The Four Color Media Monitor

This is disgusting. Image Comics is publishing a comic called "Marijuanaman" that was co-written by a singer named Ziggy Marley with Joe Casey and Jim Mahfood, and running the risk of tarnishing their reputation much worse than they did when they published Liefeld books:

At Wondercon, we had glimmers of hope for the Green Lantern movie — but there was another green superhero being unveiled. We were lucky enough to spend some time chatting with Ziggy Marley about his new superhero, Marijuanaman.

[...]

It's the story of Sedona, an alien who travels to Earth from the planet Yelram. Sedona finds that he has a particular affinity with Earth's biosphere, and then he makes a connection with one plant in particular. But he's faced with an evil corporation that wants to sell a synthetic marijuana substitute called GanjaRex — and the corporation sends a deadly monster named Cash-Money to destroy Marijuanaman and his nature-loving friends.

Oh, let me guess, this is some sort of greenie propaganda, is it? And, I suspect, a marxist stealth assault on capitalism to boot. Another something really galling about their character design is that the protagonist's costume looks almost like Green Lantern's.

The idea of Marijuanaman came from learning more about cannabis, and the fact that this plant "has millions of uses beyond just smoking," says Marley. And he started to wonder why the world isn't taking advantage of this versatile plant. "It's beneficial to the environment and less destructive than some of the things we're doing now," he adds — for example, you could use hemp-derived products in place of a lot of oil-based plastics and other stuff.

Oh please. He sounds just as deranged as Carl Sagan.

It's very important to Marley that Marijuanaman gets his power from marijuana without smoking it — he's not a smoker. "His friend [Smokestack] smokes and he gets a contact high." Marley stresses: "Nobody can say he's a bad influence because he smokes. He doesn't smoke. But he still gets his power from marijuana anyway."

When Marijuanaman encounters the plant, it empowers him and "his connection with it is immediate." But even though he gets superpowers, he's not violent — he has a philosophy of pacifism, "that sometimes is contrary to what we here would want him to be. We would want him to just beat the bad guy all the time."

Marley says there are a lot of industries out there that don't want marijuana to be legal — including pharmaceutical companies like the one in his comic book that are trying to sell "fake marijuana" and synethetic cannabinoids.

Not to mention the alcohol and tobacco industries, which don't want the competition. Marley is very passionate about the potential of cannabis to transform the environment and the economy, and replace oil-based byproducts.

Keep the pathetic excuses coming please. It makes no difference whether the character actually chuffs that crap or not; writing their protagonist taking his power from cannabis is no more tasteful than if he were to gain power from flammable acid or poisonous gases like sarin and mustard gas.

And are they saying he doesn't always battle criminals? Well clearly not dope dealers who laugh behind the backs of the people they victimize by furthering addiction.

Some of the "industries" who don't want crappy drugs legalized include family groups, who aren't going to be particularly happy with what the official author says at the end:

Adds Marley: "I want him to be a hero just like Superman, Batman, [or] any one of those guys. Everybody can love him. Kids can love him. Just because he's called Marijuanaman doesn't mean kids can't love him."

But it does mean parents who have every right to stand up for the best interests of their children can be quite disgusted that he's suggesting youngsters read this propaganda junk. And I thought the weakly written adventure comics Image published in the 1990s were bad enough; now they're willing to publish a sensationalized pro-cannabis moonbat atrocity like this and give themselves a continued bad name. Joe Casey, who's co-writing this, may have once had drug problems of his own more than a decade ago, and sure isn't helping himself by lending his services to that screwball musician. And to see prominent websites like MTV promoting this shows that they too are on the way to ruin.

It's bad enough that in past years, there have been leftist propaganda books aimed at children, including but not limited to promoting cannabis. Now these mindless nuts are making inroads into the comics biz. What will happen next, will these leading companies like Image start publishing books openly endorsing marxism?

Labels: conventions, indie publishers, moonbat writers, politics