I’ve launched a Patreon today, supporting a lot of writing about comics history and also .... Jeremy! Read more about it here. Membership starts at a dollar for all benefits!
Thank you for reading.
I did this comic for my Patreon supporters back in the day, but their dollars have withered and faded from memory. Time to share with the world!
calamityjonsaveus reblogged
My publisher, Quirk Books, has teamed up with Humble Bundle for a sale to benefit First Books, which provides educational resources for underserved communities. You can find my books, The League of Regrettable Superheroes and The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains up in the $15 dollar tier, with an IKEA-based horror novel I’ve been wanting to read, a great-looking Fred Van Lente book, the highly-recommended Princesses Behaving Badly and more than $230 worth of ebooks there and in lower tiers. You can grab a bunch books for a measly buck, even! Go Check it out!
I’ve just listed a baker’s dozen of original art pieces over at my Etsy store, including the one-and-done comic page above and some of that Metamorpho you kids like so much these days ...
I’m generally not a fan of the most recent spate of superhero movies (which tend to be merely middling action movies skinned with comic book cosmetics), but I was surprised that I enjoyed Logan -- not just as a movie about Wolverine, but an actual movie. Just as a film, it was impressive in that it gave a shit about character, dialogue, and pacing, was willing to wait for story elements to unfold at a natural pace, wasn’t shoving easter eggs and in-jokes down our throats, and embraced ambiguity.
I remember how the franchise began with a gag about the perceived silliness of the source material -- “yellow spandex” and all that -- and yet Logan introduces a nod to the source material as an actual component of the plot, to introduce doubt and frustration to the characters instead of a smarmy wink. It used it to ask a question about the aspirational quality of superhero comics, and in the end that contrived fiction was more powerful than the brutality and endless fighting in which these films trade.
Its use of violence was its major strength, tho. Violence, in the world of Logan, isn’t empowering, redemptive or cathartic -- frequently, it’s not even necessary or useful. Instead, it’s dehumanizing and shameful, and it weakens the characters’ resolve and ability to relate to each other. Laura, in particular, ran the risk of becoming another post-Buffy asskicker, but was instead a victim of her own violence as much as her targets.
Really, there’s so much more; that it wasn’t violence that redeemed Wolverine but that he killed his worst self (which I thought was a weakness in the film, writing the metaphor that blatantly) and allowed his faltering self to die, so as to save what is effectively his younger self and prevent her from going down his dangerous, pointless, suffering road. Jackman had the room to actually act for the first time in all of these films, and he and Stewart were a remarkable pair. And placing the movie seven years ahead let them do something that so few of these movies think to do -- to create a familiar world with slightly unfamiliar rules, which suit the necessary excesses of the genre. “Robocop Rules,” as it were.
Really a beautiful film. The Paris, Texas of X-Men movies. Paris, TeXas.
I checked. It works out.
Some time back, I asked some folks to recount the best advice they’d ever received from their fathers. Here’s the results...
I’m organizing some old files and wasn’t sure if I’d ever shared this piece before...
“Snickt.”
Nightwing and Flamebird
I’ve just written up the debut of Nightwing and Flamebird -- Superman and Jimmy Olsen’s Batman-and-Robin-style identities when they have to fight crime in the Bottle City of Kandor -- for The Chronological Superman. I didn’t really like N&F when I was a kid (although that was a different pair, as depicted in Superman Family), but the idea has since really grown on me.
Were I in charge of the Superman titles, I’d definitely bring this back. It seems to me that it could serve a really interesting purpose. I figure, every now and again, Superman visits Kandor specifically to play the Nightwing role, in part to keep his fighting skills sharp, inasmuch as he doesn’t have powers in Kandor.
But, more to the point, I expect he’d do it in order to be wounded, beaten and in pain. From Superman’s perspective, it would be disrespectful to the ordinary humans who frequently put themselves in danger to help others -- firefighters, search-and-rescue, police, many of his allies in the Justice League -- to not take the same kinds of risks as they do and have similar experiences, even if it’s only once-in-a-while. Superman’s invulnerable, so to really understand the bravery of everyday humans, he’d need to push himself to his mortal limits, and occasionally get a split lip or a bruised rib...
Every time they revamp Aquaman, I always hope they’ll go back to the original concept of an undersea explorer whose strange powers came from Atlantean science.
The story must start with my father, a famous undersea explorer — if I spoke his name, you would recognize it. My mother died when I was a baby, and he turned to his work of solving the ocean's secrets. His greatest discovery was an ancient city, in the depths where no other diver had ever penetrated. My father believed it was the lost kingdom of Atlantis. He made himself a water-tight home in one of the palaces and lived there, studying the records and devices of the race's marvelous wisdom. From the books and records, he learned ways of teaching me to live under the ocean, drawing oxygen from the water and using all the power of the sea to make me wonderfully strong and swift. By training and a hundred scientific secrets, I became what you see — a human being who lives and thrives under the water.
I basically enjoy Aquaman, but we’ve had almost sixty years of the Silver Age version. I’d love to go back to the original concept, even for a year or two.
Always loved, too, that he grew up in an undersea palace and then made his crimefighting headquarters inside a wrecked-as-fuck fishing boat. Aquaman was a slumming hipster. He was gentrifying the ocean floor.