A fearful symmetry is born

Now it’s time to check out Intruder as he might be expressed across the comics/games/games/comics via licensing.

Thingness

Death of the author, say the students of the Big D, it’s the text, stay with the text … yet in my experience, all too often, the text is abandoned along with the author. Instead, the eager young scholar is distracted by the cultural gestalt, a mélange of multiple derivatives, the shared “is” that “everyone knows.” The sizzle that sold once and can be referenced as having sold, in order to hawk its echo. Worse, instead of critiquing it, they adopt it, so that all the verbiage and Foucaltian Hegelian Derridan whatnot add up to nothing more than its own consumerized and recondite fandom, in which academic employment and careerism have replaced anything resembling inquiry.

Ha! I managed to utilize the characteristic prose of said academic movement and spoof it at the same time. That’s a bucket list moment.

The whites, part 2

Here’s my next post about white people. Specifically, the one who isn’t there.

Knockout

These two covers depict publications from the same year, 1989. However, the past couple of months’ posting hasn’t been about them, but about a non-simultaneous comparison between GURPS: Supers and the prior Champions (1981-1985, up through third edition). Here at the end of what’s been, for me anyway, a gut-wrenching dozen posts, I’ll review and reflect upon why.

Recursion isn’t just a river in Egypt

I love first-generation Champions. I love superhero comics. Here we have a superhero comic based on early Champions. Brace for the awesome! … oh wait …

Two women

It’s the late 1980s – chosen as a transition from one set of codes, meanings, confrontations, confusions, and stereotypes regarding American black people during the mid-late 1970s to another set which settled hard into place by the mid-1990s.

Carol Danvers spits on your grave

Yet another example of that precise gap in my superhero comics buying: purchasing Ms. Marvel #1 and following as the newsstand’s inconsistent provision allowed, then missing the whole Avengers/X-Men story, to discover it upon returning to the titles in the late 80s. Then, in retrospect, discovering the original meaning had been long erased.

The new blackface

A couple decades ago, a filmmaker friend and I were talking about racial stuff, as you do.

Found

There are stories in your head. I can smell’em. What I wouldn’t give to get in there and elbow your inhibitions in the eye, tear the guts out of the pretenses that you throw out instead, and kick your denials solidly in the ass.

Against the Establishment

You may not know my Captain America at all.

Your mama’s Oh Wow

… was better than yours.

The orgasm that saved the world

In which John is upstaged

Fair warning: I’m about to say some really inappropriate things.