Lethal Weapon also holds up nicely. RIP to a pretty much always dependable filmmaking legend.
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Another Watchmen/Simpsons mashup from Felipe Sobreiro (@therealsobreiro) / Twitter
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I read Hellions vol. 1 and enjoyed it enough to continue. The X of Swords issues were even better, which helped the decision.
One thing: they keep mentioning that Havok suffered some mind-shattering trauma before the events of the series. Anyone have any idea what that is?
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How did you get a photo of the motivational collage I keep above my desk at home?
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I watched two horror movies last night:
Crawl – Really enjoyed this. A very simple plot: a young woman drives through a hurricane to evacuate her father from his house, only to find him trapped in the flooding basement, hunted by alligators. Gets a lot of mileage out of its one location and the last 30 minutes is a masterful example of escalation as the hurricane goes full force. There’s a hilarious bit where they have to get to a speedboat across the street, and when they finally make it the levees break and a tidal wave smashes through the streets, sending the boat crashing back into the gator-filled house they just escaped from.
Night of the Demons – Terrible dialogue. Terrible acting. Terrific fun. A bunch of 80s teen stereotypes (and, inexplicably, one kid who talks and acts like a 50s greaser) throw a Halloween party in an abandoned funeral home that happens to reside over a portal to Hell. They accidentally summon some demons and get possessed or killed off. Despite the bad acting and script it’s directed stylishly. It’s going for campy fun and succeeds at that.
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Some recent reads:
Rick Remender’s pseudo-trilogy of Uncanny X-Force, Secret Avengers, & Uncanny Avengers – X-Force is the strongest but they’re all very enjoyable. Remender’s great at tapping the more bonkers tropes in superhero comics for these huge epic storylines: alternate timelines, dystopian futures, space gods, Life Model Decoys, etc. It was interesting reading these after catching up on Hickman’s X-Men work because Remender uses a lot of the same ideas: humans advancing their bodies and minds with technology, conflict between man and machine, Otherworld, Apocalypse and a secret group of Horsemen. Hickman’s take is better but Remender does a good job and it’s interesting seeing a less hard sci-fi, more action-oriented take on these ideas.
Justice League International vol. 2 (collects JLI #18-30 & JLE #1-6) – Just fun comics, with great art by Kevin Maguire, Ty Templeton, & Bart Sears. Although the amount of sexual harassment humor is a bit much; it’d be one thing if it was just Guy Gardner doing it but they’ve even got Blue Beetle and poor Wally West sleazing on their female teammates.
Miracleman: The Golden Age – Probably Gaiman’s best writing aside from his Sandman books. I really hope this gets finished someday, although I’m not holding my breath. Mark Buckingham’s art is great. Each story is drawn in a different style depending on mood and characters: avant garde, children’s book, newspaper strip-esque caricature, etc. The Andy Warhol story and the first one about the people climbing Miracleman’s pyramid to ask favors of him are my favorite. It’s a wonderful idea to do these short stories focusing on how Miracleman and his allies’ technological and cultural advances have impacted ordinary human beings. All of the stories are quite moving.
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I couldn’t really figure out who it was aimed at; it seems like a kid’s show (were we really supposed to take that weird animatronic/CG chipmunk thing seriously?) but then there are people being burned alive in their homes and hybrid kids being dissected, so
This is just how a lot of media aimed at older kids and adults used to be. Raiders had faces melting off, Star Wars had a close-up of a bloody severed arm, etc.
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I didn’t know about the change to Laura’s origins. From reading online it sounds like Dr. Kinney was her biological mother and so Wolverine’s DNA performed the role a biological father’s would. Do I have that right? There wasn’t some secret tryst between Logan and Dr. Kinney?
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About the consent issue, I don’t know if true consent can be given if one partner is pressuring and lying to the other. That’s really what he’s being criticized for. Not the sleaziness of having dozens of sexual partners who didn’t know about each other but using lies, manipulation, and promises of work to get sex.
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Aww, look at li’l Lynchy!
His father’s name is Donald so alas that isn’t Lynch. But I wonder what he thinks of Price, and for that matter what Price thought of him…
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Yeah, she’ll come back and probably won’t remember who killed her because it happened between back-ups (same as when Sinister killed off his Hellions team in X of Swords) and Gabby and the New Mutants will have to figure out what happened.
What’s the deal with Gabby, anyway? Is she another clone like X-23? Maybe she’s a cool character but I have to say having three mini-Wolverines is too much. He’s not Batman, he’s just a guy. He doesn’t need this huge supporting cast of legacies.
I’m not a fan of X-23 going by Wolverine, either. Again, he’s just a guy. No reason to make him a legacy; there doesn’t “need” to be a Wolverine at all times like you can say there “needs” to be a Batman or a Superman or a Captain America (I’m speaking in-universe). Plus, X-23 is cool as her own character, and it’d be more keeping in Logan’s spirit to forge her own way.
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We’re posting obits for people who were in two episodes of a popular TV show now?
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The whole Bat/Cat “controversy” got Dave Cockrum’s son Ivan to post some of his father’s last sketches on Twitter:
Good on Nightcrawler.
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Maybe we shouldn’t be taking racial analysis from Donald Trump Jr and Ben Shapiro.
That chart’s barely CRT. CRT is about how the modern concept of race was founded to justify the slave trade and tracking how race evolved over time to keep Black people, and soon other races, in an underclass. It’s not about attacking white people, which as Lorcan points out that chart doesn’t even do. I think some of the chart is kind of dumb but it’s not emblematic of CRT at all.
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This tweet from yesterday is by the new Israeli Prime Minister’s spokesman for Arab media.
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My, how things have changed since Bruce Timm drew this.
Who are B, S, & P?
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Yes, though not a documentary, it was fairly brutal though I thought the very end was a little off.
I really loved the ending. Like the ending of The Irishman, the final 30-40 minutes is where the film reveals itself. Garfield’s faith becomes much deeper and more personal after he gives up the notion that he is obligated to spread the truth of Christianity, that this truth (as he perceives it, at least) is more important than human lives. He had always looked down on Kichijiro for repeatedly placing his own life over his faith but why should Kichijiro, or any other Japanese convert, have to die for a religion that foreign missionaries brought to their shores? That by the end he views Kichijiro as a friend and equal speaks to how self-aggrandizing his approach, and by extension the Christian missionaries’ approach, to faith had been.
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I watched an underappreciated Scorsese film from a few years ago, Silence starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Liam Neeson, & Shinya Tsukamoto (yep, of Tetsuo: The Iron Man). It’s about the Japanese Buddhist persecution of Japanese Catholics and Portuguese priests in the 1600s. Although what the Japanese authorities did to Catholics is horrible it also takes a critical view of the missionary presence in Japan, arguing in favor of a more humble and private relationship to faith. A great movie, probably top five Scorsese for me.
It includes some of his most graceful filmmaking; there’s a scene where Garfield’s priest is forced to do something so against his character that he collapses and the sound cuts out completely for the length of his slow motion fall that will stick with me for a while.
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Planet Size X-Men lives up to it’s title. Probably the biggest world-building issue in terms of impact since House of X/Powers of X. I’m not sure why Hickman didn’t write it but Duggan does a fantastic job. You won’t want to miss this.
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Personally, I’d enjoy the perspective that the pets consider their owners to be their pets – essentially humans, even superheroes, are too incompetent to be left to their own devices and the pets think they need to take care of them.
Cats already think this. Minus the taking care of us part.
I’m pretty sure that’s why they bring people dead mice and birds, though. They don’t see us hunting so they think they need to provide food for us.
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That talk show host sounds pretty stupid because all MLK did was cheat (and even that’s debatable, iirc Coretta denied it happened and I’m gonna believe her over the FBI).
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A lot of the stuff in series 4 of The Wire was based on Ed Burns’ time as a school teacher, especially the standardised testing and how if they don’t get a certain passing grade, they lose essential state funding.
Standardized testing was the bane of my middle/high school experience. The Massachusetts standardized test is called the MCAS and for months out of every year it was just MCAS, MCAS, MCAS, MCAS. By the time I got to high school the teachers didn’t even try to hide how much they hated it. I’ve always been pretty good at taking tests–a lot of it is just understanding how the tests themselves work, not necessarily the information you’re being testing on–but so many of my classmates were unnecessarily stressed out and thought they were stupid because they were struggling with these fundamentally useless tests. But since the school mainly served low-income Black students and so funding was a constant risk, teachers had no choice but to waste a third or more of the school year on preparing us for these idiotic tests.
And personally speaking, all that test prep taught me to memorize for the test and then jettison the information, which has made my information retention shit as an adult.
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I think one thing this one does is that it draws attention to how drastic the situation is. Everybody keeps shouting for one thing or another to be reformed, but the sheer radicality of that slogan illustrates just how bad things are.
Yeah this is what I’ve been trying to get at, I just don’t think anything else will work. The demand is inherently alienating to many, no phrasing will change that, but it’s what has to be done so I believe the left should be firm about it. Settling for reforms hasn’t gotten us anywhere and is in itself insidious because the reforms don’t do what they’re supposed to while allowing many people to feel that the matter’s resolved and the police don’t need more scrutiny.
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Black Lives Matter made a lot of liberals here uncomfortable
Not me. It’s a pretty common sense argument in the circumstances. It’s also a message with a positive slant.
Sorry, I meant here in the US. There weren’t that many MWers with qualms about it iirc.
I definitely think the response to Black Lives Matter has gotten better, Dave. Like I said earlier, brands have taken BLM up now and there are signs in windows and lawns all over the place around me. I know I live in MA which is really blue but the abundance of signs is something I’ve only noticed in the last couple years. I’m sure it’s different in red states, but the fact that huge brands like Amazon & Netflix have adopted it speaks to the pressure they feel to support it.
I do agree that Defund the Police is a harder sell, as it has a target. I’d personally have gone with something like Fund Communities Not Cops, but even that has room for confusion and still targets police. But given that reforms have failed I really do think there’s just one way to handle the matter and that’s defunding. Any slogan is only going to skim the surface of the demand so Defund’s problems have been overstated imo. The point is to keep repeating it, the more it sticks around the more people will look into what it means. As long as it’s been around there’s been messaging to go with it that it means diverting police funds to social work, mental health, etc.
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Yeah, Black Lives Matter made a lot of liberals here uncomfortable when it first started, the backlash was never just a conservative thing.
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The Sopranos started at a time when episodic TV was still more or less the norm. As you say, if it started this year then they would have dragged that out for pretty much an entire season. Funny how TV went the same way as comics, dragging out a story from a single issue to a six issue arc.
Anyway, I just remembered that the prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, is finally due to be released in September. Here’s hoping they manage to recapture some of the magic of the original show.
And even though The Sopranos set the template for “prestige TV” and its epic sagas, it remained an episodic show for all six seasons. There are subplots and character threads that continue over seasons but each episode has an arc, tells a complete story. It’s the best of both worlds and I wish more shows took that lesson of combining the strengths of the two approaches.
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Something to keep in mind is that realistically there won’t be meaningful change in policing in America anytime soon. I hate to be pessimistic but the police are just too powerful. Even now, when there’s hardly been any defunding of police anywhere in America, they’re blaming rising crime rates on the movement, when in fact rising crime is another indictment of their usefulness. They turn each new atrocity they commit into a call for more funding so that they can “reform” themselves. Even though these reforms don’t get results, the public takes it as a win. Rinse, repeat.
Defund the Police is a long game. The point is to keep bringing it up–in protests, organizing, op-eds, news appearances, etc–each time the police do something monstrous. Each time, more people will learn what it means. To take the Repeal the 8th movement as a comparison, the movement is still in the early stages of messaging, a few decades before a formalized call for repeal even became tenable. Dave pointed out that the Repeal the 8th movement had years of pro-choice/anti-choice messaging throughout the world to rely on. Well, one day Defund the Police will have that too.
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A lot of shows now think they have to stretch what should just be the pilot to half a season or even a full season. If I don’t know what the hook of the show is supposed to be by the end of episode 1 then the show has failed.
The Sopranos pilot gives us Tony in therapy, the basic premise of the show (at least at that point, it of course became something much more as time went on). We see why he goes to Dr. Melfi in the pilot, but their subsequent sessions, and Tony’s experiences between sessions, reveal much more about him. A streaming show would try to draw out the experience(s) that initially gets him into therapy, jumping the gun on information and pathos that should ideally be delivered after the premise has been established.
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Then even today liberals come up with terrible branding like “defund the police”. While I understand what it means and support it, the branding makes it sound like an attack on police and safety. Liberals generally have far better ideas and policies but they’re clueless on how to brand and sell the ideas. They constantly let’s conservative control the narrative as if they believe their ideas will somehow sell themselves.
Nitpicking but I do feel it’s important: “defund the police” is more of a leftist demand than a liberal one.
But more importantly, there’s no other way to describe the demand. That’s what it means, defund them. That’s what has to happen. Reforming doesn’t work; countless reforms have already been tried, they don’t work, they just give cops more money to keep doing the same thing with a few cosmetic changes. Police, and the outdated and very racist way American society responds to crime generally, makes people less safe, not more safe. Police don’t even do their jobs that well. 4% of their time is devoted to violent crime and they suck at preventing it. This is a great thread on how useless, untrustworthy, and dangerous police are and it includes stats, the 4% number is from an NYT report: Alec Karakatsanis on Twitter: “Thread. You’re going to hear a lot about how cops need more resources because “crime is surging” in the next few months. It’s propaganda, and here’s how you can respond:” / Twitter
Anyway, the point of the slogan is to keep the demand in the public consciousness so that it becomes tenable in the future. Black Lives Matter was hugely controversial just a few years ago, now most brands in America have it on their social media accounts and you see BLM signs on every other lawn, at least in blue states.
Another example: Leftists have been condemning Israel and framing the occupation of Palestine as apartheid for decades but it only just caught on for a lot of average, less politically engaged people.
In college I went to an Angela Davis talk where she made this point: she’s worked for decades as a prison abolitionist and is realistic that it may never happen in her lifetime. But she sees the purpose of her work as keeping the idea in the public sphere for a time when it becomes possible. And in recent years prison abolition has left the realm of academic spaces and leftist orgs so that now most people in America have at least heard of it. That’s a major step even if it remains unpopular.
So, “defund the police” ruffles a lot of feathers but it sticks in people’s brains and that’s a win in the long term.
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You can buy fairtrade goods
I watched that show some time ago, I think their point was that even fair trade chocolate isn’t guaranteed slave free. You got producers who use forced child labour and pay them very little, or just give them food and a place to sleep, but slip through the net and thier cocoa beans get bought by middle men who get fair trade certification. It’s a murky business.
The people who made the shos started their own chocolate brand, but in the end they admitted they can’t 100 % guarantee it’s slave free.
We have that brand over here in some stores and it’s all I buy now. A bit more expensive, $5 compared to less than $2 for a competing brand, but it’s twice as much chocolate and tastes much better too. Sucks to hear they can’t 100% guarantee there’s no slavery anywhere in their supply chain though.
Here’s how they explain it on their site:
Why we still won’t say we’re 100% slave free – Tony’s Chocolonely (tonyschocolonely.com)
Not 100% slave free?
We have never found an instance of modern slavery in our supply chain, however, we do not guarantee our chocolate is 100% slave free. While we are doing everything we can to prevent slavery and child labour, we are also realistic. Firstly, we cannot be there to monitor the cocoa plantations 24/7, and we don’t believe in that kind of monitoring. And our ambition extends beyond our own bar: we want to change the whole industry which involves being where the problems are so that we can solve them. Only then can we say we have achieved our mission to make all chocolate 100% slave free.So.. is there illegal labour in our supply chain?
The short answer is yes, but we have never said differently, and we are glad we know about it because then we can eradicate it. We actively look for instances so we can solve them. We have a Child Labour Monitoring and Remediation System (CLMRS) in place across all 7 cocoa cooperatives that we source from in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Last year we found 387 cases of illegal child labour and remediated 221. Most big chocolate companies do not know how many cases of illegal labour there are in their cocoa supply chain and therefore they cannot work to remediate them, this is only made possible because we have a 100% traceable supply chain (as validated by PWC in our annual reports).-
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I really liked Sweet Tooth episode one. It has a nice 80s Spielberg vibe, family-oriented but still with a bite. I’m watching it with my wife so it’ll be a slow-paced watch as we work around her schedule but I’m very excited to see where it goes. It’s a good sign the pilot covered so much plot ground. I honestly thought it’d be like 3 episodes til he teamed up with Big Man. That’s modern TV for you; nice to see a show go against the grain.
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‘Swordfish’ at 20: Here’s the story behind Halle Berry’s $500,000 nude scene in the 2001 action hit
Money well spent!
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there’s one in X-Men that is, to me, the nadir of X-Men comics
Spoil me, please.
I was holding back because I read the issue a day early because I work at a comic shop.
The cameo I’m talking about is Kevin Feige. After Cyclops buys him a drink he asks Cyke to tell him his story. An obvious tease for X-Men in the MCU even though that’s not gonna be for like 4 or 5 years. I nearly threw the comic across the room, it was so cringe.
Other celebrity cameos I caught: Patton Oswalt (to the surprise of no one), Marc Maron, Eminem, Method Man.
Here’s the Feige cameo btw:
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Oh, I also read Marauders vol. 2. Even better than the first one. I love that Emma let the Morlocks vote on where to live (on her dime) and they chose a retirement village in Arizona. I hope Masque’s golf game improves.
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I read X of Swords twice so that tells you how good it is, Tini Howard’s Excalibur aside. And to be fair to her the penultimate issue she wrote is pretty decent.
Apocalypse’s backstory, plus the backstory of Krakoa and Arrako and the Arrako mutants’ time in Amenth, is fascinating and packed with emotion. This whole crossover really delivers as an epic. That last image of Apocalypse walking away with his wife and children? Beautiful. It shouldn’t be possible to wring this kind of emotion out of such an evil character without making things even a little bit sappy but Hickman manages it.
I do wish the tournament hadn’t mixed in silly challenges with the serious ones. A dance-off? A fashion show? Really? They’re just a panel each, part of a montage of a dozen or so challenges, but still, come on. Try and meet the gravitas of what Hickman is doing, guys. Yeah, yeah, Saturnyne is toying with the Braddocks and their friends, but it felt too much like the MCU’s schtick to me. What I love so much about the X-line right now is that it goes in a totally different direction from the movies and the “relatability” many Marvel titles seem to aim for now.
Some quick highlights: the wrench that dying in Otherworld throws into mutant resurrections; Solem’s introduction (can’t wait to see him antagonize Wolverine going forward); Storm’s visit to Wakanda (Vita Ayala is a very good writer); the Hellions‘ whole side-quest (I’m gonna give their book a look now); Storm’s dance with Death; how Saturnyne flips the script on Wolverine; Wolverine vs. Summoner; Wolverine and Storm’s drinking contest; everything to do with the White Sword of the Ivory Spire; all the world-building Hickman & co. do with Saturnyne’s vassal states (Blightspoke is especially cool).
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In other X news, I’m afraid I’ve turned on Hellfire Gala. The stories are okay but these celebrity cameos are embarrassing. I thought Run the Jewels in Marauders was lame but there’s one in X-Men that is, to me, the nadir of X-Men comics. Probably pushed by Disney so I’m not gonna be too hard on Hickman for it but it’s bad, really bad.
I’m ready for this event to be over. Any idea when we’ll find out what new X-book Hickman is writing?
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I’m almost done with X of Swords, it’s great and I’ll write something longer about it when I’m done, but man, I just have to say that you all are right, Tini Howard is not a good writer!
The Hickman co-written issues are great but her solo issues of Excalibur? Blech. The first one is all right but some things are a little unclear. Jamie Braddock made a Captain Britain Corps out of Jubilee, Rogue, Gambit, & Rictor? I guess this happened in Excalibur but unlike the other writers she makes no attempt to catch the reader up. Jamie kills Jubilee when the Captains attack him but no one seems all that concerned by her death, even though she died in Otherworld and therefore can’t be resurrected. Then Brian decides to become Captain Avalon instead of reclaiming his Captain Britain mantle from his sister like he intended at the start of the issue. This kind of makes sense but Howard didn’t connect the dots well enough. It seems like he wants to protect his brother Jamie, King of Avalon, who is partly insane and thus vulnerable. A decent motivation, but should’ve been clearer to the reader.
The second issue is a real trainwreck, though. Pure nonsense. Iska of Arrako shatters Betsy into glass shards somehow, and her friends mourn for about two seconds before the next round of the tournament: Bei vs. Cypher. Except for some reason that no one ever explains, instead of dueling Bei & Cypher are meant to marry each other instead. How this meets the purposes of the tournament is a mystery. Just as bad is that even though Betsy just died, the X-Men are cracking jokes in the audience. Then Jubilee, ALIVE SOMEHOW (and no one is surprised at this mind you), attacks the wedding with her son/dragon. I won’t get into all that, suffice to say the whole scene is a very hokey stab at humor.
As a whole this event is fantastic, so far the best X-Men one I’ve read, but this issue is a real low point. I won’t be reading anything else Howard writes, that’s for sure.
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Canceling after less than a month is pretty fast for a streamer, no?
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Yeah the reaction here has been so uniformly negative that I’ve avoided her books completely. The Excalibur issues of X of Swords will be the first writing of hers I’ll have read (I know she co-wrote the opening issue with Hickman but I’m guessing it was mostly co-plotting because the dialogue is clearly all him, no one else writes like that).
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Excalibur question: what’s up with Apocalypse and Rictor? X of Swords mentions a bond between them but what is it? Psychic? Mentor-student? Romantic?
I read the Marauders and X-Force issues of Hellfire Gala. I don’t think you need to read all of the Gala issues–I didn’t bother with Hellions and didn’t feel that I missed anything–but to know what shocking event happens during it, I think you have to read Planet-Size X-Men (or maybe Excalibur… I’m just going off solicit info here). Otherwise, the two books just show what their respective casts are up to during the gala. Nothing earth-shattering but enjoyable stuff if you like the characters. Marauders really should’ve gotten Dauterman to draw his designs, though. Lolli doesn’t do them justice at all. Emma’s feather dress looks especially bad.
There’s also quite a cringey musician cameo that I’m guessing was Duggan’s idea, but it’s just one panel so no big deal.
I caught up on the rest of X-Force (#15-19). Still a very good book. Beast is such a bastard. Colossus is such a sweetheart. One thing I appreciate about the X-titles is they’re very fast-paced. That’s true of this book, X-Men, Wolverine, & Marauders. Mostly 1- and 2-parters. I had at first felt that Hickman’s book was slow but he’s just taking his time with the Moira stuff. Almost every issue is a done-in-one with major ramifications for Krakoan society.
Percy isn’t taking on as many subplots as Hickman, his main ones are the Xeno group (allied with Mikhail Rasputin, one of the rare mutants who rejects Krakoa) and the Latin American nation of Terra Verde that Beast’s hubris has turned into a country of human/plant hybrids. Swapping back and forth between the two threads, with each arc lasting about two issues, makes for an exciting read. Although there are dangling questions, the immediate ones are dealt with quickly. He applies the same method to Wolverine, juggling the Flower Cartel and Vampire Nation plots, and it serves him well there too. I really appreciate a modern superhero comic that doesn’t dick me around.
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True. A Better Tomorrow II is also insane.
You’re going to apologise to the rice, right?
The American actors they get for the NYC scenes are so bad, haha.
Chow Yun-Fat’s character’s twin teaching a near-catatonic triad boss how to eat and speak again was not a subplot I was expecting for the sequel to A Better Tomorrow.
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It’s good but his other mid-90s action movies, Face/Off & Con Air, are better. Cage is also playing it straight in The Rock; Connery is the wilder one. I think the best performance in it is Ed Harris as the antagonist, though.
I love Face/Off and Con-Air – part of why I’m not as interested in The Rock is that Cage is playing it straight; he is too in Con-Air but that has the benefit of the massive cast of great actors. We rewatched it last year, and as far as big dumb action movies go? It holds up!
Wife refuses to rewatch Face/Off.
If you want to really see what Woo can do, you need to watch The Killer and Hard Boiled.
Don’t forget A Better Tomorrow and Bullet in the Head! Together 4 of the best action movies ever made, maybe even the best of the 80s/early 90s.
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Tom Strong is brilliant, probably top 5 Moore for me. I think it’s as deconstructive as a book like The Authority or Ultimates but optimistic rather than cynical. Tom has a wife and kid, a healthy sex life, he shares his technology with his city, current science informs the stories… It often gets labeled as “retro” but I think that’s doing it a disservice. It’s as forward thinking as anything else Moore’s written.
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Really liked X-Force vol. 1 & 2. Mutant CIA is a good idea, especially as Percy recognizes how straight up evil the CIA is. He literally has them doing imperialism in a Latin American country. Mystique makes the point that if X-Force is Krakoa’s CIA then their only moral center will be nationalism. Beast is the one behind their shadiest actions, which seems a little out of character, but that could be Krakoa’s influence. There’s some rocky fill-in art in vol. 2 but I really warmed up to the main team of Joshua Cassara/Dean White. Cassara’s looser, cartoonier style doesn’t scream X-Force to me but he’s really good rendering all of the weird biological technology of Krakoa.
Marauders vol. 1 was pretty enjoyable. I like the way Duggan writes Shadowcat but I find the Hellfire Trading Company plot threads more interesting than the pirate stuff.
I read the first issue of X of Swords last night and have to say it’s excellent. I was wrong to dismiss this based off the promo. This isn’t a dumb cash grab, it’s a direct continuation of Hickman’s story.
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Eric Carle has died.
I (and my kids) loved his books and animations at a young age.
My daughter loves his books. She has a Very Hungry Caterpillar toy and we took her to the Eric Carle museum in Western Mass which is on my old college campus. His art looks great blown up. His collage style is so electric. RIP.
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I think inappropriate songs are petty common at weddings. I’ve seen Careless Whisper as a first dance a lot of times and that’s about regret at cheating on someone.
My uncle left the dance floor when “Billie Jean” came on at my cousin’s wedding. Inappropriate song for more than one reason! (Although I still love it and can’t knock my cousin for putting it on the playlist.)
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The latest episode is on the 90s action hit The Rock. Cage is one of my favourite actors, but I’ve never seen this one…
It’s good but his other mid-90s action movies, Face/Off & Con Air, are better. Cage is also playing it straight in The Rock; Connery is the wilder one. I think the best performance in it is Ed Harris as the antagonist, though.
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Probably best to leave Fisch off, honestly. They didn’t bill Travel Foreman or Ben Oliver or Cully Hamner either. I get the writer-first billing is easiest and highlights who’s guiding the story/characters which is what most fans are there for, but it’s kind of silly to do it with a backup strip writer over the main series artist.
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Some callbacks to House of X in X-Men #20. Also sets up a story arc/event(?) in the fall: Inferno.
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Oof, Scot Eaton on the last two issues of Wolverine instead of Kubert or Bogdanovic….
I know this is mean, but I’ve been reading X-Men comics for almost as long as I’ve been alive and I’ve come to dread the Scot Eaton fill-in.
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I stopped keeping up with X-Men when the pandemic started, so around #8, but I just got caught up, rereading the first 8 issues then continuing on to #19. I skipped the X of Swords stuff because I don’t have all the issues. I’ll look for them at my LCS tomorrow. Luckily the post-crossover issues don’t reference it much yet.
This is a really good book. I was unsure about it initially but I think I was just disappointed that House of X wasn’t directly continued. Now that I’ve accepted that’s not in the cards, I can appreciate Hickman’s run for what it is: a gradual, panoramic exploration of how life is on Krakoa, how the new status quo, Krakoa’s bio-technology, and the Five have altered mutant psychology, politics, and culture. It’s fascinating stuff. Feels more like reading Dune or Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis or Le Guin’s The Dispossessed than a superhero comic.
So far my favorite stuff has been: the summit of the world’s leaders with Xavier, Magneto, & Apocalypse; X-23, Synch, & Darwin’s adventures in the Vault; the Crucible, and Nightcrawler’s reaction to it; Magneto donning the red and purple to protect Krakoa during Empyre (thankfully doesn’t require knowledge of that crossover); the big changes that have happened to the Shi’ar and the Brood.
I’m so pumped about this book and Percy’s Wolverine that I’m gonna start reading X-Force and Marauders.
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It’ll be Captain Marvel.
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Thanks. Pretty cool lineup!
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Finished the last two issues of The Green Lantern, my LCS had missed giving me #11 and I only just got around to buying it.
This run was a mixed bag overall, some great stuff and some undercooked stuff that just left me scratching my head. Liam Sharp’s art is great, though. He’s one of the best artists Morrison’s ever worked with. He blends styles as diverse as Philippe Druillet, Alan Davis, and Simon Bisley to create a superhero comic closer to 2000AD and Heavy Metal than DC, and drastically alters his approach depending on the needs of the story. He does looser pencil & ink drawings for down to earth stories and dazzling digitally painted artwork for the cosmic stuff.
Even in the middling or outright bad issues, Morrison always thinks up cool stuff for Sharp to draw, so on a visual level it’s a smashing success, and shows how much room there is left to experiment in superhero comics.
I do think Season One was genuinely really good, and there were a few standout issues in Season Two (the sentient cloud issue, the hospital issue) but the over-arching plot of the golden giants and their evil toys was a pale shadow of similar Morrison depictions of soul-destroying evil like Mandrakk and the Empty Hand. There seemed to be some commentary on how zany superhero concepts get watered down over time, which is nothing new for Morrison but this time they added a critique of adapting superheroes into other more profitable mediums like toys and movies. But it felt half-baked and thrown in at the last minute.
Overall though I’m still pleased with this book. Thematically it was a bit disappointing and Morrison’s writing on a sentence level was kind of all over the place, sometimes crystal clear, other times really awkward and opaque (weird, as WW: Earth One remained so focused), but as a document of how superhero comics allow the human imagination to go wild, free of budget constraints and the focus grouped mush aesthetics of modern superhero cinema, it’s pretty wonderful.
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Finally caught up on Wolverine (well, I still have to pick up #12) and it’s fantastic. Benjamin Percy gets what makes the character tick and doesn’t rely on a bunch of “I like beer and stabbing things” jokes which Jason Aaron’s run, the last Wolverine title I followed, unfortunately devolved into near the end.
Percy really leans into the shady, former CIA operative side of the character; there are outright atrocities in Wolverine’s past that make him deeply skeptical of Krakoa’s utopia and whether he deserves it, as well as more committed than perhaps anyone else there to protect it. Because he intimately knows what’s coming for them.
Percy’s also created a great supporting character in CIA agent Jeff Bannister, a laid-back, long-haired, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, similarly disillusioned mirror of Wolverine. The two work together off-the-grid, not fully trusting their superiors, as they hunt down a Russian cartel selling stolen Krakoan flowers as a new street drug called Pollen. Meanwhile, they’re monitored by the CIA’s new Krakoa-focused taskforce, the X-Desk.
Percy employs a bifurcated plot structure, the cartel arc running alongside a looming war between the Krakoan mutants and Dracula’s Vampire Nation. Omega Red is Dracula’s spy, and although Wolverine knows it he can’t get his fellow X-Men to reject the amnesty they’ve offered the world’s mutants in Red’s case. Adam Kubert handles the art for the cartel storyline and Victor Bogdanovic handles the vampires. The two art styles are complementary, combining the best of bombastic 90s superhero art with the moodiness required by the story.
I’m very happy with this book and plan on catching up with Percy’s X-Force.
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The Twilight Children, featuring Darwyn Cooke’s last ever artwork, is a bit of a mixed bag unfortunately. Cooke’s art is great, and Dave Stewart remains his best colorist, but Gilbert Hernandez’s story is too vague to be satisfying. It’s a magical realist yarn about strange glowing orbs that appear in a small coastal town, periodically making people vanish, blinding people, and unleashing deadly blasts of energy. Meanwhile, a mute young woman with snow-white hair arrives in the town, and she seems to have some kind of connection with the orbs.
Very little ends up being explained. There’s some connection between the orbs and the moon. The moon may have sent the orbs as revenge because one of the men in the town was once her lover–does this make him an alien? A spirit? Another celestial body? It’s unclear. I’m all for art that’s abstract and open to interpretation, my favorite artist in any medium is David Lynch after all, but there’s got to be some kind of entry point for the reader and here there just isn’t one. There doesn’t seem to really be any themes running through the work, the characters are sketches rather than full people, and at 4 issues the whole thing’s too short to build up a real sense of mystery. I usually love stories like this but, on the writing side of things, I was thoroughly disappointed.
I also finally read Silver Surfer: Parable which is just excellent. Moebius’s art is as great ever, rendering images of pure awe in his simple, elegant style, and Stan Lee’s script is both bombastic and a heartfelt plea for humanity to think for itself instead of following self-serving leaders and religious fanatics.
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Hamas is also the governing authority in Gaza and in charge of municipal services, making lots of non-military installations “Hamas targets.” And as the Haaretz article I shared points out, even a home that hosted a Hamas meeting once or twice becomes an acceptable target for Israel.
I agree with Arjan that targeting civilians is never acceptable but the extreme power imbalance and the number of Israelis killed vs. the much, much larger number of Palestinians killed (not just in this conflict but in all of them) makes focusing on Hamas too much misguided. It’s the same with US anti-terrorist actions in Iraq and Afghanistan that incur massive civilian casualties. We’re the ones with all of the military might, if we actually want to end terrorism (and not just fuel it so our presence there drags on and on and profits all the wrong people), the solution is not more violence but to seek restorative justice and meet the material needs of the people, which is not only the moral thing to do but will drain support for extremism. Same thing goes for Israel, with the added imperative of freeing Palestine.
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“There were Hamas bases in those people’s homes!” is such goober bullshit. What Israel is doing is collective punishment and it’s genocide. Hamas rockets, which are shitty and ineffective most of the time, are a reaction to decades of dehumanizing treatment. How about Israel, the one with all the power, money, and weapons, does something about that instead of bombing kids and wiping out whole families?
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I read Batman: Kings of Fear by Scott Peterson & Kelley Jones. Bought it for Jones but the story is pretty cool, Scarecrow doses Batman with a new fear gas and uses a hostage to force him to go under psychoanalysis. He gets Batman to envision a Gotham without Batman, where Bruce Wayne uses his wealth and influence to turn Gotham into a city of the future. Peterson bites off a bit more than he can chew though because he doesn’t really address that point satisfactorily after Batman gets his head straight and defeats Scarecrow. He does come up with a good fix for what use Batman is when his rogues gallery keeps coming back. Joker, Two-Face, Scarecrow, etc are the exception; the recidivism rate for Gotham criminals who get caught by Batman is under 2%.
Jones is the real draw and he’s fantastic, especially paired with colorist Michelle Madsen who douses his Gothic linework in neon greens and purples. It’s just gorgeous. If I was in charge of DC, I’d have her recolor the Moench/Jones run from the 90s which was seriously let down by subpar early digital coloring.
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There are water park sections in Six Flags so if you go you’re likely to see more skin than someone wearing a shirt and booty shorts.
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I was sure you’d made a mistake Gar naming Martin Landau but then I looked on his wikipedia page and he was an editorial cartoonist in addition to being an actor. Maybe he dipped into comics publishing too, I thought. Then I looked up Forbidden Planet and saw it was founded by Nick Landau; still there was a brief period where I thought Martin Landau of Mission: Impossible and Ed Wood was also a major comics figure!
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SteveUK worked on a lockdown Zoom movie called Host which has had great reviews but it’s accessed by subscribing to a horror streaming service called Shudder and I’m not a big enough horror fan to watch much else so will have to wait until it eventually arrives somewhere I am subscribed to.
Oh that’s cool, Host was a lot of fun. And just one hour, too. Does Shudder not do a free trial?
If not, you could do a month (it’s very cheap over here, just $6/mo via Amazon), watch Host and rewatch The Wicker Man!
Train to Busan and Lake Mungo are on there too; in my experience those are the kind of horror movies that even non-horror fans end up loving. -
Bought Superman: Red & Blue #3 because it has stories by Michel Fiffe and James Stokoe in it. Both are fun, especially the former, but you’re really buying them for the art. Love these guys.
Can’t find any of Stokoe’s pages on Google Images so here’s double the Fiffe:
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Alright, I’ve finished Monsters. The issues Dave and I mentioned persist through the whole thing–plot points/timing can be vague, there’s WAY TOO MUCH dialogue, the ordering of the speech bubbles can be tricky–but… BUT… this is still a gorgeous book, by one of the god tier masters of English-language comics.
The story that is being told, although it could’ve/should’ve been sharpened, and maybe didn’t need to rely on such extensive flashbacks for every principle character (the Tom/Oskar flashbacks near the end should’ve been combined into either just Tom’s or just Oskar’s recollections imo), is often very moving. This is a story about the trauma of WWII on the men who fought it and their families, about how fate often separates us from the people we need most, and the solution BWS offers his characters is both tragic and, in a spiritual sense, hopeful. Maybe this is not the only world. Maybe we can make things right elsewhere.
I’m glad this book exists. That BWS could’ve tinkered with it a bit more to achieve perfection will always be regrettable but sometimes the imperfect works by a master are the ones you go back to most often. I already feel like I want to reread it, now that I know the horrors driving these characters and where the story leads.
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The thing with Tyler Durden is that his criticisms of consumerism/capitalism are mostly correct (hedging my bets with “mostly” because I haven’t seen the movie in like 10 years) but they’re rooted in the Narrator’s emasculation. He blames society, his society is consumerist, he correctly diagnoses what’s wrong with consumerism, but ultimately he just wants to feel like a he-man sex machine and blow shit up.
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@DaveWallace yeah Monsters can be confusing in places. I like most of it but I’m often finding myself having to reread to pick up on a minor timing/plot point. The dialogue itself can be vague. When Sgt. MacFarland is tells his wife: “The story is he [Tom Bailey] went crazy and he shot up 4 of his buddies. Killed them all. Tom Bailey was Bobby’s father, and Janet’s husband, and he murdered Poppa.” I had to read that like 5 times to get that MacFarland was talking about his own father. I thought maybe BWS had left out the word “his” and meant that Tom had killed his (Tom’s) father.
I wonder if he wrote a script beforehand–either full script or the detailed storyboards that many cartoonists do–or showed it to anyone before going to finished pages. Some of the mistakes seem like things I pick up in revision and after showing the work to friends/family. The clarity issues are all relatively minor but they add up.
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The comparison I made isn’t 1:1, but morally I think it’s basically the same situation. You can’t just displace people from their homes, so by the same token this means Jews can’t just be expelled from Israel (although the ones in illegal settlements should have to give that land back to Palestinians). I think the post-apartheid South Africa model, where there’s one integrated state and Palestinians are made full citizens and brought into the political process, is the most sensible solution, although I don’t see that happening anytime soon given Israel’s power relative to Palestinians and their support from powerful Western nations like the US.
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100 pages into Monsters. It’s slow-moving, the focus has just shifted to the main character (Bobby Bailey, the military experiment subject), so still unsure what to make of it. What’s clear though is that this is a comic by an artist in complete control of his craft, pouring his heart and soul into each page. While I have issues with some of the dialogue (it can be a bit repetitive, I think it could’ve been trimmed down substantially) I am eager to see where the rest of this unpredictable narrative goes.
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I agree with Jon, Zionism is an insidious idea: that a people are obligated to a nation even if people are already living on the land. The Roma suffered too in the Holocaust, and have continued to be persecuted into the present; imagine if it was decided that they should get, I dunno, Scotland. And Scots became second-class citizens, and many of them were kept in an open-air prison, and they were subject to airstrikes, and when they weren’t being bombed they were denied many of the basic essentials of living. It would be too high a price. Compensation for an unspeakable horror like the Holocaust is understandable but just giving people land where there are already people living is just another form of violence.
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