Buffy Season 8

As people might have noticed from previous posts, I'm a huge fan of Joss Whedon's work: Buffy, Angel, Firefly, Serenity. I liked Fray, although I didn't go into raptures of ecstasy over that one like some people. Even Alien Resurrection, which was as horrible and deformed a monstrosity as the Ripley/Alien hybrid itself, nevertheless showed signs of Whedon's talents. Beneath the horrible, drool-covered grubby fingerprints and suspicious stains, one can just barely detect the faintest signs of an actual good story and interesting characters.

Particularly given the goodness that was Fray, I was hoping for fireworks from the comic book series of Season 8 of Buffy. Alas, it was not to be -- the first four issues haven't impressed me. The story itself is okay, but I expected better than okay from Joss. But it feels simultaneously rarefied and compressed: there's not enough happening, but what is happening happens too fast, if that makes sense. Perhaps that's a limitation of comic books compared to television, I don't know.

But the killer for me is that I just don't think the artist is good enough. There seems to be a tradition now for comics to have really good artwork on the covers and shockingly incompetent artwork inside. Take this example of somebody who supposedly is Giles:


Take away the cup of tea and he could be any guy in glasses -- take away the glasses and he could be any guy. It's not just Giles either -- the artist hasn't really captured the look of any of the characters from the series.

The characters faces are terribly inexpressive. They're supposed to be talking, and yet their mouths look like they're glued shut. There is little sense of kinetic motion in the artwork either: apart from action scenes, most of the time people look like badly-posed wax dummies.

I'm disappointed, and will have to think long and hard before buying any more of the series.

Why does Captain America hate America?

A nation is nothing! A flag is nothing but a piece of cloth!!
Captain America

"Professor Fury" writes about an old Captain America comic book he first read in 1984 where old wing-head himself proclaims "America is a piece of trash". Strong words for the super-patriot meant to embody everything pure and good about the USA.


Fury writes:

I've written before that Captain America planted the seeds of my eventual liberalism. Those seeds were planted over a number of issues, but this one is probably the most central, the moment where the notion that just because someone wrapped themselves in a flag, it didn't mean they understood anything about America or had its best interests at heart, that sometimes the people who shouted "AMERICA" the loudest understood its meaning the least. Such an obvious point, I'd like to be able to say, but it's one that our nation struggles with daily, so I guess it's not. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this issue provoked some severe cognitive dissonance in young pre-fessor Fury, especially during the dialogue-laden final showdown between the two Caps. It was easy for me to lose track of who I was supposed to be rooting for, identical as they were and uncertain as I was about which one was saying what.

[...]

"America is a piece of trash!" I kid you not, that freaked this flag-waving 9-year-old way the heck out. More importantly, it created in me an new awareness of the distinction, and the great distance, between the geographical America and the ideal America. Americans and Germans essentially the same? This was not the lesson that comics had heretofore imparted.

There is a vast gulf between the ideal of America, the America of "Truth, justice and the American Way", and the real America, which is merely yet another grubby neo-imperial power that frequently spits on its ideals for short-term selfish gain to entrenched special interests.

Despite the machinations of the Pentagon and White House, despite the casual bigotry and cruelty of the American heartland, despite the greed and heartlessness of Wall Street, the American ideal is still a powerful one, and icons like Captain America still have power to grip us. For, unlike the laughable patriotism of (say) Hulk Hogan's Real American, Captain America's patriotism isn't about putting other countries down, or even for that matter of putting the USA up on a pedestal, "my country, right or wrong". Captain America's patriotism is to the ideals of liberty, freedom, justice and opportunity that America -- the ideal America, the America of mythology -- stands for, and if the real American turns against those ideals, Cap will be the first to stand and fight, not for his country, but for his ideals.

Alice, Dorothy and Wendy

Alan Moore, the cartoonist responsible for such things as V For Vendetta and From Hell, has co-written a steamy three-volume graphic novel called Lost Girls.

Lost Girls tells the story of the adult selves of Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who find themselves guests at a little Austrian hotel at the brink of World War I.

BoingBoing has more.

It appears that Lost Girls is unlikely to be distributed in the UK.

Wonder Woman

We've all had a giggle at the number of times Wonder Woman has somehow got herself into bondage. But what you might not have realised is that the creator of Wonder Woman was deadly serious about his creation:

"Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them."

Dr. William Moulton Marston
inventor of the lie detector and
(under the pseudonym Charles Moulton)
creator of Wonder Woman

and also:

Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn't love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully. Woman's body contains twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male. What woman lacks is the dominance or self assertive power to put over and enforce her love desires. I have given Wonder Woman this dominant force but have kept her loving, tender, maternal and feminine in every other way.

The page also includes a rather interesting interview with Marston published in "Family Circle" in 1942, where he explained:

At this point [the interviewer] protested. "Women enjoy being bound by men; it's less work and more fun than keeping male captives secure. Girls like to get their man, then surrender to him."

"And what happens next?" prompted [Marston]. "The man loses interest completely. No man wants to be freed by the girl who has caught him and no man has the slightest interest in tying up a girl who holds out her hands to be bound. If he takes her as his property, that's a bad day for both of them. The man begins to use dominance, and that's acutely painful for the woman captive. Wonder Woman and her sister Amazons have to wear heavy bracelets to remind them of what happens to a girl when she lets a man conquer her. The Amazons once surrendered to the charm of some handsome Greeks and what a mess they got themselves into. The Greeks put them in chains of the Hitler type, beat them, and made them work like horses in the fields. Aphrodite, goddess of love, finally freed these unhappy girls. But she laid down the rule that they must never surrender to a man for any reason. I know of no better advice to give modern women than this rule that Aphrodite gave the Amazon girls."

Hastily the psychological giant added, "Of course, she may let the man think she's helpless. My Wonder Woman often lets herself be tied into a bundle with chains as big as your arm. But in the end she easily snaps the chains. Women can do lots of things by letting men think they're fettered when they're not."

You can see old WW covers here and read more about her creator on Wikipedia.

Thanks to John & Belle.

Calvin and Hobbes

Why Calvin and Hobbes stands head and shoulders above almost all other newspaper comic strips:

And it's really a shame that it's so difficult to quantify this strip's greatness. I can confidently state that Calvin & Hobbes outclasses the rest of the comic strip world more than anything else has ever outclassed the rest of its medium. Sans this strip, the industry is characterized by guys sitting on rocks making stupid puns, a Family Circus kid misunderstanding the meaning of a word, or an overweight father playing golf while telling jokes such as I LIKE GOLF and GOLF IS HARD. It's a medium that doesn't really deserve something as good as Calvin & Hobbes, but it got it anyway, and the newspaper-reading world was made a better place by it.

You really have to admire a comic strip author in the U.S.A. who has his six-year-old protagonist describe himself thusly:

He's one of the old gods! He demands sacrifice!

The strange and horrible history of Superman

With the latest Superman movie just out in the cinemas now, it is a good time to link to the strange and horrible history of the movie, and how (as of 2004) the studio had spent fifty million dollars on it without even agreeing on a director or writer. It is a tale of utter disrespect and contempt for the Superman character and the fans:

[Jon] Peters then told [Kevin] Smith to have Brainiac fight polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude, demanding that the film be wall-to-wall action. Smith thought it was a stupid idea, so Peters said, "Then have Brainiac fight Superman’s bodyguards!" Smith responded, "Why the hell would Superman need bodyguards?" Peters wouldn’t let up, so Smith caved in and had Brainiac fight the polar bears. Then Peters demanded that Brainiac give Luthor a hostile space dog as a gift, arguing that the movie needed a cuddly Chewbacca character that could be turned into a toy. Then, after watching Chasing Amy, Peters liked the gay black character in the film so much that he ordered Smith to make Brainiac’s robot servant L-Ron gay, asserting that the film needed a gay R2-D2 with attitude. Then Peters demanded that Superman fight a huge spider at the end of the film, which Smith refused to do—he used a "Thanagarian Snare Beast" instead. (However, Peters did manage to recycle his spider idea and use it in Wild Wild West.)

It is no wonder that Hollywood finds it next to impossible to bring out quality movies. The few exceptions tend to come from independent or semi-independent producers. Judging by the history of Superman, it seems that the worse a director, the more his movies bomb, the better the major studios love him.

And casting choices... Oy vey!

WB made Justin Timberlake a firm offer to cast him as Superman...which he turned down cold, saying "whatever it is you’re smoking, I don’t want any part of it"

I have it on good authority that the new Superman movie isn't bad -- but, with the exception of the incredible performance of the lead actor, isn't especially good either. As I'm not a fan of Superman, I doubt I'll be forking out my hard-earned to see this flick at the cinemas.

Still, we can all give a sigh of relief that at least there were no polar bears.

Brainiac will have to do the chores

John Holbo writes with obvious amusement about DC's "The Mutiny of the Super-Heroines" comic from May 1968.

Legion comics suffer from a tendency toward the 3-panel disaster story. (A building is falling over. Oh no, Karate Kid's karate is not strong enough to catch a building. Mon-El catches the building.) So nothing seems out of place when the visiting ambassador's ship just blows up for no reason. What stuns our boys is the figure who emerges from the burning craft. Superboy: "*GASP* The ambassador ... a woman!" The ambassador is equally shocked. "You're in charge? A male?" "Of course." "You mean earth still has a primitive patriarchal society ... ruled by men?"
[...]
Anyway, it turns out the ambassador has a plan for a feminist revolution, and the key is giving the girls more power. She does this thing with some statues. Now the girls are powerful, they make the boys look like schmucks. Invisible Kid tries to order them all into quarantine on the theory that they must have some sort of space disease, but the girls bust out to save the guys, who have screwed up again in stopping a jail break. The boys claim to have had some brilliant plan for stopping the break ... and you girls get back to quarantine!

Priceless!