Filmmaker Zack Snyder continues to discuss his comics-to-film adaptations

Variety interviewed film director Snyder, who's moved on from adapting comics to other projects, but still discusses his prior visions and how the industry's dealt with the adaptations since, while simultaneously discussing his latest movie, "The Last Photograph", which, unfortunately, is dark and sounds easily darker than the comics adaptations he directed, which is why a description of the new film may have to be highlighted here first:

The most common criticism I’ve seen is that there is a lot of violence and brutality toward women in the film and that it was excessive, which has led to accusations of misogyny being leveled against you. What do you say to that?

I mean, I don’t know. First of all, I would argue that the violence toward women and men is equal and that nobody is spared — men, women, children, everybody. The justice that’s doled out in the movie is in the same way that a hurricane doles out justice. To try and superimpose morality over it and want the violence to mean something — the meaning is that violence doesn’t work and doesn’t get anything done.

It really doesn't make much difference whether the men and women both suffer equally. What matters is that Snyder's given another clue to what problems he has with his MO: too much obsession with darkness. And who knows, based on that last line, if he's trying to say it doesn't work even when the goodies employ it as corporal punishment for what horrors the baddies committed? Now, here's a part that appears to discuss the otherwise unsuccessful Justice League film:

And to have this be added to it.

It was so loud — that part was so loud — that, in retrospect, asking, “How’s the movie going?” And they go, “Oh, it’s fine! They’re doing some reshoots.” And I go, “Oh, OK. Fuck it.” So, Debbie went and watched the Joss [Whedon] version of the movie, and to have her come back to me and say, “You can never see that movie,” and to realize then that it was 60 pages of rewrites that they did for it… I’ve never seen the movie, so I don’t know.

You’ve never seen Joss’ version?

I’ve never seen it. There was a point when the movie was released that was a low point for me because the pile-on effect was so insane. Not only did I lose my daughter, but also they’ve released this version of the movie that I had nothing to do with and my name is on a movie that I didn’t make.

Were you like, “What else?!”

“What else!” Literally. But there was this catharsis of, I met with this executive at Warner Bros. who’s long gone since — I won’t say who it was — and he said to me, “You know, Zack, I’ve got to tell you one thing: You were right about everything.” And I was like, “That’s kind of you.” And he goes, “We were fighting you, and in the end you were right.”

What were they fighting you on?

The whole vision for the DC universe and the way I made movies and everything. They did this attempt to control it — and I’m just talking about the regime that was there that’s no longer there. They had this massive IP that’s worth a ton and I can understand wanting to protect it as best they could since all their jobs depended on it working, and they’d put it in the hands of a madman — or so they thought — so the part of them thinking that, and this is going to sound horrible, “This thing that happened to Zack is a window for us to take the movie back now.”

Seriously, they "protected" it? If they had, even Identity Crisis wouldn't have been published, nor would Geoff Johns have been hired as a writer, or even Brian Bendis. Oddly enough, what they did "protect" was an editorial mandate that Superman couldn't have red tights, until a PC selection like Bendis was allowed to restore it in the comics proper. It's something that's actually alluded to in the interview, which I'll get to soon, but for now:

I do want to know what your thoughts are on the current state of the DC Universe. Have you seen “Superman” or “Supergirl”?

I haven’t seen the movies. It’s a little bit too personal for me. Too soon, I guess you could say. I do like James [Gunn]. And I do have an appreciation for his [vision].

I wonder if Gunn and company used Snyder's premise of Superman killing Zod in 2013's Man of Steel movie as justification for having Supergirl kill the villain Krem in the new movie this year? The problem, of course, is that now, a different movie canon was set up, and in the context of what Gunn's producing, it makes Supergirl look awful, with less of a moral compass than Superman, since in the Silver/Bronze Age comics of the past century, her viewpoint and MO were little different from his. For now, it's got to be telling that Snyder's favorable to Gunn, considering that, even if the latter seemingly employed a more optimistic view than the former, the problem is that there were still subtle politics attached as strings, and that's not a good confidence builder. Now, about the costume issues:

He consulted with you on Superman’s suit, right?

He asked me a question about the underwear. You know, I can’t even remember now, but I think it was about the underwear. Sorry, but I’m going to do a little diatribe. “Watchmen” is a superhero deconstruction film — neuroses, sexual impotence around their costumes, the fetishism, everything. You can’t undo that. I think about everything that way. So, the underwear on the outside of the superhero costume comes from Victorian strongmen. The Victorians were so prudish that they’d wear flesh-colored leotards and then put the underwear over it. That’s how it started. It was really just a reflection of the Victorians not wanting to show any real skin due to their prudish fear of nakedness. So to me, that’s such a dinosaur. We don’t feel that way anymore. We live in an era where we’re OK without putting the underwear on. But maybe we’re not OK! Maybe the message is that you put the underwear back on Superman because we haven’t moved on from our Victorian prudishness. But I thought we had!

I wonder what Snyder thinks of how Warner Bros. denied him creative freedom for having the red tights be part of the movie costume, and then at least a few years later, all of a sudden, studio, publisher or both has the sheer audacity to have them restored post-New52, using a woke writer like Bendis as the justification? It's enough to wonder, Snyder went to all that trouble to make adaptations that don't exactly rate as classics today, all so the company could insult everybody's intellect with a "give and take" approach? Well, that's what the "diatribe" suggests. Interestingly, both interviewer and interviewee discuss the lack of sex in a lot of major movies today:

There is sex in your movie and there isn’t a lot of sex in movies anymore.

This is one of my big things: Sex in movies is weirdly gone. I don’t understand it.

And there’s plenty of sex on TV, but not in movies.

And it’s on TV! TV shows can have sex but movies, for whatever reason, can’t. What happened? I’m an ‘80s kid and grew up with “Body Heat,” “9 ½ Weeks.”

I’m a ‘90s kid and grew up with “Basic Instinct” and “The Last Seduction” and “Wild Things.”

Eroticism in movies has somehow been stomped out, and I don’t understand it. We watched “Excalibur” the other day and it’s a very sexy movie. It’s erotic.

Make Hollywood Movies Sexy Again.

Make them sexy again! I couldn’t agree more. I don’t know why TV gets a pass.

“Game of Thrones” had so much sex that it coined the term “sexposition.”

Crazy sex. Crazy sex.

Is it the MPAA?

I don’t know what it is. You know what needs to happen? The same thing that happened with the R-rated movie. So, R-rated movies now have lost their stigma — “The Odyssey,” “Obsession,” whatever it is. Now, we need an NC-17 movie that’s a hit.

Well they didn't impress me when they brought up Game of Thrones, because if memory serves, that has a lot of sexual violence in it, which only gives sex a bad name. Since they mention it, TV's still allowed to write up sex scenes? It remains to be seen if that'll last. For now, what I do know is that, if anybody's ever thought comics adaptations were an okay and/or challenging project in which to feature sex scenes, the woke crowd sure did a splendid job putting the kibosh on all that. They certainly made it difficult to make romance movies too, no matter the suitability level for children/family. IIRC, there may have been implied sex in the 1989 Batman movie, but since that time, most comics adaptations for the silver screen are far from taking such challenges. For now, Snyder simply doesn't understand that it's the very leftist crowd he comes from that's been pushing anti-sex propaganda for as much as a quarter century now, and it's led to a steep decline. Maybe what he could argue is that the time's come to give sex a more positive - if not perfect - name, and that could provide a more encouraging environment in which to explore the themes. Similarly, maybe somebody could argue that Japanese anime/manga producers have to give sex a better name too.

But what Snyder doesn't seem to discuss is that violence, by contrast, has increased in nearly all movie genres over the past decades, and even his own new movie seems to build on that. Perhaps it occurred to him that maybe the time's come to tone down the most graphic of violence for a change, and make distinctions between that and sex that's in good taste?

Now that you’ve made “The Last Photograph,” are there other films you’re still dying to make? Do you still want to make a “Rick and Morty” movie?

I do want to make a “Rick and Morty” movie. It would be fun. For the longest time, I’ve been trying to make “The Fountainhead” into a movie or into TV show because it’s too long. I’ve written it.

That’s not going to help with the right-wing allegations.

I was going to say! That’s not going to help. But it’s an undeniably great book. What people don’t realize is that “The Fountainhead” in the 1950s was like “Harry Potter” now in terms of popularity. It was off the charts. Even just the why of that is worth it. And “The Fountainhead” is an insane melodrama. That’ll probably be my magnum opus. I’ll probably die on that one. And “Escape From New York” is what we’re working on right now.

An important clue why Snyder quite possibly had no issue with stealthing a cameo by the Asian DEI replacement for Ray Palmer as the Atom, Ryan Choi, into the Justice League film, along with an important reminder that he's sadly not all that different from countless Hollywooders in his undoubtably leftist politics. On the other hand:

How did your Christian Science upbringing inform your superhero films? Because you do depict your superheroes as gods.

It’s this alchemy of Christian Science and Joseph Campbell — however you want to mix those together. Christian Science, in the end, is metaphysics. It’s probably closer to Buddhism than Western Christianity or Catholicism. It’s about the miraculous. The one thing about Christian Science is, it’s very much about: The works that I can do, you can do too. I’m the son of God but so are you. It’s very much, like, Jesus is just a dude who figured it out. That influence on Superman is that we’re him — in “Man of Steel,” especially. Yes, he’s godlike, but he still faces the exact same problems that we face. In the end, he loves his mother and wants to find love with Lois and have a job and be a person. Even though I do glorify the version of Superman at its best, I also try at the same time to put you in that position because I believe that we all are Supermen and we all are gods on Earth. I think that’s probably the influence in some ways.

Isn't the Christian Science sect the one that became notorious for refusing medical treatment, based on bizarre beliefs to the contrary? And this was what Snyder was raised under? Good grief. Superman may be depicted as bulletproof in past comics canon, but he was anything but impervious to pain, when one takes both Kryptonite and magic energies into consideration, which not many PC advocates today do. It's actually ill-advised to tout Superman as "godlike", because that only enforces what PC advocates like to weaponize in their efforts to belittle the Big Blue Boy Scout as "inferior" to Batman. Who, if memory serves, Snyder was more favorable to in some of his screenplay drafts. At the end of the interview:

You said once that the only way you’d do another superhero movie is if you could do an adaptation of Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns.”

The reason why it’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” if anyone would ever let me do it outside of the DC Universe since it’s a novel that just happens to have superheroes in it, is if I could do “Watchmen” and “Dark Knight Returns,” those two books next to each other, to me, represent the complete cycle of the superhero comic book medium. You can do no more than those two books. “Watchmen” came at the beginning of the superhero movie phase, so it would be super fitting to have “The Dark Knight Returns” come now, at what I would say is possibly — I don’t want to call it the twilight, but we’re down the road of the superhero movie genre, and I think audiences would understand the why of it. Let’s not forget: “The Dark Knight Returns” was written for a comic book audience that was very exhausted by comic books in the same way that “Watchmen” was, so having that movie written now for people who are exhausted by comic book movies would be a good time.

I'm so tired of hearing about DKR all over the place. Besides, didn't Miller later write 2-3 sequels and even a prequel in the past 2 decades, such as Last Crusade, Dark Knight Strikes Again, the Master Race and the Golden Child? They probably didn't get as good a reception as DKR got, yet they certainly helped overflood the market with more of the same cliches Miller's known for. If the audience is tired of superhero film fare, why should they care about yet another Batman movie of this sort either? Besides, most of the more recent superhero films aren't exactly built on the most inspiring story premises, and that's why you can't be surprised if their light's dimmed.

In the end, if there's something imporatant to say, it's that I'm most terribly sorry Snyder lost his daughter, and offer my condolences, but it doesn't change that he's one of the most overrated filmmakers of the modern era, his films are no big deal, and unlikely to register high in history records in decades to come. And then he goes right along and makes yet another violence-prone movie called The Last Photograph, and we're supposed to be impressed with the more noticable lurch to darkness? Please. That's as predictable as his own comics films turned out to be.

Batman's Knightfall becomes an animated cartoon

Inverse told some history of what may be one of the better offerings of the 1990s, the time when Batman's Knightfall event introduced Bane, the hefty villain whose main achievement at the time was breaking Batman's back. A story that's now subject of animated films. The writer spoke with the animation producers, but strangely enough, neither Bane's co-creators Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, nor any other connected writers and artists of the time are named for their jobs here. For now, let's take a look at the beginning paragraphs:

Without a doubt, the 1990s were a period of extreme transformation and experimentation for the comic book industry. And depending on who you ask, it wasn’t exactly a great one. The era was dominated by gimmicks like foil and glow-in-the-dark covers, murderous edgelord antiheroes with big guns, hundreds of pockets, and odd things strapped to their legs. This was also the era in which both DC and Marvel became increasingly aware of the spectator market of comic book purchases. DC’s 1992 stunt, The Death of Superman, was designed to sell a special edition comic book, just as much as it was designed to shake up internal narrative continuity. Similarly, in 1994, Hal Jordan went mad with grief after the destruction of his entire city and became the villain Parallax, slaughtering most of the Green Lantern Corps in the Emerald Twilight storyline.

And yet neither event was as daring and complex as the most iconic destruction of one hero from that decade: the breaking of the Bat in Knightfall, a trilogy of storylines that played out over the course of 1993 and 1994 and across no less than seven distinct DC titles. Now, 33 years after Knightfall began, and 14 years after the live-action film The Dark Knight Rises adapted aspects of the storyline, an animated DC film trilogy is faithfully bringing Knightfall to life.

If there's any problem with the 2nd paragraph, it's that it has the effect of making you wonder if the writer really does find what's told in the 1st reprehensible. And Emerald Twilight definitely was. Amazing they admit the Death and Return of Superman was a stunt, because not every mainstream news site's willing to clearly admit that. Also disturbing is that it served as a lead-in to Emerald Twilight, based on how the destruction of Coast City took place in a connecting tale.

It’s impossible to understate just how shocking Knightfall was at the time of release and also how much it permeates Batman media. It’s referenced in the Arkham games and, again, is the partial basis for 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises.

Krieg remembers working across the street from New York’s Forbidden Planet Comics, going in so broke that he’d “just read the comics from the stands.” Morales, somebody who “grew up with the story and was a fan as it was happening,” describes his reaction to joining the project as one of “amazement.” Knightfall was a turning point for the industry as much as it was a turning point for the character of Batman himself – it depicted a vision of the character on the verge of extreme burnout and exhaustion, working beyond his limits while ignoring the lingering trauma of Jason Todd’s murder and Superman’s death.

Neither of which examples are very good, because the former was a cheap way of jettisoning a character based on that he supposedly sent a rapist to his death for scaring an innocent woman into committing suicide. And the latter was just a cheap way of getting short range attention for the Man of Steel, in a year long storyline that later saw the Toyman murder Cat Grant's son. We certainly didn't need the latter example put into effect, mainly because it does leave a bad aftertaste.

If there was anything peculiar about the death of Jason Todd, it's that, if he was trying and failed to defuse a bomb left by the Joker, it didn't disintegrate Todd at all. His body, though badly scarred and dripping with blood, was still largely intact, considering that in reality, it could've been blown to smithereens if struck at close range by an explosion. Batman comics can be as surreal as their more science-fantasy emphasizing couterparts, but if "reality" is really a big deal to the higher echelons, they sure didn't follow through with it there. Though it's decidedly fortunate that, when Bane broke the Bat's back in 1993, it wasn't portrayed graphically. Today, in the Geoff Johns-influenced era, that could all turn out much differently. And back to the cartoon adaptations, there's a notable character who's also making an appearance in them:

Even with those concessions, Batman: Knightfall – Part 1 is still extremely accurate and retains a key part of the original storyline overlooked by most adaptations: Jean-Paul Valley, the replacement Batman who gets a high-tech Batsuit as an upgrade but degenerates into a savage, vicious killer in the mantle. The character debuted two years before Knightfall as an unassuming college graduate, unwittingly raised since birth by the mysterious Order of St. Dumas to become the assassin Azrael. While Bane is the villain with all the pop culture recognition, Azrael was always intended to be the storyline’s final antagonist, an ideological battle between Batman’s strict moral code and the amoral ruthlessness of the antiheroes like Spawn and Cable popular in the 90s – and the movie sets up that conflict firmly by making Jean-Paul the saga’s third main character.

Azrael is introduced in a brutal cold open where Batman catches him in the middle of murdering a gang of criminals and offers him psychological help when he realizes his troubles. According to Morales, that opening “gives you a sense of Azrael and how violent he can be, how he’s not Batman but a darker version that kills. Then it shows you Batman in his peak form before we start to take him down later. I thought it was valuable to establish that this is how good Batman is, and this is how good Azrael is.”

Wow, that's their whole idea of an achievement, huh? Interesting that Azrael's the character who kills more noticeably, and unlike Jason Todd, Valley wasn't bumped off like Todd was, though at the end of the solo series created for Azrael, Valley was put to an end, and his role was later filled by a character named Michael Lane in the mid-2000s. Some could probably wonder if the arguments against killing violent criminals symbolized with Azrael is what led to the leftist hostility against the Punisher years later, even as Wolverine continues to get a free pass on the same acts Frank Castle was depicted performing. It hasn't done mainstream superhero comics any good, of course, and we've seen the effect it's had on readership and sales since.

Much as I think Dixon and Nolan turned out a significant addition to Batman lore of the time, it doesn't sound from this interview like the cartoon producers are truly grateful to the aforementioned twosome, and at this point, what's the use of a cartoon adaptation anyway, in an era where the zygote was ruined by PC and bad management?

Gal Gadot on being dropped from WW movies

The Times of Israel told about actress Gal Gadot's exit from playing the role of Wonder Woman on the silver screen:

Gal Gadot revealed in an interview aired Monday that she was cut from the next Wonder Woman film, although the project was already in development.

Gadot told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that she was slated to star in a third installment in the franchise, under director Patty Jenkins, but the project changed when new management took over at DC Studios.

CEO James Gunn took over the ailing studio in 2022, and at first assured Gadot that she would star in the next Wonder Woman film.

“No, they told me the opposite,” said Gadot on the podcast when asked about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation. “They were like, ‘We’re going to develop it with you [Wonder Woman 3], but I saw the way everybody else was handled, right?”

Considering how everything collapsed artistically with the 2nd movie, what exactly are we missing? Some could also argue that, with Gadot now reaching her 40s, she may be past her prime for a character who's meant to look early to mid-20s.

Based on the woke politics that clogged the 2nd film, what's the loss? There've been at least 3 adaptations of comics owned by DC so far that were screwed up - WW, Shazam and Aquaman, to which we could add this year's Supergirl film as the sequel to Gunn's Superman - where the 2nd entry wound up a serious dud, and there have been other examples that were even worse, like Dwayne Johnson's Black Adam film and the Birds of Prey film, that got nowhere. So what have they truly got to show for it in the end? Also noted is that:

According to media reports, Ana Nogueira, who wrote the upcoming “Supergirl” script, is penning the script for the new film. A new director hasn’t yet been named.

Gunn’s own position as CEO is reportedly in question as DC Studios is part of Warner Bros. Discovery, the media company being acquired in the $110 billion merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery that is expected to close in late 2026.

If he leaves, he won't be missed. The Lanterns series he's producing is already woke, and if the same screenwriter who penned the Supergirl movie is assigned, we can't expect them to draw from worthy material for a story on the silver screen. And even the Superman film from the past year had some very distasteful metaphors shoehorned in, one more reason why it doesn't seem to be spoken about much now, any more than countless other films from the past decade that weren't worth the hype and dollars spent to make them. Oh, and the Peacemaker TV program also reeks of revulsion. So what are we missing?

All that aside, as I once said before, I don't think Gadot has much of a film legacy, and if she's worked on TV, probably not much of one there either. So it's not like, in the end, her role as WW was something to celebrate.

Hair color style drawing from the comics

New Beauty tells of a hair stylist/colorist who took some inspiration from the dark haired color certain superheroes are known for:

Call it Blue-Black, “comic-book color” or the “Superman shade”—a rich, jewel-toned black with a cool, glossy blue undertone, emerging as one of the must-haves this fall in Los Angeles, according to celebrity colorist Chad Kenyon, who is fielding the fever.

“I thought about Superman and Wonder Woman’s comic book hair color and made them more editorial,” says Kenyon of his unexpected source of creativity.

Kenyon began developing the look in 2025 and says it has since moved from concept to a look he’s asked to create across every type of client. “I'm doing it for celebrities such as Taylor Ortega, from her series with Dan Levy streaming now on Netflix, as well as content creators and civilians alike.”

The only thing that's a shame here is the citation of figures working on a channel as awful as Netflix happens to be. But wow, what potential there could be in drawing inspiration from hair colors, and regarding the color blue, I think I've sometimes noticed it somehow turning up on characters whose hair is black, perhaps an oddity in how some colorists accidentally make mistakes with certain colors in past decades. Batman's certainly been drawn at times with the color blue on his costume in past decades, though that was bound to be more deliberate. But it was okay, and a welcome contrast to the black shade some artists and writers in later years thought was such a big deal, in all their obsession with the darkness.

Anyway, I'll wish good luck to the stylist in his new goal of developing hairstyles and colors inspired by comicdom. It could have potential, though it's still no substitute for quality in the comics storytelling itself.

Animation can be a great spot for superheroes, but only if they aren't subject to PC

Indiewire says there's animated series based on superhero fare that's more interesting than the live action film adaptations, but unshockingly, they sugarcoat the presentations, beginning with what the Supergirl movie was adapted from:

“Supergirl,” the second film in James Gunn’s developing DCU and one of the biggest box office bombs of an otherwise strong year for movie theaters, isn’t the worse movie I watched in 2026. But it’s probably the most disappointing. An adaptation of an acclaimed standalone series called “Woman of Tomorrow,” “Supergirl” has a great lead in Milly Alcock and nothing else worth remembering. Whereas the comic it is based on is stunningly bright and beautiful to look at, “Supergirl” is a murky, brown-tinted eyesore. Its generic plot strands the character in a sci-fi universe that feels microscopically small, populated by third-rate archetypes the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies would barely have time for. There are interesting threads to unravel regarding Kara’s grief and anger, but the story she’s stranded in doesn’t have time to do that in any meaningful way.

I just don't understand why we keep getting lectured about why the overrated Tom King's tale is a modern "classic". The artwork I've seen is certainly overrated. And King's stories about "trauma" are forced and contrived. And we're not told anything in regards to that.

Even more galling: as “Supergirl” was tarnishing the character’s reputation in movie theaters, a great adaptation of the character was airing on Adult Swim. “My Adventures With Superman,” an animated series reimagining the early career of the most famous superhero on the planet. Ostensibly, Clark Kent is the main character, but Season 2 introduced Kara (voiced in the show by Kiana Madeira), and the currently airing Season 3 — which airs its season finale this Sunday — sees her take center stage. And she rules: reimagined as a former brainwashed intergalactic conquerer attempting to atone for her misdeeds, the show’s Kara is charming, funny, badass, with a meaty arc about atoning for her misdeeds and a super cute romance with Jimmy Olsen (Ishmel Sahid) that slots right in with the show’s bright, optimistic tone and focus on these character’s day-to-day struggles contrasted with the sci-fi operatics. If “Supergirl” the movie only scratched the surface of the character’s potential, “My Adventures With Superman” takes the time to really examine what makes her tick.

“My Adventures With Superman” is one of three animated shows adapting popular comic book superheroes that ran over the course of this summer, along with “X-Men ’97” on Disney+, which concluded its second season earlier this week, and “Batman: Caped Crusader” on Amazon Prime, which premiered its second season in late July. Pitched to a slightly older audience than usual for an animated comic book series, teenage up as opposed to for children, these shows aren’t flawless. But as comic book film studios continues to struggle to adjust to a world where they are no longer the center of the entertainment landscape (give or take “Spider-Man”), these shows demonstrate that these characters are better suited for serialized storytelling in the first place.

Would this be the cartoon where Jimmy was changed from white to black? And where Lois Lane's turned into a short-cropped tomboy? In that case, I regret to say, but this puff piece amounts to little more than misleading the audience by obscuring how the production is allegedly optimistic with strings attached. It's also worth considering that, if Kara Zor-El was changed from an innocent girl to a former conqueror, brainwashed or not, that too, unfortunately, is tasteless. It's also symbolic of the modern era's inability to appreciate a simpler concept of a character who could be written with flaws and mistakes, but doesn't have to be written as that guilty of wrongdoing as Kara sounds characterized here.

One of the major criticisms of superhero cinema for the past decade has been its resolute sameness: while certain MCU movies may have loose genre window-dressing, they’re fundamentally tonally similar in their quippy characters and excess spectacle. But all three of these series have strong art direction and visions for these characters that feels spiritually true to the source material but also provides something fresh and new that fans haven’t seen before, and are all radically different from one another.

Heavily inspired by early 2000s anime, “My Adventures With Superman” is the bright, zippy, lighthearted offering. The show takes the characters and their battles seriously, but it provides a wonderfully comforting take on Superman that also heavily foregrounds the love story between Clark and Lois; it’s a rom-com as much as it is a series about fighting invading aliens. It works because of how well-drawn these versions of the characters are, and because his relationship with Lois was always what made the seemingly invulnerable Clark feel most human. If the 2025 James Gunn “Superman” film sometimes strained to reinvent the character’s optimism for modern audiences, “My Adventures With Superman” makes that challenge look effortless.

But again, we're not being told about the character design, and that's being dishonest with the readership, for the sake of virtue-signaling. They may not have done to Kara's hair what they did Lois', but that's still no excuse, and that Lois' ethnicity may have also been changed only further (she looks darker complected in the cartoon) confirms the disrespect the producers actually have for Siegel and Shuster's creations. The writer also made sure to take a biased look at the aforementioned Marvel cartoon:

“X-Men ’97” is another successor of a ’90s kids’ cartoon, albeit a direct sequel. The 1992 “X-Men” animated series that aired on Fox during the decade was a foundational series for fans of the Marvel superhero team, providing definitive versions of the mutant protectors in all their messy, soapy excess. “’97” picks up where the series left off, but again ages up the content for adults who grew up with the series for a much darker tone. The animation emphasizes fidelity to the original show and the time period’s garish aesthetic in general, for a show that, more than almost any film, truly feels like picking up and reading five random issues of a comic run from 30 years ago.

Not all of these series are of equal quality. “My Adventures with Superman” has been the most consistent of the three, a nice good time throughout all three seasons without ever being exceptional. “Caped Crusader” Season 1 was a promising start, but Season 2 ramped up the stakes and serialized storytelling for a much improved follow-up. “X-Men ’97,” meanwhile, had a near flawless debut season, but a divisive Season 2 that struggled with unfocused storytelling and weaker stakes, albeit with a standout fourth episode that ranks among the best of the series (the show’s production was likely marred by the firing of head writer Beau DeMayo during work on Season 2 for allegations of sexual harrasment).

No surprise they'd sugarcoat X-Men 97 as well. They made Rogue otherwise sexless, drew Storm with a mohawk forcibly, and even the treatment of Morph was reprehensible. The part about the darkness predictably goes by without objectivity, and seriously, what "fidelity" is there truly here? And why does the writer talk about being "unexceptional" when Jimmy's ethnicity was changed, while Lois was made to look unattractive, and Supergirl gets a questionable premise shoehorned onto her? Such dishonesty indeed.

I'd spoken before about why brightness and optimism can't come with strings attached, yet that's exactly what the producers of My Adventures With Superman did, and it's disgraceful how Indiewire's writer doesn't have the courage to admit it's ludicrous, divisive, and conflicts with entertainment value. Animation can certainly be a great venue for superheroics, but not if woke changes are forced onto established creations. There was once a saying that change must be consistent with what came before, and the Hollywood phonies who turned out these items certainly aren't proving much different from the live action moviemakers who race-swapped and sex-swapped any of the characters in specific adaptations.

SDCC panel on Jewish influences in comicdom

San Diego Jewish World writes about a panel at the SDCC discussing the Jewish influences in comics history:

Comic-Con attendees packed a panel room to learn about the often-overlooked role that Jewish creators have played in shaping the comic book industry.

Mark S. Zaid, Esq., an Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide advisor, comic book historian, author, and creator of GI’s Rabbi); Danny Fingeroth, former Marvel editor and writer, author of Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero; and Dr. Andrew Fogel, historian of popular culture and author of Superman’s Jaw presented an engaging PowerPoint lecture titled “The Jewish Experience in Comics: Characters and Creators.”

The presentation explored how the Jewish identities and experiences of many of comics’ most influential creators shaped the stories they told and the heroes they created. The panel traced the origins of iconic characters such as Superman, the Thing, and Magneto, examined the personal histories of Golden and Silver Age comic book creators, and discussed whether Jewish cultural identity was intentionally woven into their work.

It's worth wondering if modern audiences appreciate all this in an era where Islamic antisemitism sadly rose after October 7, 2023. Similarly, do modern film audiences even appreciate the Jewish role in building Hollywood? The article unfortunately also brings up an ideologue who's dampened the impact of his notable GN:

The speakers also addressed how publishers approached sensitive subjects such as the Holocaust and examined the lasting influence of Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Will Eisner’s groundbreaking graphic novels on Jewish storytelling in comics.

While Eisner's writings hold up well, Spiegelman's recent, repellent politics can have the effect of damaging whatever impact he expected Maus to have for years to come. That said, who knows if anybody at these convention panels appreciates that Eisner's last GN, The Plot, also did research on Islamic antisemitism?

One of the panel’s most fascinating discussions centered on Nazi Germany’s reaction to Superman. Fogel displayed a German Secret Service newspaper article attacking Superman’s Jewish creators. Germany eventually banned Superman, portraying him as a symbol of capitalist propaganda designed to brainwash American youth. The article specifically criticized Jerry Siegel’s Jewish identity, referenced his circumcision, accused him of using Yiddish rather than German, and labeled him an Untermensch (subhuman). The publication argued that Superman was not the true Übermensch (superman), claiming he violated the laws of science by defying gravity, lacked proper masculinity because of his circus-like costume, and represented irrationality rather than Aryan ideals.

It's interesting they bring up this specific history, because "Nazi" was an acronym for "National Socialists". Do the panelists know that, and did they specify? And what's their own take on capitalism in an era where it's been all but shunned? It's also interesting the Nazi propaganda they cited considers science fiction and fantasy storytelling anathema to their beliefs, indicating they also despised entertainment written for positive reasons.

At the end of the article:

This was one of the most informative and thought-provoking panels I attended at Comic-Con. My husband joined me for the presentation, and despite attending Comic-Con for nearly 20 years, he walked away having learned numerous new historical connections between Judaism and comic books. It was an eye-opening experience that offered a deeper appreciation for the people and stories behind some of the world’s most recognizable superheroes.

Unfortunately, I have a sad feeling that whatever objectivity the panel had ground to a screeching halt when it came to modern issues, and wouldn't be shocked if the panelists would not say even a word about Islamic antisemitism, and whether it should be subject of any kind of comics storytelling. That's why these panels aren't as informative as they could be, yet nobody will point that out.

A review of Frank Miller's new biography

Open Letters Review looked at Miller's new biography, Push the Wall, which may not be that long a book, and in the beginning paragraph, and the editor reviewing it appears to be disappointed, and certainly makes clear what they think of one project that years ago, I wanted to think was Miller's way of telling he'd found a valid subject to write about, until he sadly went the defeatist route several years after:

Writer/artist Frank Miller is legitimately legendary in the field of comic books, firmly stationed in a company of three dozen or so men and women who did landmark work. Miller was the creative genius behind black, nihilistic oddities like Ronin or Sin City, the genius behind signpost superhero stories like Batman: Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One, and the genius behind black, nihilistic masterpieces like 300 or the “Elektra saga” run in Daredevil. Any one or two of these would guarantee a creator immortality in the comic book field, so Miller’s status is secure no matter what sloppy, downright cracked work he might add to that body of work, incomprehensible things like Dark Knight Strikes Again or, God forbid, Holy Terror.

Sounds like the reviewer believes Miller should never have tackled the issue of Islamic terrorism, ever. And that's the problem, past, present or future. With the biggest one being that the reviewer doesn't even have the courage to make himself clear about that.

But with that said, is Miller really that "legendary"? Hardly. His obsession with the darkness - which today apparently stops at the most challenging of issues like the aforementioned - is honestly dispiriting, and if he didn't succeed in screenwriting in the long run, why must we believe he's that much of a legend? Lest we forget, he acted as apologist for somebody who definitely won't be one now, and the way he noticably remains fixated on a certain president for cheap reasons is dismaying and divisive.

This kind of status imbues his new memoir, Push the Wall, with inherent interest. The many thousands of comics readers who’ve enjoyed their work would very much like to see similar memoirs from all the other greats of the comics world. How fascinating and valuable it would be, for instance, if we had honest, grappling, detailed memoirs from figures like Bill Everett or Gil Kane or Jack Kirby.

Finishing Push the Wall, some readers will be thinking about how fascinating and valuable it would be if we had an honest, grappling, detailed memoir from Frank Miller. This sure isn’t that.

If the book's a disappointment, I can't say I'm surprised. When a guy turns as defeatist of recent as Miller has, you probably can't expect him to deliver the best of biographical material either, nor for that matter a good instruction in how to illustrate. And his art style's been so mediocre for years, whereas even Kane's art style was more comprehensive just years before he passed on at the turn of the century. But the reviewer's right about one thing: if we had serious biographies about Everett, Kane and Kirby, that could be a lot more interesting than what Miller has to offer at this point.

Miller organizes the book around 18 “lessons” about both life and working in the comics industry, and he fills in the inevitable pabulum of old-man-imparting-lessons with glimpses from his own autobiography: boyhood in Vermont, formative exposure to gritty New York and specifically the Greenwich Village of bygone decades, the initial scrambling in the comics industry, the burgeoning success after Elektra and Dark Knight Returns. And sometimes some of these memories, though decked out in the hack-purple prose that’s characterized Miller’s writing for fifty years, are interesting, particularly the Horatio Alger bits before he hit it big, when he was wandering around a pre-Bloomberg New York that would be all but unrecognizable to the city’s current wall-to-wall 1% inhabitants. “I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline,” he writes in one such passage, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.”

Miller might not be the most eloquent of writers, but he’s articulate and sure as hell prolific; instead of tarping over the subject with something like “the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all,” he could have written that feeling. His book is barely 200 pages; Saga Press would certainly have sprung for another 100.

Gee, that's not much of a page count. Whether this is a biography or an "educational" book, one would think a lengthier book would serve the goal better. Perhaps this does say something about Miller's otherwise overrated talents indeed. Interesting the reviewer alludes to NYC's current residents as "one percent", since based on where they're going lately under Zohran Mamdani, and reelected the disastrous district attorney Alvin Bragg by a comfortable margin, some could make a reasonable argument something is definitely wrong with the Big Apple today, though wealth surely is the least of the problems.

So what’s left are the lessons, and the bits about Miller’s professional life. But the lessons are mostly things Miller himself has very publicly, very repeatedly not followed. “Sometimes you have to work with others to grow,” he writes, for example. “You have to put yourself back into learning, back into wonder, back into some spooky action.” And the anecdotes from the professional comics world are so bland and sanded-down as to be virtually press releases. About his decision to kill off his massively popular character Elektra, he writes:

Exit Elektra. When it came to my decision to end her life, I have to say, it just felt like the right thing to do. Bringing this storyline to a conclusion was the most dramatic thing I could do for the story: the narrative demanded an exclamation point, so I gave it one, in the most lapel-grabbing way possible.

Not mentioned here, however, is that he actually revived her the following year, perhaps because some readers took issue with this, though afterwards, she was mostly in limbo for at least another decade before being put to serious use again, in Daredevil or other comics. By which time, she was depicted as having fully reformed, more or less. And Miller, to my knowledge, was unhappy about the new use for Elektra by that time. But considering how overrated he is in the long run, that's why his complaint is decidedly not worth listening to. And his favoratism for Batman over Superman has long become a cliche among some writers:

Or this, about his decision in Dark Knight Returns to turn Superman into a fascist lapdog:

At the time, Batman suited my creative vision for a superhero much more than Superman. I grew up reading and idolizing Superman. He was my first favorite superhero. But, truth be told, I had gotten pretty sick of the guy. He was just so ridiculously powerful, and his invulnerability reached the point of limiting him as a character for me.

Obviously, “it just felt like the right thing to do” and “I had gotten pretty sick of the guy” are serious disappointments, especially coming from an author who’s gotten a good deal of profitable mileage out of the crafted public image of a straight-talking maverick. There’s precious little maverick straight-talking in Push the Wall, and we’re unlikely to get a more satisfying follow-up. Although it’s at least theoretically possible that Frank Miller could strike again.

So long as he remains as absurdly biased as he's been for goodness knows how long, he won't deliver anything satisfactory, and probably hasn't for longer than we think anyway. I do recall Ronin had a decidedly mediocre ending where the demon called "Agat" turned out to be a robot who was possibly crafted subconsciously by the main protagonist?!? Seriously, that was pretty underwhelming, and defeated whatever fantasy-based premise the miniseries was supposedly built on. And in the end, Ronin was little more than an empty shell.

But what's really disappointing is Miller's superficial view of Superman, one that completely obscures the weaknesses to Kryptonite and magical energies that were established decades ago, if we go by what's quoted from the manuscript. If Miller wanted to, he could've written up a Superman script building on stuff like that for real, and in the end, all he does is insult plenty of hard-working writers and artists who came before him by practically depicting the Man of Steel as minion for fascism. He did something like that with Wonder Woman too in the All-Star imprint title spotlighting Batman & Robin from the late 2000s that only lasted a few years. Miller's inability to acknowledge that the writers are at fault for Superman being "ridiculously powerful" is telling, and if that's how he approaches the whole matter, he's made clear he comes from a generation that didn't make any proper distinctions between reality and fiction.

Another problem with Miller is that he sounds like the kind of scribe who only cares about his own work, and doesn't give a damn what happens with others' work, or how. That's another reason why comicdom fell into such dire straits; nobody respects the past efforts of previous writers and artists with better resumes from up to the turn of the century, and now we have a whole shambles devoid of consistent continuity and characterization in the mainstream for starters. Of course, even those creators have faults, like not showing the guts to take issue with their former workplaces if they feel something wrong was done, or worse, they practically enabled it by participating in degradation of their own creations, as Kane sadly did when he drew 5 of 6 parts of the first, very repellent Green Lantern story in Action Comics Weekly from 1988, where Carol Ferris as Star Sapphire slaughtered Katma Tui, whose death to date was never fully reversed. I don't think Miller's ever complained about whether his own work on Daredevil was disrespected by successive scribes, and so, even though he may be the kind of artist/writer who only cares about his own stories, there's plenty to suggest he still doesn't put much value on what writings he has that did matter. And those writings are decidedly way too few.

As for this new "biography", I think it's worth passing on. It sounds too short, and like Miller hasn't provided enough to think about. Which has got to be another problem with modern creators in the long run.

How a classic back issue of Action Comics was stolen from actor Nicholas Cage, and when later returned, he sold it on auction

Far Out Magazine wrote about the history of actor Nicholas Cage's onetime ownership of an Action Comics premiere issue, which was once stolen from his estate but later tracked and returned:

Cage is such a big fan of DC’s flagship hero that he named his son Kal-El, which is Superman’s name on his native planet. He was famously tapped to don the famous blue suit in a movie directed by Tim Burton, but this never came to pass. He did voice the ‘Man of Steel’ in Teen Titans Go! to the Movies and appeared as the character via CGI in The Flash, although he wasn’t too pleased with this cameo.

Considering what a fiasco that movie was in more ways than one, it's no wonder the film would be such an embarrassment. Most angering is that it drew from what terrible writer Geoff Johns set up around 2009. DC may have moved back to spotlighting Wally West more than Barry Allen 12 years after that, but the damage had long been done, and Johns was among those responsible for starting it.

At one point in time, Cage owned a pivotal piece of Superman history. In 1997, he paid $110,000 for a copy of Action Comics #1, the comic book in which Clark Kent made his debut. This must have been a dream come true for the self-professed superhero nut, but his bliss wouldn’t last for long. Just two years later, a number of comics were stolen from Cage’s private collection, including Action Comics #1. One of the most valuable and important comics in history was now missing, never to be seen again…or was it?

Vincent Zurzolo, President of Metropolis Comics and Comic Connect and the man who sold the issue to Cage in the first place, warned the actor to keep an eye out.

It’s unlikely that whoever pinched the comic did so because they were a fan; they stole it to sell it, so all they had to do was wait. Sure enough, in 2011, Zurzolo and his partner Steve Fischler stumbled across a seller flogging what looked suspiciously like Cage’s copy of Action Comics #1.

Law enforcement saw to it the copy was returned to Cage, who later sold it again on auction to pay off some debts, and he was lucky to retrieve the stolen items, but it's still regrettable he's among many people who're setting poor examples by keeping old back issues around and not donating to museums. I'm sure there's plenty of archives that'd pay just as good as an auction can for products they can put on display for history exhibits. Yet all these prominent people only think of storing them away for who knows what reasons, and it sure doesn't speak well for Hollywood any more than more ordinary speculators.

Since when was Supergirl always stuck in Superman's shadow?

The Conversation wrote a sugarcoated item about Supergirl and the upcoming movie, that rather predictably takes no objective view of the Maid of Might's history:

Since her official debut in 1959, Supergirl has struggled to emerge from the shadow of her cousin, Superman. So it’s a bold move that the second cinematic release in the newly rebooted DC Universe will be Supergirl.

Milly Alcock first appeared as Supergirl in the epilogue to Superman (2025). Her Supergirl is a brash “party girl” – an immediate contrast to David Corenswet’s squeaky clean rendition of Superman. Based on the comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow (2021) by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, she is a traumatised character, dealing with the destruction of her home planet of Krypton. “I have no people,” Supergirl laments in the trailer.

Well that's the problem: it's based more on the overrated King's story than a screenplay that could stand on its own. Might I also add I don't find the posters showing Supergirl wearing a trenchcoat appealing? The sunglasses may be cool, but the coat ruins everything. And I don't think Supergirl was always in Superman's shadow as they say, if only because there were times in the past where she did have solo adventures printed. The problem is the publishers didn't always see her as the storytelling vehicle she could be if they wanted to invest in serious merit-based writing. And the article has a pretty big goof in the following:

However, Supergirl was not always so introspective. The character and her alter ego, Kara Zor-El, first appeared in 1938, to cash in on the popularity of Superman. She was a preppy teenager who played a supporting helpmate role, allowing Superman to display his paternal side.

Publishers DC Comics also flirted with the concept of Superwoman. A 1943 story had Superman’s girlfriend, reporter Lois Lane, dream that she was Superman’s female counterpart. In her book Supergirl: Contemporary Feminist Reboot of a Hapless DC Comic Helpmate (2022), Batya Weinbaum suggests this moment reflected the “changing position of women in wartime”. In a 1947 story, Lois Lane, Superwoman! from Superman issue #45, Lane is convinced she has superpowers, only to discover she is the victim of a ruse where Superman is using his influence to simulate the experience. This prompts her frustrated exclamation: “You men who try to keep women weak and defenceless – I hate you!”

Lane may well have been addressing the DC editors who published her adventures. In his cultural history of comic book heroines, comic book historian Mike Madrid outlines an excerpt from 1950s-era DC Comics’ editorial policy which reluctantly accepts stories featuring women, but only if the female characters are “secondary in importance”.

Somehow, it's hard to believe a company that readily published Wonder Woman all these years would have a problem publishing anything with a lady in the lead. Either way, they did have some impressive lady co-stars created at the time, and who went on to see better writing as time went by. Also notice the hilarious goof in the year of debut, which is actually Superman's, not Supergirl's, which was originally early 1959.

As for what Lois Lane was written telling in 1947, well, that could easily describe the situation decades later, when men and women alike who had lenient views on discrimination led to the publication of Identity Crisis. Yet that sees no mention in this puff piece, and that's the considerable weakness here. As is the following "explanation" why Kara Zor-El was originally terminated in Crisis on Infinite Earths:

Whereas Superman (played by Christopher Reeve) was introduced in 1978 by the same producers with a daring rescue of a plummeting helicopter, Helen Slater’s Supergirl performs an aerial ballet and frolics with woodland creatures. In comics, Supergirl fared even worse. The character was killed off in 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, partly because of her threat to Superman’s unique status as “the last son of Krypton”, and partly because of the film’s disappointing box office takings.

Excuse me? What kind of monumentally stupid explanation is that? The staff may have wanted to establish Kal-El as the last Kryptonian at the time. But that doesn't make Kara a "threat" to said status. What the writer says is disgusting, and undermines any valid lamentation he's making, though he's right the editors used the film's failure as a justification, which is also sick. And then he adds insult to injury when he says:

In comic books, however, death is never permanent. Kara Zor-El and Supergirl were resurrected in 2004 in The Supergirl from Krypton. There was an attempt to add nuance to the character, with a greater emphasis on the trauma she suffered from witnessing the loss of her home planet. But this was rather undermined by various revealing costumes clearly designed to satisfy the male gaze.

And this inherently wrong because? Even years before, there were times when Kara Zor-El was drawn as quite a fashion plate, and the bare midriff costume was actually introduced around the turn of the century, at the middle of Peter David's run on the new take on Supergirl (I think Leonard Kirk was the artist), which was developed out of a character who first appeared in 1988. The real reasons to complain are that no concrete story accompanied the reintroduction in the Superman/Batman title published at the time, or even the solo title that followed, and that a very bad man accused of sexual misconduct was in charge of editing, that being Eddie Berganza, who was only fired from DC in 2017. If there's a valid complaint to make about fetishizing in what he oversaw, it can be blamed on Berganza, and also writer Jeph Loeb. Oddly, when Kara was reintroduced at the time, the figure as drawn by Michael Turner wasn't so busty, if at all. As for the costume, if there's anything wrong with it, and possibly has been for a long time, it's how it was long-sleeved, which makes it look silly. The article, interestingly enough, notes that the TV show starring Melissa Benoist appears to have followed up on the PC view of Supergirl's outfits:

In the pilot episode she finally strikes out on her own with the dramatic rescue of an airliner, assuming the mantle of Supergirl. In a show that employed several female writers and became known for its positive representation of LGBTQ+ issues, problematic topics such as Supergirl’s infantilising name and costume were directly addressed.

Kara refuses to wear revealing versions of the costume from the character’s comic book past. In discussions with her employer, CatCo Worldwide Media CEO Cat Grant, she is told: “I’m a girl. And your boss. And powerful. And rich, and hot, and smart. So, if you perceive Supergirl as anything less than excellent, isn’t the real problem you?” Significantly, Grant is portrayed by actor Calista Flockhart, known for the Ally McBeal series – a show that sparked debates about feminism and women in the workplace in the late 1990s.

Well if all they care about is putting down even creators with more common sense, along with pushing an agenda that did more harm than good, those are just some of the reasons why it's regrettable the Maid of Might's potential has suffered ruin for years. The TV show became increasingly political, and that's why it's more an embarrassment than a classic today. At the end:

The 2021 comic book Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow follows the young alien Ruthye Marye Knoll, who recruits Supergirl to seek revenge after her father is murdered. The story is told from Ruthye’s point of view, the fractured narrative lending the story a fatalistic quality. The narration also emphasises the mythic quality of Supergirl, “who lost everything and kept walking”.

It remains to be seen how closely the film will follow the philosophical source material. Meanwhile, in the pages of the latest DC comic book, writer and artist Sophie Campbell has returned to the brighter tone of the 1960s version of the character, merged with the sensibilities of the 2015 television series. The many interpretations of Supergirl continue to reveal the character’s durability and versatility.

If memory serves, the writer of the latest series is really a man with the name Ross, and it sure is ironic somebody who claimed earlier the outfits in post-2004 Supergirl were a problem suddenly makes no such arguments when somebody of "Sophie Campbell"'s standing is helming the new series. Predictably, no objective view is taken of King's overrated story either, and that takes away any impact this puff piece might've had.

Since the new movie's also a subject, Polygon says the director, as much as the screenwriter, did draw "inspiration" from both King's story and what the assigned screenwriter turned out:

"I very deliberately started with the script that Ana wrote," Gillespie says, "and I put together a lot of visuals around that coming from the script, trying to make something that I would be excited about and that had this grit and flavor of the Supergirl character, Kara." [...]

"After that, I went back and visited Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow and took some images from that," he says, "but I didn't want to start there because I didn't want to just do the comic book."

Unfortunately, that's just what he did nevertheless, and borrowing even remotely from something that pretentious doesn't help a bit. Nor did injecting feminism into the narratives of the TV show or even the comics themselves avail, but that's certainly a moot point by now. It remains to be seen what the box office results will be for this new Supergirl movie, and based on how it's crafted, I'd rather stay home and read the comics I own instead. These articles are just more examples of stuff that ultimately doesn't help the Maid of Might's reputation at all.

DC no longer celebrates USA anniversaries, with Superman or any other superheroes

A writer at the New York Post talks about DC's refusal, in all their far-leftism, to celebrate America's 250th anniversary, in contrast to a time in 1976 when they were willing to publish a Superman special where they celebrated the Bicentennial:

He may be faster than a speeding bullet, but even Superman can’t outrun globalization.

Back in the summer of 1976, one of my treasures was an oversize special edition comic book, “Superman Salutes the Bicentennial.” Reprinting a famous cover of the 1940s, with a bald eagle perched on Superman’s arm and a stars-and-stripes shield behind him, the publication contained six historical tales of the Revolution and the Spirit of ’76.

Today, a search of DC Comics’ website shows nothing celebrating America’s Semiquincentennial, by Superman or any other superhero.

Yet they're perfectly fine with celebrating LGBT pride month, which is a lot more than the one or two days Holocaust Memorial Day and 911 Memorial Day takes place on. Even USA Independence Day (4th of July) is only about that long, and when a politically motivated "celebration" goes on for as long as a month, that's also troubling. Let's also consider that the same people who don't celebrate USA Independence Day and Centennials also don't show any appreciation for foreign independence days like in Ukraine and Bulgaria to celebrate their independence from the Soviet Union, nor do they celebrate holidays like the near dozen France has, nor far eastern holidays like Japan's and Thailand's. Or even Israel's, in complete disregard of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's ancestry.

One might have thought that 1976 would be a terrible time for comics to commemorate America. Hundreds of thousands of boys who had read Superman in the 1950s and ‘60s had been sent to Vietnam, where 58,000 of them died. Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation had shattered faith in the political system, while assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, followed by devastating riots, made a mockery of the “American Way.”

Yet DC Comics, along with tens of millions of Americans, did celebrate the country. Though its values had been severely tested, Bicentennial America also had seen the greatest growth of the middle class and national wealth in human history, as well as the final push to ensure civil rights for all citizens, fulfilling the “promissory note,” as Dr. King put it, of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

That America’s most famous fictional hero — a symbol of the country around the world — would celebrate, too, seemed only natural, and it inspired young readers like me.

This patriotic portrayal continued. Thirteen years later, in September 1987, DC put out a special comic with the New York Daily News to commemorate the bicentennial of the Constitution. Traveling back in time, Superman, along with three young Americans, foils Lex Luthor’s plot to hijack the Constitutional Convention and install himself as dictator of the United States.

Amid the action, Superman delivers a mini civics lesson, explaining that while the Constitution did not outlaw slavery or give women the vote, the Framers had the foresight to allow it to be amended to fit the times.

Next to “Schoolhouse Rock,” Superman probably provided more civics education to young readers than most elementary classrooms could have hoped to do.

Times indeed have changed. In 2011, DC used Action Comics’ 900th issue as a platform to have Superman renounce his American citizenship, perhaps believing he felt more comfortable in Davos than Dubuque.

A decade later, DC officially changed Superman’s motto to “truth, justice and a better tomorrow,” a mash-up of adventure series and soap opera.

Given such changes, it’s no surprise that DC seems intent on ignoring America’s 250th.

That says more about DC than it does its most famous character. It seems the editors at DC no longer understand there is a reason that Superman was created in America, and not France or China. (DC Comics did not reply to a request for comment.)

Oh, that's not shocking either if they wouldn't respond to news writers about this. No doubt, they have a policy to shut out questions from anybody deemed patriotic and even sensible nowadays, and this is bound to be the case at Marvel too, where current EIC C.B. Cebulski rarely gives press statements like his predecessors at this point. On which note, if they're not celebrating the 250th with Captain America as a host icon, even that shouldn't be shocking. And back to DC, their story where Supes was depicted shedding his citizenship wasn't the only troubling tale they turned out back then. There was also one that downplayed the horrors of Iran's dictatorship very badly, and that definitely hasn't aged well in over 15 years, after the dictatorship slaughtered thousands of people opposed to their tyranny. When a USA publisher won't celebrate their own country, it should come as no surprise they can't even make a solid case for innocent and defenseless people overseas. Those Superman stories from 15 years ago are a stain on their resume as much as their reputation. I hesitate to think what they'd do with Golden Age-created characters like Liberty Belle too these days.

Anyway, if Paramount Skydance, as new owner of properties like DC that came with the WB purchase, has no intention of cleaning up such a mess, then that only further makes the case for why DC and Marvel can't remain under a conglomerate ownership.

Ohio Maltz Museum's exhibition for Jewish comics contributions

NPR-WOSU covers an exhibition of Jewish comics contributions at the Maltz Museum in Ohio. It was also organized by a historian who was involved in getting a NYC street named after Jack Kirby:

“Icons in Ink, The Jewish Comics Experience,” on view at the Maltz Museum in Beachwood through Aug. 23, is a revelation and a celebration, albeit with some limitations and questionable aspects.

The show’s core material is conveyed through colorful, large-scale graphic layouts resembling magazine pages that reach from the height of one’s knee to above one’s head. The layouts are filled with text and reproductions of pages from comic books. It’s an eye-grabbing approach that produces visual overload at times. Also, transitions from one section of the show to another occasionally lack continuity and flow.

But when it comes to the core goal of highlighting Jewish contributions to comic book history, the show delivers fascinating and sometimes surprising insights.

Organized by Roy Schwartz, a New York-based pop culture historian, the exhibition opened in 2023 at the Center for Jewish History in New York and is now in the middle of a five-year national tour.

It brims with Schwartz’s zeal to highlight the Jewish roots of what he described in an interview as “a unique American art form,’’ and “the bastard child of literature and art.’’ His expertise includes having written the 2021 book, “Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero.’’

For Cleveland, Schwartz and the Maltz expanded the show to highlight the city’s role in the evolution of comic books, in collaboration with Samantha Baskind, the Cleveland State University professor of art history known for her extensive scholarship on Jewish contributions to the visual arts.

Hidden meanings of Superman

Naturally, Superman, the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish high school students in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood who invented the “Man of Steel’’ in the 1930s, is a major focus.

Superman’s birth on the doomed planet Krypton and his parents’ effort to save him by launching him to Earth is a familiar tale. It may not be widely appreciated, however, that the story echoes that of the finding of Moses, and that Superman’s name at birth, Kal-El, is a Hebrew phrase often interpreted as “voice of God’’ or “vessel of God.”

Superman’s powers evoke the myth of the Golem, a massive, Samson-like humanoid purportedly molded in clay by a 16th-century rabbi Prague to defend Jews from pogroms.

As the show points out, Jewish fans have certainly understood such signals.

Somehow, I'm not so sure they do, seeing how some of those who stick with leftism are so hostile to Israel, their country of origin, that it's hard to believe at this point they care about any "signals". Speaking of which, this exhibit features at least 2 comic creators who decidedly aren't worth seeing there:

Also featured in the Cleveland section of the show are printed works and original drawings from Harvey Pekar’s ironic and self-deprecating “American Splendor” series, Peter Kuper’s hilarious “Spy vs. Spy” episodes in Mad Magazine and Terri Libenson’s Jewish-centered narratives in series, including “The Pajama Diaries.”

Cleveland Heights native Brian Michael Bendis is represented by outstanding works including a spectacular 2006 ink drawing for an Avengers episode depicting an explosion on a crowded street in what could be Downtown Cleveland.

When somebody as awful as Bendis is included, despite how overrated and atrocious his writings were on - but not limited to - series like the Avengers, something is terribly wrong. What's so "outstanding" about his cheap approach to science fiction? It's also troubling that somebody like the late Pekar was included, despite his negativity to Israel that he practically wove into a GN titled "Not the Israel my Parents promised me". These are the kind of "creators" whose works we need to see? Nope.

Conspiracists and paranoiacs might see the show as piling on more evidence for the hate-filled fantasy that Jews supposedly control everything from Wall Street to Hollywood.

On this, it's bizarre said conspiracists would want anything to do with Jewish creations, if that's how they feel, and have no interest in producing their own entertainment products that hopefully aren't laced with prejudicial visions. And then, in a very sad hint at where this NPR affiliate really stands, they say it needs an "update":

It’s also striking, given its attention to the social and political context of comic books in prior decades that “Icons in Ink’’ doesn't bring its story fully into the present.

The show’s generally triumphal tone feels oddly off-key amid the recent uptick in anti-Semitism on the left and right, and the post Oct. 7 backlash against Israel.

Debate over Israel’s military conduct in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon, or settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, has inspired authors and pundits of all political persuasions.

“Icons in Ink’’ hasn’t been updated to reflect the turmoil. It could be said that because the show was organized in 2023, there hasn’t been enough time for a significant response to current events from Jewish creators of comic books or graphic novels to warrant attention.

But it seems to be a missed opportunity that the show doesn't mention the conflicted feelings about Israel that Pekar explored in “Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me,’’ published in 2012 as one of his last books.

There’s also no mention of the three-page spread criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza published in The New York Review of Books in February 2025 by Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the Holocaust-related graphic novel “Maus,’’ whose work is otherwise lauded in the show at Maltz.

Such publications and others like them represent an intriguing opportunity to revise “Icons in Ink’’ as it continues to travel. The exhibition argues successfully that the Jewish experience in comics needs to be understood more deeply.

Given that goal, some freshening could make the show even more relevant and up-to-the-minute. After all, as the exhibition demonstrates, Jewish comic book creators and graphic novelists have been pulling no punches for decades in messages both overt and subtly coded.

When they insist Sacco's a recommendation, and no right-wing creators like the late Joe Simon are mentioned at all, or even Will Eisner, that speaks volumes as to where they really stand on this. It's actually amazing Pekar's screed didn't turn up at the exhibit, but even so, he's hardly somebody I'd consider a perfect choice any more than Spiegelman. Also note how the news site omits issues like Jews being murdered by the Religion of Peace, and all they care about is making Jews look like the sole ones responsible for anything bad happening post-October 7, 2023, while obscuring the more serious issues caused by said religion.

I'll give Schwartz and company this: they may have deliberately avoided some of these issues because they realized Pekar's POV was divisive, and it wouldn't do any good post-10.7.2023 to bring something like that into the mix. Even so, if they didn't bring in something that could provide a more positive viewpoint on Israeli issues like a Japanese mangaka's publication, then it's otherwise a defeat, though not in the way NPR wants to frame it. What they say about the exhibit in that context is shameful, and if that's their position, why'd they even bother to cover the project?

DC desecrates Wonder Woman for "pride month"

Warner Todd Huston at Breitbart informs that for their latest, pointless "pride month" special, DC's included a transsexual pseudo-Wonder Woman, using a previously created character to put in the costume:

DC Comics has announced the introduction of a transgender version of Wonder Woman for Pride Month.

The plot of the upcoming Justice League Dream Girls – A DC Pride Event #1 comic follows the company’s transgender character, Nia Nal, aka Dreamer, as she and several other characters enter into an alternate reality where Nia, not Diana Prince, had become Wonder Woman. [...]

The character first appeared on TV in 2018 — but not in the comics. Transgender actor Nicole Maines first portrayed Dreamer on the CW’s Supergirl TV series that aired from 2015 to 2021. The character finally made the switch to comics in 2021 — also in a DC “Pride” event issue — after Supergirl was canceled. [...]

Along with comics writer Jadzia Axelrod, actor Maines also helped to write the Wonder Woman switch issue, according to reports. [...]

DC has turned several of its top stars into queer characters over the last decade.

In 2023, DC issued a line of comics in which Alan Scott, who is the Green Lantern, turned out to be gay. But the comic flopped hard and sales were dismal.

The year before that, DC’s attempt to make Superman’s son, Jon Kent, into a randy bisexual character also flopped and was cancelled after only 18 issues.

DC has also pushed a list of their long-standing character into the LGBTQ+ theme, including Midnighter and Apollo, Batwoman, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, and the Tim Drake version of Robin.

Well this is more than enough reason to practically avoid advertising in their comics, based on how they're desecrating even so much as the costume of an iconic figure, putting a politicized, badly created character in the outfit. And they keep doing it despite how rock bottom sales have been for all these repeated shovings down the throat, which they also refuse to stop keeping canon. Some can reasonably ask if the new Paramount ownership intends to let DC keep receiving funding if all they care about is wasting it on propaganda that's not selling. But chances are just as possible they won't take any steps to make DC quit, so we can only hope. The best to hope for at this point is if Paramount ownership will close down the publisher, which would probably be the best thing to do for now. And even then, they don't belong under a conglomerate ownership.

The whole pride month propaganda's been going on too long, and what's also aggravating is how this is what they consider a big deal, not holidays from foreign countries like Thailand's Yi-Peng lantern festival. All this LGBT propaganda only underscores the stunning lack of creativity now dominating the mainstream.

Without merit, USA comics won't have "everlasting" appeal

The North State Journal (Raleigh, NC) wrote about why American comics are so great:

Pick one up. Be seduced by its glossy cover. Gaze upon the impossibly muscular body clad in a skin-tight suit. Our hero or heroine will surely be soaring, shouting, blasting a villain into next week.

They are ridiculous. They are addictively great. Comic books, of the superhero variety, are 100% American.

Compare the thin comic book to Europe’s graphic novels, and they come off looking flimsy, infantile. Compare the American comic to Japanese Manga and they appear innocent in their fixation with heroism; they hark back to a departed American age.

Once a nickel, a dime, a quarter, now the price of a latte, they are objects of American consumer capitalism. The comic is literature in junk-food version.

Well it used to be, but that doesn't mean it was always perfect even back in the Golden Age. And if you consider how, by the turn of the century, they were on their way to putting far more forced emphasis on leftist ideologies, that's why it doesn't make much sense now to say they're objects of capitalism. The American age in question has sadly departed, and they're not fixed on heroism like they were before.

Yet what truly makes them American objects is what plays out in their 32 pages month after month, decade upon decade.

When the Fantastic Four took their fateful space journey in 1961 and “cosmic rays” transformed the quartet into unwilling superheroes, comics entered a weird realm where the all-powerful were also the unwilling, decidedly modern victims of science and circumstance.

Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine (the list goes on) were given supernatural abilities that made them outcasts, obliging them to be flawed messiahs.

They were, by some quirk of the American character, bound to Peter Parker’s moral imperative: “With great power comes great responsibility.” They are versions of an American Sisyphus, bound to saving us over and over again.

What could be more American — that might, when lashed to a sense of justice, eventually, makes right? So honorable, so naïve.

Well now even the phrase from Spidey's 1962 premiere has been throughly trashed for the sake of pointless directions, not the least being the erasure of the Spider-marriage. When the paper, possibly a college-type one, won't get into any of those issues, something is decidedly and terribly wrong. There's no justice to be found in modern comics when they force in so much leftist ideologies at the expense of coherency.

To this day, though the tone is darker, Marvel and DC, the two mammoths of comics, continue to reimagine the American character.

Once side attractions in a world of leading white men, Gwen Stacy, Jean Grey and Susan Storm have in recent years emerged as leaders to reinvigorate the Spider-Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four sagas. Absolute Wonder Woman has broken ground with beautiful art. Miles Morales is Spidey for a new generation.

And when they make such ambiguous statements about these leading ladies, something is wrong here too. Note the absurdity of bringing up what I assume is Spider-Gwen, some kind of otherworldly take on the 616 universe Gwen, without even making anything clear, or asking if it really does favors for the Spidey franchise. Also, not all art is good today, what with the woke damage of the past decade still being felt, and the Titans' title in the DCU is one that's suffered as a result. And they don't have a problem with the darker tone? That's practically what brought down comicdom in the long run. Also, do they have a problem with white men? One can only wonder if the writer's saying he considers Peter Parker expendable.

Yet the central fissures remain.

Bruce Wayne can’t connect with anyone other than his butler; he is the lonely individual in an atomized America. Steve Rogers bears the burden of representing the “Greatest Generation” from World War II. He is a Captain America forever out of place, even in his own land.

And could there be a more iconic tech magnate toying with humanity’s fate than Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor and his delusions of grandeur? If only our world had a bespectacled Clark Kent keeping an eye on things. Just in case.

Umm, even this is flawed if they'd consider there were stories where Bruce had affairs with ladies like Vicky Vale, Silver St. Cloud and even Catwoman. Where do they get off using that kind of laughable lecture anyway? The writer's also oblivious to how there were several stories over the years where Marvel tried to replace and harm the reputation of Capt. America for the sake of publicity stunts, and it goes without saying that today's dialogue for a lot of the regular cast doesn't feel like that of the older comics anymore.

So what's the point of this article? Practically nothing, since like a lot of other such modern articles, it won't explore what went wrong over past decades, nor will it take an objective view of Marvel/DC in their modern form. Once again, comicdom's getting nowhere fast as a result of all these phonies writing about what's hardly coverage of history.

Jack Kirby gets a street named after him

Much like Stan Lee received a street named in his memory a few years ago, JNS reports the late Jack Kirby has now received a street named after him, part of a project the law firm agent Roy Schwartz and the American Jewish Historical Society worked on getting approval for:

It is no small thing to get a street in Manhattan named after you, but the creator of such timeless superheroes as Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Ant-Man, the Hulk and Iron Man received that honor on Monday, when the Lower East Side block where he was born was named “Jack Kirby Way.” [...]

“Widely recognized as the most prolific and arguably most important creator in the history of the comic book medium, Jack Kirby is also one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century,” according to a new exhibit on his life and work at Manhattan’s American Jewish Historical Society.

The exhibition, “The Jack Kirby Way: How a boy from the Lower East Side became the King of Comics,” is co-produced by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. It will be on view through Nov. 30.

One of the artifacts on display in the show is the original “Captain America” comic books, issues 1 through 10. Joe Simon, who co-created the character and many more with Kirby, owned the issues on display.

The iconic first issue of “Captain America,” published in March 1941, shows the superhero punching Hitler in the face, before the United States entered the war. Many Americans had not yet come to support the idea that the Nazis needed to be vanquished.

Based on this report from Breitbart from last year, some could reasonably argue the same sadly holds true for today when it comes to the Islamic Iranian regime, in example. If Kirby and Joe Simon were alive today and created Cap in modern times, the sad but possible reality is that the Star Spangled Avenger wouldn't get the same kind of positive regard seen in the Golden Age any more than any other Marvel/DC heroes created since.

Its publication led to death threats to both men by the German-American Bund, Roy Schwartz, a board member of AJHS and the person who drove the effort to get the street co-named in Kirby’s honor, told JNS.

The police, when contacted by Kirby and Simon, refused to do anything to help, according to Schwartz.

Then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia contacted the comic book artists and promised them personally that they would be kept safe. LaGuardia’s mother, Irene Luzzatto-Coen, was a Sephardic Jew.

And on this, it's vital to note that even today, that's not always the case in NYC, where this stuff has become a particularly sad staple ever since Zohran Mamdani was elected the 1st Muslim mayor in the Big Apple, and what he's been doing now would be hurtful to Kirby. Do the organizers of the campaign to have Jack Kirby's birthplace named after him realize that, if they don't have any concerns over what came about even before October 7, 2023 and Mamdani's election, then this whole campaign's otherwise meaningless?

As a little boy growing up in Tel Aviv, Schwartz was obsessed with comics, including Kirby’s, he told JNS.

American relatives would mail him new releases, and he learned English by reading them.

Now employed by day as “a mild-mannered chief marketing agency for a large law firm,” as he told JNS, he is the author of “Was Superman Circumcised?” and other books and essays exploring Jewish aspects of comic book history.

Schwartz was the driving force behind the labyrinthine bureaucratic process by which city agencies approved a co-named New York City street.

“There was enough red tape to circle Galactus several times,” Schwartz told JNS.

Captain America was and remains his favorite superhero, Schwartz told JNS, a few feet away from the newly-renamed street sign.

But predictably, they won't get into how, less than a decade after Kirby's passing, Marvel under Joe Quesada and Bill Jemas spared no expense taking apart much of what made Cap work in the first place, lacing the series published under the Knights imprint with anti-American propaganda, something that's continued until even recently. Equally bad is how they repeatedly tried to "replace" Steve Rogers with PC tokens. So what good does it do for Schwartz to just make the statement without bringing up how sad it is that Cap, along with tons of other Marvel/DC properties, major and minor, were effectively destroyed for the sake of woke leftist propaganda? Why, what if Mamdani had anything to do with the red tape encountered? In that case, Schwartz would be wallowing in the exact cowardice that all but victimized Kirby in his time by not showing the courage to discuss anything.

Golin, executive director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, is a long-time, major Kirby fan.

“I love all of his work. It continues to blow me away, and he was so prolific,” he told JNS. “He is so Jewish, so if you take pride in the accomplishment of fellow Jews, then he’s someone you should know about.”

But does this guy appreciate where Marvel/DC went with Kirby's creations post-2000, including the New Gods? I seem to recall Jim Starlin wrote a miniseries called The Death of the New Gods 2 decades ago, and that wasn't exactly what Kirby got into the business to do. Such a story was a slap in the face to his legacy, just as much as what became of Cap, because if memory serves, Big Barda was meant as a tribute to Kirby's wife. I recently bought an archive of Kirby's work on the New Gods from the early 70s, and that's the kind of work that counts. I will not waste time and money on the post-2000 stories that did a terrible disservice to Kirby's efforts. Also, look who turned up as guests at the event:

Less elaborately dressed but honored with seats on the dais were Schwartz, Tom Brevoort, executive editor and senior vice president of publishing at Marvel Comics; Marvel artist and writer Jim Steranko; and former DC Comics president and publisher Paul Levitz.

While Steranko's a decent visitor, that a leftist like Brevoort, who actively defended Marvel's deconstruction of Kirby and Lee's work, would attend is disgraceful and embarrassing. Even Levitz, who fulfilled quite a bit of the same when he was a leading executive at DC (and was an apologist for Planned Parenthood), isn't exactly somebody I'd consider welcome there. Yes, I do recall he was willing to sign a petition in defense of victims of October 7, 2023, but there's still no telling if he's fully reevaluated his past mistakes, and so far, he's never publicly said so. Worse, both Marvel and DC continue to employ people throughly unsuited for the jobs, and that certainly doesn't reflect well on Brevoort, considering he still works for Marvel.

Kirby certainly is worthy of a street named after him. But not all the people involved are worthy of backing his legacy.