Basketball star develops a comic with Archie

Variety reports Shaquille o'Neal, famous veteran basketball player, is developing a comic at Archie, about the history of a former African king who'd fallen victim to slavery and gained freedom through piracy:

NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal has partnered with Archie Comics to develop “Vengeance Unchained: The Legend of Black Caesar,” a new comic book series about the rise of the mythological West African pirate. Stephanie Williams will write the series, while Ray-Anthony Height and Studio Sky-Tiger will handle the art.

The official logline for “Vengeance Unchained” reads, “An African king of extraordinary physical presence must navigate the brutal transformation from royalty to slavery to piracy, searching for his kidnapped love while discovering that freedom in the Caribbean comes only to those willing to take it by force.”

“Growing up I always loved stories about warriors who refused to quit,” said O’Neal. “Black Caesar starts as a king, loses everything, and takes his freedom back on his own terms. That’s the kind of story I want to help tell. We built something that’s going to entertain you and make you think, and I’m ready for the world to see what we created with Archie Comics, an iconic brand I have been a big fan of for many years. Archie has such an incredible legacy of storytelling and being able to collaborate with a brand that has meant so much to generations of fans made this project even more exciting for me.”

What I don't understand is why O'Neal wants to do this with a company that's long succumbed to wokery, and based on that, is hardly the best place to do such a project. There's bound to be plenty of independent publishers where he could've produced this project, and it would've been just as significant. I'm sure the history O'Neal's building on has importance, but doing it at Archie is decidedly not recommended. They tainted their legacy in the past 15 years, and it still doesn't seem like they'll ever mend it.

What Alan Moore says about Frank Miller and the industry

Alan Moore, having long had little to do with the comics medium for years already, was interviewed by the UK Observer, and has rather unsurprisingly unflattering words to say about Frank Miller. But first:

You are ‘divorced’ from your earlier works like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, but they are powerfully predictive, rather than histories.

They were never meant to be predictive. Friends want me to write something nice. Why do I have to keep doing these terrible dystopian stories that then actually happen?

Well if he realizes why, more importantly, apocalyptic stories only built upon pessimism can be discouraging when you hammer away at them with no brighter side to balance, at least that's something. Though it doesn't excuse that he's such a leftist, and unfortunately, as the following suggests, he hasn't risen above this in real life:

With the [Guy Fawkes] mask from V for Vendetta, you created a symbol for resistance.

It’s one of the works that I’ve disowned, although I am very glad if that mask has been useful to a global protest movement. I was glad that Occupy could find a use for it. I was optimistic when I saw Tunisian school kids wearing it at the start of the Arab Spring, but that replaced the old governments with worse ones and led inexorably to [war in] Syria. If the old world refuses to die, the new world cannot be born.

What do you mean by ‘the old world’?

The ferocity of the rightwing push that we’ve seen over the last 10 years. I can’t really attribute that to anything other than a desperate sense that they and their politics have no part in the future.

What a groaner. He just won't let go of the whole notion on right-wingers could be a problem, but not left-wingers. And does he turn a blind eye to the dangers of Islam, which is consuming the UK even now as we speak? If he believes the "Arab Spring" really had any positive impact in Egypt, reality contradicts that. And how come he denies Watchmen and V for Vendetta were meant to be predictive? Is it because he feels that part alludes to more recent world issues he never actually meant to write a metaphor for? Also appalling is his continued favorability to the Occupy movement, years after the fact, and if that's how he's going to opine, there's no chance he sees anything wrong with how things are really going in Syria now, and the disaster its current autocrat is inflicting upon anybody considered a "kuffar".

How did you get from learning in the library to writing Future Shocks, a sci-fi cartoon strip in 2000 AD?

I asked my friend Steve Moore, who had been working as a comic script writer. He taught me the basics, and I started submitting stories to Doctor Who weekly and 2000 AD. The 2000 AD editor rejected them but liked my style, so gave me Future Shocks. They were a great way to learn how to tell a story. I don’t acknowledge them [now]. The companies have lawyers and will fight you in court until you are destitute. I don’t want to be associated with the comics industry, which is poisonous.

OK… a couple of questions about that poison. The Dark Knight’s Frank Miller, who I think you fell out with…

He’s one of the reasons I’m embarrassed to be connected with the comics industry.

There is one year, 1986, when he releases Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, you release Watchmen, and it changes comics for ever. He’s now worth $45m.

I’m aware of this. Comics are a wonderful medium but the industry is corrupt. One of the reasons I disowned that work is because it is owned by DC Comics. They can give it to any writer. There was a TV series called Watchmen and my only connection with that was receiving a parcel with a powder blue barbecue apron bearing the hydrogen symbol and a letter that began, “Mr. Moore, I am one of the bastards currently destroying Watchmen…” I wrote back a brief letter, saying that this work has been stolen from me so, as far as I’m concerned, it is unauthorised.

Okay, so he's seriously discouraged based on his experiences with a company that came to rip off its contributors more than once, recalling how Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were at one point being short-changed by DC on Superman until they went public about it in the mid-70s. A big difference is that, as the creators of the first prominent superhero, they had some backing in their time, including the late artist Neil Adams IIRC (but who knows if they'd find it now?), while Moore, by contrast, didn't find anything of the sort, if at all. And I guess he resents that, but again, his leftism is making it difficult to care.

As for his beef with Miller, I assume it's because Miller by contrast went on to work in films to some extent, even though in the end, Miller didn't have much more success than any adaptations of Moore's work did, recalling the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Watchmen films were disasters, and so too was V for Vendetta, IIRC.

Screen Rant addressed this in turn, and they unshockingly take Moore's side regardless of where Miller's been going lately, telling that:

However, that friendship was already seemingly over by 2011, when Moore was harshly critical of Miller's public comments about the Occupy protest movement in an interview. Both before and after that, Moore has criticized what he considers the "misogynistic," "homophobic," and "fascist" overtones of Miller's work. Alan Moore clearly came to dislike Miller's later comics, like Sin City and 300, but the root of the issue, on and off the page, is political.

[...] Frank Miller is frequently described as a conservative, though he disavows that label himself. Meanwhile, Alan Moore is a self-avowed anarchist and magician. But one thing they share is how much their personalities, and their ideologies, drive what they do on the page. Which makes their creative and political differences indistinguishable. Then add a professional layer to that: Miller embraced the comics industry, while Moore forsaked it.

Yes, for nearly a decade, Miller's been doing everything he can to back away from any such labeling, even going so far in his recent documentary to say he's sorry for attacking the Occupy movement. Assuming Moore knows this, it just shows that the whole notion he's going to forgive and forget so easily is exaggerated. For if the Observer interview is any suggestion, he won't change his mind anytime soon.

Anyway, now that DC owner Warner Brothers has come under the same ownership as Paramount, one could wonder, will they provide Moore with compensation, if he really deserves it? And given that the mogul who owns both is pro-Donald Trump, one can validly wonder if Moore will even accept any offered? If not, what was his whole rant about in the first place? All I know is that it's just too bad Moore has to be such a far-leftist, and it makes it hard to credit much of his resume outside of a handful of items.

What Frank Miller thinks of Superman and Batman's partnership in World's Finest, during 40th anniversary of Dark Knight Returns

At the ComicsPro convention, Popverse says veteran artist Miller told the following about the partnership and friendship between the Man of Steel and Masked Manhunter:

"When I was a child, and I would see World's Finest Comics come out, even then I'd say, 'This is crazy, these guys would never like each other.' And I knew I could build toward the crescendo of the animus between them [in The Dark Knight Returns]," Miller said.

Sigh. How can the two of them like or dislike each other when they don't exist? I think this symbolizes another problem with Miller: he can't put his absurd biases aside to enjoy something based upon merit, let alone escapist entertainment. Also worth considering is that both Supes and Bats were co-stars in Justice League of America, and if it wasn't wrong to depict them getting along there as much as with their other co-stars, then it's stupid to say it's implausible for them to have a comfy partnership in World's Finest, which became more of a team title for the twosome by the early 60s. Let's also remember Miller was the one who made such a big deal out of women in comicdom allegedly looking like they did little more than take a shower, he drew Black Widow with short hair.

And this wasn't the only thing Miller had to say at the convention. He also told how DC editorial approved of putting allusions to Ronald Reagan in DKR:

DC's The Dark Knight Returns features a range of familiar Batman characters like The Joker, Two-Face, and Barbara Gordon, but there's another familiar face in the pages of Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley's story: Ronald Reagan.

Now, Ronald Reagan was President of the United States at the time that Miller wrote The Dark Knight Returns, so it's only natural that the writer include panels of the President while showing the larger political context beyond Gotham. However, Miller's inclusion of Reagan in The Dark Knight Returns may still raise a few eyebrows, which he addressed at ComicsPRO 2026.

When Miller was asked if DC had any objections to his putting Ronald Reagan into The Dark Knight Returns, he had a succinct answer: "No."

But of course not. This was a right-wing president in focus, and even back then, most liberal artists/writers weren't exactly known for taking seriously negative approaches to left-wing politicians. But if it so matters, did anybody at the time take issue with Reagan for specific failures like running away from Lebanon and failing to avenge the USA military officials who were murdered by Hezbollah jihadists in 1983? Did anybody like Miller take issue with how, in a way, Reagan enabled Iran's ayatollahs to build up nuclear development? And while he may have taken issue with Russia's commnism, he didn't exactly do the same when it came to China's. His vetoing the Anti-Apartheid Act on South Africa in 1986 was decidedly another serious mistake. But, if neither Miller nor his fellow liberal peers ever called Reagan out on his weaknesses regarding Islamic terrorism, communism, and what occurred in the South Africa republic, what's the point of their taking potshots at him? If you can't acknowledge all his flaws with honesty, it makes no sense to belittle him in DKR, if that's what Miller really set out to do.

"By any standards, this is fair game. This is fair use, which is the legal term for it. It is satire, it is parody. Just as a newspaper cartoonist can draw the President of the United States, a comic book artist can as well. Perhaps it would have been different if I had drawn actor Ronald Reagan by name and said anything about him that wasn't true. But to do a cartoon imitation of the absurdity of some of his excesses and, of course, his personality... sorry, he ran for that Office," Miller said.

Reagan isn't the only leader to have made an appearance in DC Comics around this time. Dave McKean's cover for Hellblazer #3 features graffiti of Margaret Thatcher with vampire teeth behind John Constantine. As Miller said, it's "fair game."

But note that Thatcher too, whatever flaws she had, was also a right-leaning figure, and if they had no intention of belittling left-leaners, British or otherwise, then that too falls flat, even though Thatcher never made any serious effort to prevent Islamofascism from overtaking the UK. One of the most questionable things Thatcher's government did do, however, was ban marketing of toy merchandise with the word "ninja" in them, which led to the Ninja Turtles being renamed "hero turtles" instead. There was even some ostensible concern over bloody horror movies. But the creep of sharia didn't concern them? If Thatcher and company really thought something was wrong with horror films, hers and her colleagues' failure to take an objective view of the Religion of Peace made such concerns a joke. Of course, even Miller himself has done something like that with his 2011 GN, Holy Terror, recalling the defeatist interview he gave to the UK Guardian in 2018. By the way, what in Miller's view was true or not about Reagan? Not sure if he specified.

Miller even said that Batman's supposed to symbolize hope:

When you think of Frank Miller's writing, what words come to mind for you? What images of his vision of Batman are conjured up for you? I'm willing to bet that a lot of you thought of something along the lines of "dark." But even though Miller likes to explore darkness in his writing, he doesn't see Batman as an entirely dark character.

The writer-artist reflected on the legacy of The Dark Knight Returns with Klaus Janson at the ComicsPRO industry conference this year. "I see it as that even though [Batman is] a big, scary guy who employs terror in his methods, that he's ultimately a figure of hope. And hope is an extraordinarily powerful thing that gives people great strength and resilience," said Miller.

In that case, does he find it disappointing less editors and writers in the years after DKR tried to develop a viewpoint that could convey hope better, and depict Bruce Wayne as a guy with an optimistic side, along with possible more of a sense of humor? Come to think of it, what's his view of the supporting cast of characters like Robin? Does he think Chuck Dixon did a good job with his take on the 3rd, Tim Drake, and does he find it disturbing that later editors and writers took apart much of what made Dixon's take work in the first place? And the one who really set things in repellent motion was, alas, another so-called conservative, Bill Willingham, who never did enough to prove he's remorseful for alienating fandom. Also note that, last time I looked, Tim's father Jack never had his fate reversed. And he, on the other hand, was put in the grave by left-leaning Brad Meltzer during that repugnant "event", Identity Crisis. Something else Miller's never commented on.

And Miller even let know that it was John Byrne's idea to create a female Robin in DKR:

At ComicsPRO 2026, Frank Miller revealed where the inspiration came from to include a version of Robin in the story, opposite a grizzled and middle-aged Bruce Wayne. Of course, at the time in 1986, there had never been a female Robin, as the mantle had only been carried by Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. And the idea to create a Robin who was also a girl didn't come from Frank Miller's mind, but the mind of another creator.

"I never thought there would be a Robin. But it was my colleague, John Byrne, as a matter of fact, who suggested that I put Robin in it and that I make Robin a girl," Miller began.

Miller continued, "And I set out to create Carrie Kelley. And the whole thing really started rushing together, because all of a sudden, there was a bright spot in Batman's dark world. And all of a sudden, this middle-aged superhero had a fatherly aspect."

Wait a minute. Is he saying that before all that, Batman never had a fatherly angle in his partnership with Dick Grayson? I just don't know what's going on here anymore. What I do know is that the aforementioned Willingham made a sick mockery of even that by turning Spoiler/Stephanie Brown into a female Robin for 2 issues around 2004, even though his willingness to participate in crafting a crossover (War Games) where she'd be tortured to death by Black Mask made that far more offensive than impressive. Similar points can be made with what Willingham did with Dr. Leslie Thompkins, whom Willingham wrote telling she allowed Spoiler to die to serve as an illogical lesson to Batman.

Anyway, Miller's latest tales of his past career just don't impress me any more than some of his previous ones, perhaps because he doesn't follow through properly on whatever points he wants to make. Again, I realize DKR's not really the fault of where things wound up with the Masked Manhunter's downfall as a storytelling vehicle, but rather, subsequent editors/writers. Even so, I think it's disappointing Miller has to stick with all this grating darkness, and won't emphasize anything brighter. Or, if darkness matters, why does he grind to a halt today when it comes to more serious issues like Islamofascism and communism? At least that's what it's looked like for nearly a decade now.

Some history of an early Fantastic Four issue's story and of Lee/Kirby, that may have unfortunately been exploited for political propaganda

A writer for City News in Canberra, Australia, tells about the 51st issue of Fantastic Four, but there's suggestions this item was written as a stealth political statement. First, here's something he tells about team leader Mr. Fantastic:

The thing is, nestled among those treasures, and appearing in Australian newsagencies in early August 1966, at exactly the same time I first appeared too, was the little known number 51.

It’s worth a small fraction of the others and is a lame and ordinary 20-page story introducing a villain (the evil scientist Ricardo Jones) who was so uninteresting that he dies at the end of the story and was never seen again.

From the moment I first read it, it is my favourite comic book of all time and I read it about once a year, whenever my wife rereads Pride and Prejudice. It’s got fewer bonnets but more explosions so, you know, swings and roundabouts.

The story is simple. In every issue since number 1, Reed Richards, famed scientist and the leader of the FF, promises but fails to cure his best buddy Ben Grimm from being a monster made from rocks, known as The Thing.

I think a moment must be taken to point out that Mr. Fantastic didn't promise or practice curing the Thing in virtually every issue at the time, and certainly not within 2-3 decades of its debut, so why is this being exaggerated? That the writer seems to be putting down the story despite suggestions to the contrary is also galling. Here's more:

The story begins with Ben being so frustrated at never getting cured that he falls in with the Evil Scientist, who is jealous of Reed’s fame and fortune.

The scientist successfully turns Ben back into a normal man. Ben races to his girlfriend’s house to show off his normality and finally propose. Evil scientist is turned into the rock monster himself and impersonates The Thing, his plan being to destroy the hated rock-star scientist Reed Richards. [...]

Classic comics melodrama demands that when the evil bloke dies, Ben, about to propose to his girlfriend in his handsome human body, instantly turns back into the ugly Thing and fails to pop the question. Alicia, we know, doesn’t care what he looks like and loves him for him, but he never sees it.

When I was 11, life was often hard. I read that comic 20 times and felt such shame that I related more to the evil scientist than to Reed and Ben, our heroes.

I understood his loneliness and anger so much better than their easy success, belonging and having a best friend. I loved the redemption that could be gained from a single act.

Kindness to me is finding all those people who are behaving like the evil scientist, blaming everything for things they cannot grasp, and showing them all the love and respect we can, to open their own hearts.

People who have undergone unfair treatment, fear, and despair and seek recognition or refuge in our modern Australia – people who’ve been here for six years or 60,000 – there’s plenty here who need our love today more than ever.

But is there room for people who follow bad ideologies/religions and commit terrible crimes stemming from that? I get this strange feeling this was written as a form of apologia for Islam's entrance into Oz, and if it was meant for that purpose, that's very disturbing, considering all the damage that occurred in decades since till now. It's also disturbingly worrisome how the columnist implies he's sympathetic to people who commit crimes, and raises another troubling issue - there seem to be quite a few people like these who created a situation that got worse over the years where they pivot to loving the villains more, presumably because heroes are "boring"?!? That's practically what led to Hollywood glamorizing crime. Just what are people like these thinking? Is this how they thank Lee/Kirby for all their hard work? And just what "easy success" did Reed and Ben have? Considering the former failed several times to fully restore the latter to his human form for long, that's not exactly what I'd call success. Also, Reed had fallouts with wife Susan Storm, and while they did eventually mend fences, the whole notion everything was rosy in the FF's series up to the early 2000s is colossally exaggerated by these propagandists. Also, opening your heart to somebody who could follow an ideology built upon evil and oppression is naive and dangerous.

The above column, unfortunately, led to another one that appears to have been written even more noticeably for said apologia goals. First though:

How much of the resultant work was Lee and how much was Kirby, is a furiously debated topic in comic book circles. But what is clear is that it needed both of them to make it special.

Sadly, as the years passed, Lee would claim sole credit for the Fantastic Four, framing Kirby as simply an artist-for-hire. Kirby was deeply hurt and eventually left Marvel for DC. Fantastic Four continued under Lee and other artists, but the spark was gone.

And this is little more than another subtle putdown, when they make it sound like Kirby was the only artist who ever gave it energy. What about John Buscema, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Carlos Pacheco and goodness knows what other artists were involved up to the turn of the century? Anybody who's going to minimize the impact of FF the way both columnists have done is not writing these history pieces altruistically. I think it's a shame Lee and Kirby fell apart, but what the writer says in regards to the entertainment value going forward is still no excuse. And now, here's another clue this article was meant more for propaganda purposes:

Like Lennon and McCartney, the creative rift between Lee and Kirby was never fully resolved before their deaths. Which brings us back to Antonio’s characteristic question about kindness. How should two big egos work together?

While healthy to have, egos should never be left untempered. We know this since Renaissance times when the cloistered cathedrals of Europe interacted, often turbulently, with the polymathic Islamic world.

Gee, this sounds an awful lot like somebody's trying to make the Islamic world look far better in every way, at the expense of say, the Israeli world's innovations. Naturally, he never gets into what innovations or polymathism the Muslim world allegedly produced, when more honest research would make clear that's not literally the case. And is he implying the Christian church wrongly attacked the Islamic world, but not the other way around? Wow, this practically obscures persecution of Christians in Nigeria. The columnist should be ashamed. Towards the end of the City News column, here's what's additionally fishy:

I was 16 and saw a classifieds ad for “a box of Marvel comics”. Travelling by train to Strathfield, I walked several blocks to be met by a guy who explained that his uncle (a single man) had died and that they were selling his house contents.

What emerged were, not one, but several boxes of comics – a complete run of Fantastic Four from issue 22 to 116, plus other ’60s Marvel titles, all in excellent condition.

I can’t remember exactly what I paid – perhaps $100, which was a lot for a 16-year-old at the time – but I do remember the crazed, Joker-like, grin on my face as I shoved a fistful of $20 notes into the seller’s hand. It took two arduous trips to get them home and they’ve been with me ever since.

When I look at them now, I like to imagine that dead uncle smiling at me from above, pleased that his collection is still being loved and read, rather than sealed in a vault, awaiting a Sotheby’s sale. Some pretty strange teamwork, that’s for sure, but the world works better with strange teams.

Which is in no way a segue to my normal political milieu, to cheekily encourage a Greens/Liberals partnership. Mind you…

Ah, how fascinating. Sounds like this must be some stealth leftist propaganda as well, which only dampens the impact of the comics segment even more. And begs the question - was this article intended as comics nostalgia, or as political propaganda?

Some so-called historians sure know how to exploit the creations of people they may not like and insult everbody's intellect, all for the sake of advancing their ambiguous political goals. With the worst part being when they're not willing to be clear and state their exact beliefs. Such people, as a result, have no business commenting on comics history.

Michigan State University has the planet's largest historical comics collection

Saginaw and Bay City News talks about Michigan State University's massive collection of comics at one of their archives, with material dating back as far as the mid-1930s, and even some 19th century prototype samples, along with plenty of foreign products:

Did you know the world’s largest publicly accessible comic book collection is in Michigan? I didn’t, until my editor pitched me the idea of visiting Michigan State University to peruse the approximately 350,000-strong cache.

The treasure trove grew from a few thousand issues at its inception in 1970.

The collection, housed within the Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections, offers something rare in the world of comic preservation — the opportunity to actually handle the materials.

Visitors can access this taxpayer-funded resource by registering online and requesting specific comics at least three days before their planned visit. Upon arrival at the library, located at 366 W. Circle Drive, staff provide proper handling instructions and equip visitors with a page-turning spatula to carefully examine these historic documents.

The collection originated in 1970 through the vision of MSU Professor Russel B. Nye, a pioneer of pop culture studies who recognized comics’ cultural significance when many dismissed them as low art. Nye began with approximately 6,000 issues donated by graduating seniors, establishing what would become an internationally significant archive.

Today, the collection spans every continent except Antarctica, featuring propaganda comics from North Korea, the largest collection of Israeli comics outside Israel, and proto-comics dating to the 1860s. Current collection efforts focus on comics from throughout North and South America.

Beyond their entertainment value, comics serve as cultural artifacts that reflect their times.

I'm impressed they've shown the courage to archive Israeli comics as well in this day and age, and wonder if it includes the cartoonist Uri Fink's late 70s creation, "Sabraman". And lest we forget, many of the early creators since the 1930s were of Israeli descent, like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, of course. No doubt, it's an archive I'll one day want to see if I can visit too, though if modern comics from the Big Two are in this collection, they'd only be good for studying what modern PC propagandists turn out, and not good for entertainment and artistic value. For now, it's great the MSU is gathering only so many comics from around the world to comprise this collection for 55 years already, and it'll be interesting to see if it can continue for a few more decades and see what then can be archived within the span of a century.

A graphic novel about Muslim immigrants written as a victimology tale, and some more focused on illegal immmigration and communism

Here's a review from Noahpinion of several GNs focused mainly on the subject of immigration, and wouldn't you know it, one of the products listed here is written as a form of Islamic victimology of the most grating kind:

If rightists want to read a story about immigration that confirms all their worst fears, Huda F. Cares? will probably do nicely. It’s a story about a deeply conservative, completely insular Muslim family who lives in America but is not fundamentally of America. They stick primarily to themselves, living out their traditionalist religious lifestyle in seclusion. Their family trip to Disneyland — the one time they let themselves venture outside their enclave — is the subject of the story, and yet almost none of the book is spent describing Disneyland at all. Instead, it’s all about internal family dynamics.

They do occasionally encounter Americans outside their family, but these are pretty much always presented as threats or opponents to be overcome. Regular Americans insult Huda’s family and try to sexually harass the (conservatively dressed) women. When one of the girls is detained at the park for hitting a sexual harasser, the mother takes a video and threatens to summon the online mob against the park security, ultimately forcing them to let her daughter off the hook. At the end, the family decides that the world is always going to be against them, and that they have to stick together as a family to resist.

This is presented as a hopeful conclusion, since the family ultimately puts aside their constant squabbling to unite against the outside world. But it’s not the kind of story a lot of Americans would probably like to hear about immigration.

What's offensive here, of course, is how it presents regular Americans as revolting (and if the writer sees fit, I'm sure she'd also villify Europeans), and isn't that fascinating how the American citizens are even presented stooping to sexual misconduct. With the biggest oxymoron being that yes, of course even Muslim obviously aren't safe from sexual violence, but it's mainly that committed by Muslim men, and almost 2 decades ago, there was a horrifying case in Iran of a woman who killed a rapist in self defense, also to defend her niece, and for that, she was tragically sentenced to hang. Yet the writer of this disgraceful GN would rather accuse Americans, no matter their ethnicity, of being that evil.

Making matters regarding this propaganda GN worse, there was an atrocious incident in Westchester, New York back in 2011 where a Muslim group at Rye Playland caused a ruckus after women from the group wearing hijabs were denied access to some of the rides because they went against safety rules. Last year, a vaguely similar case regarding burkas occurred in Kansas City after a Muslim woman was told she couldn't wear it on the roller coaster ride for safety reasons. And she had the gall to call the staff "racist", but never "anti-religious". As a result, one can legitimately wonder if Huda F. Cares? really is based on fact, assuming that's how it's marketed. If anything, it's a pretty sick example of a propagandist who follows the beliefs in Islam that make a woman's body out to be an abomination, and has no confidence or self-respect. Stories like this are also obviously written as a belief that the host country should literally conform to the twisted beliefs of the "immigrant", but not the other way around. Is that acceptable?

This also reminds me of how almost 15 years ago, the awful Geoff Johns wrote apologia for the Religion of Peace when he shoehorned a Muslim protagonist into the Green Lantern franchise, and regular Americans who aren't Muslim were depicted as hostile and repellent. Similar problems occur in the Muslim Ms. Marvel series by the equally awful G. Willow Wilson (and later written by the now equally awful Saladin Ahmed). So this new GN is nothing new. But neither is it approvable.

Oddly enough, there's another GN on this list that might involve Muslim characters titled I Was Their American Dream, and this, by contrast, doesn't seem to build upon victimology propaganda:

I Was Their American Dream follows an archetype that has basically become the staple of the immigrant memoir genre — the story of a kid who come to America at a young age, and struggles to fit in at school while also dealing with their parents’ old-world quirks and problems. Malaka Gharib executes this in fine form, telling the story of her mixed Egyptian-Filipino family with humor and warmth, and adding plenty of informative cultural context.

Of all the immigrant memoir comics I read, this one was the most unambiguously positive. America never wrongs or excludes the protagonist in any way — she finds a way to fit in at school just as easily as any white kid in the 80s or 90s, and then she goes to college and has fun there too. Her parents get divorced, and her dad moves back to Egypt for a better job, but America remains the land of promise, wealth, and safety. The art is pretty cartoonish, but it adds to the generally silly fun tone.

Racial exclusion barely comes up. The protagonist/author grows up in an immigrant “ethnoburb” in Southern California where there are almost no white people, so white people are simply exotic and interesting to her, rather than dominant and threatening. When she first encounters white people en masse, it’s as a college student, and while they can sometimes be obtuse, she generally views them as fun and even exotic.

Overall, if you want a story of successful middle-class immigration, this is a good pick. There’s also a sequel called It Won’t Always Be Like This, about the author’s time visiting her father in Egypt.

This doesn't sound noxious like the prior example, so at least we're getting somewhere with this item. In a footnote, interestingly enough, the blogger also notes:

At one point the protagonist declares that “I KISSED A LOOOOTTTTT OF WHITE GUYS.” This is not necessarily the kind of thing you’d want to write in a graphic novel in the “woke” age, but I found its innocent confident positivity to be extremely charming.

One could wonder if the star's background is why he's letting it slide? Well, in any event, it's not something to get hysterical about if a non-white girl decides to date white guys. That's her choice, and nobody else's. What should matter is horrific incidents like this recent one that occurred last year.

And then, amazingly enough, Noahpinion also lists an item that covers the negative side of illegal immmigration, Just Another Story: A Graphic Migration Account:

This is the best comic I’ve read about illegal immigration. It’s about a Salvadoran boy (the author’s cousin) whose mother decides to take him to America to escape desperate poverty and the constant threat of violence in El Salvador. The story is gripping, tense, and harrowing — it feels like Lord of the Rings, with hobbits sneaking across Mordor. The main danger is not the U.S. Border Patrol, but the various criminals who try to exploit, rob, kidnap, or murder would-be illegal immigrants headed north. In the end, they make it, but only barely, and they’re emotionally scarred for life by the journey.

If you want to understand what’s really at stake when people immigrate illegally, and what they have to face in order to do so, this is a good lesson.

Those criminals who attack the illegal aliens could surely include Mexican mafias like Los Zetos. I'm amazed a blogger who confirms he's a leftist is willing to highlight a GN of this sort. However, he also lists one that, despite attacking communism, also attacks Donald Trump, titled Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey:

This is another story about a refugee from a communist dictatorship — this time, Castro’s Cuba. American leftists tend to have romantic fantasies about revolutionary Cuba, but Worm depicts an impoverished, slowly decaying country filled with fear, where neighbors rat on their neighbors and daily life is ruthlessly repressed. (The art style really compounds the feeling of anxiety.) The title refers both to a parasite that almost kills the author/protagonist, and to the protagonist’s father, who is labeled a “worm” for daring to secretly oppose Castro.

In the end, Rodriguez and his family escape Cuba on the famous 1980 Mariel Boatlift, and make it to America, where they succeed economically (after facing the usual challenges). The Rodriguez family idolizes America for saving them from a brutal dictatorship and giving them the opportunity to become middle-class.

But then Trump gets elected, and the nation suddenly seems far less friendly to immigrants. A now-grown-up Rodriguez decides that Trump is similar to Castro, and decides to use his art to oppose Trump. Rodriguez creates what’s probably still the most iconic political cartoon about Trump — an image of a melting, screaming, eyeless orange head that appeared on the cover of Time. It’s not the happiest ending, but at least America is a place where dissidents can still go against the President in public — at least for now.

Oh, good grief. A better question and topic would be why anybody approves of allowing a communist regime to continue existing instead of finding how to depose of the commies in charge and replace them with more civilized representatives. And how come Trump's seen as a problem, but not the time when Bill Clinton sent a Cuban boy, Elien Gonzalez, back instead of allowing him to stay with relatives? That wasn't bad in any way?

If one really has to take issue with Trump on anything, it's whether he's being soft on Cuba's communists, which is no more acceptable than being soft on Russia's. But when a GN like the above builds so predictably on a intentions that may not be altruistic, that's why it's appalling that yet again, another comic was written as an unfortunate excuse for attacking conservatives. Granted, the GN may take an objective look at how communism is an evil ideology. But that still doesn't make it okay to merely bash Trump because he supposedly created an atmosphere hostile to Cubans. I'll admit though, it's amazing the blogger acknowledged there's leftists who regrettably take a romantic view of communism, when it's all a lot darker than we think.

Does religious diversity matter in comicdom?

The Tribune of India spoke about how religions like the Sikh faith are never explored in mainstream comics, if at all, in an interview with a local fan of Capt. America who loves cosplaying:

“Captain America doesn’t wear a beard and a turban, and he’s white.” Vishavjit Singh looked at the boy who uttered those words, and then he looked at himself — a skinny, bespectacled, turbaned, bearded Sikh in a Captain America suit.

“I wasn’t offended, because I knew that this kid was going to have this image of me — a Sikh Captain America, forever in his mind. This image has so much power to it that it opens up conversations about what it means to be an American,” Singh said.

Representation of non-Abrahamic religions and spiritual traditions, particularly in the mainstream comics universe, is minimal. Even when they are portrayed in comics, their presentation, as Singh and others in the field point out, is often inauthentic and sometimes negative.

Having read some Golden Age stories, I am aware that there were at least a few instances where characters who could be descendants of India were portrayed as crooks, although there were some where they could be portrayed positively. But I don't think religion was involved per se. It was actually in later years during the Bronze Age that religion was more likely to be explored, and even then, they're correct, religions that may not have been monotheistic were rarely given serious exploration, if at all. And maybe that's just what led to the sad state of affairs we have today in mainstream, where Islam is whitewashed for the sake of political propaganda marketing, and if a godless religion is given prominence, it's the the cult of LGBT, and even communism, for all we know. (Speaking of which, as those familiar with the Silver Age know, communism was depicted negatively then, but in recent years, there can be no doubt it's all taken a change for the worse.) Manga stories are far more likely to explore religions that aren't monotheistic, whether the Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto or Jain religions. While I may be a monotheist myself, I do think there could be advantages for comics writers to research and develop more characters who're adherents to the religions of the far east, but so long as PC reigns in today's USA market, you can be sure the mainstream is unlikely to ever write up a truly respectable focus on faiths like the Sikh, or even Hinduism.

Recently, however, comic book writers and academics who study the intersection of religion and comics observe a renaissance of sorts, which they say is happening because people close to these faith traditions are telling these stories with a reverence and sincerity that resonate with a wider audience.

A Sikh superhero with a message

Singh’s journey to make that connection began after the attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered anti-Sikh hate incidents. Having faced hate and exclusion throughout his life, he decided to spread the message of kindness and inclusion by capitalising on the appeal of comics and superheroes — an area where he found Sikh representation to be “virtually zero”.

He suited up as Captain Sikh America in Manhattan for the first time in summer 2013 — one year after a self-proclaimed White supremacist opened fire inside a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six and injuring four others.

New York’s reaction to Captain Sikh America was joyous. “Strangers came up and hugged me. Police officers wanted photos with me. A couple wanted me to be part of their wedding ceremony. I felt I had a certain privilege I’d never had before,” Singh said.

Well great for him if he found fame in his take on cosplay. But what this article fails to elucidate is that some Sikh adherents were mistaken for Moslems after September 11, 2001, and that was the reason for the offensive and reprehensible attacks. It's strange, because as far as I know, the dastar (turban) worn by Sikh adherents doesn't look like that worn by Muslim men at all. Even the outfits worn by lady adherents to the Sikh faith don't look like those worn by Muslim women. What these terrible incidents make clear is how out of touch the education system is even today when it comes to foreign cultures, and one of the most angering results is how these wrongful attacks on Sikh at the time only made it harder to combat the far more serious dangers of Islamic jihadism.

The article does bring up graphic novelists who've explored non-monotheist themes outside the mainstream, and the following is told about African faiths, interestingly enough:

Brooklyn-born Haitian American comic book writer Greg Anderson Elysee said he didn’t learn about African and Caribbean religious traditions until he was a teenager. Elysee was raised Catholic, but he now considers himself agnostic.

For the last decade, he’s written comics about Is’nana, the son of Anansi the Spider, the god of wisdom, knowledge and mischief in the Akan religion of West Africa.

What drives his vision and his creativity, Elysee said, is the need to see more Black mythology, deities and spirituality showcased with the same level of respect as European fairy tales and Greek mythology.

“When I went looking for anything on African spirituality in the bookstore, I found it in the occult section as opposed to the religion or mythology section,” he said. Common depictions of African faith as voodoo and witchcraft are colonialist narratives aimed at demonising indigenous spiritual practices, he added.

“When I started going to ceremonies and rituals, I saw how much power there is in it. When we know who we are — whether you believe in the religion or not — it fills you with joy, a purpose and a sense of being.”

To be sure, some practices in Africa have been totally confused with voodoo regardless of whether that's all about chicken slaughter for the sake of placing curses upon anybody who could be least deserving. And if there's positive faiths and practices in Africa that could be explored, it's definitely the time to do it. But don't do under Marvel/DC, no matter what their staff's reception could be at this point. What matters is that there's no need to prop up their woke-infested machine anymore by exploring themes in what could end up being stories that won't amount to anything as a result of the lack of respect modern writers have for the established characters, along with the lack of respect for continuity, which has collapsed since the 2000s. To explore these non-Abrahamic faiths is best done in creator-owned projects today, and there, for all know, it could come off much better than in mainstream. Yes, religious diversity can matter, but that's provided it's all done plausibly. That's how it'll work best.

Woke-pandering specialty store in Tacoma closes

The Tacoma News-Tribune announced that a comics store that was emphasizing LGBT ideology is closing down:

Beloved comic book store Destiny City Comics in Tacoma will be closing its doors at the end of February after its rent has increased “exponentially,” one owner told The News Tribune this week.

Located next to King’s Books at 218 St. Helens Ave., the shop is advertised as “Tacoma’s Unapologetically Black and LGBTQ+ Friendly comic shop.” On Wednesday, shelves upon shelves of novels, graphic novels, comics, art and toys filled the walls.

Matt Nebeker owns the shop with his wife Stephanie Hagan and is known colloquially by his professional wrestling name “ETHAN HD.” Nebeker said due to rent increases the shop close Feb. 28 after more than 10 years in operation.

Well I'm sorry it got expensive to maintain the shop. But what's the big deal about LGBTQ+ among leftists like these I'll never know, and with Donald Trump's re-election (in which he won a considerable number of Black voters), it should be clear it's not appealing to the masses. I get the feeling the productions meant to appeal to Black consumers at this store don't expand beyond the superficial, and it wouldn't be surprising if it turned out they don't have anything emphasizing the history and cultures of African countries like Kenya, Cameroon and Ghana.

Nebeker said he and his wife reached out to the original owners to buy Destiny City Comics “because we wanted to keep that going and be that conduit in the community for local artists and creators and people to find comics outside the beaten path of Marvel and DC.”

I'll give them this: what they say about the Big Two in this day and age figures. But that's because they too went down the dreadful path of wokeness long ago, and at this point, it's clear it isn't improving their fortunes.

“We’ve been there for parents who find out their child is trans or queer and [are] coming in to get literature on that, and kind of go on this adventure together,” he said. “[We’ve] seen people going through name changes, going through hormonal changes, staying up to date on what their pronouns are and new names and things like that. Getting to see people over time become their authentic self and be a part of their journey, even if you’re only seeing them like, once a month or every other month, that’s very cool.”

As someone who is Black and biracial, Nebeker said he wanted to stock books by authors of color that didn’t just touch on difficult topics like racism.

“If you’re a young Black kid, not every Black story you read needs to be about, like Frederick Douglas or John Lewis’s march. Those books are important,” he said. “But you know, having graphic novels like Colin Kaepernick’s, where it’s just being young and successful, having books by Miles Morales, where you just get to see yourself as a yearling, those are equally important.”

Here's another article where somebody makes it sound like it's such a big deal that a POC creation be wearing a Spidey suit, but not whether a merit-based story's been produced that everybody can enjoy. And as the above suggests, the store seems to have been intended to pander to people who wanted affirmation for their identity politics more than entertainment value. Does that make sense? Not really, and is definitely different from what things were like decades before. The problem with Morales' stories is that they were developed as little more than a form of social justice pandering, and that's worn very thin too by now.

An important query to be raised here is whether it's healthy to despise being born man or woman. That's what's appalling about all this "transgender" propaganda, because it totally obscures whether the child should be lectured to take up pretending they're the opposite sex. Most of which looks like it'll hopefully fade in time, though already serious damage has been done.

It's not great if a comics store closes, but one must wonder what the big deal is about a store that seems to have built its whole reputation on identity politics. If there was no clear emphasis on merit at the specialty store, then doesn't that kind of explain why their sales eventually faded?

New actor playing Capt. America doesn't think his role should represent the USA

The Daily Wire reports that during a press tour for Captain America: Brave New World, Anthony Mackie, who's now taking over the role from Chris Evans in a way almost identical to the social justice pandering Marvel's been doing for a decade now, made statements that only confirm and compound how woke this "sequel" will be:

Marvel actor Anthony Mackie said during a recent appearance that he did not believe that “the term America” was one of the things that was represented in the superhero Captain America.

Mackie, whose Sam Wilson character steps into the role of the titular hero in “Captain America: Brave New World,” made the comments while doing press for the latest Disney/Marvel venture in Rome. The role was previously played by actor Chris Evans as Steve Rogers. “For me, Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term ‘America’ should be one of those representations. It’s about a man who keeps his word, who has honor, dignity, and integrity. Someone who is trustworthy and dependable,” Mackie said. “This is kind of like an aspect of a dream coming true. You know, when I was a kid … all of us as actors, I believe, want to get back to that day before someone told you no.”

That's awfully rich coming from somebody who's not arguing the entertainment industry should emphasize foreign nationalities and cultures like Kenya, France, Portugal, Armenia and Argentina. What Mackie implies is that he doesn't consider the USA's residents worthy of representation on anything. That aside, I don't expect a character like Sabra to come off well if this is what Mackie's going to espouse. His declaration was panned, and here's one example:

“I don’t know if this guy hates America or not, but I do know that he feels compelled to say so because that’s what the anti-America left wants to hear. Pathetic, mindless, leftist virtue signaling. This crap is on its way out, only some folks haven’t figured it out yet,” author Tim Murtaugh added.

Regrettably, Disney, as the undeserving owner of Marvel products today, hasn't gotten the message, or maybe they'd have instructed their contributors to avoid making divisive statements. John Nolte responded:

Due to extensive reshoots, Captain America: Brave New World’s budget is reported to have hit something like $400 million. The sequel hits theaters in about two weeks and arrives after Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels tanked. Nevertheless, here is America’s new Captain America, Anthony Mackie, making it clear that he does not believe that a character named Captain America who is also a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, should represent America.

[...] You can hear the disdain in Mackie’s voice when he says, “the term America,” and then he goes on to list a number of virtues as though they are not American virtues.

If Captain America doesn’t represent America, why is he called Captain America, or is that now his dead name?

If he doesn’t represent America, why the red, white, and blue uniform?

What’s next? Black Panther doesn’t represent black people? Ant-Man and Aunt May don’t represent ants? X-Men don’t represent Twitter?

I don’t blame Mackie for this. He’s an actor. Obviously, no one explained to him what drives and motivates Captain America because the Marvel-Disney people similarly believe Captain America should not represent America. The reason for this is simple: Marvel and Disney and Anthony Mackie hate America and Americans and see themselves as above America and Americans.

To them, America is a joke, Americans are rubes. They especially hate how our “superstitious” beliefs in things like rugged individualism, individual liberty, that all countries (including America), should put their country first, and basic moral decency, all get in the way of their globalist designs and degenerate desire to sexualize our children.

And then we have the gall to not buy tickets to their grooming movies or subscribe to their grooming streaming services. That’s what really makes them angry: we dare to disagree with them. We refuse to worship them. We hide our children from them. Above all, we criticize, mock, and ridicule them.

I'm sure Mackie never read the old comics from the Golden Age till the early 2000s, nor has he any interest in doing so. All that aside, it's beyond laughable at this point how the Falcon, instead of being emphasized as what he was created as, a guy with wings, which is certainly great, is being shoehorned into a different role, which only proves the writers are totally bankrupt and lack confidence in themselves to sell a story according to merit. And, despite any suggestions to the contrary, they once again expect everybody to care about the costume instead of the character.

It's quite possible to promote values like altruism, honor and decency without dragging anti-Americanism into the mess Mackie and Disney/Marvel have made. Unfortunately, those don't seem to be their values at all, which could partly explain why the virtue-signaling direction was taken. With a budget that big, we can only hope the new film tanks. All they're doing is make one wonder if these live action movies were worth it to start with.

A Pittsburgh exhibit dedicated to Black American comics and creators

NPR-WESA has a report on an exhibition dedicated to comics featuring Black characters, and creators who worked in the medium:

“Collections in Black: A Celebration of Black Comic Book Culture” was organized for the August Wilson African American Cultural Center by Phillip Thompson. You might know him as DJ Big Phill, one of the city’s most popular record-spinners. But he’s also a dedicated comics collector, specializing in original art, published comics and more by and about Black characters and Black history, whether Marvel superheroes or figures from real life.

[...] There are also, of course, tributes to Marvel’s Black Panther, mainstream comics’ first Black superhero. One vitrine in the AWAACC’s spacious galleries encases the 1976 issue of Jungle Action in which T’Challa battles the Ku Klux Klan. It was among the books Thompson recalls from his childhood in Penn Hills, when he and his brothers would sneak forbidden looks at his father’s comics collection.

“I was just mesmerized by those images,” he says.

Half of “Collections in Black” is drawn from Thompson’s personal trove. But it digs well beyond characters familiar from his childhood and latter-day Hollywood blockbusters (Marvel’s The Falcon and Luke Cage also among them).

[...] Thompson also honors Matt Baker, a Westinghouse High School grad who was among the nation’s top comics artists from the 1940s until his untimely death, in 1958. Baker contributed to titles like Fightin’ Marines, Teen-Age Romances and Jungle Comics, and drew the pre-Wonder Woman female superhero Phantom Lady. Baker’s work — his women tended toward the statuesque — helped inspire the ’50s backlash against comics as a corrupting influence, typified by books such as “Seduction of the Innocent.”

“He drew white women so well it was a problem,” quips Thompson.

For the PC crowd that sided with Fredric Wertham, who, as discovered over a decade ago, plagiarized some of his "research" in addition to distorting everything for the sake of his sloppy goals. The sex-negative approach Wertham took - failing to make any proper distinctions between that and violent content - are just some of the reasons why comicdom was struck as low as it is now; who would've thought the same left-wing crowd Wertham was otherwise part of would end up siding with his viewpoints, selectively or otherwise? In the past dozen years or so, it looks like all misgivings they seemingly had with Wertham have almost entirely disappeared, and they brought back his censorsious beliefs in the past decade, which did cause creative damage.

It's great Thompson's doing these tributes, but one must wonder what he thinks of modern PC takes on these creations that've only done more harm than good? If Marvel had folded in the early 2000s, their past quality would've held up far better, IMO, and it's hugely regrettable many of these articles won't get into the more challenging subjects of modern times.

Belgium's Spirou undergoes censorship

The UK Guardian reports the veteran Belgian comic series Spirou has come under woke assault for caricatures:

A comic book has been withdrawn from sale by its Belgian publisher after an outcry over racist depictions of black people and “hyper-sexualised” images of women.

The publisher Dupuis announced that its graphic novel, Spirou and the Blue Gorgon, would be removed from shops after the book caused a storm on social media.

In an announcement last week, Dupuis said it was “profoundly sorry if this album has been shocking and hurtful”, adding that it had been done in a “caricatured style of representation from another era”. The publisher added it was “more aware than ever of our moral duty and the importance of comics,” adding: “We take full responsibility today for this error of judgment.”

Spirou and the Blue Gorgon, a satirical tale of so-called “eco-terrorists”, junk food and plastic rubbish, was first published in September 2023 and widely reviewed in the Francophone press with little controversy.

That changed last month when a TikTok video denouncing its portrayal of black people and women went viral, triggering a great deal of criticism. One internet user noted that all the white characters were human beings while black characters were depicted as monkeys, and the women, typically drawn with plunging cleavage and tiny waists, were “hyper-sexualised”.

After the publisher’s decision, local media reported that approximately 30,000 copies would be removed from sale, a decision said to be the first of its kind in Belgium.

While I don't condone censorship, I will say it's surprising when some modern artists think it's inherently acceptable to draw black characters in deformed shapes. On the other hand, it's regrettable whoever filmed that video on a social media site that must be replacing X/Twitter as a place where creepy people engage in social justice propaganda did not want to make any distinctions between drawings that could be racially offensive and drawings depicting women as hot. What next, will Francois Walthery's Natacha come under the gun? If nobody's willing to defend Walthery's notable comic strip that debuted in 1970, that's what'll happen next. I guess because most cartoonists for these sort of comic strips may know better than to draw sensationalized depictions of sexual violence, that's why the wokesters go after them for something as cheap as sexualization, even if it's in good taste.

Comic strips, or bandes dessinées, are celebrated as an art form in Belgium and France, but some once-fêted works have been strongly criticised for their stereotypical depictions of women and people of colour. In 2011 an attempt to ban the 1930 comic book Tintin and the Congo over its portrayal of Africans failed in the Belgian courts.

The cartoonist behind the Blue Gorgon, Daniel Henrotin, who uses the pen name Dany, said he had been emulating the style of the late Belgian comic strip artist, André Franquin, who was celebrated in the 1950s and beyond. Dany said he recognised he had “made a mistake” and was “truly sorry if I could have hurt anyone”.

Dany, 81, denied any racist or misogynist intentions, saying it was never his goal to mock or denigrate people of colour and women, while offering a partial defence. “I heard it said that we cannot draw like that today. I respond that humour and caricature are in the DNA of the Belgian school of bande dessinée”.

Leading lights of the comic world pushed back against the idea that caricature was no longer possible. “Comics are automatically caricatures,” Isabelle Debekker, the director of the Comic Strip Centre in Brussels told Le Soir. She said artists should not stigmatise groups of people as was done in the 1980s. “It is up to us to be a little more intelligent, whether in our humour or our way of representing reality.”

“I find it a shame that there are still people who do not understand what is problematic,” she said.

I do agree that racial caricatures of blacks as seen in the early 20th century were inappropriate, but drawing an analogy between that and "hypersexualization" of women is ludicrous. If women were drawn as alarmingly ugly ducklings with hook noses, would that be acceptable? It reminds me that there's also been anti-Jewish caricatures in the past where Jews were drawn grotesquely, and black men weren't the only ones subject to insulting stereotypes - even black women were too, like having short hair, and not being drawn as attractively as white women at the time could be. One example I recall finding years ago from the Golden Age of comicdom was a story starring the original Quicksilver from the 1940-49 National Comics anthology by Quality - now owned by DC - who was later renamed Max Mercury in 1993: a black woman in the tale was illustrated with very short hair, while her boyfriend was depicted with large lips. Seriously, would today's SJWs want black men and women subject to that kind of demasculinization and defemininization? Would they even want white women subject to the same? Because that would be far more stereotypical, and dehumanizing.

What's really angering is how the cartoonist who turned out the Spirou comic that led to this scandal wouldn't recognize why racially insulting caricatures are taking a big risk, and as a result, gave the TikTokker the opportunity to plough through defenses and attack his renditions of women as well. If there aren't any crude and sensationalized depictions of sexual violence in the comic, you can't say it's "misogynist". That would only be if the artist had subjected women to uglification, physical/sexual violence, and even denigrating slurs. Where do these screwballs get the idea it's bad if you draw women beautiful? That only contradicts their alleged stance on racially offensive art to boot. This whole affair also demonstrates what's wrong with the kind of people found on TikTok, owned as it is by a Chinese company, and the biggest irony is that they were accused of racial discrimination. So where does anyone involved with such a shoddy social network get off ranting about racism and misogyny when the whole business is that shoddy?

Ta-Nehisi Coates proves yet again why he was a bad omen for comics

Far-left author Coates, who regrettably wrote runs on Black Panther and Capt. America in the past decade, was recently interviewed on TV, where his hostility to the land of Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's ancestors came to the fore as he promoted a new, offensive book he's written. As first told by Newsbusters:

CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil displayed a lot of courage on Monday’s show when confronted race hustler and author Ta-Nehisi Coates for his new book The Message, where Coates took the side of anti-Semitic, genocidal terrorists in their fight to exterminate Israel. Dokoupil pointed out that Coates completely omitted Israel’s perspective in the conflict and suggested Coates essay read like the manifesto “in the backpack of an extremist.”

Coates responded by claiming he was morally superior because he’s black.

And is the disgraced Bill Cosby superior for the same reason? What a sorry, unendurable case Coates is, and shameful he would do this. There's more:

The CBS anchor actually got Coates to admit that he believed that Israel did not have a right to exist, and essentially Israel needs to fight for it:

DOKOUPIL: So, I think the question is central and key. If Israel has a right to exist, and if your answer is “no,” then I guess the question becomes, why do the Palestinians have a right to exist? Why do 20 different Muslim countries have a right to exist?

COATES: My answer is that no country in this world establishes its ability to exist through rights. Countries establish their ability to exist through force, as America did. And so I think this question of right to Israel does exist. It`s a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.

Coates doesn’t seem to realize that his suggestion that Israel doesn’t have a right to exist because they need to fight to earn it, means that a Palestinian states doesn’t deserve to exist because they lose every fight for it.

Dokoupil hit back hard and pressed his guest to answer: “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place, and not any of the other states out there?” But Coates gave a mealy mouth answer about being against any ethno state, despite the fact that that was what the Palestinians wanted.

Further, Dokoupil called out how Coates’s book gave “no agency” to the Palestinians as if things just happened to them and they did nothing at all. “They exist in your narrative merely as victims of the Israelis, as though they were not offered peace at any juncture, as though they don`t have a stake in this as well. What is their role in the lack of a Palestinian state?” he asked.

Backed into a corner, Coates relied on his race-baiting. He suggested that Dokoupil didn’t get it because he’s white and that he, himself was morally superior because he’s black: “I have a very, very, very, very moral compass about this. And again, perhaps it`s because of my ancestry.”

It's a shame that later on, CBS management attacked Dokoupil for asking serious queries, and forced him to apologize. He shouldn't have done that, and if needed, he should've quit his job with them. Even long before this flap, CBS was repulsive, and still is.

It gets worse. As reported by Breitbart, this man, who again, was allowed to script Captain America and Black Panther in past years, also said:

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates openly wondered aloud if he would be “strong enough” to resist the kind of violence exhibited by the terrorist organization Hamas in Israel on October 7 were he to grow up as a Palestinian living in Gaza.

Coates, who recently released a book that accused Israel of practicing a form of apartheid, made his thoughts known during an interview on the What Now with Trevor Noah podcast. Coates wondered if perhaps growing up “under that oppression” would make him so radicalized that he would then commit the kind of violence Hamas exhibited on October 7, wherein over 1,200 men, women, and children were indiscriminately and brutally killed with full malicious intent.

“And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, ‘This is too far.’ I don’t know that I am,” he said, a sentiment that Trevor Noah and his co-host appeared to empathize with.

During another part of the interview, Trevor Noah even said that America’s founding fathers were like terrorists when they revolted against the British Empire.

“If you remove America’s history … then it’s like, yeah, those people who fought against the British, they were terrorists,” Noah said.

So even the anti-American sentiment of both came to the fore. Do they not realize that any community that's going to emphasize barbarism cannot be given employment or any direct freedom if they're going to resort to murder and sexual violence? It's chilling to wonder: if the Jewish founders of early comicdom were at that music festival, and they were graphically raped and murdered, what would Coates say, considering he wrote Capt. America and Black Panther, and was even once offered the opportunity to script a Superman film? I shudder to think what his response would be.

Daniel Greenfield had more to say about him:

Even the firefighters and police officers who perished on 9/11 at the hands of the Islamic terrorists whom Coates now covers up for “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a privileged millionaire, took a break from writing bad comic books and took his incredibly fragile body to Israel where he discovered the racism of black Israeli soldiers.

“There were ‘Black’ soldiers everywhere lording their power over the Palestinians, many of whom would, in America, have been seen as ‘white’,” Coates fumed, discovering that “race is a species of power and nothing else”. Despite damning the black Israeli soldiers, Coates can’t help reflexively capitalizing them as ‘Black’ and decapitalizing Muslim terrorists as ‘white’. Some habits of black nationalist woke language are harder to shake than imagining race as power.

But in this moment, Coates officially makes the sacrifice of trading blackness for wokeness, race as a living reality for race as a subset of Marxist power analysis. It’s every bit as potent as feminists who have spent generations denouncing men suddenly deciding that men can be women as long as they give up their toxic masculinity, put on a pantsuit and identify as ‘women’.

What of the ‘black body’ of Joshua Loitu Mollel, a Tanzanian agricultural intern who was kidnapped and killed by Hamas, who only wanted to return home and become one of Tanzania’s most successful farmers? What of Clemence Mtenga, also of Tanzania, another potential hostage, who turned out to be dead? Where did the power lie? Were they white or black?

One of the biggest problems with men like Coates is that, as Greenfield points out, he doesn't care about blacks living in foreign countries, and Coates' descriptions of black citizens of Israel is obscene and abominable. So, what exactly is it creeps like Coates are campaigning for? He turns his back on serious issues that've sadly been prevalent for years, and that's why his positions are entirely unconvincing. And yes, the comics Coates wrote were bad, and Axel Alonso was wrong to have given him any assignments to write books starring Jewish-created characters like BP and CA. Towards the end of the article:

That Jewish lives have no value to a man who viewed even 9/11 firefighters as “not human” is unsurprising. In his essay, Coates reveals that black people also have no value to him.

And that's telling quite a bit about a man who never deserved to write the comics he did in the past decade. One of the worst things about Coates is that, if he visited Israel recently, he did so with a predetermined position, and a closed mind on the issues involved. That's not how you solve a problem.

On the other hand, I don't think JNS editor Jonathan Tobin did an entirely good job addressing the subject:

The first thing to understand is that Ta-Nehisi Coates is something of a colossus of contemporary American letters. Since his first article was published in 2008 in the liberal publication The Atlantic, the 49-year-old has been showered with acclaim and every conceivable honor from the cultural establishment, including an obligatory MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award. Everything he writes—from comic books to memoirs about his own brief existence on the planet—is treated as a major literary event.

Though a talented writer who styles himself as a journalist, Coates mostly pens words about himself and his personal impressions of the world without bothering much with grounding his work in facts or trying to place his ideas in a context that tells more than one narrow side of a story. Indeed, he is someone who thinks writers and journalists should not be seeking to tell both sides of complex stories, believing that they should boil everything down to conform to simplistic left-wing conclusions, whether accurate or not. That is exactly how toxic ideologies like critical race theory and intersectionality work.

That philosophy is perfectly fine for comic books, such as Coates’ best-selling Black Panther series, which imagines a fictional high-tech African kingdom that was made into a blockbuster action movie. However, when it comes to his interpretations of American society and foreign conflicts, he seems to view the real world with all of its complexities as just another graphic fantasy populated only by heroes and villains.

While there's a fully valid point made that Coates' acclaim coming from establishment circles was clearly deliberate (and that's surely how Neil Gaiman and Alice Munro got as far as they did in some literary circles), why does Tobin think Coates is "talented", when here, he's legitimizing barbarism even against blacks, and why does Tobin think philosophies like CRT and intersectionality are okay in comics format? Most certainly not. A comic is no different from movies and TV shows in how it can be exploited as a propaganda pipeline, and under Marvel/DC editors like Joe Quesada, Alonso and Dan DiDio, this was definitely proven in some way or other over the past 2 decades.

Past comics editors, publishers and even film studios who employed Coates have caused monumental damage that'll take an eternity to repair, right down to how they allowed him to script comics with Jewish creators. Coates has effectively tainted and desecrated the creations of Lee, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in example, and this is decidedly one more reason why, when Marvel/DC close their publishing arms, it'll be for the best, if that's what it takes to prevent further abuse by political ideologues with twisted viewpoints.

Update: National Review says about Coates:

Peace overtures throughout the 1990s were met with routine suicide-bomb attacks inside Israel. The unilateral disengagement of every Israeli from the Gaza Strip in 2005 was similarly met with the democratic election of an Islamist mafia we now know as Hamas. The current multifront war, of course, began with Hamas’s October 7 atrocities.

Coates argued that Palestinian violence doesn’t justify Israel’s administration of the West Bank. But shaking your finger at the Jewish state for simply trying to preserve its existence is less than convincing, especially when you don’t want to explore why the Israelis fight back in the first place.

Correct. Here's more from Compact Mag:

It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. [...]

There's only so many leftists like him who are. J. Jonah Jameson would make a perfect avatar to represent them.

Israeli animator sugarcoats and ignores the belief system that led to October 7, 2023

The Jerusalem Post recently spoke about animated shorts produced by an Israeli entrepreneur who's worked in animation, and produced a series of short cartoons called "God's Gang", which cannot seem to get its "point" across without including a character representing Islam, and even then, the rest of the cast in the cartoon shorts reeks of stereotypical development:

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s – a group of four superheroes from different religions, all working together to save the world.

That’s the premise of God’s Gang, a series of interfaith cartoons on YouTube that was created by Israeli hi-tech entrepreneur Nimrod-Avraham May, who developed this channel out of a desire to promote tolerance and love.

May said that he was inspired to create this interfaith story when he thought, “I know many people who are not Jews or Israelis who are kind and compassionate and truthful and positive and friendly and loving, and why not build these bridges instead of bombing them?... The show is not a show about religion or faith.... It’s a show [whose] underlying message is promoting coexistence and unity, the teaching of love,” he said. But he chose to convey these messages via children’s action-adventure and comedy cartoons.

The hit success of God's Gang

Since the series began running last September, it has become wildly successful, acquiring 1.5 million subscribers in just a few months. May has added to the YouTube channel, in addition to the cartoons themselves, videos about different aspects of the series, with everything from lessons on how to draw the characters to content about how the series was developed. There is even a video where May reads what he calls the “mean comments” out loud and discusses them.

But the heart of it is the cartoons themselves, which feature the four superheroes – and heroines: Sumuslim, a Muslim who fights sumo-style and whose power is “hypno-storytelling,” with which he mesmerizes listeners with tales from Arab lore; TaekWonHindu, a “big sister” to the group, who loves heavy metal and fights with Taekwondo, and uses “third-eye telepathy” with animals and can multiply her arms like various Hindu gods; Ninjew, a basketball-loving Jew who has a kind of laser vision and employs “special Kabbalah invisibility powder”; and Chris Cross, a Southern Baptist street preacher who uses karate (with an unbeatable flying kick), whose power is that when he turns his cheek, he can deflect anything thrown at it.

Well this is certainly telling, and most pathetic how Mr. May apparently cannot muster the courage to differentiate between religions and make clear there's such a thing as both good and bad religions, and good and bad ways to practice one. And what's this about the Jewish character emphasizing "invisibility"? Even if that alludes to going into combat cloaked, it sounds on the surface like he's written hiding himself based on his ethnic background, which isn't a very healthy idea either. But of course, what's really offensive is Mr. May's apparent sugarcoating of Islam. This is a religion that calls for smiting necks of kuffar (infidels/non-Muslims) in Sura 47:4 of the Koran, approves of sexual violence in Sura 2:223, and many of these verses and other such content of the "religion of peace" played a part last year in the October 7, 2023 bloodbath in southern Israel, yet Mr. May has the chutzpah to shrug all that off by giving Islam a role it doesn't deserve in his cartoon project? Does he even know about the antisemitic verses in the Koran, including 5:60's reference to Jews as "sons of apes and pigs"? What May's doing is perpetuating a vehement refusal by people like him to investigate what could lead to bigoted behavior by anybody, based on selective PC. And that's continuing to seriously harm the world's ability to combat Islamic terrorism.

Depending how you see this, it's funny how an Arab character isn't considered for the role of a Christian, nor does May and his staff think of emphasizing an Armenian for the role, most likely because somebody would want to point out how Christians have been persecuted in Muslim countries, and the Turkish Ottoman empire's slaughter of Armenians during WW1 was motivated by the Religion of Peace. And the sugarcoating of Islam in May's cartoons is also hurtful to Hindus, because in India, there've been only so many horrors perpetrated by Islam in the span of over many years, and that too gets swept under the rug by ignoramuses like May. Does he really think realists are going to appreciate how he creates a moral equivalence between Islam and other religions that're still long persecuted by Islam? Men like May clearly never consider communities like 9-11 Families, Black Christians in Nigeria who've been murdered by jihadists, Israeli victims of Islamic terrorism, victims of the jihadists at the Bataclan in Paris, France, or even apostates from Islam like Rifqa Bary. By whitewashing Islam, men like May marginalize the people who really deserve the spotlight for heroism and appreciation. May continued to reveal the following:

THE IDEA for God’s Gang first came to him in 2006, May said. “I had joined Disney Channel right after they acquired Fox Entertainment from Haim Saban; two months after I joined, we were all invited to the Disney Channel Executive Summit, and I was in the marketing department. We all pitched ideas about what can make Disney great, and I offered them an interfaith Power Rangers.”

But the entertainment giant didn’t go for the idea. “Luckily, they left it for me. I feel it’s my life’s mission.”

A mission to obscure any serious issues that could be raised about the Religion of Peace? Well sadly, that appears to be just it. Most interesting he mentions Saban, whom I don't exactly consider a "national treasure" for Israel, any more than most other leftists of their kind. Saban's been one of the biggest Democrat donors, and while he may have recently been critical of the outgoing POTUS Joe Biden, it doesn't excuse how he's long been the kind of leftist who simply won't stay out of political affairs, among other questionable career specialties. To be sure, Disney was already far gone politically even during the mid-2000s, yet for the time, that didn't convince them to take up the kind of project he sadly crafted, which some Islamists will be quite pleased with, based on how it excuses their religion's dark record.

May said that he had grown up in a liberal, secular home, where his father was a Holocaust survivor and his mother was an orphan, with no family. Being without a family “was a proof for her that there is no God,” he said.

But after life threw some unexpected experiences at him, “I realized that I might have been wrong in thinking that this universe doesn’t have a governing entity, aka creator, source, God, the universe,” he said.

He began exploring his identity and studying Judaism, on his own and with rabbis, and gradually realized, he said, that all the teachings could be summed up in “two simple words: ‘one’ and ‘love.’”

The more he delved into Jewish mysticism, he realized “I had to do a big tikkun.... We were chosen to spread light.... I decided to commit myself to bringing people together. It’s a difficult mission.”

Coming from the world of marketing and entertainment, he said, “I was ready to tell the story of how we can get together.” Keeping in mind The Beatles’ lyrics to the songs “Give Peace a Chance” and “Come Together,” he chose to launch God’s Gang, which he had put aside for over a decade. “I decided to bring them to life during COVID, not knowing what the future would bring.”

Aware of the sensitivity of creating a cartoon with characters from different religions, he appointed a board of advisers, an “interfaith council” from all religious points of view, with whom he consults on every detail of the series, “just to make sure that we’re not harming anyone or touching on any sensitive topics that we shouldn’t get into.”

Among those he has brought on board is Rob Kutner, the head writer, who has won five Primetime Emmys, whose credits include The Daily Show and The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. He also hired creators from Disney, Netflix, and DreamWorks.

The article is evasive of clearer answers, but it's not hard to guess he hired a committee that's much like the "sensitivity readers" hired by some leftist book publishers to work on the scripting. Even his alleged finding of faith is suspect, as he's clearly left-wing in his viewpoints, and the article largely obscures issues like October 7, 2023. Does he know lyrics like "give peace a chance" have also been exploited by leftists who ignore these serious issues involved? And then he even employed people who worked for one of leftist Steven Spielberg's companies. That's got to be telling too.

May is currently funding God’s Gang himself, and he said he is actively looking for partners, which will enable him to produce more episodes. He hopes to create four new episodes this year.

There is also an online store selling God Gang-themed merchandise, the profits from which May is channeling back into the cartoons: “This logo promotes love, and I want this to be the most recognized trademark in the world associated with the values that we’re promoting.”

In the upcoming episodes, new characters will be added, possibly a Buddhist and an atheist, although May said that the core of God’s Gang would remain the same. So will the message.

Does Mr. May know Muslims have persecuted and attacked Buddhists too? Even atheists aren't immune. Writing up roles for Buddhists in a cartoon like this isn't going to excuse the serious issues occurring in real life. I for one will not be funding his cartoons and merchandise, if he doesn't have the courage to make distinctions between good/bad religions, and ask whether it's possible, in allusion to the 10 Commandments, to use God's name in vain for any particular religion formed. I get the awful feeling that, if National Socialism were a full-fledged religion, ditto communism, he'd blur distinctions between those and other religions too. Ditto Scientology.

Earlier in the year, the JTA had more fascinating details to tell about Mr. May and his propaganda cartoon:

But some Jewish viewers have criticized the creators for showing what they felt was a surprising lack of cultural sensitivity.

“There’s a part where the Muslim character throws a falafel bomb,” Sam Cooper, a Maryland-based pop culture critic, said in an interview. “I assume the goal of the show is to teach tolerance and educate people about other religions, but they don’t seem to be very good at that.” (Kutner said the character, Sumuslim, aspires to be a chef, but in hindsight the decision to have him prepare a big exploding falafel ball was “a little unfortunate.”)

Cooper also lamented that the Jewish character, Ninjew, is short and has big glasses and a nasally voice. “I’ve seen this stereotype in so many shows,” she says in her review. “Jewish guys aren’t allowed to be cool. They’re usually depicted as effeminate, nerdy and weak. And then our boy Ninjew is all that and then some.” (May defended Ninjew, describing him as “a handsome Jew” with non-stereotypical blue eyes and blonde hair.)

Shekhiynah Larks, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant in the Bay Area and a fan of animated shows, questioned the decision to make Chriscross, the Christian character, a Black Baptist street preacher who wears an Afro and bell-bottoms.

“Conceptually, I really like the interfaith gang, but all of the characters seem like weird stereotypes,” said Larks, who is Black and Jewish. “The Black character made me think the creators haven’t seen a Black person since the Blaxploitation films.” (Kutner said Brandon Jones, a Baptist pastor who serves on the interfaith council and is Black, loved the character.)

Yes, this is pretty troubling alright. The Jewish character is made to look absurdly pious in a way that suggests he'll never be depicted as a ladies man, and one of the commentors at the Post article noted, "Question: why does this self-proclaimed egalitarian cartoonist depict Islam as a gargantuan muscle bound djinn dwarfing the other three religions and looking down on them over his left shoulder, with the Jews getting a pint sized myopic nerd?" Yes, what's with that? Not every Muslim adherent is tall, after all. Is May scared his Muslim audience will be offended? A clue as to the wokeness involved. Interesting a DEI specialist was quoted here, and even he found it appalling. As for the Black character having an Afro hairstyle, it could've been worse - in more recent times, there was a stereotype to depict Black men as bald, as happened to Luke Cage under Brian Bendis when he was at Marvel, IIRC (even Black women were put through humiliating ideas like that, as seen in modern Black Panther comics and even the sequel movie). But, a valid point is made that it's ridiculous to make it look like Blacks should all have Afro hairstyles.

I think the most galling thing about people like May is that they believe their ethnic background will actually keep anybody else from taking serious issue with any and all leftist ideologies they embrace, though as the above makes clear, of course there's also Christians who find it ludicrous, and Judeo-Christian critics certainly did find the part involving falafel used as an explosive weapon by the Islamist disturbing. May, regrettably, is just one in a whole ocean filled with leftist ideologues, mainly because only so many conservatives over the years trashed and threw away serious chances to build their own competition, and now, look where we are. I strongly advise parents who're realists to keep their children away from May's morally equivalent propaganda that clearly whitewashes the Religion of Peace at the expense of other religions with better values.