for a first comic. My moment comes toward the end of the issue, when Spider-Man goes off to confront Venom. He locates him in a slaughterhouse, they fight, and Venom manhandles Spider-Man. At one point, Venom dumps a vat of offal and blood onto Spider-Man, and Spidey panics. He flips out, crushes Venom under a few machines, and bugs out, accidentally leaving his address behind.

This is so great because it sets up Spider-Man as something other than a super-man. He loses, and on top of that, he panics. He loses control. He gets freaked out. The man beneath the mask was revealed, just for a moment, and he rejected the horrors of superheroic life on an instinctual level. This scene is extremely humanizing, and just good entertainment besides.

I like this scene so much because it feels so true to Spider-Man. When the people in charge of his stories bring their A-game, Spider-Man is Peter Parker first and a superhero third or fourth. He’s not an everyman, not at all in thinking about it, but he is a regular man. He’s meant to be someone we can recognize slivers of ourselves in, and that makes it easier to buy the hijinks he gets into. This scene is just one of several great examples of how Peter Parker is the best superhero ever.