Gotta make this quick. I have a headache, I feel like crap and I have to wake up early. But on a lighter note, I won a free Nook Tablet at work and that absolutely rules.

Helped out this week by Was Taters, Space Jawa and my buddy Jody. All sorts of varied comic book stuff via the lot of us. No overlaps or nothing.

Amazing Spider-Man #677
Mark Waid and Emma Rios

Batman and Robin #5
Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason

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Every now and then, Something Awful does a bit for their Photoshop Phriday called Mixed-Up Movie Captions. The idea is that you take the still of one movie and add a subtitle of a quote from another movie. It’s an incredibly fun creative exercise. Over a year ago, they did one and I took part, coming up with a bunch of entries. Some got used, some didn’t.

Yesterday, they put up a new batch as created by the Something Awful forum. Once again, I had a grand old time playing this game and they even chose nine of my images in the feature. Since I did so many, I thought I might as well feature all my work.

Some of these will get a little more obscure than others. I have some reference at the bottom just in case. And sorry about the Buffalo Rider one. Not the easiest movie to find a clean image of.

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I grew up on or around Air Force bases. Shepherd, Langley, and most of all, Robins AFB. A grip of my family members served, and I gave some real thought to enlisting while I was in high school. A side effect of being surrounded by the USAF is that I love airplanes. I built a bunch of models as a kid. The SR-71 Blackbird was my favorite, probably because that was where the X-Men and the Air Force venn diagrams intersected, but I built bombers, fighters, whatever I could find. I actually built an F-14 model late last year when I got a model kit as a gift from a client. It was weird, exercising those muscles again, but sorta comforting, too. I remember killing like five hours on a lazy Saturday with the TV off, music on, and laser-focused on my task.

I like the stories surrounding planes, too. I remember really liking the story of the Tuskegee Airmen. It’s a great story, kinda the flipside of the Tuskegee Experiments, but it’s inspirational. It’s “The sky’s the limit” translated to real life. They were just one of several inspirational black figures people pointed out to me, from high level cats like Martin and Malcolm to less famous people like Ben Carson. I didn’t learn any of this in school, I don’t think. It came from family and church more than anything. It was a tonic. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and was too honorable to lie about it, but Ben Carson separated conjoined twins.

Red Tails, produced by George Lucas, drops 01/20. It’s about the Tuskegee Airmen, and despite my love of the subject matter, I was a little skeptical. I don’t hate George Lucas (I definitely like him better than modern-era Spielberg, for whatever that’s worth), so him producing wasn’t really a downside. Cuba Gooding Jr and Terrence Howard, two of my least favorite actors. Gooding has a history of starring in movies that I loathe (save for American Gangster, where he played Nicky Barnes to the hilt) and Howard is… that dude grates man, I couldn’t even tell you. There’s just something about that guy.

They were enough for me to feel some kinda way about Red Tails. My thinking was that if they put these dudes into the flick, then the rest of it was somehow compromised or tainted. I don’t know that I had any defensible train of thought about it, to be perfectly frank, just a gut feeling. What turned me around was George Lucas on the Daily Show.

While some of what he says is bunk (by what metric is Red Tails the first black anything? Wouldn’t Three the Hard Way count for something? At the very least, Bad Boys did gangbusters), he’s got a lot of interesting things going on. He talks about how studios wouldn’t fund it, and how he’s been trying to get it made for the past twenty-some years.

What got me were two things. First: he financed the movie himself. He believed in it enough to chip in more money than I will ever make in my entire life to get it done. Second: he said that “[t]his is not a movie about victims. This is a movie about heroes.” Which is basically exactly the approach I want to see. I don’t need more stories about how terrible racism is. I know how bad it was. The story of blacks and racism and being held back is, no joke, the one story I have heard the most over the course of my entire life. It is old.

The fact that Lucas and them approached this movie like an action film first, and Rosewood sixteenth or lower, goes real far with me. So I’m probably going to get over my big crybaby complaints about a couple of actors and check it out on opening weekend. The approach feels true, and Lucas says he has sequels planned, and I’d kinda like to see them. I doubt if it’ll take off the way I’d like it to, but I wouldn’t mind owning a gang of movies of black dudes in amazing mid-air dogfights. It’s one of those things I’ve imagined since I was a kid. It’ll be nice to see them realized.

I liked Spike Lee’s Miracle At St. Anna enough to buy the Blu-ray, despite it being a little overlong. How often do you see black people in actual roles in World War II pictures? Too rarely. I’m willing to support efforts like this, because they’re what I want to see more of. Black director, black screenwriter, majority black cast… I like this.

I just hope it’s good. The trailer is pretty straight, and the cast actually has a gang of people whose work I enjoy (Bryan Cranston, Method Man, Andre Royo, couple others). Fingers crossed, right?

We all remember Abobo, right? Introduced in the arcade version of Double Dragon, he became more well-known in the NES adaptation, where he looked less human and more like an angry pile of muscles. He proceeded to be a staple in the series, showing up in sequels, the Battletoads crossover game, the fighting game and the live-action movie. Even when videogame company Evoga failed to get the rights to make their game Rage of the Dragons a part of the Double Dragon franchise, they still had a character in there named Abubo.

Abobo’s been a nostalgic icon for the NES, so it’s fitting that all these years later, he’d be the centerpiece for this Newgrounds collaboration that’s taken many years to put together. Check out the trailer.

With the kidnapping of Aboboy, Abobo must go through a series of different classic NES game styles to set things right. Throughout the excessively violent journey, he deals with:

1) A warped reimagining of the first level of Double Dragon.
2) A Mario Brothers underwater level where he has Yoshi powers.
3) A very one-sided battle with Urban Champ.
4) A dungeon from Legend of Zelda where he must take on the game’s greatest villain: the old man who gives you advice. Using a sword is good enough, but using a piece of meat as a sword does even more damage.
5) After chasing the Amazon with only a pair of balloons, you then take him on in a Pro Wrestling match, featuring some unexpected but not unwelcome help.
6) As Megabobo, you must defeat your robot double.
7) Armed with a machine gun and a code for 30 lives, you blaze through the jungle to face Krang in his most dangerous form ever.
8) You take it back to the ring to face an underdog who has since become a power-hungry tyrant.

You have to play this game. It’s fun and I found myself cracking up many times, especially during the horrific ending. Good show, guys.

Chris Ryall revealed the first preview for Darwyn Cooke’s 2012 adaptation of Richard Starker’s The Score the other day. As expected, it’s a great image, well in line with the other novels Cooke has done thus far. The Score is a good novel. Not my favorite–if I had to rank them, it’d probably go 1) The Hunter 2) The Outfit and 3) Butcher’s Moon–but it definitely rates. The hook alone makes it worth reading, really. “Parker gets a posse up and robs an entire town. And then things start exploding.

This is a book with lots of Alan Grofield, too. Grofield is easily the best supporting character in these novels. He’s a thespian slash thief, and each of his interests informs the other. He pulls heists to keep his theater going, and he tends to think of his jobs as being excerpts from exciting films. He’s suave, but he’s all about his business. He’s not unlike Lupin III or Gambit in certain ways, to be honest, which is probably part of the attraction. He really enjoys acting and stealing, and that makes him an incredibly enjoyable character to read. There’s this great bit in Butcher’s Moon where he takes up with this librarian who thinks she’s too big for the town she’s in that’s just wonderful, a sublime mix of Grofield being able to spot a type, adjust to that type, and then lose interest as soon as he gets focused on the actual job at hand. He’s a romantic, but he knows how and when to turn it off.

Here’s a couple of bits from that chapter in Butcher’s Moon:

“Very nice library you have here,” Grofield said.

The girl walking through the stacks ahead of him turned her head to twinkle over her shoulder in his direction. “Well, thank you,” she said, as though he’d told her she had good legs, which she had.

They went through a section of reading tables, all unoccupied. “You don’t seem to get much of a business,” he said. She gave a dramatic sigh and an elaborate shrug. “I suppose it’s all you can expect from a town like this,” she said.

Oh ho, thought Grofield, one of those. Self-image: a rose growing on a dungheap. A rose worth plucking? “What other attractions are there in a town like this?” he asked.

“Hardly anything. Here we are.” A small alcove held a battered microfilm reader on a table, with a wooden chair in front of it. Smiling at it, Grofield said, “Elegant. Very nice.”

She smiled broadly in appreciation, and he knew she knew they were artistic soulmates. “You should see the room with the LPs,” she said.

“Should I?”

“It’s ghastly.”

He looked at her, unsure for just a second, but her expression told him she hadn’t after all been suggesting a quiet corner in which they could bump about together. The idea, in fact, hadn’t occurred to her; she was really a very simple straightforward girl, appropriate to the town and the library.

The girl was on the lookout for him, and came tripping out from behind the main desk as he was going by. She gave violent hand signals to attract his attention, and when he stopped she hurried over and whispered, “It turns out I’m free tonight after all.”

She’d broken her date; headache, no doubt. Feeling vaguely sorry for the young man, and both irritated and guilty toward the girl, Grofield said, “That’s wonderful.”

It was Tucker who got me to finally pick up Butcher’s Moon. I read something like thirteen Parker novels in a shot a couple years ago, so I’d been on a bit of a break, but his review got me back on the horse. I had no idea that Slayground got a sequel, and I love that book. It was my #3 before I read Butcher’s Moon.

University of Chicago Press is continuing their Richard Stark reprint series with three Grofield novels in April. In order: The Damsel, The Dame, and The Blackbird. I’m looking forward to reading them.

The crux of the American Dream, of America as a concept, is that we are required to be better. Not born better, because the idea of hereditary quality/morality or divine right inevitably results in corruption. The better I’m talking about is a struggle to become better. A need to be better. We need to be better than our enemies, better than our past, and better than the darker aspects of our minds. We are here. We need to be there. We need to work at being better. It isn’t a static state. It’s a constant struggle. We choose to go against our baser natures for the greater good. We avoid the easy routes to fame or fortune in favor of a more honest and rewarding path. That’s the dream. But when people talk about America the Beautiful, that’s what they’re talking about. The American Dream is about being a good person and having that be paid forward throughout every level of society. Sometimes it works out. A lot of times it doesn’t. It’s always worth believing in and striving for, though. It’s a goal, not a status quo or an end point.

Captain America, my favorite interpretation of him anyway, represents that Dream. As a result, he’s often disappointed with the actions of the country as a whole, from its government to its people. Cap represents the best of us, and that’s the source of his disappointment. There’s a Superman scene that I like a lot, created by Garth Ennis and John McCrea in JLA/Hitman. He flies up to Earth orbit and looks down at his planet. “If you knew how you are loved,” he thinks, “not one of you would raise a hand in rage again.”

It’s Superman, but it fits for Cap, too. He knows the heights humanity and America are capable of, and he’s often disappointed in the fact that the country and her people fall so short of the mark so frequently. The Falcon isn’t someone to be coddled or emancipated or attacked or guarded against. He’s Cap’s brother, someone he loves dearly and treats like family. The flag isn’t a scrap of cloth. It’s a symbol of what unity can do. And on and on and on. He’s a good man, and he represents a good thing.

Here’s a page from Secret Avengers 21, by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, Wade von Grawbadger, Dave Lanphear, and Chris Sotomayor. Drops this week.

Torture. It’s been a big deal over the past few years. The US has engaged in torture for ages, from slavery to the Cold War, but now that it’s public, it’s a lot harder to ignore. The behavior of the US government in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere has been deplorable on that front. Torture is a pretty simple concept. Even a child can define it. “I am going to hurt you until you give me what I want.”

But at some point, the government redefined it so that things like making someone think they’re drowning don’t count as torture. Waterboarding is something that Japanese soldiers were hanged for back in the World War II days, was defined as illegal in the Vietnam War, was used in apartheid South Africa on political prisoners, and was a favored tactic of both the Khmer Rouge (who murdered over a million people for unbelievably stupid and petty reasons) and Pinochet’s Chile.

Waterboarding, torture in general really, is indefensible, but the defense usually involves the words “necessity” and “protection” and other scaremongering ideas. We have to hurt them before they can hurt us.

If there is any one thing that it is important that 2012 America should be better than, it’s torture. It is an actual evil, and people who engage in it have no right to call themselves good people. Being better is about being better, not lowering yourself to the level of Pol Pot or Augusto Pinochet because you’re afraid of someone or something. Being better is about finding better ways to solve problems. Being better is about not hurting unarmed, defenseless men and women. Torture is vile.

“I don’t believe in torture. It’s ugly, dishonorable, and unreliable. So I’m going to let my colleagues do it.”

And here we meet the 2012 Captain America. He’s the antithesis of the Captain America that I enjoy reading about. He’s exactly what America should stand against. He’s a coward. This isn’t a momentary lapse in judgment. This is a man who knows better, who explains that he knows better even as he goes against what he believes, turns his back in the face of actual evil. He allows the existence of evil because it is convenient, which may well be worse than the evil itself.

There’s that axiom about all evil needing to prosper is for good men to do nothing, but I don’t agree with that at all. Good men don’t do nothing. Good men stop evil when it rears its head in their presence. They stamp it out and refuse to allow it to exist. Good men do better.

It’s 2012, and Captain America turns his back and tacitly endorses one of the worst crimes of the US government in recent memory. He turns his back on everything he should stand for and approves the use of everything America should not be. Captain America broke.

That’s vile. Maybe it’s a cynical statement on American politics and hypocrisy. Maybe not. It’s still vile. Reject it.

Last time I discussed the initial stories of Thunderbolts, where the heroes were really wolves in sheep’s clothing. They all played the role of hero with different emotional impacts and now it’s all come to a head. Somebody’s figured them out and while at a press conference, SHIELD busts in to arrest them. Everyone’s shocked to hear that these guys are the Masters of Evil, but nobody more than their own member Jolt.

Zemo himself doesn’t seem so surprised and has an escape plan ready. They sneak out and split up, told to regroup at base. Atlas is emotionally gutted from having to see the look on Dallas’ face, but runs off regardless. Jolt could proclaim her innocence in it all, but she jumps out the window, feeling that there has to be something she can do to make things right. They each get to base in their own way, but interestingly enough, Moonstone gets in a brief tussle with Hawkeye, who had come back from being… Wolverine… in a brown mask… on an Earth… on the other side of the sun…?

Listen, comics are fucking weird. What’s important is that Moonstone sneaks away in disguise and thinks about skipping town and starting over. Ultimately, she decides to keep with the team.

One little touch that I’m still not sure if it was planned or if it was damage control over a writing mishap has the media point out that in the footage of the Thunderbolts fighting Arnim Zola’s creations, Techno briefly refers to Meteorite as Moonstone. Even Jolt’s realizing that she was there and that should have raised a red flag if she wasn’t so caught in the moment.

The Thunderbolts think about who could have blown the whistle on them. Black Widow, perhaps? Nah. It was Zemo, who could see that everyone was starting to come around on the hero concept and wanted to speed up the plan to take care of that. Granted, they don’t HAVE to follow him. They could play hero and be arrested or go back to the villain life and be violently ostracized for their actions as Thunderbolts. In a bit of checkmate, he’s got them right in his pocket.

They get in their plane (Thunderjet?) and fly off into space. As an exclamation point, Zemo detonates Four Freedoms Plaza. No word yet if Dr. Doom cried.

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I recently read Eiichiro Oda’s One Piece 62, which means that I’ve read over 12400 pages of this series, far more than anything but maybe Amazing Spider-Man, which I’ve read almost front to back, barring an extended break when it went sour in 1996. But yeah: 12400 pages, minimum. It’s as good as it ever was. It’s not at the emotional heights of Water 7 (I called it “a complete and utter emotional apocalypse” a while back, and I stand by that), but it’s still plenty enjoyable and better than most books.

Here’s a couple pages from it that I like a lot:

Oda does that thing at the top of page two a few times throughout the series, and it never fails to slay me. Someone starts to explain something related to the plot or science and Luffy listens, nods, and goes “Ah hah! So it’s a mysterious _______!” It emphasizes how dumb he is, but it’s also a good joke. He doesn’t have to know how things work, because he’s just going to barrel his way through anyway.

I dunno a lot about Japanese pop culture. Actual pop culture, I mean, not just manga or anime or movies. Maybe this “Ah, a mysterious _____” is a reference to a Japanese comedy show, or the “That’s what she said!” of Japan. But this gag works for me in a way a lot of equally dumb jokes normally wouldn’t.

Part of it is Oda’s cartooning. The contented smile, lazily closed eyes, mugs of tea, and body language elevate the dumb joke. I don’t even know that I can really articulate why I find this so funny. It’s like–you get it or you don’t. The earnestness, which is mirrored on the preceding page by Luffy aggressively wondering about the conditions required to sail underwater and then immediately pretending like he knows what “salinity” means, is crucial. (One day I’ll write a really salinity post.) Nami’s the eternal straight man for the antics of the rest of the crew, even Nico Robin, and is alternately horrified and exasperated with the rest of the crew.

I never get tired of watching her bounce off the rest of the crew, in part because Oda has created clearly-defined characters with their own comedic hooks. Luffy is endearingly stupid, Chopper is unbelievably naive, Sanji is Pepe LePew, Zolo gets lost, Nico Robin is morbid, Franky is strange and really into building fancy things, Usopp is a coward, and Brook is a pervert. Once you start combining the cast and creating combinations, you’re looking at differing types of humor. Zolo and Sanji are aggressively and absurdly competitive. Robin has no time for Franky’s strange antics. There’s a great bit in the “Thriller Bark” arc where Franky comes up with a combining robot (think Voltron with humans) for the crew to pilot. Robin refuses because it would be undignified, which pisses off the giant they were fighting, who thought the finished product would look really cool.

There isn’t endless potential here, but there are so many different hooks and combinations that no type of joke overstays its welcome, so each joke comes off fresh and funny.

Someone on Twitter, I forget who (sorry), posted a link to “Shit White Girls Say… to Black Girls,”, and this video had me laughing hard at work.

With a few exceptions (“Jews were slaves, too” & “My grandma hates collards” mainly, ’cause what kind of monster hates greens?), I’ve heard all of this, despite not being a black girl. This is one of those “So funny it’s true!” videos, and its jokes have plenty of bite. I keep my hair super short in part because some white people LOVE to touch black hair, like it’s catnip or magical or something. (It isn’t. It’s just black. And mine.) If I say no, you can’t touch my hair, then that’s… I don’t even know, playing hard to get? “Your mouth says no but your hair says YES YES YES TOUCH ME TOUCH ME?” And I mean, I’m a grown man with a good aight job who’s self-sufficient, and people still pull that. I had a mohawk for a couple months in late 2011 (word to travis bickle) and it still happened. C’mon, son. It’s always so awkward, too, because nobody means nothing by it but it’s enraging and then you’re taking things too seriously and you gotta loosen up, your hair’s cute, i just wanna touch it and–

Don’t even get me started on afro-fetishism (it’s not that cool of a hairstyle, y’all, especially after you put your hands in it) or calling black folks some variety of chocolate or other brown foods as a romantic thing. Really? Are you twelve?

This chick saying “______ is soooo ghetto” and “Hollerrrrr” had me in stitches. It’s a dead on impersonation, and the ghetto one is a particular pet peeve of mine. It’s pretty screwed up, if you think about how that word is used and the perception of who is in the ghetto.

I tripped over a reference to the video for El-P’s “Time Won’t Tell” off his Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3, directed by Shan Nicholson, by accident the other day and thought to myself, “Oh, it’s my favorite video from last year.” I don’t know when I decided that, or if I’d ever been consciously aware of that fact before now, but it’s true. I watch a lot of music videos, and this is the one this year that grabbed me the most.

Part of it is El-P’s production. El is easily the best at making sinister sounding tracks. A lot of classic songs sound like impending violence, like somebody’s about to get his whole head bust outside of the club. El-P makes joints that sound like the beginning of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia or the cityscapes from Blade Runner or Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira look. They sound like impending doom on a level far beyond DMX barking in your ear about how you didn’t ride, so you must wanna die arf arf arf.

It’s the way the bass pulses and buzzes under the track, and just how dirty and dusty everything sounds. It sounds processed, but like it was fed through a meat grinder, not Pro Tools. The drums are messy, there’s a throbbing horn infesting the middle part of the track, and a wail that hints at something horrible. And then, at 2:10, the track takes a breath and comes back majestic.

Nicholson’s direction clinches the deal, though. The beginning is a tour, as we follow this kid around town and check out foreclosed homes, decrepit section 8 homes, the presence of authority figures as something to fear, and generally just life in the projects. It feels lonely, because this kid never interacts with anyone and looks uncomfortable around the people he does run into. The long shots of him walking alone push that loneliness even further, begging you to extrapolate a little.

He walks past four kids who then follow him around town and the suspense kicks up. The first thought to come to mind was one of danger, of kids who goose step over innocence. He grabs the mattress, the kids follow, and you know something bad is going to happen. And then it doesn’t, it’s just some kids playing together and having a good time. The first kid has something dope and the other kids appreciate it.

And jeez, man, I can relate. Boy, can I relate. We’re trained to think of other humans as possible threats. You stand real close to the ATM, you ignore strangers in public, you don’t wear short skirts, you practice defensive driving, you don’t make eye contact in the street, you get told to stay away from that white girl, you wonder if that guy is really talking about monkeys or if he’s just dog-whistling, you push forward on the sidewalk with your head down and dare people to not get out of your way, you sign a pre-nup when you get married, and your heart skips a beat when you hear footsteps behind you on a dark night, all because “what if something happened???”

I know what it’s like to be a lonely, skinny black kid. I went to two elementary schools, four middle schools, and three high schools. The longest time I spent in one house after elementary school was my last two years of high school. I’ve been the new guy, the guy who doesn’t get to hang because he wasn’t there when the group formed. I’ve been the guy who didn’t want the new guy in the crew.

But sometimes you connect to other people off the back of stupid things like comic books or music or jumping on a mattress out where the factories used to be and just vibe and things are wonderful. I remember as a kid, there was this big mound of red clay that the neighborhood boys would use as a bike ramp. I never did it–the thought of going in the air on my bike terrified me, and I’d had a bad bike wreck shortly after moving in–but we would hang out and that would be our sun. I have other memories–the woods between our school and our hood or the filthy creek near the dumpster where we found a gang of playboys or the youth center on base–where the “we” involved is different every time.

It’s nice when people actually connect with each other, no matter the catalyst. This video is as good a depiction of what it looks and feels and sounds like to let other people in as you’ll ever see.