Knowing your Unnhh from your Arrghh

I do like it when creative comics talk and role-playing design talk can use the same words. Let’s narrow it down to one of my three current supers design projects, Champions Now, and talk about the fights. There are three interrelated points: what happens and knowing why; the damage, pain, hurtin’, including the two famous gutturals in the post title; and why the characters are even there and fighting at all.

Gone ape indeed

In 1974 the big SF-media push was to “Go Ape!” I was so enamored of doing so at age 10 that I made it a point to imitate Roddy MacDowall’s ape-walk everywhere until brought to sanity by an unkind comment from my mom.

Cosmic muck

It was an amazing comic. A man has become a muck-monster, his humanity just a memory, seemingly limited to minor human-interest horror-adventures in a swamp, but somehow a magnet for society’s psychological ills, even attuned to cosmic insights, and eventually limping, looming into the central intersection of ultimate forces … Yeah, it’s great, man, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was really someth — wait, you’re talking about 1973?

Spider-Schlep

In one of the letter columns in the late-80s Question, Denny O’Neil refers to Peter Parker as a schlep, and always having been one. That’s Yiddish, and a little confusing because that precise word is a verb meaning to lug something inconvenient, but here, and as I’ve often heard or used it, it’s short for schlepper, meaning an inept, stupid person.

Context!

I love me a timeline. This one’s built mostly from Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, mainly because I couldn’t help but scribble it out as I went along. In the year since I did that, so many of my posts presume knowledge of the content that it’s simply good sense to get the thing on-line for reference.

Everyday religion

First things first: never mind “belief.” I’m talking about upbringing, expectations, habits, and unconsidered identity, and about the real-world, utterly political history of institutions and communities.

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.

Missed! Ran out! Dang! Unnhh!

Let’s begin with a serious observation: this is art by Carmine Infantino we’re talking about, and that is a woman’s body for a woman character – no “objectification,” no high heels, no prancing model-on-runway posture.

Today is for taboo III: Mess-Factor

This is the third of three posts about Marvel mutantdom in the late 1970s and 1980s; the previous two were Today is for taboo and Today is for taboo II.

I’ll open with perhaps the most rage-inducing comics-geek phrase I can produce: I like Cyclops better than Wolverine.

How did I get these mutton chops?

Quick! Count the Wolverine things he doesn’t have.

Wolverine, sheathe your claws! In fact, go away. (Denial … crumbling …) All right, I admit it, that would be covering up for my 80s self who dribbled all over the hairy bastard like everyone else.

Today is for taboo II

The topic is Marvel mutanthood and racism, and its relationship both to prejudice against black Americans and to Jewish-American identity, or a sector thereof. It’s the sequel to Today is for taboo earlier this month.

Today is for taboo

But about what?

Straight to the obvious question: What does Magneto think of Israel?