Oh noes

You got politics in my superheroes, shock! … and superheroes in my politics, too?! Shock and outrage!

Too bad, sweet pea. That’s just how things are and always have been. I’ll tell you why: because comics are political, either via implication due to their junk-product nature which is forced to be close to life to be consumed at all, or explicitly because you can get away with it when no one vets them (or barely). So it’s not “superheroes” I’m talking about necessarily, but rather, superheroes in comics. Political. Put it up your ass and smoke it.

Metaltürk

My pick for the most banal possible phrase to lead with in any writing about comics: “I have always loved the interplay between words and pictures.” However, right now I’m struggling to lead with anything else, because this post is simply about pictures that have emerged from playing (words).

The year of the comics

It’s Jerry Grayson’s fault. He knows all these people with opinions about comics and culture, and as the geek social fallacies would advise, said, “Hey, if I get all my friends together, they’ll be friends too!!” Which actually worked this time, for a jam let’s-all-try-it discussion for his own 1972 Project.

The whites, part 3

script: Len Wein & pencils: Herb Trimpe

Or, “Of Spades and Men.”

The whites, part 2

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

The whites, part 1

Parse race, ethnicity, and color all you want. Meanwhile, I’m gonna talk about whiteness, in what’s turned out to be at least a couple of posts.

Two villains

In the one-step-removed setting of the original Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, the president of the United States is the geriatric Richard Nixon in 1985, evidently president-for-life. In one respect, it’s not as fantastic as it seems: Ronald Reagan (born 1911) was actually older than Nixon (born 1913), thus “this geezer in the White House” as depicted in the comic – set in 1985, published in 1986 – was literally happening.

Stones, smoke, and light

A lot of my writing in this blog is retrospective, keeping most of the content removed from my present-day circumstance and present-day events in comics. But this one’s pretty close to home and I’ll share. The series Berlin nears its completion with the publication of issue #20, presaging the conclusion of the trilogy thus far seen in City of Stones and City of Smoke with City of Light.

Two men

In general this blog makes the case that 1970s culture in particular was not a hive of evil ignorance as I often see it described, but then again …

Scary war

I completely missed war comics as a kid, and the reason is easy: the covers scared the shit out of me, the few I found in the pile of comics I’d inherited, e.g. Sgt. Rock, no less than those I’d see on the stands when I started buying comics, like Weird War Tales and War is Hell.

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.

I just want to talk to him

Today’s about two comics published simultaneously in the mid-late 1990s, both of which I bought start to finish and for which I own the full runs. Each concerns going to find God and have a little talk. With a bullet.